Sermon — December 5, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

For my birthday a few weeks ago, Alice and Murray bought me a two-part present that says a lot about the kind of man I am. First, they went to Ace Hardware, and bought me the gift they knew I needed: a brand-new toolkit, with two sets of new screwdrivers and matching adult and child-sized tape measures. And then they walked next door to Whole Foods, where they bought me the gift they knew I’d love: a matching set of lavender body wash, moisturizer, and bubble bath, and three magnificent bath bombs in various flavors: cactus flower, gardenia blossom, strawberry something or other.

And you know what? I’ve loved both my presents.

Now, bath bombs for grown-ups come in all sorts of fragrant and relaxing varieties. But bath bombs for kids are even more fun. For those among us who are especially reluctant to take a bath, there are all sorts of enticing ways to make it more fun. My favorite one is ingenious: the dinosaur-egg bath bomb.

Can you imagine what I mean? Essentially, it’s a little egg made of that chalky bath-bomb stuff. And at its center, there’s a tiny plastic dinosaur. If you toss it into the water while you take a bath, the outside starts to fizz, slowly eating away at the egg until the dinosaur within is revealed. It’s a win-win-win: your boring bath is now a bubble bath, you’ve got a new dinosaur toy, and your parents might have twelve to fifteen seconds of peace.

Remember the dinosaur bath bomb. We’ll come back to that later.

For now, on to more serious, perhaps more somber, things. In this morning’s readings, the traditional Advent themes of judgment and upheaval continue. You may remember last Sunday’s prophecies of fear and foreboding, of the heavens shaking and the Lord God coming in might. Today the cosmic judgment of Advent gets personal. John the Baptist appears in the wilderness, and he wants you to repent. John is an unforgiving prophet—in next week’s gospel he’ll call his audience a “brood of vipers!”—and it’s easy to hear his proclamation of “a baptism of repentance” (Luke 3:3) as a condemnation. “For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap,” Malachi says of the messenger who comes to prepare the way of the Lord— “Who can stand when he appears?” (Mal. 3:2) Not any of you, the prophet’s rhetorical question implies.

Not many of us like John’s message of sin and judgment, of repentance and salvation. It can seem harsh. It can seem as though it’s there to draw lines between us, to separate out the good from the bad, to say that those who repent will be saved and those who don’t will be destroyed with fire.

But that’s not quite what’s going on. “He is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap,” says Malachi, “he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver.” (Mal. 3:2-3)

The process of refining precious metals involves melting them down. You put silver ore or gold ore inside a crucible, and put that in a furnace hot enough to melt stone. The heavy gold or silver sinks down to the bottom, while the lighter impurities float on the top and can be removed. So a “refiner’s fire” isn’t a force of destruction. It doesn’t burn something up. It melts something away, removing everything that obscures the metal’s brilliance, distilling it down to its essence, to liquid silver or gold.

It’s the same with fullers’ soap, an even more obscure metaphor. “Fulling,” if you don’t know, is a part of the process of making wool. The fuller takes the fleeces of sheep who’ve been shorn and, through a vigorous process of pounding and washing, slowly removes all the oils and dirt and grass that have accumulated on the fleece, transforming it slowly from a yellow, shaggy mass into fluffy white wool.

Now, neither of these processes is particularly fun. It takes extremely high heat or harsh chemicals to turn ore into gold or fleece into wool. But it’s not a destructive or even a harmful process. It’s not a punishment. It’s a refinement. It melts away everything that obscures its object’s essence, revealing it for what it really is at its core. Refining and fulling are, in a way, like a much-less-pleasant form of that dinosaur bath bomb, slowly melting away the soap to reveal the dinosaur within.

And this is what John’s baptism of repentance is, too: not a condemnation of those who need to repent and be saved, but an invitation to all of us who are being saved; not a one-time decision to repent or a cleansing of original sin on a day you can’t remember, but the beginning of a slow process of transformation that takes place every day, as all the things that separate us from God, all the things that keep us from loving our neighbor, all the things that obscure the beauty of who we are at our core, are slowly washed away and we become the human beings God always meant for us to be.

But it’s not easy.

