Category Archives: Feature

Posts with the “Feature” category will appear in a list in the footer section.

Independence Day

Posted on by

Independence Day is one of only two national holidays set aside for observance in our church calendar. (Do you know the other one?*) And like all holy days, it comes with its own set of rituals and ceremonies, both inside and outside the church.

The civic and national observance of Independence Day is one with which we’re all familiar: flags and fireworks, hot dogs and parades, family gatherings and trips to the beach. Up in the small town in Maine where we’ll be this Fourth of July, the day is a joyful celebration of Americana: decorated antique pick-up trucks and kids on red-white-and-blue-streamered tricycles, slowly looping around the tiny downtown area in one of the world’s slowest parades. At our house, we’ll be making our usual “flag cake” with whipped-cream, strawberries, and blueberries in a geometrically-sketchy approximation of the Star-Spangled Banner.

The Church’s observance of Independence Day is a little different. It doesn’t quite contradict the patriotic celebrations; but you might say that at the very least, it complements them.

The Church is, after all, not an American church. Americans make up just a small minority of the global Body of Christ. But even our Episcopal Church isn’t an entirely-American institution: the Diocese of Haiti, after all, is our largest diocese, and the Episcopal Church includes dioceses and parishes in Cuba and Taiwan, Latin America and even Europe.

And so the Church’s readings and prayers for Independence Day carefully remind us that our nation is not the only community to which we belong; and patriotism is not the ultimate value in Christian ethics. “You have heard that it was said,” Jesus reminds us in the Gospel appointed or the day, “‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have?” (Matthew 5:44-46) The ancient author Ben Sira adds a reminder of the impermanence of national life in the first reading for Morning Prayer: “Sovereignty passes from nation to nation on account of injustice and insolence and wealth… The Lord overthrows the thrones of rulers, and enthrones the lowly in their place. The Lord plucks up the roots of the nations, and plants the humble in their place.” (Ecclus. 10:8, 14-15)

The Bible, it turns out, is a bit skeptical about patriotism.

Or rather, the Bible is skeptical of patriotism that’s not tempered by love; of national pride that’s not tempered by humility. A love of country that manifests as love of the neighbor is good. A love of country that manifests as hatred of the enemy is not. A love of country that leads us to seek justice, so that the nation might become a more perfect union, is good; a love of country that leads to the arrogant boast that we are already perfect? Not so much.

No human institution is perfect—no church or country or family is unaffected by the deep imperfection of human nature—but imperfection and love, thank God, can coexist. So I’ll be eating my flag cake, this Fourth of July, and I’ll be praying that we may love our enemies, care for our neighbors, and give thanks for all the nations of the world and of our Church.

* It’s Thanksgiving Day! (To be fair, Labor Day also gets a prayer, but not an entry on the calendar or special readings.)

The Old, Old Story

Posted on by

The story of our Eucharistic Prayer begins with the blessing of creation. It continues with the messiness of the Fall. And it culminates in the ongoing story of redemption. But there’s just one problem: the story it tells isn’t really our story at all.

Eucharistic Prayer 1 from Enriching Our Worship, the prayer we’ve been using for the last few weeks, reminds us of a millennia-long series of acts in which God rescues the people again and again.

It begins with Abraham, with whose family the narrative arc of the whole Bible really begins:

Through Abraham and Sarah
you called us into covenant with you.

It continues with the Exodus, the people’s years of wandering in the wilderness, and the generations of prophets who reminded recalled people’s attention to the need to love God and their neighbor:

You delivered us from slavery,
sustained us in the wilderness,
and raised up prophets
to renew your promise of salvation.

The prayer finally culminates in the life and death of Jesus:

Then, in the fullness of time,
you sent your eternal Word,
made mortal flesh in Jesus.
Born into the human family,
and dwelling among us,
he revealed your glory.
Giving himself freely to death on the cross,
he triumphed over evil,
opening the way of freedom and life.

What I notice in this prayer is that it’s not about us, but it is for us. We are not the characters of the story, but we have been invited to make it our own story. God didn’t actually call “us” into covenant; God called Abraham and his descendants, the people who would become known as Israel. God didn’t deliver “us” from slavery or sustain “us” in the wilderness; God rescued the descendants of those Israelites and guided them through the wilderness. God didn’t send prophets to “us,” but to the people who lived around them, with very concrete messages for their own days and times. The eternal Word of God became flesh in Jesus and dwelt among “us,” but only in the broadest, human sense.

