Sermon — August 14, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

These are hard readings, this week: verse after verse of judgment, suffering, division, and despair. They seem to be starting out with something nice— “Let me sing for my beloved my love-song!” (Isaiah 5:1)—but things quickly take a turn. Oh, I’ll sing a love song, all right, Isaiah says, about a vineyard. “I will remove its hedge!… I will break down its wall!” It shall be “devoured” and “trampled down!” “It shall not be pruned or hoed,” it will not receive a drop of rain, “I will make it a waste,” and “it shall be overgrown.” (Isaiah 5:1-7) Not quite romantic.

Then Hebrews reminds us of the stories of the great heroes of the Old Testament, of the judges and kings and prophets who led their people to freedom and to victory—and of the martyrs who were “stoned to death, sawn in two… killed by the sword…” who were “destitute, persecuted, tormented,” who were driven from their homes and lived in holes in the ground. (Hebrews 11:32-38) And this encomium to faith is more than a little intimidating. Would any of us really be willing to do the same?

But thankfully, as we do everything Sunday, we finally get to the Gospel reading, and Jesus always has something nice to say. Right? “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! … Do you think I came to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but division! … Three against two and two against three… father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother… You hypocrites! Why do you not know how to interpret the present time?” (Luke 12:49-53, 56)

Just in case you didn’t get enough strife and division in the newspaper from Monday to Saturday: here’s an extra Sunday-morning dose. Of course, a part of me secretly relishes this kind of thing, because we are divided—in our nation, in our communities, in our families—and I know, as we all do, that my side is right, and it’s those people who disagree with me who are hypocrites. Right? And to be perfectly honest there’s just a little part of me that’s glad that the lectionary puts all these readings in mid-August, and not on “Welcome Back Sunday!”

Today’s lessons make for grim reading. But I want to suggest to you at least one way of making sense of them as “good news,” as a reassuring word from God to the people of God, because each of these readings comes out of the anguish of a bedraggled and discouraged minority, desperately trying to hold onto hope in a world that seems to be burning down all around them. So let’s start from the beginning.

The prophet Isaiah lived in the city of Jerusalem in the 8^th century BC, in the shadow of the Assyrian Empire. The Assyrians were a mighty and merciless power. Isaiah would watch them conquer and destroy the northern kingdom of Israel, scattering ten of the twelve tribes of the Israelites into exile. He would see them come for Jerusalem, nearly destroying that city, too, and they nearly did, in a siege that only ended with what the Israelites saw as a miraculous divine intervention. This was a terrifying thing; conquest wouldn’t have been a casual change of government, but would likely end in death or enslavement for most of the population. But it was a religious crisis as well. The Israelites were God’s chosen people. Wasn’t their God strong enough to protect them?

Isaiah’s prophecy subtly shifts the blame. It’s not that God is too weak to protect the city, it’s that the people have created a social order that’s so unjust, so unequal, that God just might allow it to be destroyed. He closes with a cutting Hebrew pun: “God expected mishpat and found mishpach; he expected tzedakah, and found tze‘aqah.” God expected that the people whom he had led into freedom would build a city based on his divine law of love, and he found bloodshed instead. God imagined they would practice tzedakah, charity—and he found tze‘aqah, outcry.

It’s not Isaiah’s prophecy that’s grim and scary. His people’s actual lives are scary. And you may or may not like his theology, but Isaiah offers hope: the hope that if they change their ways, if they reorganize their society, if they practice law and charity instead of cruelty and outrage, God will return to the people she loves and tend their vineyard again.

