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Sunday
August 18

Summer Reverie

By Marsh Chapel

Ant

The beauty of summer, sub specie aeternitatis, and particularly in a climate, like yours, long in darkness and deep in cold, the beauty that is of the four score summers God gives you, at the largest extent of God’s favor, is itself a matter for parabolic teaching, in the spirit of the Gospel for the day. Let us meditate together today for a few minutes by taking a homiletical walk, down a dusty summer road, watching for a little beauty. In the mind’s eye, and with the sun upon our backs, let us meander a moment, and see what we can see. After all, Jesus taught in parables, ‘teaching not one thing without a parable.’

Start small. There in front of your left moccasin moves a lonely red ant, the lowliest of creatures, yet, like a Connecticut Yankee, bursting with the two revolutionary virtues, industry and frugality. Benjamin Franklin wrote, admiring such frugality and industry, and dubious of much dogmatic preaching, “none preaches better than the ant, and he says nothing.” A good reminder.

While we step around the ant, the little insect recalls others: grasshoppers, flies, locusts. Simple creatures. Some of our friends prefer the heat of the west, and its insects, to the rain of the east, and ours. The locusts, burning dry heat, flat arid landscape, and lack of water, out west, would seem to offer no competition. Yet, some love the virtue of the good people known there. Some like the simple rhythm of town life, and enjoy the simple summer gatherings—reunions, little league, band concerts, parades. “The people there—they are folks with good hearts.” And as Jesus taught his students, “if people have some measure of goodness themselves, think how good their maker must be.

Maybe that is the beauty of summer, to pause and appreciate simple, good people, folks with good hearts.

Berry

We can stop up the path just a bit. Raspberries, blackberries, all kinds of wild fruit are plentiful now. Jesus taught us to ask, simply, for bread and a name. We daily need food and forgiveness. Give us each day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins, for we forgive all who are indebted to us. What bread does for the body, pardon does for the soul. One of the gifts of summer is the time and leisure to remember this. A church should be fullest in the summer, for this reason, this recognition of our ultimate needs.

Our neighbor has baked some of these wild berries into morning muffins. We stop to savor them, with butter and coffee. We listen to one another along the path. So we are nourished, by one another, and made ready for the next steps in the journey.

Maybe this is the beauty of summer, to pause and make space for real worship, for that which can feed our hungers, and set us free for the next adventure.

Fence

Up ahead there is an old fence. For a river to be a river, it needs riverbanks high enough to contain the flowing water. For a lake to hold its integrity it needs a shoreline that stands and lasts. For a field to retain any semblance of usefulness, it needs fences to mark its beginnings and endings. For an individual to have any identity one needs the limits of positive improvement, as Jesus taught about perseverance, and of protective caution, as Jesus taught about times of trial. For a life to have meaning and coherence, it needs those riverbanks, shorelines, fences, and limits that give life shape and substance.

We can spend some summer time mending fences. Especially at a time and across a country so keenly divided, a house divided against itself. It is hard work, but utterly crucial. Keep your friendships in good repair, and mend the fences where they need it. Think, heal, write, love.

Some years ago, I came by this same old fence. I was walking with my dad, as it happened. We had some coffee and a muffin. Then we started off together, down the old road, he to walk with a gnarled walking stick, and I to jog after my own eccentric fashion. But for a mile up to the same fence, to the place where the road parts, we walked together. We shuffled and talked a little, remembering the name of a former neighbor, spotting a new garden planted, making a plan or two for later on. We remembered an old friend, a old style doctor, long dead. He remembered that Dr Thro came to visit him the day his mother died. “It’s hard when your mother dies,” he said, “it gets you right in the chest!” I remembered Dr. Thro swimming the length of the lake and, while he did so, barking various orders at the universe and some of this patients along the shoreline, riverbank, fence—along the virtuous limits that make a life. We came to fork, one taking the high road and one the low, and with that an embrace and a word and a glance and we were alone again. Now, along that fence, summer by summer, I walk with my dad again, feeling him beside me.

Maybe this is the beauty of summer, to set limits and keep them, to mend our fences and protect them, to honor one another in faith and love.

Cloud

This is a clear day, in our reverie, but even so there are a few dancing clouds, white and bright. We try to make sense of the summer, and to make space for the summer, and to honor this season, one that brings together meteorological splendor and theological insight. In our chapel, we put together different summer experiences—a wedding and luncheon one day, a talk on Summer reading another, a brunch to honor parents, dads and all, a singing Vacation Bible School for the Young and Young at Heart, a Holiday Brunch, an annual summer national preacher series, and fellowship each week on the plaza–to allow meteorology and theology to dance well together.

There is a dimension of possibility alive in the summer that is hard to approximate in the rest of the year. We alter our summer habits, not at all to suggest that devotion is less central now, for in some ways summer ought to be the most spiritual of the seasons, but rather to accommodate our life to the necessary rhythms of life around us.

It is astounding to hear again in the Gospel that the kingdom of heaven is hidden, small, lovely, precious, immaterial, consequential, and secret. But so Jesus teaches us, parable by parable. Summer is the season and devotion is the focus of all such wonder and possibility.

Maybe this is the beauty of summer, to pause and allow a fuller consideration of all the possibilities around us.

Breeze

A summer wind accompanies us as we walk farther down the dirt road. A fawn—or was it a fox?—darts into the brush. The smell apples, already ripening, greets us at the turn. More sun, bigger and higher and hotter, makes us sweat.

I guess every family has a family secret or two, that one subject that dominates every present moment by it the sheer weight of its hidden silence, that one taboo topic that somehow screams through its apparent muteness. Daddy’s drinking. Junior’s juvenile record. Grampa’s prison term. The so-called elephant in the room. True of nations, too, and businesses, and projects and even churches. You find it, finally, by asking gently about what is feared.

The human family has this same kind of family secret. Something we avoid discussing, if at all possible, something that makes us fearful, something that dominates us through our code of silence. It is our mortality. Our coming death is the one thing that most makes us who we are, mortal, mortals, creatures, sheep in Another’s pasture, not perfect because not perfectible, the image of God but not God, “fear in a handful of dust”. Yet we are so busy with so many other things that this elemental feature of existence we avoid.

In the face of death, we turn heavily upon our faith. It is the steady and warming wind, the breeze of the Holy Spirit, that keeps us and strengthens us all along the road. Here is the argument. If your children ask you for something, do you not provide it? And you are evil! (Not to put too fine a point on it!) Imagine, then, how much more God will provide for the children beloved of the all powerful, holy God. You are loved, beloved, graced, embraced—a child of the living God.

Maybe this is the beauty of summer, to number our days that we get hearts of wisdom, to measure the mystery about us and give over our imaginations to a consideration of our limits.

Neighbor

Walking along, you may conjure or contract a traveling bug. Shall we drive north? A popular refrain in Montreal runs like this: “Canada could have had the best of three worlds: British government, American industry, and French culture; instead, Canada collected the worst of all three: French bureaucracy, British economics, and American culture!”

But don’t you believe it. As that proverb’s tangled contents and tone of wry self-criticism tell, Canada has a great deal to offer you and me. We can learn from our northern neighbors. This is part testimony and part admonition: Take a look at the Dominion of Canada. In particular, let me suggest three things that we can bring across the border.

First, there is the Anglican Church of Canada. Its influence far exceeds that of its sister Protestant Episcopal church in the United States. Though still statistically small, Canadian Anglicanism in one sense is the ecclesiastical leader of its land. We United Methodists-especially those out of the Methodist Episcopal tradition-need to hear the voice of the Church of England. After all, we are called to honor our father and mother; where would Methodism be without its Anglican mother? In this age when theological judgment is so frightfully difficult, the history and tradition and liturgy of this parent church have much to offer us. To take just one example: We here south of the border make much of religious experience. But there are some things that should not have to be learned from experience. The richness of our Anglican heritage can remind us of this.

Second, there is Dr. Douglas John Hall, professor at McGill University in Montreal, former student of Paul Tillich, and author. His book Lighten Our Darkness sounds like a voice of realistic truth crying in pious wilderness. For example:

The test of theological authenticity is whether we can present Jesus as the crucified. To be concrete: Can one perceive in the Jesus of this theology a man who knows the meaning of meaninglessness, the experience of negation, the anguish of hopelessness? Does he encounter the absurd, and with trembling? Would a man dare to confess to this Jesus his deepest anxieties, his most ultimate questions? Would such a Jesus comprehend the gnawing care of a generation of parents who live every day with the questions: Will my children be able to survive as human beings?…Will there be enough to eat? Will they be permitted to have children? Would he, the God-Man of this theology, be able to weep over the dead bodies of little children in Southeast Asia and Brazil, as he wept over his friend Lazarus?…Would he be able to agonize over the millions of other beings-not quite little-children, fetuses-for whom there was no place; and over the mothers…Could he share our doubt: doubt about God, about man, about life, about every absolute? Could he understand why we cling to expectations that are no longer affirmed or confirmed by experience, why we repress the most essential questions? Would such a Christ understand failure? Could he participate in our failure? Or is he eternally above all that?

Douglas J. Hall, Lighten Our Darkness: Toward an Indigenous Theology of the Cross

(Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1976), 211-212.

Third, there is the United Church. It was formed in 1925 as a union among Methodists, some Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and other Protestant groups. Today it is a church of some 2 million members (in a country of only 30 million), built out of a combination of Methodist and Presbyterian policy. It is not a church without problems. But for those of us who are still interested in walking a little further down the road toward ecumenism, the experience of the United Church in both its victories and defeats offers a glimpse of what our future might be like. Its predecessor denominations, including Methodism, gave up their inheritance for a new future, gave up their name and habits and protections, for the joy of a better future, a church not only with a yesterday, but with a tomorrow.

Canadian tourism commercials entice us to the natural, scenic, and cultural wonders of Canada, our neighbor to the north, le Europe prochein“the world next door.” On a dusty, dreamy summer walk, I believe, we have at least three other reasons for interest: Anglicanism, Doug Hall, the United Church. Take a look.

Maybe this is the beauty of summer, to nourish our souls in the heart and heat of a looming decade of humiliation, with still nine years to go, and to learn from our smaller, little neighbor due north. Sometimes it can good to fall in love with the soteriology next door, come summer.

You

May the Good and Gracious God, in the beauty of holiness, make of all of us attentive people, simple and true in our virtues of the heart, nourishing and nourished in pardon, disciplined by hard even bitter fences of peace, inspired by gracious clouds billowing and high, and supported all the day long by a summer wind, a spirited faith in the face of death, and a bright willingness to continue to journey, travel, learn and grow. May we find a little summer beauty in the ant, the berry, the fence, the cloud, the breeze, and the neighbor. The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field.

-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 08.18.2019 at 11:00 am

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Sunday
August 11

Alive To Possibility

By Marsh Chapel

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Luke 12:32-40

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A Word of Faith

In faith, you are alive to possibility.

The haunting portrait of Hebrews 11, as much as any other passage of Scripture, calls out and calls up to us, to you: in faith, you are alive to possibility. In the imagination of the Biblical Writer of Hebrews, unknown to us, himself anonymous, there is the pantheon of those who came before us, alive to possibility. They waited, and did not see. They expected, and did not receive. They looked forward, but were not satisfied. But. They were alive to possibility, which is faith, being alive to possibility, and which is daunting, haunting, searing and wearing. Faith closed the door to apathy and ignorance as choices for living. Faith commands the road forward, a road of heavy heart, and daily dismay, and earthly ennui—awaiting like those figures of old, a better world, a better day, a better life. They died without seeing it, in full. But from a distance, waiting, they saw and greeted. On those days when you are tempted to throw in the towel, to retreat, to shuffle off the mantel of possibility, look back for a moment, and remember all those who lived in faith, alive to possibility, even and especially when that love was at least temporarily unrequited. The promise and the task of our life in community, of your life at its best is just this: in faith, you are alive to possibility.

My father, dead now 9 years, had a salty way of speaking truth. One year he graciously came to play in a golf tournament our church had set up as a fund raiser for mission and children’s work. About 50 men spent the day riding around plunking balls into the woods, or beyond, hoping against hope that our proven ineptitude for the game would somehow be momentarily overcome by unearned prowess. This did not happen, not any year. Late in the day, with a 25 foot put looming, I said, ‘Dad I could sink this.’ He answered, ‘Yes, son, you could. But you won’t. He was right in the second phrase, and also right in the first. You could. In faith, we are alive to possibility, even when we cannot see it, and do not calculate its immediate arrival. Perhaps especially then. Faith is painful, for it includes living with endless contention, intractable difference, and seemingly incurable illness, all under the lasting horizon of the possibility of something different, better, good and right. Yet, as yet, unseen. Today, across this great country, one might say, we feel this keenly. Faith—things hoped for, not seen.

