Sunday
January 10
Faith Before Daybreak
By Marsh Chapel
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A voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased’.
There are some weeks when good news seems hard to come by.
Late in November, 1963, with youth hockey around the corner, and at last some new skates that fit, a lingering pallor covered our town, after President Kennedy tragically was shot. There was an evening prayer service, but good news was hard to come by. ‘We are a nation drenched in sorrow’ began Jan’s dad’s, my father in law’s rewritten sermon for that Sunday.
A decade later, with some of us studying abroad, preparing to teach college Spanish literature—a dream deferred to another lifetime, the war in Vietnam was reportedly ending, with helicopters carrying out the remaining soldiers and staff from a rooftop in Saigon. ‘How do you ask a man to be the last to die in a mistaken war?’ aptly asked one then young, now veteran national leader. A nation chastened, broken, without bearing or mooring, and little good news to be had.
A bit more than a decade later, 1988, a plane down in Lockerbie, but we rehearsed that last week, did we not?
Of a Tuesday morning, a bright one, an autumn bright morning, September 2001, some of us headed out for work, wondering what we had just seen, or what had we seen?, in the skies above the Towers above the city that never sleeps. Little sleep, and very little good news, there was in that week of 9/11. The evenings were given over to community worship, and on Friday the churches come 11am were packed. The dangling chads of Broward County the year before were forgotten.
On this very avenue, in April of 2013, with the blasts of Beacon street still reverberating in mind and memory, every evening that week brought, right in here in Marsh Chapel, some manner of worship service, and gathering, for healing and help. None of it fully adequate, all of it offered to God and neighbor on behalf of a better future day, days and weeks when there would be more news of a better sort. A promissory note, within the notes of grief and loss.
Early November of 2016 brought another set of days, a week, weeks let us say, of confusion and despair regarding that fall’s election. In hindsight, we see a bit better why. What many meant by choices in 2016 was not the meaning of those choices. What one meant was not, and is not, what it means. What you meant is not what it means. What it means is found not in intention but in consequence. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. We all can attest to that from our own experience, and our own behavior. It was hard to scare up much good news that late autumn.
There are some weeks when good news seems hard to come by, and this week is one such. Yet these serial reminders of dark days past are meant, as you rightly surmise, to recall that we did make it through them, and we will get through this, too. We did make it through them, and we will get through this, too. Not unscathed, and hopefully not unchanged, but together, we will make it through.
Coming into this week already we faced challenges aplenty. A climate reeling out of control. A pandemic claiming 350,000 lives. A political culture, a culture cooked politics, for politics is ever downstream from culture, putting people at daggers drawn. A community of communities seeing, in full, for the first full time it may be, the ravages and damages of racial bias, hatred, and prejudice. And pain, the pain of every day.
Now this week. On top of all other this (Thursday) morning’s blaring headline, ‘TRUMP INCITES MOB’. 4 dead, not in Ohio this time, but in the nation’s capital city, and inside the nation’s capitol building. Insurrection with presidential incitement. One wonders about the future of the party of Lincoln.
January 6, 2021. For the rest of history, for the rest of our lives, we shall have to live with, and attempt by faith to live down, both to live with and to live down, such utter calumny, such tragic, needless, heedless yet revelatory disaster. It is an apocalyptic—a revelatory—moment, hundreds wrecking the capitol, with hardly a single arrest to date, encouraged by a wantonly graceless leader, and with 6 Senators, 6 Senators (Cruz, Hawley, Hyde-Smith, Marshall, Kennedy, Tuberville), and much other congressional cattle (Jonah 4:11), continuing to feed its root cause. For while this sermon is being recorded Thursday late afternoon, January 7, 2021, we cannot be at all sure what further difficulty and distress may visit us, in this current week of scarce good news, by Sunday when the sermon is heard, January 10, 2021. One said, ‘this is like 9/11, except we did this to ourselves’.
But at some preconscious level, somewhere down in the declivities of the country’s psyche, we had a sense that this was coming. We did not want to admit it. We hoped against hope to be wrong in that premonition. We hoped to whistle past the graveyard for another few days. Yet we remembered, dimly, our upbringing, ‘don’t play with fire if you don’t want to get burned’. We have had four years of warning, advisement, signs along the pathway of this premonition. So we are not surprised, and have no reason to be. It has been as plain as the nose on your face, even as plain as the nose on my face, at least since Charlottesville. It is no wonder, no surprise, that the 25th Amendment remedy is now rightly, and wisely, under full consideration. For a lot can happen in two weeks.
So, the community of faith gathers come Sunday, January 10, 2021, to listen, pray, and prepare. You have come this morning, by radio or internet, to listen, pray, and prepare. And to wonder. Just what is the gospel, the good news for this Lord’s Day?
With you, I weep for my country and its people. More so, I pray for my own people, my own congregation, our University, our listenership, you and your loved ones, near or far or very far away. It must be admitted, that there are some weeks when good news seems pretty hard to come by. This is one.
Still. The preacher’s role is to announce the gospel in interpretation of and accord with the Scriptures. Scripture gives us the chance for the long view. Scripture gives us a deep grounding, with heaven a little higher and earth a little wider. Thank goodness we have the Holy Scripture to which to turn, from which to learn, with which to listen, pray and prepare. Silver and gold have I none, but that which I have I give thee. (Acts 3:6). Listen. Pray. Prepare.
