Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

Mark 10:17–31

Bach Sunday

Dr. Robert Allan Hill

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett

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

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

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

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday
October 6

Communion Meditation: Sundays, Too

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 10:2–16

Communion Meditation: Sundays Too

Mark 10: 2-16

Marsh Chapel

October 6, 2024

Robert Allan Hill

Preface

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

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

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

(Robert Hayden)

Aspiration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freedom

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sobre todo creo que

No todo esta perdido

Above all I believe that

all is not lost

Oigo una voz que mellama

Casi un suspiro

I hear a voice that calls me.

Almost a whisper.

(Jorge Drexler)

Prayer

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pinsky

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

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

Coda

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

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

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

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

Sunday
September 29

From Fear to Hope

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 9:38–50

From Fear to Hope

Mark 9: 38-50

Alumni Weekend, September 29, 2024

Marsh Chapel

Robert Allan Hill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Herein perhaps we find the valence of the dominical sayings,

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday
September 22

A Liberal Faith

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 9:30–37

A Liberal Faith

Mark 9: 30-37

September 22, 2024

Marsh Chapel

Robert Allan Hill

Opening

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

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

Mark 9

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boston University

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

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

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

Or, said otherwise, yours is a liberal faith.

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

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

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

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

Coda

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

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

Sunday
September 15

Faith and Struggle

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 8:27–38

Faith and Struggle

Mark 8: 27-38

Marsh Chapel

September 15, 2024

Robert Allan Hill

Frontispiece

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

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

Holding Onto Roots

Let us struggle in faith to hold onto our roots.

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

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

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

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

Facing Our Condition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Holding Onto Our Hopes

May we also by grace hold onto our hopes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most of us would agree.

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

Coda

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

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

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

Sunday
September 1

Communion Meditation – Matriculation Sunday

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 7:1–8, 14–15, 21–23

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

-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel

posted in Matriculation, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 09.1.2024 at 11:00 am

Sunday
August 25

A Summer Look to the Future

By Marsh Chapel

John 6:56–69

A Summer Look to The Future

John 6: 56-65

August 25, 2024

Marsh Chapel

Robert Allan Hill

It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.

Jan and I stood alongside our burial plots one afternoon. (I trust it will be many decades before we need to use them!).

Our post retirement home is nestled in a long forgotten, old village cemetery in Eaton NY. Eaton is the northern tip of Appalachia, economically, culturally, geographically and historically. Its rural poverty has come rather lately to its 250 year history, but is as harsh and weather beaten as any such rural immiseration. Its country culture receives some odd jostling from Colgate University and Hamilton College, both a very few miles away. Its spot on the edge of the great cliff of the Allegheny plateau places it at 1200 feet above sea level, with lakes and great lakes 1200 feet below within a thirty minute drive. Its history includes nearby Peterboro, a town built in the 1850’s by Gerritt Smith for freed slaves, some of whose descendants live there still; and the Oneida Community next door, whose three hundred Perfectionists lived ostensibly without sin and within complex marriage for thirty years, 1845-1875; and the shores of Gichigumi the shining big sea water, near the wigwam of Nicomis, daughter of the moon, the homeland of Hiawatha, 1200 feet down north.

Our burial neighbors will include some born before the Revolution, some several who died in the Civil War, many veterans of the wars of the 20th century, and one fellow, who was interred in 1962, but in whose youth fought with Teddy Roosevelt in the Spanish American War. One wonders about the ongoing work of mowing and trimming, and moreso about the volunteer leadership needed to keep managed a venerable, small graveyard. There had been no burials this calendar year, to date. They bury until November 1 and then after May 1 or as soon as the ground thaws in the spring.

Jan said she liked the spot. I volunteered that this was good since we would be there for a while. Actually, when you amortize $400 per plot over the course of eternity, the cost is really very little. Housing costs are way too high in Boston, and across the country, but not in the Eaton Village Cemetery. Of course, I had sometimes mused about having a bit more upscale social location, going forward. Maybe something on the East Coast—Chatham, Castine, the Cape, North Hampton—something with an ocean view, and certain standards of comportment, attire and presentation. But Jan reminded me that I am a Methodist preacher, a country preacher at that, and cannot afford ostentation, neither fiscally nor spiritually. Besides, she counseled, see all the beauty here…Yes, see it, and hear it…

Beauty is heard as well as seen. We walk past this place so I know what the music of that meadow brings. The rooster, or more than one, as dawn breaks. The cattle, feet away, lowing, as cattle do. The wind in the evergreens and the two Oak trees. An occasional auto, a more occasional truck, a very much more occasional airplane. Visitors with crosses and flags and flowers and tears. And then the sound of nothing, of silence. Hush, hush, somebody’s calling my name. In the deep winter the deep silence is sonorous. I think of the four months of real winter, and the covering, the bed cloth of four feet of snow, and it is well with my soul.

