Sermon — July 4, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

(Due to an issue with our sound system, there’s no audio recording of this week’s sermon. You can find the text below.)

Not all Episcopalians are tea-drinking, Masterpiece-Theatre­-watching Anglophiles obsessed with The Crown, but—let’s be honest, some of us are. Some combination of the Episcopal Church’s old upper-crust New England identity and our ongoing relationship with the Church of England as part of the Anglican Communion means that the Episcopal Church has its fair share of people who are fond of Merry Old England, to such an extent that Old North Church, of all places, held a service a couple weeks ago celebrating the Queen’s 95^th birthday! (And we love them for it.)

Well, this was as true on July 4, 1776 as July 4, 2021. We take the national holiday for granted, but Episcopalians on that first Independence Day were not quite sure. The majority of loyalists to the Crown, after all, were Episcopalians; although, to be fair, the majority of Episcopalians were not loyalists, and in fact more than half of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were members of the Episcopal Church—or rather, at that point, members of the Church of England. In 1776, after all, there was no Episcopal Church, just the parishes of the Church of England in the colonies, and this was part of the dilemma. From its founding, the Church of England had been defined by its commitment to “royal supremacy,” the notion that the supreme religious authority in England, second only to Christ, was not the Pope in Rome, or even the Archbishop of Canterbury, but the King or Queen.

So there was a certain cognitive dissonance for those early Episcopalian patriots. It takes a certain mental agility to believe that the King George III is both the Supreme Governor of the church of which you’re a member, and also, as the Declaration of Independence puts it, “A Prince whose character is…marked by every act which may define a Tyrant.” (Although to be fair this is the way many people feel about their church leadership.)

The Episcopal Church’s somewhat ambivalent relationship to Independence Day has continued over time. We include it in our official church calendar as a Holy Day, on par with Ash Wednesday or Good Friday, with the feast days of St. Mary or the apostles. (BCP p. 17) But we’re not actually observing it today, because in our calendar we almost never displace a Sunday’s lessons and prayers with a holy day, unless it’s on the level of Christmas or Epiphany; in fact, we transfer these holy days to the Monday. So our lessons today are the ones for the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost, not for Independence Day, which the Church observes tomorrow, transferred like the federal holiday, instead. The logic is telling: Holy Days are feasts celebrating a particular saint or a national day, but every Sunday is a feast of our Lord Jesus, and he always outranks them.

I enjoy all this trivia, of course, but there’s a serious point. This fundamental tension between royal authority and spiritual authority, between national identity and Christian identity, between our allegiance to the various kingdoms and republics in which we live on earth and our allegiance to the one kingdom of God, is not just a quirk of Episcopal Church history or of the prayer book calendar. It’s one of the key threads of the whole story of the Bible.

Our first reading this morning is near the peak of the narrative arc of the whole Old Testament. King David is the paradigmatic king, the King Arthur or George Washington of his own people. But kingship is a fairly new institution for the people. In the old days, the Israelites hadn’t had any kind of king; they were just a clan led by a series of father figures: Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob. In Egypt, they lived for four hundred years under the Pharaohs, but when they finally gained their independence, it was under the leadership of Moses: a prophet, not a king. And when, having finally entered the promised land, they found themselves oppressed and attacked yet again by the Philistines, God raised up judges, to lead them in battle in times of war and to settle their disputes in times of peace. But there was still no king, because God was the one true shepherd of the people.

Still, God is not exactly the most hands-on political leader, so the people begged the great prophet and judge Samuel for a king. (You may remember this story from way back in the beginning of June.) We want “a king to govern us, like other nations,” they say. (1 Samuel 8:5) Samuel is distraught, but God tells him: “They have not rejected you, they have rejected me from being king over them.” (1 Sam. 8:7) Samuel warns them that a king will not be good for them. He’ll draft their sons into his army, and their daughters to be his servants; he’ll take their harvest and use it to feed his court. But the people are unconvinced, and God and Samuel give in, and the people choose Saul to become their king.

But God has another plan in mind. God immediately sends Samuel to anoint instead the young boy David. The story follows David as he defeats the giant Goliath, joins Saul’s court, and befriends his son Jonathan; and likewise as Saul gradually goes mad with jealousy of this young warrior, and tries to kill him, leading ultimately to a civil war in which Saul is killed and David rises to the throne.

David is a great king; after all, as our reading says, “the Lord, the God of hosts, [is] with him!” (2 Sam. 5:10) But there are already cracks in the precarious structure of his kingdom. Within a generation it will split in two, and over the following centuries each of the two kingdoms will decline and collapse as they cycle through increasingly corrupt kings, with only occasional good ones along the way. Even over the course of David’s own decades on the throne, the decline begins; I don’t want to spoil it for you, but over the coming weeks we’ll hear more and more stories of the many ways in which even this great king is not exactly a good man.

