Sermon – The Feast of the Holy Name, January 1, 2023

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Do you know the story of your name? Many of us do. Maybe like my five-year-old Murray, you were named for a grandparent whose birthday was the day you were due. Maybe like me, you were given one of the few boys’ names with a nickname that you could keep forever, so that there would never be a day when, as every Timmy becomes a Tim and every Jimmy becomes a Jim, I would have to switch from Greggy to Greg. Maybe it was part of a trend—maybe you were a girl born in the year 1960 and so your name had to be Debbie, Deborah, or Deb; maybe you were a boy born in 2018, when Aiden, Caden, Jayden, and Braden all made the top 20.

Or maybe it was something more normal than that. Maybe an angel of the Lord appeared to each of your parents individually as they planned for their wedding day and told them that they were to name you Jesus, (Luke 1:31, Matthew 1:21) “for [you would] save [your] people from their sins.” (Matthew 1:21) And so you were “called Jesus, the name given by the angel before [you were] conceived in the womb.” (Luke 2:21) Or something like that.

Today we celebrate a holiday that falls on January 1 every year. Not New Year’s Day, although many of us may also be celebrating that, but a rather less popular one: the Feast of the Holy Name of our Lord Jesus Christ. On the eighth day of Jesus’ life, we join the Holy Family for his bris, for the ritual of circumcision and naming that had been a part of the life of the people of God since the earliest days, since the times of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

A name is an important thing. Most people carry it with them their whole lives. And in our culture, the meaning of a name itself is often somewhat obscure; it’s the sort of thing you look up in a book. But that’s only because English is a pirate language, full of words stolen from other languages. And in those languages, names mean something. “Gregory” is Greek for “watchful.” “Dorothy” is Greek for “the Gift of God.” “Jane” is the Anglicization of Jeanne, which is the French form of Joanna, which is the medieval Latin feminine form of Johannes, which is the Greek form of Yochanan, which means, in Hebrew, “the Lord is gracious.”

And “Jesus” means, “the Lord is help.” And Jesus means, “Salvation.”

“Jesus,” like many of these names, has gone through a bit of a transformation. “Jesus” is that Latin version of the Greek version of the Hebrew and Aramaic name Yeshua, which is itself a contraction of the older Hebrew name Yehoshua. You can almost hear how “Yehoshua” would become “Joshua,” just like “Yehochanan” became “Yohanan” became “Johan” or “John,” and “Yehonatan” became “Yonatan” became “Jonathan.” “Yeho” in each of these names is the name of God: not the generic term “God” but the specific name of a specific God, the four-letter name YHWH, considered too holy by observant Jews to be spoken aloud. This is the name that you’ll see translated sometimes in the Old Testament with the words, “the LORD,” with LORD in those funny small-caps.

But Jesus’ name is a bit of a pun. Because while “Yehoshua” means “God is salvation,” “Yeshua”—its contraction—sounds an awful lot like the Hebrew word meaning “salvation.” It’s literally the difference between יְשׁוּעָה and יֵשׁוּעַ, and if you can hear or understand that distinction then God just may be calling you to a deeper study of Proto-North-West-Semitic philology.

So “Jesus” means “God is salvation.” And Jesus also means “salvation.” Which means, in a sense, that Jesus, who is salvation, is God, who is salvation.

This isn’t, strictly speaking, the way logic works. But it is the way symbolism works. And it explains the enigmatic comment that the angel makes to Joseph: you will call him Jesus, “for he will save his people from their sins.” You will call him “Salvation,” because he will save them. And it’s possible that even the word “save” isn’t quite right here; it’s probably something closer to “help.” The most respected Hebrew lexicon I have glosses the name “Yehoshua” as “The Lord is help.” Jesus is not just “salvation,” in an abstract or theological sense. Jesus is help. And maybe this connects with you more. Because while you may not always feel like you are in need of salvation, you probably sometimes feel like you need some help.

Believe it or not, there’s much more that I could say about the name “Jesus” or “Yehoshua”—about the great prophet Joshua, lieutenant of Moses, who finally led his people out of their wanderings in the wilderness and into the Promised Land; about the great high priest Joshua, the anointed one who rebuilt the Temple and whom the prophet Zechariah depicts as a semi-messianic figure being accused by Satan—but I regret to say that I’m going to leave it here, instead, with a simple questions.

