Sermon — January 24, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

There’s a Chinese restaurant in Montreal that’s gotten famous recently for its menu. It’s not become famous for its authentic dishes or its affordable prices, but for something else: the owner’s very honest commentary on each menu item, printed just below the photo.

“This is the number-one-choice dish ordered by Chinese customers across China,” one description reads. “I am not a huge fan of our version, to be honest.” “This is a very popular dish,” another goes, “among the customers who don’t care about its greasiness.” And then there’s my favorite: “Compared to our General Tao Chicken, this one is not that good. Anyway, I’m not a big fan of North American Chinese food, and it’s your call.”

The owner of this restaurant is what I call an “imperfect messenger.”

           

Jonah knows what this is like.

“The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, saying, ‘Get up, go to Nineveh.’” You may recall the first time the word of the Lord came to Jonah. “Get up and go to Nineveh,” God said, “that great city” far off to the east, “and cry out against it; for their evil has come to my attention.” (Jonah 1:2 CEB) So Jonah got up and booked passage on a ship headed not east to Nineveh, to Tarshish—as far west as you could go. You know the rest of the story. God sends a storm. Jonah goes overboard. Jonah’s swallowed by a “whale”—it’s really a fish—and so on.

Now after all this, the fish vomits him onto dry land, and the word of God comes to Jonah a second time. “Get up. Go to Nineveh.” So Jonah gets up and goes to Nineveh, but with quite an attitude. You can see the thought bubbles in the comic-strip version of the story. “Fine, I’ll do it. But I’m not going to like it!”

Jonah gets up and travels to Nineveh, which is a significant trip, to proclaim God’s message to the city. But when he gets there, he drags his heels. He doesn’t even go into the city center. He begins to go into the city, the story says, but he walks just one day, only a third of the city’s width. Geographically speaking—and here I really did the math using Google Maps—it’s the equivalent of walking from Columbus, Ohio all the way to Boston, coming into the city along the Mass Pike and then stopping somewhere in Allston to deliver your message. And not only does Jonah barely breach the city limits; he gives the shortest possible sermon: “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” (Jonah 3:4)

Sure, Jonah will obey God this time, but he’s going to do the bare minimum. He’ll preach repentance to Nineveh, but it’s going to be a short sermon on the outskirts of town.

Although—as a classmate of mine used to say, “If the minimum wasn’t good enough, it wouldn’t be the minimum.” And apparently the minimum is good enough, because the king and the people and even the animals repent and turn from their evil ways, and God changes his mind about destroying them, and Jonah, predictably, sulks.

Jonah is stubborn and resistant; the restaurant owner is maybe a little too honest. But the message is effective, even with such an imperfect messenger.

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Now, the story of Jonah is a satire, so his personality is exaggerated. But the disciples Jesus calls in the gospel story today are just as flawed. The gospels don’t have much to say about the disciples. As a group, they’re unimpressive; they mostly appear in the story as a chorus to tell Jesus they have no idea what he’s talking about. Andrew never really appears again. James and John mostly show up to maneuver for top roles in Jesus’ coming administration. The “Simon” he calls with Andrew is, of course, Simon Peter. Peter is the one disciple to recognize Jesus for who he really is, answering Jesus’ question “Who do you say that I am?” with a simple, “You are the Messiah.” (Mark 8:28-29) But he is also the one who denies Jesus three times in his hour of greatest need, claiming he’s never even heard of Jesus just to save his own skin.

You have to remember that none of this is an attack on the Church or its leaders. These aren’t stories written by atheist critics, trying to show its hypocrisy and foolishness. These are the stories written down by the dearest friends and followers of these disciples in the decades after their deaths. It was Simon and Andrew and James and John who kept Jesus’ message alive and shared it with the likes of Matthew and Mark and Luke. So it’s remarkable that these are the stories they choose to tell: stories of disciples who are, at best, imperfect messengers.

I think that the messengers’ imperfection tells us something about the message that Jesus is going to send them to proclaim. “The time is fulfilled,” Jesus says, “and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” (Mark 1:15)

I think many of us struggle with these messages of repentance, these words from Jonah and from Jesus. If we repeat them we seem arrogant and judgmental, as though we were claiming the moral authority to know who needed to repent and to say it to their faces. In part, I think this is because this is how the message often sounds in our own day. When we hear talk of repentance in our culture, it’s usually more Jonah than Jesus; less “repent and believe” and more “repent…or else.”

