Sunday
October 16
Blessed Endurance
By Marsh Chapel
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‘Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart’
A conversation starts, somehow. A conversation travels, somewhere. A conversation ends, sometime. After three years of screen, of zoom, of facetime, of text, of email, of distance, of attention to quasi-spaces, electronic spaces–to which nuance, humor, personality, humanity, and connection go to die–we have been returned to the land of conversation. Here you are. Praise God from whom all blessings flow. There is a robust magic in conversation, whereby John Wesley named conversation a means of grace, alongside prayer, Scripture, sacraments, and fasting. There is a saving power, a saving grace in conversation. It costs nothing to listen, except time and risk. And it costs nothing to speak, except time and voice. And that is all our importune has today, time and voice.
In conversation, there abides, or lurks, the lasting possibility of heart-to-heart communication, heart by heart communion. That potential seizes you, not the other way around. You are longways into a talk with an old dear friend, and of a sudden, you realize, you intuit, just how much that friendship means, a friendship planted and grown in conversation. Conversation is a means of grace.
Especially on Sunday however and moreover, grace is a means of conversation. Worship is the hour when we most open ourselves not only to the idea of the holy, the mysterium tremendum, but to the grace of the holy, what matters, lasts, counts, to what is real.
Covid collapsed conversation. Are we attentively, persistently striving to regain it, to return it? Worship is the exemplary though not only hour when most we are in conversation with the holy, with the presence, with the freedom, with the experience of the holy. In silence, in word, in song, in psalm, in chorus, in instrument, in communion, in prayer. You and I are open to the holy, are opened to the holy—right now. How we need all that is holy right now.
For right now we live in a perilously difficult time and season.
Hourly we are reminded of forms of cultural demise all around us, to the shame of us all, bullying, demagoguery, vulgarity, sexism, buffoonery, megalomania, and our helplessness—willingness?—to have to have our children and grandchildren so surrounded in a culture at its worst seemingly careening into a nihilistic abyss.
The seven not deadly sins but daily 2022 maladies may have brought their own reminders: Pollution, pandemic, Putin, politics, pistols, prejudice, pain—which breed anxiety and depression, in some measure, to one and all.
Institutions are far more fragile than we sometimes think, especially the bigger ones. They all require trust, commitment, integrity, self-sacrifice, and humility on the part of their leaders, or over time they disintegrate, as one Congresswoman stated last week. It is not just the processes, the systems, the organizations and structures that matter, it is the people. No amount of systemic adjustment can ever replace the fundamental need, across a culture, for good people. No wise process has any chance against unwise people. Do not assume that institutions that have been healthy will always be so. Do not presume that free speech in newspapers, that due process in political parties, that honest regard for electoral results simply exist. They do or they don’t. It depends on the people who inhabit, support, and lead them. Beware a time like ours when the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity (Yeats).
Giving ultimate loyalty to penultimate reality is sin at its depth. To support an organization at the cost of honor, of integrity, of honesty is to give ultimate loyalty to penultimate reality. That is, to support a political party at the cost of honor, integrity and honesty is to give ultimate loyalty to penultimate reality. This is sin at its depth. That is, to support a denomination at the cost of honor, integrity and honesty is to give ultimate loyalty to penultimate reality. In the hour of judgment, the organization—party or church or other—depends on the courage and integrity of individuals to resist idolatrous loyalty to penultimate reality and to respond with courage and integrity to ultimate authority. You cannot serve God and Mammon. Giving ultimate loyalty to penultimate reality is sin at its depth. Not everything is for sale, nor should it be. Jeremiah told us so.
In 1980 with 12 Cornell students, and for a full year, we studied Jeremiah. Two of those then young graduate students are now teaching at Brown University, and are part of the extended Marsh Chapel family. They reminded me recently that the group had asked to study Jeremiah, high above Cayuga’s waters, and I had wondered ‘whether they were ready for him’. They said they were, and they were. In all these intervening years, with student and campus groups from Cornell, McGill, North Country Community, Syracuse, Lemoyne, Colgate Rochester, the University of Rochester, United Seminary and, now, in worship at Boston University, we have returned in to Jeremiah. (A student at BU who attends worship every Sunday for three years will hear the whole range of all Scripture in the weekly readings. Not every verse of Leviticus, but every high and holy point, including Jeremiah today) Never, though, have I been more grateful for Jeremiah’s evocation of the stark suffering divine love of God, for Jeremiah’s unswerving realism, than this fall. In this autumn of anxiety and difficulty, I kneel and kiss the ground, thankful for Jeremiah and his divine human realism.
I am eternally thankful for Jeremiah’s realism about what horrors can befall people and a people when they forget their identity.
I am eternally thankful for Jeremiah’s realism about what happens to a people when some of whose leaders have and live values diametrically opposed to the nation’s own values. Exemplum docet, beloved, example teaches.
I am eternally thankful, painful as it is to hear the words, for Jeremiah’s realism about how naïve in selfishness a people can become, and how earth shattering that foolishness can be.
I am eternally thankful for Jeremiah’s realism about the crucial importance of diplomacy rather than violence, and about what happens when megalomaniacal leaders mock diplomacy.
