Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

Sunday
February 14

The Light Still Shines

By Marsh Chapel

For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For it is the God who said ‘Let light shine out of darkness’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.

Preface

In a changed world, a reordered life, a twilit era, sometimes a poem lights the way. Ted Kooser’s poem sees a church transformed into a barn, heavenly order replaced by earthly disarray, a poem of love and loss, with good works yet all around.

There’s a tractor in the doorway of a church

in Red wing, Nebraska, in a coat of mud

and straw that drags the floor. A broken plow

sprawls beggar-like behind it on some planks

that make a sort of roadway up the steps.

The steeple’s gone. A black tar-paper scar

that lightening might have made replaces it.

They’ve taken it down to change the house of God

to Homer Johnson’s barn, but it’s still a church,

with clumps of tiger lilies in the grass

and one of those boxlike, glassed-in signs

that give the sermon’s topic (reading now

a birdnest and a little broken glass).

The good works of the Lord are all around;

the steeple top is standing in a garden

just up the alley; it’s a henhouse now;

fat leghorns gossip at its crowded door.

Pews stretch on porches up and down the street,

the stained-glass windows style the mayor’s house,

and the bell’s atop the firehouse in the square.

The cross is only God knows where.

Ted Kooser, Kindest Regards, p. 24

Light

In thy light we see light. In thy light we see light. If we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another. If we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another.

Now the light shines longer at the end of the day. No longer have we the deep sudden 4:30pm New England dark of December. The light hangs and hangs on longer. At 5pm you may pause, if the weather suits, and lean on the balustrade along Marsh Plaza. With a clear day, the sunlight lingers and warms and heals. The buildings to the west, as the sun now sits and sets, are a few stories only, so we have a full sunset, or nearly so. It feels good. The sunlight lingers and warms and heals.

We have had no shortage of dark days the year past. Pollution, pandemic, politics, prejudice, pain. Pollution and a challenged climate. Yet. The light still shines. One reads of a global automobile manufacturer determining now to produce only electric cars by 2035. Pandemic and endless losses, death near and far. Yet. The light still shines. One reads of the heroism of scientists in laboratories, right across the Charles River, bringing vaccines to life, for life, to use, for use. Politics unmoored from healthy culture. Yet. The light shines. There is a prayerful, heartfelt resolve, matched by some actions: a confession that character matters, decency matters, empathy matters, experience matters, honesty matters. Character, decency, empathy, experience, honesty, especially when it comes to leadership, they truly matter. Prejudice, the abiding corruption of racism near and far. Yet. The light shines. One sees, right here, here at Boston University, right now, now in 2021 a new full emphasis, embodied, in the flesh: Andrea Taylor, Katherine Kennedy, Kenn Elmore, Crystal Williams, Ibram X. Kendi, Louise Chude-Sokei—the President’s Senior Diversity Office, the Howard Thurman Center, the Dean of Student’s work, the Associate Provost’s office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, The Center for Anti-Racism, the African American Studies Program. With the late afternoon sun resting on the MLK monument, with the longer afternoon sunset resting on the Marsh door statue of John Wesley, there is an inkling, a dawning, a harbinger, an echo, of faith, and of better days coming, and a relighting of higher hopes past. Pain though remains. Pain remains especially in our losses of loved ones in COVID. In liturgy and worship on Sunday March 14, mark the date, we will engage pain and honor loss. Yet. The light still shines.

Darkness

In faith, we can face pain squarely, what Paul ascribed to ‘the god of this world’—shadow, hurt, pain. The god of this world. Hm. Paul is close here, as close as he gets, to the language of Gnosticism, and may have borrowed the phrase from the Gnostics. Paul is as far here, as far as he gets, from the language of the Hebrew Scripture, and may have used the phrase to set some distance between himself and his religious family of origin. He is in dark pain, even as he claims and acclaims that the light still shines. We can too.

Even new life brings pain. There is joy but there is pain. Even in moments of luminous new life. A student finds her way into Marsh Chapel, and asks for prayers…A young woman follows an urge and comes to church, and asks for poems…An older man prays at night, knowing what he needs to do to do his job but knowing others will be hurt and still others will judge harshly, and asks for nothing…A young man determines to face the music, to address his addiction, and does so, outside of church, and asks for prayers…A parent loses his child, and calls in grief, and hunts for consolation…A woman makes a hard choice in real time about something that counts, and finds her spirit lightened, and sings her prayers…A religious man opened an Advent devotional, one part word and one part music, and heard ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, and cried and cried and cried…A University leader does the right things at the right times in the right ways, not always with full appreication…A senator gives us his seat rather than support fascism…A family member survives the hurt of another…

There, here and there, here, the light still shines. A scientist, Anothy Fauci, and a humanist, John Lewis, worship together in Marsh Chapel, Baccalaureate Sunday, May 2018. All in worship so remember the prophetic call: Human agency, human agency, human agency: May 2018 in the nave of Marsh Chapel, John Lewis and Anthony Fauci: BU past and future. Incarnation is the honoring of the human being. You and others, in whom light shines in the heart. God is at work in the world to make and keep human life human—THROUGH HUMAN BEINGS. It will have to be a shared agency, a common purpose, for it to work in time.

