Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

By Marsh Chapel

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John 14: 15-21
Psalm 66: 8-20
1 Peter 3: 13-22
Acts 17: 22-31

Once again I find myself compelled at the outset, and even in his absence, to thank Dean Hill for his gracious offering to me of a preaching series during the late spring and early summer. Some of you may remember that we began on May 8, Mothers Day, with a reflection on life’s journeys in conversation with the resurrection story of Jesus meeting the disciples on the road to Emmaus. Yes, here you are, whether you intended to be here, or more likely not, on Memorial Day Sunday, right in the middle of Br. Larry’s 2011 secular holiday preaching series. Whether you are here in person or listening over airwaves or internet signals, it is good that you have come on Memorial Day weekend, so that you may pray that what follows you might quickly forget. Speaking of prayer.

The Lord be with you.

And also with you.

Let us pray.

God of memory and of mindfulness, guide our hearts and minds in these moments of reflection that they may be turned to you, to your wisdom and your grace, and that our lives may benefit from the beneficence of your most Holy Spirit. In the name of Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord, we pray.
Amen.

Have you ever sat and watched as a baby, sitting in the middle of the floor, attempts to get up and go after a ball or some other toy that she has flung across the room? This attempt at locomotion is often accompanied by a facial expression of some degree of anguish. It is as if said baby wants to say, “If only I could get up and go, I could get across the room and get my toy. Alas, since I cannot get up and go, I shall have to put on a show of consternation in order to motivate someone around me to get it for me.” Amazingly, as the facial expression of anguish turns to vocal consternation, someone usually does just that.

And so it begins: life in the conditional. If the baby cries, then someone goes to get the toy. If the child pushes the button, then the screen comes on. If the adolescent breaks curfew, then the parents ground him. If the young adult gets a job, then she can pay the rent. If the politician commits adultery and his constituents find out about it, then he will be voted out of office. Well, maybe. Life in the conditional is at the heart of the human endeavor. It is so much so that the great modern philosopher Immanuel Kant put it at the heart of his articulation of the nature of knowledge and experience alongside time and space: the conditional movement of causality is constitutive of pure reason.

Actually, reality is a bit more complicated than this. And so we ask, do you live in the world of Sir Isaac Newton or the world of Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr? This is an important question for us here at Marsh Chapel who seek to live faithful lives, and not merely for the physicists working in labs across the street. So, let’s have it, do you live in the mechanistic universe of Newton, where things move around bumping into each other like billiard balls such that when one thing encounters another it causes the thing it runs into to alter course? Or do you live in the probabilistic universe of Einstein and Bohr, which is to say the quantum universe, where outcomes of interactions are only certain to a degree of probability? While it is probably best for us to leave it to the physicists to demonstrate why the latter is the more robust view in the laboratory, we can confirm it in our own lived experience. After all, does the adolescent not run a rough calculus of the probability that his parents will ground him for staying out past curfew? And does the politician not calculate both the probability that he will get caught in adultery and the probability that his constituents will find out about it? Perhaps we will address the question of why it is that both adolescents and politicians are so likely to miscalculate their respective probabilities when we gather for the third and final installment of the 2011 secular preaching series on Independence Day weekend.

And so it is that we find ourselves living in a probabilistic conditional world. It should not be entirely surprising, then, that we carry the presuppositions of our probabilistic conditional world over into our spiritual lives. Our lesson this morning from 1 Peter is an excellent example of this phenomenon. “Now who will harm you if you are eager to do what is good?” Transcription: If you do what is good, then you will not be harmed. The fact that the world is not merely conditional but probabilistically conditional comes into play in the next sentence: “But even if you do suffer for doing what is right, you are blessed.” That is, for those of you who are good but fall outside of the probability of not being harmed, and thus are in fact harmed, do not worry too much, because you are still blessed. This is beginning to sound a lot like the witch test: if she drowns, then she was clearly not a witch! Oh dear.

It is an interesting thing to consider that religious people figured out that the world is probabilistically conditional long before the physicists did. After all, how often have you heard stories of people praying, “God, if only you will X, I promise to Y”? How often have you prayed such yourself? Martin Luther prayed in the forest that if he would survive a thunderstorm then he would become a monk. He survived, so he did in fact become an Augustinian. Of course, it is notable that these promises tend to arise at the extremities of life. That is, these promises tend to come about when life itself is at stake, taking the form of, “God, save my life and I will give my life to you.” This has the side effect of effectively negating the probabilistic quality of the conditional. After all, if God does not save them, then we never get to hear their story of praying that they will do something if God saves them.

