Category Archives: Feature
“Good News in Unexpected Places”
Sermon — Christmas Eve, 2022
The Rev. Greg Johnston
When Prince George was born in July 2013, the news of a new heir to the United Kingdom scored two photos above the fold on the front page of the Washington Post. The LA Times ran the headline “The prince of wails has arrived.” (That’s “wails” as in a “wailing baby.”) Our own Boston Globe, faithful to our city’s history of revolution and Irishness, placed the story on page A3, with a small photo beneath the fold on the front page, news of the future King George having been trumped by the story of a BSO conductor’s concussion and one about salmon in the Penobscot River. But if you want to know what the British media thought, you can look up the cover of the British tabloid The Sun (S-U-N), which, on the day that Prince George was born, actually redesigned its logo so that the name of the magazine itself read: “The Son” (S-O-N).
This, of course, is all old news; the young king-to-be is now some nine and a half years old. But my point is this: when a long-expected royal heir is born, it’s big news. You need someone in charge of public relations, for sure: to keep the paparazzi at bay, to take some cute photos of the new baby, maybe to put some makeup on his dad so he looks presentable. What you don’t usually need is for your royal PR firm to go drum up a little publicity from the shepherds in the fields.
But Jesus was no ordinary king, and his birth was no ordinary royal birth. And if that angel of the Lord had not appeared to those shepherds, and if that choir of angels had not praised him with a song, no one but his parents would have known he existed at all.
The story of Christmas, after all, is a story of glad tidings in unexpected places.
The people are eager for a king, for a Messiah, for a Savior who will lead them out of the dark days they’re living through and into a brighter and more glorious age. They even know where to look: in Bethlehem, the city of David, the ancestral home of their most famous king. The prophets had long foretold that a new Messiah would arise from Bethlehem, and you have to imagine that every pregnant woman in that small town wondered from time to time: could this be the one?
Nobody was expecting a child born in Bethlehem to parents from out of town. And they certainly weren’t expecting the Messiah to be born in a barn. Mary and Joseph came to Bethlehem by coincidence, and Jesus was born in obscurity, and they wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, and the story could well have ended there.
But God wanted somebody to know, and so an angel of the Lord appeared, again in an unexpected place. The angel didn’t appear in Herod’s palace, telling him that it’s time to retire because there’s a new king in town. The angel didn’t appear in the Temple, telling the people that their God ha come to save them at last. The angel didn’t appear in the sky over the city, announcing good news to the expectant crowds. No, the angel appeared to a handful of shepherds lying in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night, and they were terrified and amazed. And then the angel disappeared.
These are “good tidings of great joy that will be for all the people,” but only these shepherds have heard the tale.
God shows up in unexpected places. God shows up in the prayers we say when we’re not sure we believe there’s anyone listening. God shows up in the acts of human love that are around us every day, but will never make the front page of the news. God does show up in the moments of joy that fill the Christmas season, but God also shows up in the pain that’s sometimes present, too. God shows up in surprising places here, on earth, in the midst of our lives, however messy and imperfect they may be, reminding us again and again that God loves with an unconditional and unimaginable love.
God sometimes even shows up here in church.
So if God shows up in your life, sometime soon, where will you be in the story?
Will you be “keeping watch” with your flock by night? Will you be paying attention, in other words? Will you even notice that God is there? Will you be watching and listening for the signs of what God is doing in your life, or will you be, like I usually am, too caught up in your own preoccupations to hear the angels sing?
But if you do notice God’s sudden appearance, what will you do? Will you go with the shepherds “even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing that has taken place?” Will you “treasure” these things like Mary, “pondering them in your heart?” Will you accept the invitation, in other words, and follow that feeling of God’s grace where it leads? Or will it become a half-remembered story of the past, an extraordinary moment that has no effect on ordinary life?
And what will you do when that angel of the Lord has disappeared? Will you “return” out into the world, “glorifying and praising God for all that [you have] heard and seen?” Will you share the good news of what God has done in your life with the people around you, or will God be the best-kept secret in your life, something known only to few cold shepherds in the field?
Whatever the answer is, there is good news. However attentive or distracted you are; however curious or careless you may be; however much you share that good news or pretend it never happened, God is always here, working. There were thirty years, after all, between Jesus’ birth and the next time anybody outside his family noticed him; but everywhere he went, God was among us, all the same.
God is among us, working in us, and through us, even now, in places we come looking for God and in places we’d never think to find him, comforting us and inspiring us and above all else, loving us and saving us, casting down all the power of evil and death in this world, and freeing us to live in love.
So may God bless you in this season of Christmas, and whatever Christmas brings, may it be a time of surprising moments of joy.
“For a child has been born for us, a son given to us;
authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” Amen.
Joy
Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.
