Sermon — May 22, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Massachusetts has one of the world’s most boring flags: the Great Seal of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on a white field. The seal itself is kind of interesting. It consists of three elements—and by the way, I’ve printed the seal out on a bulletin insert so you can see what I’m talking about. In the center, a Native American holds a bow and an arrow pointed down, symbolizing peace. Above him, an unfortunately-placed arm holds a sword, looking like it’s about to swing down and cut off his head, just like the famous scene in one of the great movies about indigenous people and their relationships with the colonial state: Frozen II. And below him, there’s a scroll with the Latin state motto, Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem: “We seek by the sword a quiet peace under liberty.” It’s an unfortunate combination, implying as it does that violence against the indigenous people of Massachusetts is what ensured our quiet peace under liberty.

Now, the seal is pretty problematic—the model for the supposed Massachusett Indian, for example, is in fact an 1890s Chippewa chief from Montana—but the Frozen thing with the sword over his head is mostly accidental. The seal actually combines elements of two earlier and unrelated seals. (See the other side of the paper!) The revolutionary seal of 1775 features a colonial Minute Man with a sword in his right hand and the Magna Carta in his left, with the motto, “We seek by the sword a quiet peace under liberty.” Hence the disembodied sword-in-hand, and the motto; the violence is against the king. The original seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, first used to seal the colony’s charter in 1629, is different. It features a rather stereotyped drawing of an American Indian with a bow in one hand and an arrow in the other, which have been adopted into the modern seal. But the banner coming out of his mouth holds a very different motto from the Minute Man’s statement of revolutionary zeal, one much more relevant to our reading from Acts today: the simple English phrase, “Come over and help us.”

This is, of course, an ever-so-slightly adapted version of the message Paul receives in a dream from a Macedonian man: “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” (Acts 16:9) It’s a divinely-delivered request: cross the sea from Asia into Europe and bring us the gospel. And indeed, the settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony saw themselves as repeating that apostolic process: they came across the sea, and landed, and settled here, right here, in Mishawum, where they established their first settlement, soon renaming it after the man who’d granted their charter by stamping it with that original seal: King Charles I. Hence, the first settlement of the Massachusetts Bay Colony: “Charlestown.”

Now, placed into the mouth of an indigenous resident of Massachusetts by his soon-to-be colonizers, “Come over and help us” is somewhere between a naïve disaster and grotesque bad faith. Diseases spread by Europeans had already devastated the Massachusett and Naumkeag people of this area, and war with the newcomers would soon nearly annihilate them. Some of the more godly colonists of the Massachusetts Bay Colony surely thought they were walking in the footsteps of Saint Paul and spreading the gospel here. Others were, without a doubt, cynically exploiting the seeming parallel between the Bible and their lives, using royal authority and Western technology to grab the land for themselves, with no real concern for the actual well-being of the locals. But even the best-meaning colonial Puritan missionaries were doing the very opposite of what Paul had done in the Book of Acts. They were swimming with the stream of a growing empire. Paul was fighting against one.

For three centuries before Paul’s journey to Macedonia, the history of the Jewish people and the whole region had been marked by armies moving from the west to the east, subjugating the local people to Greek and then Roman rule. Macedonia was where it all began, with the rise of a young man named Alexander, known to us as Alexander the Great. His father, King Philip II of Macedon, had founded a powerful kingdom and united many of the independent cities of ancient Greece. Alexander had bigger dreams, and in a brilliant but short career he went on to overthrow the great Persian Empire. After his death, his generals began to squabble over the remains, and rival kings set themselves up in Syria and Egypt, battling over and over again for the areas in between, including Judea. These kings surrounded themselves with a Greek aristocracy and sometimes sought to impose Greek customs on the locals, leading to occasional resistance, including the Maccabean revolt still celebrated in the Jewish festival of Hanukkah. By Jesus’ day, Roman rule had replaced Greek rule, but it was more of the same imperial domination.

