Sunday
July 9
Rest for the Soul
By Marsh Chapel
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Upon this summer Sunday, let us meditate on discipleship, and its gifts, and its expenses…its costs. Our gospel begins with the playful imagination of children in the marketplace. St. Paul wrote in a similar way to his Corinthian congregation:
God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty
Discipleship costs more than wisdom alone. The walk of faith evokes and involves a rest for the soul, embracing imagination, the free play of insight, the province of children and saints.
What a gift are the parables of Jesus! He taught them in parables, says the Scripture, and without a parable he taught not one thing.
Jesus stands in the marketplace. He sees two warring groups of children. All community is endless contention and intractable difference. One group wants to play a game called ‘weddings’: we have our pipes, we are ready to dance, come and join us, and let us play the game of weddings. Another group wants to play a game called ‘funerals’: we have our tears, our wailing, our gathered mourning clothes and forms, come and join us and let us play the game of funerals. One game for the enjoyment of life preferred by Jesus himself, one game for the dour, self-discipline for life, preferred by John the Baptist. Come and join!
Yet neither group will give way. Groups, as Reinhold Niebuhr taught us in Moral Man and Immoral Society, have a hard time changing direction, or giving way, or forgiving, or summoning an imagination ready for discipleship. That requires a childlike heart. It requires an imagination soaked discipleship. It requires the person whom you are meant to become. And it costs.
Did you ever know and love somebody who was always a bit on edge? I mean a beautiful person with a heart of gold, who was run raw by the gone-wrongness of life? This can be a rough world for a sensitive soul. Someone who has an unquenchable passion for getting things right and for knowing when things are wrong. A little of that can go a long way. If your very hunger is for what establishes, rests, the soul, you can sometimes go hungry.
Imagine with her eyes: Every child in the community was attending a safe, well-lit, quiet school, where virtually all could read at the sixth grade level by the time they finished the sixth grade level. Every sick person in the community had ample medical care, most of it preventive, and all of it shot through with a heavenly infusion of time, talent and money. Every person of color in the community felt confident entering the public spaces—theaters, churches, stadiums, stores—in every corner of the community. Every person is seen and heard as a real human being. That is her—and perhaps your—vision.
But around us, other. Around us a frightfully warming planet. Around us the generations deep effects of poverty. Around us horrific hourly slaughter in Ukraine, without even a single honest report of total deaths 500 days later. Around us the senseless needless shootings, gun deaths, to which we become inured. Around, yes, and within us, the anxieties and distrusts of our time. Imagine with her eyes, and feel with her soul.
Today the gospel offers her, and you, a word of promise, with a note of challenge, a word of challenge with a note of promise. Come to me all who labor and are heavy laden (challenge), and I will give you rest (promise).
Here at the University, at the fountain of youth, we are blessed with intelligence, vigor, freedom, and reason.
We want to be careful, and caring, though, so we pause here. We educators sometimes tend to leave civil society to the rest of society. We have much freedom, but how we choose to use it, in relation to the rest of community and society, is another matter. We after all have that next paper to write, 50 pages of small print not including footnotes, titled with some version of the title, ‘Obscurity Squared’. To do that, one needs a capacity to spend 12 hours a day alone in a library or in front of a computer screen. To do that, to write that series of scholarly papers become books become resume become tenure become professor, can risk leaving aside, if we are not careful, or leaving to others, if we are not careful, the imaginative stewardship of forms of civil society…
Girl Scout cookies. Umpire work for the Little League. Pinewood derby leadership. A seat on the PTA. Sunday worship. Neighborhood watch. Refugee resettlement work. These we have to leave in the hands of others, or at least we think we do, those basic cultural building blocks that rest on a willingness to sit quietly in dull meetings, hoping against hope for the blessed refrain, ‘I guess we’re done for tonight’. In civil society we have the chance to influence others, to be influencers, and to be influenced among others, in lasting, personal ways. You want to speak to others, to convince others, to educate—good. But. You cannot speak to others until or unless you speak for others. To speak to requires first to speak for. Others will not hear or heed you, and should not, in your speech to them, if they do not, with utter confidence, feel, feel, that you speak for them as well. To speak for, you have to be with. At breakfast. Playing golf. In book club. In church. At the YMCA. Then, only then, will you have enough funds in the relational bank when you need to withdraw some to say something that may then be audible. If you want people to hear you, preacher, you have to go and be with people, in visitation, on their turf, in community. If you want to speak to others, educators, you will have to find a way to speak for others, not just to others. This is the whole genius of American civil society, from the time of De Tocqueville. Whether we will find, in the humiliations of an era whose leadership is shredding inherited forms of civil society on an hourly basis, the humility to go out and suffer with and for others, over the better part of the next decade, in order then to speak, is an unanswered question. To get to an answer we may just need some imagination, costly imagination, in our discipleship, and some rest along the way. Finding it, it will find us in receipt of a glorious rest for the soul, one of the real gifts of summers—the point of summer.
