Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

Malachi 3:1-4

Hebrews 2:14-18

Luke 2:22-40

Prelude: Pauline 13

February 2, 2020. Candlemas. Ground Hog Day. A religious feast. A secular holiday. The consolation of Israel. The redemption of Jerusalem. For once, we turn our meditation, at communion, both outward and inward, both toward the shadow’s length on to spring, and to the liturgy’s turn from Christmas, and the blessing of the candles of 2020. Sometimes it is not the great mysteries, but the small ones—a candle, a shadow—that touch us and heal us. The little things. Like two turtle doves, a candle on Candlemas, a shadow on Ground Hog Day. Light a candle. Watch the shadow.

One: Candlemas

‘525,600 minutes’…Midway into the old musical, RENT, the story a young woman appears at the door of her neighbor. Both are poor, lost, penniless and lonely. Like all of us, we long to connect with others, with our own truest selves, and with God. She knocks on the door, looking for a match with which to light her candle, for just a little warmth, just a little light. Unamuno on warmth: not the night that kills but the frost. And she sings, “Will somebody light my candle?” “Will somebody light my candle?” There is struggle in the air, and romance too. And what is wrong with that? Here is a young man wondering about profession, marriage, meaning. “Will somebody light my candle?” Here is young mother, raising children alone. “Will somebody light my candle?” Here is a man, or woman, alone now for the first time, this winter. “Will somebody light my candle?” Here is a grandfather listening for news of his grandson in military service, far away. “Will somebody light my candle?” Here is a preacher wondering how on earth to preach the gospel with Australia burning, China coughing, Washington exploding, Methodism imploding, “Will somebody light my candle?” Here you are, on the brink of faith, just about ready to accept your own acceptance, to connect with your own connectedness, to survive your own survival, to live in the peace of God. “Will Somebody light your candle?” Our friend Dr. Reid Cooper of Brown said last Sunday, ‘faith is the positive response to the question, ‘does life have meaning?’’ True enough, at least to start.

Watch our Sacristan, Come Sunday, just before the service, while some have gathered for quiet intercessory prayer, quietly lighting our candles, here on the altar.

The Scripture for Candlemas illumines us:

*The Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple

*Because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested

*Lift up your heads, O gates! And be lifted up, O ancient doors! That the King of Glory may come in

*Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon; this man was righteous and devout, looking forward to the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit rested on him; to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem. Jesus is our childhood’s pattern. Day by day like us he grew.

Simeon and Anna are older people, who have some insight, even prophetic insight, into what is to come. Luke has apparently confused the rites of presentation and purification. Consolation; the fulfillment of Jewish messianic hopes. The consolation is the redemption of Israel, different phrases meaning the same thing. A light for revelation to the unreligious, and for glory to the religious. The old prophet sees, as promised, and Messiah has come “for all peoples”.

The feast of the Presentation, or Candlemas, is the conclusion of Christmas, and affords the blessing of candles, and the blessing of throats. One of the oldest feasts of the church, dating to the early fourth century, it conjured sermons by Methodius of Patara (died 312), Cyril of Jerusalem (died 360), Gregory the Theologian (died 389), Amphilochius of Iconium (died 394), Gregory of Nyssa (died 400), and John Chrysostom (died 407). So the church’s liturgy joins with Scripture in teaching and testimony:

*Dear people of God, forty days ago we celebrated the joyful feast of the incarnation of Jesus. Today we recall the day on which he was presented in the temple, fulfilling the law of Moses. Led by the Spirit, Simeon and Anna came to the temple, recognized the child as the Christ, and proclaimed him with joy. United by the same Spirit, we now enter the house of God, where we shall recognize Christ in the breaking of bread.

*O eternal God, who have created all things; on this day you fulfilled the petitions of the just Simeon: we humbly ask you to bless and sanctify these candles for our use. Graciously hear our prayers and be merciful to us, whom you have redeemed by your Son, who is the light of the world, and who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God for ever and ever. Amen.

*O God most powerful and most kind…for Whose sake the glorious Martyr and Bishop, St. Blaise, joyfully gained the palm of martyrdom…Thou Who didst give to him, amongst other gifts, the prerogative of curing by Thy power every ailment of men’s throats…

At our prayer station following communion, we can at least recognize the need for health particularly at this time around the globe.

Come Candlemas, light a candle. It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness. This is not Confucius, Shakespeare, Proverbs or Ben Franklin. It is a line from a sermon, 1907.

“The earliest appearance located by QI occurred in a 1907 collection titled “The Supreme Conquest and Other Sermons Preached in America” by William L. Watkinson. A sermon titled “The Invincible Strategy” downplayed the value of verbal attacks on undesirable behaviors and championed the importance of performing good works. Emphasis added to excerpts by QI: ‘But denunciatory rhetoric is so much easier and cheaper than good works, and proves a popular temptation. Yet is it far better to light the candle than to curse the darkness.’” (Internet: QI)

Light a candle.

Aeschylus: In our sleep pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our despair and against our will, comes wisdom, through the awful grace of God.

Two: Ground Hog Day

I have this response to those of you who will not abate the ongoing contention related to my claim that Ground Hog Day is the best of all holidays:

In the ministry you offer to God and neighbor all weekends, most evenings and most holidays, and then work 9-5, Monday to Friday. All this takes a chunk out of the year. Holidays, in particular, carry, shall we say, some stress. Christmas, for an example. There are expectations. Special services. People. Doings.

Behold the blessing of February 2! An utterly ordinary day, and a holiday to boot! No expectations. No special services. No people. No Doings. Just the blessing of a single, average, wintry, bereft of expectation day. Ground Hog Day. It doesn’t get better than Ground Hog Day. A quiet, ordinary, no frills day.

But…What is ordinary about any day, anyway?

Every one of them is a gem.

Monday’s child is fair of face

Tuesday’s child is full of grace

Wednesday’s child is full of woe

Thursday’s child has far to go

Friday’s child is loving and giving

Saturday’s child works hard for a living

But the child that is born on the Sabbath Day

Is happy, witty, bright and gay!

Every day is a chance to do a good turn. Do one daily. BE: Trustworthy Loyal Helpful Friendly Courteous Kind Obedient Cheerful Thrifty Brave Clean Reverent.

We have reminders, don’t we, of ordinary daily wisdom, quotidian quips

Some are cultural:

A stitch in time saves nine…An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure…Look before you leap…eternity in a grain of sand, heaven in a wild flower

Some are familial:

(To complaining): You would complain if you were to be hung with a new rope…(To time waste): Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time. And it annoys the pig…(Too constant questions):Are you a journalist or are you writing a book?…(To inquisitive children): Where were you before you were born? Down in Canada boiling soap.

Some are national:

Give me your tired, your poor Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free The wretched refuse of your teeming shore Send these, the tempest tossed, to me I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

In truth, there are no ordinary days, no insignificant holidays.

Emily Webb stands as our fiercest sentinel to the landscape of this, truth, the Gospel on Ground Hog Day, out of the imagination of Thornton Wilder, brother to the great New Testament scholar, Amos Wilder, both New Englanders.

You will remember that she and George were graduated from High School in Grover’s Corners. On the basis of a frank talking to over a soda, in which Emily criticizes George for being less than fully humble, George decides not to leave home, not to go to college, but to start working an uncle’s farm right away, and to marry Emily, the girl next door. You remember their wedding. “A man looks pretty small at a wedding, all those good women standing shoulder to shoulder, making sure the knot is tied in a mighty public way.” You remember that Emily, after just a few years of profoundly happy marriage and life, tragically dies in childbirth. You remember that George finds no way to manage the extreme grief of his loss. Simple Yankee English. Simple reckoning about love, life, death and meaning.

Maybe you also remember, in the playwright’s imagination, Emily from the communion of saints looking out on her young husband and wanting to go back. Others warn her away from the plan: “All I can say Emily, is, don’t…it isn’t wise…(If you must do it) Choose an unimportant day. Choose the least important day of your life. It will be important enough.”

She chooses February 11, 1899, her 12^th birthday. She arrives at dawn. She sees Main Street, the drugstore, the livery stable, and breathes the brightness of a crisp winter morning. Simple. She looks into her own house. Her mother is making breakfast, her father returning from a speech given at Hamilton College. Neighbors pass in the snow. Simple. She sees how young and pretty her mother looks—can’t quite believe it. It is 10 below zero. There is fussing to find a blue hair ribbon: “it’s on the dresser—if it were a snake it would bite you”. Simple. Papa enters to give a hug and a kiss and a birthday gift. And others from mother and the boy next door. Simple. “Just for a moment now we’re all together. Mama, just for a moment now we’re all together. Just for a moment we’re happy. Let’s look at one another.”

Simple. This is the gospel of Ground Hog Day, the best holiday of the year, the holiday of the extraordinary ordinary, of the uncommonly common, of the sunlit winter, of the eternal now. Simple. Grover’s Corners. “Papa. Mama. Clocks ticking. Sunflowers. Food. Coffee. New ironed dresses. Hot baths. Sleeping. Waking up. Earth, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”

Watch the shadow.

In truth, there are no ordinary days, no insignificant holidays.

Said BU Philosopher Erazim Kohak: “A life wholly absorbed in need and its satisfaction, be it on the level of conspicuous consumption or of marginal survival, falls short of realizing the innermost human possibility of cherishing beauty, knowing truth, doing the good, worshiping the holy”.

Postlude: Beatitudes

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 02.2.2020 at 11:00 am

Sunday
January 26

Vocation

By Marsh Chapel

Isaiah 9:1-4

Matthew 4:12-23

Today we see Jesus walking the shore of his beloved Sea of Galilee. He sets out at dawn, as the fishermen begin, casting and mending. This stylized memory from the mind of Matthew kindles our own memory and hope, too.

That first light of the day, daybreak, carries a power unlike any other hour’s hue. The excitement of beginning. The promise of another start. The crisp, cold opening of the year in January. Like the skier, mits and poles at the ready, we adjust our goggles, and we lean, and…

Here is Jesus, midway from Christmas to Easter, from manger to cross, from nativity to passion. Along the shoreline he strides, one foot in sea and one on shore.

