Sermons from Saint John’s

A few years ago, the city of Swansea in Wales put up a new road sign. Now, the Welsh government wants to promote the Welsh language, so that it survives, and so things like road signs are required to be bilingual. But only about a quarter of the population actually speaks Welsh. And so it’s typical for a local government to have an in-house translator; most people working in the road-sign department don’t actually speak both languages, so they send the text off to be translated.

Anyway, the city needed to put up a sign that read, “No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only.” So, the road-sign office sent an email off to the translation office and asked for a Welsh translation. And an email came right with two sentences of Welsh. So they printed the sign with the English on top and the Welsh on the bottom, and installed it on the road.

Later that week, photos started appearing on social media with laughing emojis. Someone called the local government. “I think there’s a mistake on your sign.” Oh, really? What? Well, on the top it says, in English, “No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only.” But then on the bottom it says, in Welsh, “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated.”

In these last weeks of summer vacation, we turn to a story of Jesus healing in a synagogue on the sabbath. And I’m reminded of this classic tale of the vacation auto-reply gone wrong for two reasons. First, I think that the practice of the out-of-office reply is the closest we modern Christians have ever come to the spirit of the Sabbath as Jesus understood it. And second, I think that the point Jesus is trying to make in this story is nearly always lost in translation.

The “lost-in-translation” Christian interpretation of a Sabbath healing story goes something like this: The requirement to abstain from work on the Sabbath, the seventh day of the week, is a burdensome requirement of Jewish law. All Jews agreed on a specific definition of what “work” meant, which would have included this kind of healing. So by healing this woman, Jesus is intentionally violating the Sabbath’s prohibition of work. Jesus prioritizes compassion and love over rules and regulations, so he decides that the observance of the Sabbath should be left in the past.

But nearly everything I just said is inaccurate. The Bible tells us to refrain from work on the Sabbath, but it never says what work means, and this was the topic of active debate. The rabbis would eventually create a list of thirty-nine categories of activity that could be called “work.” But “healing” isn’t one of them. “Speaking” isn’t one of them. Reaching out your hand and touching someone isn’t one of them. Nothing that Jesus does violates the letter of Biblical or even later rabbinic law governing the Sabbath.

The leader of the synagogue criticizes Jesus for a kind of violation of the spirit of the Sabbath. Even if this healing wasn’t strictly “work,” doing it on the Sabbath is unnecessarily edgy. Sure, everyone would agree that you can do what you need to save a life on the Sabbath, but this isn’t an emergency. She’s had this condition for eighteen years. Why do you have to heal her on the Sabbath? Why can’t it wait for tomorrow?

And Jesus responds with an accusation of hypocrisy. Fair enough. (“Untying,” by the way, is one of those 39 categories of work.) But then he goes on to make a deeper point. He argues that far from being against the spirit of the Sabbath, the healing that he does is the thing that is most in line with the spirit of the Sabbath. There is nothing more fitting, Jesus says, than for this woman “to be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day.” (Luke 13:16)

To anyone who was a regular at the synagogue, his point would have been clear. They would’ve heard the Ten Commandments read from the Torah, many times during their lives. And anyone who was sophisticated enough to follow the debate here probably would’ve recognized that Jesus is playing one version of the commandment off against another.

The full text of the Ten Commandments appears twice in the Torah, but in slightly different forms. And in this case, the two versions give two different explanations for the meaning of the Sabath. So in the Book of Exodus, chapter 20, the commandment reads: “Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns.” (Exodus 20:8–10) And then it gives the reason: “For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day.” (Exodus 20:11) This explanation goes back to the creation story. God created the universe in six days, and rested on the seventh; therefore you also should work for six days, and rest on the seventh.

But there’s another version, in the Book of Deuteronomy. It begins nearly identically: “Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy, as the LORD your God commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God,” and so on. (Deut. 5:12–14) But then the reason it gives is different. “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt,” it says, “and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.” (Deut. 5:15) This explanation looks back to the bad days under Pharaoh. It reminds the Israelites of a time when they were slaves, with no control over their time, forced to work long and hard every day. And it tells them that they will never be forced to work all week again—God has set them free, one day a week, at least, from the obligation to be productive.

Jesus isn’t rejecting the Sabbath or the Jewish tradition of debate over the nature of the Law. He’s participating in that debate, and arguing that the Sabbath, truly understood, blends both these explanations. Yes, it is a day on which we rest, as God rested from creation. But it is also a day on which we are set free, as God set our ancestors free. And there could be no better way to observe the Sabbath than to set this woman free from what afflicts her.

And this is what I love about the technology of the out-of-office reply. This automated message doesn’t impose any burden on you. It doesn’t prevent you from doing anything. I’ll admit that when I was away for a month, I did in fact check my email several times. What the out-of-office reply does is remove the obligation to check the inbox. It removes the expectation that you’ll reply. It shifts the emphasis: it doesn’t forbid you from working, it sets you free from the obligation to work, and this is what makes the Sabbath a “delight,” in Isaiah’s words (Isaiah 58:13).

Any remnants of Christian Sabbath restrictions in our society are basically gone. The days on which we didn’t sell beer on Sundays, or didn’t open shops or restaurants, or didn’t schedule youth sports, are gone. And for many people, removing those restrictions feels like a relief.

And yet we’ve been left with a world in which we are never free. If you work in an office job, you can be reached 24/7 by email. If you work in retail or food service, you can be scheduled on short notice for any day or time. And even those of us who think we’re free from work are not. We come to church to rest and are faced with a volunteer  In the modern digital economy, every moment of our attention to social media or television is analyzed and monetized.  And besides—there’s always something to be done around the house.

But God wants to set you free from the constant obligation to be productive, so that for a little while, you can truly rest in the presence of God and in the company of the people you love. What would it take for you to have that time? What do you need to be set free from to lay aside your burdens for a while? And what can you do to help set other people free from the demand for constant work, so that the “entire crowd,” and not just one person, might rejoice at the wonderful things God is doing? (Luke 13:17)

Sermon — August 17, 2025
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

Before Jesus was born, it was prophesied that he would come “to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace.” (Luke 1:79) At his birth, the angels sang, “Glory to God in the highest, and peace to his people on earth.” (Luke 2:14) During his ministry, Jesus ended more than one healing miracle with the words, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.” (Luke 7:50; 8:48) And he told his disciples that when they came to a new house on their journeys to spread the good news, to offer the greeting, “Peace be to this house!” (Luke 10:5)

So you could be excused for guessing the wrong answer to Jesus’ rhetorical question today: “Do you think I have come to bring peace to the earth?” Jesus asks his disciples. (Luke 12:50) Based on the evidence so far, that’s exactly what you’d think! And just as the disciples were looking for peace two thousand years ago, we still yearn for it and pray for it now, in tumultuous times of our own.

But “No, I tell you!” Jesus says. I have come to bring not peace, “but rather division!” (12:51) And how about that. Division! Thanks, Jesus. Division is just what we need.

I don’t know whether there’s ever been a time when people lived together in harmony and concord, without polarization or conflict. The more I read about history, the clearer it becomes that we human beings have always been a pretty disagreeable bunch.

