Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

Luke 13:1–9

Unamuno Lent 2025: The Tragic Sense of Life Part 2

Luke 13: 1-9

March 23, 2025

Marsh Chapel

Robert Allan Hill

We listen for the Gospel in St. Luke today. Our other gospels do not carry any of these teachings from Luke 13. Like most of the second half of the Gospel of Luke they are special to Luke. They are notoriously hard to interpret, with edgy choices for the interpreter. But given their specificity to Luke and their place within Luke, along with their absence elsewhere, we might be forgiven an inclination to give them a heartily Lukan rendering. Luke celebrates history, theology, the poor, and the church. Yes. But Luke also celebrates love, pardon, mercy, love. When he was yet a far way off, we read soon, the father saw him, saw his son, and raced headlong toward him, racing to put a ring on his finger and shoes on his feet, and hug and embrace him, and ‘love on him’ as now I understand some people say, though the odd use of the preposition in between the verb and the pronoun seems, well, odd. The Galileans are not greater sinners than others, for all the political violence and then death sent their way by Pilate. They are beloved children of God. Those on whom the natural violence inherent in gravity and the cascading violence inherent in human architectural and other error, which led to their tragic deaths, by no means means they are greater sinners than others. We may take from their tragedy for ourselves quite simply the wise admonition to straighten up and fly right, to prize our time now we have it, to seize the day. And to what end? To love, God and neighbor. To love, God and neighbor.

And there is still time. Yes, there may well come a time when it is too late. Other portions of Scripture make sure for sure we remember that. It is later than we think, as Dave Brubeck sang. But Luke has a different Gospel to announce: there is still time, there is extra time, there is more time, there is time. The kindly gardener, gently redirecting his boss, the owner of the vineyard, makes a call for mercy. A little water, a little fertilizer, a little time—a little more of each—and who knows what may come out of the ground? And if not, next year, well…You have the feeling don’t you that next year that same gardener will have another way to protect the vine. Give it just a little more time. Give it just a little more time. Your inner life, your Miguel de Unamuno life, your existential soul life, your wisdom and contemplation in life—a little water, a little nourishment, a little time, especially time, and who knows? Mercy…mercy takes time.

This is an upended story of the fig tree. From the fig tree learn its lesson. You know what it means to be a fig tree in the New Testament. It is like being a turkey in late November or like being a green beer on St Patrick’s day. You know you are going down.

People step aside when they hear that the story is about a fig tree. They step back ten feet, because they know what is coming.

Sure enough, at least at the outset, doom descends. In stomps the
The owner. Stomp, stomp, stomp. Fee fie foe fum. Yes, we know what is coming. I have seen this lousy, lazy, no good, flee bitten moth eaten, barren, fruitless, faithless, heartless, ruthless fig tree for three years, and nothing. Where is the fruit? Where is the beef? Show me the money! Yes, we have a sinking feeling about the old fig tree, having heard a sermon or three. Is there not fruit? And here it comes… Cut it down, throw it in the fire, off with their heads.

And in the other Gospels, that is that. One dead fig tree, and let it be a warning to us. I came not to bring peace but a sword. Not a jot or a tittle will pass away. Woe to you…

Which is, of course, what makes today’s lesson so interesting. Guess what? It’s not over, at least according to Jesus in Luke 13. No, it’s not over, yet. This is the Gospel according to Yogi Berra, “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over”. With a little cunning and creativity, a little psalmist and saint in him, this lowly vinedresser says, “Well, hang on a minute…” There is something there. He sees something. Something alive, something at work, just beyond our comprehension.

Trust is what the vinedresser in our parable displays. He has a certain confidence, perhaps a confidence born of obedience to a great and loving Lord, yet still a confidence that where there is a will there is a way, no matter what the immediate corn stubble evidence suggests.

I struggle to intuit why this altered fig tree parable was so important for Luke and Luke’s struggling church. They must have had singular meaning for Luke’s church seventy years after Jesus’ death and resurrection. Perhaps, perhaps, the parable is meant to give trusting patience to those who are waiting out what scholars call the “delay of the parousia”, or the expected but not actualized return of Christ on the clouds of heaven (1 Thess. 4-5). “Give me just a little more time…” sings the gardener.

Let it be, he says. Let it be.

His is not a naïve view. No, he recognizes that there comes a time when it is too late in every venture. He recognizes that the power to kill and give life is not his own. He recognizes that human labor and human investment is required for any progress. He recognizes the messiness of manure and dailyness of water. He recognizes that trust for the future is trust, not in human wisdom, but in divine grace. He recognizes the rigid limits of nature and history. He is a realist.

But, like Unamuno, our existentialist interlocutor this Lent, and his central insight, the tragic sense of life, he trusts that there is something there, something alive, something not quite phenomenal, something just beyond our comprehension.

Maybe that his why his voice, which first found me during a Junior year abroad (for many, the best part of college), his honest exploration of tragedy in life, the tragic sense of life, and with it his non doctrinaire faith, reverberate for me more than fifty years later. As in our Holy Gospel readings this morning, for Don Miguel, God is found through love and suffering, ‘amor y sufrimiento’, and both reflect approaching death. And we, in part, because we have compassion fow what we see of ourselves in others. Compassion (Luke would shout Amen! here) is the active form this active love takes, and as we share suffering with others, we lean into, even die into, one another. We give over, give up, give out our vital energy, in whatever manner, and direct it to our neighbor.

Dag Hammarskjold put it: The anguish of loneliness brings blasts from the storm center of death: only that can be really yours which is another’s, for only what you have given, be it only in the gratitude of acceptance, is salvaged from the nothing which some day will have been your life.

You could compare his sense, his trust to a late March day when it is still winter. Yet, there is a sense, a feeling. There are geese flying past, v by v. There is a blueish tint in the evergreens. There is more light and better light. There is wind, but not with quite the bite. A light snow, maybe, like this morning. One can fairly taste the maple syrup brewing miles away. Spring is coming.

Give me just a little more time, he asks. Don’t you have the feeling that he will ask the same a year from now, if things are no different? I do. He harbors an inexplicable but crucial sense of trust that things will work out.

As a Methodist Christian, I want that trust in my heart as I see the perils and challenges of this time. I want to shout: “Give me just a little more time! Another generation, some manure and water, that is a few good preachers and a few more dollars, and you just watch the figs fall, too many to count!” I want that trust that there is something there, alive, incomprehensible, that may change the equation. I want that trust that there is something alive, incomprehensible, that may open up a different conversation (conversation that is so important, and about which more in a moment) a new way that honestly respects both the plumb line of justice and the plumb line of righteousness, as well as the historical, organizational, relational and other peculiarities of life.

And as person, a human being, stuck somewhere between regret and anxiety, I want that trust, that simple trust like those who heard beside the Syrian sea, the gracious calling of the Lord, let us like them without a word rise up and follow thee.

Our dear friend Ray Hart wrote last week, and recalled Goethe, destiny often denies us what we want in order to give us what we need.

We need some of that inexplicable trust, especially when so many things are just not normal right now. Like what?

These things are not normal…

To wield a chain saw as a threat to faithful government workers

To browbeat and humiliate the struggling leader of a war torn ally

To defund Universities’ research for the common good

To wield tariffs against close friends and neighbor countries

To loose 1600 criminal perpetrators of January 6, the near death day of American democracy

To disemploy tens of thousands of veterans without cause or process

To publicly berate by nickname a sitting female senator in the course of a coarse Presidential address

To tank the stock market on a whim and a magical view of tarrifs

To brutally cut funds for poor children abroad and school children at home

To upend decades of US foreign lpolicy, so to advantage a criminal Russian dictator

To make of 240 years of American democracy a global laughingstock

To clothe the party of Lincoln in the permanent shame of cruelty and mendacity

To intentionally make the venerable Republican Party the party of abject cruelty and idiotic mendacity

To celebrate stupidity by wicked language like ‘51st state’ in hatred of our best neighbor and ally

To foolishly equate the just need for secure borders—a country has to have borders or it is not a country—with the wanton expatriation of children and the poor

To mock the weakest among us by hatred of their gender, race, status, poverty, need and vulnerability

These things are not normal…

So, in an abnormal time, let us uncover and recover the graces of the normal. Here is one. Let us talk to one another.

Here are students, downstairs at Marsh Chapel, preparing for the Sunday service, sitting on the old pews, in eyesight of Thurman and Marsh. They are talking to each other.

Here is the choir, robing, catching a breath from practice, standing with each other before worship. They are talking to each other.

Here are the clergy, gathering ostensibly to go over the Sunday worship service outline, which they—we—know by heart. But it is encouraging and joyful to sit for a moment together. They are talking to each other.

Here are a couple of dozen people, arranged around lunch tables after worship, downstairs in the Robinson Chapel, a Chapel redesigned a few years ago to function as a multi-use, interfaith chapel. They are eating and waiting to learn about Bach. And what are they doing? They are talking to each other.

Here are some several women and men, of deep faith and lasting devotion, gathering in the narthex after worship, and there still when the Catholics begin mass at 1pm. They say, ‘have a good week’, and, ‘hope to see you soon’, and, ‘it was really good to talk for a minute’, and, ‘I wish you well for the work this week’. They are talking to each other.

Here is a group gathered up, Advent and Lent most years, before or after worship, with a kindly, bright leader, determined to read parts of the Bible, and understand them, under the portrait of Howard Thurman.

Here are four people standing the parking lot, well over an hour after church, laughing at some funny expression, some shared memory, some joke. They know each other in that shared worship, after worship, following worship, conjoined in worship way. And what are they doing? Why they are talking to each other, of course.

