Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

By Marsh Chapel

(The six summary meditations here were punctuated in worship by the choir singing the corresponding Frostiana pieces).

1. Vocation

Televised Tavis Smiley asked Maya Angelou this week to name the essence of what Dr. Martin Luther King, whose sculpture adorns our plaza this morning, was all about. “Love”, she said.

One untelevised scribe, records Mark, asked Jesus, whose people we are, to name the essence of what he was all about. “Love”, he said.

Simple but excruciating. Easy but difficult. Too good to be true, and too true to be good.

This autumn, while listening to the Gospel of Love in St Mark, we have awaited this word with choral embraces to help us each week. We lost our theological way, fifty years ago. Our choir has been asked to embed our preaching in the music and poetry of fifty years past, Frost and Thompson, for a purpose. The purpose has been to recall, and perhaps reclaim, a trail lost for a time, one of a common hope for love. Go back to the spot you last remember where you knew where you were.

Find your back to a sense of vocation, of calling. Life is about decisions. We have the choice to live as those who have survived and who have further survived our own survival, who have moved from guilt to gift. We have the power to choose a road grassy and wanting wear…

2. Invitation

You have what you give away. You only true possess what with joy

you can give somebody else. The most precious gift, in love, is your time, your welcome. Never discount the power of welcome.

Our liturgy, in the church, is our welcome.

Our teacher and Dean, Dr. Ray Hart, challenges and reminds us: What we have been culpably inattentive to is that in the same period of the modern cosmological revolution the arts have been more attuned to that revolution than has the Church. Is Schoenberg our Palestrina? Kandinksky, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollack our Raphael, Michelangelo? Merce Cunningham our choreographer? Et cetera, et cetera? Are we liturgically alive? (BUSTH matriculation sermon, 2004)

Power in the power of invitation is good news for the community of faith, for you. There is no greater joy in Christ than sharing the joy of Christ. You come too, you come too…

3. Communication

‘All life is meeting’, taught Martin Buber. If we are ever to be saved, to become real persons in communities of real persons, we shall have to seek the gifts of communication. Go and learn, we are taught. Would you see Christianity reborn? Be careful what you say.

Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice… Incarnation, Integrity, Interdependence, Theology, Tithing. Otherwise, we have a failure to communicate.

4. Leadership

The chancel choir harmony, SATB, reminds us of the four voices in every Gospel text: the soprano of Jesus’ teaching; the alto—most important—of its formation in the early church; the tenor of the evangelist; and the bass line of historic church interpretation.

Neither do the Gospels avoid engagement with the practical issues of community life. Chief among these is leadership. Every one of us has some power. If you have a pen, a telephone, a computer, email, a tongue, a household, a family, a job, a community, a church—then you have some authority.

Who taught you, by precept and example, how to use it? How much of what you picked up needs keeping and how much needs to be put out on the curb? A simple passion for the common good of the servants of God is at the heart of leadership.

Here is leadership: simple, authentic service. Tell me what it was you said…What was it that you thought you heard…

5. Freedom

You know, it is possible to miss the forest for the trees. Today we look at the full forest.

Stop for a moment, by the woods. East, West, South, and especially due North, here is a natural survey of majestic freedom, symbolic of the Bible—its main theme
freedom, and its four compass points of faith, fact, fairness, and future. The Bible is a book about freedom.

God is loving us into love and freeing us into freedom. The pulpit is freedom’s voice. The church is freedom’s defense. And the Bible is freedom’s book. The Bible is a survey of freedom.

We can pause for a moment and bask in the silent deeps of freedom, as if by the woods, on a snowy evening…

6. Hope

For we are a people in need of a rebirth of hope. On reliable hope hangs the future. Are we living with abandon? Are we living with hope? Are we living with hopeful abandon?

We are a people in need of a new rebirth of hope.

Hope that is responsible, communal, sacrificial, and orderly. Hope that moves us from political cowardice to religious courage. Look: she has given her whole life. Hope that, with Ruth and Wiesel and OMalley and Wright and Macquarrie and—especially—a certain watchful widow– asks of us a certain height, a hope, so when at times the mob is swayed, a hope, we may take something like a star…

Coda

Others have shown us something of thanksgiving, of being truly alive, in vocation and invitation and communication and leadership and freedom and hope. One old north country exemplar comes to mind at this time every year, Max Coots, who wrote:

“Let us give thanks for a bounty of people:

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

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

For feisty friends as tart as apples;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For all these we give thanks.”

by Reverend Max Coots

posted in Frostiana: Poetry & Preaching, Uncategorized on 11.19.2006 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 12: 38-44

(This sermon concluded with the last of six FrostianaR Thompson pieces, in which the autumn preaching has been embedded. Our thanks to Mr. Jarrett and the Marsh Chapel Choir for their spirited, fine music this year, and through this season)

Twenty years after Jesus’ crucifixion, somewhere in the hills of Palestine, or perhaps in Jerusalem, a small group of radiant women and men gathered for worship. We are gathered here, 2000 years later, as descendents of this alto-voiced primitive Palestinian church. After song and prayer, a preacher stood to speak. Like all preachers he was carried both by memory and hope. His memory was as it was. Human, no doubt. His sermon was hope, all hope. And his hope was his sermon, too. In Christ Jesus, the preacher announced the possibility of living with hopeful abandon. We need to hear his word of hope. For we are a people in need of a rebirth of hope. On reliable hope hangs the future. To speak of hope, the preacher remembered, or realized, a story about Jesus and a widow, a poor widow, who lived with hopeful abandon. She gave all she had. She gave out of her poverty. She gave even her whole life.

I have felt her eye me—and you—all week. Are we living with abandon? Are we living with hope? Are we living with hopeful abandon?

1. Money

Neither hope nor abandon accrues to most of our thinking about money. And whatever else may lurk within the phrases of Mark 12:41ff, the gospel seems to be about money.

Asked to speak to his Rotary club about sex, the preacher replied, ‘it would be my pressure—I mean pleasure’. So, too, with money. It would be my pressure…

People are funny about money.

Jan and I are tithers. We have learned, from others, over time the freedom and joy of giving away 10% of the year’s motley earnings. I encourage all Christians to begin the walk of faith by giving away a percentage—a tithe—however you finally want to calculate it. For your sake. For your own joy and health. Some generosity is a preamble, call it a prevenient discipline, a preemptive overture, to the obedience of faith. It is habit that produces virtue, not the other way around.

2. Money (can’t buy love)

Yet the widow sees deeper into us. For though some of life’s problems can be solved by writing a check, most cannot.

Neither getting nor spending, nor giving nor receiving, warns our widow, will give us life. You cannot take it with you.

My friend David Mosser is a pastor in Dallas. He has a unique sense of humor. He and others, from Texas to Maine, are trying to raise church budgets this year to pay for staff and for service to the poor, and a whole lot in between. David’s strategy—he claims—is to visit in each home, aided only by the presence of a single layman. His strategy succeeds. So I finally had the insight, the presence of mind to ask him who he takes along. ‘The undertaker’, he says.

I have done 30 funerals a year for 30 years, more or less. Not once did the hearse have a trailer in tow. Nor did any hearse of 2” or 1 1/2” trailer ball. Nor did any have a car top carrier. Nor did any have a luggage rack. Not one in 900.

I find it remarkable, truly uncanny, just how few men and women, daily, understand this.

None of the real, abiding matters of life give way before money alone…

Who am I?

What do I believe?

Whom can I trust?

To what may I give allegiance?

Where is my loyalty?

What is love?

Where is love?

Shall I ever truly be loved?

To whom shall I offer friendship?

With whom should I share my whole self?

And where and when and how?

Who will remember that I have lived?

What will he or she remember?

Who cares that I live now?

Will I ever escape the loneliness of freedom?

Is there truly a way to forgiveness?

Which matters more: how smart I am in the prime of life, or how dead I am at the end of life?

Does love outlast death?

Is it better to love and lose, or never to love?

Can I trust my own experience?

Can I trust my conscience to be my guide?

Is there life after blunder?

Where is love?

No, the limits of lucre are lucid. Money does not buy love.

Yet here is the widow and here are her two copper coins and hear them clink and jingle in the midst of the gospel. What does the widow mean? She looks deeper into you. Will the preacher please interpret the text?

It would be my pressure…I mean pleasure.

3. Interlude: An Alto Voice

Hers is a second level voice. Not originally that of Jesus—not soprano. Not written only by Mark—not tenor. Not absorbed in the history of interpretation—not bass (only one Commodianus, of all the early Christian writers, fully cites this passage—Commodianus, ANF IV, 221)

This minatory saying is like others from the gospels: woes for the cities of Galilee, woes for the rich, criticisms of the current generation, threats to this generation, threats to Jerusalem, woes to the daughters of Jerusalem, woes to those who say ‘lord, lord’, rejection of false disciples, warnings about the parousia, and others (RB, HST, 49).

Following Bultmann, regarding this biographical apothegm, the widow came to life in the experience of the Palestinian church—a true alto. (“There are objective criteria which yield the sure conclusion that at least the greater part of the doubtful passages were formed in the Palestinian church.”) Furthermore, this is the kind of narrative which best supports Dibelius otherwise overwrought argument that this material originated in sermons. Here his ‘theory of sermon paradigms has its greatest validity…they are best thought of as edifying paradigms for sermons…They help to present the Master as a living contemporary, and to comfort and admonish the Church in her hope’ (RB, HST, 60)

Matthew has censored the widow. Luke keeps her. Mark puts her in here, because of the use of the word widow earlier. “Jesus is the champion of the people against their extortionate and hypocritical leaders”…. ‘To do nothing where an act of love is required would be to do evil’…“At the sight of the actual state of the leaders of the people and of the great mass of the people itself—at the sight of religion frozen into ritualism, at the

sight of superficiality and love of self and the world—Jesus’ message

becomes a cry of woe and repentance”. (IBD, Mark)

4. Just Concern

The coins still jingle.

She looks hard at us, this widow does. Do you not wonder whether Jesus objected to her naïve piety, since it was not reciprocated by the rich?

I heard a speech last Sunday night, delivered in Topeka, Kansas. My wife was born while her family was in Onega, Kansas. My son-in-law, a Chicago preacher, was raised in Olathe, Kansas. One favorite theologian, Dorothy Gale, came from Kansas. No place like home. The blood of abolitionists, and the preaching of Boston University School of Theology graduates, formed an earlier Kansas. Whatever happened to Kansas?

In Topeka, the Kansas capitol, a leader made promises about taxes and terror—fewer of the former, and none of the latter. You keep your money, and we will keep you safe.

Two further readings of the widow are possible. One justice, the other, hope. Paradoxically, they contradict one another. They may reflect different strata in the gospel history, a soprano voice, to one side, an alto to the other. They are not the same sermon at all. So here they both are, and you make take whichever you need home, or both, or neither. Uncannily, though, they both reject Topeka. One rejects our materialism. The other rejects our fear.

First, while this has seldom been preached, the widow may represent Jesus’ further skepticism about political and religious materialism, that causes a poor woman, naively pious, to impoverish herse
lf in order to feed hypocritical scribes and other leaders, religious and political. Here is how such a reading would sound…(harsh voice) This poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. They have given out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.

Here is Jesus the Sabbath breaker, Jesus the friend of outcasts, Jesus the consort of the poor, Jesus the prophet, rising up, flaring up in Mark against a country in which the great have much and small have little. What one of us today truly, truly wants to face eternity, God, heaven, Jesus, or even the bathroom mirror lusting for tiny taxes in a rich land where urban children cannot read, where executives earn 250x the salaries of workers, where 30% have no health care, where infrastructure, environment, and communal interests go begging? Frugality we all affirm. But injustice? We have not looked hard enough at the widow before us today. Here she is, looking us in the eye. Here is the widow whose life has been taken from her by our various inverted pieties. (The second use of the word ‘widow’ here at least makes this reading possible). Do you really want to be remembered as a generation of people who, when push came to shove, preferred to tolerate grave injustice rather than shoulder taxes for the common good? Look…she has lost her whole living…

5. A Common Hope

Yet the concern for justice—one every pastor who has watched lonely parishioners send money off to television land has known—is not the widow’s might, or mite. It is a just concern, to be sure. But her lingering eye upon you bears something more. She looks deeper.

That is, second, it may be that this dear widow is truly a reminder of the joy that comes from tithing, from living with abandon, and giving with freedom. “She has given out of her poverty”. On this reading, not justice, but liberty is hailed. Do we want to be remembered as a people and a generation who let a few suffer in uniform for a war most have long since judged mistaken? As those whose hope was limited to security for ourselves, with little thought of those policing for us, let alone those maimed along the way? As those so imaginatively starved, so hope deprived, so love limited that all we can see is the fencing in of our own position? All protection and no risk?

This poor widow, like the babushkas of Russia who kept the Orthodox church alive under Stalin and Kruschev and Kosygin, stubbornly hopes. She embodies a hope that gives her courage, not cowardice. She lives with abandon. She lets her life speak. More: she lets her life preach. Do you? Do we? Do we glisten with that common hope that is the hallmark of the friends of Jesus, the communion of saints, the good church of every age, and the bones of Marsh Chapel?

For once, the lectionary does help us by retelling the story of Ruth, whose story is well worth your afternoon re-reading. Ruth and Naomi cross boundaries, love one another, and live with hopeful abandon. Our text today carries the culmination of that hope, Ruth’s reward. With the poor widow, Ruth lives leaning forward. Do we? Do we live with hopeful abandon?

Do we lean forward with the craggy chin of Elie Wiesel, who gently said on Monday, 10/23/06…Respect is the contradiction of fanaticism…information leads to knowledge, and knowledge to sensitivity, and sensitivity to commitment (2x)…I thought anti-semitism would have died in the camps but it did not…(RAH lecture notes)

Do we lean forward with the riveting gaze of Cardinal OMalley, who said on Tuesday, 10/24/06…What young people lack and need is a sense of calling, of vocation…I am speaking not of religious calling only, or mainly, but of a sense of purpose, of direction in life, of the investment of life in something of meaning and depth and power…What students need is a sense of calling, of letting their lives speak…(RAH lecture notes)

Do we lean forward with the English humor of NT Wright, who said on Wednesday…Made for spirituality, we wallow in introspection. Made for joy, we settle for pleasure. Made for justice, we clamor for vengeance. Made for beauty, we are satisfied with sentiment. But new creation has already begun. The sun has begun to rise…It is time, in the power of the Spirit, to take up our proper role, our fully human role, as agents, heralds, and stewards of the new day that is dawning. (Simply Christian, 229)

Do we lean forward with the spiritual and mental openness of John Macquarrie, whose book I finished that Thursday…With decline of myth as an intelligible form of discourse, religious faith too has tended to decline and Christianity has become less and less intelligible. On an ability to reformulate the insights of biblical faith in an intelligible, non-mythical way that will nonetheless avoid the reductionist error…may well depend the question of whether our Western culture will continue to hold to its Christian heritage in any lively way, or whether it will turn increasingly in the direction of a pure secularism. (God Talk: 180-181)

We are a people in need of a new rebirth of hope.