He meets two brothers at first light, and they meet him, God’s First Light, the light that shines in the darkness. Notice how Simon, called Peter, and Andrew, his brother, are sketched. There is little to nothing of history here, but what there is says so much! There is no parental shadow lying on their fishing nets. One hears no maternal imperative, no paternal dictate. These boys are on their own. They have left home already, maybe leaving the city to the south to find a meager middle-class existence farther north, with their own means of production. They are small business men, boat owners, fishermen. Neither the amhaaretz nor the gentry, they. Not poor, not rich. Working folks. Young, young men. Simon already has a nick-name. A sign of joviality, of conviviality, of gregarious playful fun. Peter, the Rock. Is this for his steady faithfulness or his failure to float? On this rock…Sinks like a Rock…You sense that these brothers play in the surf a little, kick up the sand a little, flirt with the Palestinianas, take time to take life as it comes. Brown are their forearms, and burnished their brows. They love the lake and life, and have made already their entrance into adult life. For they have left home. One envies their youth and freedom. They have taken to the little inland sea, and with joy they meet each dawn, like this one, at first light, as they see Light.

You can feel the sand under their feet as they take a moment to play and laugh. You can feel the chill of the water as they swim, while breakfast cooks over the fire. You can feel their feeling of vitality and joy as they greet another day at first light.

I wonder whether we allow ourselves to drift a little too far from that sense of vocation, that first light feeling. Those nearly pure dawn moments of almost rapturous illumination. Those moments of connection.

The day your BU acceptance letter came.

The afternoon of BU Commencement, four fast years later, 25,000 in attendance.

The evening you came out to your parents.

Your first child, tiny, red, crinkled, fists waving, crying and then asleep, literally in your hand.

Your daughter, or son, taking the vows of confirmed faith, in the church’s chancel. Yes, there was some part child and another part adult in what was said. But they were there, in tie and dress. They were there, in public and in church. They murmured, and they murmured piously. And how did that feel Dad?

Your day of matrimony. Down the aisle they come, or you come, father and daughter. Do you? Do you? I do. They do. And what was once a simpler world, now has further complexity and creative power. A new creation.

Your retirement party.

There must have been some moment, sometime, when you felt an intimacy with the universe, a closeness, a sense of purpose. That too is a kind of daybreak, dawn, first light. That is an inkling of vocation.

A simple trust, like theirs who heard beside the Syrian sea.

Our denomination once had a thriving ministry in China. When we forced out of China in the 1940’s, something vital left our church. But you can still feel the first light of mission in the halls and rooms at Scarritt in Nashville. Oriental ornaments, paintings, sculpture, gifts, symbols of connection and love. We grew up with the family of Tracy Jones, who himself had been raised as missionary child in China. As had Huston Smith. Our first parsonage, in Ithaca, had once housed Pearl Buck while she and her husband were back on furlough, from China. Have we begun with the Spirit to end with the flesh? Have we forgotten the love we had at first? Have we stayed close enough to that dawn light, and those first light experiences, to stay fresh? Have we an inkling of vocation?

Our malaise, our ennui, should we have such, our “acedia”—spiritual sloth or indifference, literally, our “not-caring”—so often is due to our turning away from the dawn, daybreak, that elemental experience of love that energizes everything else.

Peter and Andrew, of course, are casting, casting nets. They have no furrowed brows, no endless worries, no pessimism, no angst. They probably have left unattended some holes in their nets, these two happy brothers. They are willing to accept that their casting will be imperfect, as all evangelism is imperfect. But that imperfection will not keep them from enjoying the labor of casting. To miss the dawn, the first light, is to miss the fun of faith!

Invite that neighbor, the one across the street whose porch light is always on, to come along to worship with you. Do you enjoy, benefit from, appreciate worship here, come Sunday? Then, of course, you will want to share that enjoyment, benefit and appreciation, by inviting someone to come too. Here at dawn…those first stirrings, first longings, first intimations of something new and good….

Meanwhile, back on the beach, Jesus heads south, cove by cove, with Andrew and Peter frolicking in tow. They had already left home. They are ready to take a flier on some new trek, not fully sure how it will work out. It is a miracle that they are remembered, perhaps with a little hagiography, as having responded “immediately”. Still, every little scrap of memory of these two brothers tends in the same direction—full of vim, vigor, vitality and pepperino. Yes, they will follow!

But down the shoreline a little, there rests another boat. A different story, a different set of brothers altogether. James and John. Known as the sons of Zebedee. Simon has already earned his own name and nick-name. But these two are known by their father’s name. They haven’t left home. They have not yet acquired that second identity. When you won’t leave, won’t move, you won’t find, you won’t grow: you’ll miss vocation. Here they are, as usual at dawn, stuck in the back of the boat. All these years they have watched the Peter and Andrew show. All these years they have envied the fun and frolic down the beach. The late night parties. The bonfires. The singing. The swimming. And here they sit strapped to the old boat of old Zebedee. They are covered with the ancient equivalents of chap stick and Coppertone. And they are trapped. Under the glaring gaze of Zebedee, whose thunderous voice has so filled their home that their own voices have not even emerged. Every day, in the back of the boat. And what are they doing? Why you could have guessed it, even if the text had not made it plain. Are they casting? No. Are they fishing? No. Are they sailing? No. They are mending. Mending. Knit one, pearl two… Their dad has got them into that conservation, protection, preservation mode. Mending. At dawn! Of course nets need mending, but the nets and the mending are meant in a greater service! The fun is in the fishing! The joy is in the casting. The happiness is in the evangelism. And there they sit, sober Calvinist souls, mending. Deedle deedle dumpling, my son John…

Today we are mid-way between Christmas and Easter. This passage has a little passion (the Baptist) and a little nativity (Nazareth). The two stories of Jesus, of his birth and of his death, are meant to complement and interpret each other. As our colleague Milton Jordan put it this week: Matthew attempts to soften this story of Jesus' flight from the threat of arrest. He and other disciples of the Baptizer flee from Herod Antipas' region to a border town where escape to another country is not as difficult. We have, too often overlooked - if not intentionally obscured - the harsh political realities of Jesus' flight to the border.

Here is a pronouncement of a broad peace, on earth. On earth. With Gandhi along the Ganges. Beside Tutu on the southern cape. Along the path of the Dalai Lama in farthest Tibet. In Tegucigalpa with our missionary friends Mark and Lynn Baker. This is no predestinarian quietism, which has taken over parts of non-Catholic American Christianity, from its seedbeds in the Orthodox Presbyterian and Anabaptist communions: cold, careful, efficient, first mile, changeless, fearsome, depressed grace. No, this is Christmas: warm, open, effective, second mile, free, growing, angry, and hopeful! Augustine: Hope has two beautiful daughters: anger and courage.

The early church told two stories about Jesus. The first about his death. The second about his life. The first, about the cross, is the oldest and most fundamental. The second, about the manger, is the key to the meaning of the first, the eyeglasses which open full sight, the code to decipher the first. Without Christmas you can’t see Easter right. Jesus died on a cross for our sin according to the Scripture. That is the first story. But who was Jesus? What life did his death complete? How does his word heal our hurt? And how does all this accord with Scripture? One leads to the other.

This second, second level story begins at Christmas, and continues in Epiphany, and is told among us to interpret the first. Christmas\Epiphany is meant to make sure that the divine love is not left only to the cross, or only to heaven. Epiphany is meant to open out a whole range of Jesus, as brother, teacher, healer, young man, all. Christmas is meant to provide the mid-course correction that might be needed if all we had was Holy Week. And the Christmas\Epiphany images are the worker bees in this theological hive. Easter may announce the power of peace, but Christmas names the place of peace. Jesus died the way he did because he lived the way he did. Jesus lived the way he did, and so died the way he did. That is, it is not only the Passion of Christ, but the Peace of Christ, too, which Christians like you affirm. What lovely news for us at the start of a new decade. The passion too of Christ. Theologically, globally, politically, militarily, ecclesiastically —we have seen passion this year. Now comes dawn, the light, Epiphany, Christmas\Epiphany again to announce that there is more to Jesus than the passion. There is the matter of peace as well.

The real miracles of this account lie in the second invitation to the second set of brothers. It is a miracle that Jesus stopped and invited them, so somber are they. I wonder if he took in the timbre of Zebedee’s voice, and saw them quaking in the back of the boat. Perhaps his heart went out to James and John. So, he stops, and he asks.

That is the great thing about an invitation. All you can do is ask. Do ask. Ye have not because ye ask not. And for the first time in their lives, James and John are invited to live. Too many people live half asleep. Too often we don’t live life, life lives us. Like these two knitting in the back of the boat. Half asleep. Then dawn comes, and day breaks, and that first light shines! And a voice like no other, so equanimous and so serene, casts its spell upon them. Maybe upon you, this morning. Watch. It is a first light moment. First one, then the other, stands and moves. Under the shadow of that paternal presence, under the sound of that maternal imperative of home. They rise. And they move toward First Light. They are about to grow up. AND THEY LEAVE HOME! Wonderful! And what do they leave behind? You would have known even if the Scripture had not laid it right out. They leave behind the boat…and their father. We best honor the adults in our lives when we become adults ourselves. (repeat)

Will this world grow up? Will we find a way to live together, all seven point five billion of us, and to drink from the same cup? This text, strangely like John, claims for Jesus that Jesus is light. Not color, now. Light. Color is great, and good. But we all want finally to be able to drink from the same water fountain, we want our children in one school, we want to sit at one table, we want to drink from one goblet. It is light that we will need into the 21^st century. We finally all drink from the same cup.

I am told of a man who stopped in his new neighborhood to buy lemonade from a freckle faced 7 year old girl and a mahogany skinned 6 year old boy. He paid his dime and drank his beverage and stayed to talk. After a while the girl asked if there was anything else he wanted. No, he said, why?

Well sir, we are running a business here, and we have had a busy morning, and we hope for a busy afternoon, but that cup you are holding is the only one we have, so if you don’t mind, we’d like it back.

We all finally drink from the same cup. We forget it at our worldly peril. If we walk in the light as He is in the light we have fellowship with one another. We have more in common, as climate change, nuclear danger, governmental malfunction, denominational turmoil, and personal angst remind us, all around the globe, than we do in difference. Give us light. Give us light. Dear God, give us light.

Have you faith? You are going to need some this coming year, 2020.

At first light, at dawn, we may with happiness remember this. The protagonist of M Robinson’s Gilead, an old pastor in the Iowa town of this name, spends Sunday mornings, at dawn, praying alone in his church. He loves the morning hour. He waits with baited breath for the church to begin to fill up, to fill in. He basks in the first light of day.

