Sermons from Saint John’s

Imagine what a different story this would be if the people in it simply saw what was happening in front of them, and responded. The disciples would ask what Jesus was going to do for the man, rather than ask for a judgment on what the man or his parents must have done. The neighbors would celebrate with him, rather than denying who he was. The Pharisees might wonder what it meant for a man to be healed on the Sabbath, rather than knowing that it meant that the healer was a sinner. They might even listen to what the man had to say, rather than dismissing his experience out of hand.

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

She said to the people, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!”
(John 4:28–29)

“After an accident on a winding road,” the synopsis for a 1997 film begins, “four teens make the fatal mistake of dumping their victim’s body into the sea. But exactly one year later, a mysterious fisherman begins stalking the friends.” This horror film was called I Know What You Did Last Summer, and it was such a success that the studio produced a sequel the next year, entitled (almost inevitably) I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, in which (spoiler alert) “the murderous fisherman with a hook stalks the two surviving teens.” A few years later, in 2006, trying to squeeze the last dollar from the brand, the studio released a third film, I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer, to critical dismay.

Nearly two decades passed, and then, one day in 2024 or so, somewhere in Los Angeles, a film producer awoke in the middle of the night with an idea. “I know what America needs in 2025,” I imagine him thinking to himself. “So much has changed in our nation and in our world since 1997 or 2006, but the human condition remains the same.” At this tense and divided moment in American life, he knew that the people once more needed to hear that ancient story of sin and redemption, and so he offered the American people one final work of art: the innovatively-titled film I Know What You Did Last Summer. (Yes, just like the first one.)

Now, I’m the kind of guy who has nightmares after the Heffalump song in Winnie the Pooh, so I’ll admit I haven’t seen any of the movies in the series. But the titles alone point to a fundamental truth about the human condition: it’s never good news to hear the words, “I know what you did.”

Imagine that you’re sitting down, minding your own business, and someone walks into the room—your boss, your mother, husband/wife/best friend, an officer of the law or a minister of the Church—and says to you, “I know what you did.” If there is even a trace of guilt on your conscience, your heart begins to pound. What secret of your soul have they uncovered? If your conscience is clean, you might get nervous nevertheless. There must’ve been some kind of misunderstanding. When someone says “I know what you did,” it’s nearly always an accusation, or even a threat: I know you did something wrong, and—while I may not be a murderous horror-film fisherman—there will be consequences.

That’s one of the things that makes this conversation between Jesus and the woman at the well so powerful. There are many interesting layers to the story, of course. Jesus reaches out across differences of gender and ethnicity, as the woman notes when she asks him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (John 4:9) Jesus introduces some powerful symbolism with this image of “living water,” which seems to evoke both the waters of baptism and the ongoing way in which God’s presence in our life can quench our spiritual thirst.

But the Samaritan woman doesn’t go back to the city and say, “Come and see a man who bridges the divide between his people and ours.” She doesn’t tell her neighbors that she’s found a new teacher who will quench their thirst, spiritual or literal—in fact, she leaves her water jar behind. When she returns to the city to tell them that she thinks she’s found the Messiah, what she says is: “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!” (John 4:29) And her words point us toward what could’ve been an amazing title for the fourth movie in the series: not I Know What You Did Last Summer, or I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, or I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer, but the most frightening statement of all: I Know Everything That You Have Ever Done.

Of course, Jesus doesn’t actually tell her everything she’s ever done. All he says is that she was right to say, “‘I have no husband,’ for [she has had] five husbands, and the one [she has] now [is] not her husband” at all! (John 4:17–18) But that’s enough for her to feel like he has told her everything she’s ever done. In the same way that “I know what you did last summer” isn’t talking about all the hot dogs and pool parties and trips to the beach, “He told me everything that I have ever done” doesn’t mean that Jesus recited her biography. It means he identified the one big secret, the source of hidden shame that rules her life.

Now, we don’t know anything about husbands one through five—whether they died of natural causes, or the marriages ended in divorce, or something else. And I don’t mean to make any kind of ethical judgment about her life. We don’t have to believe that she’s doing something wrong to say that in the first century, for a woman to have been married five times and now to be living with a man outside the bonds of marriage entirely would have come with some significant judgment or disdain from the people around her. We can only imagine what her neighbors would have said behind her back, in the small-town life of first-century Samaria.

And that’s the most important point. We can only imagine, because Jesus doesn’t say a word. Jesus knows her truth, but he doesn’t scold her. He listens to her with respect. And then he reveals the truth about himself to her, just as she’s revealed the truth about herself to him. “When Messiah comes,” she says, “he will proclaim all things to us.” And Jesus says to her, “I am he.” (John 4:25-26) Jesus chooses to reveal to her something that very few people in the world know at this point in the Gospel. And in a sense, the story goes even further. In response to her question about which mountain is the proper place on which to worship God, Jesus says, “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” And there’s just a hint here of the sense that this woman is worshiping God in spirit and in truth; that by meeting Jesus face to face, and by being honest, by acknowledging the truth about her life, she is worshiping God more fully than anyone else. And this woman, who might have faced scorn or suspicion from the people around her, becomes one of the first apostles: she goes and tells her people that the Messiah has come.

She is seen by Jesus, and she is known by Jesus, and indeed, he knows everything that she has ever done. But she’s not condemned, or judged; she is respected and loved, and chosen to do God’s work. And the people around her seem to be able to feel the power of what has happened in her life, because they flock to Jesus, and, on the strength of her testimony alone, they invite him to come and stay with them.

There’s a distinction people sometimes make, and which I’ve probably talked about before, between “shame” and “guilt.” “Guilt” is what you feel when you feel bad about something you’ve done wrong. “Shame” is what you feel when you feel like you are wrong. “Guilt” is about what you do. “Shame” is about who you are. And while “guilt” can be feel a healthy and helpful emotion, when it leads us out of ourselves to make amends for something we’ve done wrong, “shame” is a much trickier thing. Shame tends to lead us into ourselves. Shame leads us to hide from other people; because the worst thing that can happen when you feel a secret shame is for the secret to be revealed, for someone else to see you and know you as you really are.

The worst thing that can happen when you feel shame is to be seen, but of course, that can also be the best thing, and often the only thing that can help. The true antidote to shame is to be seen—to be found out, to be known—and to find that you are loved, to be accepted and cherished, precisely as you are, precisely as the person you are ashamed to be.

And this is exactly what Jesus does, for the Samaritan woman and for each one of us. He looks at you, and me, and every one of us, as he looked at her; and he sees us even more clearly than we can see ourselves, and he knows everything that we have ever done. And he loves us nevertheless, so much and in such a way that, as Paul wrote, “while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8) If we have done something wrong, he forgives it. If we bear the burden of some hidden shame, he wants to lift it. Despite our imperfection, despite our outright wrongdoing, “God’s love has been poured into our hearts,” (Romans 5:8) and we are being sent into the world, just as that Samaritan woman was, to share the good news of the power of that love.

