The Good Shepherd?

This sermon was given by Kellogg Fellow Greg Johnston at our service of Holy Eucharist on Sunday, April 26, 2015. The readings for the day can be found here.

This Sunday is, for whatever reason, a day I look forward to more than almost any other Sunday in our church year. Something about the imagery of shepherds and sheep is incredibly attractive. Normally, I’d hesitate to project this onto anyone else, but then I read the following story, from a man who lives in the English Lake District:  

I'm not really an “early-adopter.” In fact, I'm the exact opposite. I'm a Luddite and a shepherd. Our shepherding work in the English Lake District is all about continuity and being part of a living cultural tradition that stretches back into the depths of time. Our work is often little changed from the way things were done when the Vikings first settled these valleys. Even our dialect is peppered with Norse words…I am, in short, about as unlikely to get excited by something like Twitter as anyone alive….So I was a little behind the curve on getting an iPhone, and accepted it reluctantly as a free “upgrade” when my perfectly fine old mobile died after years of good service…Whatever I wanted to happen, I suddenly had a camera and Twitter app in my pocket whilst I worked. And though it took me a while to realize it, I had the tools to connect to thousands of people around the world. I could now defend the old in my own quirky and probably misguided way. I first tweeted as an experiment in whether anyone might be interested (some friends told me it would be popular and I thought they were crazy). I’d just helped a ewe to lamb on a snowy morning and took a quick photo of the newborn lambs and posted it on Twitter. By nightfall we had something like 200 followers. My wife heard the phone pinging, “What the freaking [heck!] is going on with your phone?”

What is it with us about sheep and shepherds? How on earth has self-proclaimed Luddite and late adopter @herdyshepherd1 ended up with 59,400 Twitter followers in the last three years? Why do so many of our grandparents have framed needlepoint versions of Psalm 23 posted on their walls? Why on earth is this my favorite Sunday?

I think there are a few reasons. For starters: Sheep are really cute. You don’t get 60,000 followers on Twitter by tweeting pictures of an ugly animal. Nobody makes stuffed animals of the naked mole rat and gives them to their children. As anyone who’s ever hugged a sheep when it’s about to be shorn—in other words, Alice—will tell you, a sheep is about a foot and a half of soft, springy wool on either side of a one-foot torso. There is no “Bah, bah, black bull.” This is, of course, the way people sometimes experience this Good Shepherd Sunday: a day of cozy and comforting barnyard imagery. It is. And it’s a beautiful thing. But it’s not the only thing about these texts. It’s not the only reason we should love them.

Another part of Herdy Shepherd’s popularity, at least the way he tells it, is that sheep imagery lets us participate in an ancient part of our life and our culture from which almost all of us are completely disconnected. And the metaphor of sheep and shepherds really is ancient.

Shepherd imagery was as pervasive in the ancient Mediterranean as, well, being a shepherd. We particularly see the image of the king as a shepherd. We know this, of course, from the story of King David, the shepherd boy who defeats Goliath and later “shepherds” the people of Israel to unity and greatness. But it’s everywhere. Homer’s Iliad has about a dozen references to kings “shepherding” their people, and the first recorded references to kings as shepherds are about as old as the first recorded writings we have of any kind, some Akkadian tablets from around 2500 BC. The Israelites, of course, placed God as a higher shepherd, above any human king: “The Lord” in “The Lord is my shepherd” is a conventional way of translating the Hebrew name of God, YHWH, which Jews don’t traditionally pronounce. “YHWH is my shepherd,” not the King. God or a king in this role is someone who guides and leads the people, correcting them when they stray but also comforting and tending to them when they are wounded. And so we apply this name to other sorts of leaders who do the same thing: “pastor,” you may know, is just the Latin word for “shepherd.”

There’s a certain sense of comfort and security in seeing a leader as a shepherd. It means there’s someone greater and wiser than myself who is guiding our whole flock and caring for us. The best leader, one can easily imagine, is just like a shepherd: she wants the best for the sheep, and she knows better than they do what’s good for them. She can lead them and guide them, and is able to comfort and tend to them in ways they cannot comfort and tend to themselves or one another, even if they cannot understand or even sense the care being given to them.

For me, ultimately, I think the reason this is my favorite Sunday is pretty simple. Look at the icon of the Good Shepherd that I put on the front of the bulletin. This is the only icon I own myself. It’s associated with the Parable of the Lost Sheep, which we find in Matthew and Luke: “Which one of you,” says Jesus, “having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’” (Luke 15:4–6 NRSV)

Look into the eyes of that sheep. I don’t know how well it came out in print, but that sheep is pooped. That sheep is beat. That sheep has wandered far away from its flock, and it is lonely and it is tired and it is scared. And that shepherd comes and picks it up and bears it like it’s no burden at all. I’ve felt like that sheep. I suspect many of you have felt like that sheep. And the notion that Jesus is a shepherd who will come and bear that exhaustion and that pain, a shepherd on whose shoulders I can rest, has been an immense comfort to me.

I think sometimes some of us are so accustomed to biblical imagery that we need to be reminded to look at it with fresh eyes. I want to make two points about God, our Good Shepherd.

First: The Lord our Shepherd is one who makes us lie down in green pastures, and leads us beside still waters. What better God for Harvard? I know it’s a busy time, and I know you’re busy people. But as a friend and shepherd’s deputy I have a request for you: some time during reading period, or on the last day of class, or after your last exam, on a beautiful spring day when the sun is there to drive out all darkness go down to the still waters of the Charles River, lie down in that green grass beside it. Take a friend or two or a picnic or a book, something to eat and something to drink, and restore your soul. And if anyone asks you why, just tell them: God is making you do it. As an alumnus of this wonderful, venerable institution I can say to you that three of my five best memories of Harvard consist of doing exactly that, sitting by the river and resting. Thanks be to God.

My second point: Jesus doesn’t just say he’s a shepherd. He says he’s The Good Shepherd. And what does that mean? The good shepherd, he says, lays down his life for his sheep. The hired hand sees the wolf coming and runs away, saving himself and sacrificing the sheep. But the good shepherd lays down his life defending them. The good shepherd leaves behind the ninety-nine in the wilderness to go after the one who has wandered. The good shepherd lays out a delectable spread for the sheep, even though enemies all around are coming to beat the sheep up and steal its lunch money. Think about that. Think about it not as a metaphor, not as something you might have heard since you were a little kid in Sunday School, but really think about it.

I joked at our Bible Study on Tuesday that I don’t know where Jesus learned shepherding, but it sure wasn’t at Harvard Shepherding School. I mean, what kind of ridiculous business plan is that? What principle of animal husbandry says, “Yep, if wolves come, you just, uh, die. Yep, lay down your life for the sheep.” Sheep are sheep. People are people. Shepherding is a livelihood. If the owner of the sheep can’t fight off the wolves, he should run away and save himself! It’s unfortunate. It’s a mishap. It might even count as a calamity. But it’s not worth dying for. You can buy more sheep! And you sure shouldn’t risk 99 percent of you wealth in sheep to go find one that’s gone astray. This, I have to think, is ironic advice to people who are very familiar with the reality of what it means to be a good shepherd in this world. It doesn’t make sense! It doesn’t make any sense at all.

And that is the Good News. Sheep are sheep. People are people. God is God. Humans are humans. The shepherd is incomparably more valuable than the sheep, and yet he lays down his life to defend them. This is not a decision driven by economic calculation. This is a decision of love.

God loves you. God is unreasonably, outrageously, irrationally in love with you.

