Sunday
March 9
Lent 2025: Miguel de Unamuno
By Marsh Chapel
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Lent 2025: Miguel De Unamuno
Luke 4: 1-13
2025 Marsh Lenten Series
Marsh Chapel
March 9, 2025
Robert Allan Hill
The Marsh Lenten Sermon Series 2007-2025
In this Marsh Chapel pulpit, from 2007-2016, Lent by Lent, we identified a theological conversation partner for the Lenten sermons, broadly speaking, out of the Calvinist tradition, so important to the first 200 years in New England. With Calvin we encountered the chief resource for others we engaged over ten years—voices like those of Jonathan Edwards (2015), John Calvin himself, (2014), Marilyn Robinson (2013) (whom with gladness we greeted in the flesh here at Boston University April 11, 2023), Jacques Ellul (2012), Dietrich Bonhoeffer (a Lutheran cousin) (2011), Karl Barth (2010), and Gabriel Vahanian (2007), and themes like Atonement (2009) and Decision (2008), summarized with the help of Paul of Tarsus (2016).
For the next decade, we have turned to the Catholic tradition, so important in the last 200 years in New England. That is, in this decade, beginning with Lent 2017, the Marsh pulpit, a traditionally Methodist one, turned left, not right, toward Rome not Geneva, and we have preached with, and learned from the Roman Catholic tradition, and some of its great divines including Henri Nouwen (2017) Thomas Merton (2018) John of the Cross (2019), Teresa of Avila (2020), St Patrick of Assisi(2021), Dorothy Day (2022), Augustine of Hippo (2023), and Raymond Brown (2024). Next year will be our last in this Catholic series, before we turn in the next decade to figures from other world religions. You may have a thought or two, a suggestion about with whom we should converse in 2026. For now, we turn this Lent 2025 to Miguel De Unamuno.
First, Luke
Luke prepares the way for us on toward Unamuno.
“We want to mark the places and preserve the moments where we have encountered God’ (Ringe, loc cit).
You are following Luke well this year. Notice how roundly he changes Mark, here, too.
The other alternative is Matthew, who copies Mark nearly word for word. No, Luke has gone his own way, and given us the Lukan view, later than that of Mark, different from that of Mark, fuller than that of Mark. What do Luke’s additions amount to?
What others have seen and heard is meant to inspire us to see and hear, in prayer. Luke regularly and steadily supplements the narrative with additional moments of prayer. The most activist of the gospels is also the most passive, the most prayerful. Likewise, the whole ethos of exodus is emphasized in Luke. Yes, life is a journey. Yes, the journey of faith includes risk, distress, and pain. Yes, the sojourn in the wilderness is a cost of leaving the fleshpots of any Egypt, just as winter is the cost for summer. Luke is setting things right for the long haul. Prayer to nourish for the long haul. Journey as a metaphor for struggle over the long haul. Lordship, a higher and hierarchical Savior, to strengthen weakened knees and souls for the long haul. The presence of the divine will, soon for Luke to emerge in the body of the Church, to guide all for the long haul. Luke advises us to be ‘in it for the long haul’ whatever ‘it’ is. Luke gives Divine confirmation of Jesus’ Messiahship. It places into the history of Jesus what the later church believed, believes, knew, and preached. See: even during his life a few people knew and saw
We want to bear that mystery in our present, in our person, do we not? Tittle: ‘as he faced the possibility of suffering and death his mind reverted to the great figures of Israel’s past…let us place ourselves under the influence of Christ and even we will be transfigured…something of his glory will shine in our hearts and appear in our faces and show forth in our lives’.
Second, Unamuno
The voice of Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo (1864-1936) is singular for its frenzied call to consciousness, and to consciousness of man’s need of immortality. Hear just a snippet:
You ask me my good friend if I know how to incite delirium, vertigo, any madness whatsoever, among these orderly and placid masses that are born, eat, sleep, reproduce themselves and die. Is there no way to introduce a new epidemic of flagellants, or of Convulsionaries? And you speak of the millennium. (Nuestro Senor Don Quijote).
These words should be read aloud, as they have just been, for clearly the written words pin down and cramp the intended message more effectively than they help its communication. Oral presentation also occasions the dips and swells of the lector’s voice, the anxious movements of his limbs and torso, and the knowing or questioning glances of his eyes. It is easy to imagine Unamuno reading aloud most of his work; indeed, we are left with the thought that Unamuno’s most exciting creations may have been those spun out and lost in the afternoon ‘tertulias’. Only the most vibrant exposition would suit Unamuno’s expression of his total concern for one question: that of his own immortality. His craving of an after-life and his concomitant absolute fear of the possible disappearance of his own soul fuel all the myriad Unamunian works.
This gangling, bearded, Basque professor of Greek at the University of Salamanca, so often likened in appearance to an owl, indeed shared that animal’s nocturnal vision as he wrote from the heart of Castille, in the midst of the gathering noon darkness of the early twentieth century. His lived experience, in a time of political tumult, mirrors ours in America this Lent. Although primarily a teacher and writer, Unamuno’s political life was nearly as tumultuous as his writing. Appointed to the rectorship at Salamanca in 1900, Unamuno came to be well known before the fall of the monarchy. Alfonso XIII, while outwardly respecting Unamuno’s nascent world-wide audience, quietly had him removed as rector in 1914. In 1924 Primo de Rivera exiled him to the island of Fuerteventura. After six weeks of life as a ‘desterrado’ on the island, near the Canaries, Unamuno was permitted to return to Spain. Instead, he lived out the remaining six years of the dictatorship in Paris and Hendaye, writing little, reading little, in somewhat of a coma. With the fall of the dicatatorship, Unamuno was free to return to Spain. It is sufficient to say that while Don Miguel made his name in the literary world, he at the same time was deeply involved in the political evolution of his country. When Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship fell, Unamuno returned to the University of Salamanca and was reelected rector of the university in 1931, but in October 1936 he denounced General Francisco Franco’s falangists, was removed once again as rector, and was placed under house arrest. He died of a heart attack two months later. This Lent we shall converse with Unamuno, and learn with him, about life, about death, about faith, about immortality.