But for now, this morning, we celebrate David’s reign. For “all the tribes of Israel” have come to him. The war is over, the people want to reunited, and, God willing and the people consenting, it is David “who shall be shepherd of [God’s] people Israel.” (2 Sam. 5:1-2)

The appointed reading then skips three verses. (I put them back in this morning to make a point.) The verses appointed skip from “he reigned over all Israel and Judah thirty-three years” down to “David occupied the stronghold, and named it the city of David.” (2 Sam. 5:5 to 5:9) In other words, they skip right over the war crimes, the part of the story where David attacks disabled civilians in cruel and literal retribution for a boast. “Even the blind and the lame could beat David,” the Jebusites say—and so he instructs his soldier to attack them first. In moments like this, the Bible doesn’t tell us stories of cruelty to say that cruelty is good. It tells them, I think, to say that even the best of our human political leaders—even the King Davids among us—easily slide from bravery into cruelty, that “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” as the saying goes. And indeed, the institution of kingship—the rejection of God as king and God’s replacement with a series of human kings—will lead the people of Israel into disaster.

But as we read the stories of King David and King Solomon this summer and into the fall, we’ll also be reading alongside them the stories of a very different kind of king. For Christians, David is what’s sometimes called a “type” of Jesus, a kind of foreshadowing of who Jesus in turn will be. Jesus, like David, begins to reign at thirty years of age; but he’ll live only one year more, not forty. Jesus, like David, emerges from relative obscurity among the people; but where the tribes of Israel will come to David to anoint him, the people of Jesus’ own neighborhood will “take offense at him,” for after all, “prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown.” (Mark 6:3-4)

And most importantly, while David will be a king just as the people had asked—a king “like other nations,” a brave warrior and a savvy general, God’s predictions will be right. David will turn his violence against the people. He’ll exploit them for his own sordid gain. Having rejected God as king and yearned for the kinds of kings that other nations have, the people will get their wish, and it will be their undoing.

But Jesus is another kind of king. Jesus will decline to wage a revolutionary war. Jesus will refuse to take up arms, even to defend his own life. He’ll inspire Paul to “boast of [his] weaknesses,” (2 Corinthians 12:5) to claim to be “content in weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak,” Paul writes enigmatically, “then I am strong.” (12:10) And why? Because this is the message Paul receives when caught up in a mystical experience: “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” (12:9) So “I will boast all the more gladly,” Paul says, “of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me.” (12:9)

“Power is made perfect in weakness.” There’s no power more perfect than Jesus’ power, which breaks the bonds of death itself. And yet there’s no king who’s ever been weaker than Christ the king, abandoned on the Cross. So you can understand why I said that there can be a slight tension between the governments of the world and the kingdom of God. The very source of Christ’s strength is weakness in the eyes of the world, and it’s in following this gentle king that we find true greatness.

There’s a vigorous debate in our country right now over the right way to frame American history. The movement arising from George Floyd’s murder has convinced some that it’s more important than ever to teach about the long history of racism in America. Others take offense at the notion that America is somehow fundamentally flawed. Many American Christians have come down on this latter side. But I wonder whether they’re missing the point. Every person, every leader, every human organization is fundamentally flawed. That’s just the Christian doctrine of sin. Even King David, the greatest king of God’s own chosen people, was an imperfect man. America, too, will always be imperfect, because America is not the kingdom of God.

So happy Fourth of July! Enjoy it. There’s much to celebrate about our nation’s life, especially this summer. And there’s much work still to be done. But our nation’s greatness and strength are not the measure of our value; nor is its goodness, nor even our own individual greatness or strength or goodness—but Christ’s weakness. Our nation is good to the extent that it helps us, as our collect puts it, “keep all [God’s] commandments by loving [God] and our neighbor.” But just as this Sunday Feast of our Lord outranks the Holy Day of the 4^th of July, in the end the most central part of our identity comes from the weakness and goodness of Christ, not from the strength or goodness of these United States. For “[his] grace is sufficient for [us],” and his “power is made perfect in weakness.” Amen.

Sermon — June 27, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

So I spent last week, as you may know, with my family in southern Maine. On Sunday morning, I did something I don’t usually do when I’m on vacation. I got up early and went to church. My mom had always wanted to visit this little outdoor chapel on the water down the road in Kennebunkport, and it was their reopening day for the season, so we decided to go. On our way there, my stepfather wondered if the Bushes would be there. He’d driven by their summer home on Walker’s Point the day before and seen the tell-tale signs of a presidential presence: security at the gate, a Secret Service boat in the harbor, and the American flag flying over the compound. And sure enough, as we roll into the driveway of the church we see two black SUVs. As we find seats, we note two fit men sitting in the second pew with little earpieces. Which means that the short grey hair and familiar ears in the first pew belong to none other than President George W. Bush, right next to one of the two communion stations.