The Book of Hebrews comes from a similar place. We don’t know much about the author of the letter—he or she never names or places herself—but we do know that the early Christians were a persecuted and misunderstood group. In good times, they could hope to be treated like most of us would treat door-to-door proselytizers: strange people with strange ideas who you kind of want to avoid in polite society. In bad times, the simple statement “I am a Christian” could be punishable by death. Hebrews looks to the great heroes and the great martyrs of the Bible, and blends them together as exemplars of faith. It makes no distinction between the kings and prophets who achieve great success, and the ordinary men and women who suffer and die in failure. And this is grim, and it’s depressing, but it’s comforting, too, in its way. Hebrews reminds these early Christians that, with all due respect to Isaiah, their suffering is not a sign that God has rejected them. It’s not a sign of divine punishment. It is, in fact, what Jesus himself had endured, like generations of faithful people before him and generations  since. And more than that: Jesus’ own failure and death were the means of his ultimate triumph and our ultimate redemption, because it was Jesus, the “pioneer and perfecter” of our faith, who had “endured the cross, disregarding its shame,” and through his own death had destroyed the power of death.

And so we come to Jesus’ words in Luke, dividing households and families and nations against themselves. For what it’s worth, we know that Jesus’ own family were less-than-enthusiastic about his ministry, at times. (Luke 8:19-21) And we know that his movement did in fact divide families. Some whole households would convert, to be fair, and join the Jesus movement. But it was much more common for one or two members to become Christians, and we have ancient stories about the breaks this could cause with parents and siblings and the retribution angry fathers could take. Now, that’s very different from our own, modern Christianity, in which so many people are born into Christian families or even Christian nations, where a kind of casual cultural Christianity is taken for granted. But there’s some similarity, too; there’s comfort and hope for us in Jesus’ hard words, because they mean that the early Christians weren’t letting Jesus down when their churches struggled to grow, when the people around them didn’t just accept their message and join in. Jesus knew that what he was trying to do wouldn’t be popular, he knew it would cause division and conflict, and he did it anyway, because it was the right thing to do.

We live in very different times. And yet they’re not so different, in some ways. Our families are often divided—sometimes even by religion! Our churches, in this country, are not persecuted, but they are struggling. Our city is not besieged by a mighty army, but sometimes it does feel like the world is falling apart. And if you look around, it’s easy to find bloodshed where there should be justice; a cry, where there should be righteousness.

Isaiah, and Hebrews, and Jesus found hope in the midst of it, in their very different ways.

So where do you find hope?

I can’t speak for anyone else. But for me, there’s something comforting about Hebrews’ idea of the “great cloud of witnesses” who surround us. Human beings have been on this earth for ten thousand generations or more. There is no joy and no sorrow we can experience that has not happened before, and there are ancestors and friends, visible and invisible, bearing witness to our lives, all around us. And in Jesus, our very God suffered, and wept too. Wherever we are, whatever happens to us, it has happened before, and God loves each one of us still. God is faithful to us, even when our faith begins to fail, and is leading the way for us through all the turmoil of life into a better future for this world.

So then, “since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.” Amen.

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Sermon — August 7, 2022

Lectionary Readings

When I was in elementary school, my parents finished the basement in my childhood home. Before, it had been a dark and dirty place; I was scared to go down there by the laundry machines alone. But now, it was a bright room, with lights and a couch and a carpet and my new favorite place in the house: the cedar closet.

It was just a regular closet to store clothes, but lined with cedar, and of course cedar repels moths, so it was the perfect place to store clothes that were out of season. Of course, I didn’t care about this at the time. I loved it for a very different reason: the smell. Not the nasty smell of mothballs, but the indescribable smell of fresh-cut cedar planks. And so I’d go in there, and play among the coats like a little kid does in a coat closet, and enjoy that wonderful smell.

And then some time in early December, my mother would start telling me to stop messing around in the closets. She was always a little secretive about the reasons, and I wasn’t a very obedient child, so one day, I was playing in the basement and opened up the cedar closet and I discovered the reason she’d told me not to go in there: tucked away behind the fall coats and ski jackets was a stack of Christmas presents from my parents, each one neatly wrapped.

Now, don’t worry. This is not the story of how Greg opened all the presents in advance and ruined Christmas. And of course, my gifts from Santa Claus had not yet arrived. But to me, it’s the perfect illustration of the difference between faith and knowledge. I had faith, every year, that there would be something under the tree on Christmas morning. But I never knew for sure, not until that moment of excitement some time around 5am on Christmas Day when I would run down the stairs and peer around the corner into the living room and see that the presents had arrived. Faith and knowledge are two very different things.

