To See and Be Seen

To See and Be Seen

 
 
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Sermon — March 10, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

I want to start this morning with a poll about a common English phrase. Show of hands: If you heard the news headline, “New facts have come to light in the case of the priest accused of embezzling from a local church”—this is a hypothetical situation, to be clear—How many of you would guess that the “new facts” revealed that he actually hadn’t done anything wrong? How many would think it was much worse than you’d imagined?    

Maybe I’m just a pessimist, but I’d always assume it meant things were so much worse.

And maybe that makes sense. Because—as shocking as it is to hear me say it—maybe Jesus is right. When “new facts come to light” it’s because they’ve been hidden in darkness before. But who would want to cover up something that makes them look good? Maybe it’s true what Jesus says, that people who do evil deeds want to hide themselves in darkness, while people who do good are happy to have what they’ve done brought to light. But on the other hand: Does anyone really want to be scrutinized, even if they’ve done nothing wrong? I’m a pretty upstanding person, but even I still get pretty nervous when tax season rolls around: am I sure I’m really filling all those boxes out right?

“This is the judgment,” Jesus says in the Gospel of John: “that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.” (John 3:19) This is the judgment: Not some day of judgment in the future, when Jesus will decide whether your acts are right or wrong. But this, right now. This moment when you decide whether you’re willing to be seen. If your deeds are good, Jesus says, you come to the light. You want the things you’ve done to be seen and known. (3:21) But if they’re not so good, you love the darkness instead, because in the darkness, you are hidden from view. In the darkness, no one can see what you are doing.

There’s a special edge to his words that requires a little extra context to understand. Jesus isn’t just talking to the disciples or to Christians today. These words are the second half of a conversation with a particular disciple, a man named Nicodemus. Nicodemus is afraid to follow Jesus, afraid to be seen with him in the light of day, so he “comes to Jesus by night” instead. (3:2) Jesus’ words here are for him: Is wanting to be my disciple such an evil act that you need to sneak around, Nicodemus, coming to meet me in the dark of night? The Gospel doesn’t record how Nicodemus responds. But Jesus’ words are for us, too. As is often the case in the Gospel of John, Jesus starts with a concrete situation and kind of wanders off into making a more general point. He goes from the specific to the general. He concludes that not just Nicodemus but “all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light… but those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.” (John 3:20–21)

I’m not sure that this is as easy as Jesus makes it out to be. We are not all good or all bad, after all. We’re all mixed, and sometimes, we’re not even sure which is which. One of the universal facts of human life is that sometimes, we actually just can’t know yet whether the choices we’re making are right or wrong. At different levels, from career choices to parenting decisions to foreign policy, we often find ourselves trying to judge between two less-than-perfect paths. And even if we mostly do the right things, our inner lives are often wrapped in a layer of some amount of shame. Who in this world is so confident that their deeds are good that they would publish their diary so that it could be seen in the full light of day? How confident are you that if “new facts come to light” about you, you’re going to feel good about it? Most of us are not so confident, and so we respond to this uncertainty by hiding parts of ourselves away, creeping around like Nicodemus under the cover of darkness lest we be judged for the decisions we have made.

And Jesus seems to respond with this: To be seen as we truly are is one of our great fears; but to see God as God truly is is our only hope.


In other words: It’s time to talk about the thing with the snakes.

There are whole papers that have been written about the development and the meaning of this story in Numbers: the relationship between the poisonous serpents and the seraphim we’re much more used to hearing about; the idol of a bronze serpent that was used in the Temple before the religious reforms of King Hezekiah; traditions of “apotropaic magic,” in which the poison of the serpent can only be defeated by a picture of a serpent. These are just scholarly ways of saying it’s a very odd story.

