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The Power of Prayer

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It’s become fashionable, in recent years, to mock those who respond to tragedy by offering their “thoughts and prayers”—and for good reason! In American public life we hear this phrase most often as a politician’s hollow response to an act of gun violence: “My thoughts and prayers are with the families.” (But my vote is with the NRA.) And of course, it’s resurfaced over the last few weeks as people around the world wonder what to do in response to the Russian attack on Ukraine and are left with nothing but their thoughts and prayers.

To the extent that this is fair, it’s fair as a critique of hypocrisy, not of prayer. The problem is not that politicians pray for an end to gun violence; it’s that politicians who hold the power to change public policy are hiding behind prayer, abusing the idea of prayer by wielding it as a shield against taking responsibility for the situation. (And in my more cynical moments, I’m inclined to wonder: How much time did you really spend on your knees grappling with God in prayer before your intern sent that tweet, Senator?)

But prayer itself is not inaction. It is, in fact, a powerful act.

Leave aside for a moment the common idea of prayer as a Christmas letter mailed to the North Pole, in which we submit to God a list of our anxieties and dreams in the hope that we can persuade God to give us what we want. Without delving too deeply into the metaphysical depths of Christian theology, let me just say: God is well aware that the war in Ukraine (or gun violence, or your nephew’s health, or …) is a problem. God isn’t tallying up the votes to see which way to act. By praying our hardest, we cannot evoke a supernatural military intervention from the heavens.

But prayer is not primarily our cry of anguish to God. It is the Spirit of God groaning wordlessly in the depths of our souls, and our spirits crying out in resonant response. Theologically speaking, our prayers can only ever begin as our response to the Holy Spirit’s presence and work within us. In prayer, we quiet our minds and our voices to listen for God’s voice within us. We lay down our own egos and allow ourselves to be shaped by God’s love. And then we return into the world, transformed into ever-so-slightly-more-Christ-shaped versions of ourselves, and we act. Prayer is a powerful act. Not a human act of oration, attempting to persuade God; but a divine act of love and a human response of listening and yielding to God’s will.

Sometimes we need to set aside a particular place and time to pray, and to pray together; a moment in which to set down our anxieties and our business and listen for God’s voice. As the great pastor Eugene Peterson wrote, “I can’t be busy and pray at the same time. I can be active and pray; I can work and pray; but I cannot be busy and pray. I cannot be inwardly rushed, distracted, or dispersed. In order to pray, I have to be paying more attention to God than to what people are saying to me; more attention to God than to my clamoring ego. Usually, for that to happen there must be a deliberate withdrawal from the noise of the day, a disciplined detachment from the insatiable self.”

If you find yourself needing such a “deliberate withdrawal from the noise of the day” to pray these days—and especially to pray for peace, for the suffering of Ukrainian civilians and soldiers and Russian conscripts, and for the repentance of those who inflict such cruelty on their neighbors—I invite you to join us at a vigil of prayer for peace, to be held at St. John’s this Wednesday, March 30, at 7:00pm. It will be a short service, with time to quiet ourselves and listen to God; to lament the destruction and to pray for its end; and, perhaps most importantly, to allow ourselves to be transformed into people living lives of peace and love.

I hope to see you there. And if not: please join your prayers with ours, wherever and whenever you can.

“Turn Aside and See”

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“Turn Aside and See”

 
 
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Sermon — March 20, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Jesus’ words in our Gospel this morning crack open a debate about what’s sometimes called “karmic retribution.” You’re probably familiar with the idea: if you do a good deed now, you’ll “have some good karma” and the universe will owe you good things in the future. If you do evil now, you may escape punishment for a while, but eventually, you will reap what you have sown; bad things will happen to you.

