Sunday
May 18
By Marsh Chapel
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Sunday
May 4
By Marsh Chapel
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The Bach Experience
John 21
Marsh Chapel
May 4, 2025
Dr. Jarrett and Dean Hill
A Breakfast Quiet (Bob)
Jesus speaks to us today from the edge of the shoreline. His voice, although we often mistake or mishear or misunderstand it, carries over from shore to sea, from heaven to earth. For the souls gathered here today, that voice—His voice—makes life worth living. Within earshot of His voice there are no merely ordinary nights or days or catches of fish or meals or questions or answers or friendships or loves or losses. Within earshot of His voice there are no merely ordinary moments. When the Master calls from the shoreline, “children…have you…cast the net…bring some fish…have breakfast”, no one who hears will dare ask, “And who are you?”. We dare not. For we know. Jesus speaks to us today from the edge of the shoreline.
His disciples stumble through all the magic and grit of a fishing expedition. Many of us still find some magic in fishing, though few of us have had to depend on this sport for sustenance. Still—we know the thrill of it! And the disappointment. The roll of the boat with each passing wave. The smell of the water and the wind. The feel of the fish, the sounds of cleaning, the sky, a scent of rain: this is our life, too. All night long, dropping the nets, trawling, lifting the nets with a heave. And catching…nothing. The magic comes with the connection of time and space—being at the right place at the right time. How every fisherman would like to know the right place and the right time. It’s magic! The tug on the line! The jolt to the pole! The humming of the reel! A catch. And woe to the sandy-haired, freckle faced girl or boy (age 12 or 90) who cannot feel the thrill of being at the right place at the right time!
Easter is a season of new beginnings. The promise of resurrection is upon us. Resurrection disarms fear. Resurrection endures defeat. Resurrection displaces and replaces loneliness. Resurrection will not abide the voice that whispers, “There’s nothing extraordinary here. There’s no reason for gaiety, excitement, sobriety or wonder.” Resurrection will not abide the easy and the cheap. Resurrection takes a day-break catch, a charcoal fire, a dawn mist, fish, bread, and hungry, weary travelers, and reveals the Lord present, and Peter at the table.
One failing of this world, whether we see it more clearly in the superstition of religion, the idolatry of politics, or the hypocrisy of social life, has its root in blindness to the extraordinary. Because we are unholy, we think God must be, too. But hear the good news! The King of love his table spreads. And the humblest meal, morning moment, becomes—Breakfast with Jesus.
Raymond Brown taught us that 21 is an added account of a post-resurrectional appearance of Jesus in Galilee, which is used to show how Jesus provided for the needs of the church. The gospel never circulated without chapter 21, which is an Appendix, supplement, or epilogue, including many stylistic differences, though the material drawn is from the same ‘general reservoir of Johannine tradition’, and is part completion and part correction (RAH). Ecclesiastical, eucharistic, eschatology forms the symbolism of the chapter. C H Dodd taught us: ‘The naïve conception of Christ’s second advent in 21: 22 is unlike anything else in the Fourth Gospel’. CK Barrett suggests that chapter 21 be read as if it were a metaphorical account of the birth of the early Christian church for the purpose of explicating the different, yet equally important, roles of Peter and the beloved disciple, penned by a second author (577). Read this way, we are to see the disciples in the work of “catching men”, in “pastoral ministry and historical-theological testimony” (587).
That is, the Gospel of John ended originally with Chapter 20: These things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and believing you may have life in his name (John 20:31). And in all the twenty chapters, we have a glorious celebration of Jesus, Spirit, Cross, Resurrection, Life, Word, Love, Truth. But not a word about church. Not a single word about institutional life, nor about leadership, nor about organization, nor about just how one is supposed to live, with others, by faith, in community. For John, a new commandment is sufficient: love one another. For John, a new reality abides: Spirit. Live in the spirit and love in the spirit and all will be well and all will be well and all manner of thing will be well, as Hildegard wrote centuries later. Dr. Jarrett, in Easter reverence, by faith in community in concert with John 21, in love and spirit, how shall we hear the glorious Bach Cantata this morning?
Bach (Scott)
Praise to the Lord, the almighty! O let all that is in me adore him! All that hath life and breath, come now with praises before him! Let the Amen sound from his people again, gladly forever adore him.
You know this hymn don’t you? Praise to the Lord the Almighty -- #139 in the Methodist Hymnal in your pew. Joachim Neander’s 1680 hymn Lobet den Herren den mächtigen König der Ehren has remained one of the most popular and beloved hymns for nearly 350 years, published in 177 hymnals, in about as many languages.
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Our cantata today sets Neander’s five verses in as many movements. Cantata 137 has no recitatives, no poetic paraphrases of Neander’s verse. The outer movements are for the chorus, as you might expect, both dressed in finest Easter festival garb with three trumpets and timpani joining the strings and oboes. Working toward the middle, movements 2 and 4 are solo arias, each with a solo obbligato instrument. Both arias feature the chorale tune directly stated, by the alto and then by the solo trumpet, respectively. (Organists will recognize the first aria, here scored for alto soloist with violin solo and continuo as one of the Schübler Chorales.) Breezily agile, the violin sustains the joy of the opening movement with fleet of finger arpeggios, perhaps depicting the glory of the Lord on the eagle’s wings aloft. In the final aria for tenor and solo trumpet, fast descending scales offset by jaunty eighth- note patterns seem to depict the stream of love that rains down upon us from heaven. (Luther explained our relationship to God’s grace with a metaphor: just as rain falls to the earth from heaven, whether it asks for it or not, nourishing all living things with life-giving and sustaining water, so too, God’s grace is freely given to us.)
Neander’s third verse describes the Lord’s presence and guidance in our lives as a constant friend. Bach fittingly set this verse for a pair of oboes as the obbligato instruments alongside a vocal duet for Soprano and Bass. The chorale is outlined but only implied in the vocal lines. For the phrase “in how much suffering” or “in wieviel Not,” listen for the chromaticism of suffering on the word Not.
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The final chapter of the Gospel of John recounts a third post-resurrection appearance of Jesus with the Disciples. Here, Jesus speaks to us from the shore, not on the boat, but some 200 yards away. There, he has a coal fire prepared for their breakfast together. The coal fire is significant because we last heard mention of the coal fire in the garden of the high priest. And just as Peter warmed his hands over the coal fire the night Jesus was arrested, thrice denying his connection to Jesus, here in Chapter 21, at breakfast over a coal fire, Jesus asks Peter to affirm his love three times. Though surely an embarrassing reminder for Peter (and how could Jesus have known about his treachery in the garden??), the trifold questioning, “Simon Peter, do you love me?” with Peter’s wounded affirmations, “Lord, you know I do” seems to expiate, deed for deed. Each exchange concludes with Jesus’s command: Feed my sheep.
If the first half of Chapter 21 is an instruction, Feed my sheep. Note the pronoun – My sheep) Follow Me is the second half. This is an extension of the disciples casting the net over the boat in their own way, catching nothing. When they Follow Christ’s instructions, the nets are beyond full. And so, when Simon Peter asks about the Beloved Disciple, Jesus rebukes him, saying, “What is that to you?! Follow me.” As if to say, do not be concerned with others’ affairs – simply follow me, walk in my light, and love one another. No judging, just love. Follow me.
Neander’s five verses harness a similar rhetoric – an impatience that we must be reminded of God’s abundant grace given to us. “He is your light! Do not forget it! Have you not sensed how gloriously the Lord directs all things and sustains you?”
Lord, you know that I do.
Then feed my sheep, and follow me.
Healthy Institutions (Bob)
Sometime in the years and decades following the conclusion of John in chapter 20, a later writer added our reading today. Why? Well, because it turns out that only love and spirit alone are not enough. You need leadership. So, Peter is rehabilitated and jumps into the lake fully clothed. You need evangelism. So, we have the quintessential symbol of evangelism included, fish and fishing and a catch of 153. You need stewardship. So, we have the quintessential symbol of stewardship, the tending of sheep, with the unwritten subtext being the joy of tithing. Do you love? Then feed, then tend, then feed, then tend. Along comes John 21, most probably a later addition, to amend by insertion: in a word, institutions matter. If ever there was time in American history when we needed to hear this, today is such.
The gospel today for us today is a ringing challenge, asking in the season of resurrection, just how faithful we have been to the care and feeding of the institutions in life that make life worth living. We shall want to ‘get religion’ about attention to democracy AND ITS INSTITUTIONS, including the Congress of the United States. Beloved, hear the Gospel of John 21: institutions matter, they really matter
The church as an institution matters. Ask John Wesley.
The government as an institution matters. Ask John Lewis.
The post office as an institution matters. Ask Ben Franklin.
Public Health organizations as institutions matter. Ask Sandro Galea.
The CDC as an institution matters. Anthony Fauci.
The European Union and NATO as institutions matter. Ask Vladimir Zelensky.
Marsh Chapel as an institution matters.
The public ordered Sunday worship of Almighty God is not a matter of indifference, to you, nor to the current dean of the Chapel. Come Sunday, in worship, one may hear and heed an intervening word, and be saved from lasting loneliness, abject anxiety, deep depression, or worse. Community, meaning, belonging, empowerment, all are here, and you, beloved, you are offering these things, week by week. Otherwise, a college campus becomes a place with contact but not connection, a place with contact but not fellowship, a place of contact without communion. You have something to offer, nothing to defend, and everything to share. Institutions matter, including this one.
Therefore, Christian people, as we work and fight, play and pray this week, let us resist with joy all that cheapens life, all that dishonors God, all that mistakes our ordinary sin for the extraordinary love, power, mercy and grace, and be so reminded, by a breakfast quiet, that institutions matter.