In the first century BC, Rome was wracked by civil war as well, and while the history is too confusing to be helpful, there’s one event worth noting. In the year 44 BC, after three Roman generals defeated Julius Caesar’s assassins outside the city of Philippi, they discharged some of their veterans soldiers as a reward for their service and gave them land in and around the city. When one of them, Octavian, finally triumphed in the Roman Republic’s final civil war, claiming the title Augustus and becoming the first emperor, he sent more of his veterans there to strengthen and reorganize the colony, transforming Philippi into a “miniature Rome,” giving his soldiers all the rights of citizens of Rome itself.

All of which is to say: when Paul receives a vision inviting him to cross the sea, to “come over and help us,” he is not coming as the colonizer, the powerful one, here to spread the gospel with a sword hanging over your head. He is the one whose land has been conquered. He is the one whose people have been oppressed. And in next week’s reading, Paul and Silas will be arrested by a mob, who say, “These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe.” (Acts 16:20-21)

Now Paul was himself a Roman citizen. He would use that, at times, to his advantage, to escape from a local mob or a small-town jail by telling them he was a citizen of Rome, and therefore under Roman protection. But it was a dangerous game to play, because it turned Paul’s proclamation of Jesus Christ—his claim that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah, God’s anointed King, and that he was inviting Gentiles as well as Jews into his kingdom—from mere rabble-rousing by some foreign traveler to an act of treason by a Roman citizen.

Paul walks, nevertheless, into the mouth of the imperial lion. He crosses over into Macedonia, the homeland of the great conqueror Alexander. He walks into Philippi, a city named after Alexander’s father Philip, a colony of Roman army veterans. He shows up eager to “proclaim the good news” of another, very different, kind of King. (16:10)

You’d almost have to be insane to try it. But after cooling his heels for “some days,” (16:12) Paul does what Paul generally does: he goes to the synagogue to be with his fellow Jews.

Or rather, he goes to the “place of prayer,” down by the river. (16:13) It’s a little unclear, but it seems the Jewish community in Philippi is perhaps too small for a synagogue within the city walls; perhaps too small even to muster a minyan of ten men, as Luke tells us simply of the “women who had gathered there.” (16:13) But these are powerful women, the great saint Lydia among them. Lydia listens eagerly to Paul’s message, accepts his words, decides that she and her whole household will be baptized—and then invites him to stay at her home, which becomes Paul’s base in Philippi. (16:14-15) Lydia’s the first person Paul meets in the city, and she’ll be the last one he says goodbye to before he leaves after his miraculous escape from jail in next week’s reading. (16:40) Within a few years, the Christian church at Philippi will have become a strong and thriving one. In fact, Paul’s letter to the Philippians is one of his most upbeat: there’s much to rejoice about and little to criticize. And I think we have Lydia’s leadership to thank for that.

Paul’s ministry in Philippi gives us a better model to think about the Church’s mission in the world than that Puritan “come over and help us.” It’s one founded on resistance to imperial power and might, not backed up by it. And it’s built on the assumption that you come and work in order to hand leadership over to someone else.

I think sometimes about the relationship that churches like St. John’s and many others have had over the years with organizations like the B-SAFE summer camp program. Over time, there have been changes to those partner relationships, and some of them have been hard for partner churches to swallow. Over time, B-SAFE has made many changes that come from listening to the kids and young adults who are part of the program. This year, B-SAFE has decided to hire parents from their community to cook meals for the kids, instead of churches bringing in food for lunch. And for many people who’d enjoyed cooking those meals for years, this felt like a loss. And it is. But it also reflects a kind of growth and maturity in that program, in a very good way.