I am eternally thankful, if such can be said, for Jeremiah’s own wretched suffering as he watched his beloved country exchange their birthright of holiness for a mess of material pottage. Not everything that matters is for sale.
I am eternally thankful for the clarity, not confusion, for the courage, not timidity, of his voice ringing out across 25 centuries to say to you in a way you cannot avoid: if you follow leadership that is immoral, unjust, unloving, unwise, you will get what you deserve, and the desserts will be disastrous. In real time.
I am even eternally thankful for Jeremiah’s pitiless reproach for people whose own religion bluntly teaches them to tell truth, honor others, seek justice, protect the poor, who then are tempted to select leaders who say they have done and will do the opposite, and then are proven to have done. We have been warned.
I am eternally thankful for Jeremiah’s realism which—did you hear?—includes at the end, encompasses at twilight, for all the suffering the divine love endures, including Jeremiah’s own slave death and unmarked grave in Egypt, a grace note, a ringing bell, a song sung, a word spoken, a hope, that one day ‘says the Lord, I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah… No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord…
So we arrive today in the anxiety and perplexity of our time, at the town court of Nazareth, the honorable UnJ Judge presiding. Hear ye, hear ye. Hizzoner awaits. He of the powers that be, who fear neither God nor man. And Behold the Lord Jesus Christ dressed today in the apparel of a poor woman. For those who, rightly, feel anxiety or despair or depression at the rampant sexism now latent and palpable, including somehow an amnesia regarding the fact that women’s bodies are first and foremost women’s bodies, and revealed by the events of this year and autumn across our decaying culture, take heart: behold the Lord Jesus Christ dressed today in the raiment of an importunate, a persistent poor widow. A figure of blessed endurance.
Yes, in our autumn of anxiety, we can readily appreciate the Scripture’s utter realism. Luke too needed to remember that Jesus told them about “losing heart”. This phrase communicates, in a time like ours. Greater souls in easier times have felt such ennui. So we are not surprised today to hear reports of increased therapy, medication and consumption of comfort food. We can feel the depression.
Jesus pointed to the Town Court of Nazareth and therein to the simple figure of a persistent woman. See her at the bench. Watch her in the aisle. Listen to her steady voice. Feel her stolid forbearance. Says she: “Grant me justice.”
My beloved teacher Sharon Ringe reminds us: ‘The widow’s untiring pursuit of justice is translated into the ‘faith’ that should mark the church’s welcome of the awaited Son of Man’ (Ringe, LUKE, loc.cit.)
In Nazareth town court, all rise hear ye hear ye the honorable U J Judge presiding, a woman who exemplifies the Greek word ‘upomone’, endurance, employs time and voice. You have time and you have voice. You have time and you have voice. Like Christ himself, she implores the implacable world to grant justice. Like Christ himself, she comes on a donkey of tongue and patience. Like Christ himself, she continues to plead, to intercede. Like Christ himself, she importunes the enduring injustice of this world. Like Christ himself she prays without ceasing. Like Christ himself she…endures. She is an example to us of how we should use whatever time we have and whatever breath remains–to pray, to attend to the holy, in conversation therewith, and so to work for good. It is prayer that is the most realistic and wisest repose of the anxious of this autumn of exasperation. By prayer we mean formal prayer, yes (more here another week). But by prayer we mean, too, the steady daily leaning toward justice, the continuous pressure in history from the voice of the voiceless and the time of the time bound.
Notice, waiting with us, this poor widow. She lacks power, authority, status, position, wealth. She has her voice and all the time in the world. Like Jesus Christ, whose faith comes by hearing and hearing by the preaching of the word.
If we are not to lose heart, in the seemingly unending search for justice, we shall need to pray always, to “relax into the truth”, and to give ourselves over to the divine presence in our midst. To give ourselves over to a real, common hope, and to be clear, not confused, courageous not timid about our hope:
In Jeremiah and in Luke there is a strange, eerie, abiding sense, one that we also feel, through it all, through it all, that we aspire for something better, we long and hunger for something better, a shared common hope. In conversation with all that is holy, we find, know, trust this.
We await a common hope, a hope that our warming globe, caught in climate change, will be cooled by cooler heads and calmer hearts and careful minds.
We await a common hope, a hope that our dangerous world, armed to the teeth with nuclear proliferation, even now teetering on the brink of their use, will find peace through deft leadership toward global nuclear détente.
We await a common hope, a hope 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.
We await a common hope, a hope that our country, fractured by massive inequality between rich children and poor children, will rise up and make excellent education and health care available to all children, poor and rich.
We await a common hope, a hope 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.
We await a common hope, a hope that our families, torn apart by abuse and distrust and anger and jealousy and unkindness, will sit at a long Thanksgiving table, this autumn, and share the turkey and pass the potatoes, and slice the pie, and, if grudgingly, show kindness and pity to one another.
We await a common hope, a hope 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.
We await a common hope, a hope 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 you own days be long upon the earth.
We await a common 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.
We hear the call to endure today. It is a daily practice, a daily discipline.
An example of endurance, in the figure of an importunate widow.
‘Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart’
Blessed Endurance
Jesus Is Thine
O What A Foretaste
Of Glory Divine
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
