Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

Luke 21: 25-36

Communion Meditation

Luke 21: 25-36

December 1, 2024

Marsh Chapel

Robert Allan Hill

Jesus meets us today in the pages of St. Luke, as He will for the next twelve months. On this first Sunday of the Christian liturgical year, we turn from Mark to Luke, and see the gospel and the gospel’s world, from a Lukan horizon.

Luke was written nearly a generation later than Mark, by most estimates, Mark in or near 70, Luke in or near 90 of the common era. Traditionally ascribed to Luke the physician, its author and that of its sequel, the Acts of the Apostles, is finally unknown to us. We know him only through the writing itself.

What do we find? Or what shall we find in prayerful conversation with Luke across the next year?

Luke is made up of a mixture of ingredients. First, Luke uses most of Mark. An example is our passage today, Luke 21. Like Matthew, Luke knew and repeated most of the earlier gospel of Mark. But he made changes along the way, or construed the gospel according to his own desires and emphases. This is hopeful for us, in that it is an encouragement for us to take the gospel in hand, and interpret it according to our time, location, understanding, and need. Second, Luke uses a collection of teachings, called Q, as does Matthew. An example is our Lord’s Prayer, later in the service. Luke’s version is slightly different from that in Matthew, as is his version of the beatitudes and other teachings, found in the ‘sermon on the plain’, rather than the ‘sermon on the mount’. Third, Luke makes ample use of material that is all his own, not found in Mark or elsewhere. The long chapters from Luke 8 or so through Luke 18 or so, are all his. Examples include some of your favorite parables, like the Good Samaritan, and like the lost sheep, and like the Prodigal Son, and like the Dishonest Steward. We have Luke to thank for the remembrance of these great stories. Luke brings us a unique mixture of materials, and makes his own particular use of them.

What does Luke say? This will take us the year and more to unravel. We shall do so, on step at a time, one Sunday at a time, one parable, teaching, exhortation, miracle, or, as today, one apocalyptic pronouncement at a time. Still, there are some outstanding features of the Lukan horizon, which we may simply name as we set forth. First, Luke displays a commitment to and interest in history, and orderly history at that. Both Luke and Acts are cast in a distinctive historical mode. Second, Luke employs and deploys his own theology, or theological perspective, including this emphasis upon history and the divine purpose in history. Third, Luke highlights the humanity and compassion of Jesus in a remarkable way. The Christ of St. Luke is the Christ of magnificent compassion, embodied in the humility of a birth among shepherds. The poor, women, the stranger, the injured, those in dire need all stand out in Luke, as the recipients and subjects of Jesus’ love, mercy, grace and compassion. Fourth, Luke carries an abiding interest in the church. Ephesians says that ‘through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the principles and powers’. That catches the spirit of the author or the third gospel and of the Acts to follow.

Now Look again at Luke 21. It is a traditional Christian apocalyptic teaching, which Luke has faithfully transported into his gospel. It is not its mere presence, but its particular interpretation in Luke that we watch for this morning.

Jesus, Paul, the earliest church and most of the New Testament carry the common expectation that within days or years, but soon, the apocalyptic end of the world will occur. All were mistaken. Even 2 Peter, who changes the math, and makes a day equal to 1000 years, has grudgingly to wrestle with the delay, the postponement, of the first Christians’ fervent hope. Recite 1 Thessalonians 4: 13-18 several times and you will get a sense of what this apocalyptic hope entailed. It is early Christian mythology. (As with all myth, it carries meaning, including meaning for us. But as a world-view, as a view of history, it is not the gospel.)

It did not happen. What Jesus predicted, and Paul expected, and Mark awaited—did not happen. The end did not come. And centuries of further sparkles of expectation, from the Montanists, to the Medieval mystics, to the Millerites of upstate New York, to the Jonestown community of 1978, to the Y2K enthusiasts some years ago, did not make it so. This biblical apocalyptic may be mythologically meaningful, but it is chronologically corroded.

Further, the language and imagery of the New Testament are apocalyptic through and through. Apocalyptic is the mother tongue of Christian theology, especially of Christian hope. So our beloved Bible must be interpreted anew, to serve the present age.

Fortunately, the New Testament itself begins to do so. Some of that reassessment is beginning in our passage this morning—‘so, be alert at all times, praying ’. Some of the ethical application and communal reinterpretation of this will come in later verses: you have no idea if or when the end will come so, in scout fashion, be prepared. But most of the courageous imagination in this regard is found later still, in the Gospel of John.

Luke knows the tradition of apocalyptic teaching from Mark 13, and makes space for it here. But he turns apocalyptic into action. He puts eschatology to work in the service of ethics. Its import, all this firey symbolism, language and imagery, is in the last verse, ‘be alert at all times, praying’. The life of faith is the life of developing, expanding, creative responsibility, of responsibility taken. Action, not apocalypse. Ethics, not eschatology. Here, Luke’s own engagement in history will help us. It will remind us of our own engagement in history.

That is, we are not free to avoid our responsibility to the environment, with the excuse that the Lord may return in a generation or two anyway, and who needs gasoline in the rapture?

Nor are not free to avoid our responsibility to seek a common global peace, cognizant of the hard won insights of pacifism and just war theory both, on the bet that time is running out for the late great planet earth.

We are not free to project our anxieties about the dilemmas of the current age—out onto a far-off apocalyptic falsehood, in order to avoid what we of course have to do in every other sphere of life: negotiate, compromise, discuss, trade, and muddle through (repeat).

Nor are we free to avoid our roles, our responsibilities as citizens. It is Bonhoeffer whose example keenly and forcefully so reminds us.

Yet we are free. Here is our freedom. Pray daily for the hope of the world. Think creatively about the hope of the world. Act specifically, week by week, in communion with a reliable hope.

One of my heroes in life and work is Ernest Fremont Tittle. Dr. Christopher Evans of Boston University wrote his PhD dissertation about Tittle. A close friend of mine, now deceased, was the husband of Tittle’s long time secretary. Robert Moats Miller wrote his biography (How Shall They Hear Without a Preacher?). Tittle, a pacifist, preached in Chicago (First Church Evanston), during the depression and the Second World War. He died in his early sixties, at his desk, while working on a commentary on the Gospel of Luke. Tittle was arguably the greatest Methodist preacher of his time, a traditional Protestant and an unwavering champion of social justice. Since we are following Luke in worship this year to come, Tittle and his own comments upon the third Gospel have been much on my mind. For the record, and as may be interesting to you, I excerpt a passages from that commentary, a typically homiletical paragraph about persistence (Luke 18:1-8):

There is a special need for persistence in prayer when the object sought is the redressing of social wrongs. God will see justice done if the human instruments of his justice to not give way to weariness, impatience, or discouragement, but persevere in prayer and labor for the improvement of world conditions. Here we can learn from the scientist. Medical research is a prayer for the relief of suffering, the abolition of disease, the conservation of life—a prayer in which the scientist perseveres in the face of whatever odds, whatever darkness and delay. More especially we can learn from great religious leaders like Luther, Wesley, Wilberforce, and Shaftsbury, who year upon year prayed and fought for the causes to which they dedicated their lives. The need for persistence in prayer arises not only from the intransigence of the oppressor, but also from the immaturity and imperfection of the would-be reformer. We have a lot to learn and much in ourselves to overcome before we can be used of God as instruments of his justice. Recognizing this, Gandhi spent hours each day in prayer and meditation, and maintained a weekly day of silence. Is there a better word of encouragement for us, here and now, in the late autumn of 2024?

I find it somehow heartening to hear, across the decades, the strong voices of Tittle and others who have walked many of the same paths we now walk. I find it somehow heartening, knowing his weekly struggle, to hear about persistence in prayer. Today, as Advent opens once again, we face serious global challenges to peace and justice. May the very difficulties inherent in these challenges cause us to develop the moral fiber and spiritual resilience of our brother from Evanston and so many others like him. May the very difficulties inherent in these challenges cause us to develop the moral fiber and spiritual resilience of our brother from Evanston and so many others like him.

Today our apocalyptic gospel from Luke 21, a fading late 1^st century prediction of the end of time, no longer occupies, twenty centuries later, the kind of literal centrality for Christian teaching, which it did in the year 90. Even then, by Luke’s time, apocalyptic was waning. The church, beginning with the church’s formative influence on the New Testament, converted apocalyptic eschatology into ethical exhortation. Portents and predictions of wars and rumors of wars became, in the main, as they are today, words of caution and preparation, and warning. ‘Be alert…’. Be prepared. And on that basis this morning we shall render, interpret Luke 21.

Plan for the worst. Hope for the best. Then do your most. And leave all the rest.

Be alert. Not all tragedy befalls someone else. Not all inexplicable, hurtful, senseless accident happens to other families. Not all fire burns in the next town down the line. Into each life a little rain, and more than a little rain, does fall. If every heart has secret sorrows, which every heart does, then every home harbors potential hurt, as every home does. So, our need to remember and practice the golden rule.

We all have some responsibility here. You and I have responsibility. You and I have responsibility in your time and in our way to strive for the things that make for justice and peace. You and I can make a difference. We can do so by taking the initiative to learn something about a religion or religious perspective other than our own, as we have often emphasized from this pulpit. We can do so, gazing out from the Lukan horizon, by making our own efforts to help those in need. By keeping healthy balances in life. The teaching of faith is in part an effort to help us keep things in balance. There is a point to the cultural emphases of this weekend, of Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Football Sunday and Cyber Monday. But these alone will not allow us to make and keep human life human. For this gratitude will need to inspire generosity. There is a broad, deep generosity across this land. There is. Yet it takes the continuous reminder of others’ need, and our responsibility, to bring the latent to life, to make it patent and to make it potent. St. Luke, and his gospel of the compassionate Christ, encourage us so. The gathering of the church encourages us. The prayers and the hymns of the church encourage us. The teaching of the faith of the church encourages us. D Bonhoeffer encourages us: Religion is only a garment of Christianity. When religion disappears what remains is Christ himself, in all his immediacy: In that case Christ is no longer an object of religion but something quite different, really the Lord of the world (NYRB, 12/3/15)

So let us look out from the Lukan horizon. Let us prepare ourselves spiritually for the unforeseen future. Let us be alert. Let us meet mendacity with patient justice. We can learn to be responsive not reactive, that is to seek patient justice. Let us inculcate in ourselves and others ‘a spiritual discipline against resentment’. Let us learn the arts of disciplined endurance. I think at some low level of our collective psyche we are pushing toward this. Hence the increase in jogging, in running, in cycling, in all forms of physical endurance. At some bone level our bodies are telling us to be prepared for a long twilight struggle. Let us hold fast to he lasting commitments we have to freedom, peace, justice, and love. As Luke remembered his apocalyptic inheritance, let us remember our full religious inheritance, in the voices of those who can encourage, admonish, and advise us. That is, let us be alert at all times, praying that we may have the strength to stand before the Son of Man.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 12.1.2024 at 11:00 am

Sunday
November 24

Thanksgiving

By Marsh Chapel

John 18:33–37

Thanksgiving

November 24, 2024

Lectionary Texts

Marsh Chapel

Robert Allan Hill

Let us be thoughtful this Thanksgiving week, this week of thanksgiving after and in an ongoing season of struggle.

