Sunday
September 10
A Season of Remembrance
By Marsh Chapel
Click here to listen to the full service
Click here to listen to the meditations only
Remembrance
It felt so good last week to come back, after a summer of travel and preaching, to be at home in our church home, to lean forward from our home pulpit, that of which we are the current, temporary stewards. It is like when you go away for a week, and you come home. You turn the key in the latch. You pick up the mail. You turn on the light. You open the refrigerator to see if anything has arrived or departed (why do we do that?). And we take in, you savor, that sense, scent, sensibility of being home. It connects you again to who you are, reminds you of who you are.
Last Sunday a couple who had been married at Marsh Chapel fifty years to the day earlier attended worship here. Our attentive usher team made sure, amid Matriculation madness, that the dean had a chance to greet the happy couple. We asked them their secret of success. He replied, ‘She is the secret’. He did not miss a beat. They came to remember who they were, who they are, who they want to be. Fifty years goes by more quickly than you might think. They had connections with Kingston Ontario, and Queens College there—a beautiful college town, a fine school, along the lakeshore.
Our summer travels took us, as it happens, to Kingston, Ontario in the last days of June—near Queens college, in that beautiful college town, along the lakeshore. We went in something of reminiscence, since decades earlier it had been a regular family vacation destination. Then only 2 hours away; only a couple of hundred US dollars for a few days; only a ride across the Thousand Islands Bridge, and, wa-la, another land, another country, a different currency, a slight difference in inflection. In those years we had gone, summer and winter, to a hotel with a big pool, an indoor gym, hot tub and sauna: a place where the kids could play and the parents could enjoy seeing them do so. What one would or would not give to return, for an hour or a day, to that young adult happiness, in a Canadian hostel! In the hot tub, we found ourselves with two couples, one French and one English speaking. We watched as they watched as their kids did exactly what our kids used to do, in the same spot, the same splash, the same laugh, the same joy. We talked as travelers do. They four were headed the next day to Ottawa to celebrate the sesquicentennial of the birth of the Dominion of Canada. All six of us could remember the World’s Fair, MAN AND HIS WORLD, from the Montreal of 1967. All of us had been there. They spoke of their new leader, son of a former Premier, Justin Trudeau. They spoke plainly, eloquently, proudly, lovingly, and personally. The English wife said, ‘You know, it’s just that, I mean, it’s just that…He reminds us of who we are, at our best’. As in that moment we did refrain, so here in the sermon we will refrain from making any comparative remarks, regarding current Canadian and US leadership, as to what each has reminded us about. ‘He reminds us of who we are’.
Who reminds you of your own most self, your own best selves? You could ponder that this week, and let us know next Sunday. Whose memory, whose books, whose voice, whose example, whose life and the living of it re-clothes you in your rightful mind?
Invitation
With that question, we offer a word of invitation to you, an invitation to discipleship and through Marsh Chapel. Welcome to the varied ministry of Marsh Chapel at Boston University! We look forward to getting to know you, as you sign up to sing in a choir, as you volunteer to usher or greet, as you attend a fellowship or study group, and especially as you worship with us on Sunday at 11am!
The envisioned mission of Marsh Chapel is to be ‘a heart in the heart of the city, and a service in the service of the city’. To that end Dr. Jarrett will invite you to vocal expressions of faith in the life of our music program. To that end Ms. Chicka will invite you to global outreach in our work with International students. To that end Br. Whitney will invite you to take part and take leadership in campus student ministry. To that end Mr. Bouchard will solicit your support for work and works in hospitality. To that end I will invite you to formal membership, to joining Marsh Chapel, on October 22: mark the date!
This year, with our emphasis on ‘voice, vocation, and volume’ in our shared life, we are using as a focus for our work the word remembrance. Our fall and spring term worship and community life are laden with moments of remembrance. 2017-2018 is a full season of remembrance. On September 17, we remember Elie Wiesel. On October 29 (and again in November) we remember Martin Luther. In Lent 2018 we remember Thomas Merton. Then in April 2018, in the week following Easter, we remember the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Come and join us throughout this year in a special season of remembrance!
Where I can be personally helpful to you, and where our staff, chaplains, and campus ministers can be a benefit and blessing to you, do not hesitate to call up on us.
John Wesley famously called for a means of grace to ‘spread scriptural holiness and reform the nation’. May grace expand and extend in meaning for us in the fall term, 2017!
A Season of Remembrance
Elie Wiesel reminded and reminds us, at Boston University, of who we are. From the very first day of the life of this University, the school has welcomed with open arms all people, regardless of gender, race, or religion. Women, Blacks, Jews—all—matriculated with day one. Today we would quickly add—all religions, all nationalities, all sexual identities, all varieties of physical abilities. Wiesel’s lectures, attended by more than a thousand a night, thrice each fall, in a stroke set a moral compass for the year’s study. Every era, though few quite as despicably as our own, tempts us, particularly public leadership, to sacrifice moral judgment for the sake of political opportunity. To sacrifice moral judgment for the sake of political opportunity. It is not only a leader taking us, say, toward authoritarianism who is to be resisted and rejected, but it is also and more so those who, without recantation, abet and abide with that leadership, those who are collaborators, who use the same language, who take the same partisan identity, who quietly allow the drip by drip accretion of unfettered power that leads to the great hurricane of later trouble. It starts with a few drops. Wiesel reminds us at BU of who we are.