Now, this is an over-simplified version of the real Buddhist or Hindu idea of “karma,” but in fact, most people believe in some form of it. It’s just the timeline that changes. So, some people really do believe that “what goes around comes around” in this life: if I do good things, good things will happen to me. It may be in a week, or a month, or ten years, but it’s coming. Of course, the various Hindu and Buddhist traditions from which the word “karma” actually comes, have a much more nuanced idea of things, especially when you introduce concepts like reincarnation: I may be repaid for the good or evil I’ve done in this life in some future life, after my death and rebirth. And of course, even most people’s ideas of how “heaven” and “hell” work are variations on the same theme, but again with the timeline changed: God is just, and justice will be served, not in this life, but after death. So no good deed goes unrewarded, and no evil deed goes unpunished; it’s just that it happens in the afterlife.

Jesus dives right in to this debate. It’s clear that he rejects the most simplistic version of “karmic retribution,” the idea that “good things happen to good people” and “bad things happen to bad people,” because this amounts to a kind of victim-blaming. Jesus names a couple of recent news stories to make the point; we don’t know anything about them, but you can probably understand without much context. Think about those Galilean pilgrims, he says, whom Pilate killed in cold blood at the very Temple itself, mixing their blood with the blood of their sacrifices. Think of those eighteen poor souls killed when that tower collapsed. We might say: Think of those families huddled in subway stations in Kyiv, of that friend who’s sick and fighting so bravely, of that family member who was bullied at school for years. Is their evidence of some hidden wrongdoing? Is it simply that “what goes around comes around”?

Jesus dismisses that idea out of hand. Do you think they suffered in this way because they were worse sinners than all the rest of us? “No, I tell you,” he says—“but…” (Luke 13:3)

There’s an old saying that preachers ought to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” and Jesus knew it well. To those who are worried that their suffering is a sign of God’s wrath or vengeance, Jesus simply says: Be not afraid. It’s not your fault. You’re not being punished for anything.

But to those who are comfortable, who have the leisure to come to him with speculative questions about the cause of human suffering and the problem of evil, Jesus says, “No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish, just as they did.” (Luke 13:3, 5)

“Repentance” is such a church-specific word that it’s sometimes not obvious what it means. Our English word “repent” comes from the Latin verb repenitire, a verb which means “to feel regret.” It’s tightly tied to ideas of punishment: the pen in repent or penitence is the same Latin word as in penalty or penal; in fact, it’s an alternate spelling of the pun in punish. To “repent” is to “feel really bad,” because to “punish” is to “make someone feel really bad.” But Jesus didn’t speak Latin. The Greek and Hebrew words for repentance have slightly different connotations. You may have heard a preacher quote the Greek word metanoia, the word used in the original language of the New Testament for repentance. Metanoia doesn’t mean “punishment” or “regret” but “transformation of the mind,” a reorientation of a person’s values and beliefs. And the Hebrew and Aramaic word for repentance is even clearer about that reorientation: it’s teshuvah in Hebrew, “turning” or “returning.” Not feeling guilty, not being punished, not even changing one’s mind, but turning away from a path that’s leading to destruction, and returning to God.

It’s this “turning” that Jesus is talking about, I think. Jesus is speaking to people living under foreign occupation in the decades before an explosive, failed revolution that will end with their defeat and the destruction of their city. Pontius Pilate isn’t a generic bad guy. He’s the Roman official charged with maintaining control of this part of the empire. Those Galileans were probably killed for resisting Roman rule, one way or another. And when Jesus turns and addresses the crowd, he’s begging them to resist the Romans in a different, non-violent way, because the rebellion they are planning will lead them to their destruction. To be clear: Jesus is not claiming that unless they repent from their personal sins, whatever, God will destroy them as individuals. He’s claiming that unless they practice teshuvah, unless they turn aside from the path they’re on, they will be destroyed; by Rome or one another or.

