Sermon — February 13, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

There’s been a subtle change in the way people use the word “blessed” over the last decade. Ten years ago, if I asked someone how they were and they said “blessed,” I’d assume they meant they were grateful to God for the good things God had given them, even—maybe especially—the little things. “How are you today?” you might say to a taxi driver as you got into the backseat. “Blessed,” he might reply. Life’s not perfect. I’m not rich. But I’m blessed to be here, blessed that God woke me up this morning to spend another day driving people around.

With the rise of social media, “blessed” has acquired a new sense. In the age of Facebook and Instagram and TikTok, where you can tag photos or videos with a word or phrase, “blessed” quickly became a cliché. Circa 2014, if you posted a photo of yourself suspended mid-air off the back of a yacht as you leapt into the turquoise waters of the Caribbean, there was only one thing to say: #blessed. This kind of mock humility or gratitude could be especially infuriating. No no, it’s not bragging to post a photo of my incredible resort hotel room with an ocean view. It’s gratitude! It’s prayer! See: I’m blessed!

#blessed became such a cliché that as early as 2015 it had generated a harsh response from none other than Vogue magazine. “The #blessed hashtag,” writes columnist Hayley Bloomingdale, “is only acceptable when used ironically. Note: The #blessed hashtag used unironically (e.g., an image of a green juice with the caption ‘#greenjuice #cleanliving #lovemylife… #blessed #soblessed [several hashtags omitted]) is a clear indicator that you should unfollow that girl and avoid her in real life at all costs.”

Still, even today, you can find people unironically using the phrase “blessed” when they’re really showing off about how awesome their life is, and in fact—how awesome they are. It reflects a broader pattern, even a theology: there’s a certain strain of American culture and American Christianity that sees your success in attaining the pleasures of this life as a sign of God’s grace.

Jesus would be surprised to hear it.

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“Blessed are you who are poor,” he famously begins, “for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you…” (Luke 6:20-22)

#blessed #soblessed

These “beatitudes,” these blessed-are-yous, are completely upside-down. Even leaving social media and the prosperity gospel aside, reasonable people wouldn’t see this as a blessed way of life. Poverty, hunger, tears; these are not the blessings for which we thank our God. Riches, fullness, laughter—these are not our woes.

It’s so difficult to wrap our heads around this inversion that people have come up with ways to try to make Jesus’ words make sense. Perhaps the most common response is to spiritualize them, and you see this already in the small differences between Luke and Matthew’s versions of these says. In Luke, Jesus tells the disciples, “Blessed are you who are poor… Blessed are you who are hungry…” (Luke 6:20-21) in Matthew, Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit… Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness…” (Matt. 5:3, 6) and he adds several more: “Blessed are the merciful… Blessed are the pure in heart… Blessed are the peacemakers…” and so on. (Matt. 5:7-9) In this spiritualized version, It’s not about material poverty and wealth, hunger and fullness; it’s about spiritual hunger and spiritual poverty, yearning for God and giving up our pretenses to control. (But keeping the cash.)

Others have played with the sense of time in Jesus’ words. There’s a kind of cycle here that reminds me of the famous verse from Ecclesiastes: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.” (Eccl. 3:1 ff.) “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh… [But] woe to you who are full now, for” — no matter how filling the meal — “you will be hungry.” Read this way, the Beatitudes become a commentary on the cyclicality of time, a reassurance that this too will pass—whatever this is for you right now, be it hunger or mourning or fullness or laughter. For better or for worse, all things come to an end.

To others these are both unsatisfying ideas. Luke’s gospel is, after all, the one with the most clear-eyed concern for the poor and the outcast. It’s in Luke that we find Mary’s words that God has “cast down the mighty from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly.” (1:52) It’s in Luke that Jesus, in his opening sermon at the synagogue in Nazareth, proclaims that he has come to “proclaim good news to the poor.” (4:18) And so it should come as no surprise that it’s in Luke that Jesus stands before his disciples and bluntly says, “Blessed are the poor; for yours is the kingdom of God.” And to the extent that you are poor or hungry or reviled, this is a fantastic thing. Jesus smashes the prosperity theology of the culture of #blessed-ness. If you are poor, or hungry, or mourning, it is not a sign of God’s displeasure. No, “Blessed are you,” Jesus says, “for yours is the kingdom of God.” And if—this third school of thought wants to say—if this offends you but you are rich and full and happy, then that’s not Jesus’ problem. It’s yours.

