Sermons from Saint John’s

Sermon — November 1, 2026
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

“Beloved, we are God’s children now;
what we will be has not yet been revealed.”
(1 John 3:2) 

There’s a beautiful children’s book by Doris Stickney called Water Bugs & Dragonflies that tells the story of a little colony of water bugs who lived below the surface of quiet pond. They lived a busy life, scurrying around in the mud, doing whatever water bugs do. And one day, they noticed that one of them had disappeared. They looked up just in time to see her climbing up the stalk of a lily that hung down into the water. They waited for her to return, but she never did. The other bugs missed their friend, and they wondered where she’d gone, but they had no way of knowing. One of them came up with an idea: the next bug to climb up the stalk would come back to tell the others what was going on.

The very next day, that same bug began to climb the lily stalk. When she reached the top, she was tired, and she flopped down on the lily pad on her back to rest. When she looked up, she was amazed. She’d never seen the sky before. She’d never smelled the air before. She’d never felt the warm sun on her wings before—in fact, she’d never known she had wings, but now they were unfurling underneath her. She lifted her wings, and tried a flap or two, and before she knew it, she was flying through the air. She had transformed from a water bug into a dragonfly!

She remembered the promise she had made, to go back and tell the others. And so she tried to fly back down below the water, but try as she might, she kept bouncing off the surface. She couldn’t swim any more. She began to despair: she would never see her friends again! But then she realized something: one day, each one of them would climb the lily stalk and emerge into the sun, and they would fly together through the air. And so she took to the skies, her little dragonfly heart full of joy.

…Okay, I’m not an entomologist, but even I know that water bugs don’t really have friends. But that’s okay. This isn’t really a story about water bugs and dragonflies, after all; it’s a story about us. It’s a story about death. And it’s a story about how we relate to what we sometimes call “the communion of saints”—by which we mean that vast community of all God’s holy people, ordinary and extraordinary alike, who lived with us on this earth, and died, and entered into eternal life. It’s this communion of saints that we remember and celebrate on this All Saints’ Day.

“Beloved, we are God’s children now,” Saint John writes, “what we will be has not yet been revealed.” (1 John 3:2) We expect to be transformed into something new, but we don’t quite know what that something new will be, any more than the water bug knew what it meant to be dragonfly; any more than an acorn knows what it is to be an oak.

In the Gospel of John, speaking about his own coming death, Jesus tells his disciples that “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24) Think about a grain of wheat. Or better yet: think about a sunflower seed. Try to imagine living in a world where you had only seen the seed. Could you even begin to picture a sunflower in bloom? None of us could. And yet this is the kind of transformation Jesus tells us lies ahead.

The Christian understanding of death is built on this idea that—as one of our funeral prayers says—“to your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended.” (BCP p. 382) And we don’t know exactly what that change will be like. “What we do know is this,” John says: that “when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2) We believe in a God who is loving and good, and so we “have this hope,” as John says, (1 John 3:3) that the life of the world to come is a life more beautiful than we can imagine, in which we see God face to face and become more like the God of love.

And in the Beatitudes, these “Blessed are those”-es that we hear today, Jesus invites us to bring that life into being here and now. He asks us to run that tape in reverse, to imagine the dragonfly hidden within the life of each bug, to imagine the flower tucked into each seed. “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” he says, “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” (Matt. 5:3-5) Blessed are they now, Jesus says—because of what is to come.

That is the tension that’s at the heart of All Saints’ Day, between the promise of an amazing future and the challenges of the present. We anticipate a world in which “God will wipe away every tear from [our] eyes.” (Rev. 7:17) But we live in a world in which—while plenty of joy is here already—there’s also a lot of mourning, and persecution, and pain.

In fact, sometimes those come together. It is the very sweetness of the love we have for the parents and children and spouses and friends who have died before us in this world that gives such bitterness to death. We are separated from those saints who have gone before us by that unbreakable barrier at the surface of the pond. And yet we know that even that barrier can’t sever the bonds between us. Our hearts are still full of love for those who are gone. And, at least in our tradition, we believe that those who have gone before us still love and care for us, as we love them. All those “saints at rest” are still, in some way, present with those of us still striving, here on earth; still caring for us, still praying for us, and certainly still inspiring us to be the people that they believed that we could be.

So this fable of the water bug and the dragonfly works pretty well, as an expression of what we believe. It reminds us of these themes of transformation, and separation, and ongoing connection with those who have died. But there’s one big difference, at the end. The dragonfly can’t go back. It can’t tell its friends what’s next. They’re left with their confusion, and their grief; they have no reason to hope. But we believe that someone did come back from the other side of the pond. That there is someone who connects these two worlds, who bridges earth and heaven, who climbed up the lily stalk and came back down to tell us what’s up there. For us, the life and death and resurrection of Jesus mean that we “have this hope,” that life is changed, not ended; that we will rise again and see God face to face.

But it also means that we already know something now about the life of the world to come. Which means that we can already begin to live out some of that kind of eternal life. We can already now choose mercy and peace and love, knowing that while these are not always the values of this world, they offer us a window into that world of sun and wind and endless flight that lies just beyond our sight. We can live our lives on earth with one foot already in heaven, following the example of the saints who’ve gone before us, remembering and inspired by their love.

On All Saints’ Day, we pray for those who have died. But they don’t really need our prayers; God’s love for them is already more than enough. The prayers we say today are for ourselves: that we remember that our lives are knit together with theirs, even still; that we may be inspired to live like them; that we might never forget that “we are God’s children now,” and that while “what we will be has not yet been revealed,” we know that we “will be like him,” and we can begin to be more like him already now.

Sermon — October 25, 2026
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

There’s a great talk from 2011 by a computer programmer named Rich Hickey with the title “Simple Made Easy.” The core idea is that although we often use these words interchangeably, “simple” and “easy” mean different things. Something is simple when it does or means or consists of exactly one thing. The opposite of “simple” is “complex”; complex things are made from simple things woven together in a way that can be hard to disentangle. Something is easy, on the other hand, when it’s familiar or close at hand; when we can just do it without much effort. The opposite of “easy” is “hard.” And these two categories can be combined in any combination. We can probably all imagine things that are simple and easy (a vegetable peeler) and things that are complex and difficult (rocket science, brain surgery). But the other two combinations are possible as well. Rich Hickey’s point about programming is that in our effort to make things easy, we often make them more complex, and then suffer the consequences. A good non-programming example of this would be taco seasoning, which combines cumin and oregano and pepper, garlic powder and chili powder and also a bunch of salt. It’s easy to use, but the complexity has a cost: you can’t tweak the flavor profile, or add more spices relative to the salt. If you want spicier tacos, they end up saltier; if you want something milder, it turns out bland.

Now, both Rich Hickey and tacos are entirely irrelevant to the rest of this sermon, except insofar as the Two Great Commandments that Jesus names in our Gospel reading today fall into that fourth category of things: they’re very simple, but they’re not at all easy.

Jesus didn’t come up with these two commandments, by the way. You might be able to tell this from the lawyer’s question, but it’s worth fleshing it out. The rabbinic tradition of Judaism, which began forming around the time of Jesus, teaches that there are 613 commandments in the Torah. You can list them systematically, citing where you find them in the Bible by chapter and verse. So this lawyer comes to Jesus and asks him, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” (Matt. 22:36) For once, this isn’t a trick question or a trap. And Jesus answers straightforwardly enough. He quotes the second half of the Shema, a well-known Jewish prayer found in the Book of Deuteronomy, and says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” (Matt. 22:37; Deut. 5:4-5) “This is the greatest and first commandment.” (22:37) And then he gives a bonus track, and says that there’s a second one that’s like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (22:39; Lev. 19:18), quoting from the Book of Leviticus.

This is a real answer to the question of which of the 613 commandments is the best. But then Jesus adds a little more. He elevates them above the rest. “On these two commandments,” he says, “hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matt. 22:40)

I like to picture them as the poles of the tent, with the tent material hanging on them. They provide the structure around which everything else is built; not only the 611 other commandments in the Torah, but “all the law and the prophets,” everything that what we call the Old Testament, which was the whole Bible in Jesus’ day. The whole word of God, in other words, hangs on these two laws: you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself. These Two Great Commandments are so central to Christianity that Michael Curry, the former Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, used to say, “If it’s not about love, it’s not about God.”