The strange world of the Bible, in the large much stranger than we usually account it, come Sunday, opens us again to this same ringing affirmation in Luke 12. Be alert. Be prepared. Live on the Qui Vive. For you never know. The earliest rendering of this may have been in the apocalyptic teaching of Jesus, awaiting the coming of the Son of Man himself. But the clearest rendering comes from decades later, as the church prepares itself in the face of, shall we say simply, difficulty. The waning but not yet absent expectation of the Messiah’s return, and soon and very soon, prompts commands about discipleship, about heavenly hope, about impending judgment, about the middle of the night. And the later still and abiding rendering, ours too today, on top of what Jesus may have said, and on top of what Luke clearly wrote, say 85ad, is just this. To live as a community in faith, to live in faith is to bear the cross of possibility: in faith—and you have no choice having been captured by the confession of the church, and the gift of faith, for faith is always and ever and only a gift—in faith you are alive, painfully, to possibility. It is true. Things could be a whole lot better. Isaiah once foretold it. Wash yourselves. Make yourselves clean. Remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes. Cease to do evil. Learn to do good. Seek justice. Rescue the oppressed. Defend the orphan. Plead for the widow. The Biblical command to do justice is as plain as the nose on my face. And underneath it is the abiding great deep roiling sea of possibility. Yes, you could. You may not. But you could. Are you sure you want to live with the daunting, haunting reality, in faith, of possibility? Much easier to live without it, Ecclesiastes not Isaiah, Calvin not Wesley, depravity not possibility. Yet here you are, alive in the pew, listening on the radio, wondering again about faith.

In faith, you are alive to possibility. A word of faith.

A Pastoral Voice

For those here or listening, for those in the orbit of ministry of Marsh Chapel, these things are even a little bit harder. For we are not, from this pulpit and in this faith community, interested in rigid orthodoxy on the one hand, even newer forms of righteously indignant and progressive orthodoxies, nor in secular humanism, or post religious humanism alone, on the other. We baptize. But here we hope that the baptized in holy water will one day be swimming in a cultural sea of clean water. Why the cleansing of baptism, only to throw the faithful out into a sewer? No, we are of the liberal perspective here, the now largely attenuated desire to place tradition and experience in dialectic, in dialogue, to affirm a faith amenable to culture and a culture amenable to faith. Or at least the possibility thereof. Faith sets you free, but not loose, here. Here faith sets you free, but not loose.

As so many other Sundays over the last many years, we gather today in the shadow of violence, unnecessary and curbable violence, violence abetted by violent speech, cascading from national leadership for sure, but tragically finding a home and hearing, or least a guest room, in the heart of the heartland. In the liberal tradition, it is not enough to announce faith, pray and move on. Nor in the liberal tradition, is it enough to pronounce judgment, curse, and move on. Though both are more than tempting. No, our work, here, affirms a word of faith, yes, in pastoral voice, too, toward a common hope, afar. A word of faith in a pastoral voice toward a common hope. Those who hope for no pastoral application of the Biblical perspective to our shared dilemmas will find little warmth here. Those who hope for no religious reflection on the depths of our secular wanderings will find little warmth here. There are other pulpits.

Ours is, then, by necessity a pastoral voice. We are thinking of parents in Dayton Ohio trying to explain to their elementary age children why neighboring children and others are maimed, when assault weaponry or at least its ammunition could be outlawed. Some pastor is this week visiting there, you could imagine, about this, with a mom and dad raising kids. We are thinking of grandparents in El Paso, a city that is 84% Hispanic, worried sick about what may await their grandkids, given the deadly combinations of rhetorical hatreds and endlessly available weaponry. Some pastor is this week out making one of the two dozen weekly visits necessary for competent pastoral ministry, and praying with grandads and moms, in El Paso. Will it always be this way, it may be, that the parents in Dayton and grandparents in El Paso ask? Easier to shake your head, pray and move on, with shrug, saying, ‘I guess so’. Truer to tell the gospel. No, these things need not be, and one day there may be a better day, but many in faith have grown old and died awaiting that horizon. Tragically, these tragic horrors are not inevitable, they are communal choices with horrific consequences. We have chosen across the land to prefer it this way. But faith, hear the harsh gospel, at least faith preached in a pastoral voice, does not allow for this. In faith, you are, tragically, alive to possibility, including the possibility of something far better and far different.

Having enjoyed a pastoral conversation this week with her, I bring you greetings from El Paso, from Elizabeth Fomby Hall and her fine family, she who did so much a few years ago, to grow this Marsh community of faith as our director of hospitality. She and three boys are safe. The community there, as you did here in Boston, April 2013, is pulling together, giving blood, weeping with those who weep. She says hello to you and all and all y’all. And she and they are safe. For now.

In faith, you are alive to possibility. A pastoral voice.

A Common Hope

This summer our national preacher series has conjoured a witness to faith in community. It takes a common hope to undergird a common faith, a faith in community and through community. Your stained glass window here on the west wall of this breezy nave pictures St. Francis. Why do you single him out here, Marsh Chapel, to greet you every week, this Francis of peace? Why? It would be easier not to have his chafing voice of reminder so close to hand. It would be easier not to have to see him, alive to possibility, alive to life, working to make and keep human life human, there he is, with the birds in the beauty of the stained glass. He puts a demand, a hand, on me. He bluntly scolds me that I am not free to walk past 30 dead bodies in El Paso and Dayton and California, and order a café latte, and with a shrug muse that nothing can be done, and that I am not involved. No, that is the hard news of Luke 12. In faith, you and I are ever alive to possibility. God bless us.

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;

where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,

grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;

to be understood, as to understand;

to be loved, as to love;

for it is in giving that we receive,

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Toni Morrison took her last breath this week. Maybe her writing did not move you, as it did so many of us, though it seems hard to imagine that. She spent some lonely, cold dark winters early on Syracuse. As one wrote this week, ‘she also comprehended that…being nice is not the same as being good’. She wrote in part about ‘what it is like to be actually hated—hated for things we have no conrolt over’. She also celebrated laughter and humor, ‘a way of taking the reins in your own hands’. (D Garner, NYT, 8/7/19). She placed her characters, often, in small Midwestern towns. Like Dayton. Or like El Paso. She could be ruthless in her rendering of the truth. But not hopeless. For all the unspeakably unnecessary slaughter of the day, of her day, and now alas once more of our own, her voice did ring out again and again. Get up. Start over. Tomorrow is another day.

In 1974, my summer boss, my first real boss, for whom I ran a waterfront with one profound rule, ‘no drowning allowed’, was tragically killed in a hunting accident. I grew up with deer hunting all around, dad, uncle, neighbors. He was running the deer above Owasco Lake and his close friend mistook him for one. Koert Foster. I was studying in Spain. My mother sent a hand written—she has excellent penmanship—aerogram, carefully composed. “Bob, I am so awfully sorry to have to tell you this. Your dear boss, Koert, died yesterday. We know how much you loved him.” Every evening Koert took us water skiing, a kindness meant to divert our attention from what he could not pay us. And Koert gathered us every morning for breakfast. Every summer breakfast, a huge meal and necessarily so by the way, began with his table grace prayer, offered as his Springer Spaniel rustled and dreamed under foot, under the table. “Lord, we thank you for this another day. We thank you for this another morning. We thank you for this another day.” After Koert’s death, I realized that my then trajectory toward teaching Spanish Literature, and a graduate degree at Tulane, was not enough. Unamuno, Ortega and Calderon de la Barca wwere a good response, perhaps, but not my best response to God. Much as wanted to avoid the ministry, in some ways, his death compelled me, at age 20, impelled me, as a college senior, to think twice, to think again. His death made me alive to possibility. You never know. It may be that someone, here, or someone, listening, will be nudged by tragedy into ministry, awakened by tragedy to a new dawn of service. Nudged by Jesus, with Jesus, to bear the cross, the daily cross of possibility.

You never know. May these deaths make us alive to possibility, too. For this is another day. And Lord we thank you for this another day.

In faith, you are alive to possibility. Toward a common hope.

"Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks…You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour."

-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 08.11.2019 at 11:00 am

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Sunday
June 16

The God of Second Chances

By Marsh Chapel

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1 Samuel 15:34-16:13

2 Corinthians 5:6-17

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The God of Second Chances

The Bible is about failure and defeat.

Its stories, letters and teachings record ways people have lived with defeat. This makes the Bible difficult for us to understand. For we as a people have run and swatted and laughed our way past learning the language of failure. We don’t admit to it. We won’t accept it. We do not countenance it. So sermons, this one and others, which are fumbling footnotes to the Scripture, may hit us from the side if they hit us at all.

Paul is thinking, it may be, when he mentions “outward appearance” and “the heart”, of Samuel who learned that mortals look upon the outward appearance, but God looks upon the heart.

You remember Samuel’s story in 1 Samuel 15:34ff. Samuel didn’t want to be a prophet, but he got saddled with the job anyway. He didn’t want anything to do with kings, but he had to pick one.

The people wanted a King, just like we at our worst always long for some imperial leader, some imperious presence on which or on whom we may cast our concerns. Then we don’t have to live with our own freedom, our own birthright from YHWH I AM THAT I AM, the Sinai God of freedom.

Samuel revered the God of freedom and the Godly freedom in each person. In fact, he revered the people’s freedom more than they themselves did. So much so that he helped them choose, even when he knew they chose in error. You want a king? You shall have a king and much trouble.

Saul, by name.

Saul, trouble, came and went. Leadership is everything. But leadership is not dictatorship. Authority is not domination. Integrity is not willfulness.

Leadership, authority, integrity—they become real when they revere the God of freedom and the freedom of each person. Real leadership increases personal freedom for all.

So, Samuel, who knew about freedom and leadership, and who could have shouted “I told you so” to the children of Israel, instead went to Ramah, that place you remember from Christmas, of wailing and loud lamentation, and he wailed and lamented:

Why, O God, have you made my people a group focused on difference and not the common good? Why should there be a few rich and many poor? Why should our distinguishing characteristics be so undistinguished? Are we forever to love appearance above reality, image above heart? O my God, are we never to see your peace upon the earth, your gracious splendor among our people, your kingdom of love?

So, we may imagine, in a hot dusty cave near Qumran, Samuel wept. And wept. And wept. He cried in his beer. He cried in his soup. You get the picture.

Until, at last, he stopped. And as so often happens, once he stopped his weeping, his self-concern, a marvelous thing happened. God gave a second chance. He said, “Samuel you old codger—get up and head over to Bethlehem and see Jesse. I’m going to give you another chance.” Samuel went to the house of Jesse, in Bethlehem.

We worship a God of second chances, of new starts, of make-up exams, of the Letter to the Hebrews and pardon after baptism, of I forgive you, of surprise opportunities. In a way, in Christ, God has simply become Another Chance.

Early on Sunday morning, we walk up and down these aisles when the sanctuary is empty. We wonder about the congregation and the community and listeners.

We worry about a nation of have and have nots. We are anxious about a race torn people. We think of people. Some giving birth and anxious. Some breaking up and anxious. Some struggling to stay together, and anxious. Some aging and anxious. Some ill and anxious. Like Samuel, we have our hurts.

Up Samuel goes to see what God will do. God tells him that there will be a new King, of God’s own choosing, out of the family of Jesse, who had seven sons.

Samuel sees the first son, and thinks—yes, this must be the one, right name, right place, right pedigree, right education. But, again, something strange happens. Samuel, given to hearing voices, hears a voice. God says, “Easy big fellow, easy. Don’t look at the appearance. Forget the outside. Don’t be misled by the image. Look inside.”

All that glitters is not gold.

One can be a saint abroad and a devil at home.

Cleanse the inside of the cup.

Don’t judge a book by its cover.

Be careful, when the Lady Macbeths of life connives. Banquo was right:

‘Tis Strange

And often times to win us to our HARM

The instruments of darkness tell us TRUTHS

Win us with HONEST TRIFLES

To betray us in DEEPEST CONSEQUENCES

We see the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.

Meanwhile, back in Bethlehem, Samuel still has the seven sons on interview:

Job title: King of Israel

Profile: Perfect leader

Responsibilities: Bring salvation, justice, and peace.

Salary and benefits: commensurate with experience.

But he remembers: look on the heart. ELIAB. No. ABINADAB. No. SHAMMAH. No. And so on. Seven no’s. And he is limbo, he is in between.

It is tough to live in between. Like many who are here today can testify. Samuel would have loved to have settled things early. But he remembered the God of Another Chance, and trusted and waited, and hoped. Anybody can make a quick decision. Sometimes it takes more real courage to be indecisive. Anybody can decide. It takes guts to wait. Anybody can judge by appearance. But God looks on the heart.

