Sunday
August 25
A Summer Look to the Future
By Marsh Chapel
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A Summer Look to The Future
John 6: 56-65
August 25, 2024
Marsh Chapel
Robert Allan Hill
It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.
Jan and I stood alongside our burial plots one afternoon. (I trust it will be many decades before we need to use them!).
Our post retirement home is nestled in a long forgotten, old village cemetery in Eaton NY. Eaton is the northern tip of Appalachia, economically, culturally, geographically and historically. Its rural poverty has come rather lately to its 250 year history, but is as harsh and weather beaten as any such rural immiseration. Its country culture receives some odd jostling from Colgate University and Hamilton College, both a very few miles away. Its spot on the edge of the great cliff of the Allegheny plateau places it at 1200 feet above sea level, with lakes and great lakes 1200 feet below within a thirty minute drive. Its history includes nearby Peterboro, a town built in the 1850’s by Gerritt Smith for freed slaves, some of whose descendants live there still; and the Oneida Community next door, whose three hundred Perfectionists lived ostensibly without sin and within complex marriage for thirty years, 1845-1875; and the shores of Gichigumi the shining big sea water, near the wigwam of Nicomis, daughter of the moon, the homeland of Hiawatha, 1200 feet down north.
Our burial neighbors will include some born before the Revolution, some several who died in the Civil War, many veterans of the wars of the 20th century, and one fellow, who was interred in 1962, but in whose youth fought with Teddy Roosevelt in the Spanish American War. One wonders about the ongoing work of mowing and trimming, and moreso about the volunteer leadership needed to keep managed a venerable, small graveyard. There had been no burials this calendar year, to date. They bury until November 1 and then after May 1 or as soon as the ground thaws in the spring.
Jan said she liked the spot. I volunteered that this was good since we would be there for a while. Actually, when you amortize $400 per plot over the course of eternity, the cost is really very little. Housing costs are way too high in Boston, and across the country, but not in the Eaton Village Cemetery. Of course, I had sometimes mused about having a bit more upscale social location, going forward. Maybe something on the East Coast—Chatham, Castine, the Cape, North Hampton—something with an ocean view, and certain standards of comportment, attire and presentation. But Jan reminded me that I am a Methodist preacher, a country preacher at that, and cannot afford ostentation, neither fiscally nor spiritually. Besides, she counseled, see all the beauty here…Yes, see it, and hear it…
Beauty is heard as well as seen. We walk past this place so I know what the music of that meadow brings. The rooster, or more than one, as dawn breaks. The cattle, feet away, lowing, as cattle do. The wind in the evergreens and the two Oak trees. An occasional auto, a more occasional truck, a very much more occasional airplane. Visitors with crosses and flags and flowers and tears. And then the sound of nothing, of silence. Hush, hush, somebody’s calling my name. In the deep winter the deep silence is sonorous. I think of the four months of real winter, and the covering, the bed cloth of four feet of snow, and it is well with my soul.
Let me reveal that I say all this for a discreet homiletical purpose. I preach as ‘a dying man to dying men’, as Luther counseled. More so, our series of summer sermons has addressed a look to the future, a language of promise in the face of death. The cosmic resurrection of Christ and the life he offers is a word of hope, spoken into the teeth of cosmic, universal, individual, personal death. All of our sermons this summer have been very human attempts to announce this unseen hope, embedded, deeply embedded in New Testament language and imagery, and keenly, and preternaturally, this morning, in John 6. Remember some of the preachments of summer 2024. Consider divine metaphors. Note the saving importance of sabbath rest, of taking a break, a breather. Remember we are all in the family, so befriend a student. Ponder the miracles of seeds and growth. Honor both lineage and legacy. Know your history, and honor it. Use but don’t abuse power. Learn others’ names. Recall that Jesus is the beautiful bread of life. Bless and be a blessing.
Sometimes, at our worst, we move through life with the supposition that death comes just to others, to other people and peoples. It is something that befalls others. This very human daily supposition is not limited to young adults, to this new wave of temporarily immortal 18 year olds soon to wash up upon the BU beach. Nor is it limited to distracted, over technologized middle aged parents, trying to keep a household afloat amid the struggles of our era. Nor is it limited to the mature, or the very mature, we who should probably know better. Time flies? Ah no. Time stays. We go.
A pastoral digression. I you to an exercise for this week or some week. It is patented, informally, by me, but I give it freely. It is the RAH OOPS formula for preparation for post-retirement. O: write your obituary, at least a first draft which others can redact as needed. O: compose your funeral order of worship with hymns and texts and participants and memorials. P: select a photograph you do not mind being used in days of grieving, in the newspaper or in the funeral home. S: locate your resting space, your place and manner of burial or cremation. Place these materials, in the same box or safe deposit box in which you already, already, have placed your DNR, your living will, your will (you may choose to remember Marsh Chapel in your will by the way), and any other significant materials. How your family will thank you! But, as you are mortally aware, all of this preparation, good as it is, is not good enough, not enough.
For all of this preparation lacks the main thing needed in a summer look to the future, in the face of the power of death, which William Stringfellow so ardently and artfully described, and at the grave, at the end. And that is the bread of life. And that is hope, the feast of the bread of life. The New Testament is a language of hope lifted in the face of death. At least, this is how I would conclude and summarize our announcement of the Gospel this summer, our summer series ‘A Look To The Future’.
