Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 10:25-37

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(singing) It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day in the neighborhood. Would you be mine? Could you be mine?  Won’t you be my neighbor?

It’s hard not to admire Mr. Rogers—a champion for children’s learning, a cardigan wearer, a Presbyterian minister (well, nobody’s perfect). But perhaps his most lasting contribution to the world will forever be his theme song.

Not because it ever hit the top of the charts or because of the brilliance of his voice, but kind of the opposite of that.  You see, in 1968, when his show began what would be a 33 year run, the country was at war, young people were disenchanted with authority, and recent victories in civil rights had been answered by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the flight of middle class whites to the suburbs.

In other words, at a time in which people were literally struggling with who should be allowed in their neighborhoods, Fred Rogers found a way to invite people into his with a simple, radical, Christian request:  Would you be mine? Could you be mine?  Won’t you be my neighbor?

It was a reminder of that gospel truth that no matter crazy this world gets, we don’t have to face it alone.

And although the times have changed, friends, the struggle has not.

For as much as we talk about technology and media bringing us closer together, we still live in a world that works very hard to keep us apart: young and old, black and white, gay and straight, male and female, rich and poor, broken and whole.

We live in a world that covets community, but insists on isolation.  And our young people have noticed.

If we’re honest, we know that many contemporary young people, the same young people who grew up accepting Mr. Roger’s near daily invitation are just as disenchanted today as they were then.  They’re just as frustrated by the hypocrisies of the world today as they were forty years ago.

And frankly, the church has not helped.  Over and over again, today’s young people have heard the church fail to answer that quintessential Christian question “Who is my neighbor?” Nowhere has this failure been felt more keenly than in our treatment of our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters.  Today’s young people have heard us exclude instead of include, speak instead of listen, choose law over love.

We complain that young people have no faith, but the truth is, we haven’t given them much to have faith in.

But the good news is that we believe in a God of grace, which means that despite our imperfections, despite our failures, our fractures, our faults, there’s always hope.

And so today, as we consider together what the gospel possibly has to say to today’s emerging adults, we begin by acknowledging our failures and recommitting to the basics.

Our story today is one of the most famous in all of Scripture: the story of the Good Samaritan.  It’s only told in Luke and involves a lawyer approaching Jesus with a question.

Now we don’t know much about the lawyer in our story. Actually, basically nothing beyond the fact that Luke tells us he was a lawyer and a “he.”  But let’s imagine for a moment that he was young, maybe just out of law school.  Perhaps he was like so many young people today who finish their formal schooling, enter the job market, and pray that when the six month grace period on their student loans ends…they won’t have to move back in with their parents.
Maybe like so many young people today he’s found a job but is still getting used to not getting summer breaks or winter breaks, or breaks at all.

Maybe he’s been working for a year or two and starting to wonder “Is this it?”

In our story, the young lawyer asks Jesus, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

“What must I do to inherit eternal life?”

It’s a pretty honest question.  How do I find life?  It’s a question we all ask from time to time.

And frankly, perhaps the only difference between this young lawyer and many of the young adults today is that he thought his religious leaders might actually have an answer.

Fortunately for him, he was right.

Jesus responds, “What is written in the law?”

And the young lawyer gives the answer he had no doubt learned in school, the one that his parents, his teachers, his synagogue taught him. He says, “You shall love the lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”

And Jesus responds simply, “You have given the right answer.  Do this and you will live.”

“You have given the right answer. Do this and you will live.”

The word used for “right” in the Greek is orthos, from which we get the term “orthodox.”  In other words, Jesus is saying, you have given the right answer, the orthodox answer, the approved answer, and if you do this, you will live.  Right now, in the present tense. You will live. But he undoubtedly knew the real question the lawyer was asking:  How?

On our answer hangs every decision of life.  Most of us know that we are called to love God and to love our neighbor, but if we’re honest, we don’t always know what that means.  Despite what we are sometimes led to believe, it’s not as if in every situation there is a clear choice between loving God and not, between loving our neighbor and not, a simple right or wrong,  No!  It doesn’t work that way.  Whether we like it or not, things are not always black and white.  There is a lot of gray in our faith…at least fifty shades of it.

Sure, sometimes our choice is clear, loving our neighbor rarely means killing them, but often times being a person of faith means struggling with confusing and often contradictory choices, both of which can be justified from the Scripture or the tradition of our faith.

In other words, friends, sometimes being a person of faith means moving beyond Scripture or tradition in order to use that that other God given gift – our brains.  A gift that young people have too often witnessed people of faith checking at the door.

Perhaps Luke was offering his readers, and in turn us, a way forward; freedom from the law which threatens to imprison us.  Not necessarily an easier way, but certainly one that is more honest.  Instead of leaving it here like the other gospels, the lawyer in Luke’s gospel asks a follow up question: “And who is my neighbor?”

“Who is my neighbor?” Was there ever a more honest question asked in the entire gospel? Who is my neighbor?  Who are the people we’re called to love?

And Luke could have had Jesus respond in any number of ways. After all, there were no other gospel accounts to refute him, but instead of quoting more Scripture, or giving a map with neighborhoods highlighted, or pointing to specific people— instead of offering a black and white answer, Luke has Jesus tell a story that to this very day is open to interpretation. A story that requires our brains.

Jesus says that a man was beaten and stripped by robbers and left half dead on the side of the road. An act that would have removed any means of identification, whether social or religious. When we are naked and half-dead on the side of the road, one can’t tell if we are rich or poor, free or slave, Jew or Greek, gay or straight. In other words, this man was just a person in need.

And by chance a priest came walking by.  Now, had this been our first time hearing the story, we might think, “Ah! A priest! Surely he will help.”  But when he sees the man, he crosses over and passes by on the other side of the road.  Then we see a Levite, and again, he sees the man and passes by on the other side of the road.

And while we’re scratching our heads trying to wrap our minds around why these two religious leaders didn’t stop, a Samaritan spotted the man and was moved with pity.  So, he bandaged his wounds, poured oil and wine on them, placed him on his animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him.  The next day he took out two denarii – equal to a day’s wage each– gave them to the innkeeper and told him to take care of him and that whatever else is spent he would repay upon his return.   In other words, he didn’t just stop. He STOPPED! He stepped away from the routine, from the busyness, from the expectations of life long enough to show this man love.

Now, we knew that was going to happen, we’ve heard the story before, but we should remember the shock value for both the young lawyer in the story and the original audience for Luke’s gospel.

You see, a Samaritan, was a person hated by the Jewish people of first century Palestine. The Samaritans were people who had interbred with their Assyrian captors 800 years earlier and they had never been allowed to forget it.

It would be as if a member of Al Queda was the one to stop and lend a hand where no one else had dared.  So for the lawyer in the story and the audience of Luke, this story would have been unbelievable and more than slightly disturbing.  Jesus was telling a story in which their enemy was the one to offer more care than their religious leaders.

And to be fair to the religious leaders who passed by, they had justification. After all, they had Scripture on their side. They had interpreted the canonical law correctly, their bible, and part of ours too, says that it is sinful to come into contact with a half dead man.  It was sinful for them to come in contact with the man in need and so they went with orthodoxy over common sense; they went with orthodoxy over mercy, they went with orthodoxy over love.

And we get it. After all, we do the same thing today. We allow a couple of obscure verses of scripture to trump our common sense.
And in case there was any room for confusion, Luke has Jesus say to the young lawyer, “which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”  To which the lawyer responds, “The one who showed him mercy.”  And Jesus says, “Go and do likewise.”

Go and do likewise.  Friends, this young man came to Jesus wanting to know the meaning of life. He wanted to know the way to fullness of life. And though he had been trained enough to know that love is the answer, he didn’t know what it looked like.

Jesus told a story that reminded him that the way to life abundant isn’t about chaining ourselves to the law, to the rules that we follow through life like a map, it’s about taking time to care for those around us, to show mercy.  It’s about investing in community, not in general, but in particular.  As Howard Thurman said, we don’t love in the abstract, we love in the concrete. We love in community, and when we have a question, we ought to err on the side of love.

Friends, when we allow our understanding of what is “right” or “orthodox,” or “Scriptural” to get in the way of our common sense of mercy for our brothers and sisters in this world, we miss the point of the gospel.

When I was in thirteen, my home church in Kansas hosted an AIDS conference. It was a big deal at that time and our newly elected United Methodist Bishop, came to participate in the conference and to talk with some of the youth about the challenges surrounding AIDS.

While he was chatting to us, a person came in and whispered a message in his ear. When the person left, the Bishop turned to us teenagers and said, “There is a man who is on his way here from the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka.”  –a church that some here might know from their protests in recent years at military funerals– He told us that this church will be on the other side of the street when we left that day and that they would most likely holding up signs condemning our church.

Then the Bishop paused and said, “I had two gay sons who died of AIDS, and as we were burying them, that man was shouting at their graveside, your sons are burning in hell.”

And then he said, “I want you to know, there is another way to be a Christian.”

Friends, what today’s young people don’t often hear is that there’s another way to be a Christian.

There are people in our world, our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters among them who are in need of mercy, of love, of care, and the church keeps moving to the other side of the road.
And whether we realize it or not, we have an audience.  People, young and old, are watching us and wondering how we can proclaim the gospel of love and continue to ignore people right in front of us.

In this story, we see Jesus pointing, as he does throughout his ministry, to the one who wasn’t concerned with the law, but with grace.  Friends, even if we have questions, we are called to err on the side of love.

Perhaps the lesson of the good Samaritan for us as Christians, and for the church as a whole, is that we should never be shown up in our love.

And when we are, it is time to re-evaluate our faith.

And so, we are left with the basic question of this sermon series.  What does the gospel have to offer to today’s emerging adults?  The same thing it has to offer each of us: Life.  Real Life. Full life.  A life which promises that no matter how hard things get, no matter how crazy, how isolating, how demanding this world becomes, we are not alone.

