Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

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Isaiah 65:17-25

Luke 19:1-10

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         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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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. 

4. 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?

Are we lovers anymore?

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

By Marsh Chapel

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2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17

Luke 20:27-38

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posted in Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music, The Bach Experience, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 11.10.2019 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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Daniel 7:1-3, 15-18

Ephesians 1:11-23

Luke 6:20-31

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posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 11.3.2019 at 1:42 pm

By Marsh Chapel

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Joel 2:23-32

Luke 18:9-14

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Merciful Delay?

What drove Luke, alone, to remember or construct these marvelous parables, Luke 9-19?  Only Luke has them, and how we would miss them without his composition!  What molded them near the year 85ad? The lengthening years, without ultimate victory, since the cross? The long decades of living without Jesus? The uncertainties of institution and culture and citizenship and multiple responsibilities? The daily stresses of managing a budget? It is the primitive church that can give an example to an America waiting to meet disease with patient justice, to meet anxiety with hope. They waited for Jesus to return. And he delayed. And he delays, still. And there is rampant, hateful hurt, across God's green earth.

Though with a scornful wonder we see her sore oppressed
By schism rent asunder by heresy distressed
Yet saints their watch are keeping their cry goes up 'how long'?
And soon the night of weeping will be the morn of song.

Luke’s parables confront disease with health and anxiety with humility.   At Marsh Chapel, we try to do some of the same.  On a day in which we receive new Chapel members, a word then about Marsh.

Marsh Membership?

What is participation in ministry about here?

As a University Chapel and Deanship, Marsh Chapel has some significant structural differences from a local church, some of which are outlined in the document, ‘Forms of Ministry in our Midst’.   While there are many ways of entering ministry at Marsh, the Chapel otherwise operates, administratively, as any other deanship on campus, reporting to the President, and funded in large measure by the Provost.

Marsh Chapel is a discreet Christian community of faith, and, if I may, in my pastoral experience, including nine other pulpits, a real gem.  Theologically and spiritually, we are broad church; liturgically and musically, we are high church; communally and relationally, we are deep church, in the sense of encouraging vital fellowship and friendship.  The simplest way to describe all this is to walk through the sanctuary, and notice the stained glass, of the church through the ages, and of the church in the Methodist tradition.

We are not a Methodist congregation, but our history and lineage, from 1839 to the present, are out of that Religious, Christian, Protestant, English tradition, which emerged under the leadership of John Wesley through the course of the 18^th century.  Mr. Wesley stands above our portico at the front door.  Our hymnal is the Methodist hymnal, though we are not confined to it, and generally operate out of a dual adherence, both to Methodism and to the ‘ecumenical consensus’ (a simple way to see this is to note that we have, distinctively, both wine and grape juice available at communion).  Our dean is usually a Methodist minister (and, oddly, 4 of 6 have been named Robert!).  We are thus ‘possibilists’ in the Wesleyan sense of an openness to the future in faith, and an interdenominational, international, and even interfaith congregation (both present on Sundays and especially listening via radio, we have for example a number of Jewish participants).   Jesus is our beacon not our boundary.  You will see that the sanctuary has no permanent cross, but does have a star of David—both fairly substantive ecumenical moves in 1949.

When people join Marsh Chapel, as will happen again in today, we use a part of the ritual for new members in the hymnal.  When children are baptized, as will happen again on November 3, at 2pm, we use the order for the Sacrament in the same hymnal.  Our members come from a very wide range of religious backgrounds, and in many cases, of no particular religious background.  We do not use a single creed (though we are inclined, now and then, to recite one or another in the course of a sermon now and then).  We simply ask people, in brief, whether they want Marsh Chapel to be and to be known as their spiritual home.  There are of course some down sides to such breadth, but this has been our heritage since Daniel Marsh finished the chapel, and the Trustees named it for him, long ago.  Marsh’s book, The Charm of the Chapel, we have here, and one of our staff could get you a copy, should you want one.

To answer in more detail your fine question about doctrine, I will need to give a few points of reference.  As with coming to know Martin Luther, the first step would be to read through the sermons (now found easily on our website, from 2003 on).  As with coming to know John Calvin, the second step would be to read through the books, here the decanal books.  Mine our found in the narthex.  Those of my predecessors are also readily available:  the two most voluminous collections being those of Dean Neville, 2003-2006 (present almost every week in chapel, and my only living predecessor) and of Dean Howard Thurman, 1953-1965.  I recommend from Dean Neville God the Creator, and from Dean Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited.  Dean Robert Hamill (1965—1973: he died just weeks after his Christmas sermon of 1972) wrote two short books of sermons, but is best captured in his column for Motive magazine in the 1960’s.  Dean Franklin Little (1952-3) brought the academic study of the Holocaust to America, and his book, The Crucifixion of the Jews, is stellar, and still in print.  Dean Robert Thornburg (1978-2001) published very little, though his denominational leadership was significant.  As with coming to know John Wesley, the third step would be to look at what the chapel actually does, week by week (found in the term book, on the website, and in the bulletin—including the weekly Dean’s Choice).  You will find, I think, in broad terms, in the sermons and books and works, that we are a theologically liberal church with a spiritually liberal pulpit, again broadly construed, and in congruence with the history of Boston University, and, indeed, of Boston itself.  In sum, with Mr. Wesley, we would affirm ‘that which has been believed always and everywhere by everyone’ (the ecumenical consensus, where there is such); and we would affirm, ‘if thine heart be as mine, then give me thine hand’; and we would affirm, ‘in essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty;  in all things, charity’.

Spiritual Not Religious?

But what if I am more spiritual than religious?  What is they healthy humble balance of these two terms?

Well, the distinction, spiritual vs. religious, would not have been intelligible to St. Luke, whose gospel we have been reading these past several months.  Whether or not the distinction—spiritual\religious—is one you understand or affirm, it is in its framing at least a modern lens, and to foist it upon the New Testament would be fair in no direction.

Luke is a teacher, like Matthew, whose own gospel is a didactic one.  Matthew is organized around five narratives and lectures.  Including a long lecture from a mountain.  Affirming the jot and tittle of the law.  Honoring disciples and discipline.  Matthew sees the world and its human inhabitants, to the moment of its audibility for you and me, as a school room filled with students.  He is a teacher, and he wants us to learn, as does Luke.

In principle, then, as all learners both larger and smaller and older and younger, we are in conversation with our evangelist.   Preaching is interpretation, interpretation of Holy Scriptures, holy out of use and history and function and love and inspiration, whose opening to the ear is meant to teach, as well as to delight and finally to persuade.  Learn something from every sermon.  Teach something in every sermon.  Teach and learn in every sermon.  What would Luke and Matthew help us to learn about this current, modern, popular distinction:  ‘I am spiritual but not religious’?

It happens that at the heart of the New Testament, there is, one could say, a parallel problem, a similar distinction, at work, being worked, being worked out.   That is the problem of Christianity emerging from Judaism.   For the readers of Paul.  For the students of Luke.  For the listeners to Marsh Chapel in the past decade.  For these and others, this is not a new story.  One of the two great and deep mysteries of the 27 New Testament books is this one.  How did a religious and spiritual movement begun in Palestine, led by a Jew and other Jews, born out of the history and theology and society of Judaism, and relying on the whole of the Hebrew Scripture, become, in less than 100 years, entirely Greek?

