Sunday
December 17
He Is the Way
By Marsh Chapel
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Auden
He is the Way
Follow him through the land of unlikeness;
You will see rare beasts and have unique adventures
He is the Truth
Seek him in the kingdom of anxiety
You will come to a great city that has expected
Your return for years.
He is the Life
Love him in the world of the flesh
And at your marriage all its occasions shall
Dance for joy.
Advent accosts us with the command to remember and to hope, with promise in memory and in hope.
Remembrance
The Gospel of John gives us a form of remembrance, in the figure of John the Baptist, who came to bear witness to the light. The Baptist is present to remind us, in Advent, of the circumstances which did occasion the birth of the Son of Man. He recalls for us the long history of the law, prophets and writings, our bequest from Judaism. He recalls for us the contest and conflict which emerged, Law and Grace, Moses and Jesus. He recalls for us the struggles, the sheer bone jarring challenges, both in the ministry of Jesus and in the ministry of the church. He places us unmistakably in a particular place, at a certain time, within a specific tradition, and alongside a unique moment. Like no other. This is eternal life, that they may know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent. Je me souviens. I remember. I follow myself. I remember.
This year, with our emphasis on ‘voice, vocation, and volume’ in our shared life, we are using as a focus for our work the word remembrance. Our fall and spring term worship and community life are laden with moments of remembrance. 2017-2018 is a full season of remembrance. On September 17 we remembered Elie Wiesel. On October 29 (and again in November) we remembered Martin Luther. In Lent 2018 we will remember Thomas Merton. Then in April 2018, in the week following Easter, we remember the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Come and join us throughout this year in a special season of remembrance! And do remember…
Elie Wiesel said, ‘He who hears a witness becomes a witness’. He reminds us of who we are at Boston University.
Martin Luther said, ‘Here I stand, I can do no other, God help me’. He reminds us of who we are in Religious Life.
Thomas Merton said, ‘Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name’. He reminds us who we are as Christian people.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said, ‘The moral arm of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice’. He reminds us of who we are at Marsh Chapel.
Come and join us! I mean it. Come and join us for this year in worship, fellowship, and discipleship. Come and join us in this season of remembrance!
Memory
With mother and grandmother, aunt and others, all teachers, there was an impatience with forgetfulness, in our growing up years. A good and loving impatience, but an impatience nonetheless. In the windswept, hot Las Vegas summer car port, after the castle of sand had fallen, at age 4, there came a maternal voice, dimly in memory from age four, ‘Remember, a wise man built his house upon the rock…’ Come age 9 and the multiplication tables, across the still covered dining room table, and before the dishwashing, ‘Remember, 7 times 7 is 49, 9 times 7 is 63. Then, a few years later, say age 12, on hearing strange words like itinerancy, bishop, new church, move, district, another house, also, a very loving word, “Remember, it will be fine, we will be together, we will help each other, there are good people everywhere”. Of course, by junior high school, say 14, the time came for Latin declensions, conjugations, aphorisms. “Remember, Agricola, agricolae…Remember hic, haec hoc…Remember, porto, portare, portavi, portatum…Remember, Veni, vidi, Vici…” Until this year, that maternal voice could carry full memory across decades, and disciplines, and declensions and decisions.
Now, without memory, she has only one full form of consciousness. She knows, and articulates, only, that she does not know. “Let’s see…I’m not sure…What am I supposed to be doing?…Jane will know…” What once was a precious cornucopia, waterfall, avalanche, fortress, and endless bank account of memory, now has gone, disappeared, evaporated, melted. She knows that she does not know, at least that she knows. Is that better than knowing nothing at all? Here is where we as honest Christians, as existential apophatic theologians, can also rest.
When it comes to God, what we know is the sheer cliff of one thing. We know that we do not know. God is hidden. God is mystery. God is the great deep, the dark ground of being, the cloud of unknowing. God is transcendent. And our spiritual reflection, biblical interpretation, philosophical theology, and homiletical cadence do best, just here, when we can, in utter even desperate but honest ignorance be truly apophatic. Like my mother, what we know is, only, that we do not know. Dionysius the Areopagite (thanks to Cyril Richardson, who died one week before the end of term): “That divine Darkness is the unapproachable light in which God dwells. Into this Darkness, rendered invisible by its own excessive brilliance and unapproachable by the intensity of its transcendent flood of light, come to be all those who are worthy to know and to see God.”
