Archive for March, 2016

Sunday
March 27

Easter Morning

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to listen to the full service

Luke 24:1-12

Click here to listen to the meditations only

Luke

Opening: Canadian Creed

Our Gospel provides a particular kind of memory, a powerful kind of prayer, and a persistent kind of love as hallmarks of Easter morning.  Do they mark your life?  Do memory (‘Remember how he told you…and they remembered his words’), prayer (‘They bowed their faces to the ground’) and love (‘They went to the tomb, taking the spices which they had prepared) clothe life for you?

Easter morning is resurrection in memory, in prayer, and in love.  Luke the historian cherished memory.  Luke the healer cherished prayer.  Luke the evangelist cherished love.   What empty space, what unoccupied tomb, abides in your life for these three, and the greatest of these—love?

On Easter morning the women with courage walked tomb-ward to work through their worst experience.  The set forth to do the work of facing grief with grace, failure with faith, hurt with hope, and death with dignity.  And thee?  Is that work begun, continued, or completed?  Easter brings you life, uplift, a lift for living, even into the teeth of death, so you may face, face down, and live down death.

Death makes us mortal.  Facing death makes us human.

God is at work in the world to make and keep human life human. (J Bennett).

Easter morning means to uplift you—listen, hear, trust—from death to life.  Seek ‘the Living One’, He who is more alive than all life, whose life is the marrow of being alive.  Why do you seek the Living One (ton zonta)—a title perhaps, a Person, for sure, an announcement of Christ, crucified and risen.  All appearances to the contrary notwithstanding…

‘The marks of the new age are present hidden in the old age.  At the juncture of the ages the marks of the resurrection are hidden and revealed in the cross of the disciple’s daily death, and only there…this is what the turn of the ages means, that life is manifested in death’ (JL Martyn, of blessed memory, in 1967, Epistemology at the Turn of the Ages).  

We need not over-preach at Easter.  We still walk by faith not by sight.  We still see in a mirror, dimly.  We still have this treasure in earthen vessels.  We still hope for what we do not see.  The resurrection follows, but not replace the cross.

Today Luke announces resurrection in his own manner.  Luke honors the women at the tomb, following Mark, but he replaces Salome with Johanna, and names Mary the mother of James.  Luke’s women are composed, calm. Mark remembers the women in fear and trembling, rushing away with horror and terror and great anxiety, and speaking to no one.   In Luke, they actually remembered angelic words: on return, they calmly told the eleven ‘all’:  the prediction of the Galilean—betrayal, suffering to death, and on the third day arisen; the additional angel, the more dazzling attire, and the preference for Jerusalem not Galilee.  Luke is different from Mark, and Paul is different from both.

Paul? Paul gives no indication that he is familiar with the doctrine of the empty tomb.  There is not the remotest reference to it in any of his letters, and his conviction that the resurrection body is not the body of this flesh but a spiritual body waiting for the soul of man in heaven makes it improbable that he would have found it congenial (Gilmour, IB, loc. cit.)

Easter comes with the morning, every morning.   So walk with the women, walk with me too, let us walk together through the Gospel in sermon.  And if you get done with the sermon before the sermon gets done, if you are finished with it before I am, have no fear, do not worry.  Just wait a bit, and I will catch up with you!

Marathon 2013

We do not know what a day will bring.  True this is of every day, but truer of some days than others.  Focus for a moment on the ‘gravest’ of days you have known.  Someday I would like to hear of it.

For some who are seniors or juniors today, Patriots’ Day 2013 was such a day, nearly 3 years ago.  We learned first hand in this neighborhood about the visitation of death, tragically known again in Brussels and around the globe this week.  Spelled D…E…A…T…H. Not your imaginary friend, but an equally omni-present invisible enemy…

That Monday began with brunch and celebration, and ended with terror, and needless slaughter and (humanly speaking) unforgivable horror.  Our staff opened the chapel later for the throngs walking, T-less, by.  Water, refreshment, prayer, counsel, they gave.  One runner came very cold and was shrouded with a clergy gown, all we had to offer, a shepherd’s outfit.  What a week.  Tuesday brought us to the plaza, come evening, in vigil, to honor and reflect.  Wednesday, in this chapel, and also at other hours in other settings, gathered us for ordered worship, prayer, music, liturgy, Eucharist and sermon.  Thursday we heard President Obama, on a familiar theme, ‘running the race set before us’.  Friday at home we watched televised news.  Saturday we listened for the musical succor of Handel’s beautiful Messiah, right here.  The Monday next we gathered again for a memorial service, for our deceased BU student, Lu Lingzi. 