The New Testament witnesses, it should be strongly asserted, had as a group no disinclination to follow spiritual truth over against the dictates of religious tradition.  The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, after all.   The tearing of Christianity away from Judaism was in part a spiritual revolt against a religious authority.   The Lordship of Jesus, the way of faith, the announcement of the resurrection, the advances into the highways and byways, the preaching of the gospel, especially to the gentiles, left religion, of one form, in the dust.  One is commanded in fact to ‘shake the dust from one’s feet’.

On the other hand, and perhaps more powerfully, the New Testament writers have every disinclination to celebrate an individualized spiritual perspective, ‘Sheilaism’, ‘bowling alone’, or the new atheism which often dresses in the simple garb of introversion and social, conversational, and relational isolation.   The 27 books of the NT, if nothing else, revolve around a steady development of a new community, a beloved community, a community of faith working through love, and are themselves children of and witness to the emergence of that set of communities, the church.  Even the Gospel of John, the most spiritual and least institutional of the documents, nonetheless, from its radical angle, forcefully acclaims the experience of love in faith, the love of ‘one another’.   The dismantling of one religious structure requires the responsibility to replace it with an improved model (Methodists take note).  In this sense, the New Testament would be the polar opposite and spiritual contestant of spirituality today.

Biblical Theology?

And how, kind sir, in your own life and work does this paean to health and humility matter?

Well, remember our ride up the Matterhorn a few weeks ago?

The ride is short but terrifying.  At the top, mid-July, thick snow, hard ice, brisk wind and a coldness of cold await you.  As does the mesmerizing thrall of the mountain.  The Matterhorn.  Step gingerly out of the old open rail car.  Get your footing, your mountain sea legs.  Raise your gaze.  Raise your gaze.  Raise your gaze.  There.  A new way of seeing, and so of thinking, and so, then of being.  Health and sanity may impel or compel you to higher ground.

My sixteenth book will be published this fall, a collection devoted in part to the New Testament, in part to preaching, and in part to ministry—Bible, Church, World as we in the halcyon younger days of the World Council of Churches intoned.  None of the sixteen is a best seller, none a game changer, none found in every home.  All but two are still in print, and several in both print and cyber forms.  They are the work of Zermatt.  Fine.  The view from Zermatt is fine.  You can share it in physical comfort and communal fellowship.  The Matterhorn!  Just before you.  But.  But.  But.

As an acrophobe the rail car ride up is not appealing.  But it is time for me to move on up, to take higher ground, to climb on to Gornergrat.  Ice.  Snow. Cold. Wind.  That means the prospect of one more, a very different book, for a very different look.  A different look takes a different book.  It will be, here, for me, the work of the next decade, in pulpit and study.  As you cannot get to Gornergrat but through Zermatt, this project depends in full on all that came before:  books on the New Testament (John), on preaching (Interpretation), and on ministry (prayer and practice).  The next climb is up on to craggy cliff village—ice, snow, cold, wind—of an overture to A Liberal Biblical Theology.   Here is a marriage of Rudolph Bultmann and N.T. Wright., a partnership of Paul Tillich and (the early) Karl Barth, an aspirational possibilist (that is Methodist) correlation of history and theology, Bible and Church, accessible to the average reader.  Our climate, nation, and denomination, all in peril, hang in the balance.

⁹ He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: ¹⁰ “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. ¹¹ The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. ¹² I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ ¹³ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ ¹⁴ I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 10.27.2019 at 11:00 am

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Jeremiah 31:27-34

Luke 18:1-8

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Parable of Persistence

Hear ye hear:  the honorable Unjust Judge is presiding this morning in our homiletical courtroom.  Before him, a persistent woman, who employs time and voice. (You have time and you have voice.) Like Christ himself, she implores the implacable world to grant justice. Like Christ himself, she comes on a donkey of tongue and patience. Like Christ himself, she continues to plead, to intercede. Like Christ himself, she importunes the enduring ‘gone-wrong-ness’ of this world. Like Christ himself she prays without ceasing. Like Christ himself she persists. She is an example to us of how we should use whatever time we have and whatever breath remains--to pray. It is prayer that is the most realistic and wisest repose for we the anxious of this anxious autumn. By prayer we mean formal prayer, yes. But by prayer we mean the persistent daily leaning toward justice, the steady continuous pressure in history from the voice of the voiceless and the time of the time bound.  And the daily practice of attention, alertness, being alive, being around. Prayer public, prayer private.

Ours is a long wait. And that is just the point: we feel the length of the wait.

Notice, waiting with us, this poor widow. She lacks power, authority, status, position, wealth. She has her voice and all the time in the world. Like Jesus Christ, whose faith comes by hearing and hearing by the preaching of the word. 

He told them a parable about how they ought to pray always and not to. lose heart.  

Heart and Service

Sometimes prayer is public, even institutional.

On this Family and Friends weekend, we can remember the persistent prayerful work of Boston University, across nearly 200 years.

Boston University is an institution with a long history of outreach and engagement, said recently our President Robert A. Brown.

Boston University lives in the heart of the city, in the service of the city, said President Lemuel Merlin, 1923.

One deeply embedded value and strength of Boston University, today, and found in every school and college is this long (1839) history (Methodism) of outreach (heart) and service (in the world, for the world).

The three medical campus schools lead the way with care for the urban poor (MED), with daily recognition that public health means social justice (SPH), and with the most global dental student body of any school or college at every commencement (GSDM).

All fourteen schools on the Charles River campus show the shadows and lingering long-term influence of heart and service.

Reflect on the current emphasis in QUESTROM upon ethical business and business ethics.

Remember the BU educational 25-year commitment to the Chelsea city schools, and the to year work in urban literacy Initiative on Literacy Development, our outreach to Boston Public Schools so strongly enhanced by the Wheelock merger.

Rejoice at the concept of ‘citizen artist’, the ‘social artist’, affirmed at the College of Fine Arts, the best of theater and music and visual art, brought to the street level (along with the Arts Initiative).

Reflect on the curricular and co-curricular engagement in the School of Theology, the ongoing voice of ‘The School of the Prophets’.  

Remember the Social Work engagement with neighboring hospitals and schools, in internships and partnerships.

Rejoice at the ongoing vitality within Metropolitan College of a now veteran program in prison education.

Reflect on the School of Engineering support for Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.

Remember our School of Hospitality emphasis on servant leadership.

Rejoice at the communal nature of education in the College of General Studies, modeling dimensions of shared learning and living with great effect.

Reflect on the College of Arts and Sciences, and its PARDEE School, committed to world peace.

Remember the School of Law and its honored graduates who have defended the legal system of this country, ‘a country of laws and not of men’.

Rejoice at the varied commitments through The College of Communications to the development of an educated populace, on which the rest of democracy depends.

Reflect on Sargent’s lectureships on physical and occupational therapy, open to the public, and applicable to the work of many other schools and colleges as well.

To these vital forms of ‘outreach and engagement’ in schools and colleges, add the Howard Thurman Center, the ROTC program, the Hubert Humphrey Scholars program, the Community Service Center, the Office of Religious Life, the Elie Wiesel Center, the Sustainability Center,  The BU Initiative on Cities, and others, all of which to some measure reach out beyond the University to serve and help the larger community, across the region and around the globe. Boston University exemplifies a culture of ‘outreach and engagement’, working in the world for the world.