We are living in a different place and time. But we nevertheless sometimes find ourselves walking paths that lead us toward destruction. Perhaps it’s a personal path of destruction, an addiction or an obsession or simply an unhealthy way of relating to another person that’s destroying you, day by day. Perhaps it’s something bigger, like the path that’s leading us inexorably toward environmental catastrophe. But it is as true for us as it was for those Judeans and Galileans long ago: Unless we repent, unless we turn aside, we will all perish. This is the sense in which “what goes around comes around.” Not as the result of karmic retribution or divine justice, but simply as the consequence of our own actions. Jesus doesn’t tell these people that they’re going be suffer forever in hell. He tells them that if they don’t turn, they will perish. But what if they do turn and look to see what’s on the other road?

Like many of the heroes of the Bible, Moses isn’t much of a hero; at least not to begin with. This first reading comes from Exodus chapter 3. So far, Moses has been born into an enslaved people under the threat of violence. His fantastic escape down the river in a basket is a testament to his mother’s ingenuity and to the compassion of Pharaoh’s daughter, but we can’t give any credit to baby Moses himself. That’s chapter 1. Chapter 2 mostly tells the story of Moses as a hot-headed and violent man. Raised a prince of Egypt, he’s nevertheless killed an Egyptian man and fled, leaving behind his family and his homeland and all his privilege to tend the flocks of Jethro, the priest of Midian. It’s not a great start.

But no spiritual journey ever starts with our good behavior. It starts with God’s unprompted, undeserved calling. And so the “angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush,” and Moses noticed. (Exod. 3:2) And Moses said to himself, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight,” and “when the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see,” God called to him by name: “Moshe! Moshe!” (3:3) And Moses replied, Hineni, “Here I am.” (3:4)

It is not because Moses’ mother sets him afloat down the river in a basket that God calls him to stand up to Pharaoh and lead his people. It’s not because he’s particular good at nonviolent resistance, which he’s not. It’s not because he’s a good public speaker—in fact, he’s such a bad public speaker that God gets his brother Aaron involved to help him out. It’s because when he sees God’s glory flaring out from the bush, he turns aside to see. And when God saw that he had turned aside, God called to him.

Moses turns away from the path of destruction, the path that had led him from the royal court to a lonely wilderness, from his life being saved from Pharaoh’s violence to ending another man’s life by violence, and he turns onto another path, a path of freedom and of life. And while that path is not always easy—while Moses suffers much along the way—there is never a sense that he’s getting what he deserves, there is never a sense that what goes around comes around, there is never a sense that God is punishing or will punish Moses for this inauspicious and violent beginning, in this life or the next. Because as soon as he turns aside, he has left the path that leads to destruction, and he is safe.

God calls us each by name, as good or bad or ordinary as we are. And the God whose name is “I Am Who I Am,” calls each of us as we are, and we respond, “Here I am.” Here I am, as I am. There’s no one else I can be. And if we turn aside—no, since the moment that we turned aside to look—God will and God is and God has been leading us down the paths of life and love and peace, whatever may happen along the way.

As we walk along that path, may God indeed “keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul,” this day and for ever more. Amen.

Praying For Peace

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As I write this, it’s been nearly three weeks since Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine began. In that time, we’ve seen a dizzying escalation from scattered Russian columns attempting a quick overthrow of the Ukrainian government to an all-out onslaught against the Ukrainian people, with the Russian Army indiscriminately shelling civilian apartment buildings, besieging cities, and arresting local elected officials. These are not only war crimes, they are crimes against humanity. They are among the darkest expressions of sin imaginable.

The Ukrainian Army has, so far, shown laudable restraint and professionalism in its response; there have been no tit-for-tat attacks on Russian cities by Ukraine. But a war waged well within the lines of acceptable conduct is nevertheless a tragedy. The Russian mass murder of Ukrainian civilians is an abomination. And the needless death of thousands of Russian conscripts, mainly young men barely out of high school serving a poorly-timed year of mandatory military service, is—while not a war crime—profoundly sad.