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So, all of these interpretations have centuries of tradition supporting them, and I encourage you to hang onto whichever one draws you closer to God. For my part, I just want to make two observations.

First: in Matthew’s gospel, this is part of the famous “Sermon on the Mount.” In Luke, we find it in the shorter and significantly-less-famous “Sermon on the Plain.” It’s delivered not from high up on the mountain, evoking the holy Mount Sinai from which Moses delivered the Law millennia before; but face to face, for “Jesus came down… and stood on a level place… and looked up at his disciples.” (6:17, 20) Jesus came down among us, not just in a metaphorical way in the Incarnation, but in a very literal way, and walked among the rich and poor alike, not with condemnation or with legislation, but with a compassionate heart and a healing touch.

Second: this isn’t a third-person description of categories of people as good or bad. It’s a word of comfort in the second person, face to face; and, to be fair, a word of warning. It’s not “blessed are the poor…blessed are the hungry…woe to the rich.” It’s Jesus, speaking to his disciples, to us, and our ecclesiastical ancestors, and saying, “Blessed are you, who are poor. Blessed are you, who are hungry. Blessed are you, who weep.” And “woe to you, who are rich. Woe to you, who are full. Woe to you, who are laughing now.”

The reality is, we’re always both at once. We are, as the Church has always been, a mixed body. And in fact, every one of us is a mixed body. I do not know a single person who is so #blessed that they are full and laughing and rich in every part of their life. And when we see someone who we think is, when we compare our lives with someone who really does seem to be living the dream, we have to remember: it’s a front. It’s an important front, sometimes. We need to keep ourselves together somehow. We don’t actually want to answer every person who asks how we’re doing with the whole truth. But I would be shocked if a single person came up to me after this service and said, “Greg: my life is perfect. I have no pain. I have no tears. I have no hunger.” If that’s you, please tell me! I would love to know! But I’ve never seen it before in my life. Rich or full or cheerful as we may be, we are all poor, or hungry, or weeping, too.

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A few years ago I went to a conference and picked up some materials from a booth being run by a group that offers “strategic missional consulting” for local churches. And you can type in the address of your church and get a detailed demographic breakdown of the local area, with Census statistics and marketing demographic breakdowns and a free 45-minute phone call where they walk you through it; and then try to sell you the full consulting package for, like, ten grand.

And after walking me through the details, the priest-consultant on the call asked me a question that came from a few decades of ministry: “Tell me: What’s hunger look like in your community?”

And I said: “Well, you know, it’s a pretty affluent area of the suburbs, but there’s actually a pretty big refugee community here, and there are a lot of elders living on fixed-incomes with pretty high property taxes, and I go to this monthly meeting of human services providers and I’ve always been surprised to hear how busy the food pantry is and…”

And he said, “No, no, no. Tell me: What’s hunger look like in your community?”

We are all sometimes full and often hungry. We are all sometimes laughing and often weeping. And I know that I’m just falling into that same trap of spiritualizing away the very real material point of this text, but we are all, however rich we may be, somehow poor; and, in this country, relative to the human condition writ large, however poor we may be, we are still relatively rich.

What’s hunger look like in our community? What’s hunger look like in this church? What’s hunger look like for you, rich or poor, hungry or full, laughing or weeping; for you, as one of those blessed children to whom Jesus has promised the kingdom of God?

For “blessed are those,” whoever they are, “who trust in the Lord,” says the prophet Jeremiah, “whose trust is in the Lord.” (Jeremiah 17:7) Amen.

Sermon — February 6, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips,
 and I live among a people of unclean lips!” (Isaiah 6:5)

Welcome to my annual report.

No, I’m just kidding. But this is a fitting set of readings for a Sunday on which we’ll vote to elect the new leadership of this parish, with two new wardens and four new Vestry members. Our readings today grapple with the overwhelming sense of responsibility that can come with a transition, in any area of life. If you’ve ever gotten a promotion at work, or taken on a leadership role in a community organization, or become a parent, you’ve probably felt that combination of dread and commitment, of “Woe is me!” and “Here I am! Send me!” Even simply to babysit for a few hours for the first time is to enter into a terrifying realm of smoke and fire and quaking thresholds; surely they’re not about to entrust me with this child? And then they do, and there you are, and it’s okay. Hopefully.

