Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

Romans 4:13–25

Mark 8:31–38

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

Life

Dateline, Wheeling West Virginia, February 2021. Sarah Mervosh, The New York Times.

The day had finally arrived.

After nearly a year in lock-down for the residents of Good Shepherd Nursing Home—eating meals in their rooms, playing bingo over their television sets and isolating themselves almost entirely from the outside world—their coronavirus vaccinations were finished the hallways were slowly beginning to reawaken.

In a first, tentavive glimpse at what the other side of the pandemic might look like, Betty Lou Leech, 97, arrived to the dining room early, a mask on her face, her hair freshly curled.

‘I’m too exicted to eat’ she said, sitting at her favorite table once again…

West Virginia has emerged as one of the first states to finish giving two doses of vaccines to the thousands of people inside its nursing homes, so Good Shepherd…was among the first in the country to begin tip-toeing back to normalcy…

The first day back was full of ordinary moments: small talk over coffee, bidding wars at an afternoon auction, a game of dice. But after a year of loss, loneliness, and disruption, the very ordinariness of it all brought joy and relief.

Ordinary moments. Back to normalcy. I’m too excited to eat.

After recovering in the nursing home’s COVID 19 ward, (Ms. Leech) was feeling better, she said, and eager to return to some version of normal life, however simple. ‘Just seeing the people here’ she said ‘is enough’. On the menu for this first day back were cheeseburgers and potato soup, unveiled with a flourish of silver serving dishes…

In the bustle of the day, there were moments of stillness. In the lobby of a stained glass chapel, Frank and Phyllis Ellis savored a quiet reunion…During 69 years of marriage, the Ellises said, they have never spent so much time apart as during the last year.

‘We saw each other on Facebook’ Ms. Ellis said.

‘Facetime’ her husband gently corrected her. The Ellises visits are short and sterile: she in a surgical mask, he in a gown…mask and face guard. He does not even think about kissing her, he said, for fear of putting her at risk…She longs for the comforts of home, for her children and grandchildren. He long for her and even their marital spats.

‘We were always fighting’ he said ‘I miss that’.

Facetime. Time apart. Just seeing the people is enough. A finely written newspaper article, sparing, graceful, humorous, real.

As demonically and fiercely accosted as has been our very humanity, month by month this year, yet the rhythms of the ordinary, as my friend says, ‘the indicia of normalcy’, are coming around, encircling us in our very need, and offering us a lift for living, offering us a lift for living.

Jesus meets us today out of the pages in St. Mark, our earliest gospel, and clothed in the radiant beauty of a Bach Cantata. Music and Scripture, indicia of normalcy.

Dr. Jarrett, as you have lovingly and compassionately done for us now over many years, can you help us approach the audition of today’s cantata, with appreciation of both history and theology, a passion for compassion, and a regard for the church, through the ages?

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music:

Bach

Having just recovered from a very busy Christmas season in his second year in Leipzig, Bach once again turned his attentions and planning to the major work to be offered for Holy Week— the second version of his Passion According to St John. Fortunately for Bach and his stalwart players and singers, the Lenten season offered something of a break in that no concerted music was performed throughout the penitential season, allowing for all preparations to focus on the Holy Week Passion performance. Never one to give anything but his most remarkable best, Bach composed an absolute masterpiece for the final cantata heard before Lent, ensuring a most memorable musical moment good enough to last the forty days of of wilderness journey and musical austerity. Cantata 127: Herr Jesu Christ, wahr’ Mensch und Gott (“Lord Jesus Christ, true man and God”) seems designed with a grandeur and scope appropriate for the conclusion of the liturgical season, but also an elegant fortaste and reminder of the annual observance of Christ’s Passion a few short weeks away. All five movements of Cantata 127 are based on Paul Eber’s 1582 hymn of the same name, “Herr Jesu Christ, wahr’ Mensch und Gott.” Though a funeral hymn, the Passion themes of Eber’s chorale connect to the Luke Gospel of the day in which Jesus predicts his death to his disciples. The petition for mercy also calls to mind the blind man’s plea for sight, as also heard in the Gospel lesson. Otherwise, Eber’s verses and the subsequent movements of Cantata 127 present Jesus alone as mediator in both our final hour and on judgement day.

The opening movement surely ranks as one of the finest of all the Chorale based works Bach ever conceived. Eber’s tune is motivically present in nearly every measure of the movement, passed around through the intruments and voices — a motto of triumph and affirmation: true man and true God. But from the very first note the strings outline the German Agnus Dei, Christe du Lamm Gottes in long tones before passing to other sections. Though not sung, the presence of the Agnus Dei calls the listener both to the Blind man’s plea for mercy as well as that ultimate image of the Lamb of God lifted high on Calvary’s Cross. Intermittently, one can even hear O Sacred Head Now Wounded in the continuo line. Almost as a foil, the dotted rhythms in the foreground of the texture seem to dance over the immense theological connections achieved by the layering of so many choral motivs at one time. Far from ponderous or weighty or didactic, this thrilling opening movement brims with all the confidence of grace so freely given.

For the interior of the Cantata, Bach calls on a tenor to set the predicament in a recitative describing how in our own failings, our depths of grief, our final hour, it is our faith that draws us to Christ’s Passion and the assurance of his redeeming grace. The soprano and bass take up the cause at this point in two of the most astounding arias in all the cantatas. In echo with a heart-rending oboe obbligato, the soprano brings us without fear to our final hour: The souls of the righteous are in Jesus’ hand. In the background, the plaintive oboe and soprano lines weave together supported by two recorders and continuo marking an unrelenting and unwavering pulse, the inevitable tick of time. In the middle of the aria, the soprano seems to engage with the tick of clock: Call me soon, O funeral bells, I am unafraid of dying, For my Jesus shall wake me again! As the soprano sings the word for funeral bells — Sterbeglocken — the sprockets and gears of the clock come to life in a nimble-fingered upper-string pizzicato.

The bass draws us one level closer to life in eternity, with invocation of the last trumpet and the harrowing day of judgment. As the earth’s foundation are shattered and sunk in ruin, Jesus will be our advocate and redeemer: Believers shall survive forever; they shall not be judged, and shall not taste eternal Death; Cling to Jesus for your salvation. This is astonishing and breathtaking music. The trumpet’s presence signals the Day of Judgment amidst an apocalypse of fiery passage work for the strings. But the words of Jesus tenderly and reassuringly quell the storm affirming the believer’s redemption.

Bach surpasses himself with this cantata, and I’m so grateful for this opportunity to revisit our performance from February of 2019 for today’s broadcast. As with every interaction with Johann Sebastian Bach, our sights and souls are lifted, our standards reset and renewed, and a sometimes distant vision of what could be finds clarity of purpose, and sincerity of intention.

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

Word

Jesus meets us today out of the pages of Holy Writ, and clothed in the radiant beauty of a Bach Cantata. It may be, for you, this Lord’s Day, that his appearance, in word and music, just now, brings a lift for living, a lift for living.

One spring, I met my teacher Lou Martyn in the Union Seminary Quadrangle. He handed me a book as gift, one of John Knox’s books on the early church (Knox of 20century not of the sixteenth). I cherish the gift now forty years old, which became a kind of sign for the future, then altogether unforeseen.

I returned this week to Knox on Romans. To hear what he did hear, here. Like my later teacher NT Wright, Knox took on the hard passages, including this one from Romans.

I marvel at the beauty and mystery of this section of Romans 4, ‘who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist’.

I marvel at the phrase, ‘hope against hope’. I marvel at its assertion of a hopeless hope, of hope with no prospect, no rationale, no ready support. Yet…alive.

I marvel that faith is faith, your faith is your faith, when it is what you are left with, all you are left with.

I marvel that faith is reckoned as righteousness, that what stands up in hope against hope is the faith of Abraham. Abraham before circumcision, Abraham the father of multitudes not just the religious, Abraham the father then of believers everywhere. No one can keep the whole law. Every life includes failure, error, mistake, and misjudgment. All of us stand in need of grace, pardon, forgiveness.

I marvel at the ordering here of resurrection first and creation second, in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Do you notice? For Paul here resurrection comes first, then creation, not in a temporal but in an existential sense. Resurrection is the grounding of creation, the grounding of the ground of being, the horizon of the horizon. When Paul thinks of God, he writes first of the God who raises the dead, and only second of the God who creates. I marvel at this. Faith relies on humble trust in God’s mercy and power, as distinguished from reliance on good works. Hope against hope. To continue to have hope though it seems baseless.

And with this welcoming word, Paul can sing and soar in Romans 5:

Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.

Mark 8 sounds so similar:

If any man would come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake and the for sake of the gospel, will save it.

You recognize that this is the voice of an early preacher, whose words Mark has placed in retrospect upon the lips of Jesus. We see Jesus looking back through the cross, as did Mark. We hear Jesus through the din of the passion, as did Mark. We know Jesus through the rigor of trying to follow after him, even if we are a long way behind, as did Mark. And, as Schweitzer deftly reminded, all, all is shot through with mystery:

He comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word, ‘Follow me!’ and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.’ (QHJ, 389).

-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 02.28.2021 at 11:00 am

Sunday
February 14

The Light Still Shines

By Marsh Chapel

2 Corinthians 4: 3-6

For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For it is the God who said ‘Let light shine out of darkness’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.

Preface

In a changed world, a reordered life, a twilit era, sometimes a poem lights the way. Ted Kooser’s poem sees a church transformed into a barn, heavenly order replaced by earthly disarray, a poem of love and loss, with good works yet all around.

There’s a tractor in the doorway of a church

in Red wing, Nebraska, in a coat of mud

and straw that drags the floor. A broken plow

sprawls beggar-like behind it on some planks

that make a sort of roadway up the steps.

The steeple’s gone. A black tar-paper scar

that lightening might have made replaces it.

They’ve taken it down to change the house of God

to Homer Johnson’s barn, but it’s still a church,

with clumps of tiger lilies in the grass

and one of those boxlike, glassed-in signs

that give the sermon’s topic (reading now

a birdnest and a little broken glass).

The good works of the Lord are all around;

the steeple top is standing in a garden

just up the alley; it’s a henhouse now;

fat leghorns gossip at its crowded door.

Pews stretch on porches up and down the street,

the stained-glass windows style the mayor’s house,

and the bell’s atop the firehouse in the square.

The cross is only God knows where.

Ted Kooser, Kindest Regards, p. 24

Light

In thy light we see light. In thy light we see light. If we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another. If we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another.

Now the light shines longer at the end of the day. No longer have we the deep sudden 4:30pm New England dark of December. The light hangs and hangs on longer. At 5pm you may pause, if the weather suits, and lean on the balustrade along Marsh Plaza. With a clear day, the sunlight lingers and warms and heals. The buildings to the west, as the sun now sits and sets, are a few stories only, so we have a full sunset, or nearly so. It feels good. The sunlight lingers and warms and heals.

We have had no shortage of dark days the year past. Pollution, pandemic, politics, prejudice, pain. Pollution and a challenged climate. Yet. The light still shines. One reads of a global automobile manufacturer determining now to produce only electric cars by 2035. Pandemic and endless losses, death near and far. Yet. The light still shines. One reads of the heroism of scientists in laboratories, right across the Charles River, bringing vaccines to life, for life, to use, for use. Politics unmoored from healthy culture. Yet. The light shines. There is a prayerful, heartfelt resolve, matched by some actions: a confession that character matters, decency matters, empathy matters, experience matters, honesty matters. Character, decency, empathy, experience, honesty, especially when it comes to leadership, they truly matter. Prejudice, the abiding corruption of racism near and far. Yet. The light shines. One sees, right here, here at Boston University, right now, now in 2021 a new full emphasis, embodied, in the flesh: Andrea Taylor, Katherine Kennedy, Kenn Elmore, Crystal Williams, Ibram X. Kendi, Louise Chude-Sokei—the President’s Senior Diversity Office, the Howard Thurman Center, the Dean of Student’s work, the Associate Provost’s office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, The Center for Anti-Racism, the African American Studies Program. With the late afternoon sun resting on the MLK monument, with the longer afternoon sunset resting on the Marsh door statue of John Wesley, there is an inkling, a dawning, a harbinger, an echo, of faith, and of better days coming, and a relighting of higher hopes past. Pain though remains. Pain remains especially in our losses of loved ones in COVID. In liturgy and worship on Sunday March 14, mark the date, we will engage pain and honor loss. Yet. The light still shines.