Mr. Wesley called conversation a ‘means of grace’. It is, when it is real, full, familiar, friendly, in person, and in the spirit. Find someone to talk to this morning.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.23.2025 at 11:00 am

Sunday
March 16

Unamuno and the Tragic Sense of Life

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 13:31–35

Miguel de Unamuno 2

Luke 13

Marsh Chapel

March 16, 2025

Robert Allan Hill

First, Luke

Our lesson today, Luke 13:31ff., exudes as poignant, as heartfelt, as realistic, and as personal an outlook as one can find anywhere in the Gospels, in its soprano voice of the lingering teaching of Jesus, or in its alto voice of the earliest church’s memory, or in its tenor voice of the gospel author, or in its baritone rendering in tradition.

The highest note is Jesus’ own. The first line, the melody, is a kind of dominical soprano voice, laden with maternal imagery today. ‘Like a hen gathers, would I have gathered you?’ All these lines (31-33) are found only in Luke, and clearly go back to Jesus himself. The nature imagery, the kindliness of the Pharisees, the use of the term ‘fox’( from a country preacher’s lexicon), the gritty undercurrent of fear, the poetry of three days: mirable dictum!, we hear today what Jesus said. His voice, vss. 31-33, carries across two millennia. Go tell that fox…As a hen gathers her chicks…today, tomorrow, the third day… Here is Jesus of Nazareth, in 33ad, facing the tragic sense of life.

(There also is his frightened, hopeful church, in 70 ad, facing the tragic sense of life. There is Luke, in 90ad, facing the tragic sense of life. And here we are, gathered as partners in the Gospel. Thoreau wrote: “If it is not a tragical life we live, then I know not what to call it. Such a story as that of Jesus Christ–the history of Jerusalem, say, being a part of the Universal History. The naked, the embalmed, unburied death of Jerusalem amid its desolate hills—think of it…”)

Listen particularly, just for moment, to the voice of the writer, Luke, the third or tenor line, if you will, in this harmonic composition. Luke makes two novel moves, which differ from the interpretation offered by Matthew, with whom Luke shares a use of a portion of this text. Both moves impress us today.

First, Luke uses two powerful, forceful verbs to show the sweep of Jesus’ divine embrace, the gathering motion of the mother hen, the announcement of partnership, divine and human (thelo and sunago). I would have done…I would have done…I longed, desired, deeply wished…to gather, to embrace, to join together, to partner…There is a deeply moving aspect to this emphasis, as Luke has Jesus open the next several chapters of the Gospel of Luke, which include all the favorite and solely Lukan materials. We have the Good Samaritan, thanks to Luke. And the lost sheep and coin, thanks to him. We have the prodigal son, that most Gnostic of parables, thanks to Luke. And the dishonest steward, thanks to him. Luke is probing the partnership of the Gospel, and he begins his own emphasis right here. What we think about God determines how we live. Luke illumines that partnership.

Second, Luke stands Matthew’s interpretation of expectation on its head. For Matthew, the prediction of the coming of the Son of Man was an end of the world prediction. Not for Luke. Matthew looks up, Luke looks out. Luke sees the world a little more as we do, with miles to go before we sleep, with generations to go before we sleep. We have work to do. Here. Now. In partnership. Together. In real unity, not just in passing togetherness. Where Matthew heralds parousia, Luke heralds incarnation, and the coming entry, triumphal entry, into Jerusalem. Here Luke foreshadows what is to come. For him, as George Buttrick wrote, “Jesus was killed by the insurrectionists in the mob and by the reactionaries in the temple” (a good warning about the far left as well as the right). We can learn in our time from this text, and offer a form for its theological explanation.

Second, Unamuno

“Franco’s army is waging a campaign against liberalism”…Unamuno…As is Trump…Marsh is a liberal pulpit, one of the last…”A brand of Catholicism that is not Christian…And a paranoid militarism bred in the colonial campaigns”…

As a member of that group of Spanish authors known as the Generation of ’98, Unamuno was directed by the literary currents of the time also stirred by Baroja, Azorin, Valle-Inclan, Antonio Machado and others. As a Basque, a former student of the Institution Libre de Ensenanza and an anti-clericalist, Unamuno had much in common with these and other authors. But his best-known works, unlike those of the others, did not directly treat the socio-political situation in Spain. Rather, he reserved most political comment for his daily columns in South American papers. While his life was anything but a-political, his writing concerns individual man, and only occasionally social man. As the owl sees through the darkness while it tracks its prey, so did Unamuno pierce the outer tension of early twentieth century Spain to arrive at what was for him the center, beginning, base and constant reference point of life, the drive toward immortality.

The biggest compliment, thought Unamuno, that a philosopher could hope to receive is that his philosophy is clouded by poetic tendencies. It is not surprising therefore that the argument found in Del Sentimiento Trajico de la Vida for the immortality of the soul contains very little argument at all. The reader awaiting proof which eluded Plato, Aquinas, Descartes and Kant will find nothing to cheer him here. Unamuno attempts to touch the psychological root of the work of the aforementioned by claiming that whatever the correctness or worth of the position, the human need of immortality is undeniable. This ‘nuestro inhelo’, our desire,is the starting point for philosophy and religion, a manifestation of the need Kant had described of finality, and termination of the series. Th need for finality and man’s absolute refusal and inability to accept his own death are both symptoms of his yearning for immortality. ‘Creo en el immortal origen de este anhelod de la inmortalidad, que es las sustancia misma de mi alma.’

Distinction, individuality, fame, and separation from the mass lure every thinker to the defense of his own work. This search for singularity Unamuno finds as the universal trait present in all creation, and he may have spent so much energy and space to include thoughts of others in his major work precisely to prove this. Each author Unamuno cites, in a certain sense, lives on as a part of the Spaniard’s opus; each one wrote to make his own Byronic etching in the sculpture of world history. Unamuno’s contribution centers on this almost physical craving of eternal life…

Is this not the passion Kierkegaard described in which the Christian must hold together his infinite inwardness with his finite existence. Indeed the tension that fills every Unamunian protagonist flows out of the author’s insistence here. Unamuno’s egoistic acclamation of his own eternity explodes in the mind of the reader. And contemplating the possibility of immortality as it is here energetically posited raises the reader’s thought to a peak from which he can inspect, under Don Miguel’s guidance, the various steps along life’s way. The key, as in our gospel today, is in the elevation.

Ethical behavior, the Christian love of the neighbor, arises for Unamuno from a deep love of self. I love my neighbor because I love myself and because I incorporate my neighbor into my being. He becomes a part of myself, a part of something, someone lovable, and so is lovable himself. Likewise, I love my children because they are physically me. For Unamuno, only unflinching self-love can lead to a love of neighbor, and, for him, Catholic dogma best teaches the mechanics of this love relationship. Hear him summing up, through this perhaps imperfect translation:

Truth, good and beauty are creatures of the inward development of the artist, of each man as his own favorite artist. As I have said often enough before, a man is ‘tanto mas hombre quanto mas unitario sea’, that is, the growth of a unified personality occasions the production of these aesthetic ideals. The Socratic ‘know thyself’ and the biblical ‘for what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul’ both point up the primary importance of inwardness. And in the end, it is only in these terms that a man can define the true and the good and the beautiful. The objective ‘niebla’, mist, in which we exist not only prohibits an empirical search for these ideals, but straightaway directs us back upon ourselves for the discovery of this treasure. Because these truths are subjective, their communication is often indirect, incomplete and unsatisfying. But a telling feature in any artist’s attempt to communicate his truths is the degree of tension exhibited in his work.

Third, Life

Beware. There lurks in America an abiding appetite for chaos, cruelty, and mayhem, provided they befall others rather than ourselves. Republicans in Trump have consciously chosen to gain from this, to make political hay from others’ hurt. The ‘bully pulpit’ has fulfilled its name, and now become the torture pulpit.

Sometimes, as Karl Jaspers taught us, and noted it with surprise and joy, the third dimension of life, its transcendence, may be opened to us, strangely, in liminal moments: change, loss, death, birth, relocation, illness, healing. Let us remember Jaspers this Lent.

Sometimes, as John Wesley taught us, the third dimension of life, its transcendence, may be provided for us by means of grace: a regular mealtime prayer (do you know one?), a memorized set of verses (do you have them?), a favorite hymn or two (do you hum one?), a pattern of worship (do you claim one?), a church family to love and a church home to enjoy (do you attend one?). Personal goals, life’s length, do not come without effort. Communal changes, life’s breadth, do not come from wishes. Why should we think that transcendence will come our way without attentive effort? Let us remember Wesley this Lent.

Sometimes, as Ralph Harper taught us some years ago, we need the height

of presence: “When I am moved by a painting or by music, by clouds

passing in a clear night sky, by the soughing of pines in the early spring, I

feel the distance between me and art and nature dissolve to some degree,

and I feel at ease. I feel that what I know makes me more myself than I

knew before. This is how the saints felt about God, and I see in my own

experience elements that I share with the saints and prophets, the

philosophers and priests.” (On Presence, 6) Let us remember Harper this Lent.

At this very hour some Pharisees came, and said to him,’Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you. And he said to them, ‘Go tell that fox, ‘Behold I cast out demons and perform cures today and tomorrow, and the third day I finish my course. Nevertheless, I must go on my way today and tomorrow and the following day; for it cannot be that a prophet should perish away from Jerusalem’

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.16.2025 at 11:00 am

Sunday
March 9

Lent 2025: Miguel de Unamuno

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 4:1–13

Lent 2025: Miguel De Unamuno

Luke 4: 1-13

2025 Marsh Lenten Series

Marsh Chapel

March 9, 2025

Robert Allan Hill

The Marsh Lenten Sermon Series 2007-2025

In this Marsh Chapel pulpit, from 2007-2016, Lent by Lent, we identified a theological conversation partner for the Lenten sermons, broadly speaking, out of the Calvinist tradition, so important to the first 200 years in New England. With Calvin we encountered the chief resource for others we engaged over ten years—voices like those of Jonathan Edwards (2015), John Calvin himself, (2014), Marilyn Robinson (2013) (whom with gladness we greeted in the flesh here at Boston University April 11, 2023), Jacques Ellul (2012), Dietrich Bonhoeffer (a Lutheran cousin) (2011), Karl Barth (2010), and Gabriel Vahanian (2007), and themes like Atonement (2009) and Decision (2008), summarized with the help of Paul of Tarsus (2016).