Of course, these new responsibilities come with many benefits, including some of the greatest joys and satisfactions in life: the ability to practice new skills or finally use the ones we have, to make a bigger impact on the world, to see our children as they change and grow, to eat anything we want from some random people’s fridge while we’re babysitting. It’s not so bad.

If you ever have any anxiety about new responsibilities, just read one of the gospel stories about Simon Peter. I always love these stories, because for a chief apostle, he’s such an ordinary guy. He is both a clumsy, bumbling leader, and  a model for who we all should be, and that should be a comforting thing, because—while we may never catch prodigious numbers of fish, or go to lead the Church of Christ in Rome, we probably also won’t warm ourselves by the fire outside the place where Christ is being sentenced to death and deny we’ve ever heard of the guy, so we’re not doing too badly, overall.

I want to make a few observations about leadership, responsibility, and discipleship from our Gospel reading this morning.

First: It begins with saying yes, despite our doubts. Jesus asks Simon Peter to come out into the water and cast his net, and Simon is a bit skeptical. “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing…” he says. “Yet if you say so…” He’s not sure it’s the right time or place for him to try putting out his nets, but he trusts the one who’s inviting him into it, and he says yes, and amazing things happen.

Things that are somewhat too amazing, in fact. Observation #2: our successes can be as overwhelming as our failures, if not even more so. You can imagine that Peter and his companions were a little disappointed to have caught no fish, wasting a long night’s labor. But it’s not the end of the world. Yet the success that comes when they follow Jesus’ invitation really could be the end of the world: “they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break…and they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink.” (Luke 5:6-7) Their failure is a disappointment; their success is a catastrophe. These are ordinary people, small-time businessmen; their nets and their boats are all they have. And there is always a risk in trying something new, in ascending up a new run on whatever ladder we’re climbing. It’s just as true for a church or a neighborhood. If we want to grow, in numbers or in ministry, there’s some risk. I wonder: What would it look like for our church’s boats to be so full of fish in 2022 that they began to sink?

Observation #3: the opportunities and possibilities of this new thing can and should come with a serious sense of humility. Just as Isaiah cried out, when called to speak the words of the Lord, “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips!” Peter, too responds with humility. “Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man!” And yet Peter didn’t go away, “he fell down at Jesus’ knees.” (Luke 5:8) In fact this is too weak a translation. It was an ancient posture of supplication to kneel down and grab onto someone’s knees; if you were begging someone for your life, you’d grab their knees and plead with them. So Luke writes that Simon “fell toward  Jesus’ knees,” and you can imagine Jesus’ amusement at the sight. “Go away from me, Lord!” Peter cries. Um, sir. Those are my legs.

It’s a powerful symbol, though, of a spiritual truth: when we realize that we are unworthy to answer God’s call, that we can’t fulfill the vision God has for us, what we need is not to push God away, but to lean in closer; not to reject the calling, but to accept God’s gracious response to all our failings.

And we can lean in closer to one another, too. That’s observation #4: leadership is not an individual characteristic, but a communal effort. “James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon” on the fishing boats become his partners in ministry, the inner circle of a web that stretches from Jesus; to James, John, and Peter; to the Twelve; to the five hundred Paul names and more. Their leadership is a collaborative calling of which none of them is worthy on his own, and yet to which they can respond if they bear one another’s burdens along the way. And this is why we lead the church as a Vestry of which, at this point, the majority of our adults have been members. It’s why we work as teams and raise children as villages. We cannot bear the burden alone. But together, we can.

And even together, sometimes we can’t; and yet that is the greatest observation at all. Sometimes we try things and we fail. Sometimes our efforts simply aren’t good enough. Or at least we think they’re not. And Jesus responds to our inadequacies and limitations by inviting us into even greater growth, even greater responsibility. Your boat’s sinking? You’re a sinful man, not worthy of catching so many fish? “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” (Luke 5:10) And so the simple “fishermen” becomes the “fishers of men,” on the way to a lifelong pursuit of an ever-greater harvest.

