Sermons from Saint John’s

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

“Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’” (Matthew 3:13-14)

On Thursday, Douglas and Priscilla and I took a field trip to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where there’s currently an exhibit of work by Allan Crite. Crite was a Boston artist who documented the life of the Black communities of the South End and Roxbury. He was also a devout Episcopalian, who not only painted scenes of church life around Boston but also painted items for church life—including the illuminated text of our baptismal prayer over there, which St. John’s commissioned him to paint in 1954. It’s a great exhibit. It’s still open for a couple days, and if you’re curious, you can check out the book on the counter at Coffee Hour.

After the Crite exhibit we wandered through the rest of the museum for a bit. At one point, I stumbled upon a scene that’s familiar in any collection of Renaissance paintings: a toddler playgroup! There was a group of women dressed in 15th-century Italian garb, and running around on the floor and on their mothers’ laps were a bunch of babies. Most of them were naked, but one of them was wearing a weird kind of furry tunic or vest; and I thought—aha! It’s John the Baptist! (The camel-hair shirt he wore as an adult prophet serving to identify him for us, even as a child.)

You can see in this painting that John is just a bit older than Jesus. Jesus is shown as an infant lying in Mary’s lap; John is standing up like a wobbly toddler, holding onto her legs. It’s just about plausible that Jesus is six months old or so, and John just turned one and is starting to cruise around.

And this was always the relationship between Jesus and his cousin John. John was just that little bit ahead of Jesus at every stage. Luke tells us that John was born just six months before Jesus. We can assume, as the painting does, that John began to talk first, and to walk first. And all the Gospels tells us that when the two boys grew up, John’s ministry began first, and his movement was in fact more prominent while they were both alive. But after John’s death, and after the death and resurrection of Jesus, most of John’s followers became part of the fast-growing movement of the followers of Christ.

John didn’t think that he was the Messiah; he thought of himself as a prophet, preparing the way for the Messiah. And he’s often shown this way in Christian art: a typical Renaissance painting of John will show him with one finger pointing the way to Jesus.

And yet there’s an uncomfortable truth about the story we read today. While we might expect that John, the “less important” figure, would be baptized by Jesus, the “more important” one, in fact the story unfolds the other way around: it’s Jesus who comes to his older cousin John, to be baptized in the river Jordan.

We’re accustomed to their being some hierarchy in this sort of initiation ritual. Parents and godparents bring children forward, and make promises on their behalf. We, the older, more experienced members of the church, welcome the baby in. And even when we baptize an adult, the same is true: The new Christian comes to the priest to be baptized, and not the other way around.

Sure, John’s older by six months. But Jesus is the Beloved Son of God. John is the leader of a religious movement, preparing the way for the Messiah. Jesus is the Messiah himself. And yet Jesus comes to John as if he needs to be baptized by him. It’s clear that this was somewhat embarrassing for the early church. The Gospel writers all try to explain the fact. John himself expresses his discomfort with the reversal of roles: “I need to be baptized by you,” he says, “and do you come to me?” It’s as if I went with Teddy to the font, in a few minutes, and leaned my head down to be baptized by him.

But there’s a powerful truth in this reversal of roles.

We often think that it’s the job of parents to help a child learn: not only how to walk, but how to act; not only how to speak, but how to love. When we baptize children, their parents and godparents take vows to see that the child they present “is brought up in the Christian faith and life,” and to “help this child grow into the full stature of Christ.”  (BCP p. 302) Parents and godparents and grandparents; uncles and aunts and cousins; family friends and fellow church members all play a huge role in the lives of children. We are all responsible for helping them to grow.

But this also works the other way around. Parents teach children how to be good citizens of the world, sure. But children teach their parents at least as much about what it means to love. Sunday School teachers and pastors try to teach children what we can about our faith; but any of us who work with kids would tell you that they often inspire deeper faith in us. Jesus told his disciples that “unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven,” (Matt. 18:3) and it’s true. In baptism, we express our intention to put our whole trust in God’s grace and love—but the only way to do that is to recover some of that child-like state in which we can and do put our whole trust in the people we love, the people who love us.

In baptism, we take on some of the work of Christ and we receive some of the promises of Christ. We take on the work that Peter describes in the Book of Acts today, of preaching peace to the world. In baptism, the same mission that began with Jesus’ ministry in Galilee, and was given to the apostles after his death, continues on with us: to proclaim God’s love to the people around us, in word and in deed, and to work and to pray for a more peaceful world.

And in baptism, each one of us becomes part of the one Body of Christ, and the same words that God spoke to Jesus at his baptism, God speaks to each one of us. God looks at each one of us, and says, “Here is my servant, whom I uphold; my chosen, in whom my soul delights.” (Isaiah 42:1) God looks at each one of us, and says, “This is my Beloved Child, with whom I am well pleased.” (Matt. 3:17)

Because it turns out that however we come here today—as parents or children, teenagers or seniors, long-term church members or first-time visitors—we stand before God as children, still somewhere in the process of learning and growth. In God’s eternal eyes, none of us is more than about six months older than any of the others. The wisest and most experienced among us are like that toddler John the Baptist, standing up while Jesus lies down—but still holding on to Mary’s knees for help.

Life in Christ isn’t about having all the answers. It isn’t about doing everything right. God doesn’t need us to be perfect. But God wants us to be curious. God wants us to be willing to learn. This is what it means to say that unless we become like little children, we cannot inherit the kingdom of God. It means to admit that we are works in progress, who still have something to learn. It means to set our egos aside, as Jesus did when he accepted baptism from John. It means to let ourselves learn from the people we think we are supposed to teach; to let ourselves be changed by the love we see around us—the love that we see in our neighbors, and in our friends, in our mentors, and in our saints—but more than anything else, to let ourselves be changed by the love we see in the children who live among us, and in curiosity they show as they continue to grow into the full stature of Christ.

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

“Then, opening their treasure chests,
they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.”
(Matthew 2:11)

There’s a perfect moment in the first season of the TV comedy The Office in which Michael Scott, reflects on the importance of generosity. For those who don’t know, the series is a pretend documentary about working life in a small office supply company in post-industrial Pennsylvania; Michael Scott is the loveable but completely over-the-top character played by the comedian Steve Carrell.

So in this scene, Michael has a “talking head” interview, where he’s speaking to the camera and starts reflecting on what’s really important in life. Is life about being one of the best young paper salesmen in northeastern Pennsylvania? No. Is it about his meteoric rise into middle management? No. Is it about luxury and glamor? No.

“When I retire,” Michael says, “I don't want to just move to some island somewhere. I want to be the guy who gives it all back. I want it to be like, 'Hey, who donated that hospital wing that's saving so many lives?' 'I don't know. It was anonymous.' 'Well, guess what. It was Michael Scott.' 'But how do you know? It was anonymous.' 'Because I'm him.’”

What makes Michael Scott a good character is that he has a big ego and no filter. But what makes him a great character is that he’s not that different from any of us. He’s not a hero. He’s not a villain. He’s the regional manager of the Scranton branch of a mid-sized paper company. And so, time and time again, he surfaces these tensions that exist in all our lives. Because he’s so over the top, because none of us would ever act that way, his antics never feel like a criticism of us; but they reveal real things about our lives. None of us, if we ever became rich enough to donate a whole hospital wing anonymously, would ever stand outside it whispering, “Psst—You know that anonymous gift? That was me!” But all of us, in our own lives, are constantly dealing with the tension between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for things: Do we do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do, or do we do the right thing because we want someone to see us doing it?

