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Matthew 28: 16-20

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We are a people drenched in sorrows. As this sermon is recorded, today, Wednesday, June 3, we are a nation afflicted, caught somewhere between pandemic and pandemonium. So, come with me for a moment aside, a moment apart, wherein we scour together the high ground, the background, and the common ground of our current condition, the condition our condition is in.

The High Ground

First, the high ground.

Former Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson led us toward high ground this week. He had done so before. Right here. Some of you will remember his voice in 2014 from this pulpit. Secretary Johnson preached from the Marsh pulpit on January 25, 2014. Present with Johnson and the Dean of Marsh Chapel were Charlene Hunter-Gault, two dozen BU medical students in their white coats, another physician who had been the doctor for Arthur Ashe, the then President of Planned Parenthood, Cecile Richards, and about 300 guests, family, and friends. We were present to honor the life and faithfulness of Dr. Kenneth Edelin, a BU alumnus, renowned physician, and national civil rights leader. Marsh Chapel was full. At one point we asked the congregation to recite together the 23 Psalm. Family and friends in the first pew did so. Colleagues and physicians across the nave did so. Leaders of national organizations near and far did so. In the balcony, twenty white coated medical students together did so. Either at that point or another in the service they stood silently together, to honor the life and faith of the deceased. That day I met a friend a personal physician of Arthur Ashe, whose life, prowess, faithfulness and service have always so inspired me. Read again this summer his autobiography, Days of Grace. “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”

In the collation following the service, some of us remembered Arthur Ashe. “Arthur Ashe: Ashe suffered a heart attack in 1979. He would later undergo surgery for quadruple bypass, but continued to suffer chest pain. This forced him to retire from tennis with a record of 818-260, including his three Grand Slams.

He remains the only African-American male to have won any of these Men’s Single titles. Ashe would have to under-go a second bypass surgery in 1983. During this operation he received a blood transfusion: the blood Ashe received was infected with human immunodeficiency virus—HIV. In 1988, this discovery was made. The condition was kept private until 1992, when Ashe announced to the world, he had AIDS. When asked if having AIDS was the toughest challenge he had ever had to face, Ashe replied: “No, the hardest thing I’ve ever had to deal with was being a black man in this society…having to live as a minority in America. Even now it feels like an extra weight tied around me.” (Blaine Spence, 2009).”

Also, in the collation following the service, Charlayne Hunter Gault introduced herself. You may remember her, as we did, from her many and fine contributions to the News Hour, with Jim Lehrer. She said, ‘I need to talk to you later about the 23 Psalm’. I was so pleased to meet her, and then so worried that I had somehow offended her, that the collation time passed anxiously. It needn’t have done. She wanted to recall a memory. A memory of her younger self. At 18. The first African American to integrate the University of Georgia. The daughter of a Baptist minister. Alone in a big place, a strange place, a new place. Walking home the third night, there were taunts and threats. The University that day had suggested she might want to go home, at least for a while. She went into her room. She closed the door. She turned out the lights. And she waited, until quiet came. And then—it was the only thing that came to her mind—the prayer of David in Psalm 23 came to her. And she spoke the psalm, alone, afraid, uncertain, at night. ‘Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord, forever.’

I do not recall the full content in that memorial of Secretary Jeh Johnson’s eulogy. I do clearly remember his necessarily taking over my downstairs office, with two fully uniformed attaches carrying the famous black box, who announced, ‘we need to be next to a telephone land line’. I do also recall what Johnson said on Tuesday of this week, keeping us focused on the high ground, the high ground. June 2, 2020: “Protest, as Martin Luther King said, is a form of language by those who believe that their voices are not heard. And the grievance here is legitimate. Protests that crosses into violence is counterproductive to the message. It undermines the message. It cedes the moral high ground and it strengthens those on the other side of the debate…looting undermines the larger effort here. It undermines the message, it distracts from it, and it gives — it strengthens the hand of those on the militant extremist law and order side.”

As the sermon last Sunday affirmed, order matters, order matters…in order that the legitimate grievance be heard, the language of protest be heard.

The Background

Second, the background. From high ground to background.

We have covered this ground, call it the background, from this pulpit, many times before. A few from several examples: We did so under the theme ‘A New Birth of Freedom’, in reference to Jeremiah Wright, January 18, 2009. We did so under the theme ‘Learning Together, in reference to Ferguson and Treyvon Martin, August 24, 2014. We did so under the theme, ‘Still Point’, in reference to the Charleston Nine, June 21, 2015. We did so under the theme ‘Bear Witness to the Truth’, in reference to Charlottesville a year earlier, November 25, 2018. We do so today under the theme ‘Ground of Being’, in reference to George Floyd. These are offered with encouragement that if you have the time and energy, you take the time and energy to read these, or other materials, to know better our background.

