Sermon — May 23, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Years ago, when he was governor, Deval Patrick went to a town hall meeting in Lynn. A man stood up, and introduced the group he was with, and said he was speaking on behalf of the community of Iraqi refugees living in the area. Ahlan wa-sahlan! Governor Patrick said. “Welcome! Hello!” And his staffer, and the host of the town meeting, and the Iraqi refugees all stared at him for a second, and then the man speaking smiled and said to him, Ahlan bik! “Hello to you.” Nobody in the room knew that Governor Patrick had spent the better part of a year wandering around the Arabic-speaking half of Sudan after his Peace Corps position was canceled. It’s remarkable the kind of connection it can make to speak even just a few words in a person’s native tongue. (Unless it’s French. Never try to speak French to the French.)

But of course, language can just as easily divides us from one another as unite us. I’ll never forget the moment when Alice and I stepped into a sandwich shop in a small town outside Venice, heavily jet-lagged and—in Alice’s case—about five months pregnant, to be confronted with a glass case of unidentifiable sandwiches and a long menu in Italian only. “Excuse me,” I said with my terrible guide-book Italian, “do you speak English?” An apologetic shrug. “Spagnolo? Francese?” No. Clearly not a tourist sandwich shop. Unable to order lunch and on the verge of awkwardly walking out, we were suddenly rescued by a local man who was home for the week visiting his brother from his current home twenty minutes away from ours in Connecticut, who graciously translated the whole menu.

For all my love of language, I have to admit that even if we speak the same language, words just as often fail to communicate what we mean as they succeed. Some of you have been or are married. Some of you have worked for a boss or as part of a team. All of you, I know, have lived in the United States. And so you have firsthand experience of how easily communication can break down. We try again and again to express ourselves honestly and clearly, and it’s only rarely that we really feel heard and understood. As misunderstandings and miscommunications pile up, it can come to seem that we’re not even speaking the same language.

The Bible, of course, has a story to tell about why we can’t properly communicate with one another: “The Tower of Babel.” (Genesis 11) It’s been a few dozen generations since Noah and his family have emerged from the ark, and their descendants are still one big happy family. They have, the Bible says, “one language and the same words.” (Gen. 11:1) And they decide to build themselves a city, with a tower that stretches all the way up to heaven; so that, presumably, they might make themselves like gods. Like the gods in any ancient story about human pride, God undermines their project, “confus[ing] their language…so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” (Gen. 11:7) The one language of this one family splinters into the many languages of many peoples and, unable to communicate, they give up on their project and spread out throughout the world, leaving heaven safe from competition. God stops trying to work with all of humanity at once and chooses one people, the family of Abraham, through whom God will act in the world.

So it’s appropriate that on Pentecost, at the very moment when God’s kingdom begins to expand from the people of Israel to all the nations of the world, that God undoes the curse of Babel, at least for a moment. The two stories are mirror images. Humanity united tried to build itself a tower up to God, so God scattered them throughout the world and mixed up their languages. Now God is going to gather the people who have been scattered and to reunite them into one people of God, so God comes down among them and gives them the ability to speak to and understand one another again.

This is the miracle of Pentecost. The wind and the fire are impressive. But the point is the gift of language: the gift given to the disciples, on the one hand, to “speak in other languages,” (Acts 2:4) and to the crowd, on the other, to “hear, each of us, in our own native language,” (Acts 2:7) what the disciples are saying.

Some might want to “demythologize” these stories, seeing them as myths told to explain something about the way the world is. So Babel is just a story told to explain why people speak different languages. Pentecost is just a story told to explain how the gospel spreads from the small band of Jewish disciples in Jerusalem to Jews and Gentiles throughout the known world. But even if Pentecost were made up to explain the power of the early Christian message, it would be impressive. We’re talking about the message spreading to “Parthians, Medes, Elamites,” (over in Iran), “residents of Mesopotamia,” (that’s Iraq) “Cappadocia, Pontus, and Asia…Phyrgia and Pamphylia” (now all in Turkey), Egypt and Libya, Crete and Arabia, and even to the imperial city of Rome. And all within a few short years.

I like to believe this story of Pentecost. Maybe you have doubts. But without a doubt, the Holy Spirit’s power to help us speak is not a myth. It’s a gift. And it’s a gift we need, badly.

