Sunday
December 26
Read!
By Marsh Chapel
Click here to hear the full service
Click here to hear just the sermon
The only Scriptural account we have of Jesus’ growth and boyhood is located in today’s reading. Only here does the Gospel allow us a glimpse of Jesus growing up. In this one picture of our Lord’s maturation, we find him engaging the great teachers of his time. After three days they found him the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.
Later ages, and later writings, did not resist the urge to imagine Jesus in his boyhood, clever, magical, boy deity, able to make birds from stones and animals from the very dirt at his feet. But the Holy Gospel of St. Luke, for which and in which we stand, refrains from wilder speculation. Only here, just for a moment, does the writer relent and, in the reading meant for the Sunday after Christmas, show us the young Jesus, the young man Jesus, Jesus as a young man, which in some measure he would be for the whole of his earthly life. He who was to call disciples, now himself, just this once, is a disciple too. He whose life is the heart of faith, the call to faith, a daily call to faith, for this Christmas moment, is himself so called. And what is Jesus doing, in faith, for faith, toward faith this morning? Why, he is reading.
What good news this is for educators near and far, and for grandparents and parents and teachers and all who labor and are heavy laden in the educational projects of our time, always rigorous, and now COVID covered and far more so! As he blessed weddings in Cana and healers in Bethany, so now Jesus, by his presence and practice, blesses those who teach, who prepare the ground for a lifetime, a lifesaving call to faith, and those of us fortunate to have received their teaching, and so to have been seized by the confession of the church, the confession of faith.
Jesus is our Lord and Savior, born in a manger. Come Christmas, He is our transforming friend. We have gathered, after already much church this week, to pray and listen for grace, because of Jesus, our transforming friend. We bear witness, today, that Jesus has transformed our life, made us happier and better people than otherwise we would have been without him. How we hope that people, others, especially young people, will experience his power and love, in their own way and time!
For Christmas 2021 for us may bring a time to take another look at our walk in faith. Our gracious Advent daily devotions guided us in this direction, day by day. All fall we have noted that faith comes, to most of us, one step at a time. Yes, there are some for whom a blinding light on the Road to Damascus, a blinding light on the road of life, carries us to faith. But most of us come along more gradually, one step and then another. One such step, in faith, is to find a way to read, to read, to read what nourishes faith by nourishing the soul. the rhythm of reading that fits your own-most self. This morning, it may be, is a time for that step, to make a resolution to read in 2022. For the elusive presence of the divine lies at the marrow of the Christmas gospel, embedded in the strange stories of the season.
A few years ago, a friend down south sent me a copy of an article by E.J Dionne (WAPO, 12/23/18). I keep it in my drawer, and re-read it at this time of year. It rightly celebrates those who come to church come Christmas, perhaps only then, or only then and at Easter. Perhaps you have come or are listening during Christmas, hoping for—what?, waiting for—what?, ready, it may be to hear a call to faith. Dionne wrote about the difficulties in organized religion, particularly Christianity, today: a decline in religious observance, the rise of the ‘nones’ (now a quarter of the population in the US, and 40% of those under 30), about unwelcoming attitudes and practices regarding the LGBTQIA portion of the population, about clergy sexual abuse, about the ‘complicated and compromised structures of churches and denominations’, but went further:
Christmas remains wondrous, but it arrives at a difficult moment for Christianity in the United States…Regular worshipers can be disdainful of the Chreasters. But these twice-a-year visitors deserve our attention and, I would argue, our respect. Their semiannual presence is also testimony to the enduring hunger for the experience of the sacred…
Yes. Just so. Testimony to the enduring hunger for the experience of the sacred. You feel it in the bones on Christmas Eve, the sanctuary dark, with candles lifted, and Silent Night sung. Yes. Just so.
Dionne then went on to name and cite three people whose work and teaching, as it happens, I have personally known, with whom I have taught and studied, and who have meant a great deal to me and others. Reading matters. Theology matters. Dionne’s capacity to call up these three wise persons, for our inspiration, also matters.
One is Gabriel Vahanian: (Dionne) What the theologian Gabriel Vahanian observed decades ago…explains the larger context: “Christianity has long since ceased to be coextensive with our culture,” he wrote, and “our age is post-Christian both theologically and culturally.” I remember Vahanian granting me an interview in his Syracuse University Hall of Languages third floor office, one winter day long ago, and his comment, in a beautiful French accent, Ze will of man, it is more inscrutable zan ze vill of God!
One is Peter Berger, whom some of you knew here at BU: (Dionne)The great sociologist of religion Peter Berger offers a clue in “A Rumor of Angels,” his 1969 book about the persistence of faith in the face of rapid secularization…the stubborn refusal of human beings to give up on the transcendent. I picture Berger at lunch here on Commonwealth Avenue, chastising the Lutheran church he very much loved, and warming to tell a truly funny joke. And I remember his memorial service, in our neighborhood, 2017.
