Sermon — April 21, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

There’s a beautiful piece in the New York Times Sunday Magazine this morning, with the title, “The Poems That Taught Me How to Love,” in which Nicholas Casey writes of the summer term he spent in Chile at the age of 19, a summer when he discovered the poetry of Pablo Neruda. Neruda’s immediately had him hooked: his imagery and emotion captured everything it was to be a freshman full of romantic longing, living in a foreign land. Also, it was the only Spanish poetry he could actually read. “Ah vastness of pines,” he read on the train down to Patagonia, “murmur of waves breaking, / Twilight falling in your eyes.” And yet there was no “you,” for him; no muse to whom to recite all these poems.

Until the last day, at least, when he met a girl. A German girl, visiting from Berlin. They spent the next day together, and the eleven-hour bus ride back into town. He read her Neruda’s poetry after dinner before they went back to their separate rooms.

The next day, as the bus left and they waved goodbye, his heart was breaking. He ran out to the curb—Stop the bus! Please! I forgot something. The driver stopped, and he stepped on, and gave his love a kiss. And in the perfect version of their lives, that would only be the beginning. But this is not the perfect version of life, and there was a boyfriend back in Germany named Jan, and it’s possible she wasn’t quite as into him as his Neruda-addled brain may have thought; in any case, that one day was the story’s beginning, middle, and end.

It’s a great little story—if you don’t get the magazine, you can find the piece online.

It’s a well-timed story, too, because this Sunday is, for us, is all about love. Not romantic love, of course. But it’s tempting to sentimentalize nonetheless, to sing lovely hymns and hear lovely words, to be as intoxicated by “The King of Love my shepherd is” as our young scholar was by the poetry of Neruda, and to think that feeling was love, and to think that expressing that feeling in beautiful poetry was love. But if we go a little deeper into what 1 John has to say about love this morning, it turns out that love cannot be captured in poetry or in hymns, because love is not a feeling or a word: it’s an action.

Of course, the kind of love that Pablo Neruda’s writing about is not the same as the Christian kind of love. You may have heard before, or maybe not, that ancient Greek, the language in which the New Testament is written, uses several different words for love. Eros is passion, romantic love; the yearning and pining that we might call a “crush.” in its most refined form, it’s an appreciation of the beauty within another person that leads us to appreciate Beauty itself. This is Pablo Neruda love. The second kind of love is filia, friendship, the kind of mutual affection and loyalty that binds together two good friends. When you like somebody, when you enjoy their company, when you want to hang out and chat after church: that’s filia. But the word for “love,” when the New Testament talks about love, is neither of these. It’s agape, and that means something else. Agape is a hard word to pin down, but it means something like “unconditional love.” It means, as Thomas Aquinas would say, “to will the good for someone else.” It’s a love that’s modeled in God’s own love for us, and in this kind of love there’s more duty than sentiment. As 1 John says, we should “love one another, just as he had commanded us.” (1 John 3:23) And that’s a sentence that makes no sense for the other kinds of love. Eros and filia can’t be commandments. You can’t be ordered to fall in love with someone. You can’t be obliged to like them. But you can be, and you are, commanded to love.

And that’s possible because if we’re talking about agape love, you can love someone without being in love with them. You can love someone without being related to them. You can love someone without even liking them, without having any feelings about them at all. And if that’s the case, then love cannot be about what you feel. Love is about what you do. And this is exactly what 1 John says.

“Little children, let us love,” the Elder writes, “not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” And he asks: “How does God’s love—How does the agape of God—abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a sibling in need and yet refuses help?” (3:17) When you see someone who needs your help, he says, what matters isn’t what you feel: it’s what you do. That’s what love is.

Most of us live in Boston, or Cambridge, or Somerville. I don’t need to tell you that this is a region of great inequality, a place where people with all the world’s goods and people in deep material need live side by side. And it’s also a place where people respond in love. Our only grocery store may be a Whole Foods, but Harvest on Vine distributes 12,000 pounds of food a month. The Clothes Closet was hopping here yesterday, with dozens of people shopping from clothes that dozens of other people had donated. We can always use more filia, more friendship and loyalty and solidarity across our communities, more connections and compassion between people from different backgrounds, but when it comes down to it, what matters from a Christian point of view is not word or speech or feelings of warmth, but action.

