Sermon — April 1, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Sermon — March 28, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

When I was in college, I did a summer internship in Governor Patrick’s Office of Constituent Services. At its best, this meant helping connect people to the right state agencies to solve their problems, or even getting them on the phone with a real person from, for example, the RMV Ombudsman’s Office. At its worst, this meant being the low-ranking punching-bag fielding random Bay Staters’ complaints about their governor. In retrospect, it wasn’t bad preparation for the priesthood.

I’d received a grant, so I was the only intern there full-time, which meant I had some special privileges. For example, on most I got to open all the mail that had been sent to the Governor, to be sorted and handled appropriately. And it was a special delight that hot summer that I got to do it in a cool, quiet room by myself, away from the constantly-ringing phones. (I just tried not to think about the fact that this was so I didn’t expose anyone else if any of the envelopes contained anthrax.)

On occasion that summer—but more often when I was filing older correspondence down the hall—I’d run into a very strange envelope, containing two things: first, an outraged letter protesting the disgusting fiscal policy of “Taxachusetts,” coated in a fine, brown dust; and second, the source of the dust, a single bag of tea.

You may have thought it was a rumor, but I can assure you that in the early, chaotic days of the grassroots Tea Party movement, there were in fact people mailing bags of tea to their elected officials in protest of taxation. And sometimes we filed them for posterity.

Of course, we’re Bostonians here, and so whether or not we agree with the modern Tea Party, we all know what the symbolism of the Boston Tea Party means: patriotism, rebellion, resistance against unjust taxation; political values that can be evoked, however comically, by a single bag of tea.

And so, while you may not recognize the symbols themselves, you might be able to understand what Jesus is doing when he rides into Jerusalem on a donkey and the people wave their palms. It was a symbol that the people in the crowd would have recognized, as surely as we recognize the symbolism of a Tea Party. They had heard the ancient words of the prophet Zechariah, repeated over and over during the long years of Greek and Roman occupation. “Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!” Zechariah proclaimed. “Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” (Zech. 9:9) There’s nothing glorious about a donkey, of course, any more than there’s something rebellious about a bag of Lipton tea. But the people celebrate because of what it means: the return of the king.

As Jesus begins to ride into the city on his humble mount, the people respond with even more symbols. Some spread their cloaks on the ground to protect even this humble steed’s hoofs from becoming dirty, as they’d done for newly-coronated kings in the days of old. (2 Kings 9:13). Others cut branches from alongside the road and waved them as they’d done in patriotic parades and military triumphs for generations, (1 Macc. 13:51; 2 Macc 10:7) the hadas and aravah and etrog—the myrtle and willow and citron—and most of all, the lulav, the leafy branches of the date palm. Okay, we mostly talk about the palms, but these were the four species of leafy greens used in the festival of Sukkot, a huge national celebration. Along with the menorah, they were the most recognizable symbols of Jewish national identity in Jesus’ day, a millennium before the Star of David was created. These were such cherished national symbols that the armies fighting for Jewish independence in the century after Jesus’ death stamped them onto their coins alongside phrases like, “For the Freedom of Jerusalem.”

So when the people see this charismatic teacher riding into the city on a donkey like Zechariah’s long-imagined king, they react with the most powerful symbols they can. They shield his feet like a newly-crowned ruler. They wave their leafy branches like so many colorful flags. They cry out, “Hosanna!” (Aramaic for, “Save us, we pray!”) “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highest heaven!” (Mark 11:9–10)

Even the Roman regime couldn’t miss the point. Here was yet another pretender to the throne—so the Romans would think—another man hungry for power, claiming descent from David through some murky paternal line, gathering a band of rebels to seize the royal city.

But it’s not going to mean what they think.

There are many parallels between the prophecies of Zechariah and the life and death of Jesus. Zechariah imagines an “anointed one” (4:14) who is accused by Satan, (3:1) a royal “Branch” who will “command peace to the nations” (3:8, 9:10). A king whose life will be valued at thirty pieces of silver thrown into the treasury, (11:12-13) and on whose great day of triumph “there shall no longer be traders in the house of the Lord.” (14:21)

But the thing that distinguishes Zechariah’s vision from all the palm-waving rebels to come is that it’s not a human being who will return to rule as king. The kings have failed. “Render true judgments,” Zechariah says God has commanded them, “show kindness and mercy to one another; do not oppress the widow, the orphan, the alien, or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another. But they refused to listen, and turned a stubborn shoulder.” (Zechariah 7:9–11) “Thus says the LORD,” Zechariah proclaims, “I will return to Zion, and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem.” (Zech. 8:3) “I will encamp at my house as a guard,” says God, “so that no one shall march to and fro; no oppressor shall again overrun them, for now I have seen with my own eyes. Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you!” (Zech. 9:8-9) Lo, your king comes—not some long-forgotten descendant of an ancient king, not some guerilla leader from the desert hills; the Lord Godself is coming to reign.

