Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

By Marsh Chapel

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Matthew 16:21-28

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Change can happen.  Real change, for the good, in real time, can come.  There is in the human heart, sometimes dormant but always present, the capacity to turn around, to repent, to move again forward, to change.  Change can come.  Jesus Christ and Him Crucified is at the mysterious heart of All, of Life, and of Change.  Jesus the Son of God, the Word of God, the Lamb of God, the Presence of God, can bring change.  To you.  Simon Peter found his life immeasurably altered by a word or two, fitly spoken.  He found a liberal heart. You can too.  He found a liberal heart.  We can too.  He found his own heart opened, and forever remade, by the liberality, grace, freedom, generosity and love of God.  We can too.  Peter following this change still struggled to appreciate and bring apperception to the Person of Jesus, the Presence of Jesus, the Power of Jesus.  But the change was permanent.  He was given a liberal heart, a heart of wonder, a heart of vulnerability, a heart of self-abandon.  God is calling you to open your heart today to that kind of change, that scope of change, that force of change. Change can happen.  Real change, for the good, in real time, can come.  There is in the human heart, sometimes dormant but always present, the capacity to turn around, to repent, to move again forward, to change.  Change can come.  Let us pray.

Gracious God, Holy and Just
Thou who art loves us into love and frees us into freedom

In the mystery of thy presence we pause at the beginning

 The beginning of a new season, of a new year, of a new adventure

 Thankful for the wise leadership of our University, and for the chance to learn and study together this autumn

 Now at Matriculation 2020 we offer our common prayer

 We pray for safety, health, and wellness for all

We pray to become good stewards of, protectors of, the safety, health and wellness of others, to be our sister’s keeper, our brother’s keeper

 We pray for the disciplines of courage, and of responsibility, and of compassion that together we shall need, and that together we may find

 We remember in prayer those who got us here, who raised us, taught us, loved us and supported us, and who yearn to see us through

 Bless Boston University this year we pray, bless those who study and those who teach, those who lead and those who support, bless each and every one of us we pray

 With a joy in learning, a regard for virtue, and an inclination to piety—a joy in human knowing, a regard for human doing, and an inclination to  human being

 Grant us thy peace, grant us thy peace, grant us thy peace.  AMEN. 

Our Holy Scripture takes flight first this Lord’s Day with Moses’ fear.  The prospect and the present potential for change bring a quaking in the boots, a quaking in the heart, a quaking in the very soul.  You are right to worry and wonder a little bit about a Matriculation Sunday sermon, and whether it might bruise or cut a little bit.  Alma Mater carries the sense of birth, of child birth.  The mysterium tremendum, all about us, the HOLY HOLY HOLY.  And Moses, God love him, first, fears.  For the Divine Presence brings change.  Real change is real hard, but it comes in real time when real people really work at it:   I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters.  I know their sufferings and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey.  But there is no theological exam here, nor any doctrinal requirement.  There is just the chance for change.  It is a very broad brush, a big canvass, a wide and wild painting, big enough for cameo appearances by fearful humans, including Moses, and you, and me.

Our Holy Scripture sails and soars second this Lord’s Day with Paul’s wisdom.  These verses you need to memorize. Romans 12: 9ff.  They are neither heavily theological nor pointedly doctrinal.  They are existential.  They include. They involve many, and various, and different and all.   The church survived and grew for 150 years before it had a Bible, from 30ad to 170ad, at least a Bible of the sort we have today.  It had the Law, Prophets and Writings, but no Gospels shared, no Letters agreed upon, no Apocalypses acclaimed.  The Holy Scripture proved itself Holy, over time, in context, with debate, out of friction.  The Godfather of the New Testament was a gnostic heretic named Marcion, in opposition to whose Bible of Luke and some Letters of Paul the Church instead accepted in addition the Hebrew Scripture, in addition the other Gospels, in addition the other Letters, and even an Apocalypse or two.  Scripture came to life in and through life.  So, you would not blithely disparage it.  It comes with blisters and sores and cuts.  Paul finds change in these 13 very simple, transparent advisements, let love be genuine…practice hospitality. 

Our Holy Scripture lands at Peter’s feet, in the call to change, to a change of heart.  What will it profit if one gains the whole world yet loses one’s soul?  Somewhere between world and soul, Peter discovered a liberal heart.  What Jesus said in 30ad is written down at last by Matthew in 85ad. There was a long line of listening, hearing, sharing, speaking, long before the writing. In part we know this because the two saying here are at odds, one offering to hearing and faith the paradox of saving and losing life: you only have, only possess, only truly hold what you have the power, grace, freedom and courage to give away. If you do not have it, you cannot give it. If you give it, truly, you then show you have owned it.   The sayings were written down together in Matthew 16 because they shared a tag word—life. What can you give in exchange for your life? (Here the message is careful: hold on, flee false forfeit, prize life now you have it). Whoever saves his life will lose it, and whoever loses is life will find it. (Here the message is caring: splash around with generosity, give with no thought of return, take up the cross, follow). The two teachings are there to balance each other. Which one for which day on which way will you say? It’s up to you. Over time, you will need them both.  Just this week, in the tragedies of Kenosha Wisconsin, Jacob Blake’s mother was doing the same, balancing justice and order, the caring and the careful:  On Tuesday, Mr. Blake’s mother, Julia Jackson, had told reporters that she opposed the sort of destruction that had been left by protests spurred by her son’s shooting.  Ms. Jackson told reporters that she had been praying for the country to heal.“I’ve noticed a lot of damage,” she said. “It doesn’t reflect my son or my family.” (NYT, 8/26/20).  So, Listen. Tune your ear to God.   Life is short.   This high peak passage, Peter’s Confession, rightly evokes the deep heart of faith, of gospel, of Scripture, of change.  It is the keystone, the lynch pin, the center in some measure of the Gospel we preach, we teach, we depend upon in life, in death and in life beyond death. What will it profit if one gains the whole world yet loses one’s soul?

Life

             In September of 1976, forty-four years ago, like many of our young colleagues on arrival this week for Matriculation, I had found my way to another great city—New York, along another great river—the Hudson, to the center of another great urban university—Columbia.  A sermon that week in James Chapel at Union Seminary was brought uptown from the minister near Greenwich Village at Washington Square.  It has stayed with me, because it was true to life, and true to change in life, and especially true to Moses and Paul and Matthew today.  He commended wonder, vulnerability and self-mockery.   Change of a healthy spiritual sort is not primarily theological or doctrinal, though it might become so.  It is existential.  It is life coming alive.  It is a heart become a liberal heart.  Call it a liberal art heart.

A liberal heart radiates wonder.   Borden Parker Bowne:  Philosophy begins in wonder.  G.K. Chesterton: the world does not lack for wonders, but only for a sense of wonder.  Charles Wesley:  changed from glory into glory, ‘til in heaven we take our place, ‘til we cast our crowns before Thee, lost in wonder, love and praise.  Between Matriculation and Commencement there is chance for a change of heart, a chance for the emergence of a liberal heart, a heart open to wonder, charged with wonder, delighting in wonder.  What we will lead us in part away from anxiety, depression, ennui, acedia, loneliness and despond is in part this sense of wonder.   Some ongoing connection with the natural world, a regular walk along the emerald necklace, say, may aid you here.  Some chance to see the ocean, close at hand, on a regular basis, may help you here.  Some occasional visits to the BU rooftop telescope may help you here.  The joy of reading, the thrill of music, the mystery of friendship, all may bring a new rebirth of wonder.  Even in a fallow, covid time:  we watched one 11 year-old neighbor read 35 books this summer.

A liberal heart owns vulnerability.  Death makes us mortal.  Facing death makes us human.  We are utterly vulnerable creatures, from birth to the beyond.  If nothing else, our current pandemic has indelibly placed such vulnerability before us.  The question is whether we will own it.  Whether we will wash and wash the hands, whether we will attain, maintain and retain social distance, whether we will take up and take on the hourly masking that will protect others vulnerability, and our own.  Our physical vulnerability may also, just may bring a Petrine change to our proclivity to pretend invulnerability.   Somehow Peter came to see life from a different angle, not from the vantage point of power but from the perspective of love.  How?  Who can say?  But in some measure it may well have been a readiness, a willingness to admit his vulnerability, even as he curses his Master’s.  We have a shared vulnerability that should shock us into commitments to communal protections.  We will need shared, common behaviors, educational and health investments, global and national planning and spending to get prepared for the next virus, as have not at all been for this one.  That will take the liberal heart to admit vulnerability.

A liberal heart has a measure of self-abandon, of self-awareness, even of self-mockery.  Take yourself lightly, so that you can fly, like the angels.  Take yourself lightly, so that you can fly, like the angels.  The church has loved Peter for so long because he is so human, so prone to mistake, and yet with such a courage to admit error.  Most students will make a mistake or two in their college years.  No one recommends it. All work against it.  And yet.  We learn, to measure we learn most, from our mistakes.  When they come, if they do, take some time to learn from them.  And then get up, dust yourself off, and be able to live with a little lightness, a little self-mockery.

 Change can happen.  Real change, for the good, in real time, can come.  There is in the human heart, sometimes dormant but always present, the capacity to turn around, to repent, to move again forward, to change.  Change can come.  Jesus Christ and Him Crucified is at the mysterious heart of All, of Life, and of Change.  Jesus the Son of God, the Word of God, the Lamb of God, the Presence of God, can bring change.  To you.  Simon Peter found his life immeasurably altered by a word or two, fitly spoken.  He found a liberal heart. You can too.  He found a liberal heart.  We can too.  He found his own heart opened, and forever remade, by the liberality, grace, freedom, generosity and love of God.  We can too.  Peter following this change still struggled to appreciate and bring apperception to the Person of Jesus, the Presence of Jesus, the Power of Jesus.  But the change was permanent.  He was given a liberal heart, a heart of wonder, a heart of vulnerability, a heart of self-abandon.  God is calling you to open your heart today to that kind of change, that scope of change, that force of change. Change can happen.  Real change, for the good, in real time, can come.  There is in the human heart, sometimes dormant but always present, the capacity to turn around, to repent, to move again forward, to change.  Change can come.  Let us pray.

 Gracious God Holy and Just

Thou from whom we come and unto whom our spirits return

Thou our dwelling place in all generations

Rest upon us in the silence of this moment we pray

Dry the tears of those moved to emotion in an hour of separation

Illumine the skyline of opportunity that lies behind the rain clouds of worry

Carry young hearts open to friendship into seas of friendship

Help us hear for our time the voice of the Prophet

‘What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly’?

Help us we earnestly pray to prefer justice to judgment

Help us we earnestly pray to love the merciful more than the material

Help us we earnestly pray to walk humbly not haughtily

May the degrees we earn turn by degrees the wheel of life from judgment to justice

May the courses we choose inspire in choices later a keenness of mind matched by a fullness of heart

May the learning we gain afford us the gain of humility, the honest desire to give credit where credit is due, and not to tip the scale

May the friendships we make in their turn make us less inclined to judgment and more enamored of justice

May the regrets we acquire then incline us to mercy, as we have felt mercy, and not to material measurements alone

May the adventures we bravely pursue give us the wisdom to know our condition, mortal, frail, prone to harm others, frail, mortal

May all our acquisition of knowledge chase us toward justice, toward mercy, and toward humility

And the wisdom to welcome, later, perhaps much later, the recognition that

The larger the body of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of mystery  that surrounds it

The larger the body of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of mystery that surrounds it

Amen.

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

posted in Liberal Gospel: Autumn 2020 Sermons, Matriculation, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 08.30.2020 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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Matthew 16:13-20

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A healthy institution of any sort, particularly of any religious sort and certainly of any Christian sort, is a community that is learning together.  As Albert Camus said, the healthy society is a circle in which all are seated and each reminds the other: ‘You are not God.  I am not God.  You are not God. I am not God.’  You are the recipients, the inheritors of that liberal tradition, the legacy of the liberal church.  As such, we are learning together, every single day, every Lord’s Day, every one day.

We are learning together.

Moses teaches us.

We learn together from these glorious narratives, offered us week by week in this year, from Genesis—think of Joseph last week—and today from Exodus.  The uncanny, the unexpected, the spirited entrance into life, by and through human imagination and courage, of grace, of freedom, of love.  And Pharaoh’s daughter took a little prophet out of the bulrushes, Moses by name.  There come times when a new Pharaoh arrives, one ‘who did not know Joseph’.  There come times when the odds are set up against the real and true and good.  There come times when it is hard to name a fully good thing from any day or week.  There come times when both nature and history appear to conspire together, against grace.  And then along comes a recollection of the self-giving courage of a mother, setting her basket into the rippling waters of bulrushes along the Nile.  Loving by letting go.  There are some eyes with tears right around here this week, some parents turning away and giving children to the unforeseen future.  No matter the age or stage, it takes courage, it takes the uncanny, the unexpected, the spirited entrance into life, by and through human imagination and courage, of grace, of freedom, of love.  The community of faith knows change, knows itinerancy, knows loss that becomes gain and gain that becomes loss.  That is the legacy of the liberal church.

Moses teaches us.

Paul teaches us.

Here is a sweet memory to share, now more than twenty years old, but it is clear as a bright August morning, even so.  For how happy we were one Saturday in Rochester to hear an excellent sermon on today’s epistle, Romans 12 from our former pulpit, given at a divinity school graduation by the Rev. Mr. Peter Gomes, Harvard Chaplain.  Do you remember The Good Book, his 1996 essay on the interpretation of Scripture?  Really, his hymn of love for the Scripture.  We were really proud to have him in our Rochester pulpit, and to hear his message.

