Sermon — July 4, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

(Due to an issue with our sound system, there’s no audio recording of this week’s sermon. You can find the text below.)

Not all Episcopalians are tea-drinking, Masterpiece-Theatre­-watching Anglophiles obsessed with The Crown, but—let’s be honest, some of us are. Some combination of the Episcopal Church’s old upper-crust New England identity and our ongoing relationship with the Church of England as part of the Anglican Communion means that the Episcopal Church has its fair share of people who are fond of Merry Old England, to such an extent that Old North Church, of all places, held a service a couple weeks ago celebrating the Queen’s 95^th birthday! (And we love them for it.)

Well, this was as true on July 4, 1776 as July 4, 2021. We take the national holiday for granted, but Episcopalians on that first Independence Day were not quite sure. The majority of loyalists to the Crown, after all, were Episcopalians; although, to be fair, the majority of Episcopalians were not loyalists, and in fact more than half of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were members of the Episcopal Church—or rather, at that point, members of the Church of England. In 1776, after all, there was no Episcopal Church, just the parishes of the Church of England in the colonies, and this was part of the dilemma. From its founding, the Church of England had been defined by its commitment to “royal supremacy,” the notion that the supreme religious authority in England, second only to Christ, was not the Pope in Rome, or even the Archbishop of Canterbury, but the King or Queen.

So there was a certain cognitive dissonance for those early Episcopalian patriots. It takes a certain mental agility to believe that the King George III is both the Supreme Governor of the church of which you’re a member, and also, as the Declaration of Independence puts it, “A Prince whose character is…marked by every act which may define a Tyrant.” (Although to be fair this is the way many people feel about their church leadership.)

The Episcopal Church’s somewhat ambivalent relationship to Independence Day has continued over time. We include it in our official church calendar as a Holy Day, on par with Ash Wednesday or Good Friday, with the feast days of St. Mary or the apostles. (BCP p. 17) But we’re not actually observing it today, because in our calendar we almost never displace a Sunday’s lessons and prayers with a holy day, unless it’s on the level of Christmas or Epiphany; in fact, we transfer these holy days to the Monday. So our lessons today are the ones for the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost, not for Independence Day, which the Church observes tomorrow, transferred like the federal holiday, instead. The logic is telling: Holy Days are feasts celebrating a particular saint or a national day, but every Sunday is a feast of our Lord Jesus, and he always outranks them.

I enjoy all this trivia, of course, but there’s a serious point. This fundamental tension between royal authority and spiritual authority, between national identity and Christian identity, between our allegiance to the various kingdoms and republics in which we live on earth and our allegiance to the one kingdom of God, is not just a quirk of Episcopal Church history or of the prayer book calendar. It’s one of the key threads of the whole story of the Bible.

Our first reading this morning is near the peak of the narrative arc of the whole Old Testament. King David is the paradigmatic king, the King Arthur or George Washington of his own people. But kingship is a fairly new institution for the people. In the old days, the Israelites hadn’t had any kind of king; they were just a clan led by a series of father figures: Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob. In Egypt, they lived for four hundred years under the Pharaohs, but when they finally gained their independence, it was under the leadership of Moses: a prophet, not a king. And when, having finally entered the promised land, they found themselves oppressed and attacked yet again by the Philistines, God raised up judges, to lead them in battle in times of war and to settle their disputes in times of peace. But there was still no king, because God was the one true shepherd of the people.

Still, God is not exactly the most hands-on political leader, so the people begged the great prophet and judge Samuel for a king. (You may remember this story from way back in the beginning of June.) We want “a king to govern us, like other nations,” they say. (1 Samuel 8:5) Samuel is distraught, but God tells him: “They have not rejected you, they have rejected me from being king over them.” (1 Sam. 8:7) Samuel warns them that a king will not be good for them. He’ll draft their sons into his army, and their daughters to be his servants; he’ll take their harvest and use it to feed his court. But the people are unconvinced, and God and Samuel give in, and the people choose Saul to become their king.

But God has another plan in mind. God immediately sends Samuel to anoint instead the young boy David. The story follows David as he defeats the giant Goliath, joins Saul’s court, and befriends his son Jonathan; and likewise as Saul gradually goes mad with jealousy of this young warrior, and tries to kill him, leading ultimately to a civil war in which Saul is killed and David rises to the throne.

