Sunday
October 18
Liberal Faith
By Marsh Chapel
Click here to hear the full service
Click here to hear just the sermon
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
(Robert Frost)
We too are acquainted with the night, and walk, together, in the rain. Hear Gospel this Lord’s day, the good news from liberal gifts of faith.
There is a liberal gift of faith in the exercise of study, of sacred study, of exegesis, the careful study of Holy Scripture. The historical and critical study of Holy Writ, as practiced from this pulpit over 70 years, is a pathway to insight, interpretation, application–and sermon.
So, today, render to God the things that are God’s, God the elusive presence.
Samuel Terrien taught many the adventure of this labor, years ago, the search for the divine, for God: an elusive but real presence…not in nature but in history, and in history through human beings…a presence that does not alter nature but changes history through the character of women and men…a walking God not a sitting God, a walking God not a sitting God…nomadic, hidden, free…known in tent not temple, by ear not eye, in name not glory, in a spiritual interiority (YOURS), through a commission by command…that translates the love of God into behavior in society…demythologizing space for the sake of time…(phrases from The Elusive Presence: The Heart of Biblical Theology.) Samuel Terrien.
So, today, render to God the things that are God’s, God the elusive presence.
We are left to wonder in conscience about ‘the things that are God’s’. What are they? We are not told. There is no live interview from the heavenly conference room. There is no point-by-point bulletin, with details promised at 11pm. There is no footnote, or explanatory second conversation. We are left on our own by our Lord to wonder in conscience about ‘the things that are God’s’. We are given a fair and good amount of freedom in doing so.
In conscience, do you wonder about ‘the things that are God’s’?
Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. Give to God the things that are God’s. (In the Gospel of Thomas, [110ad?] a bit yet later than Matthew [85ad?] who is a bit yet later than Mark [70ad?] who is a good bit later than whatever Jesus might actually have said [30ad?], the Lord adds, ‘and give to me the things that are mine’!)
Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, give to God what belongs to God, and give to me what is mine (GT, logion 100).
Dear St. Matthew, true to form, intensifies the bitterness of Jesus toward Pharisees, of church toward synagogue, of Christian to Jew. He hikes up ‘entrap’ (Mark) to ‘entangle’. He is ‘aware of their malice’. To the question, ‘why put me to the test’ he adds, for good measure, ‘you hypocrites’. His Jesus demands not just a coin, but ‘(all) the money for the tax’.
Through the year, from this pulpit, we have tried continuously to trace the moves Matthew makes in 85ad away from what Mark, his source, had written in 70ad. Mostly, we want to be crystal clear about the way the announcement of the gospel changes, with the setting, changes with the occasion, changes, with the time and season and year. New occasions teach new duties. Time makes ancient good uncouth. One must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth.
A standard reading of the passage is that the Herodians (supporters of Herod who is the Simon Legree of Rome in the cotton fields of Palestine) would want the tax paid to Caesar whereas the Pharisees (the French Resistance of Palestine against the Third Reich of Rome) would want resistance to payment of the tax. Jesus is caught. If he agrees with the Herodians, the people will kill him. If he agrees with the Pharisees, the Romans will kill him.
And the response, with no real doubt of its authenticity—render to Caesar…and to God. Render to God the things that are God’s.
“Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe…the starry heavens above and the moral law within,” wrote the German philosopher Immanuel Kant at the end of his Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and these words were inscribed on his tombstone.
We are left to wonder in conscience about ‘the things that are God’s’. What are they? Are they wonder and conscience—the starry heavens above and the moral law within? Wonder and conscience? Wonder and conscience, spirit and soul?
There is a liberal gift of faith in the exercise of study.
There is a liberal gift of faith, in institutions, for the love of God and country both.
Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.
So here again, chapter 22: 15ff, is Matthew, being Matthew. He is looking at institutional life, political and religious, governmental and ecclesiastical, all 2000 years before our own similar challenges today. In Matthew 22, we hear what we perhaps most need to hear in America, in October, in 2020, in the midst of political contest, even political mayhem. Institutions matter. Institutions matter. We are broadly or dimly aware, year by year, that institutions matter, but see so most sharply when they collapse.