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

“The God of Abram praise, who reigns enthroned above;
Ancient of everlasting days, and God of love…”

I’ve heard of buildings being named after people, schools named after people, and even cities named after people; but I really have to ask: what do you have to do to get a whole God named after you? Seriously. Someone asks, “Which god should we praise?” and of all the choices for a name by which to identify God—the Holy Trinity; the Creator of the heavens and the earth; the God who raised Jesus from the dead—the Methodist preacher Thomas Olivers sat to write our opening hymn and chose to say: “the God of Abram praise.” But he didn’t come up with the idea. He was quoting Jesus, who identifies God as “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (Mark 12:26; Matt. 22:32; Luke 20:37). And when Jesus says that, he himself is quoting that same God, who spoke to Moses from a burning bush, and said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” (Exod. 3:6) Abraham was apparently so great that God named Godself after him, which is really saying something.

For the apostle Paul, it’s the faith of Abraham that makes him so important. Paul builds an entire theology of faith and works on top of the single verse, “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,” (Rom. 4:3; Gen. 15:6) and Abraham becomes the model for our faith, the spiritual ancestor of all “those who share the faith of Abraham.” (Rom. 4:16)

But what strikes in our first reading this morning, even more than Abram’s faith is his ability to listen for and listen to the voice of God.

The narrative is short and to the point: “Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house…’” (Gen. 12:1) And, just a few lines later, “So Abram went.” (Gen. 12:4) He asks no questions. There’s no follow-up. God speaks and Abram hears and Abram goes.

Ordinarily, when something happens so abruptly, it’s useful to put it in context, to understand what’s happening in this story before God speaks. Perhaps it’s like the other stories of Abram, where God takes him out into the clear air of a desert night, and he looks up at the stars, and is overcome with awe; then God speaks. Or perhaps it’s like the time when God catches Moses’ attention with a bush that burns, but isn’t consumed. Moses turns aside to look; and then God speaks to him.

But when we turn back in our Bibles to look at the context of this story, to try to understand what’s been happening in the story of Abraham so far, the answer is: Nothing! Absolutely nothing. The preface to this story is just: “Now these are the descendants of Terah. Terah was the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran was the father of Lot. (etc.) … The days of Terah were two hundred five years; and Terah died in Haran. Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house…’” (Gen. 11:27-12:1)

There is no context. It comes out of the blue. God speaks, and somehow, Abram is listening, and Abram responds. And that’s mind-boggling to me. Imagine what it must’ve been for him to hear that voice out of nowhere, after 75 years of life. Not everyone would have been ready to listen. Not everyone would’ve been able to understand. Because when God is speaking, it’s not necessarily easy to hear.

Even people who saw Jesus face to face, and heard his voice, and wanted to understand didn’t always get it, like poor Nicodemus in our Gospel story today. Nicodemus comes to Jesus because he wants to learn. “Rabbi,” he says to Jesus, “we know that you are a teacher who’s come from God.” (John 3:2) He has faith, like Abraham. He wants to listen and to hear.

So, Jesus begins to teach: “Truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” (John 3:4) And Nicodemus is baffled. How can anyone be born a second time, he asks? There’s a bit wordplay here—the same Greek word could mean “again” or “from above,” so there’s a natural confusion. Jesus tries to expand on that point at length, and Nicodemus again listens carefully, and then he simply replies, “How can these things be?” (John 3:9) He wants to listen, he wants to learn. Jesus is standing right there with him, face to face, but even so, he simply cannot understand.

Jesus puts it perfectly: “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” (John 3:8) This is another play on words. He doesn’t use the ordinary word here for “wind,” he uses a word that means “breath” or “spirit.” It’s the word he uses for “the Spirit” (with a capital S). In other words, he says to Nicodemus, who shares Abraham’s faith but lacks his listening skills: “The Spirit blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.”

Listening for God is even harder for us. We don’t see Jesus have to face, or hear him speak to us directly. We have to try to listen for the Spirit as it blows through our world, and through our lives. And in our attempts to listen, we are inevitably distracted. There are many things that clamor for our attention, inside our own minds, and outside them, and it’s hard to listen with anything like the receptivity and attention that Abram must’ve had, with the inner quiet that allowed him to hear the voice of God speaking out of nowhere after 75 years.

But there are practices we can try and habits that we can form that can help us train ourselves to listen for that wind blowing through the world. During Lent, it’s been our practice to pause for a minute or so of silence, between the Sermon and the Creed, to quiet our minds and reflect before we continue with our prayers. And just for today, we’re going to go a step further. I’m going to stop talking now, and we’re going to listen together. During the rest of my usual sermon time, Jane is going to come up and lead us in just a few minutes of Centering Prayer, to offer each one of us a taste of what it’s like to sit in the quiet or the chaos of our own minds, listening like Abram for the voice and the Spirit of God.

Sermon — Sunday, February 22
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

Imagine that Jesus Christ came back to earth, Ivan Karamazov says to his brother Alyosha, in Dostoevsky’s great novel The Brothers Karamazov. Imagine that Christ returned in 16th century Spain. He’s heard the prayers of his people for fifteen hundred years, and he’s finally come to help, and the people are amazed. Wherever he goes, joy fills their hearts. People who are sick are healed. A girl rises from the dead. “The Sun of Love burns in his heart, and warm rays of light, wisdom, and power beam forth from his eyes.” The Cardinal Grand Inquisitor himself comes to Jesus, and puts him under arrest.

His interrogation is really more of a rant. He accuses Jesus of placing an unbearable burden on the people, the burden of freedom.

He could have fixed everything the first time, the Inquisitor says. Jesus could have turned the stones into bread, and fed the people forever. He could’ve kept them full and happy and eager to obey. But he left them hungry for revolutionary change, and all the chaos that ensues. (Dostoyevsky’s thinking about the French Revolution when he writes, but he could already sense the tension building in Russian society, that would lead to their own Revolution a few decades after his death.)

Jesus could have thrown himself down from the pinnacle of the Temple, and been saved, and shown everyone proof that he was the Son of God. He could have dispelled any doubt of who he was, and people would not have had to struggle with the burden of faith; they would have certainty instead.

By accepting the devil’s offer of power over all the kingdoms of the earth, Jesus could have brought about the dream of a united world living together according to his teachings of justice and peace; but Jesus threw it all away.

He left the world in unrest, confusion, and misery, and now the Church has had to do his job. The Church, the Grand Inquisitor says, has had to feed the hungry to win their obedience. The Church has had to tell people what to believe. The Church has had to conquer the whole world to spread the gospel of the Prince of Peace.

So, you’re not needed here, the Grand Inquisitor says. And tomorrow I will burn you at the stake.

It’s a brilliant indictment of the failings of the Church. And Dostoevsky gets away with it by distancing it from himself: it’s about Spanish Catholicism in the 1500s, not Russian Orthodoxy in the 1800s; it’s a story in the mouth of a character, not an opinion from the pen of the author.

And “The Grand Inquisitor” forces us to consider one of the questions at the heart of the theological “problem of evil.” He asks us whether it would be better to have full bellies and certain faith in a world of robots controlled by God, or to be hungry and wracked with doubt in an imperfect world in which we have free will. It all comes back to that initial accusation: that it was wrong for Christ to burden human beings with the freedom of choice, rather than turning them into a faithful, obedient flock.