Coffin
We can in part to this Marsh pulpit, now our twelfth Christmas here, in part out of memory, a remembrance of what William Sloane Coffin had brought us in the pulpit of Riverside Church, along a similar river, alongside a similar University, along by a similar School of Theology, along with similar citizens and scholars, teachers and students, religious and un-religious. Coffin:
Faith is being grasped by the power of love.
God provides minimum protection and maximum support. Guilt is the last stronghold of pride.
The rational mind is no match for the irrational will.
There is more mercy in God than there is sin in us.
Romero said not ‘pobres’ but ‘apobprecidos’.
Pastoral concern for the rich must match prophetic concern for the poor.
I’m not OK and you’re not OK—but that’s OK!
They say religion is a crutch: what makes you think you don’t limp?
The religious norm is love.
Faith gives the strength to confront unpleasant truth. Faith puts you on the road and hope keeps you on the road.
A Humorous Interlude
Boy
John teaches memory. Isaiah teaches hope. To give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit…
Our friend Beth Neville tells this story of being pushed out of despair, and back into life:
“I never learned the young boy’s name but after our encounter I decided to call him, BOY. He was an attractive, open-faced kid about 10 years old, the same age as my grandson. So our ages were separated by about 70 years.
Sitting in the corridor at drab rehabilitation facility, struggling to recover from hip surgery, my spirits were low. At the end of the long corridor a large window opened out onto a beautiful view of fall colors, russets and tawny gold colors of fall Oaks against the autumn blue sky, it resembled a Gothic cathedral’s stained glass. But inside the rehab center, the color was gray. Old people in faded gowns sat in wheelchairs, some spending hours in a curled up state. The walls, bed covers, and people’s faces all faded to the same ashen grey, creating a miasma of age and sadness. Five days earlier, my worn out hip had been replaced by a piece of metal and the constant pain and discomfort was wearing at me. Before the surgery I began using metaphor of a Marathon to get me through the trauma. I was on a marathon and, every physical or emotional set back was a curve or a long stretch. But right now in the gray rehab I was on Heart Break Hill and I was beginning to loose site of the goal. After all I was almost 80 and had lived a full life, why bother to go on? I’d rather die than endure more pain. Old age was surrounding me, why not just stop here and drop out of the race? What more in life could I do to be useful? I wanted to quit.
Up the corridor came a boy and his father and they sat down next to me to enjoy the golden fall view. The boy never said his name but he had an inquisitive look . BOY’s opening question to me was a stunner, “Well, what’s your era, 1940’s?” Me laughing, “That’s close, I was born in 1937. Are you visiting your Grandmother?” BOY: “Yes. Well, what do you do?” Me: “I teach art.” BOY: “How do you do that?” Bemused, I explained an art lesson using the glowing trees outdoors as a painting example.” BOY: “Well, what else do you do?” Me: “I teach art history.” Boy, “Well, why did people start making art?” Now this was getting to be an interesting, a real challenge, Me,” People began making art because they were worried about having babies and keeping their families going, so they made female fertility figures. They chipped stone pebbles to make a pregnant woman, and maybe then they would have more babies. And people liked to decorate themselves with shells and beads.” He liked that answer. BOY, “Well, tell me about fire?” and we were on to the invention of fire, and carrying water in buckets, and cooking over fires. Boy, “Well, what about Mesopotamia!” Whoaa, this conversation is really getting interesting! Me: “I studied Mesopotamia in graduate school,” and we talked of the use of clay tablets for writing and irrigation” and off we went. BOY,” Well, what about cunnieform?” By now I’d stopped being surprised, and I dissected the use of writing with clay tablets versus Egyptian papyrus. BOY: “Well, why was Mathematics invented?” We discussed masthematics in keeping track of the seasons and crop yields. He wasn’t showing off, just interested. At one point I said, “I don’t know how yeast was invented, it is so important for making bread,” and BOY said, “Well, Yes! just one of ‘Histories’ Mysteries’ my teacher says.” Yes, I laughed, I’ll remember that line. His Dad put down his cell phone and said, “O.K. son, let’s go visit Grandma,” off they went.
