Sunday
May 3
The Marsh Spirit
By Marsh Chapel
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The Marsh Spirit…
Inquiry
We are a learning community, a teaching and learning community of faith. As branches to a vine, we attach ourselves to Way, Truth and Life, Learning, Virtue, Piety, Knowing, Doing, Being. Notice the great teachers held with permanence in our Connick stained glass windows. Select your favorite: Comenius, Alexander Graham Bell, Osmon Baker, Borden Parker Bowne. Perhaps best Augustine of Hippo, whose heart was restless until it found rest in Him. Theological Inquiry asks about God, the nature of God, the essence of God. Our services this year, in pursuit of spirit, have utilized a prayer response, in that spirit, written by Robert Cummings Neville. We feted this week Ray Lee Hart, and his teaching and his scholarship. We heard again Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty. Learn something every day, at whatever age! Read a book a day! Yours is a spirit of inquiry.
Hymnody
We are a singing community, those who sing to pray twice, qui cantat bis orat. As branches to a vine, we attach ourselves to Way, Truth and Life, Melody, Harmony, and Diction. Notice the musicians about you. Carved into the chancel wood. And about me. Here is Handel. Here is Bach. And last weekend we heard Handel. And two weeks before, Bach. And in between? Gospel! Our ISGC sang, filled the room, mid April. I have in my possession photographs of the dinner our church matriarchs—Sandra, Cecelia, Carolyn, Melvena—served the choir before their performance. Not just pulpit, nor just sermon, not just preaching, nor just proclamation: yours is a musical spirit, a spirit of hymnody. Sing when the spirit says sing! Sing lustily! Sing with the saints of glory! Yours is a spirit of hymnody.
Recollection
We are a remembering community, a place with history, a future but also a past. As branches to vine, we attach ourselves to Way, Truth, and Life, and Justice, Righteousness, and the better angels of our nature. Stands down there, as I walk toward him, Abraham Lincoln. Those who recommend slavery might try it for themselves. Those who ignore brutality might think, try to imagine, being bound hand and foot, and thrown headlong into the back of a closed van and driven not to three but four separate places, and to arrive, at last, dead. We began this school year with a forum on Ferguson, right here. Autumn sermons and winter addressed the need ‘to strive on to finish the work we are in’. We read Jesus and the Disinherited. Our summer preacher series acclaims The Beloved Community. We learned about business ethics from our esteemed Questrom Dean. Many of you have commented on the blog about Ferguson, slavery, response, and the need for investment in community, particularly worshipping community, as we slog on toward freedom. Cornell Brooks, head of the NAACP spoke here in Marsh Chapel in November. He will speak for us again two weeks from today, Baccalaureate Sunday, right here in Marsh Chapel. Where else would or could possibly place yourself, social location being so important, at 11am on May 17? You will want to be here, right here! Many things are optional. Not worship. Worship is not optional for the person of faith. Come Sunday, Come! Here. Yours is a spirit of recollection.
Patience
We are a longsuffering, a patient community. As branches to vine we attach ourselves to Way, Truth, and Life, Creativity, Organization, Expanding the circle of freedom. Daniel Marsh has his own window in his own chapel. And well he might. It took him a generation to get to build the building his most wanted, this one. He came in 1926. Marsh was built in 1949—after arrival, after depression, after World War. At last. Labor Omnia Vincit. Think about that, working for 25 years at last to get where you want to go. Academic communities do tend to have lengthened cycle times, it is true. But all of us benefit from patience. You come for prayer before worship, and patiently sit. You pause for postlude after worship, and patiently sit. Friday, honoring the Hubert Humphrey scholars, we heard Humphrey’s niece speak, in ‘the Castle’, about his patience. Hubert Humphrey. His voice is one we need today. ‘There will be no hedging. We need come out of the long dark shadow of states’ rights and into the bright shining sunlight of human rights’. That is Philadelphia, 1948. Could someone whisper that to the nine justices in Washington today? It is every bit as apt. ‘People have a right to health, education, employment, protection, and a peaceful old age.’ Humphrey worked on Medicare for 20 years before its adoption in the mid sixties. Yes, he could excoriate his opponents: ‘uh uh, o no, go slow, veto—that is the way of our opponents’, he could rant. But he also had patience. To build coalitions. To create alternative structures. To legislate. He worked at it. No surprise. He was a Minnesota Methodist, grandson of Methodist preachers. And he lives on this campus, in the program given his name. I mean he really lives in these scholars from all over the globe! Yours is a spirit of patience.
