“So I’ll tell you what this season looks like for me: it feels like we’ve all just attended a funeral. Actually, it feels as though we’re all attending a funeral. The problem is we’re all attending different funerals.”
Lent 5 - Can These Bones Live? - Greg Johnston (3/29/20)
“Every time you come to this website and join in this virtual worship, a new sinew connects you to the rest of us. Every time you phone a church friend to see how they’re doing, a new tendon stretches out between the two of you. Every time you log on to Zoom for Bible Study or Teen Formation or Crafternoon, you’re adding flesh and skin to the Body of Christ.”
Lent 4 - Breathing Under Water
“What does it mean to ‘breathe underwater?’ I’ll be the first to say, I have no idea. There was no class on any of this in seminary. And yet, before we grow any supernatural gills, we need to recognize that we are underwater. The indefiniteness of this moment; the uncertainty of it strikes us all differently, and yet the feeling of being underwater is a good one–some of us might feel like life is a massive undertow, and for others of us it is the dread of looking down and not being able to see the bottom.”
Lent 3 - Fear - Greg Johnston (3/15/20)
“I don’t know what you’re feeling right now. Confusion, or fear? Anxiety, or panic? Whatever you’re feeling, God is right there with you. If you can’t ‘shout for joy to the Rock of [your] salvation’ right now, then wail in lament and growl in frustration. If you can’t ‘come before [God’s] presence with thanksgiving,’ then ‘raise a loud shout’ of fear and anxiety. Trust me, there are plenty of psalms for that.”
Lent 2 - Springsteen Born Again - Garrett Yates (3/8/20)
“‘You must be born again,’ says Jesus. ‘If you want to see the Kingdom of God, you must be born again.’ What does that mean? Some Episcopalians get a little nervous, a little anxious, with that phrase. We associate the phrase at its best with Jimmy Carter, and at its worst with the televangelist. The holy roller. The guy with iridescent teeth and a silky tent revival voice, he and his wife rocking the bouffant hair. Is that what you want from us, Jesus?”
Lent 1 - Shame - Greg Johnston (3/1/20)
“Guilt, at its best, opens us up. It leads us outside ourselves and turns us toward reconciliation with someone else. Someone who never feels guilt is either Jesus or a sociopath; either they’ve never done anything wrong, or they’ve never felt any remorse for it. Shame, on the other hand, is never healthy. If guilt is the feeling that you’ve done something wrong, shame is the feeling that you are wrong. That you’re not good enough. You’re not strong enough or pretty enough or brave enough, rich enough or tall enough or smart enough. Where guilt leads us to turn out toward another person for forgiveness, shame leads us to turn into ourselves for concealment.”
Ash Wednesday - Garrett Yates (2/26/20)
“For some of us, coming to Ash Wednesday, coming to get the imposition of ashes, feels a little odd. It feels odd because it’s like someone living in a dust bowl being reminded that things are dusty. We know that; we open the news and often enough it reads like Henderson’s letters to a friend: ‘Letters from a Dust Bowl.’ And nevertheless, we come. ‘From dust you came, and to dust you shall return.’ Coughing, tired, struggling for any visibility – we come.”
The Transfiguration - Greg Johnston (2/23/20)
“Like ten-year-olds, we hustle to set up our tents. We lie back down again on the porch and look at the stars, praying for wonder to strike. We go to the museum or the chalkboard again and stare, waiting for the aha moment to come. We look at our children and our spouses and our parents and we feel…other feelings, mixed with overwhelming joy and love. But these moments where we once found holiness, these moments where we saw the light of God shining forth, were never the places to pitch our tents, never the places for the Holy One to dwell.”
Epiphany 6 - Garrett Yates (2/16/20)
The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple - Greg Johnston (2/2/20)
"Come and See" - Garrett Yates (1/19/20)
The Baptism of Jesus - Greg Johnston (1/12/20)
“‘He saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him.’ It just wouldn’t have the same ring to it if it was a pigeon flapping over to sit on his head. It was, of course, a pigeon. Pigeons and doves, are, after all, members of the same family. The species we call the ‘common pigeon’ is the same as the ‘rock dove.’ It’s just that, in our culture, we think of pigeons as being kind of grimy. Uncouth. ‘Flying rats.’ But doves! Oh, doves! So beautiful, so intelligent! …I say all this because I think we often look at our lives and see pigeons where we ought to see doves. We feel the Spirit of God whooshing towards us and we cower and run, covering our heads with our handbags and ducking under an awning.”