Sunday
April 27
By Marsh Chapel
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Sunday
April 20
By Marsh Chapel
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Entrance
Luke 24: 1-12
Easter Sunday
Marsh Chapel
April 20, 2025
Robert Allan Hill
The Lord is Risen! He is Risen Indeed!
Easter comes to entrance. To entrance with wonder. To entrance for practice. Two lanterns to light today!
For those who might have suspected that we forgot to change the sermon title, from Palm Sunday to Easter, fear not. It is the same lettering for sure, but for Palm Sunday it was the noun, entrance, the entrance to Jerusalem, and for Easter it is the verb, entrance, to entrance in wonder, joyful wonder, and to entrance in personal practice.
Now we in Boston this year are remembering, after 250 years, Paul Revere’s ride. Some of us will hear the full poem again on Marathon Monday. Boston University is certainly about academics, research, community, diversity and globality. We are global, a global University. But we are also, and fully, local, BOSTON University. Said Revere,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light
One if by land, and two if by sea, and I on the opposite shore will be.
(Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1903)
Two lanterns. And come the festival of Easter, we too, in the church, light two lanterns, as Easter comes to entrance us, in wonder and in practice.
One
First, in wonder.
Joanna, otherwise a stranger to us, has been included, in Luke, in the group of women who religiously approach the tomb. She is a newcomer. You may be too. You may be leaning toward, even longing for, a first encounter in faith. Good. In the main, this service, in the main every Easter sermon, is mainly meant for you.
Joanna, and others. You. You are here on Easter. Something, some lingering memory of a lingering memory, has brought you along. Ordinary, regular religious practice—ask Joanna—can sometimes, suddenly, surprisingly, bring illumination. Our preaching, here, is in part for those who are in between. Not religious enough to come to church every Sunday, but religious enough to listen. Still within earshot. Not preaching to the choir—at least not ONLY to the choir! Easter preaching, if for the ecclesiastical expatriate, the atheist, the one harmed by the church, the musician attuned—seemingly—only to the music, the academic, the lonely at home.
Our festival today affirms your religious practice, affirms your choice to be here, to listen in, and affirms that the detailed discipline of attention to the sacred, can be showered with light. The women, Joanna and others, are keeping the Sabbath by waiting until the first day of the week. They are keeping tradition by anointing the body, with materials earlier prepared. They are keeping faith by facing death. By visiting the tomb, the flesh, the corpse. Habits lead us forward. At early dawn. Death makes us mortal. Facing death makes us human. At the tomb.
On Easter we are entranced by wonder.
The women in Luke might affirm what we find all around us, when we pause to notice.
A lantern lit in wonder.
There is the sweetness of a newborn child, silent in the arm.
There is the orderly happiness of that rarest of arts, a well-written email.
There is a touch of humor.
There is a calm. Drop thy still dews of quietness ‘til all our strivings cease. Take from our souls the strain and stress, and let our ordered lives confess, the beauty of thy peace.
There is the native hue of resolution hiding behind hope.
There is the patterned simplicity of a well lived life.
There is the beauty of dawn or sunset or both.
There is music, beautiful music, invisible beauty, the ringing beauty of music.
There are hints and allegations and forms of presence. You cannot be fully alive, humanly speaking, and miss them. Wonder.
Joanna teaches us: The world does not lack for wonders but only for a sense of wonder. Or was that GK Chesterton?
Joanna teaches us: Philosophy begins in wonder. Or was that the founder of Boston Personalism, Borden Parker Bowne?
Joanna teaches us (trigger warning for academics here): The larger the body of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of mystery that surrounds it. The larger the lake of learning, the longer the lakeshore of mystery that surrounds it. Or was that Ralph Sockman?
Joanna teaches us: I would rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach 10,000 stars how not to dance. Or was that e. e. cummings?
Joanna teaches us: Just what are you going to do with your one beautiful life? Or was that Mary Oliver?
You listen to a child singing alone just before falling to sleep, and tell me you sense no entrancement?
You watch a 9-year old, ball glove on, striding toward Fenway park, other hand in his Dad’s hand, and tell me you sense no amazement?
You see Lake Lucille. You look down from the Matterhorn. You walk in mid- December through a jewelry store. And no wonder?
You come into a barn at dawn, with the milking in gear, and Louis Armstrong on the radio. You watch a daughter caring for her father in the last month of life. You hear the anthems of Easter. And tell me you sense no entrancement? No wonder? No “thaumadzon”?
Joanna schools us about wonder. Easter lights a candle of wonder, and repeats…Entrance, entrance, entrance, entrance…
Two
Second, practice.
There is come Easter a second candle, not of wonder but of practice, of holding fast to what is good. Thurman schools us about practice.
9 Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; 10 love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. 11 Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. 12 Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. 13 Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.
Practice in faith means to hold fast to what is good.
Hold fast to what is good, as did Howard Thurman, the Dean of our Marsh Chapel, Boston University, 1953-1965, through poetry, through painting, through psalms.
Thurman was a poetic theologian, a theological poet. Presence, his sense of presence, his practice of presence, intimate to the natural world, made him so. He was 100 years ahead of his time 50 years ago, so he is still 50 years ahead of me! Late at night, along his beloved Daytona Beach, he remembered walking alone and with his feet in the sand. He wrote, The ocean and the night surrounded my little life with a reassurance that could not be affronted by any human behavior. The ocean at night gave me a sense of timelessness, of existing beyond the ebb and flow of consciousness. Death would be a small thing I felt in the sweep of that natural embrace. May you discover or be discovered by such poetry.
Thurman was a painter. He did paint with brush and canvass, and loved to depict penguins, among other figures. Presence, his sense of presence, his practice of presence, intimate to the natural world, led him so. But they were the verbal paintings, the metaphors in speech, that were his greatest gifts. One favorite was ‘a crown to grow into’. A crown is placed over our heads the for the rest of our lives we are trying to grow tall enough to wear.Today, April 5, 2022, may you discover or be discovered by such a verbal painting, a rhetorical portrait.
Thurman was a lover of the Psalms. Presence, his sense of presence, his practice of presence, intimate to the natural world, led him so. You cannot find, or know, him without worship, sacrament, prayer, singing, spirituals, preaching—without religion. And particularly the Psalms. He had a favorite, or two. Perhaps you do as well.
1 O Lord, you have searched me and known me.
2 You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from far away.
3 You search out my path and my lying down,
and are acquainted with all my ways.
4 Even before a word is on my tongue,
O Lord, you know it completely.
5 You hem me in, behind and before,
and lay your hand upon me.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
it is so high that I cannot attain it.
7 Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
8 If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
9 If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
10 even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast.
11 If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around me become night,”
12 even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
Today, may you discover or be discovered by such a psalm, a new favorite or an old one. No, more. Today may you be illumined in personal practice, in the practice of faith, in poetry, painting and psalms. The world needs it. In a world in which there is so much wrong, we need Marsh Chapel, one such in every village, every town, every suburb, and every city. But it is the simple practices—prayer, worship, study, conversation, service—the daily rhythms—that see us through.
Our friend’s dad, Russell Clark, a Colgate and BU graduate, loved life as a small-town pastor, in the village of Oriskany Falls NY. One winter a farmer, his lay leader died, and his widow was not in church for a long time. The pastor tried to console and help, but she didn’t want company. (Grief is a slippery dragon. If I had another two lifetimes I would spend half of one really studying, trying to understand grief. It is a dark stranger, an opaque mystery, individual to each.) For Russell’s Oriskany Falls widow it was too. Then one day she called to say that she would like a pastoral visit. She told him something, when he asked how she was doing. She began: Don’t take this the wrong way, Rev. (You know you are already in trouble with that prelude.) It has been so unutterably hard for me. There were days when I could not get out of bed. But I did. And do you know why? It wasn’t the resurrection sermons I have heard, or Easter hyms I can sing by part, much as I love both. No. What got me going, got me out of bed was…the chickens. Every morning at dawn they would fuss, and rustle around and cluck, waiting to be fed. They were hungry and they needed feeding. So, I got up and put on my robe and went out and fed them. By then the sun was up, by then the mist was lifted, by then I was awake, and by then I could stand the thought of breakfast, and after that, well the day opened up. So don’t take this the wrong way, Rev. (you know you are in trouble when…), don’t take this the wrong way, but the clucking of those hens meant more to me in my grief than all the hymns and sermons of Easter. The clucking of those chickens meant more to me than all the hymns of Easter.
You see? The rhythms of life, evening and morning one day, detailed disciplined attention to the routine can by grace light a befry candle. Including religious practice. Joanna, the newcomer, found it so. So can you, especially if you on Easter are a newcomer, looking for a first helping, an initial course in faith, a church family to love and church home to enjoy.
The women are going about their regular rhythms, in the hour of death. They are finding ritual hand holds as they walk the dark path, the pre-dawn path, of grief. In grief, they stick to their regular routines. Joanna and the women, moving at dawn, through the mist, toward the tomb, attending to the routine practices of the day, may teach us. Our festival today affirms religious practice, affirms your choice to be here, to listen in, and affirms that the detailed discipline of attention to the sacred, can fully entrance. Or in Longfellow’s language:
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light
One if by land, and two if by sea, and I on the opposite shore will be.
Two lanterns. Come the festival of Easter, we too, in the church, light two lanterns, as Easter comes to entrance us, in wonder and in practice.
The Lord is Risen! He is Risen indeed.
