Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to hear the full service

Click here to watch the full service

Click here to hear just the sermon

Faith in the Shadows

1 Corinthians 15

February 16, 2025

Marsh Chapel

Robert Allan Hill

Vaccine

If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

         The appearance of a brilliant Easter gospel lesson, 1 Corinthians 15, amid the pre-Lenten snows of New England, and its core sentence upon ‘this life only’, conjures faith, a faith that can live even…in the shadows.  Faith in Christ in the shadows of national turmoil.  Faith in Christ in the shadows of personal ennui.  Faith in Christ in and within the shadows of mortal proximity, of the proximity of our mortality.  Faith in Christ, over against the current state of affairs.  Faith is living for, living in, living toward something better.  Your faith is about living for something better, better than this current life only.

         Part of our problem with vaccines is that we do not any longer have among us in full measure those who could see and did see what came before.  Other generations had no difficulty understanding the dread of polio, for instance.  They lived with it.  They saw the wretched hurt brought to their childhood chums, their third-grade best friends, their neighbors down the street when polio struck.  And those, Salk and Sabine and all, who developed the vaccines, did so out of a human hope, a resurrection hope, out of a faith over against the shadows, that such misery could be eradicated.  They did not live for this life only, and they did not work for this life only, but labored for a hope for something else, something better.  As do our many Boston University physicians and researchers and scientists, who labor in love for forms of life we do not yet see.  To have their brilliance accosted by the current ignorance in Washington, to have their hope belittled by the current mendacity and malignancy in Washington, elected by Republicans, sadly becoming the party of cruelty, near and far, is an unspeakable offense to God and man both.  Read and re-read the sermons from this pulpit since 2016.  We have been warned.

         My parents’ generation knew polio from the street, the swimming pool, the classroom, the Sunday school.  Mitch McConnell’s memory of such this week bears witness, McConnell who was treated at Warm Springs Georgia at the same time as was President Roosevelt. But that memory, that visceral, gut memory is now largely gone, gone with that generation gone.  On a snowy day sometime in 1959, if memory serves, I was driven up the road a few towns to receive a vaccine.  The details sadly are dim.  I believe my mother drove me alone, out from the little village of Hamilton, and due north, looking down from the edge of the Allegheny plateau, into the smaller still village of Stockbridge.  There was and still is there an elementary school built by FDR during the depression, schools that dot the towns of that region in every direction.  Solid stone, with arched openings left and right.  We pulled up, with my mother dressed in a long coat, and wearing a flattened hat, and gloves.  At least as I remember. I am sure I was every bit an ornery rascal at age 5 as you can imagine.  But we made our way.  Then something unusual and a bit terrifying happened.  My mother, a very stoic soul in all regards, especially in public, burst into tears.  We did not discuss it.  It made the impending vaccination all the more terrifying, I imagine.  But, whether Salk or Sabine, we got through it.  Here is what I think.  I think she was overcome by the recognition that her children, now beginning with the oldest, would be spared polio, spared what she had seen her classmates suffer.  By vaccine. Because some scientists had faith that over against the shadows, there was a resurrection betterness out there, waiting to be embraced. Not this life only, as we now have it, but a fuller, richer, safer, better life, under the resurrection power of new life, and finally, of eternal life.

         Healing is a sign of resurrection.

Wiesel

If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

         Our disinvestment in memory, in shared memory, in history, across the land, has somewhat gotten now the better of us just now, for a time.  But there is history to be had, and made, and honored. It is all around us, right here.  It is rich with the sacrificial lived memory of those who have suffered.  Last week, I stopped to buy a newspaper (New York Times 2/5/25, A21), and walking along, read on the bottom of the death of Marion Wiesel.  Jan and I first met Elie Wiesel in New York City in 1978, over dinner, in the living room of our teacher, of blessed memory, Robert McAfee Brown.  Wiesel had just come to Boston University as a University Professor.  Marion and he married in 1969.  Both had survived the Holocaust.  She worked alongside him, translating his writing from French to English, in elegant style, including her 2006 re-translation of NIGHT.  One said, ‘In the alignment of stars that helped make Wiesel the international icon he became, his marriage to Marion was among the most significant.’(J Berger).  On this BU campus, and across our multiple and serious differences, we shall need and want to remember and evoke, from all sides, those who have brought out the best in us, the memories of whom, again from all sides, may guide us to a better future, one that is fuller, richer, safer, one that carries the resurrection power of new life, and so brings resurrection faith along with us, even into the deepest shadows.

         When my father died in June of 2010, now nearly 15 years ago, two days after his burial, I received a note from one of our choristers, Ondine Brent, who worked as Elie Wiesel’s administrator (partly I am sure because of her own excellent French):  Dean Hill, Professor Wiesel asked me to send you the following message: ‘Dear Friend, my deepest condolences.  In our tradition we say:  may you be spared further sorrow.  Elie Wiesel.  Such a kindness. I have kept and cherish the letter. In autumn 2013 I had been scheduled to introduce him on October 21, for his first lecture of the usual three that year, all annualy attended by 800-1,000 people, on TRAGEDY AND ITS LITERATURE IN THE BIBLE.  Sadly, he became physically unable to do so, nor was he ever able to do so again before his own death in 2016.  Not so long ago, up and down the sidewalks of Commonwealth Avenue, we had here at BU a capacity to reach out to one another across serious differences, and to engage with and learn from each other, even in the teeth of dire disagreement.  I would say that such is the best of the Methodist part of our BU Methodist heritage.  My prayer and hope is that some of that, and the wisdom therein, will emerge and re-emerge, in the face of what is the deplorable contemporary tragedy, itself of Biblical proportions, in the Middle East.  Marsh Chapel has, does, and can continue to provide some measures of such engagement.  May it be so. For who hopes for what he sees?  We hope for what we do not see, and wait for it with patience, hoping not only for what this life alone can offer, but for what the life and light of eternal love, the resurrection itself, can offer.  The harbinger of resurrection is kindness, a foretaste of eternity.

         For there to be any global future worthy of the name, there will need to be investment in memory, of what works, what matters, what counts, and what lasts.

         Kindness is a sign of resurrection.

October 7

If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

         Over this past academic year, the night I had least sleep was that before October 7.  There were to be, and were, gatherings and protests that day and through that week.  But contrast, we offered here in Marsh Chapel an 8am universal, ecumenical service of prayer for peace.  Leadership included women and men from many traditions, including Methodist, Episcopal, Jewish, Muslim, Presbyterian, and Catholic, with special music guiding us.  The service was not heavily attended (even though I prevailed on my Monday 8am Gospel of John to come, and survival rates among them were high!), but our senior University leadership and some several others did grace us all with their presence. In smaller gatherings, including that one, and bit by bit, including this last week, we are beginning to see some slow emergence of some common ground.

         Our Muslim Chaplain, Nagla, very new to the campus, and to our community, particularly offered a sonorous and poetic prayer, to guide us toward a a shared hope for peace, a shared sense of possibility, a shared sense of common ground, which with the other prayers made of that morning a limited but lasting acknowledgement of all that we cannot see or know, and all that for which yearn together, in a common hope.  We were able at 8am to pray together.

