A few days ago, I was in a workshop on mental health and wellness during the pandemic. At one point we broke into small groups, and I heard in two people’s words a summary of the conundrum of this year. One participant, crammed into a haphazard working-from-home space while two little kids screamed upstairs, quietly said, “I haven’t been alone for an hour in ten months.” Another one, sitting in the beautiful living room of the house where he lived alone: “I’ve never been this lonely in my life.”

It’s the irony of 2020. Without a doubt, COVID-19 is one of the defining shared human experiences of the last two hundred years. You could ask anybody anywhere in the world what their experience of this year has been like, and they will have something extraordinary to say. In recent history, only World War 2 has had such a global effect on ordinary life.

But there’s very little shared about this shared experience. That’s one of the many cruel things about it, in fact. We have, on the one hand, families with all the adults trying to work from home while their kids try to learn from home, waking up early in the morning to send emails while the kids are still asleep and staying up late to finish off the inbox, constantly available to work and to family and never fully present to either one.

And on the other hand, we have—the opposite, in all its many forms. Families suffering from the massive increases in unemployment, doubling or tripling the usual volume of clients at food pantries, month after month. People in jobs too hands-on to work from home, literally risking their lives day after day. Retired people and seniors cut off from their children and grandchildren, from their friends and churches, in a time of tremendous anxiety and fear, with all the usual supports gone. Lonely children whose first written words will include “Mute” and “Start Video,” because they’re learning to read on Zoom.

Most of us who’re still able to have work and human connection are overwhelmed by the demands of both; most of us who have solitude or free time are crushed by its unending expanse. In an ordinary time, of course, we’d shift things around a bit. The lonely, isolated grandparents could help the overwhelmed parents with the kids, and so on. But of course, this year, that’s just the thing we cannot do.

It strikes me that Jesus knew both sides of this. In today’s gospel story, of course, we see him over-worked and under-rested. They bring to Jesus “all who [are] sick or possessed with demons.” (Mark 1:32) He heals “many,” but it could never be enough, because they pile in and flock to him until “the whole city [is] gathered around the door.” (Mark 1:33-34) You’ll notice that they start bringing them to him to be healed “that evening, at sundown” (Mark 1:32); we can only imagine that he heals them late into the night, until he finally begs off to get some rest, leaving many more disappointed at the door. And then he gets up “early in the morning,” long before dawn, “while it was still very dark,” and goes to pray. (Mark 1:35) Jesus is burning the candle at both ends, but at least he knows how to take time for himself to be with God.

But no! Even there his disciples hound him, hunting him down in the desert and, when they finally find him, they bring him news he already knows too well: “Everyone is searching for you!” (Mark 1:37) As if he didn’t already know. As if that wasn’t why he was out here, at cold, dark, dawn.

Soon enough, though, he’ll know the other end of things too well. It won’t be too long before his popularity fades, and the crowds disappear. Soon enough, in fact, he’ll be alone. He’ll have all the space he needs to pray in the dark garden at Gethsemane, and he’ll pray in anguish as his friends fall asleep around him. (Mark 14:34-42) They’ll finally stop demanding his attention, and deny they know him. They’ll stop pressing in on him to feel his healing touch, and leave him alone with God up on the cross, until even God seems to abandon him and he cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34) And the bystanders, like some kind of ancient social-distancing experts, can only comfort him from yards away, with a bit of sour wine on a sponge at the end of a stick. (Mark 15:36) Jesus will know, soon enough, the depths of loneliness and fear. And if you’ve been there recently—he’s been there, too.
For now, though, Jesus is at the other end of things. For now, Jesus is not abandoned, but overrun. So what does Jesus do, now, overwhelmed? “Let us go on,” he says, “to another town.” (Mark 1:38) “No,” he seems to say, “I can’t help. Not now.”

I have a bad habit sometimes, in my sermons, of undermining my own best efforts at volunteer recruitment. And so I tremble to preach on this story today, in which people beg an overworked and overwhelmed Jesus for his volunteer ministry, and he declines.
The secret, though, is that Jesus doesn’t exactly say “no” to this call for help. He doesn’t even say “not right now.” What he says, instead, is something different: “not right here.” He does not say, “let us go to bed,” but “let us go on to the neighboring towns,” to heal and preach and serve somewhere else, not to stop entirely.