If memory serves, it included some standard homiletical devices—a foundational text (Romans 12:2), a theme (endings are beginnings), repetition, litanies, epigrams, some old and new humor, making use of natural “oppositions” that come to the mind of the hearer and then addressing them, a little poetry (TS Eliot—“Little Gidding”), a quotation or two, and an exhortation to the congregation to be transformed “by the renewing of the mind”.  Be ye not conformed but be ye transformed by the renewal of the mind.

What most appealed was the design of the message.  Following an extended introduction, and preceding a simple conclusion, the preacher offered three memorable points.  Hah!  In the living church, much national debate and new homiletical theory to the contrary notwithstanding, there is—and especially there was on that Saturday—still room for a good three-point sermon, even one that concluded with a poem.  From Aristotle to about 1970, this design had endured, and reports of its death in the last decades have been, in Twain’s term, “exaggerated”.   Three points and a poem still work.

Gomes challenged the graduates, the students, and by reflection the church and by extension all Christians, not to be conformed to this world but to be transformed by the renewal of the mind.  How?

First, by noticing the difference between wisdom and knowledge.

Second, by practicing meekness, whose opposite is not strength, but pride.

Third, by protecting space and time for relaxation, prayer, reading.

Now, it would be nice to have the note page on which was summarized the message.  Somehow, though, between the past and present, the paper disappeared.   No matter—his design preserved the message for me—wisdom, meekness, relaxation.  Let us try to remember and, in Justice Holmes good phrase, try to give it the benefit of five great words: “I applied it to myself.”  Care to join me?  That is your legacy in the liberal church.

Paul teaches us.

Matthew teaches us.

We are disciples.  The word means student.  Disciple means student.  Salve Discipuli.  Salve Magistra.   Discipleship means studentship.  The model of faithfulness recommended, particular in Matthew, and especially in Matthew 16, is the model of the student.  Perhaps if we simply said ‘studentship’ rather than ‘discipleship’, we would do better.  Perhaps we should and could see the courageous arrival of the class of 2024 as exhibit a, exemplum docet.

Living right means learning together—in voice, in thought, in conflict, in Scripture.  Learning together.

It is this driving preachment that causes Matthew to eviscerate Mark here.   Matthew in 85ad has taken a passage from Mark in 70ad and turned it upside down.   It is not so much the detail, by the way, of the manner in which Matthew and Luke revise Mark, chapter by chapter, which is important.  What matters is that they happily re-gospelled the gospel for their own day, to a fair thee well.

No?  No?  Oh Yes. Yes, indeed.  Yes.

Mark in the passage calls Peter ‘Satan’.  Matthew calls him Rock.  Mark has no mention of any church of any kind.  Matthew uses the word, the greed word for church, ecclessia—not likely something Jesus would have said, and gives Peter keys to the kingdom.  Mark has Jesus tell the disciples—the students—to keep it all secret.  Matthew rejects that secrecy, except for the title, messiah, and says, ‘preach it’.  Why?  Why does Matthew eviscerate, confound, gut, overturn his legacy, this inherited passage from Mark?  Answer:  he and his community are learning together.  From voices.  From thoughts.  From conflicts.  And Matthew sternly tells his people:  to become fully human you will need institutional grounding, support, protection, and sustenance:  family, neighborhood, school, church, university, country, globe.  And let me be clear about the church, he adds:  the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.

Just more thing, as we are learning together in voice, thought, conflict and scripture.   Like Peter Falk used to say, in his character as Colombo, the absent-minded professor-like detective, turning as he left,  ‘Just one more thing…’

Who do you say He is?  In your life. Notice the passage crashes away from the general and the philosophical—what do others say (general) about the son of man (philosophical).  Some say (general), the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, one of the Prophets (philosophical).  Notice the move to the specific and the personal.  Who do you say I am?  Meaning for you today:  how are you going to live?  A life of studentship, or not?  Said Peter, ‘Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God.”  And you?    Remember this.  Peter is the one who most needed forgiveness, and full pardon he did receive.  There is forgiveness in life (repeat). And the church is the place where people like Peter, like you and me, who need forgiveness, find themselves forgiven.   That is your legacy in the liberal church,

Matthew teaches us.

Moses, Paul, Matthew—they teach us how to live in the liberality of the gospel, wherein we worship God who is loving us into love and freeing us into freedom.  The passages become Holy Scripture, in that they make us more whole, more ourselves, more our own healthy, safe, well, best selves, holy because whole.   Scripture teaches us.  And, so does experience, sometimes both together.

Our long-time friend and virtual, radio congregant, Dr. Kris Kahle, in New Haven, Connecticut, often sends along something of interest, a passage from Camus, say, maybe from THE PLAGUE, or a paragraph from Barth’s Church Dogmatics, which he has been reading alongside his COVID 19 medical practice.  He and family are part of our extended family, an example of so many, far and near, who are with us in spirit, together in spirit, come Sunday. Perhaps you are one such. Grateful we are, thankful we are for Dr. Kahle and others, who share with us at Marsh Chapel, the freedom and love of the church, who share with us at Marsh Chapel, the fellowship, koinonia, commonwealth, partnership of the Gospel.  What began in the bulrushes of the Nile, and then was taught to the Romans by the Apostle to the Gentiles, and then, and now, today, in the Holy Gospel is acclaimed—this is the good news of ‘the Christ, the Son of the Living God.

Earlier in the summer Dr. Kahle took a moment apart from his medical teaching and practice to send me the video of John Lewis’s funeral, or rather, one of the eulogies therein.  We otherwise might have missed it, given the backwoods lack of technological connection—a summer blessing in the main—with which we live or don’t live, in the woods of upstate New York, come summer.  We trail technologically behind the Little House on the Prairie for some of the summer.  So, we would have missed it.  He sent it.  What a gift.

What made President Obama’s eulogy for Congressman Lewis so powerful?  It was a grand, high moment, a soaring eagle moment in American rhetoric.  Was it the reminder of what gracious eloquence can mean in leadership and life?  Yes, but not only that.  Was it the painful but real measure of civil society, of what ground we have lost, much ground, much real and rhetorical and religious ground we have lost in these past few years?  Yes, but not only that.  Was it the sense of the cost of progress, the willingness to work toward ‘a more perfect union’, recognizing, with sober honesty, the myriad imperfections that beset us?  Yes, but not only that.  Was it the generous sense of common hope, that which can sustain the least and the last and the lost, as well as the rest of us?  Yes, but not only that.  Was it the personal honor, in cadence and story and honesty and heart?  Yes, but no only that.  Was it the humanity—recalling Bill Clinton lifting his hand and pointing to the casket of Coretta Scott King in 2006, and stepping off his prepared text to shout, ‘for all these kind fancy words, don’t you forget, there’s a woman in that box.’  Yes, but not only that.  What was it, at depth, that made Barack Obama’s eulogy for John Lewis such a tremendous gift to me from Dr. Kahle?  Let’s cogitate a minute on that while the sermon meanders and unwinds toward its conclusion this summer morning.

What was it that made President Obama’s eulogy for John Lewis so trenchant and true?  Scripture, Holy Scripture, The Church’s Book, The Book on and of the Church.  In the main, along with other ingredients mentioned, the power in his personal ability, rightly to choose and use timely verses of Scripture, the Holy Scripture taught and learned in the learning community of the liberal church.  The setting—Ebenezer Baptist—spoke the same truth, in the languages of architecture, history, pulpit, choir and people.   Yes, the church is both a representation and a distortion of the divine (Tillich).  But if for some reason the church were to disappear overnight, in a cultural tsunami, it would come back.  Even the gates of hell will not prevail against it.  Somehow, we would find a table, and somehow a chair or two, and somehow some bread and wine, and somehow a Bible and an hour or so, and we would start again, as, in a way, we do every Sunday, which is especially and vividly apparent to us now in this pandemic.  We start over.  We would start with Holy Scripture.  It is this Holy Scripture in the Holy Church that rose up like a lion in the Obama eulogy for Lewis, the right verse in the right time in the right way.  James! ‘Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, lacking nothing.”  That is the courage of the Book of James. Corinthians!  (SECOND Corinthians, let us be clear), We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; ⁹ persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; ¹⁰ always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies.   Acts!  “Do not be afraid, go on speaking; do not be silent, for I am with you, and no one will attack you to harm you, for I have many in this city who are my people.” (Acts 18).

It was the right handling of the word of truth that brought power and love, freedom and grace to life.  And it still does.  He concluded in eulogy, summarizing his three points, James, Corinthians and Acts:  And that’s where real courage comes from. Not from turning on each other, but by turning towards one another. Not by sowing hatred and division, but by spreading love and truth. Not by avoiding our responsibilities to create a better America and a better world, but by embracing those responsibilities with joy and perseverance and discovering that in our beloved community, we do not walk alone.

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

posted in Liberal Gospel: Autumn 2020 Sermons, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 08.23.2020 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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Matthew 14:13-21

Genesis 32:22–31

Romans 9:1–5

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Preface

“Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful; be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month or a year; it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get into good trouble, necessary trouble.”

John Lewis, 1940 – 2020

Faith is the affirmative answer to the question whether life has meaning.

Faith is the affirmative answer to the question whether love is real.

Faith is the affirmative answer to the question whether struggle is redemptive.

Faith is the affirmative answer to the question whether friendship is nourishing.

The Hebrew Scripture

Our psalm and lesson from the Hebrew Scripture recoil around us to recall for us the place of struggle in life.  In pandemic and pandemonium, in political and presidential reckoning, in personal and familial realignments and choices, we right now may benefit from such a reminder.  After all, why return Sunday by Sunday to ancient writings, if not for a chance to orient our own selves and lives by the light of what our forebears have seen and done?

One the great gifts of Boston University to our life has been the immersion and inclusion in a tradition of struggle, redemptive struggle.  Over dinner, courtesy of the Gotlieb Center, perhaps six years ago, we sat with John Lewis.  Dime con quien andas, y te dire quien eres, say the Spaniards.  Tell me with whom you walk, and I will tell you who you are.  After the meal he quietly told stories which had the aspect, for one who tells stories, of frequent narration, as overtures to good trouble.  In particular it brought a full smile to hear his childhood dream of being a preacher, a story that was new to us, but well known to others, and now to the world.  He would come home and preach to the chickens as he fed them, and baptize them as they were born, and bury them with dignity and the end of their egg producing days.  Hence, Lewis picked up the nick name, Preacher.  Yet it was really his life that spoke, and that commitment to a sense of redemptive struggle.

Now Marsh Chapel, you remember that on May 19, 2018, Mr. Lewis sat right here in the second pew before the pulpit of this nave.  You remember that he sang the hymns of faith, and heard the words of Holy Scripture, and prepared himself to address 20,000 at Commencement.  You remember his lingering among us on the Plaza, as the bus driver nervously waited.  You remember that, like any good preacher, he was willing to take the time to take you seriously.  Said the parishioner, ‘I just wish that the preacher in his sermons would take my life seriously’.  Well, by the echoing hallelujahs sent his way later that day, from the voices of the class of 2018 and others, you could hear that he did.  Take their lives seriously, I mean.  You remember the climax of his address.  Yes, class of 2018, you will get jobs and find work and buy cars and build homes and raise families and take trips.  Good.  But what else?  What else are you going to do?  What else are you going to do in the brief span years you have? Will you help make this world a better place.  And to do that, will get into some good trouble along the way?  In my years at BU Commencements, it was the rhetorical high point, and that’s saying something.  Later, in the President’s gracious lunch, we stood next to him for a photo (I was uncertain whether to interfere so, but Jan said, ‘No, let’s get a picture).  And I looked at it again this morning, from two years ago, and wept. One the great gifts of Boston University to our life has been the immersion and inclusion in a tradition of struggle, redemptive struggle.  What an inheritance, what a legacy, Marsh Chapel, you have to share.

Now recall just a few of the words offered in memorial across the nation to John Lewis:

Moral authority…aggressive yet self-sacrificial…animating a mass movement…non-violent protest grounded in the principal of ‘redemptive suffering’……from the Rev. James Lawson…and Mahatma Ghandi…’something in the very essence of anguish that is liberating, cleansing, redemptive…opens us and those around us to a force beyond ourselves’…the essence of the nonviolent life is the capacity to forgive…’even as a person is cursing you to your face, even as he is spitting on your, or pushing a lit cigarette into your neck’…At bottom, this philosophy rested upon the belief that people of good will—the Beloved Community—would rouse themselves to combat evil and injustice…in March of 1965—Bloody Sunday—Lewis suffered a fractured skull…the voting rights act…was signed into law that summer…the Supreme Court crippled the act in 2013…colleagues…we can best honor his memory by picking up where he left off… (NYT on J Lewis, July 2020)

Now hear the words written by our own congregant, friend, Marsh Chapel community member Kwame A. Mark Freeman, just this last week:

“I had the honor of meeting Mr. Lewis on a few occasions over the years. The last time I spoke with him was at Metcalf Hall in the George Sherman Union at Boston University.

Mr. Lewis was a humble man in the truest sense of the word. He was one of the last living civil rights titans of his generation who more than virtually anyone, had a grasp of the institutional memory of both the turbulent and tragic but yet triumphant period of Black people living in the United States during the period of the civil rights movement. The work Mr. Lewis engaged in on behalf of Black people is indelible and stretches over six decades beginning in February of 1960, at a lunch counter in Nashville, Tennessee.