But I’ve certainly found that over the last few years, this sense of division really has increased. So Jesus’ words feel especially poignant these days. Many of our own families have been divided over questions of religion or politics—“father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother.” (Luke 12:53) If you asked people to list the top 10 things they think our society needs, I would be shocked if “division” made the list.

Yet that’s what Jesus says he’s come to bring.

And he did! Jesus himself became divided from his immediate family, prioritizing the new family of his followers over his mother and brothers during his ministry. (Luke 8:19–21) Many among the earliest generations of Christians became estranged from their families when they decided to convert. Even in medieval Europe, when all of society was Christian, there are still figures like St. Francis of Assisi, whose father was enraged by the ways in which Francis tried to live out the gospel. And certainly in our time, it’s relatively rare to find a family that’s not divided by the question of Jesus: the evangelical sibling or devoutly Catholic mother with whom you can’t quite talk about some things; the skeptical spouse who doesn’t want anything to do with God; the adult children you wish would find their way to church, or even, these days, the unchurched parents who can’t understand what their children see in Jesus.

And I think this is inevitable. I don’t think Jesus is saying that he wants division, per se, but that division is a consequence of what he’s come to do. Only a milquetoast Messiah could arrive to declare God’s reign on earth without causing any conflict. If Jesus comes to proclaim the kingdom of God, the only way that could not create division was if our world was already following that way of love and peace. If you look at the few times in history when Christianity seems not to come along with division, they tend to be the times when the Church has lost its way, times when we have simply baptized the values of the culture around us rather than challenging them at all.

But God’s message is not that the world is basically fine as it is. God’s message is that the world has gone wrong, and there are things we need to change. We pray always that God’s will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.

And we’ve actually been told what it looks like when God’s will is done in heaven! We chanted it just now, in Psalm 82: “God takes his stand in the council of heaven; he gives judgment in the midst of the gods.” The New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan once called this “the single most important text in the Christian Bible.” And he said that because this psalm claims to explain the origins of monotheism itself. It tells a story of how God became the one god of the universe. God addresses the whole heavenly host, and asks the other gods: “How long will you judge unjustly, and show favor to the wicked?” (Psalm 82:1) God gives them the divine job description: “Save the weak and the orphan; defend the humble and needy; Rescue the weak and the poor; deliver them from the power of the wicked.” (Psalm 82:3–4)

And then God grades them by that rubric. God knows that the gods of the nations, the pagan gods of war and strength, aren’t going to defend the weak against the mighty, to protect the poor and humble from exploitation by the strong and arrogant. And so God says to them, “You are gods, and all of you children of the Most High; nevertheless, you shall die like mortals, and fall like any prince.” (Psalm 82:6–7) God’s will in the heavenly council is not peace, but division, precisely because not everyone is willing to follow the way of peace.

Jesus brings this message down to earth. He comes to bring division because the fire that he promises is the refining and purifying fire that John the Baptist foretold: a fire that burns away the violence and oppression of our world, and reveals God’s way of love. And on the one hand, this means that Christian life can mean a pretty significant break with the ordinary values of our society. And on the other hand, we Christians don’t always actually agree on what exactly this means. And so it’s inevitable that Jesus will bring division to the world.

There is good news here for us. But I think we have to be careful about how we understand it as good news. It’s good news because it means that disagreement or division within the church, or within our families or society, is not necessarily a sign that we’re doing something wrong. In fact, it can be a sign that we’re doing something right. Any challenge to the injustice of the world will always generate conflict.

But this should be a source of consolation, not of self-congratulation. It’s tempting to hear these kinds of words and pat ourselves on the back. “We’re divided, two against three, because we’re following Jesus, and they are not. We’re the ones defending the weak against the wicked people over there with whom we disagree.” To be clear, there are some people in our society who explicitly think that strength and might and greatness should be our values, and who really might oppose the vision of Psalm 82. But for the most part, the people with whom any of us disagree also think they are doing the right thing; just as we think we are defending the weak and helping the needy, they too think the same. And so even as we try to walk in God’s radical way of love, we need to do it with the kind of humility that admits that we could be wrong about some things.

That’s why I’m so comforted by the list we’re given of the “great cloud of witnesses today.” It’s too humid for me to take you through them all, but let me just say: Samson and Jephthah and David were not perfect people. They tried to do God’s will, but man, did they sometimes get things very wrong, over and over again, in more catastrophic ways than anyone in this room ever has.

But despite their failures and misdeeds, God worked through their lives. God extends that same grace to us, and to the people with whom we disagree. God gives us strength to “run with perseverance the race that is set before us,” doing our best to follow after Jesus, “the pioneer and perfect of our faith.” (Heb. 12:2) Jesus divides us, it’s true. But Jesus’ work is ultimately the work of reconciliation, and there will be a day when the truth will be revealed, and our divisions will cease. And so, I want to close with a prayer—one of my favorite prayers in our prayer book, a prayer “For the Social Order—In Times of Conflict”:

O God, you have bound us together in a common life. Help us,
in the midst of our struggles for justice and truth, to confront
one another without hatred or bitterness, and to work
together with mutual forbearance and respect; through Jesus
Christ our Lord. Amen.

Sermon — The Rev. Greg Johnston
August 10, 2025
Lectionary Readings

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. (Heb. 11:1)

 I spent the last few weeks in a place that’s relatively good for stargazing: a few hours east of New York, a few hours south of Boston, with water on both sides, in a town far enough from any big city that on a clear night, you can look up and see the night sky pretty well. And one night I was standing on the porch and I had a moment of cosmic vertigo. Looking up, I could see the Milky Way, and the reality suddenly snapped into focus that I wasn’t standing at the center of the universe: I was standing on one planet orbiting one star, in a three-dimensional field, looking head on into a galaxy that stretched so far that the light of all its stars was just a blur through the sky. And I was reminded of the words of Psalm 8:

“When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, *
        the moon and the stars you have set in their courses,
What is man that you should be mindful of him?
        the son of man that you should seek him out?” (Psalm 8:4–5)

It’s a feeling Abram might have felt, as he looked out at the stars. He was more familiar with them than I am, because he’d been journeying under those stars for years by that point. But you can still feel the sense of awe in the story. In fact, there’s a little narrative device in Biblical Hebrew that makes it clear.

The narration in conversations tends to alternate back and forth: Abram said this, then God said that, then Abram said this. But on occasion, you’ll get, God said this; then God said that. And it’s a way of indicating a pause: so where modern English prose might say, “Abram sat in silence, looking away,” Biblical narrative just does this double-“then he said” and lets us imagine the rest.

So God brought Abram outside and said, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” And Abram looks up at the stars. And he’s speechless. We’re supposed to hear the pause. And then God says, “So shall your descendants be.” (Gen. 15:5)

“And he believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.” (15:6) And this moment becomes the paradigmatic example of the great faith of Abraham.