I’m not sure everyone thinks about Christianity this way. You may have been taught ways of relating to God that have more to do with fear, or control, or shame. But I think it’s fundamentally true: if it’s not about love, it’s not about God. And lest you think this is some kind of wishy-washy Episcopalian nonsense, I can tell you that Michael Curry didn’t come up with it. It comes pretty directly from Saint Augustine, the great African bishop and theologian of the 5th century, who taught that when we’re trying to figure out whether we’re interpreting the Bible correctly, these two commandments of love should be the deciding factor. He wrote, “if it seems to you that you have understood the divine scriptures, or any part of them, in such a way that by this understanding you do not build up this twin love of God and neighbor, then you have not yet understood them.” (De doctrina I.36,40) It’s actually better, Augustine says, to misinterpret what something in the Bible means, in such a way that builds up love, than it is to interpret the Bible in any way that does not build up this love; because indeed, to paraphrase, if it’s not about love, it’s not about God.

Isn’t that awesome? I love love. I think it’s great to belong to a church that believes this. It makes me feel good to hear that the meaning of everything hangs on these two laws: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind”; and “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” I want to be on Team Love. And I suspect I’m not alone.

But… Spoiler alert for anyone who’s in an Episcopal Church for the first time today. After the sermon, we’re going to say a few prayers, and then I’m going to say to everyone, “Let us confess our sins against God and our neighbor.” And we’ll pray, together:

Most merciful God,
we confess that we have sinned against you
in thought, word, and deed,
by what we have done,
and by what we have left undone.
We have not loved you with our whole heart;
we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.

Anything that we say every week like this will sometimes feel rote. Some of us may not be thinking of particular things we’ve done in the last week during this prayer. (Some of us may; I never have a hard time coming up with a list.) Some of us may be uncomfortable or struggle with the language of “sin” at all. But this prayer is for every one of us nevertheless. Because—even if we’re basically good and decent people who spend most of our time doing basically good and decent things—by the simple standard of the Two Great Commandments, every all of us nearly always falls short.

Jesus asks us to love God with all our hearts, and all our souls, and all our minds. But I know that I don’t quite manage that. There are all sorts of things that compete with God for pieces of my heart, and soul, and mind, and that get them. Jesus asks us to love our neighbors, and that can be hard. People are wonderful in many ways, but they’re not always very easy to love. But he doesn’t only ask us to love our neighbors, he asks us to love our neighbors as ourselves, and this is a much more radical thing. To do this means to treat other people’s interests and needs as being equal to my own in the decisions that I make. And I certainly don’t do a very good job of that. I’ve known many compassionate and generous people in my life. Few of them have truly loved their neighbors as themselves.

These commandments may be simple. But they’re certainly not easy. The Two Great Commandments give us a good and beautiful Law, a goal toward which we should always strive toward—and try as we might, we will always fall short.

But that’s kind of the point of Jesus being who he is. He’s not only a prophet, who comes to give us the Word of God, or a lawyer who helps us understand the Law. He’s not only a king, a “Son of David,” who will rule the people and enforce the full weight of the Law. He’s a Savior who will forgive us when we fail to bear that load. He is the love of God made flesh, who loves us with all his heart, and all his soul, and all his mind; who loves us even more deeply than he loves himself, who loves us so much that he’s willing to die for us.

This is “the gospel of God” that Paul declared. (1 Thess. 2:2) “Gospel” means “good news,” after all. And while these Two Great Commandments are wonderful, they aren’t news; Jesus doesn’t invent them, they were already there. The good news isn’t that Jesus inspires us to be the best versions of ourselves; the good news is that he loves us, when we are at our worst. When we falter under the burden of that Law of love, he offers us compassion and grace. He forgives us, when we need to be forgiven, and he invites us to return and start following him once more on the journey toward that eternal Source of Love; to let our hearts and souls and minds be filled a little more with his love, to give us the strength to love God with our whole lives, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Imagine yourself in Boston in 1771. The Boston Massacre has happened. The Tea Party is yet to come. Imagine that you’re down on the Common, hanging out with a crowd of people listening to a popular preacher who’s visiting from out of town. Suddenly a group of local Tories arrive, parishioners of the Old North Church, along with a couple of British regulars in their famous red coats. And they ask the preacher, “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth …” (Matt. 22:16) Tell us then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to King George III?

If he says “no,” they’re going to put him under arrest: that’s sedition. And if he says “yes” in front of this crowd—well, he’ll be lucky if all they do is throw him in the Harbor as a Tea Party of One. If you’re trying to undermine a rival who you see as a threat, this kind of trap isn’t half bad.

That’s more or less the situation Jesus is in, in today’s gospel. His religious rivals, the Pharisees, send some students to ask a politically-charged question: “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” (Matthew 22:17) And they invite some of “the Herodians” to come along as well, some of the supporters of King Herod, whom the Romans had appointed to rule the province of Judea on their behalf. In Jesus’ day, Judea was in a pre-revolutionary moment of its own: in the years to come, multiple rebellions would erupt, leading to years-long wars with Rome.

But Jesus doesn’t answer the question directly. Instead, he asks, “Show me the coin that’s used for the tax.” They bring him a denarius, a Roman silver coin. A typical Roman denarius of the time would be stamped with the face of the emperor Tiberius, and the inscription “Caesar Augustus Tiberius, Son of the Divine Augustus.” He looks at the coin, and he asks, “Whose head is this, and whose title?” They answer him, “Caesar’s.” And Jesus answers them, in what’s become a familiar turn of phrase, “Then render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, but unto God that which is God’s.” (Matt. 22:21)

Most people throughout history would never catch a glimpse of the king or emperor who ruled them; there was no ancient television or newspaper to show his face. But coins told you who was in charge. To put the Sovereign’s face on a coin and spread it throughout the realm is a way to demonstrate the extent of his power. In fact, this is exactly why American currency doesn’t show the sitting President: the equivalent to a Sovereign in the United States is not the President, but our Republic itself, which we symbolize with the images of those who created it, not those who lead it now.

So the face of the emperor has symbolic value. But it’s also a part of the coin’s monetary value. A quarter’s only worth about 10 cents, if you melt it down; it’s the official stamp that gives it value. And while this was less true in the ancient world—a denarius really was made mostly of precious silver—the emperor’s face gave it some of its value even then. We don’t have enough time to talk about the debasement of currency over the course of the Roman Empire, but let’s just say that a denarius was worth more than the silver it was made of.

So Jesus says: This coin came from Rome. It signifies the emperor’s rule. Its value comes from carrying the emperor’s face. It’s a portable symbol of the emperor’s power a sign that even here, in far-away Judea, the emperor’s word is the ultimate authority. And you’re asking if it’s lawful to give it to him as a tax? It’s his coin in the first place, Jesus says. So “give to the emperor the things that belong to the emperor, but give to God the things that are God’s.”

Which raises a question: The coin belongs to the emperor because it’s been stamped with the face of the emperor. But what exactly is it that’s been stamped with the face of God?

It’s certainly not a coin, that we can look at to see God’s face. In fact, in our first reading today, God tells Moses, “you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.” (Exod. 33:20) Moses is going to stand over there on a rock, and as the glory of God passes by, God’s hand will reach out and cover his face until God’s passed by. So Moses will see God’s back, but not God’s face. (Exod. 33:21–23) There’s a beautiful image in there somewhere about the nature of the spiritual life, in which—however faithful our worship, however deep our prayer—we never quite see the face of God, although on occasion we catch a glimpse of God’s back as the Holy One rushes past. But it doesn’t really answer the question.

But there is an answer to the question. Our translation says, “Whose head is this?” In the Greek text, the word that’s used is “icon,” meaning “image.” “Whose image is this?” This is the image of Caesar. So what is the image of God? That phrase might ring a bell. It comes from the Book of Genesis, in the story of Creation itself, when God says, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.” God creates us, “according to the image of God.” (Genesis 1:26–27)

Every one of us is like a coin stamped with the image of God, a living emblem of the universal reign of God, a symbol of the peace of God that stretches further than any empire ever has. Every one of us has a value given to us by God, that no one can ever take away, a “dignity,” as Pope Leo wrote in a recent encyclical, “that belongs to every human being simply by virtue of existing, of having been willed, created and loved by God.”[1]

Every human being is made in the image of God: the people in this church, and our neighbors passing by on the street, and neighbors who live on the street. Every child born today anywhere around the world is stamped with that image, and so is person waiting on death row, and so are those who will put them to death. As different as our outward images may be, we are all made in the image of God, in some way that our human eyes can’t quite make out. And while that image may sometimes be obscured by the dirt and grime and smudges of our lives, God continually comes to us with the Windex of undying love, ready to restore us to the brightest versions of ourselves.