Hope that is responsible, communal, sacrificial, and orderly. Hope that moves us from political cowardice to religious courage. Look: she has given her whole life. Hope that, with Ruth and Wiesel and OMalley and Wright and Macquarrie and—especially—a certain watchful widow-- asks of us a certain height.

O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud --
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to be wholly taciturn

In your reserve is not allowed.

Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says "I burn."
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.

It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end.
And steadfast as Keats' Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

posted in Frostiana: Poetry & Preaching, Uncategorized on 11.12.2006 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Philippians 4: 1-9

Greeting

(As with the other sermons in this autumn 2006 series from Marsh Chapel, the choir sang immediately prior to the sermon one of the Randall Thompson ‘Frostiana’ pieces—for this Sunday, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening)

What is the Bible about?

You know, it is possible to miss the forest for the trees. Today we look at the full forest.

Stop for a moment, by the woods. East, West, South, and especially due North, here is a natural survey of majestic freedom, symbolic of the Bible—its main theme freedom, and its four compass points of faith, fact, fairness, and future. The Bible is a book about freedom.

God is loving us into love and freeing us into freedom. The pulpit is freedom’s voice. The church is freedom’s defense. And the Bible is freedom’s book. The Bible is a survey of freedom.

What James Smart decried a generation ago, “The Strange Silence of the Scripture in the Churches”, is true of you as well. All books suffer in a video culture, including the Good Book. You may yourself continue as literate (not one who can read only but one who does), but your grandchildren are stumbling about in other thickets. So if the content of the Bible is ever stranger and more foreign in an increasingly illiterate (not those who cannot read but those who do not) culture, then how much greater is the lack of capacity to interpret the book whose contents themselves are distant relations.

The old levees of biblical understanding have given way to the great flood of video culture, whose hurricane forces have carried in the disease of Biblicism, the destruction of literalism, the rampant looting of Providentialism, the tidal crash of unbiblical bibliolatry. These levees cannot be rebuilt in a New York minute. They have to be painstakingly renewed, sermon by sermon. We are doing some of this today. What kind of book have we given them? In what key is the music of scripture best played? What is the Bible about? From what angle of vision do we best see the Bible?

Faith

Stop by the woods. Turn East. We see the Bible with the eyes of faith. Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. The righteousness of God is from faith to faith. Abraham had faith and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. Yes, we may affirm, the Bible is a survey of faith. Faith is trusting reliance upon God. Says Huston Smith: “we are in good hands and in recognition of that fact it behooves us to bear one another’s burdens.” You are committed to a combination of a deep personal faith and an active social involvement. Holiness, personal and social. Ruth had faith to leave. Esther had faith to speak. Eudaia and Synteche had faith to work. Faith is the courage to shake of sleep and worry and get to church on Sunday. Faith is the courage to tote up one’s income and give away 10%. Faith is the courage to keep faith with one’s partners, through thick and thin. Faith is a personal commitment to an unverifiable truth. Yes, the Bible is about faith. We give our children the grammar of faith, the language of faith, the mother tongue of faith, when we give them their Bibles. Whether or not they choose to speak is their decision. Here is Paul’s testimony of this faith: “Do not be anxious about anything but in all things by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.”

For 2000 years women and men have found faith in the hearing of the Scripture. These are the stories and events that give us the courage to face death with dignity, disappointment with honesty, and failure with a steady hope. In the apocalyptic language of the New Testament, this faith is revealed to us. It comes by inspiration, imagination, invocation. Faith is being grasped, being seized by a love that will not let go. As Karl Barth said, visiting New York City, and asked to state his faith: “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

But faith alone, with due respect and apologies to Luther, is not the whole story. In fact, such a reading of the Bible can become the Bible’s undoing. The Bible is not to be memorized, but interpreted. It is not meant only to be repeated, but to be read. It opens its pages best not to faith alone but to faith seeking understanding. In our tradition, the Bible is not the only source of truth, primary though it be. There are many places where the Bible may be theologically though not historically accurate, which leads to another thought.

Fact

Stop by the woods. Look South. We understand the Bible with the mind of reason. The Bible is, second, a book of fact. For more than 200 years, generations of scholars have critically studied the 66 books of the Bible. We have learned a great deal about its languages, history, geography. We have seen the four different hands at work in the writing of the books of Moses. The Greek influences on Ecclesiastes we now appreciate. Isaiah’s three different modes we comprehend. Jesus meets us in these wondrous pages, and the few facts of his life of which we are certain we can list, as James Sanders did years ago. We know that Paul probably did not write 2 Thessalonians, any more than he wrote 3 Corinthians, a document from the third century. The Revelation to St John we now understand, if that is the right word, in the context of similar apocalypses from antiquity. The withering inspection and criticism of the Scripture since 1750 have borne fruit. Law, Prophets, Writings, Gospels, Letters, Apocalypse: all six parts of the Bible have factual features. We have searched the Scriptures for 200 years. Here Paul names names: two women, one man, many co-workers. Facts. Earliest Christians. Facts endure. He
re Paul discloses his worldview: time is short, the end is near, the day is at hand, as Dave Brubek would put it: ‘it’s later than you think’. Or, in verse: “The Lord is near”. It is a fact that Paul’s worldview is not our own. But his world is, and that too is a fact.

In fact, the factual limitations of the Scriptures have been the primary learning of this period. The world was not created in 7 days, unless by 7 days you mean 15 billion years. The human being was not made in a day, unless you mean by a day, the emergence out of primordial ooze that began 3 billion years ago, and is still continuing today. The words of Moses and of Jesus are not video recordings of speeches captured by unerring scribes, but are far more—words formed in the community of faith. Most famously, the scientific--religious showdown of the 20^th century was captured early on in the Scopes trial of 1925. We remember or misremember the trial largely through the play Inherit the Wind which itself was more theologically than historically accurate. William Jennings Bryant was not the buffoon caricature of that fine play, nor was his enemy Darwinism as much as it was Social Darwinism, nor was the generally insipid cast of old time religion anything like accurate with regard to golden rule Christianity, then or now. Bryant is made to say, “I am more interested in the Rock of Ages than in the ages of rocks”, and is pilloried by the protagonist, Clarence Darrow: “the Bible is a book, a good book, but not the only book”. In the matter of fact, the Bible carries a more limited weight and role in our time.

But science, and its measured facts alone, can only carry a part of the sacred story. As Justice Holmes said, science gives major answers to minor questions. Religion gives minor answers to major questions. Science alone—as wonderful as it is—does not cross the bridge from fact to value, cannot swim the river from flesh to spirit, has not forded the creek from brain to mind, and cannot judge about the things that matter most—love, death, memory, hope, thought, desire, heaven and God. To the one most important question of life, God, science has no response. Because there is no conclusive evidence. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence (H Smith). Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence…

Fairness

Stop by the woods. Look West. We hear the Bible with the ears of fairness. The Bible is, third, a hymn to fairness. To justice, equality, the right and the good. In our time, African Americans and others have found again the liberating power of the Hebrew Scriptures, of Exodus and Amos. The suffering masses of Latin America and Asia have returned to, and been nourished by, the abiding picture of God in the Bible, God who has a preferential option for the poor. Most lastingly, the feminist movement has found in the pages of the patriarchal Bible, a warning about justice, justice delayed, and justice denied. The deep rivers of fairness and justice have been diverted to flow over the dry land of prejudice, injustice, and patriarchy. The Bible is a testament, on this view, to fairness. What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with your God? It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. So, the Bible is a resource for liberation movements of many and good kinds, and the record of the churches in peace and justice is improved. Here in Philippians Paul asks for unity and peace. For fairness. He exposes his reliance on the kindness of strangers and the company of women. Paul had great regard for his partners in the Gospel, Eudaia and Syntyche, whatever he may have written elsewhere about liturgical proprieties. “I urge Eudaia and Syntyche to be of the same mind…help these women for they have struggled beside me in the work of the gospel”. Beside. Not beneath. Not behind. Not before. Beside.

It is difficult to overestimate the crucial significance of this perspective on the Scripture. Real religion is never very far from fairness, from justice. Fairness does not always mean equality, nor justice always similarity. There are varieties of gifts. But the renderings of Moses, the citations of Micah, the meditations on Job, the pictures of Jesus, the readings of Paul and even the explorations of the Apocalypse which in our time have focused on fairness, and justice, have a penultimate power. “The moral arm of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice”, said Martin Luther King. None of us fully ever deconstructs our own background, our own culture. We need, however, the whiter and maler and straighter especially that we are, to acknowledge our own privileges. The sense of limitation and injustice to which the Biblical measure of fairness responds is the gift of our time to the unforeseen future. Still, fairness alone is not the full Bible.

Will we see the Bible in our time, in full, through these lenses of faith, fact, and fairness? No, important and good as these views are, they are not the heart of the matter. They are not the heart of the Bible nor the heart of the church nor the heart of the matter. They are good, but not the final good. You will sense in them the predominant views of the Bible to date—pre-modern, modern, post-modern, or, traditional, scientific and liberal. Faith: the traditional view. Fact: the scientific view. Fairness: the liberal view. Let me show you a still more excellent way….

Future

Stop by the woods. Look North. Follow the drinking gourd. The Bible is preeminently more than faith alone, fact preserved, or fairness defended. The Bible is a survey of freedom, divine and human. In a word, the Bible is a book about freedom. God’s freeing love, and our freedom in love. God is loving us into love and freeing us into freedom. God’s way with us is loving and free, free and loving. You cannot coerce another into freedom, and you cannot frighten another into love. BUT NOTE THIS WELL: this freedom is mostly known as hope—hope for this earth and hope for eternal life, the future of freedom promised today.

Strangely, then, the Bible is fully and precisely the word we need in our emerging 21^st century.

This is the heart of what Paul writes to the Philippians. Yes, with pre-modernity, his words celebrate faith. Yes, with modernity his words carry fact. Yes, with post-modernity, his words seek fairness. But if that is all you have heard, you have missed the marrow of his meaning. Paul is s
inging here, a song of freedom. With the best insights in all of Scripture, these words of his carry us out into the open space of God’s future. Rejoice always…no anxiety about anything…whatsoever things are true…the Lord is near…Here is the radiance of resurrection, the freedom for which Christ has set us free. To the word of faith, Paul will say, yes, but work out your own salvation in fear and trembling. To the word of fact Paul will say, yes, but who hopes for what he sees. To the word of fairness, Paul will say, yes, but I know how to be abased and how to abound. The Bible is more than a source of inspiration, or of information or of insurrection. It is all those. But it is more. It is hope for the future! It is a survey of freedom, real freedom, the freedom from love and the freedom to love. The future holds an indestructible promise of freedom—of peace and joy in this life and of everlasting peace and joy in the life to come.

It has the shocking temerity to recall for us our utter dependence on God and one another, our utter similarity before the cross, before death, before God. Personal faith, yes. Factual understanding, yes. The struggle for fairness, yes. But there is more. Our age has the chance to interpret the Bible in full, as a survey of freedom, divine and human. It is this shared gift of freedom that will deliver us from the evil of this age. We are free, and in the hands of the God of freedom. All of us. The same. In our time, we need, desperately need, to reclaim our religious commonality. Across this small planet, we are all more alike than we are different. And spare us, please, as Freud said, “the petty narcissism of small differences”.

We all survive the birth canal, and so have a native survivors’ guilt. All six billion.

We all need daily two things, bread and a name. (One does not live by bread alone). All six billion.

We all grow to a point of separation, a leaving home, a second identity. All six billion.

We all love our families, love our children, love our homes, love our grandchildren. All six billion.

We all age, and after forty, its maintenance, maintenance, maintenance. All six billion.

We all shuffle off this mortal coil en route to that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns. All six billion.

Ringing out—it is unmistakable in this text and on this morning and within this sanctuary—from the heart of the Bible is a transcendent hope of a future freedom, on earth as it is in heaven, but not for all that lacking in heaven. The transcendent beauty of this nave, the transcendent glory of this sanctuary, the transcendent loveliness of this music, the transcendent history of this congregation, the transcendent height of pulpit and depth of prayer here, hold a future freedom that will endure well beyond the days that all the bongo drums are in garage sales, and all the horizontal worship spaces have been reconverted to Wal-Mart’s.

This hope is for earth and for heaven. For a day when the lion will lay down with the lamb, and lamb will be able to sleep. Asbury First, this year, in a time of change, we truly need the Bible’s perspective, its survey of freedom. We need its steady affirmation of faith, to steady us when we are anxious. We need its craggy collections of facts, when we might be tempted to avoid the harder facts. We need its preference for fairness, when we might be happier to take an easier, less far route. It will take faith, fact, fairness and more for us to prevail in this year. And more. We have no words really with which to name this. But the survey of freedom that is the Bible rests on resurrection. On a reliable future. You sing your courage and confidence:

And thou our sister gentle death

Waiting to hush our latest breath

Alleluia! Alleluia!

Thou leadest home the child of God

And Christ our Lord the way has trod

O praise ye

O praise ye

Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!

Coda

Howard Thurman could have spent his whole ministry absorbed in the inherited expressions of faith. He chose to move forward instead. He could have spent his whole ministry engaged in the science of history and psychology. He looked farther out. He could have spent his whole ministry upon the vital issue of racial justice. He saw a farther horizon. He saw, knew, felt, and heard the Bible as a survey of freedom. One night he spent walking the beach, wading in the surf, and listening to the stars above in a cloudless canopy. He wrote,

“The ocean and the night together surrounded my little life with a reassurance that could not be affronted by the behavior of human beings,” wrote Thurman. “The ocean at night gave me a sense of timelessness, of existing beyond the reach of the ebb and flow of circumstances. Death would be a minor thing, I felt, in the sweep of that natural embrace.”

posted in Frostiana: Poetry & Preaching, Uncategorized on 10.29.2006 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 10: 35-45

Who taught you about power?

Who taught you by precept or example about the use of authority?

Think for a minute, or for a good stretch of a lifetime, about those who modeled for you the spiritual dimensions of leadership. Unreflectively we follow their lead if reflectively we do not assess their example. And every one of us has power, exercises some authority, and leads, especially in our example. None of us deconstructs our own identity in culture as fully as we might. And we need to. Let there be no secrets where the issue is power. (Wouldn’t that be heavenly?) We are only as sick as our secrets.

Carlyle Marney used to ask us: “Friend, who told you who you was?”

The Gospel today asks of us a narrower question: who taught you about power? The Gospel today tells us that authentic authority, real responsibility are a matter of the heart. What are your models of power? Do they include at least a little Shaker simplicity, a little Ambrosian authority, a little steady service?

