Sermon — July 2, 2023
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

I’ve just finished watching—you might say “binge-watching”—the Netflix cooking competition show The Final Table, in which twenty-four chefs from around the world faced off in a series of culinary competitions. Murray said to me last week while I was cooking and watching, “Daddy, what are you doing? Oh, just watching another show about cooking things you’ll never actually cook?” And it’s true, in the same way that the first thing I do every week when The New Yorker comes is crack open Tables for Two, and read a review of a restaurant I’ll never go to with food nobody else in my family would ever eat. I just love this stuff.

But there’s something I’ve noticed in these cooking competition shows, as well. They’re not just a live broadcast of some chefs in a kitchen with a bit of color commentary. Like any good TV, they try to tell human stories. And so they do background interviews with each of the chefs about their childhoods, or their cooking careers, or their vision for the restaurant they’ve founded. And I’ve noticed, as I watch an episode of one of these shows every evening while I cook dinner, that nearly every chef has a mentor whose legacy they’re trying to live up to. For one, it’s the father and the grandfather who were both chefs and who founded and ran the family restaurant through good times and bad before handing it down to him. For another, it’s his single mom in a blue-collar town who transmogrified the cheapest ingredients, night after night, into a homey dish that showed her love. For another, it’s the renowned chef who took a young kid under his wing, showing her the ropes and supporting her when nobody else would.

Each one of these chefs, in other words, has been given the gift of love by someone who made them into the person they are today. And each one, at some point, no matter how many Michelin stars they have to their name, reveals that they are still trying to live up to the gift of that love.

I say all this by way of introduction to a Gospel passage that is short, sweet, and simple. If all you had were Jesus’ words to his disciples today, you might think that Christianity is the easiest religion in the world. And in a sense, you’d be right!

The early Church was full of traveling apostles, of prophets and preachers who’d travel from place to place just like Canon O’Connell visited us last week. Jesus and the early Christians taught that there were spiritual rewards for welcoming these wanderers with kindness. Welcome a prophet in the name of a prophet; receive a prophet’s reward. Welcome a righteous person in the name of a righteous person; receive a righteous person’s reward. (Matthew 10:40-41) Jesus lived in a culture in which hospitality was a household obligation, not the name of an industry. A traveling bishop or prophet would stay in your home, not a hotel. It’s expensive to feed another person, and hard work to host them; and Jesus offers a reward to those who receive and welcome his most prominent disciples as they go about their work spreading the good news.

But then Jesus goes on: “whoever gives even a cup of cold water, even to one of these little ones, in the name of a disciple—truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.” (Matthew 10:42) There’s some debate among Biblical scholars about what exactly “little ones” means. (There’s some debate among Biblical scholars about what nearly everything means.) Maybe it’s literally children who are “these little ones.” Maybe it’s the socially-disadvantaged, or just “ordinary folks.” But whatever the case, scholars agree that it’s a “deliberate contrast” to the “prophets” and the “righteous,” the famous, great, and good. ^[1] It’s not hosting an elaborate stay for an archbishop that matters; even welcoming the “little ones” counts. And as Saint Jerome noted, it’s not a bowl of soup or a cup of coffee here; it doesn’t cost you anything in fuel to warm it up, or ingredients to mix together. It’s just a plain old cup of water, something anyone can give.[2] And yet this simple, unpretentious act is enough. Whoever does even only this in the name of a disciple will never lose their reward.

So congratulations to all those on the St. John’s Coffee Hour rota. Even if you have no idea how to turn on that baffling coffee machine, even if you just put out the lemonade and iced tea, even if you only served a pitcher of water: you have been saved! You have offered a cup of cold water to dozens of these “little ones” in the name of the disciple Saint John, and you will not lose your reward.

If what you’re interested in is eternal salvation, Christianity is the easiest religion in the world. In today’s gospel, Jesus gives us one thing to do, and it’s such a small and concrete task—once in your life, give a cup of cold water to one of the “little ones”—and you will not lose your reward. And the tininess of this task way of expressing, in Jesus’ form of teaching, the same truth that Paul expresses in our epistle in his own way. Christianity, properly understood, is not a list of rules to follow, or difficult work to be done. It’s the story of what Paul calls “the free gift of God,” which is “eternal life.” (Romans 6:23).

God’s love is free. And it’s a gift. We do not have to do anything at all to earn it, in order to receive it.

