Sermon — June 2, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

“Let’s go, my beloved, to meet the bride,” one 16^th-century Hebrew hymn begins, “Let’s welcome the face of Shabbat. To greet Shabbat let’s go, let’s be gone, for she is the wellspring of blessing… Shake yourself free, rise from the dust, dress in your garments of splendor, my people.” And to this day, in synagogues all around the world, this song is sung on Friday at dusk, to welcome the arrival of the Sabbath day of rest on Saturday. The hymn captures the joy of a day of rest at the end of a long week of work. Who among us has wanted to sing, on a Friday afternoon, “Shake yourself free, rise from the dust!” It’s a liturgical TGIF, literally.

It reminds me of something my friend Meg used to say, more informally. Meg was doing a master’s degree in Jewish Studies when I was in seminary, and we ended up taking a bunch of classes together, including one with a discussion section that met early Friday afternoon, just a few hours before Shabbat began. I remember Meg leaving class one day as exams loomed over us and we were all studying hard, and saying goodbye—not with the traditional Shabbat Shalom, “Have a peaceful Shabbat,” but with a hopeful and joyous phrase that I will never forget: “Shabbat sh’almost!” Thank God it’s Friday.

But keeping the Sabbath isn’t always pure joy. I think of the story of the Scottish sprinter Eric Liddell, whose story is told in the movie Chariots of Fire. Going into the 1924 Olympics, Liddell was favored to win the 100 meter dash. But he ultimately refused to run because the heats for the 100 were being held on a Sunday, and as a good Scottish Presbyterian, he refused to violate the commandment to keep the Sabbath holy for something so frivolous as a footrace. The story has a happy ending—Liddell ended up winning the 400m race in Paris—but it’s a good example of the burden that observing the Sabbath can be in a world that doesn’t expect it.

You might think that we live in the best of both worlds. In our culture, many of us get two days off from work at the end of the week, not just one. We should have twice the TGIF joy as a 16^th-century Jewish hymn writer. And at the same time, the days of wet-blanket Puritan restrictions are behind us. Shops and restaurants are open on Sundays. No one will scold you if they see you having fun on the Lord’s Day. And yet—I think we desperately need the Sabbath more than ever, these days.

The origins of the Sabbath stretch back to the beginning of time. On six days, God worked to create the universe; on the seventh day, God rested. And you, too, are to rest, God told the ancient Israelites. Not just the privileged who can afford to take the day of, or the especially devout who want to keep it holy; but everyone: you, your son, your daughter, your ox, your donkey; even the people from foreign lands living among you; even the people you have enslaved will rest, God tells them, because you remember that you were enslaved, and made to work without rest. (Deut. 5:14-15) And the descendants of those Israelites whom Pharaoh had enslaved vowed never again to give up the opportunity to rest.

The Jewish people were considered remarkable in the ancient world, in fact, for the custom of the Sabbath day. Ancient writers commented on this peculiar ethnic custom of taking a day off each work, something no other ancient people did. But the Sabbath was vital to Jewish life. Observing it is not just taking a day off from work. It’s taking a day off from work so that you can be with family, and community, and God. On the Sabbath, the people of God enter an alternate reality. They are free from the hierarchies of the everyday, in which their lives are determined by the boss’s instructions, or by the demands of productivity. And they enter a time of community and presence. “The Sabbath,” the great 20^th-century Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share.”

The Christian relationship to the Sabbath has always been complicated by Jesus’ own complicated relationship to the Sabbath, which is often misunderstood. Consider our two stories in Mark today. It may seem at first glance as if Jesus is rejecting the Sabbath entirely, flagrantly violating the Sabbath commandments. But this is only the case if you assume that the Pharisees are right about what is and isn’t allowed. Jesus’ disciples pluck some grain from the fields to eat; the Pharisees ask, “why are they doing what’s not lawful on the Sabbath?” (Mark 2:24) But this is begging the question. It’s not lawful on the Sabbath to work; but the commandment doesn’t explain what this means. Are the disciples working on the Sabbath? None of them are grain-pluckers by trade. The rabbinic tradition would later codify thirty-nine categories of work that are forbidden on the Sabbath, but in the centuries around Jesus’ life it was all still open for debate.