No, it is much better to look to the more mundane spiritual conditionals to understand their probabilistic nature. These are more wont to take the form of, “God, if you will only find me a parking spot, I promise to stop doing whatever it was that I was doing that made me late in the first place.” Here in Boston, I am quite confident that there are more such prayers offered daily in the confines of motor vehicles than all of the prayers offered in all of the houses of worship in this city combined. And multiply that number by 100 when the Red Sox are in town! This mundane conditional is much more interesting because of the fact that it frequently does not come true. How often have you seen a host of angels swoop down and carry off a car so that you can take its space? No, often as not you are left driving around frustrated that your meeting is starting in a building mere feet away and you are stuck outside trying to dispose of a massive hunk of metal.

Of course, not all non-mortal conditionals are so trivial. How many of you have offered prayers, perhaps in this very nave, for family and friends who are terminally ill? And how many of them have died? How many of you have prayed for work? And how many of you are still unemployed? How many of you have prayed for peace? And how long will we remain at war? The fact of the matter is that these non-trivial conditionals do cause some people to abandon faith and abandon God. That this happens should not be surprising. But what is truly fascinating is how many people do not flee from faith and God upon finding themselves outside the desired probability. In religious and spiritual life we are accustomed to the probabilistic conditional.

The movement from if to then that constitutes the conditional is a place of deep anxiety in human life. The probability that the if will not come about, and the probability that the then will not in fact follow, leaves a great deal of uncertainty as to how and when to move. And the fact that the probabilistic conditional figures in the literature of our spiritual heritage does not make living in the midst of such instability any easier. However, acknowledging the reality of the probabilistic conditional as one of the primary modes of human engagement of experience is not the only testimony of the religious and spiritual traditions. The good news offered in the spiritual quest is precisely a transcendence of the if-then dichotomy of human affairs. There is more to life than predicting a probability and then hoping for the best. Our Gospel lesson from John highlights this point. “If you love me, keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever.” The if-then conditional of the first sentence is not the last word. The uncertainty of Good Friday’s crucifixion is transcended, but not eclipsed, in the confidence of the Easter resurrection. The uncertainty Jesus’ departure in the Ascension is transcended, but not eclipsed, as we shall see in the next weeks, in the confidence of the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. The promise of the Holy Spirit is not simply another conditioned clause. It is its own indicative statement. The Advocate will come in spite of our fulfillment of the condition, not because of it. We are saved by faith, not by works.

This movement of transcendence-sans-eclipse is an important one in our spiritual lives. The transcendence of the if-then dichotomy is the source of the hope that is in us, of which we are called to account in 1 Peter. And yet, we are called to give this account “with gentleness and reverence.” This is because in this life we never fully depart from the dichotomy of the probabilistic conditional. We can never escape the vicissitudes of life. At the same time, the transcendence is not merely cast off into some future afterlife. The transcendence-sans-eclipse of our Easter and Pentecost experience is a source of real hope and transformation in our lives now.

Paul testified to the importance of this transcendence in his speech in front of the Areopagus in Athens, accounted in our reading from the Acts of the Apostles. Paul testified about the unknown god to which the Athenians had built a temple. He testified that this unknown god of the Athenians was “the God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth.” Furthermore, he testified that the creator of the world cannot be bound in shrines or works of human hands, or even served by human hands. Paul testified to a God who transcends the conditional tense of daily life. God “allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope and find him – though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being.’” Our searching for the transcendent God should not lead us to place our hope in something finite, but it should also not lead us to place our hope in something to come in the future, which is, after all, also finite. No, the transcendence-sans-eclipse of the hope promised in Easter and Pentecost provides a living hope in the midst of the probabilistic conditional experience of life.

The hope that is in us is not that God will fulfill all of our desires, no matter how mundane or extreme. It is not even that we will always come out on the preferable side of the probabilities. No, the hope that is in us does not transcend the conditional character of life by resolving its dichotomies but transcends the conditional character of life without eclipsing that life as it is. After all, it is the life God gives us and calls good. Instead, the hope that is in us is the hope of life and love. “Because I live, you also will live,” Jesus proclaims in the voice of the fourth Evangelist. “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10: 10). “They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them an reveal myself to them.”