Year after year our lectionary cycle pops out two stories in the Easter Season: Doubting Thomas and the Good Shepherd. And why not? Aren’t those at the heart of the Christian faith? Despite all our failings, all our doubts, all our inadequacies, all our meanness and wrongdoing, all our woundedness and brokenness, all our inability in our sheep-sized brains to understand God’s vast love, in the midst of and because of all these things God loves us. In the words of my friend Brother Curtis Almquist, “God loves you. God wants to spend eternity with you. You make God’s day.”

What makes that one sheep so important that the shepherd should leave behind the ninety-nine others to go and save it? What makes that one flock so valuable that the shepherd should lay down his life to defend it? What makes that sheep worthy of a table prepared in the presence of its enemies, of a cup that overfloweth and spills wine out onto the ground? What makes the sheep worthy of the shepherd’s irrational, superabundant love?

Absolutely nothing. There is nothing in the world you could ever do that would earn the right to such love. And so there is nothing in the world that you ever need to do to earn that love. God is going to love you beyond your ability to comprehend it, “for,” as the hymn goes, “the love of God is wider than the measure of the mind.” And we are worthy of that love, each and every one of us. 

All the rest of Christian thought, I think, is just a series of footnotes to that. All the rest of theology, Christology, and eschatology; of ecclesiology, missiology, and homiletic anesthesiology, is a catalog of different responses to the question "God is love; What are you going do about it?" God is foolishly in love with you. What are you going to do about it? God loves you. And the person next to you. And the wolves, and the thieves, and the enemies. The martyrs and their murderers alike. That doesn’t mean God doesn’t want them to change; God wants all of us to change, to grow into God’s vision for us. But like a faithful parent God loves us, each and every one, in the midst of it. What are you going to do about it? Can you give yourself the permission to be loved and to love yourself? To love your neighbor as yourself? To love your enemies, internal and external, as yourself?

As many or maybe all of you know, my time as part of this community is finally, belatedly coming to an end. This is sort of my farewell sermon for the year. In August, Alice and I will be moving to New Haven and I’ll be starting at Yale Divinity School. Six years into what I thought would be a four-year Harvard affiliation, I’m finally moving on. I’m very excited about this, and I’m very sad to be leaving this place, this community, and all of you. I’ve known some of you for three years and more. I’ve known some of you for not even nine months. This year feels like it’s flown by, and yet it feels like I’ve known some of you for a long, long time. 

We are unlike an ordinary parish community, where people might stay for decades, even their whole lives, where they might raise children and grandchildren together. Each one of us at some point will graduate and will leave this community behind. And that’s a good thing. Although parting is difficult, it’s a part of what we all do here. We are all sheep that “do not belong to this fold.” Our Shepherd will call us away to other flocks, and yet one day we will be brought together again,

“So there will be one flock, one shepherd.” Amen.

A New Covenant

This sermon was given by Kellogg Fellow Greg Johnston at our service of Holy Eucharist on Sunday, March 22, 2015. The readings for the day can be found here.

May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of all our hearts,

be acceptable in your sight O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Jeremiah the Prophet.

The Bible, as we have it, is printed as one book, divided into two halves: what Christians call the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament (in English) contains 569,267 words—I hope you had fun over Spring Break while I was counting them all. This is the first three-quarters of the volume. The New Testament is 176,417 words: the last quarter.

And yet of our four weekly readings, two are from the New Testament; one is a little snippet of a psalm, cycling through about 5% of the Bible; and only one is from the remaining 70% of the text, the Old Testament, the only Bible that Jesus or Mary or Paul, Matthew or Mark or Luke or John ever knew. And even then, our lectionary doesn’t always follow through. Today’s first reading is the second-to-last reading we’ll hear from the Old Testament (not counting the psalms) this year—at least at our Sunday evening Chaplaincy services. Next week we have one more, and then during the season of Easter we switch over to the Acts of the Apostles for the first reading, and then we leave for the summer.

So it seems appropriate this week to preach on our reading from the Hebrew Bible. (Christians call it the Old Testament, Jews call it the Tanakh, I’ll mostly call it the Hebrew Bible—they all mean more or less the same thing.)

This passage from Jeremiah is in the midst of a series of readings from the Hebrew Bible that we’ve had throughout Lent. Rather than reading through a single book, we’ve had themed readings in two sets.

The first have been covenant stories, stories about God’s promises to humanity. On the first Sunday in Lent we heard the story of God promising Noah never again to destroy all life with a flood, and setting the rainbow in the sky when it rains to remind himself to stop the rain. This shows God’s mercy and forgiveness of sins. It’s God’s covenant with all living people through Noah and his family. The next Sunday we heard the story of Abram and Sarai becoming Abraham and Sarah. For Paul, Abraham is the central example of faith. He faithfully answers God’s call in response to God’s promise of children, even though he is so old he’s nearly dead and his wife Sarah has been unable to bear a child. He’s also the first one to enter into the covenant through circumcision, which would become a defining Jewish act later. Abraham narrows the story down from Noah to be God’s covenant with all monotheistic people; so we hear Judaism, Christianity, and Islam referred to as the “Abrahamic faiths.” The next week we heard the Ten Commandments, the central precepts of the Law, which would become—again, for Paul—the defining characteristic of God’s covenant with the Israelites, and later the Jewish people. These covenant stories tell us about God: God is merciful and forgives sins, God is faithful and values faithfulness, and God is ethical and calls us to be ethical.

Then the readings flip over to a second set, readings that are supposed to point us toward Christ. I’ll recap last week’s reading in case you skipped church during Spring Break. It’s sort of a bizarre story. The Israelites are wandering in the desert with Moses. The people complain about the food—they’ve been eating in the dining hall for too long—so God, in a not-very-proportionate response, sends a plague of poisonous snakes. The people repent, so Moses prays that they be saved. God agrees. Okay: now God tells Moses to make a snake, and put it on a pole, and raise it up in the air; when people are bitten, they’ll look at it and live. Here’s how the Gospel of John explains: “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up [on the cross], that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3:14–15).

So last week points us toward the cross. Then you’ve got this week’s reading from the prophet Jeremiah, promising a new covenant; and then next week, on Palm Sunday, a reading from Isaiah that’s in the first person, that almost demands, in the context of Palm Sunday, that you put Isaiah’s words into Jesus’ mouth:

“I gave my back to those who struck me,
and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard;
I did not hide my face
from insult and spitting” (Isaiah 50:6).

And then you have this week’s reading from Jeremiah. “The days are surely coming, says the Lord”; so this is a future time from Jeremiah’s perspective, days which have not come yet but surely will. Jeremiah’s writing right around the destruction of the last Israelite kingdom of Judah and the beginning of the traumatic period of the Babylonian exile. This is a promise for some sort of future restoration of the fortunes of these people, who have had their lives upturned. “The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors” (Jeremiah 31:31–32). And how will it be different? “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts… No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me… for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more” (Jeremiah 31:33-34). So God will make a new covenant; the law will no longer be an external thing we have to learn, but an internal thing, part of our inmost being; and God will forgive our sins.

This sounds like the God we’ve been hearing about throughout Lent, right? God is faithful and keeps her side of the covenant; God is ethical and teaches ethics; God is merciful and forgives sins. But what is this new covenant?

As Christians, of course, we answer: the new covenant is the one God makes with us in Jesus Christ. I think the Old Testament readings from the last few weeks through Easter guide us toward a certain idea of what this means. This new covenant looks a lot like the Christian faith we hear about in a certain way of reading Paul, Augustine, or Luther: a law of the spirit, rather than a law of the flesh or a law written in a book; personal knowledge of God; and the forgiveness of sins.

Taken as a whole, the story goes something like this: God makes covenants with Noah, with Abraham, and with Moses. Although the people repeatedly fall down on their half of the covenant, God keeps the promises, gives warning after warning through the prophets, and finally fulfills all those promises in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Faith in Christ is our half of the new covenant; forgiveness of our sins is God’s half.