The word “faith” is a popular one these days, in part because it’s become a catch-all replacement for the words “religion” or “spirituality.” We talk about “people of faith” and “faith communities,” and sometimes “faith-based initiatives.” It’s become distilled into such a technical term that it’s occasionally absurd: I receive a “City of Boston Faith-Based Newsletter” from someone with the title “Senior Faith-Based Advisor.” But in the Christian context, “faith” isn’t a synonym for “religion” or even “belief.” Faith means a very particular thing. For the Apostle Paul and in the Letter to the Hebrews, Abraham is the paragon of faith. And the faith of Abraham is very specifically “is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Heb. 11:1)

We only read a snippet of Abraham’s story this morning. And you might think that his faith is relatively simple: he believes what God says, and that’s faith. And that’s not wrong. But it misses the scale of the thing.

We enter the story today half-way through. Abram’s story with God had begun when he was already seventy-five years old. God spoke to him and said, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you, and I will make of you a great nation.” (Gen. 12:1) And Abram went! He brought his wife Sarai, and his nephew Lot, and they left home. They arrived in Canaan, and God appeared to Abram, and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” (12:7) Abram had no offspring, but there was plenty of time for that—he was only, what, 76?—and so he journeyed on. And many adventures later, Abram had grown into a powerful and influential man. But still no kids. And he began to worry about God’s promise. And so, in this story today, God takes him out, and shows him the stars, and pauses long enough for him to feel that sense of awe—and then promises that so shall his descendants be.

But there are still no kids! Moye years, filled with more adventures. Abram and Sarai try to come up with their own plans, which are not God’s plan. And finally, when Abram is ninety-nine years old, God appears again, and makes his promises again, and God gives them new names—they will no longer be called Abram and Sarai, but Abraham and Sarah. (In case you were wondering.)

And there are still no kids! God sends three angels, and there’s a whole aside about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and more adventures, and then finally, when Abraham is a hundred years old and Sarah is ninety, Sarah gives birth to a son: Isaac is finally born.

Abraham isn’t an example of faith because he believes in a God or gods. It’s not because he’s committed himself deeply to a particular set of doctrines. It’s not because he has regular experiences of the Divine. The faith for which Abraham is famous is the unreasonable but undeniable sense that God’s promise is true, even though its contents are unbelievable, and its timing is unreliable, and there’s no evidence at all that it’s ever going to happen.

This elderly couple are going to be fruitful and multiply? Unbelievable. It’s not going to happen now, or on the next divine visit, or on the one after that, but just vaguely some time in the next quarter century? Unreliable. Years pass by, and nothing happens? It defies all the evidence of the senses. (On this definition of “faith,” the only truly “faith-based initiative” in the City of Boston is the completion of the North Washington Street Bridge.)

And yet Abram believed God, because God has given him the gift of faith: the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

We “people of faith” proclaim many unbelievable things that have been promised to us by God. And for each one of us, the emphasis is a little different. For each one of us, there is some unbelievable thing that we desperately need. Perhaps for you it’s the promise that on the other side of the grave lies not oblivion, but reunion; that we will one day rise again, in a world in which we share eternal life with those whom we have loved and lost. Perhaps for you it’s the promise that God is working all things together for good; (Rom. 8:28) that while the road of history is long and winding, God is leading us toward a Promised Land of peace and justice and love. Perhaps for you the hardest thing to believe is that even though the entire human species amounts to nothing but a tiny drop of matter on a single planet in a single solar system in one galaxy of trillions, there is a God who loves and cares for you.

We hold these things to be true because Jesus and the prophets have told us that they are. And they’re a source of great comfort. But they can be hard to believe. They seem incredible. They aren’t fulfilled on the timelines we would like. And sometimes, it feels as if there isn’t much evidence

But “do not be afraid, little flock,” as Jesus says. The truth doesn’t depend on the strength of our faith. Even faith itself is a gift from God, and “it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” (Luke 12:32) Our work is not to prove them true, but to trust, and to journey on, reassured by the promise of the things we have hoped for, and strengthened by the reality of things we have not seen.

Sermon — The Rev. Greg Johnston
July 6, 2025
Lectionary Readings

“The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.” (Luke 10:2) 

            We live in a world in which people are simultaneously hungry for a sense of meaning and purpose—and increasingly detached from traditional religion. This disconnect is so clear that you can actually measure it in survey data. Pew Research, for example, releases a regular Religious Landscape Survey. And in 2024, their data for Massachusetts show the following: 72% of Massachusetts residents believe in a God or universal spirit, but only 20% attend a religious service more than once or twice a year, and 63% attend seldom or never. 82% believe that human beings have an immaterial soul or spirit, but only 46% feel a sense of spiritual peace and well-being once a month or more. 71% believe that there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, even if we cannot see it; but only 48% report ever feeling the presence of something from beyond this natural world. And of course my favorite: 45% believe the Bible is extremely, very, or somewhat important; but only 26% report that they ever read it.

            Those of us who are deeply dedicated to the life of the church—and if you’re here in 90-degree weather on the 6th of July, that just might be you—tend to fixate on the statistical decline of church attendance over the last fifty years or so. We often forget about the enduring spiritual curiosity and hunger all around us, and the reality that as traditional religion has waned, people have experienced the same level of spiritual hunger with fewer ways to experience and make sense of spiritual life. As Jesus puts it: the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.

And so I want to look at what Jesus does in the Gospel reading today after he says this; to look at who Jesus is sending out here, to do what, where, and when—and then of course to ask “so what?” What does Jesus’ mission to these disciples 2000 years ago have to do with the spiritual lives of the people around us today?

            So first, the who. And what I notice here is less the “who” and more the “how many.” The number seventy is important to remember. Like any movement, the early Jesus movement had concentric circles of leadership and involvement. At the center of the circle you had the big three, Peter and James and John, who saw Jesus transfigured on the mountaintop; and then the twelve disciples who were Jesus’ inner circle, whose names the gospels list and our calendar of saints commemorates. And way out in the outer circles, you see anonymous crowds of thousands—the miracle of the loaves and fishes feeds five thousand men, the gospels tell us, beside women and children. (Mark 6:44, Matt. 14:21, Luke 9:14) And if you want to zoom out even further—ancient populations are very hard to estimate, but the population of Galilee and Judea at the time would’ve been on the order a million people or so. And so it’s notable to me that here, Jesus sends out seventy of his disciples. I understand this to mean something like the whole group of dedicated, faithful, but ordinary disciples; the twelve apostles we know, sure, but fifty-eight others, too, people whose names we are not told and whose stories we don’t know but who go out to spread the good news, nevertheless.

            And that’s what they’re sent to do: to spread the good news of the kingdom of God. Jesus gives them a greeting. “Peace to this house!” they should say. (Luke 10:5) And he gives them a to-do list: to accept the hospitality they’re offered, to cure those who are sick, and to say, “The kingdom of God has come near to you.” (10:8-9) Notice: He doesn’t tell them to ask the people in the villages about their prayer lives. They don’t ask to tell people whether they want to hear about their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. They visit as travelers, and they eat; they heal the sick, and when they do, they point to that healing that’s happened and they say, “The kingdom of God has come near.”

            Now, Jesus will eventually come up. Because Jesus himself is going to appear; he’s sending the disciples as a kind of advance party “to every town and place where he himself intends to go.” (10:1) If they are not welcomed, and they wipe the dust off their feet—we might imagine that Jesus won’t actually waste time going there in the end.