Paul and the earliest Christians knew this perhaps better than anything else. They knew about being in between. Maybe that’s one reason why, providentially, their letters and writings have become our Bible. We are always a bit in between, and we need the confidence, daily, of Another Chance. The earliest Christians, Paul’s city Christians, were very much in between. They were often what the scholars call status-inconsistent, like Paul himself. A Jew, yet a Roman citizen. Educated, yet a tent-maker. So they were too: Women, yet rich. Artisans, yet slaves. They knew about being in-between.

And so the Apostle says:

In between the Body and the Lord

In between Sight and Faith

In between Home and Away

In between Judgment and Love

In between Crazy and Sane

In between One and All

In between Self and Others

In between Death and Resurrection

In between Old and New

In between Appearance and Heart

When you’re in between you know the joy of Another Chance. God sees the heart, and sees past appearances.

Well, dear old Samuel, is about ready to throw in the towel. He has been through all the sons of Jesse, and has not found the new king. He has found a lot of old king once removed, but nothing new. He is packing up his ephod and girding his loins and otherwise getting ready to shove off, when, again, something strange happens.

We worship the God of Second Chances.

If nothing else this morning, hear this Gospel.

Today is another chance for your family.

This week is another chance for you work.

This summer is another chance for our church.

This year is another chance for our city.

This decade is another chance for: our climate, our country, our denomination, our souls.

Where there is life, there is hope. And where there is hope, there is life.

God in Christ is Another Chance.

Realism and Idealism are not absolute alternatives. Often either you have both, or you have neither: witness Isaiah 60, John 3, 2 Corinthians 5, and the Sermon on the Mount. Things aren’t always as they seem.

SO LET US BE OPEN THIS SUMMER!

Read again Keith Miller’s, NEW WINE.

Visit Mount Washington or Bar Harbor in July.

Take a sandwich to the seashore.

We worship the God Of Second Chances.

Plant a flower.

Hug somebody.

Write a note.

Make a bequest.

I Believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.

And in Another Chance, God’s only Son Our Lord.

ANOTHER CHANCE!

To stand in God’s presence

To learn to help others

To have a meaningful life.

Meanwhile, back in Bethlehem…Samuel, turned as he was going, and looked at Jesse and said, “Are these all your sons”?

Jesse got that sheepish look we all get when the truth starts to come out. Well, yes and no. I mean these are all the grown ones, the ones who are worth looking at. “You mean there is a Second Chance?,” said Samuel so excited he dropped his staff and ungirded his loins and lost his ephod. “Well there’s the little guy, but we left him to tend the sheep.” “Bring him.”

And they brought David up. He was little, young, ruddy, handsome and beautiful, but mostly he had the right heart. A heart of songs and courage. A heart of love and strength. A real person. A real human being. Another Chance. Like the Tibetan Buddhists hunting for many years in the outback of the universe to find the Dali Lama. Like the birth of Jesus, we remember this Trinity Sunday, he also of Bethlehem. Like the moment your child came into the world. Or your grandchild. Like every single outburst and outcropping and intrusion and explosion and invasion of the NEW CREATION—there was David, Another Chance. And Samuel, old superannuated Samuel, could see what none of the young Turks could see—the heart. And Samuel wept, this time for joy, and said, “THIS IS THE ONE. Hire him.”

We worship Another Chance God.

Beloved, you are not last chance, anxious people.

You are God’s Second Chance people.

Let’s agree come Sunday. From now on, then, we aren’t going to look at anybody according to appearance, no matter how bad and no matter how good. I mean we once knew Christ by appearance, but then God raised him from the dead. So we look, as God looks, on the heart. By God, we will become real people, in a real church, in a real community, in a real nation. It takes a lot of idealism to become real. Anyone in Christ is new, not old.

Singing to the God of Second Chances, R. Niehbuhr wrote:

“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime. Therefore, we must be saved by hope.

“Nothing which is true or good or beautiful makes complete sense in any immediate context of history. Therefore, we must be saved by faith.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone. Therefore, we must be saved by love.”

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.16.2019 at 11:00 am

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Sunday
June 9

A Call to Ministry

By Marsh Chapel

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Acts 2: 1-21

John 14: 8-17

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A Call To Ministry

Awareness

To be supportive of our colleagues at Boston University, Marsh Chapel offered to gather and teach a co-curricular course this autumn on calling, titled Vocation. We weren’t really sure anyone would sign up. The course it turns out is full, with a waiting list. Why?

People it may be of all ages are alive to the possibilities of calling, of vocation, in life, which is the gift of the Spirit, on this day of Pentecost, the day of spirit. Where does our gladness meet the world’s deep hunger? With the Parthians, Medes, and Elamites of the first Pentecost, we today shall listen for that call, that calling, a call to ministry.

The first step in calling it may be is simply a sense of awareness. Awareness of the gift, the glorious gift of life. Have we forgotten the love we had at first? When did breathing become such an ordinary thing to our mind? And prayer? Have we begun with the spirit to end with the flesh? Has the vocation, the sense of self and soul that is the real marrow of Pentecost given way to drift, ennui, languid doldrums? Wake up! It is morning! Dawn is breaking! Come Pentecost. With great gladness that this is such a beautiful Charles River morning, such a glorious Boston morning, such a magnificent bright New England morning, we remember how Marilynn Robinson ended her gem of a novel, Gilead:

I love the prairie! So often I have seen the dawn come and the light flood over the land and everything turn radiant at once, that word ‘good’ so profoundly affirmed in my soul that I am amazed I should be allowed to witness such a thing. There may have been a more wonderful first moment ‘when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy’, but for all I know to the contrary, they still do sing and shout, and they certainly might well. Here on the prairie there is nothing to distract attention from the evening and the morning, nothing on the horizon to abbreviate or to delay. Mountains would seem an impertinence from that point of view

At dawn, with an aching heart, a full chest weight of the sense of …the Un-nameable. Radiance. Goodness. Wonder. Song. Joy.

In our Scripture lesson today, Luke is surely reminding his church, and reminding us, of the love we had at first. Every single one has a tongue of fire given, that makes effective connection with others. Everyone is called, has a vocation, a measure of spirit. You are an unrepeatable miracle, with your own fingerprint, gait, voice, and calling!

Pentecost is God at dawn, with life waking up, the birth in you of real awareness. This morning is the morning of tongues of fire, of firey tongues, of speech that burns, heals, warms, enflames, inspires.

Trust

A second step in calling, it may be, is to remember those you trust, those whose example, relationship, giving, and love have kindled in you real trust, and so, the foundation for calling. As Carlyle Marney used to ask, Who told you who you was?

It may be that you learned to love Jesus in the simple rhythms of the ordinary, in the pause before meals, with grace in his name. In singing hymns to Him, in church, at camp, in the car. In reading about his life in the Bible, and celebrating his birth in snowy December, and his destiny in snow melting April. In seeing older people love him, really love him, with their hands, and their money and their time and most especially with their choices, and within that, with their choices about things not to say, not to be, not to do. You may have learned to love Him like you learned to speak English, one lisp at a time, one dangling preposition at a time, one new word at a time. His music, it may be, played the accompaniment to all of the growth and decay of life around you. There was no wall of separation, neither artificial, nor sacramental, nor communal, between your life and his. His was your life, and your life was his. You came to know how to trust through people who showed how to trust by how they lived. Trustworthy people.

This could sound romantic, but it is not meant to be. Conflict, envy, hurt, gossip, anger, misjudgment, unfairness, tragedy, hatred, fear, abuse, neglect, betrayal, addiction, and loneliness sat around the table too—around the kitchen table, around the picnic table, around the coffee table, around the communion table.

Who came close enough to you to give a sense of trust, of confidence in the pull and push of life? Looking back, just now, in recollection, there was a closeness in the Christ, in the followers of Christ, who raised us—a pine needle Adirondack Christ, with the dawn scent of the forest primeval, a sunlit Finger Lake Christ, a blue-collar Erie Canal Christ, a blizzard Christ, an autumn peak Christ, a high summer Christ, a Christ with mud on Easter shoes. You could say that we were more Gospel people than Letter people, more Peter than Paul, more good Samaritan than justification by faith. Yet there was no forced or feigned distance between Jesus and us, between his life and our own.

He was with us in school, at home, in summer, growing, going away, coming home, in study, in marriage, in work.

Trust your experience. Honor your instincts. Listen to your heart.

Your relationships are crucial, crucial in the dawning of a sense of vocation. Whose closeness, whose friendship, could, can, do you trust? Relationships hold the key.

Last Sunday, a friend was ordained as a Rabbi, and some of us were graciously included in the service. Throughout the beautiful service, the power of trusted voices and people stood out. One said, For over thirty years, I have been in a life-long love affair witb Judaism, seeking a substantive connection to our tradition, and a close and meaningful relationship with God (Jevin Seth Eagle). Close, meaningful. These are the relationships that bring out our own-most selves. Another said, quoting another rabbi—you have to love the closeness here—I am afraid that God will ask me, ‘Zusha, why weren’t you more like ‘Zusha? And for us, come Pentecost: Bob, why weren’t you more like Bob? Mary, why weren’t you more like Mary? Felix, why weren’t you more like Felix?

Work

A third Pentecost step, coming toward calling, it may be, is to ask yourself very bluntly about your work. To level with yourself.

Say as a young adult now you are beginning to work, to hold a job, or in middle age to hold a new or different job. What counts in your work relationships? Can you honestly list what is meaningful and what is not about what you do? There are clues here, terribly important ones. Do not, do not enslave yourself to something that diseases your soul. Life is too short for that.

Richard Florida wrote recently (The Rise of the Creative Class) something that gives me hope about the future of the culture, the church, and our shared forms of ministry. All who are baptized are in ministry, one way or another. He surveyed people about what they want in work. Regarding work, he found, the question ‘what?’ is often secondary to the question, ‘with whom?’ Many people prefer the hair salon to the machine shop, for relational reasons. Hear his report on surveys of what people most want in work:

I..Responsibility: Being able to contribute and have impact. . .Knowing that one’s work makes a difference. . .Being seriously challenged.

Flexibility: A flexible schedule and a flexible work environment. . .The ability to shape one’s own work to some degree.

III. Stability: A stable work environment and a relatively secure job. . .Not lifetime security with mind-numbing sameness, but not a daily diet of chaos and uncertainty either.

Compensation: Especially base pay and core benefits. . .Money you can count on.
Growth: Personal and professional development. . .The chance to learn and grow. . .To expand one’s horizons. …cut new ground…feel at home…be creative…design your own work space…define your own role…have peer recognition…enjoy a work\life balance…

Growing segments of the population work for challenge, enjoyment, to do good, to make a contribution, and to learn. Such motivations will eventually eclipse compensation as the most important motives for work. (Robert Fogel)

Service

The dawning of awareness, a recollection of real trust, an honest inspection, leveling with yourself, about what you love in work, these three steps, come Pentecost, may just suffice. They are questions in calling to which we return all our lives, for callings change. Sometimes it is the second call, or the fourth, that takes us closer to our selves, to our own-most selves, to our calling, in baptism, come Spirit day, come Pentecost. Sometimes you have dreams, and then sometimes you have to edit your dreams. Awareness. Trust. Work. Yet for some there may be a fourth step this morning, or some beautiful summer morning at dawn. There may be a longing for service of a particular sort, a ministerial sort, a religious sort, as there was for those whom we ordained at Annual Conference yesterday.

A sense of longing deeper than existential awareness, the tingling sense of life, deeper than the trust relationships of friends and family, and deeper than the modes of meaning, in work, exploding from human hearts on Pentecost. This dawn day of spirit! This dawn day of fire! This dawn day of translation, interpretation, preaching, ecumenism! This dawn day of world Christianity! This dawn day of the church! This early morning dawn day! A deeper longing burst forth on Pentecost. Theirs, and ours, is a deeper longing, a longing for a relationship with God. And for some, who may find it hard to find any place else, that may come to a calling to ministry not in the large but in the little.

St. Augustine of Hippo at long last found himself, his soul, and his true vocation, by finding a personal relationship to God. Augustine entered the ministry. He became priest and bishop in North Africa about 400ad. He wrote 500 letters, 200 sermons, 2 great books. In some of these, he gave us great insight, and in some of these he left us confusion and perplexity. For Augustine, it was ordination that opened the future. For most us, baptism, confirmation and communion are more than enough. But then there are the harder cases, we might say, those who need more medication, something more. Augustine found that, or was found by that, in ordination. In an age, like ours, of intercultural conflict, Augustine made sense of faith’s highest vision…the city of God. In a culture, like ours, that wore the nametag of Christianity without fully understanding its meaning, Augustine celebrated…the grace of God. In a political climate, like ours, that honored highly individualized freedom and the power to choose, Augustine praised God’s freedom to choose, and acclaimed…the freedom of God. In a highly sexualized age, like ours, Augustine colorfully confessed his own wandering, his own mistakes, which, he attested, did test but did not exhaust the …patience of God. In a religious climate, like ours, which buffeted a truly spiritual belief, Augustine praised his maker, and so reminded the church of the proper…praise of God. His Confessions—perhaps part of your summer reading—his great autobiography, is a prayer—for the city of God, by the grace of God, in the freedom of God, to the patience of God, as the praise of God. Augustine found a relationship with God and was ordained. Or, better put, was ordained and found his calling, found a relationship with God.