For the next decade, we have turned to the Catholic tradition, so important in the last 200 years in New England. That is, in this decade, beginning with Lent 2017, the Marsh pulpit, a traditionally Methodist one, turned left, not right, toward Rome not Geneva, and we have preached with, and learned from the Roman Catholic tradition, and some of its great divines including Henri Nouwen (2017) Thomas Merton (2018) John of the Cross (2019), Teresa of Avila (2020), St Patrick of Assisi(2021), Dorothy Day (2022), Augustine of Hippo (2023), and Raymond Brown (2024). Next year will be our last in this Catholic series, before we turn in the next decade to figures from other world religions. You may have a thought or two, a suggestion about with whom we should converse in 2026. For now, we turn this Lent 2025 to Miguel De Unamuno.

First, Luke

Luke prepares the way for us on toward Unamuno.

“We want to mark the places and preserve the moments where we have encountered God’ (Ringe, loc cit).

You are following Luke well this year. Notice how roundly he changes Mark, here, too.

The other alternative is Matthew, who copies Mark nearly word for word. No, Luke has gone his own way, and given us the Lukan view, later than that of Mark, different from that of Mark, fuller than that of Mark. What do Luke’s additions amount to?

What others have seen and heard is meant to inspire us to see and hear, in prayer. Luke regularly and steadily supplements the narrative with additional moments of prayer. The most activist of the gospels is also the most passive, the most prayerful. Likewise, the whole ethos of exodus is emphasized in Luke. Yes, life is a journey. Yes, the journey of faith includes risk, distress, and pain. Yes, the sojourn in the wilderness is a cost of leaving the fleshpots of any Egypt, just as winter is the cost for summer. Luke is setting things right for the long haul. Prayer to nourish for the long haul. Journey as a metaphor for struggle over the long haul. Lordship, a higher and hierarchical Savior, to strengthen weakened knees and souls for the long haul. The presence of the divine will, soon for Luke to emerge in the body of the Church, to guide all for the long haul. Luke advises us to be ‘in it for the long haul’ whatever ‘it’ is. Luke gives Divine confirmation of Jesus’ Messiahship. It places into the history of Jesus what the later church believed, believes, knew, and preached. See: even during his life a few people knew and saw

We want to bear that mystery in our present, in our person, do we not? Tittle: ‘as he faced the possibility of suffering and death his mind reverted to the great figures of Israel’s past…let us place ourselves under the influence of Christ and even we will be transfigured…something of his glory will shine in our hearts and appear in our faces and show forth in our lives’.

Second, Unamuno

The voice of Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo (1864-1936) is singular for its frenzied call to consciousness, and to consciousness of man’s need of immortality. Hear just a snippet:

You ask me my good friend if I know how to incite delirium, vertigo, any madness whatsoever, among these orderly and placid masses that are born, eat, sleep, reproduce themselves and die. Is there no way to introduce a new epidemic of flagellants, or of Convulsionaries? And you speak of the millennium. (Nuestro Senor Don Quijote).

These words should be read aloud, as they have just been, for clearly the written words pin down and cramp the intended message more effectively than they help its communication. Oral presentation also occasions the dips and swells of the lector’s voice, the anxious movements of his limbs and torso, and the knowing or questioning glances of his eyes. It is easy to imagine Unamuno reading aloud most of his work; indeed, we are left with the thought that Unamuno’s most exciting creations may have been those spun out and lost in the afternoon ‘tertulias’. Only the most vibrant exposition would suit Unamuno’s expression of his total concern for one question: that of his own immortality. His craving of an after-life and his concomitant absolute fear of the possible disappearance of his own soul fuel all the myriad Unamunian works.

This gangling, bearded, Basque professor of Greek at the University of Salamanca, so often likened in appearance to an owl, indeed shared that animal’s nocturnal vision as he wrote from the heart of Castille, in the midst of the gathering noon darkness of the early twentieth century. His lived experience, in a time of political tumult, mirrors ours in America this Lent. Although primarily a teacher and writer, Unamuno’s political life was nearly as tumultuous as his writing. Appointed to the rectorship at Salamanca in 1900, Unamuno came to be well known before the fall of the monarchy. Alfonso XIII, while outwardly respecting Unamuno’s nascent world-wide audience, quietly had him removed as rector in 1914. In 1924 Primo de Rivera exiled him to the island of Fuerteventura. After six weeks of life as a ‘desterrado’ on the island, near the Canaries, Unamuno was permitted to return to Spain. Instead, he lived out the remaining six years of the dictatorship in Paris and Hendaye, writing little, reading little, in somewhat of a coma. With the fall of the dicatatorship, Unamuno was free to return to Spain. It is sufficient to say that while Don Miguel made his name in the literary world, he at the same time was deeply involved in the political evolution of his country. When Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship fell, Unamuno returned to the University of Salamanca and was reelected rector of the university in 1931, but in October 1936 he denounced General Francisco Franco’s falangists, was removed once again as rector, and was placed under house arrest. He died of a heart attack two months later. This Lent we shall converse with Unamuno, and learn with him, about life, about death, about faith, about immortality.

Third, Life

Five days ago here at Marsh Chapel about 1,100 students and others presented themselves for ashes, Ash Wednesday. Our hard-working Marsh Chaplains and team served many. The Chapel also hosted three Catholic services and the weekly contemporary Theological School service, wherein ashes were given. Hence, about 1,100. In the last few years, Ash Wednesday has begun to catch up with Easter and Christmas in active young adult participation. Why?

My middle name of late is ‘I don’t know’, which I don’t. One of our team preaches an Ash Wednesday sermon every year. ‘The ashes are not magic ashes’. But they draw. The touch draws. The solemnity, too. The whisper of mortality at the fountain of youth. The strange, numinous, yet public pause. The flesh of it all. On said, ‘it has become a moment for reset’. Yes, reset.

There is perhaps another cause or reason. Here, mid-winter, is an encounter with antiquity. For two millennia women and men have been preparing for a holy Lent. For two millennia women and men have stopped to remember, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. As our English chorister read it some years ago, Thou art DUST and to DUST though shalt return. Is this not subliminally why, in part, we are here this morning, too? For two millennia women and men have listened to readings from Holy Writ. For two millennia women and men have received Jesus in cup and bread. For two millennia, come Sunday, there have been choirs and preachers and prayers and candles and quiet. The architecture of our gothic nave, with an origin nearly a millennium ago, speaks to us so. Our long, tall, yes traditioned, stained glass captures places and people from longer ago. Our habits of liturgy, stand and sit, our habits of liturgy, sing and give, our habits of liturgy, bow and kneel, our habits of liturgy, our body language, give us a jarring encounter with antiquity. For once, every seven days, we are not jailed and stuck in the shallow shallows of the twenty first century. We are liberated to time travel, to get out and see the past, and perhaps, now and then, to hear something good and learn something new.

Here, in Luke, as in our other gospels, the Lord faces and masters the various challenges which we also know. They include a kind of will to power, and a sort of pride, and a type of avarice. We come to church with some experience of temptation and resistance. As the song writer says, ‘good experience comes from seasoned judgment–which comes from bad experience’.

In many communities, including our own, the sun rises this morning, this Lenten morning, on experience of loss and hurt. Across this country, in varying perspectives, we feel this. This morning there are homes and families who have suddenly known unexpected loss. This morning there are friends and groups of friends who have been faced with mortal danger. At one breakfast table, a wife now sits alone, for the first time on a Sunday in 60 years. At another breakfast table, a family gathers for the first time, in a long time, and missing a member. It would help us to remember just how short our words do fall in trying to describe the depth of these moments. Our words arrive only at the shoreline, at the margin of things. Beyond this we practice prayer, a kind of sitting silent before God.

We do not know why these things happen. We hurt and grieve. In the bones. At the deeper levels, we just do not know, and for an academic community committed to knowing, and knowing more, and more, this means wandering in a serious wilderness. Give us an equation to solve. Show us a biography that needs writing. Provide us with an experiment. Happily, we would organize a committee, or develop a proposal, or phone a list of donors. But loss, unexpected and unfair, is tragic. The tragic sense of life, el sentimiento trajico de la vida, as Unamuno put it, takes us out into wilderness, where we learn, with Jesus, to resist. Faith is resistance. Faith is the power to withstand what we cannot understand. Our friend, congregant, faithful minister in the Lone Star State, Milton Jordan, writes

Steadily slicing the edges off structures

of public wellbeing and the common good

on behalf of the masters of massed wealth,

legislative lackeys and their cultural

co-conspirators depend on distraction

to draw our attention away from plans
that obstruct continuing resistance

to their destruction of institutions

and practices that enable us to see

one another face to face, and maintain

those structures of public wellbeing

and the common good.

In the spirit of Christ, we are in worship this morning to attest to something. Faith is the power to withstand what we cannot understand. Worship is the practice of faith by which we learn to withstand what we cannot understand. God is the presence, force, truth, and love Who alone deserves worship, and worship is the practice of the faith by which we learn to withstand what we cannot understand. Worship prepares us to resist. So, we see Jesus again in the wilderness. To resist all that makes human life inhuman. So here you are, come lent, come Sunday, come 11am, today again to walk in the wild, in the wilderness.

The necessary freedom, and the disciplined grace, of Luke’s gospel firmly accosts us with the daily need, the daily task, the daily prospect, the daily adventure, the daily promise, the daily existential, lonely, windswept mountain top liberty of faith in the resurrection. Back at home, it may be, for those present this morning, or there at home, it may be, for those listening today there is transfiguration awaiting, a resurrection beckoning, a faith and gospel lying in hiding, ready for action. Write that letter. Sign that check. Make that call. Read that verse. Forget that hurt. Watch. Fight. Pray. Live rejoicing every day.

