“Hoping against hope, he believed…” (Romans 4:18)

Can somebody on Zoom finish the expression for me: “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, ______”?

Well, you all know it! But Abraham certainly did not. And we know this for two reasons. The first is that Abraham didn’t speak modern English, so if you said this to him, he’d just be confused. But the second reason is that this is not Abraham’s first time having this particular conversation with God. And in fact, it won’t be his last.

One of the limitations of our lectionary is that you only ever get a part of the story, and that’s fine; nobody wants to sit here and read the eleven chapters of Genesis that it takes to tell the story of Abraham and Sarah. In Lent, I’ll be following our Old Testament readings as they move forward in history, starting with Noah last week; but there’s not enough time during these six weeks to read the whole Old Testament, so we get just a taste of each phase: first Noah, now Abraham, then next week on to Moses and beyond. We lose something when we take these snippets. It’s not just that we lose the context or the bigger picture. It’s that we lose the Biblical characters’ sense of exasperation in waiting for God to do something, for once. And when Abraham finally falls over laughing at the end of this reading from Genesis, that’s exactly what he’s feeling: exasperation and disbelief. Because this is not the first time God’s made a prediction to Abraham, and not one of them has ever happened yet.

The very first thing that happens to Abraham in the Bible is that God appears and makes a promise. It comes out of nowhere, right at the beginning of Genesis 12, with no introduction at all: “Now the LORD said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great…’ So Abram went, as the LORD had told him…[and he] was seventy-five years old.” (Genesis 12:1–2, 4) So Abram and Sarai go, and wander where God leads. They go down into Egypt; they come back up into Canaan; but still nothing seems to have happened.

And then God appears again; God makes the promise again. God appears to Abram in the dry land where he wanders and tells him that his offspring will be as numerous as the dust of the earth, uncountable in number. (Gen. 13:16) And God goes away, and Abram lives his life, and wages war with great kings, and still he has no children. So God appears to Abram yet again and says he’s offering Abram a great reward, but Abram asks simply, “What will you give me, for I continue childless? …You have given me no offspring.” (Gen. 15:2-3) God takes Abram out into the desert at night and tells him that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars of the sky and the dust of the earth (Gen. 15:5). And nothing happens. Another year, another divine appearance, another promise still unfulfilled.

Now, Abram and Sarai are getting a bit old for child-rearing—by which I mean, they’re their eighties and nineties—and no child has appeared. It seems that God won’t follow through on the promise. So Abram and Sarai take things into their own hands. They come up with a horrifying scheme that’s the inspiration for The Handmaid’s Tale—Abram will conceive a child with Sarai’s slave Hagar instead, and so the child, Ishmael, will be his son. This, they think, must be what God intends. And Ishmael is born, and unsurprisingly, there’s family drama.

And then finally, twenty-five years after the first appearance, when Abram is ninety-nine years old, God appears again, in this morning’s reading, and promises to make him “exceedingly numerous.” (Gen. 17:2)

And Abram is speechless. Can you blame him?

There’s this trope that I love in Biblical narrative when someone is really at a loss for words. God appears out of nowhere, and speaks to Abram for the first time: “I am God Almighty; walk before me” and so on, for a whole speech. And Abram says nothing. And then when God speaks again in verse 9, which our reading skips, the narrator says, “And God said to Abraham…” And again, Abraham says nothing. And then God speaks again, and the narrator says, “And God said to Abraham.” (17:15) Instead of writing it as one long speech, the narrator keeps pausing, as if to leave a space for Abraham to fill—but he can’t! There’s nothing to say. It’s as if you had a screenplay:

GOD: I am God Almighty (and so on and so on…)
ABRAHAM: …
GOD: As for you, you shall keep my covenant (and so on and so forth…)
ABRAHAM: …
GOD: As for Sarah your wife, (etc., etc.)

And Abraham falls on his face, laughing. “I’m a hundred years old! Sarah’s ninety! I have a son—Ishmael—isn’t that what you wanted me to do?” “No,” God says, “but Sarah will bear you a son…”

And God goes away. And—by the way—still no baby appears until God returns one more time, finally ready to make good on the promise.

