Category Archives: Feature

Posts with the “Feature” category will appear in a list in the footer section.

“The Glory of God”

Posted on by

The heavens declare the glory of God, *
and the firmament shows his handiwork.
One day tells its tale to another, *
and one night imparts knowledge to another.
– Psalm 19:1-2

For a few brief weeks each year, I get to see the sunrise.

The daily schedules of work and school don’t shift with the seasons, so I tend to sit on the couch drinking coffee at around the same time every day. In late December, it’s already dark. By June, it’s already been light for hours. But for a few precious weeks in January, sunrise falls somewhere around coffee o’clock, when I’m the only one awake and can sit and look at the sky.

This morning was a good one.

I’ve always loved these opening words of Psalm 19 because of the way they imagine the clouds and the stars and the planets in the sky glorifying God: not by singing or by praying or by sacrificial rites, but by being themselves, exactly as they are, exactly as God intends them to be. They don’t have free will, of course; with a few exceptions subject to the intricacies of relativity and quantum mechanics, they are bound to follow the simple rules of Newtonian physics. But their doing exactly that—their following their natures so precisely—is what causes God’s great delight. Light refracted through the early-morning sky cannot but skew toward orange, and yet “the heavens declare the glory of God” nevertheless.

I find it a useful image because we human beings so rarely do the same. Unlike the planets set in their courses, we do have free will. We can and do wander out of our paths. We can and do acts in ways that don’t accord with our true selves. God set the planets to orbit around the sun, and they do it, to the glory of God. God created us to love God and one another, and we don’t do it so well, but when we do—the glory’s even greater!

Most of us, by the grace of God, have a pretty good sense of who we are. You can call it conscience, or self-knowledge, or the Holy Spirit, but for the most part, we have a pretty good sense of who we are in our most authentic selves. It’s harder to express it, to live it, to give ourselves permission fully to be ourselves, as we are.

But you are a creature of God! You were formed and molded from before time to be who you are, and God is glorified when you are, no less than by the cycles of the stars, for—as the second-century theologian Irenaeus of Lyons once wrote—“the glory of God is a human being, fully alive.”

(I didn’t actually take this photo! Link for credit.)

“Water into Wine”

Posted on by

“Water into Wine”

 
 
00:00 / 13:09
 
1X
 

Sermon — January 16, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

When time seemed to slow down in March 2020, some people’s kitchens slowed down too. All around the world, people with too much time on their hands tossed out their sliced bread in favor of sourdough starter. And it was the perfect solution to a very specific set of problems, helping limit the frequency of their grocery trips, giving them something to fill their time, and creating a new, socially-distant hobby of posting excitedly on Facebook when you found a store that actually had flour in stock. (Seriously, I bake bread sometimes. It was, like, six weeks before I could find flour at the grocery store. The guy at the corner store was selling it in little plastic containers.)

When these new converts would talk about how slow sourdough is but how much it was worth it, homebrewers laughed. Brewing beer and baking bread are both the responsibility of slow-working yeast, but on wildly different timelines. A good sourdough loaf takes an hour or two of mixing and kneading and a few days of fermentation. A batch of beer takes six or eight hours of mashing and six weeks to ferment and bottle; a whole quarantine’s worth of time before you can take a drink.

But when homebrewers talk about how slow beer is to make, home vintners roll their eyes. A six-week-old wine sounds like the punchline to a joke. If you want to make your own wine at home, as some of my retired relatives have done, you’ll be waiting something more like six months, at least; at the time that beer has begun to lose its carbonation and hoppy aroma, wine’s only just starting to age.

And that’s wine made from a kit. They ship you the juice. It’s nothing like real wine made from grapes growing on vines planted a generation ago in the hopes that one day the sun and the rain and the soil would all be distilled down intp the flavor and the color and the aroma of this grape, that the produce of an acre of vineyards would be painstakingly harvested and crushed into juice, strained and fermented and aged until its very terroir was captured in this Trader Joe’s box of Two-Buck Chuck. Or maybe even something nicer.