Come! Come travel together this Lent! Listen to Luke! Learn from Unamuno! Live in Love!

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.9.2025 at 11:00 am

Sunday
March 2

A Certain Height

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 9:28–36

A Certain Height

Luke 9: 28

Marsh Chapel

March 2, 2025

Robert Allan Hill

Opening

Martin Luther King’s own favorite sermon, “The Dimensions of a Complete Life”, (as Gary Dorrien reminded us (157, The Making of American Liberal Theology), was itself based on a sermon from Boston’s own Phillips Brooks. King preached the sermon in 1954, to candidate at Dexter Avenue, and again at Purdue in 1958 before a national UCC convention, and again in 1964 in Westminster Abbey to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. As you learn, preaching on an old style Methodist circuit, what is good the first time, can often be better preached three times or more. The opposite also may be true. Said our dear friend, of blessed memory, Peter Gomes: a great sermon is like a great Bach Cantata: you can and should hear it many times. King, following Boston’s Brooks, compared life to a cube, possessing the three dimensions of length, breadth and height. The good life flourishes when all three interact in something like a great triangle. “At one angle stands the individual person, at the other angle stand other persons, and at the top stands the Supreme Infinite Person, God”. Length means achieving personal goals, breadth comprises the concern for the well-being of others, and height signifies the desire for an upward moving longing…for God. Height signifies the desire for an upward moving longing…for God.

Today’s Gospel is about the third dimension, about height, and personally asks you whether your life exhibits this, King’s third dimension. Height. Hast Thou Height? Granted your personal achievements. Given your communal engagements. Have you known, or been known by, ‘a certain view’? In Boston, during this winter of 2025, in the speaking and hearing of Luke 9: 28, there could hardly be a more personal, pertinent question. On it hang hope and health, yours and mine. A high, craggy, high view is one of the gifts which the religious communities may offer to support our common hope across the globe, even in this time of mendacity, in this time of wanton harm and hurt.

Now. The work of a sermon is in the hearing, and the working, astute hearer regular asks A: what is this about? And B: what difference does it make?

A. What Is It About?

Today we hear Luke’s later version of the Transfiguration. Originally a resurrection appearance account, this legend eventually was placed, first by Mark, in the year 70ce, back into the life of Jesus, as a confirmation of his Messiahship, a portent of Easter, and an affirmation of Peter’s earlier confession. Our lectionary places this passage, given symbolical and other similarities, adjacent to Exodus 34. But the truth is that there are as many reasons to disjoin as to conjoin the two texts, and it is generally better to avoid the inherited usurpation by the Newer Testament of the Older, if at all possible. Rather, the passage as it washes up from Mark on the shoreline of Luke’s persecuted Roman congregation, near the turn of the century, is an ill fit to our current lectionary assembly.

Mark has brought the trumpets of universals to the occasion. All life longs for height! Hear the resurrection gospel! Light. Shining. Cloud. God. Tradition. Prayer. Silence. Presence. White…white as snow…white as no fuller on earth could bleach…white as light…dazzling white. What arrives to Luke is a High View, a certain height, an announcement of…God. This is my beloved…listen…

Today’s Gospel is about Luke’s editorial and authorial changes to the Markan Transfiguration. Notice with me a dozen changes Luke makes, working on what he inherits from Mark. Marsh’s pulpit today interprets Luke yesterday, who interprets Mark the day before, who accounts for the Transfiguration.

First, Luke adds two days to the number of days in the distance from the earlier text, perhaps a more regular 8 day week, than the more resurrectional 6 day account in Mark. Luke’s is a more ordinary account of what a week is. Think of your week: sleep, work, travel, talk, sleep. Sermon. Sleep, work, travel…

Second, Luke demotes James to the third position, after not before John, perhaps a move to distance himself and his church from the Jewish Christianity which James led. Luke represents more a Roman, regular human, than a Jerusalem, brother of the Lord, religious sentiment.

Third, Luke depicts all present in prayer. We can identify with prayer. It is something, however weakly, we practice. It is a human word to God, not the other way around. Prayer, worship, giving, journaling, doing.

Fourth, Luke makes the white ‘dazzling’, to stand out in our human experience.

Fifth, Luke fills in the detail of the conversation, the tertulia, held among the Law and the Prophets and the Lord. They speak of exodus, of glory, of what is to come. Mark kept them mute, Luke gives them voice, human language.

Sixth, to be clear, Luke has called these figures ‘men’. Mark gives their names, Luke their genus and species. They are to be seen and heard as humans, real people, not ghosts.

Seventh, Luke puts the disciples to sleep, a magical sleep, so well-known in all our folk tales, from the Brothers Grimm to Frank Baum. Sleep, sleep…nary a more human activity than slumber.

Eighth, Luke reveals Peter as even more human than thou, not only not knowing what to say, as in Mark, but not knowing what he had said. My dear friend and colleague, author of three dozen books, was accused of publishing every thought he ever had, to which he deftly replied, “Oh no, I published much more than that”. Our self-criticism can reveal our ownmost selves.

Ninth, Luke declares explicitly, what you know best in your nightmares, that the disciples are afraid. You fear, I fear, we fear. Fear in handful of dust. After this past year, we are people drenched in and numbed by fear, by anxiety and worry and ennui. So: name them, declare them explicitly as did Luke.

Tenth, Luke radically changes God’s statement about Jesus. Mark has “this is my beloved Son”, a repetition of Jesus’ baptism. Luke uses a strange word, a perfect passive participle, for Jesus whose perfection, passive reception and earthly participation, Luke names this way: “This is my Son, my Chosen”. Actually, the word means, “picked out from”. Love is a great word, but vague. Choices clarify. We are known in our choices, we choosing humans. Thank you for love. Now, what choices does that imply? What loving choices?

Eleventh, Luke implicates the disciples in the keeping of silence. Mark has Jesus keep the secret, Luke the disciples. Secrets, open or otherwise, are the stuff of human community, and tragedy. A family or institutional system is dysfunctional at the point of its secrets, and its fingerprints are in its secrets. What is not said is what is loudest. In family systems, what is not said is loudest.

Twelfth, Luke emphasizes the prophetic dimension of this tale, as the Apocalypse of Peter will do later in the century (Apoc. Pet. 6). Prophecy is what keeps biblical narrative human.

So. What is all this about? Just this. At twelve points, Luke has not so subtly re-written an inherited account of epiphany, of a certain heightened view, at every point to make it more human.Luke smashes home his Transfiguration sermon: this holy event is human, accessible to human beings, grounded in human experience, open to all the human frailties and weaknesses we so painfully know, human, human, human, human! Homo sum: humani nil a mi alienum puto. I am human, nothing human is foreign to me. Luke has rewritten the Gospel, in order to be faithful to the Gospel. As we try to do every Sunday.

In the main, the Transfiguration ill suits Luke’s general gospel purpose, to present the human face of God in Jesus, or so it would seem. But look! Luke has brought you something profoundly hopeful and healthy. Good life has height, as well as length and breadth. Good life has height that is a part of human experience. For Luke, unlike for Mark, the Transfiguration is not about divine but about human experience, not about a divine voice but about human ears. Luke’s passage is about heightened human experience. Your experience. Sometimes in order to protect traditions, we have to re-interpret them.

B. What Difference Does it Make?

So, what difference does this make? If any?

On each and every Sunday we may ask this of the text of the day: what is it about and what difference does it make?

It is striking that Luke, facing similar fright as do we in this our own time of national and cultural turmoil, Luke, during the terror of Domitian, wrote otherwise, here. (May his courage, and the courage of the other biblical writers, ever infect us.) As if to say, there is more than one witness, the persecution of Christians under Domitian, he heightens human experience, making even transfiguration fully human. As if to say to us, there is more than one witness, the trauma of the last year, and that more than one witness is making even our life open to height. As if to say to us, there is more than one witness, that life is open to a saving height.

Given the mendacity and cruelty in the last 48 hours of the current national Republican leadership, so utterly reminiscent of Joseph McCarthy, another Republican from another era, we may perhaps benefit from a little more height—in personhood, in voice, in presentation, in language, in heart. McCarthy rode high on his own generation of cruelty and mendacity. For a time. But then along came a lawyer from Boston, Mr. Welch, to challenge him and, ultimately, to bring him down. After scenes highly reminiscent of the tawdry Oval Office disgusts of Friday, at long last along came a Boston lawyer, who shouted into the Republican evils of Joseph McCarthy, then highly popular, ‘Have you no decency? Have you no decency?’ Have you no decency? Have you no decency?’ He was supported by a graduate of Boston University School of Theology, later to become a Methodist Bishop, G. Bromley Oxnam, a meticulous record keeper as it happened, who could contradict by print record, what the Senator from Wisconsin, Mr. McCarthy, proffered as true, which it was not.

That is. As dark as these days are. As low as these moments are. It may be that there will arise, in these days, as with that Boston lawyer, Mr. Welch, and that Methodist Bishop, Mr. Oxnam, a calling to account. I listen for the voices of the Senator from Maine, of the former governor from New Hampshire, of the Senators from Utah, Alaska, and Kentucky. It must be my hearing is fading, because I don’t quite hear anything. Yet. It may be that this past weekend, as with Joe McCarthy in the year of my birth 1954, is the Transfiguration moment, the certain view, the height dimension. When people realize, as they at last did with Joe McCarthy, what we are dealing with.

At least ask yourself, as this sermon comes around third base to head on home, whether your life has height? Human height? Has it?

Luke 9: 28 offers a sacred, a heightened, sacred message. Your life, in its struggle upward may open up, at points, to a humanly accessible heightened view!