The Bible is not a set of rules or laws to apply to our lives. It’s not a compendium of thoughtful sayings about the nature of the universe. If it were, it would be easy to understand its relevance for us. Universal truths, after all, are universal truths. But the Bible is not a rulebook. It’s not an abstract philosophy. It contains these things, at points. But mostly it’s a series of stories about other people, written in a language we don’t speak by people we don’t know in places most of us have never been and will never go.

But this strange old story has a mysterious power: it invites us into itself. When we say that Jesus “opened the way of freedom and life,” we mean many things. But one thing that we mean is that Jesus opens the way for all people to join the people of God. Jesus invites us to make their story our own. Jesus invites us to walk in their way of love, and to become part of the story ourselves, and the promises God made to those ancient, far-off figures become promises God makes to us.

Every week, our Eucharistic Prayer—whichever words—retells this whole story, giving thanks to God for things done long ago and far away. It reminds us of the good things God has done for God’s people in the past, and then, in Communion, it unites us to the Body of Christ, to the whole body of God’s faithful people before us, and sends us out to continuing living the story of God’s love, for generations to come.

The Harvest is Plentiful

Posted on by

The Harvest is Plentiful

 
 
00:00 / 10:25
 
1X
 

Sermon — June 18, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

All across New England, it’s officially strawberry season. Towns across Connecticut are holding Strawberry Festivals. Last weekend, when we were down in Long Island, we had our first farm-stand strawberries of the year, a rare chance to bite into a ripe berry that was actually red all the way through, without the tasteless white core of a strawberry picked underripe for shipping from California. And If you’re lucky, this time of year, you might even get the chance to go strawberry picking, and to encounter one of the great paradoxes of food pricing: the less work the person selling strawberries has to do, the more you pay, so that if they pick them in California and ship them here, it’s maybe $6 a quart; if they picked them at a local farm, it might be $9; if you pick them, well that’s like $12, at least. But of course it’s worth the extra couple of bucks, especially if there are kids involved, to have the amazing experience of standing in a field of endless fruit, picking ripe berries warm from the sun and maybe popping one or two in your mouth. (I won’t tell if you do.)

And this is what the incredible bounty of spiritual life can sometimes feel like. We’re surrounded by the beauty of the world and the mystery of God. We can walk into any church on any Sunday morning and hear beautiful music, and reflect on God’s love, and pray. Any time, any day, we can take a moment to sit and be grateful for something, or maybe even to read something from the Bible or a devotional. There’s so much out there waiting for us, and all we have to do is reach out and grab a taste. After all, Jesus says, “The harvest is plentiful.”

… “But the laborers are few.”

At the same time that I’m reminded of the incredible bounty of the U-Pick experience, I’m also reminded of the news this week from the Episcopal Church’s Executive Council meeting down in Providence, which noted, among other things, some alarming trends in the availability of clergy. In every region of the church, it seems, there are about four or five times as many open positions as there are priests looking for a new call. And it’s about to get much worse: roughly one-half of our clergy are within ten years of retirement. (Not me, for better or for worse.)

“The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.” And if this is true of clergy, it’s even more true for laypeople. In parishes like ours across the country, a dedicated core of faithful lay leaders and volunteers are in very real danger of burning out as they rotate through every imaginable position in the church to try to keep things afloat. And it’s a vicious cycle: the fewer members there are, the less likely it is they can afford a full-time priest; but the more part-time of a priest there is, they more of the work falls on those fewer members.

And yet the harvest remains plentiful. I’ll admit that people are not strawberries. But I can’t help but think that being a part of a church in a community like this is something like standing in a field full of berries, with only two hands to pick them. There are twenty thousand people in this neighborhood, give or take a few, and only—what, 100 active members of this church, if you’re being generous? And I’d like to think that maybe another couple hundred of those 20,000 might appreciate, might even benefit from, the good news of God’s unconditional love for them, in the same way that you and I benefit from hearing that good news, from being reminded of God’s beauty and forgiveness and grace week after week. There are so many ways we can serve this community; the harvest is so plentiful. But the laborers are few.

What’s true for the church is true for individuals, as well. When you’re in a busy season of life, even if you’re one of the relatively small number of people who want to engage in a deeper spiritual practice, it can feel impossible. The strawberries are there, ready for you, but there’s just too much going on in life to be able to go and pick them. And so prayer or quiet time for reflection become just yet another task on an overwhelming list, and the one that’s easiest to sacrifice in pursuit of the rest.

But it seems that this has always been the case. The harvest has always been plentiful. The laborers have always been few. At least this was true for Jesus’ little crew, a dozen apostles in the midst of a whole culture. They had an incredible opportunity to share the good news of the kingdom of God, but there only twelve of them, and they had so little time. So what are we to do?

