Archive for November, 2016

Sunday
November 27

Approaching Advent

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to listen to the full service

Matthew 24:36-44

Click here to listen to the meditations only

The gist of today’s gospel is clear enough.  We cannot see or know the future.  We ought to live on the qui vive.  Health there is, to be sure, and succor in a full acceptance and recognition of such a humble epistemology and such a rigorous ethic.  Let us admit to the bone our cloud of unknowing about the days and hours to come.  Let us live every day and every hour of every day as if it were our last.  Song and sacrament, sermon and prayer, they will guide us along this very path come Sunday morning, come this very morning.

What is less clear is the meaning of the coming of the Son of Man.  What is the nature of this coming?  Who is the person so named?  What difference, existential difference, everlasting difference does any of this make?  What did Jesus actually say here?  On what score did the primitive Christian community remember and rehearse his teaching?  Did Matthew have a dog in this fight?  How has the church, age to age, interpreted the passage?  We shall pose these four questions to verses 36 to 44 in the 24th chapter of the Gospel bearing the name of Matthew, and then apply the verses to ourselves.

Jesus.  Jesus may have used this phrase, though over late night refreshment in 1997 Marcus Borg once pushed hard that it is a later church appellation. It may have been both. This phrase, coming out Daniel chapter 7 (did Jesus hear this read and hold it in memory?) and the stock Jewish apocalyptic of Jesus’ day, was as much a part of his environment as the sandals on his feet, the donkey which he rode, the Aramaic which he spoke, the Palestinian countryside which he loved, and the end of time which he expected, in the contemporary generation.  Did he understand himself to be that figure?  We cannot see and we cannot say, though I think it unlikely.  That is, Jesus used the phrase, most probably, but not of himself, most probably. It is Mark and the author Enoch who have given us the ‘Son of Man’ in its full sense, and it is Matthew alone among the Gospel writers who uses the ‘coming’ in a technical sense (so Dr. Perrin, IBDS 834, and others).  The soprano voice of Jesus is far lighter in the gospel choruses than we would think or like.

Church.  Mark, Luke and Matthew carry forward these standard end of the world predictions.  Our lectionary clips out the mistaken acclamation of 24: 34, just two verses ahead of our reading, but we should hear it:  Truly I tell you this generation will not pass away until all these things take place.  Like the waiting figures in the Glass Menagerie, the earlier church has hung onto these blown glass elements while awaiting a never returning person, like that telephone operator, ‘who had fallen in love with long distances’.  They preserve the menagerie in fine glass of hopes deferred that maketh the heart sick.  That generation and seventy others have passed away before any of this has taken place.  We do not expect, literally expect, these portents any longer.  Nor should we.  They are part of the apocalyptic language and imagery which was the mother of the New Testament and all Christian theology since, a beloved mother long dead.  The Son of Man was the favorite hope child of that mother.  A long low alto aria this.  Yet we should, and do, hear these apocalyptic passages.  They are a part of our shared, family history.

Matthew.  To his credit and to our benefit Matthew makes his editorial, redactorial moves, to accommodate what he has taken from Mark 13.  The point of apocalyptic eschatology is ethical persuasion, here and in the sibling synoptic passages.  Watch.  Be ready.  Live with your teeth set.  Let the servants, the leaders of Matthew’s day, be found faithful.   After 37 excoriating verses directed against the Pharisees in chapter 23, white washed tombs which outwardly appear beautiful but within full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness—the hard truth about religion at our worst, and after 43 further verses in chapter 24 of standard end time language, Matthew pulls up.  He locks and loads and delivers his sermon.  You must be ready.  The figure of the future is coming at an hour you do not expect.  Hail the Matthew tenor.