Death makes us mortal.  Facing death makes us human.  

You remember death.  Your neighbor.   Your hourly companion.  You spell his or her name D…E…A…T…H. Easter morning is about intimations of life, the Living One outlasting death.  Paul:  As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.  Behold: a glimmer of light in the dark, a rumor of life in death, an angel reclining in the tomb.

Clem: Memory

Memory gives us life.  Remember how he told you…

If there has been ever an age that more needed better memory than ours, I know not what it would have been.  Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it.  The past is not dead;  it is not even past.

During that week journalists from around the globe contacted us, and others, across the university.  Many, perhaps most, called or wrote from Asia.  Some needed commentary for radio news or other newscasts.  The main newspapers across the country also sent reporters.

On Wednesday, the office took a call from the Philadelphia Enquirer.  Could someone meet their man and his photographer at the steps of the chapel, to help convey something of the nightly vigils, services and informal prayers of the week.  We picked a mid-afternoon hour.   In the April sunlight the interview began.  Suddenly the photographer dropped his camera and shouted:  Bob.  Bob.  Bob.  His name is Clem Murray, a high school classmate and friend.  He and his girlfriend Mimi Sinopoli were the ‘class couple’ because they were the most beautiful couple, a truly stunning two some.  I had seen neither for forty years.  I had heard that they married in college.  Somehow, he recognized enough of my former self, hidden behind the current condition of my condition, and recognized my name.  He let go of the camera for a hug.  We finished the interview and photo.  I turned then as they were going to ask, ‘So how is Mimi?’  You only know the really awkward moments too late.  They come up after you, like alligators out of the Florida swamp.  Clem said nothing.  He didn’t need to.  I could see what he was holding back in his face and eyes.   He just shook his head and shook.  “Two years ago she died of cancer”.   In the midst of life we are in death, every moment.   All I could see of her was a white graduation gown, a little cap and tassle.   Three decades of marriage, three children, all things bright and beautiful, and then a malignancy unto death.  Clem waved goodbye.  A kairos, not a chronos moment…

We held, together, a memory of life, that made life, that gave life, that made alive.  In the very presence of death.  It was a resurrection memory.  A living memory takes you out of the present and into a living past.  It was a resurrection memory.  And perhaps the most powerful personal conversation I have known.

Marcel Proust with his madeleine moment teaches us best:  a single minute released from the chronological order of time has re-created in us the human being similarly released…situated outside the scope of time, what could one fear from the future…(these are) resurrections of the past (Proust, RTP, II, 992, 996).   

Memory gives us life.   

Ceremonial Bow: Prayer

Prayer gives us life.  They bowed their faces…

A week after the Marathon, you may remember, we memorialized our student Lu Lingzi.  This service was held, as had been the memorial for President John Silber the autumn before, in the George Sherman Union.  Two thousand attended, with an unknown number around the globe watching and listening by cyber cast.   The service proceeded, word and music, after careful attention and planning by musicians and clergy.  We heard the Gospel of Mark and the Analects of Confucius.  We listened to instrumental and choral music.  We grieved, remembered, accepted, and affirmed, together.  The family, eighteen or so, and dressed in black, sat in the front row.  As the service ended, from the next row, I could see and hear a susurration along the family pew.  They then were meant to move to the gathering and greeting room, but no one stood.  Further conversation moved up and down the row, in a language I could not of course understand.  I feared:  have we forgotten a eulogy, or left out a reading, or skipped over an anthem?  No.  It was something else.  After a moment, the family, dressed in black stood as one, moved as one, turned as one, and faced the congregation and the world.  A long quiet ensued.  Then, as one, they bowed at the waist, and held the bow.  To honor the gathering, to honor the moment, to honor the life, to honor Life, they bowed, in silence.  It is the most powerful liturgical moment I have ever known.  It was a resurrection prayer.  And it is perhaps the most powerful liturgical moment I have seen.

‘Many are the languages of prayer, but the tears are all the same’ (A Heschel).  We should repeat this three times a day.

Prayer gives us life.

