Category Archives: Miscellaneous

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Missed Birthdays

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This month, millions of people around the world are missing their second birthday celebration in a row, including both my mother, whose birthday is in mid-March, and my wife, whose birthday is on the thirty-first. In fact, one of the last things that Alice and Murray and I did with other people last March before everything shut down was to go to a birthday celebration for our elementary-school-aged neighbor down the hall. Later in March, people didn’t feel much like celebrating, but we still tried to celebrate birthdays in our small ways. It was hard, though, to have a celebration, a real party where we could see the people we loved outside our own little family units.

Last Sunday, the fourth Sunday in Lent, was a day that the church sometimes calls “Laetare Sunday.” It comes from an old Latin introit, part of the liturgy for that days; it means, “Rejoice!” It’s a day of rejoicing in the midst of Lent, when some of the rigor of the season is relaxed. Even the purple on the altar will sometimes be changed out for pink or rose, as a sign of joy. It’s the same thing that we do in Advent, on the third Sunday, which is why there’s a pink candle in your Advent wreath. It’s a moment of joy in a penitential, somber season.

There’s a lesson for me in that, about all of life. We recognize that even in the midst of sorrow, there’s always joy; and in the midst of joy, there’s always sorrow. On any given day in any normal time of life, I may be feeling joy, I may be feeling happiness; but there’s inevitably someone else who’s suffering grief or loss. The same goes the other way around: I may be feeling sadness or frustration, and someone else is feeling relief or contentment.

It’s important for us as human beings to recognize that we don’t always experience the same things at the same time, and while many of us have been united emotionally by our experience of this pandemic, it’s become clearer over time that we’ve also been divided—not just politically, but emotionally. We’ve experienced different parts of this time in different ways over time, depending on our own circumstances and personalities.

But there’s another lesson, too, which is the importance of rejoicing, even in a serious time, the importance of celebrating those small moments even when things are hard. The lesson of a tragedy like this pandemic is not that we shouldn’t rejoice—it’s that we should! We should appreciate those moments, we should celebrate those birthdays. Not in an unsafe way, but with real and genuine joy. We should recognize and mark those things that are important to us, because even if the world is hard, even if the world is full of sorrow and struggle, it is also full of joy. They don’t cancel each other out. You can’t do the math and add the up to a positive or negative number. They just exist there, alongside each other, always.

So rejoice in your joy. And weep in your sadness. And know that they’re always there together.

“Graceful and Frank”

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“Graceful and Frank”

 
 
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Sermon — March 14, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

“By grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.” (Ephesians 2:8)

Recently, Alice and I have been watching the Netflix original TV series Grace and Frankie. (And yes, I know this is two sermons in a row, but we really don’t watch that much TV. I promise.) The eponymous characters Grace and Frankie are two women who’ve never liked each other, pushed together in their 70s by a very 21st-century sitcom plot: their two husbands have each left them after forty years of marriage… for each other. The first season or so mostly follows the action as Robert and Sol—played by Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston—build their new life together, and their soon-to-be-ex-wives Grace and Frankie move in as roommates in the beach house the two families have long shared, with a colorful cast of four adult children thrown into the mix.

Grace and Frankie are the stars of the show, and they couldn’t be more different. Grace Hanson, played by Jane Fonda, is a preppy, WASPy, waspy, put-together cosmetics mogul, a woman who founded her own company based on perfecting women’s outward appearance and rose to the top. Frankie Bergstein, played by Lily Tomlin, is a hippy, spiritual, eccentric Jewish artist, whose sage-burning, throat-singing spirituality exasperates Grace time and again. You might wonder why they’re friends, and it turns out they’re not; they’ve just been tolerating each other for years because their husbands are law partners and, it turns out, partner partners.

I can’t help but think that their names are a kind of symbol of their personalities. Frankie is… frank: she’s honest, sincere; she tells the truth even when it makes people uncomfortable. Some might say she over-shares about the most intimate parts of her life—Grace certainly would—but she would simply say she’s a liberated and open-minded adult. I think “Grace,” on the other hand, is supposed to be ironic, or at least the name captures a paradox in the word “grace” itself. Grace is always graceful, always elegant and composed; but she is rarely gracious. She doesn’t often extend grace or compassion to anyone else, and when they offer it, she pushes it away. At one point in the very first episode, after they’ve both fled to the beach house, expecting to be alone and finding on another there instead, they start bickering. After one rude exchange, Frankie apologizes, “You hurt my feelings, so I lashed out.” Grace ignores it and pushes her away: “Please, please go somewhere else.” The word “compassion” means literally “suffering with,” and who better to suffer with than someone in exactly the same situation? But in her deepest misery, she doesn’t want Frankie’s apology or her compassion—she just wants to be left alone.