Tradition.  Immediately the church scrambled to reinvent and reinterpret.  Basso profundo. One example, found early in the passage, will suffice.  Of that day no one knows, not even the Son.  Except that some texts take out ‘even the Son’, in deference to Jesus’ later and higher Person.  It is, finally, and except for occasional oddball readings, like that of the Montanists in the second century and the fundamentalists in the twenty first, the church’s view that apocalyptic language and imagery convey the future as unknowable and the present as unrepeatable. The future as unknowable and the present as unrepeatable…

To sum up: As soon as we reach out to grasp the future it has slipped past us, already flying down the road to the rear, into the past.  The present itself is no better, because its portions of past and future are tangled permanently together.  We do have the past, neither dead nor past…or do we?  Memory and memoir spill into each other with the greatest of ease.  One agnostic admitted that music, performed, was his closest approximation of God, the presence of God, the proof of God.  We shall listen in a moment to a beautiful anthem, with rapt attention.  One trusted Christian—it may have been you—sensed grace and grace in the grace of worship, unlike any other. Every moment is a veritable mystery.  Music is a veritable mystery.  So next week, we shall hear:  My body and My blood, these are veritable mysteries, so named mystery, sacramentum, to this day.  How shall we respond?

Sleepers awake!  There is not an infinite amount of unforeseen future in which to come awake and to become alive!  There does come a time when it is too late, allowing the valence of ‘it’ to be as broad as the ocean and as wide as life.  You do not have forever to invest yourself in deep rivers of Holy Scripture, whatever they may be for you.  It takes time to allow the Holy to make you whole.  Begin.  You do not have forever to seek in the back roads of some tradition, whatever it may be for you, the corresponding hearts and minds which and who will give you back your own-most self.  It takes time to uncover others who have had the same quirky interests and fears you do.  Begin.  You do not have forever to sift and think through what you think about what lasts and matters and counts and works.  Honestly, who could complain about young people seeking careers, jobs, employment, work?  Do so.  But work alone will not make you human, nor allow you to become a real human being.  Life is about vocation and avocation, not merely about employment and unemployment.  You are being sold a bill of goods, here.  Be watchful.  It takes time to self interpret that deceptively crushing verse, ‘let your light so shine before others’.  Begin.  You do not have forever to experience Presence.  It is presence, spirit, good for which we long, for which, nay for Whom, we are made.  It takes time to find authentic habits of being—what makes the heart sing, the soul pray, the spirit preach.  Your heart, not someone else’s, your soul,  not someone else’s your spirit, not someone else’s.  Begin.

You must be ready.  For the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.

 For example.  How do you deal with hurt that comes from a person you deeply love, a relationship you truly enjoy, an institution you firmly affirm, or a friendship you lastingly cherish? Was yours a contentious Thanksgiving feast?  It is one thing to think about pain, permanent or passing, that comes in collision with others whom we do not know well or care for.  These traffic accidents are perhaps to be expected in the rush hours of relational experience.  When we do not know one another, or not well, we can miss cues and generate miscues that those more familiar would avoid. Not knowing you I did not know and would never have expected that you are an avid Yankees fan, and if I had I would never have said what I did, directly, about Alex Rodriguez.  Well, I probably wouldn’t have done.  But what about the church you deeply love, when disappointment comes from the pulpit? What about that lifetime friend who says something unpleasant and hurtful?  What about that employer, whom you revere and admire, to whom you give both creativity and loyalty?  What about that community group whose organizational needs you have selflessly met, that then makes a statement or takes a decision that causes you pain? Or, what about the country you love, when its voice, its choice, deeply disappoint?  In short, what happens when those you love hurt you?  How do you deal with that?

Perhaps you will irrupt in the moment, lash out in reaction, without any due process of reflection, because the moment needs it, and you have or feel you have no choice.  Let your yea be yea and your nay be nay.  Be angry, and let not the sun go down on your anger.  This may cause more problems than it solves, of course, but you may have had no choice.  Sometimes it is better to stand and fight.

Perhaps though flight is better.  You may sense that you just want to put some distance between yourself and your source of pain, institutional, relational, or personal.  A little time, a little distance, a little pause, a little absence.   Thence a cooling off, it may be, not a squaring off.  In some measure that may suit you and the challenge.  You did not start it.  You do not need to take responsibility for it.  Shake the dust from your feet.  Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day. (You see how tough it can be even, especially when you know the Bible, to pick out the right Bible verse!)  Flight postpones, but not in healing tones.   The trouble is still there, though it may just dissipate on its own.  Not all battles have to be fought.  Sometimes it is better to take flight.