And there is more than one kind of need in the world. Every one of us, however wealthy or privileged or not, needs help, in one way or another. And every one of us, however little we may have in the eyes of the world, can love and care for and help someone else. We should yearn for and work for a more just world, in which there is no poverty or hunger, and yet on this side of the kingdom of God, we will always still need help. And when we see someone else who needs help, whether that’s material or emotional or spiritual, we should help, even if it means we have to make some sacrifice: because that is what Christian love is.

I loved the Times magazine piece because it’s the purest comparison I could possibly find. On one end of the spectrum, you have agape, Christian love, the self-giving, servant kind of love that’s not about words, but about action. And all the way over here on the other end, you have a shy college freshman’s Neruda-infused yearnings, hour after hour of poetry and speech, a depth and richness of feeling but no action at all—except that single, perfect kiss.

And yet as different as these two kinds of love are, the story points to something true, right there in the title: “The Poems that Taught Me How to Love.” We need to learn how to love. We need a poet to give voice to our inarticulate yearning. We need someone to model for us what it is to love.

And in the very different world of Christian love, that’s exactly what Jesus does. “We know love by this,” the Elder writes, “that he laid down his life for us.” (3:16) We know love by this. As Christians, we look at Jesus, and we listen to these stories about his teachings, his life, and his death, and we say: “This is what it means to love.”

And what we see, when we turn to these stories, wanting to know what it means to love, is a humble, patient, gentle, caring man, a good shepherd who lays down his own life for the sheep. To love is not to be like the hired hand, who hangs out with the sheep when times are easy, and then runs away and leaves them behind when the wolf comes and things get hard. To love is to be like the good shepherd, who lays down his life for the sheep, who’s willing to do anything to love and serve us when we are in need. And he doesn’t just do this to teach us how to love, but by doing all this, he does teach us to love.

And so we are invited—we are commanded—to love. Not to try to stir up inauthentic emotions for one another, not to try to warm our hearts with love, “for God is greater than our hearts,” and God knows already knows whether we like one another or not, and we don’t need to pretend. But to love one another, to give up some small part of our goods, to lay down some small part of our lives, to help one another when we are in need, so that just as we abide in God, God’s love abides in us.

Sermon — April 14, 2024

Michael Fenn

Lectionary Readings

One of the things I love the most about summer camp, particularly Christian summer camp, is that when you cross the line into camp–almost everything about who you are outside of camp does not matter anymore. Your varsity letter, your GPA, your parents divorce, your above-average reading level, your below-average reading level, the name of the school you go to, even your cat allergies don’t really matter once you cross from the outside world into the world of camp.

For many people, campers and counselors, this is a very freeing experience. Many sports people steer clear of the basketball courts at camp, many artists will never go in the arts and crafts shed, and the high achievers realize that there is actually nobody around to give them a grade for rock-wall climbing. 

Of course, I will admit, there are some exceptions to this relatively utopian picture I have painted. A basketball star will continue to be a basketball star at camp, and they might gain a lot of notoriety for that. A skilled painter will still have people ooh and aah over their work. Musicians will get roped into being in the camp band. However,  any of these things only go so far in the community. Your basketball skill, your paintings, your musical prowess are reduced to no more than what they are. To really parse it out, there are no grades given, no medals awarded, and nobody to put you on varsity. Any particular skill becomes less than what it actually is, and more what it does to foster joy, connection, or help your cabin win something (which is a form of joy and connection, actually).