In fact, if life does not retain a height dimension, life becomes a kind of death. Without the mountain, Transfiguration presence, the absence of the valley becomes the valley of death. Luke has smashed home his sermon, already, so in like fashion we may want to ask ourselves, I may ask you, a question. Does your life have height? Is the spiritual ceiling in your weekly house of sufficient stature? How high is heaven, day to day? Is there any place for a cloud, for brilliance, for presence, for the numinous? Is there a room with a view? Is there a place for special experience, even ‘special revelation’? As the parishioner said to her pastor, looking up from the kitchen sink, in front of a cold hard wall, I just wish this kitchen had a window over the sink.

Closing

Hear the gospel: height, height, height, a certain height, awaits you, too

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.2.2025 at 11:00 am

Sunday
February 16

Faith in the Shadows

By Marsh Chapel

1 Corinthians 15: 12-20

Faith in the Shadows

1 Corinthians 15

February 16, 2025

Marsh Chapel

Robert Allan Hill

Vaccine

If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

The appearance of a brilliant Easter gospel lesson, 1 Corinthians 15, amid the pre-Lenten snows of New England, and its core sentence upon ‘this life only’, conjures faith, a faith that can live even…in the shadows. Faith in Christ in the shadows of national turmoil. Faith in Christ in the shadows of personal ennui. Faith in Christ in and within the shadows of mortal proximity, of the proximity of our mortality. Faith in Christ, over against the current state of affairs. Faith is living for, living in, living toward something better. Your faith is about living for something better, better than this current life only.

Part of our problem with vaccines is that we do not any longer have among us in full measure those who could see and did see what came before. Other generations had no difficulty understanding the dread of polio, for instance. They lived with it. They saw the wretched hurt brought to their childhood chums, their third-grade best friends, their neighbors down the street when polio struck. And those, Salk and Sabine and all, who developed the vaccines, did so out of a human hope, a resurrection hope, out of a faith over against the shadows, that such misery could be eradicated. They did not live for this life only, and they did not work for this life only, but labored for a hope for something else, something better. As do our many Boston University physicians and researchers and scientists, who labor in love for forms of life we do not yet see. To have their brilliance accosted by the current ignorance in Washington, to have their hope belittled by the current mendacity and malignancy in Washington, elected by Republicans, sadly becoming the party of cruelty, near and far, is an unspeakable offense to God and man both. Read and re-read the sermons from this pulpit since 2016. We have been warned.

My parents’ generation knew polio from the street, the swimming pool, the classroom, the Sunday school. Mitch McConnell’s memory of such this week bears witness, McConnell who was treated at Warm Springs Georgia at the same time as was President Roosevelt. But that memory, that visceral, gut memory is now largely gone, gone with that generation gone. On a snowy day sometime in 1959, if memory serves, I was driven up the road a few towns to receive a vaccine. The details sadly are dim. I believe my mother drove me alone, out from the little village of Hamilton, and due north, looking down from the edge of the Allegheny plateau, into the smaller still village of Stockbridge. There was and still is there an elementary school built by FDR during the depression, schools that dot the towns of that region in every direction. Solid stone, with arched openings left and right. We pulled up, with my mother dressed in a long coat, and wearing a flattened hat, and gloves. At least as I remember. I am sure I was every bit an ornery rascal at age 5 as you can imagine. But we made our way. Then something unusual and a bit terrifying happened. My mother, a very stoic soul in all regards, especially in public, burst into tears. We did not discuss it. It made the impending vaccination all the more terrifying, I imagine. But, whether Salk or Sabine, we got through it. Here is what I think. I think she was overcome by the recognition that her children, now beginning with the oldest, would be spared polio, spared what she had seen her classmates suffer. By vaccine. Because some scientists had faith that over against the shadows, there was a resurrection betterness out there, waiting to be embraced. Not this life only, as we now have it, but a fuller, richer, safer, better life, under the resurrection power of new life, and finally, of eternal life.

Healing is a sign of resurrection.

Wiesel

If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

Our disinvestment in memory, in shared memory, in history, across the land, has somewhat gotten now the better of us just now, for a time. But there is history to be had, and made, and honored. It is all around us, right here. It is rich with the sacrificial lived memory of those who have suffered. Last week, I stopped to buy a newspaper (New York Times 2/5/25, A21), and walking along, read on the bottom of the death of Marion Wiesel. Jan and I first met Elie Wiesel in New York City in 1978, over dinner, in the living room of our teacher, of blessed memory, Robert McAfee Brown. Wiesel had just come to Boston University as a University Professor. Marion and he married in 1969. Both had survived the Holocaust. She worked alongside him, translating his writing from French to English, in elegant style, including her 2006 re-translation of NIGHT. One said, ‘In the alignment of stars that helped make Wiesel the international icon he became, his marriage to Marion was among the most significant.’(J Berger). On this BU campus, and across our multiple and serious differences, we shall need and want to remember and evoke, from all sides, those who have brought out the best in us, the memories of whom, again from all sides, may guide us to a better future, one that is fuller, richer, safer, one that carries the resurrection power of new life, and so brings resurrection faith along with us, even into the deepest shadows.

When my father died in June of 2010, now nearly 15 years ago, two days after his burial, I received a note from one of our choristers, Ondine Brent, who worked as Elie Wiesel’s administrator (partly I am sure because of her own excellent French): Dean Hill, Professor Wiesel asked me to send you the following message: ‘Dear Friend, my deepest condolences. In our tradition we say: may you be spared further sorrow. Elie Wiesel. Such a kindness. I have kept and cherish the letter. In autumn 2013 I had been scheduled to introduce him on October 21, for his first lecture of the usual three that year, all annualy attended by 800-1,000 people, on TRAGEDY AND ITS LITERATURE IN THE BIBLE. Sadly, he became physically unable to do so, nor was he ever able to do so again before his own death in 2016. Not so long ago, up and down the sidewalks of Commonwealth Avenue, we had here at BU a capacity to reach out to one another across serious differences, and to engage with and learn from each other, even in the teeth of dire disagreement. I would say that such is the best of the Methodist part of our BU Methodist heritage. My prayer and hope is that some of that, and the wisdom therein, will emerge and re-emerge, in the face of what is the deplorable contemporary tragedy, itself of Biblical proportions, in the Middle East. Marsh Chapel has, does, and can continue to provide some measures of such engagement. May it be so. For who hopes for what he sees? We hope for what we do not see, and wait for it with patience, hoping not only for what this life alone can offer, but for what the life and light of eternal love, the resurrection itself, can offer. The harbinger of resurrection is kindness, a foretaste of eternity.

For there to be any global future worthy of the name, there will need to be investment in memory, of what works, what matters, what counts, and what lasts.

Kindness is a sign of resurrection.

October 7

If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

Over this past academic year, the night I had least sleep was that before October 7. There were to be, and were, gatherings and protests that day and through that week. But contrast, we offered here in Marsh Chapel an 8am universal, ecumenical service of prayer for peace. Leadership included women and men from many traditions, including Methodist, Episcopal, Jewish, Muslim, Presbyterian, and Catholic, with special music guiding us. The service was not heavily attended (even though I prevailed on my Monday 8am Gospel of John to come, and survival rates among them were high!), but our senior University leadership and some several others did grace us all with their presence. In smaller gatherings, including that one, and bit by bit, including this last week, we are beginning to see some slow emergence of some common ground.

Our Muslim Chaplain, Nagla, very new to the campus, and to our community, particularly offered a sonorous and poetic prayer, to guide us toward a a shared hope for peace, a shared sense of possibility, a shared sense of common ground, which with the other prayers made of that morning a limited but lasting acknowledgement of all that we cannot see or know, and all that for which yearn together, in a common hope. We were able at 8am to pray together.

There, therein, is a footprint in the snow, a sign of lasting life, a Rosebud memory and hope. Now you don’t believe, do you, that only Methodist will be in heaven, in the resurrection. What about Presbyterians? An Episcopalians? And Baptists? And Lutherans? And what about non-Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox and all? And…what about Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Bahais? And what about non-religious folks, and others, and all? I mean, is resurrection merely an eternity of Methodist hymn sings, prayer meetings, garage sales and tithing? Prayer, when it is universal, not just particular, is hope that carries beyond this life.

Prayer is a sign of resurrection

February 11

If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

Recall ThorntonWilder’s OUR TOWN Emily Webb returning from the dead. She asks, just once, to return to Grovers’ Corners, to see and hear and taste and touch and feel. “Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.” She picks her 12th birthday, at dawn, early in the morning.

Three days snow, in Grover’s Corners. Main Street, the drug store. Mr. Webb coming home on the night train from Hamilton College. Howie Newsome, the policeman. Mrs. Webb (“how young she looks! I didn’t know Mama was ever that young”). 10 below zero… and the morning banter…

I can’t find my blue ribbon

Open your eyes dear. I laid it out for you. If it were a snake it would bite you.

The milk man arrives. Mr. Webb kisses Mrs. Webb.

Don’t forget Charles it’s Emily’s birthday.

I’ve got something right here. Where is she? Where’s my birthday girl?

Breakfast, early in the morning, in New Hampshire: ‘A very happy birthday to you. There are some surprises on the kitchen table. But birthday or no birthday I want you to eat your breakfast good and slow.

I want you to grow up and be a good, strong girl.

That blue paper is from your Aunt Carrie

And I reckon you can guess who brought the post-card album

I found it on the doorstep when I brought in the milk–George Gibbs.

Chew that bacon good and slow. It’ll keep you warm on a cold day.’

‘O Mama, look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Mama 14 years have gone by. I’m dead. You’re a grandmother Mama. I married George Gibbs. Wally’s dead too. His appendix burst on a camping trip to North Conway. We felt just terrible about it–don’t you remember? But, just for a moment now we’re all together, Mama. Just for a moment we’re happy. LET’S LOOK AT ONE ANOTHER’

‘So all that was going on and we never noticed. Grover’s Corners. Mama and Papa. Clock’s ticking. Sunflowers. Food and coffee. New ironed dresses and hot baths. Sleeping and waking up. Earth! You are too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

Wonder is a sign of resurrection.

