By Marsh Chapel

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John 16: 4-15

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When the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you into all the Truth.

Spirit Days at Commencement

Pentecost, today, is the day of the Spirit.  Yet they are all spirit days are they not?  All our days, all, are spirit days. Especially, listening caringly to the Gospel of John, we are empowered and emboldened to proclaim that all days, each day, every day, they are all spirit days.  The Bible tells us so, as does Shakespeare, Scripture and the Bard being the two best sources for learning in college, and out of college:

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players:

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages.

On arrival in Boston, some years ago, we had no grandchildren. Then they came, one by beautiful, blessed one, beginning at the end of our first year.  As she grew, she spoke, one of her first words, beneath the great CITGO logo, was, ‘sign’.  Then she walked, and walked up and down every outside staircase on Bay State Road, one by one, counting the steps.  Looking for her grandfather, off at work, she later asked, ‘Where is…somebody?  Is…somebody…coming home?’  For once, her granddad was really ‘somebody’.  Now she is 13.  You will hear from her in a spirited moment, as so fully we did hear the spirit through Commencement at Boston University this last week.

One Club launched a free laundry demonstration, on a recent Friday noon, on Marsh Plaza.  Our staff made playful comments about…a rising tide lifts all boats…whisk them away…what do they have to gain by it …Yes, it was Ajax…a whole laundry list…Reap the bounty…We were going a little stir crazy, fifty four weeks later…but at the table next to them the Sojourners Campus Ministry was writing thank you notes to social workers, and encouraging others to do the same.

Spirit Days.

Maria Erb now leads a new department at Boston University, named the Newbury Center, which is devoted to supporting first generation students, those who are first in their families to attend college.  It is a center so in keeping with the heart, spirit, tradition, history and soul of BU.  She said a few days ago:  This is my vocation, my work with first generation students.  This is my calling.  This is my ministry.  I view it as a form and type of ministry, whereby I live out my faith.  Could someone say ‘amen’ to that?

Spirit Days.

After a stirring peroration offered to Seniors, of the best ways to live and thrive into the future, a fine faculty member added, as a post script, with humor:  And also…get a cat.  At that same Senior Breakfast, our friend and colleague Dean Elmore said, ‘My mentor, George Houston Bass, in “Breer Rabbit Whole” had this closing thought that has stayed with me:

May joy, beauty and kindness be with you,

Day after day. Night after night.

May joy walk beside you,

Let kindness guide you,

May beauty surround you,

May you always want to say,

To friends, kinfolk and strangers you meet along life’s way,

May God bless and keep you each and every day.

Spirit Days.

Graduate Soren Hessler, in his fine remarks for THIS I BELIEVE, said… I believe that the modern American research university, so often built upon the educational foundation of training Christian clergy, does well to remember its roots in cultivating personal character and equipping graduates to care for the needs of the world. I believe a quality professional education, regardless of discipline must “Unite the pair so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety: learning and holiness combined.”  Graduate Afsha Kasham, said, … Being a woman has taught me a lot. But it’s mostly taught me to speak up, even if my voice shakes. Maybe they won’t believe you, but at least you’ll know that you tried.

Spirit Days.

And for Sunday’s Commencement itself:   our pioneering neighbor, the creator of the Moderna vaccine, urging us to be comfortable being uncomfortable; to learn to weather rejection; and to stay curious, always thinking ‘what if?; the head of the Boston Food Bank bluntly asking us, ‘what are you willing to really work for?’; a congresswoman bringing back to this University the voice, the voice both in content and in calling, of Coretta Scott King.

Then Monday, to hear first with the Army near Faneuil Hall, then with Navy on The USS Constitution—to be so located for commissioning!…it is like being ordained a priest at the Vatican or a preacher on John Wesley’s porch—the repeated solemn vow, taken by such young courageous women and men—to support and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic.  Can you hear that America, in May of 2021? To support and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic.

Spirit Days in John

These are spirited voices, Johannine voices.  And John is so different, so radically inspired, so different and new and spirited.  Spirit abounds especially, even perhaps in full measure, only in John.  Only John places Jesus in Jerusalem thrice.  Only in John does Jesus raise the dead at mid Gospel—“Lazarus, come out!”  Only in John does Jesus preach for five chapters on the last evening, washing feet rather than celebrating mass.  Only in John does Jesus make the Jerusalem road fully and only a road of glory, from Palm Sunday to Easter.  Only in John does Jesus say, “In my Father’s House there are many rooms…”  He is going home, home.  And somehow, again strangely, we know the way where he is going.  For it is our way, too.  Only in John does Jesus walk serenely to Golgotha.  Only in John does Jesus walk to death like God striding upon the earth.  Only in John does Jesus pronounce GLORY from the jaws of death.  Remember his dying word.  Not “eli, eli” as in Matthew and Mark.  Not “Father forgive them” as in Luke.  Simply, serenely, powerful, triumphantly, yes, gloriously, he says, in John, “It is finished.”  It is done, completed, perfected—finished.  He dies to rise, and go home, making a place a space for the whole human race.  Spirit fully flourishes only in John

‘(Those who composed John) had a burning conviction that they had been given the truth (led into all truth) and that through this truth they would come to enjoy a freedom that would release them from the constraints to which they were subjected: ‘the truth will set you free’’(John Ashton, 95)

Conscious as they were of the continuing presence in their midst of the Glorified One, no wonder the community, or rather the evangelist who was its chief spokesman, smoothed out the rough edges of the traditions of the historical Jesus…(They) realized that the truth that they prized as the source of their new life was to be identified not with the Jesus of history but with the risen and glorious Christ, and that this was a Christ free from all human weakness.  The claims they made for him were at the heart of the new religion that soon came to be called Christianity. (199)  The difference between John’s portrait of Christ and that of (the other gospels) is best accounted for by the experience of the glorious Christ constantly present to him and his community (204)

The stark strangeness, the utter difference of John from the rest of the Bible we have yet fully to admit.  But when we get to the summit, John 14 and following, we see chiseled there in ice and covered fully with wind snow, an enigmatic, mysterious riddle:  Spirit, sweet Spirit, Paraclete.  The endless enemy of conformity.  The lasting foe of the nearly lived life.  The champion of the quixotic.  The standard bearer of liberty.  The one true spirit of spirited truth.  Yet we cannot even give the history of the term, nor fully define its meaning, nor aptly place it in context, nor finally determine its translation.  Paraclete eludes us.  Paraclete evades us.  Paraclete outpaces us.  Paraclete escapes us.

Notice that the Spirit is given to all, not just to a few or to the twelve, definitely not.  Notice that it is Spirit not structure on which John relies.  Notice it is Spirit not memory which we shall trust (good news for those whose memory may slip a little).  Notice that Spirit stands over against what John calls ‘world’ here—another dark mystery in meaning.  Notice that the community around John’s Jesus is amply conveyed a powerful trust in Spirit.

Spirit Days in Life

Now the granddaughter, with whom we began at the first of life’s stages is 13 and crossing into another, and mid-Covid her local news media picked up her spirit, as she honored a retiring crossing guard:

I am writing to you because my friend…and I learned that the Crossing Guard on Monroe, Vicky, by CVS is retiring soon and this Tuesday… is her last day. Vicky has been the crossing guard for 40 years here at Brighton. She was there on our first day of sixth grade and she has always been so kind to us.

Every morning, she greets by name on our walk to school and asks us if we have anything exciting happening. She wishes us good luck on any tests that we have, and gives us advice about school and life. When we come home, she asks us about our tests, or wishes us a happy weekend. She is almost a grandmother to all of the kids she keeps safe each and every day. Vicky has been the most amazing crossing guard to us, and we will be very sad to see her go.

You will take your nourishment as you find it, day by day.  As that quintessential romantic Alexander Herzen wrote, “Art and the summer lightning of individual happiness—these are the real goods”.

Spirit Days.  Spirit Days.  Spirit Days!

Speaking of art and of the summer lightening of individual happiness, we close with a little song.  Our own daughter, a generation ago, afforded us on stage the tune, the lyrics, and the inspiration.  Our children teach us, as she has taught us, on stage.  She has taught us the power of the spoken, live spoken word, to intervene, and alter, and make new.  It takes a while to raise parents right, but over time, we sometimes learn, learning that all days of life in every one of the seven stages are spirit days.  No one says such lightly, after the last fourteen months.  After more than a year of loss, we may be able to hear something of spirit from those who have known loss too.  After this last year, those who have suffered loss, those of us who have suffered the loss of loved ones, may yet await spirit days to come.

This week I remembered our daughter’s stage voice and presence, from some years ago, in a play about love and marriage and death and spirit.  After a lifetime of loss and disappointment, and the recent deaths of their spouses, two very elderly folks fall in love at the end of musical (I Love You.  You’re Perfect.  Now Change.)  Where is life there is hope, and where there is hope there is life and where there is spirit there is life and hope together. In the song, SHE SPEAKS first, and he answers second:

I’VE GOT SOME PROBLEMS, MY HEALTH’S NOT GOOD.

Well at our age that’s understood

I’VE GOT ARTHRITS

Flairs up in June

I’VE GOT BRONCHITIS

I’ll get that soon.  No matter.   I can live with that.

I’VE HAD A BYPASS

Well I’ve had two

I DIE MY HAIR

It looks nice blue

MY WAYS ARE SET

Well, people change.  I find you sexy

I FIND YOU STRANGE

No matter.  I can live with that.

I OFTEN THINK OF THOSE I MISS

Sometimes I have to reminisce

FRIENDS KEEP DYING BUT I’M STILL STRONG

It still does hurt, but not as long

MY KIDS DON’T VISIT

Mine never leave

I MAKE A MEATLOAF YOU WON’T BELIEVE

I tell tall tales

I TELL THE TRUTH

I drink skim milk

I DRINK VERMOUTH

No matter.  I can live with that.

I LIKE THINGS CLEAN.  I SCRUB AND WASH

I’ve got a garden, I grow some squash

I KEEP IN SHAPE I MOW THE LAWN

I wake up late

I’M UP AT DAWN

No matter.  I can live with that.

I WILL BE BURIED AT MY JIM’S RIGHT.

Next to my Sue is my gravesite

BUT I’M STILL HERE WITH MUCH TO GIVE

Someday I’ll die

FOR NOW I’LL LIVE

I’ll ALWAYS LOVE JIM

And I my Sue

I JUST DON’T KNOW

You think I do?

(Together): No matter. I can live with you. No matter. I can live with you.

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players:

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages.

Pentecost, today, is the day of the Spirit.  Yet they are all spirit days are they not?  All our days, all, are spirit days. Hear good news: When the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you into all the Truth.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 05.23.2021 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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John 15:9–17

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posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel, The Rev. Dr. Soren Hessler, This I Believe on 05.9.2021 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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John 15: 1-8

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May we respond to Easter in worship, in history and in life

Responding in Worship

Let us respond to Easter in worship.

For here we are, just for a moment, in worship.  Hearing the hymns of Easter.  Hearing the Easter word.  We yearn for the day, may it be soon, when we can sing with each other, greet each other face to face, offer each other a Methodist handshake.  For now, we rely on daily prayer; we gather outside for morning prayer; we especially listen together, drawn in from around the globe, come Sunday at 11am.  Right now.

Others too have known the yearning of and for worship.  The beloved community which gave birth to our Gospel today did so. For a moment, move by the imagination to a borrowed upper room, say in Ephesus, maybe in the year 90ad.  Candles burn.  A meal has been offered and received.  There is among the fifty, say, there present, a gradual settling, a quiet.  It may be a long quiet, starting from that late first century numinous circle and ending—hic et nunc, here, now.   Acute pain abides in this circle, the pain of the loss of a beloved leader, the pain of the loss of a venerable religious lineage, the pain of the loss of a prized eschatological hope—love, faith, and hope, lost.  Our global radio circle today bears too a shared pain, the global trauma of global pandemic.