“Repentance,” though, is not shame or fear. It’s not a confession or an apology that you give to avoid punishment. It’s a transformation. In Hebrew, it’s teshuvah, “returning”; coming back from the places you’d wandered away and returning to God. In Greek, it’s metanoia, a “change of mind and heart.” And so one recent translation renders this verse: “Now is the time! Here comes God’s kingdom! Change your hearts and lives, and trust this good news!” (Mark 1:15 CEB) When Jesus talks about the kingdom of God arriving and tells people to repent and believe, he’s not threatening them with what will happen if they don’t—he’s offering an invitation. The kingdom is coming, and this is good news! Come home and try to wrap your head around it.

And here it helps to have imperfect messengers. Jonah and Peter, James and John are hardly the glossy preachers who can stand up in the pulpit and point their fingers down at you in judgment. They’re stubborn, disobedient, power-hungry, cowardly; they’re brittle and flawed in all the ordinary ways we human beings are. They’re imperfect messengers who can stand among us, like us, and point us toward God, and say with all humility: “This is the number-one-choice religion in the world. I’m not a huge fan of our version, to be honest.”

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I ended last week’s sermon reflecting on Philip’s words to Nathanael, before he brought him to meet Jesus for the first time: “Come and see.” When Jesus recruits Simon and Andrew to be “fishers of men,” (Mark 1:17) this is what he’s asking them to do: to come and follow him, to see what he’s about, and then to go to others and invite them in the same way: “Come and see.”

They do this with all the humility that comes from their imperfection. They don’t come to condemn or to judge. They’ve just found something that changed their lives, “The peace of God that filled their hearts / Brimful, and broke them too.” And all they can say to the people around them is: “Come and see,”

There are thousands of different books and videos and articles on how to have a growing or just a healthy church, and people often read them hoping for a magic solution, a secret plan that will fix everything. At the core of every one of them, though, the answer is simple: “Come and see.” We, as individual members of this body, need to be able to identify what it is that draws us here, what’s good about the good news we hear here. And we need to be able to invite others to try it for themselves.

We don’t have to be perfect to do it. We don’t have to be trained to do it. We don’t even have to like doing it. We can, like Jonah, dig our heels in, and refuse. We can, like Peter, hide our faith from sight. But we have found something we love, someone who fills our hearts with joy—and we cannot hide it from the rest of the world.

I maybe wouldn’t lead with “repent and believe in the gospel”—you can leave that one to Jesus, for now—but even if you only have the courage, like Jonah, to walk a third of the way into the city to share your message, you can still borrow that line from Philip, and say to someone who asks why you are here: “Come and see.”

Amen.

Sermon — January 17, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

I think young Samuel would have made a good Episcopalian. He’s always ready. He’s always there to help. When he hears the call, he says, “Here I am!” He’s exactly the kind of person you want on your Vestry.

Like many characters in the Bible, Samuel had had something of a miraculous birth; and his mother promised God that, in exchange for the gift of a child, she would make sure that Samuel’s life was dedicated to God. So when he was a young boy, he went up to the temple at Shiloh to serve under the priest Eli. Samuel’s clearly learned how to be a good member of a religious community. Even in the night, he’s bubbling with energy and activity. He hears someone calling his name, and assumes it must be Eli; there’s no one else around. Maybe a lamp needs to be trimmed. Maybe a candle needs to be lit. Maybe someone needs to form a committee! So he runs up to his priest, ready to help: “Here I am! You called me.” He springs into action like a faithful member of any small church today.

But Eli says: Wasn’t me. You must have been dreaming. Go back to sleep.

And so he does, but he hears the voice again, and again he’s ready for action. “Here I am! You called me.”

And again, Eli says: No. It wasn’t me. Go back to sleep.

And then a third time—because in every human story, there must be three times—a third time Samuel hears a voice calling his name, and this time he’s probably hardly even fallen asleep, but he goes back to his seemingly-forgetful guardian and, with what I can only imagine is a thin layer of politeness spread over increasing frustration and confusion, he deploys his favorite phrase: “Here I am! …You called me.”

And Samuel still hasn’t realized what’s going on, because “the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him.” (1 Sam. 3:7) But Eli has. So Eli says to him, “Go lie down. If you’re called again, say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’” (1 Sam. 3:9)

And he does. And oh, what a difference it makes. All along, he’s been hearing his name being called and immediately jumping into action. Samuel assumes that he knows what’s going on. He assumes that he knows what needs to be done. He hears a voice speaking out of the Ark of the Covenant itself, and he leaps into action, ready to be busy somewhere else with important temple business.