In our Gospel reading today, we celebrate the arrival of the Magi in Bethlehem, bearing what are perhaps the most famous gifts in history. They have seen a star rising at Jesus’ birth, and they have traveled from their homes in the East to Jerusalem, to seek “the child who has been born king of the Jews.” (Matt. 2:2) The current King of the Jews, King Herod, doesn’t like that very much. But he sends them to Bethlehem to find out more, so that he “may also go and ahem pay him homage.” (Matt. 2:8)

The Magi go to Bethlehem, and they see that the star has stopped over a house. And they go into the house, and they see the child with Mary his mother; they kneel down and pay him homage. (Matt. 2:10-11) And then they open their treasure chests, and offer him their famous gifts: gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.

And the Magi have been known for their gifts ever since. On the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6, commonly known as “Three Kings’ Day,” it’s the custom in some places to take chalk and mark your doors with the current year and the letters C-M-B, standing for the initials of the three kings. If you look around this building, you can see some of them – I think there’s one over the doors to the street, and one in one of the bathrooms, maybe? C-M-B, for Caspar, the Indian king who brought frankincense; Melchior, the Persian king who brought gold; and Balthazar, the Arabian king who brought the gift of myrrh. These three kings, coming from three foreign lands, embody the theme of the Epiphany, the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles; in other words, the revelation of the love of God for all people, Jews and Gentiles alike, made flesh in this newborn child. The homage paid by the three kings symbolizes the unification of all peoples under one God, and we remember and honor them still; their three gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh have outlasted any memorial building or hospital wing in the world, and two thousand years later, we still remember their names.

Except. There’s just one thing we need to know about these three kings, Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar. Well, three things, I guess. 1) Their names weren’t Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar. 2) There weren’t three of them. 3) And they weren’t kings. At least not according to the Bible.

Matthew calls them “Magi from the East,” “Magi” being the Persian name for a class of Zoroastrian astrologers which, when borrowed into Greek, carries connotations of mystery and magic. He doesn’t give any particular number of them; the traditional number 3 comes from the list of 3 gifts, not from any indication that there are 3 magi. He doesn’t call them kings. He doesn’t give them names, or places of origin. They’re simply “Magi from the East.” All the rest of it—all the details we know and love, the names and nations and three little figurines with camels—comes from later legends. And I think there’s something really important there, and it ties back to that uncomfortable tension between recognition and anonymity: We’ve made all these details up, I think, because we can’t handle the fact that such a royal gift could be made with total anonymity.

And yet it was. Some number of Magi from the east came and gave what they had, and they gave a lot: the rich gold with which they would crown a king, the sweet frankincense they would offer to a god, the bitter myrrh with which they would embalm a corpse. But that’s all we know, because they don’t stick around. We never see the Office scene unfold: “‘Hey, who donated that gold that’s sitting next to the baby?’ ‘I don't know. It was anonymous.’ ‘Well, guess what. It was Melchior.’ ‘But how do you know? It was anonymous.’ ‘Because I'm him.’”

Instead, “having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.” (Matt. 2:12)

Now, there’s nothing wrong with a memorial gift. They’re wonderful, in fact. The walls and windows of our own building keep alive the names and memories of a number of the saints of this church, people without whose dedication and service we would not be here together. If you’ve ever spent any time navigating around a hospital, you know that people really do donate whole wings, even building, that save people’s lives every day; and that’s a good and holy thing.

But I suspect most of us find ourselves in the opposite situation. Our problem is not that we are recognized too much; it’s that we’re not recognized enough. All of us have gifts to offer to the world: talents, or passions, or skills that we can share with the people around us. Those of us with nothing to give can give our time, and attention, and love. Some of us will achieve some level of recognition in the world; but if that happens, it will probably be for what David Brooks calls “the résumé virtues” as opposed to “the eulogy virtues.” Most of us won’t have a Wikipedia page listing either. Most of us will spend most of our lives doing good things that no one will remember in a hundred years, let alone two thousand. And many of us may, from time to time, feel unappreciated for what we do, not only by the world as a whole but sometimes by the people we love the most.

But that’s what I love about the story of these anonymous, mysterious Magi from the East. We can name their gifts but we don’t know their names. They give extraordinary things and we don’t remember them at all. And yet the story of their anonymous gift is at the heart of our celebration of the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles. This story of generosity and love—which we tell again and again every year, and then credit to three completely made-up guys—is among our dearest symbols of how God’s love was revealed to the world two thousand years ago.

The Magi gave their gifts, and they went home. They never saw the life of Christ unfold. They never received real recognition for their act. But they gave their gifts anyway. And every one of us can do the same. We can choose to offer ourselves to the world, generously and joyfully. Even if our efforts go unrecognized, we can carry on. Our names may not be remembered in a hundred years, but the gifts we will change the world, in big ways or in small ones. And we will one day meet face to face, with the one who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing, and who chose us before to foundation of the world to give the world all these unnoticed gifts… to the praise of his glorious grace. (Eph. 1:3-4, 6)

Amen.

Sermon — December 28, 2025
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman…
so that we might receive adoption as children. (Galatians 4:4-5) Amen.

Take a seat, but don’t put that hymnal away quite yet. We’re going to have a short sing-along. Could you turn with me to Hymn 102? We’re going to sing just one verse, the fifth verse, beginning with “And our eyes.”

And our eyes at last shall see him,
through his own redeeming love;
for that child who seemed so helpless
is our Lord in heaven above;
and he leads his children on
to the place where he is gone.

The story of the First Sunday after Christmas is the story of a child becoming part of a new family. But the child isn’t Jesus, and the family isn’t the Holy Family: the child is me! And, lest you think the bubble of my ego has finally burst, the child is also you, and you, and you—because the story of the First Sunday after Christmas is the story of the adoption of a whole host of children from all sorts of families into the one family of God.

We sometimes use the phrase “children of God” as a vaguely-spiritual way to say “human beings.” We should treat one another with dignity and respect, a religious leader might say, because “we’re all children of God.” This is the sort of thing a milquetoast Protestant like me says when called upon to offer a prayer at some kind of civic event hosted by local politicians: it’s true, and it’s good, and it’s unlikely to offend.

But this isn’t quite what the apostle Paul means. Paul doesn’t think that “we’re all children of God,” at least not in the sense he means it in his letter to the Galatians. Human beings aren’t born the children of God. We become children of God, in a very particular way.

“When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law—so that we might receive adoption as children.” (Gal. 4:4-5) For Paul, this is the point of Christmas: God the Father sent God the Son to be born as a human child, so that we human beings—young and old alike—might become the children of God, through adoption.

There’s some interesting context here about what “adoption” means. If you’ve ever studied ancient history, you may know what Paul, who was a Roman citizen, absolutely did know: that adoption was the primary form of succession to the imperial throne in the early Roman empire. Julius Caesar was succeeded by Octavian Augustus, a great-nephew whom he adopted as his son and heir in his will. Augustus was succeeded by his adopted stepson Tiberius, after two grandsons whom he’d also adopted died before him. Tiberius was followed by his grand-nephew and adopted grandson, Caligula, and so on, so that throughout Paul’s lifetime the position of emperor was inherited by someone who had been adopted, not born as heir. And the tradition carried on for several hundred years: in fact, adoption became such a dominant way of designating an heir to the throne that by the second century, it seemed completely normal for the elderly Emperor Nerva to adopt as his son and heir the 43-year-old general Trajan. This kind of imperial adoption was a legal and political arrangement; while many of the people involved were related, adoption wasn’t primarily about raising children.