Let us be mindful of the goodness of God. Let us be mindful of the blessings of God.

Let us be thankful for friends. Let us be thankful for nature. Let us be thankful for family.

For the measure of faith is the meeting of need. The measure of faith is the meeting of need.

The goodness of God knows no limit, no single season, no particular admixture of victory and defeat. Our friends, the seasons themselves, and the prayerful practice of remembrance, tell us this again.

Let us be mindful of friendship. The friendship of Marsh Chapel is offered each Lord’s Day, and each weekday in the Lord, first and foremost to those most in need. The physical, personal and spiritual health and safety of our students, in all times and in all seasons, stands as our highest priority in friendship. If you are a sophomore, say, and sense you are in some need or peril, our chaplains and staff welcome you in friendship. Now in a season when, given the events of this past autumn of discontents, some sense possible peril, we stand with you, on a daily basis, on the ground level, in a protective posture.

Let us be mindful of friendship, as was our friend, of blessed memory, Max Coots, longtime Unitarian minister along the St Lawrence river, a small town country preacher of the first water, of whose sort we need nearly boundless more to pull this country back to its senses:

"Let us give thanks for a bounty of people:

For children who are our second planting, and though they grow like weeds and the wind too soon blows them away, may they forgive us our cultivation and fondly remember where their roots are....

For generous friends with hearts and smiles as bright as their blossoms;

For feisty friends as tart as apples;

For continuous friends, who, like scallions and cucumbers, keep reminding us that we've had them;

For crotchety friends, as sour as rhubarb and as indestructible;

For handsome friends, who are as gorgeous as eggplants and as elegant as a row of corn, and the other, plain as potatoes and as good for you;

For funny friends, who are as silly as Brussels Sprouts and as amusing as Jerusalem Artichokes, and serious friends, as complex as cauliflowers and as intricate as onions;

For friends as unpretentious as cabbages, as subtle as summer squash, as persistent as parsley, as delightful as dill, as endless as zucchini, and who, like parsnips, can be counted on to see you through the winter;

For old friends, nodding like sunflowers in the evening-time, and young friends coming on as fast as radishes;

For loving friends, who wind around us like tendrils and hold us, despite our blights, wilts and witherings;

And finally, for those friends now gone, like gardens past that have been harvested, and who fed us in their times that we might have life thereafter;

For all these we give thanks."

Let us be mindful of friendship. And let us be mindful of nature.

This week, many of us will sit before a carved turkey. For many years, Marsh Chapel provided such a meal right here. Now the University itself has taken up that meal, and provides it for students who are here over break, along now with open housing. Your ministry, Marsh Chapel, has been such an incubator over time, for service that then becomes University wide. So. A Marsh Chapel Martin Luther King observance, becomes a University wide observance. A Marsh Chapel community service program, becomes a University wide service. A gospel group becomes a University-wide Inner Strength Gospel choir, Marsh Chapel hosted, singing with beauty and through the rafters last evening, right here. A Marsh Chapel Howard Thurman room and listening center becomes a University Howard Thurman Center. A Marsh Chapel commitment to pastoral care over seven decades becomes further embodied in behavioral health, and SARP, and the office of the Ombuds, and others. Your work in incubation continues. You plant seeds, and they grow, and grow up and on and out. Season by season. Who knows what seed planted now will grow into a great oak tree in the seasons to come? So this week, many of you be at your table, somewhere.

It may be that the rhythms of nature in harvest will help us, in this dark time of calamity, Presidential mendacity, global warfare and international strife, to help us to see and serve the hungry, thirsty, stranger, naked, sick, and imprisoned. One of our former campus ministers, a blessed soul, has now for some years given himself to prison visitation. It may be that the season itself, redolent and rich with meaning, may support us. It may be that the hymns of Thanksgiving, hummed or remembered, may help us. You could also sing them, of course, even if you are not Methodists. It may be that prayers, like those used year by year here at Marsh, and used today, may help us.

Seedtime gives way to harvest, as tears give way to shouts and joy. The long months of hidden growth, of change and development under the earth, are a firm reminder that the future will look different from the past, and from the present. Every autumn, every harvest season, we are offered such a reminder. Over time, mistake it not, God brings good even out of evil.

Let us be mindful of the good earth, of the fruits of harvest, of the fruits of years of labor and love, as one remembered in the figure of her friend. One lay woman wrote a poem prayer, about a friend, some years ago. In a quiet moment she gave it to me. It is set in Wisconsin, on a family farm.

Sitting by my window—looking out at the field

This chair has been such a comfort for so many years

Rocking—rocking

All the children were comforted in this chair

All grown and gone now

Babies—growing year after year

‘Til they could go to the field to help

The fields—so green in the spring

Then the plough broke it up into beautiful brown earth

Worked over and over

Until the seeds had a wonderful bed in which to grow

Week after week growing

And then harvest.

We all went to the field for the harvest.

Sunrise to sunset

Day after day

Finished at last

Ready for winter

Now looking across the field at beautiful virgin snow

Like watching a baby sleep. So peaceful.

Happy for the quiet.

Anxious for the awakening

Start again

Sitting by my window

Rocking Rocking

Her rocking, the rhythm of her remembrance, along the brown earth, seems a world away from our world today, and from our limited urban life, for we have been this past autumn through a very difficult patch. We need the reminders of nature. Nature may aid culture here. Nature may refresh culture here. For our culture languishes in the doldrums of a pervasive malaise (T Weeden).

We will want to be somber and sober to remember that God gives the human being a rooted, daily freedom, but does not then suddenly intervene to erase that freedom, does not ‘root it out’ however perversely, however violently, however mistakenly that freedom is used. Remember Desmond Tutu saying, God sure must love freedom, for he has given us the freedom to go straight to hell if we so choose. His words fit November 0f 2024, do they not?

We will want to remember this when the worry birds are flying, filling the late autumn darkening sky. And they are in flight, the worry birds. Planet warming. Ukraine reeling. Israel bleeding. Gaza flaming. Trump leading. Lakes greening. Loved ones moving. BU changing. Age advancing. Winter coming. We will want to remember the divine gift of freedom, when the worry birds are flying, filling the late autumn darkening sky. Remember. For freedom Christ has set us free, stand fast therefore and do not be enslaved again.

We will want to stand up, sit up, and take notice that liberty is only of any value within the constraints of security to enjoy it; and that security is only of any value as a basis for the enjoyment of liberty itself.

As people of faith, we cannot in sloth afford to be naïve, refusing the dominical wisdom of serpents to hide underneath a false innocence of doves, when facing political hatred, religious terrorism, and cultural venom. Protection for the lamb requires resistance to the wolf, before either determines to lie down with the other. Any manner of bigotry deserves to be met by condemnation, contempt and resistance. We have plenty of work to do, and let us not grow weary in doing it.

We do not want to pray, preach, sing or proffer a kind of cheap grace. Bonhoeffer, about whom next Sunday’s sermon, reminds us. The utter realism of the Bible, on the one hand, and our brutal experience across many centuries, on the other hand, forbid it. Read again Victor Klemperer’s two volume diary, I Will Bear Witness, or the exemplary biography of Bonhoeffer, Strange Glory. Or the new film on Bonhoeffer, who lived in the room my roommate and I later inhabited in Hastings Hall, Union Theological Seminary. Or Jon Clinch’s new memoir of Ulysses S Grant, The General and Julia. Or any one of the novels of Marilynne Robinson.

In helping one another, and speaking to our children, in Thanksgiving conversation, we can at least remind them that ‘they are safe, and it is OK to feel sad about what has happened to others’, and we can continue to support and protect our neighbors and friends of all manner of different traditions, religious and secular alike.

So let us be mindful of the seasons this Thanksgiving. And let us be mindful of remembrance. You know, we honor with regularity four different calendars, here in worship, Sunday by Sunday. One is our University Calendar, including Matriculation and Baccalaureate and Commencement and all. One is the Marsh Chapel calendar, including Summer Preaching Series and July picnic and Lessons and Carols coming soon to a sanctuary near you. One is our Christian liturgical calendar, including Christ the King Sunday this morning, and the beginning of Advent next week. One is our national calendar, with recognition of the Fourth of July and Martin Luther King Sunday and Labor Day and, this week, Thanksgiving, that quintessentially American holiday. All of them, all four, all four, our former dean Howard Thurman honored with a regular attention to varieties of and in life.

Howard Thurman, who was a hundred years ahead of his time fifty years ago, was so nationally, religiously, locally and collegiately mindful. Underneath it all he was attentive to all that dehumanizes life—to anxiety, to depression, to loneliness, to disconnection, to all that unbalances the person. He would remind us, come this Sunday, that there is much in life that you didn’t cause, that you cannot control and that you may be able to change. I didn’t cause it. I can’t control it, and I cannot change it. See, hear him, and know he is here with and for you. Thurman’s poem, in part:

Today, I make my Sacrament of Thanksgiving.

I begin with the simple things of my days:

Fresh air to breathe,

Cool water to drink,

The taste of food,

The protection of houses and clothes,

The comforts of home.

For all these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day!

I bring to mind all the warmth of humankind that I have known:

My mother’s arms,

The strength of my father

The playmates of my childhood,

The wonderful stories brought to me from the lives

Of many who talked of days gone by when fairies

And giants and all kinds of magic held sway;

The tears I have shed, the tears I have seen;

The excitement of laughter and the twinkle in the

Eye with its reminder that life is good.

For all these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day

Maybe our own days, week by week, should be an ongoing Thanksgiving as well.

The measure of faith is the meeting of need. The measure of faith is the meeting of need.

Maybe our thoughts at Thanksgiving, on friends, and seasons and remembrance, should carry through, and carry us through, the whole year too. Let us be thankful for friends. Let us be thankful for nature. Let us be thankful for family, during all of this Thanksgiving week.

AMEN.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 11.24.2024 at 11:00 am

Sunday
November 17

The Bach Experience

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 13: 1-8

Bach November 17 2024

Mark 13: 1-8

November 17, 2024

Marsh Chapel

Drs Jarrett and Hill

RAH:

Dear Lord and Father of Mankind

Forgive our foolish ways

Reclothe us in our rightful mind

In purer lives thy service find

In deeper reverence, praise

Beloved, we come again to Bach Sunday, wherein twice or so a term we offer a word and music duet, sermon and cantata together. Research and experiment are central to the work and to the strategic plan of the University, and find their echo and reflection here at Marsh Chapel, particularly in this unique, novel order in worship.

How often making music we have found

A new dimension in the world of sound

As worship moves us to a more profound

Alleluia!

Today our gospel of Mark continues with a sober directness to identify our need for Christ. In his time, it is related in part to the Roman destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, ‘predicted’ here in Mark 13. But every age, including our own, carries challenges, both expected and unexpected. We then hear again the good news.

God brings good out of evil. God brings good from evil, life from death, hope from cynicism, new from old. In faith, we shall need to rely upon the goodness of God, as we face an uncertain future. In a personal, pastoral and proclamatory word, we bring you this morning the Gospel of Mark, chapter 13. In a word, a word of Faith. Faith makes you well. It is the reliance upon that faith, the trust in that faith, the faithful memory that in a miraculous brilliance the Lord Christ gave faith, the faith that over long time God brings good even out of evil, it is faith that will see us through. In that spirit today we speak and hear good news.