Darkness

In faith, we can face pain squarely, what Paul ascribed to ‘the god of this world’—shadow, hurt, pain. The god of this world. Hm. Paul is close here, as close as he gets, to the language of Gnosticism, and may have borrowed the phrase from the Gnostics. Paul is as far here, as far as he gets, from the language of the Hebrew Scripture, and may have used the phrase to set some distance between himself and his religious family of origin. He is in dark pain, even as he claims and acclaims that the light still shines. We can too.

Even new life brings pain. There is joy but there is pain. Even in moments of luminous new life. A student finds her way into Marsh Chapel, and asks for prayers…A young woman follows an urge and comes to church, and asks for poems…An older man prays at night, knowing what he needs to do to do his job but knowing others will be hurt and still others will judge harshly, and asks for nothing…A young man determines to face the music, to address his addiction, and does so, outside of church, and asks for prayers…A parent loses his child, and calls in grief, and hunts for consolation…A woman makes a hard choice in real time about something that counts, and finds her spirit lightened, and sings her prayers…A religious man opened an Advent devotional, one part word and one part music, and heard ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, and cried and cried and cried…A University leader does the right things at the right times in the right ways, not always with full appreication…A senator gives us his seat rather than support fascism…A family member survives the hurt of another…

There, here and there, here, the light still shines. A scientist, Anothy Fauci, and a humanist, John Lewis, worship together in Marsh Chapel, Baccalaureate Sunday, May 2018. All in worship so remember the prophetic call: Human agency, human agency, human agency: May 2018 in the nave of Marsh Chapel, John Lewis and Anthony Fauci: BU past and future. Incarnation is the honoring of the human being. You and others, in whom light shines in the heart. God is at work in the world to make and keep human life human—THROUGH HUMAN BEINGS. It will have to be a shared agency, a common purpose, for it to work in time.

The psalmist says, "The Lord has done great things for us, and we rejoiced." It is easy to rejoice when things are going well. Nothing is more enjoyable than a season of life that is endlessly exciting, happy, and generally, personally "successful." We readily love life when life feels easy and day to day is filled with laughter. We struggle though when life is not so joyful. On days when tears come far more readily than smiles, joy is the furthest thing from our mind. We become grouchy and repel joy in favor of self-induced misery. We even remember happier days through a rose-colored lens and fall into despair instead of taking those past joys as a reminder that joy will come again. There is light, and light still shines.

This year has been full of tearful, lonely, stressful days when we looked back on life B.C. (Before Corona), and longed for times of rest and community like we had back then. Sometimes we have the feeling as though life will never be so good or so "normal" again, and we feel sorrow. We miss friends and family and ordinary life, even though we know that this isolation is not the final word. Still there is light. The light still shines. There have been good days before and there will be joyful days in the future as well. The future will restore the wealth of joy, community, and love that we have known before. For now, we are planting seeds of future joys and community, and we know that when this is all over and we are able to be together once again, we will come bearing overflowing hearts full of joy which were fostered through patience and loving-kindness toward our neighbors.

2020-2021 has brought a plague, and pain in plague, 450,000 now dead. Many have lost their parents, without having the chance to grieve their going in the last weeks, days and even hours of life. Nurses, physicians, hospital administrators, support personnel, and others in medical care have given the last full measure of devotion. (At least 1,000 nurses have died in the course of providing medical care to others). As have police officers, teachers, morticians, bus drivers, and others.

What might have been a moment of shared national commitment and common patriotic sacrifice, a war against disease, became instead a kind of war against healing, with cavalier understatement of danger, cavalier refusal to mask, distance, clean, test and trace, cavalier underestimate of the enormity and duration of the calamity (‘over by Easter’, ‘one day gone like a miracle’), and cavalier denial and avoidance of colossal grief and loss, from sea to shining sea. How does one think about this? How does one reckon with this? The presence of pandemic is a matter of nature. Wise and careful leadership, or its astounding and costly absence, is a matter of grace, or, lack of grace.

Yet. Yet. Yet. The light still shines.

Remember. There were voices, speaking truth, early on. We were warned. Jeff Flake, 10/24/17: ‘I will no longer be complicit or silent in the face of…reckless, outrageous, undignified behavior…I deplore the casual undermining of our democratic ideals, the personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedom and institutions, the flagrant disregard for truth and decency…We must stop pretending that the conduct of some is normal. It is not normal. It is dangerous to a democracy. (NYT, 10/24/17)

Sometimes things end badly. That’s why they end. Sometimes the way a person leaves proves profoundly, beyond a shadow of doubt, why the leave-taking was needed.

You may know this in your own direct experience. When someone you love says or does something you hate, something that is wrong, hurtful, damaging, and lasting, not something mild or minor but something real and permanent, then a door closes on that event or act or word, and you are left with disappointment and anger, disappointment that does not quickly dissipate and anger that does easily not abate. It is a permanent wound, a lasting, permanent scar, forgivable and forgiven, by grace it may be, but not forgettable or forgotten. By grace, it may be forgivable. In truth, though, not ever forgettable. It has only one true first cousin in life, and that cousin is death. Here. Just here. Here is where you will need a measure of faith.

Light in Darkness

In extremis, we need the voices of faith, like that of Paul, to steady us and remind us: Yet. The light still shines. And other voices, too. On Transfiguration Sunday, they may just transfigure us.

In the darkness of the 1930’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer glimpsed light: ‘God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us…Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world and onto the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us… And the church that calls a people to belief in Christ must itself be, in the midst of that people, the burning fire of love, the nucleus of reconciliation, the source of the fire in which all hate is consumed and the proud and hateful are transformed into the loving.” LETTERS AND PAPERS FROM PRISON 196.

In the darkness of the 1970’s, a decade we seem tragically intent to repeat, Erazim Kohak glimpsed light: “A life wholly absorbed in need and its satisfaction, be it on the level of conspicuous consumption or of marginal survival, falls short of realizing the innermost human possibility of cherishing beauty, knowing truth, doing the good, worshiping the holy”

In the darkness of 2020, David Blight glimpsed light: Above all we need to revive the idea that truth matters. John Dewey: ‘for truth instead of being a bourgeois virtue is the mainspring of all human progress’. (NYT 11/9/20, David W. Blight).

In our time and on our very street, Ibram X. Kendi glimpsed light, and says so in the language of possibility, the vocabulary of your own possibilist tradition, the very tongue of historic Methodism: (Let us) saturate the body politic with the chemotherapy or immuno-therapy of antiracist policies that shrink the tumors of racial inequities, that kill undetectable cancer cells…But before we can treat, we must believe. Believe all is not lost for you and me and our society. Believe in the possibility that we can strive to be antiracist from this day forward. Believe in the possibility that we can transform our societies to be antiracist from this day forward. . (Ibram X Kendi, How To Be An Antiracist, p.238.)

Coda

There’s a tractor in the doorway of a church

in Red wing, Nebraska, in a coat of mud

and straw that drags the floor. A broken plow

sprawls beggar-like behind it on some planks

that make a sort of roadway up the steps.

The steeple’s gone. A black tar-paper scar

that lightening might have made replaces it.

They’ve taken it down to change the house of God

to Homer Johnson’s barn, but it’s still a church,

with clumps of tiger lilies in the grass

and one of those boxlike, glassed-in signs

that give the sermon’s topic (reading now

a bird-nest and a little broken glass).

The good works of the Lord are all around;

the steeple top is standing in a garden

just up the alley; it’s a henhouse now;

fat leghorns gossip at its crowded door.

Pews stretch on porches up and down the street,

the stained-glass windows style the mayor’s house,

and the bell’s atop the firehouse in the square.

The cross is only God knows where.

Ted Kooser, Kindest Regards, p. 24

For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus sake. For it is the God who said ‘Let light shine out of darkness’ who has hone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 02.14.2021 at 11:00 am

Sunday
February 7

Winter Prayer

By Marsh Chapel

Psalm 147

Mark 1: 29-39

Preface

In a few minutes 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.

Coming into communion, together, together, let us listen for good news, this Lord’s Day, in Gospel and Psalm.

Mark 1: 29-39

First. In our resolute Gospel, Jesus heals and then prays at some length. What did Jesus pray? And how? And for how long? Was his prayer attendant upon his healings? Or caught up only with his pending decision to itinerate? Where was this that he went? What did he wear? Did he kneel? Is this history or theology in Mark 1?

There is a strong argument to be made that we really know very little about Jesus, including about how he prayed in Capernaum. James Sanders once gave us a list of 8 things we could know about Jesus, one of which was that he died on a cross, and the others of which were not much more startling. Norman Perrin said, “This material had a long history of transmission, use and interpretation in the early Christian communities, and when it reached the hand of Mark any element of historical reminiscence had long been lost…The Gospel of Mark is narrative proclamation.” Yet this scholarly sobriety hardly slakes our curious spiritual thirst.

We want to know about Jesus, as much as we can! When you love someone, you want to know them, root and branch, hook, line and sinker. Every Christian at every time has known this desire. We listen for, and to Him, today. We listen for his word, to his word, today.

Take his word, forbade. Forbade. He did not permit the demons to speak. We do not believe in demons. Not at least in the ancient apocalyptic sense. Some others around the globe, it may be, are much more at home with the first century worldview of the New Testament than are we. Still…we do make some admission in the midst of COVID, of reality beyond our understanding or control. Those struggling this morning with mental illness might teach us all, and rightly, here. Or those battling the corrosive power of addiction. Or those who can bear full witness to racism in systemic exclusion and in generational impoverishment. Or those alive to, keenly aware of, the specters of pandemic, pollution, politics, prejudice and pain. But demons? No. No demons. Not for us. Still…

Or take his word, ‘say nothing’. Why is Jesus forever shushing others in Mark? You can find a dozen places where the writer has Jesus muffle, silence any report about who He is. Here is the first, read today. He did not permit the demons to tell people what was really going on, that he was the Messiah. Why? We really do not know. This may though be a clue for us to the message Mark wants to convey. He is an author writing a certain version of the Gospel that differs from others. There is no shushing in John. What is Mark’s point?

As one great scholar and dear friend has carefully argued (T. Weeden, Mark: Traditions in Conflict), Mark—not Jesus now, nor the early church now, but Mark---has an axe to grind. Here it is. Jesus was powerful but crucified. Christian life will involve glory--but also pain. Jesus was not only a wonder worker whom demons could celebrate or denigrate. He also became a Messiah who disappointed his disciples, to the point of their, to the point of Peter’s, choosing betrayal. Jesus died on a cross, toward which in prayer this morning, a winter prayer if ever there was one, he chooses to itinerate. Christians suffer. Mark may want firmly to teach his generation that hurt is, tragically, a part of the walk of faith. Nero’s persecution may lie in the background. The Jewish war may lie in the foreground. A strongly competitive version of a glory gospel may lie in the background. Regardless, this gospel is about resolute discipleship. To be a Christian means to know how, and why, when you must, to pull up your socks. To be resolute.

Take his word, ‘Shush’. This lack of permission giving on Jesus’ part, confronted by demons, is a hard sell in a culture of leisure and narcissism. Christianity is a hard sell too. (Hence the inversions of it at various points.) Not all youth do easily warm to the required biblical reading of this faith. Not all young adults do easily warm to the sexual disciplines of this faith. Not all mature adults do easily warm to the expected tithing generosity of this faith. Not all older adults do easily warm to the necessary perseverance of this faith. It is a hard sell, to transform a culture of almost life to a culture full of life. This is hard, Sunday morning work. Work in pulpit and prayer. Across America we don’t so much need a political revolution as we need a cultural reformation. Today, across America we don’t so much need a political revolution as we need a cultural reformation. For that, we will need to resolve to take another look at resolution.

For this, this morning, we have some good news. We have ancient, good company in Mark. The writer’s community finds themselves at the beginning of the eighth decade AD faced with a crisis of faith. Forty years have passed since Easter morning. The eschatological age has not dawned…the joys of the kingdom are still only dreams…Mark’s church is beset by suffering…The focus of his spiritual reflection is the on the struggling, even suffering life of Jesus (Weeden, Mark: Traditions in Conflict, 159).

Some by example show us this. There are some heroes and heroines among us, making the case for resolute discipleship, in what they say and how they live. One such is Marian Wright Edelman, now 81 years old. She must pray. She must. Otherwise, how would she have the discipline to stay on the trail for children for so many years, so many decades? She wrote once to and for her students:

"I want to convey a vision to you today, as you (move) into an ethically polluted nation in a world where instant sex without responsibility, instant gratification without effort, instant solutions without sacrifice, getting rather than giving, and hoarding rather than sharing are the frequent messages and signals of our mass media popular culture and political life.