“Faith,” writes Hebrews, “is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Heb. 11:1) Faith is to “set out for a place” you have been promised, like Abraham had done, “not knowing where [you are] going.” (11:8) Faith is spending a life living in tents, wandering in the desert in a foreign land, when you’ve been promised a home. (11:9) Faith is trusting the promise that your descendants will be “as many as the stars of heaven and as the innumerable grains of sand by the sea,” even though no children have been born yet, and you are getting very old. (11:12)

Faith is not certainty; it’s more like perseverance in the face of uncertainty. And this is the frustrating and the wonderful thing about a life of faith. The greatest examples of Christian faith are not people who’ve always had an answer to everything and never doubted the teachings of their religion. They’re people who struggled with God throughout their lives, who went through long periods of spiritual dryness or despair, and who nevertheless persisted in loving God and loving their neighbors with everything they had.

This is a frustrating truth. “God, just give me a sign!” must be one of the most common prayers in human history. We genuinely want and need guidance. Some of us have had times when God felt especially present in our lives. Some of us have had spiritual experiences that reassure us of God’s love. But most of us spend most of our lives uncertain, wondering where God is, wondering whether any of this makes sense. And none of us truly know God; not on this side of eternity.

But these struggles are not a lack of faith. They are faith. Not “faith” in the sense of unquestioning belief in some theological proposition, but “faith” in the sense of Abraham’s faithfulness to God, and God’s faithfulness to Abraham. God has promised us a kingdom of peace, a community of live, an everlasting life of joy, and those things have not yet come to be. We are like all those whom Hebrews names who “died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw them and greeted them.” (11:13) We get a taste to sustain us on our journey, but the destination is far off, and we do not know where we are going. And yet, faithfully, we continue on, and it’s the power of those promises that has sustained us over the years, that invitation into the dream of God that has inspired generations of people of faith. And that’s why I say that faith is a frustrating and wonderful thing: it is perseverance and uncertainty combined.

This goes beyond our own personal spiritual lives. The same is true about our journey as a community, as a nation, as the human species. God spoke through the prophet Isaiah 2700 years ago to command us: “learn to do good; seek justice; rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.” (Isaiah 1:17) Jesus invited us 2000 years ago the enter “the kingdom”: to sell our possessions, and give alms; to make for ourselves “an unfailing treasure in heaven.” (Luke 12:33) This is God’s dream for our world, and yet it’s obvious that that dream is not yet reality. That dream has sustained and frustrated us for generations as we journey towards it. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” He knew that he would never live in the promised land of peace and equality. He could see it from a distance and “greet it,” as Hebrews said, but he would die in faith, without having received the promise—as will we all. And yet, his perseverance in the face of uncertainty—his conviction that history bends toward justice, even if the world is not yet just—has inspired millions of people to keep that faith in their own way.

God has promised many gifts to us, but Christmas has not yet come. We have made many prayers, but haven’t yet seen all of them answered. We are journeying together toward our promised home, but for now, we live in tents, in a foreign land. But even here, we live, as we always have, by faith. Not by knowledge. Not by certainty. But by persevering in the way that Jesus taught us, holding fast to that faith which is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things” that are not yet fully seen. Amen.

Sermon — July 31, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

I had a conversation a few years ago with a man who had big plans for a new non-profit he wanted to start. He’d spent a long career working hard in the financial sector, and been able to retire early, so he needed a new project. And he told me about this new organization he’d learned about in the city where he lived. Their plan was to rent unused space in under-subscribed public schools in the city, convert those empty classrooms into squash courts, and then use them to teach squash for free to kids in the neighborhood. It’s a funny variation on the idea that the best urban sports are the ones, like basketball that don’t need much space or grass, and squash certainly qualifies. And it has the kind of side benefit that certain sports, like golf, or tennis, or racquetball, carry a kind of social cachet that could actually boost the careers of kids who went on to college and professional life, at least in some professions.