Christmas 2 - Garrett Yates (1/5/20)
“One of the big differences between us and our ancestors is that they lived in an enchanted world, and we do not. That is to say, they believed in gods and fairies; that the river had its own divinity; that relics and the bones of martyrs were charged with divine energy. The divine and human realms were permeable, always flowing and interrupting the other. Our world isn’t like that. Our world is disenchanted, un-magicked.”
Christmas 1 - Greg Johnston (12/29/19)
“When we finally turned out the lights and went to bed, I discovered that there were glow-in-the-dark stars stuck all over their ceiling. I’d never noticed them all afternoon, but they’d been slowly getting charged up by the light around them, and now they were shining. Of course, I guess they’d been glowing all along. You just couldn’t notice it because of the bright lights, so it was only in the darkness that I’d realized they were there. The message, this first Sunday after Christmas, is simple: we are, all of us, glow-in-the-dark stars.”
Christmas Eve - Garrett Yates (12/24/19)
“My generation invented the word, or acronym, ‘FOMO’ – fear of missing out, of being left out, say, of that group text planning a party. There is also, so I’ve learned, ‘FOJI,’ fear of joining in: “I would totally join in karaoking but I’m busy tonight”…Christmas allows us to dream dreams and risk and dare. Because, this evening, the Christ-child enters the defenses of our world, defenseless, and thereby disarms us. He disarms us of our fear of judgment. And his presence frees us up for what theologian James Alison called the ‘joy of being wrong.’ The Joy of Being Wrong: JOBW.”
Advent 3 - Garrett Yates (12/15/19)
“Some of you know that in my previous life before I was ordained I coached girls basketball. I would often stay up late and watch my favorite college and NBA teams play, and I’d record their plays in a notebook, and I’d use it with my team. The problem was that all the players I was watching on TV were very tall, very good, and could dunk. My JV Lady Eagles were not so gifted. And many a time I’d draw something up, telling which player would be Lebron, or who would be Kobe, and when it came time to execute, I’d be mystified, and I’d have the thought – that is not what I drew up. John is in a slightly more serious situation, but I imagine a similar thought coming to him now – Jesus, did you not see the play?”
Advent 2 - Greg Johnston (12/8/19)
“The Bible is not just one self-contained episode after another. It’s a huge narrative arc, told in different genres and languages across a millennium, a library of a thousand little stories that together tell one big story. And in Jesus, Paul claims in today’s reading from the letter to the Romans, God is writing us into the story.”
Advent 1 - Garrett Yates (12/1/19)
“When we talk about what we love about church—this church—we talk about our music program, we talk about Catechesis of the Good Shepherd for our children, or maybe about the simple elegance of the worship space and the way the light comes in. Each of these things might stick out to us, but of course it’s not these things we are drawn to, but what comes through them, what meets us in this space. We come here in search of peace, and we often find it. We come to church in search of Isaiah 2. We do not, it turns out, come to church in search of Matthew 24. That’s a weird gospel. ‘Keep awake, therefore; for you do not know what day your Lord is coming.’ I know it’s your favorite doctrine: the Second Coming of Christ.”
Christ the King - Greg Johnston (11/24/19)
“The feast of Christ the King was established at a time when authoritarian regimes were on the rise and more and more people were accepting the idea that a strongman wielding violence and technology could bend morality and truth to his will. When we claim that Christ is King, we are claiming that even the most savvy dictator cannot define the truth; that the most powerful forces of this world, ‘whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities,’ are not the highest power; that however turbulent our times may be, the domain of darkness will never triumph over the kingdom of God.“
Pentecost 23 - Greg Johnston (11/17/19)
“A few years ago I served at a church with a weekly free community dinner. These dinners really brought the community together: we had suburban churches and synagogues serving food, we had our parishioners helping set up and clean up, and some of the folks who came regularly to dinner on Tuesdays also started attending worship on Sundays. And hanging on a banner above the doors into the parish hall were the Biblical words from today’s reading that had inspired it all: ‘Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.’ …NOT.”