The good news of Jesus Christ for us today is that life and love are not faint hopes. They are hopes in the power to overcome the brokenness of life in the conditional tense. They are movements toward wholeness that draws together not only the preferably possibilities but also those we might wish to avoid. Life would not be life without death. Love would not be love without struggle, pain and loss. “On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.” And is not the achievement of holding such disparate and diverse realities of life together in a more awesome whole far greater than finding a parking space?

Amen.

~Br. Lawrence A. Whitney, LC+
University Chaplain for Community Life

posted in Br. Lawrence A. Whitney, LC† on 05.29.2011 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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Well, dear friends, here we are, once again, plodding through the liturgical season of Lent. The weather has decided, this year, to cooperate with the penitential feel of the Lenten season. Here in Boston, unseasonably warm temperatures have yielded a series of rainy, dreary days instead of the usual snow. Snow, of course, is too beautiful to be penitential, although New York and Washington, DC may wish to point out that they have been experiencing penitential snowfall by sheer quantity.

Now, it must be said, and at the outset, that natural occurrences and calamities, be they rainfall and snowstorms or the earthquakes that rocked Haiti last month and Chile yesterday, are simply not a result of divine malign. In theology, like in statistics, correlation is not causation. The facts that rain and snow fall from the skies and that human beings are sinful do not mean that human sinfulness causes rain and snowstorms. The facts that the earth shifts and shakes and that human beings are sinful do not mean that human sinfulness causes earthquakes, any more than rainfall, snowstorms, or earthquakes are excuses for human sinfulness. While natural events may provide an emotional canvas on which to paint our spiritual journey, it is both a spiritual and a theological mistake to confuse the painting for reality.

Having set aside the temptation to equate natural events with divine intent, it is our task in considering the theme of atonement to investigate the equation of human sinfulness and divine grace. Temptation and addiction are two central figures in the drama of human sinfulness. Here at Marsh Chapel we may be prone to an addiction to excellent preaching. This is why it is important for me to step into the pulpit occasionally, to break the habit and remind everyone not to take for granted the homiletical extravaganza they are blessed to hear every other week.

It is no easy task we have set ourselves, to speak of atonement. Not that we at Marsh Chapel are prone to taking the easy road. Last summer we tackled the theme of Darwin and Faith, one of the greatest sources of tension in contemporary religious life. Now we delve into one of the greatest controversies in the history of Christian doctrine: how is it that the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth almost two thousand years ago effects a transformation from sin by grace in you and in me today and every day?

Rehearsing the myriad theological treatments of this central question in Christian faith and life would consume our time together and almost certainly result in even more snoring than is already emanating from the congregation. Alas, I am afraid that the vast majority of atonement theologies would not touch on the lived experience of so many of us in the second decade of the 21st century. In our question of the atonement we are not looking for the correlation between sin and Jesus, but for a causal relationship. We expect God in the person and work of Jesus Christ to actually do something to or for us on account of our sinfulness. But I wonder if the way we pose the relationship is not the source of our trouble in understanding atonement in light of our lived experience.

You see, in our posing the question, we expect something of God; that our sinfulness causes God to do something. Our Gospel lesson today sets things up differently. Jesus says, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” Paul too understands the discrepancy when in our reading from his letter to the Philippians he says “For many live as enemies of the cross of Christ; I have often told you of them, and now I tell you even with tears. Their end is destruction; their god is the belly; and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.” What Jesus and Paul explain is that we understand very well what God does for us; what we do not understand is ourselves and our sinfulness. We are not willing. Our minds are set on earthly things.

There are four movements of atonement: confession, repentance, mercy, forgiveness. Atonement theologies have historically been arguments about the relationships among these movements. But our lived experience, and the breakdown in the atonement process, that Jesus and Paul knew and that we live daily, is not in the process itself but before and between its movements. In my admittedly brief time in ministry, my own experience is that people are often in one of two places with regard to their lived experience.

The first place many of us find ourselves is stuck in the starting gate; the atonement process never even gets going. As anyone who has ever moved from addiction to recovery can tell you, the first step in overcoming the addiction is admitting that you have a problem. Yes, dear friends, many of us are in denial, and I do not mean a river in Egypt. (Clearly, that for which I most need to atone is a predilection to bad puns).