Healing, kindness, prayer, wonder. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. Healing, kindness, prayer, wonder. May our faith guide us in the shadows, on toward Him who is the first fruits of those who have died.

Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ—whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 02.16.2025 at 11:00 am

Sunday
February 9

The Bach Experience

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 5:1–11

The Bach Experience

Lectionary Texts

February 9, 2025

Dr Scott Allen Jarrett and Dean Robert Allan Hill

Marsh Chapel

Dean Hill

‘Nothing is fixed forever and forever, it is not fixed. The earth is always shifting and the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down the rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them, because they are the only witnesses we have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to one another, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with each other, the sea engulfs us, and the light goes out’. (James Baldwin)

Our meditation this Bach Sunday centers on the Holy.

A place can inspire the idea of the Hoy….

This place:
Come Sunday, every Sunday, here at Marsh Chapel:
The Chapel’s gothic nave, built to lift the spirit, welcomes you
The Chapel’s sixty year history, at the heart of Boston University, welcomes you
The Chapel’s regard for persons and personality, both in its Connick stained glass windows and in its current ministry, welcomes you
The Chapel’s familiar love of music, weekday and Sunday, especially on a Bach Sunday welcomes you

Music, especially music, can inspire the idea of the Holy…

Together we can sing. Those in the balcony, our regular closer to heaven balcony crew, can sing.

Those along the back wall, in the last pew, the AMEN corner, can sing.

Those from the east, who regularly sit to the east, who lean left, and those from the west, who regularly sit to the west, who lean right, can sing.

Those in the chancel whom we do not want to cancel, can sing, choir or clergy or other or all.

Those at home, following the bulletin, humming the tunes, imagining a day when they will again be among us in the nave, can sing.

‘They shall sing of the ways of the Lord…’

Dr. Jarrett, tell us of this Cantata, this musical holy moment, and what we may hear of here, and what it may conspire to inspire in us as a measure of all that is holy…

Scott

Dean Hill

We live in a challenging, rigorous time. Yet, even in grim reminders of grim remainders of abiding injustice, prejudice, racism, embedded in systems all about us, this reminds us of who we are and why we have come here. At least we are present, alive, together come Sunday and can recall and remind and name in the moment, this moment, the sense of the Holy, the mystery, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans about us.

A promise can inspire the idea of the Holy…And so can new places, new jobs, new homes, new ways. Truth is itinerant. And such a willingness to await the holy is a virtue, like all virtues, formed by habit. The public worship of Almighty God is not a matter of indifference. Aristotle, Aquinas and Wesley all emphasized: virtues are formed by habit, daily ritual, weekly routine, virtues are formed by habit, as the spirit is nourished by reading a Psalm a day. The past precedes but does not prescribe the future. Biology precedes but does not prescribe destiny. Family of origin precedes but does not prescribe identity. Home, hearth, culture, cult, church, school, town—they precede but they do not prescribe vocation. May we hear this as a word of faith? The past does not determine the future. There is always the open possibility of healing for past hurt. There is always the open possibility of forgiveness for past wrong. There is always the open possibility of liberation from past entrapment. This is what we mean by Christ. “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation, the old has passed away and the new has come.” In the lasting and large, this is truly what we mean by resurrection. The resurrection of Christ is the new truth of faith made eternal and everlasting across the threshold of death. The resurrection is the power of love transcending the sting of death. Love outlasts death. One day I passed by a boy climbing into a school bus. I saw his parents’ wave. I remember that the bus door closed, a closure to the past and a way to the future. It takes faith to climb on and it takes more faith to wave goodbye, across all our separations and thresholds, all our liminal moments, especially at the River Jordan. I saw the bus driver put her strong hand on the boy’s shoulder. Pause for a moment and sense a Hand on your shoulder too.

Surprise!

A surprise can inspire the idea of the Holy…

posted in Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music, The Bach Experience, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 02.9.2025 at 11:00 am

Sunday
February 2

Communion Meditation

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 4: 21-30

Communion Meditation

Luke 4: 21-30

Ground Hog Day 2025

Marsh Chapel

Robert Allan Hill

Opening

Ye that do truly and earnestly repent of your sin…

For the fruit of spirit is love…

We believe in God who has created and is creating….

Sacrament

Lead a new life…

Ten Commandments…

Shakespeare’s 66…

Tir'd with all these, for restful death I cry,

As, to behold desert a beggar born,

And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,

And purest faith unhappily forsworn,

And gilded honour shamefully misplac'd,

And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,

And right perfection wrongfully disgrac'd,

And strength by limping sway disabled,

And art made tongue-tied by authority,

And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,

And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,

And captive good attending captain ill.

Tir'd with all these, from these would I be gone,

Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

Ground Hog Day 5: prayer, worship, journal, tithing, you.

RAH: conversations, center left and center right

Sacrament: mystery. The daily, the quotidian asperity and simplicity of the sacraments, baptism and communion, a bath and a meal, are not to adorned needlessly, but reverently, discreetly and in the fear of God.

Our parents taught us: the wise man built his house upon the rock…

Scripture

Again, the strange world of the Bible beckons us. St. Luke, you see, stands every day, every Sunday, before us, here in the nave of Marsh Chapel. Here is Jesus in all his Dominical Authority. Here too is Luke. The Scripture—mighty, ancient, holy—calls to us, today out of Gospel According to Luke. Luke evokes the uncanny.One day you awake, early, and are able to recall the contours of dream. Strange. One day, walking, your mind and memory are visited by a feeling gone fore years. One day, frightful this, news comes of a loved one’s death. One day you come to worship to worship. Behold the numinous, the uncanny, the mysterious, the strange, here, now, the strange world of the Bible.

*2. Today–Luke. (He is east of, stage left of Jesus. Matthew and Mark are west of, to the stage right of Jesus. Luke and John are to the stage left of Jesus. And you can hear that truth in more than one way ()).Those at the dawn of life…in the twilight of life…in the shadows of life…You too were strangers in the land of Egypt…as you have done it to the littlest of these you have done it also to me…Our Holy Scripture today places us, at first, in a thicket of problems and questions: The Scripture is fulfilled in its hearing. A prophet is not honored at home. Elijah and Elisha go to Sidon and Syria. The crowd is outraged and poises to attack. Jesus eases on down the road. What is going on here, in this strange world of the Bible, which beckons to us to leave behind our mercantile mediocrity?

*3. The Scripture is fulfilled, not in a perfectly just world, in a perfected justice, like that, frankly acclaimed in Isaiah, but in the Reader and the Voice. Isaiah’s literal prophecy was not fulfilled, and to date has yet been fulfilled. Another fulfillment Jesus acclaims: The resurrection is the preaching of the gospel. The gospel is more than justice. Now real religion, for sure, is never very far from justice. But justice, alone, the prophetic, alone, is not the gospel, some of the last fifty years of quasi-theological education to the contrary not with-standing. The gospel is bigger, truer, deeper–and more personal than that. The prophetic is a part but not the heart of the gospel. The prophetic tradition is a just part but not the full heart of the gospel…as Luke tartly reminds us today.

*4. That is, Elijah and Elisha here are remembered for a very particular reason, one at odds with justice. They have gone outside of Israel, outside of the community of faith, outside of the expected audience, and outside of their own prophetic tradition. With Israel hungry in famine, the chosen people awaiting rain water, Elijah comforts them not, not at all, but goes instead to a foreign land, that of Tyre and Sidon, to alone woman, a lone widow, a lone gentile. With Israel halt and lame and leprous, in need of healing and health care, Elisha comforts them not, and goes away into a foreign land and heals a Syrian, a lone gentile. Jesus’ sermon at home, where, as with every prophet, he faces a tough home crowd, explodes the minor, limited appeal of justice…to universalize, to preach, the gospel. The gospel is not justice…but love. No wonder the crowd is so angry. The gospel moves away from the interior to the exterior, from the expected to the unexpected, from the just to the loving, from the familiar…to the strange. In our passage, Luke has given us the whole of his mysterious gospel in miniature. He has given us a prototypical text: Isaiah, 61, with its theme of deliverance to those who are hurting. He has given us, next, a reminder that God works in God’s own ways, as he did in the days of Elijah and Elisha, when those outside of the faith community were helped first. He has given us a warning, through the threat of the crowd to throw Jesus to death, of what awaits Him at the end of the road from Nazareth to Jerusalem. He has further given us a fragrant scent of promise, as Jesus escapes, the same sense we are given at Easter—death cannot hold him, even death cannot hold him, not even death can hold him. He is the Lily of the Valley…

*5. God is at work, at work in the world, at work in the world to make and keep human life human, often to the consternation and surprise of God’s very own people. (J Bennett).

(Strange, Luke, Prophetic, Elijah\Elisha, Bennett)

Closing

We believe in God the Father Almighty…

I lift up mine eyes to the hills…

Ye that do truly and earnestly repent of your sin…

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 02.2.2025 at 11:00 am

Sunday
January 12

Winter Light

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 3: 15-17

Winter Light

Luke 3: 15-17

Marsh Chapel

January 12, 2025

Robert Allan Hill

We shall take hold this Lord’s Day of what matters, lasts and counts, of the things that will see us through, this hour, this day, this week, this month, this year and this decade. Three of these are Scripture, memory and example.

Scripture and Mysterious Presence

Scripture sees us through, by taking, and proclaiming the long view, including today in Luke.

Let us recall the mystery of Christ, the Stranger in our midst. We can announce his presence today, again today, at his Baptism. He is among us: dealing with issues we dismiss…speaking with people whom we dislike…considering options we disdain…selecting vocations that do not yet fully exist…expanding spaces that we constrict…accepting lifestyles that we reject…attending to possibilities that we ignore…approaching horizons that we avoid…healing wounds that we disguise…questioning assumptions that we enjoy…protecting persons whom we mistreat…making allowances that we distrust. So, strangely, is He among us.

