Sermon — March 23, 2025

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Sometimes, when reading the diverse library of ancient texts we bind in one book and call “The Bible,” you’ll read something strange—something that so clearly comes from a different place and time that it can seem impossible to understand without a lot more context. Sometimes, you read something that speaks so clearly to the kinds of questions we ask here and now that it reminds you, suddenly, that in the timeline of human existence, 2000 years isn’t that long at all—that people in the ancient world felt the same things and thought the same things that we do now. And sometimes, these two experiences—this out-of-context strangeness and this sudden familiarity—happen at the very same time.

Take our Gospel today. On the one hand, you can probably tell that Jesus has something to say about a very common question: “Why do bad things happen to good people?” We asked this thousands of years ago; we still do today. But on the other hand, this story seems to have some context that we’re missing. There are other, less common questions that it raises: “What’s up with the Galileans whose blood Pilate ‘mingled with their sacrifices’?” or “What’s the deal with the tower of Siloam?” or… “What’s Siloam?” If Jesus is referring to these stories to make his point, it seems like it might be important to know more. So let’s start with some of the details about the tower of Siloam, and these Galileans, and then see what that context means for what Jesus is saying. Does that sound like a good plan?

            Wrong! It’s a bad plan, I’m sorry to say. (I apologize, I set you up for that.) The sad reality is that there are no more details. There is no more context. In fact, we have no record of these events, other than in the Gospel of Luke. But, to be fair, we can still make some educated guesses to try to understand what he means.

So, some people in the crowd come to tell Jesus about “the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.” This is probably not literally true; you shouldn’t imagine some kind of gruesome ritual event, with Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judaea, literally mixing people’s blood with animal sacrifices. It’s a metaphor for massacre in the Temple, for the killing of some pilgrims who had come from Galilee, just as Jesus is, to worship in Jerusalem. These are presumably upstanding, pious people.  And yet they’re killed, during the very act of religious worship, by their own government. And Jesus asks: Do you think that this human punishment was a sign of divine disfavor? Do you think that simply because the government accuses someone of a crime and punishes them, they are necessarily evil? “No, I tell you!”

There’s a difference, Jesus says, between what’s “legal” and what’s “good,” between what is “illegal” and what is “evil.” Especially under unjust rule, the fact that something is illegal doesn’t mean that it is evil; in fact, the worst governments make it illegal to do many things that are good. Even without the details of the story, we can understand the point: Being punished by Pontius Pilate does not mean that these people are necessarily “worse sinners than all other Galileans.”

But Jesus goes on to make a second point about what we sometimes call “acts of God.” He refers to another story, about the deaths of “eighteen [people] who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them.” (Luke 13:4) Siloam is a neighborhood of Jerusalem; we hear about the “pool of Siloam” a few times in the Gospels. But we have no more details about this tower. It seems to be just the tragic story of a building that collapsed, injuring people walking by in the street. Maybe the builders did something wrong, but Jesus doesn’t point a finger. It’s an accident, a disaster, an awful thing that happened at random. “Do you think they were worse offenders,” Jesus asks, “than all the others living in Jerusalem?” (3:4) Were these people singled out by the hand of a vengeful God, who caused a tower to collapse just as they all happened to be walking by? No! It’s an accident, and it’s a tragedy; it’s not a punishment.

And so far, if all you have is these two stories and the rhetorical questions Jesus asks, this all seems straightforward enough. Jesus gives an answer to a that question that people asked 2000 years ago and still ask today: Why do bad things happen to good people? Is there a reason for everything? Is it all part of a larger plan? Or are some things simply random? And what Jesus has to say is that human beings do evil things to one another, and that’s bad; but it’s not a judgment of the victims. And disasters happen, and that’s tragic; but they’re the result of the laws of physics, and not an “act of God.”

But then, in both cases, Jesus goes on. “No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.” (13:5)

And it’s here that finally historical context becomes the key.