So many of you bear the burden of responsibility in your lives. Maybe it’s at church, in formal or informal leadership, on the Vestry or the Building Committee, as stewardship chair or with the ECW, or in a thousand other ways. Maybe it’s at work, or at home, or in school. You may sometimes feel that you’re not good enough for the responsibility you bear. But God’s response is not to smite you for your failings. It’s not to judge you for your flaws. It’s to take you as you are, an ordinary person, good but not perfect, and to give you the strength to answer the call, so that when God asks you, “Whom shall I send?” you hear the unexpected sound of your own voice: “Here am I; send me!” (Isaiah 6:8) Amen.

Sermon — January 23, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Even in 2022, with so many free travel amenities of the past gone, 80% of hotel rooms still contain a Bible. In part, it’s because they tend to stick around. Hotels don’t have to endlessly replace tiny travel-size Bibles after guests stuff them all into their suitcases every day. And of course, they were mostly free in the first place. These hotel-room Bibles are usually donated by the Gideons, who’ve been doing exactly this for over a hundred years. You can easily picture the imagined audiences for these books: the faithful executive with no room for a Bible in her carry-on luggage; the salesman at a convention facing the temptations of the big city; the bored and unchurched traveler, who sits alone in the isolation of a modern high-rise hotel, quietly turning the pages of the Bible, and finds Jesus there for the first time.

It’s a rather different way of reading the Bible than the one I once heard from my old Syriac professor. Syriac is the classical Aramaic dialect used in the liturgy of the Maronite and Assyrian churches of Syria and Lebanon and Iraq and around the world. It’s written in its own distinctive script, a vague cousin of the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets. And when some of us were grumbling about how hard it was to learn the Syriac alphabet, George, our teacher, told us that we had it easy. George was born in Bethlehem, and he’d learned to read the Syriac alphabet when he was a child, at a monastic school in Jerusalem. He had to learn to read it in every direction—right-to-left, top-to-bottom, upside-down or backwards—because during services, he’d crowd with all the other choir boys, around a single giant, handwritten psalter to sing the psalms. You might be standing at the bottom of the page and reading rightside-up while you sang; or you might be standing at the top of the page, and reading upside-down, but either way—you certainly weren’t sitting in a hotel room alone.

There’s a strange paradox about the Bible in Episcopal churches. If you took a poll of Episcopalians asking how much of the Bible they read on their own in an average week, I’d have to think the median answer would be “none.” But walk into any Episcopal Church on any Sunday morning, and you’ll hear an uninterrupted stream of Biblical text for most of the first half of the service. The same is true of Catholic churches and many others. It’s not true in most evangelical churches, where the preacher might read a single brief “teaching text” on which he’s going to preach, or simply lace references to chapter and verse throughout the talk, for the congregation to follow along in their Bibles. This evangelical pattern has a lot of individual or small-group reading at home, little or no liturgical reading in church, and long sermons. The typical Episcopalian pattern has little or no individual reading of the Bible, lots of liturgical reading, and—one can only pray—fairly short sermons.

We’re often a bit defensive about this pattern, or dismissive about the notion of reading the Bible on your own, which is just another kind of defensiveness. Now, individual Bible reading is a wonderful thing. It can help you understand the stories of our faith more deeply and lead you to encounter God in prayer. But it’s also true that this pattern—the one we’re doing right here, right now—reading the Bible together in church, that is older and, in fact, more Biblical way of reading the Bible.

The crucial difference between reading in the modern world and reading in the ancient or medieval world is that before the invention of the printing press, every word in a every copy of a book had to be written out by hand. That’s how we ended up with the tradition of a lectionary book and a gospel book that only print the assigned readings; not for convenience or because it’s cool to walk around with a special book, but because the cost of copying out a whole Bible would’ve been prohibitive.

The expense of books and the lack of any kind of public education meant that reading was a very different thing. Books were relatively rare; readers were even rarer. But reading was common, because for most people, it meant listening to someone else read aloud. For most of human history, and most of the history of the Bible, a book was not something you looked at, but something you listened to; not pondered by yourself, but something someone else read to a room full of people, interspersed with questions and conversation. It was very much like what we do on Sunday mornings. It was very much like what Ezra and Jesus did long ago.