         There, therein, is a footprint in the snow, a sign of lasting life, a Rosebud memory and hope.  Now you don’t believe, do you, that only Methodist will be in heaven, in the resurrection.  What about Presbyterians? An Episcopalians?  And Baptists?  And Lutherans?  And what about non-Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox and all?  And…what about Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Bahais? And what about non-religious folks, and others, and all?  I mean, is resurrection merely an eternity of Methodist hymn sings, prayer meetings, garage sales and tithing? Prayer, when it is universal, not just particular, is hope that carries beyond this life.

         Prayer is a sign of resurrection

February 11

If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

Recall ThorntonWilder’s OUR TOWN Emily Webb returning from the dead.  She asks, just once, to return to Grovers’ Corners, to see and hear and taste and touch and feel.  “Choose the least important day in your life.  It will be important enough.”  She picks her 12th birthday, at dawn, early in the morning.

Three days snow, in Grover’s Corners.  Main Street, the drug store.  Mr. Webb coming home on the night train from Hamilton College.  Howie Newsome, the policeman.  Mrs. Webb (“how young she looks!  I didn’t know Mama was ever that young”).  10 below zero… and the morning banter…

I can’t find my blue ribbon

Open your eyes dear.  I laid it out for you. If it were a snake it would bite you.

The milk man arrives.  Mr.  Webb kisses Mrs. Webb.  

Don’t forget Charles it’s Emily’s birthday.

I’ve got something right here.  Where is she?  Where’s my birthday girl?

Breakfast, early in the morning, in New Hampshire: ‘A very happy birthday to you.  There are some surprises on the kitchen table.  But birthday or no birthday I want you to eat your breakfast good and slow.

I want you to grow up and be a good, strong girl.

That blue paper is from your Aunt Carrie

And I reckon you can guess who brought the post-card album

I found it on the doorstep when I brought in the milk–George Gibbs.

Chew that bacon good and slow.  It’ll keep you warm on a cold day.’

‘O Mama, look at me one minute as though you really saw me.  Mama 14 years have gone by.  I’m dead.  You’re a grandmother Mama.  I married George Gibbs.  Wally’s dead too.  His appendix burst on a camping trip to North Conway.  We felt just terrible about it–don’t you remember?  But, just for a moment now we’re all together, Mama.  Just for a moment we’re happy.  LET’S LOOK AT ONE ANOTHER’

‘So all that was going on and we never noticed.  Grover’s Corners.  Mama and Papa. Clock’s ticking. Sunflowers.  Food and coffee.  New ironed dresses and hot baths.  Sleeping and waking up.  Earth! You are too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

         Wonder is a sign of resurrection. 

         Healing, kindness, prayer, wonder. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. Healing, kindness, prayer, wonder.  May our faith guide us in the shadows, on toward Him who is the first fruits of those who have died.

         Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ—whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 02.16.2025 at 11:00 am

No Comments »

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to hear the full service

Click here to watch the full service

Click here to hear just the sermon

posted in Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music, The Bach Experience, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 02.9.2025 at 11:00 am

No Comments »

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to hear the full service

Click here to watch the full service

Click here to hear just the sermon

Communion Meditation

Luke 4: 21-30

Ground Hog Day 2025

Marsh Chapel

Robert Allan Hill

Opening

Ye that do truly and earnestly repent of your sin…

For the fruit of spirit is love…

We believe in God who has created and is creating….

Sacrament

Lead a new life…

Ten Commandments…

Shakespeare’s 66…

Tir'd with all these, for restful death I cry,

As, to behold desert a beggar born,

And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,

And purest faith unhappily forsworn,

And gilded honour shamefully misplac'd,

And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,

And right perfection wrongfully disgrac'd,

And strength by limping sway disabled,

And art made tongue-tied by authority,

And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,

And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,

And captive good attending captain ill.

Tir'd with all these, from these would I be gone,

Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

Ground Hog Day 5:  prayer, worship, journal, tithing, you. 

RAH: conversations, center left and center right

Sacrament:  mystery.  The daily, the quotidian asperity and simplicity of the sacraments, baptism and communion, a bath and a meal, are not to adorned needlessly, but reverently, discreetly and in the fear of God.

Our parents taught us:  the wise man built his house upon the rock…

Scripture

1. Again, the strange world of the Bible beckons us.  St. Luke, you see, stands every day, every Sunday, before us, here in the nave of Marsh Chapel.  Here is Jesus in all his Dominical Authority.  Here too is Luke.  The Scripture—mighty, ancient, holy—calls to us, today out of Gospel According to Luke. Luke evokes the uncanny.One day you awake, early, and are able to recall the contours of dream.  Strange.  One day, walking, your mind and memory are visited by a feeling gone fore years.  One day, frightful this, news comes of a loved one’s death.  One day you come to worship to worship.  Behold the numinous, the uncanny, the mysterious, the strange, here, now, the strange world of the Bible.

*2. Today–Luke. (He is east of, stage left of Jesus.  Matthew and Mark are west of, to the stage right of Jesus.  Luke and John are to the stage left of Jesus.  And you can hear that truth in more than one way (☺)).Those at the dawn of life…in the twilight of life…in the shadows of life…You too were strangers in the land of Egypt…as you have done it to the littlest of these you have done it also to me…Our Holy Scripture today places us, at first, in a thicket of problems and questions: The Scripture is fulfilled in its hearing.  A   prophet is not honored at home.  Elijah and Elisha go to Sidon and Syria.  The crowd is outraged and poises to attack.  Jesus eases on down the road. What is going on here, in this strange world of the Bible, which beckons to us to leave behind our mercantile mediocrity?

*3. The Scripture is fulfilled, not in a perfectly just world, in a perfected justice, like that, frankly acclaimed in Isaiah, but in the Reader and the Voice.  Isaiah’s literal prophecy was not fulfilled, and to date has yet been fulfilled.   Another fulfillment Jesus acclaims: The resurrection is the preaching of the gospel.  The gospel is more than justice.  Now real religion, for sure, is never very far from justice.  But justice, alone, the prophetic, alone, is not the gospel, some of the last fifty years of quasi-theological education to the contrary not with-standing.  The gospel is bigger, truer, deeper–and more personal than that.   The prophetic is a part but not the heart of the gospel.  The prophetic tradition is a just part but not the full heart of the gospel…as Luke tartly reminds us today.

*4. That is, Elijah and Elisha here are remembered for a very particular reason, one at odds with justice.  They have gone outside of Israel, outside of the community of faith, outside of the expected audience, and outside of their own prophetic tradition.  With Israel hungry in famine, the chosen people awaiting rain water, Elijah comforts them not, not at all, but goes instead to a foreign land, that of Tyre and Sidon, to alone woman, a lone widow, a lone gentile.  With Israel halt and lame and leprous, in need of healing and health care, Elisha comforts them not, and goes away into a foreign land and heals a Syrian, a lone gentile.  Jesus’ sermon at home, where, as with every prophet, he faces a tough home crowd, explodes the minor, limited appeal of justice…to universalize, to preach, the gospel.  The gospel is not justice…but love.  No wonder the crowd is so angry.  The gospel moves away from the interior to the exterior, from the expected to the unexpected, from the just to the loving, from the familiar…to the strange. In our passage, Luke has given us the whole of his mysterious gospel in miniature.  He has given us a prototypical text:  Isaiah, 61, with its theme of deliverance to those who are hurting.  He has given us, next, a reminder that God works in God’s own ways, as he did in the days of Elijah and Elisha, when those outside of the faith community were helped first.  He has given us a warning, through the threat of the crowd to throw Jesus to death, of what awaits Him at the end of the road from Nazareth to Jerusalem.  He has further given us a fragrant scent of promise, as Jesus escapes, the same sense we are given at Easter—death cannot hold him, even death cannot hold him, not even death can hold him.  He is the Lily of the Valley…

*5. God is at work, at work in the world, at work in the world to make and keep human life human, often to the consternation and surprise of God’s very own people. (J Bennett).