Strangely his voice addresses us.

For the mystery of Jesus Christ falls upon us, approaches us, and enchants us, when and where we least expect Him. In the strange world of the Bible. In the midst of the community of strangers that is the Church. Hidden in the brutal estrangement of our personal life. Here, behold, the Lord Christ Jesus, “L’Etranger”, “The Stranger”.

His presence is neither simple, nor surface, nor easy, nor fundamental, nor shallow, nor ideological, nor one dimensional, nor ahistorical, nor primarily political. He draws us

For St. Luke has captured a collage of portraits of Jesus, “On the Road”, beginning today in baptism. We are on a journey, as Luke reminds the church. We are making a trip to the promised land. We are headed in a certain direction. With our spiritual forebears, we are traveling, on a journey. Israel left Canaan to go to Egypt to find bread. There they became the slaves of Pharaoh. But Moses led them out, parted the Red Sea, and guided them through the wilderness. He brought them the ten commandments. At last, he sent them forth, with Joshua, to inhabit the land flowing with milk and honey. In such a glorious land, they hunted and farmed. They even built a temple, and chose a King. Samuel, Saul, David, and Solomon reigned, but were followed by others less wise and less strong. Although the prophets did warn them, the children of Israel left their covenant and their covenant God, and at last suffered the greatest of defeats, the destruction of Jerusalem and the return to slavery in Babylon, 587bc. On these hundreds of years of history depends the cry of Jeremiah, “O that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep, night and day, for the slain of my poor people.” (9:1) Like Israel marching in chains to Babylon, and then trudging home again two generations later, we people of faith are on a journey, from slavery to freedom. Faith heals, manages, handles the hardest of change.

Come Sunday, our shared role 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. Which we direly need today. 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).

Luke’s mysterious baptized Christ meets us today, hidden in the maelstrom of wild, unexpected change and even in the midst of political crisis.

Memory in the Face of Adversity

Memory sees us through, by rooting us in our own lived experience, and its careful memory, over time. Memory of four years ago this week, surrounded the sermon for this day.

I think back on this week four years ago. I remember the headlines. ‘TRUMP INCITES MOB’. 4 dead, not in Ohio this time, but in the nation’s capital city, and inside the nation’s capitol building. Insurrection with presidential incitement.

I remember four years ago this week, including January 6, 2021. We were away for a few days, or so we thought, when I walked by a group of men in earnest conversation about 2:30pm that day. I could not quite understand. So I went and turned on a television at about 3pm, and quickly realized I would need to return early to Boston for the weekly service to be recorded on the next day, Thursday, as we did in those COVID months, and was on a plane at 7:30m, in order to spare a guest preacher from addressing the moment. What was true then, and said then, is true today: For the rest of history, for the rest of our lives, we shall have to live with, and attempt by faith to live down, both to live with and to live down, such utter calumny, such tragic, needless, heedless yet revelatory disaster. It is an apocalyptic—a revelatory—moment, hundreds wrecking the capitol, encouraged by a wantonly graceless leader, and with 6 Senators, 6 Senators (Cruz, Hawley, Hyde-Smith, Marshall, Kennedy, Tuberville), and much other congressional cattle (Jonah 4:11), continuing to feed its root cause. We cannot be at all sure what further difficulty and distress may visit us. One said, ‘this is like 9/11, except we did this to ourselves’. (RAH, 1/10/21)

But at some preconscious level, somewhere down in the declivities of the country’s psyche, we had a sense that this was coming. We did not want to admit it. We hoped against hope to be wrong in that premonition. We hoped to whistle past the graveyard for another few days. Yet we remembered, dimly, our upbringing, ‘don’t play with fire if you don’t want to get burned’. We had years of warning, advisement, signs along the pathway of this premonition. (RAH, 1/10/21)

So, the community of faith gathered virtually come Sunday, January 10, 2021, to listen, pray, and prepare. And we have gathered here again, in person, this Sunday January 12, 2025. You have come this morning, or joined us by phone line or internet, to watch and listen, to wonder. And to remember.

The Gospel of Luke was written for memory. It emerged over long time, with the earliest Christians reciting and recalling their Lord, his love, and their shared shaping by that love, in faith, beginning in baptism. They listened, morning and evening, Sunday by Sunday, and over time, in direct response to weeks both empty and full, they began to write down for future generations what they had heard. Today we have such an account, that of Jesus’ baptized. Today we have such a lesson, the hearing of a voice. Today we start again into an unknown future, within earshot of that same divine voice. For all our failure, for all manner of sin and death and meaninglessness, for all that is wrong, and there is much, especially just now, there is a voice, ringing out and calling to us. Yet for generations women and men have found this particularity strikingly universal, and lastingly, eternally real. Especially in weeks when good news is scarce. And in our time, into dimensions of common ground that may cause us work and make us uncertain, we will want to learn to listen, and listen again.

What a tremendous spiritual gift to Marsh Chapel is our weekly Psalter, and its resounding echoes in our memory. Remember Samuel Terrien teaching us: Here are 700 years of psalms, 1000-400bce. For the psalmists, Yahweh’s presence was not only made manifest in Zion. It reached men and women over the entire earth. The sense of Yahweh’s presence survived the annihilation of the temple and the fall of the state 587bc. Elusive but real, it feared no geographical uprooting and no historical disruption. Having faced the void in history and in their personal lives, they knew the absence of God even within the temple. The inwardness of their spirituality, bred by the temple, rendered the temple superfluous. (279)

In other words, they knew how to live through and out through godless weeks. As we remembered four years ago: Our psalm today, Psalm 29, ancient and redolent with glory, recalls for us how to pray. From your youth you have known. Adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication. The ACTS forms of prayer. Adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication. One is a word of glory, echoing the glory of God that thunders. Glorify God and enjoy him forever. A word of glory. One is a word of contrition, by which we begin every service at Marsh Chapel. Prayer is not only a matter of individual or even personal attention, a certain sitting silent before God. Prayer is also the voice, the responsive voice, of the people of God, echoing in antiphonal chorus, the call, the bowing before glory. GLORY! All have sinned, all have fallen short of that primordial glory. All. A prayer of contrition. One is a word of gratitude. In such a week, it may simply be a prayer of gratitude that things are not yet any worse. A word of gratitude. One is a word of longing, desire, incantation, supplication. Dear God, guide us through these murky moments, like those we have seen in the past, let us pray, and let our learning now make us stronger later. A word of supplication. Prayer takes some set aside time, some quiet, some intentional focus. Prayer is the nursery of memory. Prayer is the nursery of memory in the nursery school of worship (RAH. 1/10/21)

Exemplum Docet: Example Teaches

As with Scripture and memory, example also sees us through. Every day brings new beginnings and open possibilities, known best in example.

The whole of Scripture begins with the divine preparation, in creation, and in speech. ‘Let there be…’ And what might that be, let there be? Light. Watch for the rays of light in the dark. Watch for the rays of light in the dark. Even in Boston where it seems dusk arrives just after lunch. Four years ago, that Wednesday morning, before all, well, chaos, broke loose, a newly elected Senator from Georgia was interviewed. In the same day and near same hour of utter chaos, an example was given, was rising. He was raised in public housing, one of 12 children. Whatever the day, his dad had them all up before dawn. There is a kind of light in winter, even in winter, as was Rafael Warnock’s election that week. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning, he was reminded. Yes, but that’s the thing about the morning, he responded, it begins in the full dark, it begins at dawn, before daybreak. Dean Carter of Morehouse reminded me in conversation Wednesday morning, that when his parents dropped him off at Morehouse, Rafael Warnock had not a dime to his name. His parents could give him only what they had, their powerful, limitless, ceaseless love, pride and belief in him. Their powerful, limitless, ceaseless love, pride and belief in him. THEIR EXAMPLE. Not much? Well. It seems to have been enough, just enough. That’s the thing about the morning. And winter. It begins in the dark, in preparation, awaiting the word… LET THERE BE LIGHT. (RAH, 1/10/21)

In like fashion to four years ago, this very week has given us the punctuation of the gospel, in example, in living presidential example. The living sermon in the life of our 39^th President, buried with rightful ceremony this past week, reminds us. He lived a life of simple decency, in the face of the great challenges of his time. After office, he went on to minister to the needs of others, and to use his voice and influence for leverage to that end. He found time to teach Sunday school each week, and, notable, to mow the church lawn when needed. In the best of the Baptist tradition he lived his baptism, not in word only or mainly, but in life, in service, and by example. By example. Our folks told us it not what you have so much as what you do with what you have. ‘Let those who have much not have too much, and those who have little not have too little (2 Cor. 8)’

Said President Carter: I have one life and one chance to make it count for something…My faith demands that I do whatever I can wherever I can whenever I can for as long as I can with whatever I have to try to make a difference.

That sounds like John Wesley to me!

Hear good news: Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form, as a dove, and a voice came from heaven, ‘Thou art my beloved Son; with Thee I am well pleased’.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 01.12.2025 at 11:00 am

Sunday
December 29

In Wisdom and Stature

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 2:41–52

The text of this sermon is not available at this time. We apologize for any inconvenience.

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean

Dean of Marsh Chapel

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 12.29.2024 at 11:00 am

Sunday
December 22

A Christmas Faith

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 1:39–45

Christmas 2024

Luke 1: 39-45

Marsh Chapel

December 22, 2024

Robert Allan Hill

He is the Way. Follow him through the Land of Unlikeness; you will see rare beasts and have unique adventures.

He is the Truth. Seek him in the Kingdom of Anxiety; you will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.

He is the Life. Love him in the World of the Flesh: and at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy. (Auden)

There are two shades of Christmas, and both are blessed.

The search for truth and the gift of grace are both blessed. Elisabeth and Mary; John and Jesus; the true and the good; both and all are blessed, in Luke’s Gospel, by God’s healing of the world in Christ, who is both holy and lowly.