You have lived your faith. So, now: plan for the worst, hope for the best, then do your most, and leave all the rest. Into the future, we are learning the hard way that we have work to do, if ever we are to return home to truth, goodness and beauty…learning, virtue and piety…knowing, doing and being…curiosity, challenge and care.

Dr. Jarrett, as we listen with care to our morning’s cantata, to what shall we attend, and what shall we especially apprehend today?

SAJ:

God brings good out of evil. Hope from cynicism. A light in our darkness. Peace in our time.

Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee. (Isaiah 26:3, adapted)

The darkness is no darkness with thee, but the night is as clear as the day.

The darkness and the light to thee are both alike. (Psalm 139:11–12, adapted)

God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. (John 1:5, adapted)

O let my soul live, and it shall praise thee. (Psalm 119:175)

Ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, That ye should shew forth the praises of Him who hath called you out of darkness into His marvelous light. (1 Peter 2:9)

O Jesus, keep us in thy sight, and guard us through the coming night.

O prince of peace, Grant us thy Peace.

This morning’s cantata teaches us and reminds us that it is our faith in Christ Jesus, the prince of peace, that will see us safely through the night, the coming storm, whatever wars against us. Indeed, when we go before the throne of grace, Christ is our intercessor, our soul’s preserver, offered to pay the debt of our unspeakable sin.

Based on Jakob Ebert’s 1601 hymn, “Du Friedefürst, Herr Jesu Christ”, Cantata 116 reveals the path of forgiveness and deliverance from all dangers, particularly the threat of war. Bach quotes Ebert’s hymn in text and tune directly in the opening and closing movements, and paraphrases the inner verses in the aria, recitatives, and trio within.

The alto aria is called “Ach, unaussprechlich ist die Not” or “Ah, unspeakable or unutterable is our Need or Woe”. Here Bach finds compositional inspiration in the word “unaussprechlich”. After the oboe player’s introduction, the alto soloist attempts to take up the tune, finding herself suddenly mute for “unspeakable” – quite literally, unspeakable. The heaviness of despair renders us mute before the throne of grace, unable to advocate for ourselves.

But the cellist reminds us gently, tenderly, that Jesus is the Prince of Peace, and it is Christ Jesus who will save us, our advocate.

Our faith once again fortified by Christ’s immeasurable Love, with confidence we acknowledge our sin, and our redemption, able to be the light of Christ in the world. Our hands, God’s work.

O Jesus, keep us in thy sight, and guard us through the coming night.

O prince of peace, Grant us thy Peace

RAH:

To conclude and to remember: The Bible is largely about failure and defeat.

Its stories and letters and teachings record ways people have lived with defeat. This makes the Bible difficult for us to understand. For we as a people have run and swatted and laughed our way past learning the language of failure. We don’t want to admit to it. We won’t accept it. We do not countenance it. So, sermons, this one and others, which are fumbling footnotes to the Scripture, hit us from the side if they hit us at all.

But by grace, it is the resurrected Christ who addresses us in the preaching of the church, in the announcement of the gospel. The passages of the Gospel allow us safe passage to the Gospel--because Jesus is present to us. For once we cite Bultmann: “In all the sayings of Jesus which were reported, he speaks who is recognized in faith and worship as Messiah and Lord, and who, as the proclamation makes known his works and hands on his sayings, is actually present for the church.” (Bultmann, HST, 348).

To call on Jesus is to remember…failure…to remember…difficulty…to remember warnings, to prepare ourselves for times of challenge as well as times of rest.

Let every instrument be tuned for praise

Let all rejoice who have a voice to raise

And may God give us faith always

Alleluia

Sursum Corda! Hear the good news of faith and her many handmaidens. God brings good out of evil. It is the reliance upon that faith, the trust in that faith, the faith that in a miraculous brilliance the Lord Christ gives, that faith in the goodness of God, the faith that over long time God brings good even out of evil, it is faith that will see us through. O Lord we pray:

Breathe through the heats of our desire
Thy coolness and Thy balm;
Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still, small voice of calm.

posted in Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 11.17.2024 at 11:00 am

Sunday
November 10

Faith and Freedom

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 12:38–44

Faith and Freedom

Mark 12: 38-44

November 10, 2024

Marsh Chapel

Robert Allan Hill

Scripture

Beloved, in this cool harsh season and week, a season and week of troubled culture and national division, a season for many and perhaps for most of nettled disappointment if not surprise, let us draw up together, and warm our hands and feet and selves at the fire of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the giver of faith and freedom. And as his disciples, let us offer ourselves to one another in presence and prayer. Presence to be present with care. Prayer to keep our religious muscles toned, and our religious lives in tune. This Sunday, the Lord’s Day, a symbol that every day, and every hour therein is his. We are not alone--thanks be to God.

Our exemplars from Scripture this morning are heroines of the Bible, both women. This is always good to remember, but particularly in this season of denigration of women’s rights and voices, even at the hands of other women. Ruth’s complex, multi-valent story, a series of sermons in itself, which as you remember began last week with the courage to leave the familiar, continues today in her grasp of security for the future. Naomi reminds her, and she reminds us, that we need not fear to state our needs. Say what you need, name what you need, so that, as Naomi says, it may be well with you. Then in our Gospel, the famous widow of Mark 12 makes her appearance, as she does every third autumn, in our lectionary round of readings. The ordinary perception of her, as a pillar of generous giving, which she is, misses the admonishment of those of us of means. There is a poignant recollection here, in the comparison of one who gives much, we might read too much (everything she had, all she had to live on), in contrast to those who give little, we might read too little (out of their abundance). Remember the gospel that those who have much might not have too much, and those who have little might not have too little (2 Cor 8).

The widow’s voice is an alto, second level, voice. Not that of Jesus—not soprano. Not written only by Mark—not tenor. Not absorbed in the history of interpretation—not bass.

She may have been included just here, simply by connection with the earlier teaching about disregard for widows. These admonitions are like others from the gospels: woes for the cities of Galilee, woes for the rich, criticisms of the current generation, threats to this generation, threats to Jerusalem, woes to the daughters of Jerusalem, woes to those who say ‘lord, lord’, rejection of false disciples, warnings about the parousia, and others (RB, HST, 49). Warnings also to us, let us say, in our season, this very one, when truth and its telling, character and its affirmation, compassion and its necessity, are steadily waning, even washing away. Well, the good news in part, for you, and for me, is that we shall not be spiritually unemployed going forward. We have plenty of work to do, plenty to keep us busy, plenty for which to labor, to bring salt and light, well on into the next decade.

Now this unnamed widow came to life in the experience of the early church. This narrative itself may have originated in a sermon. A sermon meant perhaps ‘to present the Master as a living contemporary, and to comfort and admonish the Church in her hope’ (RB, HST, 60)

Later, Matthew has deleted the story of the widow–it is unclear why–while Luke keeps her, in keeping with his own emphases on generosity (think of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son). Mark apparently puts her in, just here, because of the use of the word ‘widow’ in the sentence before.

Beloved, no matter how hard the wind is blowing, hold fast to the good.

In the widow’s more ordinary conscription to exemplify giving with generosity, one finds a harbinger of goodness waiting to be discovered again by another generation of women and men who will enter the ministry. There they will find her, salt and light, out in the life of ministry, endless in its labors but also precious in its gifts. Are you feeling a call to the ministry? Her story in the Bible would not mean very much alone, if we had not also known her, in experience, in our own life and ministry. I call her out in her modern incarnations, this giving, generous widow. What a privilege it is be be in ministry.

Here is Bernice Danks, whose husband ran the Cornell Veterinary School, she an Ithaca Nurse, later widow, and a teacher of nurses, whose favorite word was the word ‘routine’: ‘I tell my students to protect what is routine. We call the most important things the routine things because the most important things are the routine’. Singing with joy in the choir, attending countless, endless meetings with a good humor, greeting the day with its losses and its gains with a steady, real smile, here she is, an exemplar of goodness.

Here is Setta Moe, a North Country widow, living alone for years on a small pension, reading at dusk in the cold tundra twilight. On her own, years earlier, she had gone from house to house to raise money for some beautiful stained glass in an otherwise modest church. ‘I felt I could do something for the church. We need more beauty here, more beautiful things around here, to keep us going’. Here she is, an exemplar of goodness.

Here is Mickey Murray, a Syracuse widow, whose husband died at 40, She raised her three children alone. Every Wednesday in those years she went to the church after work and cooked a full meal for her own kids and twenty or so others, then had them play, sing, read the Bible and do their homework together. She had every reason to complain about the cards life dealt her. Instead, she practiced a communal generosity, and made a difference in her city neighborhood. Here she is, an exemplar of goodness.

Here is Ruth Lippitt, a Rochester widow, who all her life gave voice to the longing for peace and justice she had learned as a graduate student in Chicago, under the influence of Ernest Freemont Tittle. She gathered ten elderly friends for dinner in her home to meet the new minister, a year before she died, and, before the meal said bluntly, ‘tell him who you are, one by one, you have two minutes, and I will ring this bell if you go longer’. Yes, the ministry has its rigors. But it also has its own sheer joys. Here you will meet faith lived in freedom. Here she is, an exemplar of goodness.

Here is Glenice Kelly, a Boston widow for one day only, who sat with her husband Gaylen, right here in this sanctuary every Sunday. They died within hours of each other inf February 2021. She gave her life out in so many directions, to husband and family and neighbors and young people. She taught high school young people her students about human sexuality, with joy and happiness and honesty. Gaylen and Glenice went to heaven a day apart in the middle of Covid. And with so many others—like C Faith Richardson—we as a community have had no full chance to grieve her, to grieve there loss. Then along comes Mark 12 and the poor widow, to remind us of the woman of salt and light who have charmed our paths.

Hold fast to what is good!

Fromm

Freedom, the freedom of the person of faith, surely is a great or the great blessed happy victory of the modern era. Or is it?

In a time when suddenly and unhappily we witness a broad willingness to taste test authoritarianism, a dark willingness to give over personal freedom for the sake of a putative security, or a rage for order, or a minimization of the more complex forms of self-government, just how precious is freedom, and at what cost? How much of the saintly widow of Mark 12, generously sharing in faith and freedom her two copper coins, stays with us?

In 1941 the philosopher Erich Fromm wrote a striking, seminal book on this question, ‘just how precious is freedom, and at what cost?’. Its English title is Escape From Freedom. Fromm explores the dark side of freedom, religious, cultural, economic and political. As an expatriate German, watching the events in Europe at the time, Fromm was trying to understand, from the perspective of social psychology, the rise of authoritarianism in his native land, but also, and more broadly and in a general way, to understand how people and groups of people become enthralled with, enamored of, and committed to authoritarianism. His argument is direct and simple: real freedom is real difficult to handle, and, when pressed, people move to escape from the demands of freedom by investment in authority. Freedom is scary. Freedom is demanding. Freedom is dangerous. Freedom is difficult. Better to hide underneath the apparently sturdy voice of an authoritarian leader, preferably one who denies all responsibility for wrong or hurt, and the rock-solid social identity of a mass of people, the commitment, itself often quite costly, to a cause that sets aside personal freedom, so lonely and hard and uncertain, for group support under authoritarian wings.