David is a great king; after all, as our reading says, “the Lord, the God of hosts, [is] with him!” (2 Sam. 5:10) But there are already cracks in the precarious structure of his kingdom. Within a generation it will split in two, and over the following centuries each of the two kingdoms will decline and collapse as they cycle through increasingly corrupt kings, with only occasional good ones along the way. Even over the course of David’s own decades on the throne, the decline begins; I don’t want to spoil it for you, but over the coming weeks we’ll hear more and more stories of the many ways in which even this great king is not exactly a good man.

But for now, this morning, we celebrate David’s reign. For “all the tribes of Israel” have come to him. The war is over, the people want to reunited, and, God willing and the people consenting, it is David “who shall be shepherd of [God’s] people Israel.” (2 Sam. 5:1-2)

The appointed reading then skips three verses. (I put them back in this morning to make a point.) The verses appointed skip from “he reigned over all Israel and Judah thirty-three years” down to “David occupied the stronghold, and named it the city of David.” (2 Sam. 5:5 to 5:9) In other words, they skip right over the war crimes, the part of the story where David attacks disabled civilians in cruel and literal retribution for a boast. “Even the blind and the lame could beat David,” the Jebusites say—and so he instructs his soldier to attack them first. In moments like this, the Bible doesn’t tell us stories of cruelty to say that cruelty is good. It tells them, I think, to say that even the best of our human political leaders—even the King Davids among us—easily slide from bravery into cruelty, that “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” as the saying goes. And indeed, the institution of kingship—the rejection of God as king and God’s replacement with a series of human kings—will lead the people of Israel into disaster.

But as we read the stories of King David and King Solomon this summer and into the fall, we’ll also be reading alongside them the stories of a very different kind of king. For Christians, David is what’s sometimes called a “type” of Jesus, a kind of foreshadowing of who Jesus in turn will be. Jesus, like David, begins to reign at thirty years of age; but he’ll live only one year more, not forty. Jesus, like David, emerges from relative obscurity among the people; but where the tribes of Israel will come to David to anoint him, the people of Jesus’ own neighborhood will “take offense at him,” for after all, “prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown.” (Mark 6:3-4)

And most importantly, while David will be a king just as the people had asked—a king “like other nations,” a brave warrior and a savvy general, God’s predictions will be right. David will turn his violence against the people. He’ll exploit them for his own sordid gain. Having rejected God as king and yearned for the kinds of kings that other nations have, the people will get their wish, and it will be their undoing.

But Jesus is another kind of king. Jesus will decline to wage a revolutionary war. Jesus will refuse to take up arms, even to defend his own life. He’ll inspire Paul to “boast of [his] weaknesses,” (2 Corinthians 12:5) to claim to be “content in weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak,” Paul writes enigmatically, “then I am strong.” (12:10) And why? Because this is the message Paul receives when caught up in a mystical experience: “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” (12:9) So “I will boast all the more gladly,” Paul says, “of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me.” (12:9)

“Power is made perfect in weakness.” There’s no power more perfect than Jesus’ power, which breaks the bonds of death itself. And yet there’s no king who’s ever been weaker than Christ the king, abandoned on the Cross. So you can understand why I said that there can be a slight tension between the governments of the world and the kingdom of God. The very source of Christ’s strength is weakness in the eyes of the world, and it’s in following this gentle king that we find true greatness.

There’s a vigorous debate in our country right now over the right way to frame American history. The movement arising from George Floyd’s murder has convinced some that it’s more important than ever to teach about the long history of racism in America. Others take offense at the notion that America is somehow fundamentally flawed. Many American Christians have come down on this latter side. But I wonder whether they’re missing the point. Every person, every leader, every human organization is fundamentally flawed. That’s just the Christian doctrine of sin. Even King David, the greatest king of God’s own chosen people, was an imperfect man. America, too, will always be imperfect, because America is not the kingdom of God.