"Don’t be afraid of failing, it’s the way you learn to do things right. It doesn’t matter how many times you fall down, it just matters how many times you get up. It doesn’t matter how many times you fall down, it just matters how many times you get up."

In other words, this particular walk, in faith, your personal walk of faith, means that you will not always be appreciated. This walk means that you will be required to be kind to those who do not afford you the same courtesy. This walk means that you will daily get nametags thrust upon you that are misspellings. You may die a hero’s death and have your name misspelled in the paper. Jesus’ morning prayer in Mark 1: 29 had one single outcome: a resolve to take a hard path.

Will your morning prayer be resolute?

Psalm 147

Second. Listen to the morning Psalm, 147. Given the wintery snares, cold air shoveling, icy night terrors, and snow bound ennui of this winter, and this week, the icy noonday destruction, evil, scourge, wild beasts of this very day, it could be that a sober, heart-felt, reading of our psalm, one of the great trusting hymns of a faithful heart, will sustain us a bit this morning. Truth can heal. Across this country, perhaps more than anything else, we need to recover a reverence for truth itself, the antithesis of falsehood, the very basis for a shared ethic and a common language.

Our psalmist, our singer is a person of simple faith. We could make many complaints about this hymn and its singer. He has a dangerously simple view of evil, especially for the complexity of a post-modern world. He has a way of implying that trust, or belief, are rewarded with safety, a notion that Jesus many times in the Gospels, scornfully dismisses, and we know to be untrue. He seems to have an appalling lack of interest in the scores of others, who fall by the wayside. He seems to celebrate a foreordained, foreknown providence that ill fits our sense of the openness of God to the future, and the open freedom God has given us for the future. He makes dramatic and outlandish promises not about what might happen, but about what will be. As a thinking theologian, this psalmist of psalm 147 fails. He fails us in our need to rely on something sounder and truer than blind faith. He seems to us to be whistling past the graveyard.

And yet… for those who have walked past a February graveyard or two, for those who have walked the valley of the shadow of death, for us today, for a country mourning 450,000 losses (which in liturgical form we will do here on March 14), for a world searching to match its ideals of peace with its realities of hatred, for you today if you are in trouble, and who are worried today about others and other graves and other yards, and who have seen the hidden traps, unforeseeable dangers, and steel jawed snares of life, there is something encouraging about this simple song: “the Lord heals the broken hearted and binds up their wounds.” The Lord heals the broken hearted and binds up their wounds.

Our writer, our psalmist, is not a philosopher. He is a musician, perhaps, but not a systematic thinker. In his psalm, his winter prayer, he has one interest: getting by, getting through, getting out, and getting home. Maybe you feel that too this Sunday morning. So, he does not worry about the small stuff. In fact, you may have a sense that the psalmist is a bit desperate. His song is one for that point on the road when you just have to go ahead and risk and jump. That’s the thing about faith: it takes a leap. You have made your assessment, you have made your plan, you have made your study, then you have prayed. Yet you see all the pestilence about you in homes and institutions and nations, so you wonder, is it worth the risk? You are not sure.

This hymn of the heart is one you sing when you are not sure, but you are confident. Not certain, but confident. You can be confident without being certain. In fact, a genuine honest confidence includes the confidence to admit you are not sure. Faith means risk. Isn’t that part of what we mean by faith? Our writer is at that point, the point of decision. Once you are there, you have to choose between walking forward and slinking away.

Our psalmist is speaking just here to our immediate need. ‘Fear not’. The Lord is not interested in ‘the strength of the horse or the speed of the runner’. Fear not, and go about your discipleship: pray, study, learn, make peace, love your neighbor, agree to disagree agreeably, everyone convinced in her own mind.

Here is the memory of a Day Care center we opened in one of our churches, where every morning you used to see notes pinned to the coats and sweaters of daycare toddlers. Dads and moms pinning notes on the winter coats of their precious children. This psalm is a note pinned to the shirt of a loved one heading into danger. When there is nothing else we can give our daughters and sons we want them to have faith. Faith to go forward, with heart-felt bravery, without being sure of what they will find along the way.

Will your prayer be heart-felt?

Winter Prayer

So, dear friends, 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, a gathered and thus addressable community, you and I and all together, able to offer our winter prayer, framed in Gospel and Psalm, resolute and heart-felt.

Let us pray.

Gracious God,

We summon the better angels of our nature to sit quietly before you at this noon hour, in gratitude. About us await the challenges of 2021: climate, covid, race, economy. Right here, here and now, hic et nunc, on the street where we live.

For the gift of your love to inspire us, to quicken us to try, to join, to sign up, to get out, we are peacefully thankful.

For the gift of your presence to sustain us, to strengthen us to continue, to persevere, to stay up, to move on, we are simply thankful.

For the gift or your power to embolden us, to encourage us to achieve, to give, to change, to travel, to grow, we are spiritually thankful.

For the gift of your peace to illumine us, to steady us to plan, to finish, to complete, to leave, we are personally thankful.

Help us to love what is lovely, to be present to what is real, to find strength in what lasts, and to know peace in what honors, but surpasses, understanding.

Guide us to savor the beauty of holiness and the holiness of beauty, as with gratitude, right now, we remember and honor those who have supported us, our mentors, our parents, our friends.

Inspired by your love, sustained by your presence, encouraged by your power, confirmed by your peace, our life before you flows on in endless song.

For the privilege of these few days, even for this last, fallow, year, we are thankful. To thee we offer our resolute, heartfelt prayer.

Amen.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 02.7.2021 at 11:00 am

Sunday
January 31

The Bach Experience, Imago Dei: Bach and the Golden Rule

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to hear just The Bach Experience

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music:

As we turn again to our regular musical conversation partner, Johann Sebastian Bach, the tri-partite rhythm of Tradition, Confrontation, and Response echoes in the works of Bach, a fifth Gospel transforming thought, word, and deed into a sacred song of praise, inspiration and aspiration.

Today, we feature five movements from five cantatas heard over the past two decades here at Marsh Chapel in our Sunday morning liturgy. As with Bach, we begin and end with hymns of praise and adoration, before confronting the challenges of our earthly predicament. Bach seems to acknowledge the difficulty we have in loving our neighbor, but he challenges us to embrace the transformative experience of a daily opportunity to extend God’s grace, Loving into freedom and freeing into greater Love.

We begin in joyful adoration with the opening movement of Cantata 69: Bless the Lord, O My Soul and forget not all His benefits.

BWV 69a.1| Lobe den Herrn, meine Seele August 15, 1723

Psalm 103:2

Lobe den Herrn, meine Seele, und vergiß nicht, was er dir Gutes getan hat!

Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits!

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

And now, a pivot, a challenge, a confrontation, an opportunity for contrition perhaps:

Ecclesiasticus 1:28 — “See to it that thy fear of God be not hypocrisy, and do not serve God with a double heart”

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett:

Ah yes, the Apple of Sodom. Did you ever hear of this mystical fruit?? Bright and shiny on the outside, but so rotten inside, that it instantly dissolves into ash when plucked. For Bach and the librettist of Cantata 179, the Apple of Sodom represented a dire warning for the faithful: see to it that your inner and outer piety are of equal sincerity. The idea of reflection and mirroring the image of the creator is seared into the very counterpoint of the movement we’re about to hear. Written as a fugue, notice how successive entrances are cast in mirror inversion of the main theme — a paradigm for the purity faith requires, inside and out. One can hear the strain and stress of a false or double heart in the descending chromatics sung on the word Falsche or False. See to it, that your fear of God be not hypocrisy. Serve God with a pure heart, reflecting and mirroring God’s infinite grace and mercy. Jaunty, didactic, even admonishing, Bach readily flexes his contrapuntal muscles with zeal and ardor, inviting the faithful to seek the high ground, survey the common ground, but not before we’ve scoured the background.

BWV 179.1 — Siehe zu, dass deine Gottesfurcht nicht Heuchelei sei August 8, 1723

Ecclesiasticus 1:28

Siehe zu, daß deine Gottesfurcht nicht Heuchelei sei, und diene Gott nicht mit falschem Herzen!

See to it that thy fear of God be not hypocrisy, and do not serve God with a double heart.

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett:

Hear these words from the prophet Isaiah:

“Deal thy bread to the hungry, and bring the poor that are cast out to thy house. When thou seest the naked, cover him; and hide not thyself from thine own flesh. Then shall thy light break forth as the morning and thy health shall spring forth speedily; and thy righteousness shall go before thee, the glory of the Lord shall be thy reward.”

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill:

The idea of reflecting the image of the creator is the creative spark at the heart of the golden rule. For to love your neighbor, extending grace, is indeed the image of God’s grace so freely and readily given to each of us. What begins as social justice for Isaiah – feed the hungry, clothe the naked, house the unhoused, becomes the animus for our own transformation.

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett:

Like Jesus in today’s lesson from Mark 1, Bach teaches us with remarkable understanding and authority. What begins as hollow, even disembodied “dry bones” music, more resembling those who most need our help, little by little takes on sinews until fully clothed in the garb of a joyful dance.

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill:

Love and serve your neighbor, and do so with the understanding that this above all rejoices God’s heart, transforming us with the brightness of the morning sun.

BWV 39.1 — Brich dem Hungrigen dein Brot June 23, 1726

Isaiah 58: 7–8

Brich dem Hungrigen dein Brot und die, so im Elend sind, führe ins Haus! So du eienen nacket siehest, so kleide ihn und entzeuch dich nicht von deinem Fleisch. Alsdenn wird dein Licht herfürbrechen wie die Morgenröte, und diene Besserung wird schnell wachsen, und deine Gerechtigkeit wird für dir hergehen, und die Herrlichkiet des Herrn wird dich zu sich nehmen.

Deal thy bread to the hungry, and bring the poor that are cast out to thy house. When thou seest the naked, cover him; and hide not thyself from thine own flesh. Then shall thy light break forth as the morning and thy health shall spring forth speedily; and thy righteousness shall go before thee, the glory of the Lord shall be thy reward.

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill:

The Golden Rule. Seems so easy, so straightforward. The Law – to love the Lord your God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thyself. Jesus offers simply and directly, “Love one another.” No other qualifications or exemptions, but Jesus’s Lucan parable of the Good Samaritan acknowledges our human failings. In so doing, Jesus reveals a sublime dialectic – Law and Grace, inextricably connected, inviting us daily to acknowledge our sin, claim God’s redeeming grace, and freely share that same Grace.

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett:

In recent years, our survey of Bach’s cantatas has drawn inspiration and focus from those cantatas Bach wrote in his first months in Leipzig: July, August, and September of 1723. These works reveal an astonishing and radiant understanding of the scripture, far beyond mere text setting. The grand and bold opening movement of Cantata 77 unfolds with tender, unassuming lines, that ultimately gather to the most extraordinary musical essay on the great dialectic of the Law and Grace. The highest and lowest instrumental voices play the familiar Ten Commandments chorale tune in grand canonic imitation. But these lines attain new meaning and height when we realize that the inner lines sung by the chorus are that same melody sung backwards and upside down. Grace is inextricably derived from the creative stuff of the Law, in perfect equilibrium, the most noble expression of contrite, sincere love of God — a pure reflection of inner and outer piety. Bach’s musical expression of Imago Dei – the Image of God.

BWV 77.1 — Du sollt Gott, deinen Herren, lieben August 22, 1723

Luke 10:27

Du sollt Gott, deinen Herren, lieben von ganzem Herzen, von ganzer Seele, von allen Kräften und von ganzem Gemüte und deinen Nächsten als dich selbst.

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as thyself.

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill:

Well beloved, today’s journey with Bach celebrates that perfect state of grace attained when we — each of us — imparts grace, kindness, patience — persistent patience — all without quid pro quo.

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett:

Imago Dei. The mirror of the divine: freeing into love, and loving into freedom. Freide über Israel! Peace upon Israel. Bach’s song to you, God’s abiding peace to you. Peace upon Israel.

BWV 34.5 — O ewiges Feuer, o Ursprung der Liebe 1740s

John 14: 23 and 27

Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our abode with him. Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you.

Friede über Israel. Dankt den höchsten Wunderhänden, Dankt, Gott hat an euch gedacht. Ja, sein Segen wirkt mit Macht, Friede über Israel, Friede über euch zu senden.