Where in your life do you need help this year? And how can Jesus be a “help” to you? On January 1, many of us are making resolutions and setting goals in a new year. Does it help to know that there is a God who has sent the Holy Spirit to comfort and guide you as you struggle along the way? Many of us are trying to leave behind the patterns of the past, and start off fresh. Does it help you to know that there is a God who will forgive you more easily than you’ll forgive yourself for all your failings? Many of us are cold or tired or sick, trying to make it through one more day, one more week, one more month. And God has been there; in the Jesus whose birth we still celebrate during these twelve days of Christmas, we know that God has been there, and is there, right alongside us; that the God whose name is “Help” has helped us and he helps us still, because he walked among us and he lives among us even now in the one who “was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.”

Sermon — Christmas Day, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Sermon — Christmas Eve, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

When Prince George was born in July 2013, the news of a new heir to the United Kingdom scored two photos above the fold on the front page of the Washington Post. The LA Times ran the headline “The prince of wails has arrived.” (That’s “wails” as in a “wailing baby.”) Our own Boston Globe, faithful to our city’s history of revolution and Irishness, placed the story on page A3, with a small photo beneath the fold on the front page, news of the future King George having been trumped by the story of a BSO conductor’s concussion and one about salmon in the Penobscot River. But if you want to know what the British media thought, you can look up the cover of the British tabloid The Sun (S-U-N), which, on the day that Prince George was born, actually redesigned its logo so that the name of the magazine itself read: “The Son” (S-O-N).

This, of course, is all old news; the young king-to-be is now some nine and a half years old. But my point is this: when a long-expected royal heir is born, it’s big news. You need someone in charge of public relations, for sure: to keep the paparazzi at bay, to take some cute photos of the new baby, maybe to put some makeup on his dad so he looks presentable. What you don’t usually need is for your royal PR firm to go drum up a little publicity from the shepherds in the fields.

But Jesus was no ordinary king, and his birth was no ordinary royal birth. And if that angel of the Lord had not appeared to those shepherds, and if that choir of angels had not praised him with a song, no one but his parents would have known he existed at all.

The story of Christmas, after all, is a story of glad tidings in unexpected places.

The people are eager for a king, for a Messiah, for a Savior who will lead them out of the dark days they’re living through and into a brighter and more glorious age. They even know where to look: in Bethlehem, the city of David, the ancestral home of their most famous king. The prophets had long foretold that a new Messiah would arise from Bethlehem, and you have to imagine that every pregnant woman in that small town wondered from time to time: could this be the one?

Nobody was expecting a child born in Bethlehem to parents from out of town. And they certainly weren’t expecting the Messiah to be born in a barn. Mary and Joseph came to Bethlehem by coincidence, and Jesus was born in obscurity, and they wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, and the story could well have ended there.

But God wanted somebody to know, and so an angel of the Lord appeared, again in an unexpected place. The angel didn’t appear in Herod’s palace, telling him that it’s time to retire because there’s a new king in town. The angel didn’t appear in the Temple, telling the people that their God ha come to save them at last. The angel didn’t appear in the sky over the city, announcing good news to the expectant crowds. No, the angel appeared to a handful of shepherds lying in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night, and they were terrified and amazed. And then the angel disappeared.

These are “good tidings of great joy that will be for all the people,” but only these shepherds have heard the tale.

God shows up in unexpected places. God shows up in the prayers we say when we’re not sure we believe there’s anyone listening. God shows up in the acts of human love that are around us every day, but will never make the front page of the news. God does show up in the moments of joy that fill the Christmas season, but God also shows up in the pain that’s sometimes present, too. God shows up in surprising places here, on earth, in the midst of our lives, however messy and imperfect they may be, reminding us again and again that God loves with an unconditional and unimaginable love.

God sometimes even shows up here in church.

So if God shows up in your life, sometime soon, where will you be in the story?