But now he stops, and actually answers the call. “Samuel! Samuel!” the voice cries out. “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” (1 Sam. 3:10) And the patient voice of God finally gets to have its say.

In Hebrew, God uses nearly the same phrase that Samuel’s been relying on all along. Samuel says over and over again, Hineni, Hineni, Hineni—“Here I am; Here I am; Here I am.” What do you want me to do? And God turns it around on him: Hine anoki–“Here I am, doing such a thing in Israel that’ll make your ears tingle.” (1 Sam. 3:11)

And Samuel finally hears the word of the Lord.

It’s not until Samuel stops trying to respond and really listens that he understands what’s going on. Perhaps even more importantly, it’s not until Samuel stops trying to do something for God that he learns what God is going to do through him. The moment he gives up his preconceptions about what it means to serve in the temple of God is the moment he learns what it really means to become a servant of God. He’s not meant to help Eli with little tasks around the church forever. He’s been set aside for something more.

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We see that same moment of transition in a second call story this morning, in the call of Nathanael to be one of the first followers of Jesus. Samuel’s assumptions about what it means to serve God are industrious and helpful, even if they distract him from what God is really trying to say. Nathanael, on the other hand, is kind of a jerk.

“We’ve found the Messiah!” Philip tells his friend. And Nathanael skeptically replies, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:45) Rude. Nathanael’s just recycling a city-dweller’s disdain for a small-town boy; this is what John’s trying to tell us when he says he comes from Bethsaida, a bigger city down the road from Nazareth.

But his friend Philip insists. “Come and see.” (John 1:47) And Nathanael does. The results are an exaggerated comedy. Jesus offers a casual compliment—“Here’s an good honest Israelite, if I’ve ever seen one”—and Nathanael is shocked. “Where do you know me from?” He asks. “I saw you over there under the fig tree, before Philip called you.” (Before, in other words, you were just being rude.) And Nathanael, inexplicably, loses his mind: “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” (John 1:49)

I’ll admit that I was baffled as to what was going on in this story. What on earth is going on to transform Nathanael’s casual skepticism into such an incredible statement of faith, so early on in Jesus’ ministry? (This is only chapter one of the Gospel of John!) I consulted my various study bibles and commentaries, finding nothing satisfying, and eventually I ended up deep in the commentary written by Raymond Brown, an absolute prince among 20^th-century Biblical scholars and the expert on the Gospel of John. He surveys a number of wild theories about where the fig tree was and what it means and even what Nathanael was doing under it that was so remarkable, and concludes simply: “We are far from exhausting the suggestions, all of which are pure speculation.”^[1]

As dumbfounding as Nathanael’s faith may be to the modern scholar, though, I think Samuel’s story helps make it clear. Why was Nathanael so skeptical about Jesus? Because, like the young Samuel at the beginning of that fateful night, he “did not yet know the Lord, and the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him.” (1 Sam. 3:7)

It’s not that Jesus said anything particularly profound. It’s not that he saw deep into Nathanael’s heart and told him his deepest secret. Jesus does do that other times, and John tells the story well. In this moment, though, it’s nothing that Jesus is speaking about that transforms Nathanael’s life. It’s just that Jesus is speaking. And Nathanael is listening.

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I don’t know about you, but I find myself acting like Samuel and Nathanael before their respective enlightenments all the time. I hear someone calling to me, and before they’ve even gotten to speak I’m already formulating a response, making a plan; coming up with five reasons it will never work or lacing up my shoes to go do what I think they need. And that’s at my best, when I’m trying to be helpful. At my worst, when I’m tired or angry, I’m more likely to pull a Nathanael and dismiss them right away. (“Can anything good come out of his mouth?”)

This happens in our prayer lives, too. We’re too busy being human doings to be human beings. We’re too busy talking to God to listen to what God’s trying to say. And maybe—just maybe—sometimes our preconceptions close off an opportunity for a deeper conversation with God. (“Can anything good come out of Leviticus?”)

But sometimes, in a moment of grace, we stop. We listen. We hear each other’s voices—not filtered through our own thoughts and preoccupations and prejudices—but as they are. We hear God’s voice calling to us, and we listen, and something breaks through, and transforms us. In these moments of epiphany we catch a glimpse of truth shining through all the confusion of our lives.

And at our best—at our very best—we’re no longer Samuel and Nathanael but Eli and Philip, no longer doers and doubters suddenly turned into listeners, but listeners transformed into bearers of good news. When we’ve listened long enough for the word of God, we learn to find its signal in the noise of the world, and we gain an incredible power to tell others how to find it as well. We gain the wisdom to say to a friend, “Go, lie down. If you are called again, say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’” (1 Sam. 3:9) We gain the courage to say to another person: “Come and see.”  (John 1:46)

Amen.