The Episcopal Church is not pacifist as a matter of theology, as Quakers or Mennonites; while individual members may reject any and all war or military service, the Church as a body recognizes that there are situations in which armed resistance is morally acceptable, even admirable. War is horrifying. But to pray for peace is not to pray for Ukrainian surrender; it is to pray for “peace” is the fullest sense of the Hebrew word shalom: not peace as the absence of conflict, but peace as the presence of justice.

So pray, this Lent, for peace. Pray for the safety of the millions of refugees fleeing Ukraine, mourning the loss of their homes and their family members, seeking safety in a strange land. Pray for the souls of those who have died, civilians and Ukrainian soldiers and Russian soldiers alike. Pray for Russian civilians whose savings have been wiped out or whose stomachs will go unfilled as the result of sanctions. Pray, especially, for the repentance of Vladimir Putin and his allies, that they may see the truth of their evil and turn, and be saved; and save countless thousands of lives.

If you are looking for a reliable way to support the innocent victims of this conflict through financial giving, I’d encourage you to consider Episcopal Relief and Development’s Ukraine Crisis Response Fund. Working through the Action by Churches Together Alliance (ACT Alliance), donations to this fund will provide cash, blankets, hygiene supplies and other assistance to Ukraine refugees who arriving in Poland and Hungary. (You can click here to read more about ERD’s efforts.)

A group of St. John’s parishioners is in the process of planning a prayer service for peace. If you would like to participate, please stay tuned for more information or email Greg.

In the meantime, I have been lingering this month with one of the prayer book’s more powerful prayers, with which I’ll leave you today:

Eternal God, in whose perfect kingdom no sword is drawn but the sword of righteousness, no strength known but the strength of love: So mightily spread abroad your Spirit, that all peoples may be gathered under the banner of the Prince of Peace, as children of one Father; to whom be dominion and glory, now and for ever. Amen.

BCP p. 815, “4. For Peace”

Singing our Prayers

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If you were paying attention during the Eucharist on Sunday, or were here for Ash Wednesday, you probably noticed one striking difference from all the other Sunday Eucharists we’ve had here: I chanted (i.e., sang) the Collect of the Day and a large part of the Eucharistic Prayer! In keeping with the theme of my last few newsletter pieces (“Weird stuff in Lent and why we’re doing it”) I thought I’d say a bit today about chanted prayers: what they are, why we do them, and what they say about the very nature of prayer itself.

When I was meeting with some of our kids to learn about Communion on Sunday after the service, I told them that for almost everything in church, there’s a spiritual, churchy reason and a good, solid, practical reason. So, for example, the richly-decorated veil that covers the chalice until the priest sets the table for the Eucharistic Prayer symbolizes the glory and mystery of the Sacrament, whose inner nature is withheld from our sight until Christ reveals himself in the breaking of the bread; also, it keeps flies from getting into the wine. (And so on.)

Chanted prayers are common around the world: think of the muezzin’s call to prayer or the chanted Torah readings in a synagogue. They share a common and prosaic origin with our chanted Eucharistic prayers: in a world without microphones, it’s much easier to hear someone who’s singing than someone who’s speaking at a normal volume! In ancient and medieval Christian churches, large parts of the service would have been sung, with varying levels of complexity: from the Epistle sung in a simple monotone, to the elaborate chanted settings of various parts of the Mass. In the medieval Western European churches, in fact, the service essentially alternated between chanted prayers and virtually-inaudible prayers spoken or even whispered by the priest, standing and facing the altar with the people—which is to say, standing with his back to the people, making his words even harder to hear.

In a small space like ours, it’s easy to project and be heard. But sung prayers do change the sense of the service somehow. They can create a more solemn feeling, or a more festive one; the music colors the text and adds another layer of meaning and feeling. And more than anything, singing forces us to slow down, literally to focus on our breath and on our words. It’s easy to rush or stumble through a spoken prayer in distraction. It’s harder to rush through a chant, and—in fact—your body will warn you very quickly if you try to cram too much into a single breath! Modulating the speed of our prayer through this focus on breath can be one of the most spiritually-enriching changes to prayer; and I say “spiritually” quite intentionally, as the words “spiritual” and “Spirit” and “spirituality” all come from the Latin word spiritus, “breath.”