Sourdough is slow food. Beer is sluggish. Wine is positively glacial.

So you can imagine everyone’s surprise when Jesus shows up to a wedding, to which he seems by John’s account to have been invited in part as a courtesy to his mother, and, in a single instant, with a single phrase, turns 150 gallons of water into wine.

Cheers!

This story of the wedding at Cana is perfectly clear on the literal level. There’s no interesting alternative translation or important bit of historical context to understand what Jesus is doing. He’s turning a whole lot of water into a whole lot of wine, and the scope for scholarly debate has mostly revolved around exactly how big those containers really were.

It’s less clear what it’s supposed to mean. And so preachers throughout the centuries have each put their own spin on it, in ways that usually reflect the things they were already thinking about.

The fifth-century bishop Maximus of the city of Turin in Italy, for example, takes the story as an object lesson in the interrelated divine and human natures of Christ (a fifth-century concern if there ever was one): “as a man,” he writes, “he was present at the wedding, and as God he changed the water into wine.” (Sermon 23) (A classic example, by the way, of early Western Christology, which often verged on dividing Jesus’ divinity and humanity from one another.)

Later preachers, too, allegorized the story to fit their own concerns. Philip Melanchthon, who began the process of turning Martin Luther’s thought into a Lutheran theological system, interprets the story with a typical Lutheran concern for Law and Gospel, telling the story of the transformation from the plain and joyless water of the Law to the sweet, intoxicating wine of the gospel. (Commentary on John 2:1)

My favorite leader of the first generation of reformers, Martin Bucer of Strassburg, says there’s no allegory here. It’s a plain historical account, showing that Jesus asks only for our faith in his power. Jesus and Mary don’t reject marriage or celebration or even drinking a bit of wine at a wedding when the crowd’s already tipsy. And Bucer’s point could seem frivolous, were it not for the story of his own life. Like many of those first Protestant reformers, he had been raised in and taken his own vows of celibacy in a medieval Catholic church in which the everyday life of married Christians was seen as inferior to the celibate life of priests, monks, and nuns. For Bucer, by this point happily married to a former nun, Jesus’ mere presence at a wedding—Jesus’ mere affirmation that marriage could be an equally-holy calling to celibacy—was a profound spiritual comfort.

Personally, I get stuck less on the interrelationship between Christ’s humanity and divinity or between the Law and the Gospel or between marriage and celibacy and more on the surprising details of this story.

I notice first the super-abundance of it all: six water-jars’ worth of wine, each twenty or thirty gallons in volume. (John 2:6) Say 150 gallons of wine, which is about 750 of our standard bottles. Even at a huge wedding—say, three hundred adult guests—this comes out to two and a half bottles of wine per person; and that’s after they’ve drunk everything the happy couple had provided. Their cups runneth over indeed.

I notice, too, the timing. Jesus doesn’t show up to the wedding pulling a little red wagon carrying sixty-two cases of wine. He waits, until the worst moment of the night, when the guests are grumbling and the party’s winding down, and then, reluctantly, he does what his mother says, and makes some water into wine. (“Some,” I say.) And he does it in a way that goes almost unnoticed. The head waiter tastes the wine and sends for the groom, puzzled, and commends him: “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.” (John 2:10) The waiter compliments the puzzled groom, and Jesus’ place in the story remains unseen.

I notice, finally, that the miracle is not one of transformation, but of revelation and sensation. Jesus tells the servants to fill the jars with water, but he utters no magic spell, no secret incantation or even prayer to turn water into wine. It’s only when the steward tastes the water that it seems to be anything but water, that it seems indeed to be wine, and good wine in fact. And it’s only the steward who ever tastes the wine, and “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory.” (2:11) I’m left wondering whether the water ever became wine at all; or whether, in the presence of Christ, the simplest, plainest water became sweeter than the finest wine could be; whether its own glory was revealed by basking in his light.