Jesus answers this question for the disciples in what I think is an interesting and surprising way. He sends out his twelve apostles, and gives them simple instructions: Go, proclaim the good news. Take take no gold, or silver, or bag. (Matthew 10:7-10) And then he says, wherever you go, “As you enter the house, greet it. If the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it; but if not, let your peace return to you. If anyone will not welcome you, or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet” and go. (Matthew 10:12-14)

Now, not many of us are likely to become itinerant wandering evangelists, laboring to gather in the harvest door-to-door, as the apostles do. But all of us are laboring in some vineyard, all of us are oot in some strawberry field, trying to harvest something, hoping that we’ve planted bears fruit. That might be in your work life, or your family. It might be in a ministry or a group you’re part of at church. Or it might be in your own prayer life, or just the attempt to get out of your own way. And what Jesus says the apostles should do if it’s not working is really interesting to me. If their efforts aren’t bearing fruit, he doesn’t tell them to “take up your cross” and endure it, he doesn’t tell them to “offer it up” to God. He says, “shake the dust off your feet” and move on.

It seems important to me to say that this is not advice to give up when the going gets hard. “If anyone won’t listen to you, shake the dust off your feet” isn’t good relationship advice, whether that relationship is romantic, or with a friend, or family. But Jesus gives us the permission to do some spiritual discernment, and to ask ourselves: Is this thing that I’m doing right now hard but fruitful, or is it ultimately just fruitless?

Picking strawberries, after all, is hard work. It’s fun for a day trip with the kids, but as a job it’s really tough. But it bears good fruit, and that’s what matters.

There are so many ways to pray. There are so many ways to be involved in a church’s life or in a neighborhood community. There are a lot of jobs, even multiple professions, if you really need a change. Not all of them are easy. But when something is draining you of life, not giving you life, it’s important to remember that there are a lot of strawberries in the field, and maybe this row you’re standing in right now has just been plucked clean and there’s nothing more that’s going to come from it, no matter what you do.

There are many things in life that are worth doing, even though they’re hard. There are many houses that are worthy of your blessing of peace, many fields that are hard to harvest but that bear good fruit. And there are other things that are simply not worth your time, and where the appropriate answer, in Jesus’ words, is to “shake the dust off your feet” and head down to the next town. We are finite human beings living in a world of nearly-infinite possibility, and there is no time to waste on fruitless things; for “the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.”

Baptized into the Trinity

Posted on by

Sermon — Trinity Sunday, June 4, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Now, you might think that scheduling a baptism on Trinity Sunday is just a clever way of getting out of preaching a sermon on the Holy Trinity. You might even appreciate the effort. After all, Trinity Sunday, this Sunday after Pentecost every year, has something of a reputation for rough sermons. Preachers tend to either go very theological, regurgitating large chunks of seminary classes into fifteen-minute discourses featuring words like “perichoresis” and “hypostatic union”; or they tend to veer a bit in the other direction. I once heard a sermon on Trinity Sunday, the day that happened to mark the end of the church “program year,” which started by calling the Trinity a fourth-century political compromise, then proceeded to just list all the wonderful things that the church had done that year, before concluding, “And that’s

So, A baptism might seem like a fitting escape from this dilemma. There’s no better antidote to a dry exposition of fifth-century theological philosophical and theological debates, after all, than a really cute baby. But I’m sorry to tell you that the Trinity and baptism go hand in hand.

Our readings this morning, you may be surprised to hear, were not chosen because we had a baptism. They’re simply the readings for Trinity Sunday. These aren’t baptism readings and yet we begin, just as the Thanksgiving over the Water later in this service will begin, with the image of the Spirit of God hovering over the waters of the deep, as God prepares to bless the new life that is coming forth. (Gen. 1:2) These aren’t baptism readings and yet we end with Jesus’ final words to his disciples, taken from the Gospel according to Matthew, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” (Matthew 28:16)

The Trinity, an abstract, technical, dry topic, seems quite different from Baptism, a hands-on, messy, and rather wet practice, and the two can’t be separated from each other. And the reason for this, it turns out, is that the Trinity is not actually an abstract theological claim. And the Trinity is not really a fourth-century political compromise. The Trinity is a person—or, three persons, anyway, I guess that’s the point. The Trinity isn’t an idea about God, the Trinity is God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; and this tells us everything about the meaning of Baptism.

