Sermons from Saint John’s

Sermon — November 29, 2020 The Rev. Greg Johnston “Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come.” (Mark 13:33) On Christmas Eve, most American children will be so excited they’ll hardly be able to sleep. … Continue reading →

Sermon — November 22, 2020 The Rev. Greg Johnston A few weeks after I started here, a parishioner from my old church in Lincoln passed away. It wasn’t a tragic death; she died in her home at the age of … Continue reading →

Sermon — November 15, 2020 The Rev. Greg Johnston Last week, Alice and I took advantage of an earlier-than-usual bedtime to play a hard-earned game of Scrabble. Toward the end of the game, I struck gold. As I pulled a … Continue reading →

Back in March, people kept reminding everyone that this year was going to be a marathon, not a sprint. As a runner for many years, I found this metaphor kind of strange. After all, a marathon is a race too; it’s a longer one, sure; you have to pace yourself; but you still leave everything out on the course. As the year ground on, though, I came to realize something... It wasn’t a sprint, it wasn’t a marathon; it was as though the world’s supplies of gasoline had disappeared, and we all just had to walk everywhere for eighteen months. Continue reading →

Today we gather once again to obey the command: “Do this in remembrance of me,” but scattered, separated from one another, missing and grieving what life once was. But the Eucharist has always been this way. Every Sunday of the past when we gathered for worship in our various churches, we were only ever a fraction of a church. Every single one of Dom Dix’s “hundred thousand successive Sundays” has been marked by absence and grief. From the very first time that Jesus’ disciples gathered after his death down to the present day, every Sunday’s congregation has been incomplete. Every Sunday, even in ordinary times, some of us were carrying the memories of departed spouses and parents and friends. Continue reading →

Jesus’ message today isn’t a riddle. It’s not an obscure historical reference. It doesn’t need to be unwrapped, or clarified, or revealed. It’s simple: Love God with all you have. Love your neighbor as yourself. But “simple,” I’m sorry to say, isn’t the same as “easy.” Continue reading →

Right now we’re experiencing one of those brief windows that rolls around in our national political life everyone once in a while in ordinary times, when religion and politics collide, and politicians and pundits try to figure out how to use the Bible to best bash their opponents into giving way. I call it “Render Unto Caesar Season.” Continue reading →

And now, just a few days later, it’s like a ’90s teenage comedy: Father Moses goes away for the weekend and takes too long coming back, and the kids throw a house party. Uncle Aaron, Moses’ own brother, is left in charge, and he’s kind of a pushover. Moses has been gone, communing with God for forty days and forty nights, and the people are over it. “We don’t know what happened to Moses and his ‘God,’” they seem to say. “But—you can make us a god!” And Aaron, inexplicably, does. Continue reading →

I’m sure you all know the name Nobel, as in “Nobel Peace Prize”; you may even know that the prize is named after Alfred Nobel. But most people don’t know very much about Alfred Nobel, so forgive me if you do. Alfred Nobel of Peace-Prize fame was an arms manufacturer, an industrialist and innovator who transformed his steel company into a major producer of cannons and industrial and military explosives. Continue reading →

You may not think you’ve heard this kind of call, or experienced this kind of gentle “repentance.” Too often in the Church we limit the meaning “vocation” to “ordination.” You might not the things that you do in your everyday life as a ministry. Maybe you’ve always thought of your life in separate slices: work, family, hobbies, church. But if you follow the logic of the parable, it becomes clear that it doesn’t matter whether our work in the vineyard happens through the Church or outside the Church, whether we think of the ways we love and care for one another as a Christian ministry or simple humanity. We don’t need to form a committee; we don’t even need the Rector’s approval! Because it doesn’t really matter, in the end, what we say about our work or how we talk about it. What matter is whether we do it. Continue reading →