“I am God Almighty,” God says, “walk before me, and be blameless.” (Genesis 17:1) Abraham has walked a long way before God in these twenty-five years. But he’s certainly not blameless. “Walk before me,” you might translate it, “and be perfect.” But nobody in the Bible, let alone in our world, is perfect. And anyone who’s been following along with Abraham’s story knows that he’s far from perfect.

Paul, to be fair, gives him a lot of credit. Abraham “did not weaken in faith,” Paul writes to the church in Rome, “when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead… or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb… No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God.” (Romans 4:19–20)

“No distrust made him waver.” Okay, even setting aside the moment where he falls on his face laughing at God’s fourth attempt to make this promise, this isn’t quite true, is it? Abraham and Sarah assume God’s plan won’t work, and make a troubling arrangement with Hagar instead. There’s a lot that could be said about this exploitative relationship, but Abraham is far from “blameless.” In a more-trivial way, Abraham and Sarah are each so exasperated with God’s tardiness that, in separate stories, each one laughs in God’s face. They’ve been living with this promise for a quarter-century, and nothing has ever changed. Why should this time be any different?

But in some deeper sense, even in speechless disbelief, Abraham believed God, “and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” (Romans 4:3)

 “Hoping against hope,” Paul writes, “he believed.” (Romans 4:18) After three empty promises, with no change in sight, he believed. Speechless and laughing in disbelief, nevertheless in some sense he believed.

The word “believe” is a remarkably unhelpful translation of the verb Paul uses here, writing in Greek. “Belief,” to most of us, is a kind of thinking; if you believe a prediction, it means you think it will come true; if you believe in God, it means you think that God exists. But that’s not exactly what the Bible usually means by “believe,” and so you’ll sometimes hear this word translated as “trust,” so that “Hoping against hope, Abraham trusted God.” By the end of this story, though, it doesn’t really seem that Abraham has much reason to trust God’s promise. I’ve always thought that another translation is helpful. The verb for “believe” or “trust” is closely related to the word for “faith,” and it means not just “faith” in our religious sense, but “faithfulness.”

And that, perhaps, is one thing we can say. Abraham may not have believed in God’s promise. Abraham may not have trusted God to follow through. But Abraham, without a doubt, was faithful to God; and indeed, in the end, God turned out to be faithful to Abraham. God calls Abraham to blamelessness; but Paul praises him for faithfulness. And that, I think, is good news for us.

If you haven’t been shaken by doubt in the last year—if you haven’t lost faith, if you haven’t been left speechless, if you haven’t fallen on your face laughing in exasperation with your family, your government, or your God—then I want whatever you’re eating for breakfast, because I, for one, have done all those things at least ten times. But here I am: still married; still your pastor—still, by the way, never having taken up arms to overthrow the government!— sometimes laughing in disbelief; sometimes full of mistrust; but faithful even when doubtful; hoping against hope even when filled with despair.

“Faithfulness” is not about being perfect. It’s not about being blameless in everything you do. It’s certainly not about believing at every moment. If this were what it meant to be faithful, Paul would never have praised Abraham as he did. Faithfulness isn’t about never failing; it’s about what happens when you inevitably fail, it’s about how you repair what is broken and restore what has been lost. Faithfulness is failing, again and again, and returning, again and again. It’s about waiting, and watching, and hoping, for as long as it takes, for the promise of the future to become the present.

And if we only have the faith of Abraham—the faith that takes missteps, that flags and fails, that waits and waits and waits through endless days, that hopes beyond hope—that’s all God asks for.

When Alice and I got married at Christ Church Cambridge, we had our reception in the parish hall, because not only are we two little church mice, but it only cost $75/hour to rent, which is about $15,000 cheaper than anything else for a wedding reception in Harvard Square. So we spent our whole budget on food and photography and a big guest list, and we put out some cocktail tables with nice tablecloths, and nobody could see the scuffed-up floor we were dancing on anyway.