Let me reveal that I say all this for a discreet homiletical purpose. I preach as ‘a dying man to dying men’, as Luther counseled. More so, our series of summer sermons has addressed a look to the future, a language of promise in the face of death. The cosmic resurrection of Christ and the life he offers is a word of hope, spoken into the teeth of cosmic, universal, individual, personal death. All of our sermons this summer have been very human attempts to announce this unseen hope, embedded, deeply embedded in New Testament language and imagery, and keenly, and preternaturally, this morning, in John 6. Remember some of the preachments of summer 2024. Consider divine metaphors. Note the saving importance of sabbath rest, of taking a break, a breather. Remember we are all in the family, so befriend a student. Ponder the miracles of seeds and growth. Honor both lineage and legacy. Know your history, and honor it. Use but don’t abuse power. Learn others’ names. Recall that Jesus is the beautiful bread of life. Bless and be a blessing.

Sometimes, at our worst, we move through life with the supposition that death comes just to others, to other people and peoples. It is something that befalls others. This very human daily supposition is not limited to young adults, to this new wave of temporarily immortal 18 year olds soon to wash up upon the BU beach. Nor is it limited to distracted, over technologized middle aged parents, trying to keep a household afloat amid the struggles of our era. Nor is it limited to the mature, or the very mature, we who should probably know better. Time flies? Ah no. Time stays. We go.

A pastoral digression. I you to an exercise for this week or some week. It is patented, informally, by me, but I give it freely. It is the RAH OOPS formula for preparation for post-retirement. O: write your obituary, at least a first draft which others can redact as needed. O: compose your funeral order of worship with hymns and texts and participants and memorials. P: select a photograph you do not mind being used in days of grieving, in the newspaper or in the funeral home. S: locate your resting space, your place and manner of burial or cremation. Place these materials, in the same box or safe deposit box in which you already, already, have placed your DNR, your living will, your will (you may choose to remember Marsh Chapel in your will by the way), and any other significant materials. How your family will thank you! But, as you are mortally aware, all of this preparation, good as it is, is not good enough, not enough.

For all of this preparation lacks the main thing needed in a summer look to the future, in the face of the power of death, which William Stringfellow so ardently and artfully described, and at the grave, at the end. And that is the bread of life. And that is hope, the feast of the bread of life. The New Testament is a language of hope lifted in the face of death. At least, this is how I would conclude and summarize our announcement of the Gospel this summer, our summer series ‘A Look To The Future’.

We have both the freedom and the responsibility at Marsh Chapel to ring the bells of learning and piety, of mind and heart together, in a way that will inspire and guide another generation by the best insights of the faith we share. We have aimed high and stretched out. While there are few University pulpits remaining across the country, and very few open and alive 52 weeks a year, your support, your generosity, the ongoing support of Boston University, and the hard labor of my staff and colleagues here, and the generosity of our guests from around the country, continue to allow us to treat hard topics with tough love.

For in John 6, the Gospel is a song of hope, a hope of heaven on earth, a divine hope. It asks of us a certain height, a certain inclination, a change. It moves our self, our being to a new center, one in the green pasture, the great meadow of hope.

In 1954, Howard Thurman, then in his first year as Marsh Dean, gave lectures at what was to become my alma mater, Ohio Wesleyan. These later were collected in a book, THE CREATIVE ENCOUNTER. With his minimal Christology, tangential connection to Paul, perennialist inclination against narrow religion, and distrust of large portions of the biblical tradition, Thurman would at first seem an unlikely interpreter of biblical material. Yet his typically digressive, imaginative reflections, that winter’s OWU Merrick lectures, at one point touch the marrow of our theme for this summer, and today’s gospel. Thurman is trying to examine and explain the religious experience (notice his phrase). I wonder if you have had such? Its measure for him is not unlike the look to the future, lifted this summer:

“There is a point at which for the individual the surrender of the self in religious experience gives to life a purpose that extends beyond one’s own private ends and personal risks…What happens then when there is a new center of focus for the life? The answer to that, in part, is this. At such a time as the new center becomes operative, the individual relaxes his hold upon himself as expressed in the self-regarding impulse. A different kind of value is placed upon his physical existence. Death no longer appears as the great fear or specter. The power of death over the individual life is broken. (73-81, THE CREATIVE ENCOUNTER).

I wonder. Are you sensing the divine generosity inviting your one life to circle around a new center? Prayer will guide you. Even suffering will perhaps prod you. A moment in worship may lift you up. A friend, a word, a kindness, a note, a sunset, a kiss, a laugh—these are intimations of religious experience that are not religious. But real they are. I wonder. Is your center shifting? And next week, with students with us, will we nod, smile, greet, offer a Methodist handshake, learn a name?