Public prayer. As in the life of Elijah Cummings, now of blessed memory, a life reminding us that Elijah is coming, and a voice teaching us that ‘diversity is our promise, not our problem’.

Your alma mater, at her best, institutionalizes prayerful persistence.

He told them a parable about how they ought always to pray and not lose heart.

Sometimes prayer is public.

Enjoy Your Wife

And sometimes prayer is private.

Sometimes, that is, prayer is personal, meant to wake us up to what lasts, matters, counts and is real.

Speaking personally, one summer holiday joy comes from sitting alone, anonymous, a regular citizen of the planet, enjoying a pub lunch.

In Bermuda, one favorite such hide out, for the hours Jan is shopping in Hamilton, is ‘The Hog Penny’.  Its name fits British Bermuda, as does its dark wood interior’; as does its English, English not haute cuisine, meals, shepherds’ pie and chips; as does its broadcast of cricket on the ‘tellie’; and does its public house, pub mood.  Since our honeymoon we have gone to Hamilton, Bermuda, she to shop, and I to blend into the British Bermuda woodwork, and be alone.

She and I no longer need to identify our individual itineraries.  Marriage works sometimes that way. She knows where to find me, as she did, mid-shopping expedition, this August.  A surprise hug from behind came as no surprise to me; a big kiss or three, some reports from the field of shopping battle, happy and tearful memories of the same place, the same dark wood interior, every five years or so to August, 2019.  Downing a glass of ice water, she is off again on the hunt, leaving me to read. Other years the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times or both, in print, but now, sadly no longer available, in print, on the Island. A hug, a kiss, a reminder to show up on time for the ferry back to the hotel, and we are separate, again.  As one day, a long stretch of decades ago, before marriage. As one day, again, someday, when we cross the river.

I notice one other customer, alone at the dark farther end of the Hog Penny oak bar.  Six empty chairs separate us. He slowly rises, and begins slowly to approach. One chair at a time he slides his full glass gently, carefully, toward me, then rounds the chair at hand, and then pushes his glass another chair length, and again the glass, round the chair, catch your breath, start again.

He is wearing a yellow golf shirt, tan pants, loafers, eyeglasses without frames, and is, say, 15 years my senior, my father’s age when he died, balding, thin, and short.  I have learned over the years to watch for clues, signs that such an one, approaching, in such a setting, may want to sell me insurance (it happens), or invite me to church come Sunday (also), or need a loan (at least once).  I enjoy meeting new people, but this is vacation, a few precious summer hours in the beauty of Bermuda. So, I am leery.

Here he comes, slide the glass, round the chair, slide the glass, round the chair, take a breath.  No signs of trouble do I see. But still I am on the alert. A temporary lay person is a full-time pastor who has seen this movie before.

He leaves one empty chair between us.

‘Where are you from?’, he asks.

‘Boston’.

‘How did you get here?’

‘We flew direct from Logan’.   A little silence, of which there will be more than a little more.

‘How about you’, I volley back.

‘By boat, from New York City’.

‘Do you live there?’, I venture, trusting the moment a little more.

‘Nearby.  Long Island.’

‘Oh, I know Long Island’, I rejoin.  ‘I will be there near Bayshore, Point O Woods its called,  later in August.’

Then there is a long pause, as there were many in the conversation.  He seems not to know how, exactly, to proceed. At these pauses, I jump in to prompt a couple of time, but then leave him to his silence.  I notice he is making steady progress through his drink, which gladdens me to see, somehow, and it clearly does him, too. Silence. He is from a generation, one might say, in which is expected, a common courtesy, to offer a bit of conversation, gentle, genial conversation, to a stranger who is alone.  Of course, as with so much else of human being and meaning, the smart phone and internet have eclipsed this human practice. Or killed it off, outright.  

The silence is sounding more fully resonant now.

He perks up.  ‘That was your wife?’, he asks. ‘I mean’, he corrects himself, ‘She is your wife?’

‘Yes’.

‘She is so pretty, so happy’, he says smiling.

‘Yes’, I say.  ‘Well’, I add, ‘especially on vacation, and especially out shopping’.

He ponders this a bit, then asks, ‘Have you been here before?’

‘Yes’, I say, ‘about a half-dozen times.  It is one of the world’s most beautiful place, in nature and in culture.’

‘Yes’ he says, drawing a deep breath leading to another long pause.

His eyes dim, then brighten, then dim, like the sun ducking in out behind a cloud bank.  Silence. More uncomfortable with the silence than he is, I interject again: ‘Did you sail to Bermuda with friends or with family?’

‘No’, he says.  ‘I am here on my own’.

Now, somehow, I have the sense to the let the silence be long, be quiet.  Lonely.

Then he looks up and addresses me: ‘My wife and I have come here over the years.  She would shop and I would come here and have lunch, or not.’

She would shop.  I hear it.

I clumsily and with a sense of foreboding repeat, ‘She would shop?’

‘Yes’, he adds.  ‘She and I planned this trip a few months ago.  She was really looking forward to it.

‘Oh, I…’ then I stop mid-sentence.

‘She died in April’.  Silence.

‘I am so very sorry for your loss’, is what I come up with to say.

‘Thank you.  I was going to cancel, but decided to come alone, to come by myself, alone.

‘I am so truly sorry for your loss’, I clumsily repeat.  I am having a hard time seeing him, for some reason—maybe the humidity has clouded my eyes.  I wipe my eyes a bit.

‘Thank you.   I appreciate that.  She loved this place.  Bermuda and its beauty she so loved.  We both did. Together.’

‘I am glad you came.  I am glad for your memories.  I know how meaningful it must be for you to be here.’

‘Thank you’, he responds.  ‘I guess I am glad. The memories are good.  But painful too.’

Here more pause.  A light silence. A good silence wherein what is said and what is heard can sink down in and settle in.  Be heard. Like a sermon, a conversation is not about getting something said, but it is about getting something heard.

He made strong headway with his drink, and I look at my watch to see that the spousal warning to get to the ferry on time was a typically wise one.  I have an assignment to be in line for a seat on the ferry looming.

I paid the bill.  I checked to make sure I had my glasses, my wallet, my book, and, yes, my phone.  I stood next to him. His eyes were lighter and just a little moister.

‘I am sorry for your loss’.

‘Thank you.’

I turn to go, and he catches my arm for a moment.  What he says next he does not say pendanticly, or religiously, or emotionally, or emphatically.  He just says it. In a quiet voice. In a good voice. In a kind voice. And he said it twice, in a prayerful tone:

‘Enjoy your wife.’

‘Enjoy your wife’.

Sometimes, prayer is personal, meant to wake us up to what lasts, matters, counts and is real.

 Prayer public, prayer private.

And he told them a parable about how they ought always to pray and not lose heart.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 10.20.2019 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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Jeremiah 32:1-3, 6-15

Luke 16:19-31

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Exegesis

The beauty of the music this morning is itself a sort of baptism.  We sometimes long to take a spiritual shower, to bathe ourselves in the living waters of grace, faith, hope, life, and love.   Especially, it might be stressed, on any college campus today, the need for spiritual cleansing in the midst of sub cultural murkiness, is continual.  We need both judgment and mercy, both honesty and kindness, both prophetic upbraid and parabolic uplift.  And we get them, thanks be to God, in Jeremiah and in Luke.  But look!  They come upside down.  In a stunning reversal, kindness and gentle hope are the hallmarks of our passage from Jeremiah, while wrath and hellfire explode out of Luke.

