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

posted in Matriculation, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 09.1.2024 at 11:00 am

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A Summer Look to The Future

John 6: 56-65

August 25, 2024

Marsh Chapel

Robert Allan Hill

It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.

Jan and I stood alongside our burial plots one afternoon.  (I trust it will be many decades before we need to use them!).

Our post retirement home is nestled in a long forgotten, old village cemetery in Eaton NY.  Eaton is the northern tip of Appalachia, economically, culturally, geographically and historically.  Its rural poverty has come rather lately to its 250 year history, but is as harsh and weather beaten as any such rural immiseration.  Its country culture receives some odd jostling from Colgate University and Hamilton College, both a very few miles away.  Its spot on the edge of the great cliff of the Allegheny plateau places it at 1200 feet above sea level, with lakes and great lakes 1200 feet below within a thirty minute drive.  Its history includes nearby Peterboro, a town built in the 1850’s by Gerritt Smith for freed slaves, some of whose descendants live there still; and the Oneida Community next door, whose three hundred Perfectionists lived ostensibly without sin and within complex marriage for thirty years, 1845-1875; and the shores of Gichigumi the shining big sea water, near the wigwam of Nicomis, daughter of the moon, the homeland of Hiawatha, 1200 feet down north.

Our burial neighbors will include some born before the Revolution, some several who died in the Civil War, many veterans of the wars of the 20th century, and one fellow, who was interred in 1962, but in whose youth fought with Teddy Roosevelt in the Spanish American War.  One wonders about the ongoing work of mowing and trimming, and moreso about the volunteer leadership needed to keep managed a venerable, small graveyard.  There had been no burials this calendar year, to date.  They bury until November 1 and then after May 1 or as soon as the ground thaws in the spring.

Jan said she liked the spot.  I volunteered that this was good since we would be there for a while.  Actually, when you amortize $400 per plot over the course of eternity, the cost is really very little.  Housing costs are way too high in Boston, and across the country, but not in the Eaton Village Cemetery.  Of course, I had sometimes mused about having a bit more upscale social location, going forward.  Maybe something on the East Coast—Chatham, Castine, the Cape, North Hampton—something with an ocean view, and certain standards of comportment, attire and presentation.  But Jan reminded me that I am a Methodist preacher, a country preacher at that, and cannot afford ostentation, neither fiscally nor spiritually.  Besides, she counseled, see all the beauty here…Yes, see it, and hear it…

Beauty is heard as well as seen.   We walk past this place so I know what the music of that meadow brings.  The rooster, or more than one, as dawn breaks.  The cattle, feet away, lowing, as cattle do.  The wind in the evergreens and the two Oak trees.  An occasional auto, a more occasional truck, a very much more occasional airplane.  Visitors with crosses and flags and flowers and tears.  And then the sound of nothing, of silence.  Hush, hush, somebody’s calling my name.  In the deep winter the deep silence is sonorous.  I think of the four months of real winter, and the covering, the bed cloth of four feet of snow, and it is well with my soul.

Let me reveal that I say all this for a discreet homiletical purpose.  I preach as ‘a dying man to dying men’, as Luther counseled.  More so, our series of summer sermons has addressed a look to the future, a language of promise in the face of death.  The cosmic resurrection of Christ and the life he offers is a word of hope, spoken into the teeth of cosmic, universal, individual, personal death.  All of our sermons this summer have been very human attempts to announce this unseen hope, embedded, deeply embedded in New Testament language and imagery, and keenly, and preternaturally, this morning, in John 6.  Remember some of the preachments of summer 2024.   Consider divine metaphors.  Note the saving importance of sabbath rest, of taking a break, a breather.   Remember we are all in the family, so befriend a student. Ponder the miracles of seeds and growth.  Honor both lineage and legacy. Know your history, and honor it. Use but don’t abuse power. Learn others’ names.  Recall that Jesus is the beautiful bread of life. Bless and be a blessing.

Sometimes, at our worst, we move through life with the supposition that death comes just to others, to other people and peoples.  It is something that befalls others.  This very human daily supposition is not limited to young adults, to this new wave of temporarily immortal 18 year olds soon to wash up upon the BU beach.  Nor is it limited to distracted, over technologized middle aged parents, trying to keep a household afloat amid the struggles of our era.  Nor is it limited to the mature, or the very mature, we who should probably know better.  Time flies?  Ah no. Time stays.  We go.