Now, remember that I’m a little out of practice with receiving communion. And due to some combination of my clumsiness, and the light ocean breeze, and the fact that I’m a little flustered because I’m receiving communion standing not more than two feet from George W. Bush’s face—the priest places the wafer in my hands, and as I lift it to my mouth, it somehow flies out and lands in the grass at the former president’s feet, where, with my honed priestly reflexes, I immediately kneel down, grab the wafer, pop it into my mouth, cross myself, and walk away as the family laughs.

Of course, I’m laughing about it now too, but I immediately felt, as many people would, that hot and heart-racing feeling of shame. I can’t believe I just did that. It’s exactly the kind of thing that we feel when we violate one of our culture’s spoken or unspoken purity codes—in other words, when we accidentally let something holy brush up against something dirty. In my case, literally.

In her classic work Purity and Danger, the anthropologist Mary Douglas suggests that this is exactly the function of the purity codes that appear in cultures around the world: to separate things that are holy from things that are impure. We create definitions for who or what is “impure” and what is “holy,” for what counts as a sacred person or place and what can make it dirty; and then we create systems to keep these things apart. These don’t have to be particularly religious in nature. Imagine, for example, the average American’s response to someone who casually wipes his mustardy hot-dog hands on the American flag at a 4^th of July parade. Visceral disgust, perhaps even anger. The flag is sacred; mustardy hands are dirty.

For us, of course, the “danger” of the title “Purity and Danger” is a little vague. After all, what do we think would actually happen if that dirty mustard touches the sacred flag? Lady Liberty won’t suddenly smite us for our disrespect. But in other times and places, it’s been clear. If unclean things were brought into the ancient gods’ holy places, people thought, they would become angry. At worst, they might strike back—or even flee. The prophet Ezekiel, for example, envisions priests performing impure sacrifices in the Temple in Jerusalem, (Ezekiel 8) defiling the holy place to such an extent that the Holy One himself is forced out. Unable to coexist with such impurity in the same place, almost magnetically repelled, God flees away in a fantastic chariot. (Ezekiel 10) And this is not some kind of bizarre prediction of the future. It’s Ezekiel’s explanation for the people’s current predicament of exile and suffering. The land became so impure that God was forced to leave, and left the people without a protector.

I said a few weeks ago that much of Mark is about struggles between Jesus and demons, but maybe I should have been more precise: Mark calls them “unclean spirits” just as often as he calls them “demons.” If you read carefully, the gospel takes on the tone of a struggle between “the Holy One of God” and “the Holy Spirit” and the “unclean spirits”—between the holy and the impure. While the words “impure” or “unclean” don’t appear in today’s gospel passage, people have often used this framework of holiness and impurity to try to understand what’s going on.

Both the unnamed woman in this story and the unnamed girl, after all, would have been in states of ritual impurity when they came into contact with Jesus. A woman experiencing this kind of irregular bleeding would be ritually impure in a manner laid down in Leviticus, as would anyone who touched her, and Leviticus describes the process for removing that impurity. (Lev. 15:19ff.) Likewise, touching a dead body conveys ritual impurity, and the book of Numbers explains how to cleanse yourself from that. (Numbers 19:11ff.)

Now there’s always a danger, at this point, of offering interpretations that can be anti-Jewish in tone, so it’s important to be careful. Impurity is not necessarily bad. There’s nothing wrong with being in a state of ritual impurity, any more than it’s wrong to get mustard on your hands while eating, as long as you don’t come into contact with what’s holy. The most ordinary cycles of life and the most extraordinary moments of birth and death all convey ritual impurity, and yet they are good, even divinely commanded. God tells the people to be fruitful and multiply, to care for the sick and the bury the dead. In village life, away from the holy place of the Temple, impurity was not such a big deal.

The woman’s problem, after all, is not that she’s cast out from society. It’s not that the doctors refuse to treat her because she’s impure. It’s that they’ve been all too willing to take her money without having a cure, and she’s suffered much and paid much to no avail! (Mark 5:26) Likewise, the young girl’s body isn’t avoided for fear of contamination. The room is so packed with mourners that Jesus sends them out to have some peace. (Mark 5:38) The problem is not that they’re in a state of impurity, but that they’re really suffering; perhaps this is why Mark doesn’t even use the word “impure” here.