We read this story today because Jesus alludes to it in what he says. He puts himself in the place of the serpent of bronze, which is set on a pole and lifted in the air. And you can easily imagine why early Christians would have used this as an image of the Cross. “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” (John 3:14)

The serpents afflict the people with poisonous bites—as a punishment from God for their grumbling, by the way—and God provides a solution Godself. Put the figure of a serpent on a piece of wood, and raise it up, and anyone who sees it will be healed. So, what’s the analogy here? The human condition afflicts us all with the feeling of shame and the reality of death—as a punishment from God? as the reality of our fall from grace?—and God provides a solution: Godself. Put the human being who is God on a piece of wood, and lift him up, and anyone who believes in him will be healed.

But when Jesus says “lifted up,” it means more than just this. Is Jesus “lifted up” on the cross? Yes. Is he “lifted up” from the tomb? Yes. Is he “lifted up” in his ascension into heaven? Also yes, and Jesus seems to mean all three of them: by the process of his death, resurrection, and ascension, Jesus “raised us up with him,” as Paul writes to the Ephesians, lifting us out of the poisonous darkness of this world to the true light of heavenly life. And there’s something visual, almost magnetic, here: later in the Gospel Jesus says, “when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself.” (12:32)

So the two halves of this strange passage are linked by the theme of sight: to be seen in the light or to hide ourselves in darkness is judgment; but to see God crucified, risen, and ascending into heaven, doesn’t only provide us an example of how we ought to live—it actually draws us up with him.


But what on earth does that mean?

The similarities between the bronze serpent and Christ takes us about three quarters of the way. But it’s actually the difference that offers us some hope. Because the Crucifixion is not an ancient magical ritual, as if simply seeing the snake on the pole could cure us. It’s a matter of belief: not belief in the theoretical or cognitive sense of accepting certain statements of truth about the world, but belief in the sense of trust: trust in who God is and what God is like.

“This is the judgment,” that light has come into the world, and we have hidden in the darkness—not so much because we’re evil as because we are ashamed or unsure, because we often don’t believe that we really are good, or because we’re just trying to make ourselves a little more perfect first. And this is the solution: to see what God is really like, to see God offering God’s own self for us in love, to see Jesus laying down his own life because what Paul says is true: because God is “rich in mercy,” because if God loved us with “great love” even when we were “dead through our trespasses,” how much more will God love us now, as we just muddle along. We can try pretending to have it all figured out, we may think that we are hiding our flaws successfully in the dark mood lighting of this world, but Jesus’ light has come into the world, and God has seen us all as we are, exactly as we are, and God has chosen to “make us alive together with Christ.” (Ephesians 2:4) “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.” (2:7)

God has given you the gift of light: A light in which you see God as God really is, and God can see you as you really are. Whoever you are, whatever you have achieved, wherever you have failed; whatever you have done or left undone, God is inviting you to step into the light. To know that you are forgiven. To accept that you are loved. To live in the light as a child of the light, “for we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared before all time for us to be our way of life.” (Eph. 2:10)

Amen.

The Foolishness of the Cross

Sermon — March 3, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

The Cross is a symbol so familiar that it’s easy to forget what it means. For baseball players, the sign of the cross is a good-luck charm before stepping up to the plate. For Christian nationalists from the Crusades to the present day, the Cross is a sign of Christian identity and Western culture. Our own Episcopal Church logo turns the Cross into an allegory of our church’s history: it includes both the cross of St. George from the English flag and the cross of St. Andrew from the Scottish flag to symbolize our church’s original roots in the Church of England and the Episcopal Church of Scotland, and the Scottish flag is made up of nine smaller crosses, one for each of our original dioceses.

But if we treat the Cross as just a symbol of our church’s history, a recognizable sign we can paint in red, white, and blue, then we can’t make any sense of Paul’s claim that the crucifixion is a “stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” (1 Cor. 1:23) If we treat the Cross as a symbol of Western culture and heritage, then we’ve got things the wrong way around: the Cross is a symbol of the cruelty of the Roman Empire, of Western culture as a brutal occupying force. And the Cross is not, in any sense, a symbol of good luck. In fact, it’s a symbol of the worst luck. It’s a sign of failure, not success; of weakness, not strength. The Cross isn’t an abstract religious emblem: It’s an instrument of torture and death, a horrifying sign of the humiliating failure that awaits anyone who challenges the power of the Empire.