Yet as the circle settles, a prayer and reading and a further silence and a long hymn sung, THE ONE who has held them…SPEAKS.  Imagine the early church, small and struggling, in worship, in a borrowed upper room.  In the silence and in the singing and in then the antiphonal, mournful and joyful, worship antiphon.  Were these Gospel words first sung?

I am…light, life, resurrection, way, truth, Good Shepherd, door, bread, water.

I am…the true vine. You shall know…’the truth’.  That they may know Thee the only ‘true’ God.

Every heart has secret sorrows, especially now, by Covid time.  Every land has cavernous grief, especially now, by Covid time.  Back then, for the antiphonal, ancient singers of our scripture, the hurts were dislocation, disappointment and departure.  And they named them.  Can you name yours?  Have you named your hurt?

Hear the Easter antiphon: ‘Abide in me…As I abide in you’.  Stay. Remain.  Settle.  Dig in. Locate.  Vines take a long time to grow.  But so?

John’s portrait of Jesus arose from his constant awareness, which he shared with members of his community, that they were living in the presence of the Glorified One.  So dazzling was this glory, (repeat) that any memory of a less-than-glorious Christ was altogether eclipsed. (J. Ashton) (The Gospel of John and Christian Origins).

With the ancient beloved community, can you lift a muted alleluia?  Every hymn, for all its joy, carries a guttural memory of acute hurt.  In worship, today, can you pray with joy without forgetting the brokenness out of which that alleluia comes?  Let Charles Wesley, let Charles Tindley, let the poor of your own ancestral family’s older past guide you.

Let us respond to Easter in worship.

Responding in History

Let us respond to Easter in history.

What about our place in history, our communal responsibility in real time?  A surface glide across Holy Scripture will not allow, cannot provide gospel insight.  You want to sift the Scriptures.  You want to know them inside and out, upside and down, through and through and through, and then, it may be, by happenstance or grace or the clumsy luck of a very human preacher, you may hear a steadying, saving word.  Look back an Easter month. Not activism alone, but engagement matters most in history.

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

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

On April 11, the Gospel in chapter 20 revealed the Spirit, elsewhere called Paraclete or Advocate, come upon us, received and with it received the forgiveness of sins.  But at the heels, nipping, comes along 1 John in chapter 2, which names the Paraclete or Advocate not as Spirit but as Jesus Christ—the righteous—whose commandments all are to keep, on pain of disobedience become lying, and truth taken flight.  Both read on the same Sunday, within minutes of each other, even as they face each other, in loving disagreement.

On April 18, the Gospel Alleluia still lingering with the Lord and God risen, the letter in Chapter 3, on the qui vive and on the attack, spells out again in no uncertain terms that the righteous do the right, handsome is as handsome does. Both read on the same Sunday, within minutes of each other, even as they face each other in loving disagreement.

On April 25, the Gospel in chapter 10 acclaimed the pastoral image of the Good Shepherd, whose one glorification on the cross is meant to obliterate the need of any other such, even as the Letter, worried, worried out in chapter 3, a long and sorry recollection of Cain—Abel’s one-time brother—and the demands of love from one who laid down his life, and with whom and for whom we are then meant to do something of the same.  ‘Let us not love in word and speech but in deed and in truth’, says 1 John 3, when the whole of the Gospel says simply ‘love’, says that words outlast deeds, and that speech, that of the glorious Risen, ever routs works. Both read on the same Sunday, within minutes of each other, even as they face each other in loving disagreement.

And now today, May 2, when and where our one Great Gospel, the Spiritual Gospel, counsels ‘abide’ and ‘remain’ in chapter 15, just here the letter of 1 John in chapter 4, fearing antinomial abandon, appends to his own most beautiful love poem, the charge again of lying, of lack of love of brother, of schism that surely created this letter, 1 John, as the spiritualists and the traditionalists, the Gnostics and the ethicists, parted company, one toward the free land of Montanus and Marcion, the other toward Rome and the emerging church, victorious, against which the Gospel was born, bred, written and preached. Both read on the same Sunday, within minutes of each other, even as they face each other in loving disagreement.

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

The blessed Scripture bears incontrovertible, conflicted witness.  Easter is a conflicted, and so a muted, Alleluia, and was so already 20 centuries ago, as the resurrection cross of Jesus was raised up, in mournful joy, in a real joy made real by its honesty about sorrow.  Real joy becomes real by its honesty about sorrow. For us to move out of Covid time and on into joy, we shall need honesty about what we have lost.  And whom. (repeat). The Scripture, read hard and deep, can help us.  For history is endless contention and intractable difference, including religious history, perhaps especially including religious history.  To respond to Easter in history, for you, will mean bearing the cross of endless contention and intractable difference, the daily labor of history and community, where ‘the best of intentions run afoul of circumstance or chance’.

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

Let us respond to Easter in history.

Responding in Life

Let us respond to Easter in life.

The Gospel prepares us for the lifelong work of responding to Easter.  The Gospel tells about resurrection largely on the basis of experience.  Experience and troubles, troubles that provoked lasting question.

The Gospels and Letters respond in life to Easter, in a muted alleluia, in a sober acclamation.

An Empty Tomb

The church is alive they acclaim.

Especially when we come to celebrate the life of a dear sister or brother in faith, we have a powerful experience of the church alive across the river of death. The church is the body of Christ. We affirm a bodily, physical resurrection, tasted for a time in church. I give you Emily Dickinson:

This World is not Conclusion.
A Species stands beyond---
Invisible as music—
But positive, as Sound---
It beckons and it baffles—
Philosophy—don’t know—
And through a Riddle, at the last—
Sagacity must go (E Dickinson)

Or, as one of our wise beyond years undergraduates said this spring, ‘I will be careful with any kind of hope that I have’.

A Trumpet Blast

The future is open they acclaim.

There is, that is, a spiritual resurrection in your future.

Once, we met a psychiatrist who said his work was to offer the possibility that stories might have a different ending. You know that story of your life at its worst, the one that seems to have the same ending no matter how you live and how you tell it? That story can have a different ending, another conclusion. It can.

Your repeated narrative of inherited addiction can be overcome in sobriety.

Your national adolescence in forgetting the limits of power can be overcome in a more collegial, humbler, more mature foreign policy.

Your usurpation can give way to response. Your isolation can give way to community. Your imperialism can give way to justice. We can learn lessons from our experience.

Your religious amnesia about what is fun in faith—giving and inviting—can be lifted like a fog at dawn, and you can sing out your soul.

Things can, and will in Christ, be better for you and for us. That repeated tale of employment and unemployment, love and loss, relationship and rejection can change. The cycle can be broken, when what is in place is invaded by what is taking place.

An Existential Awakening

Love is real they acclaim. In this way, at least for once, the letter surpasses the Gospel, the child outdoes the parent:

⁷ Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. ⁸ Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. ⁹ God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. ¹⁰ In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. ¹¹ Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. ¹² No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.

Who would or could or should say more?

Let us respond to Easter in life.

Coda

The church is alive. The future is open. Love fills the heart. Foretastes of heaven. If the heavenly banquet has this menu, perhaps we need over these few earthly years to acquire a certain taste for certain things, faith and hope and love.

May we respond to Easter in worship, in history, and in life?  It is an Easter call to the altar.  It is your Easter altar call.

So, dear friends, then travel with a little imagination…Imagine Eucharist at Marsh Chapel.  Stand to sing… Pause to reflect… Step out into the aisle… Look at and look past Abraham Lincoln and Francis Willard…Receive cup and bread, bread and cup… Kneel at the altar to pray… Stand in communion with the communion of saints…Here is the bread and cup of friendship…Imagine, a congregation reciting together a creed, a psalm, a hymn, a poem.  Imagine, if you are willing, a congregation currently in diaspora, but just now, by the word spoken and heard, a gathered and thus addressable community, you and I and all together, able to respond to Easter.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 05.2.2021 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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1 John 3:16–24

John 10:11–18

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

Personal Faith

The Christian life is a daily combination of personal faith and social involvement (repeat).  Deep personal faith and active social involvement.

While personal faith is not merely individual faith, nonetheless, it is in persons, like you, that faith is received, and known, and nourished.   There is no hiding here, no hiding behind an unconsidered ignorance, nor behind a well-tempered philosophy, nor behind a mountainous and real hurt, nor behind sloth.  Your faith is yours, especially when it is about all you have left to go on.

So, you will continue, brightened by Easter, to develop and practice your faith.  We are not meant to live in Lent.   We are meant to live in Easter.  The difference Easter makes comes in part by way of a full body embrace of your own personal faith.  Let us in Easter spirit embrace the faith we have been given.

We know God to be a pardoning God.  We hope to be made whole in this lifetime.

Knowing pardon, seeking wholeness, holiness, can you creatively and even at some risk, work with another whom you think needs your pardon, I beg your pardon, but who may himself think you need his?  Just how sharp is your faith in its faithful practice of what we pray, Come Sunday, ‘forgive…as we forgive’?

Longing for wholeness, can you creatively and even at some risk, take up work that you have long left behind, but you know is part of personal faith development—reading, prayer, giving, serving, listening?  Pardon?  Wholeness?  It is up to you.

Here the faithful Lutheran, JS Bach, can indeed help us, by means of his own example in faith.  His own Bible, we have recently been further taught, was laden with notes in the margin, questions, renderings, and ruminations.

Personal faith may quicken with personal practices, of a new post-Covid sort.  In this past year, we may have discovered some new measures of resilience, grace, creativity and love.

One may choose to play the piano again.  Another may take a language study.  One may find a daily devotional reader, which sits on a bureau so one can read it while tying a tie.  Another may sit in the quiet of the sanctuary for a while before worship, as did Emerson, who said, I love the silent church before there is any speaking.  One may wander, saunter, flaner dans le rue, walking for a bit every day.  Exercise is so spiritually central and important. Another may start to journal, to record dreams, and to record insights, and to record angers and to record escapes.  Teaching and learning are spiritual adventures in pursuit of invisibles and intangibles (W. Arrowsmith).  Or, if nothing else, you can hardly do better than a conversation, in loving care, with another person of faith, say, over the phone.  One may look hard at her life, her actual activity, to see whether it becomes the gospel, and whether it approximates the very general guidance in the wisdom saying, in singleness integrity, in partnership fidelity.  At least one, it may be, will choose to listen with weekly discipline to the Marsh Chapel recorded and broadcast service, Come Sunday.  At least one, it may be, will choose to receive as a spiritual practice, the beauty of choral music, Come This and Other Bach Sundays.

Personal faith may quicken with disciplined personal practices, perhaps of a new post-Covid sort, inspired and empowered by the presence of the Good Shepherd, who knows his own and his own know him.

Dr. Jarrett:  in terms of today’s music, and text, what witness do you sense Bach brings us, of personal faith, within the setting of this lovely cantata?

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music:

Bach

Today’s cantata, is, indeed, a lesson in faith, assurance, and the promise of God’s goodness in our lives. Cantata 69a – “Praise the Lord, o My Soul” was first performed on August 15, 1723, during Bach’s first three months as Cantor in Leipzig. We have seen in these cantatas not just a remarkable display of compositional craftsmanship, but also an authoritative theological understanding through both the compilation of the libretto and the setting of those texts. Cantata 69a features from beginning to end an exuberant and joyful hymn of praise of God and the good works that enable a life of faith. Opening with full festival forces with trumpets and timpani, Bach sets the words of Psalm 103, vs 2 in a marvelous double fugue. The music is absolutely radiant, brilliant, and brimming with the praise of all God’s faithful. With this rich texture, we can well imagine the sound of Wesley’s thousand tongues to sing the great Redeemer’s praise.

For Bach, the Gospel lesson of the day was from Mark 7, the account of Jesus healing the deaf man at the Sea of Galilee. As the cantata turns from corporate to personal praise, the soprano and tenor soloists join the voices that witnessed Jesus’s miracle proclaiming the goodness of his deeds, and the glory of God. The cheerful tenor aria is delightfully score for recorder and Oboe da caccia. Listen for the extended line that Bach writes for the word erzähle or “declare”, and like the man whose tongue Jesus loosed, the tenor promises a “Gott gefällig Singen durch die frohe Lippen” or a “God pleasing singing though joyful lips.”

