Sermon — January 2, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

A few weeks ago The Washington Post ran an article with the headline, “The teens who hated Abercrombie are the adults shopping there now — and they can’t believe it either.” It was the kind of article that pads the Style sections of the Times and the Post and the Globe from time to time: completely pointless, offensively frivolous, and endlessly fascinating. The article transported me immediately back to the years I spent wandering bored in the Burlington Mall, caught up in all the complexities of adolescent identity formation as my big sister asserted her independence by buying clothes my parents didn’t like and I asserted my independence by saying she looked ridiculous—and by the way, the music she liked was awful.

(Sorry, Shelley.)

This process of self-differentiation is the bread and butter of adolescent life. At a certain point in life, we all try to discover or create our own authentic selves, separating ourselves from the ideas and habits we’ve inherited from our families and rooting ourselves in new sources of meaning for our own lives. The new friends and trends can vary in how well they’re serving us; in other words, rebelling against your parents by taking up religion or chess is probably better than getting into drugs or golf (just kidding). In an ideal world, this journey away from parents or family ends up where it began, with a newer and stronger relationship in which a young person can relate to their parents on their own terms, no longer either completely dependent on them or in rebellion against them. But assuming you make it through intact, this self-differentiation is a completely normal and healthy process.

In fact, it’s part of what’s going on in our Gospel reading this morning, as we see twelve-year-old Jesus acting like a twelve-year-old. His parents, observant Jews like him, have brought him up to Jerusalem as always for Passover, and on the way back down to Nazareth, he ditches them. He quite literally separates himself from his family of origin—not only his parents but his relatives and family friends—and joins himself with a family of choice, with the scholars and sages and teachers sitting in the Temple.

In a sense, it’s the ideal teenage rebellion, from his parents’ point of view; if he’s going to run away, could there be any better place to find him than hanging out with the rabbis, talking theology? And it ends in the perfect way, with a thoughtful, obedient Jesus returning home with Mary and Joseph. But of course, it must have been terrifying at the time. I can’t imagine the feeling of realizing suddenly that your child wasn’t there and then searching the city for three days before you found him.

I don’t want to minimize the theological and narrative importance of the story by just turning it into an example of a modern psychological process. It’s a hugely important text in its own right. It’s the only story Luke tells—in fact, it’s the only story in the whole New Testament—of Jesus between his infancy and the age of thirty. And it’s not exactly a 21^st-century teen drama: this is not a moody Jesus, running away from his parents to buy something at the Jerusalem Abercrombie and Fitch, but a balanced young man, astounding the crowds with his precocious wisdom and calmly asserting that he hasn’t run away from his family at all; he’s sitting, right there, in his Father’s house.

But in a way, it’s that same process, of discovering and embracing who he is, on his own, not through his parents. Throughout Jesus’ infancy in the Gospel of Luke, Mary and Joseph observe all the traditions of their faith, circumcising Jesus and bringing him to the Temple after forty days for Mary’s sacrifices of purification. They’ve taken him up to Jerusalem for all the major festivals of the faith, as any observant Jews would. Now, at twelve, Jesus has taken that identity on as his own, and when we see him emerge in eighteen years it’s as a preacher and religious teacher, but first as a pilgrim traveling to John the Baptist in the wilderness, being baptized, and hearing a voice from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” (Luke 3:22) That’s the identity in which all his ministry is centered, from his birth to his death, and it runs through that moment when he’s twelve years old, sitting in his Father’s house. He is, above all else, a child of God; he is, uniquely, the Child of God.

Last week, I prayed for the repose of the soul of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who died early last Sunday morning. If you don’t know, Tutu was an Anglican bishop in South Africa, first as Bishop of Johannesburg and then as Archbishop of Cape Town. He was a leader in the South African anti-apartheid movement, and later in the Truth and Reconciliation process that sought to repair South African society after the end of apartheid, rather than ripping it further apart. More recently, he had taken stands in support of same-sex marriage and the place of LGBT people in society and in the church: famously, in 2013, he said bluntly that he’d “rather go to hell than to a homophobic heaven.”