It may be that the only way God has to fully connect to some of us, to get our attention, to mute our pride, to kindle our affection, is to get us into the ministry. Baptism and confirmation suffice for most. But for the real hard cases—the guy who wrote the book on pride, the gal whose picture is alongside the dictionary definition of sloth, the one who embodies real falsehood—like us, like Augustine...like me? like you?...God keeps ordination in reserve. Do you hear this Pentecost a call to ministry?

Frederick Buechner’s simple lines are oft-quoted, and should be:

The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.

-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.9.2019 at 11:03 am

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Sunday
June 2

Ascension Communion Meditation

By Marsh Chapel

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Acts 1:1-11

Ephesians 1:15-23

Luke 24:44-53

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Ascension Communion Meditation

When you cross into a new time zone, you may hardly notice the change. You drive from Boston to Kansas City, from Kansas City to Denver, from Denver to San Diego, and you cross in and out of different time zones. In the crossing you hardly notice the change. Boundaries are often invisible, arranged in the imagination. They are not though for that reason inconsequential. If you forget that the zone you are in has changed, you may arrive to buy gasoline an hour after the station is closed, and sleep in your car.

On the feast of the Ascension we cross into a new time zone, in the Christian year, and especially in the Gospel of Luke and Luke’s Acts of the Apostles.

Our Gospel and Lesson today acclaim the Ascension. Let us endeavor to understand their chiming joy, to interpret these pages of Holy Writ, to understand them by standing under them, as it were. For we are placing ourselves in apprehension of Love and Truth, here, so that the chance may emerge that our apprehension of Scripture may give way to Scripture’s apprehension of us. So that, grasping, we may be grasped, and, speaking, we may hear, and longing to love, we may be loved.

Luke by legend was a physician, a writing physician, like Oliver Sachs or Anton Chekhov. Luke, whom we follow in the Sunday readings this year, is the only gospel writer to add a sequel to his book. Luke’s Gospel precedes Luke’s Acts, and together they form some 25% of our New Testament. The Ascension, the translation of Jesus from temporary earthly location to lasting eternal home, lies somewhere close to the deep heart of what Luke, fore and aft, was out for, was after.

Our Gospel lesson today is the very end of the Gospel of Luke. Our lesson from Acts today is the very beginning of the Acts of the Apostles. So, we are at a major divide, a seam in the seamless garment of the Scripture. For Luke, all of time is divided into three parts, as Caesar’s Gaul, divisum est en tres partes. First, there is the time of Israel, that runs up to and includes the ministry of John the Baptist. Second, there is the time of Jesus, beginning with the Baptist and running up to, well, this morning, to the Ascension. Third, there is the time of the Church, which runs from right now on up to the end of time, when Jesus will come again. Luke has set the orderly account of Jesus, his preaching and teaching and healing, his passion and death and resurrection, in between Israel and the Church, John and the Ascension. Jesus has been making appearances and speaking of the kingdom of God, an extension of resurrection, but now he departs, making space for the baptism of Spirit, next Sunday, Pentecost, just as his life took wing in the baptism of water, at the hand of John the Baptist. Notice that John, and his baptism, are mentioned here, right at the moment of prediction of the baptism of Spirit. For Luke, all time is divided into these three parts.

You, careful listener, will have noticed though a problem. Luke has Jesus ascend twice, once in the Gospel, on the eighth day, as is the Gospel tradition, and then, again, in Acts, after forty days. So which is it? After some study, let us simply admit defeat, as Fr. J. Fitzmyr puts it: Why Luke has dated the ascension of Jesus in these two different ways, no one will ever know. (Anchor, 1588). Though from this pulpit today we might offer a thought. For Luke, chronology, as does geography, finally serves his theology, his preaching of the gospel. He is willing to admit of a bit of chronology confusion, or contradiction, in order to insist, to make clear his joyful sense of time in three parts. So, one ascension scene, Luke 24, it may be, makes clear the end of the time of Jesus. And the other ascension scene, Acts 1, it may be, makes clear the beginning of the time of the church.

With Luke in Gospel and Acts guiding us, we come to communion this morning, in the time zone of the church. Here we find bread for the journey, wine for the soul. Here we find sustenance to go on, in faith. In the example of forebears, in the ministry of ordinary saints, in the chance possibility of conversion—example, ministry, conversion—we recognize a different time zone, that which follows on Ascension, the time of the church.

Example

First, there is bread for the journey, wine for the soul, in sturdy example. St. Luke, perhaps more than any other Gospel writer, affirms the utter importance of leadership—in life, in community, in church. And leadership is example. Period. For Luke throughout all Acts, you can see and name leadership by the examples of Peter and of Paul. We too in our own time cherish exemplary leadership.

At morning prayer in the Harvard Memorial Church, in a special service for the Board of Visitors there and some others some 10 years ago, Peter Gomes, of blessed memory, and inimitable voice, offered a meditation based on his childhood breakfast memory.

At his home in Plymouth, over breakfast, the morning papers were quietly read, including the obituaries, most especially the obituaries. His mother emphasized these, Peter remembered. She pointedly asked, morning by morning, after the meal and the morning papers, ‘Anybody interesting die?’ By these, he went on to recall, Peter’s mother meant, especially, did any African Americans of note die, and were they eulogized in the papers? It was one of her ways, one guesses, of teaching and shaping the young Mr. Gomes, in the way of faith. She wanted him to learn from the experience and achievement of others. ‘Anybody interesting die today?’

The anecdote here loses much of its punch and penache without the developed Elizabethan intonation preferred and practiced by Professor Gomes. James Forbes, at breakfast and just before preaching here at Marsh Chapel on weekend, sent his greetings to Peter, and said, ‘Remind him sometime that he is not a 19th century Englishman’. It was said in good humor, in jest, and in that covenant of the preaching clergy wherein one, once upon a time, could josh one another. There was at one time, not so long ago a preaching siblinghood, wherein one man sharpened another like iron sharpens iron (Proverbs 27:17).

It is in this sense of memory, of reading the obituaries, of noting especially those who have come up the hard way, of honoring the gifts of others that we may ourselves be capable of honor in some way, that the life of James Alan McPherson appeared, in a newspaper recollection a few summers ago. African American son of the south, son of a carpenter and maid, graduate of an HBC in Atlanta, then of Harvard Law, McPherson decided against the law, and chose to write instead, becoming the first black author to win the Pulitzer prize for fiction. Yet his writing sometimes remembered the law. I don’t have to drink the whole ocean to know it is salty, and I don’t have to read all his books to know McPherson could write. As: (Mr. McPherson wrote in The Atlantic in 1978)

What Albion W. Tourgee, in his brief in 1896 against segregated railroad cars in Plessy v. Ferguson, was proposing, I think, was that each United States citizen would attempt to approximate the ideals of the nation, be on at least conversant terms with all its diversity, carry the mainstream of the culture inside himself. As an American, by trying to wear these clothes he would be a synthesis of high and low, black and white, city and country, provincial and universal. If he could live with these contradictions, he would be simply a representative American. I believe that if one can experience diversity, touch a variety of its people, laugh at its craziness, distill wisdom from its tragedies, and attempt to synthesize all this inside oneself without going crazy, one will have earned the right to call oneself a ‘citizen of the United States’. (N.Y. Times, 7/28/16,)

There is fine writing, a paragraph finely composed. McPherson remembered Plessy v. Fergusson, and in reading him, Rev. Professor Peter Gomes came to mind. Gomes haunted the reading, partly for what his mother taught him in reading at the breakfast table down in the cranberry bogs of Plymouth, and mostly because, by ricochet, and oddly, McPherson captured the very gift of our former neighbor and pastor from the Harvard Memorial Church. Gomes lived the contradictions without going crazy.

Ministry

Second, there is bread for the journey, wine for the soul, in spirited ministry. Hear the ringing gospel in Luke! On a morning when we think of 12 more good lives sacrificed to gun violence, in Virginia Beach, a violence that proper appreciation for public health and consequent adequate gun laws would largely erase, we need to hear fully the Lukan evangel: Salvation. Forgiveness. Peace. Life. Remember and repeat. Salvation. Forgiveness. Peace. Life. There is a better way to live, and better path forward to common good than we have yet embraced. Those who show us gospel grace in ministry convince us. Like Mona Lee Brock, who died this spring. I love her story, and I cherish her ministry, partly because it connects so strongly to our own past, and part of our summer life each year.

Mona Lee Brock had farming in her bones. “Farming you don’t learn from books,” she once said. “It’s not taught to you by a professor in a college. It’s taught by sitting in your father’s lap on a tractor. Or between your mother and father in a field. It’s from birth up, and it’s a part of you.”

And so, when the farm crisis of the 1980s swept across the nation’s fields and plains, when bankruptcies and foreclosures soared and crop prices fell, and when many farmers, who saw no way out, took their own lives, Mrs. Brock was moved to act.

She assigned herself the job of ad hoc emergency counselor to farmers. As someone who had grown up on farms and had lost her own family farm, she was sympathetic to their plight. She took thousands of calls around the clock, talking despondent farmers down from the ledge and devising strategies to try to save their farms.

Willie Nelson, the country singer and driving force behind Farm Aid, called Mrs. Brock “the angel on the other end of the line.” Around that time, Mrs. Brock, who knew most people in Lincoln County from her work in the public schools, invited many of them over to her farm one night so that they could talk about how to survive. Farmers soon began calling her at home when they were in trouble, starting her on her accidental career of counseling them. Her son said the suicide calls to his mother seemed constant, and often chaotic. Her overarching goal was “to make sure the family survived, even if the farm didn’t.”

“She led the way in terms of how to counsel people. People could relate to her and unburden themselves. She was on the same level as they were. She was very calming. She was a farmer.” When the Oklahoma Conference of Churches wanted to set up a suicide intervention hotline, it contacted Mrs. Brock

Asked what kept his mother going, Mr. Brock said, “The Bible and the Constitution.” A Baptist, she often prayed with her callers. And, he said, she cautioned those who were suicidal to think about their families and what it would be like for their children “if they sat down at the supper table and there would be an empty chair.” Mrs. Brock died at 87 on March 19, 2019, at her home in Durant, Okla. (Summarized form the New York Times, April 4, 2019)

Doesn’t it make you wonder what further dimensions each of our ministries could engage?

Conversion

Third, there is bread for the journey, wine for the soul, in the call to faith, in the experience of conversion. For Luke, in the epoch, era, and time of the church, this is the baptism of the spirit.

Now let us make this personal, for you and me. Somehow, we ended up in worship this morning, or we are listening to this service. Is there a nudge to faith here, or to renewed faith here, for you? Faith is a gift of God, given in ordinary time, Luke’s time of the church. Faith is the courage and capacity to get up and start again. It is a saving gift, a forgiving gift, a peaceful gift—the gift of life itself. Is there a nudge to faith here, or to renewed faith here, for you? Faith is a gift of God, to you.

Our neighbor in Newton, Malick Ghachem, had a letter printed Wednesday of this week in the New York Times. He is explaining his conversion to faith through the Catholic Church, at a time when many churches are awash in conflict, scandal and trouble:

The word church has two meanings in Catholicism: the institutional church (the hierarchy of priests headed by the pope), and the Body of Christ (made up of all of us who are Catholic). This second church is the one I joined. I follow the pope, but the institutional church has a distinctly secondary place in my understanding of Catholicism. I want to see the institutional church reformed, but since it did not draw me to Catholicism in the first place, it would be unlikely to deter me in the end from the more spiritual definition of the church.

Many of us could say the same of our own life journeys in faith, in our own communities and churches.

Coda

Are you hearing the voice of someone whose example gladdened your heart? Take this sacrament to your comfort.

Are you remembering the labors of someone who provided saving health to others? Take this sacrament to your comfort.

Are you at a moment, come Sunday, and for all the human foibles of the churches, when someone is calling your name, calling you to faith? Take this sacrament to your comfort.

Ye that do truly and earnestly repent of your sins, and are in love and charity with your neighbor, and intend to lead a new life, following the commandments of God, draw near with faith, and take this Holy Sacrament to your comfort.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.2.2019 at 12:44 pm

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Sunday
May 5

This Holy Mystery

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to hear the full service

John 21: 1-19

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In the Morning

The sermon begins with a recitation of Psalm 110, in gender neutral language.