Will you be “keeping watch” with your flock by night? Will you be paying attention, in other words? Will you even notice that God is there? Will you be watching and listening for the signs of what God is doing in your life, or will you be, like I usually am, too caught up in your own preoccupations to hear the angels sing?

But if you do notice God’s sudden appearance, what will you do? Will you go with the shepherds “even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing that has taken place?” Will you “treasure” these things like Mary, “pondering them in your heart?” Will you accept the invitation, in other words, and follow that feeling of God’s grace where it leads? Or will it become a half-remembered story of the past, an extraordinary moment that has no effect on ordinary life?

And what will you do when that angel of the Lord has disappeared? Will you “return” out into the world, “glorifying and praising God for all that [you have] heard and seen?” Will you share the good news of what God has done in your life with the people around you, or will God be the best-kept secret in your life, something known only to few cold shepherds in the field?

Whatever the answer is, there is good news. However attentive or distracted you are; however curious or careless you may be; however much you share that good news or pretend it never happened, God is always here, working. There were thirty years, after all, between Jesus’ birth and the next time anybody outside his family noticed him; but everywhere he went, God was among us, all the same.

God is among us, working in us, and through us, even now, in places we come looking for God and in places we’d never think to find him, comforting us and inspiring us and above all else, loving us and saving us, casting down all the power of evil and death in this world, and freeing us to live in love.

So may God bless you in this season of Christmas, and whatever Christmas brings, may it be a time of surprising moments of joy.

“For a child has been born for us, a son given to us;
authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” Amen.        

Sermon — December 11, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Have you ever felt like you’re wandering in the spiritual wilderness?

I don’t mean the kind of wilderness people mean when they talk about finding God in nature, a wilderness of mountains to climb and pine trees to smell and babbling brooks in which to cool your feet. I mean the wilderness as Jesus knew it: the dry, rocky hills to the east of Jerusalem, a desert with barely enough in it to sustain life. By “spiritual wilderness” I don’t mean the kind of wilderness in which you feel God’s Spirit—no. I mean the place in which you thirst for a drop of life-giving water, and find none.

The wilderness goes by many other names—spiritual aridity or exile, burnout or the dark night of the soul—but whatever you call it, it is a kind of absence: the absence of the feelings of joy or peace or comfort you once found in prayer or work or life, the absence of a long-lost sense of meaning or of God’s love or presence. It’s very similar, in a way, to what (in a marriage) might be called the “after-the-honeymoon” period. It’s very similar to what happens in a friendship or a new job when the shine has worn off the apple. The wilderness is a time in your life where you feel, as Bilbo Baggins once said, “like butter scraped over too much bread.”

And this is what I mean when I ask: Have you ever felt like you’re wandering in the wilderness? You understand what I mean.

The startling message of our reading from Isaiah today is that God has promised to transform this wilderness—this most unenjoyable place—into a place of unimaginable joy.

Now, Isaiah doesn’t come up with the image of the wilderness. The people of God have known the wilderness for as long as there’s been a people of God. Their ancestors were nomads who spent their lives wandering through the wilderness. Generations later, after Moses led them out of slavery in Egypt, they spent forty years wandering in the wilderness before they entered the Promised Land. And a millennium later, when Isaiah wrote these words, they were in exile again. Their city and its Temple had been destroyed. Many of them had been separated from their homeland by a literal wilderness, living as hostages and refugees with five hundred miles of desert between them and the world they once knew. They are in desperate need of consolation, and Isaiah consoles them with the promise of a future in which the wilderness, literal and metaphorical, will be transformed.

“The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,” he writes, “the desert shall rejoice and blossom.” (Isaiah 35:1) God will transform the dry place into a flowering field, and “everlasting joy shall be upon [your] heads; [you] shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.” (35:10) In the very midst of the desert you will see “the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God.” (35:2) “Here is your God; he will come,” Isaiah tells the people. “He will come and save you.” (35:4)

Just… not quite yet.