Wherever we go, and whatever we do, we carry that image of God, and so does everyone else. We do our jobs and pay our taxes and obey the law, we give to Caesar the things that belong to Caesar; but amidst all these things, we know that we belong to God. To give to God that which is God’s is to recognize the gift of this life, and to be good stewards of this gift, and then and to offer it back to God with gratitude and joy.

I was reminded this week of a scene from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle, in which we hear the litany that’s said at the end of life in the imaginary satirical religion that the main character follows.

“God made mud.                       [the litany begins. “Papa” is the character saying the prayer.]
“God got lonesome.”
“So God said to some of the mud, ‘Sit up!’
“‘See all I've made,’ said God, ‘the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.’”
“And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.”
“Lucky me, lucky mud.” Tears were streaming down “Papa’s” cheeks.
“I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.”
“Nice going, God!” “Papa” said it with all his heart…
“I got so much, and most mud got so little.”
“Thank you for the honor!”
“Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.”
“What memories for mud to have!”
“What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!”
“I loved everything I saw!”
“Good night.”[2] 

Vonnegut sometimes called himself a “Christ-loving atheist” or a “Christ-worshipping agnostic.”[3] The “atheist” half shares with the Christian the idea that the human being is basically made of mud. But the “Christ-loving” half adds something more. We are the mud that got to sit up. You can almost hear where the writer and the Pope converge. There is a dignity “that belongs to every human being simply by virtue of existing,” because we have “been willed, created and loved by God.” Lucky me, Lucky mud.

It should shape our politics to believe that ultimate power lies not with the people whose images are on our coins but to the God in whose image we were made. It should shape our ethics to insist that human solidarity transcends the divisions we create; that we must respect the dignity of every human being made in the image of God. More than anything, it should shape our daily lives to remember. To look at this life, in all its messy beauty; to look at myself, with all my imperfection; to look at the people who frustrate me, and the people I love, and to remember that we are all just some of the mud that got to sit up? What precious comfort. What a gift. “Nice going, God! Thank you for the honor.”

[1] Magnifica Humanitas 52.

[2] Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle (New York: Dial Press Paperback, 2006 [1963]), 220–222.

[3] https://imagejournal.org/article/kurt-vonnegut/

Sermon — October 11, 2026
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

“When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the
people gathered around Aaron, and said to him, ‘Come, make gods for us.’” (Exod. 32:1)

You know, I can’t help but think that this all would’ve turned out differently if the ancient Israelites had only had smartphones.

In our reading from Exodus last Sunday, God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, including the second one: “You shall not make for yourself an idol.” (Exodus 20:4) And this Sunday, we read about the people doing exactly that: making and worshiping a golden calf. This is typical, in a way. When someone tries to tell us what to do—even God—we often respond by pushing back. So perhaps this is a theological account of a common tendency: No sooner do we hear the law than we begin to break it.

Or perhaps, some scholars say, it’s part of a debate about proper religious practices happening within the world of ancient Israelite religion, an attack by writers from the southern kingdom of Judah against the northern kingdom of Israel. The golden calf, they say, is a not-so-veiled reference to the golden calves set up by King Jeroboam of the north in the cities of Bethel and Dan. (1 Kings 12:25-33) This story of idolatry turns a proud tradition into a story of ancient disgrace.

Or perhaps the story of the golden calf is a timely lesson about how we should relate to wealth. Churches all around the country are launching their fall pledge campaigns, this time of year. A story about what people do with their gold? Surely someone somewhere has turned this into a church fundraising pitch.

But I’m sorry to say to our stewardship chairs, and to our historians of ancient Israelite religion, and to our theologians—I actually think the ancient Israelites were actually just kind of bored.

After all, it was way back at the end of chapter 24 that something exciting happened: “Moses went up on the mountain, and [a] cloud covered the mountain, and the glory of the Lord settled on Mount Sinai…for six days.” Now, Moses has been up there for forty days. (Exod. 24:15, 18)

God’s been giving him instructions on how to build the Ark of the Covenant (make it from acacia wood, two and a half cubits long by one and a half cubits wide); about the priestly vestments that should be made for his brother Aaron to wear (a breastplate, an ephod, a robe, a checkered tunic, a turban, and a sash); about the number of bulls and rams to be offered at the ordination of priests (not how we do it any more); and about the precise blend of spices and of oils that should be used for anointing—and all in extraordinary detail. You can see why it’s taking forty days to get it all straight.

But the Israelites have been waiting all this time with nothing to do. They don’t know what’s been going on; they are, understandably, anxious and afraid. But I live in 2026, so I know the best way to occupy your time when you’re bored, or anxious, or afraid: Looking at your phone. So I just think this whole thing would’ve gone very differently if, instead of coming down from the mountain after forty days with the two stone tablets of the Law, Moses had come down after forty minutes or so with, you know, some tablets. Just to give them something to do.

Okay, the problem with all this waiting wasn’t really that they were bored. It was more that they were anxious and afraid, in a situation that felt beyond their control. After all, the prophet who had led them out of slavery in Egypt had disappeared, and the God whose words he spoke was a mystery to them. And so they did what many of us do, when we begin to worry about the future, and they tried to create a way to control over the situation. They didn’t know what Moses was doing up there with God. But they thought that if they could make a new god for themselves, maybe that god would sort things out. This is a classic example of what a wise man once called “controlling what you can when things feel out of control.” (Technically he wasn’t a man so much as an animated magical snowman, but people start worrying when I attribute all my psychological insights to Frozen II.)

Anyway, waiting with uncertainty is hard. And yet Christianity is mostly about waiting around.

We live in the middle of the story of our faith. The Biblical story of God’s relationship with humankind is essentially divided into two parts. There is a whole long narrative arc that begins with Adam and Eve, that stretches through the story of the ancient Israelites, that tells of the prophets who call the people again and again to turn away from worshiping idols and to return to God, that culminates in Jesus’ proclamation of the coming kingdom of God. Jesus inaugurates that kingdom. He dies and rises again. And he says that he’ll return to finish the work, to bring about a new heavens and a new earth. But in between, there’s a gap between the part of the story that has already happened now and the part of the story that has not happened yet. And we experience that “now and not yet” tension every day.

In the face of grief, God comforts us with the promise that we will rise again to eternal life; but we’re not in heaven yet, and so we still mourn those whom we have loved and lost. In the face of the injustice and cruelty so common in this world, Jesus tells us that the kingdom of God has come near; but that reign of peace and love is not fully established yet. In the face of our anxieties about the future, Jesus reassures us that there is a God of love who cares enough about each one of us that he has counted even the hairs on our heads—and yet here we are, still worrying about the future anyway, because we are still waiting for it to be revealed.

In many ways, we share the condition of those ancient Israelites who’d been waiting for forty days with no word from Moses or from God, and began to worry about how things would turn out. And, like them, we fill the time by making golden calves.

We may not literally melt down our jewelry to make a statue of a god. But we spend a lot of our time and energy trying to come up with ways to cope with uncertainty while we wait for the future to arrive. We bounce around between different exercise programs and dietary supplements in the hope that there are concrete steps we can take now to ensure that we’ll be healthy then. We diligently read parenting books, in the hopes that someone, somewhere has discovered a way to exert some control over the messy and chaotic experience of being a parent. (I’ve heard that this year maybe it’s the French?) We read the news and check election polls in the hope that if people just elect our preferred politicians just one more time then the problems of the world will be resolved.

And none of these things are bad in and of themselves. But none of them is going to work. None of them can solve the problem we face, which is precisely that we live in a world that is beyond our control.