This is what Paul means when he writes that the message about the Cross is “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” Paul’s message is absurd. To say that “we proclaim Christ crucified” is a paradox. Paul’s fellow Jews were waiting for a Messiah who would deliver them from Roman rule and usher in a new era of world peace. And to them, Paul proclaims that the Messiah has come, and h he’s done wonderful things! Has he thrown the Romans out of Judea? Well, no, not quite. Is he ruling over the people in peace? Not so much. In fact, he’s dead, Paul tells them, crucified on a cross like many failed insurrectionists before him. And the Romans are still there. But I promise you, Paul says, despite the objective reality: he’s the real thing! A stumbling block, indeed, for all those awaiting the Messiah’s liberating reign.

And it’s even worse for those who aren’t waiting for the Messiah, for the Greeks, the Gentiles Paul is trying to convince. You know the gods you worship, Paul says, the ones who do great and heroic deeds in all the pagan myths, the ones you pray to for success in this world and immortality in the next? Those gods are trash, Paul says. I’ve got a much better god for you. “What did your god do?” they ask, intrigued. “Oh,” Paul says, “he died.” Yeah, the Romans killed him with a couple of bandits on either side.


This is what foolishness is.

But it’s the foolishness of Jesus himself, who stood on the grounds of the Temple Mount, the glorious monument of God’s presence in the Holy City, restored just years before by King Herod the Great, rebuilt and expanded to form the largest religious sanctuary in the entire ancient world, stories tall and covered in gold leaf, and said: “Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The people want a sign, and Jesus says he’ll give them one, but they’re too wise to understand. “We’ve been working on this thing for forty-six years—you’re gonna raise it up in three days?” Yeah, right. This Jesus is a fool, for sure.

Of course, he doesn’t mean that Temple, the building containing the Holy of Holies, the place on earth where God was believed most fully to dwell. He means the Temple of his body, the Word of God made flesh, the one in whom God really does dwell, who will be destroyed on the cross and then, miraculously, rebuilt. And it’s only through that destruction that the Holy Spirit of God comes to dwell fully in us, and we become the Temple, the place where God dwells on earth.

The world in which the message of the Cross makes sense is a world turned upside down. It is a world in which true success comes only through failure, true strength comes only through weakness; a world in which the cross of shame is transformed into the throne of glory. It is a world in which victory is not won by the edge of the sword or the barrel of a gun, but by self-sacrifice and surrender, a world in which only the eyes of faith can see God working in and through a situation that seems hopeless. In the eyes of the world, the message of the cross is foolishness, full stop.

And so we live in a world full of crosses, but the message of the cross goes unheard. We human beings continue to serve ourselves and betray one another, in small ways and in large ones. And it’s not as if the sign of the Cross alone can fix it: Jews fight Muslims in Gaza, and Muslims fight Muslims in Sudan, but in Ukraine, Russian Orthodox Christians attack Ukrainian Orthodox Christians, egged on by their religious leaders, and they could not be further from the message of the Cross, no matter how many crosses they might wear. And the same is true of every Christian church: our pews are as full of imperfect people as the world outside, and sometimes even more.

But there is another way. Hope is not lost. We can embrace the foolishness of the Cross. We can accept that in Jesus, we are invited to live in a world turned upside down, a world in which greatness and excellence and success pale in comparison to goodness and humility and love.


Toward the end of C. S. Lewis’s novel The Great Divorce, the narrator—who’s been journeying through a vision of heaven and hell—sees a procession approaching through the woods. The leaves begin to shimmer with light cast by innumerable spirits, who dance and scatter flowers through the forest, singing more beautifully than any human being ever has. A procession of heavenly musicians surrounds the lady at the center of it all, in whose honor all this is being done. The purity and beauty of her spirit shine out through her, wrapping her in a gown of goodness and joy that flows out behind her like a long train. All the light of heaven radiates from her face.