When Paul calls us “children of God,” he shares this focus on inheritance. He means that through adoption, we become heirs: “heirs of God, and joint heirs with Christ,” as he puts it when he’s writing to the Romans. (Rom. 8:17) If you think about it, this is a really remarkable claim: to the extent that Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, inherits something from God the Father—we, too, inherit that same thing on an equal basis, as “joint heirs.” If Christ will inherit the throne of God, so will we.

But Paul’s idea goes beyond this Roman imperial practice. It isn’t just a legal fiction; it’s something we really feel. God sends the Holy Spirit into our hearts, and we cry out, “Abba! Father!” (Gal. 4:6) We feel the warmth of God’s love for us, which we can only liken to the love that parents have for their children, and it really is as though the love that exists within the Holy Trinity, between God the Father and God the Son, is extended to us as well. In some mysterious ways, Christ’s birth among us as a little child enables us to become children of God. Jesus comes down among us, in order to raise us up with him to God.

It’s the same story in the beautiful Prologue to the Gospel of John. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… and the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.” (John 1:1, 14) In Jesus of Nazareth, John says, the Word of God, the eternal underlying logic of the universe, that has always been with God and that is itself God became flesh, and lived among us.

And this is such a big idea that it sometimes causes us to miss one small verse, which sounds a lot like Paul’s idea of adoption: the claim that “to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.” (John 1:12)

It’s the same arc, from heaven to earth and back. Paul writes: “God sent his Son, born of a woman…so that we might receive adoption as children…and if child[ren] then also heir[s].” John writes: “The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us,” and “gave [us] power to become children of God.” Or as Cecil Frances Alexander said so well, in our sing-along hymn: “He came down to earth from heaven, who is God and Lord of all… and he leads his children on to the place where he is gone.”

Christmas begins a circle from heaven to earth and back. Jesus came down to us at Christmas, so that we might rise with him to God. He came among us as a child, so that we might become children of God. He came to show us the love that has existed since before time, between God the Father and God the Son—and he invites us, in some mysterious way, to participate in that relationship of love.

You could spend most of your life trying to understand what that even means, let alone living into it. But the beauty of Christmas is that we don’t have to understand. We don’t need to know what it means for it to make a difference in our lives or in our world. Whether we believe it or not, whether we understand it or not, whether we like it or not, we have been adopted as the children of God.

We’ve been given the love of God, an unconditional love that embraces us wherever we go. God loved us so much, that Christ came down among us, to lead us on the road back to God. We are adopted as the beloved children of God, and God is with us as we continue to grow and to learn how to love one another. Our journeys through life may sometimes take wrong turns; but while we may sometimes find ourselves moving further away from God, and sometimes closer, we have been designated heirs, and we will one day receive our inheritance.

And at the end of our long journey, at the very moment when we leave this world behind, we will finally receive the full fruits of the love that came down at Christmas; we will finally receive the final gift; and when we fall asleep for the last time in this world, we will wake again upon another shore, and in a greater light,

And our eyes at last shall see him,
through his own redeeming love;
for that child who seemed so helpless
is our Lord in heaven above;
and he leads his children on
to the place where he is gone.

Amen.

Sermon — December 25, 2025
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God…
And the Word became flesh, and lived among us.
(John 1:1, 14)

There’s something I love about reading the most cosmic and story of Jesus’ birth at the quietest service of the church year. On Christmas Eve, we celebrate the birth of Christ in Bethlehem, with a whole crowd of people singing carols that revel in the familiar details of the scene: the shepherds keeping watch in the fields, and the angels singing in the sky, and the babe lying in a manger. And then on Christmas Day—after the shepherds have gone home, and so have the crowds—a small handful of us come here to ponder the mystery of the Incarnation, “the becoming-flesh” of the Word of God.

John’s story of the birth of Christ is both familiar and strange, simple and incomprehensible. The meaning of the words is simple enough. The important ones are only one syllable: Word and God, life and light, flesh and blood, grace and truth. And yet the full meaning of what John says is almost beyond the capacity of our minds to understand: the smartest theologians and philosophers in the world have spent millennia discussing exactly what it means, and what it tells us about how Jesus Christ relates to God, and perhaps it’s ironic that in their efforts to explain John’s simple statement that “the Word was with God, and the Word was God…and the Word became flesh, and lived among us,” they’ve ended up with some pretty complex terms: from “Incarnation” to “hypostasis.” The Word became flesh, and we’ve been coming up with new words to say so ever since.

But it’s Christmas morning, and the Word didn’t become flesh to give intellectuals something to do. The Word became flesh to change our hearts; to bring life into a world of death, to bring love into a world of hate, to bring light into a world of darkness. There’s only one kind of theologian that we need to consult on Christmas Day, and that’s a poet, of course: the queen of Christmas hymns, Christina Rossetti, who explains the mystery of the Incarnation of God in the words we all just sang:

Love came down at Christmas, love all lovely, love divine;
love was born at Christmas, star and angels gave the sign.

Jesus’ birth on Christmas Day was the beginning of many things. It was the beginning of a childhood, during which he would grow and learn and cause his parents much vexation. It was the beginning of a life of ministry, in which Jesus would teach and preach and heal the people around him. It was the beginning of the road toward the Cross, on which Jesus would give his own life to save his people from the power of sin and death.

And if these were the only important things about Jesus’ life, then you might think that Christmas Day is a celebration of the birthday of a great and important man—a day, like Presidents’ Day or Martin Luther King Jr. Day, on which we recognize the achievements of a person’s adult life by celebrating the day of his birth.

But in fact, that’s not the case. Because the birth of Christ is not just a prelude to the main event; the Gospel of John suggests that it is the main event: that Jesus was not merely a good and wise man who did good and wise things; that Jesus only born because God needed someone to die; that Jesus was not a man who later, somehow, became God. The Gospel of John insists that the process went the other way around: that Jesus was God-become-man, the Word-become-flesh, Love-come-down among us.

God looked at our world, past, present, and future. God looked at humankind, and saw who we were and what we do. God looked at the multidimensional cosmic landscape of all of space and time; God saw everything we have done and everything that we will do, good, bad, or boring. And God came down to spend a life with us. Love came down at Christmas, love incarnate, love divine.

And God invites us to respond: to accept the love of God made flesh on Christmas Day, and to respond with our own lives of love. To look for the light shining in the darkness, and to spread that light in our world. To become the children of God, not only in name, but in deed; to let our lives be enlightened by the love of God, until Rossetti’s words shine forth in our lives, until her prayer becomes our reality, and we become so full of the love of God that

Love shall be our token, love be yours and love be mine,
love to God and neighbor, love for plea and gift and sign.

Sermon — December 24, 2025
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

Behold, I bring you good tidings of a great joy, which will be to all the people;
for unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. (Luke 2:10, 11) 

We all know the story of Christmas, in its ancient and its modern forms. We know about St. Mary and St. Joseph and St. Nicholas; the donkey and the journey and the sleigh. The shepherds in the fields keeping watch over their flocks by night, and the children in the pageant dressed up like cows. The angels singing in the heavens as the babe lies in the manger; and the angel sitting atop the Christmas tree as the presents lie beneath its boughs.