But there are things that we do control. And so I find myself encouraged and comforted and challenged by the words of the Apostle Paul today. “Rejoice in the Lord always,” he says (Phil. 4:4); and that’s a choice. We can’t choose for life to be easy. But we can choose to rejoice, to celebrate what’s good, whatever else is going on. “Let your gentleness be known”; we can do that while we wait. “Do not worry about anything” may be easier said than done, but “in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” (Phil 4:6) This isn’t a finger-pointing thing. I don’t do a good job of this myself. But we can actually cultivate practices of gratitude and prayer. These are available to us.

There’s an awkward tension, I think, between the intense urgency of so much of Jesus’ message and the huge span of time that we spend waiting around. It’s a little weird that Jesus can tell a parable in which it’s so important to the father of the groom that you show up to this wedding that if all you people RSVPed and there’s an empty seat at Table 13, then God help me, I will burn this city to the ground (Matthew 22:7)… and a few days later, Jesus can say, “I am with you always, to the end of the age,” and then immediately ascend to heaven, while we wait two thousand years for his return. (Matt. 28:20) We live with uncertainty and waiting and yet God demands urgent action.

But it occurs to me that this isn’t a tension at all. It’s precisely because the future is so far off, and so uncertain—it’s precisely because we can’t control it, however many golden calves we cast—that it’s so urgent to “come to the wedding banquet” today. (Matthew 22:4) The farm and the business will be there tomorrow; but the time to celebrate will have passed. So what can we do now, given how little we can control what happens then? “Rejoice in the Lord always… And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” (Phil 4:4, 7)

Sermon — October 4, 2026
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

On Tuesday, The New York Times ran a fascinating story about a series of meetings between Christopher Olah, one of the cofounders of the AI company Anthropic, and religious leaders of different faiths, from all around the world. “The discussions served two purposes,” the Times reports: “to broach the possibility of AI consciousness, a controversial idea that Anthropic’s leaders had been unusually open to; and to learn how Anthropic—which could be valued at $2 trillion—might apply centuries of human moral wisdom to its models, as rapidly as possible. If the models themselves could be made to choose goodness, Mr. Olah reasoned, the world would be more safe.”

Believing that his company had created a thinking machine with superhuman intelligence, which can already be used by humans for good or evil and which he believed may even be a conscious moral agent capable of doing good and evil on its own, Chris Olah reached out to the religious leaders of the world to learn: how can we make it choose goodness?

There’s a kind of innocence about this question that fascinates me. Here’s a man—a couple years younger than I am—who’s dedicated his adult life to the creation of artificial intelligence. And now that his company has made AI intelligent, he wants to make it good. So he turns to the religious leaders of the world, to ask: So, you religious people have been at this for a while. You know how to make people do the right thing, right? World religions have discovered how to make an intelligent creature behave the way its creator wants? Right? Right?

And if you’ve ever read Frankenstein or Paradise Lost or any of the works of Saint Augustine or Saint Paul, or the Book of Genesis, then you already know that the answer is: Nope! The religious traditions of the world have not, in fact, succeeded in consistently making people choose the right thing.

Of course we’ve tried. Encouraging prosocial behavior is one of the basic anthropological functions of religion. And the religions of the world really do share a lot of basic moral beliefs. We read the Ten Commandments just now. While we might argue over what it means to make an idol, and whether that includes stained glass windows, and we might wonder how exactly to honor the sabbath day, we all know and we agree that murder is wrong, and theft is bad; that you shouldn’t lie and say your neighbor committed a crime, and that you should probably treat your parents well. We teach these things to children as soon as they can grasp that it’s wrong to grab someone else’s toy. And yet Louise and Priscilla and I spent four hours a couple weeks ago with our auditor, meticulously checking documents and making sure that our church has all the right policies and procedures in place to prevent any kind of financial wrongdoing, because—it turns out—you can spend your whole life reciting the Ten Commandments and still steal money from your church.

Simply having a philosopher read you the Ten Commandments doesn’t make you follow them, because knowing what’s right and wrong doesn’t mean that we’ll do it. In fact, AI researchers, and psychologists, and the Apostle Paul have all independently discovered that telling someone not to do something can sometimes have the opposite effect; it can make them more likely to do it, because now the idea’s been planted in their head.

But even doing good things doesn’t make us any more likely to choose goodness ourselves, when we do it for some external reward or punishment. Psychologists call this extrinsic motivation; in AI, it’s called reinforcement learning. In your life it might be a sticker chart, or a report card, or a set of performance metrics that will get you a promotion. This kind of extrinsic motivation kind of works. But it doesn’t build up intrinsic motivation. In fact, it undermines it. This is why Harvard’s faculty report that the two biggest problems the college faces right now are how little its students care about their coursework and how much they care about their grades. We see the same thing in matters of religion. It may have worked for Moses to put the fear of God on people so they didn’t sin (Exod. 20:20); but we’re going to spend the rest of the story listening to those same people complain and rebel. Three thousand years of history suggests that you can entice and threaten people with heaven and hell all you want—they’ll still do the right thing or the wrong one at more or less the same rate.

Paul’s own life illustrates the point he’s trying to make. Look, he says in the Epistle today, I’ve done everything by the Book. I was born into the chosen people of God. I’m as learned in the Law as the most diligent Pharisee. I’ve been zealous in my faith; I’ve been blameless in my obedience to the law. (Phil. 3:4-6) And yet when Paul was at the peak of this performance, when—by every standard offered by the religious leaders of his day—he was always doing the right thing, he stood by and watched a crowd of men stone Stephen, the first martyr of the early church. (Acts 7:58) And then he signed up to join the effort to hunt the followers of Jesus down.

This is the life that Paul regards as loss: a life in which he had measured his own goodness by external things. Paul’s conversion isn’t a matter of swapping in a new set of Christian ethics, or beliefs, or behaviors for Jewish ones, as if he’d discovered that those were bad but these were good. It’s a total reorientation of what he thinks goodness means. It’s a shift away from a kind of achievement to a kind of yearning. He doesn’t give us measurements or laws; he doesn’t tell us that he wants to love his neighbor, or that he wants to grow the church, or that he wants to become the foremost theologian of early Christianity. “I want to know Christ,” he says, and that’s really all there is. (Phil. 3:10)

Paul is filled with a desire that many of us have known, although we might not use the same language for it as Paul: the desire to come into contact with the Source of Truth and Beauty and Light that mathematicians tell us they can find in elegant proofs and poets sometimes capture in their words; that artists and musicians encounter in their art, and that we sometimes even catch a glimpse of here. “Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead,” Paul yearns to know Christ, to be filled with that Light, because he has come to believe that, while he’s not very good on his own, God’s goodness can be made manifest in him.

We either live our lives in relationship with this Source of All, or we don’t. But if it’s there, there is no third option in which we pretend that it doesn’t exist. That’s what the parable of the tenants in the vineyard is ultimately about. The vineyard is bears good fruit. The tenants are work hard to harvest it. But when God reaches out to them, they don’t want anything to do with him. They are so committed to the belief that they have earned what they have that they kill the Son and heir so they can keep it; even though that’s not at all how inheritance works.

Do you notice that Jesus doesn’t say that the tenants will be punished? He asks, “What will the owner of the vineyard do?” and the people listening answer him, “He’ll put those wretches to a miserable death.” That’s how we think God will act. But Jesus says, “Haven’t you read the Bible?” and then he quotes a Psalm: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” Jesus’ moral vision, I think, is a little bit like Paul’s. It’s not so much a vision of a world in which people follow the right rules. It’s one in which the Son who came and died, who himself embodies Love, is lifted up as the cornerstone for the whole thing; the Source of Love without which the whole structure falls apart.

The artists and musicians in the room know that there’s a difference between technical perfection and beauty. The programmers know that there’s a difference between making all your tests pass and finding the right solution. The lawyers will acknowledge, I think, that sometimes there’s a difference between simply following the law and doing the right thing. And it’s our yearning for this second kind of goodness that helps us navigate a life that’s less about the Ten big Commandments not to break and more about the ten thousand small choices we all face. If we focus on the letter of the law, if we never do what’s right without a reward, we have no hope of choosing what’s right in ambiguous circumstances. But if we try to orient our whole lives toward goodness, and let the rest follow from that, then we just might stand a chance.

Can machines experience that kind of desire to be good? I don’t know. But we can. And we can feed it, too. In fact, I think that’s what many of us are doing here. We are not here because we’ve been told that it is right. We’re not here to earn some great reward. We’re here to catch a glimpse, once more, of the One we want to know with all our hearts.