Martin Luther reminded and reminds us, in Religious Life, of who we are. Many are the difficulties to arranging a proper, nuanced recollection of Luther, Protestant Reformer, Biblical Genius, Person of Courage–and Virulent Anti-Semite. Down and up, though, for ill and good, he reminds us that religion is indeed like the weather. Sometimes sunshine, sometimes rain, never perfect, and in need of steady meteorological, that is to say, theological prediction and predilection. To be a protestant is to apply the protestant principle, as did Luther, and to subject religion to utterly, fully religious critique. (It was Paul Tillich who best did articulate the protestant principle, that all authority, including and especially religious authority, is subject to critique when it makes what is relative, absolute). The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. You see how sharply our moments of remembrance do diverge this year, from Wiesel to Luther and beyond. SEMPER REFORMANDUM. Sola gratia, sola fide, sola Scriptura, but SEMPER REFORMANDUM. The Gospel in St. Matthew today, a rehearsal of an inherited Jewish tradition, with a remarkable and telling late use of the word ‘church’, ECCLESIA, certainly many decades after Jesus, itself places us in this ongoing reformation, from the first century on. Luther reminds us in Religious Life of who we are.
We will trust to Thomas Merton to remind us, as he did in life, of the better angels of Christian nature. His artistic spirit, his international range, his mysticism, his Catholicism, his brilliant writing along the climb up life’s SEVEN STOREY MOUNTAIN, have much to commend them, for us just now. This is an age in this country when a group of nine or so religious leaders in Nashville, who having studied the Bible surely know better, can stand together and dehumanize 10% of the world’s population, straight forwardly dehumanizing anyone not straight. This is a season in which 81% of Evangelical Christians have supported the recent cultural affirmation of white nationalism, without so much as a fare thee well, and, to date, without recantation. Here is the bottom line: You shall love the God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength; and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. The reason your dean ended up preaching\ speaking 18 times not 8 this summer is in part that there is a wide-open field out there for Christian preaching that is biblical, traditional, theological and practical—that is, in a word, liberal. Who is to speak for the full, deep, wide, global body of Christianity—the Nashville 9 and the Evangelical 81? Or the deeper wisdom of scripture, tradition, reason and experience? The deeper wisdom of the church has not yet found full voice or hearing, over against the conservative cacophony. It will. But it will take a decade, and the capacity to endure humiliation for a decade. A light touch, a little whimsy, and deep wisdom: Merton reminds us as global Christians of who we are.
Come April, we will turn toward Martin Luther King, Jr. We will need to do so, to recognize and honor his sacrifice, the loss of his life in and for the cause of Right. While most are not yet across the land, or even our community, focused on the season, this will make 50 years since King was murdered, April 4, 2018. Whatever others may not or may do, Marsh Chapel, we have a song to sing, a bell to ring, a word to say, and a responsibility to meet. The statue out front, the doves, the remembrance of King, does not give us the endless troubles that schools near and far are having with their own statues. My brother is proud graduate of the law school at Washington and Lee, for instance. But it does ask something of us, and specifically of you, Marsh Chapel. With every gift, there comes a task, in the economy of grace. It asks of us a season of remembrance. Our cultural amnesia leading toward fascism, our Christological amnesia leading toward exclusion, our collegiate amnesia leading toward silence finally stand under the shadow of the King statue. King reminds us as the Marsh Chapel congregation, virtual and actual, past and future, tithing and non-tithing, you and me and all, of who we are.
A Word of Faith in a Pastoral Voice toward a Common Hope
We await a common hope, a hope that our warming globe, caught in climate change, will be cooled by cooler heads and calmer hearts and careful minds.
We await a common hope, a hope that our dangerous world, armed to the teeth with nuclear proliferation, will find peace through deft leadership toward nuclear détente.
We await a common hope, a hope that our culture, awash in part in hooliganism, will find again the language and the song and the spirit of the better angels of our nature.
We await a common hope, a hope that our country, fractured by massive inequality between rich children and poor children, will rise up and make education, free education, available to all children, poor and rich.
We await a common hope, a hope that our nation, fractured by flagrant unjust inequality between rich and poor children, will stand up and make health care, free health care, available to all children, poor and rich.
We await a common hope, a hope that our schools, colleges and universities, will balance a love of learning with a sense of meaning, a pride in knowledge with a respect for goodness, a drive for discovery with a regard for recovery.
We await a common hope, a hope that our families, torn apart by abuse and distrust and anger and jealousy and unkindness, will sit at a long Thanksgiving table, this autumn, and share the turkey and pass the potatoes, and slice the pie, and, if grudgingly, show kindness and pity to one another.
We await a common hope, a hope that our decisions in life about our callings, how we are to use our time and spend our money, how we make a life not just a living, will be illumined by grace and generosity.
We await a common hope, a hope that our grandfathers and mothers, in their age and infirmity, will receive care and kindness that accords with the warning to honor father and mother that you own days be long upon the earth.
We await a common hope, finally a hope not of this world, but of this world as a field of formation for another, not just creation but new creation, not just life but eternal life, not just health but salvation, not just heart but soul, not just earth, but heaven.
Coda
Wiesel said, ‘He who hears a witness becomes a witness’. He reminds us of who we are at Boston University.
Luther said, ‘Here I stand, I can do no other, God help me’. He reminds us of who we are in Religious Life.
Merton said, ‘Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name’. He reminds us who we are as Christian people.
King said, ‘The moral arm of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice’. He reminds us of who we are at Marsh Chapel.
Come and join us! I mean it. Come and join us for this year in worship, fellowship, and discipleship. Come and join us in this season of remembrance!
– The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.
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