Sunday
April 13
By Marsh Chapel
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Entrance
Luke 19: 28-40
Psalm 118: 19-end
Marsh Chapel
Palm Sunday
April 13, 2025
Opening
It is not so long ago that Jesus came to us wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. We murmured with the Shepherds and knelt with the Kings. We sang: “Christ the Savior is born.” We were innocent and young and happy at his birth. True: some noticed the straw in his hair and the stench of the manger, and worried about Rachel weeping for her children. Mostly, though, we happily received and reported glad tidings of great joy to all people. It is not so long ago that the trees and the greens, beautiful they were, came down.
It is not so long ago that Jesus stripped himself and knelt in the Jordan. Granted, we have been busy carving our hearts and arrows into the trees of life. Granted, we have been finding majors and friends and summer work and a little relaxation. True: some of us noticed the mud on Jesus’ face after his baptism, and wondered at the humility of such an act, God stooping to be covered in the icy, rolling, filthy waters of this world, of the world of the human. Mostly, though, we were happy to greet Jesus at his baptism, and day by day like us he grew. We went on to another month of paychecks and forechecks and last respects.
It is not so long ago that Satan tempted our Lord. Jesus stood tempted and we with Him: tempted to make of life a scramble to the top, no matter who gets hurt; tempted to make of religion a closed shop, no matter who is closed out, tempted to take up government without a government of the heart. Government without a heart is daily on display right now in Washington, D.C. Foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. The current President and his minions, his Trump Republican Party, are now fully the party of of predation, mendacity and cruelty. Leaving the many to die in the wilderness. Jesus knew the wilderness. You saw him last month, just up the hill from Jericho, stalking in the wilderness. True: some blanched at the forty days, and pondered the choice of God to lavish love on a twilight world like this one. Mostly, though, we thanked Jesus for his troubles and hoped not to succumb to the temptations he defeated. It was not so long ago.
It was not so long ago that Jesus preached and taught the mystery and mastery of Love. True: some noticed the somber tone in the verses about hardship to come. Mostly, though, we tilled our gardens. And not so long ago.
Is it only a few days ago that Jesus completed a life of servant love in the lake country beyond Jerusalem? Is it more than just a few hours from now when Patience and Humility and Wide Mercy will be nailed up to make way for the ‘god of this world’, whose violence has not yet been vanquished in fact as we trust it is in principle. A few—was it you?—spotted the hidden glory in such care. Mostly though we went to the market and to the bank, preparing for an earthly future we thought might be without end. It is not, without end. We lived, not just the young, but all, as if ‘temporarily immortal’. No, it is not so long ago that the Lamb of God met us in poverty, humility, struggle, teaching and sacrifice. At Christmas, in Baptism, in Temptation, in Preaching, today at Entrance, and, in a few hours, in Crucifixion.
Hear the Gospel: Christ the Lord is risen today: ours the cross, the grave, the skies. Love crucified is love raised. It is the same worn Jesus whom God calls ‘the future’. No wonder the disciples did not at first believe, and no wonder we have our doubts as well. The preacher leans against the cross in Holy Week, and leans against the resurrection on Sunday. For the cross is still with us, followed by but not replaced by the resurrection. Jesus is God’s future. His resurrection is our future. On the cross walk, resurrection is yours. On the way of the cross, come Palm Sunday, you walk in a proleptic newness of life. For this change of heart John Donne longs: I need thy thunder…I need thy thunder O My God, thy music will not serve me. God’s Palm Sunday thunder brings, first, the healing rainfall of personal faith and, second, the cleansing cloudburst, the windstorm and downpour of social involvement.
Personal Faith
You carry your palms today, as the children did of old. You hold your palms and are present in, to and with others, in divine worship. This hour, this hour of the sacred, this hour of the spiritual, this hour of the holy. You are here, and you hear, one way or another. Palm Sunday. Into the city I’d follow the children’s band, waving a branch of the palm tree, high in my hand, one of his heralds, yes, I would sing, loudest hosannas, ‘Jesus is King’, Here you are in a service of ordered worship, provided by those who greet, those who sing, those who print bulletins, those who speak, those who prepare the way. Sunday worship forms personal faith.
You offer in personal witness your devotions, here, day by, day, in Lent, through your worldwide Lenten devotionals, read by nearly a thousand people each morning. These words of faith, and the music along with them, bear witness to real faith. They are gifts of faith that give faith. They are uniquely, and keenly, at the heart and marrow of faith. For those morning by morning hoping for a little encouragement, a little kindness, a little grace, they bring encouragement and kindness and grace. They bear gracious, honest witness to personal faith. Daily devotion forms personal faith.
You go further, in faith. You pray for others whom you know are hurting. You think to send a note, or a card or a gift. But what is more, and more powerful, more lasting, is that you will, when it feels right, offer an invitation. I’m going to worship at Marsh Chapel this Sunday. I’d love to see you there. Here is pretty card that gives all the hours of Holy Week. Let me know if you need a ride. It is a forlorn but honest truth that the world gets better one caring invitation at a time. Weekly invitation forms and performs personal faith. You both receive and offer the healing spring rain of personal faith. Good for you
Social Involvement
Marsh Chapel, Marsh Chapel listeners and watchers and fellow travelers, and friends, you both receive and offer the cleansing cloudburst, the windstorm and downpour of social involvement.
Methodism, the womb of Marsh Chapel, is ever and always and only a combination of deep personal faith and active social involvement. Social involvement means to hold fast to what is good. And we shall need, each one of us, to find our entrance to the good, our faithful even sacrificial hold on the good. How that will be seen in this new season, this challenging year of our Lord 2025, we have yet to behold. Though the wind is starting to blow.
For example. You probably have not been to Sackets Harbor, NY. You may be more salt than fresh water fish, more ocean than lake. No worries. We need both. On the shoreline of a great freshwater lake, Lake Ontario, you will find a lovely little town, surrounded by valleys, rivers and dairy farms. (By the way, come Easter, how we miss, how we long for, our places of growth, the vistas and landscapes of home, the green, green grass of home.) You can picture the historic quiet, the simple peace, the modest homes and hollows of the little lakeshore town, where it still snows plenty in April. It is a place where in driving no one uses turn signals because everyone knows where everyone is going already anyway. No signals needed, in Sacket’s Harbor. This is a town which is the polar opposite of Washington DC today, our nation’s capital now captive to the Trump Republican party of predation, mendacity and cruelty. Sackets Harbor is a town of quiet peace. Not a town of televised shakedown of a beleaguered Ukrainian President Zelensky. Not a town of ICE attacks, of a Tufts young woman alone, after a long daily fast, going to pray and eat, but surrounded by thugs, Trump Thugs, a half dozen Trump Thugs, photographed whisking her away. Not a town of fraudulent tariff frauds. Not a town of will full stock market manipulation and disaster. Not a town of Cabinet Clowns. Not a town of withholding of funds for higher education. Not a town of false statements about 2020 lawsuits. Not a town set on attacking law firms, lawyers, or the legal profession. Not a town that would support the removal of a visa from a graduate student from China who came terrified to Marsh Chapel three days ago, this Thursday afternoon, just as this sermon, at this point, right at this point, at this point, right at this point, was being written. I tell you it is one thing to hear about people losing their visas, to hear about these things on TV, but utterly different to have a bright young person, now paralyzed in fear, afraid of being hounded by TrumpThugs, sitting in your office. No, Sackets Harbor is a town on the polar opposite of Washington, DC today. This is a beautiful, simple, quiet Upstate New York village, with the Dexter United Methodist Church nearby. Sackets Harbor. It is fresh water heaven. At least it usually is.
But.
Last week three young school children from Sackets Harbor, a place where also one of of the Trump Workers, the ICE Director, apparently owns a summer home, were wrongly rounded up last week and shipped off to Texas, with their mother. But lo and behold, and here is an example FOR US of local, daily, faithful social involvement, two women, the Governor of the Empire State, Kathy Hochul, and the Principal of the small 400 student Sackets Harbor school, Jaime Cook, worked together and brought the back, at least for now, over against the befouling machinations of Trumpdom. Governor Hochul and Principal Cook did not stop at personal faith, but went forward to social involvement, surely at some risk. Governor Hochul and Principal Cook did not stop at personal faith, but went forward to social involvement, surely at some risk. The principal wrote:
As the principal of these students, I need to speak plainly. Our three students who were taken by ICE were doing everything right. They had declared themselves to immigration judges, attended court on their assigned dates, and were following legal process. They are not criminals. They have no ties to any criminal activity. They are loved in their classrooms. Their family has worked at the neargy ‘Old McDonald’s’ petting zoo and dairy farm for 15 years. (Principal Jaime Cook).
Methodism, the womb of Marsh Chapel, is ever and always and only a combination of deep personal faith and active social involvement. Social involvement means to hold fast to what is good. And we shall need, each one of us, to find our entrance to the good, our faithful even sacrificial hold on the good.
You have homework to do to get ready. To prepare…Read Erich Fromm. To prepare…remember the Barmen Declaration. To prepare…recall the voice of Karl Barth, who wrote Barmen. To prepare, recall the self-imprecatory poem, 1946, of the German Lutheran Pastor Martin Neimoller:
First, they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
For God’s Palm Sunday thunder brings first the healing rainfall of personal faith and second the cleansing cloudburst, the windstorm and downpour of social involvement.
Coda
Now as he was approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen, saying, "Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!" Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, "Teacher, order your disciples to stop." He answered, "I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out."
Sunday
April 6
By Marsh Chapel
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Communion Meditation
John 12: 1-8
April 6, 2025
Marsh Chapel
Robert Allan Hill
She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial.