Wisdom is vindicated by her deeds, saith the Lord. In challenging promise, and in promissory challenge. Our Gospel lures us and lures our imagination forward, for discipleship. Have we yet learned the lesson that what one meant—by an act, a word, a statement, a vote, say—is not all that such an act means? We have experienced this lesson this tough truth, in the last several years. The lesson, that is, that what you in your heart meant by an act, a word, a statement—a vote, is not in fact the limit of what that act, word, statement or vote means: in fact it is a small part, the greater part of the meaning being found in the effect, the impact, the historical influence of the deed. Wisdom is vindicated, known, in her deeds. Said our onetime Boston University Dean Ray Hart, The meaning of a text is found in the future it opens, the future it imagines, the future it creates. So too, the meaning of an act, a word, a statement, a vote, say, is found in the future, bright or dark, which it creates. What you meant is not what it means. For that, we have to listen to those harmed, or helped, by it. Meaning is social, not merely individual, hence our use of words, our developed language, our investment in culture, our life in community. You may have meant it one way, but its meaning is found along another. Such hard, tragic lessons, to have to learn and re-learn, in our time. And relearn again, in 2023 and in 2024.
Here, Jesus is our beacon not our boundary. Here Jesus is rest for the soul. Imagination is a costly dimension of discipleship that is waxing not waning, needed not superfluous, crucial not peripheral. Our lessons today, Genesis, Psalms, and Romans, presage the Gospel, and draw our imaginations to forms of authority, and our engagement with them. In Genesis, the authority in ancestry. In Psalms, the authority in government. In Romans, the authority in conscience. In all these, the writers struggle to imagine a way forward, following the promising light of the beacon across the challenge of the boundary.
Our parable brings us an invocation, a summer call to rest, rest for the soul. Pause and meditate a little this summer on your own enjoyment of play. Our esteemed Boston University colleague and beloved mentor, now of blessed memory, Peter Berger did so, in rumination about discipleship, years ago in his little book, A Rumor of Angels. He noticed moments of rest for the soul. I see some too. 1. I see grown men enthralled on a green field following a wee little white ball, which seems to have a mind of its own, for three or four hours in the hot sun. 2. I see grown women shopping together without any particular need, but immersed, self-forgetful, in the process of purchasing, God knows what. 3. I see emerging adults fixed and fixated, days on end, in a large puzzle on a long table. 4. Can you remember playing bridge in college all night long, to the detriment of your zoology grade? Peter Berger: A. In playing, one steps out of one time into another…When adults play with genuine joy, they momentarily regain the deathlessness of childhood. The experience of joyful play is not something that must be sought on some mystical margin of existence. It can readily be found in the reality of ordinary life…The religious justification of the experience can be achieved only in an act of faith…B. This faith is inductive—it does not rest on a mysterious revelation, but rather on what we experience in our common, ordinary lives…Religion is the final vindication of childhood and of joy, and of all gestures that replicate these. Last winter, one sophomore, breaking from study, said: “I played basketball today, on the intramural team—it was awesome.” Rest to, and for, the soul.
A wisdom vindicated, justified by her deeds, is a cost of discipleship. (St. Luke in his version has changed the ending to ‘justified by all her children’—maybe an even closer memory to the marrow of, the history of, the parable.). There is always a possibility of and for good. In every day, there is a possibility of and for good.
Hear again the imaginative wisdom of Boston University’s own one time personalist philosopher, Erazim Kohak, in The Embers and The Stars, with whose epigram we conclude, this summer morning, to kindle and draw on a rest for the soul:
‘Humans are not only humans, moral subjects and vital organisms. They are also Persons, capable of fusing eternity and time in the precious, anguished reality of a love that would be eternal amid the concreteness of time. A person is a being through whom eternity enters time.’ Op. cit. 208
Sursum Corda! Receive the Divine Gift of Rest for the Soul! A challenging promise, and a promissory challenge.
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