I want to thank Mr. Lewis for all that he has done for Black and brown women and men living in the United States. Just importantly, I want to thank him for what he has done for all of humanity by his clarion call for justice, both now and until the day and time when -injustice- becomes a fleeting memory and a tragic but yet another triumphant footnote in the annals of Black history in the United States.

 God bless Brother John Robert Lewis, and may his soul rest in peace.”

Meanwhile, back in the Bible, in Genesis Jacob receives a new name, One Who Struggles With God:  Israel.  There is a redeeming quality in struggle, so much so that one’s full identity emerges in a different way, with a different name.  Jacob recalls for us the power of community, the formative range in the struggle of each community, including his own.  We sure need such a reminder this summer, in this summer of uncertainty. The summer, be it remembered of the use of unmarked cars and camouflaged federal agents in Portland.  We are on the brink of lawlessness from the highest offices in the country.  What shall we bring to this struggle?  A little honesty and a whole lot of ownership?  But also, a critical caution, in our choices?

In the spring of 1972, graduating soon from High School, I was watching as various communities were struggling, including that of the USA itself.  My father had bought a pool table that winter, the first of its sort to adorn that Methodist Parsonage.  Looking back, I think he had some idea to try to connect more fully with a teenage son who was about to leave home.  And it worked.  We spent some evenings playing pool and talking about nothing and about everything.  It was down in a pretty dank basement full of the things you throw in a basement.  He would smoke his pipe and I would talk about things I really knew nothing much about.  But I had opinions.  That spring there was a protest against the War in Vietnam, and I had decided to go, and we discussed it.  It was to be held outside his old high school, where he had been elected class president in 1949.  He had gone on to serve in the Air Force as a chaplain, so he was a military person but was himself also and strongly against the war.  Yet when I told him about the protest, well, he did not try to talk me out of it, but he filled his pipe and racked the balls for another game.  I could tell he was trying to tell me something, or teach me something, or something, without being too parental.  Anyway, the gist of his question, as I remember it in the haze of faulty memory and pipe smoke, was, ‘Do you know who is organizing this?  Who is running this?  For what reason?’  Well, we did not argue.  I went ahead and attended the thing, such as it was.  But that careful, critical edge, that question, who is really doing this and why, stayed with me. I cannot begin to number the times, in so many different situations, when that basic question—who is really behind this?—has come back to help me.  And this is still a struggle today, across the land, trying to do and know how to do, the right thing at the right time, in the right way.  Good trouble.  It is almost like that hymn, ‘You Got Good Religion?”  Or not.  ‘You Got Good Trouble?’  Or just trouble?

The New Testament

Likewise, our two New Testament passages, lesson and gospel, guide us in redemptive struggle.  In Romans, Paul is about to launch into two chapters of farewell to his own beloved religious inheritance, his own spiritual legacy, his mother tongue, the law.  Religious faith sometimes means leaving things behind, shaking the dust from one’s feet, and moving on.  In a way, every day has some measure of that leave taking, of saying ‘Thank You’ and of saying ‘Good Bye’.

In our weekly staff work here, we are guided by a set of values, in which we embed our ministry, music and hospitality, and which share a curious quality of leaving some things behind.  We try daily to 1 build trust, to 2 foster consensus, to 3 seek unity (not uniformity) in peace (not dishonesty), 4 to review all communication that speaks to or for the whole  5 to avoid any secrets, surprises or subversion, 5 to live a life that becomes the gospel 6 to speak to others in their presence not of others in their absence, 7 to bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the Christ law, 8 in teaching to search the Scripture, 9 in daily work to reflect on our envisioned mission (‘a heart in the heart of the city’ and our primary foci (voice, vocation, volume)10 in liturgy to be informed by the hymnal and book of worship, by Methodism and the ecumenical consensus 11 in all things to look for charitas, 12 to encourage by example regular worship, tithing, and interpersonal faithfulness, 13 to be punctual, frugal and industrious but not to worship work, for we are saved by what we receive not by what we achieve, 14 to offer attention to outsiders, first, as a matter of course, 15 to remember that the staff supports the mission of the chapel not the other way around.  16 To believe that God loves us into loving and frees us into freedom. 17 In working with staff our reigning interest is:  “Tell me what best exposes your authentic self (baptism) and what unshackles your fiercest passion for life and ministry (vocation)?”  We can build some real future around this. 18 In communications, we hope to model dimensions of spiritual health and honesty, specifically by responding promptly to voice-mail (same day or next day), e-mail (three days), regular mail (one week), interoffice memos (same day if possible). 19 Also, we believe that a good meeting lasts no more than 90 minutes, and preferably no more than 60. 20. We expect to be people who are “happy in God” (Wesley).

That is, we hope, a to find a way into ‘good trouble’, not just trouble.  Our community here at Marsh Chapel will continue to go through changes in rhythm.  Remember that once we thought we would be together again the day after Easter, April 13?  Hm.  With the insight, foresight and hindsight of Paul in Romans, we shall also need, for the long haul, the remembrance of Matthew, the miraculous feeding of the 5,000 with two fish and five barley loaves.  Not much to go on.  And yet, all were fed.  And more miraculously, according the Scripture, not only were all fed, but all were all satisfied.  All were satisfied.  Along with values to guide us, we shall need, Marsh Chapel, the gospel promise to keep us.  Satisfied.  Hm.

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 all were satisfied…e

Coda

Our virtual congregant Milton Jordan in Texas reminded us this week of John Lewis’s words:

“Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful; be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month or a year; it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get into good trouble, necessary trouble.”

John Lewis, 1940 – 2020

Faith is the affirmative answer to the question whether life has meaning.

Faith is the affirmative answer to the question whether love is real.

Faith is the affirmative answer to the question whether struggle is redemptive.

Faith is the affirmative answer to the question whether friendship is nourishing.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 08.2.2020 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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Genesis 28:10-19

Romans 8:12-25

Matthew 13:24-30

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 Preface

One summer some years ago our family made a three-day trip to Maine.  We stopped in Kennebunkport and swam in the ocean.  That day the newspaper carried a little book review of a short book called On Presence.  The review noted that the book had been written by Ralph Harper, an unknown Episcopal priest in Maryland, who also taught a religion course at the local college.  The book won a prestigious prize.  The author was quoted as saying, among other things, ‘After preaching almost every Sunday for the past 31 years, I know how hard it is to say anything honest’.  I stuffed the review in my shirt pocket.  I finally bought the book (though nine months later).  On Presence is about the practice of the presence of God.  Harper writes, We have too short a time on this earth to pass up any chance to find words and images to live by.  I believe almost everyone is capable of being moved by some person, place, (part of) nature, or individual work of art.  Of course, there is instability and incoherence in and about us all the time.  There is also the inexhaustible store of Being to keep us permanently in awe.

 This summer we are not traveling, neither up or down the coast.  Perhaps you are doing so, and is so, many blessings to you. But the matter of presence, or the question, is freshly alive in the season of plague, the season of power and its policing, the season of presidential reckoning.  One asked, Just where is God in all of this?  To the few verses of Holy Scripture accorded us this summer morning, we may portage that question, of presence, of divine presence, of God, of God’s presence, or absent presence, or present absence, during pandemic, and pandemonium, and political reckoning.  Our Scripture affirms an Elusive Presence, oddly lodged in remorse, in scrutiny, in longing and in contest.  All of our lessons today explore this question, a good and honest question of faith, the question of presence.  But they answer in a Scriptural key, in a Biblical tongue, in a Holy honesty.  In a strange way, a strange answer, coming out of the heart of the strange world of the Bible.

Remorse

 Sometimes presence appears in remorse, in hindsight.  From your campfire days you will remember Jacob’s ladder.  The Book of Genesis is about to move from Creation and Covenant, on to Providence, or at least to the naming of the sons of Jacob, the twelve tribes, with which the rest of the book will be consumed.  But first, there is the matter of Jacob himself.  Jacob dreams of a ladder ascending to and from heaven, and hears the promise of promise.  He awakes and rubs his eyes, and realizes.  He had not seen, he had not known. I knew it not!  In this place, with a baffling dream and a rock for a pillow, here, not in comfort or completion, or conquest, here, alone at night and in a dream, there appeared a strange presence.  But he sees so in retrospect, in reflection.  He sees after the fact.  And, with more than a tinge of remorse, he realizes what he had missed.  ‘Surely the Lord was in this place….but I knew it not’.  In case we are prone to think this a cheery tale, the lesson schools us otherwise.  For Jacob, we are immediately apprised, ‘was afraid’.  In hindsight.  In retrospect.  In remorseful recollection.  So that was it…was blind but now I see…If only… If only we had seen that coming tsunami of a virus for what it was, say, and earlier, say, and more fully and truly, say, and, well…

Consider, in hindsight, what you may have missed, along the way.   A season ago, or a decade ago, or most of lifetime ago.  Presence, though elusive, presence still.  So many are the examples.  The Gospel of John has as its main point, the ladder up and down to heaven, for sure, but more so, the utter grief of a congregation that only belatedly recognized just Who, just Who, this Jesus had been, among them.  God.  Divine Presence, but Elusive, mistaken, mistaken in identity.  Way and Truth and Life and, now we see in hindsight, we mistook Him—Way and Truth and Life—for so much less.

The hard truths of the strange world of the Bible include a somber recognition of divine presence, eerie and elusive, but presence nonetheless, seen most clearly in hindsight.  Presence? Yes, but known in remorse.

Scrutiny

 Sometimes presence appears in scrutiny.  In being known in full and in truth and in person.  Seeing ourselves as others, or Another, sees us.  This is the wearying challenge of friendship, of partnership, of marriage, of employment, and of any long term, honest relationship.

You may love the 139^th Psalm, as did Howard Thurman and as do I, perhaps more than any other in the Psalter.  Usually we hear it, and properly, as light in darkness.  O Lord though hast searched me…such knowledge is too wonderful for me…even the darkness is light to Thee…

 Yet some years ago, I offered it at a BU Commencement, a joyous and happy and celebrative day, in this, my preferred sense of it.  Still.  Afterward a friend and colleague, and a veteran lover of the Psalms too, came up and said, I heard that Psalm in a completely different way today.  In hindsight, I believe what he meant was, Thanks for a gladder reading of the verses, 1-12, but there is a more sober one too.  Think of being so entirely well-known by another, any other:  O Lord thou hast searched me…Thou knowest when I sit down and rise up…Whither shall I flee from thy presence…

A sudden sense of no escape, of being known through and through, of being seen for just who we are, of having no dark corner in which to hide, of having no fig leaf behind which to huddle…Even the darkness is not dark to Thee.  Yes, there is an elusive presence, at the sheer price of being fully known.  Is this not one of the great challenges of CORONA?  Our full social and cultural exposure, to full scrutiny?  Scrutiny of who suffers and who is healed, of who has and has not, of who can make easier strides and who stumbles through no athletic fault, but for lack and lack and lack?  I see your true colors…

 There is, for sure, a gladness in being known through and through.  But there is also, for sure, a sobering effect to such scrutiny, such an elusive presence in such scrutiny, be it human or divine or both.

Longing

Sometimes presence appears in longing.  Paul names for us the groaning, the groaning of all creation, awaiting the revealing of the children of God.  There is hardly a longing or groaning at more of a fever pitch in all of Scripture, or in all of literature, or in any life, than here in Romans 8.  Groaning inwardly…as we await…the redemption of our bodies…For this hope we were saved…but hope that is seen is not hope…who hopes for what he sees?  We hope for what we do not see and wait for it with patience.  Patience. 

 Our time waits for such redemption. And ours is a hard, a challenging time, yet one within which there is a shared groaning, a communal longing.   My friend’s 7 year-old daughter, at the end of glad hearted family meal, as one or another mentioned the virus, the pandemic, burst into tears, saying, When is Corona going to end?  We hope for what we do not yet see.  And wait.  With a disciplined patience.  Without a vaccine, there will need to develop a semblance of antibody bulk, of herd immunity.   We need to have a sober mind, an awareness of waiting, waiting, waiting for what we do not yet see, and may well not see for some time.  This capacity in St. Paul and in my seven year-old, to long and long without yet seeing, but still to wait, too is part of the elusive presence.  We have a long way to go.  But the 7 year-old’s groaning is spirited expression of hope, presence, divine presence, though utterly elusive.  She awaits a hope, not seen, but awaited, as did Emma Lazarus.

 Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Contest

 Sometimes presence appears in contest, in the contention of life.  The Gospel of Matthew leaves wheat and tares together sown, unto joy and sorrow grown, without yet a final winnowing, without yet an eschatological separation.  And here is our condition, too.  The challenge of every day, with decisions to make, small or large, or what appear to be small but are large, and what appear large and are actually small.  The challenge of wheat and tares is in the contest of the everyday, for and toward the true and the good and the beautiful. On your prayer list, it may well be, you have a place regularly to lift up those near and far who face rigorous, awkward and multiple daily decisions in a new era.

In this contest, we may need traveling partners, allies, those from and with whom to learn.