Spirit
Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
Then with cracked hands that ached
From labor in the weekday weather made
Banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
And slowly I would rise and dress
Fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
Who had driven out the cold
And polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?
(By Robert Hayden)
What of our gospel in John this Lord’s day? For a moment, John has brought interruption to our year long. weekly reading from Luke. With authority. But what form of authority does the Gospel of John prefer, select, elect, prize? Ah, glad you asked…
No church in John, just a communal experience of Christ. No leadership in John, just the deeds and words of the risen, I mean crucified, I mean incarnate, I mean spirited One. No worries about ethics in John, no catalogue of virtues or vices, just a single command, to love. No hierarchy, patriarchy, oligarchy, ecclesiology in John. Just this: Spirit. Another Counselor. With you forever. A guide into all further truth. How is that going to work? Exactly. That is why we have the letters of John, uno dos y tres, because, clearly, it did not. The letters add in: leadership, orthodoxy, ethics, teaching, form, all. They wake from the Johannine dream. But what a dream! A spirited dream of spirit. A dream of Spirit, leading to truth, over time. A fullness of fragrance, spirit in life. As in Proust, ‘What matters is to transform common occurrence into art (NYRB).’
You will recognize the story of the anointing at Bethany. Sort of…as we sort of recognize things in memory, or forget and remember or forget…
It is like the “familiar” parable (sic): A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and saw a man who had fallen among thieves, so he went and he asked his father for his inheritance. The father gave him seeds to plant, but most fell on rocky ground. He appealed to a judge, who would not listen, and then to a dishonest steward, who would listen, but who stole the rest of the seeds, and then planted them and they multiplied thirty, sixty and a hundredfold. But he left 99 of the fold and went after a lost sheep. On the way, he stumbled on a lost coin, and put it in his tunic. This will be like a mustard seed, he thought, which is small but grows a big plant. He went back to his father and said, I am not worthy to be a son, but make me a worker in a vineyard, and pay me as much as you pay those who started at dawn. Which of these do you think proved neighbor to the man who fell among thieves?...I know you remember that one. ().
Fragrance
That is, John has somehow combined a story which was also known to Mark, and used by Matthew, with a story from Luke, unused by Mark or Matthew, and has added his own special ingredients, Johannine special sauce if you will. Or maybe a redactor re-edited portions of this passage. For the record: John has added Judas as the stingy one; John has added Judas’ motive, not so liberal, of greed; John has not kept Mark’s ethical admonition, ‘For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you want you can do good to them’. (But Matthew also apparently erased that sentence, for who knows what reason.) John also has misplaced or erased the fine conclusion, which Mark writes and Matthew copies, wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her. John also neglects to repeat that Jesus said of Mary’s act that she has done a beautiful thing for me. In other words, what has been told in John was not so much in memory of her, though perhaps in the rest of the whole world it was so. Most delicately, Mark and John both use a rare adjective, rendered her by the English word ‘pure’, which comes in the original from the same root as the word ‘faith’. The gospels repeated an admonition from Deuteronomy 15, ‘the poor are ever present’, not at all to discountenance care of the poor (so important to us, and rightly so), but to lift the fragrance, the wonder at the heart of the gospel, to the highest level. (Bultmann, perhaps rightly, hears here a reference to the full fragrance of gnosis, knowledge, spreading throughout the world.)
John, alone, fills the room with fragrance. That is his point, here. Incense, the sense of the holy, the mysterium tremendum, the idea of the holy, the presence. Resurrection precedes crucifixion in this reading. Crucifixion is merely a coming occasion for incarnation in this reading. Incarnation is a lasting fragrance in this reading, the fullness of fragrance. The fragrant communion reminder, the fragrant gospel reminder, the fragrant Sunday reminder of our own, our personal, mortality.
Friends
My friend says of his work in ministry: ‘we are trying to help people discover their spiritual side so that they can make a difference for good in the world’. That is what we are trying to do in and from this pulpit, trying to help people discover their spiritual side so that they can make a difference for good in the world.
Long ago, tracing the same line, our poetic friend George Herbert wrote:
Love bade me welcome: yet my sould drew back, Guiltie of dust and sinne.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning, If I lack’d any thing.
A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here : Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkinde, ungratefull? Ah my deare, I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them : let my shame Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame? My deare, then I will serve.
You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat. So I did sit and eat.
To do so, for eucharist, we come together, in the same place, and at the same time, for Sunday worship. Some of us learn to do so, learn so, as children. One year a friend brought her children to worship on Christmas eve. Afterward, she asked each one—6,8, and11 years old—what they most liked. Said 6, ‘I especially liked the candle, except the wax dripped on my finger and that hurt. Said 8, ‘I liked communion and the way the choir music drew us forward, together, into it.’ Said 11, ‘I like the way you feel after you have been to church’. 6,8,11—they came to themselves. And grandma did too. And here, this Lord’s Day, meditating on eucharist, we may too.
Ron Dworkin wrote just before his death: I shall take these two—life’s intrinsic meaning and nature’s intrinsic beauty—as paradigms of a fully religious attitude to life…These are not convictions that one can isolate from the rest of one’s life. They engage a whole personality. They permeate experience: they generate pride, remorse and thrill. Mystery is an important part of that thrill. (NYTRB, 68, 3/13).
Yes, our current tragedy has daily roots, roots in the daily foibles of the human. Tomorrow you might wake up to list the smaller showers of estrangement that meet us every day, long before we ever are drenched in the great thunderstorm of tragedy. And we are living in the throes of national tragedy, as the tens of thousands gathered yesterday on the Boston, the Boston Common, did testify. The gathering was a shared, communal witness in grief to unfolding national tragedy, whose roots are deep and tangled and personal and daily…
Premature resignation
Partial self-awareness
Indirect criticism
Cold honesty
Inflated responsibility
Excessive enjoyment
Needless worry
Wasted time
Careless haste
Misguided loyalty
Postponed grief
Avoided maturation
Partial planning
Unconscious entitlement
Pointless earning
Self-serving posture
Thankless reception
My grieving friend wrote of presence, some years ago, wrestling and reckoning with the loss of his wife…
Her death left me empty. Stunned even. That emptiness stayed for the 1st year. Then, two years ago, I began to be bumping into something that I finally put a name down. ‘The Presence”. My first experience with the mystic corners of our world.
I felt unprepared and awkward, but in time, I began to experience what can only be described as whisperings quietly in my ears. So, I began to struggle with poetry as I think I was hearing:
God is as close as my breath
My heart pulsing my breast
No search reveals the Presence;
Only exhaustion, tragedy, and
Failure will temper my vision to
The point where I can sense the
Presence who responds to my
Needs with gifts of patience
(F Halse, Epiphany at Kennebunk Pond, 8/16/01)
Says the Lord: She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial.
Sunday
March 30
By Marsh Chapel
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Existential Faith amid the Tragic Sense of Life
Luke 15
March 30, 2025
Marsh Chapel
Robert Allan Hill
Our ringing gospel of love divine all loves excelling, in the parable and figure of the Prodigal Son, a parable that in some ways needs no interpretation for the story renders its own, yet comes toward us in the midst of sorrow, of loss, of pain, of worry. It is heartening to have this Lukan love story, a little light for the way forward, especially since we are in such distress, just now. And you have known trouble. Trouble leads to faith.
A few years ago, it was in Lent, a particular story came around to haunt the season, the story of Joan Humphrey. She grew up on a farm in Kansas. She was born, the third of four children, to Donna and Jake Humphrey. The Humphrey farm of 480 acres, near Woodlawn Kansas, raised cattle and crops. Joan attended a one room school there until the eighth grade. She was a cheerleader at Sabetha High School. She also was an officer in her school’s chapter of ‘Future Homemakers of America’. She graduated second in her class. A class of 48. Here is the caption under her yearbook picture: “keen sense, common sense, no room for nonsense”. *
Joan then attended Wheaton College, because her pastor was a graduate. Later on, she entered law school at Northwestern University. Her classmates there teased her about her slow prairie speech. They also envied her lack of stress over exams. In law school she met a boy named Michael. They worked summer jobs on behalf of the poor: disability benefits, evictions, food stamps.
Joan and Michael were married in 1975. He wore a white suit. She wore daisies in her hair, and a white Moroccan caftan.
Joan and Michael then began to raise their own family of four daughters. Every morning, he brewed coffee. He pre-heated her cup with boiling water, filled it with coffee, and carried it to the bed where together they could talk about the day to come.
Joan’s life had two paradigms, professional woman and devoted mother. She cooked dinner every night. She established a daycare center in the courthouse where she worked. She packed lunches for four daughters, making sure to use Tropicana orange juice to limit the girls’ sugar intake. We remember her during Women’s History Month right now.
The newspaper quoted Joan as saying, “I wanted my family to be a family that shared their food, and the mom could cook like my mom could cook.” Joan’s temperament and industry brought her, over some years, to the federal bench. She became a judge in the US District Court in Chicago. It was the culmination of a fine career, a position that had eluded her on other occasions. But, after a few years, one of her rulings angered white supremacists. One of these was convicted of plotting to have her killed. They did not succeed. Yet two years later, Joan’s husband Michael and her mother, both on crutches, were murdered. They were both shot in the head and chest with .22 caliber bullets.
The season of Lent, and its completion in the cross, every year, brings us to the precipice of a most disturbing question. At some point, we grow up or wake up enough to ask the question that Joan’s daughter Meg asked her that week. “Mom, why is the world so evil?” And Holy Week—with its fleeting laud and honor, its temple conflict, its night of betrayal, its day of trial, its hour of tragedy, and its subsequent, lasting silence—brings us right to this matter of evil. Why? Why Mom? Why is the world so shot through with evil—sin, death, the threat of meaninglessness?