We all know the story of Christmas, in its ancient and its modern forms.

But what’s the story of the day after Christmas?

Is it empty boxes and disappointment? Crumpled paper and indigestion?

Is it the exhaustion of having made it through another family holiday, or the satisfaction of having pulled it off; the loneliness of having nowhere to be on Christmas Day, or the gentle warmth of spending time with family or friends?

Is the day after Christmas a let-down or a milestone or just a day to relax?

(Or is it, sometimes, all these things at once?)

The first Christmas was full of even more celebration and excitement than any Christmas has ever been since. Those shepherds saw something we will never see: “an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them, and they were sore afraid.” And the angel gave to them, for the first time, “good tidings of great joy that will be for all the people.” The angel told them, for the first time, that “unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.” And they went and saw with their own eyes something we will never see: “Mary and Joseph, and the babe, lying in a manger.”

And all our cherished Christmas traditions: all our pageants and our carols, our tree-toppers and our Nativity scenes, are nothing but our best effort to replicate just a glimpse of the full picture that they saw; and their excitement and their wonder went far beyond anything any of us feel, no matter how excited we are for Christmas to come. And the shepherds told Mary and Joseph what the angel had said, and then they returned to the fields, “glorifying and praising God…” and the next day, they got up, and they brought the sheep out to graze. Because whatever had happened in the night, on the day after Christmas, life was much the same. The Messiah may have come, but the shepherds still had bills to pay.

For Mary and Joseph, of course, everything had changed. They, too, had heard this remarkable good news, and Luke tells us that Mary “treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart.” And she had plenty of time for that. She pondered them all day, I’m sure, and deep into the night, when the moon was bright, and the stars were out, and no one was awake but the new parents of the world, and their holy infants, tender and mild and wide awake at three a.m.

Because the child born to them was, in fact, a child. He didn’t begin to sleep through the night at birth. He didn’t help out in the kitchen as a toddler by multiplying fishes and loaves. He gave no outward sign that he was in fact “a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.”

For Mary and Joseph, the day after Christmas was wildly different from the day before, but not because of what the angel said. Their lives weren’t transformed because the child born to them that day in the city of David was a Savior, who is Christ the Lord; their lives were transformed because the child born to them that day in the city of David was a child.

So the day after Christmas may well have felt like a let-down for anyone who had eagerly been awaiting the Savior’s birth. After the last echo of the angelic choir had died out, and the last light of the glory of the Lord had faded away, the world hadn’t changed. Augustus was still emperor, and Quirinius was still governor, and the long-awaited Messiah who would bring endless peace to the throne of David would be in diapers for years.

“But Mary treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart.” (Luke 2:20) And the day after Christmas wasn’t a let-down for her. The day after Christmas was the beginning of something new.

The world can always use some good news, but these days, it feels like we’re especially in need of tidings of comfort and joy. Isaiah’s vision of the arrival of Christ seems especially poignant to me this year: a kingdom of endless peace, governed in justice and righteousness, where “all the boots of the tramping warriors and all the garments rolled in blood shall be burned as fuel for the fire.” (Isaiah 9:7, 5) “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light”—Amen!

And faced with the darker realities of the world, the sweetness of Christmas can often seem too small. One child, born to one family, long ago. A handful of shepherds who see an amazing sight. On the day after Christmas, not much in the world had changed; and two thousand years later, the world envisioned by Isaiah is still a work in progress.

But it’s only once in a while that God sends a choir of angels to sing in the sky. Usually things happen more quietly than that. God gives us glad tidings of great joy, and hopes that we’ll ponder them. God shows us visions of justice and peace, and hopes that we’ll treasure them. God comes down among us and shows us a better way.

On the day after Christmas, we’ll go back to ordinary life. We’ll clean up the crumpled wrapping paper, and throw out the empty Advent calendars, and eventually, in the weeks to come, even the diehards will put the decorations away.

But we don’t have to put these “glad tidings of great joy” back in the basement with them. We can treasure these words in our hearts. And we can bring them with us everywhere, and let them slowly change the world. We can carry the light of Christ with us and share with people who sit in darkness. We can let the love of God work through us, loving one another with compassion and with grace. We can face our imperfect world with hope, and not despair, knowing that God is working all around us: “For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” (Isaiah 9:6)

Sermon — December 14, 2025
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

“Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” (Matthew 11:11)

John the Baptist is an unusual man. The story of his life couldn’t be more different from what any of us experience day to day. And yet, of all the people in the New Testament, John the Baptist has an experience of God that’s the most similar to ours.

Last week we heard the story of John’s ministry in the wilderness: how he dressed himself in camel’s hair and leather, eating locusts and wild honey, baptizing people and preaching words of warning to the crowds. His unconventional charisma soon attracted a significant following, and the powers-that-be began to see him as a threat. Their suspicion turned to anger when John criticized the local ruler Herod Antipas for marrying his half-brother’s former wife Herodias, who was also his own cousin. Herod arrested John and had him thrown into prison, where he was ultimately beheaded as a birthday favor for Herodias’s daughter. The story of John the Baptist is a story of drama and intrigue, of religious fervor and court politics.

All of which might lead you to believe that your life doesn’t have much in common with his. But our Gospel reading today finds John in a situation with which every one of us is familiar: hearing good news of miraculous events that he cannot see, being told of things that sound like they change everything and then seeing almost nothing change.

By this point, John has known Jesus since he they were both kids. His mother Elizabeth and Jesus’ mother Mary are cousins, and John himself had baptized Jesus just a little while before. But now John has been imprisoned, and he’s starting to hear from his own disciples, when they come to visit him, that Jesus is doing remarkable things. John had preached and prophesied and baptized people, but Jesus is doing miracles, they say. So, John sends a few messengers to his cousin to ask: What’s going on? Are you the one I’ve been looking for all of my life? (Matt. 11:2) Are you the one who will finally bring about the kingdom of God that I proclaimed—or is it someone else?

Jesus doesn’t answer the question directly, but he answers it, nonetheless. He knows, and he knows that John knows, what the prophet Isaiah said when he was imagining what the world would be like when the Messiah appeared: “The eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; the lame shall leap like a dear, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.” (Isaiah 35:5) So Jesus tells John’s disciples: “Go and tell John what you see… The blind are seeing. The lame are walking. Lepers are being cleansed, and the deaf are hearing. The dead are being raised, and good news is being proclaimed to the poor.” (Matt. 11:5) These are the things the prophets said would happen when the Messiah comes. These are the things that are happening now. Go back to John, he says, and tell him these things, and you tell me if you’re still waiting, or if I’m the one who is to come.

But there’s an irony here, something Jesus doesn’t quite acknowledge but we can recognize, if we take the time to think about it. Jesus sends word to John: he really is the Messiah John’s been waiting for. But John’s also still going to have to wait.

Jesus really is the anointed King who will set his people free. But John won’t be set free.

Jesus really has come to proclaim good news to the poor. But there’s no good news for John.

Jesus really will raise the dead. But John will still die in prison.

“Go and tell John what you see,” Jesus says. But John himself will never see those things. He won’t see the miracles being done. He won’t see Jesus, risen from the dead. John will spend what little remains of his life in that same cell where he first heard the good news, waiting and hoping and praying for God to come. And God won’t seem to intervene.