The psalmist says, “The Lord has done great things for us, and we rejoiced.” It is easy to rejoice when things are going well. Nothing is more enjoyable than a season of life that is endlessly exciting, happy, and generally, personally “successful.” We readily love life when life feels easy and day to day is filled with laughter. We struggle though when life is not so joyful. On days when tears come far more readily than smiles, joy is the furthest thing from our mind. We become grouchy and repel joy in favor of self-induced misery. We even remember happier days through a rose-colored lens and fall into despair instead of taking those past joys as a reminder that joy will come again. There is light, and light still shines.

This year has been full of tearful, lonely, stressful days when we looked back on life B.C. (Before Corona), and longed for times of rest and community like we had back then. Sometimes we have the feeling as though life will never be so good or so “normal” again, and we feel sorrow. We miss friends and family and ordinary life, even though we know that this isolation is not the final word. Still there is light. The light still shines. There have been good days before and there will be joyful days in the future as well. The future will restore the wealth of joy, community, and love that we have known before. For now, we are planting seeds of future joys and community, and we know that when this is all over and we are able to be together once again, we will come bearing overflowing hearts full of joy which were fostered through patience and loving-kindness toward our neighbors.

2020-2021 has brought a plague, and pain in plague, 450,000 now dead. Many have lost their parents, without having the chance to grieve their going in the last weeks, days and even hours of life. Nurses, physicians, hospital administrators, support personnel, and others in medical care have given the last full measure of devotion. (At least 1,000 nurses have died in the course of providing medical care to others). As have police officers, teachers, morticians, bus drivers, and others.

What might have been a moment of shared national commitment and common patriotic sacrifice, a war against disease, became instead a kind of war against healing, with cavalier understatement of danger, cavalier refusal to mask, distance, clean, test and trace, cavalier underestimate of the enormity and duration of the calamity (‘over by Easter’, ‘one day gone like a miracle’), and cavalier denial and avoidance of colossal grief and loss, from sea to shining sea. How does one think about this? How does one reckon with this? The presence of pandemic is a matter of nature. Wise and careful leadership, or its astounding and costly absence, is a matter of grace, or, lack of grace.

Yet. Yet. Yet. The light still shines.

Remember. There were voices, speaking truth, early on. We were warned. Jeff Flake, 10/24/17: ‘I will no longer be complicit or silent in the face of…reckless, outrageous, undignified behavior…I deplore the casual undermining of our democratic ideals, the personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedom and institutions, the flagrant disregard for truth and decency…We must stop pretending that the conduct of some is normal. It is not normal. It is dangerous to a democracy. (NYT, 10/24/17)

Sometimes things end badly. That’s why they end. Sometimes the way a person leaves proves profoundly, beyond a shadow of doubt, why the leave-taking was needed.

You may know this in your own direct experience. When someone you love says or does something you hate, something that is wrong, hurtful, damaging, and lasting, not something mild or minor but something real and permanent, then a door closes on that event or act or word, and you are left with disappointment and anger, disappointment that does not quickly dissipate and anger that does easily not abate. It is a permanent wound, a lasting, permanent scar, forgivable and forgiven, by grace it may be, but not forgettable or forgotten. By grace, it may be forgivable. In truth, though, not ever forgettable. It has only one true first cousin in life, and that cousin is death. Here. Just here. Here is where you will need a measure of faith.

Light in Darkness

In extremis, we need the voices of faith, like that of Paul, to steady us and remind us: Yet. The light still shines. And other voices, too. On Transfiguration Sunday, they may just transfigure us.

In the darkness of the 1930’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer glimpsed light: ‘God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us…Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world and onto the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us… And the church that calls a people to belief in Christ must itself be, in the midst of that people, the burning fire of love, the nucleus of reconciliation, the source of the fire in which all hate is consumed and the proud and hateful are transformed into the loving.” LETTERS AND PAPERS FROM PRISON 196.

In the darkness of the 1970’s, a decade we seem tragically intent to repeat, Erazim Kohak glimpsed light: “A life wholly absorbed in need and its satisfaction, be it on the level of conspicuous consumption or of marginal survival, falls short of realizing the innermost human possibility of cherishing beauty, knowing truth, doing the good, worshiping the holy”

In the darkness of 2020, David Blight glimpsed light: Above all we need to revive the idea that truth matters. John Dewey: ‘for truth instead of being a bourgeois virtue is the mainspring of all human progress’. (NYT 11/9/20, David W. Blight).

In our time and on our very street, Ibram X. Kendi glimpsed light, and says so in the language of possibility, the vocabulary of your own possibilist tradition, the very tongue of historic Methodism: (Let us) saturate the body politic with the chemotherapy or immuno-therapy of antiracist policies that shrink the tumors of racial inequities, that kill undetectable cancer cells…But before we can treat, we must believe. Believe all is not lost for you and me and our society. Believe in the possibility that we can strive to be antiracist from this day forward. Believe in the possibility that we can transform our societies to be antiracist from this day forward. . (Ibram X Kendi, How To Be An Antiracist, p.238.)

Coda