Sermon — October 23, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

I don’t know if you realize this, but if you’re sitting here in church on a beautiful Sunday morning in October, you’re probably more like a Pharisee than a tax collector.

I’m not trying to insult you. I’m not talking about this Pharisee or this tax collector. I’m not saying you’re prideful or arrogant. It’s just that you’re probably exactly the kind of person that a Pharisee in general would be. “Pharisees” have gotten a very bad rap in Christianity. In some circles, “Pharisee” has become a synonym for a self-righteous, hypocritical, judgmental person. But that’s completely missing the point of what Jesus is saying.

There’s nothing wrong with Pharisees. The Pharisees were a movement of reformers, a group calling people to return to a genuine and heartfelt practice of their religion. They were, for the most part, salt-of-the-earth people, craftspeople and workers trying to live their lives according to God’s will. While the aristocratic Sadducees were more concerned with the priestly intricacies of Temple ritual, the humbler Pharisees focused their attention on personal religious study and how to live in a holy way in your own home. “Pharisee” was not a dirty word. It was the name of a genuinely popular and quite beautiful religious movement. Jesus uses Pharisees in his stories not because they were notoriously bad, but because they were notoriously good. (The “tax collector,” on the other hand, was really a troubling figure. The tax collector’s job was to fund the Roman Empire by extorting money from his own people, and to line his own pockets by adding a premium on top. When you hear “tax collector,” don’t like “IRS agent with a pocket protector.” Think of the Sherriff of Nottingham.)

So when it’s the tax collector and not the Pharisee who “goes down to his home justified,” you’re supposed to be surprised. It would normally be the other way around.

This is why I say that we’re all probably more like the Pharisee than the tax collector. Not because I think we’re condescending or rude, but because I think we’re generally upstanding people, doing our best to live good lives.

But I’ll admit that some of us, sometimes, are like the Pharisee in this particular story, as well. Maybe you’ve never quite said these things in prayer exactly, certainly not standing in the Temple, but I suspect some of you have had the occasional thought: “Thank God that I’m not like other people.” (It’s okay to admit it—I stand before you confessing that I’ve thought this very thing myself.)

Maybe it’s about religious things, like the Pharisee’s prayer. “Thank God that I’m not like those Sunday-morning layabouts and those Christmas-and-Easter Christians.” I’m doing my part to support the church. “I come to church twice a week—or at least twice a month.” “I give”—and here I have to beg forgiveness from our stewardship chair for this sermon—“I give a tenth of all my income.” Thank God that I’m not like other people. (Or maybe for you the religious one is a little different: “Thank God I’m not like those other Christians…”)

Maybe it’s about family things. “Thank God that I’m not like my husband (partner, housemate). I cook dinner every night. I take out all the trash. I’m the only one who even knows where the toilet brush is.” Thank God that I’m not like other people.

Or maybe “Thank God I’m not like my coworkers, or we’d never get anything done.” “Thank God I’m not like my teammates, who’ve been slacking off all season.” “Thank God I’m not like that person next to me on the airplane who’s dressed head to toe in a leopard-print sweatsuit.” Thank God I’m not like other people.

And it’s tempting, right, to take this text and run with it, to say, “Don’t be like the Pharisee; be like the tax collector. Don’t puff yourself up for your own piety or your own achievements. Don’t put other people down because they’re not as good as you.” But in a funny way, our very desire not to be the Pharisee turns our words into a paraphrase of the Pharisee’s own prayer: “Thank God that we’re not like that Pharisee, who proudly boasts of his own achievements and spends his time judging other people!” It’s surprising how easy it is to exalt yourself for how humble you are.

So I want to ask a question instead: Who do you think the Pharisee is trying to convince with this prayer?

The Pharisee is good, and imperfect. God knows that he is good, and imperfect. But it seems like the Pharisee has a hard time really accepting his own goodness, and he certainly has a hard time admitting his imperfection. He can only prove his goodness, it seems, by repeating over and over that it’s different from those people’s badness. And if his goodness is defined by someone else’s badness, then he can’t admit that he himself has any flaws, or he would be like them. And you can feel his spiritual muscles straining as he tries to hold these two aspects of himself as far apart as he possibly can—to prove to himself that he is good, and to hide from God that he’s imperfect, too.