Shaker Simplicity?

Is one the heartfelt happiness of simplicity? Heartfelt leadership is ultimately simple.

It is intriguing that the Gospel lessons about living, in Mark, are set in the humble reaches of the lake country of Galilee. Writing in Rome in trouble in 70AD, there must have been some comfort, some folkloric encouragement for the persecuted urban Christians in these polished memories of Jesus teaching along the shores of Galilee. There is beauty along the lake. There is calm along the lake. There is peace along the lake. There is serenity along the lake. Along the lake there is space and time to sift, reminisce, remember, sort. The still waters still restore the soul to stillness. Today’s regatta, outside our Chapel, at the head of the Charles, in its pristine beauty and vigorous discipline, bring a kind of peace, too.

Yet, though our lesson is ostensibly set in the country, up in the North Country lake region, make no mistake: these few phrases are crafted in urban Christianity. We have, exegetically, an ‘alto aria’ in Mark 10. Very little of what we hear today, and through this season of readings, comes out of the history of Jesus of Nazareth. It is the church, like we, that is struggling in these pages for a sense of power’s use. That is the second level or line in a Gospel reading. Surely #4 the baritone of tradition will follow. Surely #3 Mark, in his tenor editing, will intervene. Surely #1, the ethereal Soprano of the Nazarene echoes still. But the earliest struggles of the early church are visible here, in the dominical sayings about power. In #2, the alto voice…

Mark 10: 35ff is a place where the priority, of Mark is clear. Mark is the earliest gospel. Notice how his successors cringe at his composition. Most tellingly, Matthew removes the selfish request from the lips of the disciples, and has their mother ask! But then Matthew still has Jesus respond to the disciples! Matthew, ever the scribe, pins the responsibility on their ‘Momma’, like many today telling ‘yo momma’ jokes.

Luke simply erases the passage, and so ‘spares the twelve’. They too knew the embarrassment of inherited Scripture: what is your sense of the most offensive? John, the Jews…Psalms, dash their children on rocks…Genesis, rape and violence…David (not a children’s story)…household codes in Colossians, and assumption of slavery and of patriarchy…I

These readings come around and we mutter, ‘Is this really necessary?’

THE SCRIPTURE IS A LIVING TRADITION—the earliest writers were utterly clear about that (Luke is so embarrassed he eliminates the whole passage. Matthew has their mother ask!—and John Wesley assumes he is right!).

Mark wants to show that the disciples, as do many in his own church, intentionally miss the point. The point? There is no real greatness, there is no real leadership, without humility, none without suffering, none without pain, none without public rebuke, none without the patience of Job, none without a pastoral heart for those who experience the consequences of decisions which others make. If, in your work, you have shown humility, known suffering, felt pain, had rebuke, summoned patience, found empathy—for all the cost, take heart. You are not far from the leadership kingdom of heaven…

The intonation of glory is a clue that we are reading from years after Golgotha. The stark reference to the cup of sorrow bears a memory of Golgotha. The knowing, counter knowing of the question about baptism, and its portents reveals the hurt of Golgotha. The shadow of grief that darkens this discourse is the shadow of the Cross of Christ. And the final phrase is unmistakable in its reference: to give his life as a ransom for many.the Christian community, we ourselves included, may not ever be unclear about the potential abuse of power. That particular portal to blindness has been nailed, nailed shut.

Who taught you what you know about power?

Said John Wesley, repeatedly, “if thine heart be as mine, give me thine hand”.

And Calvin: What is the chief purpose of human life? To glorify God and enjoy God forever.

There will come a day when you wake up to the purity of the heart that, as Kierkegaard said, is to “will one thing”. That is conversion, often wrought in power struggle.

You may come to a morning hour, even this one, in which you sense a new opening, a desire to live a life that makes God smile. You will become kinder, happier, more generous, more forgiving. This is the purpose of being alive, to speak and act and be in a way that brings a smile to the divine countenance.

Again I remind you of the Shaker community. In their work, their dress, their furniture, their devotion, their relations, the Shakers lived simply. The heart of their simplicity, and ours at our best, is the desire to “live a life worthy of the calling to which we have been called”. Every renewal in Christian history has had this feature: Paul mending tents, Augustine chaste again, Luther and Erasmus cleansing Rome, Wesley and his coal miners, Latin American base communities, and every spiritual nudging in our own very human church.

Who are you trying to please? And how? And why?

Think of someone you have known who lived with a heartfelt, powerful simplicity.

Who taught you about authority?

There is an authority that is visible in
every person who has found the freedom of vocation, the freedom to live with abandon. Look around at the windows in this charming Chapel, following worship, and you will see the faces of women and men who found a simplicity, a way to live with abandon.

Ambrosian Authority?

Is another model the heartfelt affirmation of the common good?

Mark 10:35 is one of the few spots in the earliest gospel at which the emerging institutional needs of the church are visible. Christianity wrestled with formational questions in the first century: For whom is the gospel? What are the definitive texts? And especially, who shall hold authority? What, How, Where. And Who?

As this passage shows, from the outset it has been terribly difficult for the Christian church to maintain its own authentic form of authority, over against the lesser models abroad in every age. I emphasize the little phrase, slave of all, or servant of the whole. “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up,” said Paul.

Aristotle taught us to attend to the true, the good, the beautiful. In the late fourth century there emerged a good, great leader of the church, Ambrose of Milan. In just eight days he went from unbaptized layman to Bishop. His rhetorical skill, musicianship, diplomatic agility and attention to the preparations for Baptism provided the power behind his lasting influence in Northern Italy. Above all, Ambrose used his authority for the common good. Notice in the Scripture there is no avoidance of the need for leadership. Authority may be shared but responsibility is not to be shirked. What lasts, what counts, what is true and good and beautiful, finally, is what “builds up”.

The greatest teacher of the earlier church, Augustine of Hippo, came to Milan a non-Christian. From the influence of Ambrose he left baptized and believing and worked a generation to set the foundations for the church over a thousand years to come.

I find some striking parallels to the story of Ambrose in a now popular book by Jim Collins, "Good to Great." Here are the qualities of those in authority in companies that became great when they had before been good: quiet, humble, modest, reserved, shy, gracious, mild-mannered, self-effacing, understated, did not believe his own clippings—a plow horse not a show horse. A plow horse not a show horse. A lot of progress can be made when we do not linger too long over who gets the credit.

Some years ago I went to a church meeting near Canada on a very cold night. It was led by our Bishop. For some reason I was not in a very happy mood, nor was I very charitable in my internal review of his remarks that evening. I do not recall his topic or theme. I remember clearly seeing him help to move hymnals, borrowed from other churches for the large crowd, so they could be returned. Snow, dark, long arms carrying a dozen hymnals into the tundra.

Who taught you about power?

Think of someone you have known who lived with heartfelt passion for the common good.

Who taught you about leadership?

Steady Service?

Is another the example of deliberate and deliberative service, of steady service, of sincere service, of suffering service?

Bultmann places our passage in his category of ‘legal sayings and church rules’. These later sayings have used a word like ransom and: ‘ taken from the redemption theories of Hellenistic Christianity’ (Bultmann, HST, 87).

The earlier warnings of suffering and death had fallen upon deaf ears…

“The basic inability of the disciples to grasp or accept Jesus’ concept of messiahship or its corollary, suffering discipleship, becomes reflected more and more in their total relationship to Jesus. The conflict over the correct interpretation of messiahship widens into a general conflict and misunderstanding in almost every area of their relationship

A few years ago Charles Rice of Drew spoke about the servant of the servants of God. He told about an Easter when he was in Greece. He sat in the Orthodox Church and watched the faithful in devotions. There was a great glassed icon of Christ, to which, following prayers, women and men would move, then kneel. Then as they rose they kissed the glassed icon.

Every so often a woman dressed in black would emerge from the shadows with some cleanser, or windex, and a cloth and –psh, psh—would clean the image, making it clear again. A servant of the servants of God, washing away the accumulated piety before her…

Rice had a revelation about service and power and authority and leadership. And through him I did too. Maybe it will work for you. As he watched the woman in black cleaning the icon, he realized that this was what his ministry was meant to be. A daily washing away from the face of Christ all that obscured, all that distorted, all that blocked others from seeing his truth, goodness and beauty. Including a lot of piety. Including pretense and presumption and position. Service that lasts is deliberate and also deliberative, it is steady service.

Think of someone you have known who provided heartfelt service to the servants of God. Steady, sincere, suffering service.

Who taught you about power?

Coda

Every one of us has some power. If you have a pen, a telephone, a computer, email, a tongue, a household, a family, a job, a community, a church—then you have some authority.

Who taught you, by precept and example, how to use it? How much of what you picked up needs keeping and how much needs to be put out on the curb?

A simple passion for the common good of the servants of God is at the heart of leadership.

Here is leadership: simple, authentic service.

Here is leadership: simple, authentic service.

Here is leadership: simple, authentic service.

For the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many.

"

posted in Frostiana: Poetry & Preaching, Uncategorized on 10.22.2006 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 10:17

Aging it may be, brings the preacher to the point of having the temerity to offer any advice of any kind on anything. To know Christ is to know His benefits, said the reformers. Counting those benefits may be one of the joys of aging.

Parents will tell you that aging can be bittersweet.

Like the day after engagement when you are told about registering for china and appliances for wedding gifts. You feel older. But I just wanted to get married! What is all this merchandizing?

Or when you turn thirty, from twenty nine. A day that will live in infamy, a day of darkness and not of light. Who may abide the day and its coming? It is like a refiner’s fire. Illness descends.

Like the decision to buy a van, and to sell a convertible. The shift from sports car to van or station wagon—need I say more? Is there a surer measure of aging?

Time flies—ah no. Time stays—we go.

Like when you watch a 3 hour movie and realize that the stars look to you like they are teenagers. I prepare you for the pain.

Or when you find yourself asking people to repeat what they have said because you did not quite hear them. “Could you repeat that?” “Would you care to repeat what you said?” “Excuse me, but, huh?”

Or, on more serious note, you begin to feel the onset of age as you see that the great reforms you had hoped might occur in your own lifetime lie still buried under heaps of sloth and falsehood and pride.

Blame some aging for the urge to advise.

You can be happy in college, if you will remember seven words. (They may just apply to life, eternal life, real life in life, as well…)

1. Study.

An often underrated part of the student life is found in this verb. One reasonable way to find happiness in college is to study. Force yourself. Train yourself. Flog yourself. And when all else fails, talk with a mentor. Find a way to use your time wisely. As George Fox told the Quakers, quoting Hebrews, “Prize your time now you have it, for God is a consuming fire”. If possible, work some study time into your schedule every day. The benefits will accrue immediately. Your parents will be pleased. Your grades will be better. You will be happier with yourself. And, you may graduate!

Les nearly failed his way out of Oswego State 30 years ago. He had a wonderful time and mad probation mid-way through the fall semester. Then he met Diane, bowling. They had such fun. It made all his other revelries pale. Friendship and humour and love and joy—and she was a good bowler too. After a long and late Friday night, Les asked to see her again on Saturday. “Sure”, she replied, “we can study together. One night a week of parties is plenty.” Les walked home on cloud nine, waiting for tomorrow, certain she was kidding. But 8pm Saturday night came and Les walked along Lake Ontario toward the dorm. He was dressed for the evening, but Diane met him at the door in jeans with a stack of books. So Les went to the library for the first time that semester. He squeaked by the fall and spring, picked up speed and graduated with his class. Diane and he were married just before he went off to Princeton seminary. Les will tell you, “I had not realized how big a part of college studying can be, if you let it.”

Let the main thing be the main thing.

2. Walk.

There is a time to speak, says Ecclesiastes, and a time to be silent. Silence

Is rare in dorms. Students, like Jesus sitting in the temple, are beginning to think on their own, but they need time to do so. One dorm advisor who worked in a 600 student dorm (Delplain Hall) made just one suggestion at orientation: take a walk every day. Thinking is the process of integrating information and insight, experience and judgment. To think you need time and freedom to step back from the 599 others and their stereos. Otherwise the mental muscle will not develop, and you will go too easily with the flow.

Late one night a sophomore knocked at her resident advisor’s door. She was the most socially active girl on her hall—soccer, sorority, floor meetings, ski club, marching band and, even, classes. The advisor was at first surprised to hear her whisper: “I’m so lonely here.” Fleeing her own becoming person, she had grown weary. At last she stopped and faced her fear. Said her advisor, “You are lonely because, now, you are alone. Stop running from yourself. Every afternoon walk up the hill to the Ag Quad and back. Twenty minutes of pure solitude and you won’t feel so lonely.” She quoted Pascal about sitting alone, too.

In walking—we have not spoken of prayer yet—you can hear your soul grow and change, remember and foresee. You can overhear what others are too busy or noisy to hear, even the deeper truth of their own lives.

3. No!

Here is another underrated word.

But like a river needs banks, a life needs limits. Otherwise the current of

Being spills out all over the plain and there is no direction, no force, no power to the river. You just drift and glide. A good life needs boundaries, river banks. When parents sandbag, the responsibility lies elsewhere. Amos says we are too hate
evil as well as love good. You will define yourself as much by what you oppose as by what you affirm.

Every “no” is an upside down “yes”.

If you say no to steady drunkenness it is for the joy of bodily health.

If you say no to racial hatred you point out the path of future peace.

If you say no to $120 sneakers it is an affirmation of things invisible.

If you say no to nuclear arsenals it is too affirm the sacredness of life.

If you say no to flagrant abuse of the gifts of sexuality, you are trying to affirm covenant and integrity and future happiness.

If you say no to a life focused only on obtaining, you make room for enjoyment and love.

Every no hides a yes, and you can be negatively positive.

We all find some happiness by finding our “no’s” and sticking to them.

4. Fun.

Have some fun along the way.

One depressed junior spoke to his teacher who simply asked him what he

liked to do for fun. The list was made. Do you do any of these things regularly? No, I am too busy. The teacher sentenced the junior to a daily game of bridge, two basketball games a week, several monthly movies, and pop tarts every morning for breakfast. He sentenced the student too use his own list. All work and no play makes Bob a dull boy.

5. Explore.

In college and in retirement you have various kinds of freedom to explore.

Try not to explore in ways you will regret, for regret is the forecourt of hell. But explore nonetheless!

Three sorts of exploration make good sense in college.

One is travel, far and wide, national and international.

Another is into the past, mainly by reading.

A third is across cultures.

Geography, history and culture are more open to you now than they may ever be again.

Explore, with the single aim of finding what is good, of integrating this good into your vision of the truth. “Liberal education flourishes when it prepares the way for a discussion of a unified view of nature and man’s place in it.” (A. Bloom).

6. Friend.

Last, not least, open yourself to real friendship.

