Sermon — October 17, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

The ancient Greeks told stories about gods who were neither good nor bad but amoral superhumans struggling against one another for power, using us as pawns in their games. The prophet Zoroaster and his followers spoke of two opposing cosmic forces, one good, and one evil, in an eternal struggle for the universe. Modern fantasy authors invent alternate worlds in which their good protagonists struggle against evil villains, often with the help of a magical mentor who will make everything right in the end; Dumbledore always appears to make things right in the second-to-last chapter of the book, even after—spoiler alert—even after he’s dead; Gandalf and Aslan are unopposable forces for good.

These are all, in their own ways, attempts to answer one of the oldest human questions: if there is a God (or gods), and if that God is good, then why on earth are things sometimes so bad? This is sometimes called “the problem of evil,” and it’s a question that any religious tradition has to answer, especially in times of famine, war, or plague. The Greeks could simply answer that the gods are not good; one might send a plague upon you just to spite another. The Zoroastrians could point to that evil force working against the good one as the balance shifted back and forth. The fantasy authors—and it’s no surprise that Tolkien, Lewis, and Rowling are all Christians—point to a higher power who swoops in to rescue the more-human characters from evil in the end.

And the Book of Job gives us one of several Biblical answers to this question. We’ve been reading selections from Job for a few weeks, but we’ve been having so much fun with the gospel readings this fall—this is fun, right?—that we haven’t even gotten into Job. Job is an important and a powerful book, so I thought I’d spend some time with it this morning; and apologies if the sermon is a little long. Things kind of got out of hand.

The Book of Job starts and ends with a fable, written in simple, fairy-tale style. Once upon a time, there was a man named Job. He was a good man. And he was a rich man, endowed not just with seven sons and three daughters but with 7000 sheep and 3000 camels, 500 oxen and 500 donkeys and very many servants. (Job 1:1-2) One day, God was bragging about Job to Satan—as one does—how righteous he was, how humble he was, how grateful he was to God for all his blessings. And Satan said, in effect, “Of course he is. Look at everything you’ve given him! Let me ruin his life and we’ll see how pious he is then.” And God takes the bet.

So Job’s livestock are stolen, and Job’s flocks are destroyed, and Job’s oldest son’s house falls down and all ten of his children die. But still Job won’t curse God. So Satan turns to Job himself, covering him with “loathsome sores,” and he’s reduced to sitting in a pile of ashes in mourning, so pitiful that even his wife says to him, “Curse God and die.” (Job 2:9)

And then along come Job’s three friends: Eliphaz and Bildad and Zophar. And this is the real meat of the book, a series of speeches alternating between the friends and Job, written in some of the most ancient and difficult-to-read Hebrew of the whole Bible, speeches that go on and on and on, grappling with the problem of evil for thirty-six chapters of the book.

Ancient wisdom literature like the Biblical book of Proverbs, took for granted that good people are rewarded in this world, and bad people are punished. In his speeches, Job protests: I’ve been a good person all my life, so why is this happening to me? His three friends try to rationalize what’s going on, but their words are cold comfort. Eliphaz tells Job that good people end up all right in the end, even if there’s some suffering along the road. Bildad says that Job must be missing something; maybe he’s not quite as good as he thinks. Zophar is the harshest: surely what’s happened is evidence that God is punishing Job for some secret, hidden sin; he needs to repent of whatever it is that he’s done.

Over time, Job becomes angrier with God, begging for a fair trial with an impartial judge who can make a ruling whether he or God is in the right. The friends become angrier with Job, calling him arrogant and stubborn, telling him over and over that he must have done something wrong. Finally, a fourth friend shows up, Elihu, and he rips into Job for his audacity in questioning God’s inscrutable ways. God is not accountable to human beings, Elihu proclaims. He’s far beyond you and your petty concerns: “The Almighty,” he concludes, “we cannot find him! …He does not regard any who are wise in their own conceit.” (Job 37:23-24) And he rests his case.

“Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind.” (Job 38:2)

Thirty-seven chapters of interminable wrangling over the meaning of suffering and the problem of evil, and now finally God is going to give some answers.

Kind of.

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God’s answer, in the end, isn’t very satisfying. God doesn’t try to answer Job’s questions. Instead, he asks his own, changing the topic from Job’s own suffering to the grandeur of creation. “Who is this,” he asks, “who darkens counsel with words without knowledge?” (38:1) “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Who determined its measurements—surely you know?” (38:4) You think you understand the way the world should work, God says, but I’m the one who made it, and you know nothing.

 “Who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb?” (38:8) “Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place?” (38:12) “Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep?” (38:16) “Have you entered the storehouses of the snow, or seen the storehouses of the hail?” (38:22) “Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades or loose the cords of Orion?” (38:31) “Can you send forth lightnings, that they may go, and say to you, ‘Here we are’?” (38:34) “Can you hunt the prey for the lion?” (38:39) and on and on and on until finally, Job is speechless, and when God prods him to reply, all he can say is: “See, I am of small account; what shall I answer you? I lay my hand on my mouth.” (40:3)

And then God starts in on him again! “I invented the freaking hippopotamus!” he says. (I’m paraphrasing, but not joking.) And Job gives up and yields to the incomprehensible power and wisdom of God. And so—and here we transition back from archaic poetic speeches to the fairy-tale style of the beginning of the story—God made Job healthy and wealthy again. The end.