He knows, you do too, that we are going to need some faith this year. Others will, too. How will they find faith in Christ without a church family to love them, without a church home to nurture them: without you taking a moment to say, ‘I will be at Marsh Chapel on Sunday at 11am—why not meet me there?’

That is the dawn, Peter and Andrew, real joy of faith: sharing it. Would you like to have some fun this week? Look around for dawn breaking, and kick up some sand.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 01.26.2020 at 11:00 am

Sunday
January 19

A Natural Grace

By Marsh Chapel

Isaiah 49:1–7

1 Corinthians 1:1–9

John 1:29–42

‘I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove’

Scripture

O Lord, thou hast searched me and known me!
²Thou knowest when I sit down and when I rise up;
    thou discernest my thoughts from afar.
³Thou searchest out my path and my lying down,
    and art acquainted with all my ways.
⁴Even before a word is on my tongue,
    lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether.
⁵Thou dost beset me behind and before,
    and layest thy hand upon me.
⁶Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
    it is high, I cannot attain it.

⁷Whither shall I go from thy Spirit?
    Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
⁸If I ascend to heaven, thou art there!
    If I make my bed in Sheol, thou art there!
⁹If I take the wings of the morning
    and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
¹⁰even there thy hand shall lead me,
    and thy right hand shall hold me.
¹¹If I say, “Let only darkness cover me,
    and the light about me be night,”
¹²even the darkness is not dark to thee,
    the night is bright as the day;
    for darkness is as light with thee.

Spirit in Scripture, Tradition, Reason and Experience.

In this, the 139^th Psalm, a very favorite of Dean Howard Thurman’s, you hear two, or perhaps the two, central features of his teaching on Spirit, nature and grace. And they come together so smoothly, so seamlessly, that you might just speak of them together, as a natural grace. Today as we welcome our beloved and esteemed guests, today as we recognize and honor Martin Luther King Jr., today as we step even further to recognize the shaping mentorship and influence on King of Thurman, and today as we recognize and celebrate the inaugural of Boston University’s fine new Howard Thurman Center, we might just do so with…Spirit.

Scripture dazzles us, if we are alive to it. Notice here that Jesus needs no introduction to Peter: he knows his name already, without being told, like he knows yours. Notice here the closeness of the Gospel writer to the Baptists—not American or Southern or Old Regular Baptists--but those who were disciples of John the Baptist, but came over to follow Jesus. Was the Gospel writer a Baptist before he became a Christian? Notice what does not happen. In every other Gospel, Jesus is baptized by John, but not here. Notice the dog that does not bark. No. Jesus steps away, dry as a bone. Spirit ever trumps sacrament, and gospel ever trumps church in John. Jesus is not baptized in John (the Gospel) by John (the Baptist), unlike in the other three gospels. The Baptist knows and honors Him—bears witness to him (martyr in Greek) but Jesus does not stoop, deign, or allow himself to be baptized. Here is inheritance, but inheritance with innovation at its heart. Here is religion, but religion with grace, a natural grace, at its heart.

Spirit in Scripture.

Tradition

So too, Spirit in Tradition.

And we have our traditions here, one of which is the observance of this special Sunday, in this particular space, with its particular Marsh history, across six deanships. With Franklin Littell, the first Marsh dean, 1951, and one of the founders of Holocaust studies in the USA, we share an uncompromising willingness to challenge national government and leadership, for the sake of the gospel. With Howard Thurman, 1953, our most famous dean, we share a confidence in universal truth, a search for common ground, and a delight in natural grace. With Robert Hamill, 1965, we share a fierce commitment to human, to civil rights. With Robert Thornburg, 1978, we share a nuanced appreciation for the intricacies and wanderings of Methodist church bureaucracy. With Robert Neville, and his emphasis on Go the Creator. With Robert Hill, the current dean, we share a regard for biblical theology, Paul Tillich, common hope, and hymn singing in four-part harmony. All together, our tradition is one of a common hope. We have seen hope come alive, moving from chapel to university to community: Community Service Program, LGBTQ L Douglass, ISGC, Howard Thurman Center, Global Ministry, and others.

A tradition in hope buoyed by many voices.

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

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

Today especially the voice of Howard Thurman, hands raised in silence, later wrote: “there is always lurking close at had the trailing beauty of forgotten joy or unremembered peace.”

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

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

Spirit in Tradition.

Reason

So too, Spirit in Reason.

Reason can have the deepest range in Spirit. Think of Robert Francis Kennedy, late a night, in the rain, at the Indianapolis airport, April 4 1968, speaking from memory and from the heart. Looking back this week, what is striking is his reliance on spirited reason. Reason in the rain.

Robert Francis Kennedy, Indianapolis, April 4 1968:

I have bad news for you…

Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice…

In this difficult day…we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love…

For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times…

My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a

But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings who abide in our land…

Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world…

Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people…

And so also Thurman. Read or re-read this winter The Search for Common Ground, With Head and Heart, and Jesus and the Disinherited.It is the spirited reason, the life of the spiritual mind of Howard Thurman that still invigorates us:

Crown: “This is how Jesus demonstrated reverence for personality…He placed a crown over her head which for the rest of her life she would keep trying to grow tall enough to wear.” (Disinherited 106).

Harmony: As Thurman wrote in the Search for Common Ground, “The Hopi Indian myth carries still, in its thematic emphasis on “the memory of a lost harmony””. (CG, 40)

Unity: There is a unity of living structures…that includes rocks, plants, animals, and humans. Antibodies and antigens. And the arrangement of a cell in a human child (CG, 40).

Wisdom: Thurman cites Plato: ‘Until philosophers are kings…and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside…cities will never have rest from their evils’. (CG, 53)

Mind: ‘Jesus rejected hatred. It was not because he lacked the vitality or the strength. It was not because he lacked the incentive. Jesus rejected hatred because he saw that hatred meant death to the mind, death to the spirit, death to communion with his Father. He affirmed life, and hatred was the great denial’ (JATD, 88)

Child: ‘There is something more to be said about the inner equipment growing out of the great affirmation of Jesus that a man is a child of God. (JATD, 53).

Spirit in Reason.

Experience

Spirit in Experience, and we mean here spiritual experience. Whence ideas and imagination?

We are driving along a blue highway, Route 20. Conversation pauses. The rolling hillsides, now sprouting corn, alfalfa, beans, wheat, and hay, are like their own tidal waves, their own sea scape, in green not blue.

An idea arrives, related to ‘conversation’. Two books by our MIT neighbor Sherry Turkle, Alone Together and Reclaiming Conversation, have guided some of my thought about this. We hope to meet her in person sometime. Her voice is a crucial one in this conversation about conversation, and she is only the span of the river away. A thought: why not invite her, Dr. Turkle, to come to Marsh Chapel and engage in a dialogue sermon? The conversational form of the sermon would itself accent our emphasis upon conversation, as would her voice, presence, and knowledge. The work on conversation could include a pulpit conversation with perhaps the current intellectual leader in thought about conversation. An idea, maybe a good idea, has arrived, as the green sea fields of young corn roll by. But no body has done anything about it. Yet.

Where did that idea come from? Non liquet: it is not clear. Whence such an idea? How does a new prospect—here, the possibility of a pulpit dialogue—come to life? The leisure to drive and be bathed in silence, along with the occasional personal conversation, certainly allows space and time for such a thought to land in the mind. The further distance from daily, office or campus routine and rhythm, so important to the work of sermon development and any other composition, adds a further support. Perhaps the familiarity of the route, the drive itself—a road the car could meander on its own, so regular are the trips—gave a lulling quietude that became the womb of gestation for thought. ‘My best sermon ideas come while I am shaving’ once said James Forbes. Yet the moment of insight, of new thought, the arrival of an idea comes on its own with our without a well-manicured airport, runway or landing strip. Whence an idea? What is going on when we think? Or when we think we are thinking? Or when we think about our thinking? Whence an idea?

Or whence imagination? How, of a recent evening, did a current political campaign unearth the memory of 1 Samuel 16: 1-13 (here slightly updated), in the mind of a Boston preacher?

The Lord said to them: You need another leader, and I have provided one for you. Go to Bethlehem (or was it Iowa?) and see.

So, they went together as a party. And along the way they held many and great debates. And they saw Eliab, also named Joe, but the Lord had not chosen him. And then they saw Abinadab, a good Jewish fellow also known as Bernie, but they heard the Lord had not chosen him. Then they saw Shammah, also known as Elizabeth, but their guide said the Lord had not chosen her either. And then there seven others: Klobachar, Steyer, Buttegieg, Booker, Harris, O’Rourke, and Bloomberg. But these were not what they needed either. I look not on appearance but on the heart, said the Lord. And that was the end of the list. There were no more candidates. And they sat down by the olive tree, or was it a New Hampshire maple tree, or was it a Georgia peach tree, and they sighed, and they murmured, and they groaned, and they sorrowed, and they gave in to melancholy.

But then someone said: Are they all here? Well, said someone else, I think that’s all of them. Then one said, is that right? Isn’t there anybody else. And the reply came, well, I mean, there is one other, but he is really young compared to all these, and he has been busy taking care of his family and flock. He is a good shepherd, a good governor, in that way.

And the party said, after yet another debate, Send and fetch him, for we will not sit down until he comes here, or we at least see him on TV. And so, they went and fetched him. Now he was ruddy. And he had beautiful eyes, and was handsome. And the Lord said: Arise, pick him, for this is he. His name is David, also known as Deval. So, they thanked Joe, Bernie, Elizabeth, Klobachar, Steyer, Buttegieg, Booker, Harris, O’Rourke and Bloomberg, and, in a big party meeting, they picked Deval. And the spirit of the Lord came mightily upon David, also known as Deval, from that day forward.

Whence such whimsical imagination? Who knows. We know this, though, as my son the basketball coach repeats and repeats: It is not how you start that counts. It is how you finish. Life is full of surprises.

That is spirit in experience.

Spirit in Scripture, Tradition, Reason, and Experience. All of them will take you closer to Howard Thurman, to Jesus, and to your own most self.

Close To You

You can get close to Howard Thurman through

Prayer

Song

Hymns

Spirituals

Psalms

Meditation

Candles

Study

Scripture

Gathering, Meaning, Belonging

Empowerment

Community

Preaching

Ritual

Praise

Worship

Religion

My friends, the doors of the church are open! Thurman wrote: “The ocean and the night surrounded my little life with a reassurance that could not be affronted by any human behavior. The ocean at night gave me a sense of timelessness, of existing beyond the ebb and flow of circumstance. Death would be a small thing I felt in the sweep of that natural embrace.”