The friendships formed in these years will last a lifetime if they are well

Planted and watered. The freedoms and struggles of that first real experience of independence can also provide the nutrients for the growth of real friendships. In friendship, as in love, there is terror and mystery.

Several stages are visible in the growth of a friendship.

Deciding when and how and who leads and follows.

Learning to give up something for another.

Making a really big life mistake.

Talking about making a really big life mistake.

Disagreeing.

Encouraging.

Parting.

Chapters in a book.

Friendships developed now can last a lifetime. One graduate of Smith College in the year 1914 corresponded through the 1980’s monthly with her college roommate. Illness and age prevented visits, but the letters still came and went.

Friendships developed now can transform.

The newspaper recently carried the story of Jack Bruen, Colgate basketball coach. Ill but still coaching when the article appeared, Bruen died at 48 last week. We have known his kindness to our children over many summers of basketball camp. Said one former student, “Besides my father, his is the only shoulder I’ve ever cried on”. Read some books in college, but read the human documents too. They will change your life.

For the best of them, through friendship, will recall the spirit of Jesus, whom we affirm, this day, as our transforming friend.

7. Love

Love. But this word, given our Scripture today, in a very particular sen
se.

Love: learn to love the poor.

Our man in Mark lacks. One thing you lack…He is haunted by what he lacks, though he probably could not have named or narrated his lack for himself. It is the preaching of the gospel—soprano, alto, tenor, bass—which awakens, in him, I mean in you, I mean in him, I mean in us, the profound lack.

He lacks the lightness of being that comes from the lack that he lacks. Poverty. He lacks that ‘spiritual’ (for once we shall carefully use the word) freedom from abundance of possessions which poverty, sharply, may bring. What he lacks is lack itself.

Love…learn to love the poor.

Isn’t it curious…Elliot Spitzer, Princeton, candidate for governor in the Empire State, remembers, vividly, his college summer among the poor—a completely different side of life. Did that summer shape his mind? His HEART? There, then did he learn to live with abandon?

Isn’t it curious…This week Muhammed Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize for giving tiny loans to poor people in Bangladesh? His first loan: $27 out of his own pocket in 1976, repaid quickly and in full. “If you can make so many people happy with such a small amount of money, why shouldn’t you do more of it?” Yunus lives with abandon. Cut lose from all that smothers, you can find your own true self. You can become your “ownmost” self. To find your calling, your true vocation, your voice, is more than getting an A and getting a job. Sometimes people live well into their fifties before admitting and accepting their vocation—that which has them live ‘with abandon’.

The textured nuances of this text—sure signs of the middle alto voice of the early church—bear emphasis. Not all are blessed and burdened with great wealth. But all know the struggle with greed. Covenant with the poor will fill your lack. Not all are faced with the particular challenge of camel and needle. But all depend fully on the impossible possibility of grace. Before God we are naked. Before God we are empty handed. None is good but God. Connection with the poor can free you. You will recognize that grace where you are free to live ‘with abandon’.

Isn’t it curious…Some years ago—long before I knew much about Howard Thurman, or that he had stood in this pulpit—his profound little book, ‘Jesus and the Disinherited’, hit my desk. We then used it as a study guide among the clients of our dining center, after breakfast on Tuesdays. You know, I have endured and inflicted hundreds of classes and groups. But that small, untidy, alcohol scented, ravaged, male group haunts still, haunts through lack.

Have we learned to love the poor? Where great University learning and a confident love of the poor, of the least and last and lost have bonded, there has been fire. Think of Luther at Wittenberg, and among the German peasants. Think of Ignatius, in Paris, the poor in the city and the learning of the University, in 1540. Of course, think of Wesley at Oxford and in the mines.

And thee? Where is that Boston scout troop, looking for a 20 year old assistant scout master? Where is that big sister program, just waiting for what your parents gave you for free? Where is that city school, ready for your cyberknowledge? Where is that church school class without a teacher?

Says the man in the third pew, ‘Preacher, you seem to be mentioning things and words that are unhappy (study, no, poor…). Is part of learning to be happy learning to be unhappy?’ You might say so. ‘The reality of the vessel is the shape of the void within it’. (Lao Tse). Empty yourself and you will be satisfied. Empty yourself, and you will be full. As Mark writes later, ‘the last shall be first, and the first shall be last’.

And remember, there are two ways be rich: have lots of money, or very few needs.

To be happy, learn from some unhappiness, and happily so…

Study. Walk. Say No. Have Fun. Explore. Befriend. Love the poor…

Some ways to be happy in college. And in life. And “in God”.

posted in Frostiana: Poetry & Preaching, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 10.15.2006 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

Matthew 9: 9-13

1. Matthew on Mercy and Sacrifice (Exegesis)

Caught between our own identities, and the fires of Hell, we have arrived in worship. Like Matthew, who paints himself as Velazquez did into his own portrait, we are invited. Follow me. “He comes to us as one unknown as he did long ago…”, wrote Schweitzer. The real moment of real invitation and real response is real apocalypse. Paul said he met Jesus ‘by apocalypse’. I am here by apocalypse. Another story for another day. You may be too. What are we doing here?

This is a rare and holy moment. Holy, and rare.

Matthew, the author of a dark Gospel, reflecting perhaps the persecutions of the late first century, has stitched his own matriculation to faith together with an apothegem (that is a word that you never use in a sermon) about reading. His entry involved reading. “Go and learn….” Why should anyone have needed to learn the meaning of such a fine and famous line from Hosea, about mercy and sacrifice? Evidently, the meaning was far from evident, by the time of Matthew’s suffering. More study was needed. Why? The experience of the fragile church under Domitian required new readings of the inherited traditions of the church. An inheritance without interpretation breeds a failure in communication. And, as the Amish of Pennsylvania have magnificently reminded us this week, it is costly yet true to desire mercy. The first word, forgiveness.

Each Synoptic passage is like a choral piece, including four voices. There is the Soprano voice of Jesus of Nazareth, embedded somewhere in the full harmonic mix. In Matthew 9, Jesus conflicts with the Pharisaic aversion to pagan inscriptions and iconography. There is the alto voice of the primitive church, arguably always the most important of the four voices, that which carries the forming of the passage in the needs of the community. From Mark to Matthew an insertion has arisen, the citation of Hosea 6:6. Evidently, the earliest church needed the fuller support of the prophetic tradition—mercy not sacrifice, compassion not holiness—as it moved farther out and away from the memory of Jesus. The tenor line is that of the evangelist. Matthew here, marking his own appearance in the record. His work seems to reflect a connection to school, to scribes, perhaps as Stendahl said from across the river, years ago, to Qumran. The baritone is borne by later interpretation, beginning soon with Irenaeus, Against Heresies: “What doctor, when wishing to cure a sick man, would act in accordance with the desires of the patient, and not in accordance with the requirements of medicine?” ( in Richardson, ECF, 377) If our church music carries only one line, we may be tempted to interpret our Scripture with only one voice, and miss the SATB harmonies therein, to our detriment.

2. Failures to Communicate (Explication)

Communication is such a delicate art. Frost’s telephone poem, set to SATB harmony by R Thompson and our choir, reminds us. A little means a lot. Otherwise, a failure to communicate.

Like the preacher who stood before the congregation at Yale chapel some years ago, where did hang a banner, ‘God is other people’, and for the word of that day simply said he wanted to replace the comma, ‘God is Other, people’. I am not God and you are not God and we are not God, together, as Camus might have reminded us. Otherwise, a failure to communicate.

Registering our cars in Massachusetts, I chuckled with the receptionist, who could not understand whether her interlocutor was speaking of Don a man or Dawn a woman. Two people separated by common language and inflection. By the glories of England and New England both. Nearly, a failure to communicate.

Communication can have dire consequences.

One day, following the morning service, we visited a dear saint in her home. She had been in hospital that week, and sat recuperating in her parlor. Her family was with her. And she had a story to tell.

That Tuesday, she prepared to be taken, by ambulance, from one hospital to another, for a particular procedure. She is a fine, older Methodist lady, so she prepared herself with what dignity one can muster in a hospital bed, robed in a hospital gown, and alone in the corridor of life. A little makeup, a comb and brush, some careful adjustments of remaining raiment, glasses perched, smile shining.

She could see the elevator door open, and her stretcher moving out. Then the attendants clearly mentioned her name as they signed the paper work at the desk. The nurse motioned across the hall in the general direction of her room. She poised herself, prepared to be a good, courteous patient. Down the hall the men came, and she waved. They returned the gesture. To her door they rolled—and then, remarkably, rolled on by! They passed to the next room, one inhabited alone by a frail, kindly woman who is deaf as a post. “Mrs. Smith?” “YES” she replied, her volume in inverse proportion to her accuracy. Into the stretcher went the wrong woman, and down the hall they moved. My dear parishioner called out, used her buzzer, flailed her arms like a gypsy at the campfire. But in a New York minute they were gone, carrying away the wrong person. On the way home, following the procedure, someone apparently had the presence of mind to look at the stretchered woman’s wrist band, name tag. I wonder how the reader felt not to see the name Smith. A rare moment of revelation. In this case, little lasting harm occurred. Our hospitals, in fact, to my eye, given their hourly commitment to excellence and attention to detail, put other institutions to shame. We all know the fear of the wrong arm amputated, the wrong knee replaced, the wrong woman put in the stretcher. Physician’s malpractice. But the news, good news, of medical malpractice is that you know soon—an hour, a day, a decade—what has happened, and you can endure it or correct it. So it goes with the physician’s malpractice.

Not so with the m
etaphysician’s.

Biological error lasts, at most, a lifetime. Theological error resides for three generations, or more. If, as ML King Sr. said, ‘it takes three generations to make a preacher’, then it also takes three generations, or more, to recognize and correct the effects of metaphysical malpractice. You cannot fully see its effect for 20 or 40 or 60 or 80 years. And it is a short way from birdie to bogie, from clean cuts to nicks and scratches in innocent organs, mistaken severations and amputations, blood spilled and shed in the wrong bed. Choose the physical mistakes, for the metaphysical are so much more insidious, more damaging, more real.

3. Go and Learn What this Means (Exemplification)…

Sacrifice may be good, but mercy is great. Without mercy, we have a failure to communicate. Without mercy, we have a failure to communicate. Hear the gospel in the movement from sacrifice to mercy…and…

From Incantation to Incarnation…

We risk harm when we replace incarnation with incantation. The gospel of John affirms the incarnation of the Christ, in the flesh. That is—children’s flesh, adolescent’s flesh, young couples’ flesh, people, people, people. The image of God. We have forsaken our passionate interest in people, young or old, fat or thin. Half our membership in the Northeast has been erased, since my ordination. Cataclysm. Apocalypse. A moment, maybe this one, when you look down at the stretcher and you see that the nametag is not what you expected. And you face failure. Face it. It won’t kill you. Denying it will kill more than facing it. We have decided to enjoy incantation, instead, the pseudo worship that has eviscerated many of our churches across the region. We, for the most part, have not wanted to do the hard work of preaching and liturgical preparation. We prefer easy incantation to the rich announcement of incarnation. People notice. We need to cross the river from incantation to incarnation!

From Innocence to Integrity…

We risk harm when we replace integrity with innocence. Innocence is not holiness, nor holiness innocence. While there are many facets to this single haphazard metamedical blunder, the matter of sex alone should make it clear. In our region we no longer talk about sex—a tragic silence given the unfiltered filth of the internet that has invaded most homes far beyond our poor power to add or detract. After the flames of the 60’s Jack Tuell and a couple of other Bishops sat over coffee and came up with the phrase, “in singleness celibacy, in marriage fidelity”. Given the chaos of the time, the phrase made some ordering sense. But today it has served to muzzle and muffle fully honest talk about sex. Tuell’s own confessional, repositioning sermon on homosexuality specifically mentions, and laments, the phrase. But the gays are the least of our problems. Our malpractice has caused fairly good people to mask their struggle for integrity, in failure as well as success, with a false innocence, assuming there can be no integrity without innocence. Our own church has had past denominational leadership that was struggling with personal identity and sexual expression. Is there any wonder that we have no significant conference or area work on human sexuality? We need to find our voice again, to honor God’s good gift of sexuality, and its best expression within the sacramental rite of marriage. We need to pull the scalpel out of the wrong intestine, and wash up and start again. We need a fuller conversation. You can have integrity and holiness without innocence. I might redact Tuell this way: in singleness integrity; in partnership fidelity. We are crossing a river from the east bank of innocence to the great capital region of integrity!

From Independence to Interdependence…

We risk harm when we replace just war with just war, interdependence with independence. The 2003 invasion of Iraq jettisoned our inherited experience codified in just war theory. It was preemptive, unilateral, imperial, unforeseeable, post-Christian, immoral, and wrong. Anybody with half a Bible could see that. But what did our pulpits say in 2002 and 2003? With a baker’s dozen exceptions, across the country, we said: not sure, don’t know, support the troops, what a world, hope it all works out, give it up to God… We had the wrong woman in the stretcher all along, but we just were too busy tuning our electric guitars to see so. Now 2700 are dead in Iraq. It took 25 years, but the chickens did come home to roost. Let us cross over from the quiet shore of independence to the bright light of interdependence!

Now we have, for many of our own close friends right here in this community who hale from other lands, jettisoned habeus corpus. My mother is a Latin teacher and my son a lawyer, so I did my research by phone. The gospel is for the wise: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. From the Magna Charta to John Wesley to the Bill of Rights to this hour, we have understood, rightly, the high priority and cost of individual rights. The right to trial when imprisoned, the right to petition. The right to see evidence against you. The importance of due process. Have we begun with the spirit to end with the flesh?

In the large minutes of early Methodist conversations between Mr. Wesley and his preachers, a remarkable sentence abides. Wesley has given his usual ‘the beatings will continue until morale improves’ speech: Be diligent. Never be unemployed. Never be triflingly employed. Be serious. Let your motto be holiness. Avoid all lightness, jesting, foolish talking. Converse sparingly with women, especially young women. Be punctual. Be ashamed of nothing but sin. You have nothing to do but save souls, spend and be spent in the work. Take no step toward marriage without consulting your brethren…

And then: Believe evil of no one; unless you see it done…You know the Judge is always to be on the prisoner’s side…

Garrison Keillor recently wrote:

I would not send my college kid off for a semester abroad if I were you. This week, we have suspended human rights in America, and what goes around comes around. Ixnay habeas corpus.

The U.S. Senate, in all its splendor and majesty, has decided that an "enemy combatant" is any non-citizen whom the president says is an enemy combatant, including your Korean greengrocer or your Swedish grandmother or your Czech au pair, an d can be arrested and held for as long as authorities
wish without any right of appeal to a court of law to examine the matter. If your college kid were to be arrested in Bangkok or Cairo, suspected of "crimes against the state," and held in prison, you'd assume that an American foreign service officer would be able to speak to your kid and arrange for a lawyer, but this may not be true anymore. Be forewarned.