I know this to be true because I have, honest-to-God, hand on heart, one of the most highly valued skills in the camp world. More than dunking a basketball. More than passing any swim test. More than fire building. I am not overstating this. I can start boondoggles. If you don’t know what that is I have brought one. For those you can’t really see it, it is one of those plastic lanyard things you or your kids likely made at school or a summer camp at any point in the last half century. Not only can I start them, I can start almost forty in just one minute. In the outside world, this matters unfortunately very little. However, in a world where collective joy is highly valued, such a skill is of critical importance. 

I fear I may have digressed to deeply into the skills and talents that may give you notoriety at summer camp. But the point I have been trying to make is this: the beauty of camp is that when you cross the line from the outside world, the evaluations of the outside world fall away. Instead, you are judged differently, through a lens of connection, love, and joy. By your ability to start boondoggles.

In the letter of first John today–which is a lovely letter, and for those of who who may have missed the memo, it is the subject of our Easter-tide sermon series. One phrase in particular caught my attention. In his letter, John makes the extremely bold statement that “we are God’s children”. This designation–God’s child–at the time of this letters composition, was strictly reserved for emperors, heroes, and Jesus himself. It did not have the more acceptable, perhaps even jovial usage that we have today. 

To make the statement that we are God’s children is a bold one–so bold in fact, that in the Eucharist prayer, before we pray the “Our Father” (a prayer where we reference God as a parental figure) the minister says “we boldly pray..” Listen for it if you haven’t noticed it before. Suffice to say it would be unthinkable, blasphemous, and even treasonous to call yourself a child of God in the way the author of 1 John uses it. 

Even aside from the boldness of the statement, what does it actually mean? For the ancient world, it would seem to proclaim that–to quote a different epistle–that there is no more slave or free, male or female, Jew or Greek. In the ancient context, whereever you were born, and to whom you were born, pretty much determined how your life would look. For most people, this meant that their hard life, and low social status, were inherent to their very existence. Only now, the labels that get put on them by their society, by the empire they live under, are no longer their true identifiers. Instead, they are adopted by God, they are not lowly peasants, fishermen, or carpenters, they are beloved children of a God who cares deeply for them. 

For us today, it is no different. We may have more democracy, more social mobility, and different occupations. But to be a child of God means that, just like when we enter camp, we leave all kinds of allegiances and memberships behind. It is a fundamental new identifier, one that exists deeper in us than any report card, evaluation, collegiate affiliation, or social club. 

Maybe this new state of being is not obvious to the outside world. The letter says as much, the people who aren’t children of God don’t necessarily get what it is that is different–there are no physical changes and no huge jump upward into the higher social strata. However, it is something of an internal characteristic, a metaphysical change, that we understand about ourselves, and about the people we share community with–our fellow Cbristians. 

But then, the letter gives us a more ambiguous message. After this really bold statement about what we are now–children of God. The author kind of says “we don’t really know what happens next–what we are going to be later, or what will necessarily happen to us. We get the general idea that it will continue to be something good, based in our new identity as children of God. However, we get what it is not in the next section–it is not lawlessness and chaos. The author of the John letters seems to think it is important to stress that just as much as we are beloved by God, that does not give us license to cause chaos and strife.

Interestingly, in the gospel today, Jesus makes his big first appearance to the expanded group of followers. And I am going to take this as a cue into the ambiguity of what we will be according to John. The very first thing Jesus says is “Peace be with you all”. The second thing he does, after calming down the disciples, is ask them if they have any food. Resurrecting is hungry work. They give him broiled fish, which I take to be the “ordering Dominos” of ancient Galillee. Then, Jesus sits and explains all the weird scary stuff that happened. Finally, he tells them that they are witnesses to all of this. 

Here is where we have something of a touchstone in the ambiguity of what we will be. Just as we are children of God, we are witnesses to all that has been done. Maybe what we will be is witnesses to this wonderful thing and this good news in Christ. For now, maybe that means in the joyful wake of a bright Easter…we take some time….order dominos…and reflect on what this good news–that we are children of God, worldly titles be darned–means for us. Maybe in our lives as Christians, pulled in many directions as we stumble along, this ambiguity of not knowing what we will be invites us into knowing that as much as we try to do good in the world, we don’t really know what we will be. 