And this is what’s so refreshing about the tax collector’s prayer. He is not the “good guy” of this story. He knows his work is wrong. He knows the life he’s living is not as just or as ethical as it could be. The only thing he’s got going for him is his self-knowledge, that is, that he knows exactly how imperfect he is. And that self-knowledge has freed him from the anxiety of comparison, from the need to justify himself by how good he is relative to someone else, rather than just as he is.

So what about you? You are, like the Pharisee, like the tax collector, good and imperfect. What would it feel like to know that you are good as yourself? What does it feel like to have to prove that you are better than someone else? What would it feel like to know that God will love you, however imperfect you are? That while God wants you to be good, more than anything else God wants to set you free, so that you, too, can go home justified—not by your own achievements in comparison to anyone else’s, but by God’s eternal and unconditional love for you.

Sermon — October 16, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

When I was in college, I spent a semester’s-worth of Saturday mornings learning how to use an old-school, hand-operated printing press. This is the sort of thing I love: learning how to hand-set lead type in a little wooden frame; applying just the right amount of ink; the moment you realize where the phrases “upper case” and “lower case” come from, because you’re pulling a whole case of type out of a drawer.

But this was the easy stuff. The guy who taught our informal class was working on woodcuts. Those are something else. Printing a woodcut is closer to carving a statue than to drawing a picture, because when you roll ink over something, it coats only the highest, raised part of the surface. It’s like rolling ink over a mountain range: you only coat the peaks and the ridges, not the valleys. That means that to make a woodcut of a rose, you’re working completely in negative space. You can’t just carve a drawing of a rose into a block of wood, which would be hard enough for most of us. Instead, you have to carve away everything that’s not the rose, revealing the form of your design from within the wood like a sculptor revealing the human form hidden within a block of marble. It’s a gradual process of carefully, slowly carving away layer after layer, because if you go too deep or your hand slips, there’s no gluing the wood back on. You have to start again.

And all I did was print some stationery.

Our readings this morning touch on three of the central practices of Christian life: the reading of Scripture; persistent, devoted prayer; and incredible frustration with how slowly things are getting done. (But mostly the Bible and prayer.) And each of these readings is difficult in its own way.

Jeremiah’s prophecy combines destruction and restoration, accountability and judgment, and he promises the people a “new covenant.” “I will put my law within them,” God says, “and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” (Jer. 31:33) This “writing” is an interesting metaphor. “Law” here is Torah; not just “law” in the abstract, but “The Law,” the first five books of the Bible. So it’s a fascinating promise: What is now captured in a scroll or in a book, God will write within our hearts. There will be no more sermons or Sunday Schools; we will not need to teach one another about God, we “shall all” simply “know” God, because God’s Law will be written on our hearts. But of course, it’s clear that this promise has not yet been fulfilled.

Paul, for his part, introduces a phrase that’s been used as a kind of proof-text for one view Biblical authority in more years: “All scripture is inspired by God.” (2 Tim. 3:16) In the long-running debates over the exact nature of the relationship between the Bible and truth, Scripture and science, some have held tight to a particular understanding of these words. “All scripture is inspired by God,” they say, meaning every word and every sentence of the Bible is factually true, in some sense dictated by God. Creation in seven days? A literal Adam and Eve? As the bumper sticker goes: “The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it.” And if you don’t believe it, that’s just your “itching ears,” seeking “teachers to suit your own desires.” (2 Tim. 4:3) (Or maybe not.)

And then in the Gospel of Luke we get this inspiring and yet troubling image of prayer. There’s a judge who despises both God and humankind, who can’t be bothered to look out for anyone but himself. And there’s a woman, a widow, who comes to him, begging for justice, again and again. And for a while he refuses, but she persists, and eventually she’s so annoying that he just gives in—Fine! You win the lawsuit! It’s yours! Just get out of my face. And this is, Jesus tells us, a parable about “the need to pray always and not to lose heart.” (Luke 18:1) Because God, the takeaway seems to be, is at least marginally less terrible than that judge.

Three readings, each stranger than the last. But in a way it’s actually this third reading, this strange parable in the Gospel of Luke, in which we spend most of our lives. Our spiritual lives are not a one-time act of conversion, or commitment. They’re a process, a continual turning and returning to God. Spiritual life is less like passing the driver’s license test, and more like learning to drive.