One is N.T. Wright, for whom I was a teaching assistant at McGill over three years: (Dionne)The biblical scholar and former Anglican bishop N.T. Wright sees “the longing for justice, the quest for spirituality, the hunger for relationships and the delight in beauty” as human aspirations beyond the material that can be heard as “echoes of a voice” pointing toward God (from Wright’s book, Simply Christian). I picture Wright both curious and frowning as I guest lectured on the Gnostics; inviting me to dinner in his Montreal home, with four beautiful growing children; his desk stuffed in tiny closet under the hallway stairs. A few summers ago we lunched across the river at Harvard. He chuckled and thanked me for a sermon title from decades ago, What a Friend We Have in Paul. ()
Jesus had his teachers, at least according to Luke. And we have our own. Vahanian, Berger and Wright, in very different theological voices, would approve Dionne’s reliance on them. You might like to read them! My friend (Mr. Art Jester), in sending the article, brought these teachers back to me, and so gave me back a part of myself. And that is what friends do, they give us back ourselves. And finally, then, Dionne himself, who preceded us in our room the week before we were speaking at Chautauqua Institution, four summers ago:
(People) show up twice a year because some part of them is in rebellion against a society defined solely by self-interest and calculation, by the visible, the measurable and the tangible. They have an intimation that the world is made up, in the words of the Nicene Creed, of both the “seen and unseen.”…Christmas sketches “a picture of a cosmos capable of love.” (Joseph Bottom).
A picture of a cosmos capable of love!
Are we lovers anymore? Christmas comes along with a question: Are we lovers anymore, or are we resigned to a post-agapic, post-agape, ‘post-love’ world and life? (From my point of view the Christmas longing is not only for transcendence, but also and more so for love.) And in the question there is a call. Are we lovers anymore? Are we?
In 2006, our first autumn in Boston, I received a telephone call from a woman I did not know. She had been prompted to call me by my teacher, Dr. Christopher Morse, he who was a part of that pantheon of powerful professors at Union Theological Seminary 50 years ago: Raymond Brown, J Louis Martyn, Robert McAfee Brown, Donald Shriver, Cyril Richardson, James Forbes, James Washington, James Cone, Beverly Harrison, Kosuke Koyama, all. The caller was Sara Terrien now of blessed memory: Christopher tells me there is a Union man at Marsh Chapel and I should call him up and welcome him. Is that you? Sara’s husband, Samuel Terrien, retired from teaching Hebrew Bible three months before I arrived at Union, and he had died some years before her call. I never met him, or studied with him, to my great loss. But through his books, he has taught me, especially his great work, Elusive Presence. He has taught me over the valley of the shadow, come to shape, guide and form my own faith, my own theology, my own liberal biblical theology. To you I commend him, and his work, and his book, even as I cherish Sara’s personal, pastoral, kind telephone call of many years ago. Terrien wrote:
Presence….does not alter nature, but changes history…through the character and lives of women and men….The elusive presence of…a walking not a sitting God, a God nomadic, hidden, elusive and free…a God of tent not temple, of ear not eye, of name not glory…a God who creates and calls out a spiritual interiority, a commission by command…Hebrew not Judaic, a God of time not space, of grace not place…whose faith allows one to translate love for God into actual behavior in society…whose prophets demythologize space for the sake of time…a religion which does not affirm that God is hidden is not true…’vere tu es Deus absconditus’. (Elusive Presence, in passim).
Read something great this year, 2022, something that feeds your soul, that pushes off and faces down pandemic, something that surprises you, as in our friend and South Texas poet minister, Milton Jordan’s playful December poem, of this week, A South Texas Christmas:
At first glance this late December day
the weather line on my device seems
normal enough. Twenty-six is chilly
but not unheard of; until I realize
my device, just to be contrary,
has converted to Celsius
(used with author’s permission)
Before we let technology have all the power alone, maybe we could spend some time reading. Read. It is one step in faith. As Robert Bly, now himself of blessed memory put it, I recognized that a single short poem has room for history, music, psychology, religious thought, mood, occult speculation, character, and events of one’s own life. (NYT, obituary 12/21).
In the early 1970’s, a decade that seems eerily and tragically similar in its outworking to our own, some came into ministry out of parsonages, some out of college chaplaincies, some out of summer camping experiences, and some of us out of all three. In late August one year a group of high schoolers set up a panel, a kind of truth and justice panel if you will, of six elderly clergy, to ask about faith. How do we find our way to faith, the younger asked the older? One crisp response stands out, among the others: Read. You are going to need to apply yourself, learn, read, grow in what you know so that you may thrive in what makes you come alive.
The minister did not mention Augustine of Hippo. But he might have. He who found faith by reading alone in a garden. you may take a seat for a moment in Marsh Chapel, under the window of St. Augustine, just here, who amid tears, misery and lamentation reclaimed his own soul by reading:
I was saying these things and weeping in the most bitter contrition of my heart, when suddenly I heard the voice of a boy or a girl I know not which–coming from the neighboring house, chanting over and over again, “Pick it up, read it; pick it up, read it.” [”tolle lege, tolle lege”]…
So I quickly returned to the bench where Alypius was sitting, for there I had put down the apostle’s book when I had left there. I snatched it up, opened it, and in silence read the paragraph on which my eyes first fell: “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof.” I wanted to read no further, nor did I need to. For instantly, as the sentence ended, there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty and all the gloom of doubt vanished away. (Confessions, 29)
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
