Sermons from Saint John’s

For All The Saints

The Rev. Greg Johnston

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Sermon — November 2, 2025
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

We sometimes think of the saints as the superheroes of the faith, the extraordinary subset of Christians who actually manage to follow the challenging way of life Jesus just described. These are people like the soldier Saint Martin, who cut his own cloak in half on a cold winter’s night to share it with a poor a man begging on the street. People like the martyrs of the early church, who were reviled and defamed, and finally put to death when they refused to give up their faith, but prayed for those who persecuted them, all the same. People like Saint Francis of Assisi, who never hesitated to give to everyone who begged from him, even though he had already given away everything he had. Our calendar of holy days commemorates too many saints for me to name, and admittedly, some I can barely pronounce. (My apologies to St. Mechthilde of Hackeborn.) We can’t always commemorate each one individually, but on All Saints’ Day, we recognize All the Saints at once.

But the “saints” are not only these famous figures. In fact, the Bible never uses the word “saint” as a title for a single person. The Biblical authors always use the plural form, “the saints.” And this doesn’t mean a list of named saints—Mary and James and Paul and John. “The saints” means the whole body of “the holy ones of God.” So Paul, for example, often addresses himself to “the saints” in thus-and-such a place, and this is a way of addressing the whole church. You, the whole church, are the saints—you all are the holy ones of God. And so All Saints’ Day is a day on which we remind ourselves, not only of the many famous named saints, but of all the unnamed saints, who appear in our lives in ordinary ways: the holy people who can be met, as one popular hymn says, “in school, or in lanes, or at sea; in church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea.” (Why, yes, that is a British hymn… What gave it away?)

And of course, many of us primarily know All Saints’ Day as a time in which we remember those whom we have loved and lost, a commemoration of the faithful departed who have died and gone before us into eternal life. It’s a day on which we remember that their souls now rest in the loving hands of God; that, as our opening hymn said, while “We feebly struggle, they in glory shine.” Although we know that they are in the hands of God, we still feel their absence, and we mourn their loss. Even if we believe with all our hearts that we will one day see them again, we know that this is not that day, and so the joy of our memories is mixed with the sorrow of our loss.

 

These might seem like three different things—a celebration of the great heroes of the faith, a reminder of the ordinary members of the church, and a chance to mourn the loved ones we have lost. But All Saints’ Day really does combine all these things. It’s a day on which remember the extraordinary figures of the past, and we commit ourselves to emulating their lives as we try to follow Jesus’ words. And it’s a day on which we look for the Holy Spirit working in the lives of people we know, who will never make it into the history books, but who inspire us nevertheless. And it’s a day when we pray for the faithful departed, that they may receive a share of that inheritance that God prepared for them long ago.

 And for me, these three disparate elements all come together in that same challenging Gospel text of the Beatitudes that we read today: in this series of blessings and curses in which Jesus describes what it means to live faithfully as the holy ones of God.

Jesus really does lay out a program of extraordinary things, the kinds of things for which the capital-S Saints became known, things that are challenging or even dangerous for us to do. “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you.” (Luke 6:27) Few of us can manage this at our best. “Give to everyone who begs from you”—to be fair, I’ve known a handful of people who do this—“and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.” (Luke 6:30) Come on, Jesus. That’s theft! No ordinary Christian I’ve known in my own life really manages to live this way.

And yet, Jesus really is speaking to you, to us, to ordinary people. This part of Luke’s Gospel is sometimes called “The Sermon on the Plain,” rather than the “Sermon on the Mount.” Jesus comes down from the mountain, among the crowd. He sets himself on an equal footing with the ordinary people following him, and he says, not “Blessed are those who are poor,” but “Blessed are you.” Blessed are you who are poor, blessed are you who are hungry, blessed are you when people hate, exclude, and revile you. And yes, woe to you as well, who find yourselves in good times, because the kingdom of God is a world turned upside down. Blessedness in the eyes of God doesn’t look the way we expect. The holiest saints of God might be people whom the world, or the church, excludes or reviles, or just the faithful people who you’d never think to thank for what they do. We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, ordinary people who shape our lives in extraordinary lives every day.

In all of this, Jesus reminds us that the story is not over yet. Jesus says, “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.” But “woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.” (Luke 6:21, 25) In part, this is just a literal truth: we all pass through these cycles in life. No weeping and no laughter last forever. But these cycles extend beyond this life, as well, and God has promised that there will be a day when he will wipe away the tears from our eyes.

On All Saints’ Day, we give thanks to God for the bonds of love that connect us to one another. And we make the claim that those bonds do not disappear with death: that just as we still love and care for those for whom we pray today, so also those who have died before us still love and care for us. They now dwell with God and with all the saints of generations before, but they still surround us with their love. They still inspire us to do our best to “Do to others we [we] would have them do to [us].” (Luke 6:31) And the strength of their love gives us a taste of the steadfast love of God, who has pledged to us that we, too, have a part in the inheritance of the saints, and that there will one day break “a yet more glorious day,” when we will see them again.

Thank God I’m Not Like Other People

The Rev. Greg Johnston

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One of the advantages of track and field as a sport is that I could tell you, at any given point in time, exactly how good I was. There are numbers still etched into my brain from track meets that took place when I was a teenager. I can tell you, to the hundredth of a second, my fastest-ever mile time, or how long it took me to run the only half marathon I’ve ever run, both fifteen years ago.

I hear the same thing from friends who have taken up power lifting: they know exactly how much weight they can lift, and how that compares to six months or a year ago. And the same is true, I think, for golf, although—do we have any golfers here?— I try to avoid golf as much as possible.

The same thing is true with variations for some other pursuits: maybe for you, it’s when you’ve mastered a new knitting stitch, or learned a new recipe, or picked up a new instrument that you’d never learned before. There are times in life when we know how we measure up against ourselves.

But there is no easy way to calculate a “moral handicap,” to look at your life and know exactly how close you come to being on par for the course. You can’t measure your strength of character like you can measure the strength of your limbs. It wouldn’t make sense to say that fifteen years ago, you once prayed the rosary in 4 minutes and 36 seconds flat.

In the most important parts of our lives—in the questions of ethics and character and faith that really matter in the end—there’s no easy way to measure how good we are. And if we don’t trust that we are good enough, there’s always a temptation to prove that at least we’re better than someone else.

 

Consider our Pharisee today. He’s so desperate to be good that he’s willing to settle for “better than.” Jesus doesn’t tell this story the Pharisees were especially hypocritical or bad. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. Jesus tells this story because the Pharisees were widely known to be good. They were the 20% of every society who do 80% of the prayer, the hard core of people who set aside the time to think about how to serve God and their neighbors while everyone else just goes about their business. The Pharisees stood in the same relationship to their society as the people in this room do to ours: they were the conscientious, spiritual people of the day.

The tax collector is another story. Tax collectors made their living on the backs of their fellow citizens by collecting taxes and tolls on behalf of the emperor in Rome. The tax collector was the government agent who most clearly symbolized the injustice and immorality of the regime. For many of Jesus’ fellow-citizens, the tax collector’s profession alone would have marked him as a bad man.

The Pharisee certainly feels that way. And so he prays, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.” (Luke 18:11) And let’s be honest. In my heart of hearts, I have often prayed this prayer. Thank God I’m not like those other people: Bible-thumping fundamentalists, members of the other political party, or even like this guy who just cut me off by turning left through a red light and then honking his horn! I’m guessing that I’m not alone, many of us have probably said this prayer. We come to church. We serve the community. We give tithes of everything we get. (Right?) Most of us are decent, thoughtful people, and it’s easy to look at the world around us and compare.

And the Pharisee is right. The tax collector even agrees! There’s no political polarization here, where Pharisees hate tax collectors and tax collectors hate Pharisees. The tax collector knows he’s in the wrong. And all he has to say for himself is, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” (Luke 18:13)

And it’s this man, Jesus says, who returns home justified.