In a modern world of written words, many of us are used to thinking silently inside our heads. But the silence of our own minds can be an ironically-noisy place. Our silent thoughts and silent prayers can move at the speed of light, richocheting around the insides of our skulls and raising a whole cacophony of distractions and anxieties. It’s why it’s often so helpful to talk something out with a friend or therapist or priest; not because their advice or input is any good (it’s sometimes not), but because speaking out loud forces us to organize our thoughts into something more linear than silent thought often is. And because chant requires such attention to our breath, it forces us to slow down and organize ourselves even more, as the Spirit of God flows into our lungs and then out into our prayer.

So, anyway: if you hate the chanted Eucharistic prayer, don’t worry; like all things in liturgical life, this will rotate on and off. If you love it, take heart! And ask yourself (maybe out loud! maybe in song!) how it’s drawing you closer to God.

“The Right Story”

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“The Right Story”

 
 
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Sermon — March 6, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

As people have followed the news from Ukraine recently, I’ve seen a number of different ways to try to understand what’s happening by telling the stories of the past. It’s something we often do. Is this, one might wonder, closer to what Germany did to Czechoslovakia in 1938, or is it closer to what Germany and the Soviet Union did to Poland in 1939? Is it more like what Russia did to Georgia in 2008, or what Russia did to Ukraine just back in 2014? Or, if you’re not so familiar with the dates and times of 20th-century European history: Is this, as one headline said, a “David and Goliath story”?

It’s interesting, the way we try to understand, as if picking the right story about a situation can tell us something about the way it will unfold. “David and Goliath” is the perfect example. After all, nobody ever claims to be Goliath, because “David and Goliath” doesn’t just distinguish between “small and big,” it separates those who are small, scrappy, and untrained, but righteous from those who are big, powerful, incompetent, and wrong. And “David and Goliath” aren’t just characters, but a story. We know the beginning, the middle, and the end. And we know that it’s not the story of a small but righteous child slowly crushed, despite his best efforts, beneath the inexorable power of a giant. It’s a story in which the determined, innocent boy overcomes the hardened warrior by the grace of God and by the power of his goodness. To claim the David and Goliath story for oneself is to claim that one will have victory, as unlikely as it may seem; and in fact, by giving courage to your friends and attracting compassion from the world, the telling of the story itself shifts the plot of reality toward the victory. It’s not a magic formula. It doesn’t guarantee you’ll get what you want. But it’s a legitimate strategy, and it sometimes really works.

We often call Lent a penitential season, a season in which we repent, as one of our liturgies puts it, for “the evil that enslaves us, the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf,” and we try to repair the damage. It’s also a season of fasting, which is something different. Fasting—whether from certain foods or from alcohol or from anything else we choose to give up during Lent—is not a form of repentance. We don’t give up chocolate or wine or whatever because they’re evil, but because they’re good. And it’s not a punishment, a way of somehow making amends for our sins by forsaking something we like. It’s a workout for the soul, a way of practicing our resistance to really serious temptations by resisting things that aren’t actually bad to do. Along with repentance and fasting, Lent is also a season of preparation: not only of our preparation for the joy of the resurrection on Easter, but, traditionally, a season in which new Christians were formed in the traditions of the faith as they prepared to be baptized at Easter.

Lent is a season of repentance, and of fasting, and of preparation; but it’s also a season of wandering in the wilderness. The forty days of Lent symbolize the forty days of Jesus’ fasting and temptation in the wilderness, which are themselves an echo of the forty years the Israelites spent wandering in the wilderness generations before. And this is the part of Lent I’m really feeling the most this year—not repentance, or preparation, or even fasting (although, ask me in a few weeks)—but that story of the wilderness.

