Sunday
October 15
Words of Welcome
By Marsh Chapel
Click here to listen to the full service
Click here to listen to the meditations only
Welcome!
At this time in the year, at Boston University, we see parents and students, coming and going, sending and being sent. It is a bone jarring moment. It is reality, the reality of time and eternity, change and love. Most of our words to parents and students are meant to convey our sincere commitment to excellence, our attention to detail, our trustworthiness, if you will, as an institution and as individuals. The message is sincere and true, important and timely. This is a good place, and your sons and daughters will be here among good people.
But another reality of ‘Parents Weekend’ is about feelings, feelings wrought by coming and going. We also should speak of and to them. We see parents with their children and overhear…feelings.
There is a feeling of gratitude, so thick you can see it in the air. We mean not only the word of thanks that one more teenager is leaving home, one less bell to answer, one less egg to fry, though that is there, too. We mean the feeling that comes with a gasp in the throat, ‘thank you’, the feeling of seeing, my goodness, 18 or more years have gone by, and here, look, look at that young woman, that young man, my son, my daughter. It is a feeling of thanksgiving, for life, for youth, for children, for family, for affection. Every now and then, you catch a smile on a dad’s face, a lightness in a mom’s eyes, and you know gratitude, a real feeling.
There is a feeling of loss, too. In fact, loss is next door neighbor to gratitude, funny as that is. We mean not only the loss you feel with the first tuition check sent, though that is truly a real feeling. In the autumn, we see sometimes a parent turn away, with eyes brimming, a private moment that even as a pastor I feel unworthy to engage. As a parent, I know that feeling.
There is a feeling of hope as well. You cannot be around many hundred eighteen year olds and turn a cold heart to the future. That much energy brings its own promise and parents feel it. At matriculation last month we sat in front of 3500 young hearts, 7000 young eyes and ears and hands, 3500 souls. When they cheer together there is a tingle, a mixture of awe and fear and wonder, like the feeling of a ten-foot wave breaking right in front of you. ‘Bless you’ we say and pray, and so do our parents. There is a new day upon us and it brings a sense of promise.
Now our parents have other things to think about and bigger fish to fry than to connect their feeling (far more than sentiment or emotion by the way) with the birth of Boston University. Yet these three feelings of gratitude and loss and promise created this school in 1839. Oh, John Dempster and the other 19th century founders would have used other, more religious, more technically theological terms, but the feelings were exactly theirs too, as they served as midwives at the birth of Boston University. In place of gratitude, they would have spoken of grace, prevenient grace at that. In place of loss, they would have spoken of itinerancy, the spiritual journey that is the heart of life. In place of promise, they would have invoked the gospel word of freedom, in the name of the God who is loving us into love and freeing us into freedom. But the feelings—that is, the realities—are the very same, and they bring us straightway into the Gospel this morning.
Three Words of Welcome
Invitation
Do you hear a voice of invitation?
We seldom recognize what a powerful thing an invitation can be. We know the power of an invitation when we hungrily receive one heartily desired. Nothing in all the world ever happened between persons without invitations. Every sermon is in some way an invitation to decision for Christian discipleship.
The voice of invitation is an enticement, a coaxing, a luring, a courting. The board is spread, the meat and drink are prepared. All is well in the house. This open invitation is the mark of Christianity at its best.
You remember that St Matthew, the Evangelist, has a passion. It is invitation, evangelism. The point of the Gospel of Mathew the Evangelist is that he is an evangelist. This is his love. His first love. To seek the lost, gather the dispersed, church the unchurched. And it is a passionate love.
The fun of teaching knots is to show the tenderfoot the square knot. Everything else is derivative. The joy of coaching swimming is to help someone learn to float. All the rest is a corollary. The excitement of instruction in a language is the alphabet and the first declension and the initial vocabulary. All the rest is subordinate.
The capacity to offer a genuine invitation depends on the measure of verbal kindness, and so personal trust, within a community. Let me ask you to pause for a moment and think about the way we speak.
We are invited to feast with one another. We are invited somehow to communicate to one another that the joy of the Lord is our strength.
How many of us, by contrast, live lives that are visually beautiful but verbally vacuous? Maybe that is why Luke, in his telling of this parable, has the invitation go out to the poor, the maimed, the blind and the lame. To begin to invite, let us begin by attending to the character of our conversation as a community.
Warning
But the master’s call, as Matthew’s darkening tale reveals, is not heeded. That is the invitation is “taken lightly”, or as Matthew puts it, “they made light of it, and went off, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his servants and treated them shamefully.” As they had, we are meant to interpret, the prophets of old.
The divine calling does not stop, but we now hear a second dimension of it. Here the call is not so much an invitation as it is a warning. One of the most startling points in the study of the parables is to notice the difference between Luke’s account of the story in Luke 14, and today’s reading. Luke is happy. Matthew is angry. Here a man has become a king, those who refuse are not forgotten but violently killed, those who miss their chance are not worthy, and many are called but few are chosen. It is hard not overhear some bitter church experience here, perhaps related to the persecution under the Emperor Domitian in the last decade of the first century.
While we may chafe at Matthew’s intensity, we can readily appreciate this new voice, a voice of warning. Jesus exists for us at some points as a warning. A warning that there does come a time when it is too late. All the parables have this element in them. The mercy of God is eternal, never ending, all pervading. But the time to accept the invitation is passing; the time to accept is the eternal now. There comes a time when it is too late. When we are sensitive, we hear this same warning all around us.
