Sunday
November 1
Liberal Hope
By Marsh Chapel
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We then, in today’s gospel, are taught to practice what we preach.
Geese return to their nesting place, that place chosen for laying eggs and sheltering the young. Every year, geese come home to their birth place, as my lake friend tells me. They are loud this year, louder than one remembers, calling, glampa, glampa, glampa. The dark skies fill with them, and then the lake, as they find their place of nesting, and some fish for lunch or dinner.
They may have come from the northwest, an hour or three earlier swinging past the burial plot of Harriet Tubman, in Auburn NY. She with her faith and pistol brought liberal hope to hearts of enslaved people, hiking along the dark riverbed of the Susquehanna, and, for many, on to that lasting neighborly land of hope, just across the St. Lawrence. She is interred near Lincoln’s opponent become ally, William Seward, who bought us Alaska. Along fly the geese, in their autumn season of travel. We too are itinerants, you and I, un-feathered but on the move, moving into a new chapter this coming week.
The geese, spread out in v formations, may then cross by the edge of Cooperstown, resting on the head of Abner Doubleday’s handsome statue, an hour or so north of Pennsylvania, that hotly contested region of Quakers and farmers, not far from Philadelphia where Benjamin Franklin gave us the post office. Remember Franklin warned us: I give you a republic, if you can keep it. Or, in addition, he might have said as well, I give you a post office, if you can keep it.
Ah the geese, reminding us of the season, the time. Others of their feather will fly along the Hudson river, too, perhaps near Tivoli, on that river’s bank, where my grandfather is buried, who left me a gold pocket watch, which one day I will give to my grandson, Charles Robert. An hour of extra sleep on All Saints
Sunday may allow us a reach of memory, to those no longer among the church militant, but now among the church triumphant. That river bank cemetery also holds our great uncle Myron, of murky but mythic family memory, who fought in the war to end all wars, then come home through Boston in 1918, and contracted the Spanish Flu, as we were regularly told growing up, and died in the second wave, March 1919. Probably there were some back then who said of that plague, it will all just go away, like magic. Except it didn’t. And, it won’t. He left a canteen, without a jacket, dented and silver colored, which came my way for camping trips, and was lost, left somewhere up Mt. Marcy in the Adirondacks one autumn. His grave is a hundred miles from our dear lady whose liberal hope, tattered but alive, still rings out in the harbor, Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the restless refuse of your teeming shore, send these the lost the tempest tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
Coming due east along Route 90, you nearly drove past New Lebanon without stopping, so eager to get back into the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and mesmerized by the geese overhead. Here is the ghost, the shade, the specter of Mother Ann Lee and the Shaking Quakers, eschewing body for the sake of spirit, at the edge of the mountains, such communal liberal hope they had, a great- hearted willingness to practice what they preached. They remembered the height of Jesus hope. Do we? 27 “I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. 29 If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. 30 Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. 31 Do to others as you would have them do to you. 32 “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. 33 If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. 34 If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. 35 But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return.[a] Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish. 36 Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. All these nesting places of hope, places of recollection of our own best selves. Who do you mean to be, at your most hopeful? Are we lovers anymore?
Who do you mean to be, as your own-most self? It is a riveting question, is it not, this very week.
You could come further east, along route 90 or even route 20 or even bluer highways winding into the Berkshires, which always seem dreamlike with or without the white snow frosting. Fewer geese, but some still, wending their way, flying on, calling out, glampa, glampa, glampa.
Here is Stockbridge, MA, home to Jonathan Edwards, on whose life and work we preached here at Marsh Chapel a few winters ago. He who is too much remembered for sinners in the hands of an angry God, and too little recalled for his sense of the holy, his love of nature, and his rendering of Scripture. Here is the Stockbridge Church, geese on the lawn, where Abraham Heschel gave the eulogy for Reinhold Niebuhr in 1971. Think of that ecumenical, inter-religious, capacious hope, a liberal hope, a hope in what we have in common. Niebuhr asked Heschel to preach his funeral. Stockbridge is a town like those back a bit west, along the Mohawk, in which we were raised. Raised by a community. Look back at the men and women: an insurance man, a Latin teacher, a Scout executive, a musician, the owner of a heater company, a minister, several farmers. All of the same grand old party, by the way. They taught honesty. They practiced civility. They formed a creed around courtesy. They made space for charity. They prized example. They had no truck with or patience for mendacity or perversity or self- aggrandizement. They listened to what people said, but they watched what people did. Particularly leaders. Like it says in the Bible, today, practice what you preach. Boy, that was a long time ago, wasn’t it, not just in years but in habits of the heart.
We need again their balance, honesty and hope. We need to recover their magnanimity. We need the blue sky of aspiration which they saw. For such a thick cloud comes from a theological weather system in which the cold front of wrong has chased out the warm front of right, in which the low pressure of the fall has displaced the high pressure of creation, in which the radical postmodern apotheosis of difference has silenced the liberal late modern openness to shared experience, to promise and future, to common faith, common ground, common hope, liberal hope, in which the creation is seen from the cavern of the fall, not the fall from the prairie of creation, in which we have forgotten what the geese remember. Their nesting place, their birthright, their place and spirit of origin.