The wilderness is an interlude in the story of the ancient Israelites. It should just be a couple days’ journey from Egypt to the Promised Land, and yet this wilderness stretches on for a long, long time, the Promised Land always tantalizingly just around the bend. Much like the last two years. We’ve left behind an old way of living, and we haven’t quite reached the new one yet. And it turns out that this wilderness time hasn’t just been empty time. It’s been a time of transformation and change and reimagination. It’s not just the gap between Point A and Point B—it is, itself, point B in a much longer alphabet of change.

The Book of Deuteronomy is written as a speech by Moses at the end of this wandering time, forty years after he parted the Red Sea so they could escape slavery in Egypt. Moses reminds them of the law that God has given them, and tells them what to do when they finally make it there: “When you have come into the Land…and you possess it, and settle in it, you shall take some of the first fruit of the ground…” and go to the altar of God, and say, “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor,” and retell the story of their people, of their ancestors’ own ancient wanderings, of their enslavement, and of their liberation. (Deut. 26:1-2, 5)

Immediately after Jesus’ baptism in the same river Jordan, he is led out into the wilderness to be tested, and stays there for forty days, a miniature version of their forty years. And each one of his responses to the devil’s tempting offers is a quote from that same Book of Deuteronomy: “One does not live by bread alone,” and “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him,” and “Do not put the Lord your God to the test” all come from that same moment in the people’s story. (Deut. 8:3, 6:13, 6:16)

Jesus’ wilderness time is at the beginning of his ministry, not the end. But it comes while his people are still enduring another wilderness, not forty days or four decades but four centuries and more of foreign rule, of occupation and oppression. And when the devil tempts him with offers of bread, and power, and safety for himself, Jesus quotes Deuteronomy, recalling the whole story of the people’s time in the wilderness and their entrance into the Promised Land. The devil offers a single hungry man a loaf of bread; and Jesus calls forth the story of the God who fed his people with manna from heaven every day. The devil offers him power over the kingdoms of all the world, and Jesus recalls the story of a people who’ve had enough of being ruled. The devil offers him protection, but Jesus calls forth the God who parted the sea and dashed the chariots of Pharaoh, the tanks of the ancient world, into bits.

These words have power. When we quote a beloved text, or we give a ritualized address, when we recite ancient prayers or we write a news headline about a “David and Goliath” struggle, we write ourselves into the story, and that story becomes real in our lives.

Paul writes to the church in Rome that “if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9) It’s not a magic formula. It’s the retelling of a story. Like the Eucharistic prayers that evoke the story of salvation, like the Great Litany that echoes with five centuries of the prayers of the past, it draws upon the strength of the experience of Christians in ages past, and their stories begin to shape our lives and our choices as we live the remaining chapters of our stories. And in fact this retelling doesn’t just call forth the stories of our ancestors; it’s brings God to us. When we tell those old stories, Paul quotes Deuteronomy to say, “The word is near [us], on [our] lips and in [our] heart.” (Rom. 10:8, Deut. 30:14) The uppercase-W Word of God is near us. The Word who became flesh is near us. When we tell these stories, and pray these prayers, Christ is near us, whether we can sense him or not, and he is writing the rest of the story for us as leave this place today.

Only a few words of this service today came from me, or from you. More came from the generations before us, fifty or five hundred years ago. And more still came from generations long past, from those who lived in a far-off live two or three thousand years ago. But their stories are our stories. Their God is our God. Their wilderness is not our wilderness, but their wandering is our wandering, and it feels like we’re getting awfully close to the Promise Land. We don’t know what God has written for us in the next chapter of our story, but we do know where God’s story has brought us in the past: from a wilderness of spiritual fasting to a land flowing with milk and honey; from enslavement to liberation; from the cross to the empty tomb; and together with all those who live among us, we can give thanks to God and “celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord [our] God has given to [us].” (Deut. 26:11)

Amen.