Our two New Testament readings for today are classics of the theology of grace. (We’ll get to frankness a little later.) Five hundred years ago, as what we now call the Protestant Reformation began, the reformers heard these beautiful passages speaking directly to them and to their own spiritual lives. “By grace you have been saved through faith,” Paul writes to the Ephesians, “and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works.” (Eph. 2:8) It is God’s “rich mercy” and “great love” that “make us alive together with Christ,” that “raise us up with him and seat us with him in the heavenly places.” (Eph. 2:4-6) Try as we might, we could not by our own efforts launch ourselves into the heavens and reach God, so God came down among us and gave us the gift of eternal and abundant life. “Indeed,” John writes, “God didn’t send the Son into the world to condemn the world,” but to save it. (John 3:17) “God so loved the world that God gave God’s only Son, so that whoever believes in him will not perish but will have eternal life.” (John 3:16)

These words, which inspire many people today, in the context of late-medieval Christianity, when people like Martin Luther read them as the Reformation began. Medieval Western Christianity had a complex system of calculations of sin and penitence. Priests were trained to know exactly how many years each particular type of sin would add to your time in purgatory, and how many months each indulgence could knock off. If you asked a thoughtful medieval Catholic theologian, they would never tell you that you had to work hard to earn your way into God’s favor—but to many Christians, that’s exactly what it felt like.

The great reformers—Martin Luther and John Calvin, Martin Bucer and Thomas Cranmer, who created the first Book of Common Prayer for the Church of England—cut through all this complexity with the simple message they found in the New Testament, in Ephesians and John and many other books: the message of grace. You do not need to earn God’s love or your salvation; “it is the gift of God.” It’s not your hard work or your great virtue that saves you; it is God’s great love. Jesus didn’t come to “condemn the world”; he came to save you from condemnation, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life, not just a spiritual elite. This was the good news, in Greek the evangelion—the origin of words like “evangelical.”

To people like Luther, consumed with anxiety over every little sin, this came as a huge relief. But we live in different times, and it’s not always clear we feel the same. For one thing, in our secular corner of a religiously-diverse world, we may hear the exclusive and judgmental claim that “everyone who believes may have eternal life,” and not the inclusive and gracious one that “everyone who believes may have eternal life.” But even as Christians today our concerns are not those of the 16th century. Most of us Episcopalians are not wracked with guilt and anxious about eternal judgment. Our anxieties are different. Most of us spend more time worrying about human judgment, about our worth in one another’s eyes, and so we build up our protective shells. Like graceful Grace the cosmetic tycoon, we try our hardest to make it seem like everything’s okay, at least one the surface.

Grace, though, requires frankness. What I mean is that to accept God’s grace, to accept grace from anyone else, we need to be frank about ourselves. You know this if you’ve ever had to apologize for something; to accept the gift of forgiveness, you need to admit that you need it. To accept the gift of compassion and love, we need to admit—as Grace Hanson will, over the episodes of the first season, learn to do—that we are not self-sufficient, that we cannot be perfectly put together at all times.

You probably noticed that our readings this morning, for all their beauty, are not exactly optimistic. Each one of our readings blends a powerful proclamation of God’s grace with a frank evaluation of the human condition. Before it gets to God’s rich mercy, the letter to the Ephesians makes some pretty stark claims about the congregation’s earlier lives: they were “dead through trespasses and sins,” “following the desires of flesh and senses,” “by nature children of wrath.” (Eph. 2:1-3) It’s grim, maybe even a little exaggerated; but rhetorically, at least, it’s the depth of this depravity that highlights the very richness of God’s mercy. If God loves those of us who are “children of wrath” who are “dead through sin” with such great love—how much more will God’s loving grace extend to all of us who are just muddling through?

It’s the same with this odd first reading about the fiery snakes. We read it just because John refers to it in the first few verses here of the gospel reading, but it has a point. We live in a world that often “loves darkness rather than light,” (John 3:19) a world filled with venom and poison, and world that more often drives us to impatient complaints than to grateful endurance. God’s grace is not the whipped cream on top of the already-delicious ice-cream sundae of our world. It’s an intervention, a gift of love to a world in need of healing. But if we don’t recognize that we need to be healed, we’re not likely to respond graciously to the offer, and so like Grace we push it away. So we need to be frank. We need to be able to look honestly at our lives and admit that we are not perfect.