Could you require your employees to work on the Sabbath? Absolutely not, and Jesus doesn’t say you could. Should you go to the syngagogue, to read and pray on the Sabbath? Yes, and Jesus regularly did. Could you save a person’s life, even if it meant violating one of the other laws? Yes, and any Orthodox rabbi today would tell you that you are in fact commanded to break the Sabbath to save a life. Should you heal someone today who could be healed tomorrow? Well, that was where Jesus and the Pharisees are having their debate.

If you assume that Sabbath observance is narrow and defined, it might seem that Jesus is rejecting it. But if you recognize that the debate over the Sabbath was in fact very broad, it seems clearer that Jesus is just participating in that debate. For Jesus, the emphasis seems to be on the joy of the Sabbath, an invitation from God to rest and be restored, rather than a series of limits to be obeyed. To eat and to be healed are part of that Sabbath restoration and rest.

Plucking a bit of grain when you’re hungry and walking through a field, is not like working for Pharaoh seven days a week. It’s not even quite like working in your own field, if that’s what you do every day. To say to someone, “stretch out your hand,” and to heal them as they do, is not work. Not for Jesus. It’s not something that distracts people from the presence of God, that defiles a holy day. It’s something that points them to God, that shows them God’s miraculous presence in their midst.

“The Sabbath was made for humankind,” Jesus says, “not humankind for the sabbath.” (2:27) And so he embraces the Sabbath principle of rest, that builds up humankind, and he tends to lean in the direction of allowing anything that builds us up, rather than discouraging anything that could be work.

“The Sabbath was made for humankind.” The Sabbath was made for you. God has invited you to cease your work; to lay aside, for one day, the things that others are demanding of you, or that you’re demanding of yourself, and to take time to be with your community or family and with God, in a realm “where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share.”

Embracing the Sabbath today is not about going back to some imagined golden age, where everyone spent a day together in rest and prayer. We’ll probably never return to a world in which shops and restaurants are closed on Sundays, so retail and service workers can have a the day off, too. And in fact, we’re moving in the other direction. It’s hard to get that Sabbath rest when your work can buzz at you from your project, any time. And whether you have paid work or not, we all have “work” from which we need to rest, housework and volunteer work and the thousand small chores that we feel like we should do, and it’s hard to assert our freedom from them.

But Sabbath is good. Rest is good. And so, I want to invite you to think: What is your Sabbath time, and how can you observe it and keep it holy? Maybe for you it’s on Sunday morning, here, or on Saturday some time. Maybe it’s Friday family movie night, where you can order takeout and watch the same four movies over and over again. Maybe it’s the Wednesday-morning walking group where you have some time to reconnect with friends. Maybe it really is a day, a full day where you can put down the phone, and turn off the TV, and be present with the people around you. Or maybe for you, the Sabbath is a place, where you can go during the week and simply be, and not do. But in the end, the Sabbath is really an alternate reality, a way of being in which you are free to stop for a while and rest.

Wherever the Sabbath is, whenever the Sabbath is, God made it for you. And God’s inviting you to accept it. It can be very hard to unplug, to put down the list of todos, to stop working and let yourself rest. But if you can find that Sabbath place in your life, if you can “shake yourself free, [and] rise from the dust,” you just might find you look forward to it more than anything else, and when it approaches, you find yourself thinking: Shabbat sh’almost! The Sabbath is almost here.

Sermon — May 26, 2024 — Trinity Sunday

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

There’s an emotion that our ancestors sometimes called “fear,” and which we’re more likely to understand if we call it “awe”: a feeling of reverence and wonder mixed with dread, inspired by finding yourself in the presence of something you can’t even begin to wrap your mind around. It’s something I remember feeling when I was ten years old or so, standing on a transparent footbridge above a waterfall, and suddenly realizing that there was nothing supporting me but some long-retired engineer’s calculations and a prayer. It’s what I felt when we were sent home from the hospital with a newborn baby, just a couple days old, and all the nurses and the helpers were gone, and I just remember thinking: “You’re leaving this thing with us?” It’s what I felt the first time I got the phone call to plan my first funeral, as a new priest; to be the one to bear witness to a family’s grief and to be with them through their process of mourning and remembrance.