Perhaps playing dead is the way to go.  You know, like animals do, they just curl up and become a log or a part of the scenery.   Let life go along, and let the conversation play out.  You do not need to oppose.  You do not need to repose.  You can just pose in silence.  You can use the silent treatment—present but quiet.  This could work, though there is a quality of falsehood about it.  It may depend on just how substantial the fender-bender was, how hurtful the collision, how extreme the traffic accident.   Silence alone has limits to its beneficence.  Still, as the man said, ‘I would rather remain silent and be thought a fool than to open my mouth and remove all doubt’.  Sometimes it is better just to keep your own counsel, and play dead.

You have though at least one other option.  Fight, flight, play dead if need be.  Yet you might also, well, wait.  We are approaching Advent, are we not?  Wait upon the Lord.  That is, you might think through what happened, both putting the best and worst lights upon it.  You might pray about it.  Hold it in prayerful thought.  You might think out a couple of sentences that you would caringly use, should the institution, relationship, or person provide an opening for that.  And then you would have to ‘hurry up and wait’.  Be kind to one another, tender hearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ has forgiven you.  “You know, I have had that interchange in mind since it happened.  Honestly, for whatever reason, it did hurt.  But given the love, joy, happiness, meaning and help you give me over so much time, it is just one brief solar eclipse that comes once a decade, when all else is sunshine. Thanks for mentioning it.”

For example.  For those still reeling a bit from the last 18 months and the last 18 days in these United States, we may ask:  How do you feel?  What have you learned?  Your protégé, now ten years out from his Marsh Chapel choir experience, and his decision to enter ministry alongside his choir member bride, now in Philadelphia says,  I feel like I’ve been kicked in the smug (J).  How do you feel?  And what have you learned? What are the lessons to be stowed away for future use as birthday gifts, years from now, gifts on the go as it were, for future generations?  The lesson that ‘those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities’(Voltaire)?  The lesson that we see what we want to see?  The lesson that both sexism and racism lurk, endure, live and breathe?  The lesson that, in some dark seasons, selfishness trumps charity; anger trumps reason; hatred trumps comity; bigotry trumps friendship?  The lesson that voting, the act itself, matters—really matters?  The lesson that gathering—in a rally, say, or better in worship, say—empowers, enlivens, motivates, for ill, or good?  (Do you worship? Advent is a good time in which to approach worship.) The sad lesson that some, to win, are willing to enter the sphere of demagoguery, ‘sometimes you have to use a certain kind of rhetoric to motivate people’ (DJT, NYT, 11/16)?  Can you hear that?  It begs to be heard. Or, even, the basic, technological lesson that email, whether well served on its servers, or ill served by it servants, serves to dehumanize, as a sub-human form of communication?

How about this:  The lesson that what one means—by an act, a word, a statement, a vote, say—is not all that such an act means?  We will experience Advent through this lesson this year. The lesson, that is, that what you in your heart meant by an act, a word, a statement—a vote, is not in fact the limit of what that vote meant:  in fact it is a small part, the greater part of the meaning being found in the effect, the impact, the historical influence of the vote.  The meaning of a text is found in the future it opens, the future it imagines, the future it creates. (Ray Hart). So too, the meaning of an act, a word, a statement, a vote, say, is found in the future, bright or dark, which it creates.  What you meant is not what it means.  For that, you have to listen to those harmed, or helped, by it.  Meaning is social, not individual, hence our use of words, our developed language, our investment in culture, our life in community.  You may have meant it one way, but its meaning is found along another.  Such hard, tragic lessons, to have to learn and re-learn.

The gist of today’s gospel is clear enough.  We cannot see or know the future.  We ought to live on the qui vive.  Health there is, to be sure, and succor in a full acceptance and recognition of such a humble epistemology and such a rigorous ethic.  Let us admit to the bone our cloud of unknowing about the days and hours to come.  Let us live every day and every hour of every day as if it were our last.  Song and sacrament, sermon and prayer, they will guide us along this very path come Sunday morning, come this very morning, as together, in faith and hope and love, we approach Advent.