‘I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove’

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

posted in Services Honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 01.19.2020 at 11:00 am

Sunday
December 29

What Did You Learn in 2019?

By Marsh Chapel

Isaiah 63: 7-9

Hebrews 2:10-18

Matthew 2:13-15, 19-23

What did you learn in 2019? It is a question fit for our Gospel read this year, that of Matthew. Matthew is a teacher. His Gospel is meant to teach, to edify. The promise of God is fulfilled, he teaches, in Christ. He asks us to learn and teach the same. He guides us then to grow and learn, day by day, in Christ.

Now we come to the turn of the year. Our calendar is still rooted in Christmas, in the birth of Christ. So, today’s date, December 29, 2019. 2019 years since…the birth of Christ. Some day that way of keeping the global calendar could change, and of course there are other calendars abroad even now. But for now, the birth of Christ marks still the turn of the ages.

Our secular calendar carries this week a different turn, from the old year to the new. It is often a time for reflection and rumination on what has been, in light of what may be. In homiletical meditation, briefly, this morning, perhaps we could reflect and ruminate together on just what we have learned in 2019.

In a way, coming together in worship, Sunday by Sunday, is regularly a moment for such reflection and rumination. As the year ends, perhaps we owe ourselves a fuller and finer rumination in ordered worship.

Those who grace our presence in worship, each week, and those who listen in prayer from afar each week, make up a generous and disciplined community. In worship you began this year, last Epiphany, including a recognition of Martin Luther King Jr., one Sunday, and a Bach Cantata another (these Cantata Sundays, twice a term, have become distinctive, deepening moments for us, through the year). In worship you entered the season of Lent, listening for the Gospel in reflection on the voice of Saint John of the Cross (our thirteenth Lenten theological conversation partner, 10 Calvinists and 3 Catholics, with the next 7 also to come from the Roman tradition, including this spring St. Theresa of Avila). In worship you fully devoted yourselves to the special services of Palm Sunday and Holy Week, including 4 Easter services. In worship you recognized the spring ceremonial University moments, as you did again in the fall. In worship you received the thirteenth annual National Summer Preacher Series, on the theme of ‘Faith in Community’, as you will again this summer 2020 on the theme ‘Matthew and Methodism’. In worship, come autumn, you listened for the Gospel in Luke, on the trail health. In worship, this very month, you offered to God and neighbor 10 different services of worship, December 1 to December 29, as you balanced your earlier Lenten affirmation of the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection with a now equally full communal immersion in the story of Jesus’ birth and life. Both accounts, the death story and the life story, and their full balance together, are crucial to our walk of faith, each one needing the other, and we needing their intertwined acclamation. In worship, you came for the Eucharist on the first Sunday of each month, this rare and beautiful congregation whose body increases in girth on communion Sundays. In worship by various other special moments, you offered your prayers, presence, gifts and service to God and neighbor. Particularly we thank those who helped lead on Tuesday this week for two Christmas Eve services, while the University itself was closed, and our staff and chaplains on well-deserved holiday. And Sunday by Sunday, and season by season, in quiet, song, word, and sacrament, you have had a moment to reflect on what you have learned, in the week before, as we do this morning on the year as a whole. So, what have you learned, in faith, this year?

We do learn from our experience. Earlier this month we remembered here William Sloane Coffin, who taught us in and from experience. His and other University Pulpit voices from the just preceding generation—Coffin at Yale, Peter Gomes at Harvard, Howard Thurman here at Marsh, James Leslie at Ohio Wesleyan, Robert Smith at Colgate, John McComb at Syracuse, and several others, ought to be remembered, even as the number or University pulpits has radically dwindled, for they taught us in and from experience. Later this next month, on Martin Luther King Sunday, we will revisit the influence of Howard Thurman. One other University pulpit voice has come strongly to mind, for whatever reason, this season. His name was Ernest Gordon, Dean Ernest Gordon of Princeton University.

Our children lived for a time in New Jersey. One day with them we visited Princeton. In Princeton we passed the Princeton Chapel, for many years Dean Gordon’s chapel. Some years ago, his obituary reported simply a man given to the service of naming Christ Jesus, who saves. You can see a part of his life story in the old movie, “Bridge over the River Kwai”. A Scottish pilot, Gordon was captured in 1942 and forced into slave labor in Burma. He and others lived on a lump of rice a day. Slackers were beaten. The sick were shot. Those who tried escape were executed. “We were treated worse than animals”, he remembered.

Yet in that wartime bamboo hell, Gordon found salvation. “Faith thrives when there is no hope but God”, he later repeated in his weekly sermons. He survived, thanks to his comrades. He survived his survival, thanks to his Lord. He realized that “if he let himself be consumed by hatred, he would be squandering the life that had been given back to him.” So, he returned from combat, went to Seminary, immigrated to the USA, was ordained, preached on Long Island, went as chaplain to Princeton, opposed McCarthy, supported King, opposed Vietnam, supported Russian dissidents. In other words, he carefully read the Scripture, and tried to tell its truth about life and faith. Here is his proverb: “Faith thrives where there is no hope but God”. He taught what he had learned in experience. And once a year, in the spring, he preached a sermon about his experience in the 1940’s, about which he also wrote in a famous book. While Chapel attendance was generally good in those years, it overflowed it is said each year on that Sunday. He has been on the back of the mind this week, coming toward a New Year.

Now in the Bible, it is centrally the Book of Proverbs in which we find reflection on experience and faith. But in a way, we all end up collecting and curating our own book of proverbs. As my friend said, ‘you have to learn from other peoples’ mistakes, because we don’t have time to make enough mistakes on our own alone to learn what we need to learn—and we do learn most from mistakes, ours or others’. Share with me sometime a proverb you have gleaned this past year, out of hard experience, like Dean Ernest Gordon did from his. Send me a note, reading just, ‘I have learned this year that…’. Or whisper to me at the door, some Sunday, ‘I have learned this year that…’

This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man. Many people think this well-known proverb is from Proverbs, this well-known wisdom saying is from the Bible, it is so familiar and so tidy and so, well, wise. It is not. It is from the great Bard, William Shakespeare, in the words of Polonius, nearly 500 years ago.

In these 500 years past, the notion of the self, the independent person, the soul set free, has come over time out of the reformation, the renaissance, the spirit of capitalism, the emergence of democracy, and the very project at heart and depth of modernity. We today as late or post moderns have acquired something of a distrust for such direct discourse about the self. Darwin, Freud, Marx, and others, the probing doctors of disenchantment, have properly cautioned us, have rightly chastened us to realize our fragmented fragility, our life limitation, our complication by and in society and culture, sub-conscious and family. We are always in part where we come from, in no small measure, we do see today, whether that origin is the mud deep of evolution, or the mind deep of dreams, or the class conflicts of history. Determined to be our own most selves, we are nonetheless and largely ourselves as determined by forces well beyond our poor power to add or detract. So, for all of Shakespeare’s concision and beauty of rhetoric and all, we nonetheless have our doubts.

Yet, for part of 2019 I kept a little journal, a little folder wherein to store proverbial or experiential learning. No claim for spirited inspiration in any of these is here made. I have no word of the Lord on this, as Paul would say. They are offered, by modest illustration, as of interest, and more so, as encouragement to you to pen, and share, your own, in the year to come. What will you have you learned this coming year?

I have learned some things in our neighborhood.

That Fenway Park combines nature, structure, culture, and future, and has an applicable broad health in its design. They did not destroy it to rebuild it. They prized its nature. They enhanced its structure. They honored its culture. And so, they opened its future. Those of us who go regularly are the beneficiaries. Of course, it occurs to think, renewal in churches, both physical and spiritual, might also benefit from that combination: nature, structure, culture, future.

Speaking of which, also, that Bill Buckner was right, as he said: “Everyone in life has things that don’t go according to plan.”

That there is probably some religious connection we might make, right here, with the thousands of champagne bottles and robes and poses and photographs on Marsh Plaza each May at Commencement. What are these students doing out here, anyway? It is fascinating. Maybe we should give them each a Bible?

That my Jewish colleagues, here at Hillel House, are so right to emphasize the irreplaceable value of Shem Tov. A good name.

I have learned some things about communication.

That in email communication, a desire for Clarity can be read or mis-understood as a tone of Insistence

That the Japanese language, of which I am a fledgling and stumbling learner, carries a combination of delicacy and ferocity—Mishima.

That there is power in simple, memorable slogans, like HER: health, education, retirement.

That ‘as online life expands, neighborhood life and social trust decline’ (D Brooks NYT 3/12), that increasingly our current society is designed for internet vitality.

That in planning this triad helps: first Structure, then Order, then Communications.

That some sermons move from small and narrow in congregation and faith to large and broad in experience and outlook, and that is fine, since the world is our parish and we seek a heart strangely warmed.

That come Sunday we listen for a word of faith in a pastoral voice toward a common hope.

I have learned some things in self-care.

That Doctors default to easy choices later in the day, in decision fatigue, so they learn to guard against this. (And why is it we still hold our church meetings at night? SMH. SMH. Shaking my head.

That to keep faith through change, we will need non anxious presence, and self-differentiation: thank you E Friedman.

From my worrisome dreams that humans are born to worry, but that Twain was right, ‘I have had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened’.

That as a preacher to try to read or listen to more sermons, one a day if you can, as my friend Chapin Garner advises.

That there is importance in not letting things sit, of finding quickly the startup energy to address things fast so that they don't add valueless weight and stress.

That my dear friend, of blessed memory, Wylie Robson, Kodak Senior Vice President, was right: 'The secret to aging well is to learn to manage anxiety'.

That my mother was right to avoid 'borrowing trouble'. ‘I don’t need to borrow trouble’, she would say with wisdom.

I have learned some things about our country.

That Lincoln fought not just the moral evil, but, ‘the moral, social and political evil of slavery’. NYR 5/19

That social grace, as my son in law said, includes this: The power of diversity is not about correctness but correction. Being open to all means being open to change. (S Cady.)

That in 2000 1.6M migrants were apprehended at the southern border, but in 2016 only 190,000.

That before their simultaneous death, July 4, 1825, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson shared 158 letters.

I have learned some practical things.

That when you are lost, traveling, it helps to ask for help, and it really makes a difference when people lend a hand, and guide you by the hand, lend a hand by guiding you 'by the hand'.