Hold On: Love

Love gives us life.  They went to the tomb…

The next Sunday, April 28, turned out to be a nice, warm early spring day.  As the sun came up, we looked forward to a day of rest and worship, a chance for a return to normal.

About 1 hour before the Sunday service, Br. Larry came in to the office to say, ‘We have another one’.  It took me some moment to understand and internalize the fact of another death.  She had died tragically in a fire, caught in an upper room.  Her mother would be coming up from NYC on the bus later that evening.  The police would have informed her of her daughter’s death.  Our Dean of Students, Kenn Elmore, and his associate, John Battaglino and I planned to meet the bus.  That evening we awaited a delayed Greyhound, talking a bit about the week past.  We pondered how best to greet the grieving mom.  It was decided I would meet the bus, and greet her as she came down the steps, to offer our heart felt condolences, and start the trek over to the hotel.  The noise of the terminal, the lateness of the hour, the long weeks of terror and loss, and the approximate presence of death itself settled on us, and gave us that quiet of the soul that sometimes overtakes us.

In the bus rolled.  The mother came down the steps carrying a beautifully decorated box, holding it with both hands.

“I want to greet you for the University and express our deepest sympathy and heart felt concern” I said.  

She replied, “Where is my daughter?  What hospital is she in?  Please take me to her, so I can see her and talk with her.  I want to go and see her.  Where is she?  How is she doing?  I brought a rice cake.  See.  In the box.  It is her favorite.  Rice cake.  I know it will make her feel better.”

Honestly, at every phrase I tried to say, with honesty and kindness, that her daughter had in fact died the night before, caught in an awful fire.  Apparently she did not understand the police, or they did not speak clearly, or someone else in the family took the call.  I tried everything.   But she could not understand, or could not hear, until, at last, she looked up and hard and asked, ‘You mean…she…is dead?’  Yes.

There is a phrase in the Christmas gospel about Rachel weeping for her children.  That Bus Terminal echoed with the chilling, haunting, painful cries of a mother who rightly could not and would not be consoled, as Rachel could not.  The reverberation of her sobbing across that urban nighttime cacophony I can hear still.  Nothing I said helped.  Nothing I did helped.  Nothing I could offer her could she receive.  We sat on a bench, the wailing stronger still, the cake and box on the floor, the gathered friends lost in grief.   Then she stiffened, her arm in mine becoming taut and cold.  Perhaps she was going into shock.  Everything I tried—counsel, prayer, listening, scripture, all—was of no avail.

Then from her other side Dean Elmore simply surrounded, enfolded her.  He put all of his body and arms all around her, as she wailed and stiffened.  He held her.  He rocked her.  He embraced her.  And little by little, sob by sob, she began to relax.  And little by little, breath by breath, she began to loosen up.  And little by little, held tight, she came through it.  Her lament lessened, her limbs loosened. Out up from the tomb she came.   A physical unspoken compassion brought her through, from death to life.  It was a resurrection love, compassion, embrace, grace, freedom, care, acceptance, mercy, pardon, peace, inclusion.  It was a resurrection love.  And it is perhaps the most powerful very public, pastoral ministry I have witnessed.

Unamuno:  warmth, warmth, warmth;  we are dying of cold not of darkness; it is not the night that kills, it is the frost.

Six years, at the time of our dad’s death, Elie Wiesel sent a note.  It was love physical, compassionate and personal, and as with all resurrection love it made a difference.  It concluded: we have a saying in our tradition, ‘may you be spared another further hardship’.

Love gives us life.

Memory. Prayer. Love.

‘The marks of the new age are present hidden in the old age.  At the juncture of the ages the marks of the resurrection are hidden and revealed in the cross of the disciple’s daily death, and only there…this is what the turn of the ages means, that life is manifested in death’ (JL Martyn, Epistemology at the Turn of the Ages).  

Easter morning is memory, prayer and love, creation, redemption, sanctification, Father, Son, Spirit, life in death.  And life in death holds out a promise of something grander still, life after death.