One may be David Brooks.  He wrote movingly this week about such an elusive presence, and the contest of perspectives needed to arrive at a better day.  It was striking to me, as a son of a BU graduate, who studied here in the 1950’s at the time of the high water mark of Boston Personalism, to hear Brooks use the term Personalism, without any reference to BU, or any sense that the term had a longer fuse than the one he lit under it.  Yet, perhaps by accident, or grace, or the influence in contest of an elusive presence, his conclusion came close to home.  We will leave quibbles for another day.

Personalism is about constructing systems where the whole person is seen and cultivated—schools where a child is not just a brain on a stick, hospitals where patients are not just bodies in beds, cities where cops are seen as people, communities in which each person is seen as rich interplay of multiple identities, economic systems that allow people to realize their full dignity as makers and earners.  Personalism judges each social arrangement by how well it fosters the kind of relationships that enhance the full complexity and depth of each soul. (NYT 7/10/20)

 In this contest, we may need our predecessors to lean on.  Elmer Leslie taught Hebrew Scripture here when my parents were at BU so long ago.  His son, James Leslie, became my chaplain at OWU, a mentor and model for chaplaincy, he, one of only two Chaplains OWU has had since 1960, each serving thirty years.  Elmer wrote on the prophets, who themselves needed their own predecessors, in the contests of the eighth century bce. Friends, we shall need a biblical grace, tough as well as tender, for the days ahead.   Let us draw down on our spiritual endowment, our religious inheritance.  It has been done before.  A favorite verse, perhaps for you, is Micah 6:8:  He has declared to you O Mortal what is good:  and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?  Micah drew on the three great prophets who preceded him, Amos and Hosea and Isaiah, finally to craft his magnificent verse:  justice from Amos, kindness from Hosea, and humility from Isaiah.  And so, drawing on the Elusive Presence, he could preach to the need of his time.

Coda

 When we ask about divine presence (and how can we not?) we may be surprised to hear a response—Jacob, David, Paul, Matthew—that affirms, strangely, a presence, but an elusive presence, hidden in, with and under, even the sobrieties of our day:  in remorse, in scrutiny, in longing, and in contest.  Who would ask for more remorse, tougher scrutiny, unrequited longing, and ribald contest?  Yet, of a summer Sunday, in the reading and reckoning with Holy Writ, we are sent their way.

Ask yourself about a moment of remorse, of hindsight.  Was there not, even there, an elusive presence?

Ask yourself about an experience of scrutiny, of being known, really known.  Was there not, even there, an elusive presence?

Ask yourself about a keen sense of longing, a cry at night, a groan at dawn.  Was there not, even there, an elusive presence?

Ask yourself about a kind of contest, struggle in contention for the good.  Was there not, even there, an elusive presence?

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 07.19.2020 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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Matthew 10: 40-42

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Hear the gospel:  He who receives you receives me, and he who receives me receives Him who sent me.

Community

At Marsh Chapel in June, we have a fairly long-standing set of Sunday traditions, honored this year, for the obvious reasons, in the breach.  On the first Sunday of June we gather for Holy Communion and monthly dish to pass luncheon, with a presentation by Sharon Wheeler of BU on planned giving, and a review of forms of ministry in our midst.  On the second Sunday of June we gather ahead of worship for a discussion of “suggestions for summer reading’, led by the Dean, or a staff member or a lay leader in the congregation.  On the third Sunday of June we gather for Fathers’ Day brunch, welcoming all of every age and station, fathers or not, ahead of worship.  On the fourth Sunday of June we offer a foreshortened Vacation Bible School, after worship and over lunch, with one leading the singing and another teaching the Bible.  Well, this June 2020, none of this has come to pass, a bit of a loss for or community, June being the optimal time, before vacation and after graduation, to focus on the congregation itself, University and Summer notwithstanding.

Still, though, it has been pleasant to think of these none so rare as a day in June rituals, amid pandemic and pandemonium.  More, it seemed perhaps fitting to offer a sermon, this Fourth Sunday in June, to pick up at least one of these threads, that of reading.  At least, in a fallow time, we may find more time to read.  Who taught you to read?  Not how to read, but to read, to love to read?  Who taught you to read?

Reading

In 1965 our sixth-grade teacher, Marjorie Shafer, began each morning by reading to the class.  She read for about thirty minutes, standing in the middle of the front of the room, glasses fixed and eyes down (though she could readily spot any movement, misbehavior, drowsiness or discourtesy).   While other books remain in some misty memory (Harriet the Spy for example), only one of the books she read from stem to stern hangs in the mind to this day.  This was JR Tolkien’s The Hobbit.  My seat was somewhere in the middle rows, somewhere mid-way back, neither by choice nor personal assignment, but by the luck of the alphabet and a last name starting with H.  Jill Hance sat right in front of me as she had, more or less, every year of grammar school.  The Hobbit captured my imagination.  The figure of Bilbo Baggins.  The setting out on a journey from home to somewhere.  The various tangles and intrigues.  The mystical setting.  The return.  It was a sad day when the book ended.  In the spring, I learned that our family was moving out of town, the only town I really knew, and the place of school and friendships since kindergarten.  For some reason I became sick, and unable to go to school for about ten days.  One afternoon Mrs. Shafer came to our home to read to me from the last book of the year (Harriet), to make sure I did not miss the conclusion.

A few years later, rummaging in the ten-year old pile of Saturday Evening Post magazines in our summer cabin, there appeared a simple story.  The title, author, and details are gone.  Only the plot remains.  The high school quarterback and class president is challenged by his friends to date a very plain, bespectacled, socially awkward girl, a loner in their class.  On a bet and on a whim, he does so.  At first all goes well:  he is able to take her out and return to his friends and laugh with them about their trick.  But then something happens, or some things happen.  Given his attention, her attire and appearance change.  She starts to dress, well.  She doffs her spectacles.  She dotes on him, and is enthralled with his stories.  In short order she becomes something of a beauty.  Given her transformation, his own behavior changes.  The dates are no longer tricks, the words no longer jokes.  He stops seeing his friends afterward.  They fall in love, they fall fully and passionately in love.  Well.  Behold the power narrative.

One summer in high school, 1971, Tolkien struck again, this time in the form of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  If memory serves, I read the three books that one summer.  They carried me away, into another place and kind of place, and into another mind and kind of mind, and into another story and kind of story.  The struggle of light and darkness, of what is good and what is not, compellingly conveyed, stayed in memory and in heart.

Then, two summers later, heading into a Great Books of Russia autumn course, taught at OWU by Dr. Ruth Davies, a Professor of fearsome reputation, I took to lifeguarding work at church camp The Brothers Karamazov. It seems as though it took me the whole summer to read it, and to savor it, and to capture and be captured by it.  You could feel the power in the pain of Raskolnikov and the love in Alyosha, without knowing much of anything, yet, about life and books and all.  Needless to say, the book served as a fitting preparation for an introduction to the course, which, of all college courses, in its readings, requirements and sessions, was easily the best, and the hardest.

I skip to For Whom the Bell Tolls, set in the hills up outside Segovia, Spain, where I lived and studied 1974-5, the last year in the life of Francisco Franco, and of his Spain, and where I read this perhaps my favorite book.

During the fall term of seminary year one, when I should have been reading the detailed notes about the 39 books of Hebrew Scripture, about which prior I knew next to nothing, and during which season my relationship with my soon to be wife Jan was settling and congealing, heading toward marriage the next summer, I found myself up late at night reading, for the first time, Moby Dick.  In another sense, my reading life began with this book, though, in detail and in full, it would be hard to say why.  Yet it proved to be an excellent backstage for theological study of the formal sort still proffered at Union, NYC.

Two years or so out of seminary, say 1981, before the long journey into doctoral work, I found myself at the cottage, in dead summer, reading, line by line K Barth’s Epistle to the Romans.  It landed with the same demolition on my soul and ministry as it had landed ‘on the playground of the theologians’ earlier in the century.  You cannot speak of God by speaking of Man in a loud voice.  I was not, and am not, a Barthian, but I am a lover of the Bible, in part due to my reading of Barth that summer.  For many years into the next decade, it seems, any free time for reading, not sermonic or ministerial, was flooded into the dissertation.  There was gain and loss in that gain and loss.  I found myself reading less fiction.

That changed again in the 1990’s, for whatever reason.  The two books of Alistair Macleod, Island and No Great Mischief, with their silently beautifully rendering of the geography of Cape Breton, and of the inner geography of its people, stunned and captivated.  And from there I found my way back along the trails of older classics, especially Middlemarch, G. Eliot, whose close reading of close living in cloistered secular culture kept my imagination and interest.  And so many others…The Remembrance of Things Past, Proust…The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Haley…and on…Who taught you, not how to read, but how to love to read?

The Strange World of the Bible

 Those who fall in love with reading will often, over time, find the pages of Holy Writ.  Because in these there is a durability, a realism, a poignant sense of suffering, and a depth that are at least and more a match for our own experience.  As this very hour, in our lessons from Holy, Holy Scripture.

Take decisions, for example.  While Genesis 22, a most difficult passage, allows of multiple readings, they all have in the background the tragedy of choices.  People choose, but they do not choose their choices.  For three months, you have been choosing, and you have that freedom, and must use it with courage, but you do not choose the context—say COVID 19—of the choices.  So, each day carries a dim reminder that our choices, not fully ours, will have ramifications, even mortal ramifications, in the lives of others.  My friend said last week, in full heart confession, ‘I am suffering from decision fatigue.  I am suffering from decision fatigue’.  Maybe you know the feeling today.  Abraham, caught between faith and love, between God and son, at least reminds us that we are not the first, at this grim altar of choice.

Take change, for example.  While Romans 6, a most difficult passage, allows of multiple readings, they all have in the background the great watershed—god, freedom, love, grace, heaven—into which Paul has been washed, and to which, by apocalyptic poetry, he bears witness.  You can change, be changed.  The world can change, be changed.  A country can change, be changed.  The orb of sin, the wages of which are also grim, may be displaced.  Life may become an orbit around the planet of love.  HERE: Love God, Love neighbor.  Love, and do what you will.   Paul, exiled from his god, has now been enslaved in love by THE GOD BEYOND GOD.

Take contagion, for example.  While Matthew 10, a most difficult passage, allows of multiple readings, they all have in the background the power of contagious love.  It is a hundred years at least in Boston since the citizenry has been so aware of the dark mystery of contagion.  One finger touches another, one hand by doorknob traces another, one chill cough caught in the breeze catches up to another.  Beloved we are probably many months and tragically hundreds of thousands of deaths away from getting away from COVID 19.  Contagion is our condition.  But read the Holy Scripture, Matthew 10.  Here the power of contagion OF A GOOD SORT is the metaphor for God in the world.  Not, to be sure, the malevolent contagion of infection, virus, illness.  But the power of it.  That kind of power—and you have seen it, here and there, now and then—where one contagious prophet and prophecy touches another, where one contagious justice touches another, where one hand of faith, act of kindness, moment of self-abnegation touches, and gives birth to another.

Before you miss the chance, in a short life time, to befriend the Bible, reckon with its durability, realism, poignant sense of suffering, and depth that are at least and more a match for our own experience.  Especially today’s Gospel, Matthew 10.

Matthew 10

The authority of Jesus’ ministry is herein transferred to disciples, ancient and modern.  To you.

We meet Jesus today on the hinges of the first Gospel, as the flow of the Gospel swings from Lord to apostles. In the announcement of this good news is included a measure of empowerment for each one of us. This is the kind of day on which, for once, for the first time, or for once in a long time, we may be seized by a sense of divine nearness. The kingdom of heaven is at hand. The kingdom of heaven has come near to you. When that sentence makes a home in a heart, or in the heart of a community, a different kind of life ensues.

Capture in the mind’s eye for a moment the sweep of the gospel in Matthew 10.  First. Jesus has been about, teaching and preaching and healing. His compassion abounds. The endless range of needs about him he unblinkingly faces. Second. Jesus calls and sends the disciples, and empowers them, and by extension empowers us. The gospel will have been read thus, as it is thus read by us. He instructs and directs them in their work, where to go, what to do, how to be. Learning, virtue, and piety together. Start at home, heal the sick, travel light. Third. Jesus expects and forecasts for them less than utter victory in their work. They are to know how to shake dust from their feet. Fourth. Jesus warns that there will be a price to pay. The discipline that is the hallmark of the disciple here is named. Shall we not remember Jesus ministry? Shall we ignore the call and power offered here? Shall we forget the directions given? Shall we expect to turn a deaf ear to the caution about consequences? We pray not. The main sweep of the gospel today is clear as a bell. Jesus gives power to his disciples.

Hold that thought.

The clear call of Christ upon our consciences in the main flow of the gospel. For the main point is crystal clear. To follow Jesus means to take up where he and his earliest companions left off.  Jesus has taught, preached and healed. This ministry he has bequeathed to his disciples, his apostles. We have been seized by the confession of the Church; we are Christians. Now his ministry, this ministry, is ours.

Which part of this ministry draws you?

Do you love Jesus? Then you must do something for him.  Many at BU did so, or tried to, this Wednesday June 24.

Reading Today

In consonance with the preaching of Marsh Chapel over long time, and especially in the last three months, Boston University this week offered a full day of teaching and reflection on racism and anti-racism, this past Wednesday.  What was central, and striking, in the rich hours of presentation and discussion, were the many, and extemporaneous, references to apocalyptic, revelatory insights, recalled by the speakers—aha moments!—in reading.  In reading.  Alongside our own ministry through Marsh Chapel and Religious Life, and that of the now beautifully expanded Howard Thurman Center, which you celebrated right here in worship on January 19, 2020, the voices and leadership of the faculty, staff, presidential and provostial leadership of the University, and then that of the African American Studies Program, the Associate Provost for Diversity and Inclusion, and the new BU Center for Anti-Racism, came together in a great watershed, a confluence new in my experience.  It was wonderful.  I commend to you its recorded version.  Let me leave you with ten sentences (out of a hundred that might have been quoted) from that day, rooted in a shared, reading life:

There is nothing innate about our racial hierarchy.

