Sunday
September 24
Divine Generosity
By Marsh Chapel
Click here to hear the full service
Click here to watch the full service
Click here to hear just the sermon
St Matthew intends to encourage and to nurture full steps in faith, within the community of faith. Today, upon this Boston University Alumni Weekend Sunday, we remember and affirm that Marsh Chapel is one such community of faith, a precious jewel, a rare breed, a novel venture, an open window. Your community. Yours.
In Matthew 20, in the vineyard, our parable represents the ‘undifferentiated rewards of the Kingdom of God’. (Bultmann) The parable affirms divine generosity, and inscrutable divine goodness and generosity. Its point: behold the divine generosity, do not begrudge the divine generosity. Its point, justice and equality are not the same thing. (repeat)
Consider this parable (found only in Matthew). All the workers are paid the same. As in life, so here in Scripture, there is no sure, consistent equality. To be sure, the landowner has paid what he agreed to pay. To be sure, hour by hour, the workers have received what they agreed to receive. To be sure, the daily needs of all for the day to come are met, from each according to his stamina and to each according to his needs. To be sure, the added proverb, about last becoming first and first last fits the parable awkwardly if at all. The parable acclaims God’s bounteous generosity, not God’s impartial equality. Justice and equality are not the same thing.
When a job truly fit and meant for you goes to another, on a shaky or unjust premise or process, you know the feeling of the early workers. When an illness unearned and unexpected afflicts your loved one, you know the feeling of those working among the grapes and feeling the grapes of wrath. When a day begins and ends as an existential illustration of Shakespeare’s 66th sonnet, you know the resentment addressed in the story from Matthew 20:1-16.
Here in the vineyard, the undeniable difference between equality and justice faces us, as it did Jesus, Matthew, the Rabbis and others. Jesus, loving the amhaaretz, the poor of the land, may have been telling the Pharisees to broaden their embrace. Matthew, among Jews and Gentiles, Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians, may have been admonishing the former to honor the latter. The Rabbis, in the same period, used the same story, but added, by way of explication that the later workers did in two hours what took the earlier ones all day. Very dubious that.
Our landowner, through Matthew’s rendering, is called an ‘OIKODESPOTES’, a person of some power. The allegory is clear. God is obliged to…nobody. Further, the timing of God’s grace and generosity is God’s own affair, only without prejudice either to the early or to the later. In this way, Matthew concurs with Paul in 1 Thessalonians and elsewhere that the living will not precede the dead, in the hour of judgment.
Our parable does not rely on the famous passage from Exodus 16, read a moment ago. (This too is a passage we should know and know about by the way.) Yet the acclamation of divine generosity in both is the same. Evening comes, and morning, and in the morning there is a sweet hoar frost covering all the ground, a layer of dew under which is the ‘manna from heaven’. ‘The bread the Lord has given you to eat”.
Here, in the vineyard, we have again to ponder the labor at the heart of life and the labor at the heart of faith. Faith comes by hearing, but it is an active, ‘employed’ listening that allows for that hearing. Faith is a gift, but is a gift like any other that requires receipt, and response, and embrace, (and maybe a thank you note, too). If faith comes by hearing it helps if you are in earshot, in worship. Faith comes as a gift at the time of God’s choosing, but to labor and live in faith requires of us a steady, even fruitful, practice of faith. Daily prayer or quiet. Sunday worship or devotion. Tithing or disciplined percentage giving. Choosing to serve or to volunteer. This is what Paul is driving at in his letter to the Philippians: live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ, striving side by side with one mind for the faith of the gospel.
I wonder about you? and me? Has the unfailing light and love of divine generosity worked on us at all this week? Are we better people than we were last Sunday? Have we heeded John Calvin on this parable: We may also gather that our whole life is useless and we are justly condemned of laziness until we frame our life to the command and calling of God. From this it follows that they labor in vain who thoughtlessly take up this or that kind of life and do not wait for God’s calling. Finally we may also infer from Christ’s words that only they are pleasing to God who work for the advantage of their brethren. (loc cit 266).
Our Scripture lessons explore the rigors of community, by acclaiming the generosity of God. And every community is a source of endless contention and intractable difference. The very rigors of assembling a couple of hundred people on a Sunday morning for an hour of devotion itself brings rigors. Yet, here you are, and here we are, together. God is good.