Nobody here is a full-time minister of this Church—and that’s not a comment about my compensation. For five hundred years, Episcopal priests have been married, have had families, have had divided attention and energy between their ministries of love in the Church and the home. And in the last fifty years or so, we’ve done a much better job of recognizing that laypeople are ministers of this Church, every bit as much as clergy. The core of the priest’s calling to ministry happens within the institutional life of the Church; the core of most laypeople’s ministry happens in the home, or at work, or in their neighborhood, but it’s every bit as much a ministry as mine.

Over time, the shape of our lives’ ministries shift and change. We step back from church to focus on our families and our work; we retire and our children move out and we can finally give more time to the church! Some of you, I know, have finally booked vaccine appointments and are overflowing with energy to share here and with your families. And whatever these transitions may be, they usually don’t mean we’re stepping back from ministry, because wherever we go to love God and our neighbor—whatever we do to heal the sick or comfort the afflicted, care for the poor or welcome children as Jesus did—we are ministers of Christ in that place. And in fact, the whole point of our ministry here—of everything we’ll discuss at our Annual Meeting in a few minutes—is precisely to transform us and equip us for our ministry there, out there.

So may we all, at the end of this exhausting year, find the renewed strength that the prophet Isaiah promises. May God “give power to the faint, and strengthen the powerless” (Isaiah 40:28); may God guide us in our ministries, in our church and in our homes and in our world, that we may “mount up with wings like eagles,” that we may “run and not be weary,” that we may “walk and not faint.” (Isaiah 40:28, 31)

Sermon — January 31, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

“What do you have to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” (Mark 1:24)

This question has been haunting me all week. “What do you have to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” Isn’t that the question we all have to answer, and the question we all have to ask? Just days after he’s begun his ministry, Jesus travels from Nazareth to Capernaum, just a few miles down the road, and already people are asking: “What do you have to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” This isn’t your city. Stay in your lane. And now, two thousand years after his death, five thousand miles from Galilee, all of us who claim to follow Jesus are forced to ask that same question, and to answer it. What does this man from so long ago and so far away have to do with us? What do you have to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?

And then, more frighteningly: “Have you come to destroy us?”

It may be an odd question, but it’s not a surprising one. It’s one of a few possible answers to this person’s question. Perhaps Jesus has come to do what the unclean spirit says through this man. Perhaps Jesus has come to rid the world of evil, to give people commands with such powerful authority that even the demons must obey.

Or perhaps Jesus has come to do something a little different. Perhaps he is, as Deuteronomy promised, a new prophet, a “prophet like Moses,” one in whose mouth God will put God’s words, someone who will speak to the people everything that God commands. (Deut. 18:15-20) The congregation gathered in the synagogue certainly seem to think so; they recognize him as a teacher with a new and powerful authority, and his fame as a preacher and healer begins to grow.

Or perhaps Jesus has come to help us know God, a tangible human form of an abstract and inscrutable God. It’s ironic, of course, that the faithful are amazed and baffled, and keep asking each other, “What is this?” (Mark 1:27) The unclean spirit’s just told them! “I know who you are!” it cries out. “The Holy One of God!” (Mark 1:25) And of course it’s right. We, the readers of the gospel, know who Jesus is. The demons and (it will turn out) the Roman soldiers know who he is. But his own family, his own people, even his own disciples, haven’t got a clue.

Now, each of these ideas has something to it. Jesus spends plenty of his time casting out demons and ridding the world of evil, and we have to imagine he stands with us against evil in our world. Jesus certainly is a prophet with tremendous authority, through whom God speaks and who establishes a new law of love for us much like the law of Moses. Without a doubt Jesus comes to us to make it easier for us to know God.

But that’s not the whole story. The man with the unclean spirit asks Jesus, “What have you to do with us? Have you come to destroy us?” But no, it’s something worse. Not to destroy us, but to know us.

“Knowledge puffs up,” Paul writes in his first letter to the Corinthians, “but love builds up. Those who think they know something don’t yet know what they ought; but anyone who loves God is known by God.” (1 Corinthians 8:1–3) In other words: If you think you truly know God, all you’ve shown is that you don’t even know yourself. But if you think you love God, it’s certain that God knows you.