It starts with prayer. Our imperfect ability to speak and to understand applies to our relationship with God as much as our relationships with one another. It’s hard to pray! Those of us who are Episcopalians, used to the formal cadences of our liturgy, sometimes find it intimidating to pray in our own words. Even if that’s not the case, we sometimes just don’t know how to put our prayers into words, or even what we need to pray for. “We do not know how to pray as we ought,” Paul writes. (Romans 8:26) “But,” he continues, “that very Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.” (8:26) It’s the wisdom of the title of Anne Lamott’s wonderful little book Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers. We do not need to have the words to pray, we do not even need to know exactly what we’re praying for, we only need to want to pray and the Holy Spirit will pray for us in words that are beyond human words, because while even our most beautiful prayers can’t come close to building that tower all the way up to heaven, the “God who searches our hearts” has come down among us to hear those prayers. (8:27)

And it doesn’t stop there. Because the story of Pentecost isn’t a story of private prayer. It’s a story of evangelism, of people publicly sharing the good news of the great deeds that God has done for them, of being given the power to express them in terms that other people can understand, and of being given the gift of hearing them in a way that makes sense.

What great deeds has God done for you? If you are here right now listening to this, I guarantee you have a story to tell. God must have done something in your life, the Holy Spirit must have moved somehow in your heart, for you to be here this morning, sitting on Zoom or inside with a mask on, instead of enjoying yet another amazing spring day. It’s been fifteen months. You’re not here out of habit any more.

And this is all evangelism is. We don’t tell people that they’re going to burn. We don’t try to convince them that what we believe is true. We speak, as best we can, “about God’s deeds of power,” (Acts 2:11) about the things that God has been and done for us, and we trust the Holy Spirit to translate them, to give us the power to speak in words that others can understand, and to give the power to hear them in a way that connects with their own lives.

In the end, all this is God’s work, and not ours. If you’re as much a language-lover as I, you might have noticed that the disciples’ role in this story is passive, and God’s is active, until they receive the Holy Spirit. The disciples were all together, and heard a sound, and saw a flame, and “were filled with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:1-4)—and then “they began to speak.” (2:4) All we can do is put ourselves in the right place. All we can do is bring ourselves to church, online or in-person. All we can do is adopt the posture of prayer. All we can do is to share our stories of faith. And then we wait, and we pray, and the Holy Spirit speaks in us and through us in ways we’ll never understand and may never realize for years. Like many things, the miracle of Pentecost is “now and not yet.” The renewal of our ability to speak and to hear began two thousand years ago and is still incomplete. So for now, we wait for things to unfold. For as Jesus says, the story is still incomplete: “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.” (John 16:12–13)

Well, “I still have many things to say to you,” but this sermon’s long enough—“you cannot bear them now.” For now, I simply pray for the Holy Spirit’s gift of tongue: for the promise to be fulfilled that we may hear another more clearly, and speak to one another more honestly; that our language may become the things that brings us together and not what drives us apart, so that “when the Spirit of truth comes,” she may guide us “into all the truth.” Amen.

Sermon — May 16, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings for the Seventh Sunday of Easter

We like to think that you can replicate something extraordinary, if only you had the recipe for the secret sauce that makes it so. Want to live a healthier life and maximize your fitness and performance? Grab a copy Tom’s Brady The TB12 Method, which promises to teach you the secrets to his success for just $13.60 on Amazon. (Plant-based protein power and electrolyte supplement not included.) Want to learn to cook like the chef in an iconic restaurant? You’re in luck. Last summer, The New Yorker reviewed a service that delivers meal kits featuring restaurant favorites. You could buy, for example, the “burger au poivre” from Raoul’s in SoHo, which ships in a box containing four raw patties, peppercorns, cheese, sauce, buns, and a sheet of cooking instructions. Do you want to reignite a romantic relationship and recapture the passion of the all-too-brief “honeymoon phase”? You can find a million articles on the ten easy steps to go back to the way things were before you realized you’d be stuck with this person and all their habits forever.