From Theological Theology to Christological Theology….

We risk harm when we replace God with Jesus. I love Barth, too, but Jesus is not all the God there is. We are still wallowing, as Doug Hall warned a generation ago (you see it does take a long time), in a Unitarianism of the Second Person of the Trinity. Just when the gentle wisdom of Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Huston Smith and so many others might have broadened our creaky Christomonism, we let in the Calvinists. Yes, we want to name the name. The name that is above every name. But that name does not drown the others, like a Gulf hurricane, or bomb the others, like a Desert Storm, or burn the others like a terrorist hijacking. When John wrote “I am the way…”, he meant that wherever there is a way-- there is the Christ, wherever there is truth-- there is Christ, wherever there is life-- there Christ is, too. The day I met the Clergy Session of Conference, at Syracuse University, to be passed on for orders, Huston Smith walked over to the session from his office on the other side of the quad. He stood by me, outside as I waited. I was nervous. He assured me I had no reason to be. We need that voice today! The mystery of God is greater than the measure of Calvin’s mind, and greater than the Christology of the Reformation, and greater than the purpose driven life. We are crossing over the raging river from exclusivity to particularity, from Christology to Theology!

From Giving to Tithing…

We risk harm when we replace tithing with giving. The Christian life involves specific, serious commitments with regard to time, to people, and to money. To be a Christian is to worship weekly, to keep faith in marriage and other close relationships, and to give away 10% of what one earns. Not more than 10% but not less either. Where did we go off the reservation here?

The pervasive materialism of our culture receives its rejection in tithing, not in mere giving. The enduring sense of entitlement in our county receives its contradiction in tithing, not in mere giving. The abject loneliness of exurban life receives its denial in tithing, not in mere giving. We have spent too much time trying to encourage people, bit by bit, to keep faith.

How would your spouse feel if you said, “You know, I was 40% faithful this year, a 5% increase from last year.” That would not fly in my home. Other things would fly (pans, knives, etc), but that would not! Nor can this euphemistic blather about “abundance”, a culture of abundance, last much longer. We need full affirmation of a culture of scarcity, not abundance, and the virtues, once our stock in trade, that come with scarcity: frugality, saving, temperance, industry, and, yes, tithing. Let us cross over and rest in the shade of the tithing trees!

Coda

You live in a country in which 40% of the population can name the Three Stooges, and fewer than 5% the ten commandments. Literacy has a new meaning, referring not to those who can read, but to those who do read. You remember from A River Runs Through It, the line that Methodists are Baptists who can read. The future of the globe relies not on those who can read, but on those who do. Who communicate…

Would you see Christianity reborn? Be careful what you say.

Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice…’

Incarnation

Integrity

Interdependence

Theology

Tithing

posted in Frostiana: Poetry & Preaching, Uncategorized on 10.8.2006 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 9: 30-37

Preface

The shortest distance between two points is the length of the line segment connecting them. Here the distance from heaven to earth is measured in the meaning of ‘welcome’. Power in the power of invitation is good news for the community of faith, for you.

Synoptic Gospel passages, like this one, have usually a quadraphonic complexion. Like a fine hymn, lifted to the praise of God, Mark 9: 30 welcomes us in four part harmony. There is a soprano voice, that of Jesus of Nazareth. The alto, arguably the most important voice, wells up from the diaphragm of the earliest church, which formed and fashioned these passages for its own needs. Mark himself is the tenor voice, the author, the evangelist, weaving past memory into the fabric of present need. You and I complete the baritone line, stretching across two thousand years of clefs and scales and chords.

We want to be sure to honor each voice, as we listen for the divine word. Admittedly, though the musicology of the gospels is well known, few pulpits regularly enjoy the full range of the music in the Gospel. The one dimensional culture around, the drive to black and white distinctions, the need for certainty in a fear driven society, the unwillingness to admit that there is much gray, and that ‘now we see in a mirror dimly’—in short, our flat screen view of life mitigates against a textured hearing. What a loss! The Bible has as story too!

Soprano

Although the Gospels were not written as histories, they surely rest upon an historical base. The Gospel of Mark proclaims Jesus as the Christ, crucified. Yet, underneath, or behind this proclamation, there looms some shadowy recollection of Jesus, and his words and his deeds. Now, I must confess that, as your current preacher and pastor, I bring a minimalist perspective to the question of what we can know, for sure, about Jesus, and his words and his deeds. Let me take you around this once more, to be clear. Some history of Jesus is contained here in Mark 9. It comes, though, in a certain package, namely the memory of Jesus which the early church needed, and needed to use. The higher pitched duet of soprano and alto, Jesus and early church, lovely it is, is also very difficult to distinguish, voice by voice.

A few years ago, we had a nationwide flattening of the Scripture in the phrase ‘what would Jesus do?’ The gospels are written around another question, raised by the early church, a much more nuanced and careful question; ‘what would Jesus have us do?’

Still, the soprano voice of the historical Jesus sounds forth. Here, one might posit, Jesus is remembered, as elsewhere, to have acclaimed service and to have loved children. We sing together of both. The greatness of those who would serve, and the divine preference for the least and the littlest have ample visibility in the gospel records. Jesus taught the value of service, as many teachers, ancient and modern, have also done. Jesus celebrated the life of children, as many teachers, ancient and modern, have also done.

Though primary, this voice is regularly the weakest in the gospel harmony. Our own tradition of interpretation, the ringing voice of the gospel author, and especially the formative influence of the fixing of memory by the earliest church, all conspire to muffle, mute and almost quiet the originary voice of the Nazarene.

When in our worship this is forgotten, danger and even disaster follow. Go and buy an exemplary book by one of our Boston University colleagues, Stephen Prothero, American Jesus, which provides a devastating review, highly readable, of American religious conjectures and fictional portraits of Jesus. Jesus the pioneer. Jesus the businessman. Jesus the androgyne. Jesus the muscleman. Jesus the Mormon. Jesus the revolutionary. Jesus, as in Salman’s head of Christ, the long haired European. More than a careful, minimal assessment of what Jesus said, and did, opens a religious Pandora’s box. We do not know what Jesus would do, in part because we do not know what he did.

One hundred years ago, Albert Schweitzer did show this in his Quest of the Historical Jesus. He looked back at 19^th century historical study of the life of Jesus and found that scholars found what they wanted to find. So the churchman found Jesus to be an ecclesiastical leader. The bohemian saw in Jesus a free spirit. The Marxist painted him as proletarian. The conservative, as a conservative. The liberal as a liberal. Beware an overly carefully drawn portrait of the Man who stilled the waters. Schweitzer left the New Testament for Africa. He left the reading of theology for the living of theology. He went to heal children and to serve. ‘He comes to us as one unknown…’

Alto

The passage that begins at 9:33 was probably a list of instructions that Mark had inherited from the early 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 Crucifi
ed. 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 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…’ (MT25).

This morning you see the stoles worn here, signs of yokes, of humble service. 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. I 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. Hail Alto, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…

Tenor

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’ (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 hates the disciples, and attacks them at every point. Why?

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 attacking the disciples (they want power, they refuse humility, they do not suffer children, they do not welcome)” (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. To this, elsewhere and similarly, Paul, Apostle said, ‘suffering produces endurance, endurance character, character hope, and hope does not disappoint’. Just remember Ecclesiastes 9:11.

Bass

Bring us home bass section.

The echo of Jesus’ faint voice in acclaim of service and children gives us courage to acclaim service and children. The early church’s ready attention to power and weakness, insiders and outsiders, leadership and welcome gives us courage this week to give ready attention to the ways we use power and include others. Most especially, Mark’s savage attack upon the characters he constructs as the Twelve for their theology of glory gives us courage this week to sacrifice authority for authenticity, to measure our worth as individuals, churches, societies by how we treat the littlest and weakest among us.

In other words, we have responsibility imaginatively to interpret and apply the gospel to our very lives. Here is a fine definition of pastoral imagination: “In a pastoral, priestly, or rabbinic imagination, this is the capacity to see a biblical text the form of a sermon, or in the depths of a fractured relationship clues to reconciliation; to hear in an ancient prayer the voices of those who have prayed it through the centuries; in the act of a child’s generosity a vision for the stewardship of the earth”. (Foster, Educating Clergy, 323.

The measure of university success, on this model, is measured in the freshman dorm first, and at the alumni weekend last. The measure of church success, on this model, is measured by just how much welcome we extend to those who can do nothing for us, at least until they grow up.

The line segment of life is from God’s heaven to a child’s earth, from cloud to cheek, passing through Christ. This means change, toward service and toward hospitality. 150 years after Mark, an ancient document called the Acts of Philip said it this way: ‘unless you change your down to up and up to down and left to right and right to left you shall not enter my kingdom of heaven’.

We may some encouragement here. Those who are wrestling with just how to use the measures of power afforded them may contemplate 35, “whoever wants to be first must be last and servant of all”. Those pondering just how wide to cast the net for that next invitation may contemplate 37, “whoever welcomes a child welcomes God”.

Welcome, Mark 9

Soprano

What did Jesus say and when did he say it? Bultmann….

Alto

Two sayings, authority and welcome coupled. Why? Why was this good news for the community? Power and weakness…polemic against a conservative Jewish Christian group…

Tenor

How does this fit into the role envisioned by Mark for the disciples? Weeden

Core: the first shall be last, and the last first…”In Mark, Galilee is a theological-geographical sphere…” Disciples monopolize Mark’s attention…Disciples gray, with mass white and establishment black…

Bass

How did the rest of the NT, and the Fathers, handle this? How about the other texts?

AND SO WHAT FOR US?

How shall we think about the ruins of the church, and about Marsh as not the biggest but the best (music, liturgy, preaching).

What about children, then and now? What does the symbol mean?

posted in Frostiana: Poetry & Preaching, Uncategorized on 09.24.2006 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 8: 27-38

1. Preface

(The sermon was preceded by R Thompson’s ‘Two Roads’, the first Frostiana piece, and the first of seven uses of the seven pieces at Marsh this fall, corresponding to the Markan lectionary, and the sermons of the day. The service concluded with #426 UMH, to the tune ‘Marsh Chapel’.)

As Jesus taught, and Mark wrote, and Frost sang, we become who we are by the decisions we make.

We survivors, surviving survival, and moving from the guilt of survival to the gift of survival, when last we gathered did affirm…

The World Trade Center may fall, but no terror can topple the World Truth Center, Jesus the Christ.

The World Trade Center, hub of global economies, may fall, but the economy of grace still stands in the World Truth Center, Jesus the Christ.

The World Trade Center, communications nexus for many, may fall, but the communication of the gospel stands, the World Truth Center, Jesus Christ.

The World Trade Center, legal library for the country, may fall, but grace and truth which stand, through the World Truth Center, Jesus the Christ.

The World Trade Center, symbol of national pride, may fall, but divine humility stands, through the World Truth Center, Jesus the Christ.

The World Trade Center, material bulwark against loss, may fall, but the possibility in your life of developing a ‘spiritual discipline against resentment’ (Niebuhr) still stands, through the World Truth Center, Jesus the Christ.

2. A Defining Moment

Sometimes, Fosdick said, a sermon is a twenty five minute public session in pastoral counsel. We mean a place where two or more souls, in Rilke’s words, “protect, border and salute each other”. In God’s presence we may stand by one another, at the border of the soul. Not to avoid. Not to interfere. To honor.

On September 11, 2001 four airplanes were commandeered and employed as weapons in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, DC. More than 2500 people died in hellish ways in the World Trade Centers, the Pentagon, and in an open field, as a consequence of this infamous assault. Parents lost children. Children lost mothers and fathers. Husbands lost wives, and wives husbands. This senseless slaughter of innocent civilians, a cruel and hate filled act inflicted upon defenseless citizens, was further exacerbated by the expressed celebration of American deaths by terrorists across the globe. Wives of New Jersey firefighters were forced to bury their loved ones against the background music of such choruses of joy. Parents of young, single women were caused to weep for their dead within earshot of the terrorist network’s bright eyed happiness. A generation of younger Americans was caused to carry into life lasting pictures of horror: a body, floating like a leaf, falling 100 stories…two young women, clasping hands in the fire of the 90th floor, and jumping hand in hand to their deaths…the greatest of human constructs in two giant towers rendered dust…a city paralyzed…a nation frightened…a culture permanently altered. Nineleven made us a people drenched in fear, anger, sorrow, and hatred. We have scarcely begun to absorb, to digest, or to reflect upon the experience.

3. The Only Thing We Have to Fear is Fear Itself

Robert Pinsky has given us poetry. Rowan Williams has written a short book. The television produced a docudrama. Of late, the movie industry is stirring to life with a film or two. Newspaper articles, now and then, appear and are gone. A collection of sermons from that week has been printed. There are the remaining struggles over the memorial.

But what about you? ‘Who do you say that I am?’

From the perspective of the pastoral theologian, we have hardly begun to work through the psychic, spiritual ground of this tragedy. The time honored cadences of avoidance, denial, and repression are readily apparent to the pastoral eye and theological ear. This is a tragedy, too. In some ways this is the greater tragedy.

Each of us has a slice of this pie. On August 27^th, I had determined to preach a bluntly simple sermon, two live parables, about going the wrong direction and making mistakes. Jesus told paradoxically simple parables. I followed, or tried to. But I must tell you that in the hours before that service, I did not know whether I would find the courage to say what needed saying. No, we do not underestimate the spiritual struggle for health in which we are all, intimately, involved. Each of us has as slice of this pie.

For since nineleven our theological hibernation—theological hibernation-- has allowed a series of actions that multiply the tragedy of the day into the tragedy of a lifetime. We have not sifted and settled our hearts about the horror of that day. In consequence, our national life has been subliminally formed and shaped by undigested angers, unreflective fears, impatient hatreds, and untamed sorrows.

How else, in retrospect, shall we explain the race to war without final evidence for its need? How else, in retrospect, shall we account for the abuses of power in military prisons? How else, in retrospect, do we understand a sudden celebration of victory when all the evidence pointed to its opposite? How else, in retrospect, do we think about a general election decided by votes garnered through the fear of, the specter of, gay marriage, of all things? How else, in retrospect, can we possibly explain the relative silence about casualties and collateral deaths, about maiming and civilian losses? It was our own suffering and survival of these very things that got us into the war in the first place. How else, in retrospect, can we fathom our neglect of our original motto, “meet violence with patient justice”? How else, in retrospect, shall we try to understand the fracture of freedoms hard won over two hundred and more years of American history?

On a more personal, local level, how else, in retrospect, do we analyze the conservative cast of our culture that affects every opportunity to change, every opportunity to grow, every responsible risk to take, every single investment in the future? What has become of us? Tell me: are you looser or tighter with your money since nineleven?