That it is important to seek convergent aspirations, both personal and institutional, with those close to us, and those with whom we work.

That sometimes hope is the negation of negation. Hope is present by being absent. Hope names what is absent. Where would we be without the help of things that do not yet exist? Future thought is the negation of negation. We need to take ownership, to paraphrase Marx, of ‘the means of prediction’.

That we don't all have to think in the same way to face in the same direction.

What have you learned in the neighborhood, about communication, regarding self-care, of our country, or in practice?

Share with me sometime a proverb you have gleaned this past year, out of hard experience. Send me a note, reading just, ‘I have learned this year that…’. Or whisper to me at the door, ‘I have learned this year that…’. And, a Blessed Merry Christmas, and a very Happy New Year, to you, 2020.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 12.29.2019 at 11:00 am

Sunday
December 22

Angel Voice

By Marsh Chapel

Isaiah 7: 10-16

Romans 1:1-7

Matthew 1:18-25

Frontispiece

Late one night a few years ago snow was falling lightly in the far north, along the St. Lawrence. They know snow there, on the river bank. Coming over the border from Canada, and down south from the river, one enters a barren, flat land. At 1am on this winter night, the residents of little country towns--Alexandria Bay and Clayton and LaFargeville-- are asleep. The dark moonscape surrounding the road, pock-marked with valleys and an occasional farmhouse, lies silent. Fallow northern fields, farms all dead or quiet. These fallow northern fields lie strange and difficult and stern in the moonlight. With pelting flakes covering the windshield and darkening the moon, nature makes a seamless shroud, “blacker than a hundred midnights down in a cypress swamp”.

To step aside from the world of our own doing puts us out into the dark, the scene of angels. Angels. To find ourselves outside the world of our control and comfort, puts us out into the cold moonlight, the place of the uncanny, strange and unfamiliar territory. A return to church can be such a place. A sudden diagnosis can be such a place. An unplanned revisit to an old anger can be such a place. Aging can be such a place. Unemployment can be such a place. Loss of breath can be such a place. The desire to end something before it is really ended can be such a place. Sometimes things end badly. That is why they end. Sometimes things end badly. Therein lie the condition, the cause, the symptom, the root of the ending. A shooting war, on the ground, not from the technological safety of many thousand feet, but in Syria, say, or the Ukraine, say, can be such a place.

Beyond the stream that imports information, sustenance and ‘comraderie’ into our homes and lives, there is this darkness. It is a wondrous darkness, for all its unfamiliarity away from the blue haze of the computer screen. Here the lights of the city, the comfort of urban dwellers, shroud and shadow. To step aside from the world of our own doing puts us out into the dark, the scene of angels. Angels. Here is the Good News of Advent: an Angel voice announces Jesus Christ in this darkness, the grace of Almighty God.

Matthew

What of Matthew?

Our lectionary leads us through St. Matthew this year. So, let us carefully take an attentive look at the Gospel of Jesus Christ announced in Matthew, whose birth is accounted in the first chapter, which includes the first sermon, in Matthew.

It is a good Advent exercise. In the quiet breathing space of December, may we listen again for the true, the good, the right, the lasting. Can moderation learn anything from analytical zeal? Can moderation learn anything from caution? Can Advent throw any light on Christmas?

“The birth of Jesus happened in this way…” How quick we are to speak, to stare, to decide, to judge. To know. Or think we know. One teacher said to one student: “Your abundant knowledge stands in the way of your real education”. I was glad for the advice. How firm, much too firm, is our ostensible grasp of the ineffable, the wondrous, the real. Our reverence, unlike that of the Holy Scripture, too often lacks the discomfort of travel, the fear of the unknown, the quaking before angels, the conception of, let alone by, the Holy Spirit. Kings, shepherds, Joseph and Mary. Look out a few weeks. If we are not careful, it all becomes so familiar, so cozy. And the newer habits of casual worship, near and far, do not help.

No. By angel voice, the Scripture tells another story. Unlike the series of familiar events which make up our habituated rehearsal of the season, the Bible tells a strange story, a difficult story, even a stern story. This may help us more than all manner of cozy familiarity, if only to engage us when at last, or at first, we realize that it has never been easy to lead a Christian life. Such a life, as Ernest Tittle constantly repeated, is meant for heroes and heroines. As Thurman said: a crown to grow into. Listen to this unfamiliar account: a virgin is with child; a husband, who is no husband, resolves not to take revenge; an angel appears in a dream; the angel, in the dream, interprets the Scripture; the man obeys an angel voice; the man further accepts the angel’s name for what his wife, not yet truly a wife, conceives. A virgin birth, a resolute husband, an angel voice, a trusting woman, a name transmitted in a dream. This is strange, unfamiliar territory. We do not live in a world of virgin births, resolute husbands, angel voices, trusting dreamers, or names dropped from on high. Our world is rather, we prefer to think, the world of our own choices, our own creation.

We have left St. Luke, now, to follow the trail of Jesus’ life, death and destiny, this year, in another, different, strange Gospel, the Gospel of Matthew. Matthew relies on Mark, and then also on a teaching document called Q, along with Matthew’s own particular material, of which our reading today is an example. He has divided his Gospel into five sequential parts, a careful pedagogical rendering, befitting his traditional role as teacher, in contrast to Luke ‘the physician’, whose interest was history. We have moved from history to religion, from narrative to doctrine. Matthew is ordering the meaning of the history of the Gospel, while Luke is ordering the history of the meaning of the Gospel. You have moved from the History Department to the Religion Department. Matthew has his own perspective.

Some of that perspective involves a developing and developed Christology, an understanding of Christ. For Matthew, the birth narrative conveys the proper ordering of the meaning of the history of the Gospel. Birth narratives still matter, as if the politics of the last several years in this country were not enough alone to remind us. Who is he? Where did he come from? Who are his parents? Who are his people? Who formed him, He who now forms us? And some, or much of it, involves the law, as we shall see this year. It will be a good year to listen, through Scripture, regarding law.

You have missed having read the earlier part, the first half of Matthew 1, the generations from Adam to Christ. These are found before our reading. Fourteen by fourteen by fourteen, are the generations. From Abraham to David. From David to Babylon. From Babylon to Christ. They run from Abraham to Joseph, who was betrothed to Mary. To Joseph. To and through Joseph.

Abraham. Isaac. Jacob. Judah. Tamar. Amminadab. Boaz. Ruth. Jesse. David. Solomon. Uriah. Rehoboam. Jehoshaphat. Amos. Josiah. Jechoniah. Zerubbabel. Zadok. Eleazar. Matthan. Jacob. Joseph.

Every one of these names, earlier in Chapter 1, is worth a sermon! We could start next week…

Matthew 1 tells of the birth of Christ. Jesus Christ (though a later scribe dropped ‘Jesus’, yet most texts hold to it), to move Matthew a little more away from Luke, pushing religion away from history, you could say. The freedom we have to interpret the Gospel for ourselves begins with the Gospels, themselves. Each is different from the others. John is magnificently the most different of them all, the most sublime, the most mysterious, the most divine. Matthew tells of the birth of Christ. Then he will tell of the teaching of Christ. Then he will tell of the healing of Christ. Then he will tell of the cross of the Christ. Then cometh resurrection. In five moves, he is teaching us, Matthew, the teacher. Matthew orders the meaning of history, as Luke orders the history of meaning (repeat).

It is fitting that the first sermon, the first interpretation in the Gospel of Matthew, which we are going to follow this year, is offered by an angel. What other voice would be fit to herald such news? Yes, an angel. How strange this account appears when carefully studied! The angel interprets the prophet Isaiah. Because his sermon purports to tell us about the meaning of Advent and so, this is the magisterial claim, about the meaning of life, we shall want to bear down, quietly, and listen. Now Isaiah had said that the child should be called ‘Emmanuel’, or, “God with us”. God, present. Present. Present. Emmanuel. Come Emmanuel. How could any sermon, any interpretation, even by an angel, fathom this?

Matthew is apparently fighting on two fronts, both against the fundamental conservatives to the right, and against the spiritual radicals to the left. In Matthew, Gospel continues to trump tradition, as in Paul, but tradition itself is a bulwark to defend the Gospel, as in Timothy. Matthew is trying to guide his part of the early church, between the Scylla of the tightly tethered and the Charybdis of the tether-less. The people who raised us, in the dark, in the snows of those midnight blackened towns along the train tracks of the Lake Shore Limited, Albany to Buffalo, and on to Chicago, knew this well. That is, with Matthew, they wanted to order the meaning of the history of the gospel. They aspired to do so by opposition to indecency and indifference. They attempted to do so by attention to conscience and compassion. Matthew emphasizes the role of law, of the law, of laws. He is a legalist, whether or not he was Jewish (the general assumption, though some (I) would argue otherwise).

Meaning

And what of meaning in Matthew?

In the birth, it is the cradle we most need to notice. The wood of the cradle, by which Christ is born, is of a type with the wood of the cross, by which Christ is crucified. Born to give us second birth, the birth of spirit, soul, mind, heart, will, love, faith. Born to give us second birth. Is one birth not enough? No.

You are meant for two. You are meant to live in faith, to lead a life of loving friendship, to wake up every morning to the sunshine, the light of God. You are meant to walk in the light. Walk in the light. For this, you need to hear a word spoken from faith to faith, and to receive the second birth.

Christmas, as a cultural break, provides a seam, an opening, for grace, both apart from religion, and as a part of religion. You are given the light of God, to rest in your hearts, to illumine your hearts and minds, to give you peace and hope, all through the coming year. We will need that in 2020. We will need that courage this year.

A student who read Genesis and Matthew for the first time said, “This is so different from the way we think. No one is that awestruck by God.” And the polls confirm it. 90% of our people “believe in God”. As in 1952 so in 2020 (soon!), it is fashionable to profess this general belief. God is with us. The pantheist, the spiritualist, the nationalist, the literalist, and many a Methodist can agree. How easily is such a belief celebrated? Too easily. God is with us. In nature, in the occult, in the homeland, in the Bible, in the religious organization. God is with us. A tidy tale. God is all and everywhere, with us, Emmanuel. We find God whenever and wherever. Audubon, McClain, Jefferson, Jerome and Marsh equally serve as guides. God in trees, in dreams, in politics, writings, in religion. It is the same. God is everywhere! God is with us. His name shall be called, Emmanuel. This we find familiar and cozy.