Peace upon Israel! Give thanks to the Almighty’s wondrous hands, Give thanks that God has been mindful of you. Yea, the might of His blessing casts peace upon Israel, and peace upon you.

-Compiled and written by 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 01.31.2021 at 11:01 am

Sunday
January 31

Inklings of Faith

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 1: 21-28

Jesus greets us today through the inner voice, your inner voice, nudging by and through the inklings of faith, in your own experience. You are listening and so are drawn to faith, through the spiritual nudges of the Gospel, in tradition and in confrontation and in response.

Three inklings of faith are announced today, in the Gospel According to St. Mark. We shall trace their emergence in our hearing, and attempt to apply them to our spiritual benefit.

Tradition

First, notice the lingering power of tradition. Not traditionalism, but the forms of inherited tradition. The dominical voice bespeaking inklings of faith whistles through the willow branches of tradition.

Jesus speaks.

When does he speak? On the Sabbath. Where does he speak? In the synagogue.

How does he speak? As a teacher.

All three of these aspects of his speaking are named for us, though we might have inferred two of the three from just the mention of one, or another. They go together—holy time, holy space, holy words. The gospel means to emphasize by repetition.

There is, at the outset, a regard, a lingering respect for what has been, for what one inherits. For tradition, though not traditionalism. The Sabbath is the occasion. The synagogue is the setting. The role of teacher frames the message.

A time of rest and refreshment, Sabbath, here receives Jesus’ blessing, at least in the manner of his recognition and participation. Sunday can be a time of Sabbath rest. A time for sleep, for recovery, for reading, for gathering. We are a sleep deprived people, somnambulant in a sleep deprived culture. So a traditional occasion, a time for retreat and renewal can feed us, if we let it. There are none so weary as those who will not sleep.

Following my sermons, some arise inspired and some awake refreshed. Both are good outcomes. Both!

Likewise, synagogue, a coming together, is a traditional form. It means, a gathering together. Blessed are the hosts, for they shall be called the cooks of God. When you have had a hand in gathering together a gathering together, you have brushed close to something good, something godly. How we feel the force of this, mid-Covid, an inkling known in pain in the breach.

So, too, the role of the teacher. A familiar role, a familiar social location. It is not in some exotic form that Jesus greets his hearers today. The form is familiar, the teacher. We may sometimes look too far, too wide for what we most want and need, when nearby, familiarly so, our health awaits.

Sabbath, synagogue, rabbi. Tradition. Here Jesus is more than willing to don the raiment of inheritance, to be harnessed by the yoke of tradition. Jeremiah recommended the old paths. Matthew prized every jot and tittle. We hunger for those voices that will help us translate the tradition into insights for effective living.

So, a Chapel, and so a Sunday service. Some memories of college years, here, will be connected to the particular sound of our choir. Some recollections of exams passed or nearly passed, will be held in earshot of a meal or a trip or a talk, here. Some remembrances of things past, even of hard moments of loss or regret or disappointment, will have about them a shaft of light through stained glass, an echo of truth through scripture read, an admission of prayer needed and offered.

Our gospel today, which offers inklings of faith, notices the lingering power of tradition.

It is in the midst of this house, this lineage, this inheritance that Jesus speaks, not absent it.

His hearers are astonished. He is not confused in their hearing with their hearing of the scribes, his usual opponents in the flow of this gospel. They know a different voice when they hear it. A voice, nudging you today, a hum, a whisper, an inkling of faith.

But we are not told what exactly made the voice authoritative.

Like last week, in the calling of the disciples, the two sets of brothers. We are told nothing, there, about what made them move, what caused their decision, what set them free. And this week, in the authorization of teaching, we are told nothing about what made the sermon so good. Only that it was.

Confrontation

Second, notice, and how can you help it, the centrality of confrontation. Here there is an unclean spirit loose, loose amid the holy time and place and role.

A voice of authority calls out his nemesis. We are straightway here in the realm of apocalyptic, cosmic apocalyptic, battle.

I can remember the first burial, now nearly thirty years ago, in which such wailing occurred in my hearing. It was startling, as, for many, here, it was last week. But it was true and real. That is, now and then, people still ‘cry with a loud voice’, sometimes, in church.

Our worldview is not cosmic apocalyptic confrontation. We do not see a convulsive as one demon, of an unclean sort, challenging another Jesus demon of an authoritative sort. We are late modern people, women and men who do not cry out in public, unless we are at a sporting event, drinking heavily, or about to call the police into a domestic dispute. Maybe, in compensation, that is why sports and drinking and all become so central to us.

Authentic authority involves confrontation, not just pleasant courtesies of disagreement, but genuine squaring off. To your roommate you finally say: ‘One of us is wrong and I think it is you.’ To your boss you finally say: ‘Look, do you want to do my work or will you let me do it?’ To your political economy (known by the way for good reason as ‘capitalism’ not ‘laborism’, because capital rules labor in capitalism) you finally say: ‘One way or another my son needs a job.’ To your good friend, gently, you say: ‘I am sorry you feel that way. Goodbye’. To your spouse you say: ‘You can have me or him but not both at the same time’. To your warring world you finally shout: ‘My son is not your cannon fodder’.

One thing I truly admired about my dad was how he easy he was around confrontation. A man would stand up and shout and carry on a church meeting, walk out of worship the next Sunday, or send a blistering hand written hate note to the pastor, and my dad would shrug and smile and say, ‘I like to see him get worked up. It is worth the price of admission just to see him so angry.’ Less naturally and more slowly, I too have learned to honor and receive anger. Mark would understand.

Here Mark is starting his gospel, with a confrontation. The verb here rendered ‘be silent’ (so polite) means ‘to muzzle’. Be muzzled. Shut your trap. (so J Marcus, loc. Cit.). Matthew begins his public gospel with the Sermon on the Mount. Luke begins his public gospel with the sermon in Nazareth. John begins his public gospel with the wedding in Cana (again, Marcus). But Mark? He begins with demons and confrontation.

When we get angry, we get in touch with something deep inside, something not necessarily at all related to what we think we are angry about. We are not so very far from the ‘unclean spirit’ of Mark 1. We are complicated creatures.

You see and hear this again in a play from a few years ago, ‘Freud’s Last Session’, an imagined conversation between Sigmund Freud, the great psychologist, and C. S. Lewis, the great apologist. Bombs are falling on London. Freud is suffering with mouth cancer. Lewis is struggling with his young man’s sexuality. And through it all—the question of God. Freud and Lewis confront each other. They lock horns for 90 minutes of verbal combat. Each memorizes and delivers the equivalent of two Sunday sermons. They square off and argue. Good.

There is no resolution—how could there be in 90 minutes? But there is confrontation, in and through which, it may be, there is an inkling of something, and inkling of faith.

It takes sometimes the inkling of exorcising power, finally, of love, to move us.

Response

Third, response. Notice the response. The emphasis falls on an acknowledgement of an authenticity in the nudges to faith. Inklings with authority. ‘With authority…a new teaching…he commands…even the demons obey…his fame spread throughout the north country’. It works. Whatever he said, whatever he taught, it helped somebody. We wish we knew what it was!

Yet, there is a quieter wisdom in the silence of Scripture here. If we knew, we would be tempted just to repeat rather than to rehearse. We need to have the tradition, in the moment of confrontation, translated into insights for effective living which, in response, we can use. That is authentic authority in the full. If we knew that he used the 100^th Psalm, we would repeat it every Sunday. If we knew he preached on Jeremiah, we would invariably do so. If we knew he taught specific proverbs, we would ignore the rest. No, there is freedom in the silence of the gospel, here, a freedom to live and love with authentic authority. To respond. And you?

I am committed to the life of faith because the best people, leading the best lives, in my experience, have shown inklings of faith. I respond to the freedom and love I see in other people of faith, now 65 generations after the exorcism in Capernaum, and the response all across Galilee. In other lives I have seen glimpses of what I could be and do, if I would only straighten up and fly right. Some of those lives are in this room. Some are in memory. Some are out there waiting to be introduced. Don’t kid yourself. Especially, especially in a University setting, people are taking your measure. Good. Your example counts, matters, lasts, works.

Tradition and confrontation evoke a response. The unclean spirit leaves. The congregation murmurs. The report goes forth.

Let me turn it around. When you fail somehow, and we all you do, sometime, you know the negative influence of your own response. Give yourself some credit then, on the up side of the ledger. Dean Jones gave me a book. Professor Jones listened with care. That TA gave me the benefit of the doubt. I will always be grateful for what Chaplain Jones did for me. Let me say to those of us thirty years old and more: eyes are watching, ears are listening, minds are considering what path to take. Your example makes a difference in their response, right here, right now, right at Marsh Chapel. We are forever teaching and learning, learning and teaching.

Someone taught you. A High School band director? A Latin teacher in college? A chemistry professor who lingered with you in the lab? Who?

One responded to her Latin teacher. Another responded to his science teacher. One responded to her history teacher. Another responded to her family matriarch. One responded to his theology professor. As Carlyle Marney put it: “Who told you who you was?”

The music is playing all around us, all through us, in our triumph and in our tragedy. We just need to respond. To lean over, and turn the dial, and set the music free.

This is the power of Bach today. Inklings of faith are found in real response.

The Gospel According to St. Mark starts off with inklings of faith, inklings of faith. When you are searching for a sense of, then hunt around a healthy bit of lost tradition, and for a courageous and cleansing moment of confrontation and for a real and personal, public response.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 01.31.2021 at 11:00 am

Sunday
January 17

Angels of God

By Marsh Chapel

John 1: 43-51

It is not only an ethical imperative that directs us to love our neighbor. To feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome the stranger, heal the sick and visit the prisoner. Should we do these things? Yes, we should. Is it our Christian duty to do them? Yes, it is. Is this a moral imperative for us, to follow the teachings of Jesus? It is so. Then is this the gospel, the good news for today, for the Lord’s day? Well, we might say it is not the whole of the Gospel. In the Gospel, not only an ethical imperative, but also, and more so, a divine gift awaits us in Jesus the Christ. You will see the heavens opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man. You will see the heavens opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.

Let us receive the divine gifts of this day, in the midst of all manner of personal, communal, national and cultural challenges.

Over the last 15 years, in concert with a tradition dating back several years before, we have honored the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. upon this Sunday. Often, though not this year, this is also the Sunday at the opening of Spring term, a kind of winter Matriculation. Year by year, we have tried to probe the depths of our legacy, our inheritance, here at Boston University and here at Marsh Chapel, of the voice, mind and heart of Dr. King, whose beautiful, unique and aspirational monument greets us upon Marsh Plaza. Over the years, voices in concert with his have been lifted here, on the third Sunday of January, prophetic, true, and loving voices: those of the Rev. Dr. Walter Fluker (four times), Mr. Christopher Edwards, Esq., the Rev. Dr. Jennifer Quigley, the Rev. Dr. Peter Paris, Ms. Liz Douglass, the Rev. Dr. Elizabeth Siwo-Okundi, the Rev. Dr. Karen Coleman, and also the Dean (three times), including last year, January 2020, in our service celebrating the opening of the Howard Thurman Center (along with Dean Kenn Elmore and Director Katherine Kennedy). (April 2018 also included 10 days of events and services, fifty years after King’s assassination, culminating in sermons here at Marsh Chapel by Cornell William Brooks and especially of Governor Deval Patrick.) For Martin Luther King Jr. Sunday this year, this fifteenth year, we listen solely to the voice of King himself, in words all, including every undergraduate, should want to read and know and hear, out of Martin Luther King’s 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail.

The work of ethics can open a world us to a world of angels. When you feed the hungry, then you may be christened. When you clothe the naked, you yourself may be given a confirming gift. When you welcome the stranger, it may be own joy in eucharist that emerges. When you heal the sick, you might just find your own anointing and absolution. And when you visit the prisoner, it is your own soul that is fed. We are directed ethically to the periphery of life (hunger, nakedness, loneliness, illness, abandonment) so that our ethical zeal can carry us higher. John knew well, perhaps best in Scripture, that morals and ethics only take us to the foothills. There is a great high mountain before us. We find our way toward this height when, by surprise, in the midst of our work and duty…we are accosted by God, by the angels of God.