But we are left wondering how to live up to it.

This is the tension within which Paul lives in his whole Letter to the Romans. And this is why Jesus does give so many moral teachings. “What then?” Paul asks, “Should we sin, because we are not under law but under grace?” (Romans 6:15) Should we take this incredible free gift of God, which offers us an eternal reward in exchange for a cup of cold water, and throw it in God’s face? Should we take God’s unconditional love and use it as an excuse to treat one another like garbage, because God will love us all the same? Should we take the freedom we’ve been given and freely choose to follow the way of sin, and violence, and death? “By no means!” the apostle pleads. God loves you unconditionally. That doesn’t mean you should act like a total jerk. Throughout his letters, Paul is constantly trying to juggle these two competing aims: how to convince the early churches, on the one hand, of the amazing beauty of God’s grace and mercy, God’s unconditional, self-sacrificing love; and how to stop them, on the other hand, from acting in ways that are completely off the rails. And we modern Christians find ourselves in the same situation as they were, thousands of years ago.

You have been given the gift of life, and love, and hope. You have been a given a legacy and a model for the person you could be; if not by some mentor in your own life, than by the one big Mentor in whose name we gather here. You have been given a gift, and it cannot be taken away, no matter what you do. But you’ve also been given a choice. What will you do with that gift? What will you do with that legacy? Will you, who have been trained and loved by generations of chefs, turn around and treat your sous chefs like they belong in the compost? Will you, who have been handed the love of home cooking, sell mom’s apple pie recipe to McDonald’s and cash out? Will you, who have been loved beyond measure and forgiven beyond reason by God, hold resentments and grudges and judgments against the people in your life? It’s up to you. You have the freedom. You have the choice. You have been given the gift. You will receive your reward. You do not have to do anything to earn God’s love, anything at all.

But it’s the work of a lifetime to try to live up to it.

^[1]Ulrich Luz, Matthew 8–20: A Commentary on Matthew 8–20, ed. Helmut Koester, trans. James E. Crouch, vol. 61B of Hermeneia: A Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 121.

[2] Jerome, Commentary on Matthew 1.10.42.

Sermon — June 18, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

All across New England, it’s officially strawberry season. Towns across Connecticut are holding Strawberry Festivals. Last weekend, when we were down in Long Island, we had our first farm-stand strawberries of the year, a rare chance to bite into a ripe berry that was actually red all the way through, without the tasteless white core of a strawberry picked underripe for shipping from California. And If you’re lucky, this time of year, you might even get the chance to go strawberry picking, and to encounter one of the great paradoxes of food pricing: the less work the person selling strawberries has to do, the more you pay, so that if they pick them in California and ship them here, it’s maybe $6 a quart; if they picked them at a local farm, it might be $9; if you pick them, well that’s like $12, at least. But of course it’s worth the extra couple of bucks, especially if there are kids involved, to have the amazing experience of standing in a field of endless fruit, picking ripe berries warm from the sun and maybe popping one or two in your mouth. (I won’t tell if you do.)

And this is what the incredible bounty of spiritual life can sometimes feel like. We’re surrounded by the beauty of the world and the mystery of God. We can walk into any church on any Sunday morning and hear beautiful music, and reflect on God’s love, and pray. Any time, any day, we can take a moment to sit and be grateful for something, or maybe even to read something from the Bible or a devotional. There’s so much out there waiting for us, and all we have to do is reach out and grab a taste. After all, Jesus says, “The harvest is plentiful.”

… “But the laborers are few.”

At the same time that I’m reminded of the incredible bounty of the U-Pick experience, I’m also reminded of the news this week from the Episcopal Church’s Executive Council meeting down in Providence, which noted, among other things, some alarming trends in the availability of clergy. In every region of the church, it seems, there are about four or five times as many open positions as there are priests looking for a new call. And it’s about to get much worse: roughly one-half of our clergy are within ten years of retirement. (Not me, for better or for worse.)

“The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.” And if this is true of clergy, it’s even more true for laypeople. In parishes like ours across the country, a dedicated core of faithful lay leaders and volunteers are in very real danger of burning out as they rotate through every imaginable position in the church to try to keep things afloat. And it’s a vicious cycle: the fewer members there are, the less likely it is they can afford a full-time priest; but the more part-time of a priest there is, they more of the work falls on those fewer members.

