Sunday
November 6
A Communion Meditation for All Saints
By Marsh Chapel
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My goodness, you certainly have come to know some colorful characters, some new friends, this autumn.
One of these folks said to Jesus, ‘I will follow you wherever you go’. But Jesus warned him, ‘foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head’. I wonder whether he followed or not, don’t you?
Then there was the man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. He fell among robbers who stripped him and beat him and left him half-dead. You remember that neither the priest nor the Levite stopped to help, but a foreigner, a Samaritan did, and brought him to an inn and paid for his expenses. I wonder whether they became friends, wounded and healer, don’t you?
Martha and Mary, worker and prayer, both, met you as they meet their Lord, in the pages of Holy Writ. One thing is needful they learned. I wonder whether that one thing is faith, don’t you?
Then there was that woman who had been sick for 18 years, whom Jesus healed—on the sabbath—with a flick of the wrist. I wish we had heard more about her, don’t you?
Remember later that man who had two sons, and one went off to a foreign land and failed? He came back having to climb the hill of defeat and seek help again, where ‘when you have to go there they have to take you in’, that is–home. A best robe, a ring on his finger, a calf killed and cooked, and an older brother stewing out in the field. Did they ever reconcile, don’t you wonder whether they did?
And that fellow, that dishonest steward, he was a character for sure. Yet he had something we can use too, a way to manage risk, a capacity not only to generalize and not only to specialize but also—to improvise. How did he come up with that, I wonder?
Then you met up with a rich man dressed in purple whose name was hidden, a poor man with sores and hunger, who had the name Lazarus. There was a misty haze of judgment in the air, wasn’t there? There was a recognition that there does come a time when it is too late, wasn’t there?
Later you came into another place and found a persistent woman battling with an unjust Judge, who feared neither God nor man. She wore him out, wore him out, with a blessed endurance. Where did that long suffering come from, don’t you wonder?
Or that tax collector, who said only one thing, and all around him could hear his cry, ‘God…be merciful to me, a sinner!’ A spirited kind of humility he had did he not?
Then there is the wee little man sitting in the Sycamore tree—you remember him, I know, from just a few days ago. He came down a notch or two. What was that all about, don’t you wonder?
My goodness, you certainly have come to know some colorful characters, some new friends, this autumn and this year. You have Luke to thank. Luke has assembled this chorus of life-long friends for you and me.
Dime con quien andas, y te dire quien eres, say the Spaniards: tell me with whom you walk, and I will tell you who you are. The saints of God include all of the church visible and invisible. But then there are those close saints who have formed you. Luke in his remembrance of Jesus teaching has given us these. What a gift. A particular, personal gift. Your summer preachers brought others of these home to you last July and August. Read through some of those homilies again when you have a chance. I am so thankful for the new Lukan friends you have made together this autumn. They are saints of God, Scriptural saints of God.
What would your new Lukan friends say to you, to interpret these beatitudes?
Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.
Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.
Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man.
Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven.
For that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.
Would they say to all, would they say a single word like, well, VOTE!!
Would they say to all, a challenging word whether you have thought about what you did and sought a kind of contrition, compunction, lament for what those choices in retrospect have come to mean. What you meant is not what it has come to mean, is it? What you meant is not what it means.
Would they say to all to watch for the failures and errors of our own perspective, like false equivalences, like the churchly willingness to supplant the great with the good, like the foolishness of some slogans?
Would they say to all, what on earth are leaving on earth in respect of a healthy hopeful country, a healthy hopeful democracy, for your grandchildren?
Vote, lament, critique, hope. Seek the good. What was good yesterday is good today, by the main.
That is one of the hard things about making new friends. They draw you out in new ways, which is truly wonderful but can be challenging. Let them teach you, speak to you, converse, converse, converse with you.
Luke teaches us by example, does he not?
He is showing us, in his own biblical way, that we have every right and much reason to canonize our own guiding lights, our own formative figures, our own saints, come All Saints Sunday.
So, let me ask you: Who is the patron Saint of your life? Who are the saints of God whom you would like to emulate, to be one too? We have patron saints of entire countries, patron saints of schools and movements, patron saints of days and holidays. Perhaps we should begin to add the patron saints of the faithful, of you and your neighbor and your sister and your brother. What saints led the way, for you?