Archbishop Tutu’s stands against apartheid and against homophobia and heterosexism shared a common theological language. He called them “heresy” and “blasphemy,” writing, “Apartheid’s most blasphemous aspect is … that it can make a child of God doubt that he is a child of God. For that reason alone, it deserves to be condemned as a heresy.” He spoke in similar terms of the Church’s treatment of its gay and lesbian members: “We reject them, treat them as pariahs, and push them outside of the confines of our church communities, and thereby we negate the consequences of their baptism and ours. We make them doubt that they are the children of God, and this must nearly be the ultimate blasphemy.”[1]

It’s ironically and refreshingly rare to hear a church leader make an argument for social change in such explicitly theological terms, rather than in the generic-and-only-vaguely-religious language of love or justice. Tutu’s arguments for liberation flowed directly out of the first three chapters of the Gospel of Luke. Jesus’ identity as the unique Child of God was revealed to Mary by the Angel Gabriel. (Luke 1:32) We see it as the core of his self-understanding in this snapshot of Jesus at the age of twelve, as he sits in the Temple. It’s proclaimed publicly to the crowds by a voice from heaven at his baptism.

But it becomes ours in our baptism. As St. Paul reminded us in the Letter to the Galatians last week, at the moment when you were baptized, you were adopted as a child of God, a joint-heir with Christ to all the riches of God’s grace. (Gal. 4:7) And in fact, in the very Incarnation God has, in a sense, adopted all of humanity, bringing human nature itself into the very inner life of God.

This is exactly what Desmond Tutu meant. When we try to exclude one another from the family of God, for whatever reason, we blaspheme God by claiming the authority to throw them out of a household of which we are not the heads. And it goes both ways. Liberation from apartheid had to be followed by Truth and Reconciliation. This didn’t mean accepting the evil of apartheid; it meant overthrowing the system without demonizing its supporters and beneficiaries, because not only the Black South Africans who had been so cruelly oppressed but the most hardened white supporters of apartheid were and are the children of God.

And so are you.

It probably goes without saying that not everyone in the world has been accepted, loved, and nurtured by their families of origin. But however loving or unloving, however disdainful or affirming, our own families may have been or be, we are all children in the family of God. We have all been given a seat next to Jesus in the Temple by one who will never take it away. We have been adopted as children by one who would rather die for us than leave us behind—who will turn back, always, and search for us, not for three days or three years or thirty years, but again and again throughout our lives, as we, like Jesus, “increase in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.” (Luke 2:52)

So may we have the grace and the courage to remember, whenever we have been rejected or neglected, that we have been adopted into the family of Christ; that we are siblings, seated with Jesus in the Temple; that we are the children of God; and so are the ones who have rejected and neglected us.

Amen.

[1] For both quotations, see Adriaan van Klinken, “Desmond Tutu’s long history of fighting for lesbian and gay rights,” The Conversation, February 17, 2020.

Sermon — December 26, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Sermon — Christmas Eve, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” (John 1:5)

I had a parishioner once who was a professor at MIT. He was an astrophysicist, so one Lent we invited him to give a talk during our Adult Forum on the topic of “Light.” He began by showing us a picture of a telescope he’d worked on as a grad student, a massive instrument housed in a 130-foot-tall concrete dome. In that dome there was a narrow slot through which light could enter, bounce off the 200-inch mirror, and be detected by an array of sensors, one of which he’d helped build.

So he showed us the picture of this huge dome, with himself standing on the floor for scale, and then he said: Consider this. Two and a half billion years ago, the super-luminous core of a galaxy two and half billion light years away emitted a photon, a single particle of light. The photon sped forward in more or less a straight line as the galaxies shifted and the universe expanded, and by the end of the first billion years, simple multi-celled organisms had begun to live on earth. Another billion years passed, and by the time it was only about 500 million light years away, plants and mollusks were beginning to thrive. Over the next quarter of a billion years the dinosaurs rose, and fell, and the light flew on. As the photon began the final leg of its journey, the face of the earth began to be transformed in what seemed like the blink of an eye. A new kind of ape stood upright and began to spread around the world. They discovered fire and wheels and agriculture; they built cities, and temples, and eventually telescopes. And in the kind of Hail-Mary connection a quarterback could only dream of, as the universe expanded and the sun moved within our galaxy, as the earth revolved around the sun and rotated on its own axis, the photon arrived at precisely the right place at precisely the right time to slip through the slot in the dome of the telescope, where, in the blink of an eye, it missed the edge of the mirror by six inches and crashed into the floor, never to be seen by a human eye.