After 300 of his students died in a plane crash near Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, Chancellor Melvin Eggers of Syracuse University brought the question, via a newspaper interview, to his religious leadership at Hendrick’s Chapel. I will never forget his interview, the pain of it, the grief in it, the troubled angst of it, which never left him over the few remaining years of his life. It broke his big heart.
After 3000 died on 9/11, 2001, that next Friday, 9/14/01, hundreds of people filled our sanctuaries, without invitation or liturgical preparation. Here they were, truly hunting for the language and heart with which to assess the same question. What in the world is wrong with this world?
After 300,000 were lost in December on the day after Christmas, 2004, out of a numbed and fogged stupor, there gradually emerged a serious question, a question about bearing, perspective, and, ultimately, about faith. What kind of world is this? Who is the God who has breathed life into such a place? “Mom, why is the world so evil?”
After the market collapsed in 2008, and graduates for the following years worked three jobs each, while carrying student loans, the question, sometimes uttered, but often silent behind the eyes and tears, and the more bitter for that, was the same: What is wrong with this world?
In 2020, corona virus caught us up again in the depth of the meaning of Lent. Think back five years. January 11, first death in China; February 5, a cruise ship, Diamond Princess, quarantined in Japan; February 23, Italian cases go from 5 to 150; February 29, the first US death, in Seattle ; March 15, the CDC warns against gatherings of more than 50; March 26, The United States officially became the country hardest hit by the pandemic , with at least 81,321 confirmed infections and more than 1,000 deaths; March 30, this week, five years ago, 265 million Americans told to stay home. In COVID, more than 7 million deaths worldwide, more than 1 million in this country, and more than 3 dozen in this Marsh Chapel community of faith.
And our question, the Lenten one: what is wrong with this world? We have been here before. The same reckoning can arrive in quieter times, in a far more quotidian fashion. You alone, you in social distance, you with some quiet on your hands, might ponder the quotidian sense of tragedy, that upon which our 2025 Lenten interlocutor, Miguel de Unamuno, meditated day and night, day and night. Del Sentimiento Tragico de la Vida…
In our time, people of conscience are truly alive, suddenly and earnestly alive, to this question, which is, again, the whole content of Lent, leading to the cross. It is a question that, in the main, is a matter of grief, trouble, and loss. Which is, of course, the whole content of the church’s experience and memory in Lent. It is a matter of deep, abiding grief to face the gone-wrongness in life. And, while we have tried, in our churches, to feed the hunger in this question, to slake the thirst in this question, to provide compelling responses to this question, to a great degree, across the land, and over long time, we have failed. And…failure is the whole content of Lent. It is a grief to this preacher that our pulpits, nation wide, have thus far failed to meet the grief and loss and especially fear that pervade our time like a mist in London along Aldersgate Street, like an invisible unholy ghost, just on the edge of our awareness. And in this season, we shall need to evoke Martin Neimoller, the Barmen Declaration, and Karl Barth.
We are living in a time that is like a morning when dawn just will not come. Unlike Unamuno, we have not been able robustly and preparedly and piercingly to remember, to call to mind our biblical, Christian, tragic sense of life, when most we have needed it.
To hear Job on the ash heap: “What is my crime?”; and Second Isaiah: “A man of sorrow, acquainted with grief”; and Jeremiah’s lamentations; and the tears of David, and “all flesh is grass”; to evoke Ecclesiastes, and “all the rivers run to the sea”; “the race is not always to the swift….but time and chance happen to them all”; and the affliction of Paul, “persecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed”; and truest of all Jesus himself, “if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me”. But it did not. And: ELI ELI LAMA SABACTHANI.
You cannot read all of a commentary on Job the night of 9/11. It has to be read ahead. You cannot do all of a seminary course on Jeremiah the night after Tsunami. It has to be read ahead. You cannot absorb all that Paul says in Galatians, the afternoon of Lockerbie. It has to be read earlier. In wrestling we used to make weight, trying to lose 5 pounds in two hours by jogging in sweat suits through the school showers. It doesn’t work. Bodily life, Christian life, does not easily allow such last minute maneuvers. It takes a lifetime of Lenten preparations.
This morning, we try again, as we move quietly or not so quietly through Lent: Jesus meets us today along this very road of tragedy in life: of evil, grief, loss, estrangement, and failure. His church lives still as a community that knows in its bones how to face evil with honesty, grief with grace, failure with faith, and death with dignity. H R Niebuhr warned his generation to suspect the false sense that somehow a “God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross”. Oddly, it is the starkness of the cross, the coarseness of Jesus’ death, the tremendous sense of loss and failure and grief of Lent that is your best gift in and to a frightened world, and to a paralyzed and petrified America, to a frightfully anxious, rightly worried, America, 2025. His cross truly names the tragedy of evil. His cross permanently enfolds that tragedy in the larger goodness in life and the lasting goodness in God. His cross radiates a thin measure of hope, that there is life beyond brokenness, even beyond virulence. There is life beyond corona virus. That there is even life beyond the predatory mendacity and cruelty of Donald Trump and his Republican party.
People of faith. Remember your baptism and confirmation. The world is largely good (good not perfect), the good handiwork in a mysterious divine goodness that passes all understanding and endures forever.
Yet, the world is just not right, but somehow off track, wrongheaded, with something ‘loose’ rattling around inside it—the shadow of sin, the specter of evil, the sorrow of death. Older theologians wrote of the fallenness of creation
We have to face both and to pray for deliverance from the latter to the former. So we teach our children to say: Deliver us from evil. Robert McAfee Brown said so memorably (how I miss his voice): “Friends, this is God’s world, but it is a crummy world, and we have to live with both realities”.
To the daughter Meg’s question “Why?” I have no full, final answer for you. But the good news is that you have an answer for me. It is the Luke 15, the Prodical Son answer. And if you think I do not see it you are mistaken. And if you think I do not appreciate or admire it you are mistaken. And if you think I do not respect it you are mistaken. You live your answer by choosing the cruciform path of faith.
You meet evil with honesty, grief with grace, failure with faith, and death with dignity. You carry yourselves in belief.
You remember that it is not the passion of Christ that defines the Person of Christ, but the Person Who defines the passion.
You remember that it is not the suffering that bears the meaning, but the meaning that bears the suffering…that it is not the cross that carries the love but the love that carries the cross…that it is not crucifixion that encompasses salvation, but salvation that encompasses even the tragedy of crucifixion… and that it is not the long sentence of Holy week, with all its phrases, dependent clauses and semi-colons that completes the gospel, but it is the punctuation to come at the end of forty days and then of seven days, the last mark of the week to come in 168 hours, whether it be the exclamation point of Peter, the full stop period of Paul or the question mark of Mary—Easter defines Lent, and not the other way around.
Oh, we want to be clear, now: the resurrection follows but not replace the cross, for sure. Still, it is also true that the cross precedes but does not overshadow the resurrection. It is Life that has the last word. That is why Unamuno called his philosophy Del Sentimiento Tragico de la Vida, ‘the tragic sense…of LIFE. Life has the last word.
Maybe that is why Joan Humphrey—her married name, Joan Humphrey Lefkow—she like Dorothy Gale of the Kansas farm, she like Billy Graham of Wheaton College, she like Ernest Fremont Tittle of Northwestern University, she like your own mother in kitchen and coffee and packed lunch, answered her daughter Meg’s question (sursum corda!) in faithful witness (hear the Gospel!) to tragedy and goodness and hope.
I confess that I read her statement some years ago, weeping profusely, in the middle of an utterly boring Nashville denominational board meeting, and was for several moments unsure of where I was, or whether these few sentences were read from the printed page as human comments, or were resounding in the mind and heart as divine utterance. Which is this voice? Human or Divine? You be the judge.
Joan says to her daughter, as the Gospel says to us: Honey…I am so sad…It is a human tragedy…Honey, most people are good, most people would not think of doing this…Remember the sermon years ago at the Episcopal Church in Evanston, where you girls sang in the choir and I made sandwiches for the homeless once a month…The priest said, ‘Some things are just broken…they’re broken…just broken…They’re broken and you go on from there…Don’t think you can repair them but get up and go on from there…But whoever did this (killed my husband and mother), I want to look them in the eye and say…How could you?…How could you do that to me and my family?”
*New York Times, 3/10/05
Sunday
March 23
By Marsh Chapel
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Unamuno Lent 2025: The Tragic Sense of Life Part 2
Luke 13: 1-9
March 23, 2025
Marsh Chapel
Robert Allan Hill
We listen for the Gospel in St. Luke today. Our other gospels do not carry any of these teachings from Luke 13. Like most of the second half of the Gospel of Luke they are special to Luke. They are notoriously hard to interpret, with edgy choices for the interpreter. But given their specificity to Luke and their place within Luke, along with their absence elsewhere, we might be forgiven an inclination to give them a heartily Lukan rendering. Luke celebrates history, theology, the poor, and the church. Yes. But Luke also celebrates love, pardon, mercy, love. When he was yet a far way off, we read soon, the father saw him, saw his son, and raced headlong toward him, racing to put a ring on his finger and shoes on his feet, and hug and embrace him, and ‘love on him’ as now I understand some people say, though the odd use of the preposition in between the verb and the pronoun seems, well, odd. The Galileans are not greater sinners than others, for all the political violence and then death sent their way by Pilate. They are beloved children of God. Those on whom the natural violence inherent in gravity and the cascading violence inherent in human architectural and other error, which led to their tragic deaths, by no means means they are greater sinners than others. We may take from their tragedy for ourselves quite simply the wise admonition to straighten up and fly right, to prize our time now we have it, to seize the day. And to what end? To love, God and neighbor. To love, God and neighbor.