– The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

Sunday
November 20

The Bach Experience

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to listen to the full service

Luke 23:33-43

Click here to listen to the meditations only

Rev. Gaskell

The Chapel’s gothic nave, built to lift the spirit, welcomes you

The Chapel’s sixty year history, at the heart of Boston University, welcomes you

The Chapel’s regard for persons and personality, both in its Connick stained glass windows and in its current ministry, welcomes you

The Chapel’s familiar love of music, weekday and Sunday, welcomes you

The Chapel’s congregation of caring, loving souls, in this sanctuary, welcomes you in spirit.

Welcome today as we enhance our endowment.

We celebrate the endowment we already have.  It is a rich and treasure.  It is an endowment vocal not visible, audible not audited, psychic not physical, moral not material.  Listen for its echoes…listen…

All the good you can…

The two so long disjoined…

Heart of the city, service of the city…

Learning, virtue, piety…

Good friends all…

Hope of the world…

Are ye able, still the Master, whispers down eternity…

Common ground…

Content of character…

Congregation and community, you come too.

Earthly assembly and heavenly chorus, you come too.

Beauty opens the world to grace.  Beauty may prepare you for the gospel of faith, the faith of the gospel.  Beauty is a ‘praeparatio evangelica’, a preparation of the gospel.  Bach is a prelude to faith.

Faith, the leap of faith, requires preparation.  Our colleague Peter Berger has written about this preparation: “I can find in human reality certain intimations of (God’s) speech, signals, unclear though they are, of His presence…joy, expressed in (great music) which seeks eternity…the human propensity to order which appears to correlate with an order in the universe…the immensely suggestive experience of play and humor, the irrepressible human propensity to hope, the certainty of some moral judgments, and last, but not least, the experiences of beauty…”(Questions of Faith, 12).

Beauty prepares us for faith.  Bach is a prelude to the gospel.

When you stand before your grandchild, in the hour of birth, you might think about that.  When you look into your father’s eyes, as he lies critically ill, you might think about that. When you realize that you have a real friend, one real friend, you might think about that. When you look at your beautiful country, in a time of need, and wonder whether you should bestir yourself to write a check or make a phone call, you might think about that. When a sunset seizes you, when a poem teases you, when a sermon freezes you, you might think about that.  It takes a leap.  Faith takes a leap.

Something beautiful may have prepared our gospel writer.  Bach may prepare you today.  Bach may lift your soul beyond youthful grunge.  Bach may raise your soul out of religious hiding.  Bach may sear your soul with beauty, and call you out of forty years of spiritual sloth.  It would not be the first time.  Today we hear a song of thanksgiving, a grateful and beautiful anthem. “Bach’s cantatas, in fact, were conceived and should be regarded not as concert pieces at all, but as musical sermons; and they were incorporated as such in the regular Sunday church services”. (The Cambridge Companion to Bach, 86).  I wonder whether the beautiful holiness of this music will touch you?

Dr. Jarrett

Today we present Cantata 10: ‘My soul magnifies the Lord’, Bach’s German setting of the Canticle of Mary as found in the first chapter of the Gospel according to Luke. Our program annotator Brett Kostrzewski reminds us both of the joyful prevalence of this text in most all Christian liturgies, but also the familiarity of the Leipzig congregation with this most joyful and famous canticle.

Let’s first consider the libretto for our cantata. Typically, we’d expect to find a biblical exhortation – perhaps a verse or two from a Psalm – followed by a series of recitatives and arias, each of which advances a different rhetorical argument or perspective of the scriptural subject of the day. The recits tend to pack in the most theology with their syllabic declamation, leaving the arias to convey a more personal response to the scriptural subject. Cantata 10 draws its libretto entirely from the Canticle of Mary, the first two verses quoted exactly, with the interior movements paraphrasing the remainder of the text. Only once does our anonymous librettist depart from the Lukan text when, in the final recitative, the tenor expounds on the broader theological implications of the word made flesh with themes that remind us of the first chapter of John. Bach adds the string orchestra at this moment, as if to underscore the importance of this final teaching opportunity.

There are three arias that comprise the corpus of the cantata. The first proceeds directly out of the opening movement without recitative, and immediately and successfully captures both the spirit of John the Baptist leaping in Elizabeth’s womb but also Mary’s joyful exuberance. The central aria provides the bass soloist and continuo cellist a flashy and virtuosic depiction of God casting down the mighty from their seat, exalting the humble, leaving the rich empty, and filling the hungry with gifts of grace. The third aria is perhaps the most inward looking moment in the entire cantata. Scored as a duet for alto and tenor, listen for the Magnificat chant played in long tones by the trumpet.