It seems sometimes, and in some ways, that we’re living at the tail end of a wedding party in which the wine has run out. We’re tired, and we’re grumbling; the party’s over, and we need to go to bed. And at the same time, Jesus is transforming the tepid water all around us into wine, and we don’t even know. Or perhaps he is revealing that what we thought was water was wine all along, and we don’t understand. We don’t see his Holy Spirit in the beautiful moments we have with one another and with God. We call over the bridegroom and thank him for his generosity, while Jesus stands hidden to the side. In every blessing, in every moment of sweetness, in every drop of metaphorical wine, the power of God’s love is being revealed all around us, right before our very eyes. And those blessings are not just the dregs of a party past, but new wine, gallons and gallons of it, all around us, even now

God, give us eyes to see, and noses to smell, and mouths to taste the good things you are doing all around us; give us the grace to see your place in our lives, and to thank you for it; give us the hearts to love one another and share the abundance of your gifts with one another, as you have poured them out on us; that your glory may be revealed in us and all the world; through Jesus Christ, the King of Glory. Amen.

“Winter and Summer, glorify the Lord”

Posted on by
(Okay, but it’s pretty.)

I hate winter.

Yes, I’m a New Englander. No, I’ve never lived further than 10 miles from Boston except for the three years I moved down south for seminary. (…In New Haven, Connecticut.) Yes, I grew up building snow forts in the big snow banks in the driveway and drinking hot chocolate at the skating rink after a hard hour pushing two stacked Hood milk crates all around the ice.

I still hate winter.

I mean, come on… Who wants to shiver through a 12° day? Winter starts with the darkest and gloomiest month of the year, followed by a month or two of bitter cold, followed by eight to ten weeks of false springs that lift your spirits and are immediately followed by dreary cold and damp.

I hate winter. But even I will admit that nothing lifts the spirits of your average four-year-old more than a good 11” of snow. Nothing breaks up the tedium of a long winter of cold, dry days than three hours playing “Sugar-Land” in a landscape iced with confectionery snow. No temperature change is more satisfying than coming in from a cold walk to a warm apartment—it’s even better, I’ll admit, than air conditioning on a hot day.

I’m reminded, on cold winter days like these, of the words of the canticle we call the Benedicite, short for its opening words in Latin: Benedicite, omnia opera Domini — “Bless the Lord, all you works of the Lord.”

The poem invokes the whole order of creation, from the stars to the seas, from the beasts to priests, calling on every slice of creation to “Glorify the Lord…praise him and highly exalt him for ever.” Even the wind and weather are called upon to praise God:

Glorify the Lord, every shower of rain and fall of dew, *
    all winds and fire and heat.
Winter and Summer, glorify the Lord, *
    praise him and highly exalt him for ever.
Glorify the Lord, O chill and cold, *
drops of dew and flakes of snow.
Frost and cold, ice and sleet, glorify the Lord, *
    praise him and highly exalt him for ever.

BCP p. 88

The same God, after all, who made the snow day made the bitter cold. The same God who made the fiery summer sun made the wintry arctic blast. And like members of a cosmic choir, they are different but not (one hopes) dissonant. They sing in a polyphonic harmony in which each’s existence enriches the other. The heat of summer makes us appreciate, in other words, the cold of winter. Supposedly.

The same is true for all the seasons of our lives. “Silver linings” are a cliché in difficult times, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there. There are consolations tucked within every season; not only in the reminder that it will not last forever, but hidden within that very time itself.

Every dark winter’s night contains within it the promise of a warm fire. Every hot summer day holds the possibility of jumping into the sea. Every drop of dew and flake of snow glorifies the Lord; every blizzard in our lives, however literal or metaphorical, invites us to see God’s glory revealed in and through and behind it, even if only by contrast.

Or at least it gives us a chance to play Sugar-Land.

“The Baptism of Jesus”

Posted on by

Sermon – January 9, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

So, how many of you have already started failing on your New Year’s resolutions?

