Sunday
December 5
Memory and View
By Marsh Chapel
Click here to hear the full service
Click here to hear just the sermon
Past and Future
And all flesh shall see the salvation of God.
Our beloved Aunt Jane, now of blessed memory, lived with a gladness of heart, with a spiritual gladness, with a heart strangely warmed, as a child of God, a woman happy in God. A singing Methodist with a warm Methodist handshake, she taught math, and helped her fifth graders to learn to sing: row row row your boat, gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream. Life is but a dream.
Come Advent, we ponder dreams, as did John the Baptist, wet and cold in the murky Jordan. Do you record your dreams? One advantage of a college education, four years of freedom, subsidized freedom, to study and read and learn and change, the college advantage, is now and then, at least in part, to escape the 21st century. Yours is the chance by thought and lection and dream, to get out of December 2021, and dwell elsewhere, for a time. Others too spoke of dreams.
Take Shakespeare. Here is Prospero, in the Tempest, singing for all time, and all times, and our time: We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.’ Rounded with a sleep. Rounded with a sleep. The line came to mind at the gravesite last Saturday. She, a positive, optimistic, possibilist, would smile to hear it: We are such stuff as dreams are made on. You…you are such stuff as dreams are made on.
Shakespeare, for dreams and for poetry about dreams has a partner in his Spanish contemporary, Calderon de la Barca, would died at 81 in 1681. Of dreams—your stuff, you on whom dreams are made– “¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí. ¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión, una sombra, una ficción, y el mayor bien es pequeño; que toda la vida es sueño, y los sueños, sueños son”…y los suenos suenos son…even dreams themselves are themselves dreams.
You are such stuff as dreams are made on.
In hours and days when we rue and mourn the senseless and needless slaughter of innocents in public school corridors, ‘such stuff’ can be hard to hear, difficult to remember, a long way off, far and far away. Such tragedy. This is a tragedy embedded in a second amendment, originally meant to provide poor farmers defense against enemies foreign and domestic, become nationwide by the willful celebration of guns, of gun rights, and of gun violence, a portal to the loss of children, now with parents in utter grief and teachers in utter sadness, and a nation drenched in sorrow, teachers, by the way, quite like our dear Aunt Jane of blessed memory.
You are not meant to die by gunshot, or be assaulted, or en masse be misled, or be tethered to technology. You are the stuff on which dreams are made. You are. We are. So let us live so, and choose so, and vote so, and treat others so. Let us learn from the apostle, that our love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight (how in our time we need this!) to help you determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ.
That Thanksgiving vacation week, six of eight grandchildren, for the moment safe and secure, played in front of the fireplace in our modest cabin in the woods. The oldest had been there, right there, 5 weeks after birth, and the others much the same. The small room’s windows look out over the full length of the lake, facing northwest. They played. With authority their grandmother asked, What do you most love about this place? There was long silence, somewhat an embarrassed one. Then, quietly, the 13 year old said, The memories, I love most the memories here. And then another long quiet, a big chill of quiet. Then, quietly, the 11 year old said, The view, I love most the view.
Memory and view. Hopefully good memories and beautiful views. These we receive from others. Powerfully, come Advent, we receive them again from the church. The church, so avoided, mocked, forgotten and underfunded today, the church gives you memory and view. The memory of others who have lived dream lives, and an open view of the future, open to an open future. Be open, said Tillich. Cold to the bone, awaiting the Messiah in the water, John the Baptist embodies the memories of all the glories of Israel and the view of the gift and promise of heaven. Of course, here in bread and cup, we chew on the memories and drink deeply of the hope of heaven. Do you know God to be a pardoning God, intoned Wesley. Do you?
In Conversation
There is a saving power, a saving grace in our Advent interest in conversation. It costs nothing to listen, except time and risk. And it costs nothing to speak, except time and risk. Listen for what is not said or not clearly said. Could you say that in another way? What I hear you to have said is just this. Do you really mean that, or do you mean half or double that? It sounds to me like you are wandering around Robin Hood’s barn, and that makes me wonder why you are wandering like that. When you say that, who do you have in mind? Why do I have the feeling that you have a feeling about this? Let’s talk about this again some day. There is a healing power, a healing grace in conversation. Most people can in time solve their own problems, if they just have someone to talk to about them, who will really listen to them. Maybe you will be that someone for someone else this week? Prepare ye, though, be prepared
For in conversation, you are part bull fighter, part heavy weight boxer, part private detective, part spy. At stake, for all, is lasting health, personal salvation, individual growth, spiritual integrity, and the chance, the fleeting chance to experience being alive before we die. The cape ripples and the saber rattles. The prize fighter dodges, weaves, ducks, swings, retreats, advances. The PI looks through the back window, checks the mail in the mail box, notices the water still dripping from the faucet, puts two and two together. The one disguised behind enemy lines smiles, demurs, nods, remembers, and then will try to bring home a truth, the truth in hand, without getting caught. But these arts are learned, practiced, sharpened, conveyed, by one and another…in conversation, come Advent, Advent conversation.