The moral of the story seems clear: We should be humble, not boastful; compassionate, not judgmental. We shouldn’t be like that Pharisee, who puffs himself up: “I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.” (Luke 18:11) Don’t brag about how great you are. Don’t put other people down.

Do you see the problem here? It’s so easy for us to read this story about this contemptuous, self-right man, and end up thinking to ourselves, “God, I thank you that I am not like those other people, who are so pious but so judgmental, so critical of others’ lives—or even like this Pharisee!”

It’s a trap! It’s so much easier for us to walk away thinking, “Don’t be like the Pharisee” than it is to really embrace, “Do be like the tax collector.” It’s so much more comfortable for us to look at someone else and say, “Okay, well at least I don’t have that flaw,” than it is to look honestly at ourselves and admit our own shortcomings.

It might be uncomfortable even to hear the tax collector’s prayer, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” as a model for our own prayers. So many of us are used to hearing this kind of language used to divide people into two buckets—they’re the sinners, we’re the saints—and to exclude them from the circle of God’s grace and love. And that is wrong. That’s the Pharisee’s mistake.

But there’s a real freedom that comes from the tax collector’s prayer. Most of us conscientious people never quite feel we measure up. Mother Teresa herself wrote to her closest friends of the deep sense of hypocrisy she felt, enduring decades of spiritual emptiness while publicly sharing God’s love. And I’m no Mother Teresa! The temptation is strong, for all of us, to hold fast to the belief that even if we aren’t perfect, at least we’re better than someone else.

But in this parable today, Jesus offers us relief. We do not have to be perfect to be worthy of God’s love. We do not have to be better than anyone else. In fact, there’s nothing we need to do to be worthy of God’s love—we are already loved. And that’s not to say that we are off the hook. We aren’t perfect as we are. But it’s God’s love, not our constant comparisons, that enables us to grow and change. To begin the process of growth, we only need to admit that we need help to get there.

And God sets us free from trying to prove ourselves to God, and invites us to start accepting his mercy instead. God sets us free from trying to pretend that he doesn’t know the deepest secrets of our hearts, and reminds us that God loves us even in our darkest moments. God sets us free to be ourselves, as we are right now, and to admit to the people around us that we are still works in progress. And God promises that if we turn and ask for help, the Holy Spirit will complete God’s work in us; “for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” (Luke 18:14)

Wrestling with God

The Rev. Greg Johnston

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Sermon — October 19, 2025
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

A long time ago, in a country far away, a young man tricked his father into writing his older brother out of his will. The brother was understandably upset. He started plotting his revenge, and their parents—desperate to avoid bloodshed and maybe a little unwilling to hold the man accountable for what he’d done—warned the young man about his brother’s plans and sent him away.

Time passed. The two brothers grew up. They married, and had children, and each one prospered in his own right, acquiring the herds of animals and families of followers that made you an influential man in those nomadic days.

One day, the young man decided to return to his hometown, and he sent a message to his brother, telling him that he’d like to reconnect. He waited long days for his messengers to return with an answer, and when they returned, they told the young man, “Your brother’s on the way right now, with four hundred other guys.” 

Now, these were more chaotic, violent times, so this was scary news. Four hundred men is an army, not a welcome party. So he divided his family and his flocks into two halves and sent them in opposite directions, thinking that if his brother came and attacked, maybe half of them would escape.

He prepared a gift to give his brother: hundreds of goats and sheep, dozens of cows and bulls, thirty camels ready to milk. And he hoped that would be enough to cool his brother’s anger.

And then he spent the night alone, restlessly struggling in prayer.

The next day, at dawn, the man looked up and saw his brother coming, with his 400 men, and he went out toward them, bowing his head in a sign of peace and submission as he passed through their ranks. And finally, he came to his brother himself and stood before him, readying himself for whatever was about to happen.

And his brother ran up, and throws his arms around his neck, and begins to kiss him. And together, they wept. And so it came to pass that the older brother, whose name was Esau, was finally reunited with the younger brother who’d betrayed him, whose name was Jacob.

This is the story of Jacob in Genesis chapter 32, from which we read a selection this morning. Our strange wrestling scene is just a snippet: it’s what happens overnight, when Jacob spends the night in prayer. “Jacob was left alone,” the Bible tells us, “and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.” (Gen. 32:24) And we have always understood this to be a metaphor, a story about what it means to “wrestle with God” in a spiritual sense. Because, while few of us have spent long hours wrestling with God in the flesh, many of us have spent long hours or weeks or months, at some point in our lives, wrestling with God in prayer; and more than a few have come away from those long hours walking with a limp.

I imagine that from time to time, some of you have felt this way. I imagine as well that many of you have sometimes felt like that persistent widow in the parable Jesus tells about the “need to pray always and not lose heart.” (Luke 18:1) She needs help, and she comes back again and again, begging for the judge to do something until finally he rolls his eyes and gives in: “because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.” (Luke 18:5) We’re supposed to shake our heads, at this feckless judge, who decides his cases on the basis of which party is more irritating to him, rather than on the merits. Jesus isn’t saying that this this is what God is like. Jesus takes for granted that we know that God is not like this, and he asks us the question: if even this unjust judge, who “neither feared God nor had respect for people,” eventually gives in to the woman’s plea for help, won’t God come even more quickly to help those who turn to God in prayer?

That’s a wonderful message! Except… it doesn’t always feel so quick, for us. “Will he delay long in helping them?” Jesus asks. (Luke 18:7) And I know this is supposed to be a rhetorical question, but on the basis of my own observations of life, the answer appears to be… Yes? He will delay?

If you’ve ever spent time praying for someone who’s going through a hard time—just holding someone in your heart before God, and asking God for help—you’ve probably gotten the sense that God’s okay with delay. It doesn’t feel like God rushes to grant those prayers. When you’re somewhere in the middle of what St. John of the Cross called “the dark night of the soul,” it can feel an awful lot like wrestling with God; and God’s refusal to cooperate can leave you walking with a spiritual limp. That’s the power of this strange story: not that it makes sense on its own, or solves a neat theological problem, but that it gives such a beautiful image for that real experience of wrestling with God.

 

Some of you have heard me preach a couple hundred sermons by now; you know that I could probably wrap things up with a neat little bow in the next ninety seconds or so. But I want to resist that urge. I think that would cheapen things, somehow. I think it would miss the point. The divine wrestler renames Jacob to Yisrael, “he strives with God,” and from that day on his descendants, the people of God, would become known as Israel. If you ever hear “Israel” in church, in the liturgy or the readings, it’s not referring to the modern State of Israel, but to that idea of Israel as the faithful people of God, whose very name comes from the observation that our life of faith is a life of wrestling, and not of tidy answers.

So here’s an observation, rather than an answer: the ending of the story is very different from the contents of Jacob’s prayer. As he awaits the arrival of Esau and his 400 men, Jacob cries out to God, “Deliver me, please, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau, for I am afraid of him; he may come and kill us all.” (Gen. 32:11)

And then night falls, and Jacob wrestles with God, and God does not answer Jacob’s prayer. God doesn’t give in and give him what he wants, like the unjust judge would. God doesn’t give him the means to escape from his brother. In fact, God literally slows him down with a blow to the hip, so that he cannot escape, so that all he can do is to walk humbly, limping toward his fate. God does not deliver Jacob from the hands of Esau; God delivers him into the hands of Esau. But it turns out that God knew all along what Jacob did not. The hands of Esau are not hands of violence. They are hands of love. The arm of his brother is not raised for a blow, but for an embrace.

Jacob wrestles with God, and God does not grant Jacob what he asks. Because the outcome God has in mind is so much more than anything that Jacob even thought to pray for.

There are no easy answers to our prayers. We rarely get to wake up in the morning, like Jacob, and see all our problems solved. There’s a reason that the apostle Paul has to urge his readers, again and again, to be patient and persistent, reminding them always of the need to endure.