In a way, Lent presents us with this same freedom of choice. Its emphasis on temptation and repentance remind us of the dark side of free will, and our readings this morning introduce these themes. God takes Adam and Eve, and puts them in the Garden, and tells them not to eat the fruit of one particular tree; but they face temptation, and they make their choice, and we all suffer the consequences still. (Gen. 3:1ff) Paul explores the very different choices of Adam, through whose disobedience the world became subject to sin and death, and Jesus, through whose obedience we received the abundance of grace. (Rom. 5:12, 17) And in the Gospel, of course, the devil and tempts Jesus three times, but each time Jesus makes his choice to follow God, instead.

And the practices of Lent that involve “giving something up” or “taking something on” bring this experience of choice to the forefront. Whether you’re trying form a new habit or break an old one, it takes real effort to choose, every day, to continue to fast from whatever it is you’ve given up, or to continue to pursue the good works you’ve taken on. There is a burden that comes with free will, whether or not it’s worth it in the end.

But when I told you the story, I left out the final scene. When the Grand Inquisitor finally finishes his rant, Jesus doesn’t launch into his own. He doesn’t give a philosophical defense of free will. He doesn’t offer a sermon about obedience to God.

Jesus watches the Grand Inquisitor for a while in silence, gazing at him softly but intently. And then he gets up, and walks over, and gently kisses him on the lips. That is all the answer he will give. And the Grand Inquisitor releases him and sends him away.

This ending to the story captures one of the most important nuances of Christian theology. Jesus is not primarily a philosopher, here to argue about moral responsibility or free will. He’s not primarily a food pantry, here to feed the world by turning stones into bread. He’s not a magician who comes to prove his divinity with a miraculous escape, by throwing himself down or by rising from the grave. He’s not a politician who wants to rule the world, compelling our obedience to the Sermon on the Mount. His ministry touches on all these things. It has implications for philosophy and social work, for theology and politics. But none of these is the primary thing.

Jesus is first and foremost a Savior, who comes with compassion to give his life for imperfect people in an imperfect world, the world after Adam in which we live. The world in which bear the burden of choice, and we often make mistakes. The world in which we sometimes fail to love God with our whole hearts, and to love our neighbors as ourselves, which we call “sin.”

We live in this world, but God’s response is not to do what the Grand Inquisitor would like, to step in and control the world for good, like a parent hovering over their toddler making sure they never fall. But God’s answer is also not to act as the Grand Inquisitor accuses Jesus of acting, by pushing the burden of freedom and choice onto us, and forcing us to bear the responsibility alone. God’s response is to do what Jesus does in that closing scene: God comes to us and embraces us with love. Because Christianity is not a set of rules about the choices we should make; it’s the story of the irrational grace of God that we receive in response to our mistakes, and the invitation to offer that grace to one another.

I said a few words about Lenten practices last week. But let me say a few more. During the season of Lent, some people choose to take on something good, like volunteering time or donating money to a cause. Some people choose to give up something bad, one of the toxic habits or dysfunctional cycles that many of us have in our lives. And some people choose to give up something that’s otherwise good or neutral, like coffee or Wordle or meat on Fridays.

And here’s the thing. It’s always good to take on something good; Lent is just a convenient opportunity to start. And it’s always good to give up something bad, and again, Lent can be the starting point for that. But that third practice of fasting from something good is what’s unique about Lent. As I said last week, it’s an exercise in self-knowledge. You give up chocolate or Wordle to learn more about your own patterns of temptation, to prepare yourself to face temptations that actually matter. If you discover something about the circumstances in which you fail to resist the temptation of that delicious treat, you might learn more about the situations that trigger you to be rude to your family and friends. =

And all of that is good. But this Lent, I also want to invite you to learn more what it’s like to fail. If you fast from something for Lent for 40 days straight, good job. And you’re missing out. Because at least in part, Lent is an opportunity to practice gracious imperfection. To make a commitment to something, and to fall down, and to get back up again. To bear the burden of free will, and to discover that it’s too heavy to bear; and then to find that God responds not with anger or judgment, but with love and grace. To practice accepting God’s grace for ourselves, and then to offer to someone else.

When we confront an imperfect world, we can try to clamp down, to control things like the Grand Inquisitor would, so that everything goes as it should. We can try to hide ourselves from God in shame, as Adam and Eve do. Or we can accept the invitation to surrender, to recognize our limits, to open our hearts to the “free gift” of forgiveness and “the abundance of grace.” (Romans 5:16, 17) To practice love in an imperfect world is not to try to make the people around us perfect, so we can finally fully love them; it’s to accept that we are imperfect too, and yet we, too, have been fully, truly, loved.

Sermon — February 18, 2026
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

Our preparations for Ash Wednesday really begin on Palm Sunday, when we wave green fronds and leafy branches and sing the ancient song of longing and hope for the arrival of the Messiah: “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord—Hosanna in the highest!” “Hosanna,” we say on Palm Sunday, which means in Aramaic: “Save us!” and we certainly need saving. The palms symbolize the hope of salvation: the hope that maybe this year, the Messiah will set things straight. Maybe this year, we’ll see God’s kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven. Maybe this year, we’ll see the dawn of a new world of justice and peace. Maybe this year, Christ will deliver us once and for all “us out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life.”

Eleven months later, our palms are mostly forgotten. We’ve stashed them in the junk drawer, or on a sacristy shelf. They are dry, and yellow, and crackling. And in the days before Ash Wednesday, we take the last remnants of our palms, and we gather them together in a bowl. We set them on fire, and light a match, and we watch our Palm Sunday hopes for a better world burn down to ash once more.

There are no smooth factory ashes here. No finely ground black powder in a bag sent in the mail from Almy Church Supplies. These are the real deal: gritty, smoky, burned-up palms, still fresh enough that you can smell the fire. Palms aren’t easy to burn, as any of the kids can tell you who watched me do it after church on Sunday. They’re fibrous. They’re tough. But once they get going, they make quite a smoky blaze, and we mash them up and sift them into a bowl of ash.

These ashes symbolize repentance. Covering your head with ashes was in ancient days a symbol of mourning and penitence, a public and visible sign of humility and prayer. Sometimes too public and too visible, as Jesus would point out, reminding his listeners that what truly mattered was a humble heart, not humbled hair. And the ashes symbolize our mortality: they remind us that, as God said to Adam, we human beings “are dust, and to dust [we] shall return.” (Gen. 3:19) They remind us that we are stitched together from ordinary atoms, and that in the grand molecular scheme of the universe, humans and palms and ashes aren’t so very far apart. Our bodies aren’t made of that much more than dust, and after our deaths, to dust we will return.

We’re not much more than dust, and yet, we are much more. Adam is formed not only from dust, but from the breath of God. Human beings are not only matter, but spirit. And while, from a certain point of view, you could say that all our consciousness and conscience, beauty, ethics, love, and art are nothing but ephemera arising from the collisions of atoms in our brains… the most common phenomena are still miracles that boggle the mind. Right now, networks of neurons are firing in my brain, and they coordinate to tell the muscles in my throat and mouth to flap around with such precision that I shape the air and send it forth in sound waves that then crash onto your ear drums in waves with such specific varied frequencies that you, in turn, can reconstruct precisely what it was I had to say in your own mind—and we do this without thinking, thousands of times a day!? That’s just one difference between me and a bowl of ashes.