It’s not easy, in part, because sometimes the things we need to let go of the most urgently are the ones that we cling to the most desperately: our various addictions or obsessions or defense mechanisms, all the unhealthy patterns of behavior and relationships that weigh us down. Often they start as survival mechanisms, and stop working after a time; like the rock mixed in with gold, or the oil protecting a sheep’s fleece, we cling to them long after they’ve kept us surviving, when they’re just stopping us from thriving. No matter how they began, it’s hard to let go of these parts of ourselves, even when we know we need to, because it’s hard for us human beings in general to do the right thing, even when we want to.

But this process of repentance and refinement is hard for a second reason, as well, and that’s that it’s not always easy to know which things in our lives are good and which are not. Life is not actually like a dinosaur bath bomb, or even so much like a refiner’s fire or fuller’s soap. It’s easy to distinguish between gold and dross, wool and dirt, toy dinosaur and fizzy soap. It’s much harder to apply this discernment to our own lives. Some of us struggle with things so toxic that we know that we need to leave them behind. But all of us struggle with things with which we don’t even know we’re struggling, with broken cycles and habits we don’t even realize are separating us from God and one another because we’ve grown so used to them.

And this is where Paul’s letter to the Philippians comes in: with the practice of discernment. Paul begins, it’s comforting to note, with a confidence that whatever happens, however rocky the path may be through the wilderness, those to whom he writes will find their way: “I am confident,” he says, “that the one who began a good work among you”—which is to say, God—“will bring it to completion.” (Phil. 1:6) He’s confident that they’ll find their way in the end. But he prays for them still. He prays for their “love to overflow more and more with knowledge and insight, to help [them] to determine what is best.” (Phil. 1:9-10) He prays that they may have the wisdom born out of love to help them discern between good and evil, or even just between good and not so great, “so that in the day of Christ [they] may be pure and blameless.” (Phil. 1:10) He prays for them to look at their lives and to be able to distinguish between what is gold and what is dross; what is clean wool and what is oil and dirt. He knows that God is working in them to transform them, and he prays that they will have the wisdom to let themselves be transformed—that we will have the wisdom to let ourselves be transformed.

It will be hard. But that’s okay. Because this process of repentance is not really something we need to do; it’s something God is doing in us and with us and for us. We are the gold, we are the fleece, we are the bath bomb, and God is the refiner, God is the fuller, God is the happy bathing toddler who has been refining and transforming us since before we were born, and who may well be working on us still long after we have died. But I am as confident as St. Paul that “by the day of Jesus Christ,” all that obscures who we are in our essence will be stripped away until we shine like a bars of gold; like soft, white, wool; like tiny plastic brontosauruses.

“And this is my prayer,” I pray with Paul, “that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to discern what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless,having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.” Amen. (Phil. 1:9-11)

Sermon — November 28, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

It’s nice to have a gradual hymn again, isn’t it? That’s what that’s called – that hymn before the Gospel reading reminding you to stand up for the Gospel and then giving me a minute or so to walk back here and shuffle my papers. Eight hundred years ago it would’ve been a gradual psalm, sung from the steps of the pulpit. And “step” in Latin is gradus. The English words “grade” and “graduate” come from the same root. When you “graduate” from eighth to ninth grade, you are taking the next step in your education. Likewise, if something is “gradual” in the ordinary sense, it means that it doesn’t happen all at once, but step by small step. So while the “gradual hymn” is named after the gradus, the step up to the pulpit from which it was once sung, it’s nice to think of it as being “gradual” in our sense too, a way of easing us from the readings toward the gospel and the sermon, gradually.

The last few months in the church calendar have been a gradual kind of season, too. Not just because of our gradual recovery as we slowly return to in-person church, but in the church’s calendar itself. Week after week, we hear stories of Jesus’ parables and miracles in the low-drama season that follows the excitement of Easter and Pentecost. Even the names of the Sundays blend together like the words of a child counting in some kind of ecclesiastical hide-and-seek: the Twenty-Third Sunday after Pentecost, the Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, the Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, the Last Sunday after Pentecost, then — BAM! Ready or not, here Advent comes!

I say “ready or not” because there is nothing gradual about Advent.

Of course, we know that the secular version of Advent—by which I just mean December—is not a gradual season at all. For many of us, it’s a busy and increasingly-frenetic season as school semesters and fiscal years end, holiday planning and cooking and shopping accelerate, and our small apartments begin to overflow with hidden gifts. For others, it’s a dark time of the year, literally and metaphorically, when we feel the absence of those we’ve lost and wait for the dark nights and cold days to loosen their grip. Many of us pray to find just a few moments of peace and quiet to appreciate what the season is really all about.