Lukan Baptist
So, the Baptist, dressed in camel’s hair, with a diet of locusts and honey (though Luke omits to dress and feed him as Mark so does), John the Baptist is the precursor to Jesus. You cannot get to Christmas without Advent. You cannot come to Bethlehem except by way of the Jordan. You cannot celebrate grace without hearing first the prophetic voice (though it is also good to be reminded that the prophetic is a part of the gospel but not the heart of the gospel (repeat)). Every year, right now, the Baptist, out in the dark cold miserable mud-soaked Jordan River, stops us. He stops you. He says the one prayerful word of the precursor, the prophetic word: ‘Prepare’. Then he calls the whole people to prayer: to repentance for pervasive sin; to acceptance of pardon as the way out of evil and hurt; to assurance of grace.
Prayer is what comes before the rest, like Sunday morning is meant to come before the rest (of the week). Are you getting off on the right foot week by week?
John the Baptist would want to know. Look carefully at what Luke says about him. See the Lukan Baptist, different from John the Baptist in Mark. Mark, 20 years before, begins his gospel with the Baptist. The gospel opens, ‘the voice of one…’ Not Luke. Luke wants John put in particular context, 20 years later.
(We want to hear the gospel in the gospels. Luke says something different from what he borrowed out of Mark. That should give us confidence, as we preach, to take the gospel in hand, and apply it to our own condition, our own time, as, well, the first gospel writers all did.)
So, Luke has a history that precedes the precursor. This history, an orderly one, tells of the conjoint mysterious births of John and Jesus. This history, an orderly one, gives singing voice to Zechariah (whose psalm we used today) and Mary (two weeks hence). This history, an orderly one, acknowledges the days of Caesar Augustus and Quirinius. This history, an orderly one, honors Joseph, and paints like El Greco shepherds in the firelight of the ‘smoking cradle’ (Barth). This history, an orderly one, makes a little space for the childhood of Jesus, in woe and weal both, circumcision, presentation, growth in wisdom, and temple teaching. Then, only, does Luke allow the Baptist to appear. But even here, it is the orderly history that prevails: 15 years, Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate, Herod and Philip, unpronounceable regions, eminently forgettable tetrarchs and priesthoods (‘a six-fold synchronism’, as Bultmann wryly remarks (HST, 362)). Luke is making sure Jesus has his feet firmly planted in history, both of secular Empire and sacred Temple and an orderly history at that. So, for us, our engagement with history, under the influence of the Gospel of Luke, matters, counts, lasts, is lastingly real.
Imagination
An idea arrives. Whence an idea? Whence a thought? One interest in ministry is ‘conversation’. Two books by our MIT neighbor Sherry Turkle, Alone Together and Reclaiming Conversation, have guided some of our thought in the past. Her voice is a crucial one, regarding students, in this conversation about conversation. Our work on conversation benefits from good ideas, like hers. Musing, an idea, maybe a good idea, has arrived, as the green sea fields of young corn roll by.
Where did that idea, that imaginative possibility come from? Whence such an idea? How does a new prospect—here, the possibility of books read–come to life? The moment of insight, of new thought, the arrival of an idea comes on its own without our choice really, without a well-manicured airport, runway or landing strip. Whence an idea? What is going on when we think? Or when we think we are thinking? Or when we think about our thinking? Whence an idea?
There is no full answer, at least this morning. Today, perhaps, we simply want to pause before the mystery, one of life’s great mysteries, the birth of an idea, in this case quite a modest one, but an idea nonetheless. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength—and mind. And you love your neighbor as yourself. Whence an idea?
Here is an idea, more daydream than dream. As we head into a winter better than last years’s but not probably as good as next year’s or as good as we had hoped, maybe some memory and some view will help us. Pardon this more pastoral word. A winter advisory if you will. Carry the memory of what you learned in endurance and creativity last year. And carry the wide angle view behind pandemic, the promise one day of post pandemic play, a hope fir next year. Memory and view. We need the two.
The gift of memory. The gift of view. Life is but a dream. Rounded with a sleep. Suenos suenos son. So, another’s imagination, another’s Advent season, winter epoch imagination, north of Boston, a hundred years ago. Robert Frost:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
We await in the season of promise and expectation, of memory and view, the coming of a new day, in which all flesh shall see the salvation of God. And all flesh shall see the salvation of God.
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