Yes, we are dust, and to dust we will return; and yet we are also something so much more.

And so are the ashes, as a matter of fact. I’ll mark your foreheads with the sign of the cross, but dry burned palms just don’t stick on people’s faces without help. And so we mix, into the ashes, a tiny bit of holy oil, the “chrism” with which we mark each person’s forehead after baptism, when we say, “N., you are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ's own for ever.” It only takes a tiny bit of oil to do the trick—not even a whole drop—but it’s essential to the service. The oil binds the ashes together. It helps them keep their form. It infuses them with just a hint of something more—behind the smoke and fire, the scent of incense and oil.

And this is practical, of course: it allows the ashes to keep their form. But it conveys a more important truth as well. We are dust, but we are never only dust. We are mortal, but we’ve been invited to receive immortality. We live imperfect lives in an imperfect world, but there is nothing in this world that can ever separate us from the love of God. At the very moment that we are told that hope is lost, that our dried-up palms of salvation have been burned, that we are dust, and to dust we shall return—we are reminded, once again, that we have been marked as Christ’s own for ever.

And then we go home and soon enough, we wash the ashes off. Perhaps because this is what Jesus says that we should do, so that our fasting “may not be seen by others,” but by God. (Matt. 6:18) Or perhaps simply because this is an evening service, not a morning one, and we don’t want to get ashes in our beds. But sooner or later we wash our ashes off, and even this simple act becomes a symbol of how God’s redeeming love interacts with our frailty and imperfection: the water of Baptism simply washes it all away.

The Ash Wednesday service is a heavy one. It’s somber and sobering. It forces us to reckon with the reality of sin and mortality: with the truth that not one of us has been perfect, this past year; that not one of us will live forever and never see the grave. And yet, at the same time, it’s a service of great relief. Because Ash Wednesday denies despair. Ash Wednesday refuses to tell us we are dust without reminding us that we are sealed with the Holy Spirit. It refuses to let us reckon with our sins without reminding us of God’s unending forgiveness. It asks us to acknowledge the truth that we have fallen short—that we have failed to love God with our whole hearts, and our neighbors as ourselves. But at the very same time, it proclaims that God’s unconditional love is strong enough to look at every one of us in our worst moments, and to see us as we truly are, and to love us and to mark us as Christ’s own, forever.       Ash Wednesday is a day of great relief, a reminder that God “is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.” (Joel 2:13) That God “is full of compassion and mercy, slow to anger and of great kindness.” (Ps 103:1) And that God’s compassion for us comes, not despite our imperfection, but because of it: “For he himself knows whereof we are made; he remembers that we are but dust.” (Ps 103:14)

Be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place,
until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.” (2 Peter 1:19)

“Attention” is a funny word. It’s an abstract noun, but we use it all the time. Philosophers and scientists struggle to define it precisely, but the youngest children are expected to know what it means. It’s a noun that’s formed from a verb (“attend”), but we hardly ever the verb “attend” in English when we’re talking about “attention.” Instead we introduce all sorts of helping verbs. In other words, you’ll never hear a teacher in a crowded room of rambunctious children say: “Attend unto me, children!” unless you’re in a bad Victorian novel. Nor do we typically use the adjectival form, as our translation of 2 Peter did this morning: “Be attentive, kids!” No; when we’re talking about where our consciousness is focused at any given moment in time, we’re most likely to ask someone else to “pay attention!”

“Pay attention” implies that possess a certain amount of it and we can spend it on various things, giving some of our attention to someone else and receiving something in return. And that seems odd. When we “pay attention” to our family or friends, we strengthen our relationships with them; but we’re not paying for their love with our attention. When we “pay attention” to the beauty of the world, in nature, music, or art, we sometimes experience a renewed appreciation for the beauty of God’s creation; but we’re not purchasing these moments. In another sense, though, we do spend our attention on things: like time, like money, attention is a limited resource, and when we pay attention to one thing, it means we have less attention left to spend.

We sometimes believe that we can pay attention to many things at once. But let me just say this: In an interview last month about the new Netflix action thriller The Rip, starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck—I guess a new Damon-Affleck film is a kind of consolation prize for Bostonians after the Super Bowl—Matt Damon observed that Netflix has changed how movies are written relative to how movies were written twenty years ago. They now ask screenwriters to restate “the plot three or four times in the dialogue, because”—on Netflix, unlike in theaters—“people are on their phones while they’re watching.”

So maybe we’re not as good at multi-tasking as we think.

On this last Sunday after the Epiphany every year, we re-tell the story of the Transfiguration, that day when Jesus went up on a high mountain, taking with him Peter, James, and John, “and he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white.” (Matt. 17:2) Like the great prophet Moses before him, he was transformed, and the light of God began to shine out from his very face. Moses received the Law from God, shared over the course of forty days and forty nights. Jesus and his companions heard a different message instead: “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” (Matt. 17:5)

And in the Western Christian tradition—among Catholics and Protestants, in other words—this story is often treated primarily as more grist for the mill of analysis and interpretation. Moses and Elijah represent the Law and the Prophets, the two main portions of the Old Testament, which Jesus is said to fulfill. The three tents, perhaps, allude to Sukkot, the Festival of Booths; and so on. At our worst, we use the story to score cheap points in our usual debates. “Look, there’s Peter’s!” the Catholic might say. “That’s the First Pope!” “Well, yeah,” the Protestant might reply, “but his whole tent idea is a total flop.”

But in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, the Transfiguration is more than the fodder for theology or analysis. It would be fair to say that for the Orthodox, the Transfiguration is at the heart of spirituality itself. In the Transfiguration, the uncreated light of God itself shone forth around Jesus. It was absorbed into the eyes of Peter and James and John, and by seeing it, their eyes were transformed. They began to see the world as it truly was, illuminated by the light of God, and not through the veil that had been over their faces before. And Orthodox spirituality revels in these themes of light, in the splendor of the beauty of holiness, teaching that the light we see, for example, in the gold paint of an icon is not just a symbol of the light that shone around Jesus in the Transfiguration; it is that same light, and by gazing on these holy things we, too, can have our vision of the world transformed.

The work of Christian spirituality, according to this school of thought, is to do exactly what Peter says in the Epistle: to “pay attention to this [light] as to a lamp shining in a dark place.” To pay attention to the light of Christ. To open our eyes, and to see everything else illuminated by that light; to open our hearts, and let them be strangely warmed: to spend some of our attention focusing on Christ, “until the day dawns and the morning star rises in [our] hearts.” The central insight here is that “you are what you eat,” mentally and spiritually as well as physically. The more you pay attention to something, the more deeply it becomes a part of your mind and of your life.