A pastoral digression. I you to an exercise for this week or some week.  It is patented, informally, by me, but I give it freely.  It is the RAH OOPS formula for preparation for post-retirement.  O: write your obituary, at least a first draft which others can redact as needed.  O: compose your funeral order of worship with hymns and texts and participants and memorials.  P: select a photograph you do not mind being used in days of grieving, in the newspaper or in the funeral home.  S: locate your resting space, your place and manner of burial or cremation.  Place these materials, in the same box or safe deposit box in which you already, already, have placed your DNR, your living will, your will (you may choose to remember Marsh Chapel in your will by the way), and any other significant materials.  How your family will thank you! But, as you are mortally aware, all of this preparation, good as it is, is not good enough, not enough.

For all of this preparation lacks the main thing needed in a summer look to the future, in the face of the power of death, which William Stringfellow so ardently and artfully described, and at the grave, at the end.  And that is the bread of life.  And that is hope, the feast of the bread of life.  The New Testament is a language of hope lifted in the face of death.  At least, this is how I would conclude and summarize our announcement of the Gospel this summer, our summer series ‘A Look To The Future’.

We have both the freedom and the responsibility at Marsh Chapel to ring the bells of learning and piety, of mind and heart together, in a way that will inspire and guide another generation by the best insights of the faith we share.   We have aimed high and stretched out.  While there are few University pulpits remaining across the country, and very few open and alive 52 weeks a year, your support, your generosity, the ongoing support of Boston University, and the hard labor of my staff and colleagues here, and the generosity of our guests from around the country, continue to allow us to treat hard topics with tough love.

For in John 6, the Gospel is a song of hope, a hope of heaven on earth, a divine hope.  It asks of us a certain height, a certain inclination, a change.  It moves our self, our being to a new center, one in the green pasture, the great meadow of hope.

In 1954, Howard Thurman, then in his first year as Marsh Dean, gave lectures at what was to become my alma mater, Ohio Wesleyan.  These later were collected in a book, THE CREATIVE ENCOUNTER.  With his minimal Christology, tangential connection to Paul, perennialist inclination against narrow religion, and distrust of large portions of the biblical tradition, Thurman would at first seem an unlikely interpreter of biblical material.  Yet his typically digressive, imaginative reflections, that winter’s OWU Merrick lectures, at one point touch the marrow of our theme for this summer, and today’s gospel.  Thurman is trying to examine and explain the religious experience (notice his phrase).  I wonder if you have had such?  Its measure for him is not unlike the look to the future, lifted this summer:

“There is a point at which for the individual the surrender of the self in religious experience gives to life a purpose that extends beyond one’s own private ends and personal risks…What happens then when there is a new center of focus for the life?  The answer to that, in part, is this.  At such a time as the new center becomes operative, the individual relaxes his hold upon himself as expressed in the self-regarding impulse.  A different kind of value is placed upon his physical existence.  Death no longer appears as the great fear or specter.  The power of death over the individual life is broken.  (73-81, THE CREATIVE ENCOUNTER).

I wonder.  Are you sensing the divine generosity inviting your one life to circle around a new center?  Prayer will guide you.  Even suffering will perhaps prod you.  A moment in worship may lift you up. A friend, a word, a kindness, a note, a sunset, a kiss, a laugh—these are intimations of religious experience that are not religious.  But real they are.  I wonder.  Is your center shifting?  And next week, with students with us, will we nod, smile, greet, offer a Methodist handshake, learn a name?

I believe, in a way I cannot understand in full or articulate in full, that God’s love outlasts death, is stronger than death, and overpowers death.  But is something I do not see.  It is something I sense, though I cannot see it.

But who hopes for what he sees?  We hope for what we do not see.  And wait for it with patience!

For, to conclude, in John 6, food carries memory.

I turn again to Marcel Proust, whose thousands of print pages burst forth from the memory of a long-lost moment of tea and Madeleine cakes, the cakes swirling dreamily in the tea. Meal and memory.  One came back again this week, memory in a sandwich.

When I was 16, in the middle of the autumn we were dislocated or relocated to a new home by the remarkable ministrations of the Methodist church. It was November, and we all suddenly had a new house, a new neighborhood, a new room, a new city, a new school, a new church, and not a single friend. The school was a large urban school which was in the throes of serious unrest, some chaos and violence, and yet still with a fine building, faculty, and program.