The Book of Job is a powerful book. It defies the easy rationalizations of suffering that make up the oldest psychological defense mechanism in the book: Good things happen to good people; I am a good person; therefore nothing bad is going to happen to me. Like the Psalms, Job embraces the practice of shouting at God, voicing Job’s anger and grief in prayer. And it warns us against being like the sympathetic friends who try to comfort Job with platitudes and tidy explanations.

But God’s response isn’t very satisfying. I almost wish Job had the chutzpah to turn the question back on God. “Where was I, when you laid the foundation of the earth? No, where were you, God, when I lost everything I had?” Because that’s the question, I think, whose answer Job really wants to know.

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Our Gospel this morning contains a clue. At times, Jesus’ answer to James and John on the road sounds a bit like God’s answer to Job out of the whirlwind. God accuses Job of speaking “words without knowledge.” Likewise, Jesus dismisses the question: “You do not know what you’re asking.” “Can you lift up your voice to the clouds?” asks God. (Job 38:34) “Can you drink the cup that I drink?” Jesus says. (Mark 10:38)

But the roles are reversed. When God finally answers Job, it’s God who’s magnificent and splendid beyond imagining, and Job who’s suffering. When Jesus answers James and John, they’re the ones who are looking for magnificence and splendor, and it’s Jesus who will be suffering. He’s been teaching the disciples yet again about the difficult road that they’re now traveling on, about his coming suffering and death at the hands of his enemies. But James and John are distracted by their own egos. They want to be made his right- and left-hand men when he finally ascends to the throne in glory.

And Jesus asks them, “Are you able to drink the cup that I drink?” (10:38) I’m reminded of Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane as he faces his death: “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me.” (Mark 14:36) Are you, James and John, able to drink this cup? Are you able to share in this suffering that I’m about to endure? Are you really, truly able to follow me down this road that leads to the cross, with two bandits at my right hand and my left, not a throne flanked by the two of you?

 Where is God amid suffering? God is on the cross, suffering alongside us. When God speaks in Job her words can seem harsh and arrogant. But the God who answers Job so insufficiently out of the whirlwind, the God who laid the foundation of the earth and determined its measurements, the God who feeds the young lions by hand when they crouch in their dens, whose nature is so far beyond our wildest imaginings that the only way to answer our questions is to leave us speechless, this God is the one who became a helpless little baby. This God taught us and healed us. This God suffered for us and died for us.

And rose again, breaking death’s power over us, and extending the promise of eternal life to all those who came after him, to all those who drink the painful cup that this life can be. Jesus gives his life, he says, not just in solidarity with our suffering, but as a “ransom,” as the price he pays to free us from the power of death, to transform the meaning of our suffering. (Mark 10:45) The one who painted the stars in the heavens and laid the foundation of the earth is making a new heaven and a new earth, a new world in which we all one day will dwell.

During the last few years, I’ve found comfort again and again in words I read a few years ago, that remind me more than anything of this God who suffers in solidarity and who transforms our suffering. I hope you’ll excuse me for doing something I don’t often do and closing with a portion of a poem. It’s from a series for Good Friday on the 12 Stations of the Cross by a British poet named Malcolm Guite, and it’s entitled: “IX: Jesus falls the third time”:

He weeps with you and with you he will stay
When all your staying power has run out
You can’t go on, you go on anyway.
He stumbles just beside you when the doubt
That always haunts you, cuts you down at last
And takes away the hope that drove you on.
This is the third fall and it hurts the worst
This long descent through darkness to depression
From which there seems no rising and no will
To rise, or breathe or bear your own heart beat.
Twice you survived; this third will surely kill,
And you could almost wish for that defeat
Except that in the cold hell where you freeze
You find your God beside you on his knees.

Amen.

Sermon — October 10, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (Mark 10:17)

We haven’t owned an actual TV for a few years, so Murray will sometimes watch Daniel Tiger or Thomas the Tank Engine or Mr. Rogers’s Neighborhood on an old iPad we have, with one of those covers that folds up into a stand for itself. We’ve been doing this long enough that Murray kind of knows how it works: how to press the little button on the screen to stop or start the show and so on. And then, when the show has ended, Murray knows how to turn off the device: as the credits roll and the music plays, you lay the iPad flat, fold the cover back over the screen, and—[gesture]—give it three little pats, and the show stops. And so I’ve sometimes found Murray, on a more difficult day, maybe when I’ve said it’s time to stop and eat dinner and I’ve turned it off myself, slamming the screen over and over again in frustration; not trying to break it, you understand, but because clearly, clearly, this is the secret ingredient to turn the thing off and on: you have to bang on the screen.