It’s tempting to read this part out of context, actually. It sounds like a universal statement, as if it’s addressed directly to us. And depending on the way you look at things, you might take that one of two ways. Some Christians will read this and think it means that they should repent of their own, specific, individual sins, or they will “perish”—probably a way of describing some kind of eternal punishment. And so they’ll scrutinize themselves and others for signs of sin, lest they be condemned. Other Christians will read this and think it means that they should repent of their own, specific, individual sins, or they will “perish”—and therefore listen politely to the text and then file it away in the same mental drawer with the other bits of the Bible in which Jesus comes across as, well, not very Episcopalian.

But in fact, this is not addressed to the “you” of the reader, the individual modern Christian hearing the text. It’s addressed to the “you” of the story, the group of people who come to him and tell him this story about what Pilate did. And it’s here that the historical context comes into play. Jesus was living in a time that was building toward rebellion, a time of increasing patriotic fervor and nationalistic spirit. Just a few decades after his death, this nationalism would explode into an open revolt, a Jewish War against Rome that very quickly developed into a civil war among Jews well. Many of the people who hear the news that Jesus is the Messiah are ready to start things off. They think that he’s the one who will lead them into war. And he tells them, “No, unless you repent—unless you change your hearts, unless you turn aside from the path you are on—you will perish,” not metaphorically, but literally, in the very same way that the people in those two stories did (that’s what “just as” means). Some will fall to the Roman soldiers’ swords. Some will be trapped in a city reduced to rubble. But unless they turn away from the idea that God will save them through war, one way or another they will be destroyed. By the time Luke writes it down, this has already come to pass. And this is not a divine punishment, per se; it’s a natural consequence of what they want to do, and if you aren’t sure what the difference is, ask one of the parents of the toddlers at Coffee Hour, if you can catch them.

That’s a very specific message for a very specific time, but there is a broader message here, one that really is for each of us. There are times when nations are headed down a self-destructive path. It may well be the case that humankind is on that road; it certainly has been before. And it’s definitely true that in our relationships and friendships, in our church communities and in our individual lives, there are times when we are stuck in toxic patterns, headed down a path that can only lead to the destruction of those relationships and those parts of our lives.

But the good news of Lent is that there is always time to turn away. There is always time to repent from our patterns of self-destruction, and return to the way of love. Jesus wants that desperately for us. Because in a world that’s full of people who want to cut your fig tree down, Jesus is the gardener who begs them to hold off for one more year, so he can put some fertilizer down and see what grows. “God is faithful,” Paul says, and God wants you to find the “way out,” and God invites each one of us, again and again, to turn back.

Friendships and families, churches and nations—these things we build together are fragile, and they’re hard. They are the places where we practice what it is to love one another, and sometimes we don’t do that very well. But that’s why we say the Confession every week. That’s why Lent comes every year. Because we need the constant invitation, again and again, to change our hearts, and turn toward the love of God.

Sermon — March 9, 2025

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

In March of 1522 in the Swiss city of Zurich, a priest named Ulrich Zwingli participated in an event that led to outrage and condemnation. Personally, I think there was a missed opportunity for a great Hollywood film to be made on the 500^th anniversary, because the name alone is made for the silver screen. The events of that Lent, 503 years ago, became known to history as The Affair of the Sausages.

It was just five years after Martin Luther had nailed his 95 Theses to a church door. The Protestant Reformation was in its earliest days. But one thing was clear: more and more Christians, clergy and laypeople alike, were beginning to question the commandments of the church. And this was particularly true for the Church’s teachings on things like fasting during Lent. The Church had developed an intricate system of rules for which foods could be eaten when, and which could not. But this seemed to have little to do with the good news. Jesus and his disciples were accused of not fasting enough, in fact, and the Apostle Paul made compelling arguments that Christians had been freed from these kinds of legalistic practices by God: “by grace [they had] been saved through faith, and not by works of the law.” (Eph. 2:8)

And so one night in 1522, Zwingli was invited to the home of a local printer whose workers had been laboring day and night to publish a new edition of the Epistles of Saint Paul, and they shared a meal during which, despite the Lenten ban on the consumption of meat, they ate a few slices of smoked sausage.