And then we come to church and find that it’s not exactly “peace and quiet” season here either. I don’t mean that we’re busy with preparations for Christmas services or the pageant. I mean that the liturgical season of Advent itself is a bit intense. We don’t get four weeks that take us step-by-step through Mary’s eighth month of pregnancy, as she sets up a nursery and freezes lasagnas and rides ninety miles on the back of a donkey. (Ow.) We don’t get Joseph the Carpenter perplexed by the Ikea instructions on the crib. We get: “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.” (Luke 21:25-26)

(“It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…”)

Again and again, our readings today point to a time of sudden change, a season or perhaps a single day that will mark a sharp break between the way things were and the way things are to be. “The days are surely coming, says the Lord” to Jeremiah, “when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel.” (Jer. 33:14) May “you may be blameless before our God and Father,” Paul writes to the Thessalonians, “at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.” (1 Thess. 3:13) “Be on guard,” Jesus tells us in the midst of holiday happy hours and hectic preparations, “Be on guard that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, like a trap.” (Luke 21:34-35)

It’s often said that in the season of Advent we prepare for “two comings,” two Adventūs, to give you a bit more Latin. Not only for the First Coming, the birth of God the Son as the human child Jesus of Nazareth on Christmas Day, but for the Second Coming, his return to judge the world at the end of time. Not only, as the stunning Collect for the First Sunday of Advent says, for “the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility,” but for “the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead.” And that last day, that second Advent, is coming “like a trap.” At the moment we’re least expecting it will snap closed on us, and we’d better be prepared.

Advent, it seems, is not a gradual season at all.

But dig a layer deeper and you see the quieter changes going on beneath. It’s telling that where Jeremiah has a Branch, Jesus has a tree. “I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David,” God says to Jeremiah. (Jer. 33:15) “Look at the fig tree and all the trees,” says Jesus to his friends. “As soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near.” (Luke 21:29-30) This isn’t just a cute arboreal pairing by the lectionary committee. It has a point. Before every sudden branch springs up, before every green leaf sprouts forth, before every tree trunk pierces through the earth, there’s been a winter’s worth of gradual, quiet work. There is in every seed unthinkable potential, the power to transform itself, from nothing but the air and the sun and a few of the minerals in the dirt, into a towering behemoth, in a process so gradual that we don’t even stop to think of its majesty, because if we did, we may well faint from fear and foreboding. And while we know that the leaves on the trees are a sign of the sudden arrival of summer or spring, the seasons have been turning all the time, and it is in fact the gradual, quiet growth that enables the green leaves suddenly to spring forth.

St. Paul was a good writer, and in a nice symmetry he imagines two reunions in the future. He prays “night and day” that he “may see [the Thessalonians] face to face” (1 Thess. 3:10); and he warns them about a day when they’ll want to be “blameless,” the day when they’ll see Jesus face to face. (3:13) Thomas Cranmer, too, knew the power of a good symmetry, and in our collect for today, which he wrote in 1549, he balances “the time of this mortal life” and the day when we may “rise to the life immortal”— the time of this mortal life in which” Jesus came, and “the last day, when he shall come again.” But I wonder whether this poetic symmetry obscures what each is trying to say. The present and the future, are not equally balanced. The future is sharp, and sudden, and maybe a little frightening; the present is slow, and repetitive, and maybe a little boring. The future will happen once, some day; but we live the present over and over again, every day.

And so the things that they prescribe for us to do are not one-off events; they’re things that ought to happen over time. Again and again, we will need God’s grace to “cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light.” Slowly, over time, God will “make [us] increase and abound in love for one another and for all.” (1 Thess. 3:13) Gradually, slowly, our spirits’ branches gather strength until one day, the leaves will spring forth, and we’ll know that summer is near.