Listen again to the voice of the prophet, one of the great, strange voices in all of history and life, one of the great, strange voices, in all of Holy Writ.  Jeremiah.  All is lost, in Judah, as Jeremiah addresses Zedekiah the King.  You will be a slave in Babylon, King Zedekiah.  You will be given into the hand of your sworn, mortal enemy, and so too will be the fate of your city, your temple, your people, and your country, King Zedekiah.  BUT.  NONETHELESS. AND YET.  These are resurrection words.  BUT. NONETHELESS. NEVERTHELESS.  STILL.  EVEN SO.  And Jeremiah put his money where his mouth is.  Or was.

In this season of cultural demise and decay across our country, we benefit from the harsh challenge of Luke, and we benefit from the hopeful promise in Jeremiah.  You see there is more Luke in Jeremiah than at first you think, and there is more Jeremiah in Luke than at first you think.

Sin is not doing concrete deeds of generous kindness. Sin is the not doing concrete deeds of generous kindness.   Of all the Gospels, St. Luke most emphasizes this:  in the sermon on the plain; in the wording of the Lord’s prayer; in the parables of Sower, Samaritan, Lost Sheep, Lost Coin, Lost Son, Dishonest Steward, Guests to the Wedding Banquet, the 10 healed Lepers; in the communal interest extended to Samaritans (those of different ethnic and religious background), to women (those whom tradition has marginalized), to the poor (those left forgotten in transaction and acquisition, to the lepers (those ritually and culturally excluded).  To read Luke is to be given eyes to see by contrast abroad in America today an emerging culture of denigration–denigration of immigrants, Muslims, and Mexicans–and to weep.  It is not enough, though it is true enough, to blame this almost exclusively on one particular candidate and one particular party. (repeat).  No, the mirror is held up for us all, for all of us in some measure have contributed to a culture that is uncultured, a rhetoric that is rancorous, a politics that is impolitic, an increasingly uncivil civil society, a rejection of hard-won experience and preparation in favor of careless entertainment and tomfoolery, a preference for cruelty over beauty, and a robust willingness to throw away hundreds of years of painstakingly crafted institutional commitments and social norms. You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but cannot fool all of the people all of the time.  Will Lincoln’s proverb hold in our time? You may well hope so, though you may well doubt so.  I doubt it.  Finally, as Jeremiah looks upon Zedekiah, we confess, we get the leaders we deserve.

More personally, in the Methodist tradition which built Boston University, other than worship and the study of Scripture, the most cherished practice of faith is tithing:  annually giving away 10% of what you earn.  The reason for the centrality of tithing—today, sadly, honored largely in the breach, even in Methodism, now, to our shame—is set for us in today’s harsh parable of Lazarus and Dives, the harrowing horror of what it means to forget the needs of the poor.  Such forgetfulness is a persistent threat in the heart of all human life, but is especially challenging for those who have much, and so are sheltered, routinely, from the anxiety of poverty, the hurt of exclusion, the pain of hunger, and the despair of lack and loss.   Sin is the unwillingness on a weekly basis to practice generous kindness, to tithe.  Luke reminds us so.

And Jeremiah?  Now that his beloved country is in ruins (are we beginning across our own cultural landscape to catch a glimpse of his woe?), Jeremiah does something great.  Remember:  the city is burned, the temple is wrecked, the population is slaughtered or in chains, and the nation is destroyed, soon to spend two generations in Babylon, by the rivers of Babylon, where to sit down and weep, as tormentors mock, ‘sing to us one of the songs of Zion’.  But Jeremiah buys a plot of land.  One day, a long time from now, he muses and prays, there will be some manner of restoration: ‘I cannot see it.  I cannot hear it.  I cannot prove it.  Sometimes I cannot believe it.  But, hoping against hope, I will buy some land, and someday, somebody, somehow will use it’.  This is faith:  to plant trees under which you will not sleep, to build churches in which you will not worship, to create schools in which you will not study, to teach students whose futures you will not know—and to buy land which you will not till.  But someone will.  Or at least, that is your hope.  That is why, as darkness is falling across a confused, frightened, and benighted land, you have done some things this year.  You offered a morning prayer.  Good for you.  You sent a check to support some leader or candidate.  Good for you.  You went and volunteered to make contacts and calls. Good for you.  You spoke up and spoke out, regardless of the fan mail, family disdain, and other costs.  You did something.  Will it make a difference?  It may not.  But it does make a difference, for you, if for no one else.  Go and buy your little plot of land.

Explanation

For more than a decade, Music at Marsh Chapel has cultivated our own little plot of land – the rich and fertile soil of the vocal works of Johann Sebastian Bach. The endeavor around the recreation of this extraordinary repertoire by our players and singers is its own form activism, faith, tithe, and over time and shared commitment, Jeremiah might even behold restoration.

This year’s cantata series explores four works Bach composed for New Year’s Day. At the highest altitude, these are joyful and celebratory cantatas — at least in the outer movements. To be sure, the inner movements can be counted on to remind us of our sin at some point. Today’s cantata – No. 41 ‘Jesu, nun sei gepreiset’ or Jesus, now be praised, numbers among the great Chorale Cantatas from Bach’s second annual cycle of cantatas in Leipzig. In these remarkable works, the great hymns of the faith – Chorales – are the Alpha and Omega. Today’s cantata sets the outer verses of Johann Herman’s 1593 text exactly in the opening and closing movements, while paraphrasing the inner verse of the chorale in the arias and recitatives within the cantata.

The passing of the old year and the welcoming of the New Year takes on various dimensions for each of us, and for Bach and his congregation, they were reminded that as the Old Year is analogous to the Old Testament, the New Year reveals the hope of resurrection from the New Testament — Law and Grace. And perhaps a more obvious temporal analogy, our mortal life on earth is the old year that passes, and the New Year represents our hopes for the life eternal. For this reason, the central text offers a prayer for mercy and salvation upon the believer’s death. Finally, the bass soloist reminds us that this mortal life is constantly thwarted and threatened by Satan’s works, potentially jeopardizing our hope for life in eternity, the New Year of our soul.

Musically, this cantata is extraordinarily rich in invention and detail from the first measure to the last. For the central aria, our principal cellist Guy Fishman plays a five-stringed cello called a Cello Piccolo with music that seems to depict our earthly toil in sincere and honest strains of remarkable difficulty. And the joyful soprano aria heard immediately following the opening choral movement features dance rhythms and a choir of merry oboes.

However, nothing can sufficiently prepare the listener for the glorious opening movement. The chorale is faithfully rendered in long tones in the soprano part with truly astonishing invention all around. Here Bach gives us bold concertante writing in the latest style (think New Year) with the final two lines set in the old contrapuntal or fugal style, before recasting those lines to the new music. Truly a dialectic of old and new styles transformed by their relation to one another.

As academic communities at schools and colleges throughout the country commence a new year this month, they too engage in this dialectic of the hope of new beginnings forged in the knowledge and wisdom of those who have gone before. And of those who have gone before, few surpass Bach’s capacity to reveal new heights and hopes for our daily strivings and our future together.