And to return to the question we are exploring in the sermon series– maybe this is what it means to be a community of Christians in the light of the ressurection. To honor that fact that as Christians, we are given a fundamental new identity that usurps all of our other ones– children of God. To figure out how this fits into how we live our lives with one another. Of course, this is much easier at camp in a place away from typical pressures of modern life–no building job portfolios, no report cards, no quarterly reviews; where there is no rent to pay, and all your meals are cooked for you (for better or worse). But maybe we can look to that as an example for how to begin to think about it. To think about how we can uplift ourselves and others in ways that recognize that we are children of God–be it starting for starting boondoggles or something else. And also, to remember that in all of this trying and thinking, we still do not know what we will be or where God will lead us. We remain works in progress even as we are children of God. In the name of the one who loved us first. 

Sermon — April 7, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“Grace, mercy, and peace will be with us, from God the Father
and from Jesus Christ the Father’s Son, in truth and love.”
(2 John 3)

(A greeting from the Second Letter of John. More on that in a moment.)

I love this Second Sunday of Easter. Not just because of Doubting Thomas, whose faith I admire. But because it’s “Low Sunday,” when all the detailed preparations of Holy Week are over and the bells of Easter have stopped ringing in our ears; when the crowds of Easter Day have come and gone, and now a smaller group of us are left asking: “Alleluia, Christ is risen—Now what?”

On these Sundays after Easter, our readings begin to explore what it means to be an “Easter people,” what it means to live as a community in light of the Resurrection. Our first reading each week is drawn from the early chapters of the Book of Acts, following along with the community of the disciples in the days immediately following Easter. Our second readings come from 1 John, written a little less than a hundred years later, from an early church leader to a community of Christian believers. And since we only get 1 John once every three years, and because it’s one of my favorite books, and because this is after all, Saint John’s, this Easter, I’m going to preach my way through 1 John, asking every week, “What does it mean to be people of the Resurrection according to the First Letter of John?”

Although — It’s not really a letter, and it might not be by John.

We read the beginning today; there’s no greeting, and no signature. It’s more of a sermon than a letter. And 1 John doesn’t claim to be by a person named John, nor do 2^nd or 3^rd John. Nor does the Gospel of John, for that matter. 2 and 3 John are addressed from “The Elder” to “The Elect Lady” and “To Gaius” respectively. The Gospel of John talks about a “Beloved Disciple,” but it doesn’t say he’s the author and he’s not named John. So Scholars sometimes distinguish between John the Apostle, the brother of James and son of Zebedee; the Beloved Disciple (who may or may not be John); “John” the Evangelist (author of the Gospel); “John” the Elder (author of the letters); and John of Patmos (who wrote the Book of Revelation, and who does call himself John). Ancient church traditions say the Evangelist and the Elder are both the Apostle, who’s the Beloved Disciple, and even then they argued about whether Revelation was written by the same John—and we haven’t stopped arguing about it since, such that you can make a Biblical case for the existence of one, two, three, four, or five different Johns.

By the way, this is why, when people occasionally ask me who this church is named after, I either sound really pedantic or woefully uninformed. “Oh, which Saint John?” Uhhh…I don’t know.

So it’s not clear who wrote 1 John; I’ll just say “the Elder.” But it’s very clear that 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd John come from the same tradition or the same community as the Gospel of John. The letters and the Gospel share themes, and imagery, and even sentence structure, and you can hear it from the very first words of the letter we heard today: “We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life… God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.” If you know the Gospel of John well enough, you hear echoes of it constantly in the letter. And this shared tradition is sometimes called the “Johannine tradition” or “Johannine community.” We can only speculate, but you can easily imagine for example that 2 and 3 John are cover letters, addressed to the leaders of Johannine churches in two different cities along with a copy of the First Letter of John, warning against wandering prophets who’re preaching in a way the Elder doesn’t like, and reminding them of the ideas and the faith that they share, and which we have received in the form of the Gospel of John.