And yet even as we accept that God might not immediately answer our prayers—even as we prepare ourselves to endure the world as it is—we hold fast to the faith that Paul proclaimed, which is the faith that God is preparing for us things better than we can imagine. That “weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning” (Psalm 30:5)—however long that night may be. That on the other side of death lies not the abyss, but new life. That “The Lord shall preserve you from all evil; * it is he who shall keep you safe. The Lord shall watch over your going out and your coming in, * from this time forth for evermore.” (Psalm 121:7-8) Amen.

Made Well

The Rev. Greg Johnston

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Sermon — October 12, 2025
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

Then Jesus said to him, “Get up and go on your way;
your faith has made you well.” (Luke 17:19)

The term “wellness” has really taken off over the last few years. It’s common now to see “health and wellness” paired, where “health” means being in sound physical and mental condition, and “wellness” means something vaguer, but more holistic. So, for example, the “health center” at my alma mater, where you could go to the infirmary when you were too sick to stay in your dorm alone, or you could see a therapist on a regular basis or, now has a “wellness center” where you can go for acupuncture or massage. But wellness isn’t just a nice add-on. Wellness is a big business. People are spending more money than ever chasing after improvements to their health, sleep, nutrition, fitness, appearance, and even mindfulness. And I didn’t make up this list—these “six dimensions of wellness” came from a report published last year by the management-consulting firm McKinsey & Company about the booming growth of what’s now a $2 trillion wellness industry.

So there’s one kind of conversation about wellness, maybe more common in the world of healthcare, education, or spirituality, that’s about bringing a more holistic approach to discussions about health: How do you encourage practices that help people flourish, rather than just treating them when they’re sick? And there’s another kind of conversation about wellness, maybe more prevalent on TikTok and Instagram, that’s more about trying to find a product you can sell; and indeed the growth in the wellness industry has come from the promotion of “functional nutrition” and beauty products, “wellness experiences” and longevity techniques.

Our own Christian tradition has things to teach us about wellness. So I want start this morning in the Second Book of Kings, because today we’re going to talk about what you can learn from Naaman’s skincare routine.

Sorry, that wasn’t the real segue.There probably are people trying to sell you Jordan-River water as a way to clear the complexion. But that’s not where we’re going to start. Because in the Gospel today, Jesus restores ten men to health, but he only tells one of them that he’s been made well. So I thought we should back up a little, and ask: What is “wellness,” anyway?

 

Well, first we should clarify what leprosy is. When you see this term in the Bible, it’s not the horrible affliction also known as Hansen’s disease, which couldn’t be treated before the invention of modern medicine and led to the creation of isolated “leper colonies” and so on. In the Bible, “leprosy” is a more generic term for a bunch of different skin conditions, all of which were thought to convey some kind of ritual impurity. Someone with one of these skin conditions couldn’t participate in certain rituals until it had cleared; and when it did clear, they would go to the local priest, who would inspect the skin and then verify that they could return to normal life. (Over the millennia, we’ve dropped the more dermatological parts of the job description—thank God.)

So these ten lepers come out from the village and call out to Jesus. All of them have faith that he can perform a miracle cure. And what does Jesus do? Nothing impressive or flashy. He just tells them to go and show themselves to the priests as if they had recovered. And as they depart, just as they’re beginning to turn around, their skin clears. And nine go on their way, but one returns, praising God, and thanking Jesus. (And this one, by the way, is a Samaritan—a foreigner from an unfriendly country.) And Jesus says to him, “your faith has made you well.”

All ten lepers had enough faith to ask Jesus for mercy and healing. And ten of them were “made clean.” in other words, all ten of them were restored to the physical condition that the priests could inspect and declare ritually clean. But only one, when he notices that he’s been cured, offers a sign of gratitude for that healing. And it’s this one man to whom Jesus says, “your faith has made you well.”

In the eyes of the Gospel, you might say, wellness is health plus gratitude. And “gratitude” is not only a thought, or a feeling, it’s an act—there’s both an outward and visible sign and an inward and spiritual grace. The man actually comes and says thanks.

Compare this to the story of Naaman the Aramaean. Naaman is a powerful man, a conquering general who’s just defeated the people of Israel. But he, too, is in need of a cure. And eventually, after some amount of back and forth, he comes to the prophet Elisha to ask for help.

Now, wellness isn’t free, right? (It’s a $2 trillion industry.) And so Naaman comes prepared. The lectionary skipped a few verses again, today, but verses 4-6 tell us that he went, taking with him ten talents of silver (that’s 755 pounds), and six thousand shekels of gold (150 pounds)—that’s about $10 million of precious metals, unless my math has failed me. And he comes to Elisha’s door with chariots and horses and great pomp. And Elisha doesn’t even come outside, but sends a messenger to say, “Go wash in the Jordan River seven times, and you’ll be clean.” (2 Kings 5:9)

“Are you kidding me?” Naaman says. “I thought he would do something cool! I thought he would come out, and stand and call upon the name of the Lord, and wave his hands, and say a prayer! But a river? We have rivers! We have better rivers! I could wash in those!” But finally they calm him down, and he goes, and washes in the Jordan River seven times… and it works.

There’s nothing he needs to buy. There’s no work that needs to be done. He doesn’t even need to see the prophet face to face! As soon as he’s willing to admit that he needs help, and to accept the help he’s offered, he is cured.

And then, just like that one Samaritan leper who returns, Naaman the Syrian general comes, and praises God, and offers a gift of thanks.

 

So, I’m not a dermatologist. And I’m not a wellness influencer. (Not yet.) I have no advice to give you on your skincare routine, or your nutrition, or mindfulness, or sleep. (Although I do have some opinions I can give you free of charge.) But I am a priest. And I do see something about wellness for all of us.

And it’s this: ten former lepers were made healthy, but only one gave thanks, and that’s what it means to be well. The difference between the nine and the one is gratitude. And that’s really good news. Because we don’t have very much control over the world we live in or the circumstances of our own lives; there are things we can do to influence our health, but in the end many things are out of our control. But we can control how we respond.

We can choose to cultivate gratitude, and to practice giving thanks. In fact, we’re practicing it right here, right now.

I used a certain phrase, earlier. I said something like, “gratitude includes both an outward and visible sign and an inward and spiritual grace.” And if any of your ears perked up and thought that sounded familiar, that’s because it is; I didn’t make it up. That’s how we define a sacrament: “The sacraments are outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace.” (BCP p. 857) And while the cleansing of Naaman in the river certain evokes the sacrament of baptism, I’m actually thinking of the sacrament we call the Holy Eucharist.

Eucharistia, in Greek, means “thanksgiving.” And that’s what we do when we come together on Sunday mornings. Our primary act of worship is the one in which we give thanks. We pause, for a while, to listen, and to pray, and then we thank God for the work of creation and salvation, at the cosmic level and at the level of our own lives.

Day after day, we cry out to God: “Jesus, Lord, have mercy on us!” (Sometimes we paraphrase.) And day after day God reaches out to us to offer healing grace in our lives. Most of the time, we don’t even notice the effects. We don’t think to turn around. But on Sunday mornings, we set aside this time to offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving to God. There’s some ritual and some hand-waving involved, but at the heart of things, that’s at the heart of what we do: we give thanks to God. And then we “get up and go on [our] way,” trusting that God has made us and will make us well.

Increase Our Faith

The Rev. Greg Johnston

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Sermon — October 5, 2025
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith.” (Luke 17:5)

The great Saint Francis of Assisi, whose memory we celebrated yesterday by blessing cats and dogs, was said to have possessed a faith so moving that he inspired the birds to sing in praise of God, a faith so strong that he eventually came to bear the marks of the cross in his own hands. In isolated churches in the small hill towns of Appalachia, certain preachers show their faith in God by handling poisonous vipers, trusting that God will protect them from harm. Many a Pentecostal preacher has displayed a pile of crutches or of walkers or of wheelchairs that their faithful followers no longer needed due to the power of their prayers.