In other words, a life of love.

And while it can be confusing to know how to find it, we might do well to follow the example of Mr. Rogers and begin every relationship by asking, “Would you be mine? Could you be mine? Won’t you be my neighbor?”  Amen.

~The Rev. Dr. Stephen Cady, II

Pastor, Asbury First UMC, Rochester, NY

posted in Guest Preachers on 06.29.2014 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

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How fun it is today to be lead-off batter in the summer preaching series, with Dean Hill’s choice theme of “the Gospel and Emerging Adulthood.”  I’m going to take a swing at this first pitch and see if I can get us on base with my sermon title, which I boldly borrow from Kathleen Fannin’s book title, “Wonder and Other Life Skills.” Fannin, who is a college chaplain, writes about creating spiritual life retreats for young adults.

WONDER.   I’m tempted to say it’s a Wonderful word, but you know we ought not be redundant in our definitions.  WONDER As a noun: “A  feeling of surprise mingled with admiration, caused by something beautiful, unexpected.” As a verb, “to be curious to know something.”  Or better yet, WONDER as the reality of all life- as Abraham Joshua Heschel writes, “To pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain a sense of the mystery that animates all beings….Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living.”

Let’s name WONDER as a quality gifted us by emerging adults. It’s one of the reasons why I love being in ministry with young adults; they have yet to leave behind the beauty of “childlike wonder”; they are curious and open to learn; they haven’t yet developed the protective exoskeleton of cynicism some already emerged adults have grown. Let’s name today that we can all learn from young adults, and that indeed our very walk of Gospel discipleship has one persistent demand on us- that we are receptive. Receptive to wonder. That we keep our hearts and minds open to the presence of the divine all around us, and within us…. in short that we cultivate the life skill of wonder.

Pause a moment to ask What exactly is Emerging Adulthood? Whatever happened to being an adolescent and then a grown up?  Sociologists advance that Emerging Adulthood is actually a new developmental stage, one identified as part of a post-modern coming of age reality. A stage post-adolescence and pre-adulthood, generally identified as the years between 18-29. And it is interwoven with characteristics of the Millennial Generation-our current population of emerging adults.

Janjay Innis, a recent graduate of the BU STH, a young 20 something who is off taking the world by storm in mission work, spoke at the NE AC UMC last week- she said “in spite of staggering statistics about Church decline and the claims that Millennials are disengaged with the Church, God has raised up a new generation of young people who are seeking and asking questions about how faith calls them to be about the work of justice, peace, reconciliation, and love. This is Gospel.”

In the Gospel lesson that spoke to me for this day, Jesus teaches us how to engage the world. Jesus tells us to put on His yoke, to choose to walk with him tethered to the holy perspective of freedom and wonder.  To walk together, linked shoulder to shoulder along a route that he promises we’ll figure out together. And you will see dedication of service and love of selfie and love for neighbor in such a wonderful way.

The first time I saw an actual yoke happened to be in my own emerging adulthood years.  I was a brave 22 year old, and I had just loaded up my backpack to live a year on my own in Israel, learning Hebrew on a kibbutz, milking cows in Hebrew- I don’t know how to do it in English- pulling the 5 am shift in the milking parlor.  I was a NYC suburban kid enamored of farm life.  I still have the scar, faint now on my finger, given to me by the first cow I ever milked.  She didn’t like my unskilled touch so she stomped on my hand.   I learned to welcome the metal bar yoke of restraint that my kibbutznik partner taught me to apply.  It settled my bovine friends and allowed us to work together in the land of flowing milk and honey.

More commonly a yoke is used to link 2 working animals side by side - often oxen- so they can focus on the path intended for them.  With heads directed forward, the crossbar rests on their shoulders, distributing some of the weight of the pull of the plow or burden of the wagon. In Biblical metaphor, a yoke is a most often a symbol of servitude, of being harnessed to a life of toil.

But if you know anything about our friend Jesus, you know he is apt to invert metaphors, to Wake Up our settled assumptions so we might be receptive to wonder.  Jesus rebukes the established generation of religious folks who act is if they know it all and yet… they cannot recognize John the  Baptizer as a messenger of the kingdom of God- to them he is an ascetic nut job who wears weird clothes and eats weird food. They cannot recognize Jesus as the Son of God – to them he is a rule breaker who likes to wine and dine with the wrong sort of people. Jesus says these already emerged people are really like babies- they don’t get it.  Perhaps it will be the ones who are not so impressed with organized religion who will truly see him.

Hear Eugene Peterson’s lovely interpretation of our Gospel.  Jesus says, in Matthew 11:

“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”

On this first weekend of summer, doesn’t that sound like the most wonderful invitation: to recover our lives? To learn the unforced rhythms of grace.  Here in Boston, let’s face it - the historic epicenter of the Puritan Work ethic - Jesus offers us a way forward in centered peace. Let’s hear a witness to the gospel keeping company and living freely with emerging adults.

I met Bethany Printup-Davis through my previous appointment as the Protestant Chaplain at Nazareth College in Rochester NY.  Bethany grew up on a Tuscarora Indian Reservation near Buffalo, she attended a church off reservation and was particularly fond of singing in the choir.  She was an enthusiastic undergrad who came to our Sunday evening Protestant Worship services.  These services that in my first semester drew a not-so-enthusiastic crowd of 4 or 5.  And 2 of us were paid to be in attendance- myself and the undergrad piano player. The College was founded as a Catholic all women’s school, but had been independent and co-educational for 3 decades.  However, the legacy of Catholicism reverberated, and every Sunday night I waited as pew after pew of Catholic students poured out of the Chapel from evening Mass, galvanized by a specific religious tradition. Then my little flock entered the Chapel for our service. I found that while my students were keen to explore their spirituality, and to offer their lives to make a difference, they had minimal introduction to religious tradition. And they called themselves “the not-Catholic kids.”

And so I started to introduce them to wonders of Protestant churches.  I began by bringing students to a national gathering organized by United Methodist college students.  And 2 wonderful things happened for Bethany Printup-Davis at a gathering in Shreveport Louisiana.

First, the keynote speaker was Dr. Eboo Patel, a sociologist of religion, a devout American Muslim from Chicago by way of family of origin in India.  Eboo Patel, the founder of the Interfaith Youth Core, spoke eloquently to us about our Wesleyan heritage. He detailed the mission of John and Charles Wesley and enumerated the beauty of Methodism. He urged that the best way to be a fully engaged citizen and a full partner in interfaith cooperation is to know your own faith story.

Second, the music leaders were all Native Americans, taking the stage and leading us in songs with cadence of drumbeat and dancestep of ancient practice. My young friend Bethany sat in the front pew, as close as possible to the music. And she wept.  Grace flowed down her cheeks. Later she told me “Robin, I had no idea that I could unite my Native identity with my Christian identity.  I thought they had to be separate.”

The next year Bethany was up there on the stage- a leader in the music ministry.  She went on to take a Confirmation Class with me, to be baptized and welcomed into the UMC though our Campus ministry.  I saw her a few weeks ago as she led a Workshop for some 500 churches on Native American awareness.  Professionally she is a District educator for Native American cultural competencies, and is discerning a call to ministry. She is as enthusiastic as ever, attributing her joy to walking with Christ in wonder of identity.

My friend Micah Christian is a young man with a big and brave vision for being Church out in the world.  I’ve journeyed alongside him the past several years on a path that has taken him through Spiritual Life practices in seminary to baptism and confirmation in the Catholic Church to a year of service in Peru with his wife Jocelyn, to expressing beauty and faith through music. Perhaps you are one of 11.5 million people who watched him perform a couple weeks ago with his quartet “Sons of Serendip” on America’s Got Talent.  All 4 members of the band are recent BU grads- having earned degrees in law, theology, and music. At their audition they received a standing ovation. The judges- one of whom – Howard Stern – is a proud BU alumnus, were in rather stunned awe. Many in the crowd of thousands at Madison Square Garden and those of us huddled around TV sets cried for the beauty of it.  Their harp, cello, keyboard and vocals transported us.

I first learned about Micah’s new band on the last Saturday of the semester, when he approached me on Marsh Plaza.  I was in midst leading a Study Retreat for students, and we had brought the labyrinth Brother Larry and students made some years ago out onto the Plaza.  A whole variety of folks came by and walked the labyrinth – this ancient Christian practice now embraced by just about every spiritual tradition I know as a tool for centering. Students of engineering, law, management, fine arts…a family on their way to a Red Sox game, 3 fraternity brothers rushing to a big event, 2 girl scout troops… they all stopped to walk in peace. The engineers were the most suspicious.  “It’s a maze, right?  It’s a trick for me to solve, right?” “No,” I said “there is no trick, and the meaning isn’t found in external analysis.  You just have to get in there and start walking, trusting that you will be led to your center.” And so they did.

As Micah and I chatted around the perimeter of the labyrinth he told about this crazy, unexpected America’s Got Talent ride with the band.  He had just come from a rehearsal on campus. While he could not tell me anything about the results of the audition, sworn by Producers to secrecy, (we know now they advanced!)  He told me about fans waiting at the stage door, autographs requested, the pull and push of the glittery world of reality TV. And his desire, his burning deep desire to stay centered in the soul of the music and the soul of the friendship in the band.  To stay centered in integrity- so that everything he said and sang and did might reflect his calling to live as a follower of Christ.

He was on his way to see his Spiritual Director, and thanked me for sharing the labyrinth because “so many of us struggle to stay centered.”

Researchers at UCLA have a longitudinal study on Emerging Adults and Spirituality.  They conclude that there is a positive correlation between spirituality and well-being. While the highly spiritual students were by no means exempt from the significant stresses of collegiate life, they were also able to exhibit a high level of Equanimity. .. the qualities of being able to find meaning in times of hardship and feeling at peace and centered.