(Strange, Luke, Prophetic, Elijah\Elisha, Bennett)

Closing

We believe in God the Father Almighty…

I lift up mine eyes to the hills…

Ye that do truly and earnestly repent of your sin…

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 02.2.2025 at 11:00 am

No Comments »

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to hear the full service

Click here to watch the full service

Click here to hear just the sermon

The text of this sermon is not available at this time. We apologize for any inconvenience.

- Jonathan Byung Hoon Lee, MDiv

Associate Chaplain for Student Outreach

posted in Mr. Jonathan Lee, Associate Chaplain for Student Outreach on 01.26.2025 at 11:00 am

No Comments »

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to hear the full service

Click here to watch the full service

Click here to hear just the sermon

Everybody Invited, Everybody Loved

I enrolled at the School of Theology 10 years ago to study theology and ethics.  I wanted to be able to contribute to making the term “business ethics” less oxymoronic.  Like you, I expect, my call is to the laity. So, I did not, as my master of divinity colleagues did, take the introductory class in preaching.  Despite STH’s excellence in homiletics, I knew that peaching classes were not something I would ever need.  It’s not like I would ever be in any pulpit, never mind that of the chapel adjacent to Martin Luther King’s alma mater on the Sunday when we celebrate his legacy.  I. mean, something like that was never going to happen.

Oops !

So the truth is I am a teacher, not a preacher.  What I can do, however, is pray that the holy spirit has something to say to you this morning, integrate a smattering of the brilliance of The Rev Dr. King, and try to summon the wisdom to stay out of their way. So, “ Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.

The late comedian Groucho Marx is reported to have once said in a resignation letter to a social club that he did not want to belong to any club that would accept him as a member.  Perhaps it’s because whatever club it was, it did not feature the following two characteristics of the kingdom of God. First, the kingdom offers an invitation to everyone.  As Jesus said.  “In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?” Second, the kingdom is a house of all-encompassing, inescapable, unconditional love. 

Everybody is invited and everyone is loved

I rely heavily this morning on “Where do we go from here: Chaos or Community” – MLK’s fourth and final book. In it, he illustrates how God has a room for everyone.  There is a special practicality to this.  You’ve heard the expression that one man’s meat is another man’s poison.  I totally get this.  I’m a night owl. If you want to take a class in management at 6:30 in the evening, I’m your guy.  On the other hand, if the world were full of me, well, nothing much would happen before 10:00 in the morning. King wrote “All men are interdependent. Every nation is an heir of a vast treasury of ideas and labor to which both the living and the dead of all nations have contributed. Whether we realize it or not…We are everlasting debtors to known and unknown men and women. When we arise in the morning, we go into the bathroom where we reach for a sponge which is provided for us by a Pacific Islander. We reach for soap that is created for us by a European. Then at the table, we drink coffee which is provided for us by a South American, or tea by a Chinese or cocoa by a West African. Before we leave for our jobs we are already beholden to more than half of the world.”

Unfortunately, there is increasing denial of human interdependence as we see push back against inclusivity and public policies designed to distribute opportunities fairly.  In Florida, for example, public colleges are banned from using state and federal funds on programs to promote diversity equity and inclusion. Recently, a colleague shared with me a story of how a former refugee from the Soviet Union set up a $100 million venture capital fund to support immigrant entrepreneurs.  I couldn’t help but reflect on an interesting juxtaposition. This man, Semyon Dukach saw that immigrants needed opportunities to start businesses and created a venture capital firm to fund them.  I applaud him for filling a need suffered by a marginalized group.  In 2018 Simone and Ayana Parsons established “the fearless fund”, a venture capital fund for black female entrepreneurs.  They were similarly responding to the needs of a marginalized group.  Even though Black women found businesses at a higher rate than anyone else, in 2020 VC firms invested less than 0.35% of available money in companies founded by Black women. Simone and Parson’s fund was sued by the American Alliance for Civil Rights, an organization founded by conservative legal activist Edward Blum, the architect behind the fight to overturn race-based affirmative action in school admissions.  After losing in an appeals court they settled with Blum, permanently closing their strivers program which had awarded 10 and 20 thousand dollar grants to businesses at least partially owned by black women.   

To answer the pushback, we must remind ourselves that the benefits of inclusivity extend to everyone. In her book “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together,” Author Heather McGhee stresses this theme.  She cites the example of public pools in the United States, which numbered around two thousand by World War II.  Some were amazingly grand, capable of accommodating thousands of swimmers at a time. When black people sued to integrate these pools in the 1950’s, they were met with privatizations and closures. In Washington D.C. alone, 125 private swim clubs were established within the 10 years after pool desegregation.  In the end, many white residents, who had enjoyed swimming for free, now had to pay.  McGhee also notes that the subprime lending practices that led to the Great Recession in 2006 were first practiced on black and brown communities, often on credit-worthy borrowers who would qualify for higher-quality loans.  Had we stopped the more nefarious of these practices when they were visited on those typically at the margins of our society, perhaps we could have avoided the catastrophic unemployment and loss of wealth that befell us all.

Morally, we know that we are not just interdependent we are meant to live together peaceably. Dr. King shared this anecdote to illustrate the point: “Some years ago a famous novelist died. Among his papers was found a list of suggested plots for future stories, the most prominently underscored being this one: “A widely separated family inherits a house in which they have to live together.” This is the great new problem of mankind. We have inherited a large house, a great “world house” in which we have to live together—black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Muslim and Hindu—a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace.”

Dr. King may well have been channeling what St Paul tells us today in his letter to the Corinthians: “there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good”.

 To each is given the manifestation of the Sprit for the common good!

 After giving us a list of examples of the various ways in which the Sprit is manifested, he writes that  “All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.”

Each of us has a unique gift offered to us by God for the purpose of serving each other.  We are here to love our neighbor, and If we exclude our neighbor, then we exclude their gifts.  If we exclude our neighbor we weaken the kingdom.  Inclusion is not only of practical benefit, it is a moral imperative.   King wrote that “The large house in which we live demands that we transform this worldwide neighborhood into a worldwide brotherhood.” King believed that  Together we must learn to live as brothers and sisters or together we will be forced to perish as fools”

When I opened this talk I spoke of two characteristics of the Kingdom of God.  We just talked about inclusion. Let me remind you of the second, the all-encompassing, inescapable, unconditional love of neighbor. Again in “Where Do We Go From Here”,  Dr King wrote that “All inhabitants of the globe are now neighbors. This worldwide neighborhood has been brought into being largely as a result of the modern scientific and technological revolutions.” This is even more true now than it was in the 60’s.  In its 2023 annual report meta – the parent company of Facebook -  reported that their monthly active users reached 3.98 billion across their family of applications as of December 31 of that year.  That’s nearly half the world.  