This is, without a doubt, one of the hardest things about Christian life. God promises us incredible things—peace and joy and life everlasting—but in this life, we only get a glimpse. Isaiah promises that “sorrow and sighing shall flee away,” (Isaiah 35:10) but still we sorrow and sigh. It’s comforting that God makes these promises to us… it’s better than having no hope for the future. But it’s undeniably frustrating having to wait around for them. “Be patient,” the apostle James wrote two thousand years ago, and we are, and we have been, waiting quite patiently for quite some time now for “the coming of the Lord.” (James 5:7-8)

Think how John the Baptist must have felt. I think of him sitting in prison, hearing the stories of what his cousin Jesus was doing, wondering whether he was just another prophet or whether he was The One about whom John himself had prophesied. And Jesus tells John’s messengers to go back and quote these exact words from Isaiah to John the Baptist, to tell him that the moment had arrived: “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear.” (Matthew 11:5; Isaiah 35:5) The day has come when the desert will blossom, and the wilderness will be transformed from a place of desolation into a place of joy.

And yet John remains in jail. And he will not make it out alive. But neither, of course, will Jesus.

So we’re left with this conundrum: God has promised us, on the one hand, abundant joy, a world in which sorrow and sighing are transformed into joy and singing. And God has left us, on the other hand, in the wilderness, where we continue to roam. And there’s a sense in which we will always be in the wilderness in this life, a sense in which—however much joy and peace we may have—there will also always be suffering and pain, until our wandering is over and we reach that promised land of eternal life with God.

But at the same time, the wilderness is not the desert it once was. It is already being transformed. Water is already breaking forth in the desert, streams of water are already flowing in our world. God has not left us comfortless, but is working now in and among us, even if that work is still incomplete.

There’s an image that James uses that I find to be a helpful one, at least for me. “Be patient,” he says, but that’s not all he says. Be patient, he says, like a farmer who “waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains.” (James 5:7)

James talks about our lives like plants, growing over time. And eagerness and abundance can spoil a plant’s growth as easily as caution and patience. You can flood it with too much water, scorch it with too much sunlight, pick it before it’s fully grown. God waits instead, James said, until we have grown in the ways we need, until we’ve received “the early and the late rains,” but God is present all the time with us, like that careful gardener. And one day, we will finally be ready to bloom.

God is with us, even and maybe especially in the wilderness. God is with us in rainstorms and in droughts, in the driest desert and the greenest valleys. God is with us, whether we wait impatiently or patiently, whether we are singing or sighing. Whether we realize it or not, God is with us—in this short season of waiting in Advent before the joy of Christmas, and in our longest seasons of waiting and wandering in the wilderness, before the desert finally rejoices and blossoms. God is with us, and God is watering us, and God is waiting for us finally to bloom.

Every year, on the Second Sunday of Advent, John the Baptist appears in the wilderness with a stark message: “Repent!” he says, “for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” (Matthew 3:2)

John is the cousin of Jesus, sometimes called the “forerunner.” He’s often depicted in art literally pointing the way to Christ. His prophetic ministry comes right at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, and it’s clear that many of John the Baptist’s followers soon became followers of Jesus as well. But John’s message in our gospel this morning, is hardly about Christ at all. He doesn’t mention Jesus by name, or say that he is the Messiah. He makes this vague reference to the “one who is more powerful than I” simply to increase the urgency of his message: if you don’t repent now, you’re going to be chaff, not wheat, when the Messiah comes. Like everything else he says, his messianic prophecy is another variation on a single, simple, theme:  “Repent! For the kingdom of heaven has come near.” (3:2)

Except that simple theme of “repentance” is not that simple, because this is the Bible, and when we read the Bible, two thousand years later, things are almost never quite as simple as they seem.

In the modern American Christian tradition, when we hear this message of repentance, we often assume that John is addressing us as individuals. In our culture, we tend to think that “sin” means an individual moral failing. So it sounds like John’s message is that you and you and you should repent. John says to the crowds, I baptize you and you and you with water for repentance, so that you will be saved from your sin.