I believe, in a way I cannot understand in full or articulate in full, that God’s love outlasts death, is stronger than death, and overpowers death. But is something I do not see. It is something I sense, though I cannot see it.

But who hopes for what he sees? We hope for what we do not see. And wait for it with patience!

For, to conclude, in John 6, food carries memory.

I turn again to Marcel Proust, whose thousands of print pages burst forth from the memory of a long-lost moment of tea and Madeleine cakes, the cakes swirling dreamily in the tea. Meal and memory. One came back again this week, memory in a sandwich.

When I was 16, in the middle of the autumn we were dislocated or relocated to a new home by the remarkable ministrations of the Methodist church. It was November, and we all suddenly had a new house, a new neighborhood, a new room, a new city, a new school, a new church, and not a single friend. The school was a large urban school which was in the throes of serious unrest, some chaos and violence, and yet still with a fine building, faculty, and program.

There is a teenager alone in the cafeteria. For some days he goes alone to lunch, after trigonometry and before chemistry. He is not very artfully dressed. Some of that is the culture of the day and some is just who he is. He knows really no one. He is white in largely black school, over tall and awkward, hoping against hope to make the basketball team, inquisitive but not too eager to show it, curiously glad for a new and strange city environment and yet deeply lonely at the dislocation of the move. You can see him on these many days at the lunch period. He sits with his back to the wall, close enough to some others not to appear solo. The school—and by extension the world around—run quite well without any recognition of his being there. He feels something that is hard and throat-lodged and aching and chilling and strange. He is homesick for a home that no longer exists. He hurts too much to laugh and he is too tall and adult- looking to cry.

In a month or so a group of other young men, Chris Bennett and Joel Burdick and Chris Heimbach, will somehow oddly include him in lunch, as if he had been there for the previous ten years, which he had not. But right now he is alone, out on a boat, and shore is a long way off. And a shared meal seems like it will never come and if it did it might just be too awesome and too wonderful to receive. So he leans the chair against the wall. He watches the cultural tensions and hatreds. He memorizes the periodic table. He tries not to look conspicuous in any single way. He looks at the girls and wonders what he could possibly say to any of them. He looks forward to basketball. He feels what it takes a young heart really to feel.

Every day he carries to his back table a brown sack. This is a full maternal meal, fairly hastily but utterly lovingly prepared in the earlier morning before the two mile walk to school. It is the same lunch every day. Bread and fish, tunafish. Two full sandwiches. Some chips. Carrots. Cookies, sometimes made at home. And it will take another fifty years for him to fully appreciate—to taste—what he could already feel against the cafeteria wall. At least here, in this meal, for all the depressing dislocation and frightening foreignness and leavened loneliness all around, here was something to eat. Prepared with love. As reliable as the sunrise and the seasons. Or, Grace, in the midst of dislocation, as John 6 would say. The sandwiches come slowly day by day out of their tight wrap. They taste the same, reassuringly the same. Maybe, day by day, this is really all we get, a taste.

You know, starting next Sunday there will be some 18 year olds around here, maybe waiting for a kind word, a greeting, someone to encourage them, maybe some of that coming from you and me. Sursum corda!

It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 08.25.2024 at 11:00 am

Sunday
August 4

A Communion Meditation – The Food That Endures For Eternal Life

By Marsh Chapel

John 6:24–35

Communion Meditation: The Food That Endures For Eternal Life

John 6: 24-35

August 4, 2024

Marsh Chapel

Robert Allan Hill

He reposes in the immediate as if it were infinity—which it is.

That is religion, and the duck has it.

Donna

Coming to communion you come with a yearning to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called.

Among the powers that drew us here to Boston, was the chance to labor in the shadow of Howard Thurman and to preach from the pulpit he once filled. Thurman was the Dean of Marsh Chapel, 1953-1965. This summer, read his autobiography, With Head and Heart. In the work of grieving and departing from one setting, Rochester, and entering another, Boston, I was telephoned by a friend and parishioner. She wanted to set an appointment to talk, before we left Rochester. A saintly woman, Donna Adcock, made an appointment, a good formal appointment, to see me. ‘A chat after church won’t do for this’, she averred. That Wednesday she brought in a poem which she had typed out from an original handscript. Typing is an ancient technology, no longer in use, but some years ago, even, still around. (I do not linger to define keystroke, white out, ribbon, carbon paper, or Smith Corona). ‘This poem Howard Thurman your predecessor at Marsh Chapel recited in a sermon in Kansas City, my home, in 1950’, she said. ‘I was twenty years or so old, 56 years younger than I am today when that sermon changed my life. I spent the next 50 years in ‘full time Christian service’, through the YWCA. I heard something that summer day, in Kansas City, in 1950, that changed my life. I want you to have this poem. You do not need to live in New England to love it, but it does help. The fact that I heard it through Howard Thurman’s beautiful voice adds to it for me”.