It was the perfect plan. Except that our wedding was on July 11, and the parish hall was not air-conditioned, and we’d have a hundred-fifty-something guests. So when temperatures broke into the high 80s during the week before the ceremony, I found myself on the phone with the church’s architect, who was working on renovation plans for the parish house, trying to figure out exactly how many of the air conditioners we’d bought at Ocean State Job Lot we could plug into exactly which of the walls without overwhelming the church’s mid-20^th-century electrical systems. It was a little crazy, but we identified the circuits, we figured out a plan, we drew up a diagram, and we were all set.

And so it was that the mother-son dance began that night, in a room that felt warm but not hot, full of friends and family and two delighted newlyweds and three large air conditioners. And as my mother and I began to dance, in a sweet moment we would forever cherish in our memories, all of a sudden: silence!, as the AC kicked back on, tripping a circuit breaker and cutting off all power to the DJ, who had set himself up, despite our careful planning, in the wrong corner of the room.

This happened two or three more times during the night before we figured it out. We unplugged that air conditioner, and while it did get a bit hot in the parish hall, it was still the most fun I’ve ever had at a wedding.

As much as a tripped circuit breaker or a blown fuse might be annoying to a homeowner or a room full of wedding guests, they’re incredibly important. An electrical circuit, after all, can only carry a certain amount of load. If you draw too much power, the actual wires in the circuit can begin to overheat to a dangerous point. So any reasonable system has fuses or circuit breakers built into it, something that will blow or trip and interrupt the circuit before the load stresses it too much and it becomes dangerous. Because, it turns out, your wedding is much more fun if you ruin the mother-son dance than it is if you burn down the church.

And that, according to the Book of Genesis, is why we have rainbows.

Think back to our Old Testament lesson from Genesis this morning. This passage comes at the very end of the story of the Flood, after God’s destroyed everything on earth except for Noah and his family and the ark full of animals.

God seems to regret the decision a bit, because almost immediately after Noah and his family touch dry land, he promises never to do it again. He calls this a covenant, which means a binding agreement or a treaty, but you’ll notice that it’s unconditional; it’s binding only on God. “I establish my covenant with you,” God says, “that never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” (Gen 9:11) This is good. But any of us who’ve made New Year’s resolutions or chosen Lenten disciplines know that they’re hard to stick to, and God does too; so God, with excellent self-knowledge, sets up a kind of automated reminder: “I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant…and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.” (Gen 9:13-15)

God doesn’t promise never to become angry with humanity again—God knows none of us can control our emotions like that—but God does set a sign. God sets God’s bow in the clouds. And so every time God brings a storm, and the winds rage, and the waters threaten to overcome the earth again, God sees the rainbow, and remembers the promise, and it’s like a circuit breaker for God’s anger, a sign that God’s rage is about to spill over into destruction, and it trips some circuit within God’s mind, and it defuses the situation, and God remembers not to destroy us again.

Now, this is not how rainstorms or rainbows work, according to modern meteorology. Indeed, there’s disagreement between the authors of different books of the Bible about God’s temper: our reading for Ash Wednesday from the Book of Joel, for example, claims that God is “gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.” (Joel 2:13) So if you’re uncertain about this notion of an angry God needing a reminder not to destroy us, as I think most of us are, you’re in good company. I’d invite you, though, for the next few minutes, to see God’s circuit-breaking rainbow as an image of what Lent can help us learn.

I grew up in a Congregational church, where we didn’t really give things up for Lent; that was something Catholics did. I know many of you, who grew up in the Catholic Church, probably have given things up (or been forced to give them up!): chocolate or soda, meat on Fridays, maybe alcohol when you were older. Depending on how much guilt and shame was pumped into this, you may be one of the many people who gives up Lent for Lent, especially this year. But I want to suggest a different way of looking at this “giving up,” one that was news to me when I heard about it and may be new to you.

