Sunday
October 6
Communion Meditation: Sundays, Too
By Marsh Chapel
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Communion Meditation: Sundays Too
Mark 10: 2-16
Marsh Chapel
October 6, 2024
Robert Allan Hill
Preface
Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blue-black cold,
Then with cracked hands that ached
From labor in the weekday weather made
Banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
And slowly I would rise and dress
Fearing the chronic angers of that house
Speaking indifferently to him,
Who had driven out the cold
And polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?
(Robert Hayden)
Aspiration
We learn a language in prayer. In a creed, like the Canadians’ use. You know it by heart. In a poem, like the psalmists of old used, Psalm 23, 100, 121. You know them by heart. In a liturgy, like the long one you love and use here for Holy Communion. You know much of it by heart.
A language learned in prayer is that of adoration. Here is the tongue of aspiration, delight, hope, imagination, wonder and praise. In the dim-lit daily world, adoration language can be hard to hear, hard to find, for it is the exuberant utterance of ‘why not’?, of ‘how about?’, of ‘oh my’!, sentences concluding in question marks and exclamation points.
Our gospel reading, at heart, is an aspiration, a high hope about human being, human loving, and human life.
Both Jews and Greeks made welcome space for divorce, as even our text attests (‘Moses allowed…’). The church did too, before and after our passage, 1 Cor. 7 and Matthew 19. Paul before and Matthew after Mark also make allowance for divorce. We too, out of our experience, know fully, for the sake of the institution of marriage itself, that sometimes divorce is the only course. Here in Mark 10, though, the early church remembers, from Jesus or for us, a very high view, an aspirational hope for human love. A prayer in aspiration, that the joining of two, together, might make way for the One among the Many. That upon this earth there yet might be—real friendship, real fellowship, real love, real marriage, the reality of the union of hearts, for which we are made. For a union: a hint of the eternal, a glimpse of the divine, a glimmer of joy without shade.
This year we have heard the Gospel of Mark. Throughout, Mark is a work in remembrance. Some chips are down, and Mark thinks his people may not quite remember. Who they are, that is. They may forget, because they may have developed a kind of spiritual amnesia.
It has been forty years since Christ, when Mark writes. Forty years is a long time, especially in the Bible. Mark has a thought that his fellow earliest Christians, or some at least, have suffered a sort of spiritual amnesia, even a Christological amnesia.
Our lessons about marriage and children tell us where the forgetfulness started out. With treatment of women and children, apparently. There was some faulty memory at work, in the early church, when it came to women and children. The distaff side. Those without voice or presence. So the preacher, Mark, tells a couple of stories. One about Jesus standing up for women. Another about Jesus standing up for children. He says, ‘remember’.
Much of the Bible is like this. The New Testament, in particular, is like this. People needing to remember and people trying to remember. They have forgotten ‘the love they had at first’. They need a reminder. So Mark brings up his stories about women and children. He remembers Jesus, putting the last first. He remembers Jesus, putting the low high. He remembers Jesus, putting the peripheral into the center. Or, like a leader, our newest BU President, in self-disclosure, said this summer: Well, that’s the way it is and the way it goes. I say something. You challenge it. We come to an agreement.
Kosuke Koyama used to tell the gospel in this phrase, making the peripheral central. You might like his book, Water Buffalo Theology. He grew up in Japan. His whole youth he heard of the Imperial Temple, there, that it was indestructible. Given what has befallen the beloved temple of our own government, over the last decade, our somehow smug assumption that utter tragedy of a biblical and constitutional sort could never fully happen here (voters in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania beware and be aware), we might heed what the defeated Japanese learned about ‘The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord…”. Once Japan was bitterly crushed, crushingly worsted, in WWII, Koyama went on to study Jeremiah, and to advocate for the poor of the Pacific, and to teach peace, and, especially, to move from center to periphery.
The case for women, subject to summary divorce, caused Mark to wonder whether his people had forgotten something. The case of children, outside the circle, not invited to the gathering, caused Mark to wonder whether his church might have fallen ill with a theological malady, a kind of Christological amnesia. These statements, perhaps if original from very different settings, are here remembered in the alto voice of the church, remembered together. Why? Because they together bring a medication, a prescription drug, to heal amnesia. They remind the church that Jesus inhabits the periphery.
Freedom
That is, the Bible that acclaims Jesus Christ is a book about freedom, or better, a library of books about freedom, divine and human. God is loving us into love and freeing us into freedom. It is freedom that is born, with heartache, in the Garden of Eden. It is freedom that is restored, with blessing, in the covenant with Abraham. It is freedom that is promised, through famine, to the brothers of Joseph. It is freedom that lies across the Red Sea, as Israel flees Pharaoh. Deborah sings a song of freedom! It is freedom that Moses glimpses, as he dies, sitting atop Mt. Nebo. It is freedom that Samuel desires, and Saul denigrates, and David defends, and Solomon defines.