God does not want us to “go over there and help them” in the Puritan sense. No, God is working through us more like God works through Paul. God is inviting us to recognize that we are citizens of an empire founded by the sword, and to spread instead the subversive message of the Prince of Peace. God is inviting us to go to the people on the margins of society, to the people gathered at the riverside outside the city gates, not to “help them,” per se, but to accept their hospitality and to support their leadership, to build a self-sustaining community of love, and to trust them to run it. And for what it’s worth, this is as true when it comes parenting or management or friendship as it is about community service or the mission of the Church. The end goal is not a permanent program for “us” to help “them,” year after year after year, but a community built on equality and love. So I pray that when God calls us to go and help people near or far, we answer that call, and that we bear witness to the good news of Jesus’ reign of peace and justice, in word and in deed, in our homes, and in our community. I pray that we have the wisdom of Paul to recognize the strength of leadership that’s already there among the people we come to know. And I pray that by the power of the Holy Spirit, God might build us up into a community that is founded not on the sword, but on the promise of the peace left to us by Jesus Christ, in whom all our prayers are known to God. Amen

Sermon — May 15, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

It’s become commonplace to observe that life is like a journey, and religion is no exception to this trend. A quick Google Books search for “spiritual journey” shows that the phrase was virtually unused until 1950 or so, then began a gradual rise before exploding exponentially through the ’80s and ’90s. It soon became the defining way for 21^st-century people to talk about the attempt to find the meaning in one’s life. The idea has ancient roots, even in Christianity: the Acts of the Apostles reports that the Christian movement was, at first, called “the Way,” with a capital W. (Acts 9:2) And so our own Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, in his effort to recover and revive the spirit of “the Jesus Movement,” speaks often of “the Way of Jesus” and “the Way of Love.” It’s an important insight. Our lives as Christians are not about a static body of doctrine that we hold, or a one-time commitment to Christ. They’re about the journey we take together, led by Jesus, who almost always invited people into the search for God not by saying “Learn from me” or “Obey me” but with the words, “Follow me.” To call something a “spiritual journey” is to recognize that it is a process of slow and sometimes-meandering change over time, as we wander day by day toward our final destination.

We sometimes forget, though, how chaotic these journeys can be. I was reminded of this on Monday evening, as I sat outside my apartment, waiting for AAA. You see, on Sunday, Alice, Murray, and I had spent several hours playing and building up Murray’s seashell collection at the “Airplane Beach” in East Boston. And Murray was so eager to return that we planned a trip for Monday evening, after Alice had returned from work. Murray and I waited in excitement all afternoon, and halfway through dinner Murray couldn’t wait any longer and ran out to the car. When I went to unlock the door so Murray could climb into the car seat, I found the remote unlock button wasn’t working. And when I walked around and unlocked the driver’s side door with the key, I soon discovered that the car wouldn’t start. Apparently in the excitement of the night before, I’d forgotten to turn out one of the lights, and the battery was completely dead—so dead, in fact, that it could not even be jumped, and I had to wait for the AAA truck to come with a new battery, by which point Murray’s excitement had been on its own journey through denial, anger, and bargaining, to its final destination: sleep.

It never feels good to disappoint someone you love. But it’s really not so different from what Jesus does to the disciples.

“Follow me,” he says to Peter and to Andrew while they’re fishing on the shore, “and I will make you fishers of men.” (Mark 1:1719) “Follow me” he says to Philip, as he leads him from John the Baptist’s camp by the Jordan back to Galilee. (John 1:43) “Follow me,” he says to Matthew sitting at his tax booth. (Matt. 9:9) And the disciples say yes. They leave behind everything they have and follow Jesus on this remarkable journey, pledging to go with him wherever he leads.

And then he pulls the rug out from under them: “You will look for me,” he tells the disciples at the Last Supper, “but as I said to the Jews I say now to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’” (John 13:33) What a disappointment. They’ve answered his call. They’ve followed him where he has led. They’ve gone with him even to Jerusalem, the city of his destiny. But now, the same Jesus who said to them, “Follow me. Follow me. Follow me,” follows up with, “Where I am going, you cannot come.”

It’s a frustrating end to their journey. And it’s typical of this late part of the Easter season. On Easter Sunday, we celebrated the Resurrection, and in the weeks that follow we heard stories of Jesus’ resurrection appearances. But he soon stops appearing, at least in bodily form—and on this Sunday and the next, we look forward to Jesus’ Ascension, his departure from earth to return to heaven, the place he is going where we cannot come. He’s going away, and he’s leaving us behind. He has made it to the Airplane Beach, and we are stuck here, in desperate need of a jump start, completely unable to reach our destination. We seek him, but we cannot go where he has gone.