And yet the harvest remains plentiful. I’ll admit that people are not strawberries. But I can’t help but think that being a part of a church in a community like this is something like standing in a field full of berries, with only two hands to pick them. There are twenty thousand people in this neighborhood, give or take a few, and only—what, 100 active members of this church, if you’re being generous? And I’d like to think that maybe another couple hundred of those 20,000 might appreciate, might even benefit from, the good news of God’s unconditional love for them, in the same way that you and I benefit from hearing that good news, from being reminded of God’s beauty and forgiveness and grace week after week. There are so many ways we can serve this community; the harvest is so plentiful. But the laborers are few.

What’s true for the church is true for individuals, as well. When you’re in a busy season of life, even if you’re one of the relatively small number of people who want to engage in a deeper spiritual practice, it can feel impossible. The strawberries are there, ready for you, but there’s just too much going on in life to be able to go and pick them. And so prayer or quiet time for reflection become just yet another task on an overwhelming list, and the one that’s easiest to sacrifice in pursuit of the rest.

But it seems that this has always been the case. The harvest has always been plentiful. The laborers have always been few. At least this was true for Jesus’ little crew, a dozen apostles in the midst of a whole culture. They had an incredible opportunity to share the good news of the kingdom of God, but there only twelve of them, and they had so little time. So what are we to do?

Jesus answers this question for the disciples in what I think is an interesting and surprising way. He sends out his twelve apostles, and gives them simple instructions: Go, proclaim the good news. Take take no gold, or silver, or bag. (Matthew 10:7-10) And then he says, wherever you go, “As you enter the house, greet it. If the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it; but if not, let your peace return to you. If anyone will not welcome you, or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet” and go. (Matthew 10:12-14)

Now, not many of us are likely to become itinerant wandering evangelists, laboring to gather in the harvest door-to-door, as the apostles do. But all of us are laboring in some vineyard, all of us are oot in some strawberry field, trying to harvest something, hoping that we’ve planted bears fruit. That might be in your work life, or your family. It might be in a ministry or a group you’re part of at church. Or it might be in your own prayer life, or just the attempt to get out of your own way. And what Jesus says the apostles should do if it’s not working is really interesting to me. If their efforts aren’t bearing fruit, he doesn’t tell them to “take up your cross” and endure it, he doesn’t tell them to “offer it up” to God. He says, “shake the dust off your feet” and move on.

It seems important to me to say that this is not advice to give up when the going gets hard. “If anyone won’t listen to you, shake the dust off your feet” isn’t good relationship advice, whether that relationship is romantic, or with a friend, or family. But Jesus gives us the permission to do some spiritual discernment, and to ask ourselves: Is this thing that I’m doing right now hard but fruitful, or is it ultimately just fruitless?

Picking strawberries, after all, is hard work. It’s fun for a day trip with the kids, but as a job it’s really tough. But it bears good fruit, and that’s what matters.

There are so many ways to pray. There are so many ways to be involved in a church’s life or in a neighborhood community. There are a lot of jobs, even multiple professions, if you really need a change. Not all of them are easy. But when something is draining you of life, not giving you life, it’s important to remember that there are a lot of strawberries in the field, and maybe this row you’re standing in right now has just been plucked clean and there’s nothing more that’s going to come from it, no matter what you do.

There are many things in life that are worth doing, even though they’re hard. There are many houses that are worthy of your blessing of peace, many fields that are hard to harvest but that bear good fruit. And there are other things that are simply not worth your time, and where the appropriate answer, in Jesus’ words, is to “shake the dust off your feet” and head down to the next town. We are finite human beings living in a world of nearly-infinite possibility, and there is no time to waste on fruitless things; for “the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.”

Sermon — Trinity Sunday, June 4, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Now, you might think that scheduling a baptism on Trinity Sunday is just a clever way of getting out of preaching a sermon on the Holy Trinity. You might even appreciate the effort. After all, Trinity Sunday, this Sunday after Pentecost every year, has something of a reputation for rough sermons. Preachers tend to either go very theological, regurgitating large chunks of seminary classes into fifteen-minute discourses featuring words like “perichoresis” and “hypostatic union”; or they tend to veer a bit in the other direction. I once heard a sermon on Trinity Sunday, the day that happened to mark the end of the church “program year,” which started by calling the Trinity a fourth-century political compromise, then proceeded to just list all the wonderful things that the church had done that year, before concluding, “And that’s

So, A baptism might seem like a fitting escape from this dilemma. There’s no better antidote to a dry exposition of fifth-century theological philosophical and theological debates, after all, than a really cute baby. But I’m sorry to tell you that the Trinity and baptism go hand in hand.