Except, of course, that it’s a complete accident. The cover is one of those magnetic smart covers. The video stops playing because the iPad detects that the cover has been closed. At some point, Murray must have closed the cover and then given it a couple taps, and, then it stopped, and—ta-da!—that must be how it works! And you know what, it does work, because every time you close it and give it those three little taps, it turns right off.

Human beings are uniquely bad at understanding which of the things we do actually cause the effect that we see. Psychologists call it “over-imitation.” If you take a chimpanzee and a human child, and you show them how to get a snack out of a jar—take the jar, shake it upside down, tap the feather with a jar, and then screw off the lid—the chimp will pretty quickly figure out that you only need to screw off the lid. The human keeps doing the other, irrelevant parts much longer.

Psychologists argue about exactly why this is, but I like to think it reflects the human desire to be in control of our destinies. We want to think that our lives are the product of the choices we make, and the things that we do. We want to be able to predict the future and to act in the present accordingly, so we put extra weight on the things that seem to make a difference, and we’re cautious about letting go of those irrelevant steps in the process.

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If there’s one thing the man in the Gospel is looking for when he comes up the road, it’s control over his fate. “Good Teacher,” he says to Jesus, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (Mark 10:17) Like all of us, he’s looking for answers. But what he really wants is a guarantee. I say this for two reasons. The first is that the sentence structure is what’s called, in Greek, the “future most vivid” conditional: if you wanted to rephrase it in English, you could say, “what can I do so that I will inherit eternal life, no matter what?” He wants a kind of flowchart: “if I do this, then that will happen.” The second clue is the choice of verb. He doesn’t ask, “how can I receive eternal life?” or “how can I enter into eternal life?” He asks, “how can I inherit eternal life?” He wants to be an heir. He wants God’s will to name him as the recipient of eternal life. He wants the legal guarantee that he will get it.

For a moment, Jesus plays along. “You know the commandments,” he says. God has shown you how to work the machine. God has told you what to do. You have the law. You have the commandments. Isn’t that enough?

“Oh, but I’ve done all that!” he says. “Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.” (Mark 10:20) And Jesus, with a compassionate look in his eye, adds a commandment or two more: “Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’” (Mark 10:21) You want control over your eternal fate? Then give away all the things that give you control over your present life, all the resources that let you do what you want, when you want, that give you the security to live the life you want. And then give up even more: come, follow me wherever I go.

 And the man “was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.” (Mark 10:22) There’s one thing you lack, Jesus says: and it’s to give up everything you have.

“Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God!” (Mark 10:24) Jesus says. How hard it is to hand over control, to give up the illusion that we can control our own lives, let alone be masters of the universe. The more we have, the easier life gets; but the harder it is to give up that control.

 So “it’s easier,” Jesus says, “for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God,” (Mark 10:25) And the disciples asked, puzzled: “Then who can be saved?” (Mark 10:26) And that’s the thing, Jesus says. Nobody is able to be saved, no one has it in them; but they will be. “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.” (Mark 10:27)

 The man wants to know what he has to do to be good enough to earn his status as an heir to eternal life. And he’s not a bad guy. Assuming he’s telling the truth, which I think he is, he’s like many of us. He’s a type-A go-getter who wants to do the right thing, a generally-law-abiding citizen who’s looking for spiritual and ethical guidance. But the answer Jesus gives him is more radical than anything he’s prepared for. He’s not ready to give up everything he has to get this guarantee of eternal life.

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The irony, of course, is that if he wants eternal life, he’s going to lose it all in the end. He goes away grieving, because he has many possessions, and he can’t bear to part with them. But he can’t take them with him when he dies.

“The word of God,” writes the letter to the Hebrews, “is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.” (Hebrews 4:12-13)

We come before God without any of our armor. God slices away all the layers we build up to keep ourselves safe and secure: all the possessions we use to provide ourselves some level of security and independence; all the competence we’ve developed to feel like we’re good at something or other, like we’re making some kind of contribution to the world; all the reputation we’ve built up, all the esteem in which others hold us, all the value we draw from what they think of who we are or what we do. God cuts it away everything that separates us from God, for better or for worse, and we stand revealed as we really are.

“No one is good but God alone,” (Mark 10:18) Jesus tells the man. No one is good enough, that is; no one is good enough to deserve eternal life but God alone, and yet God freely gives it as a gift. Because the man is right about one thing: eternal life is an inheritance. And like any inheritance, it can’t be earned; it’s given to us for free because we are, as St. Paul writes, “heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.” (Romans 8:17) It’s impossible for humans, but possible for God, because it’s impossible for us rewrite God’s will, as impossible as it would be for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle; but for God, all things are possible. The man wants to know what he has to do to earn eternal life. Do I just follow the commandments? Do I give away everything that I have? But these good works are like three taps an on iPad cover that’s already been closed; we have already been given the inheritance. We just haven’t received it yet.

