Sunday
September 22
A Liberal Faith
By Marsh Chapel
Click here to hear the full service
Click here to watch the full service
Click here to hear just the sermon
A Liberal Faith
Mark 9: 30-37
September 22, 2024
Marsh Chapel
Robert Allan Hill
Opening
In this season, through this autumn, we embrace the various populations within the communion and congregation of Marsh Chapel, over the last 74 years. Today especially we recognize and affirm our Boston University Community. In other weeks, similarly, we greet and uphold our student community, our alumni community, our ecumenical community, our musical community, and our Live Stream community, around the globe, among others. You all, all you all, make us who we are, in ministry, a heart in the heart of the city, and a service in the service of the city, working daily at voice, vocation and volume.
Boston University and Marsh Chapel are alive, humming and spiritually energized as we come toward the Inauguration of our 11th President, Dr. Melissa Gilliam, this week, on September 27, 2024. You are warmly invited to attend the traditional service of Prayer and Thanksgiving, in President Gilliam’s honor, in Marsh Chapel, 9/27/24, at 10:30 am. Our chaplains will guide the service, the Dean will preach, the choir and Majestic Brass will bring the music. No reservations are needed. We look forward to seeing those who are able to be here with us! You are also warmly invited to view the Inauguration itself, held at 2pm, in Agannis Arena. The Dean will provide the Invocation, and student leaders from 6 religious traditions, guided by the Rev. Dr. Jessica Chicka, will bring the Benediction. You may view it on the Inauguration website, (https://www.bu.edu/inauguration-2024/) and a recording will be available in the days following the event. The live stream will include ASL interpreters and captioning.
Mark 9
Our gospel today is from Mark, the earliest of the four. The passage that begins at 9:33 was probably a list of instructions that Mark had inherited from the earlier church. This in itself, for those of us listening for good news in century 21, carries thrill. We are listening in upon a conversation from the middle of the first century! The language of the passage, a regular reminder here helps, is common Greek, the language of bills of lading, of general commerce, of death certificates, of letters, of news and announcements. Jesus spoke no Greek. Another generation, another society, communicating in a different setting and especially in a different language, has shaped the passages that came into Mark’s hands.
The needs of the church, not unlike our needs today, pressed upon the community of those who had committed themselves to the Crucified. Now it is not very hard to identify what these issues were. Power and weakness, authority and authenticity, internal leadership and external care. Anyone who has been around religious life, or life, will testify to the endless contention and intractable difference lurking in every budding community, and every congregation committed to love. In the struggles of the early church—over leadership and welcome—this collection of sayings and instructions found its birth. There are clues that set off these passages as later constructions, significantly later than the walks along the roads of Galilee that Jesus and his disciples surely took. Capernaum, in Galilee, was a reminder to the many Greeks that Jesus took interest in the land of the non-Jews, Galilee of the Gentiles. Also, when Jesus is portrayed as advancing toward the disciples (as he is here, questioning rather than responding), the interests of the early church are being carried forward with his question.
The two issues here, practically speaking, future preachers of America take note, are the hallmarks of pain in pastoral ministry. Who has authority? Who is in and who is out? Leadership and welcome. Every church issue since King David slew Uriah the Hittite can be traced roughly to authority and inauguration, power and welcome. In trying, probably with limited success, to address these issues, unknown memories and unseen voices recalled and applied memories to needs.
Who is to lead? Did not Jesus acclaim service? Did Jesus not live a life of servant suffering? This will be our way, too.
Who is welcome? Did not Jesus embrace children? Did not children, the weakest and least and least powerful become for him the sign of the divine? This will be our way, too.
The church opens to all, particularly the least, last and lost. ‘As you have done it to the littlest (gk) of these, you have done it to me…’.
This morning you see the stoles worn here, signs of yokes, of humble service. Once I asked my mentor what was the single hardest thing about ministry? He said, ‘remembering that ministry is service’.
This morning you see the windows and doors of an open church, open especially and pointedly to those who differ, those who are fewer, those who are weaker and littler in every regard. OnceI asked my dad once what hope our church had. He said, ‘well, we have tried to remember the poor.’ Anyone who has ever had issues with authority has good company here. Anyone who has ever struggled with inclusion has good company here.
Mark has taken the tradition before him into a new fight. Yes, he with us will affirm the bedrock yes to service and love of children, with our Lord Jesus. Yes, Mark with us will slake our communal thirst on the record that others too struggle over leadership and inclusion. But Mark has other fish to fry, too. He composes a short introduction to this passage, that places all that came before in a new light. He makes these stories to serve his larger war against the disciples.
In Mark, the disciples are ‘reprobates’ (T Weeden). They just do not ever get it. They misunderstand. They misinterpret. They willfully disagree and disregard Jesus and his teaching. Jesus must regularly condemn them, often in terms harsher than those used against the Pharisees. The disciples are McHale’s Navy, the crew of the Titanic, the captain of the Minnow headed for Gilligan’s island. You miss the Mark in Mark if you miss this. He excoriates the disciples, and attacks them at every point. Why?