Lenten fasts are not about fasting from something bad, about picking one of your vices and trying to give it up permanently. We should do that all the time, although if there’s some destructive pattern in your life that you need to give up, Lent, as a season of repentance, is a perfectly good time to start. Nor is Lent just about taking on a good thing, though that’s also a very admirable practice. Again, we should do good things all the time, although, again, Lent’s a perfectly good time to start something new and good. Fasting is something a little different—it’s not giving up a bad thing forever, or taking on a good thing; it’s giving up a good thing for a certain time. Fasting only exists in relationship to feasting, and that’s why Lenten fasts only run Monday through Saturday; every Sunday is a feast of the resurrection, a miniature Easter in the midst of Lent.

So why give up an innocent luxury like chocolate or reality TV for Lent? I don’t think it’s because pleasure or enjoyment are bad; they’re not. I don’t think it’s some way of making amends for our sins; that’s Jesus’ work on Good Friday, not ours in Lent. Nor is it a way of punishing ourselves through deprivation; that’s not necessary to receive the kind of unconditional love God offers us. I think the reason to give something us is to help us learn where to put our circuit breakers.

Let’s say that I give up something for Lent. I will be tempted, over and over again, to indulge. And it’s a useful exercise to try to understand just when that is. Say I’ve given up Facebook for Lent. It’s not the end of the world if I give in to that temptation for some mindless scrolling. That’s why we fast from relatively-innocent things! But if I give in again and again, I may start to notice some patterns. It’s easy for me, on a Friday morning at 11am, if I’ve got my sermon printed and I had a good night’s sleep, to resist virtually any kind of temptation. But when I am hungry, or angry, or lonely, or tired; when I am feeling unloved, or scared, or frustrated, my willpower is weak, and I just might lose my battle with temptation.

You’ll likely find that the same things that weaken your willpower to resist those small temptations of Lent are the ones that lead you to real sins: the same moments of hunger or boredom or exhaustion in which I might turn to the News Feed are the ones in which I might turn to gossip, or be snippy with my spouse, or any one of a number of much worse patterns of behavior. But studying those moments and learning from them is an opportunity to set your rainbow in the clouds, so to speak; to set reminders and guardrails, to install fuses and circuit breakers in your life that stop you from heading down that road, to set switches that flip when your circuits are overloaded and force you to power down for a moment.

I know that these days, that’s easier said than done. It’s hard to find ways to unwind or decompress when you can’t just go out meet a friend or go off on a retreat. It’s hard to flip the breaker on a fight with your spouse when you’ve been stuck at home together for eleven months. It’s even harder to break out of the circuit of loneliness or worry when you’ve been stuck alone all year.

But it’s the most important thing any of us can do. It’s hard to learn the signs that you’re overloaded, and even harder to wire the right circuit breakers into your life. But it’s nowhere near as hard as realizing you’ve burned your house down all around you.

God has learned to do this pretty well, it seems. After all, we’ve all seen storms. We’ve all seen rainbows. But God has never again destroyed all life on earth with a flood. So may we learn, this Lent, with whatever little temptations we try to resist, how to take care of ourselves so that we can resist the big ones; and may God, to paraphrase the psalm, “guide [us who are] humble in doing right, and teach his way to [we who are] lowly,” (Psalm 25:8) so that we may have the grace to grow into the shape of God’s patient and forgiving love. Amen.

A few days ago, I was in a workshop on mental health and wellness during the pandemic. At one point we broke into small groups, and I heard in two people’s words a summary of the conundrum of this year. One participant, crammed into a haphazard working-from-home space while two little kids screamed upstairs, quietly said, “I haven’t been alone for an hour in ten months.” Another one, sitting in the beautiful living room of the house where he lived alone: “I’ve never been this lonely in my life.”

It’s the irony of 2020. Without a doubt, COVID-19 is one of the defining shared human experiences of the last two hundred years. You could ask anybody anywhere in the world what their experience of this year has been like, and they will have something extraordinary to say. In recent history, only World War 2 has had such a global effect on ordinary life.