Micah, Kendall, Cordara, and Mason: Sons of Serendip, from the heart of your campus at BU, we wish you every joy and success.

Young adults witness to me just about every week the sentiment of Anne Frank, who wrote, “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”  They get inspired and they get going.  Caitlin Schultz and Lyndsey Seeley Fellows attended a national campus ministry event, and came back to the Nazareth campus with hearts strangely warmed by the Church’s impact on malaria prevention in Africa. They said, “Robin we are going to raise $1000 to donate to the Nothing But Nets campaign, to send treated bed nets to Africa, because they are so effective in saving lives. We have this idea to partner with the Men’s basketball team, because they have nets.”  Apparently my exoskeleton of doubt had developed because I did not match their enthusiasm.  “But we are a small group, we don’t know anyone on the basketball team, actually we don’t know any athletes, and I’m just not sure that’s a realistic project.” And then they called me to WAKE UP! “Robin if you are not going to help us, you can at least get out of our way.”  And you bet I joined them –as they put on the yoke of service to the world. Over the next 2 years they raised $3000, with hundreds of students and faculty and staff from all over campus participating.  And our little group of “not Catholic kids” gave themselves a new name as they multiplied in numbers and confidence and spirit.  They called themselves “The Little Church That Could.”

And, finally, I share a story about the yoke of accompaniment.

Demarius Walker is soon to graduate from BU. He’s a philosopher and deep thinker and kind soul who loves to dive deep into conversations that matter. He’s the leader of our Howard Thurman discussion group here at Marsh.  He participated at one of our recent Study retreats as we ended the long, productive day by gathering here in the sanctuary at 10 pm.  Turned out all the lights, and walked up to balcony by candlelight to reflect on the day in the shared company of friendship and prayer.  Demarius lingered, absorbing  the tranquility of the stillness, the silence, the flickering of light.  Afterwards he shared a story with me.

He told me that one time during the winter, very late at night, he wandered across campus and found himself at Marsh Chapel.  He was slightly surprised to find the front door open.  He came in.  Something compelled him in, down the center aisle of the sanctuary.  All the lights were off, except for the solitary light that illuminates the face of Christ on our chancel.  It was a moment of sheer awe for him, and he stopped in his tracks midway.  He could not go further. Then he sensed a companion. He looked over and there stood David Soper, our Marsh sexton and steward extraordinaire of this block of Comm Ave. Now, Demarius wasn’t sure he was supposed to be in the middle of the sanctuary in the middle of the night, and he was getting a little nervous in front of this man in an official BU uniform.  But before he had a chance to give explanation David spoke, “Beautiful isn’t it?” as they both gazed at the illuminated Christ.  Then, David turned and left.

I followed up with David, and asked for his recollection of the night. He said, “Oh sure I came in early, probably 3 am or so, to get a head start on clearing all the snow on the Plaza.  It was a nice quiet moment to share together.”

Friends, we are called –young and old and in between - to accompany one another in this wondrous journey. Let’s step into the summer with Rachel Carson, pioneer environmentalist from Maine, who wrote, “If a young person is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder…she needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.”  Let’s walk together in the unforced rhythms of grace.

~The Rev. Dr. Robin Olson

posted in Guest Preachers on 06.22.2014 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to listen to the University Baccalaureate service.

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Boston University’s 2014 Baccalaureate speaker was Dr. Nancy Bishop, Amgen, Inc., Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For more information, please see the BU Today article.

There will be no sermon text posted for this Baccalaureate address.

posted in Baccalaureate, Guest Preachers on 05.18.2014 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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The sermon text is unavailable at this time.

~Ms. Liz Douglass, Chapel Associate

posted in Guest Preachers on 02.16.2014 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 14: 15-24

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The Parable of the Great Banquet

When one of those at the table with him heard this, he said to Jesus, “Blessed is the one who will eat at the feast in the kingdom of God.”

Jesus replied: “A certain man was preparing a great banquet and invited many guests. At the time of the banquet he sent his servant to tell those who had been invited, ‘Come, for everything is now ready.’

“But they all alike began to make excuses. The first said, ‘I have just bought a field, and I must go and see it. Please excuse me.’

“Another said, ‘I have just bought five yoke of oxen, and I’m on my way to try them out. Please excuse me.’

“Still another said, ‘I just got married, so I can’t come.’

“The servant came back and reported this to his master. Then the owner of the house became angry and ordered his servant, ‘Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame.’

“‘Sir,’ the servant said, ‘what you ordered has been done, but there is still room.’

“Then the master told his servant, ‘Go out to the roads and country lanes and compel them to come in, so that my house will be full. I tell you, not one of those who were invited will get a taste of my banquet.’”

To Dean Robert Hill, in his absence, and the fine chapel assistants and staff of Marsh Chapel; to you, the Marsh Chapel congregation and our radio listeners, and especially to the faculty, students and staff of Boston University, I am indeed delighted to be here again on this special Sunday in which we celebrate the living legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. Had he lived, he would have been 85 years-old on this past Wednesday.

Introduction and Elaboration of Thesis

Our Gospel text is about a table conversation between Jesus and a rich and influential man of the cloth. Jesus had been invited not so much because the pleasure of his company was sincerely desired, but so that he could be watched by the cynical and critical eyes of his enemies. They wanted to see him break the rules in some word or act of religious and moral impropriety. In response to his host’s table blessing, “Blessed is he who shall break bread in the Kingdom of God”, Jesus relates the story of the Great Banquet which you have heard in the reading this morning.

In the parable, a certain man prepared a huge feast and invited all the people who are on his regular guest lists: his friends, the socialites, the fat cats and the play- makers, but they all for some reason or another made paltry excuses and did not come. So when the servant returned and reported this to his master, the owner of the house became angry and ordered his servant to ‘Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame.’ “‘Sir,’ the servant said, ‘what you ordered has been done, but there is still room.’ “Then the master told his servant, ‘Go out to the roads and country lanes and compel them to come in, so that my house will be full. I tell you, not one of those who were invited will get a taste of my banquet.’” The second and third invitations are different in respect to degree, each was more expansive than the other—from the streets and alleys of the town to the rural roads and country lanes—the servant’s orders were to compel them to come to the banquet. Welcoming the unwelcomed to the feast involved radical hospitality (and it still does).

The Welcome Table Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.—William Faulkner, Light in August

As we gather on this very special Sunday, dedicated to the memory of our greatest alumnus, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I thought it appropriate to pause and reflect on the place of memory and its power to evoke presences; ghosts, if you will, who beckon us, nudge us and demand of us that we take up their quarrel with the foe. All around us and within us, we are surrounded by memories that seek habitation in our lives, our speech and actions. It was Dean Howard Thurman who often said from this pulpit, “We died but you who live must do a harder thing than dying is. . .You must think and ghosts will drive you on.”1

During the holidays, I was struck by the powerful symbol of the Table. The times at the Table with family, friends and food were filled with moments of joy and of sadness— but precious memories, nonetheless, that I cherish because they help me to believe. I had plenty of memories. There were memories of my mother busy in the small kitchen in Chicago preparing for the big meal of ham, turkey and dressing, candied yams, greens, macaroni and cheese, cakes and pies. Ours was not the idyllic Christmas of John Boy on the Walton Farm or Beaver and Wally at the Cleaver dinner table, rather it was the gathering of my sisters, brother and brother-in-laws, uncles and aunts and cousins and friends who would drop by for good food and fellowship. Everybody was from Mississippi or one of the southern places from which people had come in search of “the warmth of other suns”. They had long memories of families gathering together at the Table. It was a Table where everyone was welcome and it really didn’t matter whether you were related or in the family’s circle of friends, if you showed up, you got fed. We knew then about the meaning of the Welcome Table--it meant radical hospitality for the least of these.

I think that we are forgetting (or have forgotten) that The Welcome Table is part of a great American tradition. Maybe once upon time, we, as African Americans, took it so seriously because we knew something about not being welcomed—not being welcomed in certain establishments, certain schools, certain neighborhoods, certain parties, around certain people—even certain churches and cemeteries. We knew what it meant to be unwelcome, so we worked hard at preparing a table that was big enough to welcome all. That’s why the old enslaved Africans, who had been relegated to the margins of anonymity and profanity, would gather way down in their brush arbor meetings and while working in the fields, and sing a song about The Welcome Table:

I’m going to sit at the welcome table Yes, I’m going to sit at the welcome table One of these days, hallelujah I’m going to sit at the welcome table Sit at the welcome table one of these days, one of these days I’m going to feast on milk and honey... I’m going to tell God how you treat me... All God’s children gonna sit together... I’m going to sit at the welcome table..3

Kennedy, King, Mandela and Obama and the Welcome Table

These “black and unknown bards” knew that while the Welcome Table was part of the great eschatological hope of African Americans, it was also costly. On this Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Sunday, I want us to remember people who paid the price for all of us to come to the Table. There are so many heroes and sheroes whose memories visit us from the past 50 years. Both 1963 and 1964 were powerful moments which shaped the legal, moral and spiritual landscape of the United States of America forever. I want to lift up the names of Medgar Evers (field secretary NAACP, murdered June 12, 1963); Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair (the 4 little girls who died in the bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham on September 15, 1963); and the 3 civil rights workers, Michael H. Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James E Chaney (murdered June 21, 1964 and found two months later in an earthen dam in Philadelphia, Mississippi)—all martyred in the struggle for justice in this country. They made possible the Welcome Table through radical hospitality. Now they implore us to join them at the Table. Longfellow wrote:

There are more guests at table than the hosts Invited; the illuminated hall Is thronged with quiet, inoffensive ghosts, As silent as the pictures on the wall.2

In late November of the past year, the nation was busy remembering the erudite and handsome, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, who was assassinated 50 years ago. Although some were suspicious of his politics and cautious embrace of the civil rights movement, in almost every African American home of the sixties his picture was on the wall alongside Jesus and Martin Luther King, Jr. His picture was there in commemoration not so much for his brilliance and commitment to civil rights—-but because of his absence. Although some felt he came kicking and screaming, he made room for us at the Welcome Table. So, we treated him as family.