And that’s why, as different as John’s life is from ours, it often seems to me that we find ourselves in the situation of John. Like John, we too hear the good news that the Messiah has come to bring about a world of everlasting joy—but in the world we live in, that doesn’t seem complete.

You could be excused for walking into this church on any given Sunday and thinking we were all nuts. You could be excused for thinking Christianity was a denial of the realities we see right in front of us. In just a few minutes, I’ll stand at the altar and say a prayer that says that “in [Jesus], you [God] have delivered us from evil... In him, you have brought us out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life.” (BCP p. 368) You have done these things, we say to God. You have delivered us from evil; and yet people around the world are still afflicted with evil. You have brought us out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness; and yet we still err and sin, at least as often as we end up in truth and righteousness. You have brought us out of death into life, and even though the disciples excitedly told John that Jesus was raising the dead—even though we celebrate the joy of the Resurrection of Christ—every one of us will still die. Every Sunday, we declare that God has done any number of things that don’t seem to be true, as far as you can tell just by looking around.

In a way, Advent is the most honest season of the church year, because it reminds us continually that God does do all these things, and God will do all these things; but not in the way that we expect, and maybe not quite yet.

And yet the good news that Jesus has for John is good news all the same, and it’s the same good news that Jesus has for us: that our life in this world is not the end of the story, and that God’s work in this world is not yet complete.

“Are you the one to come?” John asks. Yes! “or are we to wait?” Also yes! And that’s the paradox of Christian life, in a nutshell.

“Be patient, therefore, beloved,” James tells us today, “until the coming of the Lord.” (James 5:7) “As an example of suffering and patience,” James says, “take the prophets,” like John the Baptist, “who spoke in the name of the Lord.” (5:10) Patience is a good and holy thing. Patience is what it takes to endure the “not yet” of Advent and of Christian life: patience is what it takes to hold onto hope in the face of the reality that the world is not what it should be.

But patience isn’t the whole story, because “not yet” isn’t the whole of the story. Christianity isn’t only about what God will do one day. It’s about what God has already done, and it’s about what God is doing now. It lives not only in the future, but in the present tense.

We see that presence tense in the psalm, which reminds us that the life of the kingdom of heaven exists already now. It exists precisely where God is already working now to fulfill those promises. When we see “justice” being given “to those who are oppressed, and food to those who hunger,” we see the promises of God beginning to be fulfilled. (Psalm 146:6) When we see prisoners set free, we see them experience what John never did. And in fact, if we mean what we say when we say that we are members of the Body of Christ, then we have to believe that our own actions are one of the primary ways in which God works in this world. So when we “care for the stranger,” when we “sustain the orphan and widow,” we are the way in which God is carrying out God’s love for humankind.

That work of love is not yet complete. And so we find ourselves in the position of John the Baptist, living our lives suspended between the promise of a new and better world and the reality that isn’t here yet. But we’re not quite like John. We’re not left passively waiting for God to act. Even in this long season of Advent, there is good news—not only for the future, but for the present. The love of God is being poured out all around us, and the question is not whether we’re still waiting for God to act—it’s how we will be a part of God’s patient work of love.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Sermon — December 7, 2025
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing,
so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”
(Romans 15:4–13) Amen.

I almost want to end the sermon there, with Saint Paul’s beautiful words, written to the members of the early Christian church in Rome. He had never met them, but you can feel the love and compassion in his words. What a beautiful way to mark this Advent season of hope. In fact, it hits three of the four Advent themes that I learned as a child, when we were taught that the four Advent candles symbolized hope, peace, joy, and love. “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace,” Paul says. And in this dark season, who doesn’t need some of those?

But peace, hope, love, and joy are not the only Advent themes. Advent is a season of contrasts: of hope and warning, peace and chaos, joy and fear. It’s a season that’s suspended between the First Coming of Christ at Christmas and the Second Coming on Judgment Day. Advent is a season of “duality.” And for me, nothing symbolizes this better than the fact that there are actually two different sets of themes that have been assigned to the four Sundays of Advent: while many of us may have learned the four themes of hope, peace, joy, and love, there is an older, traditional set of themes for the four Sundays of Advent: those were death, judgment, heaven, and hell. Two rather different moods.

Our readings this morning are born out of that duality of Advent, that disconnect between Advent as a season of joy and hope and Advent as a season of judgment and repentance.

The prophet Isaiah describes the hope of a new and transformed world of peace, a world that has been freed from violence so completely that even the predators have become vegans. “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze,” Isaiah says, “and the lion shall eat straw like an ox.” (Isaiah 11:6–7) The prophet envisions all the nations of the world united at last. Rival nations who in our world only meet one another to make war will come together in prayer, instead, and “they will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain.” (Isaiah 11:9) The world that God proclaim through Isaiah is a world of justice and peace, wisdom, knowledge and love. This vision feels beautiful, and safe; maybe even cozy.

The world of John the Baptist is anything but cozy. John’s a wild man, a figure of chaos and judgment, who embodies in his own appearance the radical nature of his ministry: he lives in the wilderness, he’s clothed in camel’s hair and leather, he eats locusts and wild honey. (Matthew 3:1, 4)

And the roughness of John’s appearance is matched only by the sharpness of his tongue, because the tone of his message isn’t much like Isaiah’s “Peaceable Kingdom.” John doesn’t encourage his people to hope; he commands them to repent. He doesn’t tell them about a beautiful world where little children will play over the dens of vipers; he calls them a “brood of vipers!” He doesn’t reassure them with the message of peace to come, he asks them, “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” (Matthew 3:7)

(…You did? Five seconds ago? When you said, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near!”)

John’s message is a message of judgment and warning and repentance. It doesn’t matter that you’re the children of Abraham, John says—God can take these stones and raise up children of Abraham. What matters is what you do, not what your ancestors did. “Even now, the ax is lying at the root of the tree,” John says. (3:10) Don’t make Jesus chop you down! Oh yeah, he’s coming, and he’s going to be way more powerful than me. I just baptized you in water, and that was pretty good, right? He’s going to baptize you, too, and it’s gonna be fire…I mean, literally, he’s going to baptize you with fire. He’s got his winnowing fork right there in his hand, and he’s going to gather the wheat into his barn… “but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” (Matt. 3:12)

(Show of hands: Who would rather hang out with Isaiah than with John?)

These two readings seem to capture two poles of Advent, the duality of the season’s traditional and modern themes. The prophet Isaiah may lean today toward peace, hope, joy, and love, but John the Baptist wants to remind us about death, judgment, heaven, and hell.

But that’s not exactly true. There’s a distinct note of judgment in our wonderful world of Isaiah: the Peaceable Kingdom in which “they will not hurt or destroy” comes only after the Messiah will “kill the wicked” with “the breath of his lips,” (Isaiah 11:4) although that may be metaphorical, a matter of persuasion, not violence; he’s not a dragon, after all. And there’s plenty of hope in the prophecies of John. The images of baptism and pruning and winnowing are not about destruction, but about cutting away that which isn’t serving its purpose any more, enabling transformation and new growth. John’s language is extreme because that process of redemption might require radical change, quite literally; “radical” comes from the Latin radix, meaning “root,” as in, “the ax is lying at the root of the trees.”