(The light shines in the darkness, and… sometimes the darkness overcomes it.)

On these shortest days of the year, when we can start a service at four o’clock and know that it will end in deep darkness, we gather to celebrate a festival of light. Like people do in the midwinter all around the world, we light candles and warm ourselves by the fire and try to figure out how to pronounce the Danish word hygge. (Hee-geh? Hyuu-geh?)

These holiday festivals are not just about the light and the warmth of our candles and fires driving away the gloom and cold of a dark night. They’re about the warmth and love of a community dispelling the loneliness and fear of dark times. And when we, as Christians, gather to celebrate this holy night, it’s not simply a celebration of light, in general. We gather to celebrate the birth of “the true Light, which enlightens everyone.”

We’re using to telling the Christmas story as the story of the birth of a child, not the story of the lighting of a lamp. We’re used to hearing the classic Christmas-pageant tale: the census and the journey, the parents and the donkey, the shepherds and the angels and the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, and lying in the manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.

Yet in a way, it’s this other story, this story from the opening words of the Gospel of John, that matters more for us today. After the census has been taken and the Holy Family returns home, after the shepherds’ shift ends and the angels’ echo fades, after the babe outgrows the swaddling clothes and moves from manger to crib to toddler bed, two thousand years and more after the events of that first Christmas night, “the light shines in the darkness.” And the darkness has not overcome it.

If you were totally depressed by the story of the photon’s two-billion-year journey, you can thank God for the law of conservation of energy, which suggests in part that light can never be wasted, only changed. The energy of that single photon, at the end of its voyage across the universe, could not disappear. Perhaps it was absorbed in the concrete, its energy transformed into heat and radiated back into the air. Perhaps it was reflected, bouncing off the floor and shining in an astrophysicist’s eye, or pinballing its way back out into the universe. But energy, while it can be transformed, can never disappear.

            The light shines in the darkness, and its legacy can never be erased. The light of Christ shines even now on us, and it cannot go to waste. Some of it we see, and we call it a spiritual experience, a moment of awe and wonder and grace. Some of it we absorb unnoticed, and it helps keep our hearts warm with love.

And most of it we reflect, as the light of Christ bounces off us and is scattered into the world. God loves us, and we love one another in turn; God’s light shines on us, and we illuminate one another’s lives. Like John we bear witness to the light. In word and in deed we “testify to the light’s” presence in the world.

In fact, we don’t simply “testify to the light.” We are “enlightened,” by the “true light, which enlightens everyone.” (John 1:9) We’re not “enlightened” like a practiced meditator is “enlightened” or like an open-minded person is “enlightened.” It’s a transitive verb; Christ en-lightens us. He fills us with light, transforms us into light, makes us shine with our own radiance. We’re not mere mirrors, reflecting the light of Christ; we’re candles, lit on fire by one central flame, sharing our light and our warmth with one another as the fire grows and spreads, and each one of us becomes a new source of light in the world.

You are light, shining in a dark world. You have been “given power,” John writes, “to become children of God,” and you blaze with all the light of the holy child of God. For a billion years before your birth God waited with eager anticipation, wondering what new warmth your light would bring to the world, and now here you are, shining.

It can be hard to see the light of Christ in one another. It can especially hard, sometimes, to see it in ourselves. It can be so hard, in fact, to see the divine light shining in every human being that God had to come down and show us Godself. God had to hang a comet in the sky, and plant dreams in Magis’ minds, and summon shepherds keeping watch in their fields with a heavenly chorus, just to show them one simple truth: the light that you seek is not far up in the heavens, where the Magi gazed and the angels sang. It’s here, now, among you, in this most extraordinary ordinary thing: a helpless infant and his two parents, exhausted, uncertain, and full of love. Which is a real 2021 kind of mood.

There’s a happy ending to the story of the little photon that couldn’t, and it’s almost as mind-bending as the beginning. Because the quasar from which this light’s unbelievable journey began didn’t just emit one photon that happened to barely miss a telescope, never to be seen. It was so bright for so long that it gave off so much light in every imaginable direction that enough of it did in fact arrive at this telescope on this planet to be seen, and measured, and to contribute to yet another leap forward in our understanding of the cosmos. The universe is full of light. Only a fraction of it will ever be observed, but none of it will ever go to waste.