When our ancestors talked about “the fear of the Lord,” this is what they meant—not that God is scary or intimidating. Not that we should be afraid of God’s eternal punishment. But that our God is an awesome god, in the full sense of the word—because the vastness and the strangeness of God has the power to fill us with awe.

Awe is what Isaiah felt, more than 2500 years ago, when he was confronted with the prospect of speaking the word of God to the people of God, and that same awe is what many modern preachers feel when we step into the pulpit: “Woe is me! I am lost. For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips”—no offense— “yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (Isaiah 6:5) How could we presume to follow “The Word of the Lord” with any word of our own?

 One of my go-to prayers on a Sunday morning comes from a Lutheran book called the Minister’s Prayer Book, a set of daily devotions for pastors. In good Lutheran fashion, this book has a relatively low view of human perfection and a high view of God’s grace and mercy, and so in a section entitled “Prayers of Preparation for Ministry, On Sunday,” my favorite prayer reads: “Lord God, you have appointed me to be a…pastor in your church. You see how unfit I am to undertake this great and difficult office, and were it not for your help, I would long since have ruined it all. Therefore I cry unto you… Lord, use me as your instrument, only do not forsake me, for if I am left alone I shall easily bring it all to destruction. Amen.” (The book rotates between my desk and the sacristy, throughout the year, but it’s never far away.)

I don’t say this to fish for compliments. (I know you all think I’m great.) And I don’t think it reveals some hidden psychopathology. I say it because it’s true for me. Congregations entrust their pastors with many things—not just an hour of your time on Sunday mornings, which we’d better not waste, but the most precious and fragile moments in your lives, and a pastor who mishandles that trust can be just as devastating, in his own way, as a structural engineer whose hand slips on the slide rule. And so I approach my work with a certain sense of awe. But this isn’t just true for priests. I think it might be true for you, as well. The things we do in our lives are really important. Some of us are nurses or doctors entrusted with people’s health; some of us are teachers, or parents, entrusted with the care of children—all of us are human beings living as neighbors of one another and as stewards of God’s creation, and in these roles we are entrusted with incredible, precious, and fragile things. And from time to time I suspect we all feel that overwhelming awe—that reverence mixed with dread that comes when we suddenly doubt that we’re not quit up to the task.

Life is a series of challenges we are not adequate to face.

And yet.

Isaiah despairs. How can I be a prophet? How can I speak on God’s behalf? I am a man of unclean lips. But God does not despair. God doesn’t put Isaiah on a Performance Improvement Plan, and fire him if his prophecies don’t work out. God doesn’t criticize Isaiah from afar, or judge him for his many imperfections. God doesn’t say, “Stop worrying, you’ll be fine!” God sends a seraph with a coal from the altar and touches his lips. And you might think this is a painful thing, and maybe it was. But it’s not about the pain. It’s not a punishment. A sacrifice in the Temple would be made by burning incense, or grain, or meat at the altar. This live coal is the instrument of that sacrifice, the means of making an offering to God. God sees Isaiah, in all his imperfection. God sees him unable or unwilling to approach the holy place, and God reaches out. God brings the holy place to him, and marks him as holy, and says, You are worthy of offering yourself to God. And so when God asks, “Whom shall I send?” Isaiah has the strength to answer that call, with confidence—and maybe still with dread—“Here am I.”

 In his Letter to the Romans, Paul proclaims the same cycle of God’s grace, the same invitation to become something greater than we think that we can be. None of us is Jesus, Paul readily admits. None of us is perfect; earlier in the letter, Paul reminds us that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23) But even though we are not the perfect Son of God, we are children of God; not by nature, but by adoption.

  And this is an extraordinary thing to say. “You have received a spirit of adoption,” Paul writes, and the Spirit itself bears witness that you “are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.” (Romans 8:16-17) Jesus is the incarnate Son of God, the loving, perfect God-made-flesh who has always been God’s equal and heir. And yet God has chosen us, sometimes loving but rarely perfect, to be the siblings and equals of Christ. God has chosen us, God has chosen you, to inherit the kingdom of God. That awesome God, that One whose voice breaks the cedar trees, whose voice splits the flames in fire, so majestic that even just the hem of his robe fills the whole Temple, so vast that the overwhelming expanse of the Milky Way is just a drop in his Creation, has chosen you, in all your frailty, or inadequacy, or imperfection, to be a child of God, a sibling of Christ. And you are.