With the following alto recit, we turn inward to remember our human frailty and shortcomings. With further reminder of the Gospel lesson, the alto calls on God to utter his mighty ‘Ephphata’ just as Jesus did in Mark 7:34. From the singing of that Aramaic word meaning “Be opened”, the otherwise syllabic recitative opens to a lovely melody on the words, “so wird mein Mund voll Dankens sein!” “ Then my mouth will be full of thanks!”

The bass aria which follows affirms God as Redeemer and Protector. The believer, here the voice of the bass, pens himself to Christ’s Cross and Passion, pledging to praise at all times. In the same way that Christ gladly took up the cross, thereby exalting his Passion, we, too, will rejoice and sing praise in our own Cross-bearing and suffering. Note the stark contrast of the lines for Kreuz und Leiden (Cross and Suffering) with “singt mein Mund mit Freuden” (My mouth sings with joy).

The final Chorale echoes the close of Mark 7 proclaiming “He hath done all things well!” “Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan, darbei will ich verbleiben.” Because God holds me in a fatherly embrace in his arms, I will let him alone govern me. Confidence, assurance, affirmation, and ultimately, faith to live in freedom, and freedom to live by faith.

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

Social Involvement

The Christian life is a daily combination of personal faith and social involvement (repeat).  Of deep personal faith, and active social involvement.

The community of the Gospel of John knew the necessity of nimble engagement of current experience, and the saving capacity to change, in the face of new circumstances.   The community of this Gospel could do so because they had experienced the Shepherd, present, ‘here’, hic et nunc.  In distress, we hold onto divine presence, on word, the Shepherd– here.

On the front porch of our beloved Marsh Chapel stands John Wesley, posed in preaching, who reminds us that there is no holiness save social holiness (repeat).  In the tradition which gave birth to Boston University and to Marsh Chapel and so to our worship on this and every Sunday, personal faith and social involvement go together, and, in truth, are not found, except hand in hand.

As all of our 55 weeks and Sundays of worship, teaching, fellowship and remembrance, throughout these 385 days of contagion, masking and vaccine, have evinced among us, pistis and polis, faith and culture go together.   Here Bach may help us, if especially in the surge of beauty his music showers on us a sense of grace, and in so doing gathers us as one.  The older Lutheran preference for the two kingdoms, Christ and Culture in paradox, is at some lesser closeness to the transformational aspiration in Wesley’s social holiness.  Yet Bach’s very vocational choice to embed himself in congregational musical life is itself a harbinger of transformation.  More, the universal regard for the beauty of Bach itself places on the edge of a way forward, as a global village.

As women and men of faith, we are not free to celebrate faith apart from life, to affirm faith in ignorance of the polis, the city, the culture, the political.  The Bible itself is a 66-book declamation of social justice, at every turn, by every writer, with every chapter, at every point.   Moses, Amos, Micah, Matthew, Luke, Paul, All.  Try and read the Bible without being confronted, accosted, seized and shaken by its fierce acclamation of the hope of justice.  Real religion is never very far from justice, even though justice alone, a crucial part of the Gospel, alone is not the heart of the Gospel.  The Gospel is love, which is more than justice—though not less.

You then, in real time, read the newspaper as well as the Bible.  You have reason and obligation to be concerned about what you read.  You have reason and obligation to be concerned about the persons and personalities driving cultural and political formation. You also have reason and obligation to be concerned about the policies, speaking of polis, which emanate from those personalities and persons, those forms of rhetoric and language and behavior. You have full reason and obligation to be concerned about public good, about the polis, about the forms of culture and civil society across our land, painstakingly built up over 250 years, that are not government and not politics, but are more fundamental and more fragile than both.  You have reason and obligation to be concerned about the use of force of any kind, as we have been this past week. For example, our own BU President, Dr. Robert A. Brown faithfully wrote this week:

It’s my hope that this trial, and the activism and awareness which resulted from Mr. Floyd’s death, will bring us closer to that elusive equality, certainly as it relates to policing and the threat posed by law enforcement practices in communities of color. I also hope his legacy—and the legacy of the many other Black people who have lost their lives to police violence—helps to illuminate and redress the many other racial injustices which continue to afflict our society. These tragic deaths cast a bright and honest light on every form of racial antipathy, and I hope this energy carries into the fight we are having today to secure voting rights for people of color, and to stand up against every other manifestation of racism around the world.

Let us run the race set before us. So, as a runner, say, you have reason and obligation to be concerned about the route itself.  Run with joy the race set, but neglect not to engage by precept and example the social support, the cultural forms required for the race.  Like our beloved Marathon, which we have not celebrated now for two years, but we may honor in imagination today:   The route.  The roads cleared.  The police.  The first responders.  The supporting cheerers.  The rules and traditions.  The many, thousands, standing by you, and standing with you, and standing for you.  Personal holiness is the run.  Social holiness is the route (repeat). They go together.

The Christian life is a daily combination of personal faith and social involvement (repeat).  So, our song this Lord’s day, is just this:

Ah, would that I had a thousand tongues!

 Ah, would that my mouth were

Empty of idle words!
Ah, would that I said nothing other

Than what was geared to God’s praise!


Then I would proclaim the Highest’s goodness,

For all my life he has done so much for me

 That I cannot thank Him in all eternity.

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

-Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music

posted in Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music, The Bach Experience, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 04.25.2021 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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John 20:19–31

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Memory

In our spiritual Easter basket this morning we find gracious gifts of memory and mind, of story and song.

Just before Easter some years ago, a dear mentor died, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin who had been our pastor at Riverside Church in New York.  He comes to memory at Easter, as did this Easter.  His example and service were a beacon and guide for us, as was his preaching, at Yale and then in New York.  At Easter his memory arises, partly because he had gift for epigrams.  In the joy of Easter there is in the seasonal basket the particular joy of his capacity to put things simply and say things briefly.  He was a stellar epigrammatist, as in his own way, was the author of our fourth Gospel, read a moment ago.  Here are a few from Coffin:

There is more mercy in God than sin in us.

To age is grow from passion to compassion.

When my son died God’s heart broke first.

The separation of church and state is not the separation of a Christian from her politics.

Lent is the time to get rid of your guilt.

I’m not OK, and you’re not OK. But that’s OK.

Courage is the most important virtue because it makes all the others possible.

Rules are signposts not hitching posts.

The woman most in need of liberation is the woman in every man.

Hell is truth seen too late.

The trick in life is to die young as late as possible.

The longest, most arduous trip in the world is the journey from the head to the heart.

It is often said that religion is a crutch. What makes you think you don’t limp?

Good preaching is never at people, it’s for people.

To me it is hard to believe a loving God would create loving creatures that aspire to be yet more loving, and then finish them off before their aspirations are complete. There must be something more….

Mind

In our spiritual Easter basket this morning we find gracious gifts of memory and mind, of story and song.

In a class on pastoral leadership this past week, we read Parker Palmer’s classic The Courage to Teach.  In it he explores the relationship of the teacher’s inner life to the craft of teaching.  Those truest to and closest to their own best selves invariably become the most mindful teachers, of whose insights we are most often reminded.  Take Dr. Christopher Morse, who taught us to think about things.  Like heaven for instance.

How are we to think about heaven?

One way to think about something is to think about its opposite.

Our Bible uses the word heaven in opposition to the word earth. Heaven is up there. Earth is down here. ‘Heaven and earth are full of thy glory’. ‘As the heavens are high above the earth’. ‘Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.’ Heaven represents the ultimate or penultimate reality of the physical world in the Bible, as it does in the ancient philosophers.

But we are today reluctant to think that heaven is up there. For we know that ‘Up There’ is the moon, the Milky Way, and the expanding, even infinite, universe.

Our Bible also speaks of heaven in contrast to hell. Now the comparison is not between up and down, as much as it is between lasting good and lasting bad. Heaven is good. Hell is bad. But we also have some question about these inherited, mythological accounts of hell, as well as similar accounts of this Heaven. Harps, wings, clouds…fire, forks, tails…Good we acknowledge. Evil we acknowledge. Hell as the absence of God, or of good, we acknowledge. But hell as eternal torment, administered in punitive ways by a divinity of somewhat unpleasant temperament, this hell we question.

Here is a third contrast. Not heaven and earth, nor heaven and hell, but heaven and hurt. It is at the heart John and the marrow of the Easter gospel that ‘something happened’. Not up and down, nor good and bad, but now and then. This contrast is built on time, rather than on space or on morals. Heaven is then, earth is now. A belief in heaven, then, is a trust in what is ‘taking place’ over against a knowledge of what is ‘in place’. What is taking place, contrasted with what is in place. What is at hand as contrasted to what is in hand. (I am indebted here to the work of my teacher, Dr. Christopher Morse). Now we see in a mirror dimly, then face to face. Now we see in mirror dimly.  Then face to face.

Easter reminds, brings to mind. Heaven is both near and different, utterly close at hand, yet completely different from anything in hand. ‘The kingdom of God is at hand.’ ‘The reign of God has come near to you.’ ‘You are not far from the kingdom of God’. ‘The Lord is at hand…’And yet…there is nothing in our hands like what God hands us. The resurrection is Christ’s victory over death, when no other victory avails.

Story

In our spiritual Easter basket this morning we find gracious gifts of memory and mind, of story and song.

The Holy Scripture brings the story of Easter, nestled into our Easter basket this Eastertide.

Last week we heard from 1 Corinthians 15, wherein Paul writes to address an argument in the church about resurrection. (This is utterly fascinating in itself, since it shows that not 30 years after Jesus’ crucifixion there was already church disagreement about resurrection!  Imagine that.)

It is a pastoral letter, a pastoral word.  Paul sits at the bedside, as it were.  He takes your hand and remembers your experience in receiving an inherited tradition: dead, buried, and raised on the third day. He mentions to you, hand on shoulder, the centrality of resurrection to the whole of Christian preaching. He pauses to place this account of resurrection into an apocalyptic frame, which he brought with him from Judaism, but notices your flagging interest in the history of religions. So, as he did with circumcision in Galatians, and as we are perhaps inclined to think he often did in polemic, Paul lets the whole Gospel ride on this one point, at this point. He recites names of people you also have heard of—Peter, James, others. With you, perhaps asking in Hemingway fashion for your experience too (what is your actual experience of life, death, love, the numinous?), he recounts experiences of others, who have known an appearance, apostles, individuals, and groups, even himself. (This is our one and only primary source reference to a personal experience of the Risen Christ, by the way). He points to popular religious practices (the experience, apparently known in the Corinthian church, of baptizing in the name of the dead). There is a lengthy pause. Then he dramatically asserts his own experience of suffering, and risks of death, as sure evidence of the power of resurrection. He pointedly equates denial of resurrection with license to do as we please. Paul even takes up, less intelligibly, and more mystically, the further question of how resurrection happens. He then more philosophically, and lengthily, assesses our experiences of the glories of nature, the created order, the firmament, the physical body. The passage is based on experience. While he starts with his own experience, he leans heavily on yours.

Then his conclusion. Listen for what is not said, too. Paul also, for all the experiential assurance of the chapter, clearly announces that he tells of a…mystery. Not a fact. A mystery. Not a miracle. A mystery. Not a wonder. A mystery. Not evidence or verdict. A mystery. Behold, I tell you a mystery…

To announce this mystery, the New Testament in general, and Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, convey three different accounts of resurrection. Peter (representing the first three gospels) emphasizes a physical resurrection, an empty tomb, more than resuscitation, to be sure, but physical nonetheless. Paul emphasizes a spiritual resurrection, known in revelation. John announces an existential resurrection, one that fills all of life and creation, that was presaged by the raising of Lazarus, one that makes the cross itself a glorification, a completion. Peter shows us an empty tomb. Paul blows the trumpet of heaven. John acclaims a full heart. All three emphases, perhaps providentially provided to reach the varied hearts and minds of various women and men, all the spots on the personality map, affirm that something happened. Something for dreamers, doubters and doers. Something for engineers, philosophers, and politicians. You may ask if they are all on the same page.