Habits lead us forward. Come Easter. Death makes us mortal. Facing death makes us human. At the tomb. Come Resurrection. This is a Holy Mystery.

Jan and I have grave plots in the local cemetery of Eaton, NY. Where is Eaton? Exactly. It is nowhere. We bought them for $400 each, which is a real estate bargain. Especially when you amortize the amount over eternity! All need to plan ahead, one way or another. In addition to burial or equivalent, you will want to employ the Robert Allan Hill planning for post-retirement system: OOPS. O O P S. My mom always remembers the OOPS but then asks, what do they stand for? Order of worship. Obituary. Photo. Special papers (DNR, will).

Over the Hill from the fancy Hill post-retirement real estate there is a little town, Oriskany Falls, dating, like the graves in Eaton, from just after the American Revolution. Our friend’s dad, Russell Clark, a Colgate and BU graduate, loved life as a pastor there. One winter a farmer, his lay leader died, and the widow was not in church for a long time. The pastor tried to console and help, but she didn’t want company. Grief is a slippery dragon. If I had another two lifetimes I would spend half of one really studying, trying to understand grief. It is a dark stranger, an opaque mystery, individual to each. For Russell’s Oriskany Falls widow it was too. Then one day she called to say that she would like a pastoral visit. She told him something, when he asked how she was doing. She began: Don’t take this the wrong way, Rev. (You know you are already in trouble with that prelude.) It has been so unutterably hard for me. There were days when I could not get out of bed. But I did. And do know why? It wasn’t the resurrection sermons I have heard. No. What got me going, got me out of bed was…the chickens. Every morning at dawn they would fuss, and rustle around and cluck, waiting to be fed. They were hungry and they needed feeding. So I got up and put on my robe and went out and fed them. By then the sun was up, by then the mist was lifted, by then I was awake, and by then I could stand the thought of breakfast, and after that, well the day opened up. So don’t take this the wrong way, Rev. (you know you are in trouble when…), don’t take this the wrong way, but the clucking of those hens meant more to me in my grief than all the hymns of Easter. The clucking of those chickens meant more to me than all the hymns of Easter.

You see? The rhythms of life, evening and morning one day, detailed disciplined attention to the routine can by grace admit illumination, the light in which we see light. Including religious practice. Joanna, the newcomer, found it so. So can you, especially if you on Easter are a newcomer, looking for a first helping, an initial course in faith, a church family to love and church home to enjoy. Particularly in grief. It is one thing to attend to religious practice, and another to do so, to visit the body, when you have loved the person. As some of you have done so this year.

A Later Addition

Here are some notes about the unusual chapter John 21, our Gospel today. R Brown: *An added account of a post-resurrectional appearance of Jesus in Galilee, which is used to show how Jesus provided for the needs of the church. *1-14; 15-23; 24-25… *‘The gospel never circulated without 21’…. *Appendix, supplement, or epilogue?... *Stylistic differences…. *We shall work on the hypothesis of composition by a redactor… *Material drawn from the same ‘general reservoir of Johannine tradition’… *Completion or correction? (RAH)… *Other miraculous catches of fish (Lk 5)... *Ecclesiastical and Eucharistic and Eschatology, symbolism of the chapter… *‘There are good reasons for finding Eucharistic symbolism in the meal’…*15-17 ‘Peter’s rehabilitation’ (!)… *‘As shepherd, Peter’s authority is not absolute’. *Did the community think the BD would not die?* Dodd: ‘The naïve conception of Christ’s second advent in 21: 22 is unlike anything else in the Fourth Gospel’…*Thus, while the differences are not significant enough on their own to suggest that the original author did not write the 21st chapter, it does texture its continuity: *it is not immediately apparent why the original author, “wishing to add to his own book, would add [to] it in so clumsy a manner” (577)… *This chapter occurs after a strong conclusion (ch. 20:30). It is rhetorically weak to have material after a strong conclusion. *The chronological introduction of the narrative (“After these things Jesus showed himself again”) is strikingly less precise than other temporally-concerned introductions (ch. 20:1: “Early on the first day of the week;” v19: “When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week;” and v26: “A week later.”)…* From these comments, Barrett suggests that chapter 21 be read as if it were a metaphorical account of the birth of the early Christian church *for the purpose of explicating the different, yet equally important, roles of Peter and the beloved disciple, penned by a second author (577). Read this way, we are to see the disciples as “catching men” (579)… *“pastoral ministry and historical-theological testimony” (587).

Lessons For Us

Our Gospel today offers us three lessons.

The first is that change, amendment, development, becoming are not only a part of life and life in faith, but also and earlier so, found right in the heart of the Bible. The Fourth Gospel, twenty chapters long, written in the years leading toward 90 a.d., was composed out of sermons stitched together: a wedding in Cana, Nicodemus at night, the woman at the well, healings of body, feeding 5,000, debates with opponents, sight given to the blind, the raising of Lazarus, Jesus in farewell, passion and resurrection. But then, a decade later, another chapter was added, because another chapter was needed. And all the things left out of the Gospel—so beautiful the Gospel—now have their time to appear or re-appear: the importance of the church, the centrality of leadership, the holy mystery of communion, the inherited tradition of the eschaton, the rehabilitation of Peter, the importance of pastoral care, the significance of evangelism. The Bible has a story, too, and it is a story of becoming, not of static changelessness, but of adaptation, flexibility, formation—evolution. The Gospel ends in chapter 20, and is re-started in 21. If you find that you are changing, learning, growing—GRADUATING, well, you have some hints about how that happens, in the Holy Scripture. New occasions teach new duties.

The second is that institutions matter a whole lot, including the church. If you eliminate ethics and pollute politics and contaminate culture, then you are left to go all the way upstream, from ethics and politics and culture, into the higher ground, the colder waters of religion. The thing about institutions is that they don’t go away, they just either get better or worse. Love is finding a way to use time, even to waste some time, in the advancement of institutional health, in learning virtue and piety, in knowing, doing and being. In leadership. Leading by example.

(The Methodist church hit an iceberg in February, for instance, and we are a long way from beginning to fathom the cost, damage, impact and consequence that crash. It was an institutional failure of colossal proportion, and a spiritual defeat of colossal dimension. There is enough blame and responsibility to go all around. The question now is how to care for him who has borne the battle and his widow and his orphan and do all we can to attain a just and lasting peace, for ourselves, and for all. Start with ten facts:

St Louis was decided by 27 votes.

42 votes were neither cast nor counted.

2/3 of US votes were liberal.

Of $400M spent outside the US by the UMC in 2017 $398M came out of US collection plates. (Funds 1,4,7).

In Finding Our Way 2014 the African UMC general superintendent referred to gay people as ‘beasts of the field’.

In 1972 mainline Christians were 33% of the US population; today 11%.

In 1972 ‘nones’ were 4% of the population; today 24%.

All but 6 UMC general superintendents finally supported the One Church plan, but they did not say so clearly and early with signatures.

Baldwin Wallace University in April 26, 2019 severed its 174 year old affiliation with the UMC by unanimous vote of the University Trustees.

Marsh Chapel marries gay people and employs and deploys gay clergy on a regular basis.

The third is that personal concern, and pastoral care, feed feed feed, have no substitute in the peculiar holy mystery of the church. We are present for each other come Sunday. We are present for each other in Sacrament. We are present for each other in fellowship. We are present for each other in education. We are present for each other in visitation. We are present for each other in spoken prayer. We are present for each other in care. In the ministry, stay close to your people. In the church, stay close to your neighbors in town and in the pew. Love one another, as Christ has loved you.

On Friday, after senior breakfast, I met a new friend, who said, with some poise and calm, ‘well, I guess people gathering once a week to be together and remind each other to be good people and become better people, I guess that’s not such a bad thing’. I guess not.

The sermon concludes with a recitation of the Canadian Creed.

-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 05.5.2019 at 11:00 am

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Sunday
April 21

In Thy Light We See Light

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to hear the full service.

Luke 24:1-12

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Frontispiece

The Lord is Risen! Indeed.

In thy light, we see light, confesses the church of Christ. In thy light we see light…in Wonder…Weakness…Whimsy. “In lumine tuo videbimus lumen.”

Joanna, otherwise a stranger to us, has been included, in Luke, in the group of women who religiously approach the tomb. She is a newcomer. You may be too. You may be leaning toward, even longing for, a first encounter in faith. Good. In the main, this service, in the main every sermon, is mainly meant for you.

Joanna, and others. You. You are here on Easter. Something, some lingering memory of a lingering memory, has brought you along. Ordinary, regular religious practice—ask Joanna—can sometimes, suddenly, surprisingly, bring illumination. Our preaching, here, is in part for those who are in between. Not religious enough to come to church every Sunday, but religious enough to listen. Still within earshot. A paper, a bagel, a to enter a bit of religious practice from afar, by radio, by i-pod, by internet, by computer. Come Easter, many have come here. Not preaching to the choir—at least not ONLY to the choir! The beauty of the Marsh pulpit: not preaching to the choir, but to the driver, the bagel muncher, the i-pod user on a bicycle, the ecclesiastical expatriate, the atheist, the one harmed by the church, the musician attuned—seemingly—only to the music, the academic, the lonely at home.

Our festival today affirms that religious practice, affirms your choice to be hear, to listen in, and affirms that the detailed discipline of attention to the sacred, can be showered with light. They are keeping the Sabbath by waiting until the first day of the week. They are keeping tradition by anointing the body, with materials earlier prepared. They are keeping faith by facing death. By visiting the tomb, the flesh, the corpse. Habits lead us forward. At early dawn. Death makes us mortal. Facing death makes us human. At the tomb.

These daily rhythms, in Easter fact, do in fact matter, a great deal. They matter in life, and they matter all year long, too. Our Gospel this year, Luke 24: 1-12, follows on Luke’s keen interest in history—Roman history, Palestinian history, church history—by following the women to the tomb. They are going about their regular rhythms, in the hour of death. They are finding ritual hand holds as they walk the dark path, the pre-dawn path, of grief. In grief, they stick to their regular routines.

And along they come, toward us, along the practice road. Your bit of religious practice has brought you out into the light. How so? Just what are we doing here? Joanna and the women, moving at dawn, through the mist, toward the tomb, attending to the routine practices of the day, may teach us.

Teach us what? What do we see illumined by the light in which see light?

Wonder

In thy light we see…wonder.

They might affirm what we find all around us, when we pause. At dawn, through the mist, toward the tomb, they find joy, order, humor, hope, virtue, beauty, music.

There is the sweet scent of a newborn child, silent in the arm.

There is the orderly happiness of that rarest of arts, a well-written email.

There is touch of humor.

There is a calm. Drop thy still dews of quietness ‘til all our strivings cease. Take from our souls the strain and stress, and let our ordered lives confess, the beauty of thy peace.

There is the native hue of resolution behind hope.

There is the patterned simplicity of a well lived life.

There is the beauty of dawn or sunset or both. There is music, beautiful music, invisible beauty, the ringing beauty of music.

There are hints and allegations and forms of presence. You cannot be fully alive, humanly speaking, and miss them. Wonder.

Joanna teaches us: The world does not lack for wonders but only for a sense of wonder. Or was that GK Chesterton?

Joanna teaches us: Philosophy begins in wonder. Or was that the founder of Boston Personalism, Borden Parker Bowne?

Joanna teaches us (trigger warning for academics here): The larger the body of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of mystery that surrounds it. The larger the lake of learning, the longer the lakeshore of mystery that surrounds it. Or was that Ralph Sockman?

Joanna teaches us: I would rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach 10,000 stars how not to dance. Or was that e. e. cummings?

Joanna teaches us: Just what are you going to do with your one beautiful life? Or was that Mary Oliver?

You listen to a child singing alone just before falling to sleep, and tell me you sense no enchantment?

You watch a 9-year old, ball glove on, striding toward Fenway park, other hand in his Dad’s other hand, and tell me you sense no amazement?

You see Lake Lucille. You look down from the Matterhorn. You walk in mid- December through a jewelry store. And no wonder?

You come into a barn at dawn, with the milking in gear, and Louis Armstrong on the radio. You watch a daughter caring for her father in the last month of life. You hear the hymns of Easter. And tell me you sense no enchantment? No wonder? No “thaumadzon”?

In thy light we see wonder. Joanna schools us about wonder.

Weakness

In thy light we see…weakness, too. Easter, inside the tomb, our frailty, our mortality, our fallibility is all too clear, well illumined you might say.