We have both the freedom and the responsibility at Marsh Chapel to ring the bells of learning and piety, of mind and heart together, in a way that will inspire and guide another generation by the best insights of the faith we share. We have aimed high and stretched out. While there are few University pulpits remaining across the country, and very few open and alive 52 weeks a year, your support, your generosity, the ongoing support of Boston University, and the hard labor of my staff and colleagues here, and the generosity of our guests from around the country, continue to allow us to treat hard topics with tough love.
For in John 6, the Gospel is a song of hope, a hope of heaven on earth, a divine hope. It asks of us a certain height, a certain inclination, a change. It moves our self, our being to a new center, one in the green pasture, the great meadow of hope.
In 1954, Howard Thurman, then in his first year as Marsh Dean, gave lectures at what was to become my alma mater, Ohio Wesleyan. These later were collected in a book, THE CREATIVE ENCOUNTER. With his minimal Christology, tangential connection to Paul, perennialist inclination against narrow religion, and distrust of large portions of the biblical tradition, Thurman would at first seem an unlikely interpreter of biblical material. Yet his typically digressive, imaginative reflections, that winter’s OWU Merrick lectures, at one point touch the marrow of our theme for this summer, and today’s gospel. Thurman is trying to examine and explain the religious experience (notice his phrase). I wonder if you have had such? Its measure for him is not unlike the look to the future, lifted this summer:
“There is a point at which for the individual the surrender of the self in religious experience gives to life a purpose that extends beyond one’s own private ends and personal risks…What happens then when there is a new center of focus for the life? The answer to that, in part, is this. At such a time as the new center becomes operative, the individual relaxes his hold upon himself as expressed in the self-regarding impulse. A different kind of value is placed upon his physical existence. Death no longer appears as the great fear or specter. The power of death over the individual life is broken. (73-81, THE CREATIVE ENCOUNTER).
I wonder. Are you sensing the divine generosity inviting your one life to circle around a new center? Prayer will guide you. Even suffering will perhaps prod you. A moment in worship may lift you up. A friend, a word, a kindness, a note, a sunset, a kiss, a laugh—these are intimations of religious experience that are not religious. But real they are. I wonder. Is your center shifting? And next week, with students with us, will we nod, smile, greet, offer a Methodist handshake, learn a name?
I believe, in a way I cannot understand in full or articulate in full, that God’s love outlasts death, is stronger than death, and overpowers death. But is something I do not see. It is something I sense, though I cannot see it.
But who hopes for what he sees? We hope for what we do not see. And wait for it with patience!
For, to conclude, in John 6, food carries memory.
I turn again to Marcel Proust, whose thousands of print pages burst forth from the memory of a long-lost moment of tea and Madeleine cakes, the cakes swirling dreamily in the tea. Meal and memory. One came back again this week, memory in a sandwich.
When I was 16, in the middle of the autumn we were dislocated or relocated to a new home by the remarkable ministrations of the Methodist church. It was November, and we all suddenly had a new house, a new neighborhood, a new room, a new city, a new school, a new church, and not a single friend. The school was a large urban school which was in the throes of serious unrest, some chaos and violence, and yet still with a fine building, faculty, and program.
There is a teenager alone in the cafeteria. For some days he goes alone to lunch, after trigonometry and before chemistry. He is not very artfully dressed. Some of that is the culture of the day and some is just who he is. He knows really no one. He is white in largely black school, over tall and awkward, hoping against hope to make the basketball team, inquisitive but not too eager to show it, curiously glad for a new and strange city environment and yet deeply lonely at the dislocation of the move. You can see him on these many days at the lunch period. He sits with his back to the wall, close enough to some others not to appear solo. The school—and by extension the world around—run quite well without any recognition of his being there. He feels something that is hard and throat-lodged and aching and chilling and strange. He is homesick for a home that no longer exists. He hurts too much to laugh and he is too tall and adult- looking to cry.
In a month or so a group of other young men, Chris Bennett and Joel Burdick and Chris Heimbach, will somehow oddly include him in lunch, as if he had been there for the previous ten years, which he had not. But right now he is alone, out on a boat, and shore is a long way off. And a shared meal seems like it will never come and if it did it might just be too awesome and too wonderful to receive. So he leans the chair against the wall. He watches the cultural tensions and hatreds. He memorizes the periodic table. He tries not to look conspicuous in any single way. He looks at the girls and wonders what he could possibly say to any of them. He looks forward to basketball. He feels what it takes a young heart really to feel.
Every day he carries to his back table a brown sack. This is a full maternal meal, fairly hastily but utterly lovingly prepared in the earlier morning before the two mile walk to school. It is the same lunch every day. Bread and fish, tunafish. Two full sandwiches. Some chips. Carrots. Cookies, sometimes made at home. And it will take another fifty years for him to fully appreciate—to taste—what he could already feel against the cafeteria wall. At least here, in this meal, for all the depressing dislocation and frightening foreignness and leavened loneliness all around, here was something to eat. Prepared with love. As reliable as the sunrise and the seasons. Or, Grace, in the midst of dislocation, as John 6 would say. The sandwiches come slowly day by day out of their tight wrap. They taste the same, reassuringly the same. Maybe, day by day, this is really all we get, a taste.
You know, starting next Sunday there will be some 18 year olds around here, maybe waiting for a kind word, a greeting, someone to encourage them, maybe some of that coming from you and me. Sursum corda!
It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.