On the Sunday after Pentecost every year, we observe Trinity Sunday, a day devoted to the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, to the proposition that the Father is God, and the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and yet they are not three Gods, but one God. And this somewhat technical subject can sometimes drain that sense of awe. But the Trinity is not the doctrine of the Trinity. The Trinity is God. And what’s so interesting about Christianity is not the doctrine of God; what’s interesting about Christianity is God, and what touches us the most is not what we think about God, but what God does in our lives.

So think, for a minute: Where do you feel the way Isaiah feels? Where is that sense of inadequacy for you? Where do you feel unworthy, or imperfect? If God appeared to you, and said, “I need you to—[fill in the blank],” what is it that would make you respond, “Woe is me!” because you were certain that you could not?

The Holy Spirit, is working in you, even now. The Spirit is working in you to bring about new life. The Spirit bears witness with your Spirit that you are a child of God, that you are good and you are loved. In your Isaiah place, whatever it is, in all your feelings of dread, in the sense that you’re not quite up to the task, God reaches out. God sends a seraph with a live coal in its hand, to say that you are worthy to offer yourself to God; that God knows your imperfection and God wants you nevertheless, and when God asks “Whom shall I send?” you are enough to answer, “Here am I; send me!”

Sermon — The Day of Pentecost, May 19, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Imagine yourself in the middle of the scene. You’ve traveled nine hundred miles from your home in Pontus on the Black Sea coast of what’s now northern Turkey, all the way to Jerusalem, to celebrate a great feast. Today, it would be an eighteen-hour drive, but back then, the journey would have taken you 17 days at best. But the journey is worth it. You’ve come to celebrate one of the three great holy days of the year, the feast of Shavuot, seven weeks after Passover. Just as they would on Passover or Rosh Hashanah, faithful Jews and monotheism-curious Gentiles have gathered in Jerusalem to worship God, to offer sacrifices in the Temple and celebrate the arrival of spring.

Your fellow-pilgrims come from all over the known world, from Parthia in the east to Libya in the west, from Pontus down to Egypt, from Judea and from Rome. Those from the further-flung regions wouldn’t make it to Jerusalem every year. This is a special day, and people are excited, but they’re tired. You’re in a crowded room, but the volume is low. Suddenly the rush of wind fills your ears, like a strong gale blowing through the walls; and fire appears all around you, in the shape of tongues, resting on people’s heads. The room erupts into a hubbub of excited speech.

The people around you are amazed and bewildered, and they express their astonishment at these miraculous events: “Wait, aren’t those guys from Galilee? I don’t speak Galilean. How come I understand?” They don’t comment on the fire that’s divided into tongues. Nobody says a word about the wind. The miracle of Pentecost, it seems, is not the extraordinary signs and wonders; or rather, it’s the greatest wonder of all: The idea that you could hear someone else speaking and actually understand.

At the heart of the miracle of Pentecost, at the heart of the work of the Holy Spirit of God, is the paradox of language. Language is the human gift from which all the rest flow, the thing that allows us to cooperate and collaborate, to learn from one another’s discoveries and to express our love; and yet language, in its messiness and imperfection, is the source of so much misunderstanding and pain.

The miracle of Pentecost is a reversal, in a way, of the curse of Babel. Do you know the old story of the Tower of Babel in the Book of Genesis? Linguists love it. In the generations after Noah’s family survived the Flood, the story goes, the whole world spoke one language. We could understand, and be understood, by everyone, and all the people lived together in a city. And in that city they decided to build a tower that would reach the heavens. God didn’t much like this idea. If they could build a tower that could reach the heavens, they might think that they could be like God. So God puts an end to the project. Not by destroying the tower—they would soon begin to build another—but by transforming their shared tongue into many different languages, so that they could no longer understand one another.

And then on Pentecost, God acts again. God gives them the gift of understanding, and of speaking, in other languages. It’s not that God undoes the scattering of Babel, restoring them all to one common tongue. God hears the diversity of their languages, and rather than erasing their differences, God helps overcome the misunderstandings.