We have survived, when others did not. Can we say that out loud? We survived, when others died. Are we able to name that simple reality? Are we able to articulate and so escape the pervasive survivor’s guilt of this age?

4. Undercurrents of Healing

There are undercurrents of healing. Over dinner Wednesday we heard the recorded voice of Johnny Cash. It is remarkable, for instance, that the new film about Johnny Cash, well attended, is built squarely on a plot about survivor’s guilt. Cash’s father said, when Cash’s brother died, “the wrong boy died”. And the singer spent a lifetime healing from his own survivor’s guilt. He survived. His brother did not. He did. He poured his talent and art into lament and atonement.

Remember from last Sunday the contours of existential survivor’s guilt…

Here is a description of the effects of survivor’s guilt: “general anxiety, depression, inability to sleep, poor memory, difficulty concentrating, difficulty completing tasks, an inexplicable sense of guilt.” (Borgess). That sounds like life as we know it.

With birth survival, deliverance and survival down the birth canal, must come a kind of congenital survivor’s guilt, way down deeper than words, that we all, every human one of us, we all share. Not something we have done, but the air we breathe. All, all have been traumatized and stopped short of the Glory of God. Nineleven rekindles it.

This is our condition. “Like the beating of the heart, it is always present.” (Tillich). It? Tragedy, estrangement, sin, unbelief, hubris, concupiscence, separation, guilt, meaninglessness, despair, anxiety. For Peter, Luke, and Acts: especially existential survivor’s guilt. For you, your generation, your race, and your culture—the same. “It is experienced as something for which one is responsible, in spite of its universal, tragic actuality.” (Tillich)

Fair or not, we lived. Survival--strangely--brings a kind of guilt, irrational and unjust and useless, that nonetheless needs healing and pardon. Today we announce absolution for your survivor’s guilt. Kyrie Eleison. In Jesus Christ we are forgiven the fact that we survived. And we are ready to choose life, to choose the way of the future, that includes by the cross the recognition that such life will not be pain free. Good living is not cost free or cross free. We have the tenor voice of the evangelist, here at the crux of the Gospel. Mark has had to construct (so Haenchen, loc. Cit. and Weeden, loc.cit.) this passage to remind the later church of Jesus’ suffering servant role, and so, by extension, their own. (Weeden, Traditions in Conflict, 65ff).

Peter survived and thrived. Your generation survived and thrived. Your mother’s child—YOU—survived and thrived. Our country can too. But we will need to do the things that make for peace, for healing. Here they are. Once forgiven, we are thawed, freed. Now we can move, and we had better move fast. THE ONLY THING WE HAVE TO FEAR IS FEAR ITSELF.

5. Steps Toward Surviving Nineleven

The Boston Globe carried a discussion this week of survival. Don Murray, on 9/12/06, wrote about memory and surviving war. He wrote about ‘the guilt of the survivor’. Yesterday, a fellow veteran responded, insightfully, placing the phrase ‘the gift of survival’, alongside Murray’s ‘guilt of survival’. In a phrase, that is the gospel, the movement from guilt to gift. May it be ours, in the heart and in the mind, and in the soul, this day. Here are some steps along the path from guilt to gift. As one theologian has suggested, we are as a community to experience “the church as ritual sustenance”, for the journey of faith and life (RCNeville, The Symbols of Jesus, chpt 2).

1. Lament

First, we need to lament. Wail. Curse. Shout. Lament. Some of us will need to take time away from religion, until we can make sure our religion is real. Julie Nicholson, an English priest, lost her daughter to terrorists on July 7, 2005, in the London bombings. She had been ordained two years earlier. She resigned her pastorate. She could not reconcile her priestly duties with her refusal to forgive her daughter’s murderers. “I think forgiveness is a cheap grace. We have to be careful that we are not putting layer after layer on a deep and festering wound. I felt it after 9/11 and I feel it now. For a number of months, faith was more a hindrance than a help.” (New York Times, 5/6/06). The conscience of the believer is inviolable.

2. Protect

Second, it is bloodily clear that we have in this world people who will kill without qualm, and on a grand scale. There will be the possibility of further terror. We need to do all that is patient and just militarily to resist such terror. In a responsive way. Together with other nations. Without interest in gain. With exit strategies as a first priority in every case. We face a mortal threat, and with integrity we must face it down.

3. Assess

Third, we need to be realistic about the scope of this threat, by comparison with other past threats. Joseph Ellis has given one example. His view may not be yours, but may provoke you to compose yours: My first question: where does Sept. 11 rank in the grand sweep of American history as a threat to national security? By my calculations it does not make the top tier of the list, which requires the threat to pose a serious challenge to the survival of the American republic. Here is my version of the top tier: the War for Independence, where defeat meant no United States of America; the War of 1812, when the national capital was burned to the ground; the Civil War, which threatened the survival of the Union; World War II, which represented a totalitarian threat to democracy and capitalism; the cold war, most specifically the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which made nuclear annihilation a distinct possibility. Sept. 11 does not rise to that level of threat because, while it places lives and lifestyles at risk, it does not threaten the survival of the American republic (N
YTIMES, 3/06)

4. Divine

Fourth, we need honestly to assess what this does to our understanding of God. We need to think theologically about nineleven. God did not intervene on that day, nor is that the pattern of God’s participation in life. God must love freedom, says Bishop Tutu, because God leaves us free to go straight to hell if we so choose. Our understanding of God can not make space for a small, tribal divinity, even including some of our most cherished Christological affirmations. World religions are as close as the window on your cubical, as a plane approaches. It really matters—to you and your children---how 6 billion people think about God. It is a matter of life and death, of heaven and hell, right here on earth. We will need to become steadily and quickly adept at framing our faith posture in ways that accept, accommodate, and admire others. We shall need theologically, more than ever we have done in history, theologically to love our neighbor as our self. We shall need to be particular in our honest celebration of the faith of Jesus Christ without becoming exclusive to other genuine expressions of faith. Otherwise the kind of theological hatred of which we have our own personal and very local experiences will become the lingua franca of a death-prone world culture.

We want to build five theological bridges for every theological fence, five theological doors for every theological wall, five theological handshakes for every theological fist. We do not have to ‘win’. We do have to love. We shall need to love others as ourselves, by treating different theology as a new friend, not a certain opponent. When we feel the shackles of guilt falling away, we shall be able to summon the courage and energy to get on with the task at hand.

You can read one serious, hard book on world religions this year. You can find a way to offer gracious, unsolicited help to the poor, non-Christian world. You can develop a sensitivity to others, the other. You can see this post-modern world, with its fragmented face, not as a threat to be fought, but as an opportunity to be embraced. You can fund all this by tithing, and you can gain the power to tithe by selling your house and buying a smaller one, selling your car and buying a smaller one, limiting your purchases and leisure investments to a third of their current levels. It is only the unabsolved survivor’s guilt that keeps us from an heroic life. HERE THE GOOD NEWS: YOU ARE FORGIVEN FOR SURVIVING NINELEVEN. TE ABSOLVO. TE ABSOLVO. TE ABSOLVO. Now go and make your peace.

5. Appreciate

Fifth, we see in this shadow, dimly, the living and lively shades of others who have taken the narrow path. We are encouraged to remember them.

Look around , and you will see what I mean. In Toronto there lives the great Jewish teacher, and Holocaust survivor, Emil Fackenheim. Once he was asked, “How can you practice faith in God after the horror of the Holocaust?” (That may be the single most important theological question of our time.) His reply: “I practice faith, in the face of Holocaust, “in order not to permit Hitler any posthumous victories.” He survived, and survived his survival.

Look around. In Montreal there lives a great French Canadian teacher, Jean Vanier. He left the pastoral life to create a movement of caring ministries with developmentally challenged people. Working with survivors to help them survive survival. His organization, L’Arche, has attracted great acclaim, including the service at the end of life of Henri Nouwen.

Look around. When our first two little survivors arrived, we lived in a little cottage in Ithaca, around 1980. In the 1930’s, Pearl Buck and her husband had lived there as he served that church and studied at Cornell. I think of her celebration of Chinese survival, and her effort to save the survivors there, here evocation of birth in the rice paddies of Canton. With her contemporary William Faulkner, she trusted that the human race would not merely survive, but would prevail.

And whence the energy for these steps? Whence the power to continue, when weary feet refuse to climb? Whence the motive? This is our watch. ‘Who do you say that I am?’ We look for a rebirth of hope, real hope, global hope, a living common hope…

6. A Common Hope

This week we pause in prayer and quiet to honor those who lost their lives 5 years ago, and those who lost loved ones the same day. We meet this moment, in quiet, to honor and remember. In doing so we do not neglect, we do not forget, we do not side-step, those who have lost life and loved ones since. In service of God and neighbor, in service of God and country, in Tsunami and hurricane and disease, we remember those who have been hurt, in a world of hurt.

Rightly to honor those lost and those loved, and fitly to meet this moment, we shall need briefly to look out toward the far side of trouble. There is, we hope, a far side to trouble. We may watch from the near side, but there is a far side to trouble as well. That is our ancient and future hope. Dewey spoke of a common faith. Thurman preached about a common ground. Today we identify a common hope.

This is the hope of peace. We long for the far side of trouble, for a global community of steady interaction, an international fellowship of accommodation, a world together dedicated to softening the inevitable collisions of life. This is the hope of peace.

Without putting too fine a point upon it, this hope, the vision of the far side of trouble, is the hallmark of the space in which we stand, and the place before which we stand. If nowhere else, here on this plaza, and here before this nave, we may lift our prayer of hope. There is a story here, of peace.

Methodists are like everyone else, only more so, the saying goes—a wide and diffuse denomination, committed to a handshake and a song, and that shared ‘creed’ of ‘that which has been believed, always, everywhere, and by everyone (so, John Wesley).

Mahatmas Ghandi, walking and singing ‘Lead Kindly Light’, embodied this common hope. Ghandi
wrote: “I am part and parcel of the whole, and cannot find God apart from the rest of humanity”. A common hope of peace. Ghandi inspired and taught the earlier Dean of Marsh Chapel, Howard Thurman.

Howard Thurman, hands raised in silence, later wrote: “The events of my days strike a full balance of what seems both good and bad. Whatever may be the tensions and the stresses of a particular day, there is always lurking close at had the trailing beauty of forgotten joy or unremembered peace.” A common hope of peace.

Thurman taught King, whose stentorian voice fills our memory and whose sculpture adorns our village green. King wrote: “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality”. A common hope of peace. Martin Luther King inspired a whole generation of ministers, including the current Dean of this Chapel.

He (Robert Allan Hill) wrote: “We are all more human and more alike than we regularly affirm, all of us on this great globe. We all survive the birth canal, and so have a native survivors’ guilt. All six billion. We all need daily two things, bread and a name. (One does not live by bread alone). All six billion. We all grow to a point of separation, a leaving home, a second identity. All six billion. We all love our families, love our children, love our homes, love our grandchildren. All six billion. We all age, and after forty, its maintenance, maintenance, maintenance. All six billion. We all shuffle off this mortal coil en route to that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns. All six billion.”

This week, in memory and honor, we lift our hope for a day to live on the far side of trouble. We remember our ancient and future hope, a hope of peace.

7. Coda

He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave
He is wisdom to the mighty, He is honor to the brave
So the world shall be his footstool and the soul of wrong his slave
Our God is marching on.

posted in Frostiana: Poetry & Preaching, Uncategorized on 09.17.2006 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

Matriculation 2006

Boston University School of Theology

Preface

Many of us are quite new here. We hardly know each others’ names, let alone seeing each others hearts. We learn one name at a time, I and Thou.

At Chautauqua in 1999 I introduced myself to a frail saint, who asked my name, heard it, and chuckled. Hill is not a colorful enough name to become much of source of hilarity, but she chuckled still. She explained. “You know, I had such a fear of asking people their names again, once they had told me once, that I came up with a system that invariably worked. Rather than saying, ‘I have forgotten your name, please remind me’, or something equally honest, I would say, ‘now, tell me again, do you spell your last name with an ‘i’ or an ‘e’. My technique succeeded. Chuckle. Until I used it with a man who shares your surname. ‘Do you spell your last name with an ‘i’ or an ‘e’? He blustered. My name is Hill not Hell, you spell it H I L L!

Caught between our own identities, and visions for the future, both heavenly and hellish, we have arrived in Boston. Like Matthew, who in chapter 9 paints himself, as Velazquez did, into his own portrait, we are invited. Follow me. “He comes to us as one unknown as he did long ago, saying ‘Follow me,…”, wrote Schweitzer. The real moment of real invitation and real response is real apocalypse. Paul said he met Jesus ‘by apocalypse’. I am here by apocalypse. Another story for another day. You may be too. What are we doing here?

We are here for matriculation, to begin, to exchange on maternity for another. Here is a matriculation account. Vernon Jordan went to Depauw ( a small Methodist school for small Methodists) in Indiana, lead by various BU graduates. His dad, mom, and younger siblings drove him up and dropped him off their in Greencastle, “up south”, Martin King might have said, from their home in Lousiana. Weeping, his father said, “Vernon, we are not coming back until four years from now. You are here where your future opens. At graduation we will be here, sitting in the front row. This is your time. I have one word of advice. Read. When others are playing, you read. When others are sleeping, you read. When others are drinking, you read. When others are partying, you read.” Take, Vernon, take and read.

In mid September of 1976, perhaps 30 years ago to the very day, many of us stood in the common room at the Union Theological Seminary. I stood near Linda Clarke and Horace Allen, and among the ghosts of theologians past that haunted those halls as others of equal tremor do these. George Landes spoke for the Biblical Field. Sanders, Terrien, Brown, and Martyn sat behind him. “There has been some question about whether the Bible is relevant”, he said quietly, this exacting teacher of Hebrew, and noted Jonah scholar. “We in the Biblical field”—here he gestured meaningfully to his esteemed colleagues—“ask that before you settle that question, whether or not the Bible is relevant, that you…read it.” That is what I remember, in sum, from the days of entry into theological study. I cannot tell you, in retrospect, and though those days themselves were not easy, just how majestically meaningful the voices, many now dead, in that room have been to me. They are in my ears. They are here beside me. As the theological voices of this uniquely exciting, young, potent, new faculty of the Boston University School of Theology will be for many, for many years to come. May your retrospective in 2036 be similar. I hope you will remember, three decades hence, something similar. Whatever others do, in these precious days of somehow subsidized freedom, you read. Read. The savings habits of careful reading can become the difference between life and death.