Application

You may want and need to shift your perspective, to alter your angle of vision, to see things from even higher ground.  Some measure of health or salvation, or mental sanitation may require it.

The Matterhorn is the most beautiful mountain on our planet.  Today, the beautiful, tomorrow, the true, the next day, the good.  An excellent view of the majestic Alpine peak may be found in Zermatt.  If and as memory serves, you can drive to Zermatt—rent an old deux chaveaux—a pristine Alpine village, snow laden in the summer, its shops and hostels wind swept and well kept.  The view from Zermatt is fine.  You can share it in physical comfort and communal fellowship. The Matterhorn!  Just before you.

There is, though, a better view, for which though you will need to shift your perspective, to alter your angel of vision, to change your location, in order to see things from even higher ground.  High up to the southeast, in the craggy mountain cliffs, there is, farther up, the small hamlet of Gornergrat.  To get up there, if memory serves, you must take an open air, chair by chair, chain rail car, ascending at 45 degrees, up and up, and on up, nearer to the summit, and far closer to your ideal, aspirational vies of beauty.  Or truth.  Or goodness.  Acrophobics need not apply.

The ride is short but terrifying.  At the top, mid-July, thick snow, hard ice, brisk wind and a coldness of cold await you.  As does the mesmerizing thrall of the mountain.  The Matterhorn.  Step gingerly out of the old open rail car.  Get your footing, your mountain sea legs.  Raise your gaze.  Raise your gaze.  Raise your gaze.  There.  A new way of seeing, and so of thinking, and so, then of being.  Health and sanity may impel or compel you to higher ground.

My sixteenth book will be published this fall, a collection devoted in part to the New Testament, in part to preaching, and in part to ministry—Bible, Church, World as we in the halcyon younger days of the World Council of Churches intoned.  None of the sixteen is a best seller, none a game changer, none found in every home.  All but two are still in print, and several in both print and cyber forms.  They are the work of Zermatt.  Fine.  The view from Zermatt is fine.  You can share it in physical comfort and communal fellowship.  The Matterhorn!  Just before you.  But.  But.  But.

As an acrophobe the rail car ride up is not appealing.  But it is time for me to move on up, to take higher ground, to climb on to Gornergrat.  Ice.  Snow. Cold. Wind.  That means the prospect of one more, a very different book, for a very different look.  A different look takes a different book.  It will be, here, for me, the work of the next decade, in pulpit and study.  As you cannot get to Gornergrat but through Zermatt, this project depends in full on all that came before:  books on the New Testament (John), on preaching (Interpretation), and on ministry (prayer and practice).  The next climb is up on to craggy cliff village—ice, snow, cold, wind—of an overture to A Liberal Biblical Theology.   Here is a marriage of Rudolph Bultmann and N.T. Wright., a partnership of Paul Tillich and (the early) Karl Barth, an aspirational possibilist (that is Methodist) correlation of history and theology, Bible and Church, accessible to the average reader.  Our climate, nation, and denomination, all in peril, hang in the balance.

-Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music

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

posted in Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music, The Bach Experience, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 09.29.2019 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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Luke 16:1-13

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Luke

Before us today stands Jesus Christ, robed in mystery and announced in a strange parable.  There is no easy interpretation for this parable.  Why is its hero, my favorite accountant, commended for dishonesty which is a breach of the ninth commandment? We do not know.  Why is his master happy to be cheated?  We cannot say.  Why is an accountant’s swindle upheld, in this parable here attributed to Jesus, as a preparation, somehow, for heaven? No one can tell.  What, please, does verse 9, as tangled in the Greek as it is in your bulletin, intend (“Make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous mammon, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal habitations”? ) We do not see.  What possible connection is there between the story, and the four trailing proverbs?  Little at all, except that they all deal with money.  How did this story make it into Luke’s travel narrative?  It is not clear.  Is this dishonest manager our role model, in the church, as we try to “manage wealth in the direction of justice?” (Ringe)  Perhaps!  And, most of all, where is Jesus, The Divine Mystery Incarnate (Spirit and Presence Both) to be found in our reading today? The parable of the dishonest steward has really just one meaning, and it is very good news:  Faith gives spiritual health in the midst of change, including the transition into college life, in the voice of Presence Spirit, Spirit Presence.

Let us recall the mystery of Christ, the Stranger in our midst.  Spirit.  Presence. We can announce his spirited presence today, again today.  He is among us:  dealing with issues we dismiss…speaking with people whom we dislike…considering options we disdain…selecting vocations that do not yet fully exist…expanding spaces that we constrict…accepting lifestyles that we reject…attending to possibilities that we ignore…approaching horizons that we avoid…healing wounds that we disguise…questioning assumptions that we enjoy…protecting persons whom we mistreat…making allowances that we distrust.  So, strangely, is He among us.

For the mystery of Jesus Christ falls upon us, approaches us, and enchants us, when and where we least expect Him.  In the strange world of the Bible.  In the midst of the community of strangers that is the Church.  Hidden in the brutal estrangement of our personal life.  Here, behold, the Lord Christ Jesus, “L’Etranger”, “The Stranger”.

His spirited presence is neither simple, nor surface, nor easy, nor fundamental, nor shallow, nor ideological, nor one dimensional, nor ahistorical, nor primarily political.  He draws us, lures us, and enchants us.  So he sets us free.

For St. Luke in chapters 9 to 19 has captured a collage of portraits of Jesus, “On the Road”.  We are on a journey, as Luke reminds the church.  We are making a trip to the promised land.  We are headed in a certain direction.  With our spiritual forebears, we are traveling, on a journey.  Israel left Canaan to go to Egypt to find bread.  There they became the slaves of Pharaoh.  But Moses led them out, parted the Red Sea, and guided them through the wilderness.  He brought them the ten commandments.  At last, he sent them forth, with Joshua, to inhabit the land flowing with milk and honey.  In such a glorious land, they hunted and farmed.  They even built a temple, and chose a King.  Samuel, Saul, David, and Solomon reigned, but were followed by others less wise and less strong.  Although the prophets did warn them, listen to Jeremiah today, the children of Israel left their covenant and their covenant God, and at last suffered the greatest of defeats, the destruction of Jerusalem and the return to slavery in Babylon, 587bc.  On these hundreds of years of history depends the cry of Jeremiah, “O that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep, night and day, for the slain of my poor people.” (9:1). Like Israel marching in chains to Babylon, and then trudging home again two generations later, we people of faith are on a journey, from slavery to freedom.  Faith heals, manages, handles the hardest of change.

Luke’s mysterious Christ meets us today, hidden in the maelstrom of wild, unexpected change and economic crisis.  On the road, the journey of faith, the Gospel of Luke has most to say, and Jesus most regularly addresses, the issue of money.  Remember how Luke traces the Gospel.  Mary in the Magnificat honors the poor.  John the Baptist preaches justice, in the great, unique tradition of the Hebrew prophets, from Amos forward.  Isaiah’s words and hopes are affirmed.  Jesus blesses the poor, not just the poor in spirit, in his ‘sermon on the plain’.  Remember the parable of the ‘rich fool’, “tonight is your soul required of you, and these riches, whose shall they be?”  Luke sets Christian discipleship at odds with, in contest with, anxiety about possessions.  And, by the way, get ready in conclusion, to meet Lazarus and Dives.  Jesus Christ calls us to manage our possessions toward justice, both as a community and as a community of faith and as individuals.