BOY will never know it, but he had pushed me up and over Heartbreak Hill,! I felt I could still contribute something to life. It was time for me to get back to overcoming pain and start the exercises. Where did BOY come from that beautiful afternoon? I don’t believe in extra-terrestrial beings from either Mars or Heaven. But BOY did have an angelic look about him and he had pushed me out of despair, back to life and blessed me.
Birmingham
Sometimes hope takes time. Less than a month after MLK’s ‘I Have A Dream’ speech, four girls were killed in Birmingham by a bomb set at the 16th Street Baptist Church there. There is much that we do not fully remember about those years, that era, the civil rights struggle, and, especially, those who suffered, and how they suffered, in that time. Over the next three decades, three KKK leaders and members were brought to trial, and convicted of the crime. In that way, it was case like that of the Scottsboro Boys, which my namesake, Allan Knight Chalmers, Homiletics Professor at BUSTH, tracked for several decades, earlier in the century. The names of the girls: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Denise McNair.
In 1977, as the principal bomber, Robert Chambliss, was put on trial, a young second year law student skipped classes to sit in the courtroom. Twenty years after that, the young lawyer worked to convict two of Chambliss’s accomplices. Decades passed before the convictions were decided early in this century. You may be aware that the young lawyer who skipped his classes in school to attend classes in life, and who later brought a measure of justice to others, was just recently elected to the Senate in Alabama. Doug Jones. There is a self-correcting spirit of truth loose in the universe. There is a self-correcting spirit of truth loose in the universe.
Hoping
We harbor a common, shared hope:
That our warming globe, caught in climate change, will be cooled by cooler heads and calmer hearts and careful minds.
That our dangerous world, armed to the teeth with nuclear proliferation, will find peace through deft leadership toward nuclear détente.
That our culture, awash in part in hooliganism, will find again the language and the song and the spirit of the better angels of our nature.
That our country, fractured by massive inequality between rich children and poor children, will rise up and make education, free education, available to all children, poor and rich.
That our nation, fractured by flagrant unjust inequality between rich and poor children, will stand up and make health care, free health care, available to all children, poor and rich.
That our schools, colleges and universities, will balance a love of learning with a sense of meaning, a pride in knowledge with a respect for goodness, a drive for discovery with a regard for recovery.
That our families, torn apart by abuse and distrust and anger and jealousy and unkindness, will sit at a long holiday table, this week, and share the roast beef, and pass the potatoes, and slice the pie, and, if grudgingly, show kindness and pity to one another.
That our decisions in life about our callings, how we are to use our time and spend our money, how we make a life not just a living, will be illumined by grace and generosity.
That our grandfathers and mothers, in their age and infirmity, will receive care and kindness that accords with the warning to honor father and mother that you own days be long upon the earth.
That women—our grandmothers, mothers, sisters, daughters, granddaughters, all—granted suffrage less than 100 years ago, will be spared any and all forms of harassment and abuse, verbal or physical, on college campuses, in homes and families, in offices and bars, in life and work, and long having suffered and now having suffrage, will in our time rise up to be honored, revered, and compensated, without reserve, but with justice and mercy.
A common hope, finally a hope not of this world, but of this world as a field of formation for another, not just creation but new creation, not just life but eternal life, not just health but salvation, not just heart but soul, not just earth, but heaven.
Thurman
When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among brothers,
To make music in the heart.
Auden
He is the Way
Follow him through the land of unlikeness;
You will see rare beasts and have unique adventures
He is the Truth
Seek him in the kingdom of anxiety
You will come to a great city that has expected
Your return for years.
He is the Life
Love him in the world of the flesh
And at your marriage all its occasions shall
Dance for joy.
– The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.
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