There are two recitatives for the tenor soloist, both of which offer rich examples of Bach’s extraordinary text setting. Note the chromatic flourish on the word ‘scatter’ in the first recitative, for example.

It is the cantata’s opening movement that best captures the urgency and ardor of Mary’s Song. The ages old Magnificat psalm tone is heard in long notes in the Soprano part, taken up by the altos for the second verse. All around, Bach scores music of brilliant vivacity, depicting both the exuberance of Mary’s joy, but also the promise and urgency of Christ’s advent.

Rev. Gaskell

Let us prepare ourselves, upon this Christ the King Sunday, and take on for ourselves, a spirit of wonder, of vulnerability

Erazim Kohak, of Boston University said of wonder:  ‘The ageless boulders of the long abandoned dam, the maple and the great birch by twilight, the chipmunk in the busyness of his days and of his dying, even I, making my dwelling place among them, are not only right in our season.  We also have our value in eternity, as witnesses to the audacious miracle of being rather than nothing.  Ultimately, that is the moral sense of nature, infinitely to be cherished:  that there is something.  That is the eternal wonder articulated in the rightness and rhythm of time which humans honor in their commandments, the wonder of being…There are humans…who become blind to goodness, to truth and beauty, who drink wine without pausing to cherish it, who pluck flowers without pausing to give thanks, who accept joy and grief as all in a day’s work, to be enjoyed or managed, without ever seeing the presence of eternity in them.  But that is not the point.  What is crucial is that humans, whether they do so or not, are capable of encountering a moment not simply as a transition between a before and an after but as the miracle of eternity ingressing intot time.  That, rather than the ability to fashion tools, stands out as the distinctive human calling.’

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, of blessed memory, said of vulnerability:  ‘Nothing can make up for the absence of someone whom we love and it would be wrong to try to find a substitute:  we must simply hold out and see it through.  That sounds very hard at first, but at the same time it is a great consolation; for the gap, as long as it remains unfilled, preserves the bond between us.  It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap:  He does not fill it, but on the contrary, He keeps it empty, and so helps us to keep alive our former communion with each other, even at the cost of pain.’

Gaston Bachelard, that Parisian philosopher poet, wrote, in full self-awareness:  ‘Words—I often imagine this—are little houses, each with its cellar and garret.  Common sense lives on the ground floor, always ready to engage in ‘foreign commerce’, on the same level as the others, as the passers-by, who are never dreamers.  To go upstairs in the word house, is to withdraw, step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream, it is losing oneself in the distant corridors of an obscure etymology, looking for treasures that cannot be found in words.  To mount and descend in the words themselves—this is the poet’s life…Yet listen well.  Not to my words, but to the tumult that rages in your body when you listen to yourself…And why should the actions of the imagination not be as real as those of the perception?’

Bach is filling us with grace and beauty! In particular, the final recit (No. 6) strays a bit from Luke, to amplify a little more theology, and seems to borrow heavily from John: "Thus it ever is, that God's Word is full of grace and truth.”   Because the Gospel of John is centrally about the divine presence, this note fits our music today very well.  John is about presence, as is this magnificent cantata.  John is about Spirit, as is this magnificent cantata.  John is about mystery, as is this magnificent cantata.  John is about grace, as is this magnificent cantata.  Blessed be the Lord God of Israel!

“Blessed be the Lord God of Israel,

for he has looked favorably on his people and redeemed them.

He has raised up a mighty savior for us

in the house of his servant David,

as he spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets from of old,

that we would be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us.

Thus he has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors,

and has remembered his holy covenant,

the oath that he swore to our ancestor Abraham,

to grant us that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies,

might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness

before him all our days.

And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High;

for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways,

to give knowledge of salvation to his people

by the forgiveness of their sins.

By the tender mercy of our God,

the dawn from on high will break upon us,

to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,

to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

-The Reverend Victoria Hart Gaskell, Chapel Associate for Methodist students & Dr. Scott Jarrett, Director of Music

Reverend Gaskell's portion of this week's sermon is written by the Reverend Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel

Sunday
November 13

A Thanksgiving Conversation

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to listen to the full service

Luke 21:5-9

Click here to listen to the meditations only

Let us be thoughtful in conversation this coming Thanksgiving.