The ‘little duck’ is a poem about the freedom of a duck floating on the waves, written in 1947 by Donald Babcock. Here are verses from that poem…

There is a big heaving in the Atlantic

And he is part of it

He can rest while the Atlantic heaves, because he rests in the Atlantic

Probably he doesn’t know how large the ocean is

And neither do you

But he realizes it

And what does he do, I ask you? He sits down in it

He reposes in the immediate as if it were infinity—which it is.

That is religion, and the duck has it.

He has made himself part of the boundless, by easing himself into it just where it touches him.

I like the little duck.

He doesn’t know much.

But he has religion.

You come to communion yearning to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called…

Charlie

Coming to communion you come with your lost loved ones in mind and heart. Pause and honor in memory one such. This week it came to mind again, the day one winter we bade farewell to a father in law, Charlie. When we receive the Lord’s Supper we do so with the communion of saints all around us. Like Charlie. Like your beloved in memory. Coming to communion you come with your lost loved ones in mind and heart.

Charlie was a lover.

He loved nature. Garden. Seed time. Harvest. Planting. Weeding. Watering. Like the parables of Jesus. He had a green thumb. Most plants benefitted by the touch of his hand.

He loved work. With his hands. Carpentry. He had some good company in carpentry, if I remember the Bible that they had us memorize at church camp. I think of him on summer days. 14 features of our cottage have known the touch of his hand.

He loved the poor and the other. In his study group. In work with Abraham House, Retired Teachers, and Habitat for Humanity and various churches and causes. He loved others, and I mean others. Of other religions, other places, other races, other backgrounds, other orientations. He loved. Others, and they felt the touch of his hand.

He loved his country. He was not a member of any organized political party. His patriotism, his love of country was not only liberty and justice, but liberty and justice FOR ALL. And with his own hands he lived that.

He loved his church. Its committees, its pastors, its building needs, its study groups, its quirks and oddities. Especially he loved the reading he did with others.

He loved his family, and expressed that love in rocking horses and tools given and evergreens planted and windows replaced and sincere, repeated words of love.

He touched us in the most touching of ways.

He loved God by loving the things of God, the creation of God, the tasks of God, the people of God, the church of God.

He was our ‘dad’ and we learned from him.

We all need models of personal faith, people who can show us by example the dimensions of spirituality we so desire.

We are in time when there seem to be so many things going wrong, off kilter, problems without solutions. But those who came before us had such times, maybe even worse ones, and they came through it all. At communion, in communion with them, with Charlie and the Charlies of your life, we gain some strength.

Congregation

You come to communion yearning to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called. This is especially and keenly true this morning at Marsh Chapel:

*In the observation of two Sacraments.

*In the Baptism today. Beautiful child, part of the community, connected to this University, and to the Chapel, and to the choir, and to the life and leadership of the University, and to the congregation, the congregation of Marsh Chapel.

*In community. Come Sunday. Here is where life engages life, and heart, heart. Where you can learn a name. Where you can hear a voice. Where you can make a friend. Where you can share a need. Where you can listen to another’s heart. Where you can know and be known, from Baptism, through Eucharist, all the way to that last morning, and Unction. Where one receives the food that endures for eternal life. Where one may offer another a path toward where both can find bread.

*In lighthearted joy and a touch of humor. Hear voices touch home, like Dr. Amerson’s humorous reference to his long ago parishioner, who said, ‘You know, every sermon is better than your next one.’ She meant better than your last one, but said better than your next one. We will have to check in with Dr Freud about that Freudian slip. (It reminds me of Soren Hessler on Palm Sunday). That touch of humor happens in community.

*In the walk up the sawdust trail, down the center aisle, in just a few minutes.