Most Americans of that era had a deep respect and abiding reverence for the office of president. I am not so sure now. The dangerous incivility and racist innuendoes hurled at President Obama convince me that though seasons have changed, still most Americans find it easier to revere our fallen heroes than to honor and believe in the possibility of the present ones.

On August 28th of this year, my wife and I joined the throng of thousands who returned to the Lincoln Memorial, this site of memory, to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. While sitting there, I could not help but reflect on the progress that we have made towards the realization of that dream, but also on how far we still must go “if America is to become a great nation” as King so eloquently proclaimed. I was trying to believe. While we sat there in the shadow of the Great Emancipator, there were signs and banners calling attention to the George Zimmerman verdict in the killing of Trayon Martin, a seventeen year old teenager in Sanford, Florida. President Obama’s remarks that “Trayvon could have been me thirty-five years ago” came as a source of encouragement for many mass protests of righteous indignation and cries for justice from citizens around the nation. On the other hand, many felt that he had inserted the proverbial race-card into an already volatile situation of fractured race relations in this country. Some conservative pundits blamed him for acting as the “Racist-in-Chief” while some critics within the black community felt that he said too little, too late—that his statement was like “pre-sweetened Kool-Aid” suggesting that it was palliative, at best, and failed to address the deep structural issues at stake for the poor and black and hopeless masses who needed his engaged and embodied leadership in this case and others.

One has to ask why this continued public harassment of President Barack Hussein Obama which appears to be intensifying as Supreme Court rulings carefully and effectively began to dismantle the hard-fought gains of the Civil Rights Movement (the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action) in the year of the 50th Anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s historic speech.3 Is it because there are some people in this country who are afraid of the Welcome Table?

I visited family over the holidays and in the home of my sister there was a picture on the wall next to Martin and Malcolm X. It is the dignified portrait of Nelson Mandela. He was not made in America, yet he helps me to believe. He was a beautiful man with a soft smile and deep humanity. When I was at Morehouse College, each summer, I led a delegation of students sponsored by Oprah Winfrey to South Africa to study ethical leadership within the context of the South African democratization process. After a visit to Robben Island, the prison facility where Mandela spent most of his 27 years incarcerated, one of the students wrote in his diary:

The impact was strongest when I stood directly in front of Nelson Mandela’s cell, number five in the B section, which was reserved for political prisoners. Sections A and C housed criminal prisoners. What affected me most was to hear how these prisoners were actually treated. It was heart-breaking to look at the cement floor where Mr. Mandela slept without a cot or anything for cushion. It was enormously troubling to look at the five-gallon bucket that Mr. Mandela had to use for a bathroom because there was no toilet in his cell. Who can imagine having to smell something like that two feet away from you all night long until the following morning when you were allowed to empty and clean your waste bucket?4

We cannot help but resonate with this student's feelings as he observed Mr. Mandela's inhumane circumstances, but we also marvel at the deep humanity of this man who forced an apartheid government to open up the Welcome Table and who emerged as the first black president of South Africa and statesman to the world. Madiba teaches us that:

Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage; Minds innocent and quiet take That for an hermitage;

If I have freedom in my love And in my soul am free,

Angels alone, that soar above, Enjoy such liberty.5

Today, I would like to place another picture on the wall this morning. It is a picture of my colleague, Professor Kathe Darr, Chair of the Faculty Council, who has made a commitment to expand the Welcome Table at Boston University. She is joined by the President and Provost in this commitment to diversity. Let us pray that in this year when we celebrate the memory and legacy of Martin Luther King, that we place more pictures on the wall.

Opening up The Welcome Table: Welcoming the Unwelcomed

I often wonder what it will take to produce a new generation of leaders who understand the power and the cost of radical hospitality and who are willing to build on the great vision of a beloved community. What might it mean to become servants of justice and truth in this place that is haunted by the memories of Martin Luther King, Jr., Howard Thurman, Barbara Jordan, Anna Howard Shaw, Walter Muelder and Samuel DeWitt Proctor and so many others, who like ghosts, drive us on? Echoing Frederick Douglass, King often said, “Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless effort and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God.”6 Ah, there it is! Co-workers with God! An old-fashioned, unsophisticated theological assumption that has no empirical warrant and backing? Maybe . . . but it got the job done. I think it still will.

Ours is a daunting challenge, but if we are truly committed to welcoming the unwelcome here at Boston University and elsewhere, we must join the long and hallowed chorus of brave women and men and boys and girls who have dared to make room for others at the Table. King called these principled actors who are willing to risk life and limb through nonviolent creative social change, “transformed nonconformists.”

Summary and Closing

In closing, parables can be tricky—the Parable of the Great Banquet does not tell us how much work and how hard it is to welcome the unwelcomed—to expand the guest lists and to restructure the rooms so that “the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame” can come in.

First, welcoming the unwelcomed involves courage—the courage to change. According to Martin Luther King, Jr. it begins with a transformation in consciousness— a revolution of values and priorities. It implies a re-orientation of values and priorities, it requires a readjustment of our worldview, it requires a rearrangement of the personal and social furniture in our living rooms—more than that it requires a type of courage, a kind of resistance, a steadfastness to go in spite of the resistance. It says, "Wait on the Lord, be of good courage, and God will strengthen your heart."

Second, welcoming the unwelcome will require a sense of justice. Justice as fairness—a level playing field. If we are going to invite others to the Table, we will need to change the menu, change the rules of etiquette, restructure the dining room and change the seating arrangements. We will need to make room for folks at the Table who do not look like us, talk like us, dress like us, love like us and pray like us. It means ultimately, that we must learn to share power. For the religious among us, it will require repentance, confession and conversion. For some Christians, this will be especially hard.

Finally, we must practice compassion for the least of these. Who are the least of these? They are the ones whom we do not see, whom we seldom even think about except when in our hurried pace, we pass them on the street or see them behind bars or lying in their own blood on the evening news. One has to ask how is it that in a nation of so much wealth and prosperity, we are witnessing more and more poverty, mis- education, mass incarceration of the black, brown and poor, the left-out and the left behind?

Who are who are the least of these? They are your sisters and your brothers locked in poverty and locked out of a future of hope and possibility. Dare we see the face of our brothers and sisters from whom we are estranged and find our own faces?

We need not look far to see what is at stake in this call to radical hospitality. It is not enough to be gentle, civil and progressive—these are fine personal attributes, but ultimately we are called to put some skin in the game, to stand up and join the creative forces that call us to justice and peace-making in this world. Leaders in this century are called to be more than charitable actors who respond to the needs of individuals; they must be willing to stand at the intersection where worlds collide and create communities of justice and compassion. Who dares to stand in the absent spaces and places left by King and others and suffer with strangers? Who dares to welcome the Unwelcomed to the Table?

NOTES

1 From Howard Thurman’s meditation in memory of Jim Reeb in the issue of The Liberal Context (Spring 1965) a paraphrase from Hermann Hagedorn’s The Boy in Armor, "Because you would not think we had to die : . . . .We died. And there you stand no step advanced."

2 “Haunted Houses" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

3 In 1964 Congress passed Public Law 88-352 (78 Stat. 241). The provisions of this civil rights act forbade discrimination on the basis of sex as well as race in hiring, promoting, and firing.

4 Walter Earl Fluker, Ethical Leadership: The Quest for Character, Civility, and Community (Fortress, 2009)166.

5 Richard Lovelace, “To Althea, From Prison” (1642)

6Douglass actually said: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle.” Frederick Douglass, “West India Emancipation” speech at Canandaigua, New York, August 3, 1857. See more at: http://www.blackpast.org/1857-frederick- douglass-if-there-no-struggle-there-no-progress#sthash.fLNNA0p9.dpuf Accessed, 19 January 2014.

~The Rev. Dr. Walter Fluker

MLK, Jr. Professor for Ethical Leadership, Boston University School of Theology

posted in Guest Preachers on 01.19.2014 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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I am a parent today. Yes I stand in this pulpit as a Pastor whose head and heart have been claimed for years by the joy of ministry with young adults.   But, today, the title I claim is MOM. I am here for Parents’ Weekend, and I welcome members of my parent posse who have travelled across the country to spend some time on campus with our sons and daughters.  Dean Hill tells me that this day is special because we have been granted visitation rights. Welcome to campus, parents.

If you’ve had a conversation with me for longer than 5 minutes this fall, you know that my son is a freshman here at BU. All right, let’s be honest, it’s probably more like 2 minutes into our meeting. OK, you have to tell the truth from the pulpit- it’s been a message of my heart emblazoned in neon on my sleeve for the world to see. “My son is a freshman here!” I’m kind of a proud Mom, who is very close to her son, who’s had a hard time letting him go – I  know –go ahead and laugh- I am letting go all the way from my work place here at 735 Comm Ave across the street to his residence at 700 Comm Ave.

As a chaplain I’ve led many events over the years for parents dropping their kids off at college.  But there is a profoundly different experience when it is your own child…… I am a parent today. Did I mention that?  Has it been 2 minutes into our conversation?

I’ve been rereading some of my higher education books on college transitions, specifically passages for parents. I haven’t read so many parenting books since the infancy years. But I am honoring this unique time of transition. And trying to get it right on my end.  Our lesson from Jeremiah today has a pithy proverb about first generations not getting it right for the next generation.  Jeremiah admonishes that “the parents ate the sour grapes, and the children got a stomachache.”  I thought- parents - we can do better than that.  And Jeremiah thinks so too- he envisions a day when an individual’s actions will have consequences for that person.  You eat a bad apple, and you get the stomachache. Mistakes of the elders need not be passed on as problems for the children. Of course it goes both ways, and we have not a little bit of attitude in a couple verses from our Psalter toady- - did you note the line when a young writer says - “I understand more than the aged.” Just an FYI: I wouldn’t recommend students quoting that one to your parents over lunch today.