The most obvious form of denial is the excuse. The most thoroughgoing excuse conceived in human history is the strict determinism of scientific materialism, resulting in the statement, “the universe made me do it!” Indeed, many of us cannot identify the exact cause of our failures of responsibility, but the sense that something beyond our control must have impinged upon our actions is prevalent. And the conclusion is that whatever it was that intervened should be held responsible for our failure.

If you are wondering if you have ever actually had an experience that matches up with this abstract musing, just ask yourself this question. Have you ever found yourself saying, or at least thinking, “Oops! I forgot…”? “Oops! I forgot to turn off the stove!” “Oops! I forgot to make my rent payment!” “Oops! I forgot to fill the car with gas.” Really, it works with just about anything. “Oops! I slept through class.” “Oops! I cheated on my girlfriend.” “Oops! I pressed the wrong button.” The word “oops” serves a dual function in our experience. It signals that we know something is wrong, and that we should not be held entirely responsible. After all, how can I possibly be expected to remember everything? I forgot to turn off the stove, but I remembered to lock the front door. I forgot to pay my rent but I paid the cable and electricity bills. I slept through class but I work so hard and for so many hours that I get exhausted. I cheated on my girlfriend but I was drunk.

Another form of denial takes the form of “it’s not that big a deal.” This is the recognition that something is not quite right, but also the concomitant belief that the not-quite-rightness does not rise to the level of a real problem; certainly not to the level of sin. The “no big deal” form of denial is less verbal than the impingement form, mostly because we tend not to acknowledge such events since they are of supposedly negligible importance. Nevertheless, there is a sense that things could have been better. “I could have said that better.” “The sauce could use more oregano.” “The prelude would
have been better if I’d hit the F# instead of the F-natural.” Of course, Justin never hits a wrong note so he wouldn’t know.

As one great theologian, who is no stranger to this pulpit, has said, to be human is to be obligated. We are all responsible to fulfill all of our obligations. But, alas, our obligations are so many and various as to mutually exclude each other and overwhelm us. It is this condition that gives rise to the coping mechanism of denial. It is easier to simply say that fulfilling all of my obligations is impossible so I cannot possibly be responsible. Such coping mechanisms are reinforced when they are successful in getting us out of the consequences for our failures. Unfortunately, this coping mechanism is not entirely true, and thus not entirely helpful. The fact of the matter is that we do feel our obligations and resulting responsibility deeply. Even if it is the case that our obligations overlap and conflict, we still must choose which we will fulfill responsibly, and we are still responsible for the ones we choose not to fulfill. We are responsible. We ourselves. Not someone else. Not the situation. We are responsible and we have failed in our responsibility, despite any intervening agents and situational complexity. We have failed. We have sinned. We are responsible and culpable and in need of repentance, mercy and forgiveness.

The other place that many of us find ourselves is stuck in the middle. Of course, the truth is that in some sense we are all stuck in the middle. It is always the case that we have sinned again before the sin we just confessed and repented of can be forgiven. But this is a different kind of being stuck in the middle. This is the kind of stuck in the middle that gets depicted in the 1998 dramatic film, What Dreams May Come. The character Annie, wracked by guilt over the death of her husband Chris, commits suicide and is damned to hell, not by God, but by the psychological pain that brought her to commit the act in the first place. This middle place, which for many is a hell of their own making, is marked by an overwhelming sense of guilt.

The place of guilt is in many respects the opposite end of the pendulum swing from the place of denial. In guilt it is not that our obligations are overwhelming and therefore we cannot be held responsible, but that our obligations are overwhelming and we are so responsible that we can never escape. There is not enough mercy in the world to overcome our failures. To be stuck in the middle is to be stuck constantly repeating Hagrid: “I should not have said that. I should not have said that. I should not have said that.”

The problem here, once again, is not really a lack of confidence in God, but a lack of self-confidence that we are really worthy of forgiveness. God could not possibly forgive me, not because God is not capable, but because I am not worthy. “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” The agony of the place of guilt is only partly our own agony in the face of our own sinfulness; it is also the agony of God who longs for relationship but we are unwilling. It is not God who counts us unworthy; it is we ourselves.

How, then, might we bring the pendulum back to the balance point? And what might life look like once it is there? Let’s take the second question first, shall we?