            Because there’s only a limited amount of time. We know when this story takes place: Jesus is on his way toward Jerusalem, to face his ultimate destiny. This mission of spreading the good news is transient. He isn’t sending out thirty-five teams to plant churches in the villages and stay there for a while. They go and then return, having shared these brief moments of good news within the context of people’s ordinary lives.

            So let’s imagine that the mission Jesus gives those disciples is an invitation to us as well. What exactly would that mean?

            Well, first, it would be an invitation to us, to all the people in this room. Jesus doesn’t send out one priest, or two wardens, or a dozen Vestry members. Nor does he send the thousands of people who, when surveyed, would identify themselves as Christian but without doing much about it—those who’ve eaten of the loaves and fishes but not quite followed along with the rest. The set of people whom Jesus sends out to share the good news are at the scale of the seventy or so active adult members of this church, and I don’t think it’s an accident that the numbers are pretty close. Jesus extends this invitation to all those of us who have some real familiarity with his teachings, more than once or twice a year.

            But what exactly is he inviting us to do? Well, in a way, it’s an invitation to evangelism—but not the way people usually mean it. “Evangelism” is a word that has many connotations for many people, not all of them good. In modern America it sometimes gets confused with “evangelicalism,” as a religious or political project—that’s not what I mean at all.  At the heart of it, “evangelism” means “sharing the good news.”

And I think this story offers a helpful corrective to what we often think evangelism is. In this story, it doesn’t mean trying to convert people from one religion to another: Jesus, who is Jewish, sends his Jewish followers to Jewish villages to share the good news. And it doesn’t mean trying to recruit new members to the church. The 70 don’t come back as 140, or 280; they go to the villages and then return. It doesn’t mean intrusive personal questions about someone’s faith or prayer life—the name of Jesus doesn’t even come up!

            This kind of evangelism is something else. Jesus sends the disciples to go, and to share a meal with people. To offer healing where they can, and to look for what God is doing, and to name it: “the kingdom of God has drawn near.” I find this sequence so important: first the signs of God’s presence appear, then they name God’s presence there. When the disciples go out, part of what they’re doing is to help people make sense of the experience they’re having by sharing with them the good news that the kingdom of God has already come near; that God is already there, in their lives.

            In this world, in which the harvest is so plentiful and the laborers are so few—in which the spiritual hunger is so great but the religious knowledge so limited—the work of evangelism is not really about trying to convince anyone of anything. It’s about helping one another see what the God we say we believe in is actually doing in our lives.

            And so I wonder what it would mean for each of us to become evangelists in this way. Not to try to convert people to Christian belief. Not to try recruit people to our church. But to go out into a world in which 72% of us believe in God but only half feel a sense of spiritual well-being, and to offer the good news that God is right there. To go out, with our eyes and ears open, to look for God’s presence in people’s lives, and then to help one another see, “You know—I wonder if God has come near here.”

            That could mean a conversation with someone about the sense of purpose or meaning they find in a job, or in a community group. It could mean sharing some of the places you’ve found a sense of wonder or awe. It could mean simply being a loving presence in someone’s life. I don’t know what that might look like for you.

But I do know what a gift it would be to a world that is hungry for the very knowledge and love of God that we find here, if each one of us, by our words or by our deeds, could help share with the people around us just a taste of that love.

Sermon — The Rev. Greg Johnston
June 29, 2025
Lectionary Readings

Jesus’ words this morning come at an urgent turning-point in the story of his life. The time has come for him to be “taken up” (Luke 9:51), and this phrase contains a multitude of meanings. He will be raised up on the Cross to die, and he will be raised up to new life from the grave, and he will be taken up from earth to return to heaven. And he knows where he has to go for all these things to take places. They’re going to happen in the Holy City, the place where God’s Temple is found, and so he sets his face to go to Jerusalem. (9:51)

Jesus grew up in the Jewish province of Galilee, to the north. And he’s spent the last year, traveling around Galilee and the neighboring Gentile lands, preaching and teaching and performing miracles, gathering a group of students and disciples who follow him around, trying to learn about the coming kingdom of God. He’s spent the year trying to explain to them what exactly it means that he is the Messiah, and how that will be different from what they thought. And now, together, they’re going to go south to the Holy City, where Jesus will be taken up and the disciples will be sent out to spread the good news of his Resurrection and to live the rest of their lives in accordance with his teachings.

There’s just one problem with the plan: the disciples keep completely missing the point.

In between Galilee up north and Jerusalem to the south you find Samaria. And the people there, the Samaritans, are not exactly on good terms with the Jews. And they’re really not on good terms with the Temple in Jerusalem. The primary distinction between Samaritans and Jews is a disagreement about the location of the Holy City itself: Jews believed and believe that the Temple where God’s presence most fully dwelt was on Mount Zion in the city of Jerusalem; Samaritans believed and still believe (a few hundred of them still remain!) that the holy place was not in Jerusalem but on Mount Gerizim near the modern city of Nablus, just to the north. The relationship had always been tense, as things often are between two closely-related groups. But it had escalated into outright hostility over the century before Jesus’ birth, especially after a Judean army destroyed the Samaritan Temple.

So this village of Samaritans refuse to offer hospitality to someone on a pilgrimage to the competing holy site, and the disciples are mad, especially James and John, who are so infamously hot-headed that Jesus nicknames them the Sons of Thunder. (Mark 3:17) And these Sons of Thunder ask, “Lord, should we smite ’em? Just give the word—we’ll call down fire from the sky!” (9:54)

And we don’t get to hear what’s going on in Jesus’ head, but we can guess, because we’ve heard all the things he already had to say to them. Leaving aside the fact that the disciples have shown no ability to smite people so far, we know that this is not really Jesus’ kind of thing. We heard the angels singing at his birth, “Glory to God in the highest, and peace to his people on earth.” (Luke 2:14) We heard Jesus tell his disciples, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.” (6:27) We heard him say, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” (Matt. 5:9) Jesus is clear. Raining down fire from the sky on your enemies is not what Christians do. But James and John have completely missed the point. And Jesus doesn’t give them a remedial course in Christian ethics. He just rebukes them, angrily, and goes on.

And they continue along the road, he keeps having these encounters with would-be disciples expressing their faith. But it seems that they keep missing the point, as well. In particular, they don’t seem to understand the urgency or the meaning of the moment: that Jesus is going, right now; and that he’s going toward his death, not toward glory.

And so first someone comes and says, “I will follow you wherever you go.” (Luke 9:57) But Jesus has nowhere to go but the Cross; he has “nowhere to lay his head” but the tomb, and he doesn’t want to take them with him there. (9:57) Jesus calls another to follow him, and he says, “Sure, but my father’s just died; let me plan the funeral first.” He needs some time, but there’s no time to spare. (9:59-60) And yet another would-be disciple says, “I’ll follow you, Lord—just let me say goodbye to my family first.” (9:61) And Jesus answers with a general phrase: “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” (9:62)

This series of exchanges is increasingly harsh. I can understand Jesus’ rebuke to James and John for wanting to destroy a village just for not welcoming him. I can make sense of his claim that we can’t follow him everywhere, because he has nowhere to lay his head. I can understand the urgency of the moment that Jesus is in, but two thousand years later, following Jesus doesn’t feel so urgent any more, and I struggle with the high bar that Jesus sets: with this idea that no one who hesitates, no one who turns around to say goodbye, is fit for the kingdom of God.