Love of neighbor means that those of us who advocate for inclusion must develop a message for those that we feel have excluded others. When a seat at the proverbial table opens for those who were excluded because of color, sex, gender identity, religion, ethnicity, national origin, poverty, ability, or isms of any kind, we must all say to the excluders: 

Don’t Leave.  Don’t drain the pool, pull your children from their school, or sell your house in a panic when those who had been excluded come to join you.

Don’t leave because if you do, you will not experience the all-encompassing, inescapable, unconditional love of Christ that you will have unleashed by halting your exclusion. We have not come to replace you but rather to join you in the “world house” where we are all able to exhibit our manifestations of the Sprit for the common good.

Everybody invited, everybody loved.

For those of us who have felt the sting of exclusion, this is a challenge.  There are two responses to oppression.  One is vengeance and the other a commitment to ensuring that such oppression is never visited on anyone else, former oppressors included.  This second response is the way of love.  It is King’s response. It is not easy but it is essential. In reference to the race exclusion of his time King wrote that a “A guilt-ridden white minority fears that if the Negro attains power, he will without restraint or pity act to revenge the accumulated injustices and brutality of the years…Only through our adherence to nonviolence— which also means love in its strong and commanding sense —will the fear in the white community be mitigated.” 

Loving people you feel have wronged you is difficult enough, but for us here today, there is another challenge. Though no less a warrior for racial Justice, King began to center his attention on the issues of poverty, not just for black people but by name for Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, Indians and Appalachian whites, and I’m sure by sentiment all the poor regardless of demography.  King argues that the problem of poverty is solvable.  He quotes the then assistant director of the Office of Economic Opportunity in saying that “the poor can stop being poor if the rich are willing to become even richer at a slower rate”.

What makes these facts difficult for us is that it puts most of us now in the category of the excluder.  Most in this chapel are likely secure in in the true necessities of life: food, clothing, shelter.  We may have been lulled into the belief that somehow the poor suffer from their own bad choices, but social science is beginning to unveil that myth.  Studies of farmers during periods of deprivation vs anticipated abundance show significant differences in tests of fluid intelligence.  The temporary state of poverty had similar effects to losing 13 points of IQ. This research and more like it suggests that is not bad choices that lead to poverty but rather the reverse. Poverty impairs our thinking leading to those bad choices. We are reducing the ability of the poor to flourish in the Kingdom of God because we allow them to be poor.

So now it is us who must make room at the table for the excluded.  It is us who must then not leave and pray for their grace and love. 

Let us pray then that we are invited and that we can be loved

As King wrote at the end of his book,  “This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all...  This often misunderstood and misinterpreted concept has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man.  When I speak of love, I am speaking of that force which all the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is the key that unlocks the door which leads to the ultimate reality. This Hindu-MuslimChristian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the First Epistle of Saint John: Let us love one another: for love is of God: and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. . . . If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.” 

Let us go forth from here recognizing the spirit of God in each and every one of God’s children here on earth past and present.  Let us acknowledge that God has woven them into the ultimate reality that Dr. King speaks of for the purpose of the common good.  Let us go forth and love all our neighbors as ourselves, doing our best to replicate the all-encompassing, inescapable, unconditional love of Christ.

Everybody invited, everybody loved.

Amen

posted in Questrom School of Business, Services Honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on 01.19.2025 at 11:00 am

No Comments »

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to hear the full service

Click here to watch the full service

Click here to hear just the sermon

Winter Light

Luke 3: 15-17

Marsh Chapel

January 12, 2025

Robert Allan Hill

We shall take hold this Lord’s Day of what matters, lasts and counts, of the things that will see us through, this hour, this day, this week, this month, this year and this decade.   Three of these are Scripture, memory and example.

Scripture and Mysterious Presence

Scripture sees us through, by taking, and proclaiming the long view, including today in Luke.

Let us recall the mystery of Christ, the Stranger in our midst.  We can announce his presence today, again today, at his Baptism. He is among us:  dealing with issues we dismiss…speaking with people whom we dislike…considering options we disdain…selecting vocations that do not yet fully exist…expanding spaces that we constrict…accepting lifestyles that we reject…attending to possibilities that we ignore…approaching horizons that we avoid…healing wounds that we disguise…questioning assumptions that we enjoy…protecting persons whom we mistreat…making allowances that we distrust.  So, strangely, is He among us.

Strangely his voice addresses us.

For the mystery of Jesus Christ falls upon us, approaches us, and enchants us, when and where we least expect Him.  In the strange world of the Bible.  In the midst of the community of strangers that is the Church.  Hidden in the brutal estrangement of our personal life.  Here, behold, the Lord Christ Jesus, “L’Etranger”, “The Stranger”.

His presence is neither simple, nor surface, nor easy, nor fundamental, nor shallow, nor ideological, nor one dimensional, nor ahistorical, nor primarily political.  He draws us

For St. Luke has captured a collage of portraits of Jesus, “On the Road”, beginning today in baptism.  We are on a journey, as Luke reminds the church.  We are making a trip to the promised land.  We are headed in a certain direction.  With our spiritual forebears, we are traveling, on a journey.  Israel left Canaan to go to Egypt to find bread.  There they became the slaves of Pharaoh.  But Moses led them out, parted the Red Sea, and guided them through the wilderness.  He brought them the ten commandments.  At last, he sent them forth, with Joshua, to inhabit the land flowing with milk and honey.  In such a glorious land, they hunted and farmed.  They even built a temple, and chose a King.  Samuel, Saul, David, and Solomon reigned, but were followed by others less wise and less strong.  Although the prophets did warn them, the children of Israel left their covenant and their covenant God, and at last suffered the greatest of defeats, the destruction of Jerusalem and the return to slavery in Babylon, 587bc.  On these hundreds of years of history depends the cry of Jeremiah, “O that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep, night and day, for the slain of my poor people.” (9:1)  Like Israel marching in chains to Babylon, and then trudging home again two generations later, we people of faith are on a journey, from slavery to freedom.  Faith heals, manages, handles the hardest of change.

Come Sunday, our shared role is to announce the gospel in interpretation of and accord with the Scriptures. Scripture gives us the chance for the long view.  Scripture gives us a deep grounding, with heaven a little higher and earth a little wider. Which we direly need today.  Thank goodness we have the Holy Scripture to which to turn, from which to learn, with which to listen, pray and prepare.  Silver and gold have I none, but that which I have I give thee. (Acts 3:6). 

Luke’s mysterious baptized Christ meets us today, hidden in the maelstrom of wild, unexpected change and even in the midst of political crisis.

Memory in the Face of Adversity

Memory sees us through, by rooting us in our own lived experience, and its careful memory, over time.  Memory of four years ago this week, surrounded the sermon for this day. 

I think back on this week four years ago.  I remember the headlines. ‘TRUMP INCITES MOB’.  4 dead, not in Ohio this time, but in the nation’s capital city, and inside the nation’s capitol building.  Insurrection with presidential incitement.