Fromm saw and spoke, in and of his time. Freedom has a dark side. Our own current national dilemma, in this unfolding decade of humiliation, presses us and makes us present to the question of freedom. It is more than issues of political liberalism—gay rights, women’s rights—that besets us. It is more than issues of economic socialism—ample education and abundant health care—that concern us. It is more than cultural practices—unflagging Sunday worship and vigorous voluntary associations– that beckon us. As important as all these are. It is more than a highjacked national narrative, more than a collapse of moral conscience and compass, more than the protections of civil society, the customs and ceremonies of courtesy meant to protect us from the unbridled, unhinged rhetoric, that beset, concern and beckon us. As important as all these are. It goes deeper, this our current malaise. It goes down deep into the caverns and caves of freedom. How will we live, in hope, with both faith and freedom? Do we have the faith to live with freedom, in freedom---in freedom to cast our coins into the kettle?

Erich Fromm warned us, way back in 1941.

He warned us about the dread of freedom

He showed us the historical origins and outcomes of freedom.

He traced the effects of the lack of hope in faith and freedom.

He unveiled, out of his own experience, and touching too our own, the consequent appeal of authoritarianism.

He pointed to daily consequences—which sound familiar: …to lose the sense of discrimination between a decent person and a scoundrel (245)…

Beloved. Be alert, on the qui vive, watchful, be sober, be watchful for nascent authoritarianism. In the daily denigration and disfigurement of facts, of truth. In the weekly demonization of ‘others’, of those other, in religion, in race, in nation, in orientation. In the dishonoring of other seats of power, like the judiciary, like the press, like the churches and other religious communities. In the steady denial of fact and responsibility.

Yet Fromm offered a word of hope in faith and freedom, what he called positive freedom: positive freedom consists in the spontaneous activity of the total, integrated personality (257)…there is only one meaning of life, the act of living itself, for In positive freedom (one)) can relate (one)self spontaneously to the world in love and work, in the genuine expression of (one’s) emotional, sensuous and intellectual capacities (139)..

Freedom and faith. Faith and freedom.

Spontaneity. Comraderie. Emotion. Intellect. Where you come alongside these there we might say is hope faith and freedom.

Coda

There are some weeks when good news seems hard to come by, and this week is one such. Yet these serial reminders of dark days past are meant, as you rightly surmise, to recall that we did make it through them, and we will get through this, too. We did make it through them, and we will get through this, too. Not unscathed, and hopefully not unchanged, but together, we will make it through.

The church’s role, yours and mine together, is to announce the gospel in interpretation of and accord with the Scriptures. Scripture gives us the chance for the long view. Scripture gives us a deep grounding, with heaven a little higher and earth a little wider. Thank goodness we have the Holy Scripture to which to turn, from which to learn, with which to listen, pray and prepare. Silver and gold have I none, but that which I have I give thee. (Acts 3:6). Listen. Pray. Prepare.

Beloved! Let us draw ourselves together to live in freedom and affirm our faith!

Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. Where there is freedom, there is promise. There is a self-correcting Spirit of Truth loose in the universe. There is a self-correcting Spirit of Truth loose in the universe.

We follow the trail of that Spirit by walking in the dark with our Transforming Friend, the Transcript in Time of who God is in eternity, the gift of the Father’s unfailing grace, our beacon not our boundary, the presence of the absence of God, Jesus Christ our Kyrios, our Lord.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 11.10.2024 at 11:00 am

Sunday
October 27

Faith Has Made You Well

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 10:46–52

Faith Has Made You Well

Mark 10: 46-52

October 27 2024

Marsh Chapel

Robert Allan Hill

God brings good out of evil. God brings good from evil, life from death, hope from cynicism, new from old. God brings good out of evil.

In faith, we shall need to rely upon the goodness of God, as we face an uncertain future. For the outlook for this country, the land of the free and the home of the brave, our beloved land, home, country, our shared national heritage, is pretty grim today. In a personal, pastoral and proclamatory word, we bring you this morning the Gospel of Mark 10. In a word, a word of Faith. Faith makes you well. God brings good out of evil. And no matter the outcome of this or any particular election, it is the reliance upon that faith, the trust in that faith, the faithful memory that in a miraculous brilliance the Lord Christ gave astonishing sight to Bartimaeus, that faith in the goodness of God, the faith that over long time God brings good even out of evil, it is faith that will see us through.

You have lived your faith. You have encouraged voter registration. You have gathered fellowship groups for October luncheons and prayerful discussion. You have given of self and substance to a finer future. Some of you have done all three—recruited and entertained and given. I happen to be living with someone who has done so, done all three, as have many others, many of you. So, now: plan for the worst, hope for the best, then do your most, and leave all the rest. Into the future, we are learning the hard way, across the land, in small towns without colleges, in rural spaces without wealth, we have work to do. We need many more excellent self-giving historians, philosophers, theologians, poets, ministers, teachers, willing to go out and go forth into red America, even when humanities majors are down by 30%, at just the wrong time. We may need an American version of the Chinese cultural revolution, an investment of intelligence and morality in redder, smaller, poorer places, if ever we are to return home to truth, goodness and beauty…learning, virtue and piety…knowing, doing and being…curiosity, challenge and care.

Over 11 years, once a year, in our former assignment, I spent a week with other ministers from the nation’s large churches, and saw and savored the vital goodness, truth and beauty across this great land, red and blue alike, across difference. What a privilege. Pheonix, San Diego, Dallas, Minneapolis, Ft Lauderdale, Rochester, Colorado Springs, Pittsburgh, Louisville, Baltimore, Atlanta. This is such a wonderful, varied, exciting, promising country. How could we possibly allow ourselves to be discovered in this current baleful political situation, late autumn 2024?

That some 48% of the citizenry of this great land could be intent on affirming as President, a person of such pronounced mendacity, such pronounced predatory and vituperative mendacity, such utter lack of character, as the current Republican candidate for the office not only exhibits but celebrates, not only exemplifies but recommends, when not more than 5% should be willing to do and say so, at a high end, is itself a full and dire judgement upon us, and a window into a heritage that is pretty grim today, even apart from the election outcome. The level of closeness in the predictive counts are more than enough, more than judgment enough. Those who helped elect him in 2016, the time when the door should have been firmly and fully shut, bear a serious, major and lasting responsibility for our current, grim, predicament. The horse got of the barn, then. Further, those of stature and leadership in his own party, who are mute today, do as well: George W Bush, Chris Sununu, Nicki Haley, Mike Dewine, Mitch McConnell…It is a sad, tragic, long list. It was not always this way.

With very few exceptions, I did not meet a Democrat until I went to college. The Republicans, Rockefeller and Goldwater, moderate and less moderate, with whom we were raised, must be rolling over in their graves to view their party of Lincoln in such tatters, such lack of morality, such lack of civility, such lack of circumspection, such lack of humility and order, such lack of courage.

In the spring of 2017, in the aftermath of the 2016 election, I returned to my homeland, along the banks of the Erie Canal, and stood on a lawn by a tributary of that canal, awaiting the onset of a wedding dinner. I greeted a dear friend, what we would call or have called ‘a rock-ribbed republican’. A graduate of Wittenberg, in 1963, where he met his wife, he then enlisted in the Marines, and served two tours in Vietnam. Unlike another friend, he did not lose his legs, and unlike yet another, he did not lose his life. He returned alive, and gave his life over to family, business, church, neighborhood and service. Without a hello or even a greeting, and without needing any preface to the remark, he walked toward me and simply said, ‘I am so ashamed of my party’.

Going forward, we shall need to rely on faith. Faith is not faith until it is really all you have left. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. Hence, Sunday, here, worship. Faith grows through gifts of spirit: like imagination, like civility, like endurance.

Imagination

We were driving along the river bed that became that just mentioned canal, a blue highway, Route 20. Conversation paused. The rolling hillsides, sprouting corn, alfalfa, beans, wheat, and hay, are like their own tidal waves, their own sea scape, in green not blue.

An idea arrives. Two books by our MIT neighbor Sherry Turkle, Alone Together and Reclaiming Conversation, have guided some of our thought over time. We hope to meet her in person sometime. Her voice is a crucial one in this conversation about conversation, and she is only the span of the river away. A thought: why not invite her, Dr. Turkle, to come to Marsh Chapel. Our work on conversation in 2024 should include a pconversation with perhaps the current intellectual leader in thought about conversation. An idea, maybe a good idea, has arrived, as the green sea fields of young corn roll by.

But here, the point, hear the point. Where did that imaginative possibility come from? Whence such an idea? How does a new prospect—here, the possibility of a cross river invitation—come to life? The leisure to drive and be bathed in silence, along with the occasional personal conversation, certainly allows space and time for such a thought to land in the mind. The further distance from daily, office or campus routine and rhythm, so important to the work of sermon development and any other composition, adds a further support. Perhaps the familiarity of the route, the drive itself—a road the car could meander on its own, so regular are the trips—gave a lulling quietude that became the womb of gestation for thought. ‘My best sermon ideas come while I am shaving’ once said James Forbes. Yet the moment of insight, of new thought, the arrival of an idea comes on its own without a well-manicured airport, runway or landing strip. Whence an idea? What is going on when we think? Or when we think we are thinking? Or when we think about our thinking? Whence an idea?

If you expect an answer this morning, prepare for disappointment. Today, perhaps, we simply want to pause before the mystery, one of life’s great mysteries, the birth of an idea, in this case quite a modest one, but an idea nonetheless. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength—and mind. And you love your neighbor as yourself. We shall need some imagination, some new ideas, going forward.

Faith involves imagination.

Civility

Dr. Virginia Sapiro, Political Scientist, spoke to a luncheon last weekend. Some years ago she spoke to us on Civil Conversation. Former Dean of the College of Arts and Scientists, a scholar of renown, she keeps before us the need for civility, civility, civility.

The more outrageous others becomes, the more shocked the opposing public is at the number of people who seem not only unfazed by outrageousness, but even attracted to it. Attacking others for being uncivil, does not work. If we are going to prize and affirm civility, regardless of what others say and do, and the way they do so, we are called to a higher standard.

’Civility’ is not easy to achieve, not because people get hot-tempered in politics (which they do) or because they haven’t learned all the rules ‘properly’ (which they haven’t). Civility is, in fact, difficult to achieve in any setting in which people have differences of status, history, culture, or interests. In other words, civility is difficult to achieve when we most need political deliberation. Civility is itself something that needs to be sought, deliberated, and negotiated. The call for ‘civility’ is often reminiscent of calls for ‘management’ rather than ‘politics’: a method of decision-making that can transcend clashes of interests and those other aspects of decision-making that give politics a bad name, even among those who prize it as the means for a people to achieve a sustainable and just collective existence. Achieving civility, for better or worse, requires engaging in political processes of deliberation. Unfortunately, in real life, there is no meta-language for politics. Civility is of politics, not above it.

Faith gives birth to civility

Endurance

The Bible is largely about failure and defeat.

Its stories and letters and teachings record ways people have lived with defeat. This makes the Bible difficult for us to understand. For we as a people have run and swatted and laughed our way past learning the language of failure. We don’t admit to it. We won’t accept it. We do not countenance it. So, sermons, this one and others, which are fumbling footnotes to the Scripture, hit us from the side if they hit us at all.