Two Christological Perils

            Our son Ben said once of his grandfather, ‘I love to hear his voice’.   One year, his grandfather survived a nearly mortal illness.  There are not words to convey the joy, the gratitude, that we his family experienced in his escape.  Those who have been on the brink of death can appreciate the gospel promise, ‘I give them eternal life and they shall never perish and no one shall snatch them out of my hand’(John 10:28).  Not all such deliverance has an earthly horizon.  Some freedom and some grace must await us across the river.  And I don’t mean Harvard.  But some comes to us here.   He and my mother lived here in Boston 1950-1953.  In 1975, he wrote the following sentences in the back of a book.

            The temptation for the people of the church in every age is to believe: a) Jesus is only human; b) Jesus only appeared to be human.  For those who settle on ‘a’ there is no power, no mystery, no pull to pry them out of much of life.  For those who choose ‘b’ there is no hope because mankind cannot ascend the heights of divinity.  Both are heresies.  The pious wise men of 325ad  saw, though they could not explain it, that he was fully human and fully divine.

            My parents departed from Boston in 1953 just as Howard Thurman came to town.  Rev. Peter Gomes recalled, one year, as he and I exchanged pulpits, that George Buttrick and Howard Thurman used to do the same.  Thurman’s voice carries us into two dimensions, two realms of reality.  He was 100 years ahead of his time, 50 years ago, so he is still 50 years ahead of you (and me).  He evoked the Christ of Common Ground, transcendent, universal, shared, unconfined, free.  He evoked the Christ of the Disinherited, immanent, particular, grasped, embodied, back against the wall.  Two Christs.  Spirit and Presence.  Calling out to you to know the grain of your own wood, not to cut against the grain of your own wood…

                        We turn for support to Howard Thurman.  To his book, THE SEARCH FOR COMMON GROUND.  To his book, JESUS AND THE DISINHERITED.

1. Thurman and Transcendence:  The Search for Common Ground (Hillary)

Spirit.  Hillary, what does Howard Thurman say about Spirit?

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)

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).

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)

In the voice of Howard Thurman, 100 years ahead of his time 50 years ago, there is a regard for mystery, silence, presence, the transcendent.  One in kinship with all of creation. One in kinship with every human being, so that nothing human is foreign to us.  One in transformative engagement with our natural world, our home, our condition, our circumstance.  One in openness to the great differences and diversities of personal, that is to say religious, expression, including myth from long ago and far away.

The Spirit.

1. Thurman and Immanence:  Jesus and the Disinherited (Mahalia)

Mahalia, what did Howard Thurman say about Presence?

‘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)

‘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.  If a man’s ego has been stabilized, resulting in a sure grounding of his sense of personal worth and dignity, then he is in a position to appraise his own intrinsic powers, gifts, talents and abilities.  He no longer views his equipment through the darkened lenses of those who are largely responsible for his social position’ (JATD, 53).

The basic fact is that Christianity, as it was born in the mind of this Jewish teacher and thinker, appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed…In him was life, and the life was the light of all people…Wherever this spirit appears, the oppressed gather fresh courage; for he announced good news that fear, hypocrisy, and hatred, the three hounds of hell that track the trail of the disinherited, need have no dominion over them.

The Presence, as well.

An Invitation

How will you live out the deep river truths, spirit and presence?  How will you live down its opposition, however you understand it?  Have you truly intuited the brevity of life?  Have you really absorbed the capacity we have as humans to harm others?  Have you faced the dualism of decision that is the marrow of every Sunday, every prayer, every sermon, every service?  Are you ready to make a break for it?  Are you ready to discover freedom in disappointment and grace in dislocation?  Are you set to place one hand in that of The Spirit and the other in that of the Presence?

As Director Katherine Kennedy once said, "The beauty of Thurman is that he wasn't trying to convert people to Christianity. Rather, he wanted people to see that there is a common ground we can reach by respecting one another's differences, while still holding onto those beliefs that are uniquely ours."

Coda

Jan and I came over here to Boston fourteen years ago, in order to invest the last quarter of our ministry in the next generation of preachers, teachers, ministers of the gospel.  You hear today voices that will change the world for the better.  A few years ago, I asked in Thurman fashion a half dozen undergraduates to say something about Jesus.

Tom, what did they say?

Jesus

is all the world to me…

loves me…

is perpetually ripe….

means freedom…

shows us that self giving love is the way to life…is my transforming friend…

has got my back…

is the consoler of the poor…the lamp of the poor …

is unconditional love…

is the constant companion on life’s journey…

My greatest gift…

Patient pursuer….

In love with us….

the Hound of Heaven…

Friend on the Journey….

challenges us because he loves us…

brings out our best self…

He is…

Known in the promise of this season

Reflected in the joys of autumn

Overheard in the words and vows of commitment

Expanded into the lengthening evening daylight

Enjoyed in the gatherings of families and friends

Celebrated in the ceremonies of completion

And carried forward from this hour of worship and day of remembrance 

In the words of Emily Dickinson:

I stepped from plank to plank
A slow and cautious way;
the stars above my head I felt,
About my feet the sea.

I knew not but the next
would be my final inch.
This gave me that precarious Gait
Some call experience.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 09.22.2019 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28

Luke 15:1-10

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posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 09.15.2019 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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Jeremiah 18: 1-11

Luke 14: 25-33

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‘One small step for (a)man, one giant leap for mankind.’

            Our steps fifty summers ago were up and down the red rock mountains of Cimarron NM, and Philmont Scout Ranch, including July 20, 1969.   We ascended that day the sheer rock cliff known as the ‘Tooth of Time’, fourteen fourteen year olds and a beleaguered kindly insurance man scoutmaster.  ‘They should be on the moon by now’, he said.   But the detail we would only learn coming out of the wilderness some days later.

 ‘We choose to go to the moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard.’  Hard.

            That was said in a New England voice, with a New England accent, by a young, imperfect but brilliant New England President, who could celebrate Washington DC and its combination of northern charm and southern efficiency, and could compliment a room full of eminent dinner guests by saying they were the most intelligent dinner gathering ever convened in the White House, with the exception of those evenings when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.  He was a war hero, but an accidental one, as he said that he became such in a simple way: ‘they sank my boat’.    His wife could speak French, charm Royalty, set fashion directions, comment on musical selections, and light up a room, and the globe, with a smile.  He said, in introduction, ‘You will recognize me as the man who accompanied Jackie Kennedy to Paris’.   Grace.  Charm.  Elegance.  A fit for the office and for the house and for the role.  Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.

            Decision, self-sacrifice, service above self.  The greater good.

            And look at us now. Look at our national ethos, culture, rhetoric and leadership now.

            SMH.  ‘Shakin’ my head’.

            We know better.  Or at least you do, New England.   You know better.

            Out on the Tooth of Time we looked at the stars on that night, July 20, 1969.  The world of possibilities in the world around us flickered and sparkled and blazed.   It asked of us a certain height.

            The Gospel, Luke 14, interpreted here bears up under the weight of shame, of bitter conflict, of family feud.   The Gospel gives you the grace to endure, to withstand, to withstand when you cannot understand.  And its means to such a saving end?  Arithmetic.  Counting.  Counting the cost.  Hear the Gospel of Luke 14, the saving power of arithmetic.