The public was outraged. The printer who hosted the meal was arrested. But Zwingli took a public stand. Fasting or not fasting, he argued, was a matter of individual conscience, not something that the Church could demand. Fasting could not save a Christian’s soul; by grace they had been saved, through faith. The Bishop was furious. But Zwingli’s view convinced his fellow-citizens, and he went on to lead the Reformation in Switzerland, at least until his death.

Now, the Episcopal Church is a Protestant church. But we’ve also always occupied a kind of middle way between the most outspoken Protestants and the Catholic tradition. And so at Coffee Hour this week, you might hear people chat about whether they’re “giving something up” during Lent or “taking something on” or simply going about their lives as usual. So I thought it might be interesting today, as we begin this season of Lent, to try to draw this all together; to ask whether there’s a way to understand the spiritual benefits of adopting a Lenten discipline while still embracing the freedom Zwingli found, five hundred years ago, in the good news that he was saved by the grace of God, and not by his own hard work; the freedom to eat a sausage, even during Lent.

The whole practice of a Lenten fast starts with our Gospel story today, in which Jesus fasts for a season of forty days. No ordinary person can go without food for so long, of course, but the Catholic and Orthodox traditions have always had certain regulations around eating and fasting during these forty days. And many people choose to fast from a particular thing for the duration of the season. So, for example, I’ve heard of people here fasting from chocolate, coffee, alcohol, Amazon.com, and the reading of novels, among other things.

There’s an important subtlety here. There’s a difference between giving up something you think is bad, and something you think is good. You can give up something that’s bad, a habit or a vice, any time, and Lent offers a great structure to start. But to fast is to give up something good, temporarily, and plan to take it up again at Easter. So the medieval practice of giving up meat during Lent wasn’t about ethical vegetarianism; they didn’t give up meat because they thought it was bad, but because it was good, and hard to give up. And the same is true if you fast from chocolate, or coffee today.

So why would you do that? Here’s the thing: The goal is to give something up where the stakes are low; where it doesn’t matter if you cheat, because the thing you’ve given up is fine on its own; but that’s enticing enough that it can teach you something about how you respond to the cycle of temptation, failure, and grace. So I want to say a few words about temptation, and failure, and grace.

Jesus has been fasting for forty days and he’s “famished.” (Luke 4:2) And now, the temptations begin to come. The devil entices him—You’re the Son of God… Why don’t you just turn this hard stone into nice, soft bread? The devil shows him the kingdoms of the world: I’m a pretty well-connected guy; just, worship me, and I’ll give you however much political power you please. (Hm.) And the devil takes him up to the top of the Temple—Aren’t you always going on about being the Beloved Son of God? Jump off! God won’t let anything bad happen  to you.

Jesus easily resists. But temptation is harder for us. It doesn’t appear with a pitchfork and horns. It doesn’t all come at the end of forty days. Temptation appears in different times and in different ways. And one of the purposes of fasting during Lent is to understand how the dynamics of temptation work out for you. When does that little voice appear that says “Oh, surely it’s not that big of a deal…” Is it when you’re hungry? Angry? Lonely? Tired? With a certain group of friends, or a certain family member? When you experience the temptation to break your Lenten fast, you can ask the usual questions—the who/what/where/when/why of its appearance, and then the how, as in, How do you resist it? Jesus quotes repeatedly from the Psalms, and that works for him. What’s going to work for you?

And what is it like when it doesn’t work? Failure isn’t a part of the story of the temptation of Christ, but none of us is Christ. We fail. So what’s that feel like for you? What’s it like to try to abstain from Amazon for six weeks and finding your finger inexorably drawn to the orange button tempting you to “Buy Now.” Do you feel the heat of shame when you fail? Do you immediately start to rationalize it to yourself? If you find that you succeed easily in a forty-day fast—if you never give in, if you never fail—then maybe you should try something harder next time, because failing at Lent is a really important part.