We reply, “They are singing out of the same hymnal: Sings Peter, ‘ours the cross, the grave, the skies’; sings Paul, ‘my chains fell off, my heart was free’; sings John, ‘he walks with me and he talks with me’.”

What the church has tried to name, over the centuries, in the weeks of Easter, is that something happened. Something physical, something spiritual, something experiential. There is room for your particular temperament here. To some measure, they must all be true. For the physical resurrection, the resurrection of the body, at the least is attested in the ongoing life of the church. And the spiritual resurrection is at least attested in the preaching of the faith. And the existential resurrection is at least attested in unexpected, undeserved, real love. Something happened. The church is alive. The future is open. Love is real.  The Lord is risen indeed!

Song

In our spiritual Easter basket this morning we find gracious gifts of memory and mind, of story and song.

It has been just over a year since our last wedding at Marsh Chapel.  So, to converse last week with a couple to be married up the coast this fall, the first since March of 2020, brought an unexpected wave of emotion.  Joy! A song of joy of its own.  After the conversation, the words and rhythms and gladness of weddings flooded in, in full.  Especially the song of St. Paul, not always used in weddings, and when used not always rightly used, but still used often, an Easter song of love:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful;

It is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;

It does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.

For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect;

But when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away.

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways.

For now* we see in a mirror dimly, but then* face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.

So, faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Memory and mind, story and song:  Made like him, like him we rise
Ours the cross, the grave, the skies…Alleluia!

The Lord is risen!  He is risen indeed!

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 04.11.2021 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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John 20: 1-18

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Preface

Truth and Love are resurrection words.  Synonyms of resurrection.

Charles Wesley sang them:  Unite the pair so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety, learning and holiness combine, truth and love let all men see.

Notice how our Boston University seal is here embedded:  learning, virtue, piety.  Truth and love, for all to see.

The Lord is risen!  He is risen indeed.

This year, on the heels of twelve months of hibernation, loneliness, worry, and death, may we hear the Easter good news, at is clearest, at its fullest, at its…simplest.

Truth and Love are resurrection words.  Synonyms of resurrection.

More so:  may we, may you, decide, from this day forward, to walk in resurrection light, to look for truth and to lean toward love.   The Easter sermon comes with a stark, personal call to you, a challenge for you, to walk in the light as He is in the light, to walk in truth and love.

Truth

I share with you a sentence of my own.  The wording is my own, though of course as with all and all, it draws on centuries and Scripture and others.

Here it is:  There is a self-correcting spirit of truth loose in the universe.  There is a self-correcting spirit of truth loose in the universe.

This truth, this spirit of truth, is the power of resurrection in daily life.  Truth is what Easter means.

In 1995 we were sent to serve a wonderful church, in a new city, one more corporate and less academic, more formal and less familiar, richer but less communal than our own home city.  What a privilege.  What a privilege it is to be in ministry, in any case, to be present as the baby is born, to be present as the vows are taken, to be present as the losses and gains and defeats and victories of life cascade, to be present in the final hours and at the grave, reciting, Jesus said I am the resurrection and the life.

That Christmas one of the nine Sunday school classes in that church, each with up to 150 members, hosted a downtown black-tie Christmas party, in the lights and splendor of that then muscular urban setting, to hale the season, but also formally to welcome the new minister and his wife.  What an honor.  An older couple, a retired guidance counselor and lovely wife, came, as you would, to provide the newcomers a ride.  It was a little grace inside in their case of a lifetime of grace.  Some years later, as we saw our own children through high school, and drawing on forty years of experience, he said, speaking of teenagers, Yes, they will take you for a ride.  It would be good to have another lifetime to try to become as true and loving a couple as were David and Joan Closson.   After the dinner and dancing and festivities, we were again driven back, deposited at home, by grace.

This winter, January 20, 2021, I had a note from their daughter.  The apple and the tree, as so often, not being very far apart.  Here is what she wrote:

Hi Dr. Hill. My name is Judy Cama. My parents were Dave and Joan Closson, faithful members of Asbury for so many years.  I even knew your wife when she was the music director at Onondaga Valley Presbyterian Church, as I lived in Syracuse for 8 years and we were members there.

I remember attending church services with my parents at Asbury during your Village Green series, I believe you called it. One sermon really resonated with me when you talked about the “self-correcting power of truth loose in the universe.” I really believe that and I remember taking copious notes in church that day.  Since then I have related those words to many instances in my life and life in general and have shared the quote with many others.  I have always wanted to let you know how impactful your words were.

Today as I watched Joe Biden become our new president your words resonated the loudest and prompted this email.  I just wanted you to know that that particular sermon had tremendous staying power and I thank you for it.  I hope you and your family members are doing well."

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.  Before we get too far down the road into Eastertide and summer, and too tripped up in detail and complexity and variety and vagary, let us announce and trust the Easter gospel. Before we get too wrapped up in the petty narcissism of small religious differences, and the petty narcissisms of acute philosophical details, let us announce and trust the Easter gospel.  Truth is stronger than death.   Now most of the people and family who modeled us the gospel are dead, including Dave and Joan and ten thousand others.  But their truth, the truth in which they lived, and more so still the truth in which and for which they died lives on.  Soon you and I will also be dead, resting in God’s presence.  That is the point, the existential reminder of Holy Week, as if we needed it in April of 2021.  But truth lives on.

I am a perennialist.  That means that I see and hear truth across many differences including and especially religious ones.  That means I am more inclined to unity than sometimes seems popular today, more inclined to mutuality than sometimes seems politic today, more inclined to liberality than sometimes seems prevalent today, more inclined to judge that education is about what is old rather than what is new than sometimes makes the grade today, more inclined to that old perennialist creed:  new occasions teach new duties, times makes ancient good uncouth, one must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth.

Here is a hard-edged question for you.  Will you live in truth?  Will you?

On the third day he rose again.  Truth is the resurrection of the dead.

Love

I share with you another sentence of my own.  As with first, you have heard me say it before.  The wording is my own, though of course as with all and all, it draws on centuries and Scripture and others.

Here it is:  There is a self-revealing presence of love loose in the universe.  There is a self-revealing presence of love loose in the universe.

This love, this spirit of love, is the power of resurrection in daily life.  Love is what Easter means.

In 1981 we were sent and posted to two little churches on the Canadian border.  Our daughter Emily at age 3 could see the St. Lawrence river, down north in Canada, from her bedroom window.  We were sent to serve two rural churches, graced by gracious, loving women and men, who had less education and more wisdom, less money and more sense, than all the other churches combined.  This appointment allowed the initiation, and later the completion, of a PhD in Montreal.  What a privilege.  What a privilege it is to be in ministry, in any case, to be present as the baby is born, to be present as the vows are taken, to be present as the losses and gains and defeats and victories of life cascade, to be present in the final hours and at the grave, reciting,  Jesus said I am the resurrection and the life.

A few days earlier, soon to be on the way north to that border town, and now with two little children under two, and a rented moving van soon to be packed, I drove from Ithaca to Syracuse to be interviewed for ordination.  I stood outside a classroom at the University, wherein 300 or so clergy from the area were gathered, awaiting my time of questioning.  Outside was the SU quadrangle where we had relaxed as high school students in the neighborhood some years earlier, and outside too were the steps of Hendricks Chapel where I would be ordained later that spring, if the clergy approved.  In the church, you are who you ordain.  In the faculty, you are who you tenure.  In the University, you are what you endow (more on that at another time).  So, yes, I was nervous, my stipend, housing, education and future depending on the next hour or so.

Many of the clergy I knew, having been the life guard at their summer camp the years before.  They were bright, committed, adventurous, and a bit wild.  On the whole, as a group, they were, their example was, what commended the ministry to me.  They were alive in ways that others were not.  Others of the clergy I knew through family and upbringing.  These were both mixed blessings, as some did not appreciate the life guard’s whistle and some did not appreciate the candidate’s family.  So, I was on edge.  After a while I also was alone, at which point an older fellow, perhaps a professor, shorter, bearded and bespectacled, wearing jeans and sandals, came over to me.  He asked who I was.  He inquired about my presence.  He sensed and asked after my anxiety.  He nodded and smiled.  Then—I realized then he was going into the meeting—he took my shoulder and said, Bob, you are going to do fine.  I just know you will.  And you have my vote for sure.  A clean breeze blew through me.  As he departed, I thought belatedly to ask, What is your name?  He replied, Smith.  Huston Smith.  Oh my.  Oh… my goodness!  HUSTON SMITH! But I read your book, THE RELIGIONS OF MAN, I fumblingly responded.  He smiled, and off he went, to join his fellow clergy.

I am perennialist.  And I am personalist, too.  That means that I see and hear the divine in the human person, in accord with a fine, long tradition at Boston University.  While the philosophical underpinnings of that tradition have long been withered, the heart of the matter, the heart of personal experience of love remains, as in that perennialist professor’s kindness, overlooking a college campus, the friendly help of Huston Smith.  We are a generation of women and men who have not yet fully heard the difference between knowing about someone and knowing someone.  You can know about somebody by zoom.  But to know somebody takes presence, takes voice, takes body, takes talk, takes personhood, take…love.  Love is stronger than death. We are long way down the trail of I and It, and only at the trailhead of I and Thou.  So, in one sense, I am still a personalist, a bit more inclined to conversation than is currently fashionable, to visitation than is currently ministerial, to presence than is currently possible.

Here is a hard-edged question for you.  Will you live in love, lean toward love?  Will you?

On the third day he rose again.  Love is the resurrection of the dead.

Coda

Truth and Love are resurrection words.  Synonyms of resurrection.

Charles Wesley sang them:  Unite the pair so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety, learning and holiness combine, truth and love let all men see.

Notice how our Boston University seal is here embedded:  learning, virtue, piety.

Truth and love, for all to see.

The Lord is risen!  He is risen indeed.

This year, on the heels of twelve months of death, hibernation, loneliness and worry, may we hear the Easter good news, at is clearest, at its fullest, at its…simplest.

Truth and Love are resurrection words.  Synonyms of resurrection.

More so:  may we, may you, decide, from this day forward, to walk in resurrection light, to look for truth and to lean toward love.   The Easter sermon comes with a stark, personal call to you, a challenge for you, to walk in the light as He is in the light, to walk in truth and love.

In a moment we will hear again the ancient liturgy for eucharist.  We are not together to receive together the bread and cup.  But we are together in relationship, by memory, in hope, through prayer.  And with a little imagination, with eyes closed and hearts open, we might allow the familiar, ancient prayers of communion, to bring us into communion.

So, travel with a little imagination…Imagine Eucharist at Marsh Chapel.  Stand to sing… Pause to reflect… Step out into the aisle… Look at and look past Abraham Lincoln and Francis Willard…Receive cup and bread, bread and cup… Kneel at the altar to pray… Stand in communion with the communion of saints…Here is the bread and cup of friendship…Imagine, if you are willing, a baptism, a wedding, a funeral, say right here, and a congregation reciting together a creed, a psalm, a hymn, a poem.  Imagine, if you are willing, a congregation currently in diaspora, but just now, by the word spoken, a gathered and thus addressable community, you and I and all together.

Sursum Corda!  Lift up your hearts…

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 04.4.2021 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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Mark 11: 1-11

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Said St. Patrick, “I arise today through a mighty strength”.

Letter

It is not so long ago that we greeting Jesus at his nativity, humming carols at home and lighting candles of hope in winter windows.  It is not so long ago that we witnessed his growth in wisdom and stature, in the knowledge and love of God, while as a teenager he taught in the temple.  It is not so long ago that this mighty young man Jesus stooped, fully human, for baptism in the surging river Jordan, the river of death and life.  It is not so long ago that we saw him take up his ministry among us, preaching and teaching and healing.  It is not so long ago that with Peter and James and John we saw him ascend the Mountain of the Transfiguration.  With him, up through the mountains have we climbed this Lent, step by step.

We are delivered from captivity, from the power of fear, in the announcement of the Gospel. It is the word of faith that delivers from enslavement to fear. From separation anxiety, survival anxiety, performance anxiety, anxiety about anxiety. The good news carries us home, to the far side of fear.