A new light was kindled in that manger in that stable all those years ago, wrapped in swaddling clothes, and we are awash in its light. From it, a new candle was lit at your birth, however many years ago, and it still burns now, however undetected it may be. Only a fraction of its light will ever be observed, but none of it will ever go to waste.

So let your light shine, whatever the world may say. Tend that flame within you, however much it may seem to have dimmed. Search for that light in one another, however difficult that can be, and turn your mirrors to reflect its glory.

We will never know what one particle of God’s light will do as it bounces between us. We will never know what one kind word or one small gesture has meant, as the light passes from person to person around the world. But we do know that “the light shines in the darkness; and the darkness did not,” and the darkness will not, and the darkness cannot overcome it, because darkness is nothing but the absence of light; and the light will never go to waste, even if it takes two billion years and more to be observed.

Sermon — December 12, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

I do three things at the altar rail every Sunday during communion: I deliver the Body of Christ to anyone who wants to receive communion; I say a blessing for anyone who doesn’t; and I try to make every single toddler smile. I say “every single toddler” because usually the older kids are too cool for me, and just receive a blessing or a wafer in fidgety silence. But the older babies and the toddlers have none of their ennui, and some of them are just into that blessing. They look up at me from their parents’ arms or from the cushion where they stand. Their eyes track my fingers as I make the sign of the cross. And if they’re looking at me, I smile at them, and I tell you there is literally nothing that makes me happier on a Sunday morning than when a toddler smiles back. It especially impressive, when you think about it, that they can do this at all: they can look at my face, recognize that I’m smiling, and smile back, without ever once being able to see my mouth beneath my festive, liturgically-colored mask.

It has everything to do with the physiology of what psychologists call a Duchenne smile, a genuine smile. A non-Duchenne smile is what you do for school picture day: you may be feeling bored or sad or angry or tired, but when it’s your turn you sit in your chair and you put on a smile and, at the end of the day, the photographer sends home at least one print in which the corners of your mouth are upturned, however fake the smile may be.

A Duchenne smile, though, a real smile, is not just about the shape of your mouth. A real smile engages the muscles of the whole cheek and—most importantly—the orbicularis oculi, the muscle that surrounds the eye. And it’s this that leads me to smile so vigorously with my eyes; not just that I’m working on my crow’s-feet so people will stop telling me how young I am for a priest, but that I’m trying to broadcast my smile as clearly as I can over a mask. You can use a mask, in fact, as a filter for whether someone’s giving you a real or a fake smile; if it’s a fake one, you can’t even see it!

Toddlers get it. Toddlers recognize that real smile, and toddlers will smile back.

And that’s part of the actual power of the blessing. The words provide no comfort to a one-and-a-half-year-old. The gesture is fascinating to watch at first but presumably gets old with time. I can’t speak to any intangible spiritual benefits the child may receive; they are, after all, intangible. But a smile really does something.

There’s a famous study from the late 1980s in which researchers asked participants to rate how funny cartoons were while holding a pen either between their teeth or between their lips. They found that people holding the pen in their teeth (forcing their muscles into a “smiling” position) rated the cartoons as being significantly funnier than those who held the pen in their lips (and who were therefore “pouting”). Just activating the muscles they use to smile put them in a better mood, even though they didn’t know they were supposed to be smiling.

More recently, this particular study has come under fire; other researchers haven’t been able to replicate its remarkable findings. But psychologists do agree that genuine smiles really do make us feel happier. It’s not a huge effect. It’s not a miracle cure for unhappiness. But it reflects what some people call our “embodied cognition.” Our emotions don’t start in our brain and flow into the rest of our bodies; they are, in part, the way our brain interprets what our bodies are already feeling. It’s the same reason drinking coffee makes you feel anxious—because caffeine raises your heart rate, and your mind thinks something must be wrong. We can’t control the world around us, and we can’t control our own emotions; nor should we try to. But we can give them a little nudge.