Charlayne

Ten years ago we hosted the memorial service for Dr. Ken Edelin, a medical doctor graduated from BU and one of early, pioneering physicians affirming women, women’s rights, women’s rights to reproductive health care, women’s rights when needed to surgical abortion. Cecile Richards, Jeh Johnson and others spoke in eulogy. Marsh Chapel was full. At one point we asked the congregation to recite together the 23 Psalm. Family and friends in the first pew did so. Colleagues and physicians across the nave did so. Leaders of national organizations near and far did so. In the balcony, twenty white coated medical students together did so. Either at that point or another in the service they stood silently together, to honor the life and faith of the deceased. That day I met a man, a friend and the personal physician of Arthur Ashe, whose life, prowess, faithfulness and service have always so inspired me. Read again this summer his autobiography, Days of Grace. “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”

In the collation following the service, Charlayne Hunter Gault introduced herself. Some will remember her, as we did, from her many and fine contributions to the News Hour, with Jim Lehrer. She said, ‘I need to talk to you later about the 23 Psalm’. I was so pleased to meet her, and then so worried that I had somehow offended her, that the collation time passed anxiously. It needn’t have done. She wanted to recall a memory. A memory of her younger self. At 18. One of two African Americans first to integrate the University of Georgia. The daughter of a minister. Alone in a big place, a strange place, a new place. Walking home the third night, there were taunts and threats. The University that day had suggested she might want to go home, at least for a while. She went into her room. She closed the door. She turned out the lights. And she waited, until quiet came. And then—it was the only thing that came to her mind—the prayer of David in Psalm 23 came to her. And she spoke the psalm, alone, afraid, uncertain, at night. ‘Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord, forever.’

To lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, like that little duck bouncing along on the waves of the Atlantic…

He reposes in the immediate as if it were infinity—which it is.

That is religion, and the duck has it.

The Lord is my shepherd…

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 08.4.2024 at 11:00 am

Sunday
June 23

Once More to the Lake

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 4:35–41

When I am out of funds and sorts
And life is all in snarls,
I quit New York and travel east

To Boston on the Charles.

There’s something in the Boston scene
So innocent, so tranquil,
It takes and holds my interest
The same as any bank will.

For Boston’s not a capital,
And Boston’s not a place;
Rather I think that Boston is
A sort of state of grace.

(EB White)

We need refreshment and a reminder of a state of grace, a natural grace. For the winds are blowing. The winds are blowing today. And in three words our Lord Jesus Christ, riding the waves of time and storm, guides us home. In the command to go. In the announcement of peace. In the call to faith. Go! Peace! Faith!

We return again to Mark 4, once more to the lake, in the happy phrase of E B White’s little story of that title. Once more to the lake. Again, we find ourselves out on the water with the wind blowing. Again, we find ourselves on the great lake, so like a great lake in shape, in depth, in length, here Tiberias, here the Sea of Galilee, a fresh water glory, a fresh water gem.

The Lord Jesus Christ is asleep in the stern, not stern, but in the stern, sound asleep. Around him the wind is blowing… as the winds are blowing around us today. The winds are blowing in your life and mine. A wind may be blowing through your family, a steady hard breeze of change, of illness, or of loss. A wind may be blowing through your church family, your community of faith, a steady hard breeze of change, post Covid, with aging, at a time of decline of respect for any and all religion. (And hammering commandment lists on public school walls is surely no substitute for loving, excellent Sunday school teaching). A wind may be blowing through your precious, honored institutions—government, school, University, business, all. A wind may be blowing through your denomination, a steady hard breeze of decline, of disorder, of demise. A wind may be blowing—it surely is—in and through your culture, a steady hard breeze of loss of memory, of loss of morality, of loss of honesty, of loss of character, of loss of the true and the good and the beautiful.

So, again, we find ourselves out on the water with the wind blowing. Again, we find ourselves on the great lake, so like a great lake in shape, in depth, in length, here Tiberias, here the Sea of Galilee, a fresh water glory, a fresh water gem. But when the wind blows? We need the voice of the Lord to command, to announce, to call. Once more to the lake, as E B White put it in his old story title, once more to the lake.

We, you and I, you and all, will need some faith to go on, the announcement of faith to rely on, the call to faith to count on, in 2024. Any clear look to the future, to the next sixth months say, abounds with a need for faith, a need for faith, a need for faith. So Jesus in today’s Gospel speaks to us in three words.

First, says the Lord, come eventide, ‘let us go, let us go across, let us go across to the other side’. Once more. We have been on the lake, and now are back. And the wind is blowing. Hard. You have an unforeseen illness. You have a congregation awaiting growth. You have an institution in the throws of inevitable but challenging change. You have a beloved, now freed but weakened religious denomination, facing hard financial and personnel choices. You have a country and a culture that does not seem to want to face or honor the difference between right and wrong, between truth and falsehood, between service and self-service, between greed and good, between morality and immorality, between personal conviction and criminal conviction. The wind is blowing! You did not cause it, you cannot control it, and you cannot cure it. But just here, it may be, the dominical word, read and spoken and heard today, may be your safe harbor, your port of entry, your crossing to safety on the other side. Crossing to safety…hm…Wallace Stegner’s exquisite novel of that name…Robert Frost’s poem of that theme…hm That is, the next six months are going to come and go, one way or another, like a hard lake wind. We can do our part, and row as hard as we can, and aim for a safe harbor. As we go, it will take some faith, it will take some faith.