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Jesus closes with a final, surprising observation: that what we give away, we can receive back a hundredfold. These last verses are enigmatic, but I at least understand them as a vision of what can happen when we try to live that life of eternity here and now, when we rebuild our lives and our communities as if we were already living in the kingdom of heaven, as if we had already been separated from all that we have, and shared it freely with one another, and then received the gifts that others can give us in return. We take our houses and the fields that produce our food, and we give it to others; and we find ourselves invited into their homes, to share their food in turn. We give up our own sense of importance and identity, our own parochial concern for the people like us, our brothers and sisters and mothers, and we find ourselves surrounded by a newer and larger family that encompasses the whole community. And did you notice what’s missing? We leave behind brothers and sisters and mother and father, and we receive brothers and sisters and mother—but in this new family of God, we have only one father. In sharing what we have, we receive a hundredfold now in this age as a glimpse of what we receive in the eternal life of the age to come.

We do not need to think one minute more about what we must do to be worthy of God’s love. Jesus has done it all, and our possessions and power and prestige will be stripped away from us, one way or another, at the end. The rich man can’t take his possessions with him to the grave, nor can we. And so we face a choice: Do we hold onto the things that we have in this life? Do we stay locked away from one another, protecting what’s ours from one another and from God, and still losing all of it in the end? Or do we begin, even now, to share what we have with the world; to experience, even now, the blessings that come when we share our gifts with one another, and receive them in return? We do not need to earn God’s love or our salvation by following the law, or giving everything away. But we do have the chance to experience a taste of God’s eternal life here and now. “Let us therefore,” as Hebrews says, “approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” (Hebrews 4:16)

Sermon — October 3, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

So, first: Deep breath. We’ve made it through the hectic month of September, and fortunately the lectionary’s been pitching softballs to ease us back into church this fall. Last week we had plucking out eyes and cutting off limbs; this week we get to talk about divorce. Who knows what uplifting delights next week could bring? (Actually, I do; it’s the one about how you should go and sell all your stuff and give the money to the poor, because it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God. But we’ll get to that next week.)

Divorce is a tricky one to talk about, mostly because there’s no one experience of it. A divorce can be among the most devastating experiences of a person’s life, for one or both partners, and for some or all of their children, if they have some. A divorce can also be a life-saving experience, figuratively and sometimes literally, the final thing that frees someone from an abusive or just a toxic relationship. A divorce can be just the beginning of a much longer story of change in a person’s life; it can mark the brutal end of something, and it can mark, sometimes, the beginning of something new and good. And of course, one divorce, the end of one marriage, can be all these things, to the same person.

Some of you have met all four of my parents, so you know that this isn’t an abstract thing for me, any more than it is for many of you, who may have been divorced or remarried, or whose parents may have been divorced or remarried. It’s hard to talk about, but it’s important. Because it’s real.

Some of you have come from churches with different perspectives on divorce, so if you’re not aware, the Episcopal Church’s position is pretty clear. The first duty of a member of the clergy when a marriage is in distress, according to canon law, is “to protect and promote the physical and emotional safety of those involved and only then… to labor that the parties may be reconciled.” (Constitution and Canons I.19.1) Safety is the most important value. Then reconciliation. But we recognize that reconciliation is not always possible, and divorce and remarriage are allowed and common, with a slightly different marriage prep process from the one for a first marriage, but nothing like a process of annulment.

The reason that talking about divorce in church is hard, though, is not so much that divorce is hard, which it is. It’s not that the Church’s official policy is unclear; it’s not. It’s that what Jesus has to say about divorce in this morning’s is hard. Our compassionate Messiah tells us that remarriage is adultery, and then he has the gall to tell us we’re being hard-hearted?

I personally think it’s usually worth digging into passages like these to try to understand what’s going on, rather than just writing them off. I don’t mean to explain away what Jesus says, and I don’t mean to try to convince you to swallow a bitter pill. But I think that the more context we can give to difficult words like these, the better; the more we understand what Jesus’ words would’ve meant in the year 31, the more meaning they have might for us in 2021.

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“Is it lawful,” the Pharisees ask him—trying once again to trick him into making some kind of gaffe— “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” (Mark 10:2) They ask a question about the law, and Jesus answers by deferring to the law, and to the great lawgiver: “What did Moses command you?” (Mark 10:3) And when they answer with a summary of the law that Moses gives in Deuteronomy to regulate divorce, Jesus is disdainful. This was only necessary, he says, because of the hardness of your hearts; but before Moses allowed divorce, Adam and Eve were one flesh. “What God has joined together,” he summarizes, in a verse that’s made its way into the marriage liturgy, “let no one put asunder.” (Mark 10:9)

So first off, let’s be precise. The Pharisees are exactly right. This isn’t just an old-fashioned, gender-exclusive translation. Moses allowed a man to divorce his wife; there’s no provision in Old Testament law for a woman to divorce her husband, nor do the rabbis imagine such a thing. There’s some evidence that unusually powerful or prominent women, like members of the ruling Herodian dynasty, could sometimes divorce their husbands. There’s literally one ancient document dug up in the Judean Desert that might be read as a woman initiating a divorce. But divorce was, on the whole, a completely one-sided affair. A man could write a divorce certificate, a get, and divorce his wife, and that was it. (By the way, did anyone listen to This American Life last week?)