In the church I grew up in, we didn’t do this whole weird “Passion Sunday” thing. Jesus entered the city in triumph on Palm Sunday. He was betrayed in darkness of Maundy Thursday. He was put to death on Good Friday. They’re completely separate events. Why roll them into one? This strange Episcopalian “Passion Sunday,” I thought at first, must just be a compromise. We know that most people won’t show up on Good Friday, but we don’t want them to skip straight from the triumph of Palm Sunday to the triumph of Easter, without Jesus’ suffering and death in between; and so we move the passion from Good Friday back to Palm Sunday.

But really, this isn’t it at all. The reason we move so quickly from the royal procession to the excruciating passion is not that nobody’s going to come to church on Good Friday. It’s that this is what it looks like when God is king. The Roman soldiers don’t realize what they’re doing when they clothe him in imperial purple and twist together a crown, when they kneel in mock homage and proclaim him “King of the Jews.” (Mark 15:17-19) But when the patriotic crowd has faded in to the background, when the disciples have hurried into hiding, when even Peter has denied knowing Jesus and turned away, it’s left to these sarcastic soldiers to attend his coronation, to crown him with thorns and enthrone him on a cross and leave him to die, beneath the inscription naming his crime: “The King of the Jews.” (Mark 15:26)

And they’re right. Because it’s this moment of self-sacrificial love that shows what it means for Jesus to be king. He’s not there so that the ordinary folks’ coats get dirty to keep his shining stallion’s hoofs clean. He’s there to kneel at their dirty feet, and wash them with his own hands. He’s not there to gather an army to overthrow the Roman state by force, a path of violence that could only and historically would only lead to disaster. He’s there to give himself alone to spare his people from destruction. He’s not there to scheme against his family, turning royal against royal as he clings to the throne in old age. He’s there to ascend into heaven, handing power to his followers a mere forty days after he rises from the dead.

He’s there to show us another way. He’s there to give us the power to rule, and to do better than we had before—not to “devise evil in our hearts,” as the kings of old, not to “oppress the widow, the orphan, the alien, or the poor,” but to “show kindness and mercy.” Not to seize power as the kings and queens of our own lives, but to enter into citizenship in his heavenly kingdom.

So I invite you to join me, this Holy Week, as Jesus establishes his kingdom of love; to see him, in all the shame and pain of his last days, in all the glory and triumph of his resurrection—so that we might know what it truly means to say, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!” Amen.

Sermon — March 21, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

“Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24)

When I was in high school, I was a fairly serious runner. The remarkable thing about running is how objective progress is. I could still rattle off the progression of my mile time or my best times on our home cross-country course or exactly how fast I ran each 400-meter repeat during a particular workout ten years ago. And while I was never the fastest guy on the team, I was pretty good. More importantly, though, cross-country and track became my life. The people I ran with were my closest friends, and—as an unusually-boring and responsible teenager—I ended up being appointed a captain for all three seasons of my senior year.

So I loved running, and I wanted to continue in college, but I was much too slow even to walk on to Harvard track and so I joined the Greater Boston Track Club instead. They were serious, mostly post-college guys, and I trained hard. I ran something like seventy miles a week around the Charles River, honed my speed with massive track workouts, and by the end of the year I had shaved my mile team down by a whopping four seconds—from 4:40 to 4:36.

Runners have sometimes observed that that level of training can leave your body in a state that’s almost like sickness. My toenails were constantly turning black and falling off from the repetitive motion. The smallest cold tended to give me a long-lasting, chesty cough that only went away when I was running. I was never injured or exhausted—my performance stayed high—but my body was in something like open rebellion.

Then I got hurt. On a twenty-three mile hike through the Presidentials in the White Mountains with two friends, I tweaked a muscle in my hip. My legs, you have to remember, had been finely tuned to run almost endlessly on the flat, paved paths around the Charles or Fresh Pond, or on the springy rubber of a track, not to scramble up a mountainside. But the only way to make it back to our camp was to keep walking, and so I did. By the time we made it home, I found that I could hardly run, and started cutting down. I tried, for a few weeks, to run less—just forty or fifty miles a week, give it a rest—and soon had to stop entirely and try to recover. I took some time off from the track club and rested. After six months or so, I was able to run again casually, but in a very different way. I’ve never again joined a team or a club. I’ve never again trained so hard I can’t shake a cough. And I’ve never, in the last decade, run a race.

“Very truly, I tell you,” Jesus says, “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24) I love this saying because it’s so obviously true in a literal sense. The question is not how to interpret what he says, but how to apply it to something other than an actual grain of wheat.