Beneath the apparent contrasts, there is a deeper unity here. The core distinction of Advent is between what is already “now” and what is “not yet,” between the inauguration of Jesus’ ministry and its culmination. In Advent, we await our Christmas celebration of the First Coming of Christ, when he began to establish his reign of peace. We await that Second Coming at the end of time when the Peaceable Kingdom will finally be made complete. And we acknowledge that we live somewhere in the middle, where things are a bit of a mess.

John’s words aren’t harsh because God is harsh, and wants to judge a peaceful world. John’s words are harsh because the world is harsh, and the distance between the life of our world and the dream of our God is vast.

I’ve been struck by the scale of that distance especially this week, reading the newspaper, and thinking about American military strikes on boats in the Caribbean. The scope of the debate itself reveals the distance between our understanding of the world and God’s. What’s been striking to me this week is that what finally brought Congress to discuss what’s going on was not the steady stream of attacks in which the US government acted as judge, jury, and executioner for alleged drug smuggling, but the question of whether it’s crossing a line to go back for the survivors of a first strike. Both political parties, for decades, have agreed that the President can order such attacks, anywhere around the world. And I’m not a lawyer or a national security expert. There may be good reasons they could give for these attacks. But the distance between the world in which we live and the world in which “the wolf lies down with the lamb” seems vast to me.

And, to step back from current events, that distance isn’t only there in the geopolitical realm. It’s there in our own lives: the world of the Peaceable Kingdom, the world of love and joy, in which suffering is no more, can sometimes feel very far away from the reality in which we live.

But that’s not a cause for despair. An imperfect world is exactly what we should expect, in these “now and not yet” times. The very fact that our hearts break at the violence of our world, or the suffering of the people we love, or our own failures to love them as we should, is a sign that God is working in our midst; that the Holy Spirit is here, pointing us back toward the example of Christ, the Prince of Peace. God came among us, once, to show us a very different way of life. And God is with us now, working to reshape us and our world.

The “repentance” John proclaims is the long process of turning away from the road that leads to destruction to follow another way. That process of change can be hard. It may feel like we’re being baptized with fire. And it’s a lot of work to get from here to there. But God doesn’t leave us alone in that work. God is here among us, with a winnowing fork in hand. That little child born in Bethlehem is leading us toward the kingdom of peace. It can be hard to believe that we will ever get there. But giving in to despair leads only to inaction. And so I join in Saint Paul’s prayer: May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Sermon — November 30, 2025
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

“Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”
(Matthew 24:42)

Well, the cardboard cornucopias and tin-foil turkeys have been banished from the shelves. The first snow flurries have fallen. The Christmas tree is up in the window across the street from my office—in fact, the Christmas tree’s been up in Thompson Square for about three weeks by now! It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, and so I want to turn my attention to the question I know that we’ve all been pondering since last December: What’s the difference between Jesus and Santa Claus, anyway?

Think about it. We have two bearded men, loved by billions of people around the world. We spend all December in a season of eager anticipation, as we wait for them to arrive. They come bearing hope and joy, but we also associate each one of them with a stern message of judgment. (They see you when you’re sleeping, they know when you’re awake…) And finally, and perhaps most importantly: both Santa is going to show up in your house in the middle of the night; and so is Jesus, at least according to our Gospel reading today.

And these last two themes—of impending judgment and sudden arrival—are actually at the heart of the season of Advent, which we begin today.

One of the most startling things about observing the season of Advent in church is that it feels really different from the “holiday season” happening in the world around us. In our readings, and in our prayers and hymns, Advent is not primarily a time of sweetness and joy. It’s filled with surprise and alarm. Advent points back to the first coming of Jesus in the humble form of a baby born in Bethlehem, but it also points forward to the second coming of Christ in glory to judge the world. Of all the seasons in the church’s year, this is the only one that leans into this imagery of the end times, of chaos and judgment—and it can come as a surprise when someone’s just decided to come back to church in December for a little Christmas cheer and gets Advent instead.

This sense of impending judgment is one of the ways in which Jesus and Santa can be similar in some people’s experience. Both of these beloved men are often used to try to keep people in line. For example, I quoted earlier, from my least favorite song, “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.” To me, it’s the perfect example of how we sometimes imagine an all-knowing being—be it God or Santa Claus—as a kind of supernatural surveillance state. Many people are taught an idea of God that essentially says, “He’s making a list / Checking it twice, / Gonna find out who’s naughty or nice… He sees you when you’re sleeping / He knows when you’re awake / He knows if you’ve been bad or good / So be good, for goodness’ sake.” But this isn’t actually what Christianity is about. It’s exactly the kind of moralistic legalism that has been opposed by the greatest figures of our religion—by Jesus and Paul, Augustine and Luther—even though their followers often replicate it. The idea that there is a naughty list and a nice list, and that presents will come to those who are nice, but only coal for the naughty, is in fact the exact opposite of the good news of Jesus Christ, which tell us that every one of us is on both lists, the naughty and the nice; and that every one of us has nevertheless received the greatest gift, the love of God made flesh in Jesus Christ. But of course, that’s the magic of Christmas, too—we do in fact misbehave all year, we are not the perfect people we pretend, but nevertheless, Santa Claus is coming to town, and let’s be honest: how many people actually end up being given a lump of coal?

So whether it’s Jesus or Santa Claus you follow, the good news is actually the same: while he wants you to be good, for goodness’ sake, in the end, the abundance of his mercy and love far exceed the strictness of his judgment. 

But there is one difference between Santa Claus and Jesus. (At least one.) And it’s about the timing. You know when Santa Claus is coming to town: Christmas Eve, late at night. He wants you to prepare, with cookies and milk, which you know won’t spoil because you know exactly when he’ll arrive. Santa Claus is so predictable that you can even track him in real time, on the NORAD Santa Tracker.

But Jesus is coming at an unexpected time. And that’s the real heart of what Jesus has to say in the gospel today. This passage has become caught up in conversations about what some modern Christians call “the Rapture,” this idea that there will be an end time in which Jesus will take some of the faithful away, and the rest will be “left behind.” This tends to lead to intense speculation about the exact timeline. You may have heard that another round of this occurred online this fall, when a preacher went viral with the prediction that the Rapture was coming on September 23, 2025. (Which it did not.)

This kind of calculation completely misses the point. Jesus tells us, again and again, that we do not and we cannot know “on what day [our] Lord is coming.” (Matt. 24:42) In fact, even Jesus doesn’t know, but only God the Father. (24:36) Jesus, the Son of Man, will return at an “unexpected hour.” (24:44) Ands the way it’s put in Biblical Greek is even stronger: at the very hour that you don’t expect, that’s when he’ll appear. So “keep awake,” Jesus says. (24:42) Don’t try to calculate the unknown date. Pay attention, every day, as if it might be the last.

Now, if Jesus really meant that he was going to return on a specific day and time to take away some of his followers and leave the rest behind, to inaugurate the end times on a day that we could name—on some particular Tuesday in 2025—then this would be the strangest practical joke of all time. “Keep awake!” Jesus said to his followers, in the year 33 AD. “Be alert!” And then—what? He did nothing for 2000 years, while they waited? While 80 generations of people were born, and lived whole lives of faith, and remained alert, and then died, Jesus just… didn’t show up? They waited in vain? Christianity is a weird religion, but come on. Even Christianity isn’t that weird.