In 2017. When the institution of shared truth collapses under the weight oval office falsehoods, 6 lies a day (WAPO). Or when the last Planned Parenthood in Iowa is closed. Or when a Boy Scout Jamboree becomes a prop for perversity and mendacity. Or when promises to the Transgender Military are broken. Or when Heather Heyer dies as a claim to goodness on all sides is made. Or when an Alabama senator calls homosexuality ‘a crime against nature’. Or when a tax cut gives 1% of the taxpayers 50% of the reducation. Or when the mayor of San Juan is laughed at for saying ‘we are dying’. Or when the US President lies to the Prime Minister of Canada and brags about it. We are broadly or dimly aware, year by year, that institutions matter, but see so most sharply when they collapse.
In 2018. When the government summarily deports 200,000 Salvadorans. Or when countries of color are described with expletives. Or when what is true shrinks to what the Leader says is true. Or when an assault on memory comes with every new wave of every new week of every new absurdity and atrocity. Or when competent staff individual after competent staff individual is humiliated and fired. Or when the press is called steadily ‘the enemy of the people’. All this linguistic, verbal, rhetorical chaos is stealing from you your daily happiness. John Wesley taught, to the contrary, that we are meant to be people ‘happy in God’. We are broadly or dimly aware, year by year, that institutions matter, but see so most sharply when they collapse.
In 2019. When we can no longer willingly and readily tell a decent person from a scoundrel. Or when we have forgotten the Marine slogan, ‘Leadership is example. Period.’ Or when a self-sacrificial POW become veteran Senator is mocked in life and death. Or when the leader’s ‘gut is superior to anyone else’s brain’. Or when hard won peace by containment agreements are wrecked. We are broadly or dimly aware, year by year, that institutions matter, but see so most sharply when they collapse.
Or in 2020. When the power of office is used for threat, and so impeachment becomes necessary, and then when a global pandemic crisis belittled becomes a national health care tragedy betrayed, crisis become tragedy, and when leadership needed becomes evasion practiced, and when the hard won levels of trust and the painstaking pursuit of truth, trust and truth, and right perfection wrongfully disgraced and strength by limping sway dislodged, and when even the franchise, the vote, the basis of all else, becomes a bargaining chip…well, when institutions collapse or are corroded, we are more awake to their necessary, crucial importance. We are broadly or dimly aware, year by year, that institutions matter, but see so most sharply when they collapse.
As we mortally and tragically are today. Institutions, particularly those of civil society, really matter. Volunteerism in a free society is not a luxury, but a necessity. For the Christian, for the citizen in a free republic, faith involves ‘intelligent and conscientious participation in politics so that God’s will may be done as fully as possible’ (IB, loc. cit.).
Just in time, Marilyn Robinson reminds us: This country would do itself a world of good by restoring a sense of the dignity, even the beauty, of individual ethicalism, of self-restraint, of courtesy. These things might help us to like one another, even trust one another, both necessary to a functioning democracy… As a liberal, I am loyal to this country in ways that make me a pragmatist. If someone is hungry, feed him. He will be thirsty, so be sure that he has good water to drink. If he is in prison, don’t abuse, abandon or exploit him, or assume that he ought to be there. If these problems afflict whole populations, those with influence or authority should repent and do better, as all the prophets tell them. (NYT, 10/11/20).
There is a liberal gift of faith, in institutions, for the love of God and country both.
There is a liberal gift of faith in respect of and for community, given through these institutions that shape community. Community matters. So. Give of your life and breath. Till gardens you will never harvest. Build schools in which you will never study. Construct churches in which you will never worship. And listen, listen to the voices that emerge in communal conversation, particularly those tart and salty.
Listen, not for agreement but for contrast, to Thucydides’ dour dicta: ‘all moralistic ideals are meaningless postures of powerless victims’ ‘The powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must’.