I don’t think I’m alone in struggling with that high bar of dedication. In fact, I know I’m not alone, because every single one of the disciples fails to meet clear that bar. The three apostles of the Twelve who are closest to Jesus are Peter, James, and John. We’ve already seen how well James and John have absorbed the message of the Prince of Peace; Peter’s still got his hand to the plow, and he’s going to claim that he will follow Jesus wherever he will go, but one day he’ll do the ultimate in turning back. He’ll deny even knowing who Jesus is! “Didn’t I see you with your hand on that plough?” the Judeans will see. And Peter will answer, “Who, me? I’ve never seen these oxen before in my life!”

In fact, from the very moment that Jesus sets his face on Jerusalem, the disciples begin falling away, and we’ve never lived up to his standard ever since. No matter how hard we try, we cannot perfect ourselves. We cannot bear the weight of that yoke. By this standard, there’s only one person who’s fit for the kingdom of God, and it turns out to be Jesus himself.

And yet here we are. We have not been smote. God has not rained down fire from the sky on us. Nor has all humanity been excluded from the kingdom of God on account of our imperfection. Peter and James and John have been invited in, and have you. Jesus is the only one who’s worthy to open that door, but he’s held it open for us. God has made the choice to look at our imperfection as see us through Jesus’ perfect love, and then to send the Holy Spirit to help us grow to fill the gap.

And we are still growing, every one of us. Humankind is not made up of two sorts of people, the good and the bad—those who live according to the flesh and those who live according to the Spirit—those who are jealous, and angry, and envious; and those who are loving, joyful, and patient. And Paul knows this very well. If people were either one or the other, good or bad, there would be no point in Paul writing letters like the letter Paul writes to the Galatians—the good would already be good, and the bad would be beyond redemption. But that’s not the case.

Every one of us is imperfect. Every one of us has put a hand to the plow and look back. Every one of us has behaved like Peter, James, or John. Every one of us has let our relationships with the people around us be shaped by envy, quarreling, and strife. But God has also planted in each one of us the seeds of the Spirit: the seeds of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There’s plenty of work to do to try to clear out the weeds that choke those things out. But in the end, the burden doesn’t fall on us; because it’s the Holy Spirit of God who is working in each one of us to help us grow. So “if we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.” Amen.

This Sunday, we had a guest preacher: our new Regional Canon, the Rev. Marissa Rohrbach. As Regional Canon, Marissa is our primary contact with the Bishop’s Office and the wider life of the Church. In her sermon, she spends a little while introducing herself and her role, before turning to the Gospel reading for the day.

Lectionary Readings

And hope does not disappoint us,
because God’s love has been poured into our hearts
through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
(Romans 5:5)

Yesterday I spent most of the morning standing in the drizzling rain with a couple hundred of our fellow Episcopalians, catching up with some friends from my old parish in Lincoln and making new ones, eating the Werther’s hard candies Nancy had brought and then finally, setting off together to be part of the Boston Pride for the People parade. About 275 people were a part of the Episcopal presence at Pride yesterday, clergy and laypeople, LGBT Christians and allies. In Boston, at least, Pride is an uplifting, joyful event: a party/rally that serves as both a celebration of the fierce tenacity of LGBT people and a reminder of the difficult path that brought us to this point, and I walked home feeling more grateful than ever for the generations who have led the way.

As I walked home, I opened my phone to see if the Globe had an estimate on the size of the crowd, and saw instead the horrifying news of the assassination of Melissa Hortman, the Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, and her husband, and the attempt on the lives of State Senator John Hoffman and his wife. And of course, the news never ends: perhaps like me, this week, you’ve been following the news of the deployment of the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles, or of the escalating conflict between Israel and Iran; and whether you’ve been following the news or not I hope that you will join me in praying for the people of Minnesota and California, of Israel and Iran, and for the recovery of the Hoffmans and the souls of the Hortmans, in addition to the rest of our prayers today.

All this comes during a week of events in which we celebrate the neighborhood of Charlestown; both its place in the history of the American Revolution and the life of its community in more recent generations. And it comes as well amid all our ordinary joys and struggles—the unending stream of arguments and friendships, births and deaths, diagnoses and graduations and grocery shopping trips that make up human life.

And so I arrived home with fresh ears yesterday, and I did something that I do about once a year or so, and threw away the old sermon and wrote this one instead. Because today, from across a gap of two thousand years, Paul has something to say to us about peace, and about endurance, and about love. And this morning, I need to hear those things. And I thought you might like to hear them too.

The first and most striking thing that Paul says this morning is that “since we are justified by faith,” Paul writes, “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (Rom. 5:1) And the peace that we have with God is not an armistice, not a cease-fire; it is not the absence of active hostility, the armed peace of the Cold War or the modern Middle East. It’s the presence of a healed relationship. The kind of peace we have with God is not the peace that comes between friends, in an untroubled relationship. It’s the peace that comes when there is a gap between two sides, and when one side reaches out to the other, and the other accepts.

This is what it means to say that we are “justified by faith,” to be clear. That’s theological language, of course, but for Paul, our justification—the process by which God decides to restore our relationship with God—is all about the Cross. God knows there is a gap, between what humanity is and what humanity should be—between how each one of us behaves, and how we really ought—and God knows, as well, that we cannot close the gap, by trying harder and harder to fix it. So God comes down, instead; in Jesus Christ, God takes the first step toward us. And we kill him for it. But God’s love is stronger than our hate, and God forgives us, and we’re left in the position of being offered a peace treaty by someone who has given everything away, just to be with us, and we’re only asked to give our “yes.” God’s work is making our relationship right. Our work is accepting that gift in faith.

And so “we have peace with God.” Not because we’re perfect people yet, living in a perfect world. We’re not. We have things to change before we can say that we love God with all our hearts, and our neighbors as ourselves. But we have peace with a God who sees us with eyes of love, not of judgment, who chose to lay down his own life for us so that our relationship with him could be restored.

But the fact that we’re at peace with God doesn’t mean we’re in a peaceful world. Paul knew that better than anyone. He had been forgiven greater crimes than most, and he suffered great afflictions, too. He’d been ostracized, and beaten, and driven out of town. And for Paul, at least, this was a source of growth. We “boast in our sufferings,” he writes, because “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” (Romans 5:3) And I always feel uncomfortable hearing these words out of context. They can feel as though they’re trying to jump too quickly to a silver lining. If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of that kind of pious rationalization, maybe you know what I mean.