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^[1] Raymond, E. Brown, The Gospel According to John I-XII, The Anchor Yale Bible. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 83.

Sermon — January 10, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Sermon — December 27, 2020

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Sermon — December 24, 2020

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Do you know the Christmas carol “In the Bleak Midwinter”? I didn’t grow up with it, but it’s grown on me over the years. This year, especially, it seems to say it all:

In the bleak midwinter Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, Snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, Long ago.

“In the Bleak Midwinter,” we gather in the cold, the earth frozen “hard as iron,” the water “like a stone.” We gather at a moment of great darkness, and great light; of great suffering, and great hope; of painful sadness, and joyful anticipation.

We gather, in other words, in a moment that distils to its purest essence what it is to be human. This is it. This is all it’s ever been: sickness and death and compassion and hope, powerlessness and pain and rejoicing and love; the mixed-up emotional soundtrack to life. In ordinary times it’s fainter, with the volume dial turned halfway down, but this is it. This is what it is to be human beings: fragile, and beautiful, and loved.

And this is what it is God chose to be.

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If there’s comfort, in any year, in the compassion of the Christmas story, it must be this year. At Christmas, we make the extraordinary claim that in Jesus, God became human. God looked down on our world, as beautiful and broken two thousand years ago as it is today, and God had a choice. God could wash everything away in another Flood and start afresh. God could give up, set an out-of-office reply to our prayers and fly away to another part of the multiverse. God could delegate, could send another prophet to tell us where we’d gone wrong and how to make things right.

 But that’s not what God did.

God saw how often we say “no” to following the way of love, and invited one woman to say yes. God saw how powerless we are over the circumstances of our lives, and chose to walk among us, not as a mighty warrior or an influential legislator but as a newborn baby, the most helpless creature in the world. God saw the mess that human life’s become, and did the only thing a loving Parent could; God drew near to us, became one of us, became Emmanuel, “God with us.”

In Jesus of Nazareth, God walked among us. God knew the hunger and the fear of a newborn waking up for the hundredth time in a night. God knew the frustration of a toddler trying to stack his blocks too high. God knew the sorrow of losing a close friend, and the joy of eating and drinking together. God felt the deepest pain a human being could feel. God knew what it was to be betrayed; God knew what it was to die alone.

God knew, and God knows, what it is to be human, and in our deepest, darkest moments God sees us, and knows us, and loves us. And in the moments of our greatest pain, God himself is there with us, because the Christ whose birth we celebrate this Christmas is above all else the compassionate, loving God made flesh, bringing our pain up into God and God’s healing love down among us.

But this isn’t the whole story. Our God is not just a compassionate friend, a “Wonderful Counselor,” but a “Mighty God,” (Isaiah 9:6) a “Prince of Peace” sitting upon “the throne of David” “from this time onward and forevermore,” whose “authority shall grow continually,” and in whose kingdom “there shall be endless peace.” (Isaiah 9:9, 9:7)

God, in other words, didn’t just come among us to feel our pain, and then to return to heaven with a bit more empathy for the human condition. God came to change the world. In Jesus, God comes as a leader, a ruler, a “Prince.” God comes to us and starts a movement, and invites us to follow. God teaches us to love one another. God empowers us to love one another. And then God asks us to love one another, with Jesus himself leading the way.

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The one line of “In the Bleak Midwinter” that gets me every time is this: “Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain; Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign. “Our God, heaven cannot hold him.” God’s love is so great that it spills out of heaven and splashes onto earth. God’s Holy Spirit flows out and fills us all, fills us to the brim and keeps pouring, so that God’s love overflows out of us and we love one another. Sometimes we don’t even know that it’s happening. Sometimes we don’t believe that it is. Sometimes we look at the world and we ask, “Where is God?”

And the answer is: Right here! Right now. Yes, God is up “in heaven” empathizing with us, and loving us. But “heaven cannot hold him.” God is not locked away in heaven. God is here, now, with us, acting in us and through us and for us, the hidden force in every act of human love. In every nurse’s gentle touch, in every neighbor’s grocery run, in every single sacrifice we make for one another, the Holy Spirit flows through us, the light of Christ that shines brightly on this holy night shines through us.

So look for that light. Carry that light. Spread that light this Christmas season and forevermore. “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all.” (Titus 2:11) Amen.