Listen to a modern Thucydides: ‘Excess population, competition for resources, and random variation, with its attendant differential success in reproduction, constitute natural selection, yielding elaborate adaptations’. Quammen NYR 4/23/20 22. Life is about evolution and evolution is about change. But healthy evolution and change require faith and hope. I fear what this time of fear is doing to my grandchildren, to their imaginations, and to their souls.
Listen to Peter Wehner, saying with harrowing accuracy, many find it “too psychologically painful to admit that the person they supported is deeply corrupt, pathologically dishonest and brutish.”
Listen to Andrew Bacevich January 20th 2020 in Cambridge MA, a gracious evening of rumination on: hubris, common good, globalism, anger, alienation, anti-semitism, the end of the cold war, institutionalized assassination, and the need for community: ‘I will not write off 60 million Americans’. And he added, just last week, in our local paper, a gracious rumination on hopeful signs in our time.
Listen to lives that speak, for so the faithful gift of community abides, and guides us.
Over some years now, one of the treasures and delights of living in Boston is the grace, and care, with which lives are remembered in our Boston Globe. No other paper, to our memory and experience, does so well, so consistently and so personally. Those who are front line COVID workers and victims have had right, ample remembrance, here, on our behalf. So too, this past spring, the recollection of 108 year-old Elinor Fosdick Downs. A Smith graduate, she met her husband in Rochester NY, where they were both studying medicine. He died young, unexpectedly in 1945, leaving her with two daughters. She lived a life of adventure, possibility, and abandon. She was one of the first to serve in the newly established WHO, World Health Organization. She said, ‘Be positive about all the bad things that happen. Turn them around. Make adventures out of them.’ And, ‘As my 100th birthday approached I began dropping hints that perhaps I was now ready to try an iPad’. And, ‘Happiness for me is adventuring, especially when the outcome of that adventure is unkown or unexpected’. Oh, and by the way, her dad was Harry Emerson Fosdick, one of the great liberal pulpit voices. (BG, 5/4/20)
There is a liberal gift of faith, in respect of, and for, community.
There is a liberal gift of faith in the joy of discourse, of conversation. Of all our losses in the last four years, this has been the greatest. John Wesley even named conversation a means of grace. All need warm, personal, true, glad hearted, genuine dialogue. Especially, leadership needs dialogue, leaders need dialogue.
Leadership, said my friend, ‘is disappointing people at a rate they can accept, or survive, or endure. At a rate they can handle.’ Liberal leadership includes saying things that those of the farthest left reject. If there are at least three things liberals don’t get, forget and should reset, they are order, money, liberty. Liberals can learn from conservatives about these things.
For a liberal: justice is a part but not the heart of the Gospel—justice is a part but not the heart of the gospel; equality and justice are not the same thing; public safety on the streets matters to all; poor children of every hue need and deserve our care in health, in education, in protection, in nurture, and in respect.
Over forty years most of my own lasting, painful and wrenching battles have been with those well farther to the left. And still it is so.
All 6 Marsh Chapel deans have been, variously, liberal. Liberal, not: fundamentalist, orthodox, traditionalist, or conservative. Liberal, not: progressivist, successivist, anarchist, or Marxist.
The liberal will pause and ask questions like: Why is there so much distance between theology and ministry, theory and practice, when there is not such in medicine, dentistry, public health, hospitality, education, engineering, arts, social work and communications? Why?
There is a liberal gift of faith in the joy of discourse, of conversation. One level of discourse is that internal, soulful conversation—let each one be convinced in her own mind, Paul wrote—about the balance between Caesar and legitimate cultural demands, and God and pre-eminent spiritual claims. With one shout, the earliest Christians set the balance in a firm phrase: Kyrios Christos, Christ is Lord, to deny the chorus around them, Kyrios Kaiser, Caesar is Lord.
There is a liberal gift of faith in the joy of discourse, of conversation.
Study, institution, community, dialogue, gifts of a liberal faith. Sursum Corda. Hear Gospel this Lord’s day. God walks with us, in the rain. A walking not a sitting God. God walks with us in the rain.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
(Robert Frost)
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