Third, Life
Five days ago here at Marsh Chapel about 1,100 students and others presented themselves for ashes, Ash Wednesday. Our hard-working Marsh Chaplains and team served many. The Chapel also hosted three Catholic services and the weekly contemporary Theological School service, wherein ashes were given. Hence, about 1,100. In the last few years, Ash Wednesday has begun to catch up with Easter and Christmas in active young adult participation. Why?
My middle name of late is ‘I don’t know’, which I don’t. One of our team preaches an Ash Wednesday sermon every year. ‘The ashes are not magic ashes’. But they draw. The touch draws. The solemnity, too. The whisper of mortality at the fountain of youth. The strange, numinous, yet public pause. The flesh of it all. On said, ‘it has become a moment for reset’. Yes, reset.
There is perhaps another cause or reason. Here, mid-winter, is an encounter with antiquity. For two millennia women and men have been preparing for a holy Lent. For two millennia women and men have stopped to remember, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. As our English chorister read it some years ago, Thou art DUST and to DUST though shalt return. Is this not subliminally why, in part, we are here this morning, too? For two millennia women and men have listened to readings from Holy Writ. For two millennia women and men have received Jesus in cup and bread. For two millennia, come Sunday, there have been choirs and preachers and prayers and candles and quiet. The architecture of our gothic nave, with an origin nearly a millennium ago, speaks to us so. Our long, tall, yes traditioned, stained glass captures places and people from longer ago. Our habits of liturgy, stand and sit, our habits of liturgy, sing and give, our habits of liturgy, bow and kneel, our habits of liturgy, our body language, give us a jarring encounter with antiquity. For once, every seven days, we are not jailed and stuck in the shallow shallows of the twenty first century. We are liberated to time travel, to get out and see the past, and perhaps, now and then, to hear something good and learn something new.
Here, in Luke, as in our other gospels, the Lord faces and masters the various challenges which we also know. They include a kind of will to power, and a sort of pride, and a type of avarice. We come to church with some experience of temptation and resistance. As the song writer says, ‘good experience comes from seasoned judgment–which comes from bad experience’.
In many communities, including our own, the sun rises this morning, this Lenten morning, on experience of loss and hurt. Across this country, in varying perspectives, we feel this. This morning there are homes and families who have suddenly known unexpected loss. This morning there are friends and groups of friends who have been faced with mortal danger. At one breakfast table, a wife now sits alone, for the first time on a Sunday in 60 years. At another breakfast table, a family gathers for the first time, in a long time, and missing a member. It would help us to remember just how short our words do fall in trying to describe the depth of these moments. Our words arrive only at the shoreline, at the margin of things. Beyond this we practice prayer, a kind of sitting silent before God.
We do not know why these things happen. We hurt and grieve. In the bones. At the deeper levels, we just do not know, and for an academic community committed to knowing, and knowing more, and more, this means wandering in a serious wilderness. Give us an equation to solve. Show us a biography that needs writing. Provide us with an experiment. Happily, we would organize a committee, or develop a proposal, or phone a list of donors. But loss, unexpected and unfair, is tragic. The tragic sense of life, el sentimiento trajico de la vida, as Unamuno put it, takes us out into wilderness, where we learn, with Jesus, to resist. Faith is resistance. Faith is the power to withstand what we cannot understand. Our friend, congregant, faithful minister in the Lone Star State, Milton Jordan, writes
Steadily slicing the edges off structures
of public wellbeing and the common good
on behalf of the masters of massed wealth,
legislative lackeys and their cultural
co-conspirators depend on distraction
to draw our attention away from plans
that obstruct continuing resistance
to their destruction of institutions
and practices that enable us to see
one another face to face, and maintain
those structures of public wellbeing
and the common good.
In the spirit of Christ, we are in worship this morning to attest to something. Faith is the power to withstand what we cannot understand. Worship is the practice of faith by which we learn to withstand what we cannot understand. God is the presence, force, truth, and love Who alone deserves worship, and worship is the practice of the faith by which we learn to withstand what we cannot understand. Worship prepares us to resist. So, we see Jesus again in the wilderness. To resist all that makes human life inhuman. So here you are, come lent, come Sunday, come 11am, today again to walk in the wild, in the wilderness.
The necessary freedom, and the disciplined grace, of Luke’s gospel firmly accosts us with the daily need, the daily task, the daily prospect, the daily adventure, the daily promise, the daily existential, lonely, windswept mountain top liberty of faith in the resurrection. Back at home, it may be, for those present this morning, or there at home, it may be, for those listening today there is transfiguration awaiting, a resurrection beckoning, a faith and gospel lying in hiding, ready for action. Write that letter. Sign that check. Make that call. Read that verse. Forget that hurt. Watch. Fight. Pray. Live rejoicing every day.
Come! Come travel together this Lent! Listen to Luke! Learn from Unamuno! Live in Love!