To say that God is Trinity is to say that God has always existed and will always exist as a relationship, a community of love within God’s own self. And to say that we are baptized “in the name of the Trinity” is to say that we are invited into that relationship; that each one of us is drawn into that community of love. One of my favorite little New Testament facts is that the preposition Matthew uses here means “in” in the sense of “into,” not in the sense of “by.” In other words, we baptize people “into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” not “by the power invested in the name.” All of us who have been baptized have been baptized into a new identity, a new name, a new family. Baptism adopts us into the family of God, and incorporates us into a community of love.

In one sense, baptism incorporates us into the community of the Church. When a child is baptized she is no longer the sole responsibility of her parents or grandparents; they are no longer her only family. She becomes our sister in Christ, a member of all our family, under God. And we take that as seriously as we can. In a few minutes, everyone in this room will make a promise, on behalf of the whole Church throughout the world, to do everything in our power to support her. And, God willing, when she need us, we will. Wherever she goes, whoever she becomes, she will always have a home in the family of God.

But baptism does more than just invite us into the Church. Baptism makes us part of the Body of Christ, baptism brings us, in a sense, into the very heart of the life of God. By the power of God the Holy Spirit, every person who is baptized is made a spiritual member of the living Body of God the Son, and God the Father looks on her with the same love that has existed within God’s own being from before time, the same love that led God’s voice to boom out from heaven at Jesus’ own baptism and say, “This is my beloved child, in whom I am well pleased.” God looks at each one of you and sees a beloved child, in whom God delights and is well pleased. And wherever you go, and whoever you become, God’s love and compassion and care will follow you. And God sees you as you see a sweet and beloved little child: indescribably beautiful, unbelievably frustrating, incomprehensibly messy, and loved beyond anything that could ever be imagined.

So, to all who are baptized, welcome into the family of God. May God the Father bless you with the knowledge and love of God, and of God’s love for you. May God the Son inspire you to walk in the way of love for your neighbor. Maybe God the Holy Spirit guide you and comfort you as you grow in stature and in faith. And may you remember that God is “with you always, even to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20)

Amen.

Dissolved

Posted on by

Yonder is the great and wide sea
with its living things too many to number, *
creatures both small and great.
There move the ships,
and there is that Leviathan, *
which you have made for the sport of it.

Psalm 104:26-27

Alice couldn’t stop laughing at me this Saturday afternoon. We were sitting in the shade under a tree, enjoying a picnic by the beach, feasting on chicken fingers and ice cream from the snack bar while Alice read aloud from Ramona the Pest, and I could not stop myself from repeatedly exhaling huge, loud sighs of relief, each one prompting another round of giggles. For the first time since September, I’d been swimming in salt water. Summer was almost here. And with every minute I sat there, a day’s-worth of stress was dissolving into the sea as the long winter washed away.

It’s the power of water to dissolve nearly anything that makes it such a potent symbol in baptism. Water is a symbol of life, for plants and animals alike; with it we water our plants and quench our thirst. Water is a medium through which we travel, on journeys toward new places or to escape, like the Israelites at the Red Sea, from old ones. Perhaps more than anything, water is the “universal solvent,” the substance in which more things can be dissolved than anything else: the dirt and sweat that cover our bodies; the minerals that give the ocean its buoyant tang; and even, yes, sometimes even the anxiety of a minister at the end of a long year.

The water of the baptism we’ll celebrate this Sunday, and which all of us have ourselves received, does all these things. The water of baptism begins our new life in Christ, and continues to refresh us through our whole lives. It invites us into a journey with God across the often-stormy sea of our lives in this world, toward a distant and more promising shore. And yes, it cleanses us from sin; not just once, on the day of our baptism, as if babies were somehow notorious wrongdoers, but every day of our lives, as we look back on our various missteps and are reminded that we have already been given.

And maybe, just maybe, baptism gives us just a hint of that sigh of relief. In baptism, and at baptisms, we are constantly reminded that we have been made children of a God of infinite compassion and unconditional love, and God looks at us as we look at a beloved child. God looks at our greatest accomplishments, the triumphs and successes of which we are most proud, with the genuine delight of a grandparent being presented with some new refrigerator art. God looks at our failures and mistakes with the tranquility of a parent weathering yet another tantrum, albeit with divine, and not human, patience.

The stresses and strains of an ordinary life are real, but compared to the depth of God’s love, they are small, and in baptism, God washes them away. God dissolves them in the waves, and sends them out into the sea. And if that vague and spiritual thought is not quite enough to comfort you, amid the actual, concrete realities of life, then, well…

That’s why God made the beach.