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I can’t help but notice how familiar some of the details of these stories feel. The people gather together (Neh. 8:1; Luke 4:16) and a reader stands before them. (Neh. 8:3, Luke 4:16) One of the verses we skipped in Nehemiah says that Ezra stood in a “wooden tower,” maybe something like an old-fashioned pulpit or lectern. (Neh. 8:4) Ezra says a blessing, and the people respond give a response. (Neh. 8:6) (“Praise to you, Lord Christ.” Wait, no, that’s us.) And when the reading’s done, or as it goes along, they pause for interpretation—whether the three hours of reading and explanation as in Nehemiah, or in Jesus’ short quotation and punchy sermon: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” (Neh. 8:8, Luke 4:21)

These practices of reading are communal; they’re done together, not alone. They’re liturgical; they begin and end with ritual movements and prayer. They’re architectural and postural: the reader stands, often in an elevated place, to be seen and heard more easily through a crowd. They’re often musical. While it’s not explicit in Ezra or Jesus’ case, most public speaking in the ancient world was basically chanted; not to make it fancier or because people liked to sing, but simply because, like St. John’s, they had no speaker system, and singing is a way of projecting speech.

The words they read from the Bible were not assumed to be clear and simple enough to be splashed across a billboard or a bumper sticker, or even read alone without context. They required interpretation, and often multiple interpreters. Our lectionary reading skips the verse, for reasons soon to become obvious, but Nehemiah lists thirteen Levites who assisted with the task of interpreting the law: Ezra read, but “Also Jeshua, Bani, Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodiah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan, [and] Pelaiah, the Levites, helped the people to understand.” (Nehemiah 8:7)

(By the way: Always take a look at the text in advance if you’re signed up to read.)

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Okay, you know me. I love historical tidbits much as much as the next guy, if not much more. But this isn’t just trivia about the practice of reading. It’s actually about the substance of these readings.

When you sit alone in a quiet room and read the Bible, and hear God speaking words of comfort or inspiration or exhortation to you, it is a marvelous thing. It has the potential to create a deeper relationship between you and your God. And we should probably all do it more often.

But when we sit or stand together in a crowded (or a not-so-crowded) room, and we hear the word of God read aloud, and we say “Thanks be to God,” and we listen to some one of our number get up and offer a few words of interpretation, it too is a marvelous thing, because it calls into being, it literally creates, a community, the people of God gathered around the word of God, growing into a deeper relationship with God.

It’s no accident that these two stories happen when they do. Ezra and Nehemiah are the leaders of the first generation of Jews to be allowed to return from exile. They come back to their shattered homeland to rebuild. They’ve lived for years under someone else’s law, not their own law from God, and so when they finally return to their parents’ or grandparents’ homes, they come together to hear Ezra read from the law, and in this communal act of reading, they are made a people again.

Likewise, Luke tells us that it was Jesus’ custom to go and read in the synagogue, but he only writes one story about it, here at the very beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. He’s just been baptized in the river Jordan, and driven out to be tempted in the wilderness, and now he returns to civilization to announce what he’s about to do and to gather a movement around himself. And so he goes to the synagogue, where the people gather, and he reads.

And he reads to them, as Ezra does, from a text of liberation and solidarity. The Torah is sometimes mocked for its dietary rules and sacrificial laws, but it contains one of the earliest and most profound codes of social ethics in existence, with numerous laws to prevent the poor from going hungry and to reduce inequality, not least the “year of the Lord’s favor” that Jesus announces, the Jubilee, in which debts are forgiven, and accumulated wealth redistributed. We can scoff at the Book of Leviticus all we want, but it’s there that Jesus finds the commandment that “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Lev. 19:18) And when Ezra’s finished reading from the law, the very last thing he does is to command generosity and social solidarity: “Go your way, eat…drink…and send portions…to those for whom nothing is prepared.” (Neh. 8:10) Jesus’ sermon is Nazareth is the announcement that in him, God’s reign is becoming manifest, and this is “good news to the poor…release to the captives,” freedom for the oppressed, (Luke 4:18) because solidarity and justice are the cornerstones of God’s holy law.

Standing and reading together, sitting and listening together, are not just something to do; they do something. They bind us together as a community, as a people gathered around a book like a dozen chanting choristers huddled around the psalter. And it’s not just any book. It’s a book that tells the story of a world being transformed by God into something else, of a people being knit together into a single body in which, as Paul writes, “the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable,” in which “the members…have the same care for one another,” in which “if one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.” (1 Cor. 12:22, 25-26)

This is the glorious work of God: God is transforming us and our world into something very different from what it is. And this is the gift of reading Scripture together: we can hear these words from two thousand years ago, these dreams of a world of justice, solidarity, and love, and say, with Jesus, every time: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:21)