So, it is, for those who will hear, some nearly sixty years later, words from Martin Luther King, in the finest document remaining from the civil rights era, his Letter from Birmingham Jail. Those in prison, from Paul of Tarsus to Nelson Mandela, have long had wisdom to share. They have time to think, and so, something to say. The finest document from the civil rights era, now nearly sixty years past, is this letter. Its burden of truth, carried in soaring prose, is largely conveyed in these words: impatience, justice, time, love, disappointment, and hope. In the quiet of this winter weekend, with all that swirls about us across this great land of the free and home of the brave, let us carefully meditate together on the gospel as heard through these words from Birmingham. For we too, now in January 2021, sorely need the nourishment of impatience, justice, time, love, disappointment, and hope.

As we enter the next chapter of American history, the central, lasting, troublous, challenging matter of race, of racism, of anti-racism meets us head on and head long. This is not only an ethical set of issues. Rightly seen, rightly heard, this can be a gift of God to us. Perhaps, at Marsh Chapel, as a University pulpit, we have both the responsibility and the opportunity to place some of this near future work in the context of angelic words, none finer than those of Letter from Birmingham Jail. On completing the Ph.D. I went to our neighborhood college, a young Jesuit school, and asked to teach. The Religion Chair, a wonderful woman and Tillich scholar, a former religious, said, ‘You want to teach?’ So, she assigned me the Introduction to Religion Course, which I taught for two decades there, everything you never wanted to know about World Religions, Judaism, Christianity and yours truly. I asked about the curriculum. That is up to you, she replied. Except here (she looked over at a photo of Daniel Berrigan) we always require the Prophet Amos, and Augustine’s Confessions and…Letter from Birmingham Jail. Wise counsel.

Let us meditate on impatience:

For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear… with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant 'Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God- given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jet-like speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark jab of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six- year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children…then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and (we) are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

Let us meditate on justice:

One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all".

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust... Paul Tillich said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression 'of man's tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness?

Let us meditate on time:

I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: “but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth."

Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely rational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of (those) willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation…Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

Let us meditate on love:

Was not Jesus an extremist for love: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream." Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." Was not Martin Luther an extremist: "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God." And John Bunyan: "I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience." And Abraham Lincoln: "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free." And Thomas Jefferson: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal ..." So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love?

Let us meditate on disappointment:

I have looked at (our)beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious-education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: "What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices…

Yes, these questions are still in my mind. In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? l am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson and the great- grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.

Let us meditate on hope:

Perhaps I have once again been too optimistic. Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world? Perhaps I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual church, the church within the church, as the true ekklesia and the hope of the world. But again I am thankful to God that some noble souls from the ranks of organized religion have broken loose from the paralyzing chains of conformity and joined us as active partners in the struggle for freedom…They have carved a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment.

I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are at present misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America's destiny…We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.

Angels of God, ascending and descending…Hear the Gospel in the voice, the voice of Martin Luther King, Jr., meditation on impatience, justice, time, love, disappointment, and hope. You and I will need some measure of divine impatience with what is wrong, in this next year. You and I will some measure of divine justice to seize what is right in the next year. You and I will need some measure of time, Kairos time not just Chronos time, to do the right things in the right ways at the right times in the next year. You and I will need some measure of love to bring meaning to work in the next year. You and I will need some honesty about disappointment, and its depths, to endure the challenges of the next year. And most of all, you and I will need some measure of hope, that which we do not see but wait for with patience, in the next year. May God bless us all.

Let us pray:

In a season of stagnation, dear Lord, make us impatient.

In a season of unfairness, dear Lord, help us yearn for justice.

In a season of delay, dear Lord, cause us to prize our time.

In a season of decay, dear Lord, inspire us by love.

In a season of disappointment, dear Lord, grant us courage to be.

In a season of desire, dear Lord, may we hope for what we do not see.

Amen.

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

posted in Services Honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 01.17.2021 at 11:00 am

Sunday
January 10

Faith Before Daybreak

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 1: 4-11

A voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased’.

There are some weeks when good news seems hard to come by.

Late in November, 1963, with youth hockey around the corner, and at last some new skates that fit, a lingering pallor covered our town, after President Kennedy tragically was shot. There was an evening prayer service, but good news was hard to come by. ‘We are a nation drenched in sorrow’ began Jan’s dad’s, my father in law’s rewritten sermon for that Sunday.

A decade later, with some of us studying abroad, preparing to teach college Spanish literature—a dream deferred to another lifetime, the war in Vietnam was reportedly ending, with helicopters carrying out the remaining soldiers and staff from a rooftop in Saigon. ‘How do you ask a man to be the last to die in a mistaken war?’ aptly asked one then young, now veteran national leader. A nation chastened, broken, without bearing or mooring, and little good news to be had.

A bit more than a decade later, 1988, a plane down in Lockerbie, but we rehearsed that last week, did we not?

Of a Tuesday morning, a bright one, an autumn bright morning, September 2001, some of us headed out for work, wondering what we had just seen, or what had we seen?, in the skies above the Towers above the city that never sleeps. Little sleep, and very little good news, there was in that week of 9/11. The evenings were given over to community worship, and on Friday the churches come 11am were packed. The dangling chads of Broward County the year before were forgotten.

On this very avenue, in April of 2013, with the blasts of Beacon street still reverberating in mind and memory, every evening that week brought, right in here in Marsh Chapel, some manner of worship service, and gathering, for healing and help. None of it fully adequate, all of it offered to God and neighbor on behalf of a better future day, days and weeks when there would be more news of a better sort. A promissory note, within the notes of grief and loss.

Early November of 2016 brought another set of days, a week, weeks let us say, of confusion and despair regarding that fall’s election. In hindsight, we see a bit better why. What many meant by choices in 2016 was not the meaning of those choices. What one meant was not, and is not, what it means. What you meant is not what it means. What it means is found not in intention but in consequence. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. We all can attest to that from our own experience, and our own behavior. It was hard to scare up much good news that late autumn.

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

Coming into this week already we faced challenges aplenty. A climate reeling out of control. A pandemic claiming 350,000 lives. A political culture, a culture cooked politics, for politics is ever downstream from culture, putting people at daggers drawn. A community of communities seeing, in full, for the first full time it may be, the ravages and damages of racial bias, hatred, and prejudice. And pain, the pain of every day.

Now this week. On top of all other this (Thursday) morning’s blaring headline, ‘TRUMP INCITES MOB’. 4 dead, not in Ohio this time, but in the nation’s capital city, and inside the nation’s capitol building. Insurrection with presidential incitement. One wonders about the future of the party of Lincoln.

January 6, 2021. For the rest of history, for the rest of our lives, we shall have to live with, and attempt by faith to live down, both to live with and to live down, such utter calumny, such tragic, needless, heedless yet revelatory disaster. It is an apocalyptic—a revelatory—moment, hundreds wrecking the capitol, with hardly a single arrest to date, encouraged by a wantonly graceless leader, and with 6 Senators, 6 Senators (Cruz, Hawley, Hyde-Smith, Marshall, Kennedy, Tuberville), and much other congressional cattle (Jonah 4:11), continuing to feed its root cause. For while this sermon is being recorded Thursday late afternoon, January 7, 2021, we cannot be at all sure what further difficulty and distress may visit us, in this current week of scarce good news, by Sunday when the sermon is heard, January 10, 2021. One said, ‘this is like 9/11, except we did this to ourselves’.

But at some preconscious level, somewhere down in the declivities of the country’s psyche, we had a sense that this was coming. We did not want to admit it. We hoped against hope to be wrong in that premonition. We hoped to whistle past the graveyard for another few days. Yet we remembered, dimly, our upbringing, ‘don’t play with fire if you don’t want to get burned’. We have had four years of warning, advisement, signs along the pathway of this premonition. So we are not surprised, and have no reason to be. It has been as plain as the nose on your face, even as plain as the nose on my face, at least since Charlottesville. It is no wonder, no surprise, that the 25^th Amendment remedy is now rightly, and wisely, under full consideration. For a lot can happen in two weeks.

So, the community of faith gathers come Sunday, January 10, 2021, to listen, pray, and prepare. You have come this morning, by radio or internet, to listen, pray, and prepare. And to wonder. Just what is the gospel, the good news for this Lord’s Day?

With you, I weep for my country and its people. More so, I pray for my own people, my own congregation, our University, our listenership, you and your loved ones, near or far or very far away. It must be admitted, that there are some weeks when good news seems pretty hard to come by. This is one.

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

Listen. The Gospel of Mark was written for listening. It emerged over long time, with the earliest Christians reciting and recalling their Lord, his love, and their shared shaping by that love, in faith, beginning in baptism. They listened, morning and evening, Sunday by Sunday, and over time, in direct response to weeks both empty and full, they began to write down for future generations what they had heard. Today we have such an account, that of Jesus’ baptized. Today we have such a lesson, the hearing of a voice. Today we start again into an unknown future, within earshot of that same divine voice, ‘This is my Beloved’. For all our failure, for all manner of sin and death and meaninglessness, for all that is wrong, and there is much, especially just now, there is a voice, ringing out and calling to us. A voice from heaven. ‘A voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased’. Yes, this is a scandalous particularity, to name One the Beloved, to call out One with intimacy (‘with you’), to identify One, baptized in the Jordan, ‘with Thee I am well pleased’. Yet for generations women and men have found this particularity strikingly universal, and lastingly, eternally real. Especially in weeks when good news is scarce. And in our time, into dimensions of common ground that may cause us work and make us uncertain, we will want to learn to listen, and listen again. Listen. Listen. Listen.

Pray. What a tremendous spiritual gift is our Psalter. Remember Samuel Terrien teaching us: : Here are 700 years of psalms, 1000-400bce. For the psalmists, Yahweh’s presence was not only made manifest in Zion. It reached men and women over the entire earth. The sense of Yahweh’s presence survived the annihilation of the temple and the fall of the state 587bc. Elusive but real, it feared no geographical uprooting and no historical disruption. Having faced the void in history and in their personal lives, they knew the absence of God even within the temple. The inwardness of their spirituality, bred by the temple, rendered the temple superfluous. (279) In other words, they knew how to live through and out through godless weeks. Our psalm today, Psalm 29, ancient and redolent with glory, recalls for us how to pray. From your youth you have known. Adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication. The ACTS forms of prayer. Adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication. One is a word of glory, echoing the glory of God that thunders. Glorify God and enjoy him forever. A word of glory. One is a word of contrition, by which we begin every service at Marsh Chapel. Prayer is not only a matter of individual or even personal attention, a certain sitting silent before God. Prayer is also the voice, the responsive voice, of the people of God, echoing in antiphonal chorus, the call, the bowing before glory. GLORY! All have sinned, all have fallen short of that primordial glory. All. A prayer of contrition. One is a word of gratitude. In such a week, it may simply be a prayer of gratitude that things are not yet any worse. A piercing memory of an 87 year old woman who had hidden, and been hidden, from the Nazis as a child evoked this the other day: “During the war, we didn’t know if we would make a day. I didn’t have any freedom. I couldn’t speak loudly, I couldn’t laugh, I couldn’t cry…But now, I can feel freedom. I stay by the window and look out. The first thing I do in the morning is look out and see the world. I am alive. I have food, I go out, I go for walks, I do some shopping. And I remember: No one wants to kill me. So, still, I read. I cook a little bit. I shop a little bit. I learned the computer. I do puzzles. (1/3/21, Toby Levy, NYT). A word of gratitude. One is a word of longing, desire, incantation, supplication. Dear God, guide us through these murky moments, like those we have seen in the past, let us pray, and let our learning now make us stronger later. A word of supplication. Prayer takes some set aside time, some quiet, some intentional focus. Pray. Pray. Pray.

Prepare. The whole of Scripture begins with the divine preparation, in creation, and in speech. ‘Let there be…’ And what might that be, let there be? Light. Watch for the rays of light in the dark. Watch for the rays of light in the dark. Wednesday morning, before all, well, chaos, broke loose, a newly elected Senator from Georgia was interviewed. He was raised in public housing, one of 12 children. Whatever the day, his dad had them all up before dawn. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning, he was reminded. Yes, but that’s the thing about the morning, he responded, it begins in the full dark, it begins at dawn, before daybreak. Senator Warnock learned to prepare, shining his shoes every morning, before daylight, to get ready, to be ready. His parents gave him the gift of faith before daybreak. So. Light. Watch for the coming rays of light. Nor does light shine only in the heart, but also, even moreso, in the heart of the community. Individuals need to prepare, but so do communities. Senator Warnock went to Morehouse College, where his dean, Dean of the Chapel the Rev. Dr. Lawrence Carter, who has preached three times in the last three years from this Marsh pulpit, greeted him. Now Senator Warnock went on to earn a PhD from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York (I believe I have heard of the school) and has since been in the pulpit of historic Ebenezer Church, Atlanta, for many years. But Dean Carter reminded me in conversation Wednesday morning, that when his parents dropped him off at Morehouse, Rafael Warnock had not a dime to his name. His parents could give him only what they had, their powerful, limitless, ceaseless love, pride and belief in him. Their powerful, limitless, ceaseless love, pride and belief in him. Not much? Well. It seems to have been enough, just enough. That’s the thing about the morning. It begins in the dark, in preparation, awaiting the word… LET THERE BE LIGHT. Prepare. Prepare. Prepare.