In a jarring, jolting way, this question settled in during the past week. A preacher of renown, of the first water, a little older but not much, who hallowed the halls of Union Theological Seminary in the 1970’s and then the crowded streets of New York City for the next fifty years as the Senior Minister of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem—the pulpit of Adam Clayton Powell junior and senior before—died at age 73. His voice carries still, carries us forward, one of the great, leading African American preachers and teachers of our era, the Rev. Dr. Calvin Butts. He was also, at the same time, for decades, the President of a NYC College, SUNY College of Old Westbury on Long Island. That is, he was an academic preacher, a University pastor, a person committed to unite the pair so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety. Our fellow classmate sent an early morning email to let me know. He showed many of us the way, the way of University ministry. In mourning Dr. Butts, and then in thinking about All Saints Sunday, an avalanche of a world of memory, and maybe even understanding cascaded down.
You are sitting alongside one of the historic, leading University pulpits anywhere, with six deans since its dedication in 1950. How does one end up here? Saints preserve us and prepare us, who toiled and fought and lived and died the whole of their good lives long. You see it if you see it at all in hindsight, over long time. By age 6, the Sunday morning preacher at Colgate University—Adam Clayton Powell’s alma mater—the gruff and growling Robert V. Smith was a known shadow presence in our Hamilton NY home. He hosted Julian Bond, a young African American vice-presidential candidate in 1968, to preach in the Colgate pulpit, where many of us heard him for the first time. By age 16, the Sunday morning preacher at Hendricks Chapel in Syracuse NY, the Rev. Dr. John Knight, who brought the first Mosque to SU and the city itself, was known shadow presence in our Syracuse home. By age 21, the weekly preacher at Gray Chapel, Ohio Wesleyan University, the Rev. Dr. James Leslie, whose own father taught my father Old Testament here at BU, was a campus presence, and when asked where one should go to Seminary, replied in a quiet wise voice, ‘Yale, Union, or BU’. The long time anti-war preacher on Sunday mornings from Bechtel Chapel at Yale, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, shepherded us from the high pulpit of Riverside Church in the heart of the Columbia University campus through age 25. His successor, an academic preacher with a Pentecostal flair, and our own homiletics professor, the Rev. Dr. James A. Forbes, guided us by precept and example from afar for 20 years. Rev. Dr. N. T Wright filled the Henry Birks Chapel at McGill University over many years, including the 10—yes 10!—years, to age 45, of our doctoral study there. Peter Gomes and Will Willimon, Harvard and Duke, drew us on, close competitors and rivals to the voice of Marsh Chapel, before and during our time here, who gave choral echo, retort and compliment to the deans of this Chapel, Franklin Littell, Howard Thurman, Robert Hamill, Robert Thornburg, Robert Neville, and Robert Hill. Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor left church—see her book of that title—for the campus nearby, preaching all the while and everywhere and all the time. Who could see, whether at Colgate in 1968, or coming to Marsh Chapel in 2006, who could see the weaving and interweaving of all these voices, Calvin Butts included, what somehow subliminally, in holy, ghostly way, prepared the way for the present work, the current and ongoing work, in his pulpit?
In chorus, on this first Sunday of November, they would say especially to young adults, present this morning and listening, a single word: Vote. Lament. Critique. Hope.
But two saints unnamed yet, a father and father in law, Irving Hill and Robert Pennock, who both and equally both loved both the church and the college, and showed it and lived it, along with but more personally than the others, could nudge and affirm and smile to say, when the chips were down, ‘yes, a University pulpit, the pulpit of Marsh Chapel would be a great place for ministry’. You see? We don’t see until we see in retrospect. So all that was going on, wrote Thornton Wilder in Our Town, and we hardly noticed.
Asked Carlyle Marney, ‘who told you who you was?’ When the chips were down?Who are the patron saints not of Ireland or Scotland or Boston or Boston University, but the patron saints of your life, your living, your calling, your vocation, your self, your soul, your very soul? The pattern may not yet have formed for you, or may not have been visible, until this very hour.
Luke had his. We have ours. You have yours. Sing a song today, a song of the saints of God!
For all the saints, who from their labors rest
Who Thee by faith before the world confessed
Thy name O Jesus be forever blessed!
Alleluia! Alleluia!
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