Twenty years ago, a good friend and I were competing for a position, which he ended up winning. But so often the things we think we really want, don’t turn out to be that desirable. This winter, strangely, so quietly that I almost missed it, he said, of that job, I wish there were do-overs in life. On that one, I wish I had a do-over chance with that one. It was a gracious, Easter, moment. You know, sometimes, we get things wrong. We err. You learn most, if you will let yourself, from mistakes.

Inside the tomb, you see, in the shadow, as you see, there is much bowing and perplexity. Luke is accused sometimes of a lighter cross, that is, of seeing the cross as a human mistake, a rueful misjudgment on the part of his contemporaries, rather than the great Pauline cross of divine justice, righteousness, atonement and redemption. Well, what of it? Let’s let Luke have his say: surely this man was innocent. (Remember Good Friday?) A miscarriage of justice. Surely the cross is not less than that, whatever more it may be. Luke tends to love the human side of things. So, Luke is more Methodist than Presbyterian, more Wesleyan than Calvinist. He loves history, theology, the poor, and the church.

Most notably, we may humbly mention, the last sentence was not included in the RSV text, and would not have been read just a few years ago. It (vs 12) is attached here, but only with cautions, for in truth it is probably a later addition. Added? Yes, added. Added to include Peter. Added? Yes, added. Added to fit with what will come later near Emmaus. Added? Yes, added. Added to record Peter’s ‘amazement’, which a few years ago was better translated ‘wondering’, which word has a tinge of perplexity, bewilderment, and uncertainty.

There is an admitted weakness, a humility, a vulnerability about Peter in the Gospels that does not always appear in the life of the church. Peter, in the Bible, is more humble than his church, in history. Peter, come lately, at least scurries, at least sees, at least shows some humility before what in any case is beyond us. Come Easter, we may meditate on the importance, the propriety, of humility before what in any case is beyond us.

The natural horror of earthquake. The historical tragedy of warfare. The social failure of poverty. The resurrection follows but does not replace the cross. Wonder comes along with a full measure of our weakness. There is no avoiding or evading, and, worse, no explaining. As Ivan Karamazov tellingly put it, even one, just one suffering innocent defies explanation or defense. Ours will be a muted, a humble, wonder, won by living through more than by thinking through.

It is strange. Some of the strongest people, the most radiant and generous, are often those who know weakness, who are living ‘after’ and ‘over against’ and ‘nonetheless’, and ‘in spite of’. I knew ‘David’ for several years, admiring and enjoying his radiant generosity, his love for his family, before over lunch I learned his early loss of his first wife. Emile Fackenheim, Canadian Jewish philosopher, said of his faith practice, post holocaust, that he lived so in order to deny Hitler any posthumous victory.

In thy light we see weakness. Joanna schools us about our weakness.

Whimsy

In thy light we see…whimsy, too.

The Gospel of Luke later makes a telling point: ‘he showed himself to those who loved him’. Those who hear and receive the abandon, the self-abandon of faith, ‘see’ Him. Take yourself lightly, so that you can fly, like the angels. Not by historical inquiry, but by participation is the gospel known (Tillich). By routine, by regular practice of faith in worship and learning and service.

Whimsy. God is loving us into love and freeing us into freedom. Freedom means this: Reality is the arena of God’s cosmic process of redemption. (What is going on around us is infused with the divine. Freedom is the Easter gospel laid bare, and lived out in happy abandon. It is the freedom to live each day on tip toe, to live each day as if it were the last, to live each day with abandon, to live each day with self-forgetful freedom. Lost in wonder, love and praise! Or, lost in wonder, weakness, and whimsy. Watch fight and pray and live rejoicing every day.

A priest, minister and rabbi were driving across Ireland and had car trouble. They emerged from the car and could see no one, only a horse. Suddenly a horse leaned over the fence and said, ‘Open the hood, and let me have a look’. ‘You are a talking horse?’. ‘Yes. Clean the gaskets and retry the ignition.’ The car purred, and off the clergy trio drove, terrified. They stopped in a nearby pub to calm their nerves. ‘You look terrible’ said the barkeep. ‘What happened to you?’ ‘You won’t believe it. The car broke down. Then a horse came up and spoke, and fixed the car’. ‘Really? What color was the horse?’ ‘Black. Why?’ ‘Well, you were lucky it wasn’t the white horse.’ “There is white horse over there, too? But he doesn’t speak?’. ‘Oh, no his speech is fine, his English excellent. But he just doesn’t know anything about car mechanics.’ A little Irish whimsy, don’t you know.

Our seven sacramental moments in life are each and all meant to release us to self-abandon, self-giving, self-mockery. In Tillich’s phrase, to move from self-centered life to life of the centered self. Don’t take yourself too seriously.

We had a Bishop who loved golf, and would include college students to fill a foursome. One day we finished and went to drink ice tea. A man from the foursome ahead of us shouted: “I left my putter on the eighth green. You were right behind us. Why didn’t you pick it up?” I wanted to say, you know, he is a Bishop, but I kept quiet. After a while the Bishop excused himself. He was gone a while, then came in the shop door with a putter and silently laid it on the man’s table. Afterward, thinking about cheeks and cloaks, I saw him in a new light, a confirmed light, a resurrection light.

Out of the blue in February a friend recommended Wallace Stegner’s novel, Crossing to Safety. It is an exquisite book, about two couples, and about grief, tragedy, academic life, and, especially, friendship. In New Hampshire one summer, on a long hike, the men find themselves under a waterfall and near a beautiful natural whirlpool. It demands baptism, one says, and in they go. Of the swim, of the day, of the friendship, of the baptism, of that present moment, Stegner writes, It was a present that made the future tingle. That gorgeous sentence is Easter in wonder and weakness and whimsy; a present that makes the future tingle. We could even say, a future that makes the present tingle, but that would take another sermon.

In thy light we see whimsy. Joanna schools us in whimsy

Coda

Are you, like Joanna, new to the story, new to faith, new to religious practice? Welcome. In light of Resurrection, we pray, Lord grant you, and grant us all, the revelation of wonder, the admission of weakness, and the liberation of whimsy.

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.

(Robert Frost)

-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 04.21.2019 at 11:00 am

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Sunday
March 31

The Mysticism of St. John of the Cross

By Marsh Chapel

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Luke 15: 1-32

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Frontispiece

When he came to himself…

The God beyond God of the mystical tradition, the mystical chorus in which does sing San Juan de la Cruz, by means of wonder and love and praise, can bring us to your selves, our real selves, our own most own selves…

You qualify. Yes, you qualify. You are qualified. You qualify because you are in the flesh. Once you are born, an uncle did used to say, you are old enough to die. You qualify. Once you are born, an uncle did used to say, you are old enough to die. The community of faith, the community of faith working through love here in Marsh Chapel, has reason this month to remember such existential qualification. Directly or indirectly you have born witness: in memorial, in funeral, in pastoral care, in personal prayer, in vigil, this month. The line of death crossing the line of life at age 84, at age 71, at age 20, at age 18 months, and at all the ages in between. A theologian, a professor, a young adult, an infant, a foreign worshipping community. You qualify. Yes, you qualify. You are qualified. You qualify because you are in the flesh. Once you are born, an uncle did used to say, you are old enough to die.

Death makes us mortal. Facing death makes us human. Our three lessons, in this sense, acclaim together, not the denial nor the avoidance nor the suppression of the reality of death, but faith in the face of death, faith facing death. And what else is faith.

The disgrace of Egypt was slavery, social death. Death abides. Faith faces death, and, in that, rolls away the stone of disgrace. You come to communion month by month, in that faithful spirit. The LORD said to Joshua, "Today I have rolled away from you the disgrace of Egypt." Like his cousin, David, in the psalms, Joshua sings out faith: Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me, all the days of my life, AND…I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

In Corinth, amid communal chaos aplenty, St. Paul lifted the same call: From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So, if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! Not Christ according the flesh, nor even according to the spirit, but Christa kata staupon, according to the cross. You come to communion month by month in that faithful spirit. He will and does have more to say, elsewhere, on the fruit of that spirit (Gal. 5), on the effect of that spirit (Phil. 4), on the gift of that spirit (2 Cor. 3).

If we know a parable, it may be this one, the prodigal son. We will walk with the prodigal to communion today. Notice this: his discovery of life in life, his coming home to his own-most self, the best return home odyssey day of his life come out of what? Failure. His salvation emerges from what? Failure. His coming to his senses and coming to terms with self, world and God, is forged in what fire? Failure. Not all failure is self-inflicted, but almost all failure is partly so. Consider our condition. An authoritarian mind may have no intention at all to leave office, at any point at all, defeated or undefeated, impeached or unimpeached, convicted or un-convicted. Read again Eric Fromm, as we did in the autumn, sentient citizens. Here is diminishment, here is failure: in mendacious speech, in predatory relations, in destructive disregard for common good institutions, in cheap or small-minded reduction of life and its living to deals and their undoing, in disregard for climate and environment, in pitiless toying with nuclear violence, and the myriad shreddings of American civil society and its hard won support of voluntary associations (church, country, school, hospital, scouting and the like).

Merton Remembered

Last year, Lent 2018, we debated and discerned with Thomas Merton, you may remember, for whom San Juan de la Cruz was a powerful influence. From six pages of Merton’s reflections on John, we here select several telling lines:

The two words "desiring nothing" contain all the difficulty and all the simplicity of St. John of the Cross. But no Christian has a right to complain of them. They are simply an echo of …words that sum up the teaching of Jesus Christ in the Gospel… "If any man would come after me, let him deny himself”…This total self-denial, which St. John of the Cross pursues into the inmost depths of the human spirit, reduces our interior landscape to a wasteland without special features of any kind whatever. We do not even have the consolation of beholding a personal disaster. A cataclysm of the spirit, if terrible, is also interesting.

These times of aridity cause the soul to journey in all purity in the love of God, since it is no longer influenced in its actions by the pleasure and sweetness of the actions themselves, . . . but only by a desire to please God…

The joy of this emptiness: it is a solitude full of wild birds and strange trees, rocks, rivers, and desert islands, lions, and leaping does. These creatures are images of the joys of the spirit, aspects of interior solitude, fires that flash in the abyss of the pure heart whose loneliness becomes alive with the deep lightnings of God. (RAH emphasis for delivery).

Dark Night Theology

San Juan de la Cruz was an apophatic theologian, a negative theologian, one whose language of God began and ended by saying what God is not. We have kindred cousin compatriots of this tradition here within Boston University. Think of Ray Hart, God Being Nothing. Think of Bob Neville, God the Creator. Think of Wesley Wildman’s new book, dedicated to the ministry of Marsh Chapel, God Is. Think of the legacy of our BU poets and professors interpret who interpret poetry: Christopher Ricks, or Geoffrey Hill, or Roseanna Warren, or Robert Pinsky, or Derek Walcott.

Colin Thompson has summarized this form of thought: For Christian tradition, there are two main strands of thought about the relationship between language and God. One is positive (‘cataphatic’), and sees likenesses between…the world of human experience and the nature of God…It is associated with …the immanence of God…and a spirituality….that rises from the known to the unknown… The other strand is negative, or apophatic, and denies that human language can convey anything at all about God…The name of Dionysius the Areopagite is indelibly associated with it…It springs from a theology of transcendence, which insists on a complete ontological separation between the Creator and creation, on the otherness and unknowability of God…Its spirituality is one of purgation of the soul from its natural concerns…to commune with God in darkness and nothingness. Its language is of…paradox, antithesis and oxymoron (Thompson, 227).

Remember? O for that night when I in him might live invisible and dim (Vaughn). This week, concluding a superb Lowell lecture on queer theology, Dr. Mark Jordan from Harvard exclaimed, in his critique of unfair naming, turn off the factory glare of false naming! Negative theology, the theology of the dark night of the soul, we might add, theologizes his faithful cry, saying, of language about God, turn off the factory glare of false naming!

James Baldwin: whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves. (Letter from a Region in my Mind (New Yorker, reprint, 12/3/18). We might paraphrase: Whatever straight Methodists do not know about gay Methodists reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.

You heard Isaiah 55 last week: For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

There is an herbal bitterness, an antique acquaintance with hardship, in the dark night, the dark night of the soul. It recalls Ecclesiastes, for whom there is nothing new. Young adults, students it may be, can acquire a kind of muscular wisdom, a personal endurance, for STEM and pottery and all everything in between. Thompson: Before maturity can be gained a certain degree of independence is required, and…the process of gaining it sometimes leaves a bitter taste. St. John is, after all, ‘of the cross’.

So, in his spirit, we want to look at the people who work at Dunkin Donuts not at the people who shop at Dunkin Donuts…to look at the people who leave High School or college, not at the people who set up camp at high school or college…to look at the people who suffer the wounds of warfare, not at the people who gain glory by sending others into battle…to look at the people who defer to others in conversation and listen, not at the people who override others in conversation and speech.