We have arrived again at the Third Sunday of Advent, Gaudete Sunday, “Rejoice!” Sunday, the Sunday on which we switch our candles from penitential purple to joyful pink and, perhaps ironically, hear words that can be remarkably hard. I don’t mean the words of John the Baptist about the “brood of vipers” and the winnowing fork and the chaff being burned with unquenchable fire. I mean the beautiful but burdensome words of St. Paul: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice… The Lord is near. Don’t worry about anything.” (Phil. 4:4-6)

I preached a similar sermon a year ago, you may remember, on the third Sunday of Advent, when we read the other epistle, when Paul instructs us the Thessalonians simply: “Rejoice always.” I suggested then that this was a difficult proposition to preach straight into a camera in a virtually-empty church in December 2020, at the end of what was, needless to say, anything but a joyful year.

The state of the world has gotten much better since then, in some ways, but it’s still not pure, continuous joy. That’s not because of Covid. It’s part of human life. We’re not all happy all the time. “Rejoice in the Lord always” has never been good news if it’s meant “feel joyful all the time.” It’s a burden and a source of shame to anyone who aren’t always having a “holly jolly Christmas.” “Don’t worry about anything” isn’t a relief, if it means “just relax.” It’s an insult, a minimization of people’s very real concerns about very pressing issues in our lives, and our communities, and our world.

But Paul, for his part, wrote these words from jail. So I don’t think that’s what he’s trying to say at all.

“Rejoice,” after all, is a verb, not a noun or an adjective; it’s a thing that you do, not a thing that you feel or a way that you are. “To rejoice” doesn’t mean “to feel happy.” It means to celebrate. It means to give thanks. It means, in the words of the prophet Zephaniah: “Sing aloud, O daughter Zion; shout, O Israel! Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem!” (Zeph. 3:14) These are not things that you feel. They’re things that you do. I said that Paul wrote “Rejoice in the Lord always” from prison, awaiting trial. Zephaniah’s writing in dark times too. You don’t need to comfort people with the idea that they “shall fear disaster no more” (3:15) if they haven’t been afraid; you don’t need to tell people that “all your oppressors” will be “dealt with” if they haven’t been oppressed. (3:19) But despite their fear, despite their oppression, Zephaniah exhorts the people, “Rejoice! Sing! Exult!” because God is “rejoic[ing] over you,” God is “renew[ing] you in his love,” God is “exult[ing] over you with loud singing as on a day of festival.” (3:17-18)

And even Paul’s words about anxiety aren’t as simple as the Bobby McFerrin song: “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” The word “worry” here has a certain connotation; not “worry” in the sense of reasonable caution about possible danger, but “worry” in the sense of fretting, of stewing, of allowing your attention to be consumed by the contemplation of dangers over which you have no control. The English word “worry” originally meant the way some dogs and wolves kill their prey, by grabbing it in their teeth and shaking it. To “worry” about something is to grab hold of it and shake it and not let go.

Paul doesn’t tell us “don’t worry,” full stop. It’s not about suppressing your emotions. It’s about redirecting them. Paul gives us the ancient Christian equivalent of a practice of mindfulness: “Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” (Phil. 4:6) Don’t keep circling around those worries in your own head again and again and again, but name them, speak them out loud, offer them to God in prayer. And then, if they come back, well… “Let your gentleness be known to everyone,” not least to yourself. (Phil. 4:5)

“Rejoice in the Lord always,” Paul writes from his prison cell, “again I say, Rejoice.” And so, on this better-but-not-yet-perfect Third Sunday of Advent again I, Greg, say: Rejoice!

Not because I think you should feel cheerful or joyful or happy all the time. But because all of us, whatever we’re feeling at any given moment, can rejoice. All of us can give thanks for the light we find amid darkness. All of us can gather at this Eucharistic feast, literally this feast of thanksgiving, and offer our prayers and supplications to God… and then let go, just for a moment, if we can, and see if those outward practices of rejoicing might make our hearts rejoice as well, just as seeing another person smile at us and smiling in return can be a blessing in itself.

There’s nothing worse than being told to smile when you do not feel like smiling. And so I recognize the danger in telling you to rejoice, when you may or may not feel like rejoicing. I hope that you hear it not as a command and another burden in a busy season, not as an attempt at emotional manipulation, but as a gift and an invitation, a reminder that while there are many things you cannot control in this world, things that will cause you grief and things that will cause you worry and things that will cause you joy, you can choose to rejoice, to practice gratitude and joy, in ways big or small, “always,” no matter what the day may bring.

For “the Lord is near… And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” Amen.