Still, Mark has written a whole gospel about the struggle between “the Holy One of God” and “the unclean spirits,” (Mark 1:24) and now this holy one comes into the presence of two people who are, according to the culture within which they and Jesus live, unclean. There must be something here.

I think there is. Remember Ezekiel’s vision, in which the impure Temple drove out the holy God. Here, it’s the other way around. The Holy One comes into contact with that which is ritually unclean, and he is not driven out—he heals them. Now, we don’t live in a culture with this kind of purity code, so I hope you’ll excuse me making it a bit metaphorical. But we do live in a world in which we sometimes break one expectation or norm or another, in which our emotional responses of shame and anger and disgust are triggered, and Jesus remains. We worry and worry that we’re not good enough, that “what we have done and what we have left undone” has rendered us so imperfect as to drive God away. But the very opposite is true. God comes to us, amid all our “impurity,” amid all our brokenness and imperfection, amid all our unknown mistakes and all our known regrets. God comes to us, and there’s nothing we can do to drive her away. God is not disgusted with us or angry with us; God is here with us.

And more importantly still, God heals us. God really heals us. The power of the story is not that Jesus challenges purity codes; it’s that he changes people’s lives. He doesn’t just proclaim the woman cleansed; he stops the bleeding. He doesn’t just dismiss the idea that the girl’s body is impure as a silly superstition; he raises her to new life. God doesn’t just forgive us for our shame and our mistakes; God really heals our souls and our wills, making them holy, so that we may—one day!—live lives that more closely follow God’s holy way of love.

But—and here’s the catch—God does it on God’s own mysterious time. This story, you probably noticed, is a sandwich, with Jairus’s daughter as the bread and the woman as the filling. Jairus comes to Jesus with his daughter at the brink of death. (Mark 5:23) But Jesus doesn’t do what you would think. He doesn’t drop everything and come running. He begins to go with him, but then he stops and turns. “Who touched my cloak?” (5:30) And then he waits, and he listens. He listens to the woman long enough to hear “the whole truth,” (5:33) long enough to hear her twelve-year story of pain, for so long that by the time he’s finally headed on his way to the emergency sick visit—the girl is gone.

Is Jesus rude? Is he easily distracted? Is he trying to show off, intentionally upping the stakes of the miracle he’s about to perform? Maybe. But I think more than anything, this captures the paradoxical truth of Christian life: we believe that Jesus heals us, yet we suffer. We believe that Jesus saves us from death, and yet we die. We stand at the grave and proclaim the “sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life” even as “we commit” our loved one’s “body to the ground.” (BCP p. 501) No wonder they laughed at Jesus. (Mark 5:40)

But that’s what God chose to do in Christ: to turn things upside down. To take our intuition that holiness needs to live in great purity and dive into the midst of our messy lives instead. To take all the dropped communion wafers of our lives and turn them into the incarnate Body of Christ. To take our prayers for healing now and give us resurrection in the end, and to do it all on God’s own eternal time, while our souls wait “for the Lord,” as the Psalmist writes, “more than watchmen for the morning; more than watchmen for the morning.” (Psalm 130:5)

Sermon — May 30, 2021 (Trinity Sunday)

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

I sometimes think that what we want out of religion is Jesus, but what we get is the Holy Spirit.

We want the incarnate God who we can see, and touch, and hear. We get the odorless, colorless wind that gently blows through the world. We want the teacher who speaks to us face to face, who tells stories and gives commandments, however enigmatic or difficult they may be. We get the “Spirit of Truth” who mysteriously guides our consciences and conversations with a “still, small voice.” (1 Kings 19:12) We want the healer who will cure us, the shepherd who will guide us, the politician we can finally trust enough to follow wherever he leads. We get the “wind” who “blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” (John 3:8)

We want the flesh-and-blood certainty of Jesus. We get the wispy wisdom of the Holy Spirit.

It’s ironic that for all our talk of the Incarnation, the incarnate God isn’t really what we Christians have experienced for the last two thousand years. Our two most holy days are Christmas and Easter, but it’s not the Incarnate God of Christmas, born into the world in human flesh, whom we encounter week by week. Nor is it the Risen God of Easter, walking through walls but embodied all the same, emphatically not a ghost but there, in the flesh. The God we get to know instead is the God of the long “Season after Pentecost,” the aptly-titled “Ordinary Time” through which we trudge as we count the passing hours and days and weeks, the unseen Spirit whom we can sometimes feel in prayer but never quite grasp or hold onto.