People of God. Listen! Pray! Prepare! And hear again the gospel:

A voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased’.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 01.10.2021 at 10:00 am

Sunday
January 3

Faith in Flesh and Bone

By Marsh Chapel

John 1: 10-18

¹⁰He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. ¹¹He came to what was his own,^[^a^] and his own people did not accept him. ¹²But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, ¹³who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

¹⁴And the Word became flesh and (dwelt) among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son,^[^b^] full of grace and truth. ¹⁵(John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’”) ¹⁶From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. ¹⁷The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. ¹⁸No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son,^[^c^] who is close to the Father’s heart,^[^d^] who has made him known.

Preface

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Christmas at a social distance need not be Christmas at a spiritual distance. Hear the good news. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. There is a physicality at the dawn of faith, through the echoes of faith, welling up in the gift of faith. There is a physique to faith, your faith, the faith of the church, the faith which has seized us and seizes us still, a faith in flesh and bone. As Paul Lehmann taught us long ago: God is at work in the world to make and keep human life human. God is at work in the world to make and keep human life human. God works through people, through human agency. Incarnation, poetically and wondrously pronounced in John 1, reminds us so, and recalls to us the lasting power of human agency, people, like you, God's people at work in the world. God's work must truly be our own. There are many who will scoff at human agency: 'uh oh, oh no, go slow, veto'. Not you. You know you can make a difference for the good, the true, and the beautiful. YES YOU CAN. Your prayer is that of Howard Thurman. Your motto is that of John Wesley. Your carol is that of his brother Charles.

Howard Thurman:

When the Song of the Angels Is Stilled
When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and the princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flocks,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the heart.

John:

Do all the good you can.

By all the means you can.

In all the ways you can.

In all the places you can.

At all the times you can.

To all the people you can.

As long as ever you can.”

Charles:

Hail the heaven-born Prince of Peace!
Hail the Sun of Righteousness!
Light and life to all he brings,
risen with healing in his wings.
Mild he lays his glory by,
born that we no more may die,
born to raise us from the earth,
born to give us second birth.
Hark! the herald angels sing,
"Glory to the new born King!"

All the theological poetics we can muster, all the poetical theology we can risk, all the words set to music and music made for words, all the musical words, all verbal music, all, and more, that we can find and more than all that we can shape, we shall need, this Christmastide Sunday, and every Sunday through 2021, to herald the gospel, the faith of flesh and bone, the physicality of faith.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Light A Candle

We have never been far from academia—Colgate, Syracuse, Ohio Wesleyan, Columbia, Cornell, McGill, Lemoyne, University of Rochester, now BU.

Our friend Bob worked at Syracuse University for four decades. He and his wife Connie started coming to our church out of an old family connection, on her side, and because his Boy Scout troop met in the building, on his side. She was an architect, community leader, financial developer, and outgoing spirit. He was quiet, kind, soulful, and real. You could swap stories with him about Eagle Scout courts of honor, about trading neckerchiefs at the National Jamboree, about Philmont Scout Ranch and the Tooth of Time.

Bob worked in a small office on campus. We will need some archaeological tools to describe his life’s labor. He supported students who needed AV and other equipment. In the chaos of his little nest, he could find for you all manner of treasures: carbon paper, white out, typewriter ribbon, film strip projectors, carousel slide projectors, screens, amplifiers, ditto paper, pens and pencils, and virtually anything else you, dear student, might need, some decades ago, for your class presentation due in two hours, due early tomorrow morning, due in 10 minutes. In the joyful freedom of pastoral ministry, as that church grew, the minister could go and visit Bob, and watch the nearly endless stream of orphaned students stampeding their way to his little room. He didn’t hector them: your lack of planning is not my personal crisis…proper planning prevents poor performance…be punctual and do everything at the appointed hour. No. He just helped. He just quietly and joyfully helped. One winter a middle-aged former minister, working on another master’s degree, came by to speak about Bob: “I watch him. He is salt and light. He would give you the shirt off his back. He is there for students.”

On weekends he took his scout troop to be enveloped in the natural world, usually deep into the Adirondacks. There he taught a love of the created order, a respect for the history of places, and the rudiments of leadership: ‘affirm in public, criticize in private’, and other lasting truths. Big eyes covered by big glasses, a big smile, and silent except for laughter. He never bought a thing on credit. Not his house, not his car, not his camping gear. He taught his four children that same frugality.

Connie predeceased him by some years, but until Bob died a few winters ago, one could know and smile to think that at least one Christian walked the earth, in the shadow of the Carrier Dome.

As we were trying to get that urban churching rolling, we one year arranged a December dish to pass dinner. We sang some carols, maybe 100 of us or so. We had asked three of our people just to tell a Christmas story, as our fairly humble program that snow-covered evening. Bob’s was the last.

As a 20-year-old he had gone to England, as part of a bomber crew in or about 1941. During our own national and international upheaval, pandemic 2021, we may want to recall stories and courage from his generation. He told us, simply, about being away from home for the first time. About having a photo of his girlfriend, Connie. About his mom and dad and sister. He said that his only thought was to hope that he would see them all once more. Connie. His Mom. His Dad. His sister. “I would like to get home alive”. This was his prayer, as it is for some in hospital today. Christmas came, but the service men were not allowed any decorations. No candles on land that might be lit and so shine and so guide enemy bombers. Bob noticed that their rations came in cardboard boxes with a coating of paraffin on them. So, when he had time, he would sit in front of Connie’s picture, that December, and using his scout knife he would peel off the paraffin, storing it in a number 10 can. By Christmas Eve Bob had enough for three candles, each with a short wick made of shoestring in the middle. That night as plane after the plane took off, he set up a little table in the rear fuselage. Flying home, as they leveled off, he and the crew, except for the pilot, gathered at the little table. He was afraid maybe the paraffin wouldn’t work. But after a while, all three candles were lit, burning now in the dark sky over the cliffs of Dover and over the English Channel. After a long silence, one of the men recited a psalm. Then they said the Lord’s prayer. Bob prayed his hope to get home. Then together, without much singing talent and without any practice, they quietly sang a carol, ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Glory to the Newborn King’. “I would like to get home alive”, Bob said, as the candles dimmed, flickered and went out.

From that personal Christmas remembrance, we all caught a glimpse of the origins of Bob’s matured humility, kindness, and integrity. His faith in flesh and bone.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Faith is a Walk in the Dark

Before Jesus there was John, before the Christ there was the Baptist. Jesus was a contemporary of John. John prepared the way for Jesus. As we listen with word and music, perhaps we can ponder the power of faith in flesh and bone.

Before Christmas there is Advent, before the incarnation is the anticipation. The feast of Christmas, so this Lord’s day, comes after the penitence of Advent. The joy of birth comes after the anxiety of expectation. As we listen with word and music, today let us ponder the mystery of faith in flesh and bone.

Before tradition there is event, before understanding there is experience. The rolling voice of the Baptist is the event through which we each year pass in order to come to our understanding of Christmas, this Christmastide Sunday.

Before Matthew there was Mark, before teaching there was preaching, before catechesis there was kerygma. We will listen this year, 2021, mostly to Mark. Last year, Matthew, this year, Mark. Matthew is an interpreter of Mark. Mark is the model for Matthew. As we listen with word and music, perhaps we can ponder the power of change, especially for those living outside.

Before John the Gospel there was John the prologue to the Gospel, John 1, our reading today, wherein the Baptist gives way to the Christ:

Seasoned Religion said that the end was near. John says the beginning is here.

Earlier Religion saw the end of the world. John preached the light of the world.

Inherited spirituality waited for the future coming of the Lord. John celebrated the Word among us, full of grace and truth.

Earlier Religion feared death, judgment, heaven and hell, in the by and by. John faced them all in every day.

Seasoned Religion clung fiercely to an ancient untruth. John let go, and accepted a glorious new truth, and hugged grace and freedom.

Our inheritance, and Matthew and Mark and Luke and Paul and all looked toward the End, soon to come. But John. John looked up at the beginning, already here. They said with Shakespeare, “All’s well that ends well”. John replied, gut begonnen hap gebonnen, “well begun is half done”.

John alone had the full courage to face spiritual disappointment and move ahead. So, we memorize 8:32: You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free!

We face the need to change from inherited untruth to new insight and imagination. New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth; one must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of truth.

Truth: faith in flesh and bone.

Truth, at Christmas, outside, in the cold, at night, in a manger. Outside, as communities of color, needing but fearing some of their neighborhood police, both needing and fearing their own police, in the year of Taylor, Arbery, Floyd, Hill and others. Outside, as those along the borders, sometimes, without principle and without apology, stripped of their children. Outside, hunting for a meal, with children in tow. Outside, with employment lost, bereft of purpose or place or position or power. Outside, fearing, fearing pollution and pandemic and politics and prejudice and pain. Outside, and without, even, the indoor beauty of a church, or the indoor beauty of a choir, or the indoor beauty of a gathered and loving congregation, a truly addressable community. El Greco best painted the incarnation, worn fingers and bowed heads, and wrinkled brows, and outdoor clothing, shepherds abiding, abiding, abiding. All, and all, at a Christmas social distance. Incarnation comes, into a world of hurt. Faith in flesh and bone.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

The Holy Scripture assumes a multi-generational perspective, no more so than in the narratives of Christmas. Real change takes a long time, generations of time, when it comes at all. Do you remember what you were confronted with a generation ago? For some of us, another December in that same Syracuse neighborhood, 32years ago, it was the sudden announcement on a bitter snowy night, to a stunned basketball crowd in the Carrier Dome, that a plane with many of our own neighborhood students, our own Syracuse University students, and students from other regions including Boston, had crashed in Lockerbie Scotland. The portent of that moment in 1988 eluded us, eluded all, but it was a harbinger of the struggles of the next thirty years, in one limited, horror and tragedy. 182 passengers died; 270 in total died; 35 students from SU died, and some from other Universities, including one from Boston University. A few days ago, as this sermon was gestating, a newscast recast that moment, noting ongoing legal challenges, and retelling the story of Lockerbie. It brought back that night, and the silent 30,000 in the Dome, after the game, and the walk home. Over the hill and through the cemetery where now both my parents have since been buried, side by side. Through the dark and cold, wind and snow. The darkness of sin. The cold of death. The snowfall of the threat of meaninglessness. Sin, death, the threat of meaninglessness. To trod through these, again in 2021, we shall need some faith, faith in flesh and bone. Faith to face and face up to the mystery of death, the tenacity of sin, the bitter temptation of meaninglessness. Maybe the challenge of the year past, in manifold dimensions, has been just this.

Coda

All the theological poetics we can muster, all the poetical theology we can risk, all the words set to music and music made for words, all the musical words, all verbal music, all, and more, than we can find and more than all that we can shape, we shall need this Christmastide Sunday, to herald the gospel, the faith of flesh and bone, the physicality of faith. We shall need the flesh and bone of ordinary grace, to live the daily truth of faith.

And the word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Speaking of such. A friend, Kerry Loughman, recently wrote: “Hope you and your family are well in this crazy, COVID time. I have a small poem for you… We live opposite a Brookline elementary school in Coolidge Corner and every day these children were my daily blessing. I watched from my third-floor window all last spring and into the summer. “

Every afternoon, around four,

a wheeled flock of boys

flies down my city street

on bikes, scooters, skateboards,

more skilled than scared, and

raucous with it. Contrapuntal

eurhythmic beats play concrete

sidewalk sections 'til they dare

to launch off curbs, catching air,

helmet plumage drafting down,

fledging into a new reality.

Masked avengers, they swoop

into games of capture and release;

capture the invisible flag,

release time's arrested breath,

spread mojo on all our viral fears.

Circuitous flights around the school,

capture and release of joy.

They go round and round:

a circumlocution of boys.

‘Capture and Release’, by Kerry Loughman

10.08.2020

A circumlocution of boys.