The final act of violence is the very denial of violence.

The heartbeat of racism is denial.

Racism creates a group differentiated vulnerability, and premature death.

Freedom, real freedom is a whole lot more than civil rights alone.

It is unjust to ask those marginalized by the current system now alone to fix it.

Even if you can’t do empathy, can you at least do justice?

People are rediscovering their own power.

We are at a point now that comes from a movement fifty years ago.

(And last, as a cautionary note, in a sermon on reading):  We can’t just read our way out of this.  (!!)

Is yours a reading life, liberally fed by what is read?  Happy Reading, summer 2020!

Hear the gospel:  He who receives you receives me, and he who receives me receives Him who sent me.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.28.2020 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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Romans 5: 1-8

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All of us are better when we are loved.

Ride On

One day, over lunch, a pastor told us about children at church camp. One 9-year-old in pig tails chose horse camp last year. I didn’t know Methodists ran horse camp. They do. This was pre-COVID when there was still summer camp and horse camp and Methodist horse camp. But on Monday she fell off a horse, or was frightened or something. She cowered through the week, unable to get back on the horse and ride. Her counselor just kept on encouraging. Friday was the rodeo. I guess that is horse camp graduation. All week she wrestled, her fear of falling grappling with her desire to be in the rodeo. Dawn broke on Friday, as it does. I loved, really loved, the way the minister told us about the rodeo. The girl in pig tails put herself on the horse. The old glue factory mare stumbled around the little circle made of six orange cones. First the girl hugged the horse’s neck and kept her eyes closed. But then, after a little while, she opened her eyes. Then she looked up. Then she sat up. Then she leaned back. Then she straightened her back. Then she dug her knees into horse flesh. Then she clicked her tongue. Then she slapped the reins. The old glue factory mare plodded along. But the jockey beamed. She waved to the crowd. She nodded response to her counselor’s encouragement. She rode around the circle again. And again. And again. The rodeo went 30 minutes over schedule. With a little encouragement, a little girl grew up a little.

All of us ride better when we’re loved.

Swing Batter

It made me think about encouragement. A few years ago, somebody came up with the idea that the Little League champs should play their dads on Labor Day. A picnic was arranged, with watermelon and chili dogs. The right fielder’s dad tried not to come. First, he said he had to work. Then a trip was planned. Then he felt ill. But his son kept after him. Dad was at middle age and he had always been a simply terrible batter. He could not hit the broad side of a barn, when he was young. Now he was bald. And his glasses were thick, very thick. And, speaking delicately, he carried frontside a bit, let us say, of a paunch. The thought of facing fast pitching made him squirm. His son, though, was not to be stymied. Dad prayed for rain, or a hurricane, or untimely death. Anyone’s. But dawn broke on Labor Day, as it does. Not a cloud in the sky. Not a breath of wind. 72 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale. It could have been San Diego. Distraught, Dad went. The dreaded moment came, his “ups”. He stood in the box, remembering every strike out of 30 years ago. He thought of running. He adjusted his coke bottle glasses, and sweated. All of a sudden from right field he heard, in the full-throated innocent confidence of his son’s voice, “Come on Dad, you can do it, I know you can.” He took a ball, and stood tall. “I know you can!” He took a strike and felt a little better. “Come on Dad, I know you can hit it.” Over the plate came a fast, straight pitch. And he hit it. He hit the ball! Do you know how good he felt to see that little Texas leaguer dropping in behind second base? Rounding first, and stopping, he wiped his glasses. He felt good. Behind him a whisper, “I knew you could, Dad, I just knew you could.”

 All of us swing better when we’re loved.

Be Like 43

For the first time in a decade one High School basketball team competed in sectional semi-finals, some years ago. It is a mystery how this happened. A team shorter, skinnier, weaker, smaller, and less experienced than nearly every opponent, somehow succeeded. They grew steadily in ability and confidence. They failed and lost, and in this they learned. Sometimes they won, and in this they learned, too. Every so often you would see, as visible as a cocoon giving way to a butterfly or a snake shedding its skin or a calf standing after birth, one of the players find himself on the court. It was something to behold. The parents, as ever, attributed all losses to bad officiating, and all wins to marvelous genes. Before the post season, the coach sent a personal, hand written note to every one of his players. He thanked them for their willingness to play. He honestly commended their improvement. He admitted how much he enjoyed their company. Then he challenged them to rise to the post season challenge. They did. He wrote personally to one young man, number 43 on the team, “my own son is growing and learning to play ball, too, and when he asks me how to play and how to be, I just say, you look on the court and you watch 43 and what he does you do --be like 43”. Dawn broke on the day of the sectional game, and they won. Number 43 is my son.

All of us rebound better when we’re loved.

Go OWU

On October more than a few years ago, my brother and I trained to run in the Washington Marine Corps Marathon, around the Pentagon twice, through Georgetown, past every good monument, and out onto the peninsula. Dawn broke on Sunday, a rainy cold morning. I thought I was ready. I was wrong. Maybe it was the driving 40-degree rain, or maybe I’m just older than I think. My brother finished more than an hour before I did. I hit the wall at mile 16. In the rain, I was passed by young men, young women, old men, old women, waddlers, craddlers, wigglers, people in wheel chairs, moms, soccer moms, and man from Denver running backwards. It was not pretty. Somehow though, I finished. In part, looking back, through the encouragement of anonymous curbside exhorters. I was wearing a red Ohio Wesleyan sweatshirt. It was encouraging to hear a shout, “Go red guy!” It was more encouraging to hear, “Keep going Ohio!” It was even more encouraging to hear, “Good going, Ohio Wesleyan!” But most encouraging of all were the occasional alumni voices, “Go OWU!” The more personal, the more particular the encouragement, the more powerful it is. I made it to the Iwo Gima monument. Chris and I drove home.

All of us run better when we’re loved.

Paul Writes to Rome

In similar beguilingly simple terms, Paul wrote to the Romans. Our reading today could well be memorized and recited, daily, for the course of a lifetime. Our reading this morning might properly be printed and framed for the office desk or the kitchen counter. Our reading this Sunday could rightly be imprinted upon the heart, written on every human heart. This is the great watershed of the faith of Christ, simply stated for you and me, for the dying. Romans 5: 1-8.

What dim reflections we find of Love, here in the dark, come from the death of Christ. The great peaks in human history dimly reflect this love: Alexander the glory of Athens, Augustus and the pride of Rome, Michaelangelo and the beauty of Florence, Franklin and the birth of a nation. The great peaks of spirit do too: Dionysius the Areopagite, Augustine’s mother, Katie von Bora, Joan of Arc, Teresa of Avila. Love is not for the simple, only. Love is for the wise. One friend, now dead, alone caught the humor of a single phrase, years ago: we think of ourselves as ‘temporarily immortal’.

You remember the basic points in Romans: 1:16, the Gospel of which Paul is not ashamed…2:21, our condition, foolish faithless, heartless ruthless…8:33, hope that is seen is not hope…10:9, if you confess with your lips…12:9, let love be genuine…

You hear and receive his basic terms in this central high peak chapter 5: faith, the gift of God in Jesus Christ; peace, the closeness of faith and the absence of barrier; hope, not seen; glory, heaven yes but also the full humanity for which we were made; spirit, that which confers conveys conducts all the above, and all of them circling agape, the initiative of God loving us into love and freeing us into freedom.

Our business here is dying. Life is about learning to die. How are we ever going to manage? Our almost interminable avoidance will not, in itself, cut it.

To be saved is to be incorporated “in Christ”, that is, to belong to this new and heavenly order, primarily eschatological but even now proleptically present, just as the day is present in the dawn. (J Knox).

Love alone justifies. Love alone bring peace. Love alone provides space in grace. Love alone hints at glory. Love alone outlasts suffering. Love alone is stronger than death. Love alone stoops to give out for the weak and lost. Love alone bleeds on your behalf. Love alone reconciles enemies.

Now friends, there are a lot of things wrong. You can find them fast enough. In climate. In culture. In corona. In classism. In racism. In connection. In church. Right now, there are a lot of things that just are wrong. It may be that the tragic, horrible death of George Floyd will galvanize and focus us, as a people, in a new and different way. There are for sure a lot of things wrong.

But friends, there are also a lot of things right. We are going to need to hold on to these, too, in order to have a future worthy of the name. Just this week I see and hear them. Where? In the self-less ministry of our BU Catholic Chaplain, Fr. David Barnes, giving last rites for two months, recently described in the New York Times. Where? In the advent of Professor Ibram X. Kendi, coming soon to BU to found a new Center for Anti-Racist Research. Where? In a kind note from a former student, Sam Needham, now finishing his PhD, applying to lead a University Chapel, hoping to ‘incorporate both academic work and pastoral leadership into my ministerial career, as you have done so well’. Where? I give no better sermonic encouragement than that found this week inn the hopeful words of our fellow Dean, School of Public Health, Boston University, Dr. Sandro Galea:

There is no question that the circumstances of the moment are unremittingly difficult. That many millions are, and will continue, suffering ill-effects from this great national trauma for years to come. That the consequences of the moment include a loss of hope and of trust in our collective capacity to grapple with complex problems and an anxiety and fear that will haunt our dreams for years. There is no question that the moment will further entrench social divides and that these divides themselves will continue to challenge our capacity to see one another as we do ourselves, separating us by widening gulfs of experience, straining our capacity for empathy.
And yet, and yet, we shall, perhaps against all odds, survive even this moment. Why? We know that the country has survived dark moments and has gone on—at least for the privileged some—to thrive. We did survive 1918, 1933, 1968, 2001. We also survived two world wars. Each of these moments seemed to defy hope, to threaten our sense of safety and stability for our world. And yet, there was a year that came after each of these moments that brought better, a dawn after a stormy night.

Each of these moments found some resolution, in some cases vastly imperfect, that allowed the country to move on. We also know, and have seen even in this moment, that the country has stores of fierce determination to survive, to get past the dark. We have seen it in the abundant cases of heroism in the face of COVID-19, in first responders—not only nurses and doctors, but also grocery store clerks and morgue attendants—who continue to do their job, at high personal risk, because it is is the right thing to do, and because it is what is needed to ensure that our society continues to function, that we make it past the moment. We have seen it in the acts of generosity that have sustained so many through the economic hardships of the moment, and in the acts of courage in the face of unimaginable adversity shown by those who are speaking for social justice, facing down entrenched systems of structural racism that are larger than all of us. The past, and the abundant traces of hope offered by the tenuous present, both suggest that we will emerge from this moment. That there shall be sun after the dark of 2020.
Dean Galea brought us a timely, saving word of loving encouragement. For love alone has the grace and power, savingly to soften the inevitable collisions (Isaiah Berlin) of personal and social life.

Just so, Romans 5 brings a clear, even simple, word of encouragement, some bread for the journey. Better when loved, better when loved. Like many of you, we learned first this power of encouragement from our parents. My mother died, Friday, at 7pm, in a COVID encased nursing home. We were able to be with her for the hours prior to that, an opening in protocol that came just soon enough for family to gather with her. She turned 91 last Saturday, and carried her genial and congenial spirit, her smile, her gracious spirit to the very end. Before Friday, I happened to be the last person to be immediately with her, in conversation, on March 9. After that it was only through nurses (wonderful), FaceTime (equally so), and arranged ‘through the glass’ waves and greetings with my sisters (not so good, but better than nothing). It is reminder of the torrents of unexpressed, unaddressed grief around us, that will consume our work for months, perhaps longer, into the future. And, although she did not say it directly, she surely lived it fully, this saving word of loving encouragement: all of us are better when we are loved.

The first Christians even found in suffering something productive. It was their manner of suffering that impressed others. It was their manner of dying, it was Paul’s manner of dying, perhaps in Rome, that others noticed:

All of us live and, especially, die better when we’re loved.
All of us are better when we are loved.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.14.2020 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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Matthew 28: 16-20

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We are a people drenched in sorrows. As this sermon is recorded, today, Wednesday, June 3, we are a nation afflicted, caught somewhere between pandemic and pandemonium. So, come with me for a moment aside, a moment apart, wherein we scour together the high ground, the background, and the common ground of our current condition, the condition our condition is in.

The High Ground

First, the high ground.

Former Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson led us toward high ground this week. He had done so before. Right here. Some of you will remember his voice in 2014 from this pulpit. Secretary Johnson preached from the Marsh pulpit on January 25, 2014. Present with Johnson and the Dean of Marsh Chapel were Charlene Hunter-Gault, two dozen BU medical students in their white coats, another physician who had been the doctor for Arthur Ashe, the then President of Planned Parenthood, Cecile Richards, and about 300 guests, family, and friends. We were present to honor the life and faithfulness of Dr. Kenneth Edelin, a BU alumnus, renowned physician, and national civil rights leader. Marsh Chapel was full. At one point we asked the congregation to recite together the 23 Psalm. Family and friends in the first pew did so. Colleagues and physicians across the nave did so. Leaders of national organizations near and far did so. In the balcony, twenty white coated medical students together did so. Either at that point or another in the service they stood silently together, to honor the life and faith of the deceased. That day I met a friend a personal physician of Arthur Ashe, whose life, prowess, faithfulness and service have always so inspired me. Read again this summer his autobiography, Days of Grace. “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”

In the collation following the service, some of us remembered Arthur Ashe. “Arthur Ashe: Ashe suffered a heart attack in 1979. He would later undergo surgery for quadruple bypass, but continued to suffer chest pain. This forced him to retire from tennis with a record of 818-260, including his three Grand Slams.