God’s Spirit blows, Jesus says, wherever it wishes. And as much as we might like to pin her down, the Holy Spirit is in fact as impossible to control or predict as the wind. This can be an unsatisfying God. Sometimes we crave something a little more substantial. But I want to suggest to you this Trinity Sunday the Holy Spirit, the poor Third Person of the Trinity isn’t a lackluster replacement for the Second Person, Jesus. I think it’s the case that what we want is Jesus; but what we need is the Holy Spirit.

There’s a book by the psychologist Alison Gopnik called The Gardener and the Carpenter. The title’s a metaphor for two different ways we look at learning and growth. Gardening and carpentry, after all, are two very different processes. The carpenter begins with a product in mind: a chair, or a table; in fact, a particular design for a chair or table. The craftsman’s skill is in how precisely and elegantly he can take that design from his own mind and create it from a few pieces of wood. The gardener, on the other hand, works with living, growing creatures. She can’t force her flowers or vegetables to grow in precisely the way she plans. But she knows that if she can provide just the right balance of light and water, just the right kind of soil, just the right amount of protection from rabbits and bugs, they’ll grow on their own—and grow into shapes and configurations she never could have imagined.

So are we carpenters or gardeners? do we begin with a pre-conceived notion of the way things ought to be, and chisel and cut them and shape them until they fit our plan? Or do we try to create a garden, a healthy environment within which things can grow and thrive? Gopnik is writing about raising children, but we can ask her questions about any part of our lives.

Do we start with a vision of the way we want our child to be when they’re adults, and focus on how to get them there? Or do we try to create a garden for them to grow in whatever direction they grow? When we start a new ministry or plan a special event, do we begin with an idea of the way it ought to be and try to figure out how to execute the plan, or do we begin with an idea of who ought to be there, and risk our initial vision disappearing as things change? In our various professions and vocations, do we start with an idea of where we’d like to be in five or ten years and pursue it, or do we start with what we love about where we are now, and follow the best parts of it wherever they lead?

The point is not that gardening is better than carpentry, that the goal-oriented carpenter is somehow inferior to the more free-spirited gardener. The point is that they work with different kinds of materials. A pile of lumber, no matter how well-nurtured, will never grow its way into a chair; nor can a gardener know exactly what that year’s mix of rain and sun and seeds will bring. A carpenter is an expert at shaping inanimate objects according to her own will and plan. A gardener excels in supporting animate objects as they grow according to some unknown internal plan.

It would be a bit too cheesy, at this point in the sermon, to note that Jesus was a carpenter. I said that we want Jesus, and we need the Holy Spirit; we want the hands-on teacher who gives us easy answers and tangible results, but we get the invisible breeze who gently guides us on our way. But this isn’t to say that Jesus is a carpenter and the Spirit is a gardener, as if they were in some kind of struggle for our souls. No, the point is that God is a gardener, and you are the garden; that, as in Gopnik’s original use of the image, God is a parent, and you are a child, and it’s God’s job, at a point, to step back and let you grow.

“For all who are led by the Spirit of God,” Paul writes, “are children of God.” (Romans 8:14) “You have received a spirit of adoption,” (8:15) and become “heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ,” (8:17) and this is what it means, in our gospel’s words, to be “born again” or “born from above”; not to adopt a particular political or religious identity, but to be born of the Spirit who blows wherever she chooses. (John 3:3, 5, 8) At our baptism, God adopts us God’s own children, destined to grow into the shape of Christ, to grow to be more like Christ, as the Holy Spirit continually guides us in cooperation with our own spirits. And this is relationship we have with God is more like gardening than carpentry.

God plants in us a seed with the stories of Jesus’ human deeds on earth, and then God nurtures the billion different ways in which we respond in love. God’s Holy Spirit tends and waters our spirits as they grow. And time and again, God brings us by the Holy Spirit into the light of Christ in which our souls find their nourishment. The Holy Spirit doesn’t walk among us, or talk to us, or heal us like Jesus did. But the Holy Spirit guides us as we read the Bible and makes the living Word come alive for us again. The Holy Spirit draws us into Christ’s presence in the sacraments and in prayer. The Holy Spirit lays out for us innumerable ways in which to heal one another and the world, and empowers us to carry them out. Like any good parent, God doesn’t try to force us into the shape God wants us to be. God gives us what we need to learn and grow, and a few nudges in the right direction along the way. In the Holy Spirit, God remains present throughout our lives but not in the most obvious way. And then God brings us, at the last, face to face with the “one and eternal glory” of the Trinity; still God’s children, but fully grown, “heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.” (Romans 8:17)

So if you ever find it frustrating that God won’t speak more clearly in your life, that God won’t intervene more actively in the world, remember that Joseph may have been a carpenter, but God is not. The “spirit of adoption” that “[bears] witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (8:16) is the same flighty spirit that “blows where it chooses,” and that that’s no mistake. Because God has given us all that we need to grow up, to grow into our full stature as joint heirs with Christ—and God has given us the space we need to do it. Amen.