Closing:  Apostles Creed

– The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

Sunday
March 20

Palm Sunday

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to listen to the full service

Luke 19:29-40

There is no text available for this service. We apologize for the inconvenience.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

Sunday
March 13

Calvin for Lent

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to listen to the full service

John 12:1-8

Click here to listen to the meditations only

Mattherhorn

By an imaginative grace in the mind of a Presbyterian minister, we were invited to spend part of a seminary year in Geneva, Switzerland, underneath the shadow the great mountains, the Alps, of that region.  The minister was the Rev. George Todd, a founder two decades earlier of the East Harlem Protestant Parish, a still exemplary incarnation of community engagement against poverty, against racism, against bigotry, against xenophobia, against sexism, against the notion that the ‘poor you have always with you’.  Apparently, given the rhetoric and revelations of this political season in the United States, we still have a great deal of work to do.  Would somebody please shut the windows of heaven, that the saints need not hear our current discourse, language lastingly insulting to Mexicans, to Muslims, to women, by coarse extension to others who are other, and with the capacity for lasting hurt, especially in the ears of our children.  Shut the windows of heaven. George and Kathy Todd, with others, raised a generation of ministers and missioners, now the subject of a fine, new study, in a dissertation just completed here at Boston University, by a friend of Marsh Chapel, Ada Focer.

George corralled us, and a few others, to work for him at the World Council of Churches, whence he had recently gone, to provide, as he growled, ‘heat, light, and running water’.  Jan, you can still overhear, in those months, accompanied by piano the World Council mid-week worship service, with Emilio Castro or Philip Potter preaching. To think back upon George Todd’s influence, now decades past, is to scale up a great high peak, and to look out upon the vast beauty and need of a human race, longing, in such odd ways, for the presence of Christ. As we complete this decade’s reflection at Marsh Chapel, in dialogue with Calvin for Lent, George and others like him stand up and stand out as signs of hope for the future.

One summer Saturday that year we left Geneva, John Calvin’s city, and we drove an old car, a ‘deux chevaux’, a ‘two horse’, to find our way into the mountains.  After a while we transferred to a train, going higher still, and then later from Zermatt to Gornergratt, along old railroad lines.  As the sun came to a noonday brilliance, a cable car took us thence to the top of a great mountain, snow in July, and the powerful height, the pristine beauty of the creation, a hint of the power and majesty of Calvin’s view of the Creator.  Calvin is seen best from the pinnacle of the Matterhorn.  For this theological height, for this reverence for the divine freedom, for this austere, awesome vista, in his work, we are lastingly thankful, notwithstanding all and many profound disagreements along the railway up and forward.

"TULIP"

John Calvin’s theology has traditionally, perhaps over-simply, but at a first approximation accurately, been summarized by the so-called TULIP formula:  Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, Perseverance of the Saints.  A sober if not an entirely cheery, happy creed.

Yet, in the New Testament as a whole, the full gospel, at a first order of approximation, the opposite is expressed.  In the Gospel, Jesus loves people.  These people, and we too, we could discern then, must not have been totally depraved.  In the Gospel, as today, Jesus recognizes the choices that inevitably make us who we are.  Choice is relational and conditional, and makes us inspect what condition our condition is in.  These people, and we too, must have not been unconditionally elected.  In the Gospel, Jesus gathers everybody, all, and addresses all with the invitation, as today, to repent. These people, and we too, we could discern then, must not have been limited to the very narrow, tiny minority of the pre-destined elect.  In the Gospel, Jesus faces, heartsick, the brutal truth, that people, and we ourselves, can and do resist the invitations of love.  They must not have been powerless.  Jesus’ grace was resisted, steadily and effectively, to the path of the cross.  Speaking of the cross, here Jesus himself does not persevere, not at least in Jerusalem, or in the spiritual culture of our time, nor does his cause, at least not in this passage.  Persecution not perseverance awaits this holy one, our work of memory in Lent.

In this decade, come Lent, we have pondered and wondered about Calvin, and conjured something like this:  A real celebration of the Gospel will depend upon another TULIP:   T. Something temporal. A heart for the heart of the city—a longing to heal the spiritual culture of the land. U. Something universal. An interreligious setting.  L. Something lasting  of love in mind. A developed expression of contrition.  I. Something imaginative. A keen sense of imagination.  P. Some real power. An openness to power and presence.    

