Sunday
December 6
The Dawn of Faith
By Marsh Chapel
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Dormant
We rested alone in the dormant, dormant quiet of Thanksgiving 2020, as so many did. There were walks and talks. There was time for reflection and reading, as well as distance learning about dearest loved ones, by way of the current, sometimes helpful, technologies. A red, bright red, maple leaf floated our way. Leaves were there for the kicking and kicking up. We both resisted and bowed to the beckoning of disagreeable chores put off, now waiting and awaiting attention, with no earthly excuse for avoidance. Something to clean, something else to toss, something further to give off, something even to cherish, and, perhaps…something to discover or recover.
In the evenings we nestled in to see some news, not that much is newscast any longer, and then, as moved, to return to stories and novels and films and sequels. We had left off the Crown after two seasons, a good while ago, and made our way back into the next. We had stood outside Buckingham Palace, with long hair in 1972, then recently wed in 1978, then with a church tour of Methodism and its ghosts 1995, and then, overjoyed, on holiday in 2017, en route to view John Wesley’s tomb in Westminster Abbey. We worshiped there, seated that august and August Sunday above the stone marked for William Wilberforce. Would you go back? To London? In a New York minute…Marsh Chapel, Gothic in design, exudes an English spirit—the garden in the poem of Sir George Sitwell, the corner stone atop two further stones from Oxford University (St. John’s College and Jesus College) and the inscription, Boston University’s pedigree is traced directly to Oxford University, England.(Cambridge is both on and meant for the other of the river.) The University Arms, said Daniel Marsh, ‘connect Boston University both with the town of Boston, England, and also with the University of Oxford.’ And for good reason: Mr. Wesley, an Oxford don, brought through fierce preaching a vigorous gospel, the reformation faith, to the English poor, in mine and in field and in city and on ship and in prison. Our heritage is thus, personal, denominational, professional and religious. So, we are inclined to watch the show.
At one point, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, is accosted by his mother, an eccentric and brilliant nun, recently transposed to Buckingham Palace from a humble nunnery in Greece. He interrupts her kneeling prayer, after years of disconnection. She, mentally troubled, in story, cared for by Sigmund Freud, and he, a kind of orphan, left alone in the world. In the heart of the talk she abruptly asks him a question. And what about your faith? And what about your faith? Have you faith? A question of which Mr. Wesley would have been, would be, proud. What about your faith? He honestly, suddenly answers: dormant. My faith is dormant. She murmurs, she mourns, she gasps, she then says, That is not good. Find yourself a faith. Find yourself a faith. At the end of the episode, you see them walking away, arm and arm, into an English country garden.
And you? What about your faith? It is a serious question, even, maybe even especially, in a dormant time. Perhaps, sensing this, you have for a moment allowed the car radio to linger at religion, in worship, this morning. Perhaps, sensing this, you have turned on or turned toward a few minutes of music, Scripture, prayer, and preachment. A dormant Thanksgiving may have given you pause, or a pause, coming now into December. Pause before illness. Pause before randomness. Pause before mortality. Pause before God. Faith, dormant faith, wakes up in that kind of pause. A dormant pause brings, or can, the dawn of faith. Pause to pray in the morning. Pause to recite a psalm mid-day. Pause to listen in care when another speaks. Pause to write an encouraging word. Pause to push your mind in study, not for what informs but for what transforms. Pause to recover a joy in generosity. Pause to make a plan to worship, come Sunday, just as now, well, you are doing. Faith is dormant unless it wakes up in these moments of pause.
Of course. What other realm of life or experience do we know that opens itself with no investment? No investment in funds leads to no gain in growth. No investment in exercise leads to no gain in health. No investment in study leads to no gain in learning. No investment in equality leads to no gain in justice. No investment in difference leads to no gain in community. No investment in friendship leads to no gain in friends.
Your faith, how is it with your faith? If the answer is ‘dormant’, come this dormant Advent, you may want to invest yourself, say, in Scripture, say, in its serious study, say, or for what is shows in life, vital moments of awakening, life’s woke times.