Since we parents really are trying to get it right, let’s name a place of origin for us.  I quote from my Fall Canonical literature: Letting Go: A Parents’ Guide to Understanding the College Years “We all know intellectually that this is a time for our children to separate and assert their own independence.  But long after they have become taller or stronger than we are, our primal protective feelings are easily unleashed.  We carry images in our heads of the curly haired toddler, the gap-toothed 6 year old, and times when a hug could make their world all better.  The mature, rational part of us wants them to solve their own problems and believes they can- but another part of us wants to stay connected, be in control, protect them from any pain they will have to face.”  End quote.

When our son announced to us, complete with drumroll, that he was choosing BU from the 10 schools at his horizon, we were thrilled. Not the midwest college we thought he might choose, some 12 hours from home- but 9 miles, we were ecstatic.  ….My husband and I love this university, having met here, both earning our first graduate degrees here, both now working here on campus.

Our highly literate son could read the excitement in our faces.  He even read that chapter in our minds, that went something like “maybe the nest won’t be so empty with our youngest living a block away from our offices.”  Our son then presented us with a carefully premeditated, bullet pointed speech that he coined his “Rules of Engagement” for attending BU.

Our biblical scholars will recognize that These Rules are apodictic in nature- all the lovely thou shalt not commandments. MOM, You will not greet me with your usual outgoing enthusiasm.  No unsolicited hugging.  If we pass by one another on Comm Ave, you may greet me with restraint, IF I have first acknowledged you.  This acknowledgement will be in the form of a nod of the head, perhaps a smile. No Acknowledgement, no greeting.

If we see each other in the GSU, and you are looking for a table at which to eat lunch, and I give said acknowledgement, you may come over just to say hello, even to my group of friends, but NO “honey how are you, I miss you, I love you” talk.  Communications will be occasional texts and phone calls, and I will be home for Thanksgiving.

I thought for a moment and said, “So, you want us to pretend you‘re in college in Ohio.”

“Exactly!”  was his reply.

My son is here in the sanctuary today. My son, who has been raised by 2 United Methodist clergy parents, is a PK squared.  My son, who has been the object of many a sermon illustration in many a church. My son, whose classroom building shares a Plaza with this chapel. My son, who shares DNA with a BU Chapel Associate and a Professor.  So my gift to my beloved, amazing, wonderful son is that I will let him be anonymous.  But I have to call him something, so I’ve been calling him HE WHO MUST NOT BE NAMED . “You know who” is in the house today.

Now, “You Know Who” grew up book by book with Harry Potter and the Hogwarts posse.  YOU KNOW WHO is a reference to Lord Voldemort himself, the source of all evil and fear and chaos in the world.  This is where the pseudonym loses some of its utility, because my son is not the Dark Lord. But it’s the best I’ve got. Students, you gotta trust us, we parents are doing the best we can to let go and to set you free for like Robert Browning we know that “the best is yet to be.”

So, ‘You know who,” while I applaud your disengagement from your parents, I have 3 Rules of Engagement of my own I would like to share today.  Without “thou shalt not”

1. Look Up.         2. Get Lost              3. Be Unrecognizable.

Look Up. In my first parish there was a framed Norman Rockwell print, that featured St. Thomas Episcopal Church on 5th Avenue in NY -  a gothic revival beauty of a church. Numerous Urban pedestrians are passing by the church, each downcast, slumped over in cement gazing routine.  Not a one is looking up. The rector is outside on steps in full vestment, and he has just posted his sermon title on the church sign entitled  “Lift Up Thine Eyes!”  You can sense both his Jeremiad admonition, What are you doing ,people, and his Jeremiah vision for life that could be lived so much more abundantly.

Dean Howard Thurman, who served this Chapel 1953-65, stands on the steps of Marsh Chapel 24 -7, calling out “Come Alive! Figure out what makes you come alive and go do it!”  Lift Up thine Eyes. Look Up around you. That will help you to look deep to the hunger within you.  Look up. look in. That sounds a little bit like Albus Dumbledore wisdom, what do you think You Know Who?

Look up! Yes, the Mom here does want to mention, please look both ways when crossing Comm Ave- 57 bus, BU shuttle, cars, taxis, T, bikes, students on skate boards, not so smart pedestrians glued to smart phones .

LOOK Up. Be attentive to your splendor. Live mindfully.  With intentionality put down your virtual world so that you may live into the incarnational world of God’s people right here, right now.

When my generation went to college we were exhorted to do this newfangled  thing called Study Abroad. For this globally connected generation, in a post- modern flattened world, I have no doubt that you are engaging the world.  But I exhort you to engage the person right next to you.

Sharon Daloz Parks who writes about emerging adulthood and faith, notes that young people are hungry for “hearth places.”   Hearth places are places where people linger with one another, with invitation to pause, to reflect, to be. They offer an exquisite balance of stability and motion. They are places of contemplation- defined by Quaker Douglas Steere as “A continual condition of prayerful sensitivity to what is going on.”  Be attentive to what is going on. This can be in a Marsh Chapel fellowship meal when you discover that inquiring minds really belong in this place, on your dorm floor when your friends throw you a surprise 18^th birthday party , when you look up on your walk to class and smile at everyone you meet.

Hearth times can happen on the T in serendipitous conversation with a fellow sojourner , at a meal in the Dining Hall when you open your table up to greet a student from another country, studying another discipline, and Common Ground morphs from a phrase of Howard Thurman to a discovery of your heart.

This is where we parents must nuance one of previous Rules of Engagement we taught you in grade school,  notably “Stranger Danger.” You know how to be smart and safe, but our faith urges us to engage the stranger in our midst  - in addition to your 1,452 Facebook friends.  Did you know that in class of 2017, right here on campus, there are students from 66 different countries? Look Up.

Daloz Parks says that the “hunger for hearth-sized conversations persists, and it can be ignored only at the cost of a malnourished life.” Eat well at the banquet of BU community! Be attentive to the Splendor along Commonwealth Avenue.

Rule #2 for He Who Shall Not be Named and all our beloved students.  Get Lost. Sometimes we need to get lost on purpose, sometimes we just need to stop the ego car and admit that we need directions.

Now, this is going to sound counter-intuitive to this GPS dependent generation.  Where a satellite can talk to the gadget in your palm and your friend Siri can guide you wherever you want to go.  Our wisest spiritual guides tell us that pilgrims on adventures get lost a lot of the time- so we best value the process, not just the destination.  When  you are lost and must rely daily on the kindness of strangers.

In our worship life this fall we’ve been travelling through exile with Jeremiah. . .Displacement.  Separation from home. Dislocation. Life on a foreign avenue.  Following political defeat, Jeremiah travels with Judah from home field advantage of Jerusalem to refugee life in Babylonia.   At first there is the shock and lament of arrival in a new place. Then last week Jeremiah recognized that the Babylonian exile would last a long time –so he advised folks settle in- to build houses and plant vines, to thrive, even to do their part to benefit the welfare of the foreign city in which they now live.

Students, you are not here because you are lost, or exiled. You are here by privileged choice to study at this fine University. But what student has not felt the burning loneliness of banishment from all that is familiar, or the paralysis of fear during these midterm evaluations.  Am I good enough? Can I do this? Confessed or not, there is a moment of longing for the cocoon of unconditional love at home.     It’s not only OK to be lost, it’s a condition of our humanity.  To deny our moments of exile is to deny our moments of restoration.  And here’s the lavish joy of life. My colleague the Rev. Jen Quigley expressed it beautifully when she preached that “Grace is the serendipitous moment of being found.”

Sometimes it’s good to Get lost on purpose. Spend a day away from your determined efficient production, and wander.  Wander to the shoreline with Dean Hill, wander through neighborhoods of Boston, wander into colleges other than your own, wander beyond your syllabus and get lost in the thrill of an idea. Chase a footnote down its rabbit warren of antecedents until you look up at the clock and an hour has passed.  It’ll probably have nothing to do with the thesis of your current project- but it may lead you to the very thesis of your life. To Vocation. Get lost in what you love.

Over the years I’ve led numerous Alternative Spring Break trips for service and vocational exploration.  At each trip’s orientation I name that it will be a week of “intentional dislocation.”  We are purposefully leaving what is known and comfortable, in order to see ourselves in a new way, to become a joy-filled Christian community in that long fun van ride.   We must separate from homefield advantage so we may be fully open to the communities we will serve.  Kenda Creasy Dean calls it the place of “creative disequilibrium,” a liminal principle of the Gospel - that the reality of being off kilter may precipitate growth and transformation.

Getting Lost is like Falling in Love.  You are lost and you are found. Fall in love on purpose. Listen to this short poem by Ignatian priest Fr. Pedro Arrupe:

Nothing is more practical than
finding God, than
falling in Love
in a quite absolute, final way.
What you are in love with,
what seizes your imagination, will affect everything.
It will decide
what will get you out of bed in the morning,
what you do with your evenings,
how you spend your weekends,
what you read, whom you know,
what breaks your heart,
and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.
Fall in Love, stay in love,
and it will decide everything.

Look Up, Get Lost, and my final Rule of Engagement:

Be Unrecognizable

When You Know Who went off to FYSOP community service the week before classes, he was still 17.  I had to fill out special BU Rules of Engagement forms to surrender my minor’s care to the University, including my own cell number.  There was a slight miscommunication and apparently my number was confused with YOU KNOW WHOs number.  I started to get texts that week. They didn’t sound like messages that my son would write to me. “Hey DUDE, meet at the Plaza at 10 tonight to start our night out.”  I wanted to write back “Hey Dude, I’m the Mom; I’m headed to bed at 10.”  But instead I wrote, ”I believe you want You Know Who’s number. Here it is. Text him.”