I remember four years ago this week, including January 6, 2021. We were away for a few days, or so we thought, when I walked by a group of men in earnest conversation about 2:30pm that day.  I could not quite understand. So I went and turned on a television at about 3pm, and quickly realized I would need to return early to Boston for the weekly service to be recorded on the next day, Thursday, as we did in those COVID months, and was on a plane at 7:30m, in order to spare a guest preacher from addressing the moment.  What was true then, and said then, is true today:  For the rest of history, for the rest of our lives, we shall have to live with, and attempt by faith to live down, both to live with and to live down, such utter calumny, such tragic, needless, heedless yet revelatory disaster.  It is an apocalyptic—a revelatory—moment, hundreds wrecking the capitol, encouraged by a wantonly graceless leader, and with 6 Senators, 6 Senators (Cruz, Hawley, Hyde-Smith, Marshall, Kennedy, Tuberville), and much other congressional cattle (Jonah 4:11), continuing to feed its root cause. We cannot be at all sure what further difficulty and distress may visit us.  One said, ‘this is like 9/11, except we did this to ourselves’. (RAH, 1/10/21)

But at some preconscious level, somewhere down in the declivities of the country’s psyche, we had a sense that this was coming.  We did not want to admit it.  We hoped against hope to be wrong in that premonition.  We hoped to whistle past the graveyard for another few days.  Yet we remembered, dimly, our upbringing, ‘don’t play with fire if you don’t want to get burned’. We had years of warning, advisement, signs along the pathway of this premonition.  (RAH, 1/10/21)

So, the community of faith gathered virtually come Sunday, January 10, 2021, to listen, pray, and prepare.  And we have gathered here again, in person, this Sunday January 12, 2025. You have come this morning, or joined us by phone line or internet, to watch and listen,  to wonder.  And to remember.

The Gospel of Luke was written for memory.  It emerged over long time, with the earliest Christians reciting and recalling their Lord, his love, and their shared shaping by that love, in faith, beginning in baptism.  They listened, morning and evening, Sunday by Sunday, and over time, in direct response to weeks both empty and full, they began to write down for future generations what they had heard.  Today we have such an account, that of Jesus’ baptized.  Today we have such a lesson, the hearing of a voice.  Today we start again into an unknown future, within earshot of that same divine voice.  For all our failure, for all manner of sin and death and meaninglessness, for all that is wrong, and there is much, especially just now, there is a voice, ringing out and calling to us. Yet for generations women and men have found this particularity strikingly universal, and lastingly, eternally real.  Especially in weeks when good news is scarce.  And in our time, into dimensions of common ground that may cause us work and make us uncertain, we will want to learn to listen, and listen again.

What a tremendous spiritual gift to Marsh Chapel is our weekly  Psalter, and its resounding echoes in our memory.  Remember Samuel Terrien teaching us: Here are 700 years of psalms, 1000-400bce.  For the psalmists, Yahweh’s presence was not only made manifest in Zion.  It reached men and women over the entire earth.  The sense of Yahweh’s presence survived the annihilation of the temple and the fall of the state 587bc.  Elusive but real, it feared no geographical uprooting and no historical disruption.  Having faced the void in history and in their personal lives, they knew the absence of God even within the temple.  The inwardness of their spirituality, bred by the temple, rendered the temple superfluous. (279)

In other words, they knew how to live through and out through godless weeks.  As we remembered four years ago: Our psalm today, Psalm 29, ancient and redolent with glory, recalls for us how to pray.  From your youth you have known.  Adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication.  The ACTS forms of prayer.  Adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication.  One is a word of glory, echoing the glory of God that thunders.  Glorify God and enjoy him forever.  A word of glory. One is a word of contrition, by which we begin every service at Marsh Chapel.  Prayer is not only a matter of individual or even personal attention, a certain sitting silent before God.  Prayer is also the voice, the responsive voice, of the people of God, echoing in antiphonal chorus, the call, the bowing before glory.  GLORY!   All have sinned, all have fallen short of that primordial glory.  All.  A prayer of contrition. One is a word of gratitude.  In such a week, it may simply be a prayer of gratitude that things are not yet any worse. A word of gratitude. One is a word of longing, desire, incantation, supplication.  Dear God, guide us through these murky moments, like those we have seen in the past, let us pray, and let our learning now make us stronger later.  A word of supplication. Prayer takes some set aside time, some quiet, some intentional focus.  Prayer is the nursery of memory.  Prayer is the nursery of memory in the nursery school of worship (RAH. 1/10/21)

Exemplum Docet:  Example Teaches

As with Scripture and memory, example also sees us through.  Every day brings new beginnings and open possibilities, known best in example.

The whole of Scripture begins with the divine preparation, in creation, and in speech.  ‘Let there be…’  And what might that be, let there be?  Light.  Watch for the rays of light in the dark.  Watch for the rays of light in the dark. Even in Boston where it seems dusk arrives just after lunch.  Four years ago, that Wednesday morning, before all, well, chaos, broke loose, a newly elected Senator from Georgia was interviewed. In the same day and near same hour of utter chaos, an example was given, was rising. He was raised in public housing, one of 12 children.  Whatever the day, his dad had them all up before dawn.  There is a kind of light in winter, even in winter, as was Rafael Warnock’s election that week. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning, he was reminded.  Yes, but that’s the thing about the morning, he responded, it begins in the full dark, it begins at dawn, before daybreak.   Dean Carter of Morehouse reminded me in conversation Wednesday morning, that when his parents dropped him off at Morehouse, Rafael Warnock had not a dime to his name.  His parents could give him only what they had, their powerful, limitless, ceaseless love, pride and belief in him.  Their powerful, limitless, ceaseless love, pride and belief in him.  THEIR EXAMPLE. Not much?  Well.  It seems to have been enough, just enough.  That’s the thing about the morning. And winter.  It begins in the dark, in preparation, awaiting the word… LET THERE BE LIGHT.  (RAH, 1/10/21)

In like fashion to four years ago, this very week has given us the punctuation of the gospel, in example, in living presidential example.  The living sermon in the life of our 39^th President, buried with rightful ceremony this past week, reminds us.  He lived a life of simple decency, in the face of the great challenges of his time.  After office, he went on to minister to the needs of others, and to use his voice and influence for leverage to that end.  He found time to teach Sunday school each week, and, notable, to mow the church lawn when needed.  In the best of the Baptist tradition he lived his baptism, not in word only or mainly, but in life, in service, and by example.  By example.  Our folks told us it not what you have so much as what you do with what you have.  ‘Let those who have much not have too much, and those who have little not have too little (2 Cor. 8)’

Said President Carter: I have one life and one chance to make it count for something…My faith demands that I do whatever I can wherever I can whenever I can for as long as I can with whatever I have to try to make a difference.

That sounds like John Wesley to me!

Hear good news:  Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form, as a dove, and a voice came from heaven, ‘Thou art my beloved Son; with Thee I am well pleased’.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 01.12.2025 at 11:00 am

No Comments »

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to hear the full service

Click here to watch the full service

Click here to hear just the sermon

The text of this sermon is not available at this time. We apologize for any inconvenience.

-

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 12.29.2024 at 11:00 am

No Comments »

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to hear the full service

Click here to watch the full service

Click here to hear just the sermon

Christmas 2024

Luke 1: 39-45

Marsh Chapel

December 22, 2024

Robert Allan Hill

He is the Way. Follow him through the Land of Unlikeness; you will see rare beasts and have unique adventures.

He is the Truth. Seek him in the Kingdom of Anxiety; you will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.

He is the Life. Love him in the World of the Flesh: and at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy. (Auden)

There are two shades of Christmas, and both are blessed.