Let us be mindful of the goodness of God, as sung in the Psalm this morning.  Let us be mindful of the blessings of God.

The goodness of God knows no limit, no single season, no particular admixture of victory and defeat.   Our friends (1), the seasons themselves (2), and the prayerful practice of remembrance (3) tell us this again.

Let us be mindful of friendship.  The friendship of Marsh Chapel is offered each Lord’s day, and each day in the Lord, first and foremost to those most in need.   The physical safety of our students, in all times and in all seasons, stands as our highest priority in friendship.  If you are a sophomore, say, and sense you are in some need or peril, our Hospitality Staff welcomes you in friendship.  Mr. Bouchard, our Chapel Director, who will read in a moment a playful poem about friendship, guides a team, including one staff person related to Title IX issues, devoted to your security, in use of space, in programmatic support, and in personal protection.  Now in a season when, given the events of this past week and its election, some sense possible peril, we stand with you, on a daily basis, on the ground level, in a protective posture.

Let us be mindful of friendship, as was our friend, of blessed memory, Max Coots:


"Let us give thanks for a bounty of people:

For children who are our second planting, and though they grow like weeds and the wind too soon blows them away, may they forgive us our cultivation and fondly remember where their roots are....

For generous friends with hearts and smiles as bright as their blossoms;

For feisty friends as tart as apples;

For continuous friends, who, like scallions and cucumbers, keep reminding us that we've had them;

For crotchety friends, as sour as rhubarb and as indestructible;

For handsome friends, who are as gorgeous as eggplants and as elegant as a row of corn, and the other, plain as potatoes and as good for you;

For funny friends, who are as silly as Brussels Sprouts and as amusing as Jerusalem Artichokes, and serious friends, as complex as cauliflowers and as intricate as onions;

For friends as unpretentious as cabbages, as subtle as summer squash, as persistent as parsley, as delightful as dill, as endless as zucchini, and who, like parsnips, can be counted on to see you through the winter;

For old friends, nodding like sunflowers in the evening-time, and young friends coming on as fast as radishes;

For loving friends, who wind around us like tendrils and hold us, despite our blights, wilts and witherings;

And finally, for those friends now gone, like gardens past that have been harvested, and who fed us in their times that we might have life thereafter;

For all these we give thanks."

Let us be mindful of friendship.  And let us be mindful of the seasons.

Next week, most will sit before a carved turkey.  For many years, Marsh Chapel provided such a meal right here.  Now the University itself has taken up that meal, and provides it for students who are here over break, along now with open housing.  (Your ministry, Marsh Chapel, has been such an incubator over time, for service that then becomes University wide.  A Marsh Chapel Martin Luther King observance, becomes a University wide observance.  A Marsh Chapel community service program, becomes a University wide service.  A gospel group becomes a University-wide Inner Strength Gospel choir, Marsh Chapel hosted.  A Marsh Chapel Howard Thurman room and listening center becomes a University Howard Thurman Center.  A Marsh Chapel commitment to pastoral care over six decades becomes further embodied in behavioral health, and SARP, and the office of the Ombuds, and others.  Your work in incubation continues.) You plant seeds, and they grow, and grow up and on and out.  Season by season.  So next week, you will be at your table, somewhere.

Given the choices others have made in election and selection, and given the tragic tide of white nationalism, as un-Christian as it is un-American, which has surprisingly splashed upon all this week, how shall we engage in conversation with family with whom we disagree, come Thanksgiving? Perhaps it will be too much, this year, and silence or absence will be required.  Yet, it may be that the rhythms of nature in harvest will help us.  It may be that the season itself, redolent and rich with meaning, may support us.  It may be that the hymns of Thanksgiving, hummed or remembered, may help us.  You could also sing them, of course, even if you are not Methodists.  It may be that prayers, like the three used year by year here at Marsh, and used today, may help us.  Feel free to borrow.