Now this doesn’t mean that a divorced woman would be cast destitute into the streets, to be fair. She would’ve had a dowry she had brought to the marriage, and it would return to her. Perhaps she could’ve married again. But still, it was a patriarchal society. Discussions of divorce in the centuries around Jesus can sound somewhat shocking to modern ears. One of the more infamous examples comes from Mishnah Gittin, a collection of early rabbinic teachings and laws dealing with divorce. At one point, it records three different schools of thought on the interpretation of a single verse, Deuteronomy 24:1. The verse begins, “Suppose a man enters into marriage with a woman, but she finds no favor in his eyes because he finds something objectionable about her, and so he writes her a certificate of divorce…” (And then it goes on to lay out some of the process.) It’s likely this or a related verse that Jesus and the Pharisees are thinking about when Jesus asks what Moses taught. Now, the Mishnah first lists the opinion of one school of rabbinic thought, from a few decades or so before Jesus: “The House of Shammai say, ‘A man should divorce his wife only because he has found grounds for it in unchastity, since it is said, Because he has found in her indecency in anything.’” The House of Hillel, usually the less restrictive school of thought, reply, “Even if she spoiled his dish, since it is said, Because he has found in her indecency in anything.” And a few generations later, nearly a century after Jesus’ day, the great Rabbi Akiba replies, “Even if he found someone else prettier than she, since it is said, ‘And it shall be if she find no favor in his eyes.’” (m. Git. 9:10)

So this is what political scientists call the “Overton window,” the spectrum of acceptable ideas within which Jesus was operating. A man could divorce his wife, and the debate was whether he could only do it if she was unfaithful, or if he could do it because she’d burned dinner, or even just if he saw someone more attractive whom he’d rather marry. A woman could perhaps divorce her husband, if she were a powerful aristocrat who could afford to annoy the devout, but that was about it.

But this, Jesus says, is not the way things were supposed to be.

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That is, perhaps, the only real conclusion we can draw from what Jesus says. He zooms out from this debate over the particular language of Deuteronomy 24:1, over when exactly a man could write a certificate of divorce, to make that one observation: this isn’t the way things were supposed to be. Moses has to accommodate messy realities of human lives, but Jesus wants to rewind to an earlier time. He goes back, in fact, to the Garden of Eden, to the days before that first original sin, to a time, in other words, when life wasn’t quite so messy after all. At the beginning of creation, Adam and Eve were joined together and mode “one flesh.” And there’s a lot of truth in that observation. In marriage, two people “are no longer two, but one flesh.” (Mark 10:8) Their lives are joined together. And the undoing of that bond is inevitably a messy and a painful thing, whatever millennium you’re in. It’s like being cut open and, maybe, sewn back together.

So no, Jesus says, this isn’t the way that the world is supposed to be. This isn’t the way that marriage is supposed to be. I’ve never met a couple who said in pre-martial counseling that they planned for their marriage to end in divorce. I probably wouldn’t go through with it if they did. The death of a relationship is inevitably a mess, whether you are one of the partners in it, or a child of it, or simply a friend or family member watching things fall apart.

And yet God is present in the messiest of situations. That’s not to say that we should simply endure the suffering and stay together no matter what. Not at all. What I mean is that God is able, believe it or not, to bring forth new things of beauty from the deepest places of despair. God has already descended with us into the depths of despair. God was “made lower than the angels,” Hebrews says, God “tasted death” itself (Hebrews 2:9) and brought forth life. The God who is “always more ready to hear than we to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve,” (Collect for Proper 22, BCP p. 234) can redeem and will redeem the messiest and most difficult parts of our lives, can transform and will transform even “the suffering of death” into “glory and honor.” (Hebrews 2:9)

It wasn’t supposed to be this way, and yet it is, and God is here. I don’t know who I’d be today were it not for my secondhand experience of divorce. I wouldn’t have the same values, the same priorities, the same neuroses that I do today. Have I sometimes wished that Jesus’ word were law, and there were no divorce? Sure. Am I also glad, seeing what new life can come from that death, that there is? I think so. Does that mean it was all worth it in the end? Who can do that kind of math? We can try to argue back and forth about the particulars of the law. We can try to shift it one way or the other, make it stricter or looser, protect one party or the other. But in the end, all that we have is our imperfect and messy lives, and all we can know is that while isn’t the way things were supposed to be, it’s the way that they are; and the way things are can be as beautiful as it is ugly. All I know is that “God, for whom and through whom all things exist,” (Hebrews 2:10), is “bringing” us God’s “many children to glory,” one way or another. Amen.