Failure is important because it unlocks the third and most important step: grace. What do you do after things go off the rails? How do you get back on the horse? How do you admit that you’ve failed, and start again—not by rationalizing it or by hiding it in shame, but by accepting that you’ve messed up, and you are loved, and you can go on, nevertheless? Jesus raises the bar of perfection. Jesus makes resisting temptation look easy. But Paul lowers the bar completely to the floor. Salvation doesn’t  depend on your perfect Lenten fast. Salvation doesn’t depend on your good deeds. It’s simple, for Paul: “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9)

This is the kind of good news that led to the Affair of the Sausages. Those Swiss workers, after all, had just finished printing an edition of the Epistles of Paul. And what they had found in those letters, again and again, was the message of God’s grace. They discovered that they didn’t need the Church’s whole system of penance and indulgence, fasting and good works. Paul had set the bar so low that all they needed was to put their trust in what God had already done for them, because “Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” (Romans 10:13)

Even as imperfect, limited human beings, they would be forgiven and loved and saved by God, free of charge. And so are you. And so that’s the third thing about which Lent invites you to reflect: What does it feel like to be forgiven, and accepted, even when you fail?

Life is full of temptations, small and large, but they exist on a sliding scale. If you fast from social media during Lent, and find yourself logging in to scroll—that’s okay! The point is to learn how to face the bigger temptations in your life, the ones that really do matter. The temptation to gossip about the secret of a friend. The temptation to violate the trust of someone we love. The temptation to let ourselves be overwhelmed with apathy in the face of a suffering world. Temptation is a fact of human life. But Lent is a chance to play, a chance to train, a chance to experiment, to learn about how temptation works for us. To learn how failure feels for us. To practice accepting the grace that comes, inevitably, even after our worst mistakes, freeing us from the fear and the shame of being imperfect people, for as “the scripture says, ‘No one who believes in [God] will be put to shame.’” (Romans 10:11)

Sermon — March 2, 2025

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Last week, I went on a short trip to London, and after getting four hours of airplane-seat sleep on the way over, spending the day with my one- and three-year old nieces, going to a conference with a few hundred people, flying back on a plane full of British teenagers on a school trip, then making it through church and confirmation class, on Monday I somehow strangely found that I was coming down with a cold. Who could’ve imagined?

It wasn’t a bad cold, not at all. But it gave me that feeling that a head cold or allergies often do, of a kind of fuzzy barrier between my brain and the world. Do you know what I mean? As if there was a layer of gauze in front of my face, and I just didn’t feel myself. So although I wasn’t particularly tired, and I didn’t have a particularly sore throat, or much of a cough, I just didn’t quite feel like myself.

And then over the course of the week, I finally felt a little better each day, until finally, on Saturday, I woke up feeling like myself again, and it was as if a veil had lifted from before my face.

There’s a question that I have sometimes when I read these two stories about Moses and Jesus, in which they are transfigured and a divine light shines from their faces: Is this a process of addition or subtraction? In other words—In these moments, is God adding to their faces something new, some holy light that wasn’t there before; or is God taking something away, removing some outer layer that had obscured the divine spark within? Is the Transfiguration like putting on a layer of makeup and looking extra good—or is it like recovering from a cold, and suddenly finding that you are yourself again?

The answer may be different, of course, in the two stories. Moses has been up on Mount Sinai with God, receiving the Law, basking in the divine presence. And you can almost imagine him as an iron left in the fire, heating up. He’s been immersed in holiness for 40 days, and when he returns, he glows—like the iron pulled from the fire, he is himself a source of heat and light. And the people are afraid. He has to veil his face; he has to hide that light. He needs something to obscure his holiness so that the people are not burned. But whenever he goes into the Tabernacle to be with God, he lowers the face again, and it’s as if his holiness is continually renewed by returning once again to the presence of God.

For Jesus, it seems to be the other way around. Jesus goes up a mountain, too, but in this case, he’s the source of light. As he’s praying, it seems that an invisible veil has fallen away. His face is changed, and even his clothes become “dazzling white” (Luke 9:29). In this moment on the mountain, Jesus’ true nature is revealed. A voice comes from the cloud that overshadows the disciples, and says, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” (9:35) And they are stunned.