The narrator turns to his guide, and whispers: “Is it…? is it…?”

(We’re left to fill in the rest. Is it some great Queen or princess of the past? Is it some blessed saint, perhaps Mary herself?)

“Not at all,” says the guide. “It’s someone ye’ll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green.”

He goes on to tell her story. She was not great, but she was good. No journalist or scholar ever knew her name, but every animal and every child had felt her love. The narrator is astounded by the pomp with which so simple a person is surrounded in heaven. But as the heavenly guide points out, “Fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things.” “For the message about the cross,” we might add, “is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God.” (1 Cor. 1:18)

Don’t take this the wrong way, okay? But sitting in this church, right now, you are surrounded by fools. Right now, you are surrounded by potential Sarah Smiths. You are surrounded by people who have chosen to spend their time worshiping a crucified God with an eccentric crew of children old and young. You are surrounded by people who have chosen to try to give their hearts to love, however foolish it may be. And there’s a chance, just a chance, that you may even be one of them.

And you can be one of them. You cannot cause all war to cease on earth. You cannot fix every one of society’s ills. But you can be one of the nameless Sarah Smiths of the world, who look like fools on earth and shine like saints in heaven. It may be harder if you are wise in this world, if you are a scribe, if you are one of the “debaters of this age”! You may have to try, really try, to be a fool. But you can do it. I believe in you. You can treat the weak and the foolish and the small like they are just as good as you. You can give up your own self-interest, to help those in need. You can follow the way of the Cross on the path through failure and defeat, and find that God will lead you through it all, to something even better than success in this world: “For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” (1 Cor. 1:25)

Getting Out of God’s Way

Getting Out of God’s Way

 
 
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Sermon — February 25, 2024

Michael Fenn

Lectionary Readings

“Get behind me Satan” is maybe the most surreal moment of the gospel. If Jesus ever did curse, this would have been it. However, I think in the flashiness of this whole shebang that Jesus gives Peter, I have often missed what the actual rebuke is. If you get past the use of “Satan” and listen closely, you might come to understand that Jesus–frustrated as he is–primarily wants Peter to stop being so Peter and just get out of the gosh-darn way and let Jesus do what Jesus needs to do. Peter, in this moment, is justifiably concerned that his beloved friend and teacher has just told them that he is going to suffer and die. And Peter, justifiably, is trying to get Jesus to not do that.

As much as I may hate to say it, Peter is deeply relatable in this moment. I would wager there are few among us who would not react in a similar way given a similar situation. I think many of us are very Peter-like in our rashness, in our rush to be close to God, but I think an unexpected way in which we as people are like Peter is how much we can get in God’s way. How often we can plant ourselves squarely in the way of God’s plan, in Peter’s case two-thousand years ago he planted himself in the way of the physical Jesus; in our case I suspect we are more “metaphysically” putting ourselves in God’s way. 

Recently, I have found myself in God’s way in my life. The realization began because I was feeling generally restless, frazzled, and feeling discombobulated in my spiritual life. After some careful evaluation of how I was going about my day, my week, and my life. It dawned on me. I realized, likely to nobody’s surprise, that my phone was the culprit. I was spending a lot of my leisure time throughout my day scrolling through silly cat videos and the like–it was essentially the first thing I did in the morning, the thing I did often throughout the day, and the thing I did as I was falling asleep. As a disclaimer, I actually did other stuff, I have a life: but you get the idea.  

So, I decided to try and get out of God’s way, and try to put my gosh-darn phone down. I promised myself that I would at the very least refrain from opening any apps on my phone before breakfast. At first, this was harder than I expected. It is wonderful to begin your day with silly cat videos your friends sent you, or it is equally tempting to check your email and grades as soon as you are conscious, or it is just easier to sit and check Facebook than it is to actually start your day. 