And there is still time. Yes, there may well come a time when it is too late. Other portions of Scripture make sure for sure we remember that. It is later than we think, as Dave Brubeck sang. But Luke has a different Gospel to announce: there is still time, there is extra time, there is more time, there is time. The kindly gardener, gently redirecting his boss, the owner of the vineyard, makes a call for mercy. A little water, a little fertilizer, a little time—a little more of each—and who knows what may come out of the ground? And if not, next year, well…You have the feeling don’t you that next year that same gardener will have another way to protect the vine. Give it just a little more time. Give it just a little more time. Your inner life, your Miguel de Unamuno life, your existential soul life, your wisdom and contemplation in life—a little water, a little nourishment, a little time, especially time, and who knows? Mercy…mercy takes time.
This is an upended story of the fig tree. From the fig tree learn its lesson. You know what it means to be a fig tree in the New Testament. It is like being a turkey in late November or like being a green beer on St Patrick’s day. You know you are going down.
People step aside when they hear that the story is about a fig tree. They step back ten feet, because they know what is coming.
Sure enough, at least at the outset, doom descends. In stomps the
The owner. Stomp, stomp, stomp. Fee fie foe fum. Yes, we know what is coming. I have seen this lousy, lazy, no good, flee bitten moth eaten, barren, fruitless, faithless, heartless, ruthless fig tree for three years, and nothing. Where is the fruit? Where is the beef? Show me the money! Yes, we have a sinking feeling about the old fig tree, having heard a sermon or three. Is there not fruit? And here it comes… Cut it down, throw it in the fire, off with their heads.
And in the other Gospels, that is that. One dead fig tree, and let it be a warning to us. I came not to bring peace but a sword. Not a jot or a tittle will pass away. Woe to you…
Which is, of course, what makes today’s lesson so interesting. Guess what? It’s not over, at least according to Jesus in Luke 13. No, it’s not over, yet. This is the Gospel according to Yogi Berra, “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over”. With a little cunning and creativity, a little psalmist and saint in him, this lowly vinedresser says, “Well, hang on a minute…” There is something there. He sees something. Something alive, something at work, just beyond our comprehension.
Trust is what the vinedresser in our parable displays. He has a certain confidence, perhaps a confidence born of obedience to a great and loving Lord, yet still a confidence that where there is a will there is a way, no matter what the immediate corn stubble evidence suggests.
I struggle to intuit why this altered fig tree parable was so important for Luke and Luke’s struggling church. They must have had singular meaning for Luke’s church seventy years after Jesus’ death and resurrection. Perhaps, perhaps, the parable is meant to give trusting patience to those who are waiting out what scholars call the “delay of the parousia”, or the expected but not actualized return of Christ on the clouds of heaven (1 Thess. 4-5). “Give me just a little more time…” sings the gardener.
Let it be, he says. Let it be.
His is not a naïve view. No, he recognizes that there comes a time when it is too late in every venture. He recognizes that the power to kill and give life is not his own. He recognizes that human labor and human investment is required for any progress. He recognizes the messiness of manure and dailyness of water. He recognizes that trust for the future is trust, not in human wisdom, but in divine grace. He recognizes the rigid limits of nature and history. He is a realist.
But, like Unamuno, our existentialist interlocutor this Lent, and his central insight, the tragic sense of life, he trusts that there is something there, something alive, something not quite phenomenal, something just beyond our comprehension.
Maybe that his why his voice, which first found me during a Junior year abroad (for many, the best part of college), his honest exploration of tragedy in life, the tragic sense of life, and with it his non doctrinaire faith, reverberate for me more than fifty years later. As in our Holy Gospel readings this morning, for Don Miguel, God is found through love and suffering, ‘amor y sufrimiento’, and both reflect approaching death. And we, in part, because we have compassion fow what we see of ourselves in others. Compassion (Luke would shout Amen! here) is the active form this active love takes, and as we share suffering with others, we lean into, even die into, one another. We give over, give up, give out our vital energy, in whatever manner, and direct it to our neighbor.
Dag Hammarskjold put it: The anguish of loneliness brings blasts from the storm center of death: only that can be really yours which is another’s, for only what you have given, be it only in the gratitude of acceptance, is salvaged from the nothing which some day will have been your life.
You could compare his sense, his trust to a late March day when it is still winter. Yet, there is a sense, a feeling. There are geese flying past, v by v. There is a blueish tint in the evergreens. There is more light and better light. There is wind, but not with quite the bite. A light snow, maybe, like this morning. One can fairly taste the maple syrup brewing miles away. Spring is coming.
Give me just a little more time, he asks. Don’t you have the feeling that he will ask the same a year from now, if things are no different? I do. He harbors an inexplicable but crucial sense of trust that things will work out.
As a Methodist Christian, I want that trust in my heart as I see the perils and challenges of this time. I want to shout: “Give me just a little more time! Another generation, some manure and water, that is a few good preachers and a few more dollars, and you just watch the figs fall, too many to count!” I want that trust that there is something there, alive, incomprehensible, that may change the equation. I want that trust that there is something alive, incomprehensible, that may open up a different conversation (conversation that is so important, and about which more in a moment) a new way that honestly respects both the plumb line of justice and the plumb line of righteousness, as well as the historical, organizational, relational and other peculiarities of life.
And as person, a human being, stuck somewhere between regret and anxiety, I want that trust, that simple trust like those who heard beside the Syrian sea, the gracious calling of the Lord, let us like them without a word rise up and follow thee.
Our dear friend Ray Hart wrote last week, and recalled Goethe, destiny often denies us what we want in order to give us what we need.
We need some of that inexplicable trust, especially when so many things are just not normal right now. Like what?
These things are not normal…
To wield a chain saw as a threat to faithful government workers
To browbeat and humiliate the struggling leader of a war torn ally
To defund Universities’ research for the common good
To wield tariffs against close friends and neighbor countries
To loose 1600 criminal perpetrators of January 6, the near death day of American democracy
To disemploy tens of thousands of veterans without cause or process
To publicly berate by nickname a sitting female senator in the course of a coarse Presidential address
To tank the stock market on a whim and a magical view of tarrifs
To brutally cut funds for poor children abroad and school children at home
To upend decades of US foreign lpolicy, so to advantage a criminal Russian dictator
To make of 240 years of American democracy a global laughingstock
To clothe the party of Lincoln in the permanent shame of cruelty and mendacity
To intentionally make the venerable Republican Party the party of abject cruelty and idiotic mendacity
To celebrate stupidity by wicked language like ‘51st state’ in hatred of our best neighbor and ally
To foolishly equate the just need for secure borders—a country has to have borders or it is not a country—with the wanton expatriation of children and the poor
To mock the weakest among us by hatred of their gender, race, status, poverty, need and vulnerability
These things are not normal…
So, in an abnormal time, let us uncover and recover the graces of the normal. Here is one. Let us talk to one another.
Here are students, downstairs at Marsh Chapel, preparing for the Sunday service, sitting on the old pews, in eyesight of Thurman and Marsh. They are talking to each other.
Here is the choir, robing, catching a breath from practice, standing with each other before worship. They are talking to each other.
Here are the clergy, gathering ostensibly to go over the Sunday worship service outline, which they—we—know by heart. But it is encouraging and joyful to sit for a moment together. They are talking to each other.
Here are a couple of dozen people, arranged around lunch tables after worship, downstairs in the Robinson Chapel, a Chapel redesigned a few years ago to function as a multi-use, interfaith chapel. They are eating and waiting to learn about Bach. And what are they doing? They are talking to each other.
Here are some several women and men, of deep faith and lasting devotion, gathering in the narthex after worship, and there still when the Catholics begin mass at 1pm. They say, ‘have a good week’, and, ‘hope to see you soon’, and, ‘it was really good to talk for a minute’, and, ‘I wish you well for the work this week’. They are talking to each other.
Here is a group gathered up, Advent and Lent most years, before or after worship, with a kindly, bright leader, determined to read parts of the Bible, and understand them, under the portrait of Howard Thurman.
Here are four people standing the parking lot, well over an hour after church, laughing at some funny expression, some shared memory, some joke. They know each other in that shared worship, after worship, following worship, conjoined in worship way. And what are they doing? Why they are talking to each other, of course.
Mr. Wesley called conversation a ‘means of grace’. It is, when it is real, full, familiar, friendly, in person, and in the spirit. Find someone to talk to this morning.
Sunday
March 16
By Marsh Chapel
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Miguel de Unamuno 2
Luke 13
Marsh Chapel
March 16, 2025
Robert Allan Hill
First, Luke
Our lesson today, Luke 13:31ff., exudes as poignant, as heartfelt, as realistic, and as personal an outlook as one can find anywhere in the Gospels, in its soprano voice of the lingering teaching of Jesus, or in its alto voice of the earliest church’s memory, or in its tenor voice of the gospel author, or in its baritone rendering in tradition.
The highest note is Jesus’ own. The first line, the melody, is a kind of dominical soprano voice, laden with maternal imagery today. ‘Like a hen gathers, would I have gathered you?’ All these lines (31-33) are found only in Luke, and clearly go back to Jesus himself. The nature imagery, the kindliness of the Pharisees, the use of the term ‘fox’( from a country preacher’s lexicon), the gritty undercurrent of fear, the poetry of three days: mirable dictum!, we hear today what Jesus said. His voice, vss. 31-33, carries across two millennia. Go tell that fox…As a hen gathers her chicks…today, tomorrow, the third day… Here is Jesus of Nazareth, in 33ad, facing the tragic sense of life.