But by grace, it is the resurrected Christ who addresses us in the preaching of the church, in the announcement of the gospel. The passages of the Gospel allow us safe passage to the Gospel--because Jesus is present to us. “In all the sayings of Jesus which were reported, he speaks who is recognized in faith and worship as Messiah and Lord, and who, as the proclamation makes known his works and hands on his sayings, is actually present for the church.” (Bultmann, HST, 348).

Our blind beggar, ‘Bar Timeaus’, shouts out an unexpected nametag for Jesus. ‘Son of David’. To call Jesus such is to remember…failure…to remember…difficulty…to remember warnings unheeded from long ago…to remember David you have to remember Saul and to remember Saul you have to remember Samuel.

Bartimaeus calls Jesus by the name of David—David the personification of hope, of millennial portent, of national pride, of the chance to get things right. Son of David! He throws off his garment—maybe a sign of baptism—and comes naked to see if there is another chance for him. Here is another in Mark’s ‘book of secret epiphanies’ (Dibelius\Bultmann). His ‘faith has made him well’, a saying and a truth most precious to Martin Luther, whose Reformation we remember today, Luther who forever splintered the unity of the church into pieces, fragments, for the sake of the Gospel: faith is God’s work in us, that changes us and gives new birth from God. (John 1:13). It kills the Old Adam and makes us completely different people. It changes our hearts, our spirits, our thoughts and all our powers. It brings the Holy Spirit with it. Yes, it is a living, creative, active and powerful thing, this faith. Faith cannot help doing good works constantly. (M Luther, introduction to Romans).

Our Gospel seldom uses the title, ‘Son of David’, in order that Jesus not be mistaken for the hoped-for national Messiah, the hoped-for political conqueror, the hoped-for restorer of Israel. Jesus is known by failure and defeat. But the name of David also carries the reminder, with Samuel, of surprise, of a second chance, of another chance, of new beginnings…of endurance, endurance, endurance in the teeth of adversity.

The sermons in series from 2016, Presidential Election, and 2020, Liberal Gospel (available on our website) ultimately failed in their mission, and some of its facets named today. I despair in that already I have preached through this self-same national political imbroglio twice before, 2016 and 2020, with limited fruitfulness, limited success, limited hearing. And what to do? As my grandmother said, If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

So, we need the good news, especially when the trail is hard and long. God brings good out of evil. God brings good from evil, life from death, hope from cynicism, new from old. God brings good out of evil.

Faith creates endurance.

Sursum Corda! Hear the good news of faith and her handmaidens, imagination, civility and endurance. God brings good out of evil. And no matter the outcome of this or any particular election, it is the reliance upon that faith, the trust in that faith, the faith that in a miraculous brilliance the Lord Christ gave astonishing sight to Bartimaeus, that faith in the goodness of God, the faith that over long time God brings good even out of evil, it is faith that will see us through.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 10.27.2024 at 11:00 am

Sunday
October 13

The Bach Experience

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 10:17–31

Bach Sunday

Dr. Robert Allan Hill

Last Monday, early in the day, we gathered for prayer, to set a tone. Our one hope, our desired outcome early that morning, was to set a tone for this campus and beyond, for that day, a tone for that and and every day. To set a tone—brief, ecumenical, service, prayer, peace.

That University wide tone continues this Bach Sunday, this Lord’s day, as Jesus meets us on the shoreline of real hope. At the edge of the water of life he invites us to wade out from the dry land of having and into the living water of giving. He is calling you from having to giving. He is inviting me to be a trustee of the future as well as the past. He is offering us a chance, a chance, a daily chance not only to conserve and protect but also to develop and enhance. A boundless faith in God’s love.

Jesus the Faithful Presence inspires hope! In the city of Rome, under the thumb of Caesar, Mark in 70AD rehearses Jesus’ lakeside lessons. Gathered in secrecy, hearing news of a Jerusalem temple in flames, rightly fearing impending persecutions, Mark’s Roman Christians heard hope in these teachings, so frequently as today related to wealth. If you notice only one word in this passage, mark Mark’s inclusion of “persecutions” (vs. 30).

For there is an urgency to Mark’s passage that Matthew and Luke have left behind. Mark exudes raw energy under the pressure of apocalyptic expectation. Sell and give! Some will not taste death until they see the SON OF MAN. Notice the telltale apocalyptic marks: eternal life (the coming resurrection of the dead); this age and the age to come (the heart of Jewish longing); camel and needle (end of an age hyperbole); none is good but God (the apocalyptic distance of heaven from earth); the reign of God (the essential apocalyptic hope); persecutions (harbinger of the end); last become first (apocalyptic justice). But there is no mistaking the primary announcement: life is found in the lake of giving, not on the shore of having. Yes, you must honor the past, including the commandments (though Mark’s Jesus lists only the second 5). Yes, we must conserve and protect. But as LT Johnson told us: “the tradition of the church is meant to open the future!” Conserve what you can and protect what you must, then give—develop, give—enhance, give—and open the reign of God! This is what life is all about.

Last week President Gilliam emphasized…Tradition and Transformation, tradition leading to transformation. Dr. Jarrett, what has today’s beautiful cantata to bring us this morning?

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett

Today’s cantata is about trust and faith in an all-knowing God. Faith in God’s plan for us, faith in God’s timing, a resolute trust that whatever befalls us, God will provide, God will protect, and God will guide.

Cantata 97: In allen meinen Taten (In all my actions) was composed in 1734 for an unknown occasion. For his text, Bach uses the nine verses of Paul Fleming’s 1642 chorale of the same name. Fleming’s text was most often paired with the famous tune, known today as “Innsbruch”. It was the tune featured in Justin Blackwell’s prelude as well as the hymn we’ll sing in a few moments. As you might expect, Bach features this tune in the opening movement of the cantata with verse one of Fleming’s hymn, and in the final verse, set as a standard chorale. But the tune does not appear in the other seven movements. Bach relies on the sole pillar of Fleming’s text to inspire both unity and marvelous creativity. Over the nine movements of Cantata 97, we hear a French overture, with brilliant concertante writing for an orchestra of strings and two oboes; four arias – one each for soprano, alto, tenor, and bass; a duet for soprano and bass; only brief two recitatives; and a splendid harmonization of the chorale tune that features two descant voices in the violin parts.

Bach’s full creativity and invention are on display over these nine movements, challenging the ear to comprehend the beauty created by so many intricate and diverse moving parts. And so, the designs of the cantata, movement by movement, reveal an intricate model of resolute and boundless faith: I will play or sing my part as God designs, trusting in full faith in God’s all-knowing plan.

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill

Jesus spoke more about money than about almost anything else. Here as elsewhere he offers a word of hope. Giving does most for the giver. Over a lifetime you will be happiest about what you give. You only possess what you can personally give away. What possesses you, and the rich young ruler, you do not want. You want freedom, the freedom to give.

It is hard not to be had by what you have. So the good news counsels, “Store ye not up treasure on earth...”

Peter, the disciple whom Mark loved, provides the example. He has left everything and received everything. He has been inspired in Jesus the Christ to live in hope. Peter has found the hope to risk building a kingdom that does not yet exist. He is learning to swim on the lake of giving after standing for so long on the shore of having.

To learn to swim you have to trust that the water will hold you up. It will. We have a role as people of faith. All of us are trusted in our time with a future time. What becomes of this Chapel and this University in 2040 is to some measure being determined right now. We bear responsibility not only to conserve and protect the past but also and more so to develop and enhance the future. There is an irony here, too. The only way you can really conserve and protect the past is to develop and enhance the future. Like Jeremiah buying land as the city burned, Peter invested in faith as calamity overtook him. We can too. Let’s. Jesus inspired hope in Peter and he can do so in us today.

posted in Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 10.13.2024 at 11:00 am

Sunday
October 6

Communion Meditation: Sundays, Too

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 10:2–16

Communion Meditation: Sundays Too

Mark 10: 2-16

Marsh Chapel

October 6, 2024

Robert Allan Hill

Preface

Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blue-black cold,
Then with cracked hands that ached
From labor in the weekday weather made
Banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
And slowly I would rise and dress
Fearing the chronic angers of that house

Speaking indifferently to him,
Who had driven out the cold
And polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know of love's austere and lonely offices?

(Robert Hayden)

Aspiration

We learn a language in prayer. In a creed, like the Canadians’ use. You know it by heart. In a poem, like the psalmists of old used, Psalm 23, 100, 121. You know them by heart. In a liturgy, like the long one you love and use here for Holy Communion. You know much of it by heart.

A language learned in prayer is that of adoration. Here is the tongue of aspiration, delight, hope, imagination, wonder and praise. In the dim-lit daily world, adoration language can be hard to hear, hard to find, for it is the exuberant utterance of ‘why not’?, of ‘how about?’, of ‘oh my’!, sentences concluding in question marks and exclamation points.

Our gospel reading, at heart, is an aspiration, a high hope about human being, human loving, and human life.

Both Jews and Greeks made welcome space for divorce, as even our text attests (‘Moses allowed…’). The church did too, before and after our passage, 1 Cor. 7 and Matthew 19. Paul before and Matthew after Mark also make allowance for divorce. We too, out of our experience, know fully, for the sake of the institution of marriage itself, that sometimes divorce is the only course. Here in Mark 10, though, the early church remembers, from Jesus or for us, a very high view, an aspirational hope for human love. A prayer in aspiration, that the joining of two, together, might make way for the One among the Many. That upon this earth there yet might be—real friendship, real fellowship, real love, real marriage, the reality of the union of hearts, for which we are made. For a union: a hint of the eternal, a glimpse of the divine, a glimmer of joy without shade.

This year we have heard the Gospel of Mark. Throughout, Mark is a work in remembrance. Some chips are down, and Mark thinks his people may not quite remember. Who they are, that is. They may forget, because they may have developed a kind of spiritual amnesia.

It has been forty years since Christ, when Mark writes. Forty years is a long time, especially in the Bible. Mark has a thought that his fellow earliest Christians, or some at least, have suffered a sort of spiritual amnesia, even a Christological amnesia.

Our lessons about marriage and children tell us where the forgetfulness started out. With treatment of women and children, apparently. There was some faulty memory at work, in the early church, when it came to women and children. The distaff side. Those without voice or presence. So the preacher, Mark, tells a couple of stories. One about Jesus standing up for women. Another about Jesus standing up for children. He says, ‘remember’.

Much of the Bible is like this. The New Testament, in particular, is like this. People needing to remember and people trying to remember. They have forgotten ‘the love they had at first’. They need a reminder. So Mark brings up his stories about women and children. He remembers Jesus, putting the last first. He remembers Jesus, putting the low high. He remembers Jesus, putting the peripheral into the center. Or, like a leader, our newest BU President, in self-disclosure, said this summer: Well, that’s the way it is and the way it goes. I say something. You challenge it. We come to an agreement.

Kosuke Koyama used to tell the gospel in this phrase, making the peripheral central. You might like his book, Water Buffalo Theology. He grew up in Japan. His whole youth he heard of the Imperial Temple, there, that it was indestructible. Given what has befallen the beloved temple of our own government, over the last decade, our somehow smug assumption that utter tragedy of a biblical and constitutional sort could never fully happen here (voters in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania beware and be aware), we might heed what the defeated Japanese learned about ‘The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord…”. Once Japan was bitterly crushed, crushingly worsted, in WWII, Koyama went on to study Jeremiah, and to advocate for the poor of the Pacific, and to teach peace, and, especially, to move from center to periphery.