There does come a time when it is too late. The parables shout this warning. We cannot play forever with life-threatening nuclear weapons. We cannot supply the world with arms and expect them never to be used. We cannot applaud forever a narrow nationalism ill-suited to a global village. There does come a time when it is too late. The parables gracefully warn us of that time. Those of us laden with much property, much knowledge, much position may have a harder time hearing this than otherwise we would.
(The sad story which Matthew alone knows about the poor bloke who has no wedding robe apparently is a warning, either moral or spiritual. If moral, it is a warning that grace is free but not cheap. If spiritual, it is a warning that those invited to a daily feast should appreciate and celebrate.)
Summons
The call to the banquet is an invitation and warning, but in the end, it is a summons. “Go therefore to the thoroughfares, and invite to the marriage feast as many as you find”.
An open, general summons goes out. Even this morning.
A couple of weeks ago, during the communion, I recalled in one of our churches long ago the memory of an elderly man, thinking of the summons of a school bell. Every morning he would prepare to go off into the cold, at age 6. For the winter, he would cover himself from head to toe in layers of clothing. Then his mother would take a huge pancake from the griddle and put one in each mitten to keep his hands warm. The summons came. The bell rang. He dressed, prepared, and went.
For her, for me, for you, this summons is delivered: work is not meant to drive out love. No, nor are any other penultimate passions meant to take the place of God the God of love in our lives.
In Jesus Christ light came into a world of darkness. In him we are called—invited, warned, summoned—into the kingdom of heaven. This call is not an abstract, universal bellow. It is a whispering that touches and knocks at the door of every human heart. Jesus teaches of a pardoning God, who is quick to forgive. Jesus tells us of a gathering God, who gathers good and bad together. In him has the light shown in the darkness.
Exemplum Docet
Schweitzer: Invitation
Maybe we need to remember Albert Schweitzer, for all the complications and contradictions in his life and our memory of it.
A child organ prodigy, a youthful New Testament scholar, a young principal in his Alsatian theological seminary, a man whose books and articles I used with profit in my own dissertation a few years ago, Schweitzer’s life changed on the reading of a Paris Mission Society Magazine.
As a scholar, he wrote: (Tom) “He comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word, ‘Follow me!’ and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.” (QHJ, 389).
What he wrote of Jesus became his life. He left organ and desk, studied medicine, and practiced in Africa for 35 years, calling his philosophy, ‘a reverence for life’. A decision about vocation leads to nearness to the divine. Like love, like falling in love, like the discovery of a soul mate, life partner, spouse, real friend, an invitation is as powerful as it is numinous. A real mystery.
Addams: Warning
Maybe we need to remember the young woman from Rockford Illinois, Jane Addams. She grew up 130 years ago, in a time and place unfriendly, even hostile, to the leadership that women might provide. But somehow she discovered her mission in life. And with determination she traveled to the windy city and set up Hull House, the most far reaching experiment in social reform that American cities had ever seen. Hull House was born out of a social vision, and nurtured through the generosity of one determined woman. Addams believed fervently that we are responsible for what happens in the world. So, Hull House, a place of feminine community and exciting spiritual energy, was born. Addams organized female labor unions. She lobbied for a state office to inspect factories for safety. She built public playgrounds and staged concerts and cared for immigrants. She became politically active and gained a national following on the lecture circuit. She is perhaps the most passionate and most effective advocate for the poor that our country has ever seen.
Addams wrote: (Denise)“The blessings which we associate with a life of refinement and cultivation must be made universal if they are to be permanent…The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain, is floating in midair, until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.”
Yet it was a former neighbor who, for me, explained once the puzzle of Jane Addams’ fruitful generosity. This was the historian Christopher Lasch. He said of Addams, “Like so many reformers before her, she had discovered some part of herself which, released, freed the rest.”
Is there a part of your soul ready today to be released, that then will free the rest of you?
Thurman: Summons
Maybe we need to remember Howard Thurman. The first page of his autobiography announces today’s gospel, that Jesus empowers his disciples, in summons. As a summer student minister, Thurman received a late-night phone call.
(Nick) ‘There is a patient here who is dying. He is asking for a minister. Are you a minister?’
In one kaleidoscopic moment, I was back again at an old crossroad. A decision of vocation was to be made here, and I felt again the ambivalence of my life and my calling. Finally, I answered. ‘Yes, I am a minister’. ‘Please hurry’, she said, ‘or you’ll be too late’…
In a barely audible voice (the man) said, ‘Do you have something to say to a man who is dying? If you have, please say it, and say it in a hurry.’
I bowed my head, closed my eyes. There were no words. I poured out the anguish of my desperation in one vast effort. I felt physically I was straining to reach God. At last, I whispered my Amen.
We opened our eyes simultaneously as he breathed, ‘Thank you. I understand.’ He died with his hand in mine.
Sursum Corda. Lift up your hearts. Hear the gospel in invitation, warning, and summons. Words of welcome, words of welcome, words of welcome:
I’m going out to clean the pasture spring
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
And wait to watch the water clear I may
I shan’t be gone long. You come too.
– The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.
Readers: Tom Batson, Denise-Nicole Stone, Nickholas Rodriguez
Leave a Reply