But at the same time, I think this is an experience that I think many people share. Paul seems to find, as many people have, that the hardest things in life are the ones through which he’s grown. Not in a way that makes them justifies their happening or makes them “worth it” somehow, not at all, but in real a way nevertheless. There is an endurance that can come from suffering—a kind of knowledge that you can survive hard things, and still be there. And there is a depth of character that this can give, a patience and compassion for a suffering world. And there is a way in which this endurance and this compassion are necessary to hope, because it takes endurance and faith to act in expectation of a better future amid the suffering of the present.

And again—you should never try to make this meaning for anyone else. But people find it for themselves all the time. This is exactly the relationship between suffering and character, endurance and hope that I see at events like Pride and in neighborhoods like Charlestown and in so many people’s ordinary lives: there’s a hard-won wisdom that’s born out of struggle, a kind of endurance, and character, and ultimately hope.

You might have a story of your own that goes like this. And God has a story of God’s own. Because if the doctrine of the Trinity tells us anything, it’s that the One who became flesh in Jesus is God; the one who suffered and died on the Cross is God. God has known the depths of human pain, and the God who came to suffer alongside us and is the same God who gives us strength to endure day by day.

But Paul doesn’t end with the peace God makes with us. And Paul doesn’t end with suffering, or endurance, or even hope. Paul ends today with love. “Hope does not disappoint us,” he writes, “because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” (Rom. 5:5)

And this is the story of our faith: the story of God’s continuous, self-giving love. God exults in creation, rejoicing in the inhabited work and delighting in the human race. (Prov. 8:31) God becomes human in Jesus, to set us free from the power of evil, and to give us peace with God. God helps us grow, comforting us in our deepest pain, and strengthening us when we need endurance most. And God pours love into our hearts, so that we might become more like Jesus, the ultimate embodiment of love.

Our world is not at all a perfect place. Our lives are full of broken habits and mistakes. But God’s love has been poured into our hearts, again and again and again. And so we have peace in our hearts, when we know that we are loved by God. We have the strength to carry on, because God has not left us comfortless. We have the power to love, because it is God’s love that works in us and through us in the world.

God’s love has been poured into our hearts. And our hearts fill up, and begin to overflow, so that the love of God which fills our hearts pours out into the world, we do the things we can to love the people God has put in front of us in the world; to serve them, and protect them, and to stand up for them. We walk in love, praying that our hope will not disappoint us, and trusting, as best we can, that God’s love is going before us, everywhere we go.

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

Lectionary Readings

I spent the summer before my third year of seminary getting ready to lead Vacation Bible School at my second internship parish: a week-long day camp for thirty kids from the neighborhood, led by yours truly with the help of four volunteers from the church. It was five days full of stories, arts and crafts activities, and songs, and the preparation had me stressed.

I opened the plastic bucket that contained the curriculum we’d bought, and tried to wrap my head around the list of the supplies. Each day, there were three or four things to do with instructions like “for this activity, you’ll just need a pair of scissors, colored yarn, cotton balls, six soda-bottle caps, the horn of a unicorn, and a heart-shaped balloon.” Just dividing everything up into the relevant categories felt like a gargantuan task: here are the things every Sunday School room has, here are the things we could easily buy, here are the things that nobody sells: what can we substitute?

I remember standing in a Michael’s parking lot on the hottest day of July, the sun beating down on me as I stood frozen in place, completely overwhelmed by all these little details. And let me tell you, it was a brutally hot summer, as my wife Alice could attest—because, while I was stressing out about Vacation Bible School, she was six months’ pregnant with our first (and only) child.

Now, over the years since, I’ve become a wise and self-aware person—and humble—and I know now what I didn’t quite know yet then: I was feeling a lot of a stress, but it wasn’t really about Vacation Bible School. There was a bigger change going on for me that summer, and it was one for which, no matter how carefully you shop for strollers and organize a nursery, it’s not really possible to prepare.

It’s why I’ve always found the titles of the What to Expect When You’re Expecting series to be so funny. Sometimes it feels like the only useful advice I’ve ever gotten in life, let alone as a parent, is to expect the unexpected.

It certainly would have been good advice for the disciples, as they gathered on Pentecost Day. Because they were expecting something, too. It’s not for nothing that Pentecost is sometimes called “the birthday of the Church.” It marks the arrival in the world of a person who’s going to change the disciples’ lives in ways they never could have imagined, and lead them to grow in ways they desperately need; not a child, in this case, but the Holy Spirit of God.

And make no mistake, they are expecting this Spirit to come. Jesus had told them, when he was still with them before his death, that they should be expecting someone else: that he would be going away, but that “the Advocate, the Holy Spirit,” would come. (John 14:26) And he had told them, just before he ascended into heaven, that they should wait, because the “Holy Spirit” would come upon them, and they would “receive power,” and they would be his witnesses “in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” (Acts 1:8) He said he couldn’t tell them exactly when these things would take place. (Acts 1:7) But he gave them the sense of what it would mean: this Holy Spirit would be “another Advocate,” he says, just like him; a “Spirit of truth,” who would “teach [them] everything, and remind [them] of all that [he had] said to [them].” (John 14:16-17, 26)

This description of the Holy Spirit almost sounds like a kind of Jesus 2.0: a ghostly form of the same teacher they knew, there to remind them of what he’d taught, and to lead them toward the truth.

I don’t think they were quite expecting this: “a sound like the rush of a violent wind,” and “divided tongues, as of fire,” resting on their heads, and the sudden eruption of speech in other tongues. (Acts 2:2-4) They’re amazed, and they’re perplexed, and the skeptics think they’re drunk. (Acts 2:12-13)

It’s not what they’re expecting at all. But the Holy Spirit acts in unexpected ways. It doesn’t only remind them of what Jesus had said, it leads them to live those teachings out: the very first thing they do after Peter’s sermon ends is to they sell everything they have and share the money with all who are in need. (Acts 2:45) And the Holy Spirit doesn’t only lead them to the truth, in an inward, spiritual way. It sends them out into the world, to share the good news of what God has done for them.

What happened on Pentecost wasn’t what they had come to expect. But that’s only because they hadn’t yet learned to expect the unexpected.

Today we’re celebrating several different things: the baptism of Charlotte DaSilva Connors after six months in this world (almost seven!); a farewell to our seminarian Michael Fenn after two years at this church; a ribbon-cutting for the work to restore our Garden, carrying on the legacy of generations.

Each of these moments is just one phase of a longer journey. A journey for Ella and Ryan into parenthood, in all its beauty and messiness. A journey for Charlotte into a life of learning, as the Holy Spirit helps her grow into the vows that her parents and godparents will make on her behalf. A journey into ministry for Michael, as he continues to grow in his knowledge of God and of himself, and as he shares the amazing gifts he’s offered to all of us over the last two years with so many more people over the rest of his life. A journey for our church toward our own vision of the future, even as we celebrate the dreams of the generations who came before us.

These journeys all follow different paths. And yet, in the most important ways, they are the same: because if we want to be ready to receive the Spirit of truth, we need to expect the unexpected.

Vacation Bible School went fine, by the way. It turns out you don’t need to prepare for all the details on your own, and the four grandparents who’d signed up to volunteer were perfectly capable of adapting the activities based on what we had. The week was full of crises, but none of them were the ones I’d planned or prepared for. And the week was also full of joy that I’d been too distracted to anticipate. (And also full of coffee. It turns out coffee helps when you have small kids around.)