I think we can take this reading of Jeremiah too far, and many Christians have. Augustine, for example, goes on to equate the new covenant not only with Jesus, the Christ, but with Christianity, with the Christian New Testament: “Nowhere,” he writes, “or hardly anywhere, except in this passage of the prophet, do we find in the Old Testament Scriptures any mention so made of the New Testament as to indicate it by its name. It is no doubt often referred to and foretold as about to be given, but not so plainly as to have its name mentioned” (On the Spirit and the Letter 33). In other words, according to Augustine, in this passage Jeremiah explicitly names the New Testament.

I think I must have dozed off during that part of the reading. Well are some interesting translation questions here. But basically, Augustine is reading a text of Jeremiah that he understands to say, “Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will will to the house of Israel and the house of Judah a New Testament” (Jeremiah 31:31). Even though Jeremiah is living and writing six or seven centuries before any piece of the New Testament is written, and maybe nine or ten centuries before it will be called the “New Testament,” the Holy Spirit is somehow guiding his hand to write those words, “the New Testament,” as a promise to later Christians and an argument to persuade later Jews. All throughout the Old Testament, clues are hidden about its replacement, the New Testament that tells us about Christ.

I think there’s a danger if we take the reading this far. It’s what we call “supercessionist.” Supercessionism is the idea that the new covenant in Christ has replaced or “superceded” the old covenant of the Law given to Moses, and so Christians have replaced the Israelites—and their Jewish descendants today—as God’s chosen people. (This is why the name “Old Testament” can be offensive to Jews). Incidentally, the New Testament book of Hebrews, from which we read today, is one of the classic examples of supercessionism; commenting on this passage from Jeremiah, the author of Hebrews writes, “In speaking of ‘a new covenant,’ he has made the first one obsolete. And what is obsolete and growing old will soon disappear” (Hebrews 8:13). As a sort of understated note from the Jewish Annotated New Testament puts it, “Such language helped foster the view that Judaism was an inferior religion, a temporary guide prior to Christ.”  Similarly, in John’s Gospel, you see frequent, charged references to “the Jews” as if they’re somehow a separate group from Jesus (a Jew) and his band of Jewish followers. Particularly during readings of John’s Gospel on Good Friday during the Middle Ages, this has historically led to huge amounts of violence by Christians against Jews.

In a certain way, you can follow the logic. If in Jesus Christ, God has offered a new covenant, replacing the old one, then Jews have rejected a covenant with God. In the Old Testament, in their own Tanakh, when the Israelites reject a covenant with God, God punishes them—either supernaturally or through human means. So the whole history of Christian violence against Jews can be (and has been) explained away as the victims’ collective fault for rejecting God’s new covenant with them.

The point is not that every Christian who believes the supercessionist view is an anti-Semite; but that pretty much every Christian anti-Semite needs to believe something like that supercessionist view. In this season of Lent, we are called to repent not only for our own individual sins, but for our collective sinfulness; and one of the great sins of the Christian Church has been the violence it has inflicted or accepted in the name of God.

So how do we deal with this in a religiously pluralistic society like ours? How do we affirm our Christian faith without accusing our Jewish brothers and sisters of rejecting the covenant God has offered them?
Well of course, if you don’t believe that the covenant in Christ has replaced God’s covenant with the Jewish people, on the other hand, then you don’t believe that the Jews have abandoned that covenant, and so there’s no reason to try to get Jews to convert to Christianity, violently or otherwise. If you believe, for example, that God has extended this covenant to all people, without turning away from the covenant with the Jewish people through the law of Moses—God, after all, we’re reminded in the story of Abraham, is a faithful God, who keeps his promises—you have no theological basis for anti-Semitism. But then what about this new covenant in Christ? I think Jeremiah’s promise actually supports this idea.

There are some plot holes in Augustine’s version of this story. Let’s take a look back at Jeremiah. Do we still teach one another? If you say “no,” I can just sit down. Of course we do! Do we still say to one another, “Know the Lord”? Sure! Do we all know the Lord, from the least to the greatest? No… Is the law—here the word is torah, law or teaching—is God’s Torah written on our hearts, or is it written in a book? We Christians, as much as Jews, rely on a book to understand God’s teaching. Our lives today do not look like the world of the new covenant Jeremiah is promising.
How then can we understand what this new covenant means? I think the very “flaws” I just pointed out are the key.  The world we live in today does not look like the world that God describes to Jeremiah. (Interestingly enough, the world today is also not the one the author of Hebrews predicted, where the obsolete and old Jewish covenant has passed away.) God’s promise to Jeremiah is not completely fulfilled for us in the earthly life of Jesus, or even in his death and resurrection.

I think in particular the notion of a covenant “with the House of Israel and the House of Judah” gives us a clue. The House of Israel is the Ten Lost Tribes, whose kingdom was destroyed by the Assyrians, and who were exiled and lost. The promise of the descendants of the lost tribes being returned, being gathered together from all over the world, to make a new covenant with God, is an eschatological promise, a promise about the end. There is some future time in which the world will be this way; not necessarily a time we can identify as July 3rd, 2315, but an eternal time outside our understanding. Just as the Israelites were promised a land flowing with milk and honey long before they arrived there, we too have been promised a new world brimming with God’s beautiful possibilities; and we cling to the vision of that world, even as wander in the desert.

Most of us are students. All of us have been students, at one time or another. And all of us are, in fact, students still, students of that God who is writing her teaching, her Torah, on our hearts. Our God—the God of Jews and Christians alike—is like that outstanding teacher we could all name. The one who teaches us facts, knowledge, sure; but who, even more importantly, inspires us to care about what we’re learning, draws us out of our focus on grades or college admissions or internships, and shapes the path we take in the future.

The Torah—the first five books of our Bible—if you think about it, is so much more than a series of laws, or even teaching. It is a vivid set of stories, stories that range from poetic hymns of creation and covenant, to funny fables of trickery and betrayal; stories shared for centuries around campfires and among families, repeated over and over again and finally, painstakingly edited together and written down, the holy texts of a people faithful to God through many trials and setbacks, just as God was faithful to them. In and through Jesus Christ, the Word of God, God is writing that story on our hearts, writing us, indeed, into that story; so that just as he is the God of the Jews slowly writing the Torah on their hearts in careful study, so too he might be the God of all the nations. Not cutting off the covenant created in Moses with the Jewish people, but restoring and renewing the covenant through Noah with all people, until that day when we shall all know him, from the least to the greatest, Jews and Gentiles alike, the chosen people of God and those who have afflicted them for so long.

“For I will forgive their iniquity,” says the Lord, “and remember their sin no more.”

Amen.

Growing up into God

This sermon was given by Greg Johnston at our service of Holy Eucharist on Sunday, February 8, 2015. The readings for the day can be found here.

If we were living in biblical Palestine, I wouldn’t be standing here talking to you. I’d be dead. I probably would have died at the age of eighteen, when I had an emergency surgery to remove a massively infected wisdom tooth after twenty hours of antibiotics squeezed in just before a blizzard. Or perhaps I would have died a little earlier, when I was seven years old and had my tonsils removed after two years of escalating strep infections, each held off for a while with stronger and stronger antibiotics. No antibiotics, no modern surgery, no Greg.

Most of you would probably have similar stories, in one way or another. Life expectancy at birth in ancient Rome, was about twenty-five to thirty years. Half of children didn’t making it past the age of ten. Once you had escaped childhood, you could reasonably hope to live to about forty-five or fifty —less for women, who ran a high risk of dying during childbirth; less for everyone during times of war and rebellion; and, generally speaking, not very high in a world wracked by famine and plague.

