Sunday
November 1
Doxatechne
By Marsh Chapel
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Frontispiece
Whether or not a technological society will entirely overwhelm a doxological culture is up to us.
You have no choice whether or not to participate in the technological society. You have some choice whether or not to participate in the nourishment of a doxological culture. You are presented, by grace, this All Saints’ Day, with an abiding question: doxa or techne? Techne alone? Or doxatechne, prayer cautioning skill, praise denying work, the stealth emergence of a doxological culture within and underneath a technological society?
Take an hour a day. Take a day a week. Take a week a quarter. Take a quarter a year. For…doxa…doxology…DOXOLOGY! Doxa is the human art of being artfully human.
To become human, over time, costs, requires deficit spending to replenish dire deficits in relationship, tradition, and health. Although these deficits are shockingly, notoriously profound on college campuses, which tend to deaden relationship, ignore tradition, and warp health, they are by no means collegiate deficits alone. They are cultural deficits—relationship, tradition, health—and they are deficits in your life today, and in mine.
Our saints, the community of saints about us, whisper reminders. You need friendship: your computer will never kiss you. You need tradition: your little story is hardly a story at all without connection to a big story or two. You need health: mens sana in corpore sano.
Relationship
One of our students recently said, interpreting the Gospel of John, and its famous introduction, ‘In the beginning was the word’: Sometimes I hear my self introduction (student, divinity, future pastor), but the feeling beyond the words is gone. I want that feeling in the words.
So our fourth Gospel presents Jesus saying of his disciples: ‘I call you friends’. Friendship is a mystery, a great deep. It may be true that some have more capacity for friendship than others, but all have a friendship-shaped cavity in the heart, awaiting fulfillment. How poorly we in the ministry of the Word have done, over time, to speak a kind word for friendship! And for the time friendship requires. And for the courage friendship entails. And for the prayerful thought friendship demands. And for the willingness as a friend to risk the friendship for the sake of the friend.
Note the arts of friendship: introduction, attention, courtesy, invitation, and the grace to step aside. Who teaches you these habits of mind, heart, and being? No one. You learn them, if at all, by way of example from others. Ponder this week one , in your earthly life to date, who has best befriended you.
Martin Buber: “The basic word I-You can only be spoken with one’s whole being. The basic word I-It can never be spoken with one’s whole being… Inscrutably involved, we live in the currents of universal reciprocity…Whoever says You does not have something; he has nothing. But he stands in relation.”
Our Gospel, John 11, affirms the resurrection in relationship. The Gospel of John turns on Lazarus. Jesus’ crucifixion, in John, is triggered, not by the cleansing of a temple, but by Jesus raising of his friend, for whom he wept, from the dead, his friend, whom he loved, from the dead. ‘A new relationship I give you, that you love one another’: here is the resurrection in John.
Psalm 139
O Lord, thou hast searched me and known me!
2
Thou knowest when I sit down and when I rise up;
thou discernest my thoughts from afar.
3
Thou searchest out my path and my lying down,
and art acquainted with all my ways.
4
Even before a word is on my tongue,
lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether.
5
Thou dost beset me behind and before,
and layest thy hand upon me.
6
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
it is high, I cannot attain it.
7
Whither shall I go from thy Spirit?
Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
8
If I ascend to heaven, thou art there!
If I make my bed in Sheol, thou art there!
9
If I take the wings of the morning
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
10
even there thy hand shall lead me,
and thy right hand shall hold me.
11
If I say, “Let only darkness cover me,
and the light about me be night,”
12
even the darkness is not dark to thee,
the night is bright as the day;
for darkness is as light with thee.
Tradition
One of our students said recently, interpreting the Gospel of John, and its famous revelation, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life’: Sometimes we let our precious truth get in the way of the life of our precious neighbor. Jesus is not about truth and ends but about life and means.
J Pelikan: tradition is the living faith of dead people; traditionalism is the dead faith of living people. An All Saints’ Day epigram if ever there was one…
In practice, tradition is a bridge connecting memory and hope. You have a memory of Halloween that, in the outliving of your present, reaches in hope to a future you cannot see and certainly cannot define. In the carving of a pumpkin, with a certain grimace, in a certain way, there is bridge shaped that spans the chasm between the memory, your memory, of the dead, and the hope, your hope, for the living.
Hence, in Isaiah 25, the Lord, one hopes, will bring upon the mountain the heavenly feast, wherein tears are taken away and death is no more and—most significantly—disgrace is erased. As the grave swallows us, so, in time, will the grave itself be swallowed: here is our hope, and here is that hope in sumptuous memory.
A friend recently sent a reminder, a bridge from past to future, of Paul Tillich’s teaching on prayer (our Marsh theme this year): God’s directing creativity is the answer to the question of the meaning of prayer, especially prayers of supplication and prayers of intercession. Neither type of prayer can mean that God is expected to acquiesce in interfering with existential conditions. Both mean that God is asked to direct the given situation toward fulfillment. The prayers are an element in this situation, a most powerful factor if they are true prayers. As an element in the situation a prayer is a condition of God’s directing creativity, but the form of this creativity may be the complete rejection of the manifest content of the prayer. Nevertheless, the prayer may have been heard according to its hidden content, which is the surrender of a fragment of existence to God. This hidden content is always decisive. It is the element in the situation which is used by God’s directing creativity. Every serious prayer contains power, not because of the intensity of desire expressed in it, but because of the faith the person has in God’s directing activity—a faith which transforms the existential situation (P Tillich, Systematic Theology, loc. cit.).
Psalm 24
The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof,
the world and those who dwell therein;
2
for he has founded it upon the seas,
and established it upon the rivers.
3
Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord?
And who shall stand in his holy place?
4
He who has clean hands and a pure heart,
who does not lift up his soul to what is false,
and does not swear deceitfully.
5
He will receive blessing from the Lord,
and vindication from the God of his salvation.
6
Such is the generation of those who seek him,
who seek the face of the God of Jacob.[a]Selah
Health
One of our students said recently, interpreting the Gospel of John, ‘we are called to witness and wonder: to care and celebrate our part in the web of life’ .
Your mental, physical, and personal health are not someone else’s job. For 10-20% of us, broadly speaking, health in all dimensions requires an attentive discipline regarding addictive substances.
Sherry Turkle: We expect more from technology and less from each other…We heal ourselves by giving others what we most need (ALONE TOGETHER).
Today in NYC there are 58,000 living in shelters, 40% of whom are children. Our story in Boston is similar.
We await the apocalypse poetically depicted in Revelation 21. Our health is connected to such a hope, such a prospect. And the prospect is so faithful and so true, that the seer may in fact simply ‘write it down’ (21:5).
Psalm 1
Blessed is the man
who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
2
but his delight is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law he meditates day and night.
3
He is like a tree
planted by streams of water,
that yields its fruit in its season,
and its leaf does not wither.
In all that he does, he prospers.
Coda
We have no choice, to some measure, about techne. (Listen again to the Marsh Chapel sermons on Jacques Ellul, eminent Calvinist, some winters ago.) If you have a job, you will have an email address. If you are of a certain generation the still dews of social media will drop upon you until all your strivings cease. If you are investing capital, and aim to make a profit, you will purchase in technology. If you practice medicine, now, every examination will involve three faces: your patient, you, and your computer. If you work for a large corporation, university, or government agency, your life, periodically, will be upended, or worse, with a change of software and hardware, so beware.
You have the faith of Jesus Christ, though, with which to choose doxa, or a little measure of meaning in doxatechne. Let us live the Gospel!
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
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