After about 3 messages from my Dude friend- who was so very friendly and polite- I thought we had it nicely worked out. Until the second week of classes and I got a text that read,  “I’m on the Quidditch Team, I’m a chaser,  I am a member of Dumbledore’s Army, and  I have 2 interviews for staff writing positions.”  Oh great, it’s Dude again. Who is this person writing me???? Until I studied the number, and realized this indeed this was HE Who Must not be Named.  Unrecognizable to me in two weeks.  Fabulous!

Students, Reinvent yourself.  Or as a friend of mine, Nora Bradbury-Haehl writes in her new book called the Freshman Survival Guide,  “Shed you skin, not your skeleton.”      Do something so different that your parents have to google it to figure out what you’re up to.    I had to Google “chaser” (it’s a quiddtich position)  and I did some research to learn that “Boston University Dumbledore's Army is a chapter of the Harry Potter Alliance. We will harness our love for Harry Potter to bring about change in the Boston community through volunteering and fundraising.”  Wow.  I love it!

Finally, Jeremiah dreams of a day when we are transformed from the inside out. When our hearts are strangely warmed, and our new lives of justice and joy are practically unrecognizable . Jeremiah gives us these famous words -“The days are surely coming when I will make a new  covenant… I will put my law within them, and I will etch it on their hearts; and I will be their God and they shall be my people.”

Beloved students, this is our deepest and most important dream for your engagement.  That the love and grace of God will be so close to you that it is tattooed  on your heart.  That you will be in relationship with this God in Christ who accompanies you through exile and into homeland.

Friends, Be careful crossing the street. Thank you for visitation rights.  And, Fall in love with God, it will make all the difference.

~The Reverend Dr. Robin Olson, Chapel Associate

posted in Guest Preachers on 10.20.2013 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

1John 2:12-17; Luke 23:39-42

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Two others died on crosses with Jesus that Friday, according  to Luke.

The old translations of the Bible mistranslated the Greek word used to describe them so Christian legend came to call them thieves. Reza Aslan's book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth is now number one on everybody's best seller list.

Aslan is right that the two men who died on crosses with Jesus were not thieves but probably zealots and revolutionaries. Today we might call them --this is my word not Aslan's-- today we might call them insurgents.

Insurgents are patriots who fight against occupying forces much more powerful than they are. They fight not to win battles, which would be a lost cause, but because they hate oppression and they hate the oppressors and they hate those who collaborate with oppressors.

Israel was occupied by the Roman Empire so militarily advanced that Israel could never defeat them in battle but, lost cause or not, the most radical zealots fought and maimed, wounded and killed whenever and wherever they could.

The zealots hated the Romans. The Romans hated the zealots. The Romans reserved for zealots the worst, most painful, most humiliating form of punishment: execution by crucifixion.

As Reza Aslan argues, the two others dying on crosses near Jesus were most likely zealots. Aslan emphasizes their passion for social justice. He does not emphasize that they probably would have had the blood of Romans and Israelite collaborators on their hands.

In Luke's story of the conversation between the zealots and Jesus, the crowd who'd come to watch the crucifixions is mocking Jesus and one of the zealots joins them. He mocks Jesus. The other zealot sides with Jesus. He says to the first zealot: You and I are guilty of what we are accused of doing and and deserve our punishment. But Jesus has done nothing wrong and does not deserve to die like this.

This second zealot says to Jesus: “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

Part of the reason Luke tells this story is because he wants to convince us that even though he died the death of a zealot, Jesus was not one. There was no blood on Jesus' hands. Instead his blood is our hands ... all we who crucified him or stood by and did nothing, do nothing. This is Luke's point.

So the controversy that Reza Aslan raises in his book is not a new one. Luke was already trying to address it in his gospel written only a generation or so after Jesus' death.

What particularly interests me this morning is Jesus' response in Luke's story to the second zealot who asks Jesus to remember him when he comes into his kingdom.

Jesus answers: "Amen, I tell you that today you will be with me in paradise."

Today you will be with me in paradise.

There is a sermon I have been trying to preach for a number of years now. It is a sermon a member of my church back in Washington, DC, asked me to preach.

She was a fascinating person as so many of those who attend my church are. As a young woman she had been recruited to Washington when the federal government was growing rapidly and every office was looking for young intelligent single women to move to DC to be secretaries because they needed someone to, well, actually do the work.

She had grown up in a small rural town in the south, studied at a local small Christian college for a year or two. She was very bright. Someone in Washington knew someone at her college; she wanted to see the world. She ended up in Washington organizing the calendar and life of someone important in the government.

She never married but over the years she developed a wonderful community of friends who became her family: People from the apartment building she lived in, people from the little pub where she spent Friday nights.

A gay friend from the pub first brought her to our church. I mention this only because it amused her so that a gay man was the one to bring her back to church. She once told me her friends were all the people the church she grew up in had told her never to associate with: people of different races and nationalities, gay people, people who had been divorced, people who were a bit cynical and who liked to tell slightly risqué jokes, people who would have been lonely without each other.

One day the friend she attended church with called to tell me that she had been diagnosed with a terminal illness. She had only months to live.

I called to ask if I could visit. She said she didn't really need me to visit. She had friends to talk to. She didn't really need me in her living room, she said.

But, if I wanted to do something for her, she said, this is what I could do: I could preach a sermon on a certain topic. The topic she wanted me to preach a sermon about was what happens after we die.

Her request left me fairly speechless. This is not what we focused on in the seminary next door to this chapel when I attended it. What happens after we die?

She has long since died and I trust knows more about the answer to her question than I do, but I have been trying to preach her sermon ever since in one form or another ... without much success. But I keep trying, especially when I get a new audience to try to talk about it with, like you.

For a religion based on the story of a resurrection, the Bible really has relatively little to say about what happens after we die and what it says is not very systematic nor frankly is it very consistent.

The Gospel of John quotes Jesus saying his Father's house has many dwelling places and he will go to prepare a place for us. His disciples get confused during this conversation and, as so often happens with the Gospel of John, when I try to study the passage too literally I get confused too. (John 14:1-9)

Already at the time the Bible was being written people --even Christians-- were having a hard time with the idea of resurrection. What is it exactly that is resurrected? The Apostle Paul tries to explain it. The dead will be raised imperishable. The perishable must put on imperishability and the mortal must put on immortality. (I Cor. 14:35-58) Unpack that.

Paul finally admits that for now we see only through a mirror dimly. For now we know only in part. (I Cor. 13:12)

In the Book of Revelation, which you'd think might be the most helpful part of the Bible on this topic, we don't even go to heaven so far as I can tell. Heaven comes down to earth. (Rev. 21:1-7)

The writer of the First Epistle of John is the most honest and vulnerable and agnostic -- What we will be has not yet been revealed, he writes. What we do know is this: When he is revealed, we will be like him. (I John 3:2)

Other religions seem much more knowledgeable and concrete. Tibetan Buddhism describes exactly what happens to us during the first 49 days after we die.

Vedic Hinduism's Garuda Purana describes what happens after we die in perfect detail including the dark tunnel we pass through as our soul moves from our old body to our new body. The direction we travel in the tunnel is due south.

The Koran says we will enter heaven through one of eight doors depending on which of eight religious practices we prioritized during our life on earth.

Our Bible, in contrast, seems to give us only hints and poetry.

Which is why as I decided to try this sermon one more time I came to focus on Jesus' words to the zealot on the cross. Jesus says to him "Amen. I tell you that today you will be with me in Paradise."

The word Paradise appears only three times in the New Testament. It is a word, scholars tell us, that has a different connotation than heaven. Heaven is a reference to fulfillment, completion, culmination, resolution, the end. Heaven is when and where God's will is finally fully and completely done.

Paradise is a reference backwards ... back to the garden ... back to Eden ... back before history began ... before Cain murdered Abel (Gen. 4:8) ... before Hamor raped Dinah (Gen. 34:2) ... before Shem made Canaan his slave Gen 9:25) ... before we learned prejudice and racism and sexism and homophobia and xenophobia and greed and dominion and the fear that if I share with you there may not be enough left over for me.

Jesus says to the zealot whose life is defined by oppression and hate but who reaches out in kindness to him as they hang on crosses together, today you will be with me where and when the world has not yet turned into what it has become.

He says: We are going back to before we were wounded and before we began wounding others until the whole world became a world of woundedness and violence. We are going back to the garden.

I am not sure. I don't know. I don't know if we are going forward towards heaven or backward towards Eden ...  but there is something I find hopeful about the idea of being with Jesus in paradise. There is something appealing about the undoing of all we have done to hurt each other and to hurt the earth. There is something appealing about the undoing of all the pain I have caused, all the good I've left undone.

First John says: "The world and its desires are passing away but those who do the will of God live forever." (I John 2:17)

The world and its desires are passing away.

Fred Buechner says people don't pass away. It is the world that is passing away ... the world and its desires. Hate is passing away. Greed is passing away. Ignorance is passing away. Prejudice is passing away.

The world and its desires are passing away but you and I --the you and I created by God in the garden to be companions to one another, the you and I before we began to murder and rape and enslave each other-- the real you and The real me will live forever.

If I could preach this sermon to the woman who asked me to preach it I would tell her that the hate and fear the church she grew up in tried to teach her is passing away but the love she discovered with her gay, divorced, irreverent neighbors and her friends at the pub, this love she opened her heart to will never pass away.

Carol Zaleski in a lecture at Harvard reported that six years before his death America's greatest philosopher William James received a questionnaire from one of his former students.

One of the questions was "Do you believe in personal immortality?"

James answered: "Never keenly, but more strongly as I grow older."

The next question was: "If so, why?"

James answered: "Because I am just getting fit to live."[i]

The world damages us so. Not the world God created; the world we have created.   It teaches us to hate those who hate us until we all hate each other. It teaches us to be suspicion of those who seem different from us until we are suspicious of everybody. It teaches us not to trust until we are all distrustful of each other.  It teaches us murder, it teaches us rape, it teaches us domination.