Yes, our lessons from ancient Scripture regularly surround us with a thanksgiving conversation:  Isaiah in hope, the Psalmist in praise, the Epistle in encouragement, and the Gospel in patience. Even those of us dwelling mostly in an urban setting can from this autumn—warm, mostly; dry, mostly; pleasant, mostly—receive such a sense of blessing and so a sense of gratitude.  Seed-time gives way to harvest, as tears give way to shouts and joy. The long months of hidden growth, of change and development under the earth, are a firm reminder that the future will look different from the past, and from the present.  Every autumn, every harvest season, we are offered such a reminder.

Let us be mindful of the good earth, of the fruits of harvest, of the fruits of years of labor and love, as one remembered in the figure of her friend.  Carol Zahm, now deceased, wrote a poem prayer, about a friend, some years ago.  It is set in Wisconsin, on a family farm.  Today it will be read by our University Chaplain for International students, Ms. Jessica Chicka.  As Mr. Bouchard cares for space and safety, she cares for our International sisters and brothers.  As a junior, you might muse, isn’t it wonderful that she is here!  In a fortnight when the ugliness of American selfishness, and a shameful ‘Christian’ bigotry, may frighten our beloved neighbors, or worse, she is here to provide pastoral care, and programmatic support and administrative help for all—for those from Pakistan and Korea and China, and for those who are Hindu or Muslim or Buddhist or Confucian—or no religious tradition at all.  In a week when students on campuses, now, given the open space set out for this by a particular, now victorious, party and candidate, who have unashamedly ridden a wave of white nationalism, are accosted for wearing religious garb, or who are fearful for their families (one interviewed by the New York times, standing on the steps not twenty feet from the Marsh Chapel on Wednesday), your ministry with and to those who are strangers in an increasingly strange land, has real portent.  (We need someone, by the way, to endow the Deanship of Marsh Chapel, a $4 million gift, to make sure this sort of ministry continues in perpetuity.  We need others, by the way, to tithe in support of Marsh Chapel for the year to come, to make sure this sort of ministry continues into the future—where will your tithe go?)  It may be, at Thanksgiving, that the season, the harvest, nature itself, will support us.

Sitting by my window—looking out at the field

This chair has been such a comfort for so many years

Rocking—rocking

All the children were comforted in this chair

All grown and gone now

Babies—growing year after year

‘Til they could go to the field to help

The fields—so green in the spring

Then the plough broke it up into beautiful brown earth

Worked over and over

Until the seeds had a wonderful bed in which to grow

Week after week growing

And then harvest.

We all went to the field for the harvest.

Sunrise to sunset

Day after day

Finished at last

Ready for winter

Now looking across the field at beautiful virgin snow

Like watching a baby sleep.  So peaceful.

Happy for the quiet.

Anxious for the awakening

Start again

Sitting by my window

Rocking Rocking

Her rocking, the rhythm of her remembrance, along the brown earth, seems a world away from our world today, for we have been this past week through a very difficult patch. Nature may aid culture here.

We will want to be somber and sober to remember that God gives the human being a rooted, daily freedom, but does not then suddenly intervene to erase that freedom, however perversely, however violently, however despicably that freedom is used.

We will want to stand up, sit up, and take notice that liberty is only of any value within the constraints of security to enjoy it; and that security is only of any value as a basis for the enjoyment of liberty itself.

As people of faith we cannot in sloth afford to be naïve, refusing the dominical wisdom of serpents to hide underneath a false innocence of doves, when facing hatred, religious terrorism, and nihilistic venom.   Protection for the lamb requires resistance to the wolf, before either determines to lie down with the other.  Any manner of bigotry deserves to be met by condemnation, contempt and resistance.  We have plenty of work to do, and let us not grow weary in doing it.

We do not want to pray, preach, sing or proffer a kind of cheap grace. The utter realism of the Bible, on the one hand, and our brutal experience across many centuries, on the other hand, and now including this past week, forbid it.  Read again Victor Klemperer’s two volume diary, I Will Bear Witness, or the exemplary biography of Bonhoeffer, Strange Glory.

In helping one another, and speaking to our children, in Thanksgiving conversation, we can at least remind them that ‘they are safe, and it is OK to feel sad about what has happened to others’, and we can continue to support and protect our neighbors and friends of all manner of different traditions, religious and secular alike.