So to shift gears a little and with my apologies for the extended preface, here—What are those ideas? What is the Johannine answer to the question, “What does it mean for a community to live in the light of the Resurrection?”

I can’t help but notice that the first thing John wants to do, after his introduction, is to ask people to take a real, hard look at their lives. “If we say that we have no sin,” the Elder writes, “we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” (1 John 1:8-9) It’s a little ironic that we read this during Easter, when we traditionally omit the confession of sin on Sunday mornings.

But for the Elder, an honest reckoning with sin is inextricably linked to the hope of the Resurrection. He wants to hold these two sides together. By our Lenten human nature, we are imperfect. By God’s Easter action, we are forgiven. If we say we have no sin, we’re only deceiving ourselves; but if we confess our sins, he will forgive us our sin. The Elder is writing these things to us so that we may not sin; but if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with God in Jesus Christ. (2:1) (Advocate—Paraclete—there’s another good Johannine word.)

The Elder closes the letter: “I write these things to you who believe…so that you may know that you have eternal life.” (5:13) Not so that you repent and change your ways. Not so that you come to believe. But so that you know that you have eternal life. To talk about sin, in other words, is not to condemn ourselves, or condemn someone else; it’s to acknowledge that we might actually need forgiveness, so that we can remember that God has already forgive us. And that’s just the beginning of the path into the abundant and eternal life that God is already inviting us to live, in this world.

The Elder will go on to offer some of the most beautiful words that the Bible has about the gifts of love that we’ve received from God and the spiritual journey of transformation that we all share. But if we as human beings are going to aspire to love, we have to be honest about the ways in which we’ve failed to love, so that we can make amends with one another and grow together toward God.

It’s easy to think that this is an individual or a moralistic thing. But it’s not. It’s a letter about the life of a community, written to a community. And we read it today as part of a community that’s starting to do some real reckoning with its own sins in the past, and how they’ve shaped our life in the present, and that’s where I want to close, today.

Last month, our diocese published a historical study of the ways in which our parishes and the Diocese as a whole profited financially from the kidnapping and enslavement of people from Africa, entitled “‘And You Will Know the Truth, and the Truth Will Make You Free’”—another quote from John, by the way—“A Historical Framework (1620-1840) for Understanding How the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts Benefits Today from Chattel Slavery and Its Legacy.” The level of historical detail is astounding. The founding of every one of our colonial-era parishes was in some way funded by practices of enslavement. Dozens of clergy and founding members of parishes enslaved Africans, or made their livings through human trafficking. The booming Massachusetts economy that funded the Episcopal resurgence in the early 19^th century was fueled by processing cotton grown by slaves in our mills, selling food and supplies to slaveholding plantations, and building the ships that made the Triangle Trade work. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, which existed to strengthen the Church in North America, actually owned plantations, extracting revenue from unpaid enslaved Africans in Barbados and using it to fund preachers in Boston and around New England. Without a doubt, some fraction of the endowment of our Diocese of Massachusetts, and of many of our parishes, ultimately derives from the profits of the system of chattel slavery, one of the greatest sins human beings have ever committed.

“If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves…”

This is one part of what it means for us, as Episcopalians, to be an Easter people today. To accept and acknowledge the sins of our past, and to ask how we can turn them into love in the present. The promise of the Resurrection is that our sin can be transformed, and that God is inviting us together into a new life of love. The promise of the Resurrection is not only eternal life in the future; it’s a new kind of community in the present.

After all: “If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie… but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another.” (1 John 6-7)

In the name of the God who is faithful and just: Amen.