I’m happy to admit that I have, as always, already completely failed in every goal I’ve set for 2022, especially the ones that involve changing some kind of deeply ingrained habit, in the hope that a new year will come with a new me, as easy as that. Maybe you have, too. I’m willing to bet that more than a few of you already need a fresh start on your New Year’s resolution, if you made any, and I have the data to back me up. According to a study published by the exercise-tracking app Strava in 2019, 80% of people who make New Year’s resolutions have dropped them by the second week of February; the majority have stopped keeping up with them by January 19, which Strava dubbed “Quitter’s Day.” Which suggests to me that even now, eight days in, some of you are beginning to drop them.

And those data were, I remind you, from 2019, before the world’s baseline stress level went up about six notches. It’s been a difficult two years to be a human being, to say the least, so if you find that you’re still having trouble setting and achieving goals beyond survival and making it through the week, then… Well, who can blame you? Clearly not me.

To borrow Isaiah’s evocative phrase, over the last few years we have passed through some very stormy waters; we have walked through some serious flames. And while many good things have happened in many of our lives in the last two years, as individuals, and families, as a church and a community, it has still been a time of stress and unpredictability.

So maybe you need a mulligan on those New Year’s resolutions. Fair enough.

Today is, in our church calendar, “The First Sunday after the Epiphany: The Baptism of Our Lord Jesus Christ.” Epiphany itself, which fell on Thursday, celebrates Christ’s manifestation or appearance in the world. In the ancient church, it incorporated multiple events at once: his birth in Bethlehem and the arrival of Magi from the east, his first miracle at the wedding at Cana and most of all his baptism. And still in the Orthodox churches, the primary focus of Epiphany isn’t the visit of the Magi but the Baptism of Jesus, the moment at which God reveals Christ to the world with the famous words: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” (Luke 3:22) In our calendar now, we space the events of Epiphany out into a whole season, so the Magi arrived on Thursday, the wedding at Cana is next week, and the baptism of Jesus is today.

And the baptism of Jesus raises some awkward questions. The Gospels are quite clear that John the Baptist’s baptism is “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins,” (Luke 3:3) But today we hear the story of the Baptism of Jesus—the one person in human history whom we say lived without sin—and in our church, we baptize sweet little babies, who can be loud and draining and demanding but… surely not in need of a “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins”?

It’s a little strange.

For me the crucial verse of this morning’s gospel is one that often passes by unnoticed, a mere bit of narration wedged between the terrifying warning of the chaff being “burned with unquenchable fire” (3:17) and the beautiful image of the heavens torn open and the Holy Spirit descending on Jesus “like a dove.” (Luke 3:21) The verse reads: “Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened” and so on. (3:21)

At first it seems like just a simple bit of narration, and it is. But this translation is ever-so-slightly misleading. A better one, in this case, comes from the New International Version: “When all the people were being baptized, Jesus was baptized too. And as he was praying,” etc.

“While all the people were being baptized,” Luke writes, “Jesus was baptized too.” It’s not a separation and a linear progression, in which “all the people were baptized,” and then Jesus was also baptized, in which all the sinners over there receive a baptism of repentance, and then Jesus over here is baptized so that God can say, “You are my Son, the beloved.” While all those people over there were being baptized, Jesus was baptized, too—and when he had been baptized and was praying, and people were still being baptized all around him, the heavens opened and the Holy Spirit descended like a dove, and the voice spoke over them all as they plunged into the waters: “You are my Son, the beloved; in you I take great delight.” (Luke 3:22; cf. NET)

Jesus’ baptism is a baptism not of repentance, but of solidarity and love. He plunges with us into the murky waters of our world not only to forgive us, which he does, but to be with us, so that the word God speaks to the ancient Israelites through the prophet Isaiah becomes the word God speaks to all of us who have been baptized through the baptism of Christ: “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.” (Isaiah 43:2)

At every service of baptism, we re-affirm what the Episcopal Church calls “The Baptismal Covenant,” a series of statements of belief and promises about our conduct—a kind of ecclesiastical New Year’s Resolution. (And in fact, even at services on baptismal days when there are no baptisms, we use it in lieu of the Nicene Creed!) This is easy to misinterpret. A “covenant,” after all, means a kind of treaty; so if you make these promises immediately before you’re baptized, it may seem to be the reward for keeping up your end of the bargain.