Advent
That is, you cannot come to Christmas unless you cross the river Jordan…
Between you and the 12 days of grace in the feast of Christmas 2020 there runs an icy river, four weeks of Advent 2020, the journey in preparation…
You cannot get across alone, or without cost, or without preparation, or without getting wet…
You will need some investment here…
This beginning, Advent, is like all others—uncertain, difficult, scary, hard…
In these weeks there is set aside a time of preparation…
The voices of our ancestors, forebears, precursors in faith cry out in our covid 2020 wilderness experience…
In today’s readings, three distinct voices resound. The voice of the prophet Isaiah. The voice of the John the Baptist. And the voice of the St. Mark, the author of the earliest gospel and its beginning….
The voices come out of the great, distant past, cloaked in antiquity, hooded in mystery, shrouded in misty history, covered by the winds and dust of time.
Our Scripture is holy, is the word of God, because week by week, we read and listen, here, for the divine word. Where else would we possibly want to be, come Sunday, than in earshot of that Word? We stand on the shoulders of the ancients, stretching back two and three thousand years, for whom also these words were holy. They outlast us, these words of holy writ. They uplift us. They reshape us. They return us to our rightful minds. The authority of Scripture lies in a very pragmatic garden of practice: we do this every week, all the 4,000 Sundays of our lives. Scripture acquires authority out of its long-time traditional use. Scripture exudes authority as the mind, our gift of reason, explores the caverns and caves, the stalactites and stalagmites, the dark recesses of venerable words. Scripture pierces the heart with authority, in our own hearing, our own recitation, our own living, our own experience. Tradition, reason, and experience crown Holy Scripture with–authority.
Listen, then, in love, to the voices of our ancestors, forebears, predecessors who also wrestled with the question of faith, the waking of faith at the dawn of faith.
Second Isaiah
The year is 540bce.
In the dark days of exile, the second prophet Isaiah recalled for his people the nature of faith.
How difficult it is to be away from home, to be alone, to be cut off from the people and places that mean most to you. You college junior you. All travelers know this, as do all human pilgrims. Your life is a journey, a spiritual journey wrought in meaning, fraught with meaning, fought for meaning, taught by meaning.
The preparation for good news may even begin in the dark lost hurt of exile, like a birdsong before dawn. Dormancy…can be the dawn of faith. The book of Isaiah stops at chapter 39, a hard stop. The book of Isaiah begins again, heard today, in chapter 40. Isaiah could hear the early singing of the birdsong of hope long before any of his contemporaries. The people of Israel, through a series of tragic decisions, guided by a series of misguided leaders, found themselves enslaved to a foreign king. Our gospel of the Prince of Peace is born out of a strife-torn experience. Our confidence in the God of Hope is born out of a record of nearly hopeless moments in the community of faith.
What makes faith possible in a time of exile? What makes hope possible in the wasteland of a desert? What makes faith possible in pandemic?
Faith comes from a mixture of memory and imagination and vision. Faith, like its first cousin, hope, comes from trouble. Over 45 years of ministry, when the question has arisen, “Where did your faith come from?’, ‘Whence, Faith?’, the answer invariable runs something like this: “well, a long time ago, I was in a deep kind of trouble, and, here is what happened…’ Faith comes out of trouble. The dawn of faith is in the dormancy of trouble. Faith, like cousin hope, is real faith when it is most what you need. And faith comes in trouble, in times of trouble, in exile, in times of exile. Ours this year, 2020 is such. An exile. And some days we feel it to the marrow bone.
This is what a verse remembered does for us. It frees us to hope for what is not yet seen. A song like Isaiah 40, well sung, frees us from the tyranny of the present, the oppression of the right now, the slavery of the moment. We get free to dream of another time or two. Oddly, the best thing about the study of theology is that it frees us from the 21st century.
The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ may involve a newfound capacity to hope, to hope against hope, to hope for what yet cannot be seen, to hope and to hope and to hope. The song and marrow bone of faith comes calling out just before sunlight, at dawn.
Isaiah overheard and foretold another voice, another prospect. He sensed what was not yet visible. Who hopes, anyway, for what he sees? So he cried out:
The voice of one crying in the wilderness
Prepare the way of the Lord
Make his paths straight
The Baptist
The year is 27 ce.