These are three very different problems, but they’re really one problem, the problem that the 19^th-century German sociologist Max Weber called “the routinization of charisma.” Weber studied religion and politics and found a common pattern. A movement begins with an inspiring and charismatic leader—a Muhammad or a Jesus, a Donald Trump or Barack Obama—whose authority comes from their own personal characteristics and achievements, and the relationships they have with their followers. The problem comes in the next generation. How do you turn this leader’s charisma into a bureaucracy’s “routine,” a recipe that can be repeated by less-charismatic followers to achieve the same results? How can you recapture the spark and the success of that first experience, and keep it going in the long run?

It’s exactly the problem that the disciples face this Sunday in Acts. On Thursday, we celebrated the Feast of the Ascension, that day—forty days after Jesus’ resurrection—when the risen Lord finally stopped walking around with the disciples, and ascended into the heavens, leaving them without a leader. And next Sunday, we’ll celebrate the Feast of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descends on the disciples for the first time, leading them into miraculous deeds.

But this Sunday, the disciples are alone. They have to figure out how to fill the hole left in the roster of Twelve Disciples left by Judas’ betrayal, and—to the Apostles’ credit—they don’t try to replicate Jesus’ charismatic way of calling his disciples and turn it into a bureaucratic routine. There’s no committee with a five-step strategic plan. They cast lots, they draw straws, knowing that if God chooses, God can and will load the dice.

Soon enough, the Holy Spirit will arrive, and the disciples will be out of their dilemma. The Holy Spirit has plenty of charisma. The very word “charismatic” comes, in fact, from the charismata, the “gifts” poured out by the Holy Spirit. Time and again the Holy Spirit will lead them into extraordinary things, and there’s very little that’s routine about the life of the early Church.

But these ten days between the ascent of Jesus and the descent of the Holy Spirit are where we live most of our lives. We fall in love on a warm summer evening, and then we spend decades of our lives trying to recapture its magic as we live through winter, spring, and fall. We eat the perfect meal somewhere, and then spend hours in the kitchen failing to reproduce it. We sit in church one day and find, like John Wesley, that our hearts have suddenly been “strangely warmed”; and five years later, having gone through EfM or accepted the call to serve as Vestry members, we find ourselves sitting through yet another meeting about the furnace. So how do we recover that charisma, that spark? How do we get back to the way things used to be?

We don’t, I think that Jesus wants to say. There’s something better that we do instead.

“I am coming to you,” Jesus says to God, praying for the disciples at the Last Supper, but speaking as if he’s already gone. “I am no longer in the world—but they are in the world.” (John 17:11) They are “from the world,” (17:6) but “they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world.” (7:14, 16) “I am coming to you,” (17:11) he says, but “I am not asking you to take them out of the world.” (17:16) “The world,” here, has a kind of double meaning. It means the world in general, good and bad. But it’s also John’s shorthand for all those forces that are opposed to God’s grace, for what we call in our baptismal liturgy “the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.” (BCP p. 302)

Jesus was in the world, but he is not from the world, and he’s not of the world. He doesn’t belong to the powers that shape our life in this world. We are from this world, and long after Jesus is gone, we remain in this world. But we are not of the world, any more than he is.

Jesus has returned to the Father, Jesus has ascended into heaven, and Christians are sometimes tempted to think that this is what Christianity is all about: a recipe, a blueprint, a JC33 method with ten easy steps to help us, one day, ascend to be in heaven with God.

Christianity is not a recipe, it’s a gift; or, more precisely, it’s the story of a gift. As Christians, our task is not to replicate Jesus’ life but to bear witness to it, to give testimony about it. “And this is our testimony,” John writes, “that God gave us eternal life.” (1 John 5:11) God gave us eternal life, and “whoever has the Son has life,” has life, here and now, already. We do not need to ascend into heaven to be with God, although we will—we can already live eternal life here and now, whenever we live in the faith, and hope, and love that will be made complete in heaven, whenever we “have [this] testimony in [our] hearts,” (1 John 5:10) we live the life of that other world to which Jesus has gone before us, even though we live still in this world, because we are in this world—but not of it.

So this is what we do, in the gap between the Ascension and Pentecost, in the long and boring days between inspiration and renewal. We remain in the world, in ordinary life, not trying to replicate the extraordinary gift we’ve been given, but living in a way that bears witness to its power.