Sermon — September 29, 2026
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

During the first week of my first college semester, I walked into my freshman seminar and met a guy named Phil. Phil was a really nice guy; also, he’d soon come to shatter my dearest hopes and dreams. That first day, after we’d all introduced ourselves, I turned to Phil and asked, “Are you a runner, Phil?” Now, I already knew Phil was a runner. He was a local legend; a kid from the next town over who’d won the D1 state championship in cross country our senior year in a literal photo finish. (2nd place was from Charlestown, I’m sorry to say.) Anyway, Phil was running for the college cross country team, and NCAA rules said that they could only have organized practices 6 days a week. So Phil and I started running together on that 7th day, and I soon discovered that he was just in a totally different league. Phil’s casual run with Greg on his day off was one of my most challenging workouts of the week. I’d loved running in high school; I was running with a track club at the time, in hopes of one day walking on to the college team. I soon discovered I just didn’t have what it takes. Thanks, Phil.

Have you ever had a moment like this, when you met someone who shared a passion for something you held dear, but was just way better at it than you were? Or a moment when you finally reached some new phase in your life you’d always dreamed of, and suddenly realized you had no idea what you were doing?

I’ve learned this lesson many times. I remember sitting one day in my New Testament lecture in seminary and hearing a student ask some question about the Gospel of Matthew, and hearing the professor respond “Well that’s a good question, and it raises an interesting parallel to a text that was discovered at Qumran in the Dead Sea Scrolls, 4QMMT, Miqsat Ma’aseh ha-Torah, …”) and realizing that—although I was doing very well in this intro class—I knew nothing about the Bible, in the bigger academic sense. A few years later, I had the most humbling experiencing of my life, which was being sent home from the hospital with a little baby, armed with nothing but a car seat and a little complimentary hat, and discovering that I was profoundly out of my depth. And parish ministry is full of this, on a small scale: the continual realization that the people around my far outpass my knowledge of music and architecture and financial administration; in their wisdom and compassion and in the depth of their prayer.

It’s my dearest ambition to be the best at everything that I do all the time, and it’s my daily experience that I’m really not. And this has been one of the greatest gifts of my life.

“Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit,” reads the New Revised Standard Version’s translation of Philippians 2:3, “but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.” “Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory,” the King James Version says, “but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves.” The New International Version translates that second part, “in humility value others above yourselves”; in the English Standard Version, it’s “count others more significant than yourselves.” The words of each translation vary, but they cluster around the same idea: to be humble means to think of others as better than, or more valuable than, or more significant than yourself.

And in the context of these poetic verses about the self-emptying humility of Christ, that makes sense. These translations point us away from the self-interested pursuit of our own ambitions, away from chasing after the kind of fame that gives us glory in the eyes of the world but leaves us empty inside. They point us toward the kind of self-sacrificing love shown by Jesus, who descended from the heights of heaven to the depths of pain and death, even the shameful death of the cross, not for any self-promoting good but to save humankind from the consequences of our own choices. According to these translations, Paul is asking us to translate that physical act of self-sacrifice into a mental disposition that values other people more highly than ourselves.

The translation that we actually read today is a little different. It isn’t one of the standard translations; it’s from a translation done this summer of parts of Philippians by our own Paul Tompros, as part of his study of ancient Greek. And this translation offers a helpful nuance or corrective to these other versions of the text. The beginning of the verse is the same, urging us to avoid “ambition or conceit.” But that second half offers a subtly different take on the text: “let each man humbly believe that others surpass him,” Paul says that Paul says. Do you hear the difference? This is an equally valid translation of the same original Greek text. But “humbly believe that others surpass you” doesn’t mean quite the same thing as “value others above yourselves.” That cluster of published translations interprets Paul’s words as being about other people’s value, their importance, your esteem for them. But this translates Paul’s words in a more specific sense; Paul is saying to believe that other people surpass you in some way, in knowledge or wisdom or skill. To believe humbly that someone has surpassed you doesn’t mean to think they’re worth more than you are. It doesn’t mean that they’re better than you; it means that they are better than you at some particular thing.

This is closer to what humility really means. Humility isn’t having low self-esteem, saying that other people are worth more than me. It isn’t self-deprecation, belittling my own achievements with humor while really thinking the world of myself. It isn’t the kind of exaggerated politeness you find in the lunch line at a clergy conference—you first; no, you first—as if “the last will be first” applies to the salad bar.

No, humility consists of having the courage to be honest about yourself and your own abilities and the willingness to learn from people who know things that you don’t. Humility consists precisely of that decision to believe that others surpass you—to recognize that you don’t know everything; that you can’t do everything; that not only the best and the brightest but in fact nearly everyone around you knows something that you don’t. The PhD in physics knows things about the cosmos that boggle the mind; the PCA changing bedpans in the hospital knows things about the human condition that few of us want to confront.

Humility is hard to learn. But in fact, this hard lesson can set you free. I’ve found it so helpful when I have to get my car repaired, or my furnace serviced, to be confident enough in my own ignorance to say, “I really have no idea how this is supposed to work. Could you explain it to me like I’m an idiot?”

But in the end, Paul’s not actually telling us how we should see ourselves, is he? He’s telling us how to think about the people around us. He doesn’t tell us to believe that we are surpassed; but to believe to others surpass us.

Most of the most impressive people I’ve ever met seem completely ordinary. (In fact, the most humble people I know have usually had the most to brag about. They are able to be so humble precisely because they are so secure in themselves.) The corollary to this is that some of the ordinary people you see around you are actually really impressive.

And in fact, that’s the point. All around you, there are people who surpass you in many different ways, from the ways that put you on the front cover to the ways that matter only to the people you love to the ways that are known only by God.

And this is what humility is: to empty ourselves of our own ambitions, our own conceit, our own beliefs that we know everything there is; to become curious, to seek to learn from other people, and to care for and serve them, believing that—in some ways we recognize, and some ways we don’t—their wisdom, or their goodness, or their talents far surpass our own. And to do this especially when we ourselves are believed to be among the great and the good; because there was none who was greater or better than Christ, and none who more fully emptied himself.

Surely this is one way for us to work out our own salvation “with fear and trembling,” as Paul says. (Phil. 2:12) Not because we’re afraid of divine punishment if we don’t. But because we’re filled with awe at the people around us, whose lives God has filled with experience and knowledge and wisdom that far surpass our own; and because that same God is the one who is working in us. (Phil. 2:13)

Sermon — September 20, 2026
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

The landowner in today’s parable behaves more or less like you’d expect an ancient vineyard-owner to behave, at first. He sets out early in the morning, so that he doesn’t lose any of the precious daylight hours. He hires day laborers who are standing in the marketplace, because he needs extra help at harvest time. And he makes a deal to pay them the typical daily wage.

A few hours later, he goes back to the market. He hires more workers and sends them to work as well, and he tells them he’ll pay them whatever’s fair. And then he comes back again at noon and three o’clock, and he does the same thing.

Now, this is kind of odd. Why’s he hiring more people every three hours? Is he underestimating how many workers he’s going to need? You’d think that by the third time, he’d have figured it out. Is he just bored? There’s plenty of work to do; let him go pick some grapes. Is it possible that he’s actually outsmarted us all? Maybe this is some elaborate system to optimize the ratio of vineyard-acres to man-hours by dividing up the day into these tiny slices to perfectly optimize his hiring process. Maybe this is how you perfect the ancient art of grapemaxxing.

Then he comes back at five o’clock, and looks at the people who’re still left and asks, “Why’ve you been here all day with nothing to do?” “Well, no one hired us,” they say. And look, I’m all for following your passions, but if you’re still standing around eleven hours into a workday in the middle of grape-picking season trying to get hired to pick grapes, it might just be that you aren’t cut out for the job. But what does he care? Get in there, he says. Get to work.

Finally the sun sets, and the laborers come back to pick up their pay. The boss pays them last to first. And it’s at this point that my hypothesis that the landowner is a brilliant businessman is proven wrong. Because when those eleventh-hour workers see what they’ve been paid, they’re amazed. No one thought they were worth hiring. They hardly did any work. But now they have a full day’s wages in their hands!