Matthew on Taking and Reading

Matthew says go and learn, follow and discern, take and read. Matthew, the author of a dark Gospel, reflecting perhaps the persecutions of the late first century, has stitched his own matriculation to faith together with an apothegm (that is a word that you never use in a sermon) about reading. His entry involved reading. “Go and learn….” Why should anyone have needed to learn the meaning of such a fine and famous line from Hosea, about mercy and sacrifice? Evidently, the meaning was far from evident, by the time of Matthew’s suffering. More study was needed. Why? The experience of the fragile church of the late first century required new readings of the inherited traditions of the church. Here is the preacher’s task, to translate tradition into insights for effective living.

Each Synoptic passage is like a choral piece, including four voices. There is the Soprano voice of Jesus of Nazareth, embedded somewhere in the full harmonic mix. In Matthew 9, Jesus conflicts with the Pharisaic aversion to pagan inscriptions and iconography. There is the alto voice of the primitive church, arguably always the most important of the four voices, that which carries the forming of the passage in the needs of the community. From Mark to Matthew an insertion has arisen, the citation of Hosea 6:6. Evidently, the earliest church needed the fuller support of the prophetic tradition—mercy not sacrifice, compassion not holiness—as it moved farther out and away from the memory of Jesus. The tenor line is that of the evangelist. Matthew is here, marking his own appearance in the record. His work seems to reflect a connection to school, to scribes, perhaps as Stendahl said from across the river, years ago, to Qumran. The baritone is borne by later interpretation, beginning soon with Irenaeus, Against Heresies: “What doctor, when wishing to cure a sick man, would act in accordance with the desires of the patient, and not in accordance with the requirements of medicine?” ( Adv. Haer., in Richardson, ECF, 377) If our church music carries only one line, we may be tempted to interpret our Scripture with only one voice, and miss the SATB harmonies therein, to our detriment.

There are two steps in today’s Gospel. Take, Read. The first is invitation, offered and received. The second is education, prepared and planned. You have, somehow, washed up on this shore, out of the ranges of materialism all around. You have set aside more lucrative degrees, you have refrained from taking more reliable paths, and you have stepped aside from entering upon more pleasant routines. What were you thinking? You are here. Thanks to somebody, and some potent word of invitation. Then, too, you are here to learn. To learn what the ancient world still thought was obscure, even following Hosea and Plato: God delights in mercy. I (thelo) desire, delight in, enjoy, am happy for, celebrate, am passionate about…mercy.

One wonders just how pointed Matthew’s reference here is in regard to his own community. Is the contrast between the partnership of the gospel and the willingness to suffer in the coliseum? Or the choice between a hearty entrance into some of the culture around, rather than a sacrificial abstemiousness about the world? Or the happy delight in new deliverance, over against the trudging discipline of mature faith? What of mercy, and what of sacrifice? What pastoral visit, and what new learning has formed this passage? Go…and learn. Take…and read.

Point One: Take

Close reading is crucial to health.

One day, following the morning service, we visited a dear saint in her home. She had been in hospital that week, and sat recuperating in her parlor. Her family was with her. And she had a story to tell.

That Tuesday, she prepared to be taken, by ambulance, from one hospital to another, for a particular procedure. She is a fine, older Methodist lady, so she prepared herself with what dignity one can muster in a hospital bed, robed in a hospital gown, and alone in the corridor of life. A little makeup, a comb and brush, some careful adjustments of remaining raiment, glasses perched, smile shining.

She could see the elevator door open, and her stretcher moving out. Then the attendants clearly mentioned her name as they signed the paper work at the desk. The nurse motioned across the hall in the general direction of her room. She poised herself, prepared to be a good, courteous patient. Down the hall the men came, and she waved. They returned the gesture. To her door they rolled—and then, remarkably, rolled on by! They passed to the next room, 129 not 128—such a small difference, a room inhabited alone by a frail, kindly woman who is deaf as a post. “Mrs. Smith?” “YES” she replied, her volume in inverse proportion to her accuracy. Into the stretcher went the wrong woman, and down the hall they moved. My dear parishioner called out, used her buzzer, flailed her arms like a gypsy at the campfire. But in a New York minute they were gone, carrying away the wrong person. On the way home, following the procedure, someone apparently had the presence of mind to look at the stretchered woman’s wrist band, name tag. I wonder how the reader felt not to see the name Smith. A rare moment of revelation. In this case, little lasting harm occurred. Our hospitals, in fact, to my eye, given their hourly commitment to excellence and attention to detail, put other institutions to shame. We all know the fear of the wrong arm amputated, the wrong knee replaced, the wrong woman put in the stretcher. Physician’s malpracti
ce. But the news, good news, of medical malpractice is that you know soon—an hour, a day, a decade—what has happened, and you can endure it or correct it. So it goes with the physician’s malpractice.

Not so with the metaphysician’s.

Biological error lasts, at most, a lifetime. Theological error resides for three generations, or more. If, as ML King Sr. said, ‘it takes three generations to make a preacher’, then it also takes three generations, or more, to recognize and correct the effects of metaphysical malpractice. You cannot fully see its effect for 20 or 40 or 60 or 80 years. And it is a short way from birdie to bogie, from clean cuts to nicks and scratches in innocent organs, mistaken severations and amputations, blood spilled and shed in the wrong bed. Choose the physical mistakes, for the metaphysical are so much more insidious, more damaging, more real. Read carefully the signs of the times, and their distinctive differences…

There is a crucial difference between sacrifice and mercy. There is a crucial difference between holiness and compassion. There is a crucial difference between law and love. There is crucial difference between representation and redemption. There is a crucial difference between incantation and incarnation. There is a crucial difference between innocence and integrity. There is a crucial difference between independence and interdependence. There is a crucial difference between Christology and theology. There is a crucial difference between giving and tithing.

When we let the very worthy interests in representation eclipse the main work of the gospel, in redemption, we are making a surgical mistake…

We risk harm when we replace incarnation with incantation, forgetting that the Sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the Sabbath…

Integrity and holiness survive beyond innocence, so we might say: in singleness integrity; in partnership fidelity…

We risk harm when we replace just war with just war, interdependence with independence. The 2003 invasion of Iraq jettisoned our inherited experience codified in just war theory. It was preemptive, unilateral, imperial, unforeseeable, not responsive, multilateral, restorative, and limited…

We are still wallowing, as Doug Hall warned a generation ago (you see it does take a long time), in a Unitarianism of the Second Person of the Trinity…

There is a world of difference between habit and mercy, contribution and generosity, giving and tithing. The pervasive materialism of our culture receives its rejection in tithing, not in mere giving. The enduring sense of entitlement in our county receives its contradiction in tithing, not in mere giving. The abject loneliness of exurban life receives its denial in tithing, not in mere givin

These are crucial distinctions. How are we ever going to make them, and learn consistently to make them well, to avoid metaphysical misdirection?

Point Two: Read

How are we to take up the stressful work, the hard labor of careful practice?

You go and read.

Find yourself in front of the Sculpture of Arthur Fiedler, on a bench. Sit farther along the river, as the sun sets. Make permanent friends with the quiet pews of Marsh Chapel and the hidden crannies of the library. Locate that 2am diner breakfast that helped Fred Craddock become a preacher. Find the Arthur Fiedler reading room, a beautiful spot. When others are at war with administration, you read. When others are cursing their Bishops, you read. When others are finding fault with faculty hairstyles, you read. You may especially want to read those who have lived through other times of ruin. Reading frees you from the 21^st century. Reading cuts you loose from your own time and place. Others too have taught and preached in the ruins of the church….

I picture a bright autumn day. You are walking the emerald necklace, with lunch and a bag full of books.

*You start out a Charlesgate, thinking about reading today….

You live in a country in which 40% of the population can name the Three Stooges, and fewer than 5% the ten commandments. Literacy has a new meaning, referring not to those who can read, but to those who do read. We are preparing for teaching and ministry among those who do read, or will soon.

You think of a little office in the World Council of Churches, that of Paolo Freire. There he sat, brown bag lunch in hand. Who taught a continent, for their liberation, to read…

You remember from A River Runs Through It, the line that Methodists are Baptists who can read. But today, the literate are not those who can, but those who do read.

Close, careful reading, matters. I believe Colin Powell could testify to the difference between close, exacting reading, and visual learning. But he is only our best mirror upon ourselves. What have we been reading, as a people? Not enough world history. Not enough comparative religion. Not enough detailed daily news. Not enough economics or political science. Certainly not enough of the koine greek of Matthew 9, or the Hebrew verbs of Hosea 6.

*You pause to sit at the Fenway gardens to read in books from BUSTH, past and future…

The future of the globe relies not on those who can read, but on those who do. Allan Knight Chalmers taught his students here in the 1950’s to read a book a day.

Elmer Leslie, in the same decade, wrote, interpreting Psalm 1. He concluded his book on The Psalms with Psalm 1.

The psalmist first describes negatively the man who walks life’s good way, that is, by what he does not do. He refuses to walk as the morally loose, criminal element in society counsel him to do, or to stand where those congregate who have missed life’s true goal, or to sit as a willing crony among those who scoff at goodness. Then the psalmist turns to positive description and depicts a good man in terms of what he does. He delights in religion and meditates upon the Lord’s requirements as enjoined in the law, brooding over them by day and in the wakeful hours of the night. (op. cit. 432)

From Area A, learn with AT Pierson to “sanctify ambition, not crucify it”. A close distinction in a careful reading of life. From Area B, learn with Hildegard of Bingham to “become one’s ownmost”. From Area C, learn the nature of “good Samaritan” Christians. From Area D, learn with 19^th century Methodism the lasting danger of poor financial planning, and learn the merits of disciplined sacramental observance. Or, learn the history of 3 Timothy. All this and more, you can read in the books of your teachers in this fine school. Read what you want, what you need, when you want, as you need.

*You sit beside the lawn at Emmanuel College, to pray…

In our own reforming, newly reconstituted community here at BUSTH, we have been further chastened and strongly sobered by death coming as a thief in the night. In one sense, there is little we can say, either to others or to ourselves. We must hold our tongue, and stand, and, just like a preacher, wait and wring our hands. We do not know why these things happen. There is no explaining, finally, the depth of tragic loss. But we can be present to one another, and treat each other with an honest kindness, a kind honesty. And with a little humility about our own limitations. And with a happy grace that embraces every morning with a sense of wonder. G.K.Chesterton caught it right, as he did so often; “the world does not lack for wonders, but only for a sense of wonder.” This harrowing week does not lack for meanings, but only for a sense of meaning. We can trust the unseen God to give confidence, faith, and your lived capacity to withstand what you cannot understand. Sometimes that is all you have, the faith to withstand what you cannot understand. For the loss of a brother does not make this week, this matriculation, any less meaningful, or less meaning filled. In fact, it frames our study in the arch of eternity, and recalls for us the heart of ministry, which is the health of persons, the saving of souls. We are on the edge of eternity in every moment of life. You, teacher, you preacher, you pastor, are living testimony to the Eternal Now.

*You may pause and rest at the beginning of the Riverway to think practically about theological education…

The ministry will be upon you in three years, or less, or more. If you can start, by reading, to think theologically, and model that dimension of spirituality for your parishioners, you will have done them a world of good.

Students, read the bottom line. You need to leave seminary with no debt. Faculty, read for the fine truth that sets free. Teachers, love your subjects and your students, as Augustine advised. You have nothing to do but to know the truth. Administration, read the need for conviviality, with joy. Minimize debt, students. Marginalize delusion, faculty. Maximize community, administration.

Oh, I know, there is more to life than books. I remember the 1904 Discipline and its terse rebuke, “we would rather throw over all the libraries in the world, rather than let one soul perish”. The difference 100 years later is that for the world soul not to perish, you must become living libraries. Bradbury’s campfire at the end of Fahrenheit 451 comes to mind.

*You find a quiet corner along the river think about the impact of careful reading, and its absence…

This fall we shall witness a titanic struggle for the minds and hearts of America. We do not cast a single ballot in any direction. But the difference between a fear soaked visual bombardment, and a careful literate philosophy of peace, is close to the marrow of what will or will not save us. What some discern as the shift from a gender to a religious divide, should perhaps be seen as a literacy divide. It matters what hymns, prayers, liturgy, and certainly sermons people know.

One does not live by bread alone. Better read than dead. Better well hung than ill wed, better well read than spiritually dead.

Read now. Robert Kennedy did not have the freedom to do a research paper on Aeschylus the night Martin King was killed. He either had read or he hadn’t. He had. His 3 minutes in the Indianapolis rain were his greatest words, because he had read. There is very little left of the historic Protestant church in the Northeast. What there is clings for life to the words, and to the Word.

*In the glade you wonder about the nature of reading itself…

And what relationship shall the reader have to the read? Who among us does anywhere near enough to deconstruct our own various contexts? Is the text to have the sole divining voice, or is the reader king? What of the relationship between the unsaid and the uttered? In reading, how do ranges of power dance with colors of truth? Is the truth of Scripture the sole truth? Or one truth among many? Or primus inter pares? Or an anachronism altogether? How then do you read?

Misreading intelligence can land a nation in the soup of a civil war. Misreading tests can land a patient in the wrong surgical suite. Misreading accounts payable can land a business in bankruptcy. Misreading a traffic signal can land you in the ditch. Most of these have healing solutions available within one generation. Theological misreading lasts for several generations. It takes three of four generations to bring correction to a sincere or not so authentic theological misreading. Be careful how you read, for how read is how you think, and how you think is how you act.

*You may circle the pond at Jamaica Plains, eat lunch, and read especially from those who have read and preached in various conditions of the ruins of the church…

Here is an October Saturday in the sun. Read in the ruins. Take, Read. Read along with those who also rose to preaching amid the ruins of the church. You walk. You read BBTaylor. Leaving Church. You walk. You read K Phillips, American Theocracy. You walk. At Jamaica Pond you read P Beinhart, The Good Fight. Then you read Vaclev Havel, on almost anything. You read H Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited. Boston is your campus.

McCourt in Angela’s Ashes is really giving you a hymn to language. He sits by the hospital bed of his eleven year old girlfriend. She teaches him a poem, “The Highwayman”, and she dies. He is so hungry that he finds a soiled newspaper, with the remains of fish and chips, and licks the grease…and the words…off the paper. That is, McCourt’s lovely bildungsroman, Angela’s Ashes, ends with the young boy escaping his past, escaping his family of origin, escaping the biology that threatens always to become full destiny, and feeding himself. He is so hungry that he finds trashed newspapers in which the daily fish and chips have been wrapped, and he licks the papers clean of scraps and bits and crumbs and oil, until the words on the paper fill his mouth. His whole book is about his deliverance, how he learned to live by reading, how he learned to love through words.