I’d never heard of this, but the acquaintance who was telling me about it loved the idea. It was right up his alley. There was just one problem. “I don’t play squash,” he said, “but I love golf. So, I want to start the same thing, but teaching golf to inner-city kids!” And—never having really seen the appeal of golf myself, and thinking that a golf course is a little harder to squeeze into an empty classroom than a squash court, I nodded politely. And then he said something I’ll never forget: “I’m all ready to get started. I just need to lower my handicap by a few strokes first, so I have enough cred in the golf world.”

Jesus’ parable today confronts us with the urgency of God’s call to each one of us. “What should I do?” the rich man asks himself. “I have no place to store my crops!” (12:17) Or rather, he has a place to store his crops, it’s just not big enough anymore. It’s as if your bank account were a physical place where you stored your cash, and you became so wealthy that your bank account was full. When you went to make your deposit, you could not cram another hundred-dollar bill into its depths. And instead of thinking to yourself, “Maybe I don’t need all this. Maybe I should share some of this wealth,” you spent your money building a bigger bank. And when you’d built a bank big enough to hold it all, you took a deep breath, and said to yourself, “Eat, drink, and be merry.” (12:19) You could finally relax. “But God said to you: ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you!’” (12:20) What do you have to show for yourself?

Now, let’s be as generous as we can to the rich man in the story. Perhaps he planned to give some of his wealth away one day. Perhaps he had good intentions of feeding the hungry with some of that food, perhaps he had always planned to donate a hospital wing or to renovate the synagogue. Perhaps one day he would, when he was finally comfortable enough that he could give something away without it undermining the lifestyle he’d come to expect.

But if there’s one thing I know about human psychology, it’s that that “one day” is elusive. We set our sights on the future, thinking things will be different then; and then the future arrives, and things feel much the same. The parable is about wealth, and we shouldn’t lose sight of that, but the pattern applies to so much more of our lives than that. Have you ever thought to yourself, “Once I X, then I’ll finally be able to Y?” “Once the baby’s sleeping through the night, then I’ll finally take some time for myself.” “Once the kids are out of the house, then we’ll work on our marriage.” “If I just put my head down for a few years of seventy-hour weeks and make partner, then I’ll be able to relax.” “If only he’d try just once to make things better, then I’d let go of this resentment I’ve been carrying.” “If I could just knock a few strokes off my handicap, then I could finally start teaching golf to the kids.”

And then we get there… and we kick the can down the road again, because it feels just as hard now as it ever did then. But there’s an urgency to these things. We can defer them further and further into the future, but we can’t guarantee that the future will ever arrive. We can’t control our own destinies; and we’re not very good at predicting our future actions. All we can do is act now, or not. But “this very night your life is being demanded of you,” God says. What are you leaving undone? (12:20)

Now, I don’t want you to think I’ve come back from vacation full of fire and brimstone. (I was always like this.) No, because alongside this parable of urgency, we have to read a prophecy of mercy: our first lesson, from the prophet Hosea.

You may not quite grasp the historical and geographical and national references, to Israel and Ephraim, Admah and Zeboiim; that’s okay. But you can probably tell that they’re a way of locating the original hearers of the prophecy, a way of addressing them directly. So indulge me for a minute in addressing this prophecy from God to you, as Hosea addresses it to the ancient Israelites: “When you were a child, I loved you; and out of hard times I called you. The more I called you, the more you went from me… it was I who taught you to walk, I took you up in my arms; but you did not know that I healed you. I led you with cords of human kindness, with bands of love. I lifted you like an infant to my cheek… You may be bent on turning away from me… But how can I give you up, O my beloved people? How can I hand you over? …My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender… for I am God, and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.” (Hosea 11:1-11)

And here’s the thing: if you deferred your humanity, if you put off every act of goodness, if you turned away from God again and again and again and never acted on any of those vaguely good intentions for the future, and if this very night you came face to face with your Maker, this would be God’s response: “How can I give you up? How can I hand you over? From before time, I have loved you, through it all.”