Our readings this morning, you may be surprised to hear, were not chosen because we had a baptism. They’re simply the readings for Trinity Sunday. These aren’t baptism readings and yet we begin, just as the Thanksgiving over the Water later in this service will begin, with the image of the Spirit of God hovering over the waters of the deep, as God prepares to bless the new life that is coming forth. (Gen. 1:2) These aren’t baptism readings and yet we end with Jesus’ final words to his disciples, taken from the Gospel according to Matthew, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” (Matthew 28:16)

The Trinity, an abstract, technical, dry topic, seems quite different from Baptism, a hands-on, messy, and rather wet practice, and the two can’t be separated from each other. And the reason for this, it turns out, is that the Trinity is not actually an abstract theological claim. And the Trinity is not really a fourth-century political compromise. The Trinity is a person—or, three persons, anyway, I guess that’s the point. The Trinity isn’t an idea about God, the Trinity is God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; and this tells us everything about the meaning of Baptism.

To say that God is Trinity is to say that God has always existed and will always exist as a relationship, a community of love within God’s own self. And to say that we are baptized “in the name of the Trinity” is to say that we are invited into that relationship; that each one of us is drawn into that community of love. One of my favorite little New Testament facts is that the preposition Matthew uses here means “in” in the sense of “into,” not in the sense of “by.” In other words, we baptize people “into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” not “by the power invested in the name.” All of us who have been baptized have been baptized into a new identity, a new name, a new family. Baptism adopts us into the family of God, and incorporates us into a community of love.

In one sense, baptism incorporates us into the community of the Church. When a child is baptized she is no longer the sole responsibility of her parents or grandparents; they are no longer her only family. She becomes our sister in Christ, a member of all our family, under God. And we take that as seriously as we can. In a few minutes, everyone in this room will make a promise, on behalf of the whole Church throughout the world, to do everything in our power to support her. And, God willing, when she need us, we will. Wherever she goes, whoever she becomes, she will always have a home in the family of God.

But baptism does more than just invite us into the Church. Baptism makes us part of the Body of Christ, baptism brings us, in a sense, into the very heart of the life of God. By the power of God the Holy Spirit, every person who is baptized is made a spiritual member of the living Body of God the Son, and God the Father looks on her with the same love that has existed within God’s own being from before time, the same love that led God’s voice to boom out from heaven at Jesus’ own baptism and say, “This is my beloved child, in whom I am well pleased.” God looks at each one of you and sees a beloved child, in whom God delights and is well pleased. And wherever you go, and whoever you become, God’s love and compassion and care will follow you. And God sees you as you see a sweet and beloved little child: indescribably beautiful, unbelievably frustrating, incomprehensibly messy, and loved beyond anything that could ever be imagined.

So, to all who are baptized, welcome into the family of God. May God the Father bless you with the knowledge and love of God, and of God’s love for you. May God the Son inspire you to walk in the way of love for your neighbor. Maybe God the Holy Spirit guide you and comfort you as you grow in stature and in faith. And may you remember that God is “with you always, even to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20)

Amen.

Sermon — Pentecost, May 28, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

The last year or so has seen a huge explosion in the field of “large-language models,” artificial-intelligence technologies that can be trained to process text and produce things we never thought they could: art and music and entire conversations, all in response to a paragraph of text. These tools are a little frightening, raising questions about “deep fakes” and plagiarized papers, about the future for copywriters and graphic designers and software engineers in a world where AI is starting to do parts of their jobs. But last week MetaAI—the artificial-intelligence research branch of the company formerly known as Facebook, now called Meta—released something new, which I’m shocked to say may actually be good for the world.

It’s a service that uses AI to transcribe speech to text, and text to speech, in over 1,100 different languages from all around the world, ten times more than any other speech-recognition approach. These sorts of tools make life better for real people in some very specific ways. Text-to-speech software, for example, lets people who are blind read emails or search the web without the need to see. Speech-to-text software provides automatic closed-captioning, so that Deaf people, for example, can watch cooking recipe videos or church services and be able to read the text. (In fact, if you watch the video of this service on Facebook, you’ll see that it provides closed captioning for the whole service, free of charge!)