I report to you that I have made it about a month with this new practice, and it has gotten easier with each passing day. I more or less feel securely out of God’s way. 


Returning to the second part of our gospel today. Jesus, even in his moments of fiery rebuke, is not without his pastoral nature and teaching. After the shocking and fiery line he delivers down on Peter, he helpfully redirects him, much like a parent or babysitter redirects undesirable behavior. After telling them to go sit in the corner, and get out of the way, he gives Peter and company a behavior more becoming for disciples and followers of Christ. He tells Peter and the assembled company to take up their crosses and follow him. 

Here we come to the very Lenten part of the story. Like many of you, the motif of taking up a cross is one I have often heard when discussing Lenten disciplines. In my experience so far, “taking up your cross” in Lent can mean anything from volunteering one’s time at soup kitchens, to giving up chocolate, to being nicer to your siblings, or a new exercise routine. Each of these would seem to generally fall under the category of a cross to take up. 

However, in light of reading this story. I wonder how many people “take up their cross” before they take the proper time to actually get out of God’s way in their life. I wonder how many people simply decide that one thing is bad for them, or another thing good, or even difficult, and just commit to that thing for Lent. I wonder if people allow God to lead them into a particular practice before deciding on one for themselves, or how many people let God take the lead on where they are going when they  take up their cross. 

Here, I will confess, I have not actually taken up a Lenten practice. In the week or so leading up to Lent, I had thought off and on about taking one up. Then assignments built up, I was preparing for the Episcopal 101 class, and life just got busy. All of a sudden it was Ash Wednesday and I still didn’t have one. Though, I will say, a good number of great Christians do not observe the custom of giving something up for Lent, so I feel in good company here. 

I suppose if I was truly pressed in some odd way of what I was giving up for Lent. I suppose I would say I am giving up my phone in the morning, and by extension, my Lenten practice is to try and continue to stay out of God’s way in my life. So far it has been working very well. I feel more present throughout the day, I have begun journaling again (which is an underrated contemplative practice, if you ask me), I feel more connected to God throughout my day, and generally less frazzled. 


However, I have a second confession to make. Even in this Lenten discipline of mine that is not truly a Lenten discipline, I have failed. I have dropped my cross I have taken up. There was one day last week where some wire got crossed in the noggin and I found myself watching one of the many silly videos one of my friends had sent me. Before I knew it I was checking my emails, checking my texts, scrolling through Facebook and Instagram. All of the usual milieu of things that are fun to do so you can delay getting started with your day just that much longer. I will say, upon remembering the Lenten practice I had taken up, I did nearly throw my phone across the room and recoil in shock. Besides throwing your phone away, it is hard to know what to do when you drop your cross. Or, more broadly, what do we do when we fail at being good. Which is really what taking up a cross is supposed to be. 

Here, I turn to Paul’s words to us this morning. Paul in a general sense is theologizing about what it was about Abraham that was so cool and special that God chose him, and is furthermore bringing it into his own time as a person who lived centuries after what he was writing about. He comes to a conclusion that may be startling, that it was not that Abraham was an upright man who followed every law and rule set out before him. It was that Abraham had faith when God told him that something impossibly good would happen to him. In other words, it was not that Abraham never dropped the cross he took up, it was that Abraham loved God and did his best to live out that love.

Right now, there is good news and bad news. The bad news, in my reading of these texts, is that if you drop your cross the only way to make it better is to take up your cross again. The good news is that if you drop your cross, God does not hate you, and you can pick up your cross again when you are ready. Just as Paul lays out in the first part of our reading today, we are not beloved of God because we are stringent rule-followers who are perfect all the time, if that were true than faith would be pointless. Rather, we are beloved of God because it is in God’s nature to love God’s people. 