Everyone else is tired after a long day, but this perks them right up. If he paid a full day’s wages for one hour of work, and I got here at three, or noon, or nine, or 6am… at that hourly rate I’m going to be getting three days’ wages, or six, or nine, or twelve days’ worth of pay. I could take the next two weeks off! How awesome is that?

But then these workers receive their pay. And those who worked three hours are paid for a full day. And those who worked six hours are paid for a full day. Those who worked nine hours are paid for a day, and those who worked twelve long hours in the hot sun picking grapes are paid for the work of exactly one day. These last workers to be paid, who were the first workers to arrive, start to get angry. They’d been there twelve times longer than the happy-hour dilettantes, but they aren’t paid any more. And they’re outraged. This is unfair!

They’re not wrong, exactly. It isn’t fair. But on the other hand: they agreed to be paid a day’s wages for a day’s work, and that’s exactly what they received. They haven’t been underpaid; they got what they earned. They’re angry because the owner was so generous to people they thought didn’t deserve it, in a way he wasn’t generous to them.

Because the owner of the vineyard, it turns out, wasn’t grapemaxxing at all. He wasn’t trying to optimize his operations or maximize his profit. He was trying to hire every last person that he could, and give them the same reward however hard they’d worked. And—depending on who you are in the story—this either feels like the best day in the year or a sign of disrespect.

This Sunday marks exactly six years since my first Sunday at St. John’s, on September 20, 2020. And because we repeat our readings in a three-year cycle, we read exactly this Gospel reading on my first Sunday here. I had a look back at what I said in my first sermon here, and I thought it was worth quoting, in part. Here’s what I said back then about this parable:

God wants us to work in the vineyard. God wants us, in other words, to grow in our spiritual lives; to love and serve our neighbors and our world; to spread the good news of God’s love in word and in deed. But these things aren’t a job that we perform in exchange for pay.

…As Christians, we don’t do good things so that God will reward us. We do good things because God loves us, and we love God. But God will love us whether we do good things or not. This unconditional love frees us from the anxiety of trying to be good enough, and frees us to respond in gratitude to God’s love. 

Now, this is a risky thing to say in your first sermon as a new rector. [I said, six years ago!] Maybe I should be cracking the whip, telling you to roll up your sleeves and get to work, quoting from the classic hymn: “Come, labor on! Who dares stand idle, on the harvest plain?” (It’s a great hymn.)

But this isn’t really Jesus’ M.O. In fact, Jesus has one of the worst volunteer recruitment pitches of all time: “Take up your cross and follow me.” It will be hard. It will be dangerous. And God will reward you exactly the same, no matter how much or how little you do, whether you’re out working in the vineyard at dawn or you’re still in bed at 3pm. So: want to join the Stewardship Committee?

We all get the joke. If you tell people, look—you have the choice between working hard starting at 6am, and punching in for an hour at 5 o’clock; you have the choice between showing up early for choir practice every Sunday, or walking through the door at 11:15 to eat some snacks; you have the choice between modeling for the world the kind of humble, self-sacrificing love that led Jesus to the Cross or just doing whatever you want—and God will love you unconditionally either way, and God will offer you the same reward in the end, no matter which one you choose—surely, no one in their right mind would choose that harder path. But the whole point of this parable is that that is precisely how the kingdom of heaven works.

This is a risky thing to say, on your first Sunday or your 312th Sunday as the Rector of a church. What if I tell people that God loves them unconditionally, whether they show up to the Vestry meeting at 7pm or they wait until 8:12, and then… nobody shows up? But in fact, six years later, I don’t think I lost that bet. I think it turns out Jesus is right. Unconditional love is a better motivator than obligation, fear, or shame. We’re more likely to do the right thing when the burden of obligation is lifted from our shoulders. We’re don’t make decisions based on the prospect of an eternal reward, but because of the joy and the love we find here and now. And this may not be a good way to run a vineyard. But the last six years have convinced me, at least, that it’s a pretty good way to be a church.

But of course, this parable isn’t just about church, it’s about our whole lives. And maybe that’s where the bigger impact is. Most of us, I think, have lots of little equivalents to the day’s wage in our minds, ways that we measure ourselves compared to one another and to the world. For me, they’ve included my place on the cross-country team and whether I made the cut for the jazz band; how my child behaved in school and how many people were showing up to church; and you can probably name some of your own, big and small: which sibling cared more for your parents as they aged and how many people liked your latest Instagram post and, yes, who put in the longest hours at work. Some of these are worthwhile goals. Others, not so much. But the parable of the vineyard tells us that in God’s eyes, all the ways we measure and compare ourselves to one another will one day fade away. So here’s the question I want to leave you with today: if this were true—if none of these things mattered in the end—how would you really want to live your life? Because it is true. God has chosen to give to the last just as to the first. And you are free to live how you imagined.

Sermon — September 13, 2026
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

On December 16, 1956, a young woman made American cultural history with a nothing but a football, a helmet, and a dream. In the eyes of the world, her job that day was simply to hold the ball for a kicker. And she did. As the kicker ran forward at full speed, she carefully held the ball in place; as his leg swung back, she remained focused on the plan; and then, as the kicker’s foot flew forward, she pulled the ball away, and—WHOMP. History was made. For the first time ever, Lucy van Pelt had pulled the ball away from the swinging foot of a gullible young kicker named Charlie Brown.

In the Peanuts comic strip every subsequent autumn from 1956 to 1998, Lucy played that trick again. As the years passed, and Charlie Brown grew neither older nor wiser, Lucy repeated the same football gag, with endless variations. Every year, she had a new explanation for why this year would be different. “You’re truly amazing!” she says to Charlie one year, as he pumps himself up to try again. “You talk the talk and you walk the walk!” Run run run run aaaaaah! “But you don’t kick the kick.”

Lord, if my friend pulls the football away when I try to kick it, how many times should I forgive? As many as seven times? Not seven times, I tell you, Charlie Brown, but seventy-seven times.

Peter comes to Jesus and asks him, “If my brother sins against me,”—the version I just read translation “brother” as “another member of the church”—“If my brother sins against me, how many times should I forgive?” Conventional wisdom says that you should forgive someone once, if that. (“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me…”) Some ancient rabbis suggested that you should forgive up to three times. Peter tries to be unusually merciful. “As many as seven times, Lord?”

“Not seven times,” Jesus answers him, “but seventy-seven times.” And this seems to turn forgiveness into a Charlie-Brown situation. Someone wrongs you again and again and again, and you forgive them again and again and again, and still you come back for more. And that raises an awkward question. We know that we’re supposed to practice forgiveness. We pray every week for God to “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” But is our life really supposed to resemble a 50-year-long running joke in a comic strip?

I don’t think that’s quite what Jesus means. There’s a difference between forgiveness and gullibility. The point of the football gag isn’t that Charlie forgives Lucy, again and again, for what she’s done. It’s that he’s oblivious, or optimistic, or in denial about what she’s about to do. If Charlie Brown had gone to his priest and said, “Father, I know that Jesus tells us to forgive seventy-seven times. The last forty times I’ve tried to kick a football, Lucy van Pelt has pulled it away, and I’ve fallen flat on my behind. And I’ve forgiven her every time. Should I try to kick the ball again?” then the answer, of course, is no. Charlie Brown, do not try to kick that ball. Forgiveness doesn’t mean letting yourself be hurt again. It means refraining from taking revenge, and then letting go of resentment and anger about the past. Charlie shouldn’t trip Lucy in return; and he shouldn’t stew about the prank for the rest of the year. But he also probably shouldn’t try to kick the football again the next fall.

But there is a sense of inevitability in what Jesus says. None of us will act like Charlie Brown. But most of us will find that we need to forgive the same people time and again. The closer they are to us, the more often we’ll need to forgive. And that’s really what Peter means. In the original Greek text, Peter’s question is a little less like “If my brother sins against me, how many times should I forgive him?” and a little more like “How many times will this happen: that my brother will sin against me, and I will forgive him?” There’s nothing hypothetical about it; if someone is as close to you as a brother or a sister, a spouse or a close friend, they will sin against you, and you will need to forgive. You can probably come up with examples in your life. Jesus’ point is that life will be full of these small sins; too many to remember, in fact. Not one or three or seven but seventy-seven; and who’s really keeping track by then?