This merciful, unconditional love doesn’t undermine the urgency of God’s call. In fact, it’s the only thing that lets us answer that call. Because, left to our own devices, we will probably never feel like we’ve arrived. We will never have enough to really feel comfortable giving it away. We will never have achieved enough to really feel comfortable relaxing. We will never golf well enough to feel like we’ve earned the respect we need to start that non-profit. No matter what anyone says to us, most of us will never fully feel like we are good enough to be loved; and yet if God loves us so deeply in our imperfection, even in our outright rejection, what risk could there possibly be in just starting now?

So, you may never reach that “one day.” Or, if you do, it may not feel as different as you’d imagined. But this day, “this very night,” you are enough to answer that call. You are enough to tackle that task. You are enough to live your life right now as you wish you could live it then. For—as St. Paul writes in that beautiful but enigmatic phrase, “your life is hidden with Christ in God.” (Col. 3:3) So may you indeed be, as he says, “renewed in knowledge according to the image of [your] creator,” (Col. 3:10) who has loved you for so long with such indescribable love. Amen.

Sermon — July 3, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“It was the middle of November when the strange man came to the village,” writes Dorothy Sayers in her short mystery, “The Incredible Elopement of Lord Peter Wimsey.” “Thin, pale, and silent, with his great black hood flapping about his face, he was surrounded with an atmosphere of mystery from the start.” A wizard! A magic man! Martha decides to pay him a visit. She’s a young woman in a remote Spanish village in the 1920s, and she’s serving as the maid to an aristocratic Englishwoman who’s been brought to live in the village by her husband, seemingly bewitched. Perhaps this mighty man can break the spell. When she enters his house, Martha encounters a remarkable scene: “An aromatic steam began to rise from the cauldron… Then, a faint music, that seemed to roll in from leagues away. The flame flickered and dropped… Then, out of the darkness, a strange voice chanted in an unearthly tongue that sobbed and thundered… she saw his pale lips move and presently he spoke, in a deep, husky tone that vibrated solemnly in the dim room:

ὦ πέπον εἰ μὲν γὰρ πόλεμον περὶ τόνδε φυγόντε|
αἰεὶ δὴ μέλλοιμεν ἀγήρω τ᾽ ἀθανάτω τε…
O pepon ei men gar polemon peri tonde fugonte,
aiei dē melloimen agērо̄ t’ athanatо̄ te…”[1]

(And so on.)

Martha needs no further evidence. This man is a mighty wizard. This man can break the spell.

But this man is, the reader knows, no wizard, no magician. He’s the English amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey. The unearthly sights and sounds are simply artifacts of chemistry and lighting; his incantation is nothing but a fragment of the Homeric Iliad he had memorized in school, albeit rendered quite dramatically. The woman has not been bewitched. She’s simply being drugged by her terrible husband. And all Lord Peter needs is access to the house to help her to escape. The magic is all a front to convince the superstitious locals to help him out.

But Peter Wimsey understands that human beings sometimes prefer a flashy cure to a simple one. The prophet Elisha could have told you the same thing. It’s part of the comedy of this reading from the Second Book of Kings. There’s a constant contrast between the pompous grandiosity of the important kings and generals in the story, and the simplicity of the humble and lowly, the servants and the prophet. Naaman is the “commander of the army of the king of Aram,” a “great man” who’s “in high favor” with the king, a “mighty warrior.” (2 Kings 5:1) But he doesn’t know the cure for his disease. Instead, it’s a “young girl” who points the way, an enslaved girl, kidnapped from the land of Israel on an Aramaean raid. “There’s a prophet in my old hometown who could probably help!” (5:2-3) Why don’t you go see? But this is too simple. Naaman needs something more grand. So he consults with the king of Aram, who sends him to the king of Israel with a diplomatic letter in hand, and ten talents of silver, and six thousand shekels of gold, and a few nice suits to boot. (5:5) And the king of Israel is full of dramaL “Am I God, to give life or death?” The king of Aram is mocking me—I’m sure! (5:7) But Elisha is calm: “Why have you torn your clothes? Let him come to me.” (5:8) So Naaman comes. And Elisha’s answer is simple: “Go wash in the Jordan seven times.” (5:10)