But I’ve never once heard a story of a Christian whose faith so strong that she could uproot a mulberry tree and plant it in the sea.

So, maybe Jesus is wrong: although he predicted that the Holy Spirit would manifest itself in mulberry-tree replanting, it opted instead for the gifts of faith, hope, and love. Or maybe it’s just a very-specific kind of hyperbole: Jesus just means that people with faith will do extraordinary things.

Or maybe—just maybe—when Jesus says this to the apostles, he’s being a little sarcastic.

 

To understand his reply, I think, we have to understand their question. And to understand their question, we actually need to consider a few verses that the lectionary skipped in this chapter. Last week, we had the story of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16. And then we skipped over Luke 17:1-4, and went straight to verse 5, with the apostles’ demand: “Increase our faith!” When we start at verse 5, this sounds like it comes out of nowhere. But in verses 1–4, Jesus just told the disciples that if someone sins against them and then comes and apologizes, they must forgive—not just once or twice; not once a week, or every day; but seven times a day, they must be ready to forgive.

And the apostles—looking around, we might imagine, at the people around them, who can be a lot to handle, especially before they’ve had their coffee—“said to the Lord, ‘Increase our faith.’” (Luke 17:5) You want us to forgive each other seven times a day? We’re going to need some help with that.

To which Jesus responds, “Oh yeah, if only you had enough faith, you’d be out there launching trees through the air with your minds like bearded Matildas!” Let me just increase your faith. I’m sure then you’ll start working miracles.

The disciples seem to think of faith as a substance, a kind of fuel for extraordinary things. I could forgive my friends and neighbors seven times a day, if only I had enough gas in the spiritual tank. So top me up, Jesus! Increase my faith.

And Jesus responds by saying that forgiveness doesn’t actually need extraordinary fuel. Forgiveness is an ordinary thing. This image of the slave serving at the table is a challenging one. It’s especially uncomfortable, I think, because Jesus doesn’t have anything to say about the institution of slavery itself, he simply takes it for granted as an illustration. He doesn’t challenge it. To be fair, he also doesn’t quite validate it—he makes observations about how “you,” the people around him, actually behave. In any case, the point he’s making is about duty—about whether you deserve extraordinary praise for doing what you’re supposed to do. And this connects back to the verses on forgiveness that we  skipped. Forgiveness, Jesus says, is not an extraordinary act that requires extra faith, a form of heroism for which we should be praised. Forgiveness is table stakes for Christian life.

Faith is different. Faith is for extraordinary things. Faith is for launching mulberry trees.

 

People sometimes think of faith in terms of belief, as the cognitive assent to certain ideas. To have more faith would mean to believe more deeply in what Christianity says about God and the world. Others suggest that faith is more about trust. To increase one’s faith doesn’t mean to believe even more strongly in the truth of even more lines of the Nicene Creed. To increase one’s faith means to trust ever more deeply in the God who loves you.

But there’s another kind of faith, as well. A faith that cannot be increased or decreased. A faith that’s simply the last desperate act that comes when you reach the end of your rope.

 

That idea of faith would look much more like the words of the prophet Habakkuk than the words of the apostles. The faith of Habakkuk is the faith that cries out to God, “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you ‘Violence!’ and you will not save?” (Hab. 1:1–2) That isn’t an statement of cognitive belief in the underlying philosophical truth of monotheism. It’s a question born of anger and frustration with God. “Why do you make me see wrongdoing and look at trouble? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise.” (Hab. 1:3) That isn’t a deep trust in the God who loves you, that’s an accusation—God, you’re supposed to be better than this. You’re supposed to do something! Helloooo! Wake up!

The faith of Habakkuk is a faith that wrestles and questions and yells—and then waits, standing at the watchpost, demanding a response. (Hab. 2:1)

And the answer, when it comes, is sometimes a frustrating one. “There is still a vision for the appointed time… if it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come.” (Hab 2:3) Okay. But could it come soon, please?

The faith of Habakkuk in this moment is like the faith of Job, who rages against God after suffering incredible loss. In chapter after chapter of elaborate verse, his so-called friends try to comfort him with pious platitudes, but Job accepts none of it. He rants and raves and waits for an answer from God, and when the answer comes, it’s actually not that satisfying; but it’s true. The faith of Habakkuk is like the faith of Jesus, who weeps in the Garden of Gethsemane before his arrest, praying that God would take this cup from him, but nevertheless goes to the Cross. The answer for him is that the appointed time when he’ll be vindicated will come, not before he dies, but on the other side of death.

The faith of Habakkuk is like the faith of every one of us, who has ever received news of a difficult diagnosis, and asked God, “How long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen?” It’s the faith of every one of us who has picked up a newspaper or scrolled through whatever, and said, “Why do you make me see wrongdoing and look at trouble?” It’s the faith of every one of us who’s been treated unfairly, in a small way or a big one, and said, “So the law becomes slack and justice never prevails.” It’s the faith of every one of us who has endured these things and asked these things and then—and this is the really important part—has stood at the watchpost and waited for an answer from God.

This faith is not belief, or even trust, per se. This faith is simply to stand there in the silence that comes when the world leaves us speechless, and we cannot even find the words to pray, and to wait.

This faith is to cry out, as Jesus did, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and sometimes to receive, after interminable silence, the frustrating response that Resurrection comes only after death; that the only way out of the situation is to go even deeper in.

This kind of faith is not a miracle fuel that enables us to do extraordinary things. But it may be the only way to endure extraordinary things. And in a world that’s full of suffering, in which our hunger for miracles is rarely satisfied, this kind of faith, at times, is all that we have: the chance to cry out to God, and to wait in the silence that comes next, not so much holding fast to as held fast by the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus, (2 Tim. 1:13) who sees and knows our deepest pain, and has opened for us a new life of joy and light.

In the Bosom of Abraham

The Rev. Greg Johnston

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

“And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels
into Abraham’s bosom: the rich man also died, and was buried.” (Luke 16:22 KJV)

That was the King James version of the verse. Have you heard the song that comes from it?

Rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham,
Rock my soul, in the bosom of Abraham,
Rock my soul, in the bosom of Abraham,
Oh, rock my soul.

This song has been recorded by Peter, Paul & Mary, and by Elvis, and it’s been sung in children’s ministries around the world. The tune is simple. The lyrics consist of a single line. If your Children’s Choir can’t memorize this, they’re not going to be memorizing anything. It’s popular, it’s sweet, and it is, without a doubt, one of the most subversive songs in history. (And I mean that in the best possible way!)

Like many great American songs, it originates as a Black spiritual. It was first written down in the book Slave Songs of the United States, published in 1867, shortly after emancipation. And I suspect that its initial popularity came in part from its combination of sweetness and heat. The lyrics are unobjectionable on the surface. And yet, to those with ears to hear, it is the most pious way possible to tell the people oppressing you that they can go to hell.

And I’m not just swearing from the pulpit. I mean that as a theological proposition. “Rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham” isn’t just a nice prayer that the singer go to heaven. It’s a claim that the singer is like Lazarus, specifically. “The bosom of Abraham” is not a common phrase for eternal life. In the whole Bible, that phrase is only used once, and it’s here, in this gospel story of Lazarus and the rich man. It evokes the whole story. To sing “rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham” is to claim that you are like Lazarus, who suffered evil in this life and was rewarded in the next—and also that the person who is doing evil to you is like the rich man, and he might want to think hard about the state of his soul.

(Not so sweet any more, huh?)

I want to offer three words to frame this fire-and-brimstone story. And those are: dignity, judgment, and knowledge.