Tom Brady’s greatest legacy, after all, won’t be that he left us The TB12 Method for diet and exercise. It will be that he inspired thousands of athletes young and old to grow in strength and skill. A good restaurant’s purpose isn’t to give us recipes that we can replicate at home. It’s to give us a meal we’ll never forget. A relationship isn’t about reenacting the first date or trying to recapture the honeymoon period. It’s about living faithfully in a way that honors the continued power of that spark of love to shape our lives together so that the years and decades after the honeymoon is over, for all their frustration and tedium, see us growing into a deeper kind of love.

It’s not our task to routinize that charisma, to recreate that first extraordinary thing—and thank God! Because (news flash) we can’t. I don’t care what dietary supplements you take, or how precisely you follow that recipe, or how many Cosmo articles you read, you will never be Tom Brady. You will never take that perfect bite again. You will never feel the way you did on that last first date. But we have been given a gift, and we have been given an invitation to bear witness to that grace, so that, sustained by the power of Jesus’ prayer and by the new gift of the Holy Spirit, we might live faithfully and lovingly in the long days between the Ascensions and the Pentecosts of our lives. Amen.

Sermon — May 9, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Many of the debates within Christianity in the last few decades have come down to one fundamental disagreement: whether Christianity is, ultimately, an inclusive or exclusive religion. Some forms of Christianity are basically exclusive. Take, for example, the Roman Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention, the two largest Christian denominations in America, are exclusive in both sense. On the one hand, they believe that Christianity is an exclusive path to God: there’s no salvation outside the Church, or outside faith in Jesus. On the other, they’re exclusive in the sense that they exclude people in same-sex relationships from membership in good standing; they exclude women from ordination and most leadership positions; there have even been calls, not just from cranks on the Internet but from bishops, to exclude liberal Catholics like John Kerry or Joe Biden from communion because of some of their political views.

Ironically, on the other end of the political spectrum, many liberals also see Christianity as a religion of exclusion, and simply they simply leave the Church entirely. But there are also many who believe in an inclusive God and turn to more inclusive Christian traditions: The Episcopal Church or the United Church of Christ or whichever it may be. This is not to say that every member of our churches is or should be politically liberal. But it’s simply a fact that in some of the most visible ways, particularly with regards to gender and sexuality, the Episcopal Church is inclusive where others are exclusive. And while we sometimes take these differences for granted, they’re worth thinking about; it’s not obvious why we should disagree. Worshiping the same God, reading the same Bible, relying on the same Holy Spirit to get through our days, we nevertheless end up having diametrically-opposed views on some pretty fundamental questions.

This morning’s readings are a pretty good starting place for this kind of conversation. One of the main themes of the Book of Acts, for example, is the expansion of the Christian movement to include not only the small group of Jewish disciples we know from the Gospels, and not only a growing number of Jews who join them after Jesus’ death, but Gentiles, non-Jews, people from all the nations of the world. In this morning’s reading from Acts, Peter’s speaking in front of a mixed group. In response to a divine vision, he’s gathered together a group of other Jewish followers of Jesus and gone to visit a Roman centurion named Cornelius, a man who’s intrigued by the God of Israel but not himself a Jew. Halfway through Peter’s speech, inspiration strikes; the Holy Spirit begins to spread among the crowd. The Jewish Christians are astounded: is it possible that these Gentiles have received the Holy Spirit? (Acts 10:45) And it’s actually kind of surprising that they’re surprised.

Look, after all, at our psalm! Psalm 98 celebrates precisely the fact that the God of Israel is going to break out beyond the boundaries of the people of Israel. “He remembers his mercy and faithfulness,” yes, “to the house of Israel.” (Psalm 98:4) But now “he has openly shown his righteousness in the sight of the nations,” (98:3) until “all the ends of the earth have seen the victory of our God.” (98:4) God is coming to judge the whole world “with righteousness,” and all the peoples of the world “with equity.” (98:10) The whole psalm is a story of the way in which the God of Israel, the God of one small people in one small corner of the world will become a God for all peoples. We find this theme throughout the Old Testament, from God’s promises to Abraham in Genesis that by his offspring all the nations of the world will be blessed (Gen. 22:18) to the prophecy of Isaiah that the house of God will become “a house of prayer for all peoples.” (56:7) If Peter’s companions had been reading their Bibles, they shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the God of Israel would one day become the God of the Gentiles as well.