And multilingual translation software unlocks even more power. In the very near future a single app on your phone could handle a whole conversation between two people with no language in common at all. Imagine how much easier it would be to be a refugee, or an immigrant, or a tourist, if you could speak into your phone, and have it transcribed, translated, and spoken out loud again, back and forth, all by artificial intelligence.

There’s just one problem. Large-language models depend on having access to, well… a large amount of language. Artificial intelligence isn’t actually intelligent. It’s just really good at recognizing patterns. So what the model needs to learn a language, is to digest and analyze a huge amount of language; and what the model needs to be able to translate between languages is to have access to texts that mean the same thing, in a lot of different languages.

And last week, Meta’s engineers unveiled a great discovery. They discovered a single text that has been translated into more languages than any other and is widely available in a digital form online. Even better, audio files of this text and closely-related bodies of literature are also available online. Their discovery was so big that they just had to put out a press release. “Collecting audio data for thousands of languages was our first challenge,” they wrote in their announcement this week, “To overcome it…”—and maybe you’ve already guessed where this is going—“to overcome it, we turned to…the Bible.”

There is no institution in the entire world, after all, that believes more deeply in “translation” than the Christian Church. Meta’s machine-learning engineers were able to gather a language-learning dataset based on text and audio recordings of the New Testament in over 1,100 languages, with an average of 32 hours of audio data per language.

We heard our readings this morning in our familiar English. But thousands of translators have worked for thousands of years translating these same readings into thousands of languages, spoken all around the world. Not just the big ones like English and Spanish, Arabic and Mandarin. And not just the languages that seem obscure to you or me—Gujarati or Burmese or Lingala—but are in fact spoken by tens of millions of people. The dataset from Meta includes languages like Muria, spoken by 15,000 people in south-central India, and Kilivila, spoken by 20,000 in Papua New Guinea, and Itelmen, which is down to 82 native speakers at the southern tip of the Kamchatka peninsula in the far east of Siberia. The New Testament has been translated into all of these languages from Greek, and this is no accident.

The story of Pentecost, after all, is a story of translation. The rushing wind is amazing. The tongues of fire are impressive. But the miracle of Pentecost is, above all else, the miracle of translation. It’s a common tradition in some churches to have this story read aloud in many languages at once, perhaps beginning in English and then having readers join in speaking Spanish and French, Creole and Dutch, German and Arabic and whatever other languages their members speak.

But Pentecost itself, as you may notice, happens the other way around. “Devout Jews from every nation under heaven” (Acts 2:5) are gathered in Jerusalem for the great Feast of Shavuot, seven weeks after Passover. And the apostles begin to speak. They’re used speaking the Galilean dialect of Aramaic; perhaps a bit of Hebrew, perhaps a bit of Greek. But when they open their mouths on this day, “the Spirit gave them ability” “to speak in other languages.” (Acts 2:4) The people gathered from across the world hear them speak and are amazed, “because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each.” (Acts 2:6) The disciples are recognized as Galileans by their dialect; yet the Parthians hear them in Parthian, the Cappadocians in Greek, the Phrygians in Phrygian, the Egyptians in Egyptian, the Arabs in Arabic, the Romans in Latin. (Acts 2:9-11) Each one hears the disciples speaking in a foreign language and thinks it’s drunken babbling. Then they hear themselves addressed in words they understand, and they’re amazed, saying, “What does this mean?” (Acts 2:12)

What it means is this: the Christian message is, and has always been, and will always be, a message in translation.

This is true, of course, on the literal and historical level, and it’s important to remember. Christianity is not native to our culture. It’s not an American religion, or an English one. The Christian tradition doesn’t belong to us, any more than it belongs to anyone else. With the exception of that small band of Galilean-Aramaic speaking Jews, Christianity comes to every culture as a translation, as a gift or an imposition brought by someone else. It’s important sometimes to remember that our own traditions and understandings are not the whole truth of our faith. And it’s important sometimes to remember that our religion is one of constant change and reinterpretation: that the traditions handed down by the generations before us might sound different from the ones being created by the next, and that’s okay. They’re speaking different languages, is all.

But it’s true on the individual level as well. The Christian message doesn’t only need to be translated from Greek into English, from ancient Mediterranean cultures into a modern American one. The Christian message needs to be translated for each and every one of us, so that what seems at first to be nothing more than random babbling becomes, by the power of the Holy Spirit, a “river of living water,” (John 7:38) an encounter with the living God who is pouring that same Spirit out on us.