But, take courage,  because the world and its desires are passing away. Even the part of the world that lives inside of me and inside of you is passing away. Even the part of the broken, messed up world that lives inside of me and inside of you is passing away.

As we make our way back to the garden or forward to heaven, whichever it is, I so want to learn how to trust, how to forgive, how to accept forgiveness, how to be unreservedly generous, how to love with all my heart. On the day I die, I want to finally be ready to live.

posted in Guest Preachers on 08.18.2013 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Genesis 2: 18-25; Matthew 19:3-12

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After I graduated from Boston University School of Theology forty-one years ago and became a local church pastor if you'd told me that I would preach at Marsh Chapel during my last year of active ministry and that the topic I would choose to talk about would be marriage I would not have believed you.

Marriage was a routine part of the life of the church and my work as a pastor, usually more fun than funerals. We did premarital education and counseling with couples but we drew much more heavily on psychology and the social sciences than we did biblical studies or theology or ethics when we taught and counseled.

I am fairly amazed that I have spent so much time these last several years of my ministry trying to understand marriage biblically, theologically, and even politically.

It is in some part your fault, Massachusetts. In 2004 you became the first state in our nation to make same-sex marriage legal, and look what has happened since. Less than ten years later, marriage equality is now the law in 13 states, the District of Columbia, and five Native American tribes.

The Supreme Court has ruled that the federal government must recognize and honor same-sex marriages conducted in states where they are legal.

A recent Gallup poll indicates that 52 percent of Americans would vote for a federal law that made same-sex marriage legal in all 50 states.

It seems increasingly likely what you began here in Massachusetts will eventually reach every state and beyond.

The argument in the courts and on the public square for marriage equality, put simply, is that marriage is a civil right and that we cannot constitutionally deny any group of people their civil rights.

Earl Warren writing the 1967 Loving v Virginia Supreme Court decision said: "The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men" ... and presumably by free women as well.

Legally, marriage is a civil right and so marriage equality for adults of all races, nationalities, genders, sexual orientations and identities is undeniable.

Since the principle of equality is rooted in the teachings of all of the Abrahamic religions, you might think the churches, synagogues, mosques and meetings of America would applaud another advance for justice.

This, of course, has not entirely been the case. There have been problems.

One problem is the Bible. The Bible simply always assumes that marriage is between a man and a woman or, in some cases, between a man and women. As the religious opponents of marriage equality like to say, there is no Adam and Steve in the Bible. It is true. There isn't.

So to understand marriage equality people of biblical faith need to take a leap of theological deduction and imagination. We need to ask whether the Bible's teachings about marriage are about anatomy and biology and physiology or whether they are about the quality of relationship between two people who love each other and want to make the profound commitment to each other that we call marriage.

It is a theological leap many find difficult and it is a leap, frankly, it would never have occurred to us to take ...  except that we have known gay and lesbian couples who have demonstrated in their lives together this quality of love and commitment that is the ideal of marriage. It is because of them that we've needed to go back and read the Bible again and see if we can find room for them in the story.

I have tried to read and consider carefully the arguments of those who oppose marriage equality on the basis of biblical teachings. Most now acknowledge that the battle within the American culture is pretty well settled. They acknowledge the secular culture has changed its mind. The secular culture now accepts same-sex marriage.

But, they argue, the church needs to be counter-cultural. They argue that the church cannot allow the secular culture to redefine biblical teaching.

it seems to me this argument is based on the theological assumption that God is not present or at work within the culture, only within the church. The assumption is that the culture is godless while the church holds all godly truth. I find no substantial support for this way of thinking within Scripture or Christian tradition and certainly not experience.

Jesus says the wind blows where it chooses. (John 3:8) The spirit goes where it will.

Biblically God has always resisted being caged inside temple walls built by human hands. God's very name is I am who I am and I will be who I will be. (Exodus 3:14)

The Gallup poll I mentioned that indicates that 52 percent of Americans would vote for a federal law that made same-sex marriage legal in all states has some other interesting data. Among those who said they rarely or never attend church or a house of worship, 67 percent said they would vote for same-sex marriage. Among those who say they attend church monthly or nearly weekly, 51 percent said they would vote for same-sex marriage. Among those who reported that they attend church weekly only 23 percent said they would vote for same-sex marriage and 73 percent said they'd vote against it.

I hate to say this but it may be a mistake to spend too much time in church. God is not contained within church walls nor within the covers of a book. God is in the world --at work in the culture-- and only when we are listening to both the book and the world can we find a path toward understanding God's will and way.

We come to church not because this is where God lives and we want to pay a visit. We come here to recall where God encountered us in our lives in the world last week and to prepare ourselves to meet God in the workplace, the classroom, the bowling alley, the bar, the ballpark in the week to come.

The theologian Karl Barth said that the preacher needs to have a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other. Christians need to pay attention to both the book and the culture.

Unless our experience in the world helps us always read the Bible anew, it becomes a dead book that keeps us buried in the ancient past instead of the story of a God of justice, inclusion, and love who helps us find our way into the future ... a future the people who wrote the book would have never imagined but which they understand to be consistent with what they began as they watch us from heaven.

I serve a church in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, DC. We reflect our neighborhood. On an average Sunday, a fourth to a third of our congregation are openly gay and lesbian men and women.

We are part of a denomination that forbids same-sex commitment ceremonies or weddings. The rules say these ceremonies shall not be celebrated in our buildings or by our clergy.

Back before marriage equality came to the district we started doing what we called services to honor gay and lesbian committed relationships. Couples would come here to Massachusetts to be married or they would have private ceremonies in their homes where they exchanged vows and then we would have a public service in church to honor their commitment. We were careful not to celebrate until we'd left the building. We didn't break the rules.

Then in the fall of 2009 friends started telling me that marriage equality was coming to the district. I went to my board and asked, "If it happens, what do we do?"

Clergy and congregations in my denomination had been punished in the past for doing same- sex weddings.  Pastors had been suspended or even defrocked, the ministries of congregations had been disrupted.

We were engaged in a dozen ministries in our community as well as trying to provide quality religious education for our children and youth and all the ordinary programs congregations do. We were working with others to end homelessness. We were engaged in global mission in Haiti. We were trying to address the ridiculously high incarceration rate of young African-American men in our city.

We didn't want our ministries disrupted. And we had no desire to break any rules.

We started a congregational conversation that lasted for several months.

The conversation was a bit chaotic and confusing. We were all over the place in our thinking. No path ahead was emerging.

Then during yet another disjointed, somewhat frustrating, congregational meeting Doug stood up and walked to the front of the sanctuary. Doug of Sam and Doug. Known by everyone in the congregation. Between Doug and Sam they had served on countless committees and task forces and mission groups. They were faithful, generous, always offering their home for meetings. They were loving towards each other, caring towards others, especially the elderly and weak of the congregation.

Doug stood before the congregation and simply said "I want to be married in my church by my pastor."

I want to be married in my church by my pastor.

The tone and direction of the conversation changed. We were no longer talking about theories or strategies or consequences. We were talking about Sam and Doug.

In September 2010, Foundry Church members adopted a policy of marriage equality by a vote of 367 to 8.

We just cannot read the Bible as though Sam and Doug do not exist. We cannot be the church as though Sam and Doug were invisible.

Marriage equality as the law of the land is good and right, but the struggle will not be over until it is settled in our faith communities.

While marriage is a civil legal status, it is more than that. We don't go to our lawyers to marry us.   We go, most of us, to our priests, pastors, rabbis and imams.

The latest edition of the textbook Choices in Relationships: Introduction to Marriage and Family by David Knox and Caroline Schacht says that 80 percent of marriage ceremonies in America are conducted by clergy. A 2011 article[i] by Michelle Boorstein in the Washington Post suggests this percentage may be declining but the majority of Americans still go to a person they believe to be a man or woman of God to be married. Even those who don’t, Michelle Boorstein reports, still often include religious rituals in their ceremonies.

There is a deep intuition within us that marriage is more than just a secular legal contract. In the love and intimacy of marriage, even in the times of distance and disagreement and disappointment that we need to painfully work our way through, even in the experience of brokenness of a marriage ... in the joys and struggles of marriage we experience something that is like the relationship between humanity and God. We know deep down that our marriages are not just legal but also holy and sacramental.

The creation story of Genesis 2 talks about the purpose of marriage. Genesis 2:24 and 25 say: "Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife and they become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and they were not ashamed."

The holy purposes of marriage are, first, to get you out of your parent's home. Then –holiest of all-- it is to give you someone to hold on to ... to cling to in bad times, to hug in good times, to hold on to when holding on is hard … to give you someone to become one flesh with even as your flesh grows old … and to give you someone to be naked with without shame.

How could we be so unimaginative, so incapable of translation and deduction, so densely literal that we would deny such a holy marriage to Sam and Doug? If we don't start doing it, the rocks in the walls of our buildings will start putting on our robes and stoles and doing weddings themselves.

Jesus said it -- Those whom God has joined together, let no one separate.

posted in Guest Preachers on 08.11.2013 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 10:35-45

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It’s a boy!  George Alexander Louis.  On Monday afternoon, the world waited on pins and needles to hear about the birth of the new heir to the throne of England. It was, by all accounts, a momentous occasion. Filled with shouts of joy, the ringing of bells, and many many souvenirs.  Sure, there were and continue to be some critics—those who ask, rightly, why we would celebrate the birth of one uber-privileged child when we virtually ignore the hundreds of thousands of poor children being born into this world every day.

And to be fair, they have a point.  After all, as a people of faith we know that every child born into this world matters just as much as the royal baby.

But as a people of faith, we also know that new life is new life.  And whenever we witness it, wherever we witness it, we have reason to celebrate.