In this spirit and with this notion, my commission to you, should you choose to take it, is to get out of God’s way in your life, however you think you are able to. After you are securely out of God’s way and letting him lead, see what cross he is inviting you to take up. It can be a big one, or a small one, or a different one than you have been carrying, or maybe you don’t know yet. If and when you do pick up your cross, because you are human you will inevitably drop it; you pick it back up, dust it off, glue it back together if you must, and try again. In the name of the one who loved us first. 

The Rainbow of Wrath

The Rainbow of Wrath

 
 
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Sermon — February 18, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

I know an avid golfer, and a couple years ago she told me about a great new system she had for working on her swing. There were all these small tips she’d gotten over the years from her coach that she wanted to internalize. So she distilled them down into sticky-note-sized reminders and then posted them on her bathroom mirror, so that as she got ready in the morning, she could be reminded of an important tip. You wash your face, and look up, and see, “Keep your hips loose.” Brush brush brush. “Keep your eye on the puck.” (Clearly golf is not my thing, but you get the point.)

Some of you might find, three days into Lent, that you need the same kind of reminder for yourself. A “DO NOT ENTER” sign posted on the handle of the liquor-cabinet door. An icon of a wagging finger in the place of your go-to social media app. A sticky note, perhaps, on your bathroom mirror, reminding you of this year’s Lenten discipline: “Do Not Yell at the Children.” (I’ll pray for you.)

If you find yourself embarrassed that you need a reminder like this, or else you’ll instantly forget, then: Don’t be! You’re in good company. Because as the Book of Genesis tells us today, even God needs to set a reminder on a post-it note on the proverbial bathroom mirror, something to see when God first wakes up: “Remember: ‘Never Again Make a Flood to Destroy the Earth.’”

After all, that’s where we begin Lent today: with this odd little aside above God’s invention of the rainbow. I don’t know whether the ancient Israelites would have taken this at face value, but it makes me laugh to think that God needs a sign like this, after the great Flood. We human being are apparently so frustrating, that every time it rains, God is tempted to just keep going and wipe everything out again, but God has committed not to do that, and so God puts a rainbow in the sky, so as to “see it and remember the everlasting covenant” that God has made, never to destroy all life again. (Genesis 9:15) At the very least it should give a whole new meaning to the phenomenon of the “double rainbow”: not just an extra-special moment of magic, but a sign that humankind is really getting on God’s nerves.


But there’s something serious in this image, too. And so I want to stay with it, this morning, and ask: What can God’s covenant sign of the rainbow tell us about the nature of our spiritual lives this Lent?

The most unusual thing about this covenant that God makes is that it’s entirely one-sided. You probably know the story of the Flood: Humanity has become so wicked that God decides to wipe us out and start over, but God saves one righteous man named Noah and his family. And Noah builds an ark, and loads in all the animals, two by two: and God floods the earth, and destroys all other life, and then God makes this covenant with Noah.

It’s not like the covenants that God makes in later times with the Israelites. Those covenants are treaties, two-sided agreements in which each side has responsibilities and rights. They’re conditional: over and over, God says, “If you obey the laws and commandments that I am giving you this day, then I will ____…” But this covenant is one-sided, unconditional. God gets nothing in return. God simply promises: “I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the water of a flood.” (Gen. 9:11) God realizes, in this moment, that God can’t control what human beings do. We will sometimes do good. We will sometimes do evil. God can give laws, and send teachers and prophets; but we’re not puppets. God can’t control what we do. But God can choose not to destroy us in return.

And you can do this, too! You can choose how you act, on your own. In this season of Lent, as we focus on repentance and reconciliation, you might consider whether there are relationships in your life where this kind of one-sided covenant is exactly what you need to make. You can’t control how anyone around you behaves. Most of us can barely even control ourselves, but at least we have some influence over what we say and do. So ask yourself: Is there anyone in my life who just gets on my nerves? Anyone who tests me, intentionally or not? Anyone who, despite my best efforts, I simply cannot change? What would it look like for you to give up on that person changing and make an unconditional covenant, instead—to recognize that you cannot control their actions, but you can control your own, and to respond to them, not with destructive anger, but with restraint? In the same way, if there’s some sin, some toxic pattern in your life that you need to give up, you alone can give it up. It’s a one-sided choice. It’s not easy. It’s not always possible. But it is in your power, and your power alone, to commit to it.