But there’s very little shared about this shared experience. That’s one of the many cruel things about it, in fact. We have, on the one hand, families with all the adults trying to work from home while their kids try to learn from home, waking up early in the morning to send emails while the kids are still asleep and staying up late to finish off the inbox, constantly available to work and to family and never fully present to either one.

And on the other hand, we have—the opposite, in all its many forms. Families suffering from the massive increases in unemployment, doubling or tripling the usual volume of clients at food pantries, month after month. People in jobs too hands-on to work from home, literally risking their lives day after day. Retired people and seniors cut off from their children and grandchildren, from their friends and churches, in a time of tremendous anxiety and fear, with all the usual supports gone. Lonely children whose first written words will include “Mute” and “Start Video,” because they’re learning to read on Zoom.

Most of us who’re still able to have work and human connection are overwhelmed by the demands of both; most of us who have solitude or free time are crushed by its unending expanse. In an ordinary time, of course, we’d shift things around a bit. The lonely, isolated grandparents could help the overwhelmed parents with the kids, and so on. But of course, this year, that’s just the thing we cannot do.

It strikes me that Jesus knew both sides of this. In today’s gospel story, of course, we see him over-worked and under-rested. They bring to Jesus “all who [are] sick or possessed with demons.” (Mark 1:32) He heals “many,” but it could never be enough, because they pile in and flock to him until “the whole city [is] gathered around the door.” (Mark 1:33-34) You’ll notice that they start bringing them to him to be healed “that evening, at sundown” (Mark 1:32); we can only imagine that he heals them late into the night, until he finally begs off to get some rest, leaving many more disappointed at the door. And then he gets up “early in the morning,” long before dawn, “while it was still very dark,” and goes to pray. (Mark 1:35) Jesus is burning the candle at both ends, but at least he knows how to take time for himself to be with God.

But no! Even there his disciples hound him, hunting him down in the desert and, when they finally find him, they bring him news he already knows too well: “Everyone is searching for you!” (Mark 1:37) As if he didn’t already know. As if that wasn’t why he was out here, at cold, dark, dawn.

Soon enough, though, he’ll know the other end of things too well. It won’t be too long before his popularity fades, and the crowds disappear. Soon enough, in fact, he’ll be alone. He’ll have all the space he needs to pray in the dark garden at Gethsemane, and he’ll pray in anguish as his friends fall asleep around him. (Mark 14:34-42) They’ll finally stop demanding his attention, and deny they know him. They’ll stop pressing in on him to feel his healing touch, and leave him alone with God up on the cross, until even God seems to abandon him and he cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34) And the bystanders, like some kind of ancient social-distancing experts, can only comfort him from yards away, with a bit of sour wine on a sponge at the end of a stick. (Mark 15:36) Jesus will know, soon enough, the depths of loneliness and fear. And if you’ve been there recently—he’s been there, too.
For now, though, Jesus is at the other end of things. For now, Jesus is not abandoned, but overrun. So what does Jesus do, now, overwhelmed? “Let us go on,” he says, “to another town.” (Mark 1:38) “No,” he seems to say, “I can’t help. Not now.”

I have a bad habit sometimes, in my sermons, of undermining my own best efforts at volunteer recruitment. And so I tremble to preach on this story today, in which people beg an overworked and overwhelmed Jesus for his volunteer ministry, and he declines.
The secret, though, is that Jesus doesn’t exactly say “no” to this call for help. He doesn’t even say “not right now.” What he says, instead, is something different: “not right here.” He does not say, “let us go to bed,” but “let us go on to the neighboring towns,” to heal and preach and serve somewhere else, not to stop entirely.

Nobody here is a full-time minister of this Church—and that’s not a comment about my compensation. For five hundred years, Episcopal priests have been married, have had families, have had divided attention and energy between their ministries of love in the Church and the home. And in the last fifty years or so, we’ve done a much better job of recognizing that laypeople are ministers of this Church, every bit as much as clergy. The core of the priest’s calling to ministry happens within the institutional life of the Church; the core of most laypeople’s ministry happens in the home, or at work, or in their neighborhood, but it’s every bit as much a ministry as mine.