First: this is a story about dignity. This story isn’t just about what we would call “economic inequality.” The rich man’s problem isn’t that he’s rich, per se. The details are important. Lazarus lies at his gate, suffering every day, and the rich man does nothing to help him. He “feasts sumptuously every day,” while Lazarus “longs” for just a few crumbs that have fallen from his table. (Luke 16:20) It’s not that the rich man doesn’t know that Lazarus is there. He does! He even knows his name. He recognizes him from a great distance; he says to Abraham, “Send Lazarus to help me!” (16:24) But what a difference a few words make: It’s not “Lazarus, have mercy and help me,” but “Abraham, have mercy—and send Lazarus” to dip his finger in water and cool my tongue. Oh, and “send him to my father’s house” to warn my family, too. (16:27) The rich man acts as though he’s entitled to power over Lazarus without having any responsibilities to Lazarus. He never helped him during his life. But he thinks he can command him after death. He doesn’t even offer Lazarus the respect of addressing him directly, once. And you can see why this story would make sense in a song written by a slave: to be enslaved, after all, is to be in the position of Lazarus, ordered around and treated as undeserving of basic human dignity by someone who mistreats and neglects you every day.

Second: this is a story about judgment. It subverts the all-too-common idea that we can look at the world around us and understand who is favored by God by looking at who is doing well in this world; that those who have wealth and power in this life have them because they deserve them, and those who suffer maybe deserve it, too. This is not a Christian idea. We can look at the world around us and see that good people do suffer and that wicked people do benefit. What goes around does not necessarily come around, in this life. There is a good and just God, but the timeline of God’s justice extends beyond this life—God is just and fair and rewards people for their deeds or misdeeds, but that process happens after death. The story of Lazarus and the rich man is an extreme case, a story of a world turned upside-down, in which our places in the kingdom of God can be very different from our places in the kingdoms of men. And so again, you can see why this would be popular with Christians who were enslaved: “rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham” is a theological claim: that the long-suffering but faithful Christian who received “evil things” in this life would be comforted in the next, and that those who did evil things to them might find themselves less comfortable in the world to come.

Finally: this is a story about knowledge and how it shapes what we do, or not. The rich man begs Abraham to send Lazarus to warn his brothers to treat their neighbors well, or they might “also come into this place of torment.” (Luke 16:28) Abraham replies that they have the Law and the Prophets—they have what we call the Old Testament—they have been told what love and justice mean. But no no no! They ignored all that, the rich man says. But if Lazarus rises from the dead to tell them, they’ll listen to him. And Abraham replies, in that foreshadowing phrase, “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.” (Luke 16:31) Remember that it’s Jesus telling the story, Jesus saying these words. And Jesus did rise from the dead, and we have continued not to be convinced. We have continued leaving Lazarus at our gate—continued treating one another as servants to be commanded as we would. And this question of knowledge is at the heart of the song. There were faithful white Christian landowners in the South—and faithful white Christian shipbuilders and industrialists in the North—who built their fortunes on slavery. If they heard “rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham” and didn’t understand what it meant about them, it was because they were more ignorant Christians than the enslaved people they treated as less-than-human. And if they understood but didn’t care, then they were indeed among those who would not be convinced of the need to love their neighbors as themselves, even though Jesus had risen from the dead.

So maybe the rich man would’ve been better off if he’d had this letter from Paul to Timothy to remind him that “we brought nothing into the world, so that we can take nothing out of it,” (1 Tim. 6:6) to warn him against the temptations and the traps that await those who want to be rich, to tell him—in the famous but often-misquoted phrase—that “the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.” (6:10) Perhaps he’d be better off if Timothy had met him and “command[ed him] not to be haughty.” (6:17)

Maybe he would’ve been better off if he’d absorbed this message from Amos, this condemnation of those devote themselves to luxury—to ivory and couches, lamb and veal, harps and wine and perfume—“but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph”; in other words, not troubled by the distress and the suffering of the people around them.

But maybe not. Because, of course, that’s a part of the message of the story, too. Even though he had the prophet Amos, he acted this way. Even if Paul came to tell him to treat Lazarus well, even if Timothy came and commanded him not to be haughty, even if Jesus himself rose from the dead and told him personally to cut it out—he might not be willing to believe it. There is a chasm fixed between him and Lazarus, for sure—but he’s the one who wants to ensure that the chasm remains fixed where it is, that the distinction between him and Lazarus remains. He would rather be tormented by flames, than admit that Lazarus is his equal and ask him for help.

 

In a strange way, in the end, I think this is a story about stewardship. (Albeit maybe not a great theme for a stewardship campaign.) Not “stewardship” as the euphemism for “the church’s fall pledge drive,” but “stewardship” as in the question: what do we do with what we have? How are we good stewards of our possessions? Do we try to be “rich in good works, generous, and ready to share,” as Paul says? (1 Tim. 6:18) Do we use the things we have to help the people around us? Or do we let them puff us up into people who think like the rich man does: entitled to command Lazarus around, enjoying luxury while the people around us hunger for the scraps? Do we try to set that chasm between “us” and “them” in the world.

Or are we willing to admit that the kingdom of God is a world turned upside down—that God pays not attention to our hierarchies of worth—that we are all human beings, equally worthy of dignity and love, and that we will meet again in a world that’s not very much like this one at all?

The Jesus MBA?

The Rev. Greg Johnston

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Sermon — September 21, 2025
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth
so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.
(Luke 16:9)

For a long time, I’ve had the idea of writing a book called The Jesus MBA, offering some practical advice on money management from the world’s wisest man. In my imagination, it falls somewhere into that nebulous genre at the intersection of personal finance, self-help, and pop Christianity that seems to generate endless numbers of book sales. You would learn through parables instead of case studies; guys would start wearing sandals and robes instead of Patagonia vests. I really think it would be a hit.

There’s just one problem: if you follow Jesus’ business advice, you’re probably going to get fired. And maybe go to jail.

 “Make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth” is not great business advice. And that’s not Jesus’ only questionable piece of financial wisdom. Today’s parable doesn’t tell us exactly why the manager is being fired, just that he was “squandering [the rich man’s] property”—but maybe this guy really internalized the sermon last week and lost 99% of the boss’s sheep.

Yet again, Jesus has given us a story that doesn’t quite align with the wisdom of the world.

 

Now, the parable itself makes sense as a story, in its context. Jesus lived in an agricultural society, in which most of the land was owned by large landowners. For the most part, small farmers worked on land that was owned by an aristocrat somewhere else. And in exchange for the right to live on that land, the farmers paid a proportion of what they produced to the landowner. Like most aristocrats, these wealthy landowners didn’t handle their own business directly; they hired a manager or steward to keep things running. The manager had the full legal authority to make decisions about the business, to make and amend contracts on behalf of the owner, and to interact with the tenants as if he were the landowner himself. This was a position of great power, and great trust.

The steward in today’s parable has violated that trust. We don’t get the details: only that he’s been accused of “squandering [the owner’s] property” and that he’s been called to account for his work. Now, he’s cooked. It’s clear that he thinks he’s guilty; at least, he doesn’t think he can talk his way out of it. And he knows he won’t be able to get another job managing land for someone else after being fired for cause. He isn’t “strong enough to dig” in the fields, and he doesn’t want to beg. And he needs to find some way to support himself after he’s fired.

But he hasn’t been fired yet. Today, he still has the job, with all the power he had yesterday. And so he goes around to each of the tenants, and he makes some changes. How much olive oil do you owe in rent? 100 jugs? Make it 50. How much wheat do you owe? 100 bushels? Make it 80.

It’s not entirely clear what he’s doing here. Is he taking vengeance on the landowner who’s about to fire him by cutting everyone’s rent so the boss makes less money? That kind of revenge would make sense. But it’s hard to understand why his master would “commend” him for it in the next verse. It’s possible that he would have made his living by charging a commission on top of the rent, and that he’s waiving that extra fee. And that makes even more sense: he now knows that he’ll never receive that money, because he’s going to be fired before the rent is due. And the master wouldn’t necessarily be that mad—he’ll still get what he would’ve gotten in rent, in the end. That’s plausible. But it’s only a guess. Jesus doesn’t give us those details, because they aren’t really the point.