Say, to profiles in courage.  One day you may be coming home to Boston.  You may fly into Logan Airport.  You may deplane and walk toward the exit. And there you will find a greeting from the past.  A visitor today to the cradle of liberty, the home of the bean and the cod, coming by air will walk underneath a bright portico at the Airport, adorned with the countenance of a familiar President, whose term of office was tragically foreshortened.   He is pictured pointing out a rocket on the launch pad.

You cannot help but pause. John F Kennedy.  Boston Airport.  A new frontier.  A profile in courage.   An entrance into a new place.  A homecoming lit up in green.  A New England place.  Like the Gospel itself, a new space, a newness of life. The familiar Presidential Boston voice simply says: ‘We do not choose to go to the moon because it is easy to do so.  We choose to go to the moon because it is hard.’ (He recalls O.W. Holmes: Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing. While we are permitted to scorn nothing but indifference…). Not because it is easy, but because it is hard.  For the same reason some choose the ministry, not because it is easy.   He evokes St. Patrick:  I arise today through a mighty strength.

Paul needed this strength.  Today Paul writes, alone in prison. His own missionary work, as we can overhear from chapter 1 of Philippians, is under revision and redirection by others who claim he has failed in certain key areas. His own personal future is more than cloudy, including the possibility of death, and again, his ruminations in the first chapter of Philippians bear this out. He acclaims deliverance for the captives, you and me, a saving drumbeat along the river of life. He has a sight line to the far side of fear.

Ane, he is unafraid, this Apostle to the Gentiles, to quote his opponents. His Gnostic opponents sang hymns, like that in the Poimandres. In these hymns they celebrated a great mind in the universe. They acclaimed the forms of God. They spoke of emptying and filling. They especially and repeatedly compared human life to enslavement in these writings and hymns. To be human is to be ensnared by the elemental spirits of the universe, to be at the mercy of the cosmic, that is historical and natural, forces all around us. To be human is to be humbled by death, even ignominious death. They sang the praise of a Redeemer, who was once preexistent in the form of God, who came to earth in human guise, and who returned to the father’s house, preparing rooms for his followers, and being the most highly exalted. The name beyond all names, the light beyond all lights, before Whom all bow…

Sound familiar? It sounds like Philippians 2.

Philippians 2 sounds like a Gnostic hymn. Paul may have lifted and used it, because his hearers know it and because it suits his message. It is a plundering of the Egyptians, a use of the cultural language of the day to convey great tidings of good news. You need not fear. You need not fear. God has broken in upon our fear, and invaded this life with liberation to live fully and lastingly! God’s beachhead is the cross. The cross is the presence of God in suffering. The cross is the love of God in suffering. The cross is the power of God in suffering, to free the captives—to free every human being—from fear.

I wonder if we can recapture, by the imagination, Paul’s decision to recite for himself and for his correspondents, a hymn to the faithful love of God that carries us over, to the far side of fear. Here is Paul.  Here is the outspoken leader of a religious movement charged with atheism, with rejecting the gods of the empire. Here he is alone in prison. Here he affirms what can only be affirmed by faith, the victory of the visible over the invisible, of God beyond the many gods, of Christ the failed messiah over the cross of his failure. He does so in measured, nearly serene tones.

His attention is captured by the servant Christ, here so like the figure in Isaiah. To be a human being, for Paul, is to be captive under the control of malignant powers, to live in a world in which the human being has too often fallen prey to powers that are aligned and arranged against what is truly human.  In days, like today, following the racist slayings in Atlanta, and following the senseless slayings in Boulder, and clouded by our abject unwillingness as a people to confront gun violence, and guns, and violence, we can readily, fully, even without sermonic amplification, hear Paul in Philippians.

Yet, as one himself immersed in fear, Paul, seized by Christ, is set to singing in his prison cell. Maybe today, given our fears, we may hear something of his happy news.  I arise today through a mighty strength. Meditate this Palm Sunday on what in the past has brought you strength, what brings you home.

The west side of Syracuse New York includes Tipperary Hill, the only neighborhood in America where the green light is on top of the red light in the stoplight.  The green light is on top, just so you know.  Especially coming home that light guides and illumines.  The streets on Tipperary Hill are named for poets.  Tennyson, Bryant, Milton, Coleridge, and Whittier, Whittier the street where my dad grew up.  He said he was the only Protestant on Tipperary Hill.  That was an exaggeration. He said he had to fight his way to and from school every day. That was an exaggeration.  He said all his classmates grew up to be priests or policemen.  That was an exaggeration.  He said the streets of Tipperary Hill were the birthplace of great leaders.  That was not an exaggeration.  I give you Theodore Hesburg, born on Tipperary Hill, for 35 years the President of Notre Dame. I look forward to coming home again, someday, say this summer, to a place of poetic memory, a poetic topography.  Speaking of Whittier:

I know not what the future hath of marvel or surprise

Assured alone that life and death God’s mercy underlies

And so, beside the silent sea

I wait the muffled oar

No harm from Him can come to me

On ocean or on shore

I know not where His islands lift

Their fronded palms in air

I only know I cannot drift

Beyond His love and care

Gospel

And now the passion.  And now it is time to come down from the mountain, to take the full measure of this Man, the Son of Man, and to have the courage to let Him take our full measure, too.  The crisp air and vistas of the mountain pass have fed our souls.  But now it is time to head home, and turn our face to Jerusalem.  It is not so long ago that with Peter and James and John we saw him ascend the Mount of the Transfiguration.  With him, up through the mountains have we climbed this Lent, step by step.  And now the passion.

The road down the Mount of Olives, or down any mountain, can tax the traveler.  It reminds us all of earlier homecomings.

Odysseus walking the last few miles to Thebes.  Socrates walking to the center of Athens and the cup of hemlock.  Richard the Lionhearted sailing the English Channel, heading home.  A prodigal son, scuffling up the last mile of country road toward a dreaded homecoming.  You, returning at last to whatever you have long avoided, wandering as you have in the Galilee of the rest of life.  At last, there is an Emerald City, and the road home.

Today, we raise a question.  What was Jesus’ state of mind, what was on his mind and heart, as he entered the Holy City?

It is perilous, even arrogant, at this late date and from this great distance, to try to imagine Jesus’ state of mind as he descends the Mountain and enters the City.

Albert Schweitzer, before he went of to heal the jungle sick, showed convincingly how inevitably errant are all such attempts.  More recent attempts, like those of NT Wright and Marcus Borg, only confirm Schweitzer’s thesis.  We paint our own inner lives into the life of Jesus, when so we try to see what cannot be seen in Scripture.  That is, against some more popular work of recent years, I still fully agree with Schweitzer.  And yet, particularly at this point in his journey, on Palm Sunday, at the entrance into the Holy City, and on the threshold of his own death,  we are haunted—are we not?—by the desire to see what Jesus saw and feel what he felt and sense what he did sense, coming home.

Now Jesus is walking down into the city, down off the mountain, and down into the heart of his destiny.  He is going to his grave.

Some of the Gospel today, as Jesus heads home, is too true to be good.  For He is not at home, not at home, in a world of injustice, abuse, violence, and death.  For him, in such a benighted world, there is really no place like home.

Jesus is heading home. As are we all, though, it seems sometimes to be a conspiratorially well-kept secret.  We all are walking down the Lenten mountain and into our lasting, our last future.  Every one of us is going to die.  We are going home.

Here are two possible sentiments in Jesus’ heart and mind as he descends the Mount of Olives.

First.  He looks back upon his ministry and feels that he is homeless. He has found no lasting nest on earth, no lasting crib, no lasting domicile.   He has found opposition and rejection.  He has encountered misunderstanding and criticism.  To a harsh world he has brought a gentle manner.  To a wolfish world he has brought the labor of love.  To a selfish community he has brought the summons to service.  To an inconsistent dozen disciples, he has brought the steady presence of peace.   He has not found a home, no home for Jesus, descending the Mount of Olives.   He has even said of himself, “foxes have their holes, and birds of the air their nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”

Some of greatest sentences ever written in English are devoted, in Hamlet’s soliloquy to a similar ennui, a similar existential vagrancy.

And those of us who have been shot out of the saddle, riding for a righteous cause, as we dust ourselves off and bind our wounds, we do so in the best of company, in the company of the crucified, for whom, on this green earth, as yet, there is no place like home.   Today you may feel shot out of the saddle.  But let me ask you something.  What other saddle would have rather ridden?  Some losing causes are worth support even in defeat.  I would rather be shot out of the right saddle than to canter comfortably all the live long day in the wrong one.  So, dust off, bind the wound, and get ready to ride again.  It is a warning.  This last 52 weeks has been one long warning.  Just because we were alive last year is no guarantee that we will be next year.  We have not a person, dollar, idea, day or dream to spare.  Not one.  And it is, let us confess it, an uphill pull.

Second.  There is something else alive in this homeless homecoming.  Frederick Buechner compares the feeling of faith to the feeling homesickness, that longing for the feeling of home.  Faith is a heartfelt longing for the comforts of home.

Jesus looks forward to his passion and feels that he is going home.  He is not yet home, but going home. He has come and now he must go.  He tarries for a while, but he is going home.  Only the greatest of the Gospels, that of John, fully and resoundingly displays this sentiment.  But it is present, muted, in Mark as well.  Jesus must endure the cross, just as we inevitably must endure tragedy, accident, betrayal, injustice, failure and death.    We have the finest of company, the Lord Jesus Christ himself, when we endure life’s damaging darkness.  Some have lost loved ones to death, this past year.  Some of lost beloved institutions to death, this past year.  Some have lost beloved dreams to death, this past year.  Jesus walks beside you.  Jesus walks beside you. In fact, this is his peculiarly chosen path, his way, his way of the cross.  All of the passion, all of the passion music of Lent, all of it, all the way to the cross itself, acclaims, in passion, the compassion of God in Christ our Lord.  God has a passion for compassion.  God has a passion for compassion.   So Jesus looks forward—does he not?—to the completion of his mission, to the last word in the soliloquy, to the transition to glory.  Again, only John has fully held this diamond.  Only he sees the cross as glory, without remainder.  Only he has Jesus say, on the cross, as we remembered last week, “it is completed”.  But Mark too senses Jesus homesickness at his homeless homecoming.  His longing for God.  And we sense it too, because we feel it, too.

Some of the Gospel today, as Jesus heads home, seems too good to be true.  This greatest of passionate tragedies, the cross of Christ our Lord, is the passageway, strangely, wonderfully, to our heavenly home.  He dies as we die.  And we die with Him.  We all die.  We are not even temporarily immortal.  Yet, attendant upon this road down the mountain and into the city, there resounds, softly at first, a carol of grace, a carol of love, a carol for all, like we, who are going home.   And we are.  Going home.

This homesickness, this spirited sense that home is over the next street, up the winding trail to the cross, this hunger for home, this is what Paul meant elsewhere:  this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison…this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison. 

You know, we came far closer on January 6 to a final moment in the American experiment of democracy than, on the whole, we have yet fully to internalize, than, thus far, we are willing to admit.  We just do not want to face it.  We will, over time.  Yet coming home, as a country, in the weeks following, perhaps it helped to awaken us to hear, coming home, reminders of a green light on top, reminders of a mighty strength:  not the example of our power but the power of example…history, faith and reason will show us the way…we are defined by our common loves (Augustine)…there is a cry for racial justice 400 years in the making…and…especially…and hope and history rhyme (Heaney).

One way or another, are you coming home today?  If so take with you the breastplate of St. Patrick.  Said he:  I arise today through a mighty strength. Said St. Patrick, “I arise today through a mighty strength”. Said St. Patrick, “I arise today through a mighty strength”.

Sursum Corda:  Lift up your hearts!