And so he comes to us instead. And for me, this is the most startling part of Revelation’s stunning vision of “a new heaven and a new earth.” (Rev. 21:1) This passage is the culminating moment in John’s vision. It’s the second-to-last chapter of the whole Bible, and it’s a message so comforting and powerful it’s (ironically) hard not to cry:

See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them as their God;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away. (Rev. 21:3-4)

The destination of our life’s journey is a place where God will wipe away every tear from our eyes, where death and mourning and crying are no more, where the pain and the toil of this world are no more, “for the first things have passed away.” We have so many blessings and so many things to be thankful for in life, and we have so many burdens to lay down, so many tears to be wiped away. And It can be a great relief to hear these comforting words.

But the emotional power of these verses makes it easy to miss something. This is not a message about our final destination, when our lives’ journeys come to an end and we arrive in heaven to dwell with God. It’s a message about God’s final destination, when God returns to and renews the earth to dwell with us. It’s not a vision of each one of us individually journeying toward heaven, our eternal home. It’s a vision of God coming down out of heaven to dwell with us, and all who have gone before us, for “see, the home of God is among mortals.” (21:3) God will come here once again, as God came here once before, and walk among us again, and care for us with tenderness and love. It’s as though the AAA truck never came, and my battery was never replaced, but we woke up in the morning to find that the beach had come to us.

Our spiritual journeys can be long and winding. Sometimes they’re interrupted or cut short. Even the most blessed and saintly souls often struggle with periods of doubt, or despair, or dead spiritual batteries. And while we pray to drink deeply from the sweet, fresh “spring[s] of the water of life,” our lives are filled as well with brinier waters too, with tears, and sweat, and blood. Our journeys take us far afield, and sometimes we don’t know where they’re leading us. But God knows, and God is coming home to dwell with us as our God; to be with us, and to wipe away every tear from our eyes. God is making all things new. And this promise of renewal is already being fulfilled.

This is important. This passage from Revelation is traditionally read as if it’s about the end state of things, about what’s sometimes called the “Parousia,” Jesus’ final return at the end of time or in some eternal sense, and that’s true. It is. right now, we get a taste of that eternal life. The season of Easter, after all, doesn’t end with the Ascension, with God’s disappearance from earth to go away into heaven, never to return until Judgment Day. Jesus ascends into heaven, yes, but Easter goes on until the day of Pentecost, when he sends the Holy Spirit to be our comforter and guide. And in this long ordinary time, between the first Pentecost and the final Parousia—between one day two thousand years ago, and the Last Day in some eternal and unknowable time—the Holy Spirit is already here, dwelling with us.

Our comfort is not yet complete. God’s new creation is not yet complete. We still live in the world of death and mourning and crying and pain. But there’s a reason it’s called a spiritual journey. We are not alone on our voyage toward God. God the Holy Spirit is already here with us, comforting us, dwelling with us, recreating us into new people every day, as God will one day create a new heavens and a new earth. For “behold,” says the one who is seated on the throne, “I am making all things new.” (Rev. 21:5) Not “I made it once and it was good enough,” not “I will one day fix it all,” but “I am making all things new.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Sermon — May 8, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and
honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever. Amen.”

Once upon a time, a group of friends were trapped in an escape room together. It was one of those birthday parties, where you’re given a set of clues and try to figure out how to escape the room. But this room came with a twist: there were no windows, and no lights, and they were plunged into a darkness so absolute that they could not see anything.

Each one felt around for clues. Soon, one felt his hand press up against a solid, rough expanse. “It’s a rock-climbing wall!” he said. “We have to climb our way out!” His friends were unconvinced. “I’ve got a spear,” one said, “or a sword. Something sharp! Maybe we need to drill a hole.” “I’ve got some rope,” said the third. “It’s kind of swinging back and forth.” Another felt something like the solid trunk of a tree. Maybe a battering ram to smash their way out?