Again and again and again, Sunday after Sunday, night after night, we bring ourselves before God in prayer, wondering whether God will answer our pleas. Year after year after year, for centuries and millennia, we read the same stories and sing the same songs. And that’s not because we have “itchy ears” or insufficient faith. It’s not because we need to be, as Jeremiah says, broken down and overthrown and destroyed. It’s because God is slowly writing on our hearts. And the human heart is a precious thing, more fragile than any woodcut, and carving away at it takes time and care.

If you look back at 2 Timothy, you’ll see that Paul doesn’t actually see mean that the Bible as a repository of simple facts, something we can consult to give us easy answer, because “the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.” “From childhood,” Timothy has “known the sacred writings,” and they are still instructing him. (2 Tim. 3:15) The scriptures are “inspired by God,” they are, Paul literally writes, “God-breathed,” in the sense that God breathes through them. They are “useful” for us, and when we use them “for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness,” (2 Tim. 3:16) we are engaging in exactly the same kind of gradual process as the widow slowly wearing down the judge. Over time, as we read again and again what has been written, God is writing in our hearts.

In our worship and in our prayer, in our singing and our sermonizing, God is gently carving away everything that obscures God’s image in us. When we come before God in prayer, wondering whether God is out there listening, God is in here, working. The story is not yet finished. The new covenant is not yet complete. The judge who lives in our hearts has not yet broken down. But day by day and year by year, as we “persevere with steadfast faith,” God is carving away within us and among us, refining an image whose beauty will one day be revealed.

Sermon — October 9, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

For many people, life in a city neighborhood like ours can be transient, just one stop on a train that goes from the suburbs to a college dorm to an apartment in the city back to a house in the suburbs or maybe just the first place they could find a place to live. For some, the neighborhood is the only place they—or their parents, or their grandparents—have ever known. But for others, a city neighborhood is neither an ancestral home nor a temporary stopping place. It’s a place that they choose to make a home, even if it’s not forever. They can “plant gardens,” a Jeremiah says, knowing that they’ll be around long enough to “eat what they produce.” (Jeremiah 29:5) They can marry, and maybe have children, knowing that it’s a place that they could raise them. (29:6) They can “seek the welfare of the city,” because it is their city, and “in its welfare [they] find [their] welfare.” (29:7)

These are the prophet Jeremiah’s words. But there’s a big difference between the people to whom Jeremiah’s writing and the “yuppie long-haulers” who move into a city neighborhood and decide to stay. The people to whom Jeremiah is writing didn’t have any choice. They didn’t move to Babylon for its walkability or its amenities. They didn’t leave Jerusalem fleeing persecution or even war. They were kidnapped, and brought to Babylon, and kept there in exile, and still Jeremiah writes to them, “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”

Jeremiah writes this letter in between two cataclysmic defeats. For years, he’d been warning about the danger of rebellion, urging the king and the leaders not to resist the mighty Babylonian armies, not to throw away their people’s lives seeking through ham-handed diplomatic maneuvering. He’d been ignored, called a traitor and a pessimist, even imprisoned for his efforts. But he was right. The Babylonians had won the war, and had taken the king and the queen mother and many of the most prominent Judeans back to Babylon as hostages. Jeremiah, that gadfly, was left at home, but even from Jerusalem he writes to those leaders, “the elders among the exiles, and the priests, the prophets, and all the people” living in exile, and he urges them to stay put. (Jeremiah 29:1)

There are prophets who want to convince you, he says, that this will all be over soon; a year or two more, and we’ll be back in Jerusalem. But no, he says. It won’t be two years. It will be seventy. In other words: it will last your whole life. You will live out your days in exile. So plant roots.

Meanwhile in Jerusalem, Jeremiah continues preaching the way of peace, and continues to be ignored, and within just a few years, the nation will once again rise up in rebellion, and lose, and this time the city of Jerusalem and its Temple will be destroyed, and even more of its people will be carried off into exile in Babylon, and the rest will scatter. Jeremiah himself will flee to Egypt. And the exiles will remain in Babylon, for the next half-century, as a small minority in the midst of a big city. They’ll find themselves in the situation of many refugees: What was, for them, the most traumatic and defining event in their whole lives, in fact in the whole history of their people, would hardly be noticed by anyone else. They have every right to curse the city of Babylon, but Jeremiah tells them to pray for it. They have every right to give up on life. But Jeremiah tells them to live it instead.