If what Jesus says makes any sense at all, then it must be the case that Jesus has shown up during those 2000 years. Not predictably, like Santa Claus, once a year on Christmas Eve. But not just eventually, either—not only once at the end of time. For this to make sense, it must be the case that Jesus has shown up, continually, in our lives, at the very moments that we’ve least expected him.

Jesus has shown up, when we, like the generation of Noah, have been eating and drinking, marrying and being married, grinding meal and threshing grain and typing at our desks. Jesus has shown up while we’ve been roasting turkeys and hanging wreaths and sitting in holiday traffic. All the while that we’ve been living what we think are just our ordinary lives, Jesus has been breaking in, silently, sneakily, like a thief in the night.

He appears to us when two or three people are gathered together in prayer. He appears hidden under bread and wine on the altar. He shows up in the nagging feeling that there’s something you need to change in your life, and in the moment of surprising grace that allows you to be patient with the most frustrating person in your life or to be reconciled with someone you’ve struggled to forgive. Jesus tells us here in Matthew 24 that we should stay awake, lest we miss him appearing in our midst; and he also tells us in Matthew 25 that whenever we feed someone who is hungry, or clothe someone who is naked, or visit someone who is sick or in prison, he is there, and we do those things to him. (Matt. 25:34-40)

December is, for many people, the busiest time of the year. Ironically, this season of quiet anticipation is the time when most of us have the least attention to spare; when it’s difficult, amid the frenzied holiday preparations and complicated holiday emotions of this time of year, to pay attention to anything at all. But Jesus is going to appear to you, this Advent, at an unexpected hour. He is going to break into your life, like a thief coming in the night. And the question isn’t whether you’ll be ready to greet him, with cookie and with milk; it will be an unexpected hour, after all. The question isn’t whether you’ll be distracted, or busy, or tired; you probably well. The question is only whether you’ll be just awake enough to notice that he is there, and to accept the gifts that he is bringing into your life.

Sermon — November 23, 2025
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

This isn’t how the story’s supposed to end.

At least, this isn’t how the story of a hero on the rise usually goes. At some point, in the long process that leads from his betrayal to his trial, from his arrest to his death, something is supposed to happen. Jesus is supposed to act. In the Marvel version of the Life of Christ, this should be the climax of the first issue: at the moment of greatest sorrow, when it looks like all hope is lost, that’s when the gamma radiation is supposed to kick in, and Jesus is supposed to swell into a big green Hulk and tear the Cross apart.

This kind of superhero story is a modern favorite, of course. But it’s not just a modern idea. Ancient people had their superheroes too, who miraculously snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. Jesus and his friends had grown up hearing stories of the heroes of old; from the mighty warrior Samson, who was strong enough to kill a thousand Philistine warriors armed with nothing but the jawbone of a donkey, as long as you didn’t cut his hair; to the shepherd boy David, who overcame the great champion Goliath when he was just a kid.

They’d grown up hearing of prophets who’d predicted the arrival of a coming king. By Jesus’ day, there hadn’t been a king in five hundred years or so, and even then, they hadn’t been all that great. The prophet Jeremiah was active in the dying days of the old Kingdom of Judah, and he pretty much captured the tone when he wrote, “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!” (Jer. 23:1) He wasn’t talking about the kind of shepherds who keep watch over sheep. And he wasn’t talking about priests or rabbis, the spiritual “shepherds” of their people. He was talking about kings. From the ancient Egyptian pharaohs to the shepherd King David, “shepherd” had always been a favorite image for a king, whose job it was both to care for and to lead his people.

But not every shepherd is a good shepherd. Not every shepherd really cares for the sheep. And so Jeremiah prophesies against the kings of his day: “It is you who have scattered my flock!” The very people who were supposed to shepherd the flock have driven them away. But God has a solution: God “will raise up shepherds…who will shepherd them,” not exploit them. (Jer. 23:4) He will raise up for David a “righteous Branch,” who shall “reign as king.”

Now, it had been six hundred years since Jeremiah wrote these words, and there had never been another king. There had been years of exile in Babylon. Then rule by governors, and by high priests. King Herod was kind of a king, but he had been made a king by Rome, and he was a polarizing figure at best.

But word about Jesus has been spreading for months. They said that he could heal the sick, that he could cast out demons, that he could feed five thousand people with a couple of loaves of bread. They called him the beloved Son of God. Some even said that he was the Messiah, the Christ, the anointed king who would finally set his people free and bring about the kingdom of God on earth.

But here he is: betrayed, arrested, crucified. And some people in the crowd stand by, waiting for Jesus to act, hoping that he really is what his followers say; hoping that he really will go into Hulk mode and set his people free. And the skeptics in the crowd have fun mocking yet another would-be king.

You think you’re the savior of the world? How about you save yourself? You think you’re the King? Come down off the Cross and show us! Even one of the criminals who’s crucified next to him asks—with some mixture of sarcasm and hope: “Aren’t you the Messiah? Save yourself and us!?” (23:39)

Everyone agrees that if he’s really the Messiah, it will mean a show of force. If he really is the anointed King, he’ll come down off the Cross, and smite the soldiers who mock him, and seize the throne for himself. Some people hope he can still pull it off, some say his crucifixion proves he isn’t the real deal. But everyone thinks they know what it looks like to be King, and it isn’t this.

Jesus isn’t clothed in royal robes; he’s stripped bare. He isn’t crowned with gold and jewels, but with thorns. He isn’t leading a mighty army to set his people free; he’s suffering at the hands of the only soldiers in sight, and his followers are nowhere to be found.

But as their final moments approach, one of the other men being crucified still holds out hope. “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom,” he says. (23:42) And Jesus reassures him that his kingdom is coming soon; it’s coming now: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” (23:43) And then, all three men die.

This Sunday, the Last Sunday after Pentecost, just before the season of Advent begins, is sometimes called “The Feast of Christ the King.” As far as the church calendar goes, this observance is new—it only dates back a hundred years or so, to the time between the First and Second World Wars. The greatest kings of Christendom had just ordered the deaths of several million men in a pointless war, the fascist dictators who would shape the 1920s and ’30s were just beginning to rise, and the Pope decided it was a good time to remind people who was really King.

On Christ the King, we declare that we owe our highest allegiance not to human kings or kingdoms, politicians or nations, but to the Messiah: we claim that Jesus is the King of kings and Lord of lords. We pray that the peoples of the earth, who have been divided from one another and enslaved by sin, may be set free and brought together under his most gracious rule. And sometimes all this talk of “Christ the King” rubs people the wrong way.

The hymns and the prayers and the name itself can sound like a kind of triumphant Christian nationalism. They can sound like they lend themselves to the idea that if Christ is King, then we should live in a Christian nation, with divine law established as the law of the land, and “Christian values” shaping our public life. (Of course, this idea always raises the question, “Whose understanding of Christian values?” Because we’ve never yet agreed on what that means.)

But Jesus is not that kind of king. When Christ is King, it doesn’t look like a theocracy: it looks like death on the Cross. Jesus never tries to pass a law to ensure that all people will live according to his teachings. He refuses to marshal his followers to throw the Romans out and establish the kingdom of God on earth. He doesn’t go looking for a donkey’s jawbone with which to smite his foes.

Instead, he prays for them: “Father, forgive them. For they know not what they do.” (23:34) And then he dies to save them from the power of death. He gives his own life on behalf of those who have let him down. And these two acts—the act of gracious forgiveness and the act of self-sacrificing love—are what it looks like in this world when Christ is King. This is what it looks like when we are finally led by a good shepherd.