In a sense, then, the story in Acts is a microcosm of our own struggles over inclusion and exclusion in our much-later church. On one side, you have the preconceptions of the other Jewish Christians who are with Peter: Jesus is the Messiah, the long-awaited leader of the Jewish people, and their savior; but his movement doesn’t include people who are not Jews. On the other side, you have Peter and indeed the Holy Spirit, offering a more inclusive vision of the faith: that Jesus is the savior of all people, that the Holy Spirit will be “poured out even on the Gentiles.” (Acts 10:45)

But that’s not exactly what’s going on. The story of Psalm 98 and Acts 10 is not exactly a story of embracing religious pluralism. It’s the story of the god of one people “winning for himself the victory.” (Psalm 98:2) Likewise in today’s epistle. John writes that “whatever is born of God conquers the world”! (1 John 5:4) “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ,” John writes, “has been born of God.” (1 John 5:1) But what about those who don’t? Suddenly this story of an inclusive God welcoming all the peoples of the world into one fold starts to sound like an exclusive imposing his rule on all the peoples of the world by right of conquest and casting non-believers out of the family of God. You can see how different people could read this and see either an inclusive or an exclusive kind of God.

So we have to go another level deeper. If this God is not just one God among many local gods, but the one God—then what does that mean for people of other faiths?

“Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ, has been born of God,” John writes. (1 John 5:1) On one level, this is a radical statement of inclusion. Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Messiah has been born of God; Jew or Gentile, gay or straight, transgender or cisgender, male or female or whoever they may be. But it can sound exclusive. We live in the twenty-first century in a cosmopolitan city. Not everyone does believe in Christ. You may notice, though, that John doesn’t go on to say, “and those who don’t believe that Jesus is the Christ have not been born of God.” In fact, this is one of the oldest and simplest logical fallacies. “People who believe in Christ are born of God” doesn’t mean that “people who don’t believe in Christ aren’t born of God,” any more than “people who live in Charlestown live in Boston” means that “people who don’t live in Charlestown don’t live in Boston.” We’re not the only neighborhood in town.

So at least within our own community, the Church is inclusive: whoever believes in Christ is part of the fold, no matter who they are. But that’s not all. In the Gospel, Jesus assures the disciples that “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love… ‘This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.’” (John 15:10, 12) This is and has always been Jesus’ central commandment to his disciples: love one another, as I have loved you, with self-giving humility. There are billions of people in the world who are not Christians but practice every day this kind of humble love. Jesus seems to say nothing other than that they abide in his love, whether they think they’re abiding in him or not.

Of course, it’s harder for most of us to accept that other Christians abide in Christ’s love. There’s an old joke that inclusive Christians welcome everyone except exclusive Christians. 

I think self-righteousness is one of the great human flaws. We love to think we know who’s in and who is out—and by the way, we almost always think we’re in. We give ourselves credit for being right and blame the people who we think are wrong. This applies to family life as much as spiritual life, but at least in our world, it seems to infect politics the most. (And before you doubt that this is true, consider this CNN headline from the fall: “Americans hate political opponents more than they love their own party, study finds.”)

It strikes me, though, as I listen to today’s readings, how little we have to do with it. While Peter is still speaking, the Holy Spirit falls upon them. (Acts 10:44) When he retells the story a few days later, he admits that it as “while I was just starting to speak” that the Holy Spirit comes. (11:15) It’s not about what he says, but what God does. “You didn’t choose me,” Jesus says, “I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit.” (John 15:16)

God did not need to become the God of the whole earth. God did not need to come and teach us the way of love. God could have stayed an ordinary God, with a single ordinary chosen people. But God chose to include us in the scope of God’s love. God choose to include us—and the Catholic Church, and millions of loving non-Christians, and, yes, the Southern Baptist Convention—in God’s own family, and God chose to give us Jesus’ many commandments, “so that” we “may love one another.” (John 15:17) We did not choose God, and we cannot choose whom God loves. All we can do is join in the spirit of the psalmist and “shout with joy before the King, the Lord,” because God chose to love us with this kind of love; the love that calls us friends and not servants; the love whose commandments are not burdensome, but the source of life and love.

Amen.