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, your own 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.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 01.3.2021 at 11:00 am

Sunday
December 27

The Gift of Faith

By Marsh Chapel

Galatians 4: 4-7

Preface

The birth of Christ places before us a new possibility.

We can live in a new way.

“Christ is alive and goes before us, to show and share what love can do. This is a day of new beginnings. Our God is making all things new”.

You can continue to live in the old way.

Or you can live a different life, living the gift of faith.

Paul’s Christmas Gospel

Paul writes to the Galatians: But when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption, as children.

Paul of Tarsus rarely is mentioned at Christmas. He never saw Jesus and knew almost nothing of the birth. Or of birth. Of Christmas, he says only: “born of a woman, born under the law”. (Gal. 4) A human birth, still in the dark shadow of religion.

Paul is our earliest, best witness to the primitive Christian church. Yet he says nothing about any of the things we take for granted in this season: Mary, Joseph, manger, Bethlehem, shepherds, Kings, Herod, Rachel weeping.

In fact, you may have ruminated a little about how Paul might have approached our reading from Luke 2: 22-40, composed some thirty years after Paul’s own (legendary) death in the Roman coliseum. How would the celibate rabbi have thought about Mary and a complicated birth?

More basically, more biologically, how would a man like Paul have connected, if at all, with the multiple nursery scenes found in the first three gospels?

You will admit, if pressed, that there are few things more bemusing than listening to men talk about child birth. All the gospels and almost 2000 years of Christmas sermons fall beneath this judgment. What do we know about it?

And Paul?

How can men--how could Paul--possibly fathom the pain, change, and transformation of childbirth? Especially when this birth is not just birth but--Incarnation?

Which brings us to Christmas 2020 and the stunning news that Paul, more than all, “gets it”! Better than virtually any other piece of the New Testament Paul names the Christmas Gospel with utter precision in Galatians 4: 4-7.

This verse of Holy Writ, read for this Christmas Sunday, places a claim on you and me. If Paul can “get it”, if Paul can receive the grace of Christmas, the gift of faith, and faith is ever and only and always a gift, then there is hope for everybody. Especially for you this morning if you feel at some distance from the Christmas traditions, the old stories, the church’s habits and patterns. Especially if you feel, that is, a little on the outside. Come COVID, we are all, by some measure, on the outside. Here is Christmas. And Christmas is all about God’s love for the outside. Paul—what a friend we have in Paul!—changed, was changed, became a changed man, in the full morning light of Christmas.

There is a place, a bit earlier in his collection of letters, that gives us the full picture. In the earliest piece of our New Testament, 1 Thessalonians, as he describes his happy relationship with one of his first churches, Paul offers us a glimpse of the gospel, the Christmas gift of faith. We will lean on Thessalonians to interpret Galatians. Paul wrote, For we were gentle among you, like a nurse taking care of her children. For we were gentle among you, like a nurse taking care of her children. It is Christmas testimony that we can live in a new way!

The coming of Christ changed Paul. Christmas changed Paul. From Pharisee to freedom fighter. From lawyer to preacher. From religion to faith. From law to gospel. He has been given the “wings of the morning”. There is no other way to interpret his self-designation, a Christmas nametag if ever there was one, here in 1 Thessalonians. Nurse.

Paul refers to himself and his way of living as “gentle as a nurse”. Gentle? Paul? Apparently so, at least now and then. And then, “nurse”. In our COVID era, we readily and rightly and with great gratitude and respect think of heroic nurses, first responders. It is right for a quiet moment, here, just to think of all that nurses and others have given, to us and others, this year, 2020. And now some receiving vaccines, a modern miracle if ever there was one, even as we converse here this morning. Yet here, in Paul’s letter, the word does not refer to white gowns, medical degrees, stethoscopes, or medications. It means the other kind of nurse and nursing, the nurse-maid. We learn this, even without reference to the Greek, from the rest of the verse, a “nurse caring for her children”. The word, ηπιον, means wet nurse or nursing mother. The image so jarred one early copier, one early scribe, so much, that he added an extra letter to one text to “clean it up” and change the meaning. Paul is staggeringly clear, however. He describes himself as a wet-nurse, like a woman nursing a child! Paul, that is, is referring to his own new way of living as a kind of nursing, as intimate, physical, personal, vulnerable, self-giving. As in, well, as in nursing a child.

You may find this astounding, that one who could speak so harshly of his opponents in Galatia (it is Christmas and we will avoid a direct citation) could understand himself by analogy with a mother and child in the moment of nursing. If the birth of Christ can move Paul that far, how much more can Christmas do for you and me!

A generation ago, I discovered, James Clarke had a similar insight, writing about Paul’s self-designation as a nurse maid:

Here is conversion in great might. It is easy to think of Paul as the missionary who made Europe and Asia his parish and lifted Christianity out of its Palestinian cradle; as the warrior who fought the good fight of faith and whose sword seldom rested in its scabbard; as the statesman who conceived vastly and executed daringly; as the theologian who handled the huge imponderables and grand peculiarities of the faith with ease and judgment; as the personality, powerful and decisive, who cut his signature deeply into the life of his time; as the mystic who beheld the faraway hills of silence and wonder, and whose great theme was “union with Christ”. But it strains the imagination to picture him, who was so imperious, in the gentle and tender role of nursemaid. Truly there is no limit to the converting power of God in Jesus Christ. (IBD loc cit)

Yet Clarke climbs only half the mountain. Yes, it does astound our imaginations to picture Paul as a mother with a child at the breast. What is doubly astounding, however, is to realize, fully to intuit, that Paul understood himself this way! Paul understood himself this way! Paul, at his most converted, could see his life in a new way, a marvelously new way, as different from all he had lived before as a nursemaid is different from an imperious religionist.

Paul may not have known the account narrated in our reading from Luke 2 today. He may not have had any more idea than we do about the exact nature and detail of these birth narratives. He probably would have been somewhat surprised by their imaginative peculiarity.

But the meaning of Christmas he fully knows. Paul ‘gets it’.

Your Christmas Gospel

And, so may we, mais oui, may you and I, ESPECIALLY, if you are not easily or closely enthralled by magic stories, birth miracles, speaking wombs, nursery rhymes, and angel voices. Paul hears the truth of it all, and his life changes. Ours can too.

Paul may not have known the Christmas stories we do, but his pastoral life embodied the incarnate love of God in Christ, physical intimate, personal, vulnerable self-giving, gentle as a nurse-maid.

Ours can too. Yours can too. You can live in a new way. You can.

It is the way of the turned cheek, the offered cloak, the second mile. It is the way of love for those who are not lovely. It is the way of the love of enemies. It is the way of forbearance. It is the way of tenderhearted forgiveness. It is the way of prayer for those who persecute. It is the way of God, who is kind to God’s ungrateful and selfish children. Gentle as a nurse…

A famous leader, once, and sadly, scornfully disdained the “turn the other cheek approach”. You had to wonder whether his Methodist Sunday School had shown him Paul’s letters. Maybe he was absent that day.

Christmas gives birth to the daily, very real possibility, starting again for you at noon, the real potential that you can live in a new way. Christmas gives birth to the life and death decision for or against Jesus, for the new path or the old.

If Paul can “get it”, all can. This is the change that God works (GOD works) in the human heart. The God who said “let light shine out of darkness…” It is the gift of faith. Faith comes by hearing. Hearing by the word of God.

We live in age of violence, even global and extreme violence. Certainly cultural, verbal, rhetorical violence. But this is Christmas! With Luke we may marvel at the mystery of Christ. But with Paul we may practice the partnership of the Gospel, living as gentle as a nurse with her children.

We can live in a new way. The world does not lack for promise, but only for a sense of promise. But how?

Three Applications

First. We can live as those who look forward to a gentler world community. In a year, 2020, of manifold and multiple difficulties that included environment, virus, government, race and loss—pollution, pandemic, politics, prejudice and pain, we can afford to listen to the strange language of the Bible, and of Paul. All of us listening this morning, liberal and conservative, democrat and republican, urban and rural, blue and red, hawk and dove. We can all share the horizon of hope for peace on earth, good will to all. We can look out for ways to “soften the collisions” that will come in our time. As Inman says, in that great old novel Cold Mountain, life is riddled with “endless contention and intractable difference”. Collisions are virtually inevitable. But they can be softened.

Our guide here is the great quintessential liberal British philosopher, Isaiah Berlin:

Collisions, even if they cannot be avoided, can be softened. Claims can be balanced, compromises can be reached: in concrete situations not every claim is of equal force—so much liberty, so much equality; so much for sharp moral condemnation, so much for understanding a given human situation; so much for the full force of law, and so much for the prerogative of mercy; for feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, healing the sick, sheltering the homeless. Priorities, never final and absolute, must be established.

Of course, social or political collisions will take place; the mere conflict of positive values alone makes this unavoidable. Yet they can be minimized by promoting and preserving an uneasy equilibrium, which is constantly threatened and in constant need of repair—that alone is the precondition for decent societies and morally acceptable behavior, otherwise we are bound to lose our way. A little dull as a solution you will say? Yet there is some truth in this view.

Not just some truth, much, much, much truth.

Second. We can work toward a gentler local community, in the heart of the city, in the service of the city. More than you know, you transform the culture around you with every act, every choice. Remember…

Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low.

He shall feed his flock like a shepherd.

And the glory, the glory of the Lord shall be revealed.

And all flesh shall see it together.

Since by one man death came, so by one man shall come the resurrection of the dead. (my favorite)

Blessing and honor and glory and power be unto him!

So, they received Christ. Here is a door held. There is a criticism softened. Here is a preparation made. There is a courtesy extended. Here is a listening ear. There is a gesture of welcome. As we follow our course let us not become coarse.

One Christmas decades ago, when we lived in NYC, Lily Tomlin produced a single actor play. One night a street person stumbled into the theater and was treated roughly. She made the paper by stopping her performance, guiding the man to center stage and quietly addressing the audience: “Let me introduce you all to--a fellow human being.” She gave him a seat.

At our best, Marsh Chapel and this community both set a fine example of liberal gentleness, even gentility. (That is a compliment to you, by the way. Just so you know.) It is not just what you do that counts, it is how you do it.

At our best, we can live together, watching over one another in love, and treating one another “as gently as a nursemaid”. Men and women both. I can be even more personal. The Christmas Gospel in its Pauline cast directs me as a minister. It gives me the courage to be, to be a pastoral administrator, and to be so with gentle care. Now I will admit that the phrase, “pastoral administrator” is something of an oxymoron, two words that contradict each other. Like jumbo shrimp or United Methodist. Either you are pastoral or you are administrative, tender or tough. But here is Paul, the Great Tough Apostle to the Gentiles, identifying his way of being with that of a woman, a tender mother, breast feeding her kids. That means time spent. That means some tolerance for untidiness. That means a willingness to admit imperfection, some fruitful slobbery sloppiness. That means a habit of being that is more rounded than rectangular, more organic that engineered, more maternal than mechanical. That means not to worry when things aren’t perfect and not to listen when others want them immediately perfect. Life is messy. Community life is particular messy. That means a willingness to go the second and third mile, as you would for your infant. That means risking getting bitten. That means burping and wiping and holding. And especially that means a fierce focus on the future of now young life! That sounds like hard work! Manger work. Nursery work. New Creation work.

Third. We can become gentler people, one by one. Christmas too can become a season as gentle as a nurse. Someone wrote, mimicking, yes, Paul, in 1 Cor 13:

If I decorate my house perfectly with plaid bows, strands of twinkling lights and shiny balls, but do not show love to my family, I’m just another decorator.

If I slave away in the kitchen, baking dozens of Christmas cookies, preparing gourmet meals and arranging a beautifully adorned table at mealtime, but do not show love to my family, I’m just another cook.

If I work at the soup kitchen, carol in the nursing home, and give all that I have to charity, but do not show love to my family, it profits me nothing.

If I trim the spruce with shimmering angels and crocheted snowflakes, attend myriad holiday parties and sing in the choir’s cantata but do not focus on Christ, I have missed the point.

Love stops cooking to hug the child.

Love sets aside decorating to kiss the spouse.

Love is kind, though harried and tired.

Love doesn’t envy another’s home that has Christmas china and table linens.

Love doesn’t yell at the kids to get out of the way, but is thankful they are there to be in the way.

Love bears, believes, hopes, endures all things, and never fails.

Board games will break, pearl necklaces will be lost, golf clubs will rust. The gift of love will endure.