The question whether our time and condition afford a true opening to an inner life, of any vibrant sort, is itself open, very much an open question. The momentary droplets of technologies new and inescapable stand up the first phrase of the question, while the commerce and discourse they carry construct the second. Our Lenten theological conversation partner is St. John of the Cross. His one interest was the inner life.

Experiment

Have you given attention to inner life?

If you will forgive personal illustration, in the main to be minimized or avoided in preaching, the question arose in early January. With SJDLC and Lent on the horizon, and the prospect of his poetic, pious illumination of such a life, it seemed fit to use the works of early epiphany ins some seclusion, to try out, or test again the prospect of an inner life, largely un-invaded by the droplets of technologies new and normally inescapable. A fortnight, this was to be, given over to reading, to quiet, to composition, to exercise, to nature, to prayer.

It was unpleasant. In temperament and by habit only roughly aligned with seclusion, the early days caused an increase, not a diminution, of anxiety, worry, acedia, despond and ennui. The temporary banishment of routine, rhythmic, and regular stimuli—no internet? no cable news? no unexpected visits? no steady buzzing of instruments—caused lingering worries to multiply, potential crises to seem real, and absent anxieties to return, like the biblical demon into the woman’s scrubbed home, seven-fold. It was miserable. I am not fit for the monastic life, neither eromitic nor cenobitic. Not even a tiny bit(ic). Of a sudden the great distance between our Lenten sermons was no longer geographic (Segovia to Boston), epochal (16^th to 21^st centuries), denominational (Catholic to Protestant), theological (medieval or early renaissance to late modern or post-religious), or linguistic (Castillian Spanish to American English). The great distance, it first seemed, was from sound to silence. In the silent din of loneliness and anxiety, the study and reading and early sermonic composition went ahead, unfunded, as it were, from the central government.

Yet something remarkable happened. After several days, somehow, the fever broke. Somehow the absence of earlier common stimuli and the presence of regular exercise, pages read and written, intermittent visits from spouse and friends, the draw of the poetry itself (it must be emphasized), and a determined hour glass routine, caused the fog to lift. The quieter routine, unto itself, brought at least an inkling of a tiny little aperture—a fortified inner life. It is difficult for us to assess our addictions and our dispositions without some intervening variance in habit and position. The standard recommendation here, for ordinary life, as you know is quiet or rumination or reading or prayer or reflection: an hour a day, a day a week, a week a quarter, a quarter a year. Death makes us mortal. Facing death makes us human.

Eucharist at Eucharist

Gracious God

Thou giver of every good gift visible and invisible

We pause in grace to offer our thanks

Thankful we are for women and men who have given support, labor and service to our ministry, over many years

Their talents, loyalty, commitment and care we honor today

Thankful we are for this day, a harbinger of coming warmth, of brighter days, of robins’ return, of the promise of spring

Every day is a gift from your hand, including this one sunny day we share, here and now

Thankful we are for the kindness and thoughtfulness that make our work spaces, classes and meetings better places, happier places

Help us remember that it is not the night that kills but the frost, not the night of unknowing but the frost of unloving that does harm

Thankful we are for the good people in this good place at this good time

For leadership rooted in nearly two centuries of moral intention, of ethical compass, including our leadership here today

Thankful for commitment, kindness, and goodness, we come to eucharist, to thanksgiving

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

posted in Lenten Series 2019: St. John of the Cross, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.31.2019 at 11:00 am

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Sunday
March 24

The Poetry and Piety of St. John of the Cross

By Marsh Chapel

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Luke 13:1-9

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We interlace our interpretation of Holy Scripture, this Lent, with the poetry and piety, the mystical witness of John of the Cross. Today, then, first Luke, then San Juan, second Isaiah, then San Juan.

Luke On Mercy

We listen for the Gospel in St. Luke Our other gospels do not carry any of these teachings from Luke 13. Like most of the second half of the Gospel of Luke they are special to Luke. They are notoriously hard to interpret, with edgy choices for the interpreter. But given their specificity to Luke and their place within Luke, along with their absence elsewhere, we might be forgiven an inclination to give them a heartily Lukan rendering. Luke celebrates history, theology, the poor, and the church. Yes. But Luke also celebrates love, pardon, mercy, love. When he was yet a far way off, we read soon, the father saw him, saw his son, and raced headlong toward him, racing to put an ring on his finger and shoes on his feet, and hug and embrace him, and ‘love on him’ as now I understand some people say, though the odd use of the preposition in between the verb and the pronoun seems odd. The Galileans are not greater sinners than others, for all the political violence and then death sent their way by Pilate. They are beloved children of God. Those on whom the natural violence inherent in gravity and the cascading violence inherent in human architectural and other error, which led to their tragic deaths, by no means means they are greater sinners than others. We may take from their tragedy for ourselves quite simply the wise admonition to straighten up and fly right, to prize our time now we have it, to seize the day. And to what end? To love, God and neighbor. To love, God and neighbor.

And there is still time. Yes, there may well come a time when it is too late. Other portions of Scripture make sure for sure we remember that. It is later than we think. But Luke has a different Gospel to announce: there is still time, there is extra time, there is more time, there is time. The kindly gardener, gently redirecting his boss, the owner of the vineyard, makes a call for mercy. A little water, a little fertilizer, a little time—a little more of each—and who knows what may come out of the ground? And if not, next year, well…You have the feeling don’t you that next year that same gardener will have another way to protect the vine. Give it just a little more time. Give it just a little more time. Your inner life, your John of the Cross life, your wisdom and contemplation in life—a little water, a little nourishment, a little time, especially time, and who knows? Mercy. It takes time.

Feminine Divinity

St. John evoked mercy. Mercy, pardon, peace and love, discovered through the inner life, through inner struggle, is the gift of St John of the Cross and his sixteenth century mind, to our own time of bewilderment in century 21. San Juan is best known, if at all, in popular imagination for the poetry and piety in the opening phrase of his greatest poem, ‘The Dark Night’, of the ‘Dark Night of the Soul’. Listen again to three lines from this most beautiful and famous of poems: …en una noche oscura…en la noche dichosa…!o noche que guiaste…Dark night. Lucky night. Guiding night. Colin Thompson has aptly best summarized this poem, in his recent composite study of St. John of the Cross, based on years of work and multiple essays and articles: ‘in this ‘noche’ a woman cries out and…all activity ceases and all cares are abandoned’. There is an abandon, a freedom here, that casts aside what is inherited, expected, and customary.

For instance, we notice here the happy nonchalance about gender. The seeker, presumably a voice for the saint himself, is nonetheless given voice as an adoring woman. We notice here, as resplendently everywhere in San Juan de la Cruz, a direct and easy conflation or combination of the sensuous and the spiritual, erotic love and love divine. Of course, the Bible, in particular the ‘Song of Songs’ has paved or led the way here from antiquity. It is striking to assemble the chorus of female divines who in a broadly mystical tradition explored the back roads and trails of the inner life: Julian of Norwich, Margery Kemp, St. Catherine of Siena, Hildegard of Bingen, Mechtold of Magdeburg, and, of course, she from whom John learned and for whose Carmelites he labored, Santa Theresa de Avila. Together they sang: “God is incomprehensible to our intellect, but not to our love”. Human language and thought will ever fall short (of God). Here we notice the beautiful, the twilight ‘negative’ perspective of John of the Cross. We notice here that the “dark night of San Juan is all-embracing: it is the negation of the creaturely appetites at the start of the journey (ascetism, mortification), the route taken (faith), and the goal sought (the hiddenness of God)”. That is, we here notice a movement from purgation to illumination to union, from purgation to illumination to union. We notice here the rare, lily-like beauty of the poetry whose roots are deep in the caverns of Scripture, whose trunk is made up of the sung, country love ballads of Italy and especially of Castilla la Vieja, and whose branches touch and are touched by the personal, ‘dark’ experience of San Juan de la Cruz: poet, priest, monk, theologian, confessor, leader, ascetic, Spaniard, Catholic—saint, lover of God and neighbor, a dead though living reminder of the possibility of the inner life: en una noche oscura…amado con amada…amada en el amado transformada…sin otra luz y guia…sino la que en el Corazon ardia…en mi cuelo heria…todos mis sentidos suspendia…

Isaiah’s Hope

We listen for the good word, the God Word, today also in Isaiah. One of Isaiah’s keenest modern interpreters was our preacher in Evanston, Illinois until his death in 1960, Ernest Fremont Tittle. Back in the 1930’s Tittle organized a listing of 1000 preachers who, like him, were committed to the principles of Christian pacifism. While his dream was submerged during the Second World War, nonetheless his hope lives on. His work reminds us that citizenship is always subordinate to discipleship, that the first commandment against idolatry presides over all the other nine, that while the separation of church and state is a quintessentially American and necessarily Christian understanding.

Tittle preached the Jesus of the prophets, of peace, of the new creation, the hope that Isaiah did foretell. The special 8^thcentury bce hope of Isaiah for Israel and her Davidic King, changes, is transformed, into a grand and lasting vision of the Christ of God, and the power of Christ to bring heaven to earth. Some of this changes happens in Isaiah itself, as part I gives way to Chapter 40 (II) in the exile, and the Isaiah of the exile is further decorated by the excitement of the last ten chapters, written during the restoration (III). Isaiah 1,2,3. To be clear: in Isaiah, a small, particular, national hope becomes a grand and universal vision of great hope, on earth as it is in heaven. Divine hope is honed in the struggle of Isaiah’s own life, in the predicted demise of Israel, in the brutality of exile, in the sweetness of liberation, and, at last, by your faith, in the advent of Christ. The ringing bells of hope, an eschatological bell choir of prophesy, make Isaiah so memorable. Especially our passage today, Isaiah 55. And Tittle’s Isaian hope for the future was based wholey upon his allegiance to Jesus Christ, the light shining in the dark:

Jesus, after 19 centuries, remains an object of wonder. There is something wonderful in the very fact that he has escaped oblivion. What chance, on any human reckoning, did he have to be remembered? A Jew, living in a small and remote province of the Roman Empire; an obscure Jew belonging to the peasant class; a man of whom the vast majority of his contemporaries never heard, and who moreover left no written record of anything that he had said or done or dreamed; a man rejected and repudiated by the leaders of his nation, and deserted at the last even by his disciples. Out of obscurity he came; and when, an object of hatred and derision, he was put to death on a gallows, it might well have been supposed that into oblivion he would go. But upon the contrary, the name of Jesus, in Emerson’s phrase, is “not so much written as ploughed into the history of the world.”

Grace at Dusk

For St. John of the Cross, in full depth, Jesus was an object of wonder. We note the attention in SJDLC to the art of co-operating with grace, to the human search for God and God’s search for the human, to amanuensis—memory, to words that ‘find us out’, to witness even stammering witness, to the authority and oneness of Scripture. We note that St. John’s prime concern is the inner life of the individual. And that is as good a short definition of pastoral ministry as one can find. It is based on eremetismo interior. And it is based on the connection between sensory deprivation and imaginative stimulus: out of his dark night there arose—poetry and piety.

“In the same way God will appear dark to the human intelligence because it lacks the organs to comprehend him”. The dark night is a night of purgation, yes, but also of faith. Like the moth, like the owl, who see in the dusk not in the sunlight. O for that night when I in him might live invisible and dim. For St John, there clearly was a connection between sensory deprivation and imaginative stimulus. Out of his dark night arose poetry. In the poetry and piety of St John of the Cross, we may find, uncover or discover, the courage and capacity to see at twilight, in the dark, in the dusk.

In the dusk. What do we see at nightfall? Do we see, for instance, to take one obvious and immediate example, that a claim of national emergency might not be seen as merely an extension of corruption, mendacity, and scurrilous life. Come twilight, cultural and social twilight, do we like moth and owl squint and see that it is quite possibly much more? It is the harbinger, the promissory note of a move toward authoritarianism. It may be the emergence, or ironically emergency, of an openness to authoritarian leadership, that against which the US Constitution was largely written, was largely composed. We shall need our night vision, our dark night vision.

In the dusk. What do we see at nightfall? Our sight, dimmed in the dark, finally relies on, recoils to, the sight of moth and owl, the twilight sight along the path of spiritual negation, along the path of the dark night of the soul. Fear not the dark. Faith is a walk in the dark. Fear not the dark. Hope is a companion in the dark. Fear not the dark. Love is present in the dark, in with and under all. Or, to conclude, as San Juan wrote:

On a night of darkness,

In love’s anxiety of longing kindled,

O blessed chance!

I left by none beheld.

My house in sleep and silence stilled.

In darkness and secure,

By the secret ladder disguised,

O blessed venture!

In darkness and concealed,

My house in sleep and silence stilled.