We don’t get to see Jesus transfigured before us, in clothes turned dazzling white. But the light of Christ does shine in the world, in many other ways. The light shines through the words of Scripture, as Peter says, and through our long traditions of music and prayer. The light of Christ shines in the glowing gold of an icon, and in the kaleidoscopic rainbow that the sun projects onto the wall when it shines through stained glass. The light of Christ shines in the eyes of our neighbors, especially when they who find themselves in the circumstances in which Jesus himself tells us he is present: when they are “hungry or thirsty or foreign or naked or sick or in prison,” for “Truly I tell you,” Jesus says, “just as you did to one of the least of these, you did to me.” (Matt. 25:38-40)

The light of Christ shines in the world like a lamp lit in a dark room, and if we pay attention, it will be attention well spent. When we pay attention the Word of God, we begin to hear things differently in the news. When we pay attention to beautiful things, we begin to see more of the hidden beauty of the world. When we pay attention to one another, our capacities for compassion and grace and mercy grow; when we pay attention to the light of Christ, our minds become more like the mind of Christ.

That’s all kind of abstract, so I want to make it as concrete as I can. In English, we talk about “paying attention” or “being attentive” or “attending to” something. But Peter’s Epistle was written in ancient Greek, and the word he uses gives us a helpful hint to what this means, in a practical sense. “You would do well,” he writes, “to prosekhontes this, as a lamp.” He uses this verb, prosekho. (Not the bubbly kind.) It means to pay attention, to care for something—but etymologically, it means “to have it in front of you.” To pay attention is simply to have something in front of you—to put it right in front of your face.

So if you’re trying to balance the budget of your attention, as Lent begins, you might start there: Let what’s in front of you be the thing that’s in front of you. If the task at hand is walking down the street, try just walking down the street, and looking at the people and the buildings around you, rather than, you know... If what’s in front of you is a member of your family or a friend, be with them and not with a thousand other thoughts; pay attention to the person in front of you, as they are, and not as you want them to be. If you find yourself overwhelmed by the big picture, by news coverage of the state of the whole world, try paying attention to the people God has put around you, in your own neighborhood instead—especially those neighbors who are, as Jesus says, hungry or thirsty or foreign, naked or sick or in prison. Wherever you find yourself over the course of the day, and with whomever you find yourself spending time, pay attention to what’s in front of you; “for,” as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, “Christ plays in ten thousand places, / Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his.”

Christ plays in ten thousand places in our world, his light shining through ten thousand cracks; and if we pay attention to the light of Christ, if we are “attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place,” then our eyes, and our minds, and our lives will be transformed, “until the day dawns and the morning star rises in [our] hearts.” (2 Peter 1:19)

“Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself?
Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes?” (Isaiah 58:5) 

I was surprised to discover this week that Lent is rapidly approaching. I was surprised, because if it’s true that Ash Wednesday is only ten days away, then it means that’s Easter’s only two months away; and if Easter’s only two months away, then it means that it’s almost spring; and if it’s almost spring, then why is it six degrees outside? It doesn’t add up.

But it’s true. Lent begins in just ten days. And so, it’s around this time that some people begin to think or talk about fasting: about what they’ll “give up” for Lent, or perhaps what they’ll take on instead. You might hear people planning to fast from alcohol, or chocolate; from social media, or from coffee. You might hear people planning to take on a new practice or prayer or journaling, of serving the community or giving money to a good cause. Some people see the traditional Lenten practicing of fasting, of “giving something up,” as a helpful spiritual practice, others as an outdated burden. Personally, I always try to think of Lent as an exercise in willpower and self-knowledge: the point of “giving something up” for Lent is to refrain from something you enjoy, but which is essentially harmless, in order to gain a better understanding of your own internal dynamics of temptation. You might give up chocolate, for example, not because chocolate is bad; but because learning to resist the temptation to have just one more little square helps you learn how to resist the temptations that actually matter.

This isn’t quite what fasting has always been about. The Bible is full of people covering themselves in ashes and dressing in sackcloth as a sign of repentance, in the hope of propitiating an angry God. The Puritans who once inhabited the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared numerous “days of humiliation” and fasting to try to turn away God’s wrath in times of war or sickness or particularly cold winters. (Do you think that would work, actually? I’m willing to try it.) We’re less inclined to see fasting as a way to bring God’s favor on our society, and maybe more inclined to see it as a self-improvement project: my favorite example of this being, of course, the Today Show headline that referred to Lent as if it were a new fitness program: “Mark Wahlberg’s 40-Day Challenge.”

But as we prepare for the season of Lent to begin, we might consider the same question that God asked through Isaiah almost 3000 years ago: “Is such the fast that I choose?”

The prophet Isaiah lived in the 8th century BC, at a time when the ancient Israelites were divided into two rivaling kingdoms, north and south. In Isaiah’s day, the northern kingdom was on the verge of being destroyed by the Assyrians, and the southern kingdom, where Isaiah lived, was under threat as well. It was a time of chaos and crisis. And while the stories and prophecies in the first half of the book describe Isaiah’s response to the crisis—his advice to the kings and his rebukes to the people—the later prophecies address what would happen in the future, even after Isaiah’s death: the eventual destruction of the southern kingdom; the decades of exile endured by those who had been kidnapped and taken to Babylon as prisoners; their eventual liberation and their return home to Jerusalem.

Today’s reading is about that period of restoration, which is a work in progress. The people have managed to endure destruction and exile, and they’ve returned home, but their “ancient ruins” have not yet been rebuilt. (Isaiah 58:12) There is still a literal breach in the city wall that needs to be repaired. And like those old Massachusetts Bay colonists, the people have turned to God for help. They’ve humbled themselves and bowed their heads; they’ve covered themselves in sackcloth and ashes. They’ve spent long days in fasting and in prayer. And as things fail to improve, they’ve asked God, “Why do we fast, but you do not see?” (Isaiah 58:3)

And God answers them with these words: “Is such the fast that I choose? … Will you call this a day acceptable to the Lord? Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?” (Isaiah 58:5-7) If you do these things, “then,” God says, “your light shall break forth like the dawn.” (Isaiah 58:8)

We sometimes think of life in little independent slices: our spiritual lives, and our family lives, our work lives; our sports and our hobbies and our political views. But God sees our lives holistically. If the people of Judah want to ensure God’s favor, Isaiah says, then they can’t focus exclusively on fasting and ritual and prayer; God wants to know how they treat their workers, and whether they feed the hungry, and give shelter to the homeless. Their relationship with God is not one slice of the pie: it is the crust, that holds and gives shape to all the rest.

The fast that God chooses isn’t about how each one of us relates to God, by bowing down our heads in worship or repentance. And it isn’t about how we relate to ourselves, by understanding our own internal dynamics of temptation and willpower. It’s about how we relate to one another. If we look at things through the lens of the Two Great Commandments that Jesus extracts from the Torah, we might say that God’s problem with the people is not that they aren’t loving God with all their heart and all their soul and all their mind; it’s that they’re not loving their neighbors as themselves. (Matt. 22:37-39) It is impossible to follow the commandments of God if you will not share your bread with the hungry; it is an act of “rebellion” to worship God but not respect the dignity of every human being. The people can return to Jerusalem, but if they do not if they do not care for poor, then their society will be never truly be rebuilt.