And what a relief. Because if it’s true for the Israelites wandering in the desert, and it’s true for the church gathered in the city of Ephesus, and it’s true in a Netflix original series, then it’s possible—just possible!—that’s it true for all of us. It’s just possible that none of us is perfect. That all of us are struggling; more or less, at different points, but never as put-together as we seem. We all need grace, and what a gift; because to recognize that we need grace enables us to accept it, and maybe even to extend it to someone else.

Because that is where the story ends; not with God loving us, but with us loving one another. Not with God forgiving us and having compassion on us, but with us compassionately forgiving one another. Christ has been raised up from the earth on the cross, and raised up from the tomb to new life, and raised up from the earth into heaven, and we have been raised with him—week after week we “lift up our hearts” to the Lord to bask in his love. But we’re still here. We can still “come to the light,” (John 3:21) we can still live out those “good works, which God prepared” for us “to be our way of life.” (Eph. 2:10) Not because we need them to be saved. Not because we need them to be loved. But because we are loved, and the gift of that love overflows, inevitably, into our love for others.

“By grace you have been saved,” Paul writes, and not because you are graceful. Not because you are frank. Not even because you are gracious. It is simply “the gift of God.” (Eph. 2:8) Even in your darkest moment, even in your deepest wrath, even in your most evil deeds, God would love you, God would die for you—not to condemn you, but to save you from condemnation.

So give yourself a break.

And, at least as importantly, give the people around you a break.

For some of us, I think, it’s harder to be gentle with our own imperfections. For others, it’s harder to be patient with other people’s foibles. But all of us—if we’re being frank—know what it is to need forgiveness, what it is to need compassion, what it is to need someone to extend us a little grace. And all of us can choose, by the grace of God, to offer that grace to others—as hard, moment to moment, as it may be—so that just as God has shown “the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us,” (Eph. 2:7) so also we might share the riches of that grace with one another. Amen.

Signs of Spring

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I’ve had a strange experience the last couple of days as I go out for a morning run in the park near our apartment. The trees are still bare. The ground is still muddy. The snowbanks are still there, and the black ice is covering the paths where they’ve melted and frozen. But the birds are chirping like I haven’t heard in months; not just one bird optimistically singing away, but what sound like hundreds, all around me. Things have warmed up, spring is almost here, and the birds are just as excited as I am!

It’s a good image to me of this “Lenten” season, the season when the days are lengthening—that’s where “Lenten” comes from. We live in this bare, dry, cold time, but we can already see the signs of hope and spring on the other side.

My father-in-law is famous for predicting that spring’s coming. On a warm day, when you can smell the snow melting and feel the sun shining and hear the water trickling away from the snowbanks, he’ll say, “Spring’s just around the corner!” And this is great!

The problem is that he starts saying it in December, while the winter’s very first snow is melting.

This is what often happens in life, I think. We know that there will probably be another snowstorm between now and May. We know that we might have another deep freeze. But today, it’s warm, at least by our standards after a cold month of February. And this happens in all of life: we go through phases of freezing and thawing. There might be a moment when we feel grace and encouragement and consolation, and then a long period where we feel spiritual dryness and despair and exhaustion.

The secret is to hold onto those signs of spring; to enjoy them, when they’re here. To go out for a walk in the warm weather, to take a break between Zoom meetings and get a little bit of sunshine. And then to remember them, when they’re gone again, in the sure and certain hope that they will return. Because the beautiful thing about a 45-degree day in February is not that it’s really warm. It’s that it’s a little hint of the many 50- and 60- and 70-degree days to come.

So hold on, this Lent, to those signs of spring, because the secret is the same in spiritual life as it is in New England weather: to hold onto the warmth when it’s here, and to remember it when it’s gone.

Forty Days

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The rain of the Flood fell for forty days and forty nights, just as long as Moses communed with God on the mountaintop and as Elijah journeyed to reach the cave where he’d meet God in a still, small voice. (Genesis 7:12; Exodus 24:18; 2 Kings 19:8-12) Jesus wrestled with his demons for forty days after his baptism; he appeared to the disciples for forty days after his resurrection before ascending into heaven forever. (Mark 1:13; Acts 1:3)

“Forty days” is an interesting length of time. It’s not forever, as any of us who’ve counted the 346 days since our last “normal” Sunday know. But by no means is it a short amount of time, as any of us giving something up or taking something on for Lent will learn. The forty days from Ash Wednesday to Easter are just the right amount of time, it seems, for us to speak to God and listen for God’s voice; to struggle with temptation and witness miracles; to journey across the desert or try to stay afloat in our hermetically-sealed arks.