EB White you remember wrote Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, The Trumpet of the Swan and other children’s books. He also, along with his Cornell Professor Dr. Strunk wrote the unsurpassed book on writing, ‘Elements of Style’, including the marvelous three-word admonishment, ‘omit needless words’. Omit needless words! As true for preaching, one must confess, as writing of any sort. White also wrote about skating in Boston on the frog pond (a habit we continue on February 2 each year, and did so this winter, with the fruitful invitational support of our colleague and chaplain for student outreach Mr. Lee). With his uncle White left his shoes on a bench, for an hour of skating. He returned to find his shoes gone, and had to limp up Beacon Hill on the tips of his skates. But his uncle said, ‘whoever took them needed them a lot more than you’, and White remembered. Somehow, we have to find a way to remind ourselves and to teach another generation about generosity of spirit, and we are long way from the shoreline on that quest. Somehow, we have to find a way to remind ourselves and to teach another generation about generosity of spirit, and we are long way from the shoreline on that quest.

Second, says the Lord, and now comes the second word, the second dominical utterance: ‘peace, be still’. Jesus has been asleep in the stern, comforted by cushions—a nice touch, and a good nautical practice to have nice cushions in your boat—and he has no worries, no cares, no furrowed brow. He awakes and commands. And the wind ceases! For he says, ‘Peace. Be Still’. And all is still. Once more to the Galilean lake we come, today, to receive a gift of peace, of stillness, of inner calm, both individual and communal. Whence this story, what its origin, what its history, what its historical grounding—who can say? Not I for sure. It may have arisen amid first century persecution of the nascent church. But the main point in the Scripture is crystal clear. The Lord Jesus Christ offers, brings and confers peace. The wind is blowing! Yet, right in the heart of it, right in the teeth of the gale—a stillness, a peace, a quiet, a quiet heart. With all the storming micro bursts of this season, we may well covet such peace. ‘Breathe through the pulses of desire thy coolness and thy balm’, your Boston poet wrote. I wonder…Upon this summer Sunday, may we, for a moment, receive a gift of peace, hold onto a sense of peace, accept the blessing of peace? EB White said of his marvelous writing, ‘All I have written is a love for life’. Peace. Peace. Peace. Be Still. Be Still. Be Still.

In a way, this is what the Apostle to the Gentiles conferred upon the Corinthians, a wayward lot were they for sure. It is in and within each of our sermons in the summer series, ‘A Look to the Future’. And it has been at least in the background of the sermonic work each summer and our work for this summer: the Upper New York Conference of the United Methodist Church, May 30-31; Asbury First United Methodist Church, June 1-2; Union Chapel, NH, July 21; and sermons for Marsh Chapel on June 23, August 4, and August 25.

As Paul wrote: We are putting no obstacle in anyone's way, so that no fault may be found with our ministry, but as servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way: through great endurance (and he gives examples)…by purity (and he gives examples)… as having nothing, and yet possessing everything. We have spoken frankly to you Corinthians; our heart is wide open to you. There is no restriction in our affections…open wide your hearts also. His letter echoes Jesus announcement of peace.

Yet it is the third moment of speech which Jesus confers in the midst of the storm which includes or builds upon the others, and carries in full the Gospel, the state of grace, for this day. The Lord calls us, calls all, to faith. Faith as contrasted with fear. Faith, daily faith, by which the buffeting winds and serious frightening storms—and they are serious and they are frightening—are faced down. We my friends are going to need some faith, hour by hour, this year. In season and out, faith. In failure as well as success, faith. In defeat, should and as defeat should come, as well and more so than in success. This is why the Corinthians passage fits so well with the Gospel. Life includes trouble, mistake and failure. In and through these, the gift of faith brings perseverance. When it gets dark enough, you can indeed see the stars.

We may today return, once more to the lake. God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.  The faith of Jesus Christ and the freedom of Jesus Christ we celebrate today.  Our forebears were disinclined to leave the pursuit of freedom to others.  They lived with faith that the center could hold. They seized freedom in their own hands and by their own lives.  They did not wait on others.  They did not pause to seek a secret blessing.  They did not wait until some ethereal sign emerged.  They did not expect some magic insight.  They preferred deliverance to diffidence. Real love means taking historical responsibility.

In earshot of our Lord’s teaching, there awaits us every Lord’s day a personal question:  as a Christian person, what are you going to do to continue to expand the circle of freedom, spirit, life and love in our time? Speaking of lakes, with Hiawatha, where is your tribal council to create?  With Harriet Tubman, where is your slavery to escape? With Frederick Douglass, where is your North Star to publish?  With the Shakers, where is your libertinism to avoid?  With all, where is your hope to share? 