You can imagine the pause. “…That’s it?” “I thought for me,” Naaman says, “he would surely come out, and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, and would wave his hand over the spot, and cure the leprosy!” (5:11) Naaman wants the Lord Peter Wimsey treatment. He wants the bubbling cauldron and the flickering lights and the incantation in a strange and foreign tongue. He does not want a bath. It’s insultingly simple. But again, his servants carefully approach: If he gave you something hard to do, wouldn’t you do it with gusto? So why not do it all the more when all he said was, ‘Wash, and be clean?’” (5:13) And, finally wising up, he does what they say. And it works.

The truth is so much simpler than he expects. That doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

I sometimes worry that we approach the Christian faith like Naaman, not Elisha; as a tangle of inscrutable mysteries, not a simple truth. And there’s some virtue to this. It’s good to be thoughtful, and careful. It’s good to approach God with humility about our own understanding of the depths of God’s nature, to appreciate nuance rather than dumbing things down to a bumper sticker. But I sometimes worry that our yearning for complexity and subtlety and depth can distract us, like Naaman, from the simple truths.

Jesus has plenty to say that’s enigmatic, for sure. But at the heart of the gospel, there is a simple truth: “The kingdom of God has come near.” (Luke 10:9, 11) He sends his followers out to thirty-five towns in pairs, and gives them their instructions: Go where I am sending you. Greet no one on the road. Whatever house you enter, first say, “Peace to this house!” (10:3-4)

If they welcome you, stay with them. Eat what they give you. Cure the sick. And say to them: “The kingdom of God has come near.” (10:8-9) If they don’t welcome you, get out of town. Wipe off even the dust of their roads from your feet, and tell them that’s what you’re doing. But nevertheless proclaim the same, simple message: “The kingdom of God has come near.” (10:11) And that’s it.

It’s a truth that’s almost too simple for us to bear. We want to be the Naamans of our lives: we want to be the mighty commanders, competent and in control and held in high regard. At the very least, we want there to be something we can do: some ritual we can enact, some prayer we can say, some good work we can perform that will heal us or save us, improve our lives or change our world.

But the kingdom of God is not conjured with a magic spell. We don’t wave our hands or invoke the mighty name of our God. In Jesus, the kingdom of God is near at hand. And all we have to do is to turn aside and enter into that kingdom, just as Naaman steps into the river: not as mighty and powerful people in control of our own destinies, but as people who recognize that we need to be healed, that our nation needs to be healed, that our world needs to be healed.

Because that’s simply what we need: to turn aside and be healed.

There are moments, throughout life, where you can see that kingdom of God and feel how near it is. I don’t know if you’ve ever had an experience like this. I did, actually, just this week. On Thursday night, I went to the 10th anniversary celebration of Turn It Around, the Charlestown Coalition’s youth group. Some of you may remember that some folks from the Charlestown Coalition came and spoke with us here after a service during Lent. Turn It Around started as a kind of social marketing campaign about the dangers of drug overdoses, and it’s involved into a group of young leaders who work with the staff of the Charlestown Coalition to try to spread their message of peace and of love and of health throughout our community.

The very fact that many of us have not heard of their work has a lot to do with the divisions within our community. But as I sat in that room on Thursday night, looking around, I saw, for once, a Charlestown community that bridged our divides: a group of young people of color, who mostly live in the Bunker Hill development, supported by Townies who’ve been part of the recovery community for years, supported by a network of yuppie social workers and doctors, being together as a community, trying to heal and comfort our community in this neighborhood. For me, it was a glimpse of the kingdom of God, a vision of what the world could be if we turned and stepped into that kingdom that is so near at hand, a place in which—as our collect this morning said—we have learned to follow all God’s commands by loving God and loving our neighbor.