But there’s very good news here. God doesn’t ask the people to change the world: he asks them to change themselves, and if they do, then “[their] light shall rise in the darkness and [their] gloom be like the noonday.” (Isaiah 58:10) They will truly be the “light of the world” that they are meant to be. (Matthew 5:14) And this is exactly what Jesus means by the classic images he gives us today. You are the “salt of the earth,” he says, that small portion of the food that gives it its flavor; or maybe preserves it for the future. (5:13) You are “the light of the world,” the small point that illuminates everything around it. You are “a city on a hill,” a community that can be seen by everyone around it, and stands as an example for the world. (5:14) Each one of these sayings is about how something small can affect something big. And the interesting thing is that in each case, while the small thing can’t control the world, it can control itself. You are the light of the world, and you can cover that light up with a basket, or you can take the basket off, and let it shine. You are a city on a hill, and you can organize your life together in a way that inspires the world, or not. Okay, nobody really knows what it means to say that salt can lose its saltiness, but the point seems to be more or less the same.

There are so many things that are not within our control. But there are also many things that are. We cannot control whether there is hunger in the world; but we can share our bread. We cannot stop evil from being spoken in the world; but we can stop pointing the finger ourselves. We cannot end all oppression; but when we see the bonds of injustice, we can think about what we can do to loosen them a bit. This is what it means to remove bushel basket from the lamp; because when we do these things, then our “light shall break forth like the dawn.” As individuals and families, as a church community and a local community, we can’t control the rest of the world. But we can choose to live according to Isaiah’s words; we can choose to be a city on the hill.

So as you prepare for Lent this year, think to yourself: “Is such the fast that [God] choose[s]?” It’s good for us to strengthen our own willpower and to spend time in prayer, and we should do those things in Lent. But that’s not all it means to be a light to the world. What would it mean for you this year to “offer your food to the hungry” or to “satisfy the needs of the afflicted,” (Isa. 58:10) not in a global and total way, but in your own small way? This is the fast that God would choose for us this Lent; and if do these things, then truly “[our] light shall rise in the darkness and [our] gloom be like the noonday.” (Isaiah 58:10)

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

“Blessed are those”— a modern adaptation of the Beatitudes might begin—“who attend the Annual Parish Meeting.”

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for Coffee Hour, for they will be filled.
Blessed are the bakers, for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who stare at budget spreadsheets for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people email you and call you and ask all kinds of financial questions of you redundantly on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven; for in the same way they persecuted the treasurers who were before you.

I’m only kind of joking. Every church lives suspended between two realities. On the one hand, the local church is a human institution, with legal requirements and established bylaws and literal brick and mortar to be maintained. On the other hand, every local and visible church is also a part of the universal and invisible Church, the mystical Body of Christ. And it’s a conundrum. Because if we don’t attend to the practical side of things, then we’re not able to gather for worship or to carry out our mission. But if we don’t attend to the spiritual side of things, it’s even worse: all the effort of keeping a church afloat is wasted if keeping the church afloat is the only thing we do.

We live suspended between the practical needs of running the church and the theological demands of being the Church. And while my imaginary Beatitudes might reflect some of the agenda for our church’s Annual Meeting today, it’s Jesus, in his real Beatitudes, who sets the agenda for the deeper, spiritual life of the Church.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit,” the Beatitudes begin, “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. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” (Matthew 5:3-5)

Jesus says these words at the very beginning of the Sermon on the Mount. It’s his first public address, and Jesus sets the tone for the rest of his ministry with a series of counter-cultural claims: “blessedness” is not greatness, or power, or fame; it’s meekness, and mourning, and poverty.

Some of the Beatitudes are about time, and change, and the impermanence of everything, good and bad alike. Blessed are those mourn, Jesus says; for they will be comforted. (Matt. 5:4) Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness; for they will be filled. (Matt. 5:6) The version of the Beatitudes recorded in Luke expands on this theme, and also states it in reverse; “Blessed are you who weep now,” Jesus says, “for you will laugh.” (Luke 6:21) But also “woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry; woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.” (Luke 6:25) In part, this is about cycles that occur over the years, or even over the day: those who are mourning this year have laughed before, and will laugh again; those who are laughing now have wept before, and will one day weep again; most of us go between hunger and fullness three or four times a day. But these Beatitudes are also about the promise that one day, these cycles will end. We live in a world that’s full of mourning now, and there is another world of eternal comfort. We live in a world in which we hunger and thirst for righteousness now, and there is another world of God’s eternal justice and peace. Although the process may be slow, God is breaking the cycles in our lives; God is leading us toward a better world. And our faith in this truth is what gives us hope in the face of adversity.

But the Beatitudes are not only about hope for the future. I said that the Beatitudes are an “agenda” for the Church. And—as any of our classicists could tell you—agenda means “things to be done,” as opposed to credenda, which are “things to be believed.” And the Sermon on the Mount is truly an agenda for the Church. It’s not only about our beliefs, but about our actions; not only about what we hope God will do, but what God says we ought to do.

“Blessed are the peacemakers,” Jesus says, “for they will be called children of God.” (Matt. 5:9) “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.” (5:7) “Blessed are,” not those who “hunger and thirst” in general, but specifically those “who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” (Matt. 5:6) We are not blessed because we wait for God to bring about a more peaceful world eventually; we are blessed when we make peace in this world. We are not blessed because we believe that God is merciful, we are blessed when we offer our own acts of mercy. To hunger and thirst for righteousness means to open our hearts to the suffering of others, and to yearn for it to end, even though it causes us pain, in our guts, to hunger and thirst for justice in an unjust world.

Christians throughout history have only rarely been insulted and reviled and persecuted simply for being Christian. From the eras of persecution in the early Church to the struggles for civil rights and social justice in the modern day, Christians have been rewarded for keeping their mouths shut and saying their private prayers. The push-back that Jesus predicts has always come when we begin to speak out in his name against the violence and injustice of the world. But when this happens, Jesus says, don’t despair. “Rejoice and be glad, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” (Matt. 5:12)

You might think that this agenda for the Church sets way too high a bar. What can we, at little old St. John’s, do to be peacemakers in a violent world? How much do our small acts of mercy mean in the face of so much need? Why does Jesus insist that the Church expose itself to persecution and insult and reviling—doesn’t he know we’ve got a budget deficit to sort out?

But as is always the case, and as Paul reminds us this week, “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” (1 Cor. 1:25) God doesn’t choose to act through the great and mighty people of the world. God chooses the humble and the meek: God chooses the ordinary. “Consider your own call,” Paul writes to the Christians at Corinth, in the ultimate back-handed compliment: “Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.” (1 Cor. 1:26-27)

… Thanks, Paul? I guess? That’s a little rude, but in fact it’s incredibly good news if you are among the weak, and the foolish, and the humble people of this world. Just as the Beatitudes turn our idea of blessedness upside-down, so too Paul tells us that God’s power works through the powerless.