By dark of blessed night,

In secrecy for no one saw me

And I regarded nothing,

My only light and guide

The one that in my heart was burning.

This guided, led me on

More surely than the radiance of noon

To where there waited one

Who was to me well known,

And in a place where no one came in view.

O night, you were the guide!

O night more desirable than dawn!

O dark of night you joined

Beloved with beloved one,

Beloved one in Beloved now transformed!

Upon my flowering breast

Entirely kept for him and him alone,

There he stayed and slept

And I caressed him

In breezes from the fan of cedars blown.

Breezes on the battlements—

As I was spreading out his hair,

With his unhurried hand

He wound my neck

And all my senses left suspended there.

I stayed, myself forgotten,

My countenance against my love reclined;

All ceased, and self-forsaken

I let my care behind

Among the lilies, unremembered.

May God grant usgospelas in Luke, poetryas in St. John,hopeas in Isaiah, and pietyas in St. John. Lift up your hearts: Fear not the dark. Faith is a walk in the dark. Fear not the dark. Hope is a companion in the dark. Fear not the dark. Love is present in the dark, in with and under all.

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

posted in Lenten Series 2019: St. John of the Cross, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.24.2019 at 11:00 am

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Sunday
March 17

The Divine Presence and St. John of the Cross

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to hear the full service

Luke 13:31-35

Click here to hear the sermon only

At that very hour some Pharisees came, and said to him, ‘Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you. And he said to them, ‘Go and tell that fox, ‘Behold I cast out demons and perform cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my course.

Every day, and especially each Lord’s day, Jesus brings us out, and meets us, at the existential line between life and death. The Gospel from St. Luke foreshadows the cross. The triumphant trumpet joy of the Letter to the Philippians, including its promise of our commonwealth, our koinonia, ‘in heaven’, pauses sharply to recall the cross. Psalm 27, perhaps your favorite, or one of them, faces squarely the host of enemies encamped against Love, a prefigurement of the cross. The genesis of Genesis which is the genesis of the people of faith, come Abraham, far more than the genesis of the creation prior, its real genesis is in the promise spoken to Abraham, often all we have to go on anyway, a word of faith in a pastoral voice toward a common hope, which is ‘Fear Not’, in a cruciform world, ‘fear not’, walk by faith in the dark.

Tomorrow in the dark on Marsh Plaza we will gather under the leadership of our BU Muslim student society, for vigil in faith, in the teeth of slaugher in New Zealand, and in the lasting shadow of the technology it was meant utilize and capture, world wide. 7pm. We weep with those who weep.

We rustle about the cabin for nourishment, day by week, this Lent, delving for teaching and learning into the poetry of San Juan de la Cruz.

Toward the end of his life, St. John of the Cross was assigned to Granada in the south of Spain. He came to love the natural beauty of his new home. Those who have travelled in Andalusia can appreciate how he might have been enthralled so. Though he loved the natural beauty of the region, the Andalusian accent, and to some measure the temperament of the people he met displeased him. He missed the Castilian accent and the Castilian bonhomie it may be.

John offered his teaching, counsel, and spiritual direction in the open, warm Andalusian air, on long walks in the country side. Spain does fully offer the willing peregrinator, pilgrim, pedestrian many and most wonderful trails, scenes and vistas. Its ancient paths and pueblos carry in their very material the memories of a marvelous, ancient civilization. That antiquity can teach us.

Jan and I visited once the winter home of Chopin, on Mallorca, where he composed etudes in concert with the rhythms of the falling seasonal rains, there in the heart of the Mediterranean. Above the house in which Chopin composed and reposed was an ancient monastery, built in the year 1000 and closed near the year 1400. We marveled, partly for the shimmering beauty of the mountain views, but also and more so that the monastery had been closed more than 600 years, more than twice the time my beloved Methodism has even existed. It had more years dead and closed than we have had alive and open. The ancient memories of Spain’s paths and pueblos help us gain, or regain, perspective. One such is our 2019 memory of San Juan de la Cruz.

In Granada, later in his life, St. John wrote a great deal, including the composition of his commentaries on his few but famous poems. Soon, though, in connection with ongoing institutional, religious disputes, he was transferred again, this time back to Castilla la Vieja, to the city of Segovia. There he endured the ongoing political disputes within the Carmelite order. After the death of St. Theresa of Avila, fights began between the factions of leaders, Doria and Gracian. St. John travelled widely, to the detriment we imagine of his health in his waning years. His habit was to ride on donkey or horseback, reading from the Scripture, and singing from his favorite book of the Bible—perhaps it is yours, too—the Song of Songs, the Song of Solomon. One thinks from the corner of the imagination of Cervantes’ woeful knight errant, the one and the great, Don Quijote de la Mancha, the religious knight errant of a begone era, tilting at windmills and at the locura, the craziness of life itself. La razon de la sin razon a mi razon me enflaquece… St. John engaged his own travels in the year 1588, the year, all bright BU undergraduates will recall is that of the Spanish Armada, and its surprising defeat by the English, the dreaded English, along the cliffs of Dover. When St. John died in 1591 (in December), his body, or most of it, was interred in Segovia, where there is to this day a notable and sizable shrine.

In these years, San Juan de la Cruz was an outspoken critic of clerical power, favoring short leadership term limits, favoring elected rather than appointed leaders, favoring outspoken communal discoursed and debate rather than smoke filled rooms, and most especially, favoring full recognition of the corruption that comes with power. We can take some notes here, particularly those of us consigned with and to religious leadership. You do not have to go far into the Q document record of Jesus’ teaching, found in Matthew and Luke, to come upon his description of religious leaders, those wearing robes and holding degrees, to be clear about it, as ‘whited sepulchers full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness’. As harsh as that may be to our ears, try to hear it in the context of kosher commands, the context of the uncleanness of burial, the context of early Rabbinic Judaism. As my friend Roy Smyres used to say of bishops, though he meant it fully for all ordained and all religious leaders, ‘They hear so often what a good job they are doing and what great people they are that after a while…they start to believe it’. I try to keep his voice in earshot myself. Roy traveled in mission across Africa as a young man in the 1920’s, and loved to recite from memory the poem ‘The Hound of Heaven’.

At the end of his life, St. John found himself in rugged travel, and in contest with religious leadership and religious corruption, the corruption that comes with power. Hence, at the end of his life, he found himself under suspicion of undermining his superiors. An inquisition was begun by the Inquisition, during which time, to protect him, John’s correspondence and many if not most of his writings were burned. A woman, Ana de Penalosa, of Segovia, helped him and later developed the shrine in Segovia to his honor. In 1974 in Segovia, six of us from Ohio Wesleyan studied for a year, under the tutelage of Don Felipe de Penalosa, he of ancient Spanish aristocracy, and most probably of the same family as Ana Penalosa. On January 6, 1975, a lovely young woman from Cleveland joined our class for the remainder of the year, very petite, blonde and Scandinavian, and Don Felipe, most happily and faithfully married, at age 85 or so fell in love again. He just marveled at Rebecca Heskamp, of OWU, now in Segovia, who arrived January 6, saying Es un don de los reyes (she is a gift of the Magi, a gift of the kings). A little later in the winter he would introduce her as Rebecca, de los Vikingos, ‘one of the Vikings’. It is amazing how spoken speech can stay in the memory, over long time, is it not? St. John died at midnight, December 14, 1591, saying, ‘Tonight I will sing matins in heaven”. We remember last words. Like those of Stonewall Jackson, Let us cross over the river and rest in the shade of the trees. Like those of John Wesley, The best of all is, God is with us. Like those of Jesus, I thirst. Father forgive them. It is finished. Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani. And, like those of John of the Cross, Tonight I will sing matins in heaven.

Some few of John’s writings and poems escaped the protective burning. We have only 2500 verses of poetry, few but exquisite they are. His poems rely heavily on a refrain of often repeated words: secret, secret; hidden, hidden; forgotten, forgotten; in disguise, in disguise; silence, silence; emptiness, emptiness; night, night. His poems honor the inner life, ‘whose continual impulse’ is love of God and through God love of man and creation, or as we would say today, of the human being and of nature. Beginning in 1614 and continuing on through 1627, his remaining poetry and prose and his memory recalled by colleagues, including his remembered speech, were recalled by colleagues and collected en route to his beatification in 1675. The poems fill only a total of ten pages.

Influences on his poetry are both sacred and secular. This accords beautifully with the lesson from Romans read among us last Sunday by Rev. Dr. Karen Coleman: If you confess with your lips that Jesus in Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved…for there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and bestows his riches on all who call upon him (Romans 10: 9-12). No distinction between Jew and Greek. No distinction between religious and unreligious. No distinction between observant and unobservant. No distinction, as in the poetry of St. John of the Cross, between sacred and secular. God is all in all! God sings ‘don’t fence me in!’

Influences on his poetry are both sacred and secular. The sacred in particular include the Bible as a whole, and the Song of Songs, of Solomon, especially and in particular. The secular, most intriguingly, include ordinary Spanish love songs, pastoral romantic poetry, the popular influence of Garcilaso de la Vega (who imported the 11 syllable poetic line from the Italian Renaissance), and his own audition, his own experience of these. Physically cloistered, he was poetically a regular citizen! In Garcilaso, we read of Renaissance poetry, The refined sense of beauty, the artificiality of the pastoral themes, the diffused and sublimated sensations, all of which were taken from the Italian (106). As a young man, St. John of the Cross would have read Garcilaso de la Vega.

Of most importance was the Song of Songs, an anthology of Hebrew folk songs intended for use at marriage festivals and dating in its present state from the third century bce (108). The drama here of human love becomes a form and format for expression of love divine. Marriage itself is just this. With most coming to marriage at or over the age of 30, the more usual practical matters in marriage preparation are of less importance than they were a generation ago, when marriage occurred in the early twenties. There is less need for counsel regarding budgeting, regarding sexuality, regarding extended family matters, regarding religious rhythms and observances. But on the other hand, somewhat older couples coming to marriage today are more prepared to, more ready to understand marriage, ‘on earth as it is in heaven’ as it were. By the mid thirties soon to be newly weds are more experientially prepared, than their cousins a generation ago, to understand human commitment, covenant, betrothal, intimacy and love as forms and formats and especially foretastes of divine commitment, covenant, betrothal, intimacy and love. We say this in consideration of and counsel for those among us preparing others among us for marriage, an honorable estate, instituted of God and signifying unto us the mystical union which exists between Christ and his church, which holy estate Christ adorned and beautified by his presence in Cana of Galilee. Note this: it was a secular love song heard through the walls of this castle prison in Toledo that set John off into his writing of sacred poetry.

Yet, for all his talent, St. John really could not fully explain his own work, to his own satisfaction: it is not only that the poet cannot understand or explain his own experiences, he cannot understand or explain the poems that have come out of those experiences either (110). In this, as in many other things, St. John foreshadows the poetry of Antonio Machado.

Longing. Anguish. Lightness. Exhilaration. Travel. Adventure. Passion. Tenderness. Mountains. Rivers. And VERY FEW ADJECTIVES! These are the themes one finds in the poetry of St. John of the Cross. His genius, throughout, is the capacity of ‘condensing different elements of thought and feeling into a single phrase’. It is—here is a new word for it—a kind of ontomontopoesia.

We note that the central image in the poetry, in the work, of the theology of St. John of the Cross is marriage, as in the Song of Songs, as in the Fourth Gospel, as in the poetry of William Blake. We note that the abiding, attendant issues of church political intrigue, of popular country music ballads, of a confluence of spiritual, sensual love, again of marriage, of the dark nights soul nights, the soul’s pain in memory and hope. We note the wise and lasting dialectics: to know and not to know; to descend and to ascend; to live and to die; to dwell in light and in darkness. With St. John and with St. John we note the power of the paradox.

One of San Juan’s most important contributions to the history of Christian spirituality is to give a necessary and positive value to experiences of inner frustration and paralysis. Like the dark nights themselves, they have to be faced, but rightly understood and used they become a means of growth (Thompson, 220).

They become ‘rays of darkness’. They become rays of darkness, and the listener becomes one with the music, the reader becomes one with the poetry.

Here is a pointed personal question. Have you worked to allow the dark nights of your life, the inner frustrations of your life, the times of paralysis in your life, to offer a mode, a condition for growth in faith? Here is a pointed personal question. Have you worked to allow the dark nights of your life, the inner frustrations of your life, the times of paralysis in your life, to offer a mode, a condition for growth in faith? If so, you may have or may well find some unexpected, unusual company, in the figure of One who experienced threat, One who wrestled with inner demons, his own and others’, One who brought spiritual medicine to bear on spiritual illness, and One who died on a cross:

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

posted in Lenten Series 2019: St. John of the Cross, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.17.2019 at 11:00 am

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