Each friend was clear about exactly what they needed to do, but none of them agreed. They knew, in theory, that there must be some way out. But as their bickering continued, one of them panicked, thinking they would never escape, and cried out, “Help! Help! We give up!”

And when the escape-room lights turned on, their fears dissipated… only to be replaced, very quickly, by a deeper and more reasonable fear. For the things they were still holding onto and had been brandishing throughout their argument were not the tools intended for their escape. When the lights came on, it became clear that these disparate tools of escape were in fact a full-grown Asian elephant, and it was not altogether pleased.

You may have heard this story in another form, but the point is the same. One patted the vast flank of the elephant and mistook it for a rock-climbing wall. One grabbed hold of a sharp tusk and imagined it to be a spear. One felt the sinuous rope of the elephant’s trunk, one the thick legs that supported its weight. And while each one was partially correct, none of them had the whole picture.

I sometimes think the Bible is like this. Take, for example, Jesus. Mark’s Jesus is a wandering holy man, a healer and demon fighter. Matthew’s is a well-read sage, expounding on God’s holy law in well-structured speeches, with ample citations from the Bible. Luke’s Jesus is a prophet of social justice, driven by the Holy Spirit to proclaim good news to the poor and create a multicultural movement from all the nations of the world. John’s is a man of mystery, performing signs and giving circuitous discourses that bear witness to the glory of God. And like the parts of the elephant, each one of these versions is true, but incomplete, so we layer them on top of each other, and each one enriches the others, like a really good sandwich; bacon, lettuce, tomato, and bread: meet Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

And then along comes the Book of Revelation, which is not so much a carefully layered sandwich as it is the bowl full of leftovers you throw into the microwave the day after Thanksgiving, so many different things thrown together that it’s almost overwhelming. Revelation operates on the great principle of literary prose that “more is more.” Why say in one word what you could say in four? So there’s a great and uncountable multitude from every nation and tribe and people and language, (7:9) and the angels and the elders and the four living creatures fall on their faces and worship God, and say, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever. Amen.” (7:12) (And it’s like the flavor of that leftover meal: Turkey and stuffing and gravy and cranberry and potatoes and yams…Amen!)

And it works. It creates a kind of hyper-saturated atmosphere You literally could not pump any more incense or chanting or prostration or prayer into John’s vision of this celestial worship. It can’t absorb any more. It’s full of symbolism. The Book of Revelation gets a bad rap, and part of that comes from the strange way in which fundamentalist interpretations try to flatten this overladen symbolism down, to squeeze it out into a straightforward prediction of future events. But the Book of Revelation is actually doing exactly what the gospels do: not predicting the future, primarily, but telling us about Jesus: who he was, and who he is, and who he will be on Judgment Day.

This scene, with the waving of palm branches and the blood of the Lamb, is a Holy Week scene. It may be strange. It may be different from the passion and resurrection stories of the gospels. But it tells the same story. Every Sunday, we say, “Alleluia! Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us!” And these early Christian authors agreed. Jesus is like the Passover lamb, sacrificed for us to drive away the angel of death. When the gospels want to make this point, they make it part of the plot of the story. So Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell the story of the Last Supper as a Passover meal. John creates endless chronological problems by telling it a slightly different way: he puts the crucifixion at the very moment that the Passover lambs are being sacrificed, which unfortunately makes it a different day and, as a result, a different year. Which is awkward, if you’re really invested in the inerrant truth of every single detail and word of the Bible. The Book of Revelation, though, is an apocalyptic vision; it doesn’t have to make sense in the same way, so Jesus just appears as a Lamb, and the Passover image is understood. And as surreal as the Book of Revelation may seem, this surreal symbolism allows it to show the cosmic truths that are sometimes hidden behind the earthly need for consistency and plot.