Except they aren’t forty days, are they?

You’ll notice, if you do the math, that there are forty-six days until Easter. You’ll notice, too, if you’re very bored during a Sunday service and start starting at the bulletin, that we call them Sundays in Lent and not Sundays of Lent. Each Sunday during this season is a miniature Easter, a joyful feast plopped in among forty days of solemn fasts, but not one of them; so the traditional fasts of Lent are relaxed on Sundays, and the forty-days of Lent are really forty-six, minus Sundays.

There’s a power in that idea, for me, this year. This winter has been unrelenting in its monotony. Day after freezing day, I wish for a break—for one trip to a library, one visit with family, one warm spring day to play outside. We live our ordinary lives in natural patterns of work and rest, of stress and relaxation, of business and leisure, but there’s no such thing as a COVID vacation. (Unless, I suppose, New Zealand would let you in.) I think one of the many difficult things about this year has been its refusal to relax its grip: an Easter with little joy, a summer that felt like it never really began, a Christmas strange and sad for so many of us. We need that break, one day in seven, to make it through the other days.

I’m sorry to say I haven’t solved that problem. If only any of us could! But if the pandemic won’t relax its grip, we may have to loosen ours; to take one day out of seven, and let go of our resentments and frustrations, anxieties and self-criticisms, and simply be who we are, as we are, where we are.

So if you do nothing else to mark this Lent, try to loosen the pressure you put on yourself, just one day out of seven, to somehow be okay in extraordinary times. God knows that will be hard enough work for one Lent!

“Letting Go”

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“Letting Go”

 
 
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Sermon — February 14, 2021 (Lectionary Readings)

The Rev. Greg Johnston

What do we do when something we love is changing and disappearing?

This is the question that Elisha faces in the Old Testament story, as he’s reminded over and over that his relationship with his beloved teacher Elijah is about to end. It’s the question Peter and James and John can’t answer, when Jesus tells them he’s going to die and then takes them up on a mountain and appears transfigured, as they’ve never seen him before. It’s the question all of us face in our ordinary lives, as our marriages and children and jobs change and transition; it’s what all of us face in this extraordinary time, as we mourn the simple pleasures we’ve lost over the last year.

What do we do when the things we love disappear? Do we chase after them? Try to hold onto them? Freeze in fear? Or could there possibly be a different and maybe-better way?

I want to start with today’s gospel reading. To understand what’s going on, it will help to turn the Bible back a few pages. We’ve spent most of the last few weeks reading stories from the very beginning of the Gospel of Mark, and now we’ve leapt ahead in time, because on this last Sunday before Lent we always read the story of the Transfiguration. The story comes at the halfway point in Jesus’ ministry and in the Gospel. Jesus is done wandering around Galilee, healing people and teaching. Just as we begin our journey through Lent toward Holy Week, Jesus is beginning his own journey to Jerusalem, toward his trial and death. He’s just told his disciples that he must suffer, and be rejected, and die and rise again—and he’s told them that those who want to follow him will need to take up their own crosses, as well. The disciples are in denial, and try to argue with him, but Jesus is having none of it. He knows where he’s headed.

But for now, he takes his closest friends, and brings them up onto the mountain, and they discover who he really is. Moses and Elijah appear, the literal embodiments of all the Law and the Prophets—what we’d now call “the Old Testament.” The whole Bible, the whole Law and all the Prophets, point toward this man, at this moment. And the dazzling light of the glory of God shines through Jesus, who stands before them in “raiment…shining, exceeding white as snow; so as no fuller on earth can white them.” (Mark 9:3 KJV) (I’m not sure what a fuller is, but I always liked that one in the King James Version.)

And the disciples are “terrified.” (Mark 9:6)

And Peter, seemingly at a loss for words, suggests that they should build three little tents.

It’s clear from the story that Peter’s suggestion is wrong, although Jesus doesn’t say so, explicitly. For millennia people have argued about exactly why. Is it that Peter equates the divine Son of God with these two human prophets, and honors them equally? Is it that he tries to build God a physical home, when God wants to dwell within us? Is it that his suggestion is completely inadequate when faced with such an astounding display—that the glory of the Lord appears to him in all its splendor and all he can think to say is, “Okay! Okay! We’ll… we’ll pitch you a tent!”

Peter, of course, is baffled. “He did not know what to say, for they were terrified.” (Mark 9:6) He was terrified, I think, not only of this sudden transformation from a human teacher into something unbelievably more; but terrified, as well, by Jesus’ prediction of his own death. His closest friend and teacher is disappearing before his very eyes, and even in the few days he has left with them, he’s been transformed beyond recognition.