This is a pastoral problem. It is not just or mainly a political conflict. It is a theological contrast. It is not a matter of church coloration or religious style, it is a matter of creation, of God’s creation and the truth about creative goodness. Just how balanced is our balance between creation and fall? And God saw all that God made, and it was good. Not perfect, but good. There are a lot of things wrong. But. There are a lot of things right, too. How do we find that balance?
We locate that balance in a magnanimous hope. As the theologian said, “Thus the Spirit is the power to suffer in participation in the mission and the love of Jesus Christ, and is, in this suffering, the passion for what is possible, for what is coming and promised in the future of life, of freedom and of resurrection (212). In all our acts we are sowing in hope (213). ( J Moltmann, A Theology of Hope.)
It is two hours from the river to the ocean, from the Hudson to the Atlantic. In and across those two hours, say as the crow or even the goose flies, there lies a whole great deal of our shared history. If you get to Boston, come by Marsh Chapel, where there is a monument to Martin Luther King, Jr. I walked past it again this morning. It is mute, silent, and yet its very stone cries out, its marble makes music and sings, for those with ears to hear. It is a statue that points to a liberal hope, and so points away from much of our experience in the last four years. Yes, it points to justice, though justice is not the deepest heart of the gospel, of faith, of religion, or of that monument. It is a part, but not the heart. The heart belongs to…another word, another gospel word. Not one in opposition to the first, but one in tension and tandem with the first, and one outpacing the first. The heart of the gospel is love, and love is the marrow of the liberal hope, one true hope worthy of the name. King can teach us still: There is a liberal hope in the sometime radical practice of loving-kindness.
Last summer I was asked to offer a thought about love and transformation, for the final portion of our summer devotions. My friend from Yale Gene Outka once helped me think about this. He reminded us that Martin Luther King, Jr. advanced a compelling version of love, including love of enemies. In this affirmation, King distinguished agape from eros or romantic love and philia or friendship as follows:
“Agape is more than romantic love, agape is more than friendship. Agape is understanding, creative, redemptive, good will to all (people). It is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return…. When one rises to love on this level, he loves (others) not because he likes them, not because their ways appeal to him, but he loves every (one) because God loves him. And he rises to the point of loving the person who does an evil deed while hating the deed that the person does. I think this is what Jesus meant when he said ‘love your enemies.’ I’m very happy that he didn’t say like your enemies, because it is pretty difficult to like some people. Like is sentimental, and it is pretty difficult to like someone bombing your home; it is pretty difficult to like somebody threatening your children; it is difficult to like congressmen who spend all of their time trying to defeat civil rights. But Jesus says love them, and love is greater than like.” (See my former teacher, James Melvin Washington, A Testament of Hope, p. 46)
Hear good news: In Jesus there is ‘a new creation, a new man and woman, a new life, a new age, a new covenant’ (Anchor, xxviii). In Jesus there is a hopeful creation, a hopeful man and woman, a hopeful life, a hopeful age, a hopeful covenant.
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 on this All Saints Day…Here is the bread and cup of friendship…Imagine, if you are willing, your own funeral, say right here, and a congregation reciting together a creed, a psalm, a hymn, a poem. Imagine, if you are willing, a congregation currently in diaspora, but just now, by the word spoken, a gathered and thus addressable community, you and I and all together.
And let us practice what we preach. Come home, this All Saints Day. Come home to the place of your nesting, the place of your birth, the place of your baptism, the place of your taking wing, taking flight, your nesting place. It is a fine
place to visit, as the winter comes on, and you look for warmth, for health, for nourishment, for salvation. It is a little lake named love, a nesting place for the liberal hope:
We await a liberal hope, a 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 social distance this Thanksgiving, and with or without a common meal, will 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 your own days be long upon the earth.
We await a liberal 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.
Now, from Auburn to Cooperstown to Albany to Stockbridge to Boston, like geese in flight, we have come. They call to us: glampa, glampa, glampa. Maybe we want to pray. What shall we pray? Shall we pray in words Martin Luther King used in August of 1963? Shall we pray in words with music that Aretha Franklin sang in January of 2009? Shall we pray time honored words, written just down the street, in Boston, the nesting place of America, the place of birth for both goose and gander, your words from 1831 and a Park Street Church children’s concert and the pen of an Andover Newton graduate Samuel Francis Smith, Boston, your hymn, Boston, your psalm of liberal hope?
My country, ’tis of
Thee, Sweet Land of Liberty
Of thee I sing;
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrims’ pride,
From every mountain side
Let Freedom ring.
Let music swell the breeze,
And ring from all the trees
Sweet freedom’s song;
Let mortal tongues awake;
Let all that breathe partake;
Let rocks their silence break,
The sound prolong.
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
