Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

From Fear to Hope

Mark 9: 38-50

Alumni Weekend, September 29, 2024

Marsh Chapel

Robert Allan Hill

Alumni Weekend itself is a two-level drama, a stereoptic, bifocal collision of past and present, of hope and fear, of what we expect on the one hand, and what we experience on the other, expectation and experience never quite becoming equivalents.

On Alumni Weekend you walk past a classroom where you heard something new. As was once said by a famous baseball player, ‘It’s déjà vu all over again’. You see a teacher’s office where you learned the hard news about a midterm result. You pass by a tree under which you hugged or kissed your then boyfriend or girlfriend.   Your memory is quickened by the spatial, locational power of a sunset on a river, or a trolley bell ringing, or the crack of the bat and the roar of the crowd. You watch and you see.

As Yogi Berra also said, ‘You can observe a lot just by watching’.

But all these memories are held in a new way, in a second level recollection, that of today as today looks at yesterday.   You enter a restaurant and where others simply see a television, you see a television on which you watched and heard 7^th BU President John Silber interviewed in 1980 on 60 minutes by Mike Wallace. You look out over Nickerson field while others watch soccer, and you remember a football game. (Oops…). You sit in Marsh Chapel as the sermon meanders on toward its inevitable conclusion, or what you hope will be its proximate conclusion, but you hear some other voice once uttered here, or a song once sung here, or a prayer once dropped with a full heart into the prayer request box.

Three honored alumni once spoke in this manner. ‘BU became my passport’. ‘At BU I grew up’. ‘Here I was taught that the authority of the highest idea should prevail over the idea of the highest authority’. (Not who has the idea, but what idea is best; not power but truth.)

Time and space are not quite as absolute in determination of our being as sometimes we think. It helps to have a bifocal, stereoptic vision, a two-level drama, of sorts.

That is the nature of the New Testament, shot through from Matthew to Revelation with apocalyptic language and imagery. Our Holy Scripture, both Holy and Scripture, is both heaven and earth.   It is both sacred and secular, at the same time, both divine and human. Its Word walks with human feet and sings with divine voice. Its word faces earth: Gaza, Lebanon, Ukraine, Hurricane, Election, All. Yet its word sings with a divine voice to remind each one of us that we are children of the living God.

(By the way, the apocalyptic warnings of Mark 9 are not to be taken literally. We know this. We know about hyperbole. Even the convoluted hyperbole of a famous ballplayer describing a once favorite restaurant: ‘Nobody goes there any more—it’s too crowded’. Let us pause one good moment to recognize that, and why, we do not understand the Bible as utterly inerrant and divine. The Bible is inspired and so inspires us, and is our first point of reflection, prototypical but not archetypical—first but not exclusive in the church’s long history of the search for truth. These verses, harsh and judgmental, need careful interpretation. So, Matthew cuts half of them, in his use of Mark 15 years afterward. So, Luke cuts all of them in his use of Mark 20 years later. Even Mark himself shifts the weight from fear to hope, even in this passage, as he wrestles to interpret what he has inherited, from whatever source: be salt, have peace among yourselves, who is not against us is for us.)

Charles Wesley wrote hymns, many of which we still sing, and found the music, the melodies and harmonies, in the sung music of his day, did he not? St John of the Cross, the greatest of Spanish mystics, whose poetry strikes the heart to this day, composed his lyrics with the help of Italian, pastoral love poetry, did he not? The author of the Song of Solomon, who wrote a torrid, fierce, erotic ballad of human of love, would perhaps have been bemused to see how quickly Judaism made of it by analogy the love of God for the covenant people, and how quickly Christianity by analogy made of it the love of Christ for his church, we she not?

In our time, wherein the attempt to embrace the secular with the sacred, to express a faith amenable to culture and a culture amenable to faith, to unite the pair so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety, has become marginal, pitiable, nearly a lost cause, of a sudden, this Sunday, Come Sunday, we have music, sacred, Scripture, holy, word, current, and silence, heavenly, all made sacred, for us, among us, in ordered worship For all our fears, of heaven and of earth, this one hour does ring out a note of hope, does it not?

We remember St. Augustine’s proverb, ‘Hope has two beautiful daughters, anger and courage’

Hope indeed has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage. Anger at the way things are. And courage to see that they do not remain as they are.

Our community, including our Alumni, and our choir, and our congregation offer out into the unseen world around a dynamic dialogue, of heaven and earth, of sacred and secular, of divine and human. Here at Boston University!

We cherish the history and traditions of this University, marvelously on display this week, nearly two hundred years of faithful liberality.  BU is born of and embodies liberality, a liberal sort of faithfulness.  Our traditions show a range and robust versatility over almost 200 years of service.  So this week, we borrow and employ H Richard Niebuhr’s book outline from some years ago, to point to the various versatilities in our midst.  Against, In, Above, In Paradox, Transforming.

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. I am prejudiced, but 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. One said to me, ‘That choir scorches the angels’ wings’. 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 hundreds of Tulane students, 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 Menino 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.

So, Alumni and friends, let us remember our heritage and identity, even if It becomes difficult to do so.   A Christ against Culture alone fits easily and well with a popular Christianity, Bible drenched, which rejects the world around. Harder it is to think, speak and sing of a Christ in Culture, a Christ above Culture, a Christ in paradox with Culture, a Christ transforming Culture. So slips away the religious commitment. So also, from the side of the society, there grows an unwillingness to admit of the value of propositions that are not verifiable but may well be true. Harder and harder it is to say ‘if thine heart be as mine, then give me thine hand’, or ‘in essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, and in all things charity’. Or, as today, ‘have peace among yourselves…who is not against us is for us’

Yet here these are today, in the Gospel, interwoven. Fear and hope, both so deeply human, sing around and around each other. As we hear in the Scripture—who is not against us is for us; be at peace with one another.  Sometimes they surprise and heal us.

Here is a religious voice, speaking in the halls of government. Here is a faithful person, addressing the nations as united, in the United Nations. Here is a representation of the Holy, riding the streets of the most secular of cities. Not just the church mumbling its prayers behind closed doors; not just the culture, its government and its authority and its society, stumbling ahead with its decisions apart from a final horizon. But sacred and secular singing together.

Maybe, among other things, this is why there are still a few University pulpits, whose calling it is to remember and to remind that the point of education is transformation. What makes this University unique is its capacity to harness learning to help people. Education is meant to help people. Education is transformation. Period.

That is. On one hand, it is good to know as Einstein showed that gravity is a manifestation of the curvature in space-time resulting from the presence of matter and energy. On the other hand, it is great to see that insight and others like it making space, in new inventions and discoveries, for safety, for progress, for care, for health. Transformation that helps people.

Just for a moment. A heavenly hope embracing an earthly fear, both real, both true. Just for a moment, this Alumni Weekend morning, prayer, soul, eternity, faith, heaven, judgment, salvation, love, God.

This worship, this Scripture, this day, this week, this life, just now, they do give you a sense, for all our fears, that hope survives and may just prevail. After all, did not Mr. Berra also say, ‘it ain’t over ‘til its over’?

When people hear of us, hear of Boston University, perhaps they will think, Things are not as bad as we think they are, and these folks are helping to make things better.

Herein perhaps we find the valence of the dominical sayings,

He that is not against us is for us. He that is not against us is for us…

Have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another…

He that is not against us is for us. He that is not against us is for us…

Have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another…