And in this neighborhood, of all places, loving our “neighbors” is not a metaphorical thing. It is what it means to be a community. It is what is to be Christian.

It’s not complicated. It’s not impressive. Christianity is not that hard.

Correction: Christianity is very, very hard. It’s just not complicated. So I wonder what it means to see the kingdom of God near you. I wonder what it means to turn aside and step into that river. I wonder what it would mean for us to become part of that beloved kingdom of God together.

[1] “The Incredible Elopement of Lord Peter Wimsey,” in Dorothy L. Sayers, Lord Peter (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 337–339.

Sermon — June 26, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“For freedom Christ has set us free.” (Gal. 5:1)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The 2013 PBS special Constitution USA opens with a shot of the NPR news quiz host Peter Sagal riding through the Arizona desert on a Harley-Davidson painted with the American flag. “A guy on a motorcycle,” he narrates in the voiceover, “it’s like freedom personified! Five guys on five motorcycles?” (Here the camera pans to show him riding in formation with four members of the Arizona Leathernecks Motorcycle Club.) “Five times more freedom! It’s a freedom fiesta! But freedom to do… what, exactly?”

“Freedom to do what, exactly?” This is the question Sagal sets out to answer, biking around America to talk with citizens and scholars about the meaning of the United States Constitution. And we can add another question: freedom from what? Because, as one of the bikers astutely points out to Sagal in the bar after their ride, the Constitution isn’t there to protect us from one another. It’s there–he says, drawing a pocket copy out of vest and brandishing it—to protect us from our government. And while I imagine I may disagree with some of his politics, he’s right about that. The Constitution says much more about what we are free from than what we are free for. And the same is true of the national holidays in this season of freedom. Juneteenth commemorates Black Americans’ freedom from enslavement; the Fourth of July celebrates a new nation’s freedom from tyrannical monarchy. But—freedom to do what, exactly?

It’s not a new question, and it’s not limited to American politics. In fact, these are exactly the questions St. Paul addresses in his letter to the Galatians, and which Christians have struggled with for generations since. “For freedom Christ has set us free,” Paul writes. But from what and for what?

Paul is writing to the churches in Galatia, in what’s now the heartland of modern Turkey, at an inflection point in their history. They had received the gospel from Paul, the good news that they—these Gentiles, these non-Jews—can be accepted into the family of God, can be counted part of the chosen people of God, can be reckoned as righteous in God’s sight, not by conversion to Paul’s religion, Judaism, not by adopting the practices of circumcision and kosher food laws and Sabbath observance that define Jewish identity, but through faith in Christ, apart from these works of “The Law.”

But Paul’s letter is not just a cheerful reminder of this good news. It’s a rebuttal to what seems to be an alternate set of teachings by another set of early Christians, people who were, like Paul, Jewish members of the new Christian movement. They seem to be teaching that the Galatians do need to follow the law: that if they’re so excited about this good news of Jesus, the Messiah, the next step into entering his kingdom is to join his people, the Jewish people, and to follow the commandments of Jewish law. Paul is having none of it. This is precisely not the point! Paul has a more universal message in mind: it’s not obedience to Jewish law that makes a person righteous is God’s sight, but faith in Christ, and our Christian freedom is, in a sense, freedom from the obligation to fulfill the Law.

Of course, our problems are different from Paul’s, and “the Law” has been reimagined over time so it applies to more contemporary situations. For the Protestant Reformers, “the Law” was the kind of external, legalistic requirements, the “points systems” the Church had created. Paul’s message of Christian freedom led them into rebellion against some of the demands of the medieval church, exemplified by a historical event with one of my favorite names: “The Affair of the Sausages,” a dinner in 1522 in which Swiss reformers exercised their freedom in Christ by committing what was, to the authorities, a grievous sin: eating sausages at dinner on a Friday in Lent.