So I wonder whether, alongside the business of our Annual Meeting this year, we might run a sort of parallel Annual Meeting of the heart. The items on the agenda for our Annual Meeting and in the contents of our Annual Report provide some implicit rubrics by which we measure the life of the church: operating income and expenses, numbers of baptisms and average Sunday attendance, and more.

But the Beatitudes offer another set of rubrics by which we might evaluate our lives as Christians this year, and our life together as a church, and it’s only in service of these theological demands that the practical concerns actually matter.

So I wonder:

            How foolish were we at St. John’s this year, in the service of God?

            How hungry were we for righteousness?

            How poor were we in spirit this year?

            How meek were we? How pure in heart?

            What acts of mercy did we undertake?

            What did we do to make peace?

            What did you mourn this year in 2025? When were you comforted?       

            Were you persecuted or insulted or reviled this year? Did people utter all kinds of evil falsely against you in 2025?

It’s easy to get caught up in the practical challenges of church life. There are difficult questions for how churches will carry on in the decades ahead, and there are no easy answers. But we should never lose sight of the simplicity of our faith: for God has told us, as the prophet Micah says, “what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8)

“For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing,
but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” (1. Cor. 1:10-18)

At the heart of Paul’s mission is the paradoxical “message about the cross”: the claim that even though the kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed did not come about in any visible way, even though Jesus was subject to the most painful and humiliating death the Roman Empire could devise, he was nevertheless the Messiah, the Anointed One who would set God’s people free. The message about the cross is the claim that this man, who appeared to the world to be just another failed revolutionary, was in fact the incarnate Son of God; and the moment that looked like his ultimate defeat was in fact his greatest victory. This certainly sounds like “foolishness.” It’s the opposite of what any reasonable person would expect, including most of Jesus’ disciples. But nevertheless, “it is the power of God.”

Paul continues to develop the paradox in the verses that follow, which we’ll read next week: “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom,” Paul writes, “and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” (1 Cor. 1:25) “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise,” he says; “God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.” (1 Cor. 1:27)

And while our Gospel reading today comes from the near the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel—while Jesus’ death on the cross is still far away—this contrast between strength and weakness is already there. On the face of things, Jesus appears to be gaining in strength. He’s traveling around from place to place proclaiming his message: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” (Matthew 4:17) He’s recruiting the disciples who will become the inner circle of his movement: James and John, who will dream of sitting at his right hand and his left in power; Simon who is called “Peter,” the “Rock” on whom Christ will build his Church. He moves to Capernaum in fulfillment of an ancient text that proclaims that God has broken the yoke of the people’s burden and the rod of their oppressor. (Isa. 9:2-4)

These were dangerous political acts. You didn’t get to proclaim the arrival of a new kingdom within the borders of the Roman Empire without the permission of Rome. You couldn’t even criticize a local ruler for his personal moral failings; that’s what got John the Baptist thrown in jail.

There’s a profound weakness below the surface of what appears to be a strong launch for Jesus’ ministry. “Now when Jesus heard that John had been arrested,” Matthew tells us, “he withdrew.” (4:12) Jesus cares deeply about John, but there’s nothing he can do. There is no band of merry men who can help set John the Baptist free. There are no favors Jesus can call in with influential friends. There is no protest movement he can organize. John the Baptist has been arrested, and Jesus is powerless to help, and so he withdraws back to his home base in Galilee, where he begins to recruit. Not among the fighting men, the bandits and desperadoes who could help him launch a war. Not among the leading rabbis of his day, the scholars and teachers who could move a nation with their words. Not among the aristocrats who could pull some strings to get John out of jail.

No, he gets four fishermen, and goes off to change the world.

Now, we know how the story goes. We know that the band of Jesus’ followers will grow into a crowd: the four will become twelve, then hundreds; then thousands. But they’ll all fall away, before the end. Even James and John will disappear. Even Peter will deny him. Jesus will end his ministry as he began it: alone, with no followers, completely vulnerable to the power of Rome. And while Jesus would die and rise again, his followers would still be weak in the face of Roman strength. They would be arrested and exiled, put on trial and put to death: and so it was that “Young John, who trimmed the flapping sail, Homeless in Patmos died. Peter, who hauled the teeming net, Head down was crucified.”

But as Paul says, “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.” And somehow, the weakness of Christ on the cross was the method God chose to overthrow the strongest powers of the world: not only Rome, but death itself; and the weakness of his followers began to inspire a great change in the world.

If you want to see what weakness and strength look like in our time, I commend to you the pages of the Minnesota Star Tribune, whose journalists have been documenting the enormity of what is going on in the Twin Cities right now. A few photos and videos from this week: A man lies pinned to the ground by three federal agents with his arms behind his back, when a fourth walks up and pepper sprays him directly in the face. A loose gaggle of protestors stand in the snow along the side of the road, observing a group of agents in the street, when a Customs and Border Patrol commander steps onto the sidewalk and calmly throws a tear gas canister into the crowd, shoving a young woman as he walks away. A US citizen, a grandfather, is taken from his home into the cold of a Minnesota January, wearing nothing but shorts and Crocs, after agents break down his door with a battering ram. He’s released an hour later; they had the wrong guy.

All that had already happened this week before the shooting yesterday by federal agents of yet another US citizen. And while his memory has already been insulted by the claim that he was there to kill ICE agents, I’ve watched the videos. (I would recommend you not watch them, for your own sake.) He stands in the middle of the street, calmly directing traffic and filming while ICE detains someone. If he had come to do violence, as some say, he had his chance. But that wasn’t why he was there. He was there because he loved his neighbors. He was an ICU nurse at the VA hospital. And in the last minute of his life, he saw a young woman thrown to the ground by ICE, and he tried to help her up, while they pepper sprayed him in the face. He was tackled to the ground and then shot again and again. His last words, spoken to the woman he was trying to help: “Are you okay?”

In the face of such overwhelming force, what can ordinary, weak people do?

I was reminded this week, as we celebrated the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., of the title of one of his books: Strength to Love. In this book of sermons, he picks up on the ideas of Jesus and of Paul. He argues for the thesis that “the strong man holds in a living blend strongly marked opposites.” The paradox of strength is like the paradox of the cross. The strongest man in the world isn’t actually Caesar; it’s Christ. To be like Christ, King says, mean to hold in ourselves the same marked opposites he held. “We must combine the toughness of the serpent with the softness of the dove,” he says. We must have the courage to practice nonviolence. We must have the strength to love.

King’s method of nonviolent resistance had a specific goal: to awaken a sense of “moral shame” in those who perpetrated violence and in those who witnessed it, to evoke not humiliation but repentance. The insight that King shared with Gandhi, and Jesus, and Paul, was that every violent act contains within itself the seed of its own undoing. It’s a profoundly hopeful idea: Human hearts can be moved, and human minds can be changed. The sight of the courage of the weak when enduring the full force of the strong can soften even the most hardened hearts.