Exposition

            Count the cost.  Ahead of time, count the cost.  By way of illustration:  in business, and in war.  In war that is big business and in business that is warfare.  And in everything in between.  Count the cost.

            Do the arithmetic, study the detail, count.

            You, careful listener, you recognize that Luke 14: 25-33 is not Jesus talking, but Luke writing.  You realize that Jesus left no written record, like Socrates in that.  You recognize that he spoke Aramaic, not Greek, and whether or not he was literate.  You recall the arithmetic of his life, death and destiny, the years 4bce to 33ce, and the distance of those from our reading, Luke 14, in 85ce, to the earliest (some would date Luke much later).  What we hear this morning is, in the first instance, not the voice of Jesus but the composition of Luke.   Of course, and granted, there will be traces of Jesus’ voice, along the way, Luke 9-19, especially, and especially therein the parables, his own mode of teaching, without which nothing.  In all, though, and on the bigger whole, this is not Jesus’ voice but Luke’s writing.  This makes all the arithmetical difference in the world, these 50 years and 2 opposed forms of rhetoric.

            Now, it may be, gazing again at the bulletin, or ruminating on the remembered reading of the Gospel, the high-water mark of our worship each Sunday, you begin to wonder, to ponder, to question.   Here are your questions, or some of them.

            Why this discussion of hatred, when the Gospel in other clothing is about love?  Why this denigration of family, when the family is one of the protected entities in the Decalogue:  protection of truth, of communication, of speech, of worship, of family, of life, of property, of marriage, of law, and of commerce?  Therein, whence the rejection of life itself, when otherwise the Gospel acclaims life, having life, and having life in abundance?   There seems to be some counting and accounting needed.

            More so:  What is the mention here of the cross?  Jesus in this narrative is preaching, teaching, healing, going about in Galilee and Judea a free itinerant prophet.  All of a sudden, here comes a word from much later, ‘cross’.  Was Jesus making a prediction that only he could see and understand?  Or is this a clue to the fountain and origin of this passage?  Cross?  Cross?  I thought we were sharing parables and blessing children and rounding up disciples.  Moreso, the cross is ‘one’s own cross’.  The writer seems to assume that all will get the reference, including you, and me, to the cross.  How all this talk about the cross when Jesus just now in Luke is teaching in parables and healing the sick, a long way from Jerusalem and ‘the cross’?

            Even more so:  How is it that all of a sudden, everyone around Jesus is expected to be a monk?  Ridding oneself of all, all, not most, not much, but all possessions?  All.  That’s at a lot, even in an era of tunics, ephods, camels, donkeys, sandals, fishing, shepherding and travel by foot.  All?  What is transpiring here?

            Nor does this seem metaphorical, in a way that our current preaching would likely choose.   Hatred—well, you know, not exactly hatred but mature self-differentiation.  Life—well, you know, not exactly life in the sense of breath and nourishment, but in the sense of deep meaning.  Cross—well, you know, not exactly crucifixion in the bloody and excruciating physical sense, but self-discipline, more in the sense of yoga.  Possessions—well, you know, not in exactly the form of car, home, bank account and pension, but in the sense of a general materiality, of not letting your possessions possess you.  No, actually Luke 14 does not seem or sound metaphorical at all, regarding hatred, life, cross, or possessions.  It sounds literal enough.

            Forgive what is only an interpretative guess, even less than that, yet after many decades of hearing these harsh words, even in Luke--the Gospel of peace, the Gospel of love, the Gospel of church, the Gospel of freedom—these are phrases that sound like the esoteric, ascetic, anti-worldliness of the emerging gnostic movement.  It is as if here, in Luke and Matthew, by way of Q, some measure of the enthusiastic pessimism, the bodily asceticism, the turning away from the world which we know in full in full Gnosticism, has grown up alongside the gospel, wheat and tares together sown.    There are strong parallels, almost identical, in the Gospel of Thomas, a gnosticizing document of about the same time as Luke. And there are strong parallels in Poimandres, a fully gnostic document of about the same time as Luke (Fitzmeier, Anchor, 1064).

            Uncompromising demands regarding self, regarding family, and regarding possessions may well be part of the life of faith, warns Luke out of the gnostic shadows of his sources.  Like all serious engagements, this spiritual one is not be entered into lightly, but reverently, discreetly and in the fear of God.  ‘Jesus counsels his followers not to decide on discipleship without advance, mature self-probing’.   It is as if Jesus is saying, ‘come along, I want to make this for you the hardest decision of your life’.

            So.  This may mean that the struggles under this passage of Holy Scripture, our sufficient rule of faith and practice, are from 85ad, not 30ad.  That there is in the emerging church a set of conflicts that require some arithmetic, some counting and accounting.  How much home, how much away?  How much kindness, how much honesty?  How much self-affirmation and how much self-abnegation?  How much materiality and how much spirituality?  Before you set out, to go to college or to take a job or to move in together or to get married or to sell the farm or to go to war or to build a tower, well, you might want to…do the math.

Explanation

            A few years ago, both at Marsh Chapel and in other pulpits, and not to worry if you remember it not, we will not be offended (much), we offered a sermon on the theme ‘Exit or Voice?’.  The heart of that sermon engaged a dilemma familiar to many, perhaps to you:  do I stay and lift my voice in a situation I find intolerable, or do I leave an intolerable situation and lose my voice to effect its change?   An economic study from MIT in the 1970’s, on a similar though commercially related thesis had partly inspired the sermon.  The question in the Gospels generally, about freedom and determinism, human will and divine will, gave the theological background to the sermon.

            The difficulty—exit or voice?—is in some ways a daily one for people of faith, in matters tiny and gigantic.   It requires arithmetic, and a counting of cost, an accounting.  Do I leave my church because of its current discrimination against gays, or do I stay to lift my voice in opposition to that discrimination?  Do I leave my party, perhaps the party of my upbringing, now become party of ethnic hatred and rhetorical ugliness, or do I stay and live to fight another day?  Do I leave regular relationship with my extended family out of real painful hurt occasioned in conversation, or do I stay and take my lumps and hope for sunshine at the next holiday gathering?  The determining impact and influence of conditions and situations, well beyond my control, is undeniable.  But so is the freedom, or sense of freedom, I feel to make a choice, make a decision, and make some difference, one way or another.  You will not be surprised to know that the theme still enervates, reverberates, and agitates, near and far.  Call it a daily cruciform arithmetic.

            Here is an example and application of our gospel lesson. Three years ago, summer 2016, David Brooks took time to consider a meaningful, cultural and personal issue, perhaps a newly nuanced though unintended approach to ‘exit, voice’, ‘at the edge of inside’.   He starts, though with different language, at the juncture of exit and voice.  Then, adds:  there’s also a third position in any organization:  those who are at the edge of the inside.  These people are within the organization, but they’re not subsumed by group think.  They work at the boundaries, bridges, and entranceways…I borrow this concept from Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest who lives in Albuquerque.  His point is that people who live at the edge of the inside have crucial roles to play…You are free from (a group’s) central seductions, but also free to hear its core message in very new and creative ways…A doorkeeper must love both the inside and the outside of his or her group, and know how to move between these two loves.  A person at the edge of inside can be the strongest reformer (think of Martin Luther King)…A person on the edge of the inside knows how to take advantage of the standards and practices of the organization but not be imprisoned by them…Now more than ever we need people who have the courage to live on the edge of inside, who love their parties and organizations so much that they can critique them as a brother, operate on them from the inside as a friend and dauntlessly insist that they live up to their truest selves.  (NYT, June 2016)

            One could hear, here, encouragement for University congregations and pulpits, at once on the edge of the academic inside, and on the edge of the ecclesiastical inside too.  One could hear, here, a question for you to take home, about your social location in gospel ministry.  Again, with Luke, a reminder of the need for some basic arithmetic.