“For freedom Christ has set us free!” Freedom to do what? To eat hot dogs on a Friday night.

In our day, the Law is different. It’s not a requirement to obey the Jewish law, the law of Moses, in order to become Christian. It’s not a requirement to obey the Church’s arbitrary rules of fasting and penitence in order to earn God’s forgiveness. It’s the little-l law, less-obvious but more devious, the whole set of expectations and requirements and achievements that tell us that we are not enough: that our home isn’t clean enough, or our kids’ school isn’t “good” enough, or we don’t volunteer or call our mother or meditate enough. The law is good—all these things are good—but the law demands that we do and do and do and do, and we do and do and do and find that we can do no more, and however much we’ve done, it is never enough.

But we have been set free from the demands of the law. We do not have to submit to its yoke. Our worth is not determined by any external measurement than God’s love, by anything at all but our faith in Christ.

We’re set free from the law’s power to judge or condemn. But we’re set free also from the flesh. We are subject to two opposing forces“the flesh” and “the spirit.” “The flesh” is Paul’s phrase for the tendency within us that pulls us into ourselves and away from our neighbors, the source of our jealousy, anger, envy, drunkenness, and more. “The spirit” is what draws us out of ourselves, into the world, with “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” (5:22-23) “There’s no law,” Paul wryly points out, “against such things.” (5:23) And somehow, mysteriously, Christ’s crucifixion in the flesh has put to death the power of the flesh. God’s sending of the Holy Spirit has strengthened the power of our spirit. The delicate balance between the flesh and the spirit has shifted, so that we can grow and flourish and bear “the fruit of the Spirit.”

“For freedom Christ has set us free.” We are free from the law and free from the flesh. We are free from the external demands and measurements others make of our lives and free from the internal forces that lead us astray. We are free from all those things outside ourselves that distract us from the primary commandment, to love our neighbors as ourselves; and free from all those things within ourselves that prevent us from loving our neighbors as ourselves.

“For freedom Christ has set us free.” But it’s not the freedom of the solo cyclist. It’s the freedom of the motorcycle club. It’s not the freedom to go wherever we want and do whatever we want because God’s going to love us anyway. It’s the freedom to love. It’s the freedom to live together in a community like those Arizona Leathernecks, riding together, watching each other’s backs—in a joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, and loving way, of course. Christ has set us free from the law, from social norms and expectations and even from daily needs, in a way that can sound as shocking to our ears as it did to theirs. (Freedom from burying your father? (Luke 9:60) Freedom from saying farewell to your family? (Luke 9:61) These probably deserve a whole sermon of their own.) And he’s set us free from the worst versions of our own selves, from our jealous and anger and fearful sides, from everything that draws us away from one another and into ourselves.

But human beings aren’t so good at being so radically free. We crave order, structure, leadership. We love to take on the yoke; we need its solid certainty over our shoulders. Paul’s seen it already in the Galatians’ temptation to adopt the customs of the Law for what Paul sees as no benefit at all. And I wonder if this explains the strange paradox in what he writes to the Galatians: “Do not submit again to a yoke of slavery,” he says; then, just a few verses later, “but through love become slaves to one another.” You need to serve something? Okay. If you’re going to enslave yourself to something, don’t make it the law outside you or the flesh within you; make it the people around you. Serve one another, in love, for this is the essence of the law.

Not many of us have ever felt quite so free to love. Not many of us feel that radical freedom from the expectations and judgments of the world, or from our own weak wills. And our unfreedom comes from many different sources. There are at least as many things keeping us in chains as there are people in this room.

So what is it that’s keeping you from love? What is it that stops you from loving your neighbor as yourself? What is it that distracts you, that leads you to try to measure up? What is it that draws you into yourself? And what would it mean to say that Christ had truly taken away the burden of that thing? What would it mean to say that God’s unconditional love for you had actually set you free? What would it mean to say that you were being guided by the Spirit into ever greater love?

What would that “freedom fiesta” look like for you?

Because I have good news: Christ has set you free.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.