But the angel voice says otherwise. The angel gives another name. Read, hear the account as represented by Matthew. Here is another name, not just Emmanuel, not just Advent, not just Christmas, but a name fit for the travel, darkness, and fear, of Advent. It is a name spattered with the blood of history. It is a name that fits in a manger. It is a name that cries out for response. It is a winter name, a name in the dark, a name that sends a fierce, cold wind across the unbroken heart. We feel a chill. And. It is a name that burns a bright flame for every kind of love. It warms us now. It is a name that charms fears, opens prisons, brings music of life and health and peace. The Matthean angel gives another name, particular, not universal, a name that means one thing, not everything, a hedgehog name not a fox name. A name that is above every name. Whose birth do we celebrate anyway?

“His name shall be called Jesus, for He shall save his people from their sin.”

Jesus is a personal name. The angel voice of the Lord gives a sermon, interprets. The angel replaces Emmanuel, and gives the name Jesus, which means, being translated, “he will save” or “God saves”. Mary did not give birth to the object of an airy belief in the general proposition that God is with us, somehow, somewhere, anyhow, anywhere. She bore a son, Jesus, who saves from sin. This is a different, strange, stern name. It has personal, profound meaning for you and me.

It means, bluntly, that God enters your life to get you free from your besetting sin. Not in trees, dreams, votes, words, or committees, but in person. ‘He will save his people from their sin.’ You will know him—if he be known at all—as He saves you. Christ was born to save.

To save a globe from the sin of climate exhaust

To save a world from the sin of nuclear holocaust

To save a nation from the sin of pride

To save a generation from the sin of greed

To save a church from the sin of self-congratulation

To save a man from alcohol, a woman from suicide, a boy

from drugs, a girl from opioids, a family from disaster

To save his people from their sin

To save souls, to set us on the road to heaven

Angel voice: such is the name of Jesus, a name that cries out for response. A name that cries out for a people who can acknowledge and confess their sin, who learn the necessity of saying please, thank you and I’m sorry. Can we become that kind of people? A people who name God not everything but one thing, the way to freedom from bondage? Can we become that kind of people? A people who can share this: there is a transforming friendship through which all manner of entrapment dies. It is a lifelong process, and it is process of a gradually deepening friendship with Jesus Christ, in person, who saves us, his people from our sin. Can this friendship be ours? The Angel Voice commends its path to you.

Coda

He whom Isaiah called Emmanuel, the Angel further named, or renamed Jesus. Strange, difficult, stern. The wondrous news from the darkness, if you can hear and believe an angel, is not just that God is with us, but that truly God is for us (repeat). The good news is not only that God is with us, but also that God is for us.

(Matthew 1 in Greek): Τοῦ δὲ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ ἡ γένεσις οὕτως ἦν. μνηστευθείσης τῆς μητρὸς αὐτοῦ Μαρίας τῷ Ἰωσήφ, πρὶν ἢ συνελθεῖν αὐτοὺς εὑρέθη ἐν γαστρὶ ἔχουσα ἐκ πνεύματος ἁγίου. Ἰωσὴφ δὲ ὁ ἀνὴρ αὐτῆς, δίκαιος ὢν καὶ μὴ θέλων αὐτὴν δειγματίσαι, ἐβουλήθη λάθρᾳ ἀπολῦσαι αὐτήν. τέξεται δὲ υἱὸν καὶ καλέσεις τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Ἰησοῦν· αὐτὸς γὰρ σώσει τὸν λαὸν αὐτοῦ ἀπὸ τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν αὐτῶν.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 12.22.2019 at 11:00 am

Sunday
December 15

The Adventure of Advent

By Marsh Chapel

Isaiah 35:1-10

James 5:7-10

Matthew 11:2-11

Frontispiece

The adventure of Advent is part memory and part hope.

A couple of weeks ago, our Christmas tree appeared, here in the NE corner of Marsh Chapel, whence the sermon this Lord’s day. It took six men and a boy to bring it in, and set it up. At about 12 feet in height, it is our largest tree in memory. Carrying caked ice, the tree tested the mettle of those carrying her. Many have commented on the tree’s stature and beauty. Some have rightly noticed the fragrance, the scent, the pine needle and pine woods perfume it has brought along, to help us, downstairs and upstairs, to welcome a new season, a familiar return of the rhythms of Advent leading to Christmas.

One or another, it may be, sitting quietly in the nave, embraced by the fragrance, aroma, scent, perfume of Advent, may have wondered, even aloud, whether the return of a season—secular, religious, cultural, familial all—might bring with it a healing balm. Our climate is in calamity. Our government is in an uproar: ¾ of Americans cannot name the three branches of government. Our denomination is in tatters. Our semester is at an and. Our work places are more human than divine. Our families are in need of prayer: 200,000 opioid related deaths since oxycontin was approved, 1995. Incidents of self-harm for young adults, ages 10-24, increased from 2007 to 2017 by 56% (during the same decade as the full expanse of social media). Our souls themselves are divided, part hope and part fear. And here stands the tree, mute, but claiming our senses, at the turn of the ages. Lovely thy branches. Can the return of a season, sensed in the senses, bring balm, bring a healing balm, bring judgment and redemption? The tall tree before us is laden with ornaments of memory and lights of hope, ornaments of memory like that in Matthew, lights of hope like that is Isaiah.

Adventure in Memory (Matthew)

You will have noticed that our Matthew reading is from chapter 11, in the middle of the gospel. Jesus has gathered the twelve disciples, on Matthew’s rendering, in the prior chapter. He has given them directions, marching orders, discipleship for disciples, and has sent them forth. Now, oddly, in chapter 11, John the Baptist, reappears, with whom the Gospel began long chapters ago. He emerges, he returns, like a familiar season, or scent. The Gospel writer wants to be sure that his hearers, his readers remember those who came before. The community will nod, and knowingly, at his mention. The cross is foreshadowed in John the Baptist, the greatest of all, says the Lord, before the turn of the ages, he whose head was severed. He came before, and preached before, and baptized before, and died before Jesus. Even Jesus, even Jesus, even Jesus had predecessors. John predeceased Jesus. A part of our judgement and of our redemption lie in seeing and hearing and sensing our forebears. Who told you, as Carlyle Marney asked, ‘who told you who you was’? Our liturgy, our ritual, make sure that we don’t get to Christmas without going through Advent, that we don’t get to the manger without the woods and its trees, that we don’t get to the warmth of cattle lowing and mother and child, without the ice water of the Jordan. The past is not dead. It is not even past. Some memories depend on diversity, some rely on unity. We need both going forward, diversity and unity.

I came in to see my Aunt Hazel one December day. I was glum. She asked if my girlfriend had given me the ‘wet mitten’. She had, but I did not know it because I did not understand the metaphor. My great Aunt, who worked her adult life as home care giver, was raised on the St. Lawrence River, whence, she often said, ‘we could look down into Canada’. She and my uncle Bob, a janitor with the electric company, childless themselves, raised my Dad while his single mom worked as a scrub nurse, day and many nights. She taught my dad to become an excellent cook, at least in the making of apple pies. Once as a boy my dad asked Aunt Hazel, repeatedly: ‘where was I before I was born?’ She reportedly replied, irritated, ‘down in Canada boiling soap’. Anyway, that afternoon at age 16 she asked about my despond with a mysterious metaphor. The image is of a winter sleigh ride. The horses pull through the snow. The young people ride in the hay in the back keeping warm. They hug, they kiss, they enjoy each other. Until or unless one gives another a shove away, using the instrument of a hand gloved in a ‘wet mitten’. It is telling image, and a memorable one, and in that far gone winter afternoon conversation happened to be entirely accurate. We had split up, my girlfriend and I, at least for 48 hours or so. We had fallen out of love, at least for a couple of days. But life went on. Memory, diverse and utterly personal, of some similar seasons from the past can guide us now. Life will go on.

On a Wednesday in December 2007, I walked late to the University Christmas party here at Boston University. I entered the packed hall to various greetings and smiles. Greetings a tad to various and more than the usual smiles. Had I seen the ten sleds decorated for competition? No, I had not. More greetings, more smiles, a few little moments of happy laughter. I began to feel followed. In fact, I was. My friend drew me through the crowd. Then, with a woosh of surprise, the throng parted and there before me was Marsh Chapel. I mean a four-foot sled decorated with Marsh Chapel made of marshmallows and ginger bread and licorice and chocolate. A group of administrators from the Metropolitan college had built it. They gathered in kitchens. Singing Christmas tunes they baked and cooked. They sampled the chapel as it came out of the oven. You could tell they loved doing so together. It was an emotional moment for me to see the true affection they have for their chapel, their chapel, and its architectural, symbolic, historical, physical and spiritual centrality in this college community of 40,000. They gathered. They sang. They worked. They ate. They found meaning. In baking the church, they came home to church, in their own way. You could call it a second birth, a new rebirth of basic religious rhythms. For all the sorrow, there is still, on your part, and on mine, and on others’, a listening ear, a willingness to tune in, a hard to articulate longing, a reaching toward…Another. Memory of some seasons now past can guide us now. Their gift provided a unifying memory, like that familiar refrain from Howard Thurman:

When the song of the angel is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost

To heal the broken

To feed the hungry
To release the prisoner

To rebuild the nations
To bring peace among brothers and sisters
To make music in the heart.

Adventure in Hope (Isaiah)

A return can bring healing. Just listen again to the passage from Isaiah, about fertility in the desert, written probably on the return of Israel from bondage in Babylon. Chapter 35 fits better with later parts of Isaiah. It is a hymn of hope. Some hopes depend on diversity, some rely on unity. We need both going forward, diversity and unity.

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,
the desert shall rejoice and blossom;

³Strengthen the weak hands,
and make firm the feeble knees.
⁴Say to those who are of a fearful heart,
“Be strong, do not fear!
Here is your God.

⁵Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,
and the ears of the deaf unstopped;
For waters shall break forth in the wilderness,
and streams in the desert;

¹⁰And the ransomed of the Lord shall return,
    and come to Zion with singing;
everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;
    they shall obtain joy and gladness,
    and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

Today, perhaps, we simply want to pause before the mystery, one of life’s great mysteries, the birth of any idea. Where do the aspirations of Isaiah 35 come from? The Scripture teaches us: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength—and mind. And you love your neighbor as yourself. For this to come to pass, we shall need: ‘an educated citizenry fluent in a wise and universal liberalism’ ‘This liberalism will neither play down nor fetishize identity grievances, but look instead for a common and generous language to build on who we are more broadly, and to conceive more boldly what we might be able to accomplish in concert.’ NYT 8/27/18.