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

posted in Lenten Series 2021: St. Patrick, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.28.2021 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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John 12: 20-33

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John

Now Jesus stands before us at the feast, talking with Greeks as a reminder in John that Jesus came for us, the non-Jews, so that the boundaries of Israel might be expanded, and a branch might be grafted onto the tree of life. Today Jesus stands before us in all his youth. He stands before us as a young man facing certain death. He is a grain of wheat that is cast into the earth and that then brings forth much fruit. His is a life of servant love, given over against so many others who clutch at life, and tragically lose it. Selfishness kills. Generosity saves. Selfishness kills. Generosity saves.

But now the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.

For John and his church, this meant that the hour has come for faith. The hour has come to see past and see through the physical reality of death to its true significance.

The hour has come to see past and see through the shameful and painful reality of crucifixion to its true significance. The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. This fourth gospel trims out of the story of Jesus’ death almost all the harsher detail, all the spitting, all the degradation, all the abject humiliation, all the brutality-they are gone. Peter’s denial and the crown of thorns alone remain. And this is because for John the cross of Jesus Christ is not crucifixion alone, nor departure alone, nor exaltation alone. This hour is first of all the hour of glory.  So, Matthew may end his gospel with a cry: Eli Eli lamasabacthani. Luke may conclude his gospel with a prayer: Father forgive them for they know not what they do. But John ends with a single word-tetelestai-it is finished. What the world sees as defeat is really a triumph and what the world sees as the end of Jesus’ hopes and aspirations is really the beginning of his ascent to glory. (Blessed Ashton). The heart of life is found in love and death, and today we are right at the heart of life. Love and death, these are our existential space and our daily time.  We are told today to find our life by losing it, to drop our grain that fruit we may gain, we are taught again to love our neighbor as if she were our very self.

In these verses, John 12:20-33, there lingers an essence, a fragrance that eludes description. Why did Dostoevsky choose these verses as frontispiece to his greatest novel, Crime and Punishment? John seems to have distilled a potent nectar, more potent than that found elsewhere, from his knowledge of loss. Why are these verses so haunting?

I believe they astound us so, because they reflect a double death. I believe the sense of glory found in the cross here comes from the hard lesson of loss, in a little church, somewhere in Turkey, turned out of the synagogue, and losing or about to lose, long after the death of Jesus, their last link with the primitive church. In the cross, in their loss, they saw both the death of Jesus, and the death of their beloved disciple, their beloved preacher, their pastor, John. The fourth Gospel is so strange and so startling because it operates at two levels, first that of Jesus and second that of John. After decades of pastoral care, guiding them through change, leading them out of the synagogue, protecting them from their own worst selves, reminding them of Christ the Lord, and showing them how to walk in the light, the towering figure of their beloved preacher was overtaken by death.

First, they lost Jesus, then they lost John. Both losses hurt with unspeakable pain. But here is what they learned: love carries us through loss. Love carries us through loss. Love outlasts loss. In fact, only self-opening love can bring any meaning through loss!

Patrick

Our Lenten conversation partner St. Patrick deeply and fully shared this Johannine sense of loss and love, of loss in love.  The brooding, the longing, the poetry he and his followers, over many centuries, gave to life is located, met, at the intersection of loss and love, a spot we have known keenly in the last 12 months, as we recalled last week.

Near the year 400, a boy named Patrick was kidnapped in Britain and taken as a slave to Ireland.  For six long years he lived poor and alone, a shepherd slave, out in the cold green meadows and mountains.  He lived poor and alone, and as we mostly do, found his faith in trouble.  He turned to the Creator God of his parents, and found a magnificent source of strength.  Out of poverty, out of silence, out of fear, out of hunger grew the life changing faith of St. Patrick, who spent thirty years among the people of Ireland, bringing faith outside the Roman Empire. I wonder where we might find Patrick today.   For out beyond the bounds of what remains of Christian culture today there live many for whom the Gospel is pure news, not just good news, but news.  Our mission is blocks away as well as time zones away.  A friend who normally sits in the balcony when there is seating and seating in the balcony reminded me this winter of Thomas Cahill’s short book, his essay from some years ago, one with a jaunty title and a graceful lyrical composition, How the Irish Saved Civilization.  He tells about St. Patrick, and about his successors the Green Martyrs, and a country of green meadows.  Since our fifteenth Lenten conversation partner, here at Marsh Chapel 2021, is St. Patrick, it seemed time to blow the dust off the volume.

Patrick inspired a host of others to follow him and to follow his Christ.  He embodied a love of nature, a sense of confidence, and a capacity for vision which were wrought in the dark days of his poverty.  Out in the shepherd fields he found his love of nature.  His natural world was forever teaching him, forever succoring him, forever saving him.  Most of us are too far from nature.  We take too few walks, and attend too few funerals.  From this first love, he then found a confidence in God.  A confidence that gave him ease, real peace, in the face of difference, in the need for confession, and, centuries early on, as a champion of the place of women.  Faith is contagious, when it is confident, as Patrick was confident.   Somehow, this poor shepherd, this lover of nature, this confident happy fellow, found a capacity to envision, the power to envision, daily, a better world.  Nature, confidence, vision—these gifts are ours today as well.

For in Patrick’s wake there arose, in the fifth and sixth centuries, an Irish movement called the Green Martyrs.  They took to heart his love of nature, his sense of confidence, and his capacity for vision.  Their country, almost alone had received Christian faith without bloodshed—they had no “red martyrs”.  They knew though that the blood of the martyr is the seed of the faith.  So, they endeavored to offer themselves as Green Martyrs.  And off they went to live as hermits and monks, each in his little cell, copying books, providing hospitality to strangers, living out of doors, keeping a memory of past beauty and glory alive through the dark ages. *

They knew the bright side of Christ.   So, they went off into the green woods or the green mountains or the green islands of their native land—there to be faithful, to pray, to read, to love, to commune.  They went to draw nearer to God.

Nature

One follower of St Patrick in the sixth century wrote:

Grant me sweet Christ the grace to find—

Son of the living God

A small hut in a lonesome spot

To make it my abode

A little pool but very clear

To stand beside the place

Where all men’s sins are washed away

By sanctifying grace

A pleasant woodland all about

To shield it from the wind

And make a home for singing birds

Before it and behind. *

There is a holiness to the creation itself that we do not always well articulate.  One of our leading feminist theologians and teachers, Elizabeth Johnson, has in her work and teaching clearly reminded us of this.  Nature sings, teaches, helps, saves.  Bless those past and present Green Martyrs who by their example help us to live in easy communion with Nature, to walk lightly upon the earth.  Bless those past and present Green Martyrs who by their example notice the sacred groves in which we dwell.

An early Irish poet sang:

I am an estuary into the sea

I am a wave of the ocean

I am the sound of the sea

I am a powerful ox

I am a hawk on a cliff

I am a dewdrop in the sun

I am a plant of beauty

I am a boar for valor

I am a salmon in a pool

I am a lake in a plain

I am the strength of art*

Confidence

From this easy communion with nature, there arose in Patrick and in his Green Martyrs a kind of confidence.  What an inspiring quality is confidence!  Confidence before potential conflict.  Confidence in the face of uncertainty.  Confidence, which the poor must have as the Scripture continually reminds us, in front of random hurt.  Confidence to offer hospitality (will they like my home? will they receive my friendship? will they accept my meal? will they reciprocate?).  Confidence to accept difference.  Confidence of women among men and men among women.  As Thomas Cahill says, it is confidence that builds a nation, a civilization, a culture, a people.  And it is confidence that is lost when a civilization grows weary and small.  Think of your own heroes, your own role models.  Were they not inspiringly confident?  Not arrogant, or pushy, or aggressive, or domineering.  Confident.

There is a connection between being at home in nature and being confident in life. There is confidence that comes from reading, from learning something every day. In 1843, just a visitor to the Irish city of Kerry noticed a poor farmer, alone at midday, and reading an old manuscript.  The visitor was startled to find, in the gnarled hands of this poor man, an old manuscript.  Written in the Irish language, in Celtic character.  Containing poems, stories, histories, philosophy.  Handed down from grandfather to father.   A poor man holding a priceless book. *

Sometimes gifts come from unexpected sources. Here is one.  Confidence.  Confidence that God is a God of love—no small affirmation.  Joseph Plunkett wrote:

I see his blood upon the rose

And in the stars the glory of his eyes

His body gleams amid eternal snows

His tears fall from the skies

I see his face in every flower

The thunder and the singing of the birds

Are but his voice—and carven by his power

Rocks are his written words

All pathways by his feet are worn

His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea

His crown of thorns is twined with every thorn

His cross is every tree. *

Vision

Over a lifetime, one lived in communion with nature, and one filled with a sense of confidence, it may be that a capacity for vision emerges.  It was true for Patrick.  It was true for the Green Martyrs.  In their little huts, through the Dark Ages, fully at peace, furiously copying, making books, making books.  Living beyond heartache, into God’s future.  Learning to love words.  Recognizing that the one sacrifice needed, Christ crucified, has been made, by God.  Ritual sacrifices are no longer needed.  We may seek together God’s purpose.  This is good news for leaders, today.  I love the Bishop Cyprian, himself a lover of the city, whose motto still is central to leadership: “From the beginning, I made up my mind to do nothing on my own private opinion, without your advice and without the consent of the people”. *  That is, what will last is what we have the courage to share.  It may be that in our time, this very year, say, we are learning again to savor a biblical vision.

You know, the cities across upstate New York, my home, came to life 170 years ago, along the path of the Erie Canal.  In their, in our, spiritual constitution, lie buried, though not long dead, memories of what poverty can mean.  Today, we are fast becoming two nations, separate and unequal.  Our public institutions, protectors of the non-rich, are today imperiled.  Our public health.  Our public schools.  Our public parks and places.  Our public churches—I mean churches that have not yet succumbed to the temptation to return to sectarian life, those who will yet dare to be both residents and aliens, not merely resident aliens, willing to see in Christ the vision of a culture transformed, a culture and country to be shared. We need to remember the poor, this Lent.

For it is the poor, the outcast, who at depth know the endless contention of time, and of our time, caught as they are in its undertow.  We in our churches have forgotten our own poverty, our days not long past, of want.  Once, we were poor.  Your family, too, if you go back far enough or long enough.  Not that long ago.  Because we have forgotten, or hidden, our own hurt, not long past, we miss Jesus among the poor, Jesus who meets us amid the endless contention of life.

Here is a vision, a green country vision. We are a church universal, a church catholic.  We are not to leave the poor behind.

Will you acquire an easy communion with nature and nature’s God?

Will you seek a sense of confidence?

Will you develop a capacity for vision?

By the side of the road, from your little garden, will you share a love of nature, a sense of confidence, a capacity for vision?

Will the riches of the poor—nature, confidence, vision—be yours and ours to share?  Today?  As our spiritual worship?

Coda

Here is a challenge written this winter by Leigh Stein (the author most recently of the novel ‘Self Care’, a satire of the wellness industry and influencer culture) (NYT 2/21):  There is a chasm between the vast scope of our needs and what influencers can provide.  We’re looking for guidance in the wrong places.  Instead of helping us to engage with our most important questions, our screens might be distracting us from them.  Maybe we actually need to go to something like church? Contrary to what you might have seen on Instagram, our purpose is not to optimize our one wild and precious life. It’s time to search for meaning beyond the electric church that keeps us addicted to our phones and alienated from our closest kin. 

So, dear ones, walk the meadows and open landscapes of a spirited green country.  Watch this week for worship in life, the green country of lasting life, the places where Sunday and weekday join hands and dance.  If what you are saying and doing has some place in the liturgy on Sunday, then you may have found fruitful life:

Does it glorify God?

Does it meet and greet the neighbor?

Does it provoke honest confession?

Does it provide for children, for the poor?

Does it include silence?

Does it allow a listening for truth?

Does it further learning and teaching?

Does it involve a commitment, a decision?

Does it build, broadly understood, the Body of Christ?

May our daily grace be the blessing of Brigid’s hospitable monastery, St. Brigid of Kildare:

I should like a great lake of finest ale

For the King of kings

I should like a table of the choicest food

For the family of heaven

Let the ale be made from the fruits of faith

And the food be forgiving love

I should welcome the poor to my feast

For they are God’s children

I should welcome the sick to my feast

For they are God’s joy

Let the poor sit with Jesus at the highest place

And the sick dance with the angels

God bless the poor

God bless the sick

And bless your human race

God bless our food

God bless our drink

All homes, O God, embrace. *

*Drawn from Thomas Cahill’s excellent essay:  How the Irish Saved Civilization (NY: Doubleday, 1995).