It is freedom that Israel loses, when she ignores the prophets, and freedom that is resurrected by Cyrus who frees Israel from Babylon. It is freedom to worship the One God, with whom Jacob wrestled as Israel (the word means ‘one who wrestles with God’), for which the Temple was restored. And it is freedom that Israel awaited as Israel awaited Messiah. The Bible is a book about freedom. So, when the Bible is used in ways that increase slavery and decrease freedom, beware. In those cases, even in our time, the teaching about the Bible is unbiblical. Note, read, absorb and abhor the red-wave unbiblical teaching of the Bible, this autumn. Wake up, America, wake up!
John Wesley used the Bible to free coal miners from poverty. Abraham Lincoln used the Bible to free African Americans from slavery. Walter Rauschenbush used the Bible to free immigrants from destitution. Georgia Harkness used the Bible to free women from narrowed roles. Martin Luther King used the Bible to free blacks from segregation.
Still, the freedom in the Bible comes with a high price, a heavy cost. For all the plaudits great leaders receive, freedom breaks out, one by one, heart by heart. So Hosea, heartsick over his lost love, imagined a similar divine grace, and roared: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice, the knowledge of God, not burnt offerings.”
The prophets recall for us the divine desire that all, all might be included in the great open space of covenant love. It is this great promise of freedom that opens and closes the Bible, and that empowers men and women to get up in the morning and to face insurmountable odds, and unwinnable battles, and lost causes. Some causes are worth fighting for even though the outcome is foredoomed.
As Anthony Abraham Jack wrote last month: I hope my work helps colleges not only see their students more clearly, but also the gaps in policies to support those students. (Boston Globe, 9/22).
Sobre todo creo que
No todo esta perdido
Above all I believe that
all is not lost
Oigo una voz que mellama
Casi un suspiro
I hear a voice that calls me.
Almost a whisper.
(Jorge Drexler)
Prayer
We pray for biblical freedom this day and every day, for safety, for vocation, and for wonder.
May we rise to meet each new day, with a full feeling of gratitude.
May this gratitude make us attentive to what makes for health, attentive to what protects against harm, attentive to ways that we may watch over one another in love. May our Inaugural prayer of gratitude provoke a daily attention to what lasts, matters, and counts.
May this gratitude make us curious about our place in the world, curious about our emerging vocations, curious about where our passion meets the world’s need. May it provoke a daily curiosity about calling.
May this gratitude make us sensitive to the delight of each day, sensitive to the wonder of life, sensitive to the sheer joy of being alive. May gratitude provoke a daily sensitivity to wonder.
May the Spirit of Life bless us we pray in curiosity, challenge and care, to become confident, delighted and sensitive, a people attentive to safety, insightful about calling, and capable of wonder
Pinsky
Last Friday, I had the privilege to sit with Robert Pinsky, US Poet Laureate and now BU professor. We were waiting for the set up and line up ahead of President Gilliam’s Inauguration. Other than the evening I was treated to sit with Marilynne Robinson last year, and engage her in her own poetic fiction, being with Pinsky, for a chance in private conversation, was one of the highest moments in our time here at BU. Before and during and after 9/11 he restored a portion of American soul and hope, by restoring a love of poetry, and doing so simply by gathering people, city by city, to read their favorite poems to one another.
At the end of the Inauguration, last Friday, Pinsky stood to give a brief reflection. And as he was unwinding his thought, he took out a piece of paper. He had chosen a poem, one of his favorites, for the occasion. Imagine my shock as he named the poet, Robert Hayden, and the poem, which I first used in a sermon October 22, 2000. A friend had given it to me, and I had loved it, and so used it. But I had no idea that anyone else knew it, or loved it, as I did. It turns out that across the country many, many people do, as Pinsky told us. You see, what is most personal is most universal. What one truly loves, many do. It is the memory of a young black man, a memory of his father, in their modest home, shining his shoes. But it is more. It is the memory of love, of being loved, of being loved in the teeth of difficulty. And I used it to say so, 24 years ago. And Pinsky used it to say so, 9 days ago. And it carries, soars, lives, and breathes, reminding us of love. Reminding us…of love.
Coda
Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blue-black cold,
Then with cracked hands that ached
From labor in the weekday weather made
Banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
And slowly I would rise and dress
Fearing the chronic angers of that house
Speaking indifferently to him,
Who had driven out the cold
And polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?