Over time, the shape of our lives’ ministries shift and change. We step back from church to focus on our families and our work; we retire and our children move out and we can finally give more time to the church! Some of you, I know, have finally booked vaccine appointments and are overflowing with energy to share here and with your families. And whatever these transitions may be, they usually don’t mean we’re stepping back from ministry, because wherever we go to love God and our neighbor—whatever we do to heal the sick or comfort the afflicted, care for the poor or welcome children as Jesus did—we are ministers of Christ in that place. And in fact, the whole point of our ministry here—of everything we’ll discuss at our Annual Meeting in a few minutes—is precisely to transform us and equip us for our ministry there, out there.

So may we all, at the end of this exhausting year, find the renewed strength that the prophet Isaiah promises. May God “give power to the faint, and strengthen the powerless” (Isaiah 40:28); may God guide us in our ministries, in our church and in our homes and in our world, that we may “mount up with wings like eagles,” that we may “run and not be weary,” that we may “walk and not faint.” (Isaiah 40:28, 31)

Sermon — January 31, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

“What do you have to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” (Mark 1:24)

This question has been haunting me all week. “What do you have to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” Isn’t that the question we all have to answer, and the question we all have to ask? Just days after he’s begun his ministry, Jesus travels from Nazareth to Capernaum, just a few miles down the road, and already people are asking: “What do you have to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” This isn’t your city. Stay in your lane. And now, two thousand years after his death, five thousand miles from Galilee, all of us who claim to follow Jesus are forced to ask that same question, and to answer it. What does this man from so long ago and so far away have to do with us? What do you have to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?

And then, more frighteningly: “Have you come to destroy us?”

It may be an odd question, but it’s not a surprising one. It’s one of a few possible answers to this person’s question. Perhaps Jesus has come to do what the unclean spirit says through this man. Perhaps Jesus has come to rid the world of evil, to give people commands with such powerful authority that even the demons must obey.

Or perhaps Jesus has come to do something a little different. Perhaps he is, as Deuteronomy promised, a new prophet, a “prophet like Moses,” one in whose mouth God will put God’s words, someone who will speak to the people everything that God commands. (Deut. 18:15-20) The congregation gathered in the synagogue certainly seem to think so; they recognize him as a teacher with a new and powerful authority, and his fame as a preacher and healer begins to grow.

Or perhaps Jesus has come to help us know God, a tangible human form of an abstract and inscrutable God. It’s ironic, of course, that the faithful are amazed and baffled, and keep asking each other, “What is this?” (Mark 1:27) The unclean spirit’s just told them! “I know who you are!” it cries out. “The Holy One of God!” (Mark 1:25) And of course it’s right. We, the readers of the gospel, know who Jesus is. The demons and (it will turn out) the Roman soldiers know who he is. But his own family, his own people, even his own disciples, haven’t got a clue.

Now, each of these ideas has something to it. Jesus spends plenty of his time casting out demons and ridding the world of evil, and we have to imagine he stands with us against evil in our world. Jesus certainly is a prophet with tremendous authority, through whom God speaks and who establishes a new law of love for us much like the law of Moses. Without a doubt Jesus comes to us to make it easier for us to know God.

But that’s not the whole story. The man with the unclean spirit asks Jesus, “What have you to do with us? Have you come to destroy us?” But no, it’s something worse. Not to destroy us, but to know us.

“Knowledge puffs up,” Paul writes in his first letter to the Corinthians, “but love builds up. Those who think they know something don’t yet know what they ought; but anyone who loves God is known by God.” (1 Corinthians 8:1–3) In other words: If you think you truly know God, all you’ve shown is that you don’t even know yourself. But if you think you love God, it’s certain that God knows you.

So what does Jesus have to do with us? He heals us, yes; he teaches us, yes; we know God through him, yes; but even more so, through him God knows us. “I know you,” says the man with the unclean spirit. “Well, I know you.” Jesus seems to reply.

For me, this is a terrifying thing.