What kind of sign do you need to set for yourself to remember to follow through?

God chooses a sign of great beauty. It’s not a wagging finger or an instructive post-it note that God sets in the sky, but a rainbow. The beauty of the sign is intimately linked to the force of destruction: the water vapor that would have flooded the earth, instead refracts light into beauty in the sky. And it’s as if this beauty jars God out of the path of anger: That’s right. This is what water is for.

Lent has its own strange kind of beauty. Fasting from something can feel like a chore, or a struggle. Repenting from some pattern in your life that needs to change can be hard. Reconciling with someone you need to forgive is always more appealing at another time. And yet there can be a beauty in these things. It’s not the beauty of the luxury vacation. It’s the beauty of the desert, of the wilderness, of life pared down to its essentials. It’s the satisfaction of a struggle won. And you might observe how it feels, in your actual body, to give up what you’ve given up, or to take on what you’ve taken on. It might turn out that the beauty of that rainbow is even greater than the satisfaction of destruction; that your Lenten practice this year is not all self-denial and discipline, but contains some gift for you as well.

But in the end, here’s the thing: Lent is about God’s work, not ours. We spend our forty days of temptation in the wilderness, and we may feed like we succeed or fail, but Jesus has been there before us. We try to turn away from our destructive ways, but it’s God who’s already pledged never again to flood the earth. The question of Lent is not how we can be more like God, how we can resist temptation, about what we have to learn from this sign of the rainbow. It’s about what God has already done for us.

Because Lent is not just forty days of giving something up with a celebration at the end. Lent is the path that leads to Good Friday. Lent is the road that leads to the Cross, where God fulfills the promise never again to the destroy all flesh, but to be destroyed, instead; the day on which Christ “was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit,” (1 Peter 3:18) as Peter says, and gave new life to every one of us.

And that is the ultimate beauty of Lent. It’s the beauty of the rainbow: God’s unconditional promise of love. If you succeed in “giving up” for forty days, well done; but still, Good Friday’s coming all the same. And if you fail, again and again and again, or if you never start at all: it’s okay. Jesus has already won the victory for you. Lent is not an achievement, or a way to earn God’s love. It’s just an invitation to learn about ourselves. It’s a way to experiment with our own willpower, always remembering that God loves us, whatever the results; that God’s covenant comes with no strings attached; that “the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near,” whether you repent or not, and whatever you believe about “the good news.” (Mark 1:15)

“For He Knows Whereof You Are Made”

“For He Knows Whereof You Are Made”

 
 
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Sermon — Ash Wednesday, February 14, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“As far as the east is from the west,
so far has he removed our sins from us…
For he himself knows whereof we are made;
he remembers that we are but dust.”
(Psalm 103:12, 14)

I’ll never forget the conversation I had in a hospital room one day in Connecticut, when I was in seminary. I was visiting a woman who’d been suffering for years with various health problems. She’d been in and out of the hospital several times over the last few months. She was sick, and she was tired. And after a few minutes of introductions and small talk that felt like pulling teeth, she looked at me with her eyes full of despair, and said, “I just don’t know why God would do this to me. I thought I was a good person my whole life. I always tried to do the right thing, and I thought I had. I guess I was wrong.” I suddenly realized why she wasn’t so happy to have a chaplain dropping by her room: she really believed that God was punishing her for something, but she had no idea why. And it broke my heart to hear that the spirituality that could have helped alleviate her pain made it worse instead.