Advent is not a very gradual time. And yet it is. Christmas doesn’t come out of the blue; as abrupt and as wild as their imagery may be, Advent really does ease us toward it. And I wonder whether the very abruptness of Advent is part of its gradual work; whether these wild predictions of the turbulence and change, of the roaring of the sea and the waves, are the only thing that could really prepare us for the birth of a sweet and gentle baby, which is itself a world-unraveling event. These predictions that the world will be turned upside down, that the sun and the moon and the stars themselves will be changed, are there precisely to prepare us for the most extraordinary thing of all—not the day on which God sees us as we really are, but the day on which God reveals to us who God really is: all-powerful and powerless, begotten of the Father before all worlds and yet just minutes old, the one through whom all things in heaven and earth were made unable to lift up his own tiny head. What’s startling about Christmas—what’s startling about the day when almighty God, the creator of heaven and earth, enters into the world—is precisely how gentle that day is.

The sudden first Advent of Christmas Day doesn’t actually give us much to do in response, and that’s okay; we don’t need anything more on our to-do lists this time of year. Nor does the second Advent that is to come. Christians have spent a thousand years making guesses about the arrival of the Last Day, and every single time, they’ve been wrong, leaving us only with the conclusion that maybe Jesus was right after all; it’s going to come when we’d least expect.

In between these sudden, world-shaking events, we live our gradual lives. Day after day, in ordinary ways, we cast away the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. We pray to God to strengthen our hearts and restore our faith. It can sometimes be hard to see any change. But I wonder whether, in and through all these gradual days, God is transforming us, as profoundly as the ancient prophets expect God to transform the world; whether in the season of Advent, God is not just over-turning our ideas of who God is, but our ideas of who we are, too.

So “may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you. And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.” (1 Thess. 3:11-13)

Sermon — November 21, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

In a time of national crisis, just a few years before the whole nation would erupt into rebellion and destruction, a man rose from the obscurity of provincial life into sudden prominence. He had a unique combination of strangeness and self-confidence, a charisma that drew many to him even as others turned away, baffled. Viewed as a dangerous upstart by some and an oddball by others, he nevertheless enjoyed some degree of popular support. In time, he was elevated to the company of some of the most powerful political people in the world, declaring himself the sovereign lord and ruler of his people. With no known royal ancestry, no political experience, no military support, nevertheless he stood prepared to take the throne. He was a once-in-a-century figure, a man of such mysterious power that the stories of his life have been told and re-told, disputed and debated, generation after generation and down to the present day.

Of course, there could only be one man I’d be talking about on this last Sunday after Pentecost, on the Feast of Christ the King, and some of you may recognize his name. Yes, that’s right. It’s Norton the First, Emperor of the United States.

If you’ve never heard of Emperor Norton, you’re missing out. He’s one of those figures whose place in the historical record far outstripped his actual significance, because he was simply so strange. Born in England and raised in South Africa, Joshua Abraham Norton immigrated to the United States, arriving in Boston in 1845 and making his way to San Francisco by 1849. America was, at that time, in the final years of our decades-long struggle over the enslavement of human beings, and within ten years of arriving in California, old Joshua Norton had seen enough. In a letter to the editor of the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, Norton declared:

At the peremptory request and desire of a large majority of the citizens of these United States, I, Joshua Norton… for the last 9 years and 10 months past of San Francisco, California, declare and proclaim myself Emperor of these United States; and in virtue of the authority thereby in me vested, do hereby order and direct the representatives of the different States of the Union to assemble in Musical Hall, of this city, on the 1st day of February next, then and there to make such alterations in the existing laws of the Union as may ameliorate the evils under which the country is laboring, and thereby cause confidence to exist, both at home and abroad, in our stability and integrity.

Needless to say, the states did not heed the call to send delegates to a new constitutional convention. As the years went on, Emperor Norton was afforded a certain degree of respect by the citizens of San Francisco, treated with as much dignity and respect as the people of what was then a small town halfway across the world from much of anything could afford.

But nobody took him seriously. Within just two years of his letter, the Civil War would begin; and while certain Americans may argue to this day over whether the Confederacy or the Union was the legitimate continuation of American democracy, there was no Nortonist faction in the Civil War, no third way between North and South, no Californian Empire fighting its way across the continent to “ameliorate the evils under which the country [was] laboring.” You can’t just go around telling people that you’re the king. That’s not how any of this works.