So what does Peter do? He tries to keep him in place.

It’s not so much that Peter wants to keep Jesus confined up on the mountaintop. The thing he wants to build him isn’t a temple, but a tent; he uses the same word he would have used for the Tabernacle, the portable tent-shrine that the Israelites long before had carried around with them on their wilderness wanderings. He knows that Elijah had ascended into heaven before his death, and perhaps he’d heard echoes of the same tradition about Moses; now he sees them descend to earth, and worries that they’re going to take Jesus back with them! So perhaps, he thinks, he can put it off a while. If only he can build a tent that’s nice enough, perhaps they’ll stay with him, forever! And this miraculous ministry he’s witnessed, this amazing time he’s spent with Jesus on earth, will never have to change.

But he’s rambling, afraid; he doesn’t know what to say, and this is all he’s got.

The prophet Elisha starts out with a similar attitude. This story is a typical Biblical combination of loyalty and comedy. Elijah knows his time on earth is drawing to a close; Elisha, his student and closest companion, is in denial. Three times Elijah tells him, “Stay here; for the Lord has sent me” to the next town over. (2 Kgs 2:1, 4, 6) Three times Elisha swears by God and by Elijah that “I will not leave you.” (2 Kgs 2:2, 4, 6) In Bethel, the prophets see Elijah pass and ask him, “Do you know that God is taking him away?” “I know!” he says, “Be quiet.” (2:3) And then again at Jericho, “Do you know that today God is taking him away?” “I! Know! Be! Quiet!” (2:5)

Peter and Elijah are in slightly different kinds of denial, but to more or less the same effect. Peter, who had rebuked Jesus when Jesus told the disciples that he would have to suffer and die (Mark 8:32) now tries to find some way to hang onto him. Elisha, who knows that Elijah’s going to disappear, still tries to stop anyone else from talking about it, and follows him to the very end.

But here, the two stories diverge, and I think we can learn something from what Elisha does. They’ve finally reached the Jordan, and Elijah has performed one final miracle, and he turns and asks Elisha, “What can I do for you, before I’m taken away?” And Elisha, wise despite all his denial, asks exactly the right thing: “Please, let me inherit a double share of your spirit.” (2 Kgs 2:9)

“Most of us in the West today,” writes the therapist and marriage counselor Esther Perel, “will have two or three marriages or committed relationships in our lifetime. [Those] daring enough to try…may find themselves having all of them with the same person.” Even those of us, in other words, who marry one person and stay married to them our whole lives, have more than one marriage. Perhaps there’s the first marriage, of romance and adventure; the second marriage, of child-raising or home-making and the long, slow trajectories of careers and family life; the third marriage, of retirement and travel; the fourth marriage, of sickness and death, of mourning and remembrance. Some people get divorced and remarried between those marriages; some have them all with one.

The same thing’s true of all our relationships. You can raise ten different children but only really have two; you can have five or six friendships with the same one close friend; you can work two or three different jobs over time without ever leaving your desk. And we all know you can be a member of three or four different churches, sometimes in the same parish and sometimes not.

We have all left behind old versions of our lives this past year. Our work has looked different than it did; our relationships with our spouses or kids or grandkids have been different from what we’d imagined; our retirements and travel and volunteering have been wildly different than we’d planned. And it’s natural to grieve those things, and want the ones that we’ve lost to come back.

But I alsp think that as we go through these transitions, Elisha’s insight can be helpful. His final prayer before Elijah disappears, you’ll remember, was not “Don’t go! Stay with me forever!” It was, “Let me inherit a double share of your spirit.”

As the last versions of our lives disappear from our sight, we face a choice. Do we deny that anything’s going to change until the very last moment, following it from town to town until the bitter end? Do we try to keep it with us, building a shrine to it up on the mountain?

Or do we pray to inherit a double share of its spirit; do we try, in other words, to carry the best of the stage that’s passing away into the new one that’s being born? Do we try to take what we have learned and how we’ve grown in the past, and bring them with us into the future?

As we begin to emerge from hibernation this year, that’s my prayer. Not that we return to the way things were. But that we rebuild our lives with the double-spirit of the best parts of the past: that we take up the mantle of the things that gave us life in 2019, and rejoice to wear them again; that we lay down the things that brought us down, and give ourselves permission to let them go; that we may “behold by faith the light of [Christ’s] countenance” in the last version of our lives as it passes away, and “be changed into his likeness from glory to glory” as we are reborn into new versions of ourselves.