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

posted in Lenten Series 2021: St. Patrick, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.21.2021 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Service in Commemoration of Lives Lost in COVID

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John 3: 14-21

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Frontispiece

For a full year, we have been worshipping in diaspora, our sanctuary empty.  We have by grace and the work of WBUR and many others continued to broadcast our service around the globe, come 11am on Sunday.  For the sustained efforts of those at every turn who make this service possible and available, we are endlessly grateful.  Today we turn our minds and hearts to those who have died in this last year, near and far, and, especially, to their loved ones, perhaps including you, who bear the losses to this day.  If you have lost someone this COVID year, our sermon and liturgy today here are meant especially for you.

One of the great challenges and difficulties of the last year is found here.  Across the country and indeed around the world, we have not been able fully to gather, to assemble, to worship in person, at the hour of death.  We have lost loved ones without the ability or capacity to face the losses in full in the full company of the church, the church militant, even as we give over our loved ones to God and to the church triumphant.  Later on, later this year, some of this we will again be able to do, even as, in the breach, to some small measure, at gravesides and in small circles, we have done so a bit in the last year.  But we should be frank, candid with one another, and with ourselves, that this particular labor of love is an unfinished labor, just now.

We have not yet been able to grieve, in church, the loss of our loved ones.  We have not yet been able to remember in public, in full, in sermon, in eulogy, the manifold gifts and graces of their lives.  We have not been able to share the acceptance together of their deaths, by singing them home, singing them on to that greater light and farther shore.  We have not been able, as the body of Christ, the fellowship of love, the assembly of believers, to join our voices in real time, in affirmation, in affirmation that love outlasts death.  Today, we make a start, or a further step, in grieving, remembering, accepting and affirming.  There will be more, many more, times and occasions, with which to continue the work, in the months ahead.  And it is work, good and honest work.  Mourning is work.  It takes time, energy, attention, focus, investment, prayer and love.  Conclusively, to mourn means for you to need to do something in mourning.

As a son, you may have buried my mother.  As a brother, you may have remembered and eulogized your siblings’ mother.  As a pastor, you may have given over parishioners, sisters and brothers in Christ, one by one.  In a University community, you may have faced and mourned the losses of students, faculty, staff, alumni, relatives and others of the University community.  As an itinerant Methodist preacher, you may have had to sing alone ‘Blessed be the Tie that binds’, rather than, by custom, gathering around the casket of a fellow preacher, to sing the hymn with others in ministry.  As an American, you may have wept at the stories of those taken, young and old, rich and poor, black and white, conservative and liberal.  And, as a child of God, you may have lamented without ever fully grasping the depth or breadth of such lament, the deaths of others, other children of the living God.  And I may have, too.

Wherever you are, whoever you are, in your time of loss, in your year of mourning, this morning as we face our mourning, we feel for you, we are sorry for your bereavement, we reach out with invisible hands to hold you in an invisible embrace, and listen with invisible ears as you utter your prayers of lament.  Whatever else may be, at least hear this, you are not alone, you are not alone, you are not alone.

Ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. (L Cohen)

So, this morning, in this liturgical sermon, in this homiletical liturgy, we call you forward to join together:  To grieve. To remember. To accept.  To affirm.

To Grieve

We call you forward to grieve.

Jesus meets us today in love and with love.  His appearance, in word and music, utterance and hymn, takes the form of honest grief, honesty about grief, good grief.

Out of all manner and mixture of feelings, grief, usually unnamed and unspoken, can bring us to worship.  We do not come usually or specifically to church to grieve, unless, perhaps in attendance at funeral or memorial services.  We do not say, slipping into the pew, today I am here to grieve, in grief, grieving.  Grief is bigger, miles higher and longer than that, beyond depiction, beyond description.  Yet alongside us, walking alongside us, come Sunday, it may be, paces grief, our grief.

Grief is a kind of sacrament.  It has a mysterious cast and quality to it, something well afar from our own control, like the grace given us in the Gospel, in that way.  Nor is it enough for the preacher to utter the word ‘grief’ for us to greet grief ourselves, of a Sunday morning, on personal terms.  Here is where memory may come in.  The memory of a partially remembered verse, or homily, weeks later, may trigger something that then allows you to say to yourself, Well my goodness, that is what this is, this mid-winter something alongside me:  it is my grief.  You don’t have to count Citizen Kane your favorite or only favorite film to recognize the cavernous, celestial, capacious range of grief.  Grief takes years.

Robert Hass says:  the movement of grief has something in it of the desert’s bareness and of its distances. the movement of grief has something in it of the desert’s bareness and of its distances.

Here is our affirmation, in grief, our affirmation in mourning:

It is enough that faith knows

That Jesus stands by me

Who patiently draws near His passion

And leads me too along the arduous path

And prepares for me my resting place

It is enough that faith knows

That Jesus stands by me

Who patiently draws near His passion

And leads me too along the arduous path

And prepares for me my resting place

Let Us Ring the Bells of Grief

To Remember

We call you forward to remember.

“It is no small matter whether one habit or the other is inculcated in us from early childhood; on the contrary, it makes a considerable difference, or, rather, all the difference.” (repeat). (Jonathan Edwards).

Remember, real religion involves religious affections. Give some consideration this morning to your own religious affections.  Your experience.  Your dispositions, inclinations, predilections, and affections.  Remember.

Just before our gospel reading today, Nicodemus, thrice mentioned in John, has departed.   You remember his interview with Jesus.  He asks about being born from above.  He asks about resurrection life.  He asks about spirit.  In the nighttime interview, Jesus answers him:  You must be born anew.  Your religion, your religious affection, counts on this.  Our gospel today takes the same theme further.

God is love.  Or Love is God.  Eternal life is trust in God who is love.  The doorway to eternal life is trust.  The doorway to eternal life is trust. We learn this in our experience.  This trust is a gift, God’s gift.  With open hands we receive the gift of God.   We do not achieve or earn or create this trust.  It is given to us.  The gift comes wrapped, belief and trust and faith and knowledge come gift wrapped in meaning, belonging, empowerment—in the beloved community.

To make sure the hearer and reader of his gospel get the full measure of his point, the author of John uses a great old word, judgment.  KRISIS in Greek.  You hear our own word, CRISIS, there.  Until John, more or less, judgment was reserved for the end of time, the eschaton, the apocalypse.  John, as is resonantly clear here, says something different.  Judgment is not at the end of time.  Judgment is now.  Judgment does not await the arrival of the Son of Man on the clouds of heaven, or the millennial reign, or wars and rumors of wars, or signs of the times.  No.  The critical moment is now.  John has replaced speculation with spirit.  John has replaced eschaton with eternal life.  John has replaced Armageddon with the artistry of every day.  John has courageously left behind that to which most of the rest of the New Testament still clings.  John has replaced then with now.  What courage!  The upshot of this change, as recorded in our Scripture today, is the near apotheosis of experience.  And as an ineffable mystery, (you) shall learn in (your) own experience, Who He is (Schweitzer).

In other words, the ancient near eastern apocalyptic, of heaven and end of time judgment, still present in various religious traditions, as we have tragic and sorrowful occasion to see in our own time and struggles with violence, is replaced.  In your experience.  This is the judgment.  The light has come into the world.

As my grandmother used to ask, ‘Are you walking in the light?’

Likewise, we notice that the letter to the Ephesians, written by a student of Paul, makes a complementary affirmation.  By grace you are saved through faith (he writes this twice, or an editor has added a second rendering).  The phrase, both in its repetition and in its cadence, seems clearly to be a prized inheritance for the Ephesians.  God is loving you into love and freeing you into freedom.  God first loved us.  You are not made whole by your doing.  You are God’s beloved, and so, by being loved, by divine love,  you are made whole, made healthy, made well, ‘perfected’.   Both in our successes and in our failures, we truly depend upon a daily, weekly hearing of this promise and warning.  In our experience, we are given to trust God.  Our response in actions will then forever be overshadowed by real love, by God’s love.

Let us ring the bells of remembrance

To Accept

We call you forward to acceptance.  We pray for a measure of acceptance.  We pray for a measure of acceptance.

Gracious God in whom we are all interrelated, interdependent and one in humanity

Thou whose grace embraces all, and in whom violence to our brothers and sisters is violence unto each of us

We grieve for, remember and honor those whose lives were lost in this last year

Give us grace to accept the reality of these losses

Give us grace to accept

Especially we pray for the communities of faith across the country, and around the globe

In these troubling and tumultuous times when bigotry and prejudice breed inhumanity to one another

In this time of challenge and struggle, of tumult and destruction

May we find our way, Your Way, amid conflict, unrest and violence

Teach us your ways, God of refuge and strength, the ways of love and peace

Make us tender hearted and loving toward one another as your mercy rests upon those whose lives have been deeply altered by death or injury

Though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea, You are our God of refuge and strength, a present help in time of trouble

Let us ring the bells of acceptance.

To Affirm

We call you forward to a moment of affirmation.

We rely in affirmation on the voice of the Apostle, Paul:

To bring about the obedience of faith among all the nations

I am not ashamed of the Gospel.  It is the power of God for salvation to all who believe, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.  For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith.  As it is written, ‘the righteous shall live by faith’

God gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.

Therefore, since we are justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ…Suffering produces endurance, and endurance character, and character hope, and hope does not disappoint us because of the love of God shed abroad in our hearts by faith through the Holy Spirit.

Hope that is seen is not hope.  Who hopes for what he sees?  We hope for what we do not see, and wait for it with patience.

‘What then shall we say to this?  If God is for us, who is against us?  Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?

Shall tribulation or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword?  No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.

For I am sure that neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities nor things present nor things to come nor powers nor height nor depth nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed, by the renewal of your mind.

Let love be genuine.  Hate what is evil.  Hold fast to what is good.  Love one another with mutual affection.  Outdo one another in showing honor.  Never lag in zeal.  Be ardent in spirit.  Serve the Lord.  Rejoice in your hope. Be patient in tribulation.  Be constant in prayer.  Contribute to the saints.  Practice hospitality.

And, we rely in affirmation upon our own personal creed, whispering or quietly saying, wherever we are today, our shared affirmation, responding, ‘and we do’:

If we believe that life has meaning and purpose

And we do

If we believe that the Giver of Life loves us

And we do

If we believe that divine love lasts

And we do

If we believe that justice, mercy, and humility endure

And we do

If we believe that God so loved the world to give God’s only Son

And we do

If we believe that Jesus is the transcript in time of God in eternity

And we do

If we believe that all God’s children are precious in God’s sight

And we do

If we believe grace and forgiveness are the heart of the universe

And we do

If we believe that God has loved us personally

And we do

If we believe in God

And we do

Then we shall trust God over the valley of the shadow of death

And we do

Then we shall trust that love is stronger than death

And we do

Then we shall trust the mysterious promise of resurrection

And we do

Then we shall trust the faith of Christ, relying on faith alone

And we do

Then we shall trust the enduring worth of personality

And we do

Then we shall trust that just deeds, merciful words are never vain

And we do

Then we shall trust the Giver of Life to give eternal life 

And we do

Then we shall trust the source of love to love eternally

And we do

Then we shall trust that we shall rest protected in God’s embrace

And we do

Then we shall trust in God

And we do.

Let us ring the bells of affirmation.

Coda

And let us act as well.  In grieving let us reach out by visit or voice to another who knows grief.  In remembering let us write out for another generation some central memories of our lost loved ones. In accepting, let us take the silent time of silence we need, in prayer.  In affirmation, let us invite another to the faith of Christ through fellowship with His people, attendance in worship at his church, and the commitments of tithing and service that are His salt and light.