Sermon — Holy Saturday, March 30, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

“A mortal, born of woman, few of days and full of trouble,
comes up like a flower and withers, flees like a shadow
and does not last. Do you fix your eyes on such a one?”
(Job 14:1–2)

The Book of Job is an arcane, almost archaic poetic text. Its Hebrew vocabulary and terminology are so obscure at times, its meaning so unclear, that Biblical scholars will plumb the depths of their knowledge of ancient languages trying to determine the meaning of some of its phrases. They pull out the latest work in comparative North-West Semitic linguistics and Old Babylonian philology, trying to determine what a particular word means and come up short. Ironically, though, the book as a whole is simple in its meaning. And of all the books in the Bible, you might say that it’s among the most modern in its concerns. The Book of Job opens with a short fable about Job’s misfortune and suffering, and closes with a tidy little chapter in which he lives happily ever after. But in between, we just get readings like this: chapter after chapter and verse after verse in which Job cries out to God, begging for an explanation—and listening to the less-than-helpful speeches of his friends.

“There’s hope for a tree!” Job says. “If it’s cut down, it can sprout again.” And Job is right. If you walk down to the back side of the Doherty Playground over Bunker Hill right now you can see the proof. There’s a gnarled old stump there that Murray has decided is a troll. It’s four feet wide, grizzled, and mossy, but out of it is growing, this spring, a sprout.

“There’s hope for a tree,” Job says, “But mortals die and are laid low; humans expire, and where are they?” We have all seen perennials come up, year after year, to bloom. We have all seen shoots growing out of the stump of a tree. But we do not see human beings rising from the dead.

On Holy Saturday we read these words of Job at a service that serves as Jesus’ funeral. This service has none of the pomp and parades of Palm Sunday. It has none of the agony and suffering of Good Friday. We don’t get the candlelight and chanting of the Easter Vigil, or the bells and fancy hats of Easter Sunday. Instead, we lay Jesus to rest. We hear the Gospel story of his burial in the tomb, and we offer prayers taken from our burial service: the same prayers that could be said at a funeral service for you or I, we’ll say today for Jesus.

On Holy Saturday, Jesus rests in the tomb. And we rest, too, waiting for something to happen. Waiting for God to answer Job out of the whirlwind. Waiting for God to answer us: Because Job’s questions really are modern questions. So often, in human life, these are questions we share. Why, God, are things not the way they ought to be? Why do the people we love become sick and die, long before they reach old age? Why are bombs still falling, all around the world? Mortal human beings like us suffer in a thousand ways, large and small, and then we die.

In medieval times, we would have wondered where to place the blame. We would’ve assumed that God must be punishing us, and people do still sometimes think this way. But by and large the question modern people ask is more like Job’s: Do you fix your eyes on such a one, God? In other words: Is there anyone out there watching? Is there a God who cares? Or is the universe, after all, nothing but atoms and void?

And the almost-unbelievable good news of the Christian faith is that God’s answer to Job’s question—“Do you fix your eyes on such a one?”—is “Yes.” And so much more. God is keeping an eye on us, God does care for us, so much that God became one of us, and suffered like one of us, and died for all of us—so that God might make us like those trees, from which new life can grow, long after they are reduced to stumps. And when we read these words of mourning and despair from Job on Holy Saturday, there’s a kind of dramatic irony. We know something that Job doesn’t know, and it’s that despite all the suffering and disappointment of this world, he should not give in to despair. God is not in an far-off, uncaring world. God is here, suffering too; dying, too. And God is transforming that suffering and death into something new, and just as Jesus rose from the dead, we will rise again, too.

On Holy Saturday, we aren’t quite there yet. Holy Saturday is still a day of stumps. But even now, the hidden work begins. On the one hand, Christ is resting in the grave. On the other, as Peter tells us, Christ is proclaiming the gospel even to the dead. Tradition calls this “the harrowing of hell,” the moment on Saturday when it seems to us that Jesus is at rest, but in reality, he’s down among the souls of the departed, preaching good news to them, too.

In our eyes, in this Holy Saturday world, sometimes it looks like God’s work has stopped.  Even now, the hidden work of Easter has begun—Christ is bring forth new life from the deepest, darkest places. Even now, something is going on in your life’s deepest, darkest places, something that you cannot yet imagine and yet which will make everything new.

You cannot see it yet. None of us can. But somewhere, in the place you’d last expect it—maybe even in the sealed-off tomb, in the place from which you thought nothing could come—something new is becoming real.