Our minister at Riverside Church, some decades ago, William Sloane Coffin, of blessed memory, spoke in aphorisms and in epigrams, to evoke the triumph of the invisible, to speak resurrection. His voice is one of the diverse, personal and particular signs of hope, the hopeful lights around us. Each of us has someone different to whom we turn and return, it may be.

On Faith: faith is being grasped by the power of love.

On Reality: God is reality.

On Safety: God provides minimum protection and maximum support.

On Adversity: We learn most from adversity.

On Sin: Sin is a state of being. When the triangle of love, GOD SELF NEIGHBOR, is sundered, there is sin.

On Guilt: Guilt is the last stronghold of pride.

On Will: The rational mind is not match for the irrational will.

On Mercy: There is more mercy in God than there is sin in us.

On Justice: Pastoral concern for the rich must match prophetic concern for the poor.

On Love: The religious norm is love

On prejudice: White racism. Male chauvinism. Straight homophobia. It is what is known and unspoken that causes the most trouble.

On Truth: Faith gives the strength to confront unpleasant truth.

On Journey: Faith puts you on the road. Hope keeps you on the road. Love is the end of the road.

(He could be acerbic too: I’m not OK and you’re not OK—but that’s OK…And I wish my father in law were not some Liberace…Preachers are egotists with a theological alibi).

On Loss: When my son died, God’s heart was the first to break.

Those who have seen the recent beautiful film about Fred Rodgers will recognize his time-honored pastoral practices. His work provided a unifying hope. He preached from this pulpit, at Baccalaureate, 1992. He was a Presbyterian minister, you know, a religious man, you know, a practiced pastor, you know:

Pray for people by name. This is good.

Exercise each day. This is good.

Read the Scripture in the morning. This is good.

Play the piano, including banging bass notes, when moved. This is good.

Talk to people (at work, in transit, by phone, all). This is good.

Visit people in their homes. This is good.

In the film abroad, and in the sermon right here, Rogers asked people a question: who has taught you, believed in you, supported you, and loved you? His way of being, of teaching, of speaking to children as though they were adults, and to adults as though they were children, is a kind of unifying hope for us, which we sorely need.

Coda

Advent Adventure: Memory, Hope. One part diversity and one part unity each. An ornament or three for memory, a light or three for hope.

Good News: In the long run, those who accept him as an influence in their lives will experience that comprehensive peace which is the effect of the Christ event itself.

Take a minute, in the quiet, as the organ plays, with the tree listening and within a season of healing, to remember someone who helped bring you to who you are today.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 12.15.2019 at 11:00 am

Sunday
December 1

Healing in Sacrament

By Marsh Chapel

Isaiah 2:1-5

Romans 13:11-14

Matthew 24:36-44

The gist of today’s gospel is clear enough. We cannot see or know the future. We ought to live on tip toe, on the qui vive. Health there is, to be sure, and succor in a full acceptance and recognition of such a humble epistemology and such a rigorous ethic. Let us admit to the bone our cloud of unknowing about the days and hours to come. Let us live every day and every hour of every day as if it were our last. Song and sacrament, sermon and Eucharist, they will guide us along this very path this very morning.

What is less clear is the meaning of the coming of the Son of Man. What is the nature of this coming? Who is the person so named? What difference, existential difference, everlasting difference does any of this make? What did Jesus actually say here? On what score did the primitive Christian community remember and rehearse his teaching? Did Matthew have a dog in this fight? How has the church, age to age, interpreted the passage? We shall pose these four questions to verses 36 to 44 in the 24^th chapter of the Gospel bearing the name of Matthew.

First, Jesus. Jesus may have used this phrase, though many have judged that it is a later church appellation. It may have been both. This phrase, coming out Daniel chapter 7 (did Jesus hear this read and hold it in memory?) and the stock Jewish apocalyptic of Jesus’ day, was as much a part of his environment as the sandals on his feet, the donkey which he rode, the Aramaic which he spoke, the Palestinian countryside which he loved, and the end of time which he expected, in the contemporary generation. Did he understand himself to be that figure? We cannot see and we cannot say, though most think it unlikely. It is Mark and the author Enoch who have given us the ‘Son of Man’ in its full sense, and it is Matthew alone among the Gospel writers who uses the ‘coming’ in a technical sense (so Perrin, IBDS 834). The soprano voice of Jesus is far lighter in the gospel choruses than we would think or like.

Second, Church. Mark, Luke and Matthew carry forward these standard, end of the world predictions. Our lectionary clips out the mistaken acclamation of 24: 34, but we should hear it: Truly I tell you this generation will not pass away until all these things take place. Like the waiting figures in the Glass Menagerie, the earlier church has hung onto these blown glass elements while awaiting a never returning person, like that telephone operator, ‘who had fallen in love with long distances’. They preserve the menagerie in fine glass of hopes deferred that maketh the heart sick. That generation and seventy others have passed away before any of this has taken place. We do not expect, literally expect, immediately expect, these portents any longer. Nor should we. They are part of the apocalyptic language and imagery which was the mother of the New Testament and all Christian theology since, a beloved mother long dead. The Son of Man was the favorite hope child of that mother. A long low alto aria this.

Third, Matthew. To his credit and to our benefit Matthew makes his editorial moves, to accommodate what he has taken from Mark 13. The point of apocalyptic eschatology is ethical persuasion, here and in the sibling synoptic passages. Watch. Be ready. Live with your teeth set. Let the servants, the leaders of Matthew’s day, be found faithful. After 37 excoriating verses directed against the Pharisees (say, religious leaders in general) in chapter 23, white washed tombs which outwardly appear beautiful but within full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness—the hard truth about religion at our worst, and after 43 further verses in chapter 24 of standard end time language, Matthew pulls up. He delivers his sermon. You must be ready. The figure of the future is coming at an hour you do not expect. Hail the Matthew tenor.

Fourth, Tradition. Immediately the church scrambled to reinvent and reinterpret. Basso profundo. One example, found early in the passage, will suffice. Of that day no one knows, not even the Son. Except that some texts take out ‘even the Son’, in deference to Jesus’ later and higher Person. It is, finally, and except for occasional oddball readings, like the Montanists in the second century and the fundamentalists in the twenty first, the church’s view that apocalyptic language and imagery convey the future as unknowable and the present as unrepeatable, the future as unknowable and the present as unrepeatable.

In sum. As soon as we reach out to grasp the future it has slipped past us, already flying down the road to the rear, into the past. The present itself is no better, because its portions of past and future are tangled permanently together. We do have the past, neither dead nor past, or do we? Memory and memoir spill into each other with the greatest of ease. One searcher admitted that music, performed, was his closest approximation of God, the presence of God, the proof of God. One trusted Christian—it may have been you—sensed grace and grace in the grace of the Eucharist, unlike any other. We shall taste in a moment and see. The moment is a veritable mystery. Music is a veritable mystery. My body and My blood, these are veritable mysteries, so named mystery, sacramentum, to this day. How shall we respond?

Sleepers awake! There is not an infinite amount of unforeseen future in which to come awake and to become alive! There does come a time when it is too late, allowing the valence of ‘it’ to be as broad as the ocean and as wide as life. You do not have forever to invest yourself in deep rivers of Holy Scripture, whatever they may be for you. It takes time to allow the Holy to make you whole. Begin. You do not have forever to seek in the back roads of some tradition, whatever it may be for you, the corresponding hearts and minds which and who will give you back your own-most self. It takes time to uncover others who have had the same quirky interests and fears you do. Begin. As our brother in Christ, Mr. Ed McLure put it, he who passed from life to eternal life this week (his calling hours are tomorrow evening in Brookline): Politically correct without spiritual respect—is suspect. Begin. You do not have forever to sift and think through what you think about what lasts and matters and counts and works. Honestly, who could complain about young people seeking careers, jobs, employment, work? Do so. But work alone will not make you human, nor allow you to become a real human being. Life is about vocation and avocation, not merely about employment and unemployment. You are being sold a bill of goods, here. Be watchful. It takes time to self- interpret that deceptively crushing verse, ‘let your light so shine before others’. Begin. You do not have forever to experience Presence. It is presence, spirit, good for which we long, for which, nay for Whom, we are made. It takes time to find authentic habits of being—what makes the heart to sing, the soul to pray, the spirit to preach. Your heart, not someone else’s, your soul, not someone else’s your spirit, not someone else’s. Begin.

You must be ready. For the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.

As our near neighbor, Jonathan Edwards, put it in his sermon of a mere 300 years ago:

If you would be in the way to the world of love, see that you live a life of love — of love to God, and love to men. All of us hope to have part in the world of love hereafter, and therefore we should cherish the spirit of love, and live a life of holy love here on earth. This is the way to be like the inhabitants of heaven, who are now confirmed in love forever. Only in this way can you be like them in excellence and loveliness, and like them, too, in happiness, and rest, and joy. By living in love in this world you may be like them, too, in sweet and holy peace, and thus have, on earth, the foretastes of heavenly pleasures and delights. Thus, also, you may have a sense of the glory of heavenly things, as of God, and Christ, and holiness; and your heart be disposed and opened by holy love to God, and by the spirit of peace and love to men, to a sense of the excellence and sweetness of all that is to be found in heaven. Thus shall the windows of heaven be as it were opened, so that its glorious light shall shine in upon your soul. Thus you may have the evidence of your fitness for that blessed world, and that you are actually on the way to its possession. And being thus made meet, through grace, for the inheritance of the saints in light, when a few more days shall have passed away, you shall be with them in their blessedness forever. Happy, thrice happy those, who shall thus be found faithful to the end, and then shall be welcomed to the joy of their Lord! There “they shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and lead them to living fountains of waters, and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.”

Begin. You do not have forever to experience Presence. It is presence, spirit, good for which we long, for which, nay for Whom, we are made. It takes time to find authentic habits of being—what makes the heart to sing, the soul to pray, the spirit to preach. Your heart, not someone else’s, your soul, not someone else’s your spirit, not someone else’s. Begin.