The case for women, subject to summary divorce, caused Mark to wonder whether his people had forgotten something. The case of children, outside the circle, not invited to the gathering, caused Mark to wonder whether his church might have fallen ill with a theological malady, a kind of Christological amnesia. These statements, perhaps if original from very different settings, are here remembered in the alto voice of the church, remembered together. Why? Because they together bring a medication, a prescription drug, to heal amnesia. They remind the church that Jesus inhabits the periphery.

Freedom

That is, the Bible that acclaims Jesus Christ is a book about freedom, or better, a library of books about freedom, divine and human. God is loving us into love and freeing us into freedom. It is freedom that is born, with heartache, in the Garden of Eden. It is freedom that is restored, with blessing, in the covenant with Abraham. It is freedom that is promised, through famine, to the brothers of Joseph. It is freedom that lies across the Red Sea, as Israel flees Pharaoh. Deborah sings a song of freedom! It is freedom that Moses glimpses, as he dies, sitting atop Mt. Nebo. It is freedom that Samuel desires, and Saul denigrates, and David defends, and Solomon defines.

It is freedom that Israel loses, when she ignores the prophets, and freedom that is resurrected by Cyrus who frees Israel from Babylon. It is freedom to worship the One God, with whom Jacob wrestled as Israel (the word means ‘one who wrestles with God’), for which the Temple was restored. And it is freedom that Israel awaited as Israel awaited Messiah. The Bible is a book about freedom. So, when the Bible is used in ways that increase slavery and decrease freedom, beware. In those cases, even in our time, the teaching about the Bible is unbiblical. Note, read, absorb and abhor the red-wave unbiblical teaching of the Bible, this autumn. Wake up, America, wake up!

John Wesley used the Bible to free coal miners from poverty. Abraham Lincoln used the Bible to free African Americans from slavery. Walter Rauschenbush used the Bible to free immigrants from destitution. Georgia Harkness used the Bible to free women from narrowed roles. Martin Luther King used the Bible to free blacks from segregation.

Still, the freedom in the Bible comes with a high price, a heavy cost. For all the plaudits great leaders receive, freedom breaks out, one by one, heart by heart. So Hosea, heartsick over his lost love, imagined a similar divine grace, and roared: "I desire mercy, not sacrifice, the knowledge of God, not burnt offerings."

The prophets recall for us the divine desire that all, all might be included in the great open space of covenant love. It is this great promise of freedom that opens and closes the Bible, and that empowers men and women to get up in the morning and to face insurmountable odds, and unwinnable battles, and lost causes. Some causes are worth fighting for even though the outcome is foredoomed.

As Anthony Abraham Jack wrote last month: I hope my work helps colleges not only see their students more clearly, but also the gaps in policies to support those students. (Boston Globe, 9/22).

Sobre todo creo que

No todo esta perdido

Above all I believe that

all is not lost

Oigo una voz que mellama

Casi un suspiro

I hear a voice that calls me.

Almost a whisper.

(Jorge Drexler)

Prayer

We pray for biblical freedom this day and every day, for safety, for vocation, and for wonder.

May we rise to meet each new day, with a full feeling of gratitude.

May this gratitude make us attentive to what makes for health, attentive to what protects against harm, attentive to ways that we may watch over one another in love. May our Inaugural prayer of gratitude provoke a daily attention to what lasts, matters, and counts.

May this gratitude make us curious about our place in the world, curious about our emerging vocations, curious about where our passion meets the world’s need. May it provoke a daily curiosity about calling.

May this gratitude make us sensitive to the delight of each day, sensitive to the wonder of life, sensitive to the sheer joy of being alive. May gratitude provoke a daily sensitivity to wonder.

May the Spirit of Life bless us we pray in curiosity, challenge and care, to become confident, delighted and sensitive, a people attentive to safety, insightful about calling, and capable of wonder

Pinsky

Last Friday, I had the privilege to sit with Robert Pinsky, US Poet Laureate and now BU professor. We were waiting for the set up and line up ahead of President Gilliam’s Inauguration. Other than the evening I was treated to sit with Marilynne Robinson last year, and engage her in her own poetic fiction, being with Pinsky, for a chance in private conversation, was one of the highest moments in our time here at BU. Before and during and after 9/11 he restored a portion of American soul and hope, by restoring a love of poetry, and doing so simply by gathering people, city by city, to read their favorite poems to one another.

At the end of the Inauguration, last Friday, Pinsky stood to give a brief reflection. And as he was unwinding his thought, he took out a piece of paper. He had chosen a poem, one of his favorites, for the occasion. Imagine my shock as he named the poet, Robert Hayden, and the poem, which I first used in a sermon October 22, 2000. A friend had given it to me, and I had loved it, and so used it. But I had no idea that anyone else knew it, or loved it, as I did. It turns out that across the country many, many people do, as Pinsky told us. You see, what is most personal is most universal. What one truly loves, many do. It is the memory of a young black man, a memory of his father, in their modest home, shining his shoes. But it is more. It is the memory of love, of being loved, of being loved in the teeth of difficulty. And I used it to say so, 24 years ago. And Pinsky used it to say so, 9 days ago. And it carries, soars, lives, and breathes, reminding us of love. Reminding us…of love.

Coda

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
And slowly I would rise and dress
Fearing the chronic angers of that house

Speaking indifferently to him,
Who had driven out the cold
And polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know of love's austere and lonely offices?

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 10.6.2024 at 11:00 am

Sunday
September 29

From Fear to Hope

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 9:38–50

From Fear to Hope

Mark 9: 38-50

Alumni Weekend, September 29, 2024

Marsh Chapel

Robert Allan Hill

Alumni Weekend itself is a two-level drama, a stereoptic, bifocal collision of past and present, of hope and fear, of what we expect on the one hand, and what we experience on the other, expectation and experience never quite becoming equivalents.

On Alumni Weekend you walk past a classroom where you heard something new. As was once said by a famous baseball player, ‘It’s déjà vu all over again’. You see a teacher’s office where you learned the hard news about a midterm result. You pass by a tree under which you hugged or kissed your then boyfriend or girlfriend. Your memory is quickened by the spatial, locational power of a sunset on a river, or a trolley bell ringing, or the crack of the bat and the roar of the crowd. You watch and you see.

As Yogi Berra also said, ‘You can observe a lot just by watching’.

But all these memories are held in a new way, in a second level recollection, that of today as today looks at yesterday. You enter a restaurant and where others simply see a television, you see a television on which you watched and heard 7^th BU President John Silber interviewed in 1980 on 60 minutes by Mike Wallace. You look out over Nickerson field while others watch soccer, and you remember a football game. (Oops…). You sit in Marsh Chapel as the sermon meanders on toward its inevitable conclusion, or what you hope will be its proximate conclusion, but you hear some other voice once uttered here, or a song once sung here, or a prayer once dropped with a full heart into the prayer request box.

Three honored alumni once spoke in this manner. ‘BU became my passport’. ‘At BU I grew up’. ‘Here I was taught that the authority of the highest idea should prevail over the idea of the highest authority’. (Not who has the idea, but what idea is best; not power but truth.)

Time and space are not quite as absolute in determination of our being as sometimes we think. It helps to have a bifocal, stereoptic vision, a two-level drama, of sorts.

That is the nature of the New Testament, shot through from Matthew to Revelation with apocalyptic language and imagery. Our Holy Scripture, both Holy and Scripture, is both heaven and earth. It is both sacred and secular, at the same time, both divine and human. Its Word walks with human feet and sings with divine voice. Its word faces earth: Gaza, Lebanon, Ukraine, Hurricane, Election, All. Yet its word sings with a divine voice to remind each one of us that we are children of the living God.

(By the way, the apocalyptic warnings of Mark 9 are not to be taken literally. We know this. We know about hyperbole. Even the convoluted hyperbole of a famous ballplayer describing a once favorite restaurant: ‘Nobody goes there any more—it’s too crowded’. Let us pause one good moment to recognize that, and why, we do not understand the Bible as utterly inerrant and divine. The Bible is inspired and so inspires us, and is our first point of reflection, prototypical but not archetypical—first but not exclusive in the church’s long history of the search for truth. These verses, harsh and judgmental, need careful interpretation. So, Matthew cuts half of them, in his use of Mark 15 years afterward. So, Luke cuts all of them in his use of Mark 20 years later. Even Mark himself shifts the weight from fear to hope, even in this passage, as he wrestles to interpret what he has inherited, from whatever source: be salt, have peace among yourselves, who is not against us is for us.)

Charles Wesley wrote hymns, many of which we still sing, and found the music, the melodies and harmonies, in the sung music of his day, did he not? St John of the Cross, the greatest of Spanish mystics, whose poetry strikes the heart to this day, composed his lyrics with the help of Italian, pastoral love poetry, did he not? The author of the Song of Solomon, who wrote a torrid, fierce, erotic ballad of human of love, would perhaps have been bemused to see how quickly Judaism made of it by analogy the love of God for the covenant people, and how quickly Christianity by analogy made of it the love of Christ for his church, we she not?

In our time, wherein the attempt to embrace the secular with the sacred, to express a faith amenable to culture and a culture amenable to faith, to unite the pair so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety, has become marginal, pitiable, nearly a lost cause, of a sudden, this Sunday, Come Sunday, we have music, sacred, Scripture, holy, word, current, and silence, heavenly, all made sacred, for us, among us, in ordered worship For all our fears, of heaven and of earth, this one hour does ring out a note of hope, does it not?

We remember St. Augustine’s proverb, ‘Hope has two beautiful daughters, anger and courage’

Hope indeed has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage. Anger at the way things are. And courage to see that they do not remain as they are.

Our community, including our Alumni, and our choir, and our congregation offer out into the unseen world around a dynamic dialogue, of heaven and earth, of sacred and secular, of divine and human. Here at Boston University!

We cherish the history and traditions of this University, marvelously on display this week, nearly two hundred years of faithful liberality. BU is born of and embodies liberality, a liberal sort of faithfulness. Our traditions show a range and robust versatility over almost 200 years of service. So this week, we borrow and employ H Richard Niebuhr’s book outline from some years ago, to point to the various versatilities in our midst. Against, In, Above, In Paradox, Transforming.

So, Alumni and friends, let us remember our heritage and identity, even if It becomes difficult to do so. A Christ against Culture alone fits easily and well with a popular Christianity, Bible drenched, which rejects the world around. Harder it is to think, speak and sing of a Christ in Culture, a Christ above Culture, a Christ in paradox with Culture, a Christ transforming Culture. So slips away the religious commitment. So also, from the side of the society, there grows an unwillingness to admit of the value of propositions that are not verifiable but may well be true. Harder and harder it is to say ‘if thine heart be as mine, then give me thine hand’, or ‘in essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, and in all things charity’. Or, as today, ‘have peace among yourselves…who is not against us is for us’

Yet here these are today, in the Gospel, interwoven. Fear and hope, both so deeply human, sing around and around each other. As we hear in the Scripture—who is not against us is for us; be at peace with one another. Sometimes they surprise and heal us.