The point is that the tenants feel relieved, because some of their debt has been forgiven. And now, they’ll welcome this disgraced manager into their homes with gratitude after he’s thrown out on the street. The forgiven of this debt has transformed their relationship.

This parable is still somewhat confusing, and somewhat strange. But in a way, the very lack of details about the situation focuses our attention on what Jesus does want to say: “make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth.” An equally good translation would be to “make friends for yourselves by an unjust (or an even unfair) use of wealth.” And maybe that last one hits the mark: This is a story about what happens in our relationships when we break the rules of fairness and justice and balance, and we choose instead to forgive one another’s debts.

 

I wonder how many of you have ever been tempted to keep a running ledger of the relationship you have with someone—perhaps with a spouse, or a sibling, a parent or a child or a friend. “I call him every couple weeks to catch up on things—he only calls me when he needs something from me.” “I cook dinner every night, and yes, you ordered takeout on Tuesday, but I was the one who picked it up.” “I drove you to the hospital every week when you were sick, but then when I was going through a really hard time, and I needed a friend, you were nowhere to be found.”

I think most of us keep these kinds of accounts in our heads. At least, I’ve heard it from enough people that at least I know it isn’t just me. But I’ve never once actually seen this go well for anyone.

Congratulations! You are the better spouse in your relationship. You are the better friend in your friendship. The feeling of being in the right is delicious in the short term. But then what? Keeping track of what we think we’re owed is a road to increasing resentment. And resentment is corrosive to our relationships.

But every one of us has the incredible power that the steward has: we can open up the ledgers in our heads and write off that debt.

I’m not saying that you should stay in a relationship that isn’t safe. I’m not saying you should let a friend walk all over you and give nothing in return. There are times when it’s right for a relationship to end. But I’m talking about the ordinary, everyday relationships that are actually pretty good for us, but that nevertheless tempt us to keep score. When we keep those tallies in our heads, we run the risk of allowing resentment to build. But when we choose to forgive those debts, we open the opportunity for our relationships to grow, instead. We offer that same sense of relief felt by the tenants to the people we love—and to ourselves, as well.

 

Because there are two deeper realities at play. One is that we are not always the most honest stewards of our own lives. We don’t necessarily keep the most accurate accounts. We remember our own good deeds more clearly than we remember someone else’s; we hold grudges for things that other people do to us, and forget the times that we have done the same to them. Most of us think we’re mostly running a surplus in most of our relationships—but if we asked the other people involved what their balance sheets said, we might find that things were closer than we thought.

But the other, deeper reality is that this parable isn’t really about us. Like all parables, it’s an earthly story about a heavenly reality. The details don’t line up perfectly, and that’s okay in a parable, but there’s a way in which Jesus is the steward here. Jesus is the one against whom charges have been brought, who knows he can’t talk his way out of it. Jesus is the one who wants to be welcomed into our homes and into our hearts. Jesus is the one who’s taken our debt and wiped it out, and who’s willing to bear the consequences himself. He has been given the authority to forgive our sins, and he’s done it, and the Master has been pleased. Again and again, Jesus tells us that God plans to forgive us with a grace that goes beyond anything we have asked for or deserved. And we hear that message, and receive that grace, and all too often, we keep it for ourselves.

But we can do something else. We can let that grace overflow into our lives. We can try to forgive one another, as we have been forgiven. We can try to love one another as we have been loved. We can make friends for ourselves by an unfair use of wealth—and we can see what happens then.

Being Forgiven

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Having been born and raised in Massachusetts, and having spent a lot of time with people who grew up in the Roman Catholic Church, I’m used to hearing people use the phrase “Catholic guilt.” It’s one of those terms that’s easy to understand, but hard to define. But in a pinch, I’d say it means a sense of guilt that lingers even past the church’s rituals of repentance and forgiveness; a persistent anxiety that even if you live a pretty ordinary life, and you try to do the right thing, you’re still doing something wrong. As Alec Baldwin’s character put it in 30 Rock: “Even though there’s the whole confession thing, that’s no free pass… Whether things are good or bad or you're simply... eating tacos in the park, there is always the crushing guilt.” I’m not trying to knock the Catholic Church, by the way! I don’t think it’s supposed to feel that way. But for many people, it does.

Many mainline Protestant churches in recent years have gone quite far in the other direction. Seeking to rid ourselves of the moralizing Puritanism of the past, we’ve adopted a kind of polite discomfort with conversations about “sin” in many churches. Yes, there’s a confession during the service, but we don’t talk about it. Maybe during Lent. Personally, I grew up in a church in which I don’t really recall “sin” being on the radar at all. We focused a lot on learning from Jesus, on being good people and serving the community. But there wasn’t a prayer of confession on Sundays. We didn’t talk about “sin” in youth group. These dynamics of repentance and forgiveness weren’t a part of everyday life.

And if that’s true in mainline churches, it’s even more true in secular life. People are still imperfect; people still do sin. But we don’t always have the language to talk about it.

So I was interested to see the title of the most recent episode of the NPR Podcast Hidden Brain: “Winning the Battle Against Yourself.” This sounds like a title for Lent! In this episode, the host, Shankar Vedantam, interviews a psychologist and neuroscientist named Emily Falk about all the ways in which our willpower fails us. He begins with the: “Many of us have been raised to believe that if we want to get something done, we need only to set our minds to it. And yet something odd and discouraging often happens… [What we do] is not what we set out to do. It’s as if we are not the ones in charge.”

And I realized, as I listened, why it sounded so familiar. This idea of the divided will is an accidental paraphrase of Paul’s letter to the Romans: “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (Romans 7:15)

It was a great interview. It had some great practical tips on strengthening your willpower.

But there was something missing, for me. Everything they discussed was about diet, or exercise, or productivity at work. It was all about the ways in which we fail to meet personal goals. But there was nothing about the ways in which we fail and hurt someone else; when we say something in anger that we really shouldn’t have, or break the trust of someone we love. There was no need for forgiveness. But there was also no room for forgiveness: only striving to be better.

And so the most stereotypical form of “Catholic guilt” at one end of the spectrum and pop psychology all the way at the other share something in common: they can both tell you all about how you have to be better in the future; but they don’t leave you, it seems, with a feeling of being forgiven.

But forgiveness is at the heart of our readings today.

 

We begin with the story of the ancient Israelites worshiping the golden calves. They’ve escaped from Egypt, and they’re wandering in the wilderness, and Moses has gone up to the mountain to commune with God. He’s been gone for forty days. And the people start to get nervous. Moses said he would lead them to worship God in the wilderness, but he’s disappeared. And they only know one way to worship a god. So they say to Moses’ brother Aaron, “Make us some gods.” (Ex. 32:1) And he melts down their jewelry and makes it into two golden calves for them to worship.

And God is mad! “Your people,” he says to Moses, “whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely.” (Ex. 32:7) Moses corrects him: Why are you so mad, God, at “your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt?” (32:11) And then he appeals to God’s PR department: You don’t want the Egyptians to say, Look, God “brought them out to kill them in the mountains,” do you? (32:12) You don’t want people to think of you as a god who’s focused on punishment, right? You’re a god who sets people free. And God relents. God “change[s] his mind about the disaster,” and the people are forgiven. (32:13–14)

And we should note: They haven’t repented yet. They haven’t confessed their sins or changed their ways. They still don’t even know that it’s wrong to worship those calves. But before they even begin to make amends, Moses intervenes, and God decides to forgive them.

That wasn’t the end of human sin, and it wasn’t the end of divine forgiveness, and in the end, we needed and we received an even greater mediator than Moses. The Son of God himself came among us in Jesus, to intervene on our behalf, and to show us what God’s forgiveness is like.