It is the year of the courage of the Baptist. It takes a peculiar spiritual strength in faith to find the grace to…step aside. John the Baptist created a commotion with his call to confession of sin. He called, and the people came. They had a common mind, at least to the point of acknowledging their need. Like Isaiah, he was, he is, one of our venerable ancestors, forebears, precursors.
John came out of tradition—the tradition of the prophets. His role and work were not alien to the long history before him. So, when he went out in his rough clothing, into a harsh desert, to speak unpleasant but true words of warning and judgment, he did so out of a common understanding that prophets might just come along every now and then. They might call the city of Jerusalem to repent every now and then. They might direct the people of Israel out to the river bank every now and then. They might point to God every now and then.
John spoke directly to his people. He challenged his generation to look hard at the way they had lived, and with a spiritual plumb line to measure themselves according to the law of God. What one has no sin to confess? What one has no fault to regret? What one has no desire to be made clean? What one would not, given the chance, wash in the Jordan and start over? Who has not tossed and turned at night, in the dark, awaiting the dawn?
Friends. Politics lies downstream from culture, and culture downstream from religion, and religion downstream from…faith. The dawn of faith is at the headwaters of all the rest, for all the cultural amnesia of such today.
The Baptist reminds us of the distance between our dreams and our deeds.
But the lasting word of the Baptist is not about his own work at all. Like the church to this day, finally, he exists to point to Another, the thong of whose sandals none is worthy to loosen.
For all his accomplishment, at the pinnacle of human endeavor, right religion, John finds, in faith, at the right time, the grace to make space.
The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ may involve a willingness, at the right time, to make space for someone else, to step aside. For you, one day, the gospel may evoke a willingness to step aside. Or, one day, not so much the willingness, but the reluctant courage to do so.
John felt that nudge,and so he cried out:
After me comes he who is mightier than I
The thong of whose sandals
I am not worthy to stoop down and untie
John Mark
The year is 70ce.
With others, Mark could have found a more pleasant way to begin his gospel. He might with Matthew have offered a long list of names of great saints and sinners past, and then told a story about wise men from the east. Or he might with Luke have started with thrilling birth stories, retelling the birth of the Baptist and of Jesus, to Elizabeth and Mary, and then recounted the advent of the Son of God among humble shepherds, in a humble inn, in a humble town, on a humble night. The Gospel of John even begins with the beginning of time and Jesus rounding the unformed cosmos as the divine word, logos.
As plain as the nose on your face, though, Mark starts simple and bare. No frills, no varnish, no make-up, no extras. Like Paul, Mark says nothing about the birth of Jesus, or young man Jesus, or the family of Jesus. He begins with the river Jordan, and John, a man dressed in camel’s hair.
This gospel begins with a barren, bleak moment in the icy dark, along a cold river, faith dormant in exile.
The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ may well involve just such a cold, and foreboding start, a beginning that in that way is like all beginnings, from the infant cry at birth, to the coughing susurration at death, and every new venture in between: a little quiet, a little cold, a little wild honey. And hovering somewhere nearby…the divine possibility of a divine possibility. So, Mark writes: The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
Let us pause to shrug off our dormancy. Let us awake. Together, let us begin the journey.
Coda
With Second Isaiah, in a time of exile, we will face down the loneliness we feel, and will explore a newfound capacity to hope. In a period of discouragement, we will accept the courage and the capacity to wait, to wait without idols, to wait for the living and true God, whose messengers do come, in the fullness of time.
With John the Baptist, in a period of anxiety, an age of anxiety, when our own service has been rendered, and our own work is done, we will look for that saving willingness, the grace to make space, to make way for Another.
With John Mark, in an age of pestilence and dislocation, when change in work or health arrive, we will face the harsh difficulty of a cold, new beginning. We will rely on faith, the faith of our ancestors, forebears, precursors, those who came before, who also knew the icy cold of the river Jordan. We will name our precursors, honor them, remember them. At a dinner table. In the comfort of a family conversation. In the discussion and dialogue of real national debate. In divine worship, as the Scriptures are read and the Word is proclaimed. And in the communal silence of eucharist, today a spiritual eucharist.
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…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.
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