You can see why whole cities came flocking to Jesus. In our Gospel reading for today, we see examples of physical and mental healing drawing in increasing crowds. What’s most interesting to me, though, isn’t what Mark says Jesus does here. It’s what Jesus doesn’t say he’s here to do.

Let me explain. The Gospel reading for today breaks down into three short episodes, picking up shortly after the demonic fight scene we heard last week, a week later in our lectionary but only a few hours in the story. Later in the afternoon on the same day as this opening battle, Jesus goes to Simon and Andrew’s house and heals Simon’s mother-in-law. Hearing that she has a fever, Jesus takes her hand and raises her up. He raises her up, foreshadowing how Jesus himself will later be raised up, in the resurrection—not from the brink of death but from beyond it. Mark uses the very same verb. The fever leaves her, and she begins to serve them. (If it troubles you, by the way, that the one, unnamed woman in the story is healed in order to serve the men, good. You’re not alone. Hold that thought for a few minutes.)

Then just after sundown, the whole city comes to him, and he heals many who are sick or possessed by demons. In Mark’s gospel, these demons are mostly associated with what we would probably now diagnose as mental illnesses of various kinds: powerful supernatural forces seemingly external to our own selves that control our actions in ways that strip us of our dignity. In Greek literature the demons are semi-divine creatures, between humans and the gods. This builds a parallel structure: demons, pagan demi-gods possessing individuals; the Roman Empire occupying the Jewish homeland; and the powers of evil, sin, and death embodied in the character of Satan corrupting God’s whole creation. And so it’s unsurprising that the monotheistic Jewish authors of the New Testament uniformly have Jesus triumphing over demons, casting them out of Jewish bodies and out of Jewish land. And all this combined with real physical healing in a world where you only had a fifty-fifty chance of becoming a teenager.

So Jesus is a hero. He’s overturning the powerful forces that are holding down his people: sickness and death, demons and false gods—and by extension, the crowds hope as they wait for their Messiah—Rome and its armies. Jesus comes into a town and all other powers are cast down.

And then, a few hours later, he goes out to a quiet place to pray. The disciples hunt for him, trying to find the man everyone’s looking for, to bring him back to heal more people. And he turns away.  “Let us go on to the neighboring towns,” he says, “so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do” (Mark 1:38 NRSV). I said before that this reading fascinates me not for what Mark says Jesus does there—healing and casting out of demons—but for what Jesus doesn’t say he’s there to do: healing and casting out demons. Let us go elsewhere, not in order that I may heal the people; not in order that I may cast out demons, but that I may “proclaim the message, for that is what I came out to do.”

So what does that mean? The phrase “proclaim the message” is one Greek verb, κήρυσσω kēryssō. Although it’s occasionally translated as “preaching”, its sense is not primarily teaching moral behavior, or telling strange parables, or discussing and interpreting holy texts, but rather “proclaiming” as in heralding: announcing, declaring, making known and, in a sense, making real the good news. Just as when Neil Armstrong, in that iconic image of the moon landing, plants a flag in the moon, it’s a statement that “the United States of America are here,” when Jesus goes from town to town “proclaiming the message” it’s a statement that “the kingdom of God is here.”

I’m reminded of an analogy from the Egyptian theologian and bishop Athanasius of Alexandria, writing in the fourth century:

You know how it is when some great ruler comes into a large city and dwells in one of the houses in it; all people consider the city to be honored by this, and enemies and robbers no longer come down to attack it. So it is with the Ruler of All. At his coming into our land, and dwelling in a body like ours, the entire plot of the enemies of humankind has been brought to an end, and the corruption of death, which was formerly powerful against them, has been put away. 

God, dwelling in a human body in Christ and dwelling in the metaphorical “city” of the earth, pushes away all the enemies of her human children. All the loyal subjects of the realm come looking for Jesus—for healing, for teaching, or simply to be in the presence of the conquering king, like kids young and old at the Patriots’ victory parade.

And then he abandons them. There may be a nicer way to put it, but I’m sure that’s how it felt at the time. Jesus leaves behind all those in that city who are still looking for healing, still hoping to be for a moment in his presence, and moves on. Many of us, I suspect, know the feeling. We have wandered through months or years of spiritual desert, with no sense of God’s presence. We have suffered from physical illnesses, or seen loved ones die without the intervention of a sudden, divine cure. We have been crushed by the unrelenting grip of the demons of mental illness; we have lived two thousand years, even in our ostensibly Christian societies, without Jesus our Messiah overturning the structures of oppression, exploitation, and evil. It often seems that the city in which we’re living is not the same one in which the Ruler of All has come to dwell.

If it’s any comfort at all, Athanasius wasn’t among the “fair-weather faithful.” He was born in Egypt in the last few decades of illegal Christianity. His teachers and mentors were slaughtered in the last great gasp of persecution, which was most ferocious in Egypt and Palestine. Athanasius was a bishop for forty-five years, of which he spent seventeen years in five different exiles ordered by four different Roman emperors—all, it’s worth noting, Christians—not counting the six times he fled Alexandria to escape attempts on his life. He truly earned the nickname Athanasius Contra Mundum: “Athanasius Against the World.” And yet he maintained the faith that God, in Jesus Christ, had come to dwell in our earthly city, defeating evil and death.

The line that is perhaps Athanasius’s most famous statement is this: “God became human, that we might become god.”  This is not about becoming gods, in the sense of super-heros with divine powers. It’s about growing up into our nature as human beings created in the image of God. Although we cannot take on what Eastern Orthodox theologians call the “divine essence”—the indescribable and transcendent inner nature of God—we become godly when we participate in the “divine energies,” the work or actions of God. When we love one another, when we comfort one another, when we heal one another, when we pray with one another, we are joining in God’s love, in God’s compassion, in God’s healing, and in God’s prayerful relationship with Godself, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in the divine community of the Holy Trinity. When we gather to offer our lives and our selves as a sacrifice of thanksgiving at the altar, or when we see the light of God in the eyes of those around us, we are entering into the kingdom of heaven that is veiled just behind everything we see. This is not a restoration to the days of innocence before suffering and death, nor of the days of Jesus’ ministry of miraculous healing. Rather, God comes into the pain and the brokenness of our world, and—having experienced it himself at its very worst—brings us through it to the other side.

Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, you see, is the only one who really gets it. If you look through Mark for the moments when he says someone serves Christ—the few times he uses the Greek verb διακονειν diakonein, “to serve,” the source of our modern word “deacon”—it’s never about the male disciples, who are usually looking out for their own status, or disputing among themselves who will get to sit at his right and left sides in heaven. No. It’s the angels, when Jesus is being tempted in the wilderness; it’s Peter’s mother-in-law; it’s—fast-forward fifteen chapters—the women watching at the cross: Mary Magdalene and Mary mother of James and Salome, who had followed and served him in Galilee. And, crucially, it is Jesus himself, who says to the disciples: “Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant [διάκονος diakonos], and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:43–45). Peter’s mother-in-law, the first to serve God in Christ, the first to be deacon to his followers, has shown herself to be great among the disciples.

Jesus has proclaimed the good news: God’s reign is here, God has claimed us for God’s own, God’s flag is planted in the soil of our hearts and of our minds, of our societies and of our world itself. We can choose to participate in that divine life or not; to serve God and one another or to seek our own glory. It isn’t the instantaneous cure we’ve been expecting—if there’s one thing we can say for sure about Jesus, after all, it’s that he rarely does what we’re expecting—but the love, care, and support we show in serving one another are God’s miraculous intervention in our world.

God, the Ruler of All, turns out to be pretty good at delegating—not because God doesn’t care about comforting and healing us, but because God cares even more about giving us the opportunity to grow into our human nature as images of God, by comforting and caring for one another.