A Time to Choose

This is the spiritual change that God (and God alone) works in the human heart. “Born to raise us from the earth, born to give us second birth”. Here are the birth pangs of the new creation.

Gentle globe, gentle community, gentle soul.

Are you ready to live in a new way?

For their parts, the ancients were caught off guard. So the Kings meandered, the shepherds shuddered, the cattle were low and lowing. There was no ready expectation of Jesus, a poor Messiah. No, there was no prepared expectation for God touching earth in a manger. “A smoking cradle”, said Karl Barth, is all we have of Christmas. How about you? Are you ready for Christmas? That is, are you, as did Paul, able and willing and ready to receive the gift of faith? That is, are you, as did Paul, able and willing and ready to receive the gift of faith?

Merry Christmas!

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 12.27.2020 at 11:00 am

Sunday
December 20

Echoes of Faith

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to hear the just the sermon

Romans 16:25-27

Luke 1:26-38

A Preface

If we listen with the ears of the heart, the sounds of Christmas may just envelop us, its echoes of faith may revive us. And heal us.

A voice, Gabriel, fear not.

A cough, Joseph turning.

A shuffle, Shepherds moving.

A murmur, a shudder, a shake.

Cattle, lowing.

The crisp crackle of hard soil, snow and ice, under foot.

Distant laughter, ribald and rough, out from the inn.

And Mary. Mary. Her yawn, her sigh, her song, her cry.

If we listen with the ears of the heart, the whole creation sings in ecumenical chorus, and the sounds of Christmas heal us by enveloping us in a circle of love, whose circumference is without measure.

You know, our time, and world and culture are fixed on limits. We lean more on what we can count, than on what we can count on. (repeat). Christmas inquires about our sense of limits, and reverberates with echoes of faith, a robust cosmic faith.

Our lips may echo such faith, even if our habits muffle such faith. Health care, for all or for some? Good education (with books, safety, discipline, respect), for all or for some? Employment (most people just need a job and a home), for all or for some? Civic protection for all or some? Heavenly hope, for all or for some? We do tend to live and move and have our being as if the very temporary distinctions we so prize had, somehow, a lasting life.

Here is a Christmas pronouncement of a broad peace, the prospect of love and peace, on earth. On earth. With Gandhi along the Ganges. Beside Tutu on the southern cape. Along the path of the Dalai Lama in farthest Tibet. In Tegucigalpa with the church Amor, Fe Y Vida. This is no religious quietism: cold, careful, efficient, first mile, changeless, fearsome, depressed. No, this is Christmas: warm, open, effective, second mile, free, growing, creative and hopeful!

A Tale of Two Tales

The early church told two stories about Jesus. The first about his death. The second about his life. The first, about the cross, is the older and more fundamental. The second, about the manger, is the key to the meaning of the first, the eyeglasses which open full sight of the first, the code with which to decipher the first.

Jesus died on a cross for our sin according to the Scripture. That is the first story. How we handle this story, later in the year, come Lent and Easter, is a perilous and serious responsibility, given the myth of redemptive violence in which so much of our national and global thinking is now enmeshed. This morning, we do light a virtual candle, light a candle, for our siblings across this great land, 300,000, 300,000, taken by COVID, to a farther shore and a greater light. We wail for them, even as Rachel and others wailed long ago. Yet this week, across the globe, the first vaccines appeared, including right here in the USA. In Canada, first responders were pictured receiving vaccination. A country of 36 million, and a government that has already purchased 80 million vaccines. Those receiving, and those watching, wept. To remember the past year, and now the approaching vaccine, a latter-day miracle for sure, is to weep, with Rachel, at Christmas.

That is, the first story, the death story, the story of Jesus’ death, another season’s work, needs careful, careful handling. Today I might briefly say again what we have said each year in Lent: Remember that it is not the passion of Christ that defines the Person of Christ, but the Person who defines the passion. Remember that it is not the suffering that bears the meaning, but the meaning that bears the suffering…that it is not the cross that carries the love but the love that carries the cross…that it is not crucifixion that encompasses salvation, but salvation that encompasses even the tragedy of crucifixion. The resurrection follows but not replace the cross, for sure. Still, it is also true that the cross precedes but does not overshadow the resurrection. It is Life that has the last word. Later in the year, come March and April, and who knows what life will be like by then?, we shall return to story one. At Christmas, we listen for story two, the story of Jesus’ life, the story of Jesus birth, and its echoes of faith. I wonder: are you ready, Christmas Sunday 2020, ready in a new way and ready for the first time or the first time in a long time, to hear the susurrations of faith? Have you faith? Where is your faith? How is it with your faith?

Last Saturday in the later afternoon it rained heavily. That meant the best walk home, from Chapel to residence, did lie through the long hallways of the College of Arts Sciences, where my mother worked as a secretary in 1951, putting her husband through seminary, when the building was spanking new. From the chapel, the portico will keep you dry, and then take you into the building. The building is regularly teeming with echoes, voices, greetings, laughter, discourse, lecture, music, all. By that late hour, all was silent. Not a person, not a peep, not a word, down the long, lovely hallway of the College of Arts and Sciences. Solitude of a COVID sort, CORONA cause, CORONA based. Solitude. And echoes and ghosts at every step. A meeting here, years ago. Two lectures there, years ago. An Academy graduation speech, here, many years ago. A memorial reception for a lost student, there, years ago. And meetings, meetings, meetings. Now: silence, los sonidos de la silencia, Solitude. Here a photo of a colleague whose memorial we celebrated in 2017. Here a reminder of a past curriculum. And all about, nothing, nothing but quiet, with the rain falling fast outside. In the atrium, a pause, amid the ghosts, and amid the silence.

And a quickened, sharp awareness, a COVID moment: Solitude has its own beauty. Solitude has beauty. It is harsh beauty. It is a dark beauty. And it is a discomfiting beauty for those of us who thrive on presence, conversation, gathering, and human being, morning to night. But a beauty still. I wonder: does your faith have space for such solitude, such harsh, dark, discomfiting beauty? Does mine? When it gets quiet enough, there can be a hearing for the echoes of such faith.

So, we recall at Christmas, the birth story. Who was Jesus? What life did his death complete? How does his word heal our hurt? And how does all this accord with Scripture? One leads to the other.

This second, second level story begins at Christmas, and is told among us to interpret the first. Christmas is meant to make sure that the divine love is not left only to the cross, or only to heaven. Christmas in a troubled world, a world of pollution, pandemic, politics, prejudice and pain, is meant to remind us, all of us, that you do not need to leave the world in order to love God. Alf Landon said, “I can be a liberal and not be a spendthrift”. We might say, “I can be a Christian and not reject the world around”. Christmas is meant to open out a whole range of Jesus, as brother, teacher, healer, young man, all. Christmas is meant to provide the mid-course correction that might be needed if all we had was Lent. And the Christmas echoes are the worker bees in this theological, spiritual hive. Easter may announce the power of love, but Christmas names the presence of love. Jesus died the way he did because he lived the way he did. Jesus lived the way he did so that he could die the way he did. That is, it is not only the Passion of Christ, but the Peace of Christ, too, which Christians like you affirm. What good news for us at the end of 2020! We together need both passion and peace. Such a passionate year we have had. Theologically, globally, culturally, politically, ecclesiastically, we have exuded passion this year. Now comes Christmas again to announce that there is more to Jesus than passion. There is the matter of peace as well.

Creation and Redemption

With great effort, the ancient writers join the God of Creation with the God of Redemption. The coming of the Savior does not limit the divine care to the story of redemption, but weaves the account of redemption into the fabric of creation. There is more to the Gospel than the cross. The ancient writers did sense this and say it with gusto: angels to locate heavenly love on earth; shepherds to locate love on ordinary earth; kings to empower the sense of love on earth; a poor mother to locate physically the Prince of Peace, the Lord of Love, in the womb of earth, and remind us of the physique, the physicality of faith. The location of love is earth, and its circumference is without limit. God’s Christ is without limit.

God’s Christ. The Christ. Echoes of faith.

Ah, the Christ. There are many rooms in this mansion. In the Hebrew Scripture, as translated into Greek long ago, Christ referred to Cyrus the King of Persia, who at last freed the Jews from their bondage in Babylon. 'The Christ of God' later Isaiah calls King Cyrus. Echoes of faith.

Then Christ meant the messianic conqueror who would bring apocalyptic cataclysm, the end of things as we know it, the reconstitution of Israel, and the reign of God--the main wellspring of hope for those breathing and sweating in Jesus’ day, including Jesus. Echoes of faith.

Christians then began to use the term to refer to Jesus, who spoke Aramaic, rode a donkey, recited the Psalms thinking David wrote them all, walked only in Palestine, never married, and was crucified for blasphemy or treason or both. Echoes of faith.

A while later Christ, in Paul, becomes the instrument of God's incursion into the world, to recreate the world, and is known in the cross and the resurrection. Echoes of faith.

Still later, when the Gospel writers pick up the story, Christ is the Risen Lord, preached by Paul, and narrated by unknown silent ghost writers who somehow put together the story of his earthly ministry, always spoken as a resurrection account, and always seen, if seen, in light of Easter, but interpreted through the faith of Christmas, and its echoes. Echoes of faith.

John takes another trail, in the telling of the Christ, because for John none of the above really matters at all, save that Christ reveals God--wherever and whenever there is way, truth or life, there is Christ. Echoes of faith.

Still later, and drawing on all the above and more, the early Christian writers painstakingly and painfully tried to fit all this into neo-platonic thought, involving natures and persons, the human and the divine, the seen and the unseen, and described Christ in creeds, perhaps best and for sure first in the Apostles' Creed--only Son, Lord. Most of the options then have been laid out by 325ad or so, to be regularly and fitfully retried and rehearsed into our time.

John Calvin could write that we really can't say, definitively, where Christ, as Lord, begins or ends. Alpha, Omega…echoes. Leo Tolstoy wrote a Christmas Story about this once. "Where Love is, Christ is". Story two.

The lovely decorated Christmas tree in your living room, with its natural grace adorned by symbolic beauty, is meant to connect the God of Creation with the God of Redemption. The story of Jesus the Christ, and his love, is as wide and large and limitless as the refraction of light throughout all creation.

We felt it, a bit, last Sunday, in the virtual open house, our congregation gathered by zoom, with voices greeting us from California, Iowa, Indiana, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, New York, Florida, Virginia, and most all the New England States.

Once we visited in the home of a friend whose lovely tree sported a particularly wonderful ornamentation. Oh, he had placed upon the boughs the more usual collection of angels, bulbs, lights, tinsel and all. But here and there, slowly illuminating and slowly darkening, there were five lighthouses. I had never seen a lighthouse as an ornament. As we shared life and faith in the living room, the slowly illuminating and slowly darkening lighthouses, all five, caught my imagination. With Wesley we affirm five means of grace, ever available, and savingly so, amid the branches and brambles of life. These are saving, Christmas echoes of faith. Prayer: as close as breath. Sacraments: in the closest church, weekday and Sunday, or maybe a love feast, at home, in pandemic. Scripture: take and read, read and remember, remember and recite. Fasting: we might say walking, exercise, attention to discipline and diet. Christian conversation: a word spoken and heard that just may be healing enough to be true, or true enough to bring healing. Even in a sermon on the Sunday before Christmas.

An Invitation

At Christmas we can listen, and remember. We are most human when we are lovers. Are we lovers anymore? Where love is, Christ is.

If we listen with the ears of faith, the whole creation sings in ecumenical chorus, and the sounds of Christmas heal us by enveloping us in a circle of love, whose circumference is without measure.

You may decide today to lead a Christian life. To worship every Sunday. To pray every morning. To tithe every dollar. To take up the way of peace, by loving and giving. You may decide upon this path this morning. Do. An echo of faith may catch you up, with a susurration, a whisper:

The birth of Christ is for you.

His way of life is for you.

His manner of obedience is for you.

His church is open to you.

His happiness is for you.

His love is for you.

His death is for you.

His life is for you.

His discipline is for you.

If we listen with imaginative ears, the sounds of Christmas, and its echoes of faith, envelop us and heal us.

A voice, Gabriel, fear not.

A cough, Joseph turning.

A shuffle, Shepherds moving.

A murmur, a shudder, a shake.

Cattle, lowing.

The crisp crackle of hard soil, snow and ice, under foot.

Distant laughter, ribald and rough, out from the inn.

And Mary. Her yawn, her sigh, her song, her cry.

AMEN.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 12.20.2020 at 11:00 am