Here is a religious voice, speaking in the halls of government. Here is a faithful person, addressing the nations as united, in the United Nations. Here is a representation of the Holy, riding the streets of the most secular of cities. Not just the church mumbling its prayers behind closed doors; not just the culture, its government and its authority and its society, stumbling ahead with its decisions apart from a final horizon. But sacred and secular singing together.

Maybe, among other things, this is why there are still a few University pulpits, whose calling it is to remember and to remind that the point of education is transformation. What makes this University unique is its capacity to harness learning to help people. Education is meant to help people. Education is transformation. Period.

That is. On one hand, it is good to know as Einstein showed that gravity is a manifestation of the curvature in space-time resulting from the presence of matter and energy. On the other hand, it is great to see that insight and others like it making space, in new inventions and discoveries, for safety, for progress, for care, for health. Transformation that helps people.

Just for a moment. A heavenly hope embracing an earthly fear, both real, both true. Just for a moment, this Alumni Weekend morning, prayer, soul, eternity, faith, heaven, judgment, salvation, love, God.

This worship, this Scripture, this day, this week, this life, just now, they do give you a sense, for all our fears, that hope survives and may just prevail. After all, did not Mr. Berra also say, ‘it ain’t over ‘til its over’?

When people hear of us, hear of Boston University, perhaps they will think, Things are not as bad as we think they are, and these folks are helping to make things better.

Herein perhaps we find the valence of the dominical sayings,

He that is not against us is for us. He that is not against us is for us…

Have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another…

He that is not against us is for us. He that is not against us is for us…

Have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another…

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 09.29.2024 at 11:00 am

Sunday
September 22

A Liberal Faith

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 9:30–37

A Liberal Faith

Mark 9: 30-37

September 22, 2024

Marsh Chapel

Robert Allan Hill

Opening

In this season, through this autumn, we embrace the various populations within the communion and congregation of Marsh Chapel, over the last 74 years. Today especially we recognize and affirm our Boston University Community. In other weeks, similarly, we greet and uphold our student community, our alumni community, our ecumenical community, our musical community, and our Live Stream community, around the globe, among others. You all, all you all, make us who we are, in ministry, a heart in the heart of the city, and a service in the service of the city, working daily at voice, vocation and volume.

Boston University and Marsh Chapel are alive, humming and spiritually energized as we come toward the Inauguration of our 11^th President, Dr. Melissa Gilliam, this week, on September 27, 2024. You are warmly invited to attend the traditional service of Prayer and Thanksgiving, in President Gilliam’s honor, in Marsh Chapel, 9/27/24, at 10:30 am. Our chaplains will guide the service, the Dean will preach, the choir and Majestic Brass will bring the music. No reservations are needed. We look forward to seeing those who are able to be here with us! You are also warmly invited to view the Inauguration itself, held at 2pm, in Agannis Arena. The Dean will provide the Invocation, and student leaders from 6 religious traditions, guided by the Rev. Dr. Jessica Chicka, will bring the Benediction. You may view it on the Inauguration website, (https://www.bu.edu/inauguration-2024/) and a recording will be available in the days following the event. The live stream will include ASL interpreters and captioning.

Mark 9

Our gospel today is from Mark, the earliest of the four. The passage that begins at 9:33 was probably a list of instructions that Mark had inherited from the earlier church. This in itself, for those of us listening for good news in century 21, carries thrill. We are listening in upon a conversation from the middle of the first century! The language of the passage, a regular reminder here helps, is common Greek, the language of bills of lading, of general commerce, of death certificates, of letters, of news and announcements. Jesus spoke no Greek. Another generation, another society, communicating in a different setting and especially in a different language, has shaped the passages that came into Mark’s hands.

The needs of the church, not unlike our needs today, pressed upon the community of those who had committed themselves to the Crucified. Now it is not very hard to identify what these issues were. Power and weakness, authority and authenticity, internal leadership and external care. Anyone who has been around religious life, or life, will testify to the endless contention and intractable difference lurking in every budding community, and every congregation committed to love. In the struggles of the early church—over leadership and welcome—this collection of sayings and instructions found its birth. There are clues that set off these passages as later constructions, significantly later than the walks along the roads of Galilee that Jesus and his disciples surely took. Capernaum, in Galilee, was a reminder to the many Greeks that Jesus took interest in the land of the non-Jews, Galilee of the Gentiles. Also, when Jesus is portrayed as advancing toward the disciples (as he is here, questioning rather than responding), the interests of the early church are being carried forward with his question.

The two issues here, practically speaking, future preachers of America take note, are the hallmarks of pain in pastoral ministry. Who has authority? Who is in and who is out? Leadership and welcome. Every church issue since King David slew Uriah the Hittite can be traced roughly to authority and inauguration, power and welcome. In trying, probably with limited success, to address these issues, unknown memories and unseen voices recalled and applied memories to needs.

Who is to lead? Did not Jesus acclaim service? Did Jesus not live a life of servant suffering? This will be our way, too.

Who is welcome? Did not Jesus embrace children? Did not children, the weakest and least and least powerful become for him the sign of the divine? This will be our way, too.

The church opens to all, particularly the least, last and lost. ‘As you have done it to the littlest (gk) of these, you have done it to me…’.

This morning you see the stoles worn here, signs of yokes, of humble service. Once I asked my mentor what was the single hardest thing about ministry? He said, ‘remembering that ministry is service’.

This morning you see the windows and doors of an open church, open especially and pointedly to those who differ, those who are fewer, those who are weaker and littler in every regard. OnceI asked my dad once what hope our church had. He said, ‘well, we have tried to remember the poor.’ Anyone who has ever had issues with authority has good company here. Anyone who has ever struggled with inclusion has good company here.

Mark has taken the tradition before him into a new fight. Yes, he with us will affirm the bedrock yes to service and love of children, with our Lord Jesus. Yes, Mark with us will slake our communal thirst on the record that others too struggle over leadership and inclusion. But Mark has other fish to fry, too. He composes a short introduction to this passage, that places all that came before in a new light. He makes these stories to serve his larger war against the disciples.

In Mark, the disciples are ‘reprobates’ (T Weeden). They just do not ever get it. They misunderstand. They misinterpret. They willfully disagree and disregard Jesus and his teaching. Jesus must regularly condemn them, often in terms harsher than those used against the Pharisees. The disciples are McHale’s Navy, the crew of the Titanic, the captain of the Minnow headed for Gilligan’s island. You miss the Mark in Mark if you miss this. He excoriates the disciples, and attacks them at every point. Why?

Because. The disciples represent for Mark those in his own church who are interested in glory. Jesus here is Mark’s voice, reminding his own people of the way of the cross. The disciples are those miracle loving, glory seeking, happy and easy living, strong and handsome and beautiful emerging ‘leaders’ in the church at Rome. After all, Rome was the center, and used to the best. Why not in the church as well?

Mark’s opponents want ease. Jesus speaks of suffering. Mark’s ‘disciples’ garner power. Jesus speaks of weakness. Mark’s foils and foiled disciples expect that faith will ever and always empower, heal, help, enrich, enhance, embolden. Jesus says again: ‘here comes betrayal, here comes struggle, here comes suffering, here comes the cross.’ “The evangelist, here and elsewhere, is intentionally criticizing the disciples (they want power, they refuse humility, they do not suffer children, they do not welcome)” (Again, T. Weeden, Traditions in Conflict).

How you lead your life is directly dependent upon how you view the Christ of God. Christology forms discipleship. A Christ of great fame, fortune, future—this Christ will create a certain kind of discipleship, a discipleship of glory. Notice, in America today, the pervasive presence of this pseudo-Christ. To this, elsewhere and similarly, Paul, Apostle said, ‘suffering produces endurance, endurance character, character hope, and hope does not disappoint’.

Boston University

George Eliot’s beautiful book, Middlemarch, holds a scene in which an Anglican priest gives a sermon. It was, as she writes, ingenious, pithy and without book. This morning our word is none of the three, but is one hopes a celebration of what is creative, and what is brief, and what is memorable.

We cherish the history traditions of our University, marvelously soon on display this coming week, two hundred year of faithful liberality. BU is born of and embodies a liberal faith. Our traditions show a range and robust versatility over almost 200 years of service. We could borrow and employ H Richard Niebuhr’s book outline from some years ago, to point to the various versatilities in our midst.

That is, Boston University leans against culture. You welcomed women, religious minorities, people of color, the poor and the foreign in the first ranks of students here, not waiting on the culture around for support—at the time there was none. Boston University also lives inculture. Our green line trolley and our hockey team remind us so. Boston University further and also can soar above culture. As a summer live stream participant in Marsh Chapel Boston University worship, every Sunday, whether by music or by word or by both, arrested me and reminded me so. That choir scorches the angels wings. Thank you. Boston University has a complicated, paradoxical engagement with culture around. We are tax exempt but pay large sums in lieu of taxes. We live a separate community life, yet one strung along the river, one adjacent to Common and Garden, one close on an after worship walk to the very Atlantic ocean along our coast. And Boston University, perhaps most especially, at our best, not always, and not consistently, but at our best, transforms the culture around us. In study of football impacts. In the Tulane students, 1000 strong, brought here in 2006 to escape Katrina. In the artistic and service celebrations on campus but also afar, in Tanglewood, for years at the Huntingdon theater. In education offered in prisons, and support offered in city schools. In community service trips at Spring Break, and in scholarships for bright, worthy and needy Boston 18 year olds. Yes, BU, you are all the above, against culture, in culture, above culture, in paradox with culture, and, especially, transforming culture. The transformational Anglican priest, John Wesley, who founded Methodism and so gave life to 128 schools and colleges, starting with BU, and running all the way to Southern California, would be proud. The transformational 16^th President of these United States, Abraham Lincoln, States still, if by a thread, yet united, and living at our best with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, would be proud. The finest preacher of the 20^th century, a BU graduate of 1955, who had the courage to have a dream and the courage to evoke a dream and the courage continually to dream, would be proud. Wesley at your front door. Lincoln in your stained glass. King on your plaza. Transformation not just education. Transformation not just education. Transformation not just education. This is who you are BU, what you are about BU, what makes you distinctive better and best.

Or, said otherwise, yours is a liberal faith.

You may have been reminded, in our season, of the choices made in cable network so-called journalism, where confusion and timidity, have been found in full this year, in equal measure.

You may have been reminded of the cultural demise all around us, to the shame of us all, the acceptance of bullying and demagoguery, the normalization of vulgarity and sexism, the accommodation of buffoonery and megalomania, our willingness to have our children and grandchildren so surrounded in a culture careening into a nihilistic abyss.

Institutions are far more fragile than we sometimes think, especially the bigger ones. They all require trust, commitment, integrity, self-sacrifice, and humility on the part of their leaders, or over time they disintegrate. It is not just the processes, the systems, the organizations and structures that matter, it is the people. The people. No amount of systemic adjustment can ever replace the fundamental need, across a culture, for good people. No wise process has any chance against unwise people. Do not assume that institutions that have been healthy will always be so. Do not presume that free speech in newspapers, that due process in political parties, that honest regard for electoral results simply exist. They do or they don’t. It depends on the people who inhabit, support, and lead them. Beware a time like ours when, as Yeats intoned, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity..

