Sunday
February 18

A Word in the Wilderness

By Marsh Chapel

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Mark 1: 9-15

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May the Gracious God, Holy and Just

From whom we come and unto whom our spirits return

The source of Wisdom, fount of Wisdom, well spring of saving Wisdom

Make of us, this Lent, 2018, an addressable community

That we might listen

That we might hear

That we might understand

That we might listen, hear and understand before we analyze or criticize

May God make of us an addressable community

 

May God make of us a benevolent community

That we might polish our proclivity for the second thought, the second try, the second chance

That we might expect to uncover a latent goodness, latent in others and in ourselves and across this great, though troubled, globe

That we might become good in ways that become the Gospel

May God make of us, we pray, a benevolent community

 

May God make of us, we pray, a soulful community

Alive to spirit, alive to love, alive to grace

And take away from our souls all strain and stress

Let us breathe again, breathe deeply, breathe the soulful breath of life

Make of us a soulful community

For we have gathered and bear witness to Jesus, our beacon not our boundary.

 

Today we are again a land, culture, people and country drenched in sorrow, now due to the unspeakable horror, the unnecessary American carnage in Parkland, Florida. In a decade of deepening humiliation, wherein our current elected leadership readily chooses to exchange long term moral judgment for short term political opportunity, we can but rise up, come Sunday, and face God. One way, this morning, will be to start simply by naming those dead, those children and others sacrificed on the altar of hideously exaggerated individual gun rights:

Alyssa Alhadeff, 14

Scott Beigel, 35

Martin Duque, 14

Nicholas Dworet, 17

Aaron Feis, 37

Jaime Guttenberg, 14

Chris Hixon, 49

Luke Hoyer, 15

Cara Loughran, 14

Gina Montalto, 14

Joaquin Oliver, 17

Alaina Petty, 14

Meadow Pollack, 18

Helena Ramsay, 17

Alex Schachter, 14

Carmen Schentrup, 16

Peter Wong,15

 

Wilderness Theology

Lent is indeed a time of wilderness travel, reflection, theology and preaching. Over a past decade, 2007-2016, Lent by Lent, here at Marsh Chapel, we identified a theological conversation partner for the Lenten sermons, broadly speaking, out of the Calvinist tradition.  For this current decade, 2017-2026, we turn to the Catholic tradition.   With Calvin, that is, in the earlier decade, we encountered the chief resource for others we engaged over the last ten years—voices like those of Jonathan Edwards (2015), Paul of Tarsus (2014), Marilyn Robinson (2013), Jacques Ellul (2012), Dietrich Bonhoeffer (a Lutheran cousin), (2011), Karl Barth (2010), and Gabriel Vahanian (2007), and themes like Atonement (2009) and Decision (2008), and, of course, himself, John Calvin.  But beginning with Lent 2017, the Marsh pulpit, a traditionally Methodist one, did turn left, not right, toward Rome not Geneva, and we in these years will preach with, and learn from the Roman Catholic tradition, so important in the last 200 years in New England, and some of its great divines including Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Ignatius of Loyola, Erasmus, Hans Kung, Karl Rahner, and others, one per year.  Perhaps you will suggest a name or two, not from Geneva, but from Rome?  For those who recall, even if dimly, the vigor and excitement of Vatican II, there may well be other names to add to the list.  We began with Henri Nouwen (2017). We continue with Thomas Merton (2018). Next year, St. John of the Cross (2019).

Thomas Merton was born in 1915 and died in 1968, fifty years ago. This Lent we follow his thought by following his life, most famously recounted in his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (storey being an English way of spelling what in American English we call story—meaning the same, meaning a level in a house or building). His compelling account of conversion and vocation, placing him for life in a Trappist monastery, holds us in part because of his global engagement with global and local culture, and personal and family life. He reads. He loves art. He travels. He learns. He fails. Most heavily, he loses to death his mother and his father at quite early ages. Another sermon or another occasion might compare and contrast his testimony to that of Augustine of Hippo from the late fourth century. More immediately, though, his personal travels along the terrain of spirit and spirituality, far more in vogue today, we might say, than they were fifty years ago, may illumine a dark corner for a frustrated undergraduate, or challenge a heedless pride for a wise academic, or inspire a new-found energy in a lapsing person of faith, or, say for you, call you again to faith, to the gift of faith, to the reception of the gift of faith. We travel with Thomas Merton this Lent.