So happy Fourth of July! Enjoy it. There’s much to celebrate about our nation’s life, especially this summer. And there’s much work still to be done. But our nation’s greatness and strength are not the measure of our value; nor is its goodness, nor even our own individual greatness or strength or goodness—but Christ’s weakness. Our nation is good to the extent that it helps us, as our collect puts it, “keep all [God’s] commandments by loving [God] and our neighbor.” But just as this Sunday Feast of our Lord outranks the Holy Day of the 4^th of July, in the end the most central part of our identity comes from the weakness and goodness of Christ, not from the strength or goodness of these United States. For “[his] grace is sufficient for [us],” and his “power is made perfect in weakness.” Amen.

Sermon — June 27, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

So I spent last week, as you may know, with my family in southern Maine. On Sunday morning, I did something I don’t usually do when I’m on vacation. I got up early and went to church. My mom had always wanted to visit this little outdoor chapel on the water down the road in Kennebunkport, and it was their reopening day for the season, so we decided to go. On our way there, my stepfather wondered if the Bushes would be there. He’d driven by their summer home on Walker’s Point the day before and seen the tell-tale signs of a presidential presence: security at the gate, a Secret Service boat in the harbor, and the American flag flying over the compound. And sure enough, as we roll into the driveway of the church we see two black SUVs. As we find seats, we note two fit men sitting in the second pew with little earpieces. Which means that the short grey hair and familiar ears in the first pew belong to none other than President George W. Bush, right next to one of the two communion stations.

Now, remember that I’m a little out of practice with receiving communion. And due to some combination of my clumsiness, and the light ocean breeze, and the fact that I’m a little flustered because I’m receiving communion standing not more than two feet from George W. Bush’s face—the priest places the wafer in my hands, and as I lift it to my mouth, it somehow flies out and lands in the grass at the former president’s feet, where, with my honed priestly reflexes, I immediately kneel down, grab the wafer, pop it into my mouth, cross myself, and walk away as the family laughs.

Of course, I’m laughing about it now too, but I immediately felt, as many people would, that hot and heart-racing feeling of shame. I can’t believe I just did that. It’s exactly the kind of thing that we feel when we violate one of our culture’s spoken or unspoken purity codes—in other words, when we accidentally let something holy brush up against something dirty. In my case, literally.

In her classic work Purity and Danger, the anthropologist Mary Douglas suggests that this is exactly the function of the purity codes that appear in cultures around the world: to separate things that are holy from things that are impure. We create definitions for who or what is “impure” and what is “holy,” for what counts as a sacred person or place and what can make it dirty; and then we create systems to keep these things apart. These don’t have to be particularly religious in nature. Imagine, for example, the average American’s response to someone who casually wipes his mustardy hot-dog hands on the American flag at a 4^th of July parade. Visceral disgust, perhaps even anger. The flag is sacred; mustardy hands are dirty.

For us, of course, the “danger” of the title “Purity and Danger” is a little vague. After all, what do we think would actually happen if that dirty mustard touches the sacred flag? Lady Liberty won’t suddenly smite us for our disrespect. But in other times and places, it’s been clear. If unclean things were brought into the ancient gods’ holy places, people thought, they would become angry. At worst, they might strike back—or even flee. The prophet Ezekiel, for example, envisions priests performing impure sacrifices in the Temple in Jerusalem, (Ezekiel 8) defiling the holy place to such an extent that the Holy One himself is forced out. Unable to coexist with such impurity in the same place, almost magnetically repelled, God flees away in a fantastic chariot. (Ezekiel 10) And this is not some kind of bizarre prediction of the future. It’s Ezekiel’s explanation for the people’s current predicament of exile and suffering. The land became so impure that God was forced to leave, and left the people without a protector.

I said a few weeks ago that much of Mark is about struggles between Jesus and demons, but maybe I should have been more precise: Mark calls them “unclean spirits” just as often as he calls them “demons.” If you read carefully, the gospel takes on the tone of a struggle between “the Holy One of God” and “the Holy Spirit” and the “unclean spirits”—between the holy and the impure. While the words “impure” or “unclean” don’t appear in today’s gospel passage, people have often used this framework of holiness and impurity to try to understand what’s going on.

Both the unnamed woman in this story and the unnamed girl, after all, would have been in states of ritual impurity when they came into contact with Jesus. A woman experiencing this kind of irregular bleeding would be ritually impure in a manner laid down in Leviticus, as would anyone who touched her, and Leviticus describes the process for removing that impurity. (Lev. 15:19ff.) Likewise, touching a dead body conveys ritual impurity, and the book of Numbers explains how to cleanse yourself from that. (Numbers 19:11ff.)