Giving ultimate loyalty to penultimate reality is sin at its depth. To support an organization at the cost of honor, of integrity, of honesty is to give ultimate loyalty to penultimate reality. That is, to support a political party at the cost of honor, integrity and honesty is to give ultimate loyalty to penultimate reality. This is sin at its depth. That is, to support a denomination at the cost of honor, integrity and honesty is to give ultimate loyalty to penultimate reality. In the hour of judgment, the organization—party or church or other—depends on the courage and integrity of individuals to resist idolatrous loyalty to penultimate reality and to respond with courage and integrity to ultimate authority. You cannot serve God and Mammon. Giving ultimate loyalty to penultimate reality is sin at its depth. This depth of despond your liberal faith resists.

Coda

To conclude. A liberal faith recalls, honors and evokes Mark 9. Dean Neville wrote it clearly some years ago: “I invite you into the humble way Jesus preached. Seek not arrogance but poverty of spirit, not vengeance but mourning for those who harm and are harmed, not a “me first” way but meekness, not avarice and materialism but a hunger and thirst for righteousness, not retribution but mercy, not conniving for position but purity of heart, not war but peace, not victory but persecution for righteousness’ sake. The humble will be persecuted for righteousness’ sake, do not mistake that. Humble people and nations are not life’s winners in the material sense. But they are indeed life’s winners in the spiritual sense that counts. The humble will be blessed. The arrogant will be brought down. The last shall be first and the first shall be last.” (RCN, Preaching Without Easier Answers, 188.)

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 09.22.2024 at 11:00 am

Sunday
September 15

Faith and Struggle

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 8:27–38

Faith and Struggle

Mark 8: 27-38

Marsh Chapel

September 15, 2024

Robert Allan Hill

Frontispiece

If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow.

Beloved, as our lessons from Holy Scripture recall for us today, faith means struggle, faith involves struggle, faith to be fully faithful engages with struggle. There are times and seasons when faith takes a hard life and makes it easier. And for that we are honestly grateful. But there are also times when faith takes an easier life and makes it harder, not for a joy in difficulty, but out of a genuine longing for something better. Here faith leads us into a struggle to hold onto our roots. Here faith leads us squarely into a struggle truly to face our condition. Here faith leads us into the struggle to retain, to hold onto our hopes and dreams.

Holding Onto Roots

Let us struggle in faith to hold onto our roots.

If ever there were an age that could hear, and appreciate, the teaching of James about the tongue as a fire, it is our own. You know, the preacher here does not need to bring exegesis to bear, or to give explanation for the wisdom proffered, or to bring examples, many or few. We know in our evenings of listening to the cable news. We hear in our mornings of commuting with the radio on. We read and learn and inwardly digest what speech can do for ill. We are coming to a point where even Proverbs 1 and James 3 are too tepid, too mild to describe our national condition. At some point we will need to repair to Amos, and to drink the hard cold medicine of his teaching. When we wreck the use of words without pause, we do come to a time when words no longer work. You have stripped the gears. You have shredded the fabric. You have cut the muscle. And no one can speak the truth and no can hear the truth any longer.

Behold the Lord was standing beside a wall built with a plumb line, with a plumb line in his hand. And the Lord said to me, ‘Amos, what do you see?’ And I said, ‘A plumb line’. Then the Lord said, ‘Behold I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel; I will never again pass by them; the high places of Isaac will be made desolate, and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid to waste, and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword’. Amos 7: 7-8.

Remember our roots in right speech. Remember James saying, Be quick to listen, so to speak, slow to anger, for the anger of man does not work the righteousness of God.

And especially let us hold onto our roots in this crucial, perhaps the crucial passage in the Gospel of Mark, Mark 8. To renounce oneself, said John Chrysostom is ‘to treat oneself as if one were another person’ (Marcus, II, 624). Consider oneself as every day on the edge of death. Death makes us mortal. Facing death makes us human. We live at the intersection of present advent and future hope. What good is the greatest possession if there is no possessor to enjoy it? ‘Take up the cross’ is a reference to the beginning of the journey, and the next part, ‘follow me’ refers to the ongoing life of faith. Baptism, first, you could say, Communion, second, you could say. We like Peter of course have aversion to suffering, as did Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. Jesus is more than a prophet. But he is not less than a prophet. Mark’s harsh portrayal of Peter as ‘Satan’ is too much for Luke, who omits it later, and that reaction was probably not unique, for we can understand it too. But our roots, our inheritance, especially here in Mark 8, remind us of the call to struggle, to struggle in faith to hold onto what has brought us here, to hold onto our roots

Facing Our Condition

Let us also struggle in faith to face our condition. Right across this country, and right now, and in a seriously difficult season of political, economic, cultural and religious division and discord, we will need to face and face up to what matters, counts and lasts. That means facing and naming mendacity, falsehood, in expression, in word. Again, we could add in a bit of Amos, in concert with Proverbs and James

‘Behold the days are coming’ says the Lord God, ‘when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord. They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east, they shall run to and fro, to seek the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it.’ Amos 8: 11-12.

For us, as we watch a vast part of our national culture now careening toward decay, our memory seems to be failing us. Rhetoric and rancor that befit no civilized people we have somehow accepted, acceded to, accommodated. We forget Emma Lazarus and prefer demagoguery. We forget Lincoln and support nativism. We forget Jesus the crucified and cleave to the cry of triumphalism, out of fear and out of exhaustion and out of amnesia, both a cultural and a Christological amnesia. But along comes the gospel, If any one would come after me…

Peter Berger (Rumor of Angels) reminded us that the very sense we have of lasting, earthly injustice, of wrongs not and never made right, a real and palpable sentiment, is itself a rumor of something more. Which we cannot yet see, of course, and of which we do not yet know, of course. But maybe a heavenly breakfast will again be served, at which the table will seat the resurrection of the just.

In the local as well as the large, we in faith want to struggle to face our condition. In a time when many young adults, many students, are facing a combination of anxiety, loneliness, alienation and depression, we togther will want to face this part of our shared condition with regular presence and active listening. This very school year.

In presence. At meals, in gatherings, at sporting events, simply being present. One friend tries to attend the opening session of very sport, being personally present. Another brings her family along to times on campus for shared service. Yet another makes a habit of walking Commonwealth Avenue once a day. And you, with grace, have given your presence to this service of worship, and those present here. You share a prayer, a moment, an hour, perhaps a greeting, a handshake, a story. Facing the conditions of our local culture, right here, right now, presence really matters.

And in listening, active listening. My old friend, a Dean in the Agricultural College at Cornell used to say and repeat, ‘most people can solve their own problems if they have someone who will actively listen to them.’ That may be as simple as honestly reflecting what another has said. One says, ‘I am feeling uncertain about this’. Another responds, with active empathy, ‘I do sense that you are really feeling uncertain about this’. Especially those new to the college experience, from backgrounds where such study was less common, or as first generation college students, can really, fully benefit from such. Active listening opens possibilities of new dimensions and new directions. But first, we have to face our condition, not just in the large but in the local as well.

Jean Twenge, GENERATIONS, 461: The generations have gone from a cohort with resilient mental health even when they were the age group most at risk during the pandemic (Silents) to young people in the midst of a full-blown mental health crisis as they grapple with growing up in the smartphone era (GenZ).

Sherry Turkle, RECLAIMING CONVERSATION, 325: There is nothing wrong with texting or email or videoconferencing. And there is everything right with making them technically better, more intuitive, easier to use. But no matter how good they get, they have an intrinsic limitation: People require eye contact for emotional stability and social fluency. A lack of eye contact is associated with depression and isolation, and the development of antisocial traits such as exhibiting callousness…One thing is certain: the tool that is handy is not always the right tool. So an email is often the simplest solution to a business problem, even as it makes the problem worse….

Let us fully face our condition, both in the large and in the local.

Holding Onto Our Hopes

May we also by grace hold onto our hopes.

We have been the beneficiaries of others who by example have shown us how to live with hope, to hold onto our best selves, hopes and dreams. Decades ago a dear faithful woman gathered a dozen twenty something couples, including those who didn’t know each other form Adam’s house cat, for a meal. Half or more had little babies in tow. We sang and prayed a little, ate a little more, and laughed a whole lot more about the oddities of life, young adult life, parenthood, ministry and the loneliness lurking behind and above and underneath them all. She gave us ourselves, by giving us to each other. She gave us ourselves, by giving us to each other. We came alive. The next week the phone rang. She said, Hi how is the ministry, how is life, how is that beautiful little daughter, how are your folks wasn’t that a great brunch, is Jan there?

From that one gathering friendships formed, and kindnesses were exchanged—a lunch, some golf, car repair, shared worship, a study of the Psalms. The habits of hope, the habits of visitation, the habits of welcome, the habits of outreach, the habits of hospitality, the habits of Christian charity and love, all so dearly central to any genuine form of community, are not necessarily permanent gifts. They have to be struggled for. They have to be held onto, remembered. To be remembered they have to be modeled. To be modeled they have to be practiced. Think with thanks of one or more who showed you habits of hope. Such habits can and will lead us to a common hope. We have some shared, some common hopes, and we should hold onto them! Most reasonable people would agree. Together:

We await a common hope, a hope that our warming globe, caught in climate change, will be cooled by cooler heads and calmer hearts and careful minds.

We await a common hope, a hope that our dangerous world, armed to the teeth with nuclear proliferation, will find peace through deft leadership toward nuclear détente.

We await a common hope, a hope that our culture, awash in part in hooliganism, will find again the language and the song and the spirit of the better angels of our nature.

We await a common hope, a hope that our country, fractured by massive inequality between rich children and poor children, will rise up and make education, free education, available to all children, poor and rich.

We await a common hope, a hope that our schools, colleges and universities, will balance a love of learning with a sense of meaning, a pride in knowledge with a respect for goodness, a drive for discovery with a regard for recovery.

We await a common hope, a hope that our families, torn apart by abuse and distrust and anger and jealousy and unkindness, will sit at a long Thanksgiving table, this autumn, and share the turkey and pass the potatoes, and slice the pie, and, if grudgingly, show kindness and pity to one another.

We await a common hope, a hope that our decisions in life about our callings, how we are to use our time and spend our money, how we make a life not just a living, will be illumined by grace and generosity.

We await a common hope, a hope that our grandfathers and mothers, in their age and infirmity, will receive care and kindness that accords with the warning to honor father and mother that you own days be long upon the earth.

We await a common hope, finally a hope not of this world, but of this world as a field of formation for another, not just creation but new creation, not just life but eternal life, not just health but salvation, not just heart but soul, not just earth, but heaven.

Most of us would agree.

We listen again for the windchimes of hope, whispering and singing to us, beckoning us into and out from an unseen future. The chimes ring, ring out today in Proverbs and James and Mark.

Coda

Beloved, as our lessons from Holy Scripture recall for us today, we sound the gospel around the globe: faith means struggle, faith involves struggle, faith to be fully faithful engages with struggle. There are times and seasons when faith takes a hard life and makes it easier. And for that we are honestly grateful. But there are also times when faith takes an easier life and makes it harder, not for a joy in difficulty, but out of a genuine longing for something better. Here faith leads us into a struggle to hold onto our roots. Here faith leads us squarely into a struggle truly to face our condition. Here faith leads us into the struggle to retain, to hold onto our hopes and dreams.

If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 09.15.2024 at 11:00 am