Sermon — September 19, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.” (James 4:8)

Over the past sixty years or so, religious life in America has been in sharp decline, by every measure. It’s true of religious identity: when asked what their religion is, fewer Americans every year answer “Catholic” or “Protestant” or “evangelical” or “Jewish,” while more and more answer “nothing in particular.” The same goes for religious affiliation: fewer and fewer Americans are formal or informal members of any particular church or synagogue. The trend is even starker for religious attendance: every year, fewer Americans attend church regularly, and the ones who do, do so less frequently. Total attendance in the Episcopal Church drops something like 25% every decade, and we’re not alone; denominations from the Catholic Church to the Southern Baptist Convention to mainline Protestants like us report a decreasing engagement with religion over time.

But this decrease in religiosity hasn’t meant an increase in atheism, in active disbelief in God. Self-identified “atheists” have remained a tiny fraction in surveys, even as the number of people whose religion is “nothing in particular” has exploded. The number of Americans who say they believe in God or pray regularly has stayed steady, even as religious life has collapsed. And in fact, Pew Research suggests that, to quote one of their headline findings, “feelings of spirituality are on the rise.” More Americans today say that they feel a deep sense of spiritual peace and wellbeing or of wonder about the universe at least once a week than did a couple decades ago. So while “religion” declines, “spirituality” is on the rise.

Of course, I have a vested interest in religiosity, so this is sad news for me. But I don’t think it’s necessarily all bad. People really are searching for something, and that’s great! They’re just not finding it in the church.

The final verse of our reading from the Epistle of James this morning almost sounds as if it’s crafted for these spiritual seekers. Do you seek “wisdom from above” that is “pure…peaceable, gentle…full of mercy and good fruits?” (3:17) “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.” (4:8)

But… how? James doesn’t tell us where to go when we’re seeking after God. James doesn’t tell us how exactly to draw near. But we’re in luck! Because Jesus does.

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus again teaches his disciples about what it is to come, about how exactly the rest of this story will go. Jesus teaches them, yet again, that it will not be a triumphant journey to take the throne in Jerusalem. Instead, he “is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” (Mark 9:31) But the disciples don’t understand, and they turn to much more pressing concerns: Which one of us is the greatest?

Jesus is disgusted. “If anyone wants to be first,” he literally says, “he will be last of all.” (Mark 9:35) Jesus has come to turn the world upside down, and the one who tries to puff himself up now will soon be deflated. And then comes the most remarkable part. “He took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, ‘Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.’” (9:36–37)

Jesus tell the disciples that he will die, and then that he will rise again. Jesus lives now, today. And this is incredible news for all of us who’re seeking after God. Jesus lives, and we can meet him face to face. But his resurrected life is not like ordinary life. He rises, and walks around among them, but only for forty days; and then he ascends into heaven.

So yes, maybe Jesus is alive. Maybe we can meet him face to face. But… where? We’re left with that same question from James: How exactly do we “draw near to God”?

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As far as I know, there are only four places where Jesus promises his disciples they can find him after he’s gone.

Let’s start with the most obvious, at least for any Catholics. At the Last Supper, Jesus tells the disciples he will be present in the Eucharist: “This is my Body,” he says; “This is my Blood.” (Mt 26:26-28; Mk 14:22-24, Lk 22:17-20, 1 Cor 11:23-25) In Holy Communion, we encounter and receive Jesus. He is present in a mysterious but real way. The bread and the wine are not, in our tradition, mere reminders of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Jesus is really present here, and we receive him here, and carry him around with us all day long. Cool.

Number two, let’s pick another church-y one. In Matthew 18, Jesus teaches his disciples about forgiveness and prayer, and then he promises them, “where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” (Matthew 18:20) This applies to a Thursday-evening Centering Prayer group or to a visit to a sick church friend, to a Vestry or committee meeting or to Sunday-morning worship. Wherever even just two or three of us gather in Jesus’ name, he is in the midst of us.

Third, Jesus gives us a promise and warning, this time in Matthew 25. On the last day, he says, the Son of Man will separate the sheep from the goats, some to eternal punishment and some to eternal reward. And when they ask him why, he’ll answer: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me… Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25:35-36, 40 NRSV) He doesn’t tell us to be kind to the hungry and thirsty and sick, because he’ll be pleased, or because it’s the right thing to do. He tells us that he is just as really present in them as he is at the altar; “this is my body” and “this is my blood” and “I was hungry, I was thirsty”; not just “a beloved child of God was sick” but “I was sick and you took care of me.”

And then, as far as I know, the last place where Jesus tells us we can meet him now comes in today’s gospel reading: in caring for children. “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.” (Mark 9:37)

Many people believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, although it’s not mandatory by any means. Many people can buy the idea that you might encounter Jesus in prayer; you may have had moments where two or three were gathered and you felt Jesus there. Many people love the Matthew 25 citation when it encourages them to care for people who are hungry, or sick, or in prison. But few, in my experience, remember that in this Gospel passage today, Jesus puts children in exactly that same group. I’ve heard Emily Garcia, one of my favorite priests and one of your former Godly Play teachers, make this point more than once. Yes! she’ll say, when someone cites Matthew 25 to prove that compassionate work for social justice is at least as important as worship in Christian life, we encounter Christ when we truly encounter people who are hungry, or sick, or in prison—or who are children! “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.” (Mark 9:37) And what a relief for anyone whose baby has ever cried all the way through Mass.