Now, there’s a simple, spiritual meaning of this text that many people find applies to their lives. You may sometimes find yourself imagining a different life, a world in which the grass is greener, a life in which if only you could do X, then you would finally be happy and could get on with your life. And if you’re ever in this situation, then Jeremiah’s letter may come as good news: You have the ability and you have the choice, now, to live your life, as it is, not as you wish it were. In this spiritual sense the city in which you find yourself is a metaphorical city; the houses and gardens are metaphorical gardens, but the life is your real life.

But we, here at St. John’s, find ourselves in the midst of a city that is not at all metaphorical. And as I gaze out on this community of thirty-something souls gathered this morning in a neighborhood of nearly twenty thousand people, I can’t help but see the similarity to Jeremiah’s letter. What can we do, as a small church in a big city? What difference could our lives and our ministry possibly make?

The late Desmond Tutu, Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town in South Africa, often spoke about something called ubuntu. It’s a term that’s hard to translate, but easy to understand. It means something like “a human is human through other humans.” It is not “I think, therefore I am,” but “I am because I belong.” He often tried out different phrases to explain: “I can be me only if you are fully you.” Or, “I am because we are.” “We are created,” he wrote, “for a delicate network of relationships, of interdependence with our fellow human beings, with the rest of creation.”[1] Where the modern European and American tradition of political philosophy imagines that we are completely independent and separate individuals, who make a kind of social contract with one another, Tutu drew together the Biblical tradition of Jeremiah with the political philosophy of his Xhosa and Motswana ancestors to teach that our full humanity only emerges in community, and in fact—our fullest humanity emerges from community across difference.

It’s one thing to live in a small, mostly-homogenous community, like the ancient city of Jerusalem or a small Xhosa village or a single city block of similarly-decorated homes. It’s another thing, perhaps a deeper and a richer thing, to learn that your particular sub-community is just one small slice of a great city like Babylon, or a multiracial democracy like post-apartheid South Africa, or a genuinely-diverse neighborhood like Charlestown or region like Greater Boston, and to discover that your well-being is actually not just your individual well-being, or the well-being of the people like you, but the well-being of the whole body, of the whole city. “For in its welfare you will find your welfare.”

There are many ways in which our city is not well. You may have seen the dozens of memorial photos of residents who’ve lost their lives to overdoses and addiction during September’s recognition of Recovery Month. You may have friends who live in senior housing and are isolated and alone and can’t seem to get the help they need. Just this week, the Boston Housing Authority finally held meetings to address the rat infestation in the Bunker Hill development, a public-health crisis that’s gotten so acute that multiple families have been driven from their homes, with most of their furniture and children’s toys and books left behind, too damaged by droppings and bite marks to be safe.

And there are so many ways in which we our community responds to these afflictions. I think of our growing programs to support at-risk youth and prevent substance abuse. I think of the community members who give their time and money to raise funds for our schools. (Shout out to the Harvard-Kent School, whose fundraiser I believe is going on right now!) I think of the literal gardens being planted and replanted in this neighborhood, at St. John’s and at Sprouts and at Gardens for Charlestown, to bring food and beauty and peace to this neighborhood. (And that’s just this week’s newspaper!)

You may only be here for a season of your life. You may never leave. Or you may not even live here! But what Jeremiah says is as true for the most transient student or yuppie as it is for the Towniest Townies around: Where you are right now, is where you are right now. It may be for two years, or twenty years. It may be for seventy years, that is, for the rest of your life.

But for however long you are wherever you are, it is the not just a place. It is the community in which your full humanity has a chance to appear. And God has given you the gift of a choice. Will you “build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce”? Or you will yearn for the good old days, in a different kind of world? Will you stay locked within yourself or keep to your own kind? Or will you let that web of human interdependence grow? Will your curse the city, when it has done you wrong by jackhammering outside your bedroom for three morning straight? Or will you pray to the Lord on its behalf, “for in its welfare you will find your welfare?” (Jeremiah 29:7)

[1] Desmond Tutu, ‘Ubuntu: On the Nature of Human Community’, in God is Not A Christian (Rider 2011).