Sunday
November 22
Liberal Helping
By Marsh Chapel
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May we be blessed with liberal helpings of grace, gratitude and generosity, both to receive and to give, in this singular Thanksgiving season.
Grace
May we be blessed with a liberal helping of grace, in this season of needed grace.
We hear in Matthew 25 today a ringing valediction, a ringing acclamation of grace. Although it is found in no other gospel, we feel and sense today’s parable as the very word of the Lord, pronounced in full, in an unmediated way. We are haunted by it: as you have done it to the least, you have done it to me (repeat). A last word, a valediction, a last will and testament, sure, unshakable and downright clear. We are still rightly measured by the way we treat those at the dawn of life, those at the twilight of life, and those in the shadows of life. As you have done it to the least of these, you have done it to me.
A valediction, a last word, carries an acute power. In a way, the Bible is a long chain of valedictions. Jacob, Moses, Elijah, David, Job, Jesus, Peter, Paul. Especially, read again the second half of the Gospel of John, a wondrous, fulsome valediction.
One type of valediction is a concession. It is a grace to concede–at the end of a contest, or race, or election. There is a powerful poignancy of a particular kind, a riveting poignancy, in a concession rightly rendered. It has a power like no other. For all the joy one finds in acceptance and celebration at victory, there is a deeper reach in the concession. We think of Abraham Lincoln, after a loss, saying he was like a boy who stumbled and found he was ‘too hurt to laugh and too old to cry’. Adlai Stevenson quoted him a century later. There is a kind of courageous offering on the part of those who will stand and offer themselves, who then are defeated or rejected, and then have the grace to step forward and offer support to their opponent, for the greater good. We could use such a liberal helping of grace today. In our Methodist tradition, at the election of general superintendents, the grace of acceptance is often surpassed by the grace in concession. It takes more courage, more grace, to concede in defeat than to accept in victory. A liberal helping of grace.
Another type of valediction is a farewell, perhaps at retirement. What kept me going to our denominational annual meetings, as the years progressed, was the chance to listen to the soon to be retired,superannuated clergy, reflecting in five minutes on fifty years of travel, labor, and discipline. They were the truest words, many joyful, some somber, of the conference gathering each year. Or, think of University life, as students graduate, on the one hand, and as faculty and staff step down, on the other. This University, it should be said, thanks to offices of President and Provost, has lived a proud commitment to these moments. What you say at the end, in leave taking, has a lasting power. In ministry, the way you leave is the most important thing you do. I suspect the same could be said for other professions, other callings.
Another type of valediction comes at a point of change, of separation. In one setting, as we prepared to itinerate from one pulpit to another, the children of the church were guided to offer their own shared valediction, during a children’s moment. They were encouraged to say two things: thank you, and, goodbye.
Yet another mode of valediction comes at the grave. Here the life, not the voice, speaks, or others give voice to the life now departed, dearly departed. We shall struggle in covid time, and following covid time, to match these moments aright. We have not been able, 250,000 deaths later, fully, fully to validate in valediction, the lives our dearest loved ones, and the lives of others in our communities. We shall need to find other and further ways to do so, into the unforeseen future. It is a heap of work, necessary and good work, that lies ahead.
With grace, Matthew concludes his gospel in words that ring surely and truly–of Jesus. Now, as you have come to see, and perhaps dislike or regret, Matthew cloaks his teachings, including the last judgment—hungry, thirsty, stranger, naked, sick, imprisoned—in apocalyptic garb—Son of Man, angels, sheep and goats, glory, eternal punishment, eternal life, though not as harshly here as in some of our parables earlier this fall. Many, including beloved Rudolf Bultmann, found apocalyptic language and imagery entirely useless, the husk of antiquity shrouding the kernel of truth. Yet, even the apocalyptic dress has something for us, which today, late autumn 2020, we may be ready, in part, to receive. Apocalyptic faces squarely the unyielding powers around every individual, the principalities and the powers, the powers that be, and admits the ravenous darkness therein—technology, weaponry, plague, resentment. Apocalyptic faces squarely the transience of life, the brevity and difficulty embedded in even the best of life—the fragility of inherited norms, the fragility of venerable insitutions, the fragility of acculturated kindnesses taken for granted. Apocalyptic, ever consolation literature fore and aft, keeps an eye on the far horizon, the freedom beyond fragility, and the promise of a new heaven and a new earth, freedom for lives and communities redolent with gratitude and grace and generosity. (John Collins of Yale, years ago, reminded us of this)
We hear today in St. Matthew 25, the gospel valediction, the gospel in gracious valediction.
May we be blessed with a liberal helping of grace, in this season of needed grace.
Gratitude
May we be blessed with a liberal helping of gratitude, in this season of gratitude.
Let us be mindful this Thanksgiving, off gratitude, as was Howard Thurman, who was a hundred years head of his time fifty years ago, so he is still fifty years ahead of us. As is our long time custom here at Marsh Chapel, on this Sunday we remember his poem, his paean, his hymn to generosity:
Today, I make my Sacrament of Thanksgiving.
I begin with the simple things of my days:
Fresh air to breathe,
Cool water to drink,
The taste of food,
The protection of houses and clothes,
The comforts of home.
For all these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day!
I bring to mind all the warmth of humankind that I have known:
My mother’s arms,
The strength of my father
The playmates of my childhood,
The wonderful stories brought to me from the lives
Of many who talked of days gone by when fairies
And giants and all kinds of magic held sway;
The tears I have shed, the tears I have seen;
The excitement of laughter and the twinkle in the
Eye with its reminder that life is good.