And frankly, couldn’t the world use a reason celebrate? Couldn’t we use a little good news about now? After all, we’ve definitely experienced our fair share of bad news lately, we’ve felt our fair share of pain and strife and death. We’ve felt it here on the sidewalks of Boston, we’ve felt in the courtrooms of Florida, we’ve felt it on the streets of Egypt and Syria.

And as we know from experience, sometimes it’s only those little reminders of new life that keep us going.  So when we find it, we have reason to celebrate.

But as we also know from experience, whether we celebrate it or not, new life isn’t easy.  No! As William and Kate are no doubt discovering with their new, very tangible form of new life…it isn’t always easy.  It doesn’t matter if you are rich or poor, young or old, black or white, gay or straight, having a baby is not easy.  It’s not.  It’s an entirely new way of life.  There’s crying...lots and lots of it.  There’s feeding…lots and lots of it.  There’s…the end result of feeding…lots and lots of it.

In other words, friends, even new life itself comes with challenges.  It’s worth it, but it’s hard.

And we, of all people, should understand.  After all, as Christians we, too believe in a way of life that is much more than we could have ever bargained for, full of responsibilities and frustrations, but like a new parent, once we have experienced it, fully experienced it, we couldn’t live any other way.

And so today, after a week in which people around the world paused to celebrate new life in our midst, we pause a moment longer to consider what new life means.

We get assistance in our quest today from the Gospel of Mark.

Now some will know that the Gospel of Mark was the first gospel written, as early as 30 years after the death of Jesus.  It was written to a community that would have had to face its own fair share of pain and strife and death, and who were no doubt starting to recognize that being a community of faith was not all sunshine and roses.  We can hear that tension in our story today.

Our passage begins just after Jesus has shared some hard news with his disciples; news of pain and strife and death.  Jesus has told the disciples for the third and final time in Mark’s gospel that the son of man will be given over to the chief priests and that he will be condemned and killed and that after three days he will rise again.

He has shared this same thing with the disciples two other times in Mark’s gospel. And in each of those other times, we are told that the disciples ask questions and express confusion.

And, frankly, we get it. After all, when we’re confronted with hard news in our own lives, our first impulse is often to question it; to want a second opinion; to pretend like it isn’t really about us. It’s a way of protecting ourselves from the pain of the news.

But one of the hard lessons of life, friends, is that simply ignoring something doesn’t make it go away…just ask the people of Syria.

And we get the sense in Mark’s telling of this story that it took until this third time hearing it for the reality of what Jesus had been saying to set in; because in our story today, instead of questions, or confusion, or denial, the disciples are not reported as saying anything.

They were silent.

And, if we’re honest, we get this too. We know that sometimes when we are confronted with hard news, when we are forced to finally hear it and acknowledge it and accept it, we just don’t know what to say.

We don’t know what to say and so we don’t say anything. Sometimes, friends, we just need that sweet grace of silence.

Certainly this is a lesson our world could afford to hear; a reminder that, believe it or not, sometimes it’s ok to be silent.  Sometimes we don’t need a 100 cannon blasts, or a million tweets, or a full running commentary.  Sometimes we just need silence.

Imagine how different our world would be if each time a child was born we had a moment of silence.  It might make some kids harder to ignore.

But just as in our world, in our story, the silence doesn’t last forever.  James and John, two of the first disciples called in Mark’s gospel, two of the witnesses to the transfiguration of Jesus a chapter earlier, break the silence by saying to Jesus. “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.”

“Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.”

It’s a pretty bold demand. So bold in fact that Matthew changes this passage to have their mother ask on their behalf, perhaps recognizing that it takes some chutzpah to stand in front of Jesus, their teacher, the messiah, and ask for their wishes to be granted.

And frankly, if we knew it worked that way, we’d no doubt have a few things to ask ourselves.

But Jesus, ever patient, simply responds, “What is it that you want me to do for you?”

And we think, aha! Now’s their chance!  Now’s their moment to get answers to all of life’s troubling questions, why do bad things happen to good people, what is the meaning of life, what’s up with the name Louis? And our excitement starts to build as they open their mouths and say to him, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left hand in your glory.”

What?!? What does that mean?  They have just been told that their teacher, their master, their friend is not going to be with them anymore and they are worried about seating arrangements?  What gives?

But then we remember the sweet grace of silence and take a moment to listen again. “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left hand in your glory.” –and it starts to make sense. Friends, this is not just about seating arrangements in some heavenly throne room.  No! It’s the disciples expressing fear about being left alone.  It’s the disciples starting to get what Jesus has been saying.  Jesus has just told them that he is not going to be with them forever.  This man whom they had given up everything in their lives to follow is now going to be leaving them and they are basically saying, “take us with you.”

A chapter earlier these same disciples witnessed Jesus standing in his glory as he was transfigured. They witnessed a taste of the beauty of God and didn’t know how they were going to find that again alone. Do you see? They had been witnesses to what life could be and didn’t want to live with what actually is.

Friends, we know what this is like. We know what it’s like to face a long hard road ahead and want to just be there.  Every four years The United Methodist Church meets to make decisions about the doctrine and practice of our beloved denomination.  And every four years for the past 40 we have failed to recognize the full humanity of gay and lesbian people.  And although some of us have glimpsed the possibility of what could be, we are forced to live with what actually is.  And if we’re honest, we dread it, we’re embarrassed by it, we just want to be there.

But that’s not the way it works.  No.  For better or worse, a big part of the way of life taught by Jesus Christ is life itself, in all its gory details.

Friends, our faith is about life. Not after death, but right now.  And Jesus understood this. He understood that our faith is not about earning a place at the table in the sweet by and by, it is about opening a place at our tables right now.

In other words, life is not a means to an end, it is the end itself. And make no mistake, what we have been given as a people of faith is life, new life, precious life; we’ve been given an example of what it means to fully live.

“I came that you might have life and have it abundantly.”

But here’s the kicker: new life takes work.  It takes work. It takes not just accepting the world as it is, but working to make it what it could be.

Jesus responds to them, “You do not know what you are asking for.”

He says, “Can you drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?”

In other words, be careful what you wish for because when we skip the hard work and jump straight to the end, we miss out on the most important part…life.  Not a life free from pain, but life nonetheless.

It was announced this week that the Rev. Stephen Heiss, a United Methodist Minister from my home conference in Upper New York will be brought up on charges for performing homosexual marriages, one of which was for his own daughter.  Rev. Heiss is an example of someone who does not just see the world for how it is, but how it could be, and is doing the hard work of living.  It’s not easy, but it’s life.

Friends, there is and will always be pain and strife and death, that is part of life, but there is also always the possibility of new life. And whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not, we have a part in it. A vital part. And if we don’t live into it, no one else will.

Not wanting to hear what Jesus is saying, the disciples respond that they are able to drink the cup and be baptized with the water, but again Jesus says to them, that you may be able to drink the cup and be baptized in the water, but in the end, it is not his to grant.
This is admittedly strange language, implying that Jesus doesn’t have the power to snap his fingers and make things happen, but we also know this to be true.

Friends, we know that we have been given freedom to live in this world. We know that God doesn’t cause pain and strife and death.  No! Those things are part of the freedom God has given us to live in this world, but so is joy and hope and love.  In other words, the promise of our faith is not that bad things are not going to happen to us.  No. They will.  The promise is that we don’t have to face them alone.

Friends, do you hear?  We are not alone.

Surely, the language of the cup and the water in this passage is a reminder. After all, Mark’s audience would certainly have recognized these two symbols of the Christian faith. These two sacraments that remind us over and over again that we are now the body of Christ for the world; that we are part of the family of God.

As the epistle lesson for today reminds us, we are God’s children now, what we will be is yet to be revealed. It’s a reminder both that we are not God, but also that we’re not only children.

Or said another way, we might not be able to sit on the throne of God, but as Howard Thurman might say, we have certainly all been given a crown to grow into.  In the example of Christ, we have had a crown placed over our head which for the rest of our lives we will keep trying to grow tall enough to wear.

Friends, we might not be heirs to the throne of England, but each of us by virtue of our birth has a crown.  Surely that’s worth a celebration.

Do you see? James and John saw what they thought they wanted, to sit at the right and left hand of Jesus, and like so many of us wanted the end without the means and in the process missed the point of our faith entirely.

As Christians we are not called to a destination, we are called to a journey; a way of life.  And by not granting them their wish, Jesus offered them a chance to truly live.

When the other ten disciples heard the conversation going on we are told that they became angry. We don’t quite know which part angered the others, but we know that it was enough that Jesus again reminded them that they were called to a different way of life.

He reminds them that there are those in the world who lord power over one another, but that they are called to serve one another; to care for one another; to love one another.  In other words, he reminds them again that whatever they do, they do it together.  And as many have learned in recent months, we can face a lot if we know we don’t have to face it alone.  Friends, the good news of the gospel is that we are not alone.

Our passage today closes with these words from Jesus. “For the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

A ransom is that which frees us from captivity.

Friends, what is it that holds us captive? What is it that keeps us from fully living? Money, family, fear?  Christ is our ransom. Not as some sacrifice sent from God, but as one who frees us from our captivity. He breaks us out of our bonds and shows us how to fully live. He takes away the identities that society tries to place on us and reminds us over and over again that whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not, we are all children of God.  All of us, young and old, black and white, gay and straight, male and female, royal or common.  Which ultimately means that we all have a chance at life.

Will it be easy? No. Like having a baby, living as a person of faith in the world means having some late nights, it means taking some unwanted responsibilities, it means shelling out some hard-earned cash, and it even means having to put our hands in some things that we never want to touch, but the truth is, we couldn’t live any other way.

Amen.

~The Rev. Stephen M. Cady, II

Pastor, Asbury First UMC, Rochester, NY

posted in Guest Preachers on 07.28.2013 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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~The Rev. Stephen Bauman

Senior Minister, Christ Church (UMC), New York

posted in Guest Preachers on 07.21.2013 at 11:00 am