Philippians 4:4
The third week of Advent marks a period of joy. Many of us light pink candles in our wreaths, reflecting the old tradition of pink vestments and altar hangings on the third Sunday of Advent, a moment of joy in the midst of a “mildly penitential” season. This week comes in the midst of a season of joy, in many ways and for many people. But it is also a time when it can be hard to find joy.
As a priest, I find myself subscribed to a number of different churches’ email newsletters, and this week of joy seems also to be the week of Blue Christmas services, services designed for those who are mourning or in grief, or those for whom the holidays are simply a difficult time, for one reason or another. The Blue Christmas service is an antidote to a world pushing joy and cheer during the holiday season, to a culture that insists that you have happy holidays, when happiness may be the last thing you feel. I imagine that for some of you reading this, mid-December truly is a season of unadulterated joy, in which case I’m delighted for you! But I know that for many of us, there is a note of pain or grief, anxiety or sorrow that is playing in your heart, still audible beneath the eleven-hundredth repetition of the line: “Just hear those sleigh bells jingling, ring ting tingling too!”
This week’s theme of joy is not an insistence that you feel joy, that you be filled with holiday cheer. It’s an invitation to rejoice. Joy is an emotion, and a fickle one. It’s harder to pin down than contentment or satisfaction, or even peace. Joy comes seemingly out of nowhere, in moments ordinary and extraordinary, and overwhelms us, and then departs.
Rejoicing is something different. Rejoicing is something we can choose to do, however we feel. It is a practice of giving thanks and celebrating. Rejoicing is easy when we’re feeling joyful. It’s harder when we aren’t, and it can feel hypocritical or fake. But rejoicing is not about pretending to be cheerful, or faking forced joy. It’s about recognizing that our lives are always mixed: that even in our moments of greatest joy we carry some sorrow, and even when life is hardest there can be things to celebrate. We rejoice during the darkest days of the year because we know that even in the midst of deep darkness, there is some reason to rejoice.
In the Wilderness
Sermon — December 11, 2022
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Have you ever felt like you’re wandering in the spiritual wilderness?
I don’t mean the kind of wilderness people mean when they talk about finding God in nature, a wilderness of mountains to climb and pine trees to smell and babbling brooks in which to cool your feet. I mean the wilderness as Jesus knew it: the dry, rocky hills to the east of Jerusalem, a desert with barely enough in it to sustain life. By “spiritual wilderness” I don’t mean the kind of wilderness in which you feel God’s Spirit—no. I mean the place in which you thirst for a drop of life-giving water, and find none.
The wilderness goes by many other names—spiritual aridity or exile, burnout or the dark night of the soul—but whatever you call it, it is a kind of absence: the absence of the feelings of joy or peace or comfort you once found in prayer or work or life, the absence of a long-lost sense of meaning or of God’s love or presence. It’s very similar, in a way, to what (in a marriage) might be called the “after-the-honeymoon” period. It’s very similar to what happens in a friendship or a new job when the shine has worn off the apple. The wilderness is a time in your life where you feel, as Bilbo Baggins once said, “like butter scraped over too much bread.”
And this is what I mean when I ask: Have you ever felt like you’re wandering in the wilderness? You understand what I mean.
The startling message of our reading from Isaiah today is that God has promised to transform this wilderness—this most unenjoyable place—into a place of unimaginable joy.
Now, Isaiah doesn’t come up with the image of the wilderness. The people of God have known the wilderness for as long as there’s been a people of God. Their ancestors were nomads who spent their lives wandering through the wilderness. Generations later, after Moses led them out of slavery in Egypt, they spent forty years wandering in the wilderness before they entered the Promised Land. And a millennium later, when Isaiah wrote these words, they were in exile again. Their city and its Temple had been destroyed. Many of them had been separated from their homeland by a literal wilderness, living as hostages and refugees with five hundred miles of desert between them and the world they once knew. They are in desperate need of consolation, and Isaiah consoles them with the promise of a future in which the wilderness, literal and metaphorical, will be transformed.
“The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,” he writes, “the desert shall rejoice and blossom.” (Isaiah 35:1) God will transform the dry place into a flowering field, and “everlasting joy shall be upon [your] heads; [you] shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.” (35:10) In the very midst of the desert you will see “the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God.” (35:2) “Here is your God; he will come,” Isaiah tells the people. “He will come and save you.” (35:4)
Just… not quite yet.