*At last, as night is falling, you pause for a minute on the way home to read this last passage from Augustine’s Confessions…

I was saying these things and weeping in the most bitter contrition of my heart, when suddenly I heard the voice of a boy or a girl I know not which–coming from the neighboring house, chanting over and over again, “Pick it up, read it; pick it up, read it.” [”tolle lege, tolle lege”] Immediately I ceased weeping and began most earnestly to think whether it was usual for children in some kind of game to sing such a song, but I could not remember ever having heard the like. So, damming the torrent of my tears, I got to my feet, for I could not but think that this was a divine command to open the Bible and read the first passage I should light upon. For I had heard how Anthony, accidentally coming into church while the gospel was being read, received the admonition as if what was read had been addressed to him: “Go and sell what you have and give it to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven; and come and follow me.” By such an oracle he was forthwith converted to thee.

So I quickly returned to the bench where Alypius was sitting, for there I had put down the apostle’s book when I had left there. I snatched it up, opened it, and in silence read the paragraph on which my eyes first fell: “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof.” I wanted to read no further, nor did I need to. For instantly, as the sentence ended, there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty and all the gloom of doubt vanished away. (Outler translation, Book V111)

At dinner someone may ask what the matriculation sermon on Wednesday was about. You would say, well, I think he was singing a song of love for reading; I think he was raising a hymn of praise for reading; I think he was lining out a psalm of affirmation for reading…

Tole, lege…

posted in Frostiana: Poetry & Preaching, Uncategorized on 09.13.2006 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

Acts 10: 34-43

Marsh Chapel, Boston University

Preface

On Thursday the newspaper (NY Times 9/7/06) carried a narrative, a retrospective interview of NYC, five years after nineleven. Births, migrations, deaths have changed the city’s population, so that today New York City is a city of “newcomers and survivors”. The writer, Michael Brick, attended to themes of a biblical nature. Loss, empathy, anxiety, sadness. Especially, survival.

Today’s Gospel is a word about survival.

Peter, we are expected to remember, denied Jesus three times. His sermon is ostensibly remembered here today. But there was another day in Peter’s life, too. Cowering in the corner, he watched Jesus die. Peter survived. Maybe this is why his sermon here begins with testimony: “I truly understand…”

The early church, we are able to recall, watched the destruction of Jerusalem from afar. They saw the temple destroyed in 70ad. Luke and the church survived. Is this what fuels the memory here of Galilee and Judea and even Jerusalem? “Beginning in Galilee…”

This text, Acts 10, we are stunned to see, displays a potential, universal salvation. Any and all who have lived well, and lived to tell the story--are accepted. The race survives. Fear God and do what is right: “anyone who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to him”.

Yet there is more. What Jesus the Risen Christ brings is survival grace, survival forgiveness, the capacity for you to survive your survival. For those who survive often do so with a shadowy sense of –well, read the paper--guilt—irrational, unutterable, survivor’s guilt. Peter—forgiven in survival. Luke—forgiven in survival. All—forgiven in survival. We—forgiven our survival.

Remember the newspaper’s careful report about thought and emotion in the city of New York, five years after nineleven. NYC today is a community of newcomers and survivors. The former discover a capacity for empathy, the latter a way forward.

Peter survives, but he will carry with him always, as the Gospels testify, a memory, and a sense of guilt, about his darkest hour. The story of his life, and perhaps of ours, comes in leaves from the notebook of a survivor. Survivors’ guilt is a condition, that sense that ‘it could have, might have, should have been me’.

Peter raises a question for you about the greatest trauma you have personally have survived. You did survive. Good for you, you survivor, you. Now: have you had absolved the lingering sense of guilt that attends almost every survival?

Luke raises a question for you about the greatest trauma your generation has survived. Your generation did survive. Good for you, you survivor you. Now: have you all received absolution for the lingering sense of guilt that attends almost any survival?

Acts raises a question for you about the greatest trauma the human being has survived. Now: have you heard the word of absolution for the lingering sense of guilt that attends any survival?

You survived a car accident. You survived a war. You survived birth. Personal, generational, congenital survival. It is the Gospel that will empower you to survive your survival, too.

1. Peter and You: Personal Salvation

Have you named your greatest trauma? Death of a brother. Loss of a son in law. Expiration of a mother. Pink slip. Bone cancer. Hospital closing. A phone call from the Bishop announcing your displacement. Moving after 25 years. Abuse at an earlier age. A child’s suicide. An unexpected pregnancy. A plane crash. Divorce. A car accident. A run across an open field, with live ammunition coming at you. The sudden death of a classmate at the opening of term.

In the first three Gospels, it is centrally Peter who faces trauma like this. He has left all. He has followed. He has stayed. He has loved. He has waited in the dark courtyard. But then—his singular existential trauma—he has denied his Lord thrice. And Jesus has died and Peter has survived, watching the death of his Beloved.

The Gospel accounts of Peter’s denial, or betrayal, form the rich heart of the passion narrative. The pathos, the hurt with which the accounts are given reach to the depths of our hearts, even 2000 years later. Yet, through it all, Peter has survived. What remains for Peter, and for us, is to learn how to live as survivors, to survive our own survival.

I am not a psychologist, nor the son of a psychologist. But I know that “survivor’s guilt” is real. Do you remember the film “
Ordinary People” (based on Judith Guest’s novel), about two brothers who capsize in a boat? One dies and one survives. Mary Tyler Moore oversees a spotless home where “everything is in its proper place—except the past.” Berger, the counselor says at one point: “a little advice about feelings kiddo, don’t expect it always to tickle.” Conrad, the survivor, very nearly takes his own life, saved at the last by wise, loving, intervening words of his counselor, and friend, who asks repeatedly, “what is it that makes you feel so bad?” The answer, at last: “I survived.”

Never doubt the saving power of personal presence and a word fitly spoken.

You too have survived. Something. Some years ago we were grieving the Columbine tragedy. The kids there testified, truly, that a strange guilt followed their grief. This is the tragic guilt of the innocent, survivor guilt. “Megan hid her tears behind sunglasses: ‘I just feel so lucky to still be here.” Greg Martinez said, “You almost feel guilty, about, you know, having your kid get out.” Their counselor said those who feel guilty for making it out alive “need to be reassured that they can celebrate their survival.” (AP, A Levinson, 4/99).

Here is a description of the effects of survivor’s guilt: “general anxiety, depression, inability to sleep, poor memory, difficulty concentrating, difficulty completing tasks, an inexplicable sense of guilt.” (Borgess).

That sounds a lot like human life in general!

In the light of Resurrection, Peter finds the power not only to survive but to prevail. He finds the power to enter a new life, to change, to risk. He finds courage that will take him beyond mere survival and will help him travel throughout the known world, and, if legend serves us, to die a martyr in the far off city of Rome. He survives his own survival.

Here is a promise for all of us. Whatever lingering survivor’s guilt attends our survival through trauma, here is a power that frees us for a new life, beyond that great past tomb.

Are you ready to survive your own survival?

Even more. Something from that trauma you may fashion into a great gift for others, this side of Resurrection. Your loss will sensitize you to others. Your illness, to that of others. Your demotion, your failure, your dislocation—these now are gifts in your love for others.

For something happened, to Peter, that took a suffering survivor, bitterly weeping at the foot of the cross, and made him a fisherman for God, on whom the whole church has been built. What happened? Something happened. Something that saved Peter from his own survival.

2. Luke and Vietnam: Generational Salvation

What is true of individuals like you and Peter, is also promised today to generations, like yours and Luke’s. Again, I ask. What is single greatest trauma your generation has survived?

For the people to whom Luke speaks, now toward the end of the first century, one great generational trauma overshadows their life. Thirty years earlier, in the year 66ad, the Jews began a tragic, and losing, conflict with Rome. The war ended with the burning of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple.

Did you ever wonder why Rome, not Jerusalem, is so central to Christianity? Jesus, Peter, John, James, Paul—all Jews, all focused on Jerusalem. The earliest church—that in Jerusalem. But by Luke’s time, all that has been destroyed. And Luke’s church is adrift. They have survived the destruction of Jerusalem. Others have died, including perhaps the brother of Jesus, James. But they have survived this central generational trauma. Now the question is whether they can survive their own survival.

Have you named your generation’s greatest trauma?

For one generation today, located halfway between my father and me, that trauma was Vietnam. This conflict, in the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta, on the grassy lawns of Kent State, in the classrooms of Columbia University and the board rooms of America, traumatized a whole generation. The trauma is not limited to one political perspective. All, all have been traumatized, to retranslate Romans 5: 12. All, the whole generation, all have been traumatized and stopped short of the glory of God.

Still, as a generation, you have survived. You survivor, you. The Chevy 409 is gone. But here is the Chrysler Sebring. Arnold Palmer is retired. But here is Tiger Woods. You got through. Not all did. But you did. Do you come through with some generational survivor’s guilt? Does it continues to carry the potential to hobble, maim and kill. For another generation, the trauma was that of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. (Still a great film). For you, it is Coming Home, The Killing Fields, Apocalypse Now, Platoon. Public trust, the place of authority, community commitments, and your relationships to other generations are overshadowed by trauma past. Yes, you survive. But the Easter gospel brings power to survive your own survival.

Here is historical fact. Something happened to Luke that 60 year later still had the power to take a generation like Luke’s, a church that had lost its Jewish moorings and was adrift in a punishing and forbidding culture, and make a movement that became an Empire wide community, full of men and women ready to die in public rather than call Caesar God.

Even more. Something from that generational trauma you will be able to carry forward, from many perspectives, to make a new way, for a new day. God had a purpose for Luke and his generation.

Resurrection is cutting you free from generational survivor’s guilt. This is unspeakably good news, like fine wine, 30 years in the making. And one day, a generation we have hardly seen in church since they were teenagers will come home, surviving their own survival. Coming home, this generation situated half-way between my father and me. Coming home out of survival guilt, to explore the use of a great wave of treasure, a huge transfer of wealth (and I would like to speak to some of you personally!). Coming home to a new rebirth of wonder, and a new global community, with one shepherding Lord.

How will this occur? In church. But the church is so…. Yes, the church is always both a representation and a distortion of the divine. But how can you love God and hate the things of God? How can you come near to God at a distance from the grace of God? How can you experience God without praying, singing, communing, hearing, giving, serving? No, you will have to find a church. Maybe not this church, but a church.

3. Christ and Humanity: Congenital Salvation

Could it be that the salvation promised to you and Peter, the power given to your generation and Luke’s, is also conferred upon the human race?

For a third time I ask a question. What is the single greatest trauma shared by the human race? All of us together?

Peter runs to the tomb, sees the linen clothes, marvels and wonders. It is Paul who puts the unspeakable into words. He reminds us that all have been traumatized and fallen short of God’s glory. Individuals, generations, races—all for some unknowable reason—are tinged with survivor’s guilt. It is an irrational, inaccurate, unfair, untrue sense of ennui, gonewrongness, fallenness, exile. It is what the Bible means by sin—not something we do, but the air we breathe. Paul understands that God has subjected the whole creation to futility, for the final purpose of saving the whole creation.

Just here, St. Luke in Acts has much to give us. Luke emphasizes the will and plan of God. Luke explores the nature of the Kingdom of God, on earth as it is in heaven. Luke proclaims as far back as Christmas Eve: “all flesh shall see it together.” Luke repeatedly uses a lit
tle greek verb, found also in verse 7 of today’s reading, dei—it is necessary, it is purposefully required, it is providentially needed, it is necessary. Luke holds all life in three parts: the time of Israel, the time of Jesus, and the time of the Church. For Luke, this time—our time—is the greatest of times, the time of the Kingdom of God, on earth as it is in heaven. For Luke, there abides a twin craving, held at the heart of the universe: a craving for a faith that appeals to culture and a culture that is attractive to faith. When church and city, faith and culture dance together on the bandstand of brotherhood—that is the Kingdom of God! And Luke, with scholarly Paul (Gal 3) and wondering Peter (Acts 10), means this for all people. All.

What great trauma do all people share?

Birth.

You by virtue of your lonesome journey through birth are an heroic survivor. You by virtue of your gestation for nine long months, are an heroic survivor. You by virtue of your sudden, violent and cataclysmic deliverance, through natal Red Sea waters, are an heroic survivor. You made it. You got through. Others may not have. But you did. You survivor, you. And there you are, crying and all messy, pink and little fisted and wrinkled and wailing to beat the band. You survived.

Not unscathed, but undefeated. Bloodied but unbowed. I have not read it anywhere, and have not time to write my own book, but I think that with birth survival must come a kind of congenital survivor’s guilt, way down deeper than words, that we all, every human one of us, we all share. Not something we have done, but the air we breath. All, all have been traumatized and stopped short of the Glory of God.

This is our condition. “Like the beating of the heart, it is always present.” (Tillich, STIII, 188). It? Tragedy, estrangement, sin, unbelief, hubris, concupiscence, separation, guilt, meaninglessness, despair, anxiety. Existential survivor’s guilt. “It is experienced as something for which one is responsible, in spite of its universal, tragic actuality.” (Tillich).

As Jim Croce might have written, had he survived: I’ve got those steadily depressing, low down, mind messing, existential post-partem blues.

Hear the promise of salvation from survivor’s guilt. You just may survive your own survival. The resurrection saves us from the lingering effects of birth by giving us—second birth. “Born to raise the sons of earth, born to give them second birth.” Friends, on Easter we are set free to live in the Kingdom of God, a kingdom of love and light!

God is cutting us free from congenital survivor’s guilt. We are set loose to risk, to try, to change, to laugh, to weep, to become who we were meant to be. Irenaeus: “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”

For Peter, for Luke, for the church….For you, for your generation, for you race…

Something happened. Something that even 2000 years later has men and women saying prayers, giving money, offering time, swinging hammers, sorting clothes, attending meetings, singing hymns, loving neighbors and on every day in every way building the kingdom of God. Luke would love it. What happened? Something happened, something that opens life up wide and frees us from our original survival and saves us for a new life, a new way, a new creation, a new heaven and a new earth!

You survived trauma, Vietnam, and birth. You will survive surviving 9/11 too. (Come next week.)

Next week, once we have survived nineleven again, we shall consider the gospel as it speaks to the single greatest trauma our nation, recently, has faced….Then we shall sing…

The World Trade Center may fall, but no terror can topple the World Truth Center, Jesus the Christ.

The World Trade Center, hub
of global economies, may fall, but the economy of grace still stands in the World Truth Center, Jesus the Christ.

The World Trade Center, communications nexus for many, may fall, but the communication of the gospel stands, the World Truth Center, Jesus Christ.

The World Trade Center, legal library for the country, may fall, but grace and truth which stand, through the World Truth Center, Jesus the Christ.

The World Trade Center, symbol of national pride, may fall, but divine humility stands, through the World Truth Center, Jesus the Christ.

The World Trade Center, material bulwark against loss, may fall, but the possibility in your life of developing a spiritual discipline against resentment (as Reinhold Niebuhr, author of Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic) still stands, through the World Truth Center, Jesus the Christ.

posted in Frostiana: Poetry & Preaching, Uncategorized on 09.10.2006 at 12:00 pm