Coda

            It is a matter of arithmetic, of counting and accounting.  Try to fit that for which you hope into the waist and shirt size of the clothing you have to put on.  Calculate.  (Such an interesting word, referring to counting pebbles!) Sometimes that counting and accounting is found inside and sometimes outside.  Sometimes this is about what you can hold in your hand.   We begin 21 minutes ago in New England, where also we shall conclude. Not all great poets and poems come from New England.  But…But you are now in New England.  So, to conclude, Robert Frost,  ‘And what I would not part with I have kept’.   Be able to count what you can count on your own experience.  And leave the rest.

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

 -The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 09.8.2019 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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Luke 14: 1, 7-14

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Tradition

We believe in God who has created and is creating, who has come in the true person, Jesus, to reconcile and make new, who works in us and others by the spirit…

We remember and respect the ten commandments, Thou shalt have no other God before me…

We recall and are nourished by the Beatitudes, Blessed are the poor in spirit…

We affirm the creed, though perhaps not in every phrase with all fulsome understanding, We believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth…

And we begin the day, the Lord’s Day, the first day Matriculation day, the lasting and every day of God’s mercy and peace and love with hope.  We are here to offer a word of faith, in a pastoral voice, toward a common hope.

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune without the words,

And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;

And sore must be the storm

That could abash the little bird

That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chilliest land

And on the strangest sea;

Yet, never, in extremity,

It asked a crumb of me.

(E Dickinson)

Matriculation

Last year on Matriculation Sunday, following the Matriculation service at Agganis Arena, three freshmen come up upon me, walking back this way on Commonwealth Avenue, now nicely restored, in the heat of that day, one year ago.  They could see that I continue to try to earn the prize as the slowest walker at BU, and they graciously accommodated my pace.  We walked.  We strolled.  We sauntered.  We were flaneurs, flaneur dans les route.  We lollygagged.  There is time, even in college, for real life.  One from China, one from Maryland born in Puerto Rico, one from Florida.  We talked about the Matriculation service.  They had gracious, kind things to say.  Especially the third, who said:  “Well, I am the first person in my family to go to college.  I am first generation student.  Today at Matriculation I learned that 17% of my class are first generation college students.  That really was meaningful to me.  And then I heard the President, President Brown say, that he himself was first generation college student, the first in his family to go to college.  And he has a PhD.  And he’s the President!”  Another asked her, “Do you want to be a college president some day?”  “If I have time, I might!”  What an exciting, joyful day this is, full of new possibilities.

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune without the words,

And never stops at all.

Parable

Walk with me some day, in a slow pace, and tell me your hopes, along Commonwealth Avenue.  Come alongside me and tell me what you hope to have time for down the road.

And listen now and then for a parable or two.  Jesus taught in parables, teaching not one thing without a parable, and today’s two are clear as a bell two millennia later:  one on humility and one on generosity;  be self-critical, self-aware, count others better than yourself, make space at the table; and, be generous, give to those who need, who cannot give you something back, tithe, remember those less fortunate;  one on humility and one on generosity.  Good reminders at Matriculation.

So taught and inspired, we will offer a third parable for the day, for those starting a four year journey.

Be careful.  Four years from now, may your happy memories be many, and your sour regrets be few.  I preached for a week in Ohio in June. After the Sunday service, a college classmate of mine came up and re-introduced himself, Lenny Baker.  My freshman year at Ohio Wesleyan, Lenny had taken me home for Easter break, in Canton, Ohio. He is now retired, married to a Methodist minister—just a great guy with whom I had sadly lost touch.  I had not seen him since graduation in 1976.   Later that week, at luncheon, he rose to tell a college story about us.  I admit I was a little nervous about what he might narrate!  He said:

We lived together our sophomore year together in the TKE house, which was a little wild.  Bob was often, though not always, a voice of reason.  One day some of us went up to the roof with a cat we somehow caught, for which we had made a parachute.  We were going to throw the cat over the roof of the three-story ante-bellum house, when he said, ‘Don’t do that.  You will kill that cat.  Look, instead, experiment. Go down in the kitchen and get a milk bottle, and fill it to the weight of the cat, then use the parachute first with milk bottle.  You will see then if your parachute works.  You know, pilot your idea first.’  Well the brothers of TKE were not inclined to delay and debated that for some time, but in the end voted for the experiment and fetched the milk bottle.  We latched up the parachute, counted to three, and threw the flying milk bottle off the roof of that three story—former stop on the underground railroad in mid-Ohio by the way—fraternity house.  It fell on the driveway and splattered into smithereens.  The brothers silently let the cat go free, with eight lives left to spare.  I said, ‘Lenny, I don’t remember that.  Is that true?’ ‘Bob, I have been telling that story for thirty years and it sure is true.  It is a happy college memory’.   

Of course, there is a Matriculation moral to this feline fable.  Be careful.  Think twice.  May your happy memories be many, and your regrets few.

Hope

May the Gracious God, holy and just, on this day of new beginnings, give us hope and joy and anticipation, as we in faith lift a common hope.

A common hope that our warming globe, caught in climate change, will be cooled by cooler heads and calmer hearts and careful minds.

A common hope that our dangerous world, armed to the teeth with nuclear proliferation, will find peace through deft leadership toward nuclear détente.

A common hope that our culture, awash in part in hooliganism, will find again the language and the song and the spirit of the better angels of our nature.

A common hope that our country, fractured by massive inequality between rich children and poor children, will rise up and make fine education and excellent health care truly available to all children, poor and rich.

A common hope that our schools, colleges and universities, will balance a love of learning with a sense of meaning, a pride in knowledge with a respect for goodness, a drive for discovery with a regard for recovery.

A common hope that our families, in some many ways divided, will sit at a long Thanksgiving table, this autumn, and share the turkey but also talk turkey and pass the potatoes but also pass along a word of kindness in a spirit of honesty.

A common hope that our decisions in life about our callings, how we are to use our time and spend our money, how we make a life not just a living, will be illumined by grace and generosity.

A common hope that our grandfathers and mothers, in their age and infirmity, will receive care and kindness that accords with the warning to honor father and mother that your own days be long upon the earth.

Today we lift in common, a hope not of this world only, but of this world as a field of formation for another, not just health but salvation, not just heart but soul, not just life but eternal life, not just earth but heaven, not just creation but new creation.

We sing with our forebears of old: Finish then thy new creation, pure and spotless let us be, let us see thy great salvation, perfectly restored in thee, changed from glory into glory, ‘til in heaven we take our place, ‘til we cast our crowns before thee, lost in wonder, love and praise

-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean

posted in Matriculation, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 09.1.2019 at 11:00 am