This is, without a doubt, one of the hardest things about Christian life. God promises us incredible things—peace and joy and life everlasting—but in this life, we only get a glimpse. Isaiah promises that “sorrow and sighing shall flee away,” (Isaiah 35:10) but still we sorrow and sigh. It’s comforting that God makes these promises to us… it’s better than having no hope for the future. But it’s undeniably frustrating having to wait around for them. “Be patient,” the apostle James wrote two thousand years ago, and we are, and we have been, waiting quite patiently for quite some time now for “the coming of the Lord.” (James 5:7-8)
Think how John the Baptist must have felt. I think of him sitting in prison, hearing the stories of what his cousin Jesus was doing, wondering whether he was just another prophet or whether he was The One about whom John himself had prophesied. And Jesus tells John’s messengers to go back and quote these exact words from Isaiah to John the Baptist, to tell him that the moment had arrived: “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear.” (Matthew 11:5; Isaiah 35:5) The day has come when the desert will blossom, and the wilderness will be transformed from a place of desolation into a place of joy.
And yet John remains in jail. And he will not make it out alive. But neither, of course, will Jesus.
So we’re left with this conundrum: God has promised us, on the one hand, abundant joy, a world in which sorrow and sighing are transformed into joy and singing. And God has left us, on the other hand, in the wilderness, where we continue to roam. And there’s a sense in which we will always be in the wilderness in this life, a sense in which—however much joy and peace we may have—there will also always be suffering and pain, until our wandering is over and we reach that promised land of eternal life with God.
But at the same time, the wilderness is not the desert it once was. It is already being transformed. Water is already breaking forth in the desert, streams of water are already flowing in our world. God has not left us comfortless, but is working now in and among us, even if that work is still incomplete.
There’s an image that James uses that I find to be a helpful one, at least for me. “Be patient,” he says, but that’s not all he says. Be patient, he says, like a farmer who “waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains.” (James 5:7)
James talks about our lives like plants, growing over time. And eagerness and abundance can spoil a plant’s growth as easily as caution and patience. You can flood it with too much water, scorch it with too much sunlight, pick it before it’s fully grown. God waits instead, James said, until we have grown in the ways we need, until we’ve received “the early and the late rains,” but God is present all the time with us, like that careful gardener. And one day, we will finally be ready to bloom.
God is with us, even and maybe especially in the wilderness. God is with us in rainstorms and in droughts, in the driest desert and the greenest valleys. God is with us, whether we wait impatiently or patiently, whether we are singing or sighing. Whether we realize it or not, God is with us—in this short season of waiting in Advent before the joy of Christmas, and in our longest seasons of waiting and wandering in the wilderness, before the desert finally rejoices and blossoms. God is with us, and God is watering us, and God is waiting for us finally to bloom.
Peace
“For from the least to the greatest of them,
everyone is greedy for unjust gain;
and from prophet to priest,
everyone deals falsely.
They have treated the wound of my people carelessly,
saying, ‘Peace, peace,’
when there is no peace.”
(Jeremiah 6:13-14)
When the prophet Jeremiah decries the false prophets who proclaim to the people, “‘Peace, peace,’ where there is no peace,” he’s talking about more than just the absence of war. Like all Hebrew words, shalom, “peace,” doesn’t align exactly with its English equivalent. Shalom does mean “the absence of conflict,” but it means something more: the presence of wellness. This is why shalom makes sense as a greeting and as a goodbye. It doesn’t simply mean “may you not be at war.” It means “be well.”
So Jeremiah’s words are in part a condemnation of self-serving leadership. It’s in the interests of those in positions of power—religious leaders no less than politicians—to keep proclaiming “all’s well, everything’s fine, nothing to see here,” when all is not well at all. They’re the ones for whom the system is already working. But the “false dealing” Jeremiah condemns is the kind of self-serving denialism you can find all over the place, “from the least to the greatest.” It is always easier, in the face of real problems, to say that everything’s all right than it is to deal with them. But this is to “treat the wound,” as Jeremiah says, “carelessly.” You cannot heal a wound that you’re pretending isn’t there.
We all want and hope and pray for peace, for shalom, for wellness. Sometimes we even find it. But often, we say to ourselves “‘Peace, peace!’ when there is no peace.” Sometimes we deny that anything is wrong because the problem (say, climate change or racism) seems too big to do anything about. Sometimes we deny that anything is wrong—especially in our personal lives or relationships—because we’ve convinced ourselves that everyone else has their act together: that their marriages or their kids or their lives are perfect. (They don’t and they aren’t.)
But God invites us into another way: not peace as the absence of conflict, not peace as perfection, not peace as denial, but peace as the result of reconciliation. God invites us into an ancient path of self-examination, forgiveness, and reconciliation. God invites us to consider where we have wronged one another, and where we have been wronged; to ask forgiveness, and to offer it; and to transform the status quo of our lives with one another from the absence of war to the presence of peace. And this way of forgiveness is a way of peace, not only between us, but for us, because it gives us a break from the need to never mess it all up.
So take a word of advice from Jeremiah this Advent:
“Stand at the crossroads, and look,
and ask for the ancient paths,
where the good way lies; and walk in it,
and find rest for your souls.”
(Jeremiah 6:16)