Depending on your exact spiritual orientation and your own beliefs, you may either love this or hate it. Some people find an emphasis on individual sin, repentance, and forgiveness to be incredibly life-giving. Other people can’t stand it. So if you love this idea that you as an individual need to repent, and if it draws you into a time of reflection and self-examination during Advent, then that’s wonderful; and I want to invite you into another, broader way of looking at it. And if you hate the idea that you, as an individual, need to repent, if it makes you shut down and write John off as yet another crazed street preacher, yet another Puritan consumed with “the haunting fear,” as H. L. Mencken put it, “that someone, somewhere may be happy” … then I want to invite you into another, broader way of looking at it.

Because when John the Baptist calls the people to “repent,” there’s a sense in which he’s addressing each individual. But there’s another, very real sense in which the call for repentance is not addressed to “you” and “you” and “you,” but to “you,” to us, to all of us, humankind as a whole.

The whole story, after all, is told in collective terms. Matthew doesn’t say that “many people from Jerusalem” came to him, but that “the people of Jerusalem and all Judea” came, and were baptized, confessing their sins. (3:5) And he actually doesn’t say “confessing their sins.” He says “confessing their sin,” in the singular; and our translators translate it “sins,” plural. It’s easy for preachers to make too much out of this sort of thing, but I think in this moment it’s important, because it fits with the story. It maintains that same focus on the collective. It suggests that what John the Baptist is out there preaching about is not only individual sin. It’s a collective, social state of sin.

Jesus and John lived in a society continually wracked by violent revolution, by attempts to establish or reestablish the kingdom of God on earth through the force of arms, by rebellions whose leaders often turned against one another as much as they did the Romans. Jesus tried to teach another way to establish God’s kingdom, a way of peace and love. And John was trying to tell the people that the kingdom of heaven had come near—not through their attempts to create it by force, but through the coming of one who was more powerful than he was, but whose power would turn out to be a paradox: whose moment of greatest strength would look like weakness, and whose greatest success would look like failure. The kingdom of heaven was coming near, not with the sword but on the Cross, and that made all the difference.

We, too, live in a world that’s full of violence. We live in a world very unlike Isaiah’s vision, a world in which we do still “hurt” and “destroy,” in ways small and large. (Isaiah 11:9) We do not live “in harmony with one another,” as Paul writes to the Romans. (Romans 15:5) We—as a society, as a species—need to repent. We need to turn away from the path of hatred and violence and turn toward the way of reconciliation and love.

But that doesn’t mean the burden is all on you.

My favorite thing about this passage from Isaiah—and the one thing to remember from this sermon, if you remember nothing else—is that peace is not a compromise between predators and prey. Peace is a world of vegetarian wolves. It’s not the armed peace of mutually-assured destruction we have in this world. It’s not that the wolves eat the lambs on Mondays, and the sheep eat the wolf pups on Wednesdays. No. The wolf and the lamb live together. The leopard and the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling, dwell in peace. The bears graze, and the lion eats straw like the ox. (Isaiah 11:6-8) It’s the predators who need to repent, not the prey.

So what are we to do, we little lambs in a world full of wolves? Is it safe yet to stick our hands into the adder’s den? Maybe not. But we can recognize and cherish the power of the lamb. We can build communities of peace. We can live with one another as if the kingdom of heaven had not simply come near, but had already come. We can “welcome one another…just as Christ has welcomed us.” (Rom. 15:7)

And we can recognize, as well, that there is within each one of us a little bit of wolf, and a little bit of lamb; a little bit of cow and a little bit of bear. We are not either chaff or wheat, but each one of us is a grain, consisting of both. The threshing process that John the Baptist foretells doesn’t happen between us, as if “you” and “you” were chaff and “you” and “you” were wheat. It happens within us, not only as a whole society but within each one of us as well. We all have wolves and bears within us who need to give up meat. We all have chaff that needs to be burned away.

It sometimes feels like there is nothing I can do about the violence and anger of this world, nothing I can do to bring us closer to Isaiah’s vision of peace. But I know that there’s a little bit of the wolf in my heart, too, that would sometimes rather growl at the lamb than lie down with it in peace. I pray that the Holy Spirit may come and thresh us all, to burn away the chaff that is within my heart and your heart and our world, allowing us to live with ourselves and one another in something a little more like peace. So “may the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant [us all] to live in harmony with one another,” and “may the God of hope fill us with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” Amen. (Rom. 15:5, 13)