A Biblical Chorus Line

Hear again the gospel in John 12.  The main trouble a preacher faces, with regularity, is how to understand, and so interpret, a passage from 2,000 years ago.  Every gospel passage, like this one from John 12, is like a hymn, or an anthem.  There is soprano line (the lead, the voice of Jesus of Nazareth).  There is an alto line (the most important voice, that just below the surface of the text, the voice of the early church, in its preaching of the gospel, its remembering, hearing and speaking.  For the early church Jesus meant freedom, and his cross and resurrection meant one thing—the preaching of good news, that we may face the world free from the world).  There is the tenor line (what we read from the pulpit, the gospel writer, in this case John).  And there is the baritone, basso profundo (the way the line reverberates throughout the rest of scripture, and down through nineteen hundred years of experience to us today, as John gives way to 1 John, and 1 John to Irenaeus, and Irenaeus to Calvin, Calvin to Wesley, and Wesley to March 13, 2016.)

Calvin on John 12

Calvin’s reading of John 12 emphasizes the overarching divine freedom, and a determinism at work in human affairs.  He writes:

It is surprising that Christ should have chosen as treasurer a man whom He knew to be a thief.  For what was it but giving him a rope to hang himself with.  Mortal man’s only reply can be that the judgments of God are a profound abyss.

Here is the inheritance of determinism, along with the view of Scripture addressed two weeks ago, the second lastingly great trouble for us, coming out of Calvinism.  Calvin:

God preordained, for his own glory and the display of His attributes of mercy and justice, a part of the human race, without any merit of their own, to eternal salvation, and another part, in just punishment of their sin, to eternal damnation…We ought to contemplate providence not as curious and fickle persons are wont to do but as a ground of confidence and excitement to prayer.

So let us take stock of our Gospel today.  It includes one of the most infamous lines in Scripture, ‘the poor you have always with you’.   John here is making a Christological point, another sermon for another day, but in much regular memory of the Bible, especially when colored by a kind of Calvinism, the verse has not been a way of recognizing the overwhelmingly gracious presence of Christ, overshadowing all other concerns, but rather a tragic support to careless disregard for those at the dawn of life, those at the twilight of life, those in the shadow of life.  Be careful about your theological inheritance.   

K Tanner, in recent essay:  More specifically, a religiously inspired psychological sanction for hard work in the pursuit of profit reaches its height, Weber thinks, among religious people of a Calvinist stripe who believe in double predestination—that God predestines from all eternity some to salvation and some to damnation—and where the only effective way, it’s also believed, of stilling anxiety about whether one is to be saved or damned is the outwardly disciplined character of one’s everyday behavior without regard for material enjoyment. If one is graced by God, among the elect, one’s actions in ordinary pursuits will be of this character: coolly self-disciplined, restrained, non-hedonistic. And in that way amenable to capitalism’s requirements.”

The poor always with us?  Nonsense.  On a daily basis, we have as many poor among us as we choose to have poor among us.  There is no divine determinism about how many 12 year olds across this land, let alone those younger, are stripped of layers of human dignity, and saddled with the lastingly crippling effects of childhood poverty.  The poor we have are the number we choose to have, as a society.  The number of children and others without full education, effective health care, protective communal services that we have is a direct consequence, not of some pre-ordained, divinely determined formula, but of human choice, of human freedom.  It is a result of our choices in election and selection.  It is a result of our choices, in tithing and generosity.  It is a result of just how many poor we want to have with us, or how many we can somehow justify having with us.  There need not be any.  There need not be any.   It is a matter of human not divine freedom.  Diane Ravitch (NYRB 3/16):  As a society we should be ashamed that so many children are immersed in poverty and violence every day of their lives.

Presence For Lent

Jesus Christ may enter your life, at this point, along this night road crowded with terror.  This house is filled with the fragrance of perfume  covering him by grace. So utterly gracious is He that you may not notice without at least a homiletical whisper of introduction.   To the question of the poor, He makes no philosophical response.  To Plato he leaves the Thought that, really, suffering is illusory, unreal.  To Aeschylus  he leaves the proposition that suffering produces wisdom.  To Boethius he leaves the idea that suffering is instructive, since we need truth more than we need comfort.  To Freud he leaves the deep insight that all life, all creativity springs forth from some birth-pangs of suffering.  He makes no philosophical response.  His response is personal, and divine.

Rather, he prepares for his crucifixion, his burial, and his lasting resurrection presence.  Jesus meets us inside our suffering.  He meets us when we ask to withstand even when we cannot understand. He is with us.  Search the Scripture.  We find Jesus in the longsuffering of our people.