For all these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day
I finger one by one the messages of hope that awaited me at the crossroads:
The smile of approval from those who held in their hands the reins of my security;
The tightening of the grip in a simple handshake when I
Feared the step before me in darkness;
The whisper in my heart when the temptation was fiercest
And the claims of appetite were not to be denied;
The crucial word said, the simple sentence from an open
Page when my decision hung in the balance.
For all these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day.
I pass before me the main springs of my heritage:
The fruits of labors of countless generations who lived before me,
Without whom my own life would have no meaning;
The seers who saw visions and dreamed dreams;
The prophets who sensed a truth greater than the mind could grasp
And whose words would only find fulfillment
In the years which they would never see;
The workers whose sweat has watered the trees,
The leaves of which are for the healing of the nations;
The pilgrims who set their sails for lands beyond all horizons,
Whose courage made paths into new worlds and far off places;
The saviors whose blood was shed with a recklessness that only a dream
Could inspire and God could command.
For all this I make an act of Thanksgiving this day.
I linger over the meaning of my own life and the commitment
To which I give the loyalty of my heart and mind:
The little purposes in which I have shared my loves,
My desires, my gifts;
The restlessness which bottoms all I do with its stark insistence
That I have never done my best, I have never dared
To reach for the highest;
The big hope that never quite deserts me, that I and my kind
Will study war no more, that love and tenderness and all the
inner graces of Almighty affection will cover the life of the
children of God as the waters cover the sea.
All these and more than mind can think and heart can feel,
I make as my sacrament of Thanksgiving to Thee,
Our Father, in humbleness of mind and simplicity of heart.
May we be blessed with a liberal helping of gratitude, in this season of gratitude.
Generosity
May we be blessed with a liberal helping of generosity, in this season of needed generosity.
As you have done it to the least of these…
Today, as a nation, we yet await a full, national, coordinated, generous response to the pandemic, as in: here is what we are facing; here is what we have done; here is what we need to do; here is the probable duration of our efforts; here are the greatest risks; here is what you can do (cleanliness, distance, testing, tracing, masks). And one more thing: this will take a long time, and will be very hard, but together we can and will meet the challenge. Together we can do this.
To do so, we will need the grace of honesty confronting loss. We have a checkered history here: there have been 200,000 opioid related deaths since Oxycotin was approved in 1995, for instance. The number of US children without health insurance rose by more than 400,000 between 2016-2018, for instance. NYT 3/24/20. (Think about doctor visits, annual physicals, sick care, dental care, all). And now 250,000 dead in this covid 190 corona virus time. Of course, in plague, we think of Albert Camus. We will need his honesty.
Plague or no plague, there is always, as it were, the plague, if what we mean by that is a susceptibility to sudden death, an event that can render our lives instantaneously meaningless. This is what Camus meant by the ‘absurdity’ of life. Recognizing this absurdity should lead us not to despair but to a tragicomic redemption, a softening of the heart, a turning away from judgment and moralizing to joy and gratitude”(Alain de Botton, NYT, 3/22/20.)
A liberal helping of such honesty will turn us toward generosity.
To do so, we will need a liberal helping of balanced liberalism, a recollection that ‘the invisible hand of the market requires the visible hand of the government to regulate its inevitable excesses’ (Ellis on Adams, 91). Further we shall require ‘an educated citizenry fluent in a wise and universal liberalism…This liberalism will neither play down nor fetishize identity grievances, but look instead for a common and generous language to build on who we are more broadly, and to conceive more boldly what we might be able to accomplish in concert.’ (NYT 8/27/18). To and for the support of this liberal balance, the maintenance of a liberal balance, have been devoted the Marsh pulpit sermons in series, August to November: they in one sense have been simply an interpretation of the gospel devoted to the reclamation and rehabilitation of a single word in spoken English, a word as both adjective and noun, the word ‘liberal’.
And when did we see thee…
Hungry, thirsty, stranger, naked, sick, imprisoned…
As you have done it to the least of these…
As Mark Twain put it, ‘it’s not the the parts of the Bible I don’t understand that worry me, it’s the parts I do understand’
I come back again to the voice of James Alan McPherson: ‘each United States citizen would attempt to approximate the ideals of the nation, be on at least conversant terms with all its diversity, carry the mainstream of the culture inside himself (The Atlantic in 1978). As an American, by trying to wear these clothes he would be a synthesis of high and low, black and white, city and country, provincial and universal. If he could live with these contradictions, he would be simply a representative American. I believe that if one can experience its diversity, touch a variety of its people, laugh at its craziness, distill wisdom from its tragedies, and attempt to synthesize all this inside oneself without going crazy, one will have earned the right to call oneself a ‘citizen of the United States’. (N.Y. Times, 7/28/16, a25). It will take a liberal helping of generosity, given and received, to ‘live’ the contradictions without going crazy. We can too. You can too.
As you have done it to the least of these…
This week our friend Tom Fiedler, former BU School of Communications Dean, spoke on Boston television, and wrote for the Charlotte Observer, about the new struggle in evangelical Christianity, the struggle over power vs. generosity, seen in example through the bitter conflict within the Billy Graham family.
He quotes Graham’s daughter Jerushah: “I have spoken out as much as I have because I feel that some of these evangelical leaders are tarring (Christianity) with shame,” she said, in a pointed reference to her uncle…People who don’t know Jesus are not being introduced by the leadership to the Jesus I know.” And she said she is confident that her positions on such issues as gay rights, the treatment of refugees and respect for “the most marginalized” are those that not only resonate with the future generation, but that align with those of her grandfather.
When did we see thee hungry, thirsty, stranger, naked, sick, imprisoned…
May we be blessed with a liberal helping of generosity, in this season generosity.
Grace, gratitude, generosity. Grace, gratitude, generosity. May our Thanksgiving tables be fully laden with liberal helpings of all three.
–The Reverend Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