Which leaves us followers of Jesus in a bit of pickle. Because Jesus, in his day, wandering around preaching and teaching about the coming kingdom of God, must have seemed like an ancient Emperor Norton. To be fair, Jesus was a bit slippery on the question of his own kingship. At times, he seems to deny it—“You say that I am a king,” he says to Pilate—but of course his claim that Pilate’s putting words in his mouth is somewhat undermined by the fact that he’d just used the words “my kingdom” three times in the sentence before. (John 18:36-37) It’s clear, in any case, that everyone else thought Jesus was saying he was the king. Not only his enemies, but also his closest friends and disciples, and his followers for a hundred generations have all agreed on one thing: that this man thought he was a king. In fact, even the most skeptical historical scholars of Jesus accept at the very least, as the most basic facts of his life, that Jesus was 1) born, 2) called by some “Christ,” the Messiah, which is to say, the king; and 3) was crucified under an inscription that accused him of being “The King of the Jews.”

It’s important to recognize that this imagery of Christ as King, crowned with many crowns, drowning out all music but his own, can be troubling. “Kingdom” carries the baggage of feudalism and patriarchy, of oppression and violence, of Christian triumphalism and colonial imperialism, of a world in generations of Christians could happily sing “Onward Christian soldiers” as they conquered the world in the name of the cross because, after all, it’s Christ’s kingdom we’re building, not ours.

And it’s a point that’s more than fair. Pick up the Bible, read any book of history and you’ll find that benevolent monarchs are few and far between. Far more common are the grandiose schemers who throw their citizens’ lives away for glory; the malevolent tyrants who crush their subjects like so many ants beneath their feet; the saintly fools who drive their countries into the ground. Our first reading takes up the beautiful last words of David as a prophecy of Christ: “One who rules over people justly…is like the light of morning, like the sun rising on a cloudless day, gleaming from the rain on the grassy land.” (2 Sam. 23:3-4) But David himself wasn’t all blue skies and just rule. In fact, some of you may recall I spent half the summer preaching about what a messed-up guy the great King David really was.

So if this is kingship, who wants Christ the King?

Fair enough. But I want to suggest another way to see things. Perhaps to say that kings are bad, and that Christ is king, doesn’t necessarily mean we should that Christ is bad, or that God’s caught up in some oppressive human scheme. Perhaps it could, instead, transform our idea of what royalty really is. If Christ is King, then true leadership is not to seek one’s own glory, but to serve one’s people humbly. The true king is not the one who spends the lives of those he rules like spare change, but the one who gives his own life to spare them from destruction. True power is not the power over another person that us in all the hierarchy and oppression of earthly kingdoms, but the power of the one who “loves us and frees us by his blood.” (Rev. 1:5)

Jesus “loves us and frees us,” Revelation says. He frees us from sin—from all the destructive and distorting power that the kingdoms of this world hold over us—and “makes us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father.” (Rev. 1:6) Christ frees us from everything that dominates us in this world, from all those who claim that they can judge us or command us or lead us, and Christ frees us for royal priesthood.

What makes Emperor Norton ridiculous is not that he called himself an emperor; many men have done that in history, before him and since. What made him ridiculous was that he tried simply to declare himself emperor, to acquire the trappings of ultimate power and authority over us without holding any actual power to back it up. With Jesus, it was just the opposite. He in fact held all the power in the world, all the power, you might say, in the universe; and yet he gave it all up to set us free from every other power that there was. He doesn’t make himself the Emperor of a one-man empire; he makes us a kingdom several billion strong, royal priests serving our God.

That’s exactly why the title “Christ the King” doesn’t bother me; why, for all my egalitarian politics, I love it. Because if Christ is King—if Jesus is, as Revelation says, “the ruler of the kings of the earth” (Rev. 1:5)—then no one else is. If Christ is King, then anyone and anything that claims your ultimate allegiance or concern is a sham. If Christ is King, then anyone who claims they can condemn or judge you is a liar. If Christ is King, then anyone or anything that tells you you’re not good enough is a fraud, because you are “a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father.”          

If Christ is King, and if Christ has made us royal priests, then we are left only to play our part, to love one another and free one another as Christ loves us and frees us, to care for one another and forgive one another as Christ loves and forgives us. Needless to say, none of us is Jesus. Sometimes we’re like David, well-intentioned and good overall but deeply flawed. Sometimes we’re like Norton, ridiculous in our own self-importance. Sometimes we’re just like the countless billions of faithful people who have lived the Gospel, died, and been forgotten. But all of us have been loved and set free by “Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth… to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.” (Revelation 1:5–6)