He remains the only African-American male to have won any of these Men's Single titles. Ashe would have to under-go a second bypass surgery in 1983. During this operation he received a blood transfusion: the blood Ashe received was infected with human immunodeficiency virus—HIV. In 1988, this discovery was made. The condition was kept private until 1992, when Ashe announced to the world, he had AIDS. When asked if having AIDS was the toughest challenge he had ever had to face, Ashe replied: “No, the hardest thing I’ve ever had to deal with was being a black man in this society…having to live as a minority in America. Even now it feels like an extra weight tied around me.” (Blaine Spence, 2009).”

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

I do not recall the full content in that memorial of Secretary Jeh Johnson’s eulogy. I do clearly remember his necessarily taking over my downstairs office, with two fully uniformed attaches carrying the famous black box, who announced, ‘we need to be next to a telephone land line’. I do also recall what Johnson said on Tuesday of this week, keeping us focused on the high ground, the high ground. June 2, 2020: “Protest, as Martin Luther King said, is a form of language by those who believe that their voices are not heard. And the grievance here is legitimate. Protests that crosses into violence is counterproductive to the message. It undermines the message. It cedes the moral high ground and it strengthens those on the other side of the debate…looting undermines the larger effort here. It undermines the message, it distracts from it, and it gives — it strengthens the hand of those on the militant extremist law and order side."

As the sermon last Sunday affirmed, order matters, order matters…in order that the legitimate grievance be heard, the language of protest be heard.

The Background

Second, the background. From high ground to background.

We have covered this ground, call it the background, from this pulpit, many times before. A few from several examples: We did so under the theme ‘A New Birth of Freedom’, in reference to Jeremiah Wright, January 18, 2009. We did so under the theme ‘Learning Together, in reference to Ferguson and Treyvon Martin, August 24, 2014. We did so under the theme, ‘Still Point’, in reference to the Charleston Nine, June 21, 2015. We did so under the theme ‘Bear Witness to the Truth’, in reference to Charlottesville a year earlier, November 25, 2018. We do so today under the theme ‘Ground of Being’, in reference to George Floyd. These are offered with encouragement that if you have the time and energy, you take the time and energy to read these, or other materials, to know better our background.

Not everyone will find satisfaction in listening to or reading old sermons. Pity. So, you may simply want to read, and read. So, read! Don’t scan. Read.

Start with James Baldwin:

‘Nothing is fixed forever and forever, it is not fixed. The earth is always shifting and the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down the rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them, because they are the only witnesses we have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to one another, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with each other, the sea engulfs us, and the light goes out’…James Baldwin: whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves. (Letter from a Region in my Mind (New Yorker, reprint, 12/3/18)

Continue with William Faulkner, Light in August, say, something bracing and dark, Faulkner on fire:

…a fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he's already got. He'll cling to trouble he's used to before he'll risk a change. Yes. A man will talk about how he'd like to escape from living folks. But it's the dead folks that do him the damage. It's the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and dont try to hold him, that he cant escape from.” …He said, ‘Remember this. 240

The past is not dead. It is not even past.

But don’t stop until you have read Cornell professor Edward Baptist’s,

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. You dwell in the tenth floor of a building whose first three stories were constructed with stolen land and enslaved labor, free land and free labor, for the benefit of anyone who had or used money, then or now. Now bear with me a moment, as we cover the contours of our background.

Read Baptist on the building of the new south, 1807-1861: The massive and cruel engineering required to rip a million people from their homes, brutally drive them to new, disease-ridden places, and make them live in terror and as they continually built and rebuilt a commodity-generating empire—this vanished in the story of a slavery that was supposedly focused primarily not on producing profit but on maintaining its status as a quasi-feudal elite, or producing modern ideas about race in order to maintain white unity and elite power (xix).

Read Baptist on the investment incentives therein: And because the main in the iron collar and all who followed him into the depths of the continent would make not a luxury product but the most basic commodity in a new kind of endlessly expanding economy, there would also be no limit to the number of enslavers, or to the number of investors who would want to chase enslavement’s rewards. Only conscience, or the inability of the world’s investment markets to deploy enough savings, could impede the transfer of capital to slavery’s new frontiers (41).

Read Baptist on avarice: A world greedy for a slice of the whipping-machine’s super-profits had financed the occupation of a continent, and the forced migration of enslaved African Americans to the southwestern cotton fields helped to make the modern world economy possible…Slavery’s expansion was the driving force in US history between the framing of the constitution and the beginning of the Civil War. It made the nation large and unified (413).

The Common Ground

Third, the common ground. We conclude with a Trinitarian reminder of our common ground, from high ground to background to common ground, in our holy gospel.

Our gospel lesson, the conclusion of St. Matthew, is an early introduction of the Trinity, the relational mode of divinity so struggled after and so central to early Christianity. In that way, the Trinity is the original Christian common ground, the divine dimension of the possibility of relationship. We can use that reminder this morning in early June 2020. We conclude with a Trinitarian reminder of common ground, in our very humanity.

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

We conclude with a trinitarian, that is a relational reminder of common ground, in our communion with one another, the communion of saints. A reminder that given our endless fallibility and our ending mortality, we need each other.

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… Imagine, if you are willing, your own funeral, say right here, and a congregation reciting together:

The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.7.2020 at 10:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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John 20: 19-23

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Spirit

For the months and years ahead, we shall need… Spirit. Those who worship shall worship in spirit and in truth. Receive the Holy Spirit, beloved. Today is Pentecost! Receive the Holy Spirit!

Scripture and tradition depend on reason and experience. Spirit involves reason and experience. A question for you, day by day as our mortally challenging pandemic reminds us, is whether we can find the courage to trust our own experience and whether we can find the capacity to rely on our own reason. Opportunities to subcontract both are amply available. But in order to live a life that is yours not almost yours, Spirit is needed. More: not many of us signed up to make decisions, choices, on almost a daily basis, that may in fact have direct impact on another’s safety, health and well-being. We have the freedom of spirit, but there is a weight, a dead weight to that freedom. Said Robert McAffee Brown, This is God’s world. But it is a crummy world. And we have to live with both realities. It is the Triune God as Spirit that empowers, makes a space, for Brown’s proverb.

Wind at midnight. Wind from the sea. Summer wind, blowing in. The wind blows where it wills. Wind of God…

The strangest of strange outcroppings of Spirit in all of Scripture is located in the Fourth Gospel, in the odium theologicum of John 7, and on the windswept steppe of John 14, the ice-covered snow peak of the Bible, the haunted moonscape of planet Gospel, and, especially, come Pentecost, today, in the elusive presence of John 20. In John both the mystical eye and the ethical ear, in Samuel Terrien’s phrase, are alive, ethics here only meaning love God and love your neighbor. Once you have ascended John including to the last discourse, John 14ff, you are clearly in a strange, strange land and landscape. The venerable preacher who originally spoke to the late first century community in the town of Ephesus (say) if nothing else had absolute confidence in his own experience. It led him, and thus his church, to establish what became later emerging Christianity. Here, Logos. Here, Nicodemus. Here, Blind Man healed. Here, Lazarus—raised. Here, Beloved Disciple. Here, Paraclete, especially, Spirit, by another name.

John

John has had the courage to face the awful disappointment behind the New Testament: Jesus did not return, not on schedule, not as expected, not soon and very soon, not maranatha, not yet. But John looked at his own experience, and in biblical measure, with traditional tools, reasoned. In place of apocalypse, he celebrated the artistry of the everyday, and in place of the speculation about the end, he celebrated the Spirit of truth, and in place of parousia, the coming of the Lord, he nominated Paraclete, the presence of the Lord. You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. One way to solve problems is to face them, to name them, to admit them. No parousia. Paraclete. To face our present challenge, with courage, neither with recklessness nor with anxiety, neither with rashness nor with timidity, as the President of Notre Dame put it this week.

The stark strangeness, the utter difference of John from the rest of the Bible we have yet fully to admit. In the COVID time, it may be, you will have the time or take the time or make the time, to become better acquainted: with the Bible, with the Gospel, with John. With faith. Faith, says my friend, is a response in the affirmative to the question whether life has any meaning. Is there meaning in life, to life? Faith says ‘Yes’. My beloved advisor, perhaps the greatest John scholar of our era, Fr. Raymond Brown, got only as far as saying that John is best understood as ‘an embraceable variant’ emphasis on embraceable less emphasis on variant. But when we get to the summit, John 14 and following out to John 20, we see chiseled there in ice and covered fully with wind snow, an enigmatic, mysterious riddle: Spirit. Paraclete. The endless enemy of conformity. The lasting foe of the nearly lived life. The champion of the quixotic. The standard bearer of liberty. The one true spirit of spirited truth. Yet we cannot even give the history of the term, nor fully define its meaning, nor aptly place it in context, nor finally determine its translation. And maybe that is as it should be. Paraclete eludes us. Spirit evades us. Paraclete outpaces us. Spirit escapes us. There is, says faith of meaning in life, says faith in meaning in life, there is a self-correcting spirit of truth loose in the universe.

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

John, Spirit in John, may be the verses of the Bible we most need in Corona Time. Especially recent graduates. Six months ago, you had multiple opportunities, jobs and internships and travel and study and any myriad of combinations thereof. Today? Today we need the Spirit to empower us to edit our dreams, to recognize past dreams and edit them for a new, challenging time.

Other parts of the New Testament take another trail. The Book of Acts offers confidence by way of hagiographical memories of Peter and Paul, and of exaggerated but loving assertions of the utter agreement of Peter and Paul. The

Pastoral and Catholic Epistles—and to some degree 1 John in opposition to his gospel namesake—rely not on memory or memories and not on Spirit, but on structure: presbyters, faith once delivered to saints, deacons, codes of conduct, stylized memories of orderly transmission of tradition. We need memory. We need structure. Neither can hold a candle to Spirit. That is, for John, what Moses, the Law, the historical Jesus, the Sacraments or any other can suggest, Paraclete provides. By Spirit we hear the Word God. God reveals by Spirit. God self-reveals by Spirit. Here the stakes are very high.

Raymond Brown: People who live by the spirit is the only way others will be convinced of the victory of Jesus (Hill, Courageous, 82). You. You living by the Spirit will be the only way others will be convinced of faith, of the affirmation of meaning in life.

Paraclete

Parakletos, Paraclete, is a word used only by John. In the first letter of John the word is used to describe Jesus. The word comes from kalein, to call, to call along side of. It is the legal form for advocate, one who has been called along side to help (ad vocare). The Holy Spirit will tell you what to say: this is the Synoptic claim. But that is not quite what John says here. Here the Holy Spirit is a prosecuting attorney. He puts the world on trial. There is a legal sense to Paraclete. A lot of this language and imagery ought to be understood in light of the trial of Jesus itself. The Paraclete is Jesus’ Spirit. The Spirit is not just a memory but is a living force.

In Job we hear “I know that my defender lives”. The figure here is probably an angelic defender. He will prove to the world Job’s innocence. The angelic figure in the Job passage is translated by the rabbi’s as “paraclete”. “My defense attorney”. The angelic spirit is related to the individual.

However, “the Advocate” is not the whole picture. “The Comforter” is also a part of this. The Spirit will comfort, will hold your hand. Paraclete has this notion too. Luther’s Bible emphasized the notion of the comforter. Thus, we have in English the Paraclete as comforter. Furthermore, this figure is a ‘he’, though there is no intention to emphasize maleness. This is Jesus’ Paraclete since he is our own defense attorney. And the Paraclete is with us forever.

Even Jesus was confined by time and space. But the Paraclete is not bound by time and space. The Paraclete is given to all who love Jesus and keep his commandments. There is no contract here for John. The Paraclete is not given only to a few. (In Acts, by contrast, the spirit is tied more directly to the twelve). In John, the Spirit is the property of all. The Spirit is an internal force which the world cannot see. The world cannot see the Spirit. And the Spirit has no name. His identity comes from Jesus and the Father. The Spirit takes on the role of Jesus, and is sent in Jesus’ name. He will teach. He will remind. He will tell. Just as Jesus did. This is the Teacher

for the Johannine community. He will not speak on his own. He will speak only what he hears. He will speak of the things to come.

At the end of the first century, the apostolic churches had a moment of paralysis. All the leaders were now dead. “How are we going to survive?”, they mused. We will hold on. Preserve what has been given. One way to cope is to structure, to pass on. This structure is the test of the Spirit. It is a mechanism for preserving the situation. There is a human witness, to be sure. But that witness is only powerful because of the Paraclete. Thus, the Beloved Disciple is so exemplary, because of the Holy Spirit. This is the notion of passing things on, in a viable, adaptable way.

The Paraclete teaches.

There are two different visions of Christian mechanisms for dealing with the future. One: Acts, the Pastorals, preserve and remember. Two: John, the Spirit. This is a most interesting tension: spirit guidance plus guidance from structure.