(There also is his frightened, hopeful church, in 70 ad, facing the tragic sense of life. There is Luke, in 90ad, facing the tragic sense of life. And here we are, gathered as partners in the Gospel. Thoreau wrote: “If it is not a tragical life we live, then I know not what to call it. Such a story as that of Jesus Christ–the history of Jerusalem, say, being a part of the Universal History. The naked, the embalmed, unburied death of Jerusalem amid its desolate hills—think of it…”)
Listen particularly, just for moment, to the voice of the writer, Luke, the third or tenor line, if you will, in this harmonic composition. Luke makes two novel moves, which differ from the interpretation offered by Matthew, with whom Luke shares a use of a portion of this text. Both moves impress us today.
First, Luke uses two powerful, forceful verbs to show the sweep of Jesus’ divine embrace, the gathering motion of the mother hen, the announcement of partnership, divine and human (thelo and sunago). I would have done…I would have done…I longed, desired, deeply wished…to gather, to embrace, to join together, to partner…There is a deeply moving aspect to this emphasis, as Luke has Jesus open the next several chapters of the Gospel of Luke, which include all the favorite and solely Lukan materials. We have the Good Samaritan, thanks to Luke. And the lost sheep and coin, thanks to him. We have the prodigal son, that most Gnostic of parables, thanks to Luke. And the dishonest steward, thanks to him. Luke is probing the partnership of the Gospel, and he begins his own emphasis right here. What we think about God determines how we live. Luke illumines that partnership.
Second, Luke stands Matthew’s interpretation of expectation on its head. For Matthew, the prediction of the coming of the Son of Man was an end of the world prediction. Not for Luke. Matthew looks up, Luke looks out. Luke sees the world a little more as we do, with miles to go before we sleep, with generations to go before we sleep. We have work to do. Here. Now. In partnership. Together. In real unity, not just in passing togetherness. Where Matthew heralds parousia, Luke heralds incarnation, and the coming entry, triumphal entry, into Jerusalem. Here Luke foreshadows what is to come. For him, as George Buttrick wrote, “Jesus was killed by the insurrectionists in the mob and by the reactionaries in the temple” (a good warning about the far left as well as the right). We can learn in our time from this text, and offer a form for its theological explanation.
Second, Unamuno
“Franco’s army is waging a campaign against liberalism”…Unamuno…As is Trump…Marsh is a liberal pulpit, one of the last…”A brand of Catholicism that is not Christian…And a paranoid militarism bred in the colonial campaigns”…
As a member of that group of Spanish authors known as the Generation of ’98, Unamuno was directed by the literary currents of the time also stirred by Baroja, Azorin, Valle-Inclan, Antonio Machado and others. As a Basque, a former student of the Institution Libre de Ensenanza and an anti-clericalist, Unamuno had much in common with these and other authors. But his best-known works, unlike those of the others, did not directly treat the socio-political situation in Spain. Rather, he reserved most political comment for his daily columns in South American papers. While his life was anything but a-political, his writing concerns individual man, and only occasionally social man. As the owl sees through the darkness while it tracks its prey, so did Unamuno pierce the outer tension of early twentieth century Spain to arrive at what was for him the center, beginning, base and constant reference point of life, the drive toward immortality.
The biggest compliment, thought Unamuno, that a philosopher could hope to receive is that his philosophy is clouded by poetic tendencies. It is not surprising therefore that the argument found in Del Sentimiento Trajico de la Vida for the immortality of the soul contains very little argument at all. The reader awaiting proof which eluded Plato, Aquinas, Descartes and Kant will find nothing to cheer him here. Unamuno attempts to touch the psychological root of the work of the aforementioned by claiming that whatever the correctness or worth of the position, the human need of immortality is undeniable. This ‘nuestro inhelo’, our desire,is the starting point for philosophy and religion, a manifestation of the need Kant had described of finality, and termination of the series. Th need for finality and man’s absolute refusal and inability to accept his own death are both symptoms of his yearning for immortality. ‘Creo en el immortal origen de este anhelod de la inmortalidad, que es las sustancia misma de mi alma.’
Distinction, individuality, fame, and separation from the mass lure every thinker to the defense of his own work. This search for singularity Unamuno finds as the universal trait present in all creation, and he may have spent so much energy and space to include thoughts of others in his major work precisely to prove this. Each author Unamuno cites, in a certain sense, lives on as a part of the Spaniard’s opus; each one wrote to make his own Byronic etching in the sculpture of world history. Unamuno’s contribution centers on this almost physical craving of eternal life…
Is this not the passion Kierkegaard described in which the Christian must hold together his infinite inwardness with his finite existence. Indeed the tension that fills every Unamunian protagonist flows out of the author’s insistence here. Unamuno’s egoistic acclamation of his own eternity explodes in the mind of the reader. And contemplating the possibility of immortality as it is here energetically posited raises the reader’s thought to a peak from which he can inspect, under Don Miguel’s guidance, the various steps along life’s way. The key, as in our gospel today, is in the elevation.
Ethical behavior, the Christian love of the neighbor, arises for Unamuno from a deep love of self. I love my neighbor because I love myself and because I incorporate my neighbor into my being. He becomes a part of myself, a part of something, someone lovable, and so is lovable himself. Likewise, I love my children because they are physically me. For Unamuno, only unflinching self-love can lead to a love of neighbor, and, for him, Catholic dogma best teaches the mechanics of this love relationship. Hear him summing up, through this perhaps imperfect translation:
Truth, good and beauty are creatures of the inward development of the artist, of each man as his own favorite artist. As I have said often enough before, a man is ‘tanto mas hombre quanto mas unitario sea’, that is, the growth of a unified personality occasions the production of these aesthetic ideals. The Socratic ‘know thyself’ and the biblical ‘for what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul’ both point up the primary importance of inwardness. And in the end, it is only in these terms that a man can define the true and the good and the beautiful. The objective ‘niebla’, mist, in which we exist not only prohibits an empirical search for these ideals, but straightaway directs us back upon ourselves for the discovery of this treasure. Because these truths are subjective, their communication is often indirect, incomplete and unsatisfying. But a telling feature in any artist’s attempt to communicate his truths is the degree of tension exhibited in his work.
Third, Life
Beware. There lurks in America an abiding appetite for chaos, cruelty, and mayhem, provided they befall others rather than ourselves. Republicans in Trump have consciously chosen to gain from this, to make political hay from others’ hurt. The ‘bully pulpit’ has fulfilled its name, and now become the torture pulpit.
Sometimes, as Karl Jaspers taught us, and noted it with surprise and joy, the third dimension of life, its transcendence, may be opened to us, strangely, in liminal moments: change, loss, death, birth, relocation, illness, healing. Let us remember Jaspers this Lent.
Sometimes, as John Wesley taught us, the third dimension of life, its transcendence, may be provided for us by means of grace: a regular mealtime prayer (do you know one?), a memorized set of verses (do you have them?), a favorite hymn or two (do you hum one?), a pattern of worship (do you claim one?), a church family to love and a church home to enjoy (do you attend one?). Personal goals, life’s length, do not come without effort. Communal changes, life’s breadth, do not come from wishes. Why should we think that transcendence will come our way without attentive effort? Let us remember Wesley this Lent.
Sometimes, as Ralph Harper taught us some years ago, we need the height
of presence: “When I am moved by a painting or by music, by clouds
passing in a clear night sky, by the soughing of pines in the early spring, I
feel the distance between me and art and nature dissolve to some degree,
and I feel at ease. I feel that what I know makes me more myself than I
knew before. This is how the saints felt about God, and I see in my own
experience elements that I share with the saints and prophets, the
philosophers and priests.” (On Presence, 6) Let us remember Harper this Lent.
At this very hour some Pharisees came, and said to him,’Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you. And he said to them, ‘Go tell that fox, ‘Behold I cast out demons and perform cures today and tomorrow, and the third day I finish my course. Nevertheless, I must go on my way today and tomorrow and the following day; for it cannot be that a prophet should perish away from Jerusalem’
Sunday
March 9
By Marsh Chapel
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Lent 2025: Miguel De Unamuno
Luke 4: 1-13
2025 Marsh Lenten Series
Marsh Chapel
March 9, 2025
Robert Allan Hill
The Marsh Lenten Sermon Series 2007-2025
In this Marsh Chapel pulpit, from 2007-2016, Lent by Lent, we identified a theological conversation partner for the Lenten sermons, broadly speaking, out of the Calvinist tradition, so important to the first 200 years in New England. With Calvin we encountered the chief resource for others we engaged over ten years—voices like those of Jonathan Edwards (2015), John Calvin himself, (2014), Marilyn Robinson (2013) (whom with gladness we greeted in the flesh here at Boston University April 11, 2023), Jacques Ellul (2012), Dietrich Bonhoeffer (a Lutheran cousin) (2011), Karl Barth (2010), and Gabriel Vahanian (2007), and themes like Atonement (2009) and Decision (2008), summarized with the help of Paul of Tarsus (2016).