You must be ready. For the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 12.1.2019 at 11:00 am

Sunday
November 17

The View from the Sycamore Tree

By Marsh Chapel

Isaiah 65:17-25

Luke 19:1-10

It is hard for me to tell, from this angle, which tree you are in. Given the troubles of this autumn, it is hard for me to tell which tree I am in myself, day to day. Has life chased you up the tree of doubt? Or are you treed in the branches of idolatry—idol-a-tree? Or are we shaking or shaking in the money tree? Or stuck without faith in the religion tree? Jesus calls us today, to come down out of the tree forts of our own making, and embrace a loving relationship with Him. May we measure all with a measure of love.

Doubting Zacchaeus

Perhaps the presence of unexplained wrong provokes you to doubt the benevolence in life or the goodness in God. To doubt that ‘God is at work in the world to make and to keep human life human’ (John Bennett). Randomness may have treed you.

No one can explain why terrible things happen, as they do. But if you will come down a limb or two from your philosophical tree of doubt, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you may hear faith. God can bring good out of evil, and make bad things work to good. This is not a theological declamation, and certainly not a paean to providence. It is just something we can notice together.

One Sunday, years ago, I drove late to church. I used to run early Sunday and finish memorizing the sermon along the way, as I did on that Lord’s Day. I just forgot the time. We raced to church, and in so doing I cut a corner, literally, and so popped a car tire. I was not happy to hear my son say, “haste makes waste”. You know, though, both rear tires were thin. I had replaced the front two months earlier, and forgot about the rear ones. I have to admit, it was good that I had reason to replace them, before I had a blowout, on the highway. Sometimes it happens that a bad thing prevents a really terrible thing from happening.

Joseph was thrown into a pit, and sold into slavery. He had to find his way, as a Jew, in the service of the mighty Pharaoh. He did so with skill, and rose to a position of influence, even with Potiphar’s wife chasing him around in his underwear. Then, a full generation later, a great famine came upon those brothers who had earlier sold Joseph down the river. They went to Pharaoh, looking for food. And who met them, as they came to plead? There was Joseph. He so memorably said, as written in Genesis 50: “You meant this for evil, but God meant it for good, that many might be saved.” Sometimes it happens that a bad thing in one generation prevents starvation in the next.

So, in Jericho, as Jesus found the little man up in the tree, his fellows grumbled (vs. 8). Why would he take time with such a greedy, selfish person who makes his living off the sweat of others’ brows? That hurts, to see divine attention given to those who have harmed you. Why would he have a meal with someone who takes no thought for the hurt of God’s people? This is bad! And it is. We miss the power of the parable if we do not see this. This is Jesus taking up with those who have wished the church ill, who have used the church for their own very well intended but nonetheless self-centered reasons. This is Jesus consorting with sinners. But sometimes a bad thing in the little brings a good thing in the large. Zacchaeus changes, and in so doing provides great wealth for others’ benefit.

Come down from this one tree, doubting Zacchaeus. I know that bad things happen to good people, and as a pastor hardly anything troubles me more. Sometimes, though, sometimes—not always, just sometimes--a bad thing early averts a really bad thing late. I have seen it, and you have too. It is enough to give someone up the doubting tree a reason to come down at least a branch. Think of it as existential vaccination.

It is the labor of faith to trust that where sin abounds, grace over-abounds. Even in this autumn of anxiety and depression. But one of the redeeming possibilities in this season of cultural demise is the chance that as a result, enough of us, now, will become enough committed to the realization of a just, participatory and sustainable world, that these darker days will move us toward a fuller light. Sometimes a bad thing in one part of history protects us from a worse thing in another part.

Let us not lose sight of the horizons of biblical hope, as improbable as they can seem. The lion and the lamb. No crying or thirst. The crooked straight. All flesh.

The divine delight comes still from saving the lost, including the forgotten, seeking the outcast, retrieving the wayward sons and daughters of Abraham. God wants your health, your salvation. God wants your healthy prudence. Your salvation “has personal, domestic, social, and economic consequences” (Craddock). Jesus Christ saves us from doubt. Those who have seen this fall the magnificent musical, ‘Come From Away’, and its evocation of 9/11, with its recollection of St. Francis, ‘make me an instrument of thy peace’, and its recitation of Philippians 4:6, ‘Have no anxiety about anything,’ may just have caught a glimpse, heard a hint of the divine delight in saving the lost.

So come down Zacchaeus, come down from your perch in that comfortable sycamore tree, that comfortable pew, that skeptical reserve, that doubt. Come down Zacchaeus! The Lord Jesus Christ has need of your household and your money, and He responds to your doubt.

Idolatrous Zacchaeus

Come down Zacchaeus, down from your overly zealous leanings, hanging out on the branch of life. Idolatry comes when we make one or more of the lesser, though significant, loyalties in life to shadow the one great loyalty, that which the heart owes alone to God. Zacchaeus had governmental responsibility, community status, a welcoming home, a fine family, and we can suspect he was loyal in these regards. Curious as he was, up on his branch, he had no relationship with the divine. Into this relationship, Jesus invites him. More precisely, Jesus invites himself into relationship with a man up a tree. He is invited into a whole new life, a new world of loving and faithful relationships, that stem from the one great loyalty.

We need to be careful about lesser loyalties this fall. We need to. Be prudent about the lesser loyalties than the one owed to God. We can forget whose water we were baptized into, if we are not careful. Rather, let us remember the student of Paul who wrote 2 Thessalonians: your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing (2 Thess. 1: 4).

Do you see the danger? Come down Zacchaeus, come down, before it is too late. Make sure your lesser loyalties—to government, career, friends, family, home, all---do not cover over, do not shadow the one great loyalty, that all of your daily tasks do not eclipse a living memory of a healthy future, a common dream.

So yes, we harbor a common dream, a dream for instance that women—our grandmothers, mothers, sisters, daughters, granddaughters, all—granted suffrage a mere 100 years ago, will be spared any and all forms of harassment and abuse, verbal or physical, on college campuses, in homes and families, in offices and bars, in life and work, and long having suffered and now having suffrage, will in our time rise up to be honored, revered, and compensated, without reserve, but with justice and mercy.

Yet yours finally is a dream not of this world, but of this world as a field of formation for another, not just creation but new creation, not just life but eternal life, not just health but salvation, not just heart but soul, not just earth, but heaven.

Wealthy Zacchaeus

Come down Zacchaeus, come down, at last. Impediments to faith come through doubt and idolatry, through resentment and religion, but none of these holds a candle to the harm that wealth can bring. In global terms and in historical terms, every one of us in this room is wealthy. Ours are first world problems. Luke’s entire gospel, especially its central chapters, 9-19, are aimed at this point. For Luke’s community, the remembered teachings of Jesus about wealth were most important. That tells me that the Lukan church had money, and so do we. This is what makes the account of Zacchaeus, “one who lined his own pockets at other people’s expense”, so dramatic for Luke, and so Luke concludes his travel narrative with this clarion call: come down. Be careful as you do not to trip over wealth, power or status. We lose them all, give them all away, over time. They are impermanences. They go. Better that we see so early. Time flies—ah no. Time stays—we go.

Wouldn’t you love to know what Jesus said to Zacchaeus that caused him to give away half of what he had? I would.

It is a western, white, male, educated, wealthy, healthy, heterosexual, middle class, two handed world. I need to be reminded of that. Come down Zacchaeus, and feel the pain of others. Come down and remember: soon we will all be dead. Maybe we could find ways to use whatever power we have now to honor God, love our neighbor, reflect our mortality, and affirm the powerless. Come down Zacchaeus, come down!

We will need to remember our forebears. Harriet Tubman lived her later life in Auburn, NY, dying in 1913, just 15 years before my mother was born a few miles away. But as you remember she spent her earlier life freeing her people from slavery, 13 perilous journeys back south. One wrote this week, Tubman’s story is an example of courage combined with practicality…She marched at night, communed with God, drugged crying babies and even held a gun to the heads of those who grew weary or turned back. (New York Review 12/12). Those who have seen the most recent film ‘Harriet’ have seen again that remarkable combination of courage and practicality.

Before we left seminary, on the day after Thanksgiving in 1978, an odd event befell us. I worked nights as a security guard in those years and would come home to sleep at 7am. Jan had the day off, and left to shop, but left the door to our little apartment ajar, by accident. About noon a street woman found her way into the building and up onto our floor, and then into our room. I woke up to see a very poor, deranged woman, fingering rosary beads, and mumbling just over my head. Boy did I shout. She ran into the next room and I stumbled downstairs to call the police. By the time three of New York’s finest and I returned to the apartment, the poor lady was in the bathtub, singing and washing. They took her away. Jan came back at 3 and asked how I had slept. That moment has stayed in the memory, though, as an omen. Our wealth is meant for the cleansing of the poor of the earth. Perhaps the Lord wanted me to remember that in ministry, so I have tried to remember that, in ministry. Come down Zacchaeus, and use your wealth for the poor.

Religious Zacchaeus

Let’s talk for a moment about religion, shall we? Come down Zacchaeus, come down! No amount of religious apparatus can ever substitute for what Jesus is offering you today, and that is loving relationship. No amount of theological astuteness can ever substitute for loving relationship. No amount of sturdy churchmanship can ever substitute for loving relationship. No amount of righteous indignation can ever substitute for loving relationship. No amount of beautiful music, instrumental or vocal, can ever substitute for loving relationship. No amount of formal religion can ever substitute for the power of loving relationship. Jesus invites us into loving relationship with him, and so with each other. That is health, that is salvation. Are we lovers anymore?

Like Zacchaeus in the tree, religion can dwell above Jesus, high and aloof. Is it good to be above Jesus?

It was the German monk Martin Luther who, in 1517, went alone and nailed his 95 theses to the door in Wittenberg, and thereby splintered inherited religion to bits. The words of this same Luther were read, as interpretation of Romans 8, on the rainy night in London, 1738, along Aldersgate Street, as John Wesley’s heart, at long last, was strangely warmed, and he came down from the tree of religion, to sit at table with the Faith of Christ. On a November Sunday in 2019, hic et nunc, both are recalled, in invitation to loving relationship with God and neighbor. We pointedly remember that we are saved by faith, by faith alone, by grace we are saved by faith, and not by any or all the works of the law. You know, in college, just a steady participation in a loving group, like the one Dr. Herbert Jones has led here for many years, can make all the difference.

Come down Zacchaeus! Come down from the doubting tree, the tree of idolatry, the wealth tree, the tree of religion. Come down and receive the Gospel: Jesus invites us into loving relationship with himself, and thereby into loving relationship with our neighbors.

Are we lovers anymore?

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 11.17.2019 at 11:00 am