And I suspect that’s true for all our paths through life: there are crises that we never could’ve prepared for, and joys that we never could’ve imagined. And is a God who loves us, who is there to comfort and inspire us, and to send the Holy Spirit to remind us of this again and again. “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” Jesus says, “and do not let them be afraid,” and it’s not bad advice. Not because nothing bad will ever happen in this life. But because the greatest joys and sorrows of life are rarely the ones we’re worrying about: they’re the ones that show up as unexpected as a sudden wind, or a tongue of fire.

Lectionary Readings

It’s been days, by now, and it’s starting to get old.

The first time Paul and Silas heard footsteps behind them on the street, they started to worry. They’ve been run out of town before, and they’ve learned: when you start hearing footsteps on your trail, it’s time to leave, before the one person following you down a back alley turns into a mob.

But that first time, it wasn’t a mob, it was just a girl they’d seen before, telling fortunes for a few coins, payable to the two burly guys standing on either side of her. They were nowhere to be seen, that day, just her, following them quietly, looking at them curiously, until suddenly it’s as if something has seized hold of her and the words spill out of her mouth, “These men are slaves to the Most High God, proclaiming to you the way of salvation!” Silas laughed, at first. Paul knew better. They didn’t need this kind of publicity. Couldn’t she just be cool?

She could not just be cool, it turns out, because the next day, there she was again, following them. This time she looks a little worried, like she wants to walk away, but instead she keeps calling out in an even louder voice, “These men are slaves to the Most High God, proclaiming to you the way of salvation!” Heads started to turn. Silas started walking faster. Paul jaw clenched. Can’t she take a hint?

But she cannot take a hint, it turns out, because the next day, there she is, shouting frantically, again and again, “These men are slaves to the Most High God, proclaiming to you the way of salvation!” Now Paul is annoyed. And Paul is worried. And Paul is not the calmest guy, under the best of circumstances. And so he finally turns, and he stares into the very depths of her soul, and says, directly to the fortune-telling spirit within her, “In the name of Christ, I order you to come out of her.” And it’s as if something drains out of her, and she looks exhausted, and lucid, and scared.

Unfortunately, that’s the moment that her so-called masters come by. And they look at the woman, and they look at Paul, and they can tell right away that something’s changed. “What did you do?” they snarl. And they’re enraged. “That’s my business you’re messing with!” And the two big guys grab Paul and Silas and drag them right up to the courthouse.

“These men are Jews,” they say, “and they’re disturbing our city. They’ve been going around telling everyone not to follow our laws.” And the crowd who’s followed them in from the marketplace starts to push and shove, and things get a little blurry, and the next time Silas really comes to his senses, he’s lying on the floor, in the dark, with chains around his feet.

If only they’d left town when they started hearing footsteps.

But here they are, behind bars, and Paul starts humming. A real earworm of a hymn. And Silas can’t help himself. He starts humming, too. And then Paul starts to sing, and Silas starts to sing, and there they are, sitting in jail, rocking out, and everyone else in the cell is looking at them, thinking, “This is kind of cringe, but… it’s not a bad tune,” and they’re listening, and then [jump] the floor begins to shake, and the chains rattle, and a crack creeps up the wall as the whole doorway crumbles and then the guys in the cell look down and their chains have come undone, and they look up, and there’s Paul and Silas, still bopping away.

It’s dark in the cell, but from where they’re sitting they can see out into the hall, and they see a man, stumbling toward the door, wiping the sleep from his eyes. They can hear him mumbling—“Oh, gods! Oh no. The door’s gone. They must’ve gotten away.” And he covers his face in his hands. He had one job—to keep the prisoners inside the jail—and he had failed. He can’t bear the shame. And as he stands there, completely at a loss, he can only think of one way out. But as he begins to draw his sword, Paul shouts, “Whoa, whoa! Put the sword away. We’re here! We’re all right here.”

And the man’s sword falls to the ground, and he grabs a torch, instead. And he walks into the room, and he falls on his knees, the torch trembling in his hands, and, still worried about the consequences of his failure, but even more worried that he appears to have two demigods in jail, he asks, “Lords, how can I be saved?” And they say, “Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.”

And still numb with shock, he shows them out of the room, and brings them home with him.

There’s a remarkable irony in the climax of this story. The guard was so full of shame, so overwhelmed by the dishonor that would come if it was discovered that the prisoners had escaped, that he’s prepared to end his life. But when he finds that they’re still there—that they’ve been released but haven’t escaped—he’s so full of gratitude that he goes ahead and sets them free.

Can you imagine the conversation the next day? The magistrates come down to survey the damage to the jail. And they ask the jailer for an update. “Boy, was I worried,” he’d say. “This place was a wreck. The foundation’s cracked, the door came right out of the wall. I thought for sure the prisoners would be gone.”

“…And?” the magistrates would say.

“Well, I was so relieved when I saw they were still there, I just went ahead and let ’em all go.”

“…You what?”

(You shouldn’t worry too much about what happens to our friend, by the way. The reading this morning cuts off here, but in fact, on that next day, Paul belatedly reveals that he and Silas are Roman citizens. You do not let the crowd beat up two Roman citizens, so the magistrates apologize to Paul, and beg his forgiveness, and Paul and Silas go and say goodbye to Lydia, and they head on their way.)

But the jailer didn’t know that then. He isn’t thinking clearly when he sets these two men free. He’s acting instinctively. He’s doing what almost anyone would do. Having been set free from the overwhelming shame of losing his prisoners, he does the only thing he can, and sets them free in turn.

There’s a clever saying that you may have heard: “Hurt People Hurt People.” If you haven’t heard it, you can probably guess what it means. People who have been hurt go on to hurt other people in turn; unless something changes, we tend to perpetuate the cycles of trauma and pain that we have experienced.

The jailer’s actions suggest a related principle to me: “Freed people free people.” And this is really all the story is, from start to finish, an exchange of one set of chains for another until, finally, every character is free. Paul frees this enslaved woman from the spirit that possesses her and allows her captors to exploit her. They’re so enraged that they throw Paul in chains in retribution. God breaks Paul’s chains. But the breaking of those bonds wraps the jailer in his own spiritual chains: he is bowed down and nearly broken beneath their weight. But Paul sets him free, with a simple phrase: “We’re in here!” Freed from his burden, he sets Paul free in turn.

Each of these acts of liberation and release is a kind of forgiveness. And we should remember that while Paul begins the chain of events in this story, Paul’s own life is a response to having been set free. This man, who once persecuted the Christians viciously, has been forgiven by God for what he’s done, and gone out to spread the news of God’s liberating forgiveness and love.

In this ultimate sense, forgiveness isa vertical thing; it all flows out of God’s choice to forgive us. But we experience it horizontally. We mediate it to one another. We practice it by setting one another free, because barring a voice speaking to us out of the heavens or an earthquake shattering the walls, forgiving the people in front of us, as we have been forgiven, is all there is.