And every one of us has a chance to follow him where he leads. Some of us, have some power or influence in the world, and following Christ the King might mean following his form of servant leadership, using the power we have not to puff ourselves up, but to build other people up. Some of us have no power than Jesus did when he was in his last moments on the Cross, but even then, we have the same power he had at the last to forgive one another, as we have been forgiven. This may not seem like much power at all, in the face of all the evils of the world. But it’s an essential part of the work of healing the world’s divides, of bringing people together again who have been divided. If our efforts at healing the world don’t start from the same posture of grace, and mercy, and love that Jesus held even on the Cross, they will always fall short of the kingdom of God. But what a gift: every one of us, whoever we are and whatever other power or influence we have, has the chance to follow Christ as King, and to use our lives to participate in the reconciling work of Christ himself, “through [whom] God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things.” (Col. 1:20) Amen.

Sermon — November 16, 2025
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

People come to church for various reasons. But not many people come to church because they want to suffer more. Some appreciate the chance, once a week, to sit in a beautiful place, to listen to music and poetry, and to be at peace. Some want to make the world become a better place, and know that the church is committed to peace and love. Some people who come to church because they want their families to be shaped by service and prayer, or because they want to pass on some of the comfort and joy they’ve found in their faith to their children. And there are many other reasons, as well: from a deep relationship with Jesus or a curiosity about the Bible to the simple need to be with other people. But I’ve never in my life had someone shake my hand at the door and say that they’re here for the first time because they want to be “hated by all.” (Luke 21:17) I don’t know what I would say. “I’m not sure anyone here is going to hate you, this morning, but—do you want to come to Coffee Hour? There might be leftover pie.”

Very few of us come to church because we want to suffer, and yet in the Gospel reading today that’s exactly what Jesus has to offer his disciples. And in a way, Jesus is pressing them to think about a question that still speaks to me today: If all these reasons fell away—if our faith wasn’t guaranteed to come with beautiful buildings or to make the world a better place or to bring our families together—what would remain?

The disciples have finally made it to the end of the journey we’ve been reading about all fall, as they travel from home up in Galilee down to the big city of Jerusalem, the Holy City, where the Temple of God was found. And the Temple was an impressive place. King Herod spent decades building it up from a small shrine into the largest religious complex in the ancient world. It was massive, and it was shiny, and it was new: an architectural testament to the devotion that the people felt for their God.

But Jesus asks the disciples: “Do you see all these beautiful stones, these gifts dedicated to God? The days will come when not one stone will be left on another; all will be thrown down.” (Luke 21:5–6) And we can imagine Jesus saying the same thing to us. The beauty of our buildings and our art may seem eternal, but it’s not; the greatest monuments of every civilization eventually crumble into dust.

And we disciples, ancient and modern, might say that yes, okay, we know that “the church isn’t the building”: the church is the people, and what really matters is the mission of those people in the world. We’re here to help build the kingdom of God. We’re here to make the world in which we live look more like God’s dream of love. The disciples thought that Jesus was the Prince of Peace, who would finally come to set his people free. But Jesus has a more alarming vision of what the aftermath of his ministry will be. “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom,” Jesus says, and many scary things besides. (Luke 21:8–11) Jesus’ teaching and disciples’ ministries will not immediately bring about an era of world peace: wars and insurrections will soon come, and even these are not the end!

And so those disciples may have thought, as some Christians always have, that the answer is to withdraw. The world outside may be chaotic and violent, and I can’t control that—but I can create a little bubble for my family or my church, and I can control things in there—right? But Jesus’ prophecies of doom touch even our closest relationships: it may or may not be the case that “the family that prays together stays together,” as the saying goes; but Jesus wants his followers to know that they “will be betrayed even by parents and siblings, by relatives and friends.” (Luke 21:16)

And it’s worth saying: what Jesus said was true. Within a few decades of his death, war had broken out, a rebellion against Roman rule that ended in civil war and defeat. The Temple they were gazing at would indeed be destroyed, and every stone cast down, so that all that stood of what was once the Temple Mount was the Western Wall. It really was true that Jesus’ followers would be arrested and persecuted, put on trial before governors and kings, betrayed by friends and family and sometimes put to death.

These predictions applied in a very direct way to the first disciples’ lives, and they have continued to be true for every generation since. It is as true for us as it was for them that our beautiful holy places can fade or be destroyed. Despite our best efforts, the world is a violent and a dangerous place. Our own families may be torn apart by strife, over religion or politics or many other things. And so while Jesus was speaking to his disciples two thousand years ago, his words still speak clearly to us.

Today happens to be our stewardship ingathering day, which really just means that in ten minutes or so, during the offertory hymn, we’ll have a chance to formally hand in cards on which we pledge to support the church in the year 2026: by offering our skills, by giving our time to volunteer, and by making a commitment to support the church financially during the year ahead. In large part, this is a planning tool: it allows our Treasurer and Vestry to put together a reasonable budget for 2026 based on expecting giving. So if you’ve never pledged before but you give in the plate or online regularly, you might consider this year making a pledge to commit to continuing that in 2026; every pledge, whether it’s $10 or $10,000, really does help with that planning process.

Now, you might think that this is an inauspicious set of texts with which to conclude the stewardship campaign. “As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.” (At least it’s not a capital campaign.)

But in fact, I think the clarifying effect of Jesus’ words is perfect today. And so, I want to return to that question with which I began: If everything Jesus said were true, what would we be building here?

If this beautiful building collapsed, and our nation was torn apart; if wars covered the face of the earth, and families were divided over questions of religion as often as they were united; what would we be left with?

The answer is the same as it was two thousand years ago, because the situation is more or less the same. In the long history of Christianity, it has always been the case that our beautiful monuments to God are temporary and fragile at best; that our world continually churns with violence and conflict; that we are betrayed, from time to time, by the people we trusted the most.

And yet the same two things remain for us that those ancient disciples had: when everything else falls away, we have each other, and we have God.

Jesus would die, and Jesus would rise, and Jesus would ascend into the heavens, but the community of the disciples would remain. They might be betrayed by family, or scorned by friends, but they would be embraced by a new family of faith. They would become the Body of Christ, and it was in them that the Holy Spirit came to dwell. (1 Cor. 3:16) Not in the physical Temple that was going to be destroyed, and not in the church buildings that the disciples would build, but in the people, the Body of Christ.

They might face wars and insurrections, earthquakes and plagues. They might be brought on trial before governors and kings. But that won’t mean that they’ve been forsaken by God. God will be with them, Jesus says. And in their darkest moments, when they will be completely at a loss, Jesus will be with them, and he will “will give [them] words and a wisdom” that nothing can “withstand.” (Luke 21:15) And it’s by their endurance—not by their success, but by their endurance—that they will gain their souls.

I can’t guarantee you that this building will always be beautiful—although, to be honest, it’s looking pretty good right now. I can’t guarantee that we will make the world a better place. I can’t guarantee that you’ll never be betrayed by family or friends.

But in this place, I’ve seen a community of faith brought together by the love of a God who will never forsake us, a community of people who show up for one another in the hardest moments of life, and in the most beautiful ones. And although for two thousand years we have continually endured dark times, God has not forsaken us, and we continue to walk together in love, knowing that one day, “the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings.” (Mal. 4:2)