 So let us be mindful of the seasons this Thanksgiving.  And let us be mindful of remembrance.

Howard Thurman, who was a hundred years ahead of his time fifty years ago, was so mindful.  Our University Chaplain, Br. Whitney will read Thurman’s poem in a moment.  What Mr. Bouchard brings to physical safety, and what Ms. Chicka brings to religious safety, Br. Whitney brings in full to psychic safety.  With his team, and in partnership with others across the campus, he ministers—perhaps with you in your senior year?—to anxiety, to depression, to all that unbalances the person.  See, hear him, and know he is here with and for you.  Thurman’s poem:

 

Today, I make my Sacrament of Thanksgiving.

I begin with the simple things of my days:

Fresh air to breathe,

Cool water to drink,

The taste of food,

The protection of houses and clothes,

The comforts of home.

For all these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day!

 

I bring to mind all the warmth of humankind that I have known:

My mother’s arms,

The strength of my father

The playmates of my childhood,

The wonderful stories brought to me from the lives

Of many who talked of days gone by when fairies

And giants and all kinds of magic held sway;

The tears I have shed, the tears I have seen;

The excitement of laughter and the twinkle in the

Eye with its reminder that life is good.

For all these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day

To conclude, a story, an analogy—full well knowing that all analogies stumble.  The point of the parable is that there is still a future, remarkable, different, and good—we just do not know what the future holds.

In 1978 we had planned maybe to stay in NYC, and there or nearby to study further.  In our third year of seminary though we became pregnant.  Then after Christmas Jan suffered a severe illness, requiring surgery:  the doctor said he did know whether either mother or child would survive the six-month stage operation.  By God’s grace, they did.  We moved suddenly into a small church in Ithaca, NY, a congregation whose minister had run off with the organist mid-year, hence an opening, and a place where mother and coming child could convalesce, and ministry could begin, with some commuting for the finishing seminarian, back down to NYC.

Now my Korean student in Boston says, ‘Dean Hill there are three kinds of Korean Christians:  conservative, very conservative and very, very conservative’.  Then, in Ithaca, there were three kinds of people:  liberal, very liberal, and very, very liberal.  It was 1979, and all weddings were done on horseback, underwater, out in a field, or naked (well, that is hyperbole, but you get the point).  That fall, a modest proposal to improve a road up the far hill to the hospital was met with communal outrage, and defense of the squirrel population near Trumansburg. The newspaper reported that three people attended a hearing, in squirrel defense, dressed as squirrels (not hyperbole, and you get the point).  The next year, an election was held.  Its results produced apocalyptic apoplexy:  the president elect—Ronald Reagan.  That winter, in a Cornell graduate student home, over dinner, we spoke in fear and trepidation of what would befall the republic.  But the host, a veteran Washingtonian back to do a PhD above Cayuga’s waters, listened and quietly, presciently, replied: “No, he will not trim the bureaucracy—it will expand.  No, he will not eliminate the debt—it will grow.  No he will not cut taxes—they will increase.  He doesn’t have the power.  He will shove and push that tree and one apple will fall.  Watch and wait. (You would have thought he was quoting today’s Lukan little apocalypse).”

You watch and wait.  We left Ithaca in 1981 for pastoral visits along the St. Lawrence, in the far north, in the bitter cold, in the barns at milking; for ministry among farmers and truck drivers in the fire department; for an immersion in non-urban poverty, poverty without electricity and without a subway, along a frozen river; and later for counseling with engineers let go by a failing Carrier Corporation; prayer with factory workers dis-employed by Oneida Silver and Smith Corona; tearful farewells to executives leaving Kodak; in short, the disappearance of both farming and manufacturing, as the drums of globalization beat along the Mohawk.  That is, our real theological education began, in earnest, in 1981.  Martin Luther: “One becomes a theologian by living, by dying, and by being damned, not by understanding, reading, and speculation.” You watch and wait.  You have faith, you have hope, and you have each other.  And you have plenty of work to do, awaiting the day when ‘the wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; and dust shall be the serpent’s food.  They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain says the Lord.’

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

Sunday
November 6

All the Saints

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to listen to the full service

Luke 6:20-31

Click here to listen to the meditations only

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

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.