This list, it turns out, is remarkably similar to what we do in church. We come together Sunday after Sunday to receive Christ’s Body and Blood. We gather in Jesus’ name to sing and to pray, to plan and sometimes to party. We care for other people when they are hungry or they are sick. And generation after generation, we welcome children in Jesus’ name. We do our best to teach them about the faith. We smile when they accuse us of stealing people’s pajamas and put us in “ninja jail.” (Which was last week.)

We do not do these things because we are a kindly social club, and it’s a good thing to do to serve the community and look after the kids so the parents can relax. We do these things, whether we realize or not, because it is in doing them that we encounter Christ.

We may not, to borrow Pew’s turn of phrase, feel “a deep sense of spiritual wellbeing” every time we meet on Zoom. We may not feel “a deep sense of wonder at the universe” every time we receive communion. We may not feel much peace as our children scream and run around upstairs.

But Jesus Christ is there.

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I have no issue with people’s quest for their own spiritual truth, as such. But I worry that it sometimes leads us away from one another and into ourselves. It sometimes leads us to pursue not the presence of God but our own self-improvement or our own feeling of wellbeing. It sometimes leads us away from what James calls “works…done with gentleness born of wisdom” (James 3:13) and towards, well… CrossFit. No offense.

This morning begins our official “program year,” such as it is. We’re back to a full schedule of activities and meetings for kids and adults alike. And I want stick up for organized religion as we start this year, young fogey that I am. Our life together is hard. It’s not as peaceful or as satisfying as it would be to just stay home and pray, or do yoga, or catch up on sleep. But it’s in the community gathered, not just in the quiet moments alone, that Jesus comes to us. It’s when we break bread together. It’s when we gather in Jesus’ name. It’s when we care for one another, poor and hungry and children alike.

Jesus has told us where to find him; may he give us the grace to see him there. May he “grant us,” in the words of the opening collect today, “not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure.” Amen.

Sermon — September 14, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a sixteenth-century Spanish conquistador; an adventurer, a conqueror, a colonizer. You’ve struck out to make your fortune, and you make landfall somewhere in the area that we now call the Yucatán Peninsula, that part of Mexico that juts out into the Caribbean. (Most Americans know it best for places like Cozumel and Cancún.) When you land on the beach, you encounter some of the local folks, and you draw yourself up with your full European dignity and you ask them, in your most imperious tone, “¿Cómo se llama este lugar?” “What is this place called?” And they answer you, and you listen carefully to what they say, and that night, you record in the ship’s log: “Today we arrived in Yucatán.”

There’s just one problem, though. Yucatán was not this place’s name. It’s not what the local Maya people called it, at least. It wasn’t the name they would’ve given you. So for at least four hundred years historians have tried to figure out what exactly the Maya said that the Spaniards wrote down as “Yucatán,” and for four hundred years, one theory has reigned supreme: “Yucatán” was not the name of the place. It was not the name of any place. It was, in fact, the last few syllables of a simple but important phrase in Mayan, the only reasonable response when someone pulled their boat up onto your beach and started interrogating you in a language from across the sea: “I don’t understand you.”

I love this story, not just because I’m a language nerd who loves to see the conquistadores looking ridiculous, but because to me it sums up something that happens all the time in conversation, even when we speak the same language. We listen to each other, and we think we get the point. We become so confident that we know what’s going on in a conversation that we stop listening, stop trying to understand. And then it turns out we’re completely wrong.

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Our readings this morning are full of communication breakdowns of various kinds. The Book of Proverbs starts with a vision of a one-sided conversation between Wisdom and the world. The personified Wisdom of God cries out in the street (1:20), and no one listens. She pours out her thoughts (1:23), but the listeners ignore them. (1:25) She has the most important things to say that could be heard, and it’s not that the people passing by aren’t smart enough to understand; it’s that they don’t care enough to stop and listen.

The epistle introduces another problem with our speech. James points out how easily we lose control of the things we say. The tongue’s small size masks its “great exploits.” “The tongue is a fire” that can set a “great forest” ablaze. (James 3:5-6) A careless word can bring our whole world crashing down. So sometimes it’s better just to keep your mouth shut. “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, James says—and here I think he’s mostly talking about preachers, but…welcome back to school—“for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. For all of us make many mistakes.” (James 3:1-2) Amen, says the preacher.