Sermon — May 23, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Years ago, when he was governor, Deval Patrick went to a town hall meeting in Lynn. A man stood up, and introduced the group he was with, and said he was speaking on behalf of the community of Iraqi refugees living in the area. Ahlan wa-sahlan! Governor Patrick said. “Welcome! Hello!” And his staffer, and the host of the town meeting, and the Iraqi refugees all stared at him for a second, and then the man speaking smiled and said to him, Ahlan bik! “Hello to you.” Nobody in the room knew that Governor Patrick had spent the better part of a year wandering around the Arabic-speaking half of Sudan after his Peace Corps position was canceled. It’s remarkable the kind of connection it can make to speak even just a few words in a person’s native tongue. (Unless it’s French. Never try to speak French to the French.)

But of course, language can just as easily divides us from one another as unite us. I’ll never forget the moment when Alice and I stepped into a sandwich shop in a small town outside Venice, heavily jet-lagged and—in Alice’s case—about five months pregnant, to be confronted with a glass case of unidentifiable sandwiches and a long menu in Italian only. “Excuse me,” I said with my terrible guide-book Italian, “do you speak English?” An apologetic shrug. “Spagnolo? Francese?” No. Clearly not a tourist sandwich shop. Unable to order lunch and on the verge of awkwardly walking out, we were suddenly rescued by a local man who was home for the week visiting his brother from his current home twenty minutes away from ours in Connecticut, who graciously translated the whole menu.

For all my love of language, I have to admit that even if we speak the same language, words just as often fail to communicate what we mean as they succeed. Some of you have been or are married. Some of you have worked for a boss or as part of a team. All of you, I know, have lived in the United States. And so you have firsthand experience of how easily communication can break down. We try again and again to express ourselves honestly and clearly, and it’s only rarely that we really feel heard and understood. As misunderstandings and miscommunications pile up, it can come to seem that we’re not even speaking the same language.

The Bible, of course, has a story to tell about why we can’t properly communicate with one another: “The Tower of Babel.” (Genesis 11) It’s been a few dozen generations since Noah and his family have emerged from the ark, and their descendants are still one big happy family. They have, the Bible says, “one language and the same words.” (Gen. 11:1) And they decide to build themselves a city, with a tower that stretches all the way up to heaven; so that, presumably, they might make themselves like gods. Like the gods in any ancient story about human pride, God undermines their project, “confus[ing] their language…so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” (Gen. 11:7) The one language of this one family splinters into the many languages of many peoples and, unable to communicate, they give up on their project and spread out throughout the world, leaving heaven safe from competition. God stops trying to work with all of humanity at once and chooses one people, the family of Abraham, through whom God will act in the world.

So it’s appropriate that on Pentecost, at the very moment when God’s kingdom begins to expand from the people of Israel to all the nations of the world, that God undoes the curse of Babel, at least for a moment. The two stories are mirror images. Humanity united tried to build itself a tower up to God, so God scattered them throughout the world and mixed up their languages. Now God is going to gather the people who have been scattered and to reunite them into one people of God, so God comes down among them and gives them the ability to speak to and understand one another again.

This is the miracle of Pentecost. The wind and the fire are impressive. But the point is the gift of language: the gift given to the disciples, on the one hand, to “speak in other languages,” (Acts 2:4) and to the crowd, on the other, to “hear, each of us, in our own native language,” (Acts 2:7) what the disciples are saying.

Some might want to “demythologize” these stories, seeing them as myths told to explain something about the way the world is. So Babel is just a story told to explain why people speak different languages. Pentecost is just a story told to explain how the gospel spreads from the small band of Jewish disciples in Jerusalem to Jews and Gentiles throughout the known world. But even if Pentecost were made up to explain the power of the early Christian message, it would be impressive. We’re talking about the message spreading to “Parthians, Medes, Elamites,” (over in Iran), “residents of Mesopotamia,” (that’s Iraq) “Cappadocia, Pontus, and Asia…Phyrgia and Pamphylia” (now all in Turkey), Egypt and Libya, Crete and Arabia, and even to the imperial city of Rome. And all within a few short years.

I like to believe this story of Pentecost. Maybe you have doubts. But without a doubt, the Holy Spirit’s power to help us speak is not a myth. It’s a gift. And it’s a gift we need, badly.