“When [the disciples] found [Jesus], they said to him, ‘Everyone is searching for you.’ He answered, ‘Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.’” (Mark 1:37–38)

Amen.

A Song of Christ's Goodness

Our first reading for the coming Sunday, the Second Sunday of Advent, concludes with the verses:

See, the Lord GOD comes with might,
    and his arm rules for him;
his reward is with him,
    and his recompense before him.
He will feed his flock like a shepherd;
    he will gather the lambs in his arms,
and carry them in his bosom,
    and gently lead the mother sheep.

It's not often that we hear about the mighty arms of our tender mother God. What does it mean for God's arm to rule, Isaiah seems to ask, if not for God to gently gather us together in those arms?

St. Anselm of Canterbury

I was reminded, on reading this passage today, of the great poem by St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109), the medieval theologian, philosopher, and pastor, that we call "A Song of Christ's Goodness." Here's the version used as a canticle (a response to the readings in Morning or Evening Prayer) in the Episcopal Church's Enriching Our Worship:

Jesus, as a mother you gather your people to you; *
    you are gentle with us as a mother with her children.
Often you weep over our sins and our pride, *
    tenderly you draw us from hatred and judgment.
You comfort us in sorrow and bind up our wounds, *
    in sickness you nurse us and with pure milk you feed us.
Jesus, by your dying, we are born to new life; *
    by your anguish and labor we come forth in joy.
Despair turns to hope through your sweet goodness; *
    through your gentleness, we find comfort in fear.
Your warmth gives life to the dead, *
    your touch makes sinners righteous.
Lord Jesus, in your mercy, heal us; *
    in your love and tenderness, remake us.
In your compassion, bring grace and forgiveness, *
    for the beauty of heaven, may your love prepare us.

In a time when members of churches across the world are searching for language that expresses God's love with something other than masculine imagery, I'm always excited to see such beautiful examples from ancient and medieval sources within the Christian tradition.

And of course, in this season when we prepare to celebrate the simple and beautiful story of the Holy Family, of God born into the world to and through a kind and gentle mother, let's remember the beautiful circle of the love of our God, who was born of a human mother in order to be mother to all humans.

Pieta, sculptor unknown, c. 1420. Harvard Art Museums.

"Whose Image is This?"

This sermon was given by our Kellogg Fellow Greg Johnston at our service of Holy Eucharist on Sunday, October 19th.

“Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” (Matthew 22:21 KJV)

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

The verse I just quoted—“render therefore unto Caesar”—is from the King James Version of the Bible. Though this translation is dear to many people’s hearts, we don’t often use it in our liturgy. The King James was translated between 1604 and 1611. So it’s a translation from the best Hebrew and Greek manuscripts we had in 1611, using the best knowledge of Hebrew and Greek we had in 1611, into the English of 1611. In the four centuries since, we’ve discovered older manuscripts, closer to the original texts of the Biblical books, we’ve improved our knowledge of Hebrew and Greek, and of course our own language has continued to change.

So the translations we use today, like the New Revised Standard Version we use for our readings, are more accurate and easier to understand. But sometimes they lack a certain poetry. In a few weeks, once Advent has begun, Alice will start lamenting about once a week the replacement of “wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger” (Luke 2:7 KJV) with the NRSV’s “wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger” (Luke 2:7 NRSV). The King James’ text is one that’s become an almost proverbial classic, found everywhere from the highest-church Midnight Mass to the lowest-church children’s pageant.

“Render unto Caesar” is another one of the proverbial poetic phrases. It has a punch that “Give to the emperor” never will. I hear it most often, of course, used in a secular context, to argue for the separation of church and state. “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and unto God that which is God’s.” In other words, keep your Christian values out of my politics.

But as is so often the case with proof-texts—single verses that can be thrown down out of context to prove a certain point—I think it’s important to rewind a bit, to see what’s actually being said.

Because of the shape of our liturgical year, we haven’t actually been reading straight through Matthew’s gospel. If we had, a few weeks ago we would’ve had Palm Sunday. By our reading for today, Jesus has already ridden into Jerusalem for the last time on the back of a donkey. The people have shouted “Hosanna!” and proclaimed him their king. They’ve claimed for him some political authority. Then he’s entered into the Temple, driven out the money changers, and begun teaching with the parables we’ve read for the last few weeks. In other words, he’s claimed a certain religious authority.

So the powers that be are worried. The Pharisees and the Herodians wouldn’t normally get along. The Pharisees are a set of religious teachers who preach individual holiness, applying the purity laws of the Temple to all of life. They’re generally skeptical of Roman rule. The Herodians—supporters of the Herodian dynasty, the sons and relatives of King Herod—are a broadly pro-Roman party. To keep themselves in power, they must keep the flow of taxes going to Rome and keep the population subservient to the Empire.

So both groups are feeling threatened. A new king has been proclaimed, and now he’s teaching in the Temple. And so they come to him and plan to trap him with a question with religious and political overtones. “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” (Matthew 22:17) If Jesus says it’s lawful to pay taxes to the oppressive Roman occupying regime—taxes that were extremely unpopular among the people—he’ll lose his popular support and political legitimacy, boosting the Pharisees. If he says it’s not lawful, the Herodians will turn him over to the Romans and accuse him of inciting rebellion. And if he refuses to answer the question—which is framed as a halakhic question, a basic question of interpreting Jewish law—he’ll appear to be a sham, a phony rabbi who won’t give you a straight answer. So they challenge his political and religious authority.

Jesus, unsurprisingly, turns the tables on them. He asks them to show the coin they use to pay the tax. Now, we have to remember that this isn’t 21st-century America, where a dollar is a dollar is a dollar. You can pay with almost anything: a Roman coin, sure, but also a Jewish coin minted by Herod, an old Greek coin, a chicken, a loaf of bread, some livestock...whatever you have. And yet they hand over a Roman coin, a denarius. He’s accused them of being hypocrites, and they are. Trying to force him to appear as a Roman collaborator by legitimizing taxes, they’ve demonstrated that they themselves participate in the Roman economy. And even worse, they’ve given him a coin with a human face on it, a graven image abhorrent to Jews of the time—whose own coins, minted by Herod, had no human face. And worse, they’ve shown this graven image within the bounds of the Temple itself. Their political idolatry, their worship of Roman-minted money and Roman-protected power, is also a literal idolatry.

But Jesus is not simply a master of debate, content with putting his opponents to shame. He goes a step further with a question that at first seems stupid: “Whose head is this?” (Matthew 22:20) Here our NRSV, in trying to be clear, misrepresents the text a bit. The Greek word is “εἰκὼν” (eikōn), “icon.” Whose icon is this?

I said earlier that Jesus is answering a halakhic question, a question of law. This would normally be answered by referring to the Torah. Jesus does this in other places: for example, when answering a question about marriage and divorce, he refers to the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis. In our Gospel reading today, Jesus doesn’t explicitly refer to or quote a verse of Torah; but his reference is clear.

In Genesis 1:26, in the Greek translation with which the New Testament authors were familiar and often quote, God says, “Let us make humankind according to our εἰκὼν, according to our icon.” Our English translations usually read “according to our image,” “image” simply being the Latin equivalent to the Greek “icon.” And indeed, both Genesis 1:26 and Matthew 22:20 in their Latin translation use “image.” On the one hand, “Let us make humankind according to our image”; on the other hand, “Whose image is this” on the coin. Okay, enough historical linguistics—what’s the point?

The point is that Caesar can stamp his image on as many coins as he wants; but God has stamped God’s image on humankind itself, on every human being. The point is that the next verse is “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21 NRSV). Go ahead, Jesus says. Give to Caesar the things a human being can create: money, power, status, soldiers, armies. Give to God your whole selves as human beings, as embodied human souls beloved of God.