This doesn’t always look like it’s “working,” in the short term. Dr. King had the courage to practice nonviolence; he still died a violent death. Jesus had the strength to choose weakness; they still nailed him to the cross. And their witness to the message of the cross—to the power of God’s weakness and the strength of God’s love—has moved hundreds of millions of people toward their vision of justice, peace, and love. And although we live in a world that is full of injustice, violence, and hate, there is always hope for change. God is always reaching out to us with mercy and with grace. And there is always a chance to answer Jesus’ call to “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

An acquaintance of mine who lives in Minnesota went down to the scene of the shooting yesterday as people gathered afterwards. He described speaking to one of the young agents there. “Matthew 25 is what got him,” he wrote. (“Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”) He said to him: “You can walk away. You can choose justice. You can use your skills and training for good. You can be a protector. But right now, you’re not.” Minutes after the shooting, he went down to the scene, and invited the officers to repent of violence. And he says, “two of them were shook up. One of them cried, and walked away.”

This may have been a foolish thing to do. But this was a brave thing to do. And this was a strong thing to do. And this was a powerful thing to do. “For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

Sermon — January 18, 2026
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

“They came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day.
It was about four o’clock in the afternoon.” (John 1:39)

I have to admit that four o’clock in the afternoon is not my favorite time of day.

It’s not that beautiful moment when I first wake up and get to reward myself for climbing out of bed by making a cup of coffee and then climbing back in. It’s not five o’clock, when it’s time to head home and start cooking dinner, with most of the day’s work in the rearview mirror. By four o’clock, lunch was long enough ago that I’ve started getting cranky. I’ve used up most of my mental energy for the day, but my to-do list isn’t done. Four o’clock comes every day, I suppose; I don’t think I’ve ever once looked forward to it.

But four o’clock is when Jesus comes and changes your life. Or at least—four o’clock was when Jesus came and changed their lives, these two disciples: Andrew and the one who isn’t named, but who some of the Church Fathers identify with John, the Beloved Disciple and author of the Gospel. It’s an ordinary afternoon, and they’re just hanging around with their teacher John the Baptist, when he exclaims, “Look! Here is the Lamb of God!” And they’re so intrigued by this that they follow Jesus as he walks by. Eventually he turns, and sees them there, and asks—

Well, there are two versions of what he asks. It depends on how you read his tone. If you imagine Jesus as a profound spiritual teacher in this moment—the incarnate Word of God, the Love of God made flesh among us—then you’d probably say that he asks these two disciples-to-be, “What are you looking for?” (John 1:38 NRSV) or even “What are you seeking?” (ESV) If you remind yourself that Jesus was fully divine and fully human; that it was, after all, about four o’clock in the afternoon, and that he’d just seen two strange man following behind him, you might say that he asks them, “What do you want?” (NIV)

Same words, three translations, two very different tones. But in any case, they ask him where he’s staying, and he simply answers, “Come and see.” (1:39) And they come with him, and the Gospel doesn’t tell us what it is that they see, but it’s so compelling that they prepare to leave everything behind, and follow him. And Simon Peter, brother of Andrew, and Andrew himself, and the unnamed disciple who is probably John become three of the Twelve who are at the very heart of Jesus’ ministry.

It was about four o’clock in an ordinary day. And by about 4:01, their lives had changed.

Returning for a moment to the topic of translation—“What are you looking for?” or “What are you seeking?” or “What do you want?” The translation of this particular verse isn’t that important, but the topic of translation itself seems to matter to the Gospel of John. Three times in these last few verses, John translates something for us, from the Hebrew and Aramaic that Jesus and his disciples spoke, into the Greek in which the Gospel is written; and our translators translate for us, from Greek into English. They say to him, “Rabbi,” which means “Teacher.” They tell Simon that they’ve found the “Messiah,” which means “Anointed” (in Greek, that’s “Christ.”) Jesus calls Simon “Cephas,” which is translated “Peter,” but that’s really the Greek form of the name; in English it should be translated, “Rock.”

Already, by the end of the first century or so, only a few decades after Jesus’ death, the traditions of the faith needed to be translated. Already the Gospel of John is written for an audience who spoke Greek, not Hebrew or Aramaic; for an audience who were likely mostly Gentiles, rather than mostly Jews. And there were things they didn’t know, things that needed to be explained: What’s “Rabbi” mean? What’s the “Messiah”? Why do some people call Peter “Cephas” and others “Peter,” the Rock? If you were a Jew who spoke Hebrew or Aramaic, this would all be self-explanatory; if you were a Gentile who spoke Greek, maybe not so much.

Christianity is always in need of translation. None of us speak ancient Greek as our first tongue. But even this translation isn’t enough. You can understand every word in a sentence, and still not know what it means. It’s four o’clock in the afternoon, and John the Baptist says, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!” Which translated means… What exactly?

John talks about Jesus with symbolic language and philosophical claims. “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” he tells us. “This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’” (John 1:29-30) These words are in English; that doesn’t mean that we know what they mean. There’s a second layer of translation that adds context and interpretation. This second layer might tell us, for example, that in the first sentence, the image of the “Lamb of God” evokes the Passover ritual of the sacrifice of lambs, which itself refers back to the story of the Exodus, and the lambs whose blood spread on the doorframes turned away the Angel of Death, such that Jesus is Lamb of God whose death at Passover will turn away the power of death from us; and that in the second sentence, John the Baptist reveals that Jesus is not only a man who was born a few months after John, he is also the incarnate Word of God, who existed before all time.

And all of that is interesting enough, at a theological level. But we still need a third layer of translation, from theology to life. John talks about Jesus in an elevated way, with winding syntax and complex ideas; we live at four o’clock in the afternoon, with growling stomachs and unfinished to-dos. It’s not that ideas don’t matter, and it’s not that anything John says is wrong; ideas do matter, and everything he says is true. But being told true ideas isn’t usually what changes people’s lives.

For that, you have to come and see.

Jesus wasn’t born to explain something to us. He was born to do something for us. He didn’t come to tell us that he was the Lamb of God, who would take away the sin of the world, he came to be the Lamb of God, and to take away the sin of the world. He didn’t come to explain the philosophical mechanism by which giving his own life for us would set us free from the power of death; he came to give his life for us, and to actually set us free from the power of death.

Translation is important. Interpretation is important. I’ve spent years of my life studying these things, because it matters what Jesus thought and what he said. But the foundation of our faith is what he did, and what he’s doing now.

Jesus comes to us in the four o’clock moments of our lives. He comes to us when we are distracted or tired, lonely or grieving. He comes, as well, when we are filled with joy or gratitude or praise. He meets us where we are and invites us to come and stay with him. He invites us to meet him in the Eucharist, or to sit with him in silence or in prayer. He invites us to see him in the faces of the people around us, and especially in those who are hungry, or in prison, or sick. If we stay with him a while, we’ll begin to learn more. There will be time for moral instruction and theological explanation. There will be endless hours of sermons to sit through on the way to his Body and Blood. There will always be another book to read, or another form of prayer to try, on the way deeper into a life of faith.

But life with Christ always begins with the simple question that Jesus asked those first disciples two thousand years ago, and which he asks each one of us: “What are you looking for?” And whatever we say in response, however vague or specific we may be, it turns out that his answer is the same. He invites us to come and stay with him; to search for what we’re looking for in his presence, and maybe even to find it there. He offers us an invitation that can come at the most ordinary time, but can change the rest of our lives: “Come and see.”