Psalm 19 seems to have a more positive take. It begins with the beautiful image of a celestial conversation between the day and the night, as “one day tells its tale to another.” (Psalm 19:2) The psalm exults in the beauty of the word of God, which is “sweeter far than honey, than honey in the comb.” (19:10) Yet even here, communication is flawed. We can’t fully understand what God is saying. “The law of the Lord” may be “perfect and revive the soul.” (19:7) “The command of the Lord” may be “clear and give light to the eyes.” (19:8) And yet all the divine enlightenment cannot reveal our own flaws to us. So the psalmist asks, “Who can tell how often he offends?” as if even that perfect law weren’t enough to teach us right and wrong. (19:11-12) At least the psalmist recognizes the imperfection, and wards it off with a simple prayer: “Above all, keep your servant from presumptuous sins.” (19:13)

“Keep your servant from presumptuous sins.” Words St. Peter would do well to heed.

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I sometimes feel bad for picking on St. Peter, but I don’t feel that bad. Again and again, throughout the gospels, Peter gets so close and then fails, once more. He just can’t stop getting in his own way.

Peter starts off well in our Gospel story today. Jesus asks who the disciples say that he is. “You are the Messiah,” Peter replies. (Mark 8:29) Plain and simple. Some people say that he’s John the Baptist, risen from the dead; or he’s Elijah, returning to herald in the last days; or one of the prophets, sent by God bearing a divine message. But Peter knows better. “You are the Messiah.” You are the anointed one, the king who will deliver us, the one who will finally throw out the Romans and lead the people to glory, or at least to independence. And this moment is huge, It’s the first time the disciples recognize who Jesus is. It’s so important it gets its own feast day. “The Confession of Saint Peter the Apostle,” January 18. The day on which Peter finally gets it right.

Well, sort of. Because Jesus goes on to explain what he is going to do: not to conquer, and be crowned king, and to rule his people in glory; but to suffer, and to be rejected, and to die—and then to rise. “And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.” (8:32) Peter is outraged. He’s scandalized. He’s so convinced that Jesus is wrong about the nature of his own mission that he takes him aside and scolds him. I think of Peter like that Spanish soldier standing on the shore. He’s convinced that he understands what he’s heard. And he’s completely wrong.

And Jesus cuts him off. “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” (Mark 8:33) You’re imagining what it would look like for a human being to come and be made king; not what it looks like when God is becoming king. The wisdom of David and Solomon is the wisdom of the great conqueror, who rules with power and might. But the wisdom of God is foolishness, in human eyes.

Because God is not just the God of glory, but the God of the cross. God is not just the God of victory, but the God of defeat. God is not just God when we look at a beautiful sunset, when we see one day telling tales to another in the sky, when we experience the many things in life that are “sweeter far than honey, than honey in the comb.” (19:10) God is also God in the midst of the wind and the storm, at the very worst moments of our lives. And God does not just cheerlead the way victory and success; God walks with us in suffering and defeat. In fact, God leads the way.

“If any want to become my followers,” Jesus says, “let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” (Mark 8:34) This is some grim advice. Jesus never says it will be easy to be a human in this world, or to be a Christian. In fact, he says it will be hard.

But it will never end there.

The Son of Man must suffer, and be rejected, and die, Jesus tells the disciples; and after three days, rise again. The cross is not the end of the story. It’s the worst chapter by far. It will be painful beyond imagining. But it’s not the end. In fact, in the story of what it really means to say with Peter that “Jesus is the Messiah,” Jesus’ suffering and death and even Jesus’ resurrection are only the beginning.

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I will be the first to admit I’ve felt discouraged, these past few weeks. I had so hoped and prayed that this summer we could leave COVID behind. I’d looked forward to relaunching our life as a church this year, a few years older, maybe a little wiser, but safer, without the uncertainty and anxiety that have marked the past few years. And as I came back from vacation to face another year of church with mask mandates coming from the mayor and the bishops, with daily case counts higher in Boston than they were this time last year, I felt some amount of despair.

And yet this is not last year. Our kids are back in school, strange as it is. Our adults have free and easy access to vaccines, that make things much less dangerous than they were. We are not fifteen people gathered in the Garden outside for Morning Prayer, but—well, a few dozen more, back in church to share the Eucharist together, as we’ve done more or less safely for nearly six months now. We have been walking the way of the cross. We have been walking the way of suffering and death, and yet there have been many signs of hope along the way, because the way of the cross is also always the path towards the resurrection.

This is not just a “pie in the sky” promise that things will be better in the afterlife, that we will live in misery and suffer and die and then receive our reward. The resurrection is an eternal truth, which means it exists outside of space and time, which means we can taste it sometimes here and now, wherever heaven breaks through onto the earth. We will feast joyfully with God and one another in heaven; but we get a foretaste of that communion in this little heavenly banquet every Sunday. We will sing with the choirs of angels in glory; but today, we sing together pretty well. We will gaze one day upon the loving face of God, and today we can catch a glimpse of that in prayer. We will live in unity and love with one another, and we do that day after day, at home, and at church, and wherever we go.

We do not need to have Peter’s conquering king. We do not need to reach the perfect end. We simply need to walk together on the earth where Jesus walked, and look for the signs of resurrection along the way. For even a little glimpse of that eternal life is “more to be desired…than gold, more than much fine gold.” Even a little taste of heaven on earth is “sweeter far than honey, than honey in the comb.” (Psalm 19:10)