I don’t mean this in a fire-and-brimstone kind of way, in which God is tallying up all your secret misdeeds and preparing to hold you to account. This is the theology most succinctly expressed in the song “Santa Claus is Coming To Town”: “He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake; He knows when you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness’ sake!”

What’s frightening is not so much that God knows my misdeeds, which are many but minor; it’s that God knows me, really knows me, in the deepest and most hidden parts of myself. God knows the things I’ve never said out loud to anyone, even my spouse; God knows the things I say when I know my spouse isn’t listening. God knows me, really knows me, as I am. And who really wants to be known? Who really wants to be seen for who they are?

Not any human being I know. For thousands of years we human beings have been trying to hide from one another who we really are. We carefully curate our social media feeds, sharing only our most fun adventures on Facebook and deleting Instagram posts that don’t get enough likes. Or at least we did, when there was anything worth posting about—now we dig around in Zoom settings to try to look as good as possible. We ask each other as a matter of course the question, “How are you?” and our answers range from “I’m fine” to “pretty good,” as though anything more honest would be a faux pas. The phenomenon of feeling as though everyone else around us knows what they’re doing in a way that we don’t, that everyone else belongs here and I don’t, is so common among so many professions and areas of life, that it has its own name: “Impostor Syndrome.” To put it simply: it’s very hard for us to be vulnerable with own another, and so—from the moment Adam and Eve first sewed leaves together to cover themselves from God from God’s sight—we hide.

But still, God knows us, in our deepest moments of shame. How embarrassing.

And what a relief.

Because if God knows our deepest secrets, the things of which we are most ashamed, then there’s nothing to be ashamed of anymore. Our secrets are no secret. God sees us, and knows us, and loves us, loves us so much as to lay down his own life for us, just as we are. And God’s love builds us up.

“What do you have to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” we ask. “Have you come to destroy us?” In a sense, he has. Not to destroy us, per se, but a part of us; that part of us that hides us from ourselves, and from the ones we love. That part of us that keeps us locked in shame, for fear of being found out. That part of us that keeps us from being genuinely vulnerable with one another, from honestly recognizing where we’ve fallen down and making it right.

Last week, I found a photocopy of a letter from the Rev. Wolcott Cutler, long-time rector of St. John’s, to the priest who arrived here after him. It was in a box of St. John’s memorabilia that Marie Hubbard had had in her apartment, and that her daughter gave to St. John’s after Marie’s death. Attached to the photocopy was a note from Brian Murdoch, another past rector of St. John’s, to Marie, saying he’d found this letter and thought she might appreciate a copy of it.

Rev. Cutler was a complicated man, and his letter shows remarkable humility and self-knowledge. “Dear Mr. Kelley,” it begins, “I hope that you can persuade Archdeacon Burgess of Boston to tell you some of the things that this parish in Charlestown has lacked during my ministry here… It seems to me that some of the work wherein I have been weak requires not so much time as grace for its performance; and that is where a different personality…can provide leadership that will be greatly needed and, we trust, deeply appreciated.” For three pages Rev. Cutler outlines the joys and regrets of his four decades of ministry here, before concluding: “Each of us, being human, has many blind spots, and leaves certain important aspects of his ministry uncultivated. I pray that our parishioners are now at long last, to be treated to a religious emphasis and an evangelical warmth and a personal concern that they have failed to receive from me. And if they do, I believe that our habitually desultory attendance at the Sunday services will receive an impetus and show a growth that my inarticulate parochial calling has never accomplished.”

It’s rare to find someone so willing to be honest about his own limitations—especially among the clergy. But what Rev. Cutler says of his ministry is true of all of us as human beings. “Each of us, being human, has many blind spots, and leaves certain important aspects uncultivated.”

So what does Jesus have to do with us? He teaches us the way of love, yes, like an authoritative prophet. He heals and comforts us and stands with us against the evils of the world; yes. But more than anything, perhaps, he knows us as we are; he sees us as we are; he frees us from the shame of simply being who we are.  For “anyone who loves God is known by him.” (1 Cor. 8:3) Amen.

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.

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.”

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.