We, in the spirit of Lent, seek to live in the space between denial and guilt. If we are to avoid denial, we must be honest, first and foremost with ourselves, about our own failures and thus our own sinfulness. And yet, to avoid extreme guilt, we must learn humility. We must humbly acknowledge our faults and enter a place of deep contrition out of which those we have faulted may offer forgiveness. So too, we must humbly recognize that the mercy of God is far greater than any sin we might possibly commit. When I was last on silent retreat with the Community of Taizé, Br. Sebastian led our daily reflections. He pointed out that the only possible way to withstand humiliation is to cultivate humility. Denial and guilt are both defense responses that attempt to fend off humiliation. But at the end of the day, neither are successful coping mechanisms. Br. Sebastian is correct. The only possible way to withstand humiliation is to cultivate humility.

I often find myself saying to faculty and administrators that if students at Boston University learn nothing in the classroom, but during their time here learn to fail and recover gracefully, then we will have succeeded in our mission as an institution of higher education. To fail in our responsibilities is indeed inevitable in life. This inevitability does not absolve us of our responsibility. Only God can do that. But neither does it doom us to live guilt-wracked existences. We can, in fact, recover.

The good news of Jesus Christ for us today is that there is more love in God than sin in us. “But now, irrespective of law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith” (Romans 3: 21-25).

From the perspectives of denial and guilt, it may appear as the saying goes, “you just can’t get there from here.” In the Protestant traditions there is a hesitation here, because justification is by faith, not by works. Indeed, it is God who delivers mercy and offers forgiveness of sins, and yet it is we ourselves who must make the spiritual journey of Lent from denial and guilt to humility. This journey largely consists in ritual.

There are two theories of ritual at Boston University. The first is that of the former Dean of Marsh Chapel, the Rev. Dr. Robert Cummings Neville, who points out that ritual is the cultivation of habits that allow us to live well in the world. The second is that of anthropology and religion professors, respectively, Rob Weller and Adam Seligman. For them, ritual is the creation of subjunctive, “as if” spaces in which our own brokenness and the world’s brokenness can be held together as if they were whole. In neither perspective is ritual identified solely with religious rites such as the one we are in the midst of now. Both understand that ritual consists in such mundane patterns of behavior as walking down the street and driving the car, all the way up to the patterns of ceremony involved in religion and civil society.

So who is right? Is ritual a set of patterned behaviors that allow us to live well, or the creation of “as if” spaces that help us cope with our own and the world’s brokenness? The mistake would be in assuming that the two views are mutually exclusive, and the Lenten spiritual journey is the perfect case for demonstrating that the correct answer is a resounding, “both!”

On the one hand, the rituals of discipline in Lent really are better ways of living in the world. To reject temptations, begin to recover from addictions, and honestly and humbly recognize our own sinfulness makes us better able to see ourselves and our world as they truly are. Furthermore, the ritual movements from confession and repentance through mercy and forgiveness help us keep balance between denial and guilt and to cultivate humility. When we do so we are better able to relate to friends, family, neighbors, the world and, above all, God.

But in order to have that effect on our lives, ritual must first pull us out of our world and then stuff us right back in. The rituals of Lent pull us out of our normal daily existence and confront us with that fact that human sinfulness is world destroying. According to the Christian narr
ative, it was human sinfulness that lead to the death of Jesus on the cross, not the sinfulness of some humans, but the sinfulness of all humanity. Jesus Christ, who in our ritual context was in the beginning with God and through whom God created the world, is destroyed by our sin. But just as surely as our sinfulness is world destroying, so too is the grace of God world founding. Sin is not the final answer, but is overcome by the victory of resurrection life by the grace and mercy of God. And so the ritual places us back in the world in the middle, not stuck but moving more fluidly through the process of confession, repentance, mercy and forgiveness.

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” In the Lenten journey let us participate in the drama of atonement, the movements of confession, repentance, mercy and forgiveness that we might become willing participants in the realm of justice and peace that resurrection ordains. To do so we must in all humility reject the extremes of denial and guilt by allowing the ritual discipline of Lent to do its work. The ability to fail and recover gracefully is the greatest learning we might hope for, and then give thanks that the love and mercy of God indeed triumph over sin and death.

Let us bless the Lord. Thanks be to God. Amen.

posted in Br. Lawrence A. Whitney, LC†, Lenten Series 2010: Atonement on 02.28.2010 at 1:50 pm