 

Wilderness Scripture

As Merton reminds us, the body and its habits, in collusion with the unconscious and its rhythms, takes us where we habitually go, to do what we ritually do. We are creatures of habit, guided along by our suppositions and assumptions. Lent arrives to wake us up, to make us aware. Lent arrives to challenge us to move from sensation to reflection, from activity to awareness. Hence the overwhelming response this past Wednesday by Boston University students and others to eight Ash Wednesday services, all heavily attended, half Protestant, half Catholic. This affirmation of ritual in worship will need further attention from us, in the days ahead. Our millennials are teaching us and telling us something.

Jesus meets us today in the long experience of the wilderness. The wilderness where reflection quickens. The wilderness where discipline begins. The wilderness where the great questions—freedom, immorality, God, all—may touch us. The wilderness where there is quiet, space, silence. I invite you this Lent to journey with me, one beggar among others, to travel from sensation to reflection.

We begin this morning, taking stock of our sources (or media?) of authority, upon which we shall base our coming Lenten teaching. In the Gospel, Jesus hears Scripture, Thou art my beloved Son, with thee I am well pleased. That is Psalm 2: 7. You are meant to recognize the divine voice echoed here from Holy Scripture. In the Gospel, Jesus honors tradition—baptized by John in the Jordan. In the Gospel, Jesus is driven by the spirit, the breath of God, the spirit of truth, reason and reasoned. In the Gospel, Jesus struggles, and suffers, he experiences depth and height, as do we: tempted, endangered, in need of angelic support. These are the sources of authority on which the gospel is proclaimed—scripture, tradition, reason, experience.

Your move today from sensation to reflection involves a recognition of sources for authority.

Tread lightly. Your love of Christ shapes your love of Scripture and tradition and reason and experience. You are lovers and knowers too. We are ever in peril of loving what we should use and using what we should love, to paraphrase Augustine. In particular we sometimes come perilously close to the kind of idolatry that uses what we love. We are tempted, for our love Christ, to force a kind of certainty upon what we love, to use what is meant to give confidence as a force and form of certainty. It is tempting to substitute the freedom and grace of confidence for the security and protection of certainty. But faith is about confidence not certainty. If we had certainty we would not need faith.

 

Wilderness Bath

Here is a Lenten question: Did you ever feel the need to take a spiritual bath? The layers of accumulated anxiety and estrangement call out for removal. A little steam, a filling tub, some quiet and peace, moments of grace. Did you ever feel the need to take a spiritual bath?

Even as the early church had need and experience to remember Jesus as the one who first experienced our communion, in the last supper, so for the same communal reasons, this early legend of Jesus’ baptism met the needs of the primitive church, and so, we may hope, shall meet our own. They too knew alienation. They too estrangement. They too sin and ennui. All that separates you from yourself, from others, from God—this is sin.   All that separates you from your best hope, the real hope of others, and the divine hope in which the world was made—this is sin. The early church found it soothing, healing to be immersed in the water of baptism, and to think of Jesus as the first baptized. Ours is not a biographical account, but a story of faith.

Surely, with many generations fore and aft, the early church would have remembered the cleansing holiness of the ten commandments, as they read these words.

Likewise, with two thousand years of saints to follow, this same church would have remembered the cleansing compassion of the beatitudes.

When they heard the splash of water, they might have thought again of Noah, and the flood. The promise of God’s care, to follow such hurt, they would have seen again in the rainbow: I establish my covenant with you and your descendents after you…This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all generations. I have set my bow in the clouds…the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.

When they heard the banishment to the wilderness, the school of experience, of hard knocks, to which every great religious leader from Moses to the Buddha has been sent, they would have recalled another blessing. The blessing of nature in the rainbow would be matched by that of experience in the Psalms. Lead me in your truth, and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; for you I wait all day long…Do not remember the sins of my youth…according to your steadfast love remember me…

When the moment of baptism came, John holding Jesus, both of the prophetic tradition, both of a certain courage and calling, both to have tragic fates, both to know and need each other—brothers, really—they would have had something to say, now, a blessing of an emerging sacrament. Every sacrament and every symbol need interpretation. For that reason, the whole of 1 Peter is written as an essay on baptism. Remember what the letter says: And baptism, which the ark of Noah prefigured, now saves you—not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience. Baptism—an appeal to God for a good conscience. How timely.