As one wrote long ago, along another shoreline: “This is what one thirsts for, I realize, after the smallness of the day, of work, of details, of intimacy – even of communication, one thirsts for the magnitude and universality of a night full of stars, pouring into one like a fresh tide…I would like to achieve a state of inner spiritual grace from which I could function and give as I was meant to in the eye of God.”

So too, may it be for us, here in Boston on Commonwealth Avenue, and with friends around the world…

When I am out of funds and sorts
And life is all in snarls,
I quit New York and travel east

-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.23.2024 at 11:00 am

Sunday
April 28

The Bach Experience- April 2024

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to hear just the Sermon and Cantata

John 15:1–8

The Bach Experience- April 28th, 2024

Cantata: O ewiges Feuer, o Ursprung der Liebe, BWV 34

Dean Hill:

Through this Easter season, Easter tide, you have perhaps noticed, noted, or winced to hear the letter of John, 1 John, amending, redacting, muting and amplifying the gospel of John. You are keen listeners, practiced and adroit, so you will have wondered a bit about this. Why does 1 John nip at the heels of John?

The two ‘books’, John and 1 John, were written by different authors, in different decades, in different circumstances, with different motives. The Gospel acclaims Spirit. The Letter adds in work, ethics, morals, community, tradition, leadership and judgment from on high, rather than judgment by belief and by believer. We may just have, it is important to say, the Gospel as part of the New Testament, with all its radicality, due to its brother named letter, vouching as it were for the sanity of the Gospel. The letter, like James Morrison Witherbee George Dupree, takes good care of its Gospel mother, the very cat’s mother, you see.

The Gospel in chapter 20 revealed the Spirit, elsewhere called Paraclete or Advocate, come upon us, received and with it received the forgiveness of sins. But at the heels, nipping, comes along 1 John in chapter 2, which names the Paraclete or Advocate not as Spirit but as Jesus Christ—the righteous—whose commandments all we are to keep, on pain of disobedience become lying, and truth taken flight. Both read on the same Sunday, within minutes of each other, even as they face each other, in loving disagreement.

The next Sunday, the letter in Chapter 3, on the qui vive and on the attack, spells out again in no uncertain terms that the righteous do the right, handsome is as handsome does. Both read on the same Sunday, within minutes of each other, even as they face each other in loving disagreement, maybe even at daggers drawn.

A week later, the Gospel in chapter 10 acclaimed the pastoral image of the Good Shepherd, whose one glorification on the cross is meant to obliterate the need of any other such, even as the Letter, worried, worried out in later chapter 3, a long and sorry recollection of Cain—Abel’s one-time brother—and the demands of love from one who laid down his life, and with whom and for whom we are then meant to do something of the same. ‘Let us not love in word and speech but in deed and in truth’, says 1 John 3, when the whole of the Gospel says simply ‘love’, says that words outlast deeds, and that speech, that of the glorious Risen, ever routs works. Both read on the same Sunday, within minutes of each other, even as they face each other in loving disagreement, a family row.

And now today, when and where our one Great Gospel, the Spiritual Gospel, counsels ‘abide’ and ‘remain’ in chapter 15, just here the letter of 1 John in chapter 4, fearing antinomial abandon, appends to his own most beautiful love poem, the charge again of lying, of lack of love of brother, of schism that surely created this letter, 1 John, as the spiritualists and the traditionalists, the Gnostics and the ethicists, parted company, one toward the free land of Montanus and Marcion, the other toward Rome and the emerging church, victorious, against which the Gospel was born, bred, written and preached. Both read on the same Sunday, within minutes of each other, even as they face off.

Of course, both are right. Or we would not still need or read them, let alone together. But you are right, too, to feel some neck pain, some whiplash, as Gospel soars and Letter deflates. It is as if the Song of Solomon were being sung by Obadiah.

Still. We are meant to live in Easter, not in Lent. All the disciplines of Lent, the forty and days the ten worship services of Holy Week, and the four of Triduum, and all, they are preparation for the real. The real is joy, the real is love, the real is Easter. Here our outstanding, Pentecostal cantata, inspires, guides and shapes us.

Dr Jarrett, tell us what to listen for and how, now in Easter, with our Sunday Cantata.