We come into and to worship with a heartfelt desire to grow in faith, to walk in faith, and to grow in faith as we walk in faith. One such step, one step in faith, is to find a congregational family to love and a congregational home to enjoy. To some measure, each of you, each of us, has so found that here in Marsh Chapel. For others this may be a moment when one has an inkling that this is your community, your congregational home, not only to visit but also to inhabit (notice the habit in inhabit). In the great long and happy shadow of divine generosity announced in Holy Scripture today, we step forward in a growing faith, to notice around and about us the particular aspects of divine generosity afforded us in this chapel. Here are some things you may or may not know about your community.
Marsh Chapel is a distinctive community, a congregation of souls, a chapel not a church, with the various differences and similarities so named, a congregation laden with hopes, tasks, plans and goals, all of which are steadily in motion.
We have hopes.
In 2025, we will celebrate the 75th anniversary of the building of Marsh Chapel (March 1950 dedication). And we lean forward with hope. We hope then also to celebrate a full or partial completion of the endowment of the Deanship of Marsh Chapel. We hope then also to celebrate the full physical refurbishment of the building, Marsh Chapel. We hope then also to celebrate the many hundreds of students who have heard a calling to or entered or continued on the path of ministry with the support and guidance of Marsh Chapel 2006-2024. We hope by then also to continue to show increase in our virtual community, audio and video both—on livestream, by telephone, by internet, on podcast, by blog, and all. As we move forward we hope then also to continue to welcome a growing number of students each week into the worshipful ministry of Marsh Chapel each and every week of the school year. We hope then also to encourage our congregants, students, chapter members and affiliates to volunteer weekly in a form of direct service to a neighbor in need. These are aspects of our shared faith and hope to ‘do all the good we can’ in our brief time of stewardship, ministry and service. All of these hopes rest on a global vision, a conviction that ‘the world is our parish’, and that we serve a University, Boston University, in the world and for the world, with a longstanding history of outreach and engagement, in the heart of the city, in the service of the city. That is, Marsh Chapel, Boston University, our focus will become more fully global. We shall retain our envisioned vision and mission without redaction, but the weight and sense will shift: ‘A heart in the heart of the city, a service in the service of the city’: meaning a heart in the heart of the globe, a service in the service of the globe.
The Scripture teaches, at the very conclusion of the gospel of Matthew, ‘as you go, make of all disciples’. We hope to serve God and neighbor, and be of service to our University in particular, through * Sunday Worship Excellence, *All University Events Ceremonial Leadership, *Pastoral Care at Death, *Astute Oversight of University Religious Life Ministry, Program and Presence, and, perhaps the hardest, ongoing exemplary *Embodiment of the University ‘Identity’, in History and Hope. These are our tasks, the work that your prayers, presence, gifts and service afford the University in which we dwell and for which we labor.
We also have plans.
A heart in the heart of the city, and a service in the service of the city. Our use of President Merlin’s epigram means city as the global city, and service as worship and work. Our foci guiding this envisioned mission are voice, vocation, and volume. We happily take our lead from the new, refreshed Boston University Plan, especially its own five-fold foci: academics, research, globality, diversity, community, and have our own renderings of such. In fact, the University plan seems deeply rooted in the very heart of Marsh Chapel itself. In weekly work, in staffing and strategy, in the warp and woof of shared ministry, we offer our gifts: through a leading academic University pulpit; through music choral and instrumental that carries an experimental, in that way a research dimensions; through particular attention to the 26% of our student body who are international students; through decades deep and daily commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion; and finally and mainly to the ongoing sharing of the gifts of belonging and community which religious life, including the Sunday congregation, offer with warm welcome and earnest outreach.
A couple of years ago, a friend was ordained as a Rabbi, and some of us were graciously included in the service. Throughout the beautiful service, the power of trusted voices and people stood out. The one ordained said, For over thirty years, I have been in a life-long love affair witb my faith, seeking a substantive connection to our tradition, and a close and meaningful relationship with God. Close, meaningful. These are the relationships that bring out our own-most selves. Steps in faith, nurtured by a community of faith, nurtured in this community of faith, are meant to bring out, bring forward, your best self, your true self, your own-most self. The old story holds. God’s divine generosity desires and affirms your life, lived as your own most self, not your almost self, as your own most self, not your almost self. The divine question is not, ‘Why are not more like Jane or John or Mary or Mark’ but, ‘Why are you not more like you?’ There is only one you, and in community, step by step in faith, we are given time, grace and support to become ourselves, our own-most selves
Hear the gospel. St Matthew intends to encourage and to nurture full steps in faith, within the community of faith, perhaps beginning for you this day, this morning in this community. Today, we remember and affirm that Marsh Chapel is one such community of faith, our community of faith, and with glad hearts give ourselves over to the joyful service of living our faith, step by step, here and now. We receive the divine generosity of God, and give ourselves over to the joyful service of faith.
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