Life
We are a living community, tracing the spirit of life, in this and every new dawn. Even when weary feet refuse to climb. As branches to vine, we cling to life, the spirit of life, Way, Truth and Life, Children, Students, All. It is the life of Jesus Christ, the Living One, which is our true vine, and we the branches. James Bashford—bishop, college president, preacher, watches us from his balcony window every Sunday. I have stood beside his in Oak Grove Cemetery, Delaware, Ohio. A kind man. Our commencement speaker will be Meredith Vieira. You know of her roots in Rhode Island. You know of her honest, happy form of journalism. You know her face and voice. Her celebrity. But we think of her differently, in our family. She is a close friend of a close friend. Our step father, who adored her, and who has been ill, until his recent death, received, unexpectedly, a signed photograph from her, a lengthy note, a personal greeting, which stands still above his desk. Ministry is service. Ministry is to place oneself at the disposal of others. Ministry is to give life by giving life, beginning with time and kindness. Don’t you have a phone call you might make? Don’t you have a letter you might send? Don’t you have a visit you might offer? Don’t you have a check you might write? Yours is a spirit of life.
Secularity
We are a secular community, tracing the sacred in and within the secular. As branches to vine we affirm that nothing human is foreign to us, and hold onto Way, Truth, Life, Community, Fellowship, Culture. Notice The Star of David. In his spirit, stretch your legs and walk Commonwealth Avenue, wonder and wander through the commonwealth of the Gospel. The Marsh Spirit awaits a faith amenable to culture and a culture amenable to faith. Yours is a cosmopolitan spirit, one that envisions Christ transforming culture—not just Christ against Christ above or Christ in or Christ across culture. Christ who brings not just theological reformation but also cultural revolution. Christ the Extraordinary incarnate in the ordinary. There is a particular spirit of this place and community. You honor both the lectionary of the church and the lectionary of the culture. You know that there are many ways of keeping faith, as our THIS I BELIEVE Sunday again this year will emphasize. Our Hillel community at BU is in a season of resurgence, in part through a reconnection to the community, the society, the culture of Boston and Boston University, through its Director, David Raphael. Yours is a spirit of secularity.
Rigor
We are a rigorous community, unwilling to let the pale cast of thought completely overcome the native hue of resolution. As branches to vine, we cling to Way, Truth and Life, Courage, Change, Heart. One of my favorite windows is that of the four chaplains, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, who gave their life jackets and their lives that others might survive a naval tragedy in WW II. Their tradition in chaplaincy, and in self-giving, was continued here a generation later by James Carroll. You know him as a writer—Boston Globe columnist, esteemed novelist, historian and cultural critic. But as he told us this week, he really came alive here at BU, and found his way here. He left the priesthood, but not the church. He married and raised children and grandchildren, but also stayed wedded to his faith. He directly and valiantly opposes religious wrong, but also rejoices in religious right (though not THE religious right!). He was our Catholic Chaplain here for six years, through 1974. With Robert Hamill, third Marsh Chapel Dean, he brought the weekly Catholic Mass from Morse Auditorium to this nave, where it lives still today. Couples, one Protestant and one Catholic, can come to Marsh Chapel for 11am Protestant worship and 12:30pm Catholic Mass, and be home by 2pm. Your remember his elegant pastoral sermon here, for the class of 1970, in 2010. With rigor he has followed in the footsteps of the Master. And, as he reminded us, God is Compassionate Love. You can believe in God as Compassionate Love! You can worship at that altar. And you do. Yours is a spirit of rigor.
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.
Morning Prayer
“15 prayers for the class of ‘15”
May you finish your papers, wake up for your finals, and pass your courses
May you find a job when you are hunting for one, and be found by a calling when you are not (hunting for one)
May you remember your mom on Mothers’ Day, nine days from today
May you recall that there are two ways to be wealthy: have a lot of money, or, have very few needs.
May you honestly face death, as together we did two springs ago, and so discover the precious value of every breath, as together we also did two springs ago.
May you, with the Greeks, see in tragedy the seedbed of nobility.
May you bring a sense of purpose to days and events which lack both (sense and purpose).
May your return your overdue library books. May you find your overdue library books.
May you with Samuel Johnson keep your friendships in good repair, with John Wesley and Mother Theresa remember the poor, with Lord Baden Powell do a good turn daily, and with Bill Coffin take yourself lightly so that you may fly, like the angels, and with Martin Luther King have a dream
May you as a generation live a common hope, find the wisdom to design a better world, acquire the power to build a better world, and have the goodness to want a better world.
May you have a life long, rapturous, torrid love affair—with Boston, dear old Boston, the home of the bean and the cod, and bring your first born child to Fenway Park, and remember the radiant happiness of this Senior Breakfast all your days.
May life be good to you, and may you be good to life.
My dear ones, my dear friends, who so resemble my own dear children, may you be safe, may you be well, may you be happy.
May it be so.
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
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