For the next decade, we have turned to the Catholic tradition, so important in the last 200 years in New England. That is, in this decade, beginning with Lent 2017, the Marsh pulpit, a traditionally Methodist one, turned left, not right, toward Rome not Geneva, and we have preached with, and learned from the Roman Catholic tradition, and some of its great divines including Henri Nouwen (2017) Thomas Merton (2018) John of the Cross (2019), Teresa of Avila (2020), St Patrick of Assisi(2021), Dorothy Day (2022), Augustine of Hippo (2023), and Raymond Brown (2024). Next year will be our last in this Catholic series, before we turn in the next decade to figures from other world religions. You may have a thought or two, a suggestion about with whom we should converse in 2026. For now, we turn this Lent 2025 to Miguel De Unamuno.
First, Luke
Luke prepares the way for us on toward Unamuno.
“We want to mark the places and preserve the moments where we have encountered God’ (Ringe, loc cit).
You are following Luke well this year. Notice how roundly he changes Mark, here, too.
The other alternative is Matthew, who copies Mark nearly word for word. No, Luke has gone his own way, and given us the Lukan view, later than that of Mark, different from that of Mark, fuller than that of Mark. What do Luke’s additions amount to?
What others have seen and heard is meant to inspire us to see and hear, in prayer. Luke regularly and steadily supplements the narrative with additional moments of prayer. The most activist of the gospels is also the most passive, the most prayerful. Likewise, the whole ethos of exodus is emphasized in Luke. Yes, life is a journey. Yes, the journey of faith includes risk, distress, and pain. Yes, the sojourn in the wilderness is a cost of leaving the fleshpots of any Egypt, just as winter is the cost for summer. Luke is setting things right for the long haul. Prayer to nourish for the long haul. Journey as a metaphor for struggle over the long haul. Lordship, a higher and hierarchical Savior, to strengthen weakened knees and souls for the long haul. The presence of the divine will, soon for Luke to emerge in the body of the Church, to guide all for the long haul. Luke advises us to be ‘in it for the long haul’ whatever ‘it’ is. Luke gives Divine confirmation of Jesus’ Messiahship. It places into the history of Jesus what the later church believed, believes, knew, and preached. See: even during his life a few people knew and saw
We want to bear that mystery in our present, in our person, do we not? Tittle: ‘as he faced the possibility of suffering and death his mind reverted to the great figures of Israel’s past…let us place ourselves under the influence of Christ and even we will be transfigured…something of his glory will shine in our hearts and appear in our faces and show forth in our lives’.
Second, Unamuno
The voice of Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo (1864-1936) is singular for its frenzied call to consciousness, and to consciousness of man’s need of immortality. Hear just a snippet:
You ask me my good friend if I know how to incite delirium, vertigo, any madness whatsoever, among these orderly and placid masses that are born, eat, sleep, reproduce themselves and die. Is there no way to introduce a new epidemic of flagellants, or of Convulsionaries? And you speak of the millennium. (Nuestro Senor Don Quijote).
These words should be read aloud, as they have just been, for clearly the written words pin down and cramp the intended message more effectively than they help its communication. Oral presentation also occasions the dips and swells of the lector’s voice, the anxious movements of his limbs and torso, and the knowing or questioning glances of his eyes. It is easy to imagine Unamuno reading aloud most of his work; indeed, we are left with the thought that Unamuno’s most exciting creations may have been those spun out and lost in the afternoon ‘tertulias’. Only the most vibrant exposition would suit Unamuno’s expression of his total concern for one question: that of his own immortality. His craving of an after-life and his concomitant absolute fear of the possible disappearance of his own soul fuel all the myriad Unamunian works.
This gangling, bearded, Basque professor of Greek at the University of Salamanca, so often likened in appearance to an owl, indeed shared that animal’s nocturnal vision as he wrote from the heart of Castille, in the midst of the gathering noon darkness of the early twentieth century. His lived experience, in a time of political tumult, mirrors ours in America this Lent. Although primarily a teacher and writer, Unamuno’s political life was nearly as tumultuous as his writing. Appointed to the rectorship at Salamanca in 1900, Unamuno came to be well known before the fall of the monarchy. Alfonso XIII, while outwardly respecting Unamuno’s nascent world-wide audience, quietly had him removed as rector in 1914. In 1924 Primo de Rivera exiled him to the island of Fuerteventura. After six weeks of life as a ‘desterrado’ on the island, near the Canaries, Unamuno was permitted to return to Spain. Instead, he lived out the remaining six years of the dictatorship in Paris and Hendaye, writing little, reading little, in somewhat of a coma. With the fall of the dicatatorship, Unamuno was free to return to Spain. It is sufficient to say that while Don Miguel made his name in the literary world, he at the same time was deeply involved in the political evolution of his country. When Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship fell, Unamuno returned to the University of Salamanca and was reelected rector of the university in 1931, but in October 1936 he denounced General Francisco Franco’s falangists, was removed once again as rector, and was placed under house arrest. He died of a heart attack two months later. This Lent we shall converse with Unamuno, and learn with him, about life, about death, about faith, about immortality.
Third, Life
Five days ago here at Marsh Chapel about 1,100 students and others presented themselves for ashes, Ash Wednesday. Our hard-working Marsh Chaplains and team served many. The Chapel also hosted three Catholic services and the weekly contemporary Theological School service, wherein ashes were given. Hence, about 1,100. In the last few years, Ash Wednesday has begun to catch up with Easter and Christmas in active young adult participation. Why?
My middle name of late is ‘I don’t know’, which I don’t. One of our team preaches an Ash Wednesday sermon every year. ‘The ashes are not magic ashes’. But they draw. The touch draws. The solemnity, too. The whisper of mortality at the fountain of youth. The strange, numinous, yet public pause. The flesh of it all. On said, ‘it has become a moment for reset’. Yes, reset.
There is perhaps another cause or reason. Here, mid-winter, is an encounter with antiquity. For two millennia women and men have been preparing for a holy Lent. For two millennia women and men have stopped to remember, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. As our English chorister read it some years ago, Thou art DUST and to DUST though shalt return. Is this not subliminally why, in part, we are here this morning, too? For two millennia women and men have listened to readings from Holy Writ. For two millennia women and men have received Jesus in cup and bread. For two millennia, come Sunday, there have been choirs and preachers and prayers and candles and quiet. The architecture of our gothic nave, with an origin nearly a millennium ago, speaks to us so. Our long, tall, yes traditioned, stained glass captures places and people from longer ago. Our habits of liturgy, stand and sit, our habits of liturgy, sing and give, our habits of liturgy, bow and kneel, our habits of liturgy, our body language, give us a jarring encounter with antiquity. For once, every seven days, we are not jailed and stuck in the shallow shallows of the twenty first century. We are liberated to time travel, to get out and see the past, and perhaps, now and then, to hear something good and learn something new.
Here, in Luke, as in our other gospels, the Lord faces and masters the various challenges which we also know. They include a kind of will to power, and a sort of pride, and a type of avarice. We come to church with some experience of temptation and resistance. As the song writer says, ‘good experience comes from seasoned judgment–which comes from bad experience’.
In many communities, including our own, the sun rises this morning, this Lenten morning, on experience of loss and hurt. Across this country, in varying perspectives, we feel this. This morning there are homes and families who have suddenly known unexpected loss. This morning there are friends and groups of friends who have been faced with mortal danger. At one breakfast table, a wife now sits alone, for the first time on a Sunday in 60 years. At another breakfast table, a family gathers for the first time, in a long time, and missing a member. It would help us to remember just how short our words do fall in trying to describe the depth of these moments. Our words arrive only at the shoreline, at the margin of things. Beyond this we practice prayer, a kind of sitting silent before God.
We do not know why these things happen. We hurt and grieve. In the bones. At the deeper levels, we just do not know, and for an academic community committed to knowing, and knowing more, and more, this means wandering in a serious wilderness. Give us an equation to solve. Show us a biography that needs writing. Provide us with an experiment. Happily, we would organize a committee, or develop a proposal, or phone a list of donors. But loss, unexpected and unfair, is tragic. The tragic sense of life, el sentimiento trajico de la vida, as Unamuno put it, takes us out into wilderness, where we learn, with Jesus, to resist. Faith is resistance. Faith is the power to withstand what we cannot understand. Our friend, congregant, faithful minister in the Lone Star State, Milton Jordan, writes
Steadily slicing the edges off structures
of public wellbeing and the common good
on behalf of the masters of massed wealth,
legislative lackeys and their cultural
co-conspirators depend on distraction
to draw our attention away from plans
that obstruct continuing resistance
to their destruction of institutions
and practices that enable us to see
one another face to face, and maintain
those structures of public wellbeing
and the common good.
In the spirit of Christ, we are in worship this morning to attest to something. Faith is the power to withstand what we cannot understand. Worship is the practice of faith by which we learn to withstand what we cannot understand. God is the presence, force, truth, and love Who alone deserves worship, and worship is the practice of the faith by which we learn to withstand what we cannot understand. Worship prepares us to resist. So, we see Jesus again in the wilderness. To resist all that makes human life inhuman. So here you are, come lent, come Sunday, come 11am, today again to walk in the wild, in the wilderness.
The necessary freedom, and the disciplined grace, of Luke’s gospel firmly accosts us with the daily need, the daily task, the daily prospect, the daily adventure, the daily promise, the daily existential, lonely, windswept mountain top liberty of faith in the resurrection. Back at home, it may be, for those present this morning, or there at home, it may be, for those listening today there is transfiguration awaiting, a resurrection beckoning, a faith and gospel lying in hiding, ready for action. Write that letter. Sign that check. Make that call. Read that verse. Forget that hurt. Watch. Fight. Pray. Live rejoicing every day.
Come! Come travel together this Lent! Listen to Luke! Learn from Unamuno! Live in Love!
Marsh Chapel Sunday ServicesNovember 6, 2008