Here the Paraclete is also the grounding of the community. Says Jesus: For your own good, I will go away. The presence of the Spirit in the long run is better. I have many things to say, but you cannot bear them now.

Now

The person who possesses the Spirit possesses Jesus.

The Spirit is the Advocate. He calls forth and calls out and calls down. The word for Spirit, pneuma, is actually neuter in gender. Our friend Linda, an OWU and BU graduate, lives by Spirit. She happened to call, a Friday ago, to offer thanks for a BU program she had heard. When she finished her BA in Delaware Ohio and wanted to go on to study religious education her chaplain, James Leslie, son of former BU Old Testament professor Elmer Leslie, suggested BU. “Who knows, you may even meet your husband there” he said. She went and she did. Last year Linda was spotted holding a sign in traffic near an upstate New York shopping center. She and her husband Gary, a BUSTH graduate of 1964, served a dozen urban and rural churches together, never really complaining about itinerancy or salary or ministry. Gary retired and unexpectedly died shortly thereafter. Linda teaches Sunday school, writes letters to the editor, checks in on elderly preachers’ widows, and reads poetry. This particular day she was moved with a few others to stand in a busy traffic area holding a sign, ‘Remember the children of the Middle East’. An advocate. Do you possess, or are you possessed by, the Advocate?

The Spirit is the Counselor. A recent college graduate, call her Emma, works for an outdoor therapy program, aimed at delinquent teenagers. She loves nature, having studied the environment and environmental science in college. A 15 year-old boy asked her why he should bother to get up in the morning. He meant it. She

had no answer, at first. But then she brought him a paragraph the next day from Thoreau. She meant it. Somehow, maybe more for this trust in her and her care for him, a saving, an intervening word of counsel was spoken, and more importantly, was spoken and heard. Faith is the affirmative response to the question whether life has meaning. Do you possess, or are you possessed by, the Counselor?

The Spirit is the Comforter. On the edges of mayhem in various parts of the world, let us not forgot for all our current troubles, there are camps for refugees. Millions of refugees. There are tents, there is food, there are medical units, there is some semblance of order. Temporary, insufficient, makeshift order, but order nonetheless. A photo of one of the nurses in one, eyes wide and tear-filled and kind, stood out from the newspaper the other day. She stood for all the heroic first responders right around us in this pandemic. We all cannot do such work. But we can appreciate and admire, respect and support, those who do. We take order for granted, to our peril. One day we shall need the succor of such women, and the safety of such order, however temporary, insufficient and makeshift. Do you possess, or are you possessed by, the Comforter?

The Spirit is the Helper. Brian was admitted to my alma mater, Ohio Wesleyan, but really could not read well. He was failing everything, left and right and center. His history teacher told him ‘you do not belong here’. He tried, but he could not continue. He found his way to the registrar, and got papers to withdraw. He sat on the steps of Gray Chapel one afternoon, filling in the forms. A secretary in the admissions office saw him, remembered his spirit and spunk, his energy and courtesy, from the spring. She stopped looking into her computer and went out to look at him, asking what he was doing. He began to weep. He stumbled through an explanation. They sat quietly. “Brian, you are not going home, at least not today, and at least not in this way. We have help here. We are a small school and we take care of our kids. We have a writing center here. We have ways to make this work for you. Just come with me.” You may have seen or heard Brian. Today he is a prominent news anchor. He told this story the day our third, our youngest child, graduated from OWU. “She saved my life by helping me” he said. Do you possess, or are you possessed by, the Helper?

Hear the Gospel: If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him or knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you…These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you. But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you

–The Reverend Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 05.31.2020 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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1 Peter 2:2–10

John 14:1-14

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Wherever there is a way, there is Christ.  Wherever there is truth, there is Christ.  Wherever there is life, there is Christ.

The Gospel today reveals three secrets to lasting health in life.  Here is the marrow of worship, wherein we care for the Body of Christ, to rediscover the things that make for peace.  This is the point of Mother’s Day, to reflect on the healthy habits of being, graciously given us by those who raised us, that have made us happy, and kept us healthy.  One day at a time. One day at a time. As my grandmother pasted on her kitchen door, in her late eighties, Today.  Do one thing.  There. You’ve done one thing.

Now an opening confession, and a concern about your preacher today.  He is pretty rusty at preaching on Mothers’ Day.  For fourteen years past, here at Marsh Chapel, this was the Sunday our graduating seniors spoke (you will be pleased to hear four of them next Sunday, May 17).  For eleven years before that, in Rochester NY, the Mothers’ Day sermon was usually given by one of my three supremely talented female associates—with accumulated degrees from Boston University, from Colgate, from Yale, from University of Pennsylvania, from Colgate Rochester, and, exceptionally, preeminently from Ohio Wesleyan.  This was a practice based on the awareness that these three, pioneers from the first full wave, and at the top level, of women in ministry, also were all mothers of many years’ experience, and might actually know quite a bit more about it all than their boss. Which they did.  What gifts they brought to ministry!  (We shall continue to see, by the way, in similar fashion the gracious gifts, of gay clergy, now not just here and there, but in a great wave.)  Then, too, in Syracuse, the eleven years before that, the Sunday was devoted to a celebration of the United Methodist Women of that church, without whom no money would have been raised, no educational programs mounted, no mission investment done, nor hardly a fellowship dinner arranged.  The sermon came from the UMW President that day.  It usually began with an old story…

Like the one about the UMW group that was mistakenly sent to hell.  After a month the devil placed a long-distance phone call upstairs to heaven to ask that they be removed.  Why, asked Peter?  Because, said Beelzebub—they are thorn in my flesh.  They are organized.  They raise money.  They increase membership and now, the last straw, they have fundraiser to put in air conditioning.  I want them out of here.

Or like the one about a friend who once received a gracious introduction with this humorous response: “I wish my parents were in the room to hear such a glowing, flattering introduction.  My father would have enjoyed it.  And my mother would have believed it!”

Or like the one about the UMW leader who was asked, “Madam President, if I give lots of money to the church will it get me into heaven?”  Discarding all the theological responses to the contrary, she paused and replied, “Well, it’s worth a try!”

So, it has been 36 years, and the pastor today is a little rusty regarding Mothers’ Day preaching.  Bear with me, preach with me, and hear the Gospel; Way, Truth, Life.  Wherever there is a way, there is Christ.  Wherever there is truth, there is Christ.  Wherever there is life, there is Christ.  This is one of the deepest unities of the Scripture.  In the deep unities of Scripture, we lean again into the secrets of happy life.

First, Way

We learn from others.  Especially in the home.  What parents do is crucial.  Especially, we might say, during this virus, the example parents set will be the path children walk.  Parents, regardless of any or nor religious tradition, model dimensions of spirituality for their children.  Children watch and listen.  I think this Mothers’ Day 2020 of young mothers in New England.  Maybe you? Today, one half mom, one half professional, one half wife, one half home school administrator, one half neighbor.  And that’s not the half of it.

One day I saw a young mother walking in a department store.  She had too little girls in tow to starboard, and her own elderly mother to port.  The girls pulled ahead, and grandma lagged behind, and between daughters and grandmother and promises to keep I thought I overheard this practical prayer from the mom in middle: “Lord get me through this day.”

Phyllis Trible taught us long ago that reading the Bible involves your own perspective.  It matters what you bring with you into the reading room.  I imagine women, and men, on this Sunday, trying desperately to balance the generational claims of relationship.  And in some cases, to sift through hard memories, hurts, traumas left by another generation.  You are trying to raise another generation to be faithful, good boys and girls, women and men.  They know what they see.

But we know others are hurting too, in harsher and different ways.  We keep things in perspective, and in prayer.  Think for a moment of the mother of Ahmaud Arbery, killed in the cross fire of race and class, the cross fire of culture and guns.  We hold things in perspective, and in prayer.

Our Gospel lessons, like John 14, are primary sources for the time, occasion, community and condition in and for which they were first written.  They are secondary sources, at best, for what may have come before.  So, two weeks ago, Luke 24 showed us Luke, and his community, in joyful celebration of the mystery of the Lord’s ascent.  At his ascent they did assent, perhaps following decades of loss, displacement, and martyrdom.  Having lived through the long old-time religion winter of most of the first century, and all its rigors, they acclaimed a faith in a high, divine goodness, through it all.

This is the example that Jesus has shown us, in his life, and in the lives of his own.   More than we acknowledge, the examples of those around us sustain us in hidden, powerful ways.  Near Pittsburgh Frank Lloyd Wright built his famous home for the Kaufmann family, called “Falling Waters”.  It is built into the stone, on top of the flowing water, alongside the verdant forest, amid the wondrous rolling beauty of southern Pennsylvania.  It protrudes, suspended nearly in thin air, like our own lives so often seem to be.  The house is held up by cantilevers, like a diving board or a teeter totter.  The strength and saving grounding are hidden away in the rock, and out the house stretches.  I think that is like the hidden, silent strength that parents by example give to children.  We remember what we have seen, by example, through others.  This Mothers’ Day 2020 we think of suffrage and suffragettes 100 years ago:  Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Staunton; of reforms and reformer, 100 years ago: Sojourner Truth, Harriett Tubman.

We learn from others.  Especially in the home.  What parents do is crucial.

Second, Truth

So too is what parents say.  As we are tightly quartered, now, parents at the office in the living room, and children at school in the dining room, we might want to measure what we say.  To think before we speak.

For the gospel reveals another of the secrets to health, in what is said.  We learn from what is said to us by those whom we love.  Our minds cannot change unless our hearts are changed.  No argument will ever be as strong as ardent care.  What changes people comes from what is said by those they know who care.  One esteemed UTS professor could in the end never speak to me because he could never speak for me.  Especially, we might say, during this virus, the wisdom, the sayings, the forms of speech children hear from their parents will be more formative and more lasting than the pandemic itself.  A friend said to me, just recently, ‘I think of my grandmother telling me, ‘keep your wits about you, keep your wits about you.’

At Sing Sing, almost100 years ago, another suffragette, the warden’s wife became one of those people.  She attended to the imprisoned.  When she found a blind prisoner, she learned Braille and taught him.  When she found a deaf prisoner, she learned sign language and taught him.  In that hardest of spaces, she spoke the language of love.  When she died and her coffin was pulled past the gates, the men stood in silence in her honor, and asked if the gate could be opened so that they might fill the chapel, promising to return.  The warden took them at their word, and to a man they kept the promise and returned.  We listen to those we trust.

Our deeds are important.  So, Matthew Mark and Luke.  But so, and more so are our words.  So, we have a fourth gospel, John.  John best reminds us that what lasts is what we say.  What did Jesus say on the night he was glorified, John 14-17? John celebrates the secret in speech.  God-Christ-Spirit—all for John are known in the ‘glory’ that is the cross, the strange divine manner among us; the little preposition “in” holds the mystical magic every day—celebrate, dance, love, sing, live—God in Christ, Christ in God, we in him, they in us; a new commandment…new…new…something new...are we ready for something new?  Jesus has said something to us that is the very secret of lasting health.  What is it?

He binds what he says to what he does.  Form and function come and go together.  So, Jesus is the Word, the Word of God for us.

The Gospel continues to teach us something that is the very secret of lasting health and happiness.  At every step, Jesus is inviting you to deepen your capacity, to sharpen your acuity, to soften your heart.

Third, Life

Today we dimly realize, again, just how much Jesus has shared with us.

I think of that young mother, balancing daughters and grandmother.  They stop at the counter, in Kaufmann’s, and she buys some perfumes and body lotions.  Later she wraps them and gives them as symbols of affection.  Especially, we might say, during this virus, the living, the sharing of life modeled by parents will in the long run have a sturdy, lasting effect on children.  It is not so much what we are going through, as how we are going through what we are going through, in spring 2020, that lasts.  It is not so much what we are going through, as how we are going through what we are going through, in spring 2020, that lasts.  

We need to learn in the north from our southern cousins.  They have shown us how to take care of Mother Church. At least this.  We need to learn again to attend to the Body of Christ.  They care to apply the body lotions of hospitality and generosity to the Body of Christ.  They attend to the Body, like a mother tending her children and parents.  They attend to the Body, the church, the Body of Christ, like a young mother fretting for toddlers and the aged.  It is not just the Mind of Christ that we seek.  It is not only the Spirit of Christ that we need.  It is not solely the Truth of Christ that we desire.  We need years of body lotions, applied to the church, the Body of Christ, in the north. As Hal Luccock always said, in gentle reference to different religious cultures and worship attendance patterns, When I preached in the south the sermon hymn was always, ‘O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing’. When I preached in the north, the Gospel Lesson was always, ‘Wherever two or three are gathered…’. 

Oddly, or divinely, were we to invest ourselves fully in the house not made with hands, our more minor differences would gradually dissolve.  We need to apply some ointment, some healing salve, some body lotions to the Body of Christ.

I remember visiting a young woman who had been raised by her grandmother. In the last months of her grandmother’s life, the young woman would visit, and I was privileged to watch their consort together.  She would stand by the bedside and comb her grandmother’s hair, and straighten her glasses, and rub her arms and hands with lotion.  It was a wordless rebaptism that meant more than all the Psalms of David and all the Parables of Jesus and all the paragraphs of the Book of Discipline.