That’s why Jesus tells these two parables in today’s gospel: to show us what God’s forgiveness is like. When we go astray; when we fail to walk in Jesus’ way of love; when we do not love God with all our hearts, or we do not love our neighbors as ourselves—God doesn’t respond with wrath. When your willpower fails you completely, and you can’t stop yourself from slipping back into the same broken patterns as before, God looks at you and sees a lost sheep, who needs to be brought back to the flock. He doesn’t want to scold you, or to punish you—he wants to pick you up, and lays you on his own shoulders, and he rejoices, because what was once lost is now found. When you are convinced that you’re not good enough, when you feel that vague sense of constant guilt, God is looking at you like you’re a precious coin; God treasures you enough to stop everything and search for you.

Even when we are like sheep who don’t even know we’re lost; even when we’re like coins hidden under the couch; even when we’re still worshiping the golden calves, God is already seeking us out to offer us grace and mercy, not with anger and punishment but with patience, love, and joy.

 

All we have to do is accept that we’re forgiven, and act accordingly.

And that’s where we come to the apostle Paul. Paul is an all-or-nothing kind of guy, by all accounts, and you see it here in his letter to Timothy. He isn’t just a little lax about his prayer life; he persecutes the church. He doesn’t just prioritize his own comfort over love of his neighbor; he’s a “man of violence.” But nevertheless, “the grace of [God] overflowed for [him] with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.” (1 Tim. 1:13–14) And in his gratitude for this mercy Paul arrives at a deep humility: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners,” he says—“of whom I am the foremost.” (1 Tim. 1:15) There is no finger-pointing here; or rather, the only finger Paul points is at himself. The “sinners” and the “saints” are not distinct groups of people—we are all always both. And in fact, the people most grateful for God’s mercy and love are those, like Paul himself, who have needed the most of it.

That humility is the key. It’s what allows for empathy and connection between us. That recognition that all of us are imperfect, that all of us have fallen short, is the most solid foundation for forgiveness that we have. We can own up to the truth when we’ve done something wrong, knowing that there is joy in heaven when we come to admit it. We can accept that when we are forgiven, we are really forgiven; although we remain imperfect, God isn’t holding a grudge. We can forgive one another when we have been wronged, because we know what it’s like to need to be forgiven.

This is true in our closest relationships. It’s true in our neighborhoods and places of work. It’s true in our nation and in our city and in our world. And I think it’s an important part of the healing that we need from a culture of anger and violence: to recognize that every one of us has gone astray sometimes. Every one of us has needed forgiveness, and every one of us deserve the chance to be forgiven, because there is joy in the presence of the angels of God as soon as we begin to make it right.

 

To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God,
be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen. (1 Tim. 1:17)

The Cost of Discipleship

The Rev. Greg Johnston

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“Now large crowds were traveling with him; and he turned and said to them, ‘Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.’” (Luke 14:25–26)

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

So, I have a confession to make to all of you: my family and I are still in denial that it’s September, and so we stole away out of town for another short weekend the last couple of days. And we had a lovely time; and that’s what I have to confess to you, my deficiency as a disciple in recent days. I do not, in fact, hate my family.

Maybe I shouldn’t make fun of what Jesus says. But you have to admit that today’s Gospel sounds more than a little absurd. Three easy steps to becoming a disciple: 1) hate your family; (Luke 14:26) 2) prepare yourself for execution; (14:27) and 3) give up all your possessions. (14:33)

How are we supposed to make sense of this?

How do we reconcile the Jesus who says that the Two Great Commandments are to love God with all our hearts, and to love our neighbors as ourselves; the Jesus who tells us to love another as he has loved us; with the Jesus who tells us that we cannot be his disciples unless we hate our families, even life itself. How do we reconcile our experience of spiritual growth, of the gradual and often-surprising ways in which our faith changes and develops over the course of our lives, with these all-or-nothing demands: not “be ready to endure some suffering” but “be ready to be put to death”; not “be a little more generous,” but “give up all your possessions.”

Well, the great Biblical scholar Origen of Alexandria, one of the most brilliant people in the early Church, often remarked that the most confusing or inconsistent parts of the literal text of the Bible are there to remind us that its true meaning is always found in the spiritual sense. So in the spirit of Origen, I’m going to lean into the contradictions today and try to see: What spiritual sense is wrapped within these confusing words?

 

Origen, by the way, was a talented scholar of Hebrew. And so Origen knew what you might not know, which is that the word “hate,” when used in the Bible, doesn’t always mean what we mean by hate. The Hebrew idiom of the Bible often pairs these two verbs, “love” and “hate,” when it actually wants to indicate a priority or a preference between two things that are really both loved. So for example, the ancient Israelite patriarch Jacob marries two sisters, Leah and then Rachel, but Laban their father tricks him into marrying Leah first, when he really wants to marry Rachel. So Genesis tells us, “he loved Rachel more than Leah,” and then in the next verse it says, so “when God saw that Leah was hated.” (Gen. 29:30–31) “Hated” here, is a relative term; one is the favorite, and one is second-favorite. Jesus seems to be using “hate” in this same kind of idiomatic way. And we know this because the Gospel of Matthew gives us another version of what Jesus said today, when Jesus says, “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.” (Matt. 14:26) Jesus isn’t saying that if you want to be a disciple, you have to be cruel or mean to anyone; it’s an idiomatic way of saying that the disciple’s love of God has to take priority over love of anyone else. I still struggle with this idea—for me, these different kinds of love don’t feel like they are ranked, one above the other. But I can at least understand the notion that a genuine commitment to the teachings of Jesus will sometimes bring us into conflict with the people who share our blood—and that was even more true in the early days of the church, when the new Christian’s parents and siblings often didn’t share that faith.

So there’s some important linguistic context here. But there’s also narrative context. In other words, this at a particular place in the story. Jesus is on the road, in this section of the Gospel of Luke, on his way from his home in Galilee down to Jerusalem. And Jesus knows what’s going to happen at the end of the story. He keeps predicting it, and the disciples keep ignoring or misunderstanding it. But Jesus is on his last journey to Jerusalem; he’s going to face betrayal, and abandonment, and death. But the people around him don’t seem to understand. He’s being followed by a “large crowd.” (Luke 14:25) They seem to think he’s going to seize the throne. And Jesus turns to them. This is not some kind of a parade. I’m not going to march into Jerusalem and take charge, and give cushy jobs to all of you. If you want to be my disciple—if you really want to follow me, he says, you’re going to have to do it with your cross on your back, because that’s where I’m headed.

They’re not quite ready for that. Between this moment and Good Friday, all of them will turn away. They’ll love their own lives more than him. They won’t choose to carry their cross and follow him to death. They won’t give up all their possessions—in fact, after Jesus dies, they go back home to fish, because they did not, in fact, sell off their boats and nets. Not one of these disciples can bear to pay the cost to bring the task to completion.

 

And what does God do then? If you didn’t know the rest of the story, you might think that God would apply the logic of the law: the cause-and-effect logic we saw in Deuteronomy and Psalm 1 today. “I have set before you… life and prosperity, death and adversity…” Choose life and you shall live. Turn away and you shall perish. (Deut. 30:15–17) Delight in the law of the Lord, and you’ll be like a tree planted by streams of water; linger in the way of sinners, and you’ll be like chaff that blows away. (Ps. 1)

But that’s not how God responds. Because God is not a God of vengeance or of punishment. The God of Christian faith is the God revealed in Jesus—who is hated, more than he could ever hate; who carries his cross alone, to be crucified between two bandits, not between his friends; who gives up everything that he has, to save the very people who have let him down.

The disciples fail him, and Jesus dies. And he rises again. And then he sends the Holy Spirit to give them the strength that they never had before to live up to his love. And after his death, they do what they never did during his life. They do sell what they have and share it with those who are in need. They are willing to follow Jesus even to their own deaths. Somehow, even though the Holy Spirit is so much less tangible than the Jesus they once knew, it reminds them of what he said and leads them to follow.