There are two trails to Christmas. That of doubt, and that of faith.

In this morning’s Gospel, following earlier separate scenes, the two stories come together—John and Jesus, Prophet and Pastor, Doubt and Faith, two sorts of Christmas—John soon to be out by the river, Jesus soon to be in his Father’s house.

David Brooks this week wrote a lengthy, compelling essay about this combination, and the yearning, the longing, the desire for the divine, herein.

At one Christmas party a soon to graduate theological student talked about returning to her home in the south central part of the country, and her impending interview before her board of ministry. What will they ask you? About the documentary hypothesis, or the second aorist, or the synoptic problem, or the teleological suspension of the ethical, or the art of preaching? No, they will ask me “Why did you go to Boston?” Her reply might be: ‘Because at Boston University I can search for truth and affirm God’s grace, I can combine the necessity of doubt with the promise of faith’. Hers would be a Christmas answer. Lord I believe, help my unbelief.

Evidence? Spiritual things? Truth? Grace? Doubt? Faith?

Doubt

First, doubt. One dimension of Christmas begins with the search for truth, and, therefore, with the real experience of doubt. For today, then, a full look at violence, greed and silence.

We are so anxious and fearful of what has become of our fragile planet that we burrow into feverish work, feverish drink, feverish sex, feverish exchange—getting and spending. No, come this Christmas Sunday, one does not see the Word made flesh fully abroad. And lurking down deep in the psyche, and the collective unconscious is the worried fear, the prospect of single nuclear weapon, somewhere, somehow, in the wrong, violent hand.

That sort of anxiety makes even strong people inclined toward demagoguery, belittling, bullying simplicity, in the rhetoric of culture, politics, religion, and life. That anxiety makes us forget the importance of institutions, and the health, and the well-being and the care of institutions—whether a marriage, a family, a business, a college, a company, or a country. Or a country. Process matters. Due process matters, greatly. Proven experience counts. Excellent proven experience counts, greatly. Morality matters, and telling the truth matters. Mocking the institution one aspires to lead does real damage. ‘A successful campaign against nihilism will have to resist nihilism itself’. (NYRB). It will be a shame if it takes the current generation of twenty-somethings half a lifetime to learn this. (As apparently it has taken their parents.) Traction in history requires institutions, and they require leadership that speaks with honest transparency, builds genial trust, and thereby waters the earth with goodwill, goodwill, goodwill (a Lukan Christmas term) in institutional form.

The pervasive materialism and mindless consumption of a people hurtling down a highway focused on the speedometer and blind to the road ahead, are a long way from Christmas. From every corner we are encouraged to shop. To buy! But… to give? Both would strengthen the economy, but in different ways. One leans toward commodity and the other toward community. It may be, one thinks, along the river, that Immanuel—the college, or the doctrine, or the hope—have gone, left for a far country. As Vahanian said of ‘God’ 60 years ago, the symbols of faith have grown cold for the culture. Has such a fate of symbolic anachronism now permanently infected Christmas? Is the whole symbol set, from angels to straw and all between, become, simply, a once told tale? We know that symbols die. Sometimes from neglect, sometimes from abuse, sometimes from both. It is hard to find evidence that the poor manger has much traction to shape a culture any longer. Whither wonder, morality, generosity? Greed is a long way from Christmas.

Here is my friend awash in grief for the tragic and inexplicable loss of a spouse. Here is he, years later, still caught in the flow and ebb of that sorrow beyond sorrow. It is an empty time for this concert stage, and its empty loss, and lack, is one that many know better than any other truth. To hear the improbable predictions of Isaiah, about streams in a desert, is to this ear, just now, at the shoreline of the absurd.

When to the heart of man

Was it ever less than a treason

To go with the drift of things

And to yield with a grace to reason

And to bow and accept the end

Of a love or a season? (Frost)

And from the hurt comes doubt. Having in the churches exchanged much of our capacity in philosophical theology for a saltier but lighter mix of personal narratives and identity politics, we find ourselves scrambling a bit to respond to first level questions about evidence, about suffering, about creation, about content, about God. Like the earliest Christians, thinkers today do not fear the charge of a-theism. Nor should they. The search for truth, by the presence of John the Baptist, down by the river is blessed at Christmas. Nihil humanum: nothing human is foreign to us.

Emptiness unabated is a long way from Christmas.

Here then is one Christmas trail and tale: a search for truth and an experience of doubt. The honesty and the courage of this account need naming..

Although…

In your doubt. Just how sure are you? In the moonlight, with a shimmering. Lights and a light wind and the faint call of carolers. And…Other? Mystery? Spirit? The Luminous Numinous? A little faith tracks the trail of every doubt, and sometimes, come Christmas, even causes us to doubt our doubt.

Faith

All along the river of doubt there is a shimmering something alongside… Mystery. Being. Spirit. All the cultured doubt of a late modern, post Christian culture, still, does not erase what is just beyond saying, knowing, and hearing. Doubt is shadowed by faith.

Another sort of Christmas begins with the gift of faith. A full hearing for wonder, and care, and peace.

Your Christmas trail may be ecclesiastical and not cultural, indoors and not outdoors, by candlelight and not moonlight.

You may be a cradle Christian at Christmas, or a cradle Christmas Christian. Then your trail would move not along the river, but along the rail.

All failure, folly and horror bracketed, for the moment, there is the start of this trail in carols of the English tradition, and in candles to evoke the numinous, and in word and sacrament to mirror heaven. Every year, come Advent leaning toward Christmas, as at no other time of year, there is an awareness of lasting life. The world does not lack for wonders, but only for a sense of wonder, as Chesterton never tired of saying. It is the imagination, that quality of heart and mind so necessary to being human, which quickens again, here at the rail. Step ahead, just a moment, as sometimes we do, to read the Gospel, moving the page itself into the heart of this chapel community.

Wonder still appears on the candlelit faces uplifted at Christmas (1pm and 7pm Tuesday, by the way). Good deeds, selfless and real, emanate still from hearts, homes, and communities of faith. Generosity, both of spirit and of wallet, emerges again in December. My Jewish friend’s daughter, steady and staunch in her own faith, nonetheless just loves to go to her neighbor’s house to decorate the Christmas tree: lights, ornaments, tinsel, all.

Now the passage read from Luke for this Sunday prepares us for the very birth of Christ. Here is Elizabeth, the mother of the one on the river, and Mary, the mother of the one at the rail. There are two kinds of Christmas, that of John and that of Jesus, both blessed. One in the cold light of reason, and one in the warm heart of love. Both are good, both needed. Even in utero, according to this Lukan narration, John the Baptist is aware of, we might say prophetically aware of, the unborn Messiah. But there is a palpable portent of possibility shot through all of this strange reading. We shall honor by acceptance its strange, numinous portent, pregnant with potential for the future. The Gospel creates its own audience, in the audience of its announcement. Grace renders a sense of imagination, that quiet surrender of the self to the spirit of God.

The lessons of Holy Scripture teach us and form us. One of the littlest clans of Judah…Lifte up the lowly…A body you have prepared…A town in the hill country…

The earlier prophecy from Micah recalled David, born in Bethlehem, and was taken by primitive Christianity as a prediction of the Christ. The whole of the book of Micah realistically portrays the limits of human goodness. And yet, the image of the shepherd stays with us, and stands out. A shepherd leads by example. Here is care: in the giving of money. Here is care: in taking the cloak as well, and going the second mile. Here is care: waking in the morning with hope, and praying into the night with hope. Here is care: investing in what can cross the bridges of difference. Here is care: the ability to see one’s own hurt and suffering, to some degree, as part of a larger labor pain, the birth of the future. Every heart has secret sorrows.

So, pause, too, at the Epistle, the letter to the Hebrews, and its early portent, even at Christmas, of the sorrow and struggle to come. To conclude. Suffering produces endurance. But God, in Christ, has acted to heal and cleanse. In faith, we have a way forward, even in the face of other ways forward that do not seem to go forward. Every day we can live a changed life. Peace come through peace makers. Let us seek, and then live out, a Christmas faith.

In our own lives let us, in faith, eschew any first strikes, on the cheek, or on the character, or on the person.

In our own lives let us eschew any self-full, unilateral action that is not cognizant of circumstance.

In our own lives let us free ourselves, personally, from acting in overweening ways, in ways that use people and love things, rather than loving people and using things (Augustine).

In our own lives let us learn patiently to plan, to foresee, with forbearance, and so practice Niebuhr’s ‘spiritual discipline against resentment’.

Here is a Christmas faith. In church, gospel, lesson and letter, we may surely affirm the gifts of faith at Christmas: wonder in silence, care amid greed, peace in a time of violence.

And yet. Lest faith curdle to blind faith, and the gift of faith into the wrapping of fideism, we may take the test of reason, a pinch of doubt, with us too. ‘Test the spirits’, says the Scripture (1 Thess. 5: 22). While Luke surely means to place Jesus above John (cf. R Brown, The Birth of the Messiah, 333ff.), and that without a doubt, Luke nonetheless makes full space for both kinds of Christmas.

There are two shades of Christmas, coming soon to a home near you. One of Elizabeth and one of Mary, one of John and one of Jesus, one of river, and one of rail. Yours may be one tinged by faith, though full of doubt. Yours may be one tinged by doubt, though robust in faith. Both are blessed, both the true and the good.

We might add, though, if your Christmas is of the indoor variety, take a walk in the moonlight; and if your Christmas is of the outdoor variety, come into the beauty of the sanctuary at night. It takes a poet to get this middle voice, this reflexive, this nuanced announcement in the right key. So, Auden:

He is the Way. Follow him through the Land of Unlikeness; you will see rare beasts and have unique adventures.

He is the Truth. Seek him in the Kingdom of Anxiety; you will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.

He is the Life. Love him in the World of the Flesh: and at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 12.22.2024 at 11:00 am