Each one of us holds great power in our hands, to keep other people wrapped in the chains of our resentment or to release those bonds and set them free. And most of us, I suspect, are also wrapped in chains: held by some sense of shame or fear or guilt, afraid to be seen for who we truly are, lest someone else slam the jail door shut. But God sees us. And God loves us. And there is no shame that is too great for God to want to set you free, no chains of guilt too strong for God to break, because God’s deepest desire is to set you free from judgment and condemnation and despair, and to send you into the world to set other people free, “so that the love with which [God] loved [Jesus Christ] may be in you,” and in all of them. Amen.

Lectionary Readings

Jesus answered him, “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them,
and we will come to them and make our home with them.” (John 14:23)

Bilbo Baggins travels far to the east to find himself; to live the life of adventure he’d always secretly craved, he must first leave behind the homely comforts of cozy Hobbiton. Harry Potter takes a train, departing from a mysterious platform at King’s Cross Station for a castle in parts unknown; to learn about the magic he was born with, he has to go to a place he’s never been. Elizabeth Gilbert processes the end of a marriage that has come apart by traveling the world on a voyage of self-discovery in which her adventures fall neatly into three chronological sections, which just so happen to correspond with the title of the memoir that she writes: in order become who she was meant to be she must journey around the world, learning to Eat, to Pray, and to Love.

These stories share a common structure that’s sometimes called “the hero’s journey.” Time and time again, we human beings tell tales of a hero who leaves ordinary life behind and, with the assistance of a mentor or two, embarks on a road of trials and testing, only to return back home, bearing the gifts and the wisdom they have earned. We can’t help ourselves from writing the same story, over and over again, of a Frodo-Harry-Luke who leaves the Shire-Dursleys-Tatooine, and, with the help of Gandalf-Dumbledore-Obi Wan—spoiler alert—destroys the Death Star-Horcruxes-Ring. If you’re not careful, 4000 years of stories can begin to blend together into one story of what the scholar Joseph Campbell called The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Look too closely, and you can get jaded about how easily we replicate the trope. Wait a minute—are you telling me the mentor dies, leaving our hero to undertake the final stage of the journey alone? NO WAY! What a twist.

I love these stories, in their ancient and modern forms. But I often think about a comment I read years ago by the author Orson Scott Card, best known for the science-fiction series Ender’s Game. He observed that most stories like this, including his most famous ones, are about adolescents, literal or metaphorical. After all, “Who but the adolescent,” he asks, “is free to have the adventures that most of us are looking for when we turn to storytellers to satisfy our hunger?” Even the characters who are grown adults are basically teenagers still. Bilbo Baggins and James Bond share with Harry and Luke a kind of freedom to adventure that comes only when you haven’t yet settled down.

 Now, some of you today do have adventures ahead of you in life. But all of our adventuring days will one day fade into the past. Maybe because of kids or pets at home, who can’t be left alone while we go off to find ourselves. Maybe because of our own health or mobility. Maybe we’re already overwhelmed by the things we have to do right here, and can’t afford the time or the money it would take to undertake a quest.

And that’s the tension of this literary form. The hero must go on a journey to be transformed. But the reader’s life mostly stays in place. And that same tension between “home” and “away” appears in all our readings today.

For example: Paul has a vision. A man from Macedonia pleads for help. And so he goes, to spread the good news. The Book of Acts is careful to note the itinerary, so that you can follow along—from Troas to Samothrace, and then you kind of bear left to Neapolis, and just up the road to Philippi. If you’re not looking at a map, let me just say that this is one small step for Paul, one giant leap for Christianity. It’s a relatively quick sail across the waters separating what’s now Turkey from Greece, but it symbolizes the spread of this new Christian religious movement from east to west, from Asia into Europe for the first time. Paul has left the continent he calls home to share the good news. But the women whom Paul meets haven’t traveled very far. They’re right there by the river, as they often are, where there is a place of prayer. And they’re intrigued. When Lydia hears what he has to say, she invites him in: “Come and stay at my home.” (Acts 16:15) And they do. But soon enough, Paul and his companions continue on their journey around the Mediterranean; and Lydia and her companions remain, right where they are, at home, and continue to live their ordinary lives.

Jesus, for his part, lives out the hero’s quest more than once: in the stories of his birth, in his temptation in the wilderness, in his travels from Galilee to Jerusalem, and in the bigger theological story of his voyage from heaven to earth and back, Jesus’ life is journey after journey. Jesus comes from the Father, and goes back to the Father. (14:29) He goes away to die, and returns to live again. (14:28) He ascends to the Father, then he sends the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, to teach us everything, and remind us of what he’s said. (14:26) As he sums it up: “I am going away, and I am coming to you.” (John 14:28) But for all this back and forth there’s a sense that the journey does have an end. And it’s a surprising one: “Those who love me,” Jesus says, “will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.” (14:23) Jesus doesn’t say that if we love him, we will make our home with him; that if we are good in this life, we will go to heaven. He says that they will come—the Father and the Son and the Spirit will come—and make their home with us.

It’s that same journey that we find in the closing chapters of the Revelation to John. John is taken up to a great, high mountain for a better view. But he isn’t brought to see people going up to heaven. No. He sees the holy city, the new Jerusalem, “coming down out of heaven from God.” (Rev. 21:10) Because the story of the Bible doesn’t end with all of us leaving earth behind to go live somewhere else. It culminates in God coming down again to live with us, in a renewed and restored creation, right here.

We are Lydia and the other women, gathering time and again to hear the good news, and then returning to our homes. We are the disciples, gathered around the table with Jesus. We are John, sometimes catching a glimpse of heaven as it breaks through onto the earth. And there is a journey happening in these texts, but it’s not our journey; we stay in place, and all the motion is God’s.

Many people talk about their own spiritual journeys, and I don’t want to discount or discourage that. I think it’s a really helpful way for many people to reflect on their relationship with God.

But I think we’re used to thinking that way. And I think it can create a sense of a lack, of something we’re missing out on. I look at some people and I think, “Wow, what an incredible spiritual journey they’ve been on, while I’ve been spending my time trying to figure out what to cook for dinner.” But there’s a journey that’s taking place even when we feel like we’re treading water. There is an ongoing quest, even when we feel too overwhelmed to pray, let alone to go off and find ourselves. But we are not the heroes of that quest.

Are you ready for me to push the premise of this sermon past its breaking point? Okay. What would it mean if, in the story of your life, you were not the Frodo/Harry/Luke Skywalker of it all? What if you were Merry-Pippin/Ron/Chewbacca? What if Jesus were the protagonist, and you were one of those supporting characters who turns out to be the best of all, because they are ordinary, decent people inspired to do extraordinary things by the hero’s quest, even after Frodo-Harry has ascended into heaven. Sorry, I mean sailed West to the Undying Lands/mysterious heavenly train station.

For the most part, our role story is the part of Jesus, or even Paul. It’s more like Lydia or John. It’s not the struggle to ascend the great, high mountain up to God, but to see God’s holy city is coming down to us, and to walk in its light, exactly where we are. That’s the least exciting job. It doesn’t feel like a fun adventure of self-discovery. But God has come and made God’s home with us. God is already here. God’s light already shines, here in this world. And we can look for and walk in that light.