The search for truth and the gift of grace are both blessed.  Elisabeth and Mary; John and Jesus; the true and the good; both and all are blessed, in Luke’s Gospel, by God’s healing of the world in Christ, who is both holy and lowly.

There are two trails to Christmas.  That of doubt, and that of faith.

In this morning’s Gospel, following earlier separate scenes, the two stories come together—John and Jesus, Prophet and Pastor, Doubt and Faith, two sorts of Christmas—John soon to be out by the river, Jesus soon to be in his Father’s house.

David Brooks this week wrote a lengthy, compelling essay about this combination, and the yearning, the longing, the desire for the divine, herein.

At one Christmas party a soon to graduate theological student talked about returning to her home in the south central part of the country, and her impending interview before her board of ministry.  What will they ask you?  About the documentary hypothesis, or the second aorist, or the synoptic problem, or the teleological suspension of the ethical, or the art of preaching?  No, they will ask me “Why did you go to Boston?”  Her reply might be:  ‘Because at Boston University I can search for truth and affirm God’s grace, I can combine the necessity of doubt with the promise of faith’.  Hers would be a Christmas answer.  Lord I believe, help my unbelief.

Evidence?  Spiritual things?  Truth? Grace?  Doubt? Faith?

Doubt

First, doubt.  One dimension of Christmas begins with the search for truth, and, therefore, with the real experience of doubt.  For today, then, a full look at violence, greed and silence.

We are so anxious and fearful of what has become of our fragile planet that we burrow into feverish work, feverish drink, feverish sex, feverish exchange—getting and spending.  No, come this Christmas Sunday, one does not see the Word made flesh fully abroad.  And lurking down deep in the psyche, and the collective unconscious is the worried fear, the prospect of single nuclear weapon, somewhere, somehow, in the wrong, violent hand.

That sort of anxiety makes even strong people inclined toward demagoguery, belittling, bullying simplicity, in the rhetoric of culture, politics, religion, and life.  That anxiety makes us forget the importance of institutions, and the health, and the well-being and the care of institutions—whether a marriage, a family, a business, a college, a company, or a country.  Or a country. Process matters.  Due process matters, greatly.  Proven experience counts.  Excellent proven experience counts, greatly.  Morality matters, and telling the truth matters. Mocking the institution one aspires to lead does real damage.  ‘A successful campaign against nihilism will have to resist nihilism itself’. (NYRB).  It will be a shame if it takes the current generation of twenty-somethings half a lifetime to learn this.  (As apparently it has taken their parents.)  Traction in history requires institutions, and they require leadership that speaks with honest transparency, builds genial trust, and thereby waters the earth with goodwill, goodwill, goodwill (a Lukan Christmas term) in institutional form.

The pervasive materialism and mindless consumption of a people hurtling down a highway focused on the speedometer and blind to the road ahead, are a long way from Christmas.  From every corner we are encouraged to shop.  To buy!  But… to give?  Both would strengthen the economy, but in different ways.  One leans toward commodity and the other toward community.  It may be, one thinks, along the river, that Immanuel—the college, or the doctrine, or the hope—have gone, left for a far country.  As Vahanian said of ‘God’ 60 years ago, the symbols of faith have grown cold for the culture.  Has such a fate of symbolic anachronism now permanently infected Christmas?  Is the whole symbol set, from angels to straw and all between, become, simply, a once told tale?  We know that symbols die.  Sometimes from neglect, sometimes from abuse, sometimes from both.  It is hard to find evidence that the poor manger has much traction to shape a culture any longer.  Whither wonder, morality, generosity? Greed is a long way from Christmas.

Here is my friend awash in grief for the tragic and inexplicable loss of a spouse.  Here is he, years later, still caught in the flow and ebb of that sorrow beyond sorrow.  It is an empty time for this concert stage, and its empty loss, and lack, is one that many know better than any other truth.  To hear the improbable predictions of Isaiah, about streams in a desert, is to this ear, just now, at the shoreline of the absurd.

When to the heart of man

Was it ever less than a treason

To go with the drift of things

And to yield with a grace to reason

And to bow and accept the end

Of a love or a season? (Frost)

And from the hurt comes doubt. Having in the churches exchanged much of our capacity in philosophical theology for a saltier but lighter mix of personal narratives and identity politics, we find ourselves scrambling a bit to respond to first level questions about evidence, about suffering, about creation, about content, about God.  Like the earliest Christians, thinkers today do not fear the charge of a-theism.  Nor should they. The search for truth, by the presence of John the Baptist, down by the river is blessed at Christmas.  Nihil humanum:  nothing human is foreign to us.

Emptiness unabated is a long way from Christmas.

Here then is one Christmas trail and tale:  a search for truth and an experience of doubt. The honesty and the courage of this account need naming..

Although…

In your doubt.  Just how sure are you?  In the moonlight, with a shimmering.  Lights and a light wind and the faint call of carolers.  And…Other?  Mystery?  Spirit?  The Luminous Numinous?  A little faith tracks the trail of every doubt, and sometimes, come Christmas, even causes us to doubt our doubt.

Faith

All along the river of doubt there is a shimmering something alongside…  Mystery.  Being.  Spirit.  All the cultured doubt of a late modern, post Christian culture, still, does not erase what is just beyond saying, knowing, and hearing.  Doubt is shadowed by faith.

Another sort of Christmas begins with the gift of faith.  A full hearing for wonder, and care, and peace.

Your Christmas trail may be ecclesiastical and not cultural, indoors and not outdoors, by candlelight and not moonlight.

You may be a cradle Christian at Christmas, or a cradle Christmas Christian.  Then your trail would move not along the river, but along the rail.

All failure, folly and horror bracketed, for the moment, there is the start of this trail in carols of the English tradition, and in candles to evoke the numinous, and in word and sacrament to mirror heaven. Every year, come Advent leaning toward Christmas, as at no other time of year, there is an awareness of lasting life.  The world does not lack for wonders, but only for a sense of wonder, as Chesterton never tired of saying.  It is the imagination, that quality of heart and mind so necessary to being human, which quickens again, here at the rail.  Step ahead, just a moment, as sometimes we do, to read the Gospel, moving the page itself into the heart of this chapel community.

Wonder still appears on the candlelit faces uplifted at Christmas (1pm and 7pm Tuesday, by the way).  Good deeds, selfless and real, emanate still from hearts, homes, and communities of faith.  Generosity, both of spirit and of wallet, emerges again in December.  My Jewish friend’s daughter, steady and staunch in her own faith, nonetheless just loves to go to her neighbor’s house to decorate the Christmas tree:  lights, ornaments, tinsel, all.

Now the passage read from Luke for this Sunday prepares us for the very birth of Christ.  Here is Elizabeth, the mother of the one on the river, and Mary, the mother of the one at the rail.  There are two kinds of Christmas, that of John and that of Jesus, both blessed.  One in the cold light of reason, and one in the warm heart of love.  Both are good, both needed.   Even in utero, according to this Lukan narration, John the Baptist is aware of, we might say prophetically aware of, the unborn Messiah.  But there is a palpable portent of possibility shot through all of this strange reading. We shall honor by acceptance its strange, numinous portent, pregnant with potential for the future.  The Gospel creates its own audience, in the audience of its announcement. Grace renders a sense of imagination, that quiet surrender of the self to the spirit of God.