It starts with prayer. Our imperfect ability to speak and to understand applies to our relationship with God as much as our relationships with one another. It’s hard to pray! Those of us who are Episcopalians, used to the formal cadences of our liturgy, sometimes find it intimidating to pray in our own words. Even if that’s not the case, we sometimes just don’t know how to put our prayers into words, or even what we need to pray for. “We do not know how to pray as we ought,” Paul writes. (Romans 8:26) “But,” he continues, “that very Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.” (8:26) It’s the wisdom of the title of Anne Lamott’s wonderful little book Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers. We do not need to have the words to pray, we do not even need to know exactly what we’re praying for, we only need to want to pray and the Holy Spirit will pray for us in words that are beyond human words, because while even our most beautiful prayers can’t come close to building that tower all the way up to heaven, the “God who searches our hearts” has come down among us to hear those prayers. (8:27)

And it doesn’t stop there. Because the story of Pentecost isn’t a story of private prayer. It’s a story of evangelism, of people publicly sharing the good news of the great deeds that God has done for them, of being given the power to express them in terms that other people can understand, and of being given the gift of hearing them in a way that makes sense.

What great deeds has God done for you? If you are here right now listening to this, I guarantee you have a story to tell. God must have done something in your life, the Holy Spirit must have moved somehow in your heart, for you to be here this morning, sitting on Zoom or inside with a mask on, instead of enjoying yet another amazing spring day. It’s been fifteen months. You’re not here out of habit any more.

And this is all evangelism is. We don’t tell people that they’re going to burn. We don’t try to convince them that what we believe is true. We speak, as best we can, “about God’s deeds of power,” (Acts 2:11) about the things that God has been and done for us, and we trust the Holy Spirit to translate them, to give us the power to speak in words that others can understand, and to give the power to hear them in a way that connects with their own lives.

In the end, all this is God’s work, and not ours. If you’re as much a language-lover as I, you might have noticed that the disciples’ role in this story is passive, and God’s is active, until they receive the Holy Spirit. The disciples were all together, and heard a sound, and saw a flame, and “were filled with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:1-4)—and then “they began to speak.” (2:4) All we can do is put ourselves in the right place. All we can do is bring ourselves to church, online or in-person. All we can do is adopt the posture of prayer. All we can do is to share our stories of faith. And then we wait, and we pray, and the Holy Spirit speaks in us and through us in ways we’ll never understand and may never realize for years. Like many things, the miracle of Pentecost is “now and not yet.” The renewal of our ability to speak and to hear began two thousand years ago and is still incomplete. So for now, we wait for things to unfold. For as Jesus says, the story is still incomplete: “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.” (John 16:12–13)

Well, “I still have many things to say to you,” but this sermon’s long enough—“you cannot bear them now.” For now, I simply pray for the Holy Spirit’s gift of tongue: for the promise to be fulfilled that we may hear another more clearly, and speak to one another more honestly; that our language may become the things that brings us together and not what drives us apart, so that “when the Spirit of truth comes,” she may guide us “into all the truth.” Amen.

Sermon — May 16, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings for the Seventh Sunday of Easter

We like to think that you can replicate something extraordinary, if only you had the recipe for the secret sauce that makes it so. Want to live a healthier life and maximize your fitness and performance? Grab a copy Tom’s Brady The TB12 Method, which promises to teach you the secrets to his success for just $13.60 on Amazon. (Plant-based protein power and electrolyte supplement not included.) Want to learn to cook like the chef in an iconic restaurant? You’re in luck. Last summer, The New Yorker reviewed a service that delivers meal kits featuring restaurant favorites. You could buy, for example, the “burger au poivre” from Raoul’s in SoHo, which ships in a box containing four raw patties, peppercorns, cheese, sauce, buns, and a sheet of cooking instructions. Do you want to reignite a romantic relationship and recapture the passion of the all-too-brief “honeymoon phase”? You can find a million articles on the ten easy steps to go back to the way things were before you realized you’d be stuck with this person and all their habits forever.

These are three very different problems, but they’re really one problem, the problem that the 19^th-century German sociologist Max Weber called “the routinization of charisma.” Weber studied religion and politics and found a common pattern. A movement begins with an inspiring and charismatic leader—a Muhammad or a Jesus, a Donald Trump or Barack Obama—whose authority comes from their own personal characteristics and achievements, and the relationships they have with their followers. The problem comes in the next generation. How do you turn this leader’s charisma into a bureaucracy’s “routine,” a recipe that can be repeated by less-charismatic followers to achieve the same results? How can you recapture the spark and the success of that first experience, and keep it going in the long run?

It’s exactly the problem that the disciples face this Sunday in Acts. On Thursday, we celebrated the Feast of the Ascension, that day—forty days after Jesus’ resurrection—when the risen Lord finally stopped walking around with the disciples, and ascended into the heavens, leaving them without a leader. And next Sunday, we’ll celebrate the Feast of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descends on the disciples for the first time, leading them into miraculous deeds.