The fruit of the Holy Spirit, you might say, isn’t homogeneity, but translation. And since that day, Christianity has always been a religion of translation. As the Yale history professor Lamin Sanneh wrote, who grew up in a Muslim family in Gambia before converting to Christianity, Christianity is almost uniquely a religion in translation. You can’t become a bar or bat mitzvah, a “son” or “daughter of the covenant,” without learning some Hebrew; the Quran isn’t the Quran if you translate it out of Arabic. But Christianity is not the religion of any one language, culture, or nation. The Galilean Aramaic of the apostles has no special status in our faith. From its earliest days, Christianity has been translated, again and again and again, and it belongs to none of our cultures any more than to any other.

This morning, St. Peter explained that the disciples could not be drunk, for it was only nine o’clock in the morning, and however decorous you may have been I think some of you laughed; and this is an extraordinary thing. That the voice of a man who died two thousand years ago and four thousand miles away can reach out to you across the millennia and make you laugh—surely, that is miracle in itself.

But this Pentecost miracle of translation is about more than just the past.

The Holy Spirit is always present in our work of translation in the present.

We experience this miracle anew whenever we can get over the ways that language and culture and history divide us, and connect with one another. Sometimes that happens in small ways within a much bigger picture; I think of the Jerusalem Peacebuilders camps run every summer by an Episcopal priest, that bring together Israeli, Palestinian, and American teenagers to spend time together, getting to know one another, speaking and listening and being heard. Sometimes it happens in big ways within a smaller picture. Language and history can divide us as much in individual relationships, with family or friends or partners, as they do in our collective life, and the miracle of Pentecost is there every bit as much when we really listen to the people we love, and the Holy Spirit helps us really understand what they’re saying. Every one of us speaks our own language, and translation can be hard, but every time we hear one another speaking in a language we can understand, the Holy Spirit’s work is there.

But God is not only with us when we listen. God is with us when we speak! And that’s the other side of the Pentecost miracle. “Each one” of those present “hears [the disciples] speaking in the[ir] native language,” specifically because “the Spirit gave them ability” to speak in those other tongues.

“Spirit” is always present when we speak: the Latin word spiritus, after all, just means “breath,” speech is mind and voice shaping the sound of breath. But sometimes, when we speak, the Holy Spirit is joined to our spirit, and we speak as one. We speak with the Holy Spirit when we speak words of love and kindness to one another. We speak with the Holy Spirit when we speak truth to power in the hope of building a better world. We speak with the Holy Spirit when we share the good news, as those ancient disciples did: when we proclaim the love of God to the world, and the Spirit helps us translate what that means to all those who hear it. The Holy Spirit is there, whether we invoke its name or not, when we share out loud with someone else the joy and the pain of life; when we translate our experience into a language someone else can understand, and we are heard.

But God is also with us when we cannot speak, when we don’t know what to say, as Paul reminds us in his Letter to the Romans. “The Spirit helps us,” he writes, “in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” (Romans 8:26) The Holy Spirit is with us when we speak in love, and that’s a wonderful thing. But sometimes we just don’t have the words. Sometimes, a situation is too hard, and there’s nothing we can say. Sometimes, someone’s looking for advice, and we have no guidance to give. Sometimes we know we need to pray, but we don’t even know what it we’re praying for, and yet, the Spirit prays for us, “with sighs too deep for words.” God knows us more deeply than we know ourselves, and when, despite the Holy Spirit’s help, words fail us, there the Spirit is, praying with us nevertheless.

So I wonder what the Holy Spirit needs to translate for you, this Pentecost. Is there some aspect of your faith or some practice of prayer that you’ve received from someone else but which isn’t quite speaking your language, and which needs to be translated for you? Is there someone in your life who’s trying to tell you something, which you just can’t understand? Is there something you need to say, but can’t quite find the words to express? Or do you simply need the Comforter to come and be with you awhile?

Whatever it is, may the fire of the Holy Spirit give light to your eyes, so that you can see the road ahead; may the wind of the Holy Spirit give you a nudge in the right direction; may the Holy Spirit be your translator, so that you can speak and you can hear; and when there are no words to say, may the Holy Spirit speak for you in “sighs too deep for words.” Amen.