The lessons of Holy Scripture teach us and form us.  One of the littlest clans of Judah…Lifte up the lowly…A body you have prepared…A town in the hill country…

The earlier prophecy from Micah recalled David, born in Bethlehem, and was taken by primitive Christianity as a prediction of the Christ.  The whole of the book of Micah realistically portrays the limits of human goodness.  And yet, the image of the shepherd stays with us, and stands out. A shepherd leads by example.  Here is care:  in the giving of money.  Here is care:  in taking the cloak as well, and going the second mile.  Here is care:  waking in the morning with hope, and praying into the night with hope.  Here is care:  investing in what can cross the bridges of difference.  Here is care:  the ability to see one’s own hurt and suffering, to some degree, as part of a larger labor pain, the birth of the future. Every heart has secret sorrows.

So, pause, too, at the Epistle, the letter to the Hebrews, and its early portent, even at Christmas, of the sorrow and struggle to come. To conclude. Suffering produces endurance.  But God, in Christ, has acted to heal and cleanse.  In faith, we have a way forward, even in the face of other ways forward that do not seem to go forward.  Every day we can live a changed life.  Peace come through peace makers.  Let us seek, and then live out, a Christmas faith.

In our own lives let us, in faith, eschew any first strikes, on the cheek, or on the character, or on the person.

In our own lives let us eschew any self-full, unilateral action that is not cognizant of circumstance.

In our own lives let us free ourselves, personally, from acting in overweening ways, in ways that use people and love things, rather than loving people and using things (Augustine).

In our own lives let us learn patiently to plan, to foresee, with forbearance, and so practice Niebuhr’s ‘spiritual discipline against resentment’.

Here is a Christmas faith.  In church, gospel, lesson and letter, we may surely affirm the gifts of faith at Christmas:  wonder in silence, care amid greed, peace in a time of violence.

And yet.  Lest faith curdle to blind faith, and the gift of faith into the wrapping of fideism, we may take the test of reason, a pinch of doubt, with us too. ‘Test the spirits’, says the Scripture (1 Thess. 5: 22). While Luke surely means to place Jesus above John (cf. R Brown, The Birth of the Messiah, 333ff.), and that without a doubt, Luke nonetheless makes full space for both kinds of Christmas.

There are two shades of Christmas, coming soon to a home near you.  One of Elizabeth and one of Mary, one of John and one of Jesus, one of river, and one of rail. Yours may be one tinged by faith, though full of doubt.  Yours may be one tinged by doubt, though robust in faith.  Both are blessed, both the true and the good.

We might add, though, if your Christmas is of the indoor variety, take a walk in the moonlight; and if your Christmas is of the outdoor variety, come into the beauty of the sanctuary at night.  It takes a poet to get this middle voice, this reflexive, this nuanced announcement in the right key.  So, Auden:

He is the Way. Follow him through the Land of Unlikeness; you will see rare beasts and have unique adventures.

He is the Truth. Seek him in the Kingdom of Anxiety; you will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.

He is the Life. Love him in the World of the Flesh: and at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 12.22.2024 at 11:00 am

No Comments »

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to hear the full service

Click here to watch the full service

Click here to hear just the sermon

The text of this sermon is not available at this time. We apologize for any inconvenience.

- The Rev. Dr. Karen Coleman

posted in The Rev. Dr. Karen Coleman, Chaplain for Episcopal Ministry on 12.15.2024 at 11:00 am

No Comments »

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to hear the full service

Click here to watch the full service

Click here to hear just the sermon

Communion Meditation

Luke 21: 25-36

December 1, 2024

Marsh Chapel

Robert Allan Hill

Jesus meets us today in the pages of St. Luke, as He will for the next twelve months.  On this first Sunday of the Christian liturgical year, we turn from Mark to Luke, and see the gospel and the gospel’s world, from a Lukan horizon.

Luke was written nearly a generation later than Mark, by most estimates, Mark in or near 70, Luke in or near 90 of the common era.  Traditionally ascribed to Luke the physician, its author and that of its sequel, the Acts of the Apostles, is finally unknown to us.  We know him only through the writing itself.

What do we find?  Or what shall we find in prayerful conversation with Luke across the next year?

Luke is made up of a mixture of ingredients.  First, Luke uses most of Mark.  An example is our passage today, Luke 21.  Like Matthew, Luke knew and repeated most of the earlier gospel of Mark.  But he made changes along the way, or construed the gospel according to his own desires and emphases.  This is hopeful for us, in that it is an encouragement for us to take the gospel in hand, and interpret it according to our time, location, understanding, and need.  Second, Luke uses a collection of teachings, called Q, as does Matthew.  An example is our Lord’s Prayer, later in the service.  Luke’s version is slightly different from that in Matthew, as is his version of the beatitudes and other teachings, found in the ‘sermon on the plain’, rather than the ‘sermon on the mount’.  Third, Luke makes ample use of material that is all his own, not found in Mark or elsewhere.  The long chapters from Luke 8 or so through Luke 18 or so, are all his.  Examples include some of your favorite parables, like the Good Samaritan, and like the lost sheep, and like the Prodigal Son, and like the Dishonest Steward.  We have Luke to thank for the remembrance of these great stories.  Luke brings us a unique mixture of materials, and makes his own particular use of them.

What does Luke say?  This will take us the year and more to unravel.  We shall do so, on step at a time, one Sunday at a time, one parable, teaching, exhortation, miracle, or, as today, one apocalyptic pronouncement at a time.  Still, there are some outstanding features of the Lukan horizon, which we may simply name as we set forth.   First, Luke displays a commitment to and interest in history, and orderly history at that.  Both Luke and Acts are cast in a distinctive historical mode.  Second, Luke employs and deploys his own theology, or theological perspective, including this emphasis upon history and the divine purpose in history.   Third, Luke highlights the humanity and compassion of Jesus in a remarkable way.  The Christ of St. Luke is the Christ of magnificent compassion, embodied in the humility of a birth among shepherds.  The poor, women, the stranger, the injured, those in dire need all stand out in Luke, as the recipients and subjects of Jesus’ love, mercy, grace and compassion.  Fourth, Luke carries an abiding interest in the church.  Ephesians says that ‘through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the principles and powers’.  That catches the spirit of the author or the third gospel and of the Acts to follow.  

Now Look again at Luke 21.  It is a traditional Christian apocalyptic teaching, which Luke has faithfully transported into his gospel.   It is not its mere presence, but its particular interpretation in Luke that we watch for this morning.

Jesus, Paul, the earliest church and most of the New Testament carry the common expectation that within days or years, but soon, the apocalyptic end of the world will occur. All were mistaken. Even 2 Peter, who changes the math, and makes a day equal to 1000 years, has grudgingly to wrestle with the delay, the postponement, of the first Christians’ fervent hope. Recite 1 Thessalonians 4: 13-18 several times and you will get a sense of what this apocalyptic hope entailed. It is early Christian mythology. (As with all myth, it carries meaning, including meaning for us. But as a world-view, as a view of history, it is not the gospel.)

It did not happen.  What Jesus predicted, and Paul expected, and Mark awaited—did not happen. The end did not come. And centuries of further sparkles of expectation, from the Montanists, to the Medieval mystics, to the Millerites of upstate New York, to the Jonestown community of 1978, to the Y2K enthusiasts some years ago, did not make it so. This biblical apocalyptic may be mythologically meaningful, but it is chronologically corroded.