We come to this place seeking some way to experience God. And we’re confronted with language. Paragraph after paragraph of language. Some of it comes from the Bible, written thousands of years ago in Hebrew and Greek. Some of it comes from pieces of our liturgy written in Latin a thousand years ago, or in English five hundred years or fifty or twenty years ago. Some of it is set to music, having been composed in verse. Some of it comes out of my mouth, and some of it you hear from one another. But none of it flows directly from God’s mouth to your ears. Most of it isn’t addressed directly to you. All of it needs to be translated from its original language and context and meaning into the circumstances of our lives, because every word that’s ever been spoken loses something as it passes between two minds. (Unless, of course, you’re talking to yourself, which I do, almost constantly.)

And the fact that it makes any sense at all, the fact that some verse or prayer or lyric in this service might touch you somehow, that it might move you, comfort you, maybe even change you, is the miracle of Pentecost happening again. If there is anything in this hour of your Sunday morning that makes sense to you at all, it is only by the power of the Holy Spirit, allowing you to hear the babble of a thousand voices speaking to you in the words you understand and need to hear. “Would that all the Lord’s people are prophets!” Moses said, “and that the Lord would put his Spirit on them all!” (Numbers 11:29) And he does. God gives the Holy Spirit to us all, God pours out the Spirit on all flesh, (Acts 2:17) God does the work to translate the good news to each and every one of us, so that across the millennia we too, can understand God’s power—not just in the stories of the past, but in all the wonders of the present—and be amazed. (2:12)

Sermon — May 21, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Of all the Sundays in the entire church calendar, today seems to me be the one in which the apostles’ lives actually seem something like our own. For the last six weeks, we’ve been in the season of Easter, celebrating Jesus’ resurrection appearances. Next Sunday, we’ll hear the story of Pentecost, and the miraculous and overwhelming manifestation of the Holy Spirit. Most of the rest of the year, we follow Jesus around in his Galilean perambulations, as he heals people and casts out demons and teaches his disciples face to face. And then for a few weeks in December, we’ll eagerly await the Messiah’s birth.

But none of these are the way we spend our lives today. Jesus does not appear to us in his resurrected body and say, “Peace be with you.” (I want you to call me if he does!) We don’t sit at Jesus’ feet and engage in a Q&A about his parables, or see people cured of an illness just by touching the fringe of his garments. And while the Holy Spirit is active among us, it rarely shows up with tongues of fire and the miraculous ability to understand other languages.

Most of the year the “plot” of our church year follows Jesus himself, during a short period, the year or three in his life when he was really, tangibly present with his disciples. But today, this Sunday after the Ascension, finds the disciples in a very different place. And it’s one that’s much more like our world. The amazing story of Jesus’ time on earth, of his ministry and death, his resurrection and reappearances, is over. The miraculous manifestation of the Holy Spirit is yet to come. The one whom the apostles thought would transform the world and establish a new way of life for them and all their people has gone, and the apostles are left wondering, “What now?”

“What now?” is the great question of Ascensiontide, this strange little mini-season of the church year between the Ascension and Pentecost. But “what now?” is also the great question of our lives. Something happens. Somehow, we encounter God. And we’re left asking: What next?

If you’re sitting in this church, after all, it’s not by accident. The overwhelming majority of people in this neighborhood, this morning, are not sitting in church at all. Something happened, for you, at some point, which brought you here. Maybe it was a spiritual experience or a life crisis, a moment of great beauty and inspiration or a parent or spouse telling you that you didn’t have a choice. But one way or another, you’ve found your way here, and the question that you face, whether it’s conscious or not, is, the same as those disciples. Here we are. What next?

Well, if you’re anything like me, your instinct is to plan; to worry, fret, imagine, dream about the things that could come next. Every two or three years of my adulthood, I’ve come up with a five or ten-year plan. And the fact that every single one of them has been almost completely wrong hasn’t been enough to stop me yet. Like the apostles, I crave certainty. They ask Jesus, “Okay, Lord, you’ve risen from the dead; now are you going to take charge and set up that kingdom of God you’ve been talking about so much?” (Acts 1:6) I ask Jesus, “Okay, Lord, we’ve made it through the pandemic, more or less; now is it time for a big new vision for the church? Okay, Lord, the child’s six months old. (Two years old, three, four, five, fifteen years old.) Now is this going to start getting easier? Okay, Lord, you’ve made your point; I’ve realized that this grudge is only hurting me, and it’s time for me to let go and forgive my father, mother, sister, friend, spouse. Now could you just get them to apologize, first?” And to this, and to every single one of our attempts to predict the future, to force God’s hand, to speed things up or slow them down, Jesus replies that “it is not for you to know the times or periods” that God has set (Acts 1:7).