Listen. The Gospel of Mark was written for listening. It emerged over long time, with the earliest Christians reciting and recalling their Lord, his love, and their shared shaping by that love, in faith, beginning in baptism. They listened, morning and evening, Sunday by Sunday, and over time, in direct response to weeks both empty and full, they began to write down for future generations what they had heard. Today we have such an account, that of Jesus’ baptized. Today we have such a lesson, the hearing of a voice. Today we start again into an unknown future, within earshot of that same divine voice, ‘This is my Beloved’. For all our failure, for all manner of sin and death and meaninglessness, for all that is wrong, and there is much, especially just now, there is a voice, ringing out and calling to us. A voice from heaven. ‘A voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased’. Yes, this is a scandalous particularity, to name One the Beloved, to call out One with intimacy (‘with you’), to identify One, baptized in the Jordan, ‘with Thee I am well pleased’. Yet for generations women and men have found this particularity strikingly universal, and lastingly, eternally real. Especially in weeks when good news is scarce. And in our time, into dimensions of common ground that may cause us work and make us uncertain, we will want to learn to listen, and listen again. Listen. Listen. Listen.
Pray. What a tremendous spiritual gift is our Psalter. Remember Samuel Terrien teaching us: : Here are 700 years of psalms, 1000-400bce. For the psalmists, Yahweh’s presence was not only made manifest in Zion. It reached men and women over the entire earth. The sense of Yahweh’s presence survived the annihilation of the temple and the fall of the state 587bc. Elusive but real, it feared no geographical uprooting and no historical disruption. Having faced the void in history and in their personal lives, they knew the absence of God even within the temple. The inwardness of their spirituality, bred by the temple, rendered the temple superfluous. (279) In other words, they knew how to live through and out through godless weeks. Our psalm today, Psalm 29, ancient and redolent with glory, recalls for us how to pray. From your youth you have known. Adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication. The ACTS forms of prayer. Adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication. One is a word of glory, echoing the glory of God that thunders. Glorify God and enjoy him forever. A word of glory. One is a word of contrition, by which we begin every service at Marsh Chapel. Prayer is not only a matter of individual or even personal attention, a certain sitting silent before God. Prayer is also the voice, the responsive voice, of the people of God, echoing in antiphonal chorus, the call, the bowing before glory. GLORY! All have sinned, all have fallen short of that primordial glory. All. A prayer of contrition. One is a word of gratitude. In such a week, it may simply be a prayer of gratitude that things are not yet any worse. A piercing memory of an 87 year old woman who had hidden, and been hidden, from the Nazis as a child evoked this the other day: “During the war, we didn’t know if we would make a day. I didn’t have any freedom. I couldn’t speak loudly, I couldn’t laugh, I couldn’t cry…But now, I can feel freedom. I stay by the window and look out. The first thing I do in the morning is look out and see the world. I am alive. I have food, I go out, I go for walks, I do some shopping. And I remember: No one wants to kill me. So, still, I read. I cook a little bit. I shop a little bit. I learned the computer. I do puzzles. (1/3/21, Toby Levy, NYT). A word of gratitude. One is a word of longing, desire, incantation, supplication. Dear God, guide us through these murky moments, like those we have seen in the past, let us pray, and let our learning now make us stronger later. A word of supplication. Prayer takes some set aside time, some quiet, some intentional focus. Pray. Pray. Pray.
Prepare. The whole of Scripture begins with the divine preparation, in creation, and in speech. ‘Let there be…’ And what might that be, let there be? Light. Watch for the rays of light in the dark. Watch for the rays of light in the dark. Wednesday morning, before all, well, chaos, broke loose, a newly elected Senator from Georgia was interviewed. He was raised in public housing, one of 12 children. Whatever the day, his dad had them all up before dawn. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning, he was reminded. Yes, but that’s the thing about the morning, he responded, it begins in the full dark, it begins at dawn, before daybreak. Senator Warnock learned to prepare, shining his shoes every morning, before daylight, to get ready, to be ready. His parents gave him the gift of faith before daybreak. So. Light. Watch for the coming rays of light. Nor does light shine only in the heart, but also, even moreso, in the heart of the community. Individuals need to prepare, but so do communities. Senator Warnock went to Morehouse College, where his dean, Dean of the Chapel the Rev. Dr. Lawrence Carter, who has preached three times in the last three years from this Marsh pulpit, greeted him. Now Senator Warnock went on to earn a PhD from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York (I believe I have heard of the school) and has since been in the pulpit of historic Ebenezer Church, Atlanta, for many years. But Dean Carter reminded me in conversation Wednesday morning, that when his parents dropped him off at Morehouse, Rafael Warnock had not a dime to his name. His parents could give him only what they had, their powerful, limitless, ceaseless love, pride and belief in him. Their powerful, limitless, ceaseless love, pride and belief in him. Not much? Well. It seems to have been enough, just enough. That’s the thing about the morning. It begins in the dark, in preparation, awaiting the word… LET THERE BE LIGHT. Prepare. Prepare. Prepare.
People of God. Listen! Pray! Prepare! And hear again the gospel:
A voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased’.
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