But this Sunday, the disciples are alone. They have to figure out how to fill the hole left in the roster of Twelve Disciples left by Judas’ betrayal, and—to the Apostles’ credit—they don’t try to replicate Jesus’ charismatic way of calling his disciples and turn it into a bureaucratic routine. There’s no committee with a five-step strategic plan. They cast lots, they draw straws, knowing that if God chooses, God can and will load the dice.

Soon enough, the Holy Spirit will arrive, and the disciples will be out of their dilemma. The Holy Spirit has plenty of charisma. The very word “charismatic” comes, in fact, from the charismata, the “gifts” poured out by the Holy Spirit. Time and again the Holy Spirit will lead them into extraordinary things, and there’s very little that’s routine about the life of the early Church.

But these ten days between the ascent of Jesus and the descent of the Holy Spirit are where we live most of our lives. We fall in love on a warm summer evening, and then we spend decades of our lives trying to recapture its magic as we live through winter, spring, and fall. We eat the perfect meal somewhere, and then spend hours in the kitchen failing to reproduce it. We sit in church one day and find, like John Wesley, that our hearts have suddenly been “strangely warmed”; and five years later, having gone through EfM or accepted the call to serve as Vestry members, we find ourselves sitting through yet another meeting about the furnace. So how do we recover that charisma, that spark? How do we get back to the way things used to be?

We don’t, I think that Jesus wants to say. There’s something better that we do instead.

“I am coming to you,” Jesus says to God, praying for the disciples at the Last Supper, but speaking as if he’s already gone. “I am no longer in the world—but they are in the world.” (John 17:11) They are “from the world,” (17:6) but “they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world.” (7:14, 16) “I am coming to you,” (17:11) he says, but “I am not asking you to take them out of the world.” (17:16) “The world,” here, has a kind of double meaning. It means the world in general, good and bad. But it’s also John’s shorthand for all those forces that are opposed to God’s grace, for what we call in our baptismal liturgy “the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.” (BCP p. 302)

Jesus was in the world, but he is not from the world, and he’s not of the world. He doesn’t belong to the powers that shape our life in this world. We are from this world, and long after Jesus is gone, we remain in this world. But we are not of the world, any more than he is.

Jesus has returned to the Father, Jesus has ascended into heaven, and Christians are sometimes tempted to think that this is what Christianity is all about: a recipe, a blueprint, a JC33 method with ten easy steps to help us, one day, ascend to be in heaven with God.

Christianity is not a recipe, it’s a gift; or, more precisely, it’s the story of a gift. As Christians, our task is not to replicate Jesus’ life but to bear witness to it, to give testimony about it. “And this is our testimony,” John writes, “that God gave us eternal life.” (1 John 5:11) God gave us eternal life, and “whoever has the Son has life,” has life, here and now, already. We do not need to ascend into heaven to be with God, although we will—we can already live eternal life here and now, whenever we live in the faith, and hope, and love that will be made complete in heaven, whenever we “have [this] testimony in [our] hearts,” (1 John 5:10) we live the life of that other world to which Jesus has gone before us, even though we live still in this world, because we are in this world—but not of it.

So this is what we do, in the gap between the Ascension and Pentecost, in the long and boring days between inspiration and renewal. We remain in the world, in ordinary life, not trying to replicate the extraordinary gift we’ve been given, but living in a way that bears witness to its power.

Tom Brady’s greatest legacy, after all, won’t be that he left us The TB12 Method for diet and exercise. It will be that he inspired thousands of athletes young and old to grow in strength and skill. A good restaurant’s purpose isn’t to give us recipes that we can replicate at home. It’s to give us a meal we’ll never forget. A relationship isn’t about reenacting the first date or trying to recapture the honeymoon period. It’s about living faithfully in a way that honors the continued power of that spark of love to shape our lives together so that the years and decades after the honeymoon is over, for all their frustration and tedium, see us growing into a deeper kind of love.

It’s not our task to routinize that charisma, to recreate that first extraordinary thing—and thank God! Because (news flash) we can’t. I don’t care what dietary supplements you take, or how precisely you follow that recipe, or how many Cosmo articles you read, you will never be Tom Brady. You will never take that perfect bite again. You will never feel the way you did on that last first date. But we have been given a gift, and we have been given an invitation to bear witness to that grace, so that, sustained by the power of Jesus’ prayer and by the new gift of the Holy Spirit, we might live faithfully and lovingly in the long days between the Ascensions and the Pentecosts of our lives. Amen.