Now there’s always a danger, at this point, of offering interpretations that can be anti-Jewish in tone, so it’s important to be careful. Impurity is not necessarily bad. There’s nothing wrong with being in a state of ritual impurity, any more than it’s wrong to get mustard on your hands while eating, as long as you don’t come into contact with what’s holy. The most ordinary cycles of life and the most extraordinary moments of birth and death all convey ritual impurity, and yet they are good, even divinely commanded. God tells the people to be fruitful and multiply, to care for the sick and the bury the dead. In village life, away from the holy place of the Temple, impurity was not such a big deal.

The woman’s problem, after all, is not that she’s cast out from society. It’s not that the doctors refuse to treat her because she’s impure. It’s that they’ve been all too willing to take her money without having a cure, and she’s suffered much and paid much to no avail! (Mark 5:26) Likewise, the young girl’s body isn’t avoided for fear of contamination. The room is so packed with mourners that Jesus sends them out to have some peace. (Mark 5:38) The problem is not that they’re in a state of impurity, but that they’re really suffering; perhaps this is why Mark doesn’t even use the word “impure” here.

Still, Mark has written a whole gospel about the struggle between “the Holy One of God” and “the unclean spirits,” (Mark 1:24) and now this holy one comes into the presence of two people who are, according to the culture within which they and Jesus live, unclean. There must be something here.

I think there is. Remember Ezekiel’s vision, in which the impure Temple drove out the holy God. Here, it’s the other way around. The Holy One comes into contact with that which is ritually unclean, and he is not driven out—he heals them. Now, we don’t live in a culture with this kind of purity code, so I hope you’ll excuse me making it a bit metaphorical. But we do live in a world in which we sometimes break one expectation or norm or another, in which our emotional responses of shame and anger and disgust are triggered, and Jesus remains. We worry and worry that we’re not good enough, that “what we have done and what we have left undone” has rendered us so imperfect as to drive God away. But the very opposite is true. God comes to us, amid all our “impurity,” amid all our brokenness and imperfection, amid all our unknown mistakes and all our known regrets. God comes to us, and there’s nothing we can do to drive her away. God is not disgusted with us or angry with us; God is here with us.

And more importantly still, God heals us. God really heals us. The power of the story is not that Jesus challenges purity codes; it’s that he changes people’s lives. He doesn’t just proclaim the woman cleansed; he stops the bleeding. He doesn’t just dismiss the idea that the girl’s body is impure as a silly superstition; he raises her to new life. God doesn’t just forgive us for our shame and our mistakes; God really heals our souls and our wills, making them holy, so that we may—one day!—live lives that more closely follow God’s holy way of love.

But—and here’s the catch—God does it on God’s own mysterious time. This story, you probably noticed, is a sandwich, with Jairus’s daughter as the bread and the woman as the filling. Jairus comes to Jesus with his daughter at the brink of death. (Mark 5:23) But Jesus doesn’t do what you would think. He doesn’t drop everything and come running. He begins to go with him, but then he stops and turns. “Who touched my cloak?” (5:30) And then he waits, and he listens. He listens to the woman long enough to hear “the whole truth,” (5:33) long enough to hear her twelve-year story of pain, for so long that by the time he’s finally headed on his way to the emergency sick visit—the girl is gone.

Is Jesus rude? Is he easily distracted? Is he trying to show off, intentionally upping the stakes of the miracle he’s about to perform? Maybe. But I think more than anything, this captures the paradoxical truth of Christian life: we believe that Jesus heals us, yet we suffer. We believe that Jesus saves us from death, and yet we die. We stand at the grave and proclaim the “sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life” even as “we commit” our loved one’s “body to the ground.” (BCP p. 501) No wonder they laughed at Jesus. (Mark 5:40)

But that’s what God chose to do in Christ: to turn things upside down. To take our intuition that holiness needs to live in great purity and dive into the midst of our messy lives instead. To take all the dropped communion wafers of our lives and turn them into the incarnate Body of Christ. To take our prayers for healing now and give us resurrection in the end, and to do it all on God’s own eternal time, while our souls wait “for the Lord,” as the Psalmist writes, “more than watchmen for the morning; more than watchmen for the morning.” (Psalm 130:5)