There’s an inscription on Emerson Hall in the Yard; I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed it. As you walk out of the back doors of Sever, through the Yard to Quincy St., and you look up to the right, there it is: “What is man that thou art mindful of him?” This is a quotation from Psalm 8, in the King James Version:

“When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,
the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;
What is man, that thou art mindful of him?
and the son of man, that thou visitest him?” (Psalms 8:3–4 KJV)

Who are we, as human beings, compared to the mind-numbing vastness and beauty of the universe, that God should pay us any attention at all, should care for us so much, should love each one of? Psalm 8 is the psalm of all those who have ever lain on their backs in a field and looked up at the stars and felt a sense of awe.

This wasn’t the inscription that was originally intended. Emerson Hall, as you might know, is the home of Harvard’s philosophy department. It’s named after Ralph Waldo Emerson, that great Harvard Unitarian and transcendentalist. And it was built at the turn of the century, as Harvard strived to finally shed its Puritan past and fully embrace the new rationalism, which taught that human beings, through their own logic, intellect, reason, and effort could create a new age of peace, prosperity, and progress. I would note that this was just ten or fifteen years before the outbreak of the Great War, when the technological brilliance of the age turned to the mass slaughter of human beings by the most efficient means possible: trench warfare, machine guns, and poison gas. But of course, this hadn’t yet happened. The illusion of unlimited reason and progress was still intact.

So perhaps it’s not surprising to hear that the original inscription that the philosophy faculty sought was not Psalm 8, but instead the great line of the Greek philosopher Protagoras: “Man is the measure of all things.” Now what does it take to look up at the stars and say to yourself,

“When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,
the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;
Man is the measure of all things?”

I can’t say. And I have to believe that inscribed in granite at the top of a monument to philosophy in the center of the bastion of the Boston Brahmin intellectual elite at the turn of the century, this means something more like, “The achievements of Man are the measure of all things.”

How often, I wonder, do we follow in the footsteps of our Harvard forebears? How often do we fool ourselves into believing that the things we can create—money, prestige, control, even others’ perceptions of ourselves—are more important than the things that God has created: human beings, our fellow animals, and our planet? How often do we too commit the idolatry of putting ourselves in the place of God as the ultimate arbiters of what is good?

On Friday our recently retired Bishop Tom Shaw died. Last year, after he had been diagnosed with brain cancer but while he was still well enough to work, Bishop Tom joined us at one of our Life Together trainings. During a time when we had the opportunity to ask questions, I asked him if he had any advice for those of us considering a life in ordained ministry. He took a moment to think, and answered, “Be open to the future.” As he continued to speak I realized he didn’t mean I should be open to my future—to remember during the long institutional process of discernment that I might not be called to priesthood—but to remember that we, as the church, should be open to our future—that it might look drastically different from our past.

Tom, of course, was a monk, not a parish priest, and he was a great supporter of less-conventional congregations and communities like Life Together, and like our college chaplaincies. He saw past the structures and titles we’d created to organize the church to the human beings who make up the Church.

As students and faculty at Harvard, we have shown ourselves to be good at navigating the application processes and career tracks we, as a society have created; structures and titles are sort of our specialty. Many of us here today are trying to figure out our next steps in life. So I can only pass along the advice I once got from a departed brother: Be open to the future. Grad school applications and on-campus interviews, clerkships and internships are things we have created. But we ourselves are made in God’s image.

“Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s;
 and unto God the things that are God’s.”

Amen.

"For it is God who is at work in you"

Henry Lamb, "Lamentation," 1911.

This sermon was given by Greg Johnston, our Kellogg Fellow, at our Eucharist on Sunday, September 28.

The year is 592 BC. The priest and prophet Ezekiel is experiencing the second of a series of visions, which his followers will eventually write down in what we now know as the Book of Ezekiel. This is a traumatic time in the history of the people of Israel. It’s been five years since the failed rebellion that ended with the Babylonian army looting the city of Jerusalem and the Temple and dragging off the king, Ezekiel, and many of the nation’s other leaders into captivity in Babylon.  In another five years, another rebellion will end with the fall of Jerusalem, the total destruction of the Temple, and the exile of the entire people of Judah. The author of Lamentations will write:

“How lonely sits the city
    that once was full of people!
How like a widow she has become,
    she that was great among the nations!
She that was a princess among the provinces
    has become a vassal.
 She weeps bitterly in the night,
    with tears on her cheeks…” (Lamentations 1:1–2)

In such a time of distress, the people naturally turn to their religious leaders, like Ezekiel.  How could God’s chosen people have fallen on such hard times? How could God’s habitation on earth, the Temple, be violated? How could the people whom God had brought out of bondage in Egypt be returned into bondage in Babylon?

In the ancient Near East gods were national gods; the defeat of the people of Israel by the people of Babylon was a defeat of the God of Israel by the gods of Babylon.

Unless—and this is the answer that the people came to—unless God was in control all along, and the people had somehow brought such destruction on themselves.

But of course, nobody wants to take responsibility for causing the Babylonian punishment that follows the rebellion. So they blame what they see as God’s punishment on somebody else. “The parents have eaten sour grapes,” they protest, “and the children’s teeth are set on edge”” (Ezekiel 18:2). We’ve done nothing wrong, in other words. We’re being punished for the sins of our parents!

Ezekiel rejects this theory. We rebelled, he says, and we are being punished. It’s quite straightforward: “When the righteous turn away from their righteousness and commit iniquity, they shall die for it” (18:26). And there’s a hopeful corollary: “when the wicked turn away from the wickedness they have committed and do what is lawful and right, they shall save their life” (18:27).

Righteousness and wickedness, life and death. There are at least two ways to think about these things. We can think about them historically, on one level: If the people of Israel turn away from their warlike ways, they will continue to live as a single nation. If they do not, they will die. The Temple will be destroyed, as it was after the next rebellion. If we do not stop rebelling, trying to save ourselves through violence, we will die. Or we can think about this, as later Jewish and Christian interpreters would, as a sort of eternal or spiritual life and death. This mysterious sense of spiritual life and death being distinct from physical life and death would shape later ideas of heaven and hell, sin and salvation. Either way, God seems to be offering a choice.

Our collect for today begins with the words, “O God, you declare your almighty power chiefly in showing mercy and pity.” Not in deciding the outcome of wars, but in mercy and pity. Here is an example of how God’s mercy operates, one that is central to the work of John the Baptist and to Jesus’ ministry: those who turn away from sin into righteousness will be brought out of death into life.

And yet this notion of divine mercy, I have to admit, troubles me. Unlike other virtues—kindness, love, humility, faith, hope—mercy has a dark side. To be merciful to you means that I had every right to punish you, but chose not to.  The president is merciful when he pardons someone on death row; it would have been right according to the law to execute that person, but someone with authority chooses not to.

My faith in God is a faith in a God of unconditional love. But the mercy we’re told about here is a conditional mercy; if the wicked turn from their wickedness, then their lives will be saved. But if God is really in control—and that’s what this whole theory of divine punishment is about in the first place—God can save the lives of the wicked, whether they repent or not! God’s so-called mercy isn’t an act of benevolently loosening the application of the rules, it’s simply a system of its own rules.

Or is it?

To really follow the thread of this story we have to zoom back out to the historical view. About a half-century later, you see, the people of Israel are saved. They are offered the chance to return to their homeland, to rebuild their Temple, and to reunite their nation. This isn’t due to their own righteousness—they haven’t embraced the prophets and created a utopian society of peace, love, and justice—no! It’s at the hands of yet another conquering king: Cyrus the Great, the Persian king who overthrows the Babylonians and allows the exiles to return home and rebuild the Temple. If this is an act of God’s mercy, it’s one that truly goes beyond the rules, beyond the need for repentance, into unconditional love for an unrepentant people.