(Of course, it’s good to have some kind of vision or strategic plan. I worry that the Church doesn’t do this enough, that we just veer from crisis to crisis. And then I remember that the five-year Mission Strategy we adopted in 2016 had nothing to say about pandemic preparedness, and the one we adopted in 2021 will probably miss the crises of 2025. Maybe it was Dwight Eisenhower who put it best, when he said, “Peace-time plans are of no particular value, but peace-time planning is indispensable.”)

Well then, maybe plans won’t work; so what’s the plan?

“I know!” the apostles say. If focusing on the future won’t work, then let’s turn our eyes to the past! We know where Jesus went, and we know he’s coming back. So let’s get out our telescopes and fix them on the heavens, and wait and watch for Jesus to return in that very same patch of clouds. And this is something that we, the Church, love to do. We tell and re-tell stories of the past. We cherish the art and the buildings and the memories we’ve been left. We hold onto our traditions and value them, simply because they’re traditions. And we don’t just do this as churches. We do it as individuals, too. You see it all the time when we, as parents or teachers or coaches or friends, try to recreate the best moments of our lives for someone else. Our lives are full of golden memories, beautiful experiences of life or worship or prayer, and we try to reenact them so someone else can experience that same transcendent feeling that we did. And it almost never works.

I don’t even mean this as a criticism. Sure, it can go too far. We don’t want the church to become a museum, a place where nothing can change or grow or be touched. We want it to be a home, and a community, and it is. But there’s nothing wrong with remembering traditions. If those apostles had just thrown out their memories of Jesus altogether, where would we be? We certainly wouldn’t be reading the Gospels. But as the pastor and author Sam Rainer says, it becomes a problem when nostalgia trumps devotion, when “memories of the past bring more emotion than the mission of the present.”[1] And it’s not a problem because there’s something wrong with what worked in the past. It’s a problem for the very reason the angels suggest when they appear and ask the apostles, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” That’s where Jesus went, and Jesus really was there. But it’s not where he’s going next.

So if we want to follow Jesus in these in-between days, the question remains: What next? We can’t make a fool-proof ten-year plan. We don’t want to become stuck in the past. What’s left?

Well, what’s left is the present. And that’s what the apostles do: they live in the present. Not in the peculiarly-modern YOLO sense—they don’t fly to Bali and drink smoothies and do yoga on the beach, and post it all on their Instagram accounts. It’s something else. They go to a holy place, to the city of Jerusalem, and they go to a room, and they spend their time in prayer.

(Do you like to go to a holy place, and to go into a room, and to spend your time in prayer? Because if not, I have bad news for you, about what you’re doing right now.)

The disciples don’t seek self-indulgent pleasure or isolated enlightenment. They live in community; not just the abstract idea of community, but an actual community of actual people. Annoying people. Difficult people. Not“Beloved Community” in theory, but Peter, John, and James, Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James son of Alphaeus, Simon the Zealot, and Judas Jameson; and Mary, the mother of Jesus, who’s just fantastic; and all his brothers, who… hmm.

In those remarkable early days, between losing Jesus, the leader of their community, and receiving the Holy Spirit that would lead them to transform the world, the disciples do what we do now. We come, and we pray, and we wait for the Spirit to lead us where it will. And in the meantime, we live together as a community of prayer; as imperfect people made holier by one another and by God.

We can’t predict when the Spirit will come, or what it will say. We know it probably won’t be in the exact same place it appeared in the past. We might suffer along the way, as Peter is always eager to remind us. But God will not leave us comfortless. And even if we don’t know the way, and even if we can’t plan ahead, God is guiding us into even greater things. For “the spirit of glory,” as Peter says, “which is the Spirit of God, is resting on you…” and “the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you. To him be the power forever and ever. Amen” (1 Peter 4:14, 5:11).

[1] Sam Rainer, The Church Revitalization Checklist (Church Answers: 2021), 59.