Of course he’s talking, on one level, about himself. This is Jesus’ final public teaching in the Gospel of John, and his final days are drawing near. But Jesus’ death, he seems to say, is not the abrupt and unfortunate end to a ministry that could’ve lasted for years. Instead, Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension are the culmination of his ministry. In the larger, mythological sense, the coming days will be the climax of the struggle between Jesus and all the forces of evil. “Now is the judgment of this world,” he says; “now the ruler of this world”—which is to say, the power of sin and evil and death itself, sometimes personified as “Satan”—“will be driven out.” (John 12:31) In a more tangible, historical way, it’s the moment where Jesus stops being a local teacher and becomes a global figure. The story starts with “some Greeks” coming to see him, meaning “some Gentiles,” some non-Jews, a symbol of Jesus movement spreading from his own people to the whole world. And indeed, Jesus says that “I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” (John 12:32) It’s as if to be seen by all the people of the world, to draw all the people of the world to himself, Jesus needs to be raised up into the heavens. And in the simplest historical sense, Jesus is right. It’s not the brilliance of his teaching that spreads his movement around the world; it’s the incredible news of his death and resurrection.

So on one level, Jesus is talking about his own death here. If he lives to a ripe old age and passes away, a wise teacher, he remains one man. But if, at the right moment, he is sown in the ground, he will spring forth and bear much fruit. His small movement will spread and grow; his own body will become the seed for the Body of the Church. But even to say this is to lead inevitably to a second level of interpretation, because the Church, the fruit that grows from that grain, must also in turn “fall into the earth and die.”

I don’t mean this in the numerical and statistical sense that people mean when they say that “the church is dying.” I mean something less linear, more cyclical. Like a field of wheat, the Church is always somewhere in a process of rebirth. Our traditions and our ways of worshiping and talking about God grow and ripen, and then fall. If we plant them in fertile ground, they sometimes spring up and bear new and invigorating fruit. If we try to hold onto them, we’re left with a single husk of desiccated grain. We go through constant transformations and reformations, large and small, and there’s something appropriate about the image of the grain of wheat. When we’re trying to understand where God is leading the Church, we don’t need to make it up from scratch; we’re sowing the seeds of the past and watching for growth. Nor do we make changes out of envy of other traditions or denominations; we know that we’re a field of wheat, and that wheat doesn’t need to become blueberries to bear fruit. It probably goes without saying that during this long year, people have been planting seeds left and right, and there’s hope in that—we have a real chance to see where new life will grow. But there’s also grief. There are things about the way that church used to be that have died to plant those seeds.

Of course, there’s another level at which we need to apply what Jesus says. We need to apply it to ourselves. “Those who love their life,” he says, “lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” (John 12:25) This is a hard verse to translate without giving the wrong impression. He’s not talking primarily, I don’t think, about “life” in the biological sense; the word he uses is psyche, “soul” in Greek. The “soul” is not the breath of life, the biological reality of life; it’s the form of life, the seat of the values and priorities that give shape to our lives. In a sense, it’s even close to the “way of life.” So you could almost paraphrase this, “those who hold their way of life dearly destroy it, and those who disdain it guard it for the age to come,” and that starts to move us back toward the grain of wheat.

Like grains of wheat, like the Church, we constantly go through cycles of growth and stagnation and rebirth. Different parts of our lives are constantly in different places in an unending cycle of bearing new fruit and withering away. It takes wisdom and discernment to know which is which, and it takes courage to let go of the seeds and plant them in the earth. It sometimes means giving something up that once nourished you, taking some of those grains of wheat and letting them die in the earth to seed new life. Because if we hold on too dearly to our present form of life, even as everything changes around us, we may well be destroying it.

One version of what it meant for me “to be a runner” is long gone. It died there somewhere halfway through a hike. It was one of the most important things in my life, but I know now that it was not feeding me. The cost was too high: the sleepless anxiety before a race; the obsession with measuring myself to the tenth or a second and the hundredth of a mile; the gruesome physical effects. But that grain of wheat fell into the ground and bore fruit, in a new form; not identical with the old plant, but a new life for the same species.

I don’t know what the equivalent is for you. I don’t know what’s changing in your life. I don’t know what seeds you’re holding in your hand, and wondering—consciously or not—what to do, whether to hold on or let them die. Sometimes there are things that have been at the core of our identities that we need to give up on to keep living our lives. And that can be hard; any change is hard, especially no, when so much has already changed. But God does not change. And God’s promise to be with us and love us doesn’t change. So I pray, in the words of our collect for today, that God may grant us to grace to love what God commands and desire what God promises, “that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Amen.