So what does Jesus have to do with us? He heals us, yes; he teaches us, yes; we know God through him, yes; but even more so, through him God knows us. “I know you,” says the man with the unclean spirit. “Well, I know you.” Jesus seems to reply.

For me, this is a terrifying thing.

I don’t mean this in a fire-and-brimstone kind of way, in which God is tallying up all your secret misdeeds and preparing to hold you to account. This is the theology most succinctly expressed in the song “Santa Claus is Coming To Town”: “He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake; He knows when you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness’ sake!”

What’s frightening is not so much that God knows my misdeeds, which are many but minor; it’s that God knows me, really knows me, in the deepest and most hidden parts of myself. God knows the things I’ve never said out loud to anyone, even my spouse; God knows the things I say when I know my spouse isn’t listening. God knows me, really knows me, as I am. And who really wants to be known? Who really wants to be seen for who they are?

Not any human being I know. For thousands of years we human beings have been trying to hide from one another who we really are. We carefully curate our social media feeds, sharing only our most fun adventures on Facebook and deleting Instagram posts that don’t get enough likes. Or at least we did, when there was anything worth posting about—now we dig around in Zoom settings to try to look as good as possible. We ask each other as a matter of course the question, “How are you?” and our answers range from “I’m fine” to “pretty good,” as though anything more honest would be a faux pas. The phenomenon of feeling as though everyone else around us knows what they’re doing in a way that we don’t, that everyone else belongs here and I don’t, is so common among so many professions and areas of life, that it has its own name: “Impostor Syndrome.” To put it simply: it’s very hard for us to be vulnerable with own another, and so—from the moment Adam and Eve first sewed leaves together to cover themselves from God from God’s sight—we hide.

But still, God knows us, in our deepest moments of shame. How embarrassing.

And what a relief.

Because if God knows our deepest secrets, the things of which we are most ashamed, then there’s nothing to be ashamed of anymore. Our secrets are no secret. God sees us, and knows us, and loves us, loves us so much as to lay down his own life for us, just as we are. And God’s love builds us up.

“What do you have to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” we ask. “Have you come to destroy us?” In a sense, he has. Not to destroy us, per se, but a part of us; that part of us that hides us from ourselves, and from the ones we love. That part of us that keeps us locked in shame, for fear of being found out. That part of us that keeps us from being genuinely vulnerable with one another, from honestly recognizing where we’ve fallen down and making it right.

Last week, I found a photocopy of a letter from the Rev. Wolcott Cutler, long-time rector of St. John’s, to the priest who arrived here after him. It was in a box of St. John’s memorabilia that Marie Hubbard had had in her apartment, and that her daughter gave to St. John’s after Marie’s death. Attached to the photocopy was a note from Brian Murdoch, another past rector of St. John’s, to Marie, saying he’d found this letter and thought she might appreciate a copy of it.

Rev. Cutler was a complicated man, and his letter shows remarkable humility and self-knowledge. “Dear Mr. Kelley,” it begins, “I hope that you can persuade Archdeacon Burgess of Boston to tell you some of the things that this parish in Charlestown has lacked during my ministry here… It seems to me that some of the work wherein I have been weak requires not so much time as grace for its performance; and that is where a different personality…can provide leadership that will be greatly needed and, we trust, deeply appreciated.” For three pages Rev. Cutler outlines the joys and regrets of his four decades of ministry here, before concluding: “Each of us, being human, has many blind spots, and leaves certain important aspects of his ministry uncultivated. I pray that our parishioners are now at long last, to be treated to a religious emphasis and an evangelical warmth and a personal concern that they have failed to receive from me. And if they do, I believe that our habitually desultory attendance at the Sunday services will receive an impetus and show a growth that my inarticulate parochial calling has never accomplished.”

It’s rare to find someone so willing to be honest about his own limitations—especially among the clergy. But what Rev. Cutler says of his ministry is true of all of us as human beings. “Each of us, being human, has many blind spots, and leaves certain important aspects uncultivated.”

So what does Jesus have to do with us? He teaches us the way of love, yes, like an authoritative prophet. He heals and comforts us and stands with us against the evils of the world; yes. But more than anything, perhaps, he knows us as we are; he sees us as we are; he frees us from the shame of simply being who we are.  For “anyone who loves God is known by him.” (1 Cor. 8:3) Amen.