As Gene Outka of Yale put it: ‘God loves us before any merit on our part.  Love is spontaneous and unmotivated, indifferent to value, creative, and initiates fellowship…God’s love should (prevail) when we estimate our neighbors’ value.  We should not allow our dislike of particular harms others inflict on us, or our condemnation of particular evil deeds, however understandable or justified, to take normative precedence over God’s love for every person.  Such love should rather carry final authority for us, and evoke in us a corresponding love.’

This too is the secret of lasting health which Jesus has shared.

The secret shown:  Love one another. Way.

The secret spoken: Love one another.  Truth.

The secret shared:  Love one another. Life.

Coda

Now, if memory serves, and remember your preacher today is rusty, a Mothers’ Day sermon concludes with a memory.  So, in the late spring of 1966, my mom invited me to have a talk on the back stoop of our parsonage, the only home then I had ever really known.  Now I had never been invited to back porch conversation.  In those days, gently, she ambled about the little town of Hamilton NY, a bucolic place, of ice skating, sleds, swimming lessons, autumn, the Baptist Church bells hour by hour and loud and deep, early in the morning, late at night.  After breakfast, one day that spring, gently, she sat with me on the back steps.  The words hardly landed, caught as I was in the Eastertide reverie of boyhood. Making plans for the next ball game. From where we sat, I could spot two windows through which I had flown, launched, catapulted two baseball.  Eric, whose dad was the Colgate librarian, was also involved. 2 Sons break, 2 fathers repair, the world turns.  I could see a half finished go cart, no wheels.  I could look at the neighbors' garden, which I had also tilled for fun--such is youth.  Across the street lived the feared Russian professor, next door to the feared TKE fraternity, alongside a feared empty, and quite possibly haunted, house.  I could see the evidence of unreflective, free life, naive, unaware, redolent with happiness, responsive.  All this was about to change, for good or forever.  Gently she spoke, but again I could not quite hear or believe or intuit. "We are moving in June.  Next month we will leave Hamilton.  You will have your twelfth birthday in another town".  It was clear that I did not comprehend.  "Bobby, we are going to move in June." Then a torrent of words I did not understand, and to some measure still do not, came forth.  Itinerancy, appointment, Methodism, conference, apportionment, Bishop.  I also was not seeing her clearly, because somehow my eyes were all watered, producing a difficulty to see.  Probably due to pollen in the spring air, don’t you think?  We had not needed privacy, before, in which to speak.  Somehow, I should have known that a back-porch talk meant dark news.  And so early in the morning, early, too early to gather the friends, our fight and argue gang, and attempt to puzzle through the meaning of such disaster.  But the talk was not done.  Way, Truth, Life. She, my then young, lovely, gentle, mom, in example, and in speech, and in generosity, had something more to say.  ‘You know, I know this makes you very sad.  But this will the best thing that ever happened to you.  You will make new friends.  You will see.  You will have a new house, bigger and better.  You will see.  You can come back in the summer by bus for the Colgate chemistry program.  You will see.  Your sisters will be with you.  (Here she may have gotten a little off script).  You will see.  And there is something more.  Your dad and I and your siblings need you to help us to do this.  We are going to do this together.  You are the oldest.  And you can do it.  I just know you can, and I know you will.  You are going to love it.  I guarantee it.  And, of course, she was right.

Wherever there is a way, there is Christ.  Wherever there is truth, there is Christ.  Wherever there is life, there is Christ.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 05.10.2020 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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1 Peter 2:19-25

John 10:1-10

Acts 2:42-43

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To begin, our colleague the Rev. Dr. Karen Coleman I have asked to give us a few verses from Robert Frost:

What now is inland shall be ocean isle,
Then eddies playing round a sunken reef
Like the curl at the corner of a smile;
And I could share Time’s lack of joy or grief
At such a planetary change of style.

I could give all to Time except – except
What I myself have held. But why declare
The things forbidden that while the Customs slept
I have crossed to Safety with? For I am There,
And what I would not part with I have kept.

Last Sunday, April 26, given the new and different schedule of Sunday during the pandemic, I happened to tune in to a television show, one new to me.  Before of course tuning in to WBUR for virtual worship of course.  Well, all Sunday morning TV is pretty much new to me, at least any such from the last forty some years or so.  I peddled along on my little stationary bike, sipped a coffee, and listened.  A familiar person—it took me a while to settle up on the memory of her name, not Katie Couric, not Meredith Vieira —with grace and a happy smile gave an overview of what the program would include.  Her name—ah yes, Jane Pauley.  She proposed to tell us about Julie Andrews.  

Now most people of a certain age, and in fact many of any age, can begin singing, just at the introduction of her name.  Doe, a deer… Edelweiss…Chim chiminee…My favorite things…It was all very satisfactory, along with lazy exercise and coffee, and a kind of mental freedom somewhat or entirely new to me, Come Sunday.  In fact, it made you wonder how people leave this sort of thing behind and get going out the door to church at all.  Julie Andrews, she, of unmatchable voice, a four- octave voice as the music teacher in our home recalled, she lost her voice a few years ago in a medical operation. Did you know that?  She lost her voice.  Such a voice to lose.  Something pierced the heart, in a corona swept country, to be reminded amid our own immediate loss, of such a loss.  

Now something happened.  In a whirl, a great whoosh, there appeared a combination of modes and media in the televised telling of this tale.  You had the guide speaking, the afore-remembered Ms. Pauley.  You had the grace and voice of the British star, Julie Andrews.  You had clips of scenes and songs from long ago, spliced and splashed into the moment.  You had soon enough the appearance of Ms. Andrews talented daughter, an author of children’s books.  You had footage of Ms. Andrews as a child in London during World War II.  Hm…You then had mother and daughter, across the miles from Long Island to Southern California, or as we like to call that area from our snow perch here in Boston, ‘heaven’.  They agreed that Ms. Andrews had found another sort of voice, in the work with her daughter on children’s books.

It was the mixture of media, to which we are a bit more attuned here, now on Sunday, now last Sunday and now this Sunday that mesmerized, for a moment at least.  Splicing.  The old.  The new.  The Voice.  The music. An empty home, really, a kind of empty church.  All you needed was a sermon.  And it came.  The guide, the afore remembered Ms. Pauley asked the daughter, ‘what did your mother teach you that stands out in memory?’  Now that is a daunting question to answer in front of God and the whole televisioned world.  But she did neither falter nor quail at all.  ‘My mother taught me, ‘When in doubt, stand still.  When in doubt, stop, stand still’.

Now that is in some fashion what happens for us on Sunday morning.  We come to church, or in this remarkable season, virtual worship, dressed in our doubts.  And we are asked, for just an hour, just one hour, to stand still.  To bring our doubts to the full emptiness of a silent church.  To bring our doubts to the fullness, the fullness of an empty church. 

  Ah, an empty church.  An empty church has a strange potent power to touch our hearts.  One church organist confessed that after practicing for a while, alone in the nave, he would sit, still, and “let the power of the place fill me”.  A woman told of entering an empty church after, by phone, she learned that her father had suffered a stroke: “the power of the place filled me”.  One young husband went late into a large old church when his wife went under the surgeon’s knife: “I let the power of that place help me”, he said of the empty nave.  Even a boy and girl in youth group once groped into a dark sanctuary to talk and touch and taste tender love: “the place, empty, was full”.  A Bishop, adrift in a sea of paper, prayed in a fully empty big sanctuary:  “it was powerful to be there”.  An empty church has a strange potent power to touch our hearts. Emerson:  I love the silent church, before any speaking.

Augustine in Hippo there awaited the vandals.  St Aquinas there realized what he had written—a life work—was “so much straw”.  Thomas More there prayed before death.  Luther, Calvin and Wesley there awaited Christ.  Oscar Romero there died, in the prayer of humble access.  Though he had no elements, alone each morning Terry Waite in prison for four years had communion—by imagination—in all the great British Cathedrals:  Monday in Salisbury, Tuesday in Durham, Wednesday at Coventry….

With you, I try to read the news and listen to the events of the day.  As you do, I try to overhear behind the immediate din of sounds and bites, something of the heart of people and of our people.  This spring, sometimes, I overhear a pained and painful sense of doubt about the possibilities in life.  A doubt that things can change very much.  A doubt that anything new could ever emerge.  A doubt that people can repent and turn around.  A doubt that systems, so entrenched and contentious, can ever be made orderly.  A doubt that any of the older differences among us can ever be bridged.  A doubt that any common expression of faith can be trusted.  A doubt that any common faith or common ground or common hope can ever, with authenticity, emerge and survive.  A doubt in which the radical postmodern apotheosis of difference has silenced the liberal late modern openness to shared experience, to promise and future, to common faith, common ground, common hope. A doubt that minimizing one’s own visibility or audibility, for the sake of something bigger and someone else, could ever be faithful or reasonable.  A doubt that the general public could be trusted to shoulder significant sacrifice.  A doubt that anything I do or you do would ever make a difference.  A doubt that this virus will ever let us go…A viral doubt.

When this cloud of doubt gets so thick that it eclipses both the sun and the moon, it is time to hear again the gospel.  When in doubt, stand still. 

John 10 today shows us the fullness of emptiness, presence in absence. John has always more than one opponent or contestant. He is fighting always on two fronts. So much for tradition, so much for culture. So much for depth, so much for breadth. So much for Hebrew, so much for Greek. So much for church and so much for community. So much for memory, so much for experience. John contrasts the freedom of Christ with fragile, formulaic faith. Things do not always fit into little boxes. The Hurricane winds of change, the reaches of pandemic, say, rearrange every manner of dwelling.

 The Gospel of John, more than any other ancient Christian writing, and in odd contrast to its prevalent misunderstanding abroad today, knew the necessity of nimble engagement of current experience, and the saving capacity to change, in the face of new circumstances.   The community of this Gospel could do so because they had experienced the Shepherd, present, ‘here’, here and now.  In distress, we hold onto divine presence, we hold onto the Shepherd– hic et nunc. Speaking, and hearing.  They found that in speaking of the Shepherd: ‘he is here’.  ‘I am…’  That is all, still, we have, the voice.  Utterance.  ‘I am…’  The ‘here’ is in the hearing.  Can you hear that?  It begs to be heard, here.  I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.

Others over time have heard the same.  At this time of year, I often think of Churchill and Wesley.

These two Englishmen have something for us, in any spring time, and perhaps most especially this corona spring time.  Think of England in May 1940.  Think of London in May 1738.

At the right moment, in May of 1940, Winston Churchill faced down the more polished, better heeled, more popular and more experienced old Britons of his newly formed war cabinet, and steadily led his country away from their desire to compromise with Adolf Hitler.  With Belgium defeated, Churchill clung to a love of freedom.  With France cut in two, Churchill clung to a love of freedom.  With 400,000 men stranded at Dunkirk and escape virtually impossible, Churchill clung to a love of freedom.  With the whole German air force poised to incinerate England’s green and pleasant land, Churchill clung to a love of freedom.  With Lord Halifax ready to seek terms, and Lord Chamberlain ready to let him, Churchill clung to a love of freedom.   Re-read this summer John Lukacs’ Five Days in London, May 1940.   He concludes: “Churchill and Britain could not have won the Second World War.  In the end, America and Russian did.  But in May 1940 Churchill (alone) was the one who did not lose it.”  Easter faith is about love of freedom. In his presence we find the courage for our own assent.

In the same London, at midlife, one enchanting night in May of 1738, John Wesley heard something said in church that warmed his heart for good.   He had been on Aldersgate street that Sunday evening, going to chapel service more from duty than from passion, when he heard a preacher read Romans 8 and also Martin Luther’s commentary on that passage.  There is something so fragrant and so full about damp London in the springtime.  As he left church, Wesley felt something new, a freeing love in the heart, which is the creation and work of the Holy Spirit, which blows where it wills and you hear the sound of it.   Easter faith is about freeing love.  In his presence we find the courage for our own assent.

There are for sure a lot of things wrong.  But there are also, and more surely still, a lot of things right.  Hear the good news.  You are witnesses of the goodness of God, witnesses who come from a long line of people who joyfully bless, and routinely give great thanks.  “Faith is an event expressing the conviction that the things not yet seen are more real than those that can be seen” (L Keck).  As you, as I, as we together walk toward our last adventure, our mortality, our own look over Jordan, it is this freeing love, which carries us.

John 10 is an altar call for you.  Come Sunday, I propose that you come to an imagined communion, as did Terry Waite, ready to accept the gift of faith, to give assent in the hour of the divine presence, of the Sheperd:  I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.

So come, to experience freeing love.  So come, to receive a love of freedom.  So come, to give thanks for the freedom to love.   Such is the gift of the Gospel, upon this Lord’s day.  So come, on a feast day of the Lord’s ready and willing, joyful and happy to assent to a new life of faith, hope and love.

Wherever two or three are gathered, there I am with you.

There is a fullness to an empty church, right here and just now.  I don’t see you.  I don’t hear you.  I don’t touch or taste or sense you present.  But I know you are out there, listening and praying and worshipping.  But I can’t see you.  That is something like faith, faith in God, in love, in meaning.  I don’t see it or hear it or measure it our touch it or scent it.  But I know it’s there.  So, alongside you, touched by the fullness of an empty church, I may just be able to go forward, as of old the apostles did too.

To conclude, our colleague the Rev. Dr. Karen Coleman I have asked to give us our lectionary verses from Acts 2:

42 They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.

43 Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. 44 All who believed were together and had all things in common; 45 they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. 46 Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, 47 praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 05.3.2020 at 11:00 am