Sunday
April 3
Communion Meditation- April 3, 2022
By Marsh Chapel
Click here to hear the full service
Click here to hear just the sermon
Keep it for the day of my burial…
Sometimes a single, personal experience of someone’s sacrificial living and giving can make a lasting, transformative impact. And sometimes, perhaps Lent 2022, an encounter with a truly radical spirit, with whom you and I may not always agree, can cause one, you?, as we said last week, to come to himself.
In the Holy Scripture there rise up moments in recognition of loss…that can become lines into the future.
One cascades upon us in Psalm 46…
Another falls upon us in Romans 12…
Another rises up and out of Psalm 121…
Still another can be found in any of the great poets, as with Frost and his mordant poetic lines…
Likewise, in these verses of John 12, there lingers an essence, a fragrance that eludes description. Why did Doestoevsky choose these verses as frontispiece to his greatest novel, Crime and Punishment? John seems to have distilled a potent nectar, more potent than that found elsewhere, from his knowledge of loss. Why are these verses so haunting?
I believe they astound us so, because they reflect a doubledeath. I believe the sense of glory found in the cross here comes from the hard lesson of loss, in a little church, somewhere in Turkey, turned out of the synagogue, and losing or about to lose, long after the death of Jesus, their last link with the primitive church. In the cross, in their loss, they saw both the death of Jesus, and the death of their beloved disciple, their beloved preacher, their pastor, John. The fourth Gospel is so strange and so startling because it operates at two levels, first that of Jesus and second that of John. After decades of pastoral care, guiding them through change, leading them out ofthe synagogue, protecting them from their own worst selves, reminding them of Christ the Lord, and showing them how to walk in the light, the towering figure of their beloved preacher was overtaken by death.
First they lost Jesus, then they lost John. Both losses hurt with unspeakable pain. But here is what they learned: love carries us through loss. Love carries us through loss. Love outlasts loss. In fact, only self opening love can bring any meaning through loss!
You know this Gospel in your bones, in the old bone structure of Marsh Chapel. For you too have known the loss of Jesus, and the loss of a beloved disciple, an originating pastor, who guided and lead, and reminded and showed, and at last was overtaken by death. You too know about the two level drama of faith, the loss and love of Jesus Christ our Savior, and also the loss and love of a beloved disciple who built the Chapel, who located it on Commonwealth Avenue, who helped us through a depression and a war, who had a vision and built a building.. And then, he died. He is buried right under our pulpti, his ashes and those of his beloved wife are interred here. And every moment of loyal offering, and every baby baptized, and every couple married, and every moment of eucharist, and every funeral service bringus back here, to the twin shadows. The cross of Christ and the ashes of Daniel Marsh.
We can feel the Gospel, the Fourth Gospel, the Gospel of the Fourth Gospel, here.
Sometimes a single, personal experience of someone’s sacrificial living and giving can make a lasting, transformative impact. And sometimes, perhaps Lent 2022, an encounter with a truly radical spirit, with whom you and I may not always agree, can cause one, you?, to come to himself.
Sometime ago we knew, not well, but well enough a man who embodied Irenaeus saying, the glory of God is a human being fully alive. Born of two Irish immigrants in 1926, John Joseph Murray, by the time we crossed his path 65 years later, exuded life. Says my friend, I don’t have to drink the whole ocean to know it is salty. Salt. Salt and light he was. An Army veteran. A father of 8. A rising star in a great corporation who quit on the spot when that business invited and funded Joseph McCarthy to speak in Syracuse. He marched with MLK in 1963. Then a leader in research and in national management circles. A weekly voice in the Thursday Morning Roundtable, a breakfast for city leaders. But it was his smile, it was his vigorous bicycling, it was his bee-keeping, it was his presence and advocacy at pretty much every significant critical gathering in that decade, it was his full partnership with his wife Nancy, it was his neighborly gracious friendship, it was all these and other marks of humanity that linger, now a month beyond his death. Sometimes, and often early in young adulthood, something happens that quickens, inspires, frees, empowers, illumines, changes a person, for the better and for life. That is Word and that is Sacrament. Reading his obituary a fortnight ago, one came upon a remarkable record: John was a proud “Christian Brother boy” too, graduating from Manhattan Prep and Manhattan College. On John’s first day at the Prep he was exposed to Dorothy Day through her newspaper The Catholic Worker. He read it and was hooked. She exposed him to the impact of mercy on hopelessness and set him on a path of peace and justice. He felt he had three crucial mentors in his life: Dorothy Day, Father Charles Brady and, the best of his life, his wife Nancy. (Syracuse Obituary for John Joseph Murray, obits.syracuse.com). One part of him, at a young age, once freed up, freed up the rest of him.
Keep it for the day of my burial…
Sometimes a single, personal experience of someone’s sacrificial living and giving can make a lasting, transformative impact. And sometimes, perhaps Lent 2022, an encounter with a truly radical spirit, with whom you and I may not always agree, can cause one, you?, as we said last week, to come to himself
In the Holy Scripture there rise up moments in recognition of loss…that can become lines into the future.
New York Times January 21, 2022: Hundreds of people gathered at St. Patrick’s Cathedral to celebrate an important moment for Catholics in New York. Cardinal Timothy Dolan delivered a homily on the life of one of their own, Dorothy Day, a native New Yorker and anarchist writer and activist who died in 1980.
The sermon last month represented the end of a 20-year inquiry by the Archdiocese of New York on whether Ms. Day should receive sainthood, a question the Vatican will ultimately decide…
Ms. Day loved the church and its rituals and devoted her life to the Gospel, which she felt drove her to renounce material possessions and commit herself to a life of activism on behalf of the poor, a devotion to pacifism and opposition to both capitalism and communism. She often described herself as an anarchist.
Presence. Thanksgiving. Remembrance. Presence. Thanksgiving. Remembrance.
As in Psalm 121…
As in the Canadian Creed…
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