Further, the language and imagery of the New Testament are apocalyptic through and through. Apocalyptic is the mother tongue of Christian theology, especially of Christian hope. So our beloved Bible must be interpreted anew, to serve the present age.

Fortunately, the New Testament itself begins to do so. Some of that reassessment is beginning in our passage this morning—‘so, be alert at all times, praying ’. Some of the ethical application and communal reinterpretation of this will come in later verses: you have no idea if or when the end will come so, in scout fashion, be prepared. But most of the courageous imagination in this regard is found later still, in the Gospel of John.

Luke knows the tradition of apocalyptic teaching from Mark 13, and makes space for it here.  But he turns apocalyptic into action.  He puts eschatology to work in the service of ethics.  Its import, all this firey symbolism, language and imagery, is in the last verse, ‘be alert at all times, praying’.   The life of faith is the life of developing, expanding, creative responsibility, of responsibility taken.  Action, not apocalypse.  Ethics, not eschatology.  Here, Luke’s own engagement in history will help us.  It will remind us of our own engagement in history.

That is, we are not free to avoid our responsibility to the environment, with the excuse that the Lord may return in a generation or two anyway, and who needs gasoline in the rapture?

Nor are not free to avoid our responsibility to seek a common global peace, cognizant of the hard won insights of pacifism and just war theory both, on the bet that time is running out for the late great planet earth.

We are not free to project our anxieties about the dilemmas of the current age—out onto a far-off apocalyptic falsehood, in order to avoid what we of course have to do in every other sphere of life: negotiate, compromise, discuss, trade, and muddle through (repeat).

Nor are we free to avoid our roles, our responsibilities as citizens.  It is Bonhoeffer whose example keenly and forcefully so reminds us.

Yet we are free.  Here is our freedom.  Pray daily for the hope of the world. Think creatively about the hope of the world.  Act specifically, week by week, in communion with a reliable hope.

One of my heroes in life and work is Ernest Fremont Tittle.  Dr. Christopher Evans of Boston University wrote his PhD dissertation about Tittle. A close friend of mine, now deceased, was the husband of Tittle’s long time secretary.  Robert Moats Miller wrote his biography (How Shall They Hear Without a Preacher?).  Tittle, a pacifist, preached in Chicago (First Church Evanston), during the depression and the Second World War.  He died in his early sixties, at his desk, while working on a commentary on the Gospel of Luke.  Tittle was arguably the greatest Methodist preacher of his time, a traditional Protestant and an unwavering champion of social justice.  Since we are following Luke in worship this year to come, Tittle and his own comments upon the third Gospel have been much on my mind.  For the record, and as may be interesting to you, I excerpt a passages from that commentary, a typically homiletical paragraph about persistence (Luke 18:1-8):

There is a special need for persistence in prayer when the object sought is the redressing of social wrongs.  God will see justice done if the human instruments of his justice to not give way to weariness, impatience, or discouragement, but persevere in prayer and labor for the improvement of world conditions.  Here we can learn from the scientist.  Medical research is a prayer for the relief of suffering, the abolition of disease, the conservation of life—a prayer in which the scientist perseveres in the face of whatever odds, whatever darkness and delay.  More especially we can learn from great religious leaders like Luther, Wesley, Wilberforce, and Shaftsbury, who year upon year prayed and fought for the causes to which they dedicated their lives.  The need for persistence in prayer arises not only from the intransigence of the oppressor, but also from the immaturity and imperfection of the would-be reformer.  We have a lot to learn and much in ourselves to overcome before we can be used of God as instruments of his justice.  Recognizing this, Gandhi spent hours each day in prayer and meditation, and maintained a weekly day of silence. Is there a better word of encouragement for us, here and now, in the late autumn of 2024?

I find it somehow heartening to hear, across the decades, the strong voices of Tittle and others who have walked many of the same paths we now walk.  I find it somehow heartening, knowing his weekly struggle, to hear about persistence in prayer.  Today, as Advent opens once again,  we face serious global challenges to peace and justice.  May the very difficulties inherent in these challenges cause us to develop the moral fiber and spiritual resilience of our brother from Evanston and so many others like him. May the very difficulties inherent in these challenges cause us to develop the moral fiber and spiritual resilience of our brother from Evanston and so many others like him.

Today our apocalyptic gospel from Luke 21, a fading late 1^st century prediction of the end of time, no longer occupies, twenty centuries later, the kind of literal centrality for Christian teaching, which it did in the year 90.  Even then, by Luke’s time, apocalyptic was waning.  The church, beginning with the church’s formative influence on the New Testament, converted apocalyptic eschatology into ethical exhortation.  Portents and predictions of wars and rumors of wars became, in the main, as they are today, words of caution and preparation, and warning.  ‘Be alert…’.  Be prepared.  And on that basis this morning we shall render, interpret Luke 21.

Plan for the worst.  Hope for the best.  Then do your most.  And leave all the rest.

Be alert. Not all tragedy befalls someone else.  Not all inexplicable, hurtful, senseless accident happens to other families.  Not all fire burns in the next town down the line.  Into each life a little rain, and more than a little rain, does fall.  If every heart has secret sorrows, which every heart does, then every home harbors potential hurt, as every home does.  So, our need to remember and practice the golden rule.

We all have some responsibility here.  You and I have responsibility.  You and I have responsibility in your time and in our way to strive for the things that make for justice and peace.  You and I can make a difference.  We can do so by taking the initiative to learn something about a religion or religious perspective other than our own, as we have often emphasized from this pulpit.  We can do so, gazing out from the Lukan horizon, by making our own efforts to help those in need.   By keeping healthy balances in life. The teaching of faith is in part an effort to help us keep things in balance.  There is a point to the cultural emphases of this weekend, of Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Football Sunday and Cyber Monday.  But these alone will not allow us to make and keep human life human. For this gratitude will need to inspire generosity.  There is a broad, deep generosity across this land.  There is.  Yet it takes the continuous reminder of others’ need, and our responsibility, to bring the latent to life, to make it patent and to make it potent.  St. Luke, and his gospel of the compassionate Christ, encourage us so. The gathering of the church encourages us.  The prayers and the hymns of the church encourage us.  The teaching of the faith of the church encourages us.  D Bonhoeffer encourages us:  Religion is only a garment of Christianity.  When religion disappears what remains is Christ himself, in all his immediacy: In that case Christ is no longer an object of religion but something quite different, really the Lord of the world (NYRB, 12/3/15)

So let us look out from the Lukan horizon.  Let us prepare ourselves spiritually for the unforeseen future.  Let us be alert.  Let us meet mendacity with patient justice.  We can learn to be responsive not reactive, that is to seek patient justice.   Let us inculcate in ourselves and others ‘a spiritual discipline against resentment’.  Let us learn the arts of disciplined endurance.  I think at some low level of our collective psyche we are pushing toward this.  Hence the increase in jogging, in running, in cycling, in all forms of physical endurance.  At some bone level our bodies are telling us to be prepared for a long twilight struggle.   Let us hold fast to he lasting commitments we have to freedom, peace, justice, and love.  As Luke remembered his apocalyptic inheritance, let us remember our full religious inheritance, in the voices of those who can encourage, admonish, and advise us.  That is, let us be alert at all times, praying that we may have the strength to stand before the Son of Man.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 12.1.2024 at 11:00 am

No Comments »