But God’s love is not conditioned on our keeping up our side of the covenant. God’s love is unconditional, and more than that, you could even say it’s preconditional; God doesn’t love us more or less if we are naughty or nice, but we can’t be very nice at all without God’s love. It’s why we pray that God will grant us grace “that all who are baptized into his Name may keep the covenant they have made.” We pray for God to bless us with God’s gift of love so that we can be good; not that God love us if and only if we are good.

This is the beauty and the power of Isaiah’s words today: “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine… For I am Adonai, your God; the Holy One of Israel, your Savior… You are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you.” (Isaiah 43:1, 4) God will give nations for you, God will give the world for you, God will give God’s very own self for you, no matter how badly you fail at things however trivial or however important, because you, like Jesus, are God’s beloved child, a person who is precious in God’s sight.

So when parents ask me why their sweet little baby needs to baptized for the forgiveness of their sins, I point out that you can receive the Eucharist every week, but you’re only baptized once. And you can take that two different ways: Either that you’re only baptized once, so you can only be forgiven once, so you should wait, like the emperor Constantine waited to be baptized, until your dying day, lest you sin after baptism and miss the chance of being forgiven. Or you can take it the other way: that you can only be baptized once, and you were baptized long ago with “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins,” and God has already forgiven everything you have ever done or will ever do, every imperfection and flaw that you will ever have, and if you ask God why you had to be baptized all those years ago, her answer to you is clearer than mine could ever be: “Because you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you… When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you.” Amen.

The Epiphany

Posted on by

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany, one of the most ancient Christian holidays. These days, we mostly associate it with the arrival of the Magi, the wise ones from the east who see the star shining and follow it where it leads, bringing royal gifts to the newborn Jesus: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. But in its more ancient form, it actually wrapped together several different stories into a kind of mega-feast: beginning with Jesus’ birth, including the arrival of the Magi, but stretching forward to his baptism in the River Jordan and his first miracle at the wedding in Cana. It celebrated all the manifestations of Christ, all the ways in which Christ appeared or was revealed to all the nations of the world, which is what the word “Epiphany” means.

It’s a holiday of glory and splendor, of light and power, and yet it’s a holiday of paradoxes. Because while that star shone so brightly in the sky for everyone to see, there were only a few who understood and followed. While we celebrate and remember Jesus’ earliest miracles, we live in a world in which miracles often seem like far-off memories. And while our church calendar lists Epiphany as one of the six principal feasts of the church year, it often passes by unnoticed, less than culmination of the Twelve Days of Christmas than an afterthought, an echo, a day in which the City of Boston has already collected Christmas trees from the streets.

In a way, though, this paradox of revelation and obscurity is fitting, because this is exactly how Christ appears in our world and in our lives today. We do not see light shining in the sky pointing out to us where to find Jesus, but we’re told in whom we can find Jesus and how. We don’t receive miracles of water turned into wine, we receive stories and are called to walk by faith, and not by sight. We don’t always set aside time for another party or celebration—sometimes we don’t even have a service in church—but always, everywhere, all around us, Christ is being made manifest in the world.

So I pray, in this new year of 2022, that you may find the ways in which Jesus is being revealed in your life; that you may see the star shining in the lives of the people around you, and see the miracle of each everyday act of human love.

And as the Collect for the Epiphany prays:

O God, by the leading of a star you manifested your only Son to the peoples of the earth: Lead us, who know you now by faith, to your presence, where we may see your glory face to face; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.