Not everyone will find satisfaction in listening to or reading old sermons. Pity. So, you may simply want to read, and read. So, read! Don’t scan. Read.

Start with James Baldwin:

‘Nothing is fixed forever and forever, it is not fixed. The earth is always shifting and the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down the rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them, because they are the only witnesses we have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to one another, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with each other, the sea engulfs us, and the light goes out’…James Baldwin: whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves. (Letter from a Region in my Mind (New Yorker, reprint, 12/3/18)

Continue with William Faulkner, Light in August, say, something bracing and dark, Faulkner on fire:

…a fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he’s already got. He’ll cling to trouble he’s used to before he’ll risk a change. Yes. A man will talk about how he’d like to escape from living folks. But it’s the dead folks that do him the damage. It’s the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and dont try to hold him, that he cant escape from.” …He said, ‘Remember this. 240

The past is not dead. It is not even past.

But don’t stop until you have read Cornell professor Edward Baptist’s,

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. You dwell in the tenth floor of a building whose first three stories were constructed with stolen land and enslaved labor, free land and free labor, for the benefit of anyone who had or used money, then or now. Now bear with me a moment, as we cover the contours of our background.

Read Baptist on the building of the new south, 1807-1861: The massive and cruel engineering required to rip a million people from their homes, brutally drive them to new, disease-ridden places, and make them live in terror and as they continually built and rebuilt a commodity-generating empire—this vanished in the story of a slavery that was supposedly focused primarily not on producing profit but on maintaining its status as a quasi-feudal elite, or producing modern ideas about race in order to maintain white unity and elite power (xix).

Read Baptist on the investment incentives therein: And because the main in the iron collar and all who followed him into the depths of the continent would make not a luxury product but the most basic commodity in a new kind of endlessly expanding economy, there would also be no limit to the number of enslavers, or to the number of investors who would want to chase enslavement’s rewards. Only conscience, or the inability of the world’s investment markets to deploy enough savings, could impede the transfer of capital to slavery’s new frontiers (41).

Read Baptist on avarice: A world greedy for a slice of the whipping-machine’s super-profits had financed the occupation of a continent, and the forced migration of enslaved African Americans to the southwestern cotton fields helped to make the modern world economy possible…Slavery’s expansion was the driving force in US history between the framing of the constitution and the beginning of the Civil War. It made the nation large and unified (413).

The Common Ground

Third, the common ground. We conclude with a Trinitarian reminder of our common ground, from high ground to background to common ground, in our holy gospel.

Our gospel lesson, the conclusion of St. Matthew, is an early introduction of the Trinity, the relational mode of divinity so struggled after and so central to early Christianity. In that way, the Trinity is the original Christian common ground, the divine dimension of the possibility of relationship. We can use that reminder this morning in early June 2020. We conclude with a Trinitarian reminder of common ground, in our very humanity.

We are all more human and more alike than we regularly affirm, all of us on this great globe. We all survive the birth canal, and so have a native survivors’ guilt. All eight billion. We all need daily two things, bread and a name. (One does not live by bread alone). All eight billion. We all grow to a point of separation, a leaving home, a second identity. All eight billion. We all love our families, love our children, love our homes, love our grandchildren. All eight billion. We all age, and after age fifty its maintenance, maintenance, maintenance. All eight billion. We all shuffle off this mortal coil en route to that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns. All eight billion.”

We conclude with a trinitarian, that is a relational reminder of common ground, in our communion with one another, the communion of saints. A reminder that given our endless fallibility and our ending mortality, we need each other.

In a moment we will hear again the ancient liturgy for Eucharist. We are not together to receive together the bread and cup. But we are together in relationship, by memory, in hope, through prayer. And with a little imagination, with eyes closed and hearts open, we might allow the familiar, ancient prayers of communion, to bring us into communion.

So, travel with a little imagination…Imagine Eucharist at Marsh Chapel. Stand to sing… Pause to reflect… Step out into the aisle… Look at and look past

Abraham Lincoln and Francis Willard…Receive cup and bread, bread and cup… Kneel at the altar to pray… Stand in communion with the communion of saints… Imagine, if you are willing, your own funeral, say right here, and a congregation reciting together:

The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.

-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.7.2020 at 10:00 am