When the story, the faith legend of Jesus’ baptism was then told, in a small Mediterranean church, they again would meet their Lord. As do we. Jesus, from Galilee. Jesus, baptized. Jesus, related to John. Jesus, spirit touched. Jesus, beloved. Jesus, tested and tempted. Jesus, tough against wilderness and beasts and Satan. Jesus, guarded by angels. Jesus, preacher. Jesus, preaching good news. Jesus, whose time has come.

 

Wilderness Failure

Jesus particularly meets us today in supplication. In supplication, today, we feel or murmur or mutter, perhaps through clenched teeth, a prayer of supplication, a confession of failure:  Free our land of horrid, tragic, gun violence. How will this happen? We see no easy way.

But then our minds begin to move. Gun violence is a matter of public health. You have lifted your voice in chorus with those who attack gun violence not as an issue of individual right or freedom, but as an issue of public health and safety. We have had success in other improvement to public health. Reductions in death from smoking. Reductions (some) in death from drinking. Reductions in highway deaths.   Here is a different evil, so we shall need to think differently.

How shall we do so?

Maybe we shall restrict the sale of ammunition: keep and bear arms all you want, but ammunition we will lock down. Maybe we shall make those who make money on gun sales pay a stiff price for every misuse of their product. Maybe we shall hold households and home insurance responsible for mayhem that emerges from a house.

Congress regularly supports the so-called gun lobby, fearing to contradict its champions. Oddly, though, they are mistaken about what Americans, and particularly gun owners, think about gun restrictions and gun safety. They mistake the faux representative voice for the people’s voice. ‘85% of Americans and 81% of gun owners favor gun show background checks, which Congress rejected…Since 1960 1.3 million Americans have died from fire arms, which amounts to 80 gun deaths a day.’ The broad swath of the American people, in harmony with the Book of Hebrews, offer prayers of supplication for an angelic deliverance.   And here and there, there is change: ‘In 1970 ½ of all US homes had guns. Today it is less than 1/3.’ Our tendency to conformity, our over-eager deference to authority, and our too willing adaptation to imposed roles weaken us over against these and other challenges. Yet…

 

You have agency and influence. As you pray. As you think. As you speak. And as you vote. You have power, agency and influence. You cannot see the unforeseen future. You do not know what may, against all current expectation, suddenly emerge. Decades ago we lived in a little cottage parsonage in Ithaca, once inhabited by Pearl Buck, she of THE GOOD EARTH, while her husband took a degree at Cornell. It was fifty yards from Fall Creek, a good size river, frozen solid for the cold months. No amount of waiting and watching would shift that ice, and for those years it was Easter, usually, before anything happened. Just block ice, wind, snow, cold, silence. No movement. And then, with no warning, like a sudden angel thunder from heaven itself, in a great cataclysmic whoosh, all that ice would pound down the hill into Cayuga Lake, in ten minutes. It was terrifying to hear, and to see. What combination of underwater thawing and freezing, what combination of sun and shadow, what combination of tiny little changes finally ushered in that apocalypse? Who can say. But you never know when change, even big change, may well arrive.

 

Wilderness Faith 

We now receive Jesus. Because we are loved, we can love. Marsh Chapel, you have been love for this community for many generations. What you have said and done, stood for and stood by, we now repeat, even as we kneel before God and unknown. In fact, I believe that if you were to write a creed together, it might sound something like this:

  1. God is love.
  2. Love is both mercy and justice, both compassion and holiness.
  3. Compassion is more important than holiness.
  4. God loves the world (not just the church).
  5. The church lives in the culture. The church lives in the culture to transform it. (Not above it to disdain it, not below it to obey it, not behind it to mimic it, not before it hector it).
  6. The church is the Body of Christ.
  7. Christ is alive. Wherever there is way, truth, life…
  8. Life is sacred.
  9. Life is a sacred journey to freedom.
  10. The Bible is freedom’s book.
  11. The Bible is a source, not the source, of truth
  12. The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath
  13. Women and men, people all people, need each other
  14. There is a self correcting spirit of truth loose in the universe.
  15. God’s love outlasts death.

Let us bring who we are to this moment, remembering the wilderness desire, theology, Scripture, bath, failure, and faith, along with promises and gifts of faith, and trusting in Almighty God to heal and sustain in this new season.

Merton wrote, I was to become conscious of the fact that the only way to live was to live in a world that was charged with the presence and reality of God (SSM, 208)

– The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

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