In the Old Testament teaching about the utter patience—passion--of divine love—in Jacob who worked for 7 years for Leah and another 7 for Rachel, throughout the exodus (Exodus 34), in the heart of the wilderness (Numbers 14), in psalms of lament (Psalm 86), in prophetic pain (Jeremiah 15).  Can’t you hear Jeremiah crying out:  “O Lord, thou knowest:  remember me and visit me and take vengeance upon my persecutors.  In thy patience, take me not away, now that for thy sake I bear reproach.”? Here he comes, prefigured in Job.  In Hosea, patient with adultery.  In Isaiah, awaiting resurrection. In John the Baptist, patient before death. In Paul, and Peter, and John of Patmos.

Sometimes, when we miss Jesus amid all our activity, we may find him again, or rather be found again by him, entering the poverty and hurt of his people…standing with the ill, ministering with the aging, incarnate to the lonely, showering himself on the pains of this life, present as the charismatic fullness of real life.  Jesus Christ empowers us to withstand suffering, even when, honestly, we have no way to understand it.  Here is Jesus Christ, publicly portrayed for you as crucified, who, unlike any merely religious representation of God, who, come Lent, invades the depth, the troubled dark night of life, to claim that darkness is as light for Him and for his own.

One Day

One day, in the fullness of time, compassion will reign.

One day there will emerge a people fully filled with a passion for compassion.

One day, as the Old Testament says, in the heart of difficulty with Job we will “sing songs in the night”.  And, “they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength.  They shall mount up with wings as eagles.  They shall run and not be weary.  They shall walk and not faint.”

One day, as the New Testament says, the “long-suffering” grace of God will prevail.  Suffering will produce patience, and patience endurance, and endurance hope, and hope shall not disappoint us, because of the love of God made manifest in Jesus Christ.

One day…and why not start here, and why not begin now?…there will be a real community setting a patient, passionate, compassionate beat, a cadence of quiet endurance.

One day, in the fullness of time, His presence will reign.

O Day of God draw nigh

In beauty and in power

Come with thy timeless judgments now

To match our present hour.

Bring to our troubled minds

Uncertain and afraid

The quiet of a steadfast faith

Calm of a call obeyed.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

Sunday
March 6

Sacrament as Prayer

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to listen to the full service

Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

Click here to listen to the sermon only

Came to himself….

Scripture

J Wesley, 5 means of grace

Bible, reading and memory, examples

Luke:  what is absent (religion), spiritual not religious, greek and gnostic, Delphic oracle

Bible full of variety, not a single theme (eg Gospels)

Diversity preceded unity in earliest Christianity

Marrow of Gospel; grace, freedom, pardon, acceptance, mercy, reconciliation, peace, acceptance, inclusion, embrace…love

2 Cor

1 John 4: 7

Fasting

Meaning, diet and exercise

Wesley, T\F, horseback, 5am preaching

We, spirit, soul, body

Spiritual Yoga: integration, stillness community
Ministry on campus:  worship, relationship, safety

Lent has its point here—though we are not meant to live in Lent, we live in Easter, and Sundays remind us so in Lent

Prayer

Public and private, all year this year at Marsh

Senses, Language, Practice, Architecture, Sacrament of Prayer

Moment, quiet, meditation, walk, pause, own-most self

Have no anxiety about anything…Phil 4

In this nave, week by week—nothing

Well being vs work\ production vs self\immediacy vs imagination

Sacrament

Mystery, definition, two, five rites, sign, grace, simplest elements, entry\journey, belonging\meaning, beginning\sustaining, prevenient\sanctifying

Thanksgiving (eucharist), remembrance, presence

Ever need to take a spiritual shower? (Remember baptism)

Cleanse, from misuse of public forms of rhetoric, meant to allow difference, courtesy maintains a way to disagree, sermon prayer speech address debate, when gears stripped, better angels, ask not, then the path opens from a civil society to social incivility, be careful what you find entertaining, or where, where entertainment ever TRUMPS engagement

Grief as a sacrament

Conversation

Luke 15 is a conversation, barely engaged

The week at Marsh

Circles of 6-12 people

Sherry Turkel 2 books

What is an education—periodic table or finding one’s voice?

Soul and World Soul, Word and Word of God,

Thurman to recite 139

Sacrament as Prayer:  mark the means of grace:  Scripture, fasting, prayer, sacrament, Christian conversation

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.