And let us act as well.  In grieving let us reach out by visit or voice to another who knows grief.  In remembering let us write out for another generation some central memories of our lost loved ones. In accepting, let us take the silent time of silence we need, in prayer.  In affirmation, let us invite another to the faith of Christ through fellowship with His people, attendance in worship at his church, and the commitments of tithing and service that are His salt and light.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.14.2021 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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John 2: 13-22

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Queen Elizabeth

On Christmas Day, two months ago, Queen Elizabeth spoke from Buckingham Palace to her country, and, indeed the whole world.  Carried along on clear, crisp, elegant prosed, and given voice in the Queen’s own ‘King’s English’, her homily evoked a profound, powerful hope.  May there be still many years in which we all shall hear her voice from Buckingham Palace.  As my friend says, in late pandemic, late COVID, we hunger for ‘indicia of normalcy’.  Well, Queen Elizabeth and her long life, Queen Elizabeth and her steady presence, Queen Elizabeth and her regal voice, Queen Elizabeth and her gracious aging, gives us such, such ‘indicia of normalcy’.  Think of her as young girl in war torn England, in bombarded London.  Think of her as a Queen in youth, supervising the elderly Winston Churchill, brilliant--and un-supervisable.  Think of her steady presence, her non-anxious presence, for most of us through our whole lives to date.  She was coronated before I was born.  May there be many more of her addresses at Christmas.

People more need reminder than instruction.  Looking toward 2021, she reminded her country, and, indeed the whole world, of the calling to kindness.  The Queen’s primary image, the heart of her reminder, the crux of her peroration, was drawn from Holy Scripture, from the Bible, a brief mention of the Good Samaritan.  Her application to interpret the parable was neither unusual nor novel:  love your neighbor.  Neither unusual nor novel, but so powerful, so true, so good, so right and so beautiful.  Notice:  the message relied on a liberal biblical theology.  Her short speech was founded on a shared, common language of life, known across the globe by adherents of many and no particular religious traditions, known uniquely in the Bible, a source of shared personal and social ethics, and of the very shared common tongue that, more than nearly anything else, we shall need, to get by.  The Bible is a great, global code.  We shall need a common tongue, a common language, a common personal and social ethic, as a globe, around the globe, to survive the 21^st century, and to deal savingly with nuclear weaponry, climate pollution, and pandemic, this one…and the next.  And here stands Scripture—not as confessional requirement, but as reliable grammar, syntax and spelling, for a shared future.  Marsh Chapel, every Sunday you give the globe four lessons and fifty-nine minutes in sermon and song, of this common tongue, interpreted in a global, a liberal biblical theology.

My friend, deciding about his life, says, ‘it is a road to Damascus moment’.

My friend, hearing the broken Hallelujah of Leonard Cohen, can better bear his own grief.

Now I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

My friend, quoting Lincoln, he says, remembers ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand’.  But Lincoln did not write that, did he.  He learned it in a great code, a tome perhaps more meaningful to him than any other, though he hardly ever went to church. The Bible is still—unsurpassed--a great code.  We shall need a common tongue, a common language, a common personal and social ethic, as a globe, around the globe, to survive the 21st century, and to deal savingly with nuclear weaponry, climate pollution, and pandemic, this one and the next.  Just as old Elijah said to Jezebel, you better start to learn your lessons well.  To the shared great code, Queen Elizabeth repaired, to start the year, as 2021 opened.  You remember, a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho when he fell among thieves…

St Patrick

You remember. In Lent, we remember.  “(Lent) is for people who know what it means for their soul to be logged with these icy waters: all of us are such people, if only we can realize it.  There is confidence everywhere in (Lent), yet that does not mean unmixed and untroubled security.  The confidence of the Christian is always a confidence despite darkness and risk, in the presence of peril, with every evidence of possible disaster…  Once again, Lent is not just a time for squaring conscious accounts: but for realizing what we had perhaps not seen before.  The light of Lent is given us to help us with this realization.  Nevertheless, the liturgy of (Lent) is not focused on the sinfulness of the penitent but on the mercy of God.  The question of sinfulness is raised precisely because this is a day of mercy.”(Thomas Merton)

Our Lenten Sermon Series, beginning today, will engage in conversation with St. Patrick.  From 2007-2016, Lent by Lent, we identified a theological conversation partner for the Lenten sermons, broadly speaking, out of the Calvinist tradition.  In the next decade, we have turned to the Catholic tradition.  With Calvin we encountered the chief resource for others we engaged over ten years—voices like those of Jonathan Edwards (2015),  John Calvin (2014), Marilyn Robinson (2013), Jacques Ellul (2012), Dietrich Bonhoeffer (a Lutheran cousin, (2011), Karl Barth (2010), and Gabriel Vahanian (2007), and themes like Atonement (2009) and Decision (2008), summarized with the help of Paul of Tarsus (2016).  Then in this decade, beginning with Lent 2017, the Marsh pulpit, a traditionally Methodist one, turns left, not right, toward Rome not Geneva, and we have preached with, and learned from the Roman Catholic tradition, so important in the last 200 years in New England, and some of its great divines including Henri Nouwen (2017) Thomas Merton (2018) John of the Cross (2019), Teresa of Avila (2020).  Other years, it may Ignatius of Loyola, Erasmus, Hans Kung, Karl Rahner, and others, one per year.  Perhaps you will suggest a name or two, not from Geneva, but from Rome?  For those who recall, even if dimly, the vigor and excitement of Vatican II, there may well be other names to add to the list.  We began with Henri Nouwen in 2017, and by Lent 2020, we were listening in prayer for grace in the life, voice, heart, poetry and spirit of Santa Teresa of Avila.  I had prepared to preach with Dorothy Day this year, 2021, and spent some of the summer reading her biography.  Another year, maybe next, 2022.  But something about this past year, something about life in Boston it may be, something about the events and outcomes of late autumn, something about immersion in the home of the bean and the cod for several years, something, a touch of green, something brought the patron saint of Ireland forward.  St. Patrick will help guide is for Lent 2021.  A touch of memory, shaded in green.

John 2

Speaking of memory.  Our lesson from the fourth gospel gives us memory, in and through which we prepare.

The long weeks of patience, wandering, and wilderness which form our yearly Lenten pilgrimage prepare us.

Notice that John has rearranged the furniture of the gospel. He has placed the temple cleansing at the outset of the story.

We become who we are by daring to decide. We discover the power of imagination by daring to find the courage to decide.  Choose.  Choose!

Some years ago, in the aisle of a darkened sanctuary, and following a dark re-enactment of the events of Holy Thursday and Good Friday, a ten-year old, guided by his mother, came forward and asked, of the Jesus so depicted, ‘What did he do that was so wrong?’ What was the linchpin for the move to the cross?

Well, I said, or perhaps mumbled something about blasphemy and something about treason.

But Matthew, Mark and Luke, the gospels other than John, mark Jesus’ downfall at the temple. As he attacks inherited religion, as he cleanses the temple, his doom is sealed. In John, it is the resurrection of Lazarus, long chapters later, which seals his fate. But John too sees the power of decision in Jesus’ appearance in the temple. In fact, in the second chapter, John opens with Cana, and the promise of incarnation enshrined in that wedding, and closes with the temple, and the forecast of the cross, the hour, the word, which is his abiding interest. Jesus is himself the temple which others will destroy. Here, he gives his new view of the future, not to be awaited somewhere in the clouds. It is taking place now in the life and destiny of Jesus. All throughout, throughout his life, and throughout your own, there is the struggle, this struggle, his struggle, for truth and grace. This is Jesus’ struggle. He becomes himself, his own most self not his almost self, in dealing with decision, in this today’s decision to affront and confront inherited religion.

Faith is finding the courage to choose. Faith is dealing with decision.
Memory is our aid here. Remember Proust comparing ‘the low and shameful gate of experience, and the other… the golden gate of imagination’ (RTP, 401). Memory feeds imagination. Faith is finding the power, receiving the power to choose, to reflect on choosing, to take responsibility for the choice, to learn with choosing, and to address the consequences of choice. Dealing with decision means dealing too with regret and failure. This too is faith in action. Listen again to the regret in Yeats’ poem…

No single story would they find
Of an unbroken happy mind,
A finish worthy of the start.
Young men know nothing of this sort…
Observant old men know it well

This year, intermittently when not reading Mark, we will scale a far greater promontory, the highest peak in the Bible, which is the Gospel of John. With every cut-back trail, at every rest point, atop every lookout, with every majestic view, this spiritual gospel will address you with the choice of freedom, with the ongoing need to choose, and in choosing to find the life of belonging and meaning, personal identity and global imagination. Yes, choosing diversity and inclusion. Yes, and also, choosing unity and mutuality. More personally, this Gospel helps those who struggle with dislocation and disappointment. The Bride in Cana experienced dislocation, and so have you. The Bride of Christ experiences disappointment, and so have you.

John features Jesus in mortal combat over all of these. Jesus demarcates the limits of individualism during a wedding in Cana. Jesus pillories pride by night with Nicodemus. Jesus unwraps the touching self-presentations of hypocrisy in conversation at the well. Jesus heals a broken spirit. Jesus feeds the throng with two fish and five barley loaves. Jesus gives sight and insight, bifocal and stereoptic, to a man born blind. Jesus comes upon dead Lazarus and bring resurrection and life. He brings the introvert out of the closet of loneliness. He brings the literalist out of the closet of materialism. He brings the passionate out of the closet of guilt. He brings the dim-witted out of the closet of myopia. He brings the church out of the closet of hunger. That is: in all, He brings the dead to life.  Jesus brings the dead to life

In poetry, St. Patrick greets us, with just this strength, strength for decisions, strength for the journey.

Breast Plate

St Patrick was British by birth, you will remember.  He lived and worked in the fifth century c.e., the dating beyond that obscure.  By legend and tradition, he brought Christianity to Ireland, of which he became the patron though uncanonized saint.  He survived capture and slavery, and guided by his own visions, his own touches of green, he evangelized: ‘never before did they know of God...but they became the people of the Lord’.  Of many, there is one chief, telling clue to the truth and depth in the wilderness journey of Patrick.  That is, he was unafraid to incorporate pre-existing Irish beliefs and symbols into his teaching about Christianity and his offering of faith, as was the author of the Gospel of John, who himself was unafraid to incorporate pre-existing Gnostic beliefs and symbols into his teaching about Christianity and his offering of faith.  St. Patrick is best known for his glorious poem, his ‘breastplate’ to which we return in later Lent.  Hear a few verses:

I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
of the Creator of creation.
I arise today
Through the strength of Christ's birth with His baptism,
Through the strength of His crucifixion with His burial,
Through the strength of His resurrection with His ascension…

I arise today, through
The strength of heaven,
The light of the sun,
The radiance of the moon,
The splendor of fire,
The speed of lightning,
The swiftness of wind,
The depth of the sea,
The stability of the earth,
The firmness of rock.
I arise today, through
God's strength to pilot me,
God's might to uphold me,
God's wisdom to guide me,
God's eye to look before me,
God's ear to hear me,
God's word to speak for me,
God's hand to guard me,
God's shield to protect me,
God's host to save me..

I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
of the Creator of creation.

Invitation

In a moment we will hear again the ancient liturgy for eucharist.  We are not together to receive together the bread and cup.  But we are together in relationship, by memory, in hope, through prayer.  And with a little imagination, with eyes closed and hearts open, we might allow the familiar, ancient prayers of communion, to bring us into communion.

So, travel with a little imagination…Imagine Eucharist at Marsh Chapel.  Stand to sing… Pause to reflect… Step out into the aisle… Look at and look past Abraham Lincoln and Francis Willard…Receive cup and bread, bread and cup… Kneel at the altar to pray… Stand in communion with the communion of saints…Here is the bread and cup of friendship…Imagine, if you are willing, a baptism, a wedding, a funeral, say right here, and a congregation reciting together a creed, a psalm, a hymn, a poem.  Imagine, if you are willing, a congregation currently in diaspora, but just now, by the word spoken, a gathered and thus addressable community, you and I and all together.

Sursum Corda!  Lift up your hearts…

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

posted in Lenten Series 2021: St. Patrick, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.7.2021 at 11:00 am