When Moses comes down from the mountain, it seems like addition: the Spirit of God has added something to Moses to infuse him with a holiness that is visible and palpable. When Jesus goes up on the mountain, it seems more like subtraction: the Spirit seems to take away something that otherwise hides the divine reality of who Jesus is.

But we didn’t only hear two stories of change, today. There was a third, this strange story of a boy who’s been possessed by an “unclean spirit.” Now, we could speculate about the medical details of his condition, but that would miss the point. There is some spirit, Luke tells us, some outside force, that’s in control. It oppresses him, it makes him act unlike himself. And Jesus frees the boy from the thing that is controlling him. He heals him, he restores him to wholeness, and the boy’s true self, no longer weighed down by the power of this spirit, is revealed. It is the miraculous version of recovering from a cold: The greatest miracle Jesus does is to allow this boy to be himself, as he really is. The boy is revealed just as Jesus was: he is himself, exactly as he is.

This is the beauty and the promise of the Transfiguration for us. We are not Jesus. But sometimes in our spiritual lives, we are like Moses, and what we need is to spend some time in the presence of God, and be filled with God’s holy warmth and light, so we can bring those back down to the world. And sometimes, we’re like the boy; sometimes we need to be freed from the things that are weighing us down, so that we can be revealed as ourselves, as we truly are.

It’s occasionally been observed that churches are full of quirky people. And it’s true. I’m sure I’ve said it before, but if you’re sitting in a church on a Sunday morning in Boston in 2025, you must be at least a bit unusual. (In a good way!) In a statistical sense, just by virtue of being among the small fraction of the population who regularly go to church, you’ve proven that you’re kind of strange, but that actually misses the point. Here’s my thesis: Every human being is kind of strange; faithful Christians are just more willing to admit it. In a healthy church community you should expect more quirkiness than in the world outside, because the nature of the Gospel is that it frees us to be ourselves.

We come here into the presence of God, and we hear that God is love. We hear that God loves us, as we are in our inmost selves, and not as we pretend to be. And at our best, we can lower the veil for a moment that hides our faces, and see one another as we really are. For a moment, together, we can see the glory of God “as though reflected in a mirror,” and we can be transformed, growing from glory into glory. (2 Cor. 3:18) We can absorb a little bit of the radiance of God, and more importantly, we can be freed from the unclean spirits of judgment and criticism that afflict us in the world. We can be ourselves, and we can be a little weird, thank God. Because God wants us to recover from our life-long spiritual cold. God wants to set us free from the things that keep us from being our true selves. God wants us to lower the veil, and to let our faces shine with the radiance of God’s own love and light.

And this may sound like a frivolous thing, like a whole sermon built around the slogan “Keep Austin Weird.” But I think it’s the most serious thing in the world. I genuinely believe that the message of God’s unconditional love is good news, and I genuinely think that is has the power to change the world: not by giving us a new burden, a new commandment to love one another as God has loved us; but by releasing us from the burdens the world puts on us to be anything other than the people we truly are.

There is a weight of expectation that seizes many of us and dashes us to the ground. There is a veil we use to hide ourselves in shame, praying that nobody really find us out. There is an epidemic of anxiety driven by the brutal judgment of social media and dating apps. There is a real crisis of masculinity driven by our failure to say that to be kind and compassionate and vulnerable is, in fact, to be a man, and a better man than the one who’s brash and arrogant and rude. There are a thousand small ways in which we veil our faces so that the world cannot see us as we are, and every one of them is a lost opportunity for light to shine in the world. And while I don’t want to go through a whole list, I really do think that there are dozens of social and political effects of our basic inability to believe that God loves us, and that God’s grading us with a rubric that’s nothing like what we would call success.

So Lent begins this week. And Lent is a good time to make an honest reckoning of who we are. Lent is a good time to let go of some of the ways in which we hide our true selves in shame, and to let the veil disappear. Lent is a good time to act with great boldness, as Paul says; to be who we really are, as God has made us and as God loves us. To turn toward the Spirit of the Lord, knowing that “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom,” (2 Cor. 3:16) and to let ourselves be freed from the burdens that hold our spirits down, so that we stand before God and be transformed from one degree of glory to another.