But then Jesus tells a very specific story about a man who is forgiven a debt of ten thousand talents and then refuses to forgive a debt of a hundred denarii. And this is really a story about the scale of things. A denarius was a day’s wage for an ordinary laborer, so a hundred denarii is a significant debt: it’s more than three months’ pay. The debtor asks for time to put the money together; he doesn’t have the savings to pay the loan back, any more than most people could pay their mortgage off on demand.

But the one who loaned him the money has no mercy. He has him thrown into jail. And because we’ve heard the story, we know this is hypocrisy; this man has just been forgiven a great debt. But the magnitude of the difference isn’t obvious at first. A talent was six thousand denarii; so this ten-thousand-talent debt is worth sixty million days’ wages, 164,000 worker-years. It would be hard for the second man to pay off a 100-denarius debt; it would take at least a year to scrimp and save. But it would be impossible for the first man to repay that 10,000-talent debt. The first man has been forgiven a debt he could never repay; and yet he holds as tightly as he can onto the debt that he is owed.

When Jesus tells us that we need to forgive one another seventy-seven times, it’s not because he wants a church of Charlie Browns, endlessly forgiving but also kind of pathetic. It’s because in God’s eyes, we’re like the man in this parable: we owe a debt that we could never repay, and that debt has been forgiven, and yet we hold on tight to debts that are worth just a fraction of that.

You’ve probably heard the idea that we should forgive other people when they wrong us, because we know that we have wronged other people, and we’ve needed to be forgiven. It’s right there in the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Forgive “one another, as God in Christ forgave you,” Paul writes. (Eph. 4:32) In a way, this is just a variation on the Golden Rule.

But this parable isn’t that. This isn’t about forgiving other people as we have needed to be forgiven. The scales all wrong. Show of hands: Who among you has ever done something so wrong that it would take you 164,000 years to repay the debt? (…I was a little nervous someone was going to raise their hand.)

If this parable is going to apply to any of us, I don’t think that’s the kind of debt he means.

But I’m reminded of the words of Psalm 49: “We can never ransom ourselves, or deliver to God the price of our life; For the ransom of our life is so great, that we should never have enough to pay it, In order to live for ever and ever, and never see the grave.” (49:6-8)

As far as I can tell, that’s simply true. Life is priceless. There is no amount that I can pay for immortality. And it cost me nothing to be born. To feed and clothe and house myself, these things cost money of course. But life itself is a completely free gift, a huge debt I could never repay that’s already been forgiven.

And yet I spend my life keeping track of much smaller things: who washed which dishes when, and who sat on the couch; who hurt my feelings how and whether they ever apologized. I tally them up in the ledger I keep in my mind, as if I’ll show up on Judgment Day and present God with the results: Look, I know that I committed 300 denarii worth of minor sins, but I actually forgave 400 worth, and look, I have receipts; so… we good?

Most of our minds work like this sometimes, and when they do, we’re completely missing the point. We have been given invaluable gifts. We’ve been given the gift of life. We’ve been forgiven when we have gone wrong. In this parable, Jesus challenges us to avoid hypocrisy, it’s true; he encourages us to forgive one another, as we have been forgiven. But he also invites us to recognize the gift and grace of this life, and live it not with resentment, or obligation, but with gratitude instead.

Sermon — September 8, 2026
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

When Alice and I were married, one of my mother’s oldest friends gave us a wedding gift: a binder full of some of her family’s favorite recipes, with plenty of empty plastic page protectors for us to add our own. I’ve put a few recipes in there over the years, but I have to admit I’m not good at keeping up with it; in part because, try as I might, I can never seem to keep a printer working for more than a couple months at a time. Anyway, as a result, I often find myself cooking from recipes that I found online. In other words, I often find myself doing something with which you may be familiar: scrolling through what appears to be the entire story of the recipe author’s life, marriage, and culinary education, until I finally arrive at the recipe itself. I’ve never really understood this phenomenon. I don’t need to know about your first date. I just want to know how much baking powder these waffles need.

I think people sometimes make the mistake of reading the Bible as if it’s a recipe blog. And I can understand why. Our readings today certainly look like a series of instructions, from the ritual practices of the Book of Exodus to the ethical commandments of the letter to the Romans to the practical guide to church conflict that Jesus offers us in the Gospel. We read them without much context; our lectionary cycle has conveniently skipped past the stories for us. But these Biblical recipes aren’t for cooking or baking, but for the much more complicated subject of living a human life. And in this recipe book, the story really does matter; the meaning of these instructions is shaped by the story that leads to each one.

Take, for example, these ritual instructions for the celebration of Passover. It’s hard to know what to do with this text. Christians don’t celebrate Passover. Our Jewish friends and neighbors don’t celebrate it quite like this. This predates the Seder as we know it. It mostly sounds like a series of precise and somewhat gruesome instructions for how to slaughter and eat a lamb and where to smear its blood.

But today, we only read the recipe. (Literally, in this case.) But the story is the real source of its flavor. If you’ve been here the last two Sundays, you’ve heard pieces of the story of Moses. We’ve heard that the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt. We’ve heard that God sent Moses to set them free. You may know that Moses has demonstrated God’s power with a series of plagues culminating in this one: the angel of death is going to pass through the land of Egypt and pass over the homes that the Israelites have marked with the lamb’s blood.

The particularities of the ritual reflect the intensity of the experience of flight. There’s no time to gently simmer the lamb in water; it must be roasted on the fire. There’s no time for bread to rise; it must be eaten flat. The Law commands the people to eat it with their sandals on their feet and their staffs in their hands, to eat it that night and leave nothing leftover, because then it’s time to run.

And as much as these instructions reflect the urgency of the initial situation, this isn’t a story about a ritual done once in the past; it truly is a recipe for a ritual to repeat year after year in the future. This month, God says, will mark the beginning of the year; it marks such a deep break with the past that it initiates a whole new way of marking time. (Exod. 12:2) It will be a day of remembrance through all generations. For thousands of years, it will remind the people of God of their ancient experience of being strangers in a strange land and becoming refugees, of preparing to flee in the middle of the night.

While the Israelites would escape Egypt and find a new home, in the coming centuries they would continue to need to flee. In the wake of destruction, in the hope of safety, in the pursuit of better lives for themselves and the children, they traveled throughout the world. By the time of Jesus and Paul, Jewish communities could be found scattered throughout the Middle East and the Mediterranean. Some ancient Jews grew up, as Jesus did, in the Jewish regions of Judea and Galilee. Others, like Paul, were members of small minorities who lived within much larger Greek and Roman cities around them.

These small Jewish communities became the nucleus of the Christian movement as it spread throughout the world. When traveling to any city, the apostles would first spread the news of the arrival of the Messiah to the Jewish community there; and then, through them, to the monotheism-curious Greeks and Romans around them.

And so it is that Paul, his Letter to the Romans, addresses a remarkably diverse group: in his conclusion, he sends greetings “Prisca and Aquila,” two Jews (Acts 18:2-3) with Roman names, and Epaenetus, “the first convert in Asia for Christ”; (Rom. 16:5) “Mary” and “Herodion,” who have traditionally-Jewish names, but also “Hermes” and “Olympas,” whose names evoke the Greek gods.

He offers them a simple message: “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.” All of the commandments, he says, are summed up in this word, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” (Romans 13:8-9) Jesus says much the same, when he names the Two Great Commandments: to love God with all your heart, and to love your neighbor as yourself.

But Paul’s words are even richer when we put them in context; when we remember the story behind this recipe. Jesus comes from the village of Nazareth, home to a couple hundred people in his day. To “love your neighbor,” in this context, means to love people whom you’ve known for your whole life. Which can be difficult, but is a particular kind of difficult. When Jesus identifies the Second Great Commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” (Mat. 22:39) he’s in Jerusalem. Jerusalem was a much bigger city, with a population of 50-100,000 at the time, but all sharing the same culture, all identifying with a shared religious text.

But Paul is writing to a genuinely mixed group in the big imperial city of Rome—population about 1 million, drawn from all the nations of the known world. To “love your neighbor” in Rome means to love someone who doesn’t share your culture or your religion or your way of life. But Paul elevates this commandment nevertheless. He asks these Roman citizens, whose culture dominates the world and whose philosophy comes has its own sophisticated set of ethical ideals—to embrace the commandments of the Jewish God. And in exchange, the Jewish Christians like Paul will accept that many of the traditions and rituals of their Law will not be binding on these converts to their faith.