Imagine this scene as the whole “Paschal mystery,” the whole reality of Christ’s suffering, death, and resurrection, happening in one particular place and time but transforming all of space and time. Revelation is weird, so it doesn’t need to tell a story over  three days and leave us to understand what it means for us: it can symbolically drag us into the story, and who cares about consistency? So the crowd standing “with palm branches in their hands,” (7:9) are not just a small procession of Jesus’ followers on their way into Jerusalem. They’re “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages,” (7:9) a congregation spanning the breadth of space and time. And here’s Jesus, the sacrificial Lamb, not abandoned by the disciples, even by Peter, but surrounded by worshipers earthly and heavenly; enthroned in the center of the throne of God, even on the Cross.

Revelation’s verbosity drives home the point: Jesus is never just one thing. Yes, Jesus is a teacher, and Jesus is a healer, and Jesus is a social prophet and a learned sage and the incarnate Word of God. Jesus is the Lamb who was slain, and Jesus is the Good Shepherd, “for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd,” and he will guide us to “springs of living water,” and God “will wipe away every tear from our eyes.” (7:17)

I love that: only the Book of Revelation could tell us that the shepherd is a sheep, and then move on as if that made any sense at all. And yet it does! In fact, it’s probably the best summary of the Church’s understanding of who Jesus is: Jesus is both sheep and Shepherd, both human and God. Jesus is King and friend, teacher and healer and demon-fighter. Jesus is all these things and more, and it’s part of his appeal: we trust his ethical teachings more because we know the depth of his compassion. He is a truly Good Shepherd because he truly knows what it is to be a sheep.

It’s a wonderful thing to be many things at once. It’s often true of the Episcopal Church. In fact, there’s a line in one of our prayers that perfectly encapsulates the diversity of thought in our Episcopal or Anglican tradition, which we sometimes call a “middle way” between other Christian traditions: “Grant,” it prays, “that we may maintain that middle way, not as a compromise for the sake of peace, but as a comprehension for the sake of truth.”

That’s what an elephant is. Not a compromise between its parts, but a comprehension of its parts. And that’s who Jesus is. The Bible gives us so many different pictures of Jesus. We could choose our favorite. We could try to create a least-common-denominator compromise Jesus. Or we could embrace the comprehensive richness of Christ: a trunk from Matthew, a tusk from Mark, a flank from Luke, and from Revelation: a couple of legs and a whole bunch of other weird stuff, and together, they begin to introduce us to the fullness of Christ.

We are elephants too. We are also many things at the same time. We’re among the disciples denying Jesus in the courtyard and abandoning him on the Cross, and we’re among the great multitude praising him on the throne. We are here living through “the great ordeal” of life, our faces sometimes drenched in tears, (Rev. 7:14) and we’re already in heaven, worshiping the God who wipes away every tear from our eyes. We are imperfect, fragile sheep, who sometimes go astray; we are God’s sheep who hear our Shepherd’s voice and follow. (John 10:27) And to recognize that we are both good and imperfect, that we are loved and yet flawed, is not a “compromise for the sake of peace,” but a “comprehension for the sake of truth.”

Revelation can be a scary or offensive book. Jesus stands in judgment over the world, holding court from the very center of the throne of God, and yes, several people are thrown into a lake of fire. We fear judgment, whether God’s or one another’s, and in fact we tend to reject the idea that anyone has a right to judge us, whether God or one another. But what a gift that Jesus stands in judgment over the world, and no one else, that only he can condemn us, and no one else, because Jesus is not just the sharp tusk of Divine Judgment. He’s the whole elephant. The Shepherd who leads and guides the sheep is himself a Lamb. The one who judges our eternal worth is the one who wipes away every tear from our eyes. (Rev. 7:17) The one who has the power of creation and destruction chooses to gather a great multitude of sheep, from every tribe and people and language and nation, (7:9) and give them the gift of eternal life, and no one will snatch them from his hand. (John 10:28) And there is absolutely no one on this earth who can tell you what you’re worth except the God who loves you so deeply that he would sacrifice himself to save you from the power of evil and death in this world.

So “blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever!… for the Lamb at the center of the throne [is our] shepherd, and he will guide [us] to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from [our] eyes.” Amen.