Because. The disciples represent for Mark those in his own church who are interested in glory. Jesus here is Mark’s voice, reminding his own people of the way of the cross. The disciples are those miracle loving, glory seeking, happy and easy living, strong and handsome and beautiful emerging ‘leaders’ in the church at Rome. After all, Rome was the center, and used to the best. Why not in the church as well?
Mark’s opponents want ease. Jesus speaks of suffering. Mark’s ‘disciples’ garner power. Jesus speaks of weakness. Mark’s foils and foiled disciples expect that faith will ever and always empower, heal, help, enrich, enhance, embolden. Jesus says again: ‘here comes betrayal, here comes struggle, here comes suffering, here comes the cross.’ “The evangelist, here and elsewhere, is intentionally criticizing the disciples (they want power, they refuse humility, they do not suffer children, they do not welcome)” (Again, T. Weeden, Traditions in Conflict).
How you lead your life is directly dependent upon how you view the Christ of God. Christology forms discipleship. A Christ of great fame, fortune, future—this Christ will create a certain kind of discipleship, a discipleship of glory. Notice, in America today, the pervasive presence of this pseudo-Christ. To this, elsewhere and similarly, Paul, Apostle said, ‘suffering produces endurance, endurance character, character hope, and hope does not disappoint’.
Boston University
George Eliot’s beautiful book, Middlemarch, holds a scene in which an Anglican priest gives a sermon. It was, as she writes, ingenious, pithy and without book. This morning our word is none of the three, but is one hopes a celebration of what is creative, and what is brief, and what is memorable.
We cherish the history traditions of our University, marvelously soon on display this coming week, two hundred year of faithful liberality. BU is born of and embodies a liberal faith. Our traditions show a range and robust versatility over almost 200 years of service. We could borrow and employ H Richard Niebuhr’s book outline from some years ago, to point to the various versatilities in our midst.
That is, Boston University leans against culture. You welcomed women, religious minorities, people of color, the poor and the foreign in the first ranks of students here, not waiting on the culture around for support—at the time there was none. Boston University also lives inculture. Our green line trolley and our hockey team remind us so. Boston University further and also can soar above culture. As a summer live stream participant in Marsh Chapel Boston University worship, every Sunday, whether by music or by word or by both, arrested me and reminded me so. That choir scorches the angels wings. Thank you. Boston University has a complicated, paradoxical engagement with culture around. We are tax exempt but pay large sums in lieu of taxes. We live a separate community life, yet one strung along the river, one adjacent to Common and Garden, one close on an after worship walk to the very Atlantic ocean along our coast. And Boston University, perhaps most especially, at our best, not always, and not consistently, but at our best, transforms the culture around us. In study of football impacts. In the Tulane students, 1000 strong, brought here in 2006 to escape Katrina. In the artistic and service celebrations on campus but also afar, in Tanglewood, for years at the Huntingdon theater. In education offered in prisons, and support offered in city schools. In community service trips at Spring Break, and in scholarships for bright, worthy and needy Boston 18 year olds. Yes, BU, you are all the above, against culture, in culture, above culture, in paradox with culture, and, especially, transforming culture. The transformational Anglican priest, John Wesley, who founded Methodism and so gave life to 128 schools and colleges, starting with BU, and running all the way to Southern California, would be proud. The transformational 16th President of these United States, Abraham Lincoln, States still, if by a thread, yet united, and living at our best with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, would be proud. The finest preacher of the 20th century, a BU graduate of 1955, who had the courage to have a dream and the courage to evoke a dream and the courage continually to dream, would be proud. Wesley at your front door. Lincoln in your stained glass. King on your plaza. Transformation not just education. Transformation not just education. Transformation not just education. This is who you are BU, what you are about BU, what makes you distinctive better and best.
Or, said otherwise, yours is a liberal faith.
You may have been reminded, in our season, of the choices made in cable network so-called journalism, where confusion and timidity, have been found in full this year, in equal measure.
You may have been reminded of the cultural demise all around us, to the shame of us all, the acceptance of bullying and demagoguery, the normalization of vulgarity and sexism, the accommodation of buffoonery and megalomania, our willingness to have our children and grandchildren so surrounded in a culture careening into a nihilistic abyss.
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. It is not just the processes, the systems, the organizations and structures that matter, it is the people. 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, as Yeats intoned, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity..
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. This depth of despond your liberal faith resists.
Coda
To conclude. A liberal faith recalls, honors and evokes Mark 9. Dean Neville wrote it clearly some years ago: “I invite you into the humble way Jesus preached. Seek not arrogance but poverty of spirit, not vengeance but mourning for those who harm and are harmed, not a “me first” way but meekness, not avarice and materialism but a hunger and thirst for righteousness, not retribution but mercy, not conniving for position but purity of heart, not war but peace, not victory but persecution for righteousness’ sake. The humble will be persecuted for righteousness’ sake, do not mistake that. Humble people and nations are not life’s winners in the material sense. But they are indeed life’s winners in the spiritual sense that counts. The humble will be blessed. The arrogant will be brought down. The last shall be first and the first shall be last.” (RCN, Preaching Without Easier Answers, 188.)