It’s a delicate dance. Like Jesus, Paul, digs into the Book of Leviticus, which is usually known as the book of the Bible that contains the most intricate ritual laws, and pulls out one commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” (Lev. 19:18) And even as Paul plays down many of the ritual requirements of Biblical law, he elevates this particular commandment to love. Because even in a big and diverse city—perhaps especially in a big and diverse city—the whole Law is summed up in this one commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself.”

The beauty of the Bible is that it’s not a series of recipes to be extracted from the text and applied directly to our lives. And it’s not a series of stories about the past, without relevant to our lives. It’s a great library in which those two things intersect with one another and with our own lives to form a living text. The ancient Israelites knew that the experience of the Exodus was what gave meaning to the Passover ritual. Paul knew that the experience of an ethnic minority living in a cosmopolitan city gave meaning to the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself. And we know that our own experiences breathe life into what we hear in church, today and every Sunday. Our experiences of life in our city teach us what it means to love our neighbors as ourselves.  

Sermon — August 30, 2026
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

The Presbyterian minister Eugene Peterson once wrote an essay entitled “The Ministry of Small Talk.” He begins it with a story from his youth: “My pastor, during my adolescent years [in the late ’40s] came often to our home. After a brief and awkward interval, he always said, ‘And how are things in your SOUL today?’ (He always pronounced ‘soul’ in capital letters.)” Teenage Eugene never said much; his ordinary thoughts and experiences, he writes, “seemed small potatoes after that question. I knew,” he writes, “that if I ever wanted to discuss matters of SOUL, I could go to him. But for everything else, I would probably do better with someone who wouldn’t brush away as worldly vanity what it felt like to get cut from the basketball varsity.”[1] Eugene had been told—and his pastor had been told, too—that faith was about big questions and weighty demands, not the ordinary struggles of his life.

And, when you listen to our readings this morning, you can kind of understand where they’d get that idea. To be fair, Moses began our story today as an ordinary guy. Sort of. An ordinary guy who’d been miraculously rescued from violence at his birth and adopted by the daughter of the Pharaoh, to be fair. But things have taken a turn since then, and now he’s out there in the field, keeping track of his father-in-law’s sheep. (Exod. 3:1) This is about as normal as you can be in Moses’ day. But not for long. One ordinary day, he sees an extraordinary sight: a fire burning in a bush that is blazing but not consumed. (3:2) He turns aside to look. (3:3) And then comes the dramatic call: “Moses! Moses!” God calls Moses by name and assigns Moses a task: to go and rescue the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. Moses shies away. “Who am I,” he says, “that I should go to Pharaoh?” (3:11) Well, you’re his adopted grandson, but we get your point—you’re just a regular guy. And by the way, Moses asks God, “Who are you?” If they ask me, “This ‘God’ who sent you, what’s his name?” what do I say? And God answers, “I Am Who I Am” (and you can hear that God pronounces it in capital letters.) (3:14)

Jesus’ words to his disciples this morning are equally weighty. Immediately before this passage, in our Gospel last Sunday, Peter proclaimed, for the first time, that Jesus is “the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” (Matthew 16:16) Now Jesus begins to tell the disciples that he must suffer, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. (16:21) And Simon Peter pulls him aside. Jesus, don’t say that. Don’t do that. “This must never happen to you.” (16:23)

Moments ago, Jesus told Simon he’ll now be called “Peter” because he’s the “rock” on whom Jesus will build his church; now he calls him “Satan,” and tells him he has set his mind “not on divine things but on human things.” (16:23) “Satan” is an interesting choice. In the Bible, Satan is not a generic figure of evil, but specifically a “tempter,” someone who entices Jesus to choose the easy way out rather than the difficult path of faith. Jesus rejects that temptation. He’s headed toward Jerusalem, and toward the Cross. And in fact, he tells his disciples, so are they. “If any want to become my followers,” he says, “let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” (16:24) Following Jesus, he says, will be a matter of life and death. And he’s not wrong. Peter and Paul and James, and many more of the early Christians, will indeed lose their lives because they refuse to abandon their faith in Jesus.

Moses experiences an extraordinary call. Jesus describes an extraordinary cost. And the extraordinary ideas in these stories can be hard to translate to the level of our ordinary lives. “Take up your cross,” we sang, as I processed down the aisle. “Let not its weight fill your weak spirit with alarm.” And my weak spirit wasn’t alarmed. My weak spirit was looking out the door and thinking, “Wow, it is just a beautiful day out there today.” “The God of Abraham praise,” we sang, “who reigns enthroned above.” Great hymn! But it feels a little strange to sing these big hymns about the majesty of God and the cost of discipleship on a quiet August morning, when the whole world and half the congregation are trying to squeeze in one last summer weekend, and then to invite you all to join us for a lovely Coffee Hour in the garden’s cool breeze. And that’s not a criticism of the worship planning. It’s exactly the disconnect that Eugene Peterson felt.

Paul’s Letter to the Romans helped me connect a few of those dots, this morning. At first, this passage seems like a series of semi-connected platitudes: “Let love be genuine; hate what is evil; hold fast to what is good.” (Romans 12:9) “Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep.” Beautiful. Wonderful. But there’s nothing particularly surprising there. But there is a counter-intuitive edge to some of what Paul says, as well. “Associate with the lowly,” and “don’t claim to be wiser than you are”; (12:16) these are certainly counter-cultural. “Never avenge yourselves” is quite a pacifistic stance, although it turns out we can still “leave room for the wrath of God.” (12:19) But “bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them”? (12:14) That’s really hard. “If your enemies are hungry, feed them.” (12:20) That’s nearly unheard of, in this world. But this, I think, is what it looks like—in a world in which Christianity is not punishable by death—to “take up your Cross.” It means to live out the values and the teachings of your faith in a way that might actually be to your detriment. It means to deny some of the things that you want—like taking revenge on those who’ve wronged you—and to make your own sacrifices for their benefit instead; to feed them with food you’d been keeping for yourself.

Even Paul’s words probably need to be scaled down to our lives. I’ve heard plenty of people say, in reflecting on this passage, that they don’t have enemies. Many of us don’t feel like we are persecuted. Some of us don’t really need to avenge ourselves.

But Paul isn’t writing to Moses or Peter, extraordinary people living extraordinary lives. He’s writing to Prisca and Aquila and Mary and Urbanus and a dozen other people you’ve never heard of, people living more or less ordinary lives. And Paul doesn’t ask them, “How are things with your SOUL?” He tells them to care for the people around them, friends and strangers alike. To bless the people who reject them, who criticize and question them. To choose not to take revenge when people do them wrong; to leave that in God’s hands and to feed them instead. And even this may sound abstract, but I’ve seen the way people drive, and I’ve heard the way people yell at the refs, and I know a lot of people who claim to be pretty wise, and I can tell you: Paul has some good advice.

This is what it means to “take up your cross,” not as an extraordinary act, but as an extraordinary way of living an ordinary life.

There is no life of the SOUL that’s somehow distinct from the rest of life. The soul is what shapes the way you live your life. The small things of life are where the big things of faith are worked out. And that’s the irony of the story that Eugene Peterson tells. That’s the point of entitling an essay “The Ministry of Small Talk.” These so-called “small” things really matter. Learning how to respond well to not making the varsity basketball team was probably the primary opportunity for him to grow that year as a person and as a Christian. But it seemed small beside the command to “take up his cross.” He’d been told that was a “human thing” and not a “divine thing.” He’d been told that Christianity was about things too big to be relevant to his everyday life. What a shame. Because the same great I Am that was there to call Moses was there when Eugene got cut from the team. That same God is there for you and me, amid all the struggles and opportunities of our ordinary lives. If we think that faith’s about something so big that we can’t attain it, then we miss the chance to let a living faith shape the way we live every day. But if we recognize that the cross we bear is sometimes very small, then we might quiet our own minds enough to hear the voice of God speaking to us, as to Moses, encouraging us—however big or small our struggles may be—to “hold fast to what is good.”

[1] Eugene Peterson, “The Ministry of Small Talk,” in The Contemplative Pastor (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1993), 112.