We’re at the beginning of a new year, at least as far as schools and churches are concerned. And I wonder: What will it look like for you to follow Jesus this year? Think about the most gentle rephrasing of what Jesus has to say. What would it look like to make your relationship with God a priority in your life? What kind of discomfort, or even suffering, are you willing to bear because of the things you believe? How much of what you possess are you able to give away?

All around the world, in ordinary parish churches like this, ordinary people are asking themselves these questions today. And the answer to the question, “Can I be a disciple in the radical way that Jesus is talking about?” is mostly, “No.” And yet—many of those ordinary people will do extraordinary things this year. They’ll start projects in the community that they never thought they could get off the ground. They’ll make it through things in their lives that they never thought they could endure. All around the world, we’ll count the cost of discipleship this year and find that we fall short and nevertheless, we’ll try to follow Jesus; and God will respond to our inadequate attempts not with punishment but with grace, and with a Holy Spirit that empowers us to grow more and more into the shape of Christ.

So, I wonder: what fruit will God’s love bear in your life, this year?

The Humblest Man in the World

The Rev. Greg Johnston

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“For all who exalt themselves will be humbled,
and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”
(Luke 14:11)

Sermon — August 31, 2025
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

There’s something a little ironic about Jesus’ exhortation to humility in our Gospel reading today. Most of the time, when we say that someone is “humble,” we mean something like “modest” or “not boastful.” Humble people don’t speak very highly of themselves. They avoid fame and notoriety, especially if it comes from talking about how great they are.

What they don’t usually do is to go around saying things like, “I am the light of the world,” as Jesus does in the Gospel of John. (John 8:12) We generally don’t think it’s very humble for someone to say, “whoever has seen me has seen [God] the Father.” (John 14:9)

But here’s Jesus—the self-proclaimed Light of the World who travels around Galilee and Judea telling other people that they’re wrong—telling a parable about the importance of humility.

Of course, there’s a piece missing here, and it’s that Jesus isn’t really boasting, per se. According to one school of thought, honesty is the essence of humility. Noah Webster defined humility as “a modest estimate of one's own worth,” if you are indeed the Son of God, your worth is inestimable. Jesus isn’t boasting. He’s just telling the truth. He really is the Light of the World. He really does know the will of God, and he can see where people have departed from it. It comes off as braggadocious only to those who don’t understand who Jesus really is.

And that’s all well and good for Jesus. I’m not particularly concerned that he isn’t humble enough. But what about for us? To say that to be humble is to be honest about our own capacities and our own worth seems lacking to me. Most arrogant people aren’t being dishonest, necessarily. They’re just acting like jerks.

 

But you might notice: none of this has very much to do with what Jesus says in this parable. His idea of humility is about something else. Jesus doesn’t say anything about how people think about themselves. He doesn’t say anything about how people talk about themselves. This parable today is all about what people do, and why.

Our short first reading from the Book of Proverbs offers the same practical insight: “Do not put yourself forward in the king’s presence or stand in the place of the great; for it is better to be told, ‘Come up here,’ than to be put lower in the presence of a noble.” (Proverbs 25:6-7) This is just honestly good advice. If you’re walking into a room full of people who are going to organize themselves by importance, you should put yourself at the back. It’s embarrassing to be told that you’re not as important as you think. But what if the king says, “No! Come on, you know we’re closer than that”? Now you look awesome and humble. Big win for you.

Jesus finds himself in a situation just like that, and so he expands the proverb into a longer form. He sees guests at a dinner carefully choosing their places at the table, seeing who gets to sit closest to this important religious leader, (Luke 14:1) just like you would all be angling to sit as close to me as you can. (Right?) This seating arrangement is an uncertain and a complicated thing. But Jesus makes it much simpler. When you go to a banquet like this, don’t sit down next to the guest of honor, and don’t try to figure out where exactly in the pecking order you fit. Just pick the furthest-away and least important seat. (14:8) Worst case, you really are the least important guest, and it looks like you possess both self-knowledge and equanimity. Best case, the host says, “No! Come on, you know we’re closer than that,” and you look even better than before. (14:10)

And then Jesus expands on the thought. He says to the one who’s invited him there, “When you host a dinner like this, don’t invite your friends or siblings or rich neighbors,” (14:12) the people you think are your equals or your “betters” in society. Act as though you belong among the people whom society values the least, and invite them in—and even if they can’t reciprocate by hosting you, you’ll still be rewarded in heaven. (14:13–14)

Humility is not a state of mind or a manner of speech. Humility is an action: it’s the act of choosing to sit in the place of least honor. And the distinctions between these three categories, of thought and word and deed, is what makes humility different from low self-esteem, or false modesty, or humiliation.

Low self-esteem is when you think you aren’t as good as you really are, and you talk and you act that way. False modesty is when you think you’re pretty good, but you speak as if you’re not—“What, these old rags?” Humiliation tends to come when someone thinks you’re acting as though you’re better than you are, and they decide to “put you in your place.”

But humility is the decision to go and sit in that lowest seat, to choose the place of least prestige and honor, regardless of what you think about yourself.

Humility is not the opposite of confidence or self-esteem. In fact, if I think about the people I’ve known who are the most humble, in the true sense, they tend to be people with a deep sense of confidence in themselves. I don’t know about you; the people who come to mind for me are some of the most brilliant, or talented people whom I’ve known. They’re people who are incredibly good at what they do, and who know it, and who have no need at all to prove it to the world. People who can step back and let others shine, without feeling another person’s success as a threat to themselves. It’s their confidence and sense of self-esteem that allows them to be humble; to let another person take the place of honor.

And in the opposite direction, the greatest braggadocio often comes from a deep sense of insecurity. The most pompous or boastful or arrogant people I know tend to come across as if they’re trying to prove they’re better than me. They’re trying to convince everyone that they belong in the most honored place, and so they take their seat at the front and puff themselves up and dare the world to question them—and feel even more enraged when people roll their eyes and look away, because they read that disapproval of their behavior with the very sense of judgment that they feared.

But there’s one more piece of this. Parables aren’t just fables, simple stories with a moral for us. Parables have something to say about who Jesus is and what he’s there to do. And while, yes, Jesus sometimes speaks of himself in honest-but-exalted terms—what Jesus does is the humblest thing of all.

Jesus leaves behind the place of honor he deserves, seated at the right hand of God the Father. He comes down to earth, and he goes down into the depths of human pain. He suffers and dies. He’s put to death on the Cross, in the least honorable form of execution the Romans had. And nevertheless, he is exalted—he is raised from death into new life, and he ascends back from earth to heaven, and—like the best mentor, or boss, or friend—he invites us to come with him there, to the place of honor, where we too might experience the presence of God face to face.

Jesus is able to act with perfect humility because he has perfect confidence. He is able to descend into the depths of human pain, to endure mockery and scorn, because he knows that wherever he goes and whatever happens to him, he remains the beloved Son of God. And it’s his great act of humility that sets us free from the need to prove anything to anyone about ourselves. Because of Jesus’ humble, self-giving love, “we can say with confidence,” as the Letter to the Hebrews says, “‘The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can anyone do to me?’” (Heb. 13:6)

And we can live the humble lives that the Letter to the Hebrews imagines. We can show hospitality to strangers, (Heb. 13:2) because we can choose to act as if they belong here just as much as we do. We can “remember those who are in prison, as though [we] were in prison with them,” (13:3) because we can choose to act as though people who have broken the law deserve to be treated with just as much dignity as we are, who have not. We can “keep [our] lives free from the love of money, and be content with what [we] have,” knowing that while we need money to survive, having more doesn’t mean we’re worth more. We can act humbly, and love one another boldly, because we know that we, too, are the beloved children of a God who says to each one of us, “I will never leave you or forsake you.” (13:5)