And yet the narrative is never so simple. The end of the exile is not the end of conquest, but only the beginning; the Jewish people are ruled by a variety of foreign kings with only brief spells of independence until the time, centuries later, a few decades after the death of Jesus, when, at the end of yet another great rebellion, Roman armies destroy the Second Temple and the Jewish people are scattered across the world.

You can see why the spiritual reading became more popular. In this interpretation, we’re not necessarily punished for our sins or rewarded for our goodness in this life; this fits better with our personal and historical experience. We know that goodness doesn’t guarantee good fortune, and vice versa. As Christians, of course, we read these lines about life and death through the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus, in which God somehow takes on death itself. Having sent prophet after prophet, God finally comes in person to call us back into right relationship. This, like the liberation from exile, is not a result of our goodness; if anything, it’s the opposite, the result of our brokenness.

So the rules of repentance are broken. God calls us to turn away from evil and lovingly disregards our failure to do so. What are we supposed to do, in light of this pattern of divine mercy, this pattern of God breaking the rules of repentance and calling us again and again to return to our relationship with God?

Paul gives one answer to the Church in Philippi: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5), he writes, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited [other translations of the word are “grasped,” “grabbed,” “claimed”], but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:6–8).

Paul’s quoting a hymn here, one that would have been known to his audience. And he’s not quoting it to tell them about the life of Jesus. They know about the life of Jesus. They know about his death on the cross. No, Paul is exhorting his audience to have the same mind in them that was in Christ, to practice the same mercy we see in Christ.

Jesus, after all, had every right to do nothing—he was in the form of God, he was equal to God, he was the second person of the Trinity of God. But he chose not to exploit, to grasp onto that equality to save himself but to dive in to the world of human brokenness and pain, emptying himself—the Greek term for this is kenosis, emptying—humbly emptying himself of his own ego, of his own sense of justice and injustice done to himself and allowing love to take its place. And we, Paul says, are to have the same mind in us.

Now, with the possible exception of some of the lawyers in the room, few of us will ever be able to practice mercy in the execution of criminal justice.  But I don’t think that’s what this is really about. At its core, it’s about relationship: God’s relationship with us, our relationships with one another. All of us have been wronged: by friends, parents, roommates, strangers—hopefully not by professors, so early in the semester. I think most importantly and most universally, all of us have wronged ourselves.

And all of us are entitled to experience anger, frustration, and indignation. In fact, not only are we entitled to feel these things: we simply will. We have no control over our emotions, any more than Christ had control over his divinity, his “being in the form of God,” his equality to the Father and the Holy Sprit.

We don’t have the choice not to feel angry. But we do have a choice: not to grasp onto our anger. I can’t speak for you, but I know that I have often been tempted to hold onto a feeling of righteous anger, to keep using it as an excuse not to rebuild my relationship with another person. Rather than feeling angry because I’ve been wronged, I feel smug because I’m in the right!

To be merciful, I think, means to be humble about our own senses of justice and injustice. It means the judge is humble about how perfect the system of law and its prescribed punishments really are. It means that God humbly recognizes that God’s love for us transcends any rules God can set. It means that Jesus recognizes that his love for us goes far beyond his own entitlement to a safe detachment from the world. It means that as Ezekiel suggests, perhaps for a moment, we stop blaming our parents for everything we’ve done wrong. It means that we have to work to recognize that our love for one another must go beyond our feelings of hurt and of righteous anger.

I can’t pretend that this sounds easy to me. In fact, I think it’s terrifying, the notion of striving to forgive others with the same self-emptying, the same kenosis with which God forgives.

But I think that when we strive to let the same mind be in us that is in Christ Jesus, we are doing our best—to paraphrase the collect— to “declare God’s mighty power chiefly in showing our mercy.”

“For it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13). Amen.

The Bishop's Chair

This past Saturday, people from across the world gathered to consecrate and celebrate Alan Gates as the new Bishop of Massachusetts. At first glance the service—which my sources, incidentally, timed at two hours, seventeen minutes, and forty-four seconds from the first words of the opening hymn to the last line of the dismissal—was all about an individual man. The decorations of the arena were structured around a set of wall hangings brought from St. Paul’s Church in Cleveland, Ohio, where Bishop Alan had been rector. The sermon highlighted the personal qualities that will make him an excellent bishop. The liturgy for the ordination of a bishop includes a lengthy examination, in which examining bishops directly address the bishop-to-be, with everyone else spectating.

But as with so many of the rituals we use to mark the stages of our lives—baptisms, confirmations, marriages, funerals—this one was only partly about the individual. In a bigger way, it marked a time of transition for the Episcopal Church in Massachusetts: a transition from two decades with Bishop Tom Shaw into a new era.  The length of a bishop’s tenure is long, when we’re accustomed to the constant campaigning of the political calendar. Consider, for a moment: the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts and the United States of America were founded almost simultaneously. Barack Obama is the forty-fourth President of the United States. Alan Gates is only the sixteenth Bishop of Massachusetts. The end of a long service marks only the beginning of an immeasurably longer relationship.

Essdras M. Suarez / The Boston Globe

In his sermon, Bishop Mark Hollingsworth of Ohio speculated about the size of the bishop’s chair. The bishop’s chair, he joked, is the largest in the church—because the bishop has the most growing to do.

Almost a year ago, Bishop Tom visited one of our Life Together trainings and we had the opportunity to ask him a few questions. I asked what advice he had for those of us considering a life of full-time ministry in the church. With characteristic and genuine thoughtfulness, he paused for a few moments, then answered: “Be open about the future.”

We can’t know, Bishop Tom suggested, what the church will look like a few decades down the road. We can’t steer it in the right direction; often we can’t even guess what that direction might be.

What we can do—what all of us can do, bishop or layperson, college student or experienced professional, newborn or near to death, as individuals and communities—is to choose, over and over again, a seat that’s just a bit too big for us.

We’ve got plenty of time to grow.

Reflections on Repentance

This sermon was given on Saturday, December 7 by our friend Greg Johnston at All Saint's Parish in Brookline. Greg is one of the Life Together fellows All Saint's has graciously housed in the church rectory this year.

I want to thank you all for welcoming me here today. And even more importantly, I want to thank you for the welcome you’ve given me in the last three months. Most of you probably don’t recognize me, although some might. Maybe you’ve seen me carrying bags of groceries through the front door of the rectory as you come here on Saturday evening, or maybe you’ve seen me sitting on the bench in the yard.

I’ve been living next door since August as a part of the Life Together Community. A group of us live in the rectory in intentional community, working at congregations and nonprofits across Greater Boston, doing service and community organizing, working for justice. Those of us staying at ASP have come from Texas, North Carolina, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin—and even Massachusetts! It’s been incredible for us to have access to a big house in a great neighborhood like this—it’s allowed us to build a strong community that can help support us in our work outside it.

Well, I’m one of the few from Massachusetts. I grew up in Winchester, which is a lot like Brookline in some ways: it’s white, upper-middle class, great schools, progressive. I grew up in a congregation that was very focused on service: I always volunteered moving furniture at the Mission of Deeds, or working at the Woburn Council of Social Concern soup kitchen, and went further afield on youth mission trips to work in homeless shelters in DC and New York, on a farm in Georgia, and at a youth camp in Puerto Rico. But we’d never really been activists: we spent our time working to ease the symptoms of injustice rather than addressing the causes.