Dr. Jarrett:

Today’s Cantata was written for Pentecost, the Christian Holiday that celebrates the Coming of the Holy Spirit and is observed on the 50^th Day of Easter, hence Pentecost. In the New Testament, we find record of the first Pentecost in Acts 2. The Holy Spirit arrives by the wind appearing as cloven tongues of fire. And despite the many and varied languages spoken by the early followers of Jesus assembled in Jerusalem, the expression or accent of the Holy Spirit was understood by each hearer according to his own tongue. The Tower of Babel rebuilt. The new Church, the new Body of Christ, of the risen Lord, was to be for all. In John 14, Jesus explains our family tree, so to speak, first by explaining that he himself is of the Father, and that though he will soon return to the Father, another Comforter, also of the Father, will be sent to indwell in hearts of all those who keep the commandment, the Word, and love one another. A radical new intimacy with the Father, through Christ Jesus, will connect the new Church, like vines and branches, as a Body of and in Christ. The Gospel reading for Pentecost that Bach was working with was John 14: 23-31, which culminates in two sayings of Jesus: “Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make. Our abode with him. (Verse 23) and”Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you” (verse 27).

Setting side the brilliant opening movement of today’s cantata, the other four movement are structured around these two sayings of Jesus: Recit No 2 around the idea of Indwelling, with the only aria of the cantata a pastoral rumination of how glorious this will be – Eden restored in each of us. The second recit, No. 4, broadens the indwelling to the new church, with the sign of Peace. The whole of the new church interrupts the baritone’s recitative to take up the new greeting shared by all who choose Love: Peace be with you.

Music of the high Baroque is much like a Swiss clock – there is extraordinary beauty in the clock itself – face and casing – but admiration becomes awe when the extraordinary number of component and moving parts are found to create such clarity and beauty. As an aural guide for Cantata 34, listen for how Bach sets the word Ewiges – or eternal, and at the same time the flickering, darting line sing for the word Feuer – or fire. Notice how Bach sets the word for ‘ignite’ – entzünde – you can almost feel the music spark each time the choir sings it. The trumpet signals the arrival of Christ, as bride-groom, of this most royal of weddings.

The central movement of the cantata, focuses on the rapture of the individual whose body becomes Christ’s Holy Temple. There is a perfection and naturalness of beauty here – directly from the sublimity of Eden’s garden.

The cantata ends in thanks and praise, but not without significant emphasis on Christ’s pronouncement, ‘Peace upon Israel.’

Today we observe two masters whose musical settings give voice to Christ’s wedding invitation. An invitation to all, without amendment or exclusion.

We prepare ourselves for cantata and covenant, in wonder and vulnerability and self-awareness…

Dean Hill:

There may well come a discreet time, for you, as a person of faith, to say something or do something, a time when some somewhat risky and uncomfortable mode of social involvement, or existential engagement, will beckon you.

After 40 years not just 40 days, such has come I believe to my beloved Methodist church, now in General Conference in Charlotte. There is a great whoosh of new life, coming into a church formerly fraught with conflict, and a great excitement of love to love and include ALL. It is the first such quadrennial gathering I have not attended with one exception since 1992. And the most successful. Maybe you just need the right people in the room and outside the room! Maybe it was my fault!

With this cantata, Methodism, at its best, built into the walls of Marsh Chapel, is love divine all loves excelling. Memorize the lines from 1 John 4: 7-12 today.

We once went to preach in a little church high in the Adirondacks, Mountainview UMC. It was one of the churches in the string served by a lone itinerant preacher. Listen to the names. Chasm Falls. Owls Head. Wolf Pond. Mountainview. My, my… (Owls Head, the ice box of the north, is where the New York Times for decades found the coldest temperature on record each winter). Reality squared, just in the names. A story, an old Methodist story, a Pentecostal cantata story, from the 1930’s comes, if memory serves, from Mountainview, a little town at the end of the rail line, where the locomotive turned around to head back downhill. Some farmers, a teacher or three, the druggist, some retirees, a small but loving congregation. They had been saving for ten years to build a new church building to replace their old one, and were just about able to break ground. But after Easter, as annually they did, they had a missionary come, this time from China. He was a gentle spirit, in the manner of Pearl Buck and others. He simply but directly told the Mountainview folk what he had seen in China of sheer poverty, of abject need, of kindness in the face of suffering, of living on nothing, and, too, of the difference faith can make. Over three days, with meals, and sugar on snow for dessert with the last marks of winter, with three days of conversation, something happened. After the missionary went to bed, the folks sat in the twilight, in silence. You don’t have to say much in a small town anyway because everyone knows what everyone thinks already. Finally, a farmer with gnarled hands, who would be milking at 4 in the morning, leaned in and said, Well. I sure would love a new church. We have waited a long time. But…but…this fellow and his people need that money a whole lot more than we do. Let’s draw out the building money and give him a check before the train leaves tomorrow. We can make do with this place another decade.

Let us live in Easter, let us love one another!

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music

posted in Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music, The Bach Experience, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 04.28.2024 at 11:00 am