I don’t know where along the way through life she’d learned this idea. Maybe she was taught as a child, by teachers or parents trying to get her to behave, that if she followed the rules, God would reward her in this life, and if she broke them, she’d be punished. Maybe she attended a church where preachers told her that mortality was Adam and Eve’s punishment for their primordial sin, or where they hammered home Paul’s statement that “the wages of sin is death.” (Romans 6:23) Maybe it was just her own anxiety in the face of suffering, the need to have control, the need for things to make sense, the hope that if we can simply be good enough, nothing bad will ever happen to us. More likely, it was all of these, and more. It takes a lifetime of experiences to learn these kinds of ideas. And it takes more than one hospital visit from a shiny new seminarian, however charming, to unlearn them.


You might think at first that our Ash Wednesday service could be part of the problem. On Ash Wednesday, after all, our liturgy combines the two themes of sin and death, of repentance and mortality. Its two special features are the imposition of ashes and the Litany of Penitence. With one breath, we remind one another that we are dust, and to dust we shall return; with the next, we confess that even for creatures made of mud, our lives are pretty messy, and we acknowledge the many ways in which each one of us falls short. And I can certainly understand how someone might think that there’s a causal connection here: that if “the wages of sin is death,” then it’s my individual failings that explain my own suffering.

And yet I can’t help but notice that in our Scripture readings tonight, things seem to work the other way around. I think in part this is because we’re living in a very different world. The ancients assumed that misfortune was the result of divine punishment, from one god or another, for sins known or unknown or simply because the gods were cruel. But the prophet Joel spends his time saying something else. Joel doesn’t say that the people have sinned, or that God will punish them, but that God will forgive them, “for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.” It’s never too late, Joel says; “even now” you can return, and God will embrace you as her own. (2:12–13)

Fast forward a few hundred years, and when Paul talks about sin and suffering, it couldn’t be further from what my poor patient learned long ago. For Paul, the difficulty of his life, the depth of his suffering, is not an act of divine punishment or a sign of hidden wrongdoing; it’s the proof that he’s doing something right. If suffering in this life was a measurement of God’s love, then Paul’s is a world turned upside down, in which “we are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see!—we are alive.” (2 Cor. 8–9) Paul is left with nothing, and yet, by the grace of God, he finds himself possessing everything.

But for me, the “aha!” moment, the link that finally makes sense of this connection between sin and death, repentance and mortality, comes in the psalm. “The Lord is full of compassion and mercy,” the psalmist says, echoing Joel, “slow to anger and of great kindness… He has not dealt with us according to our sins, nor rewarded us according to our wickedness.” So far, so good. We can always use a reminder, especially on Ash Wednesday, that God’s capacity for grace and mercy are far greater than our capacity for sin. But then this: “As a father cares for his children, so does the Lord care for those who fear him. For he himself knows whereof we are made; he remembers that we are but dust.” (Psalm 103:13–14) And it’s that “for” that gets me.

God is full of compassion and mercy. God does not deal out a punishment that fits our crimes. God has removed our sins from us, God cares for us like little children, FOR God knows whereof we are made; God remembers that we are dust. It’s not that we are mortal and fragile, sick and suffering because God is punishing us. That’s not the case at all. We are mortal, and we are fragile; we get sick and we suffer. And God sees us, and God loves us, and as far as the east is from the west, God removes our sins from us, for God knows that we are but dust. Our suffering is not the result of God’s wrath; it’s the source of God’s compassion, God’s choice to come alongside us, and help us bear the load.

So tonight, this Ash Wednesday, remember that you are but dust. Your greatest achievements, the things in life of which you are most proud, will one day be dissolved. Your youth, your health, will crumble into ash; if they’re not already long gone. Even the most powerful legacy will be forgotten one day. But the same is true of your flaws. Your deepest shame, your darkest moments, the ineradicable issues you wish that you could fix, but can’t, will one float away, like so much dust on the wind. There is no shame that you can carry that will last forever, no mistake that can never be undone. God sees you as you are, and God cares for you as you are, because God knows whereof you are made, God knows that you are but dust; and God wants to love you nevertheless: for God is “is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.” Amen.