I went to college and, like many young adults, drifted away from the church. Outside the community I was used to, I didn’t have my own spiritual life. With papers and exams and reading, service wasn’t a priority. And I got so caught up in the culture of achievement, of success, that it seemed for a while like the best way to change things would be to go to law school, work in government, eventually maybe run for political office. And if, along the way, I ended up in corporate 

But instead here I am, making $450 a month, living a life of intentional simplicity with six other people, spending my time in prayer and working at a community organization in Dorchester called the Massachusetts Communities Action Network. Why?

One of the first weekends I was working there, a coworker and I were driving to a meeting at a church in Fall River. Now, Tomas is 42 years old. He grew up in South Boston and Dorchester. His family, who were some of the only Latino business owners in Southie during the busing riots, left after their bodega and their home were burned down. He had worked in politics and for the labor movement his whole life. We were going to a meeting with a bunch of working-class congregations in Fall River and New Bedford about the minimum wage. He turned to me and said: “You know, when I looked at your resume, I had no idea why you were taking this job.”

And so I told him. I told him about the lack of real connections between people I’d seen in college, about people so obsessed with getting the best internship that they didn’t have time to really get to know each other. I told him about my family: that the same economic system that forced people working minimum-wage jobs to work sixty hours a week forced my venture-capitalist dad to do the same, that the culture of possessions, power, and prestige that led Walmart to fire employees for organizing had led to my parents’ divorce.

And I told him about the moment, when I was sitting in my college dining hall with a friend, one of the most genuine people I knew, talking about our real selves, our values, our families, who we thought we were, what we really cared about—the moment when I first experienced genuine, holy listening, and the first moment in a long time when I experienced the presence of God.

It was a moment that led me to repent.

Repentance is one of the central themes of Advent, what we call—in a truly-Episcopalian turn of phrase—a “mildly penitential” season. Now, you know I’m a New Englander. And you know I’m a mainline Protestant. I don’t know about you, but growing up we didn’t talk much about repentance. Repentance meant sin. It meant Puritanical ideas about sex. But the contrast we see in the readings today is different. It’s a contrast between “righteousness” and “repentance.”

“Repent!” John the Baptist says. “μετανοεῖτε,” in in Matthew’s Greek. He sounds like one of those guys you encounter on the T—they’re generally guys—who works himself up into a furor over fornication or contraception or Obamacare while everyone politely looks away.

That’s not what John is going for. “μετανοεῖτε” means something different. It comes from two Greek words: “μετα,” which often means “across”—a metaphor is something that carries its meaning across expressions; and “νους,” which is understanding or intellect. “μετανοεῖτε” means “Change your mind!” but even more than that... “Change your understanding!”

Benedictine monks and nuns have a principle of “conversion of life.” This really goes beyond Benedictines though, to all Christians. In our baptismal covenant we renounce Satan, evil, and sin—and we turn toward Jesus. We repent. We re-orient ourselves away from the path of evil toward the path of righteousness, of justice. “Repent!” John the Baptist tells us. But what—in a concrete sense—are we supposed to turn away from? What are we supposed to turn towards?

Isaiah gives us one answer: righteousness. In Advent, we read Isaiah as a prediction of the two comings of the Messiah, the Christ: a shoot from the stump of Jesse, who “shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor” (Isaiah 11:3–4). Righteousness, Isaiah tells us, “shall be the belt around his waist” (Isaiah 11:5).

But what’s righteousness? Is it just about wolves and lambs lying together, about unimaginable pie-in-the-sky dreams? Is it just what will happen after the Second Coming, something we don’t have to worry about until then? Is this topsy-turvy world, the world turned upside down, the world that the Gospel proclaims—is this something we can work for on earth?

The psalmist puts it a little more straightforwardly. A righteous person is an ally to the poor, an enemy to the oppressor. The New Revised Standard Version translation maintains the parallelism in the second and fourth verses:

May he judge your people with righteousness,
and your poor with justice. (Psalm 72:2)

May he defend the cause of the poor of the people, 
give deliverance to the needy,
and crush the oppressor. (Psalms 72:4)

To judge with righteousness simply means to defend the cause of the poor, give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor. Sure, there’s some community service here, in delivering the needy. But the overwhelming force of the point is that the righteous king, when judging between the causes of the rich and the poor, chooses the cause of the poor. Community organizing, the way we do it, is all about building an alliance between the cause of the poor and the values of the faithful. As the BCP psalter puts it, and as we’ve all just said, we have a commitment to “defend the needy among the people,” “rescue the poor,” and “crush the oppressor.”

At my site placement I’ve been working on a ballot-initiative campaign to raise the minimum wage and to allow all workers to earn sick time at work. Passing these questions would benefit one million of the poorest workers in the state. We needed 200,000 signatures to put them on the 2014 ballot. We gathered 285,000. People of faith working with MCAN collected 69,000, two or three times the number of the strongest labor unions or progressive political groups. This, today, is “the cause of the poor of the people.” And this is how we, as people of faith, have responded.

This is the conversion of life, the repentance, that I’ve experienced in these last three months. Tomas, you see, was right. When I graduated from college, I could have been making six or seven times what I’m making, working in a job with ten or twenty times the prestige. Working alongside poor and working-class people on poor and working-class issues, living simply in an intentional Christian community founded on faith, prayer, and real relationships—these are choices that come directly out of the calling I experienced from God to repent. Not to feel guilty; not to say “I’m sorry”; but to turn away from a life that wasn’t sustaining me, a life that wasn’t really living at all, and to turn toward the kingdom of God. “Repent,” says John the Baptist, “for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

Repentance has never been easy. Conversion of life has never been easy. It’s never even been comprehensible. St. Cyprian, a third-century African bishop—a man who gave away his entire estate and inheritance over the course of his life to support the poor in his diocese—wrote this to a friend:

“How,” said I, “is such a conversion possible, that there should be a sudden and rapid divestment of all which, either innate in us has hardened in the corruption of our material nature, or acquired by us has become inveterate by long accustomed use? These things have become deeply and radically engrained within us. When does he learn thrift who has been used to liberal banquets and sumptuous feasts? And he who has been glittering in gold and purple, and has been celebrated for his costly attire, when does he reduce himself to ordinary and simple clothing? One who has felt the charm of the fasces and of civic honours shrinks from becoming a mere private and inglorious citizen.”1

Possession, power, prestige—these are things that have become “deeply and radically engrained” within us. We can’t simply decide to root them out and have them gone the next day. There’s no magical switch we can flip. Intentional community, more than anything, is a structure that supports each of us in our practice of eradicating our deeply and radically engrained dependence on privilege and wealth. Having a house, a place for that community to live together in this daily practice, has been so important, and such a blessing—and for that we thank you, again and again.

I’m certainly not perfect. I know for a fact that I never will be, this side of that second Advent, the Second Coming in Glory. It’s a good thing, really, that Advent comes every year—that every year we hear the call to “repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

And so I ask you, on this Second Sunday of Advent 2013, as we’re surrounded by advertisements for gifts, by news stories of people being beaten at Walmart over a good deal on a new Xbox, as we hear about strikes for fair wages at Walmart and McDonald’s, as we hear about activists turning in a stack of petition sheets for workers’ ballot issues a foot-and-a-half taller than a T-re—I ask you, what are you doing, individually, congregationally, and as a whole church, to repent? What are you doing to defend the cause of the poor? To deliver the needy? To crush the oppressor?

“μετανοειτε!” John the Baptist cries out. “Repent!” “Change your understanding!” “Change your life!”

Amen.

1 Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, eds. Fathers of the Third Century: Hippolytus, Cyprian, Caius, Novatian, Appendix. vol. V of The Ante-Nicene Fathers. Accordance electronic ed. (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1885), n.p.