There is a teenager alone in the cafeteria. For some days he goes alone to lunch, after trigonometry and before chemistry. He is not very artfully dressed. Some of that is the culture of the day and some is just who he is. He knows really no one. He is white in largely black school, over tall and awkward, hoping against hope to make the basketball team, inquisitive but not too eager to show it, curiously glad for a new and strange city environment and yet deeply lonely at the dislocation of the move. You can see him on these many days at the lunch period. He sits with his back to the wall, close enough to some others not to appear solo. The school—and by extension the world around—run quite well without any recognition of his being there. He feels something that is hard and throat-lodged and aching and chilling and strange. He is homesick for a home that no longer exists. He hurts too much to laugh and he is too tall and adult- looking to cry.

In a month or so a group of other young men, Chris Bennett and Joel Burdick and Chris Heimbach, will somehow oddly include him in lunch, as if he had been there for the previous ten years, which he had not. But right now he is alone, out on a boat, and shore is a long way off. And a shared meal seems like it will never come and if it did it might just be too awesome and too wonderful to receive. So he leans the chair against the wall. He watches the cultural tensions and hatreds. He memorizes the periodic table. He tries not to look conspicuous in any single way. He looks at the girls and wonders what he could possibly say to any of them. He looks forward to basketball. He feels what it takes a young heart really to feel.

Every day he carries to his back table a brown sack. This is a full maternal meal, fairly hastily but utterly lovingly prepared in the earlier morning before the two mile walk to school. It is the same lunch every day. Bread and fish, tunafish. Two full sandwiches. Some chips. Carrots. Cookies, sometimes made at home. And it will take another fifty years for him to fully appreciate—to taste—what he could already feel against the cafeteria wall. At least here, in this meal, for all the depressing dislocation and frightening foreignness and leavened loneliness all around, here was something to eat. Prepared with love. As reliable as the sunrise and the seasons. Or, Grace, in the midst of dislocation, as John 6 would say. The sandwiches come slowly day by day out of their tight wrap. They taste the same, reassuringly the same. Maybe, day by day, this is really all we get, a taste.

You know, starting next Sunday there will be some 18 year olds around here, maybe waiting for a kind word, a greeting, someone to encourage them, maybe some of that coming from you and me.  Sursum corda!

It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 08.25.2024 at 11:00 am

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posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 08.4.2024 at 11:00 am

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Mark 4:35–41

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When I am out of funds and sorts
And life is all in snarls,
I quit New York and travel east 

To Boston on the Charles.

There’s something in the Boston scene
So innocent, so tranquil,
It takes and holds my interest
The same as any bank will.

For Boston’s not a capital,
And Boston’s not a place;
Rather I think that Boston is
A sort of state of grace. 

(EB White) 

We need refreshment and a reminder of a state of grace, a natural grace.  For the winds are blowing.  The winds are blowing today.  And in three words our Lord Jesus Christ, riding the waves of time and storm, guides us home.  In the command to go.  In the announcement of peace.  In the call to faith.  Go! Peace! Faith! 

We return again to Mark 4, once more to the lake, in the happy phrase of E B White’s little story of that title.  Once more to the lake.  Again, we find ourselves out on the water with the wind blowing.  Again, we find ourselves on the great lake, so like a great lake in shape, in depth, in length, here Tiberias, here the Sea of Galilee, a fresh water glory, a fresh water gem.  

The Lord Jesus Christ is asleep in the stern, not stern, but in the stern, sound asleep.  Around him the wind is blowing… as the winds are blowing around us today.  The winds are blowing in your life and mine.  A wind may be blowing through your family, a steady hard breeze of change, of illness, or of loss.  A wind may be blowing through your church family, your community of faith, a steady hard breeze of change, post Covid, with aging, at a time of decline of respect for any and all religion. (And hammering commandment lists on public school walls is surely no substitute for loving, excellent Sunday school teaching). A wind may be blowing through your precious, honored institutions—government, school, University, business, all.  A wind may be blowing through your denomination, a steady hard breeze of decline, of disorder, of demise.  A wind may be blowing—it surely is—in and through your culture, a steady hard breeze of loss of memory, of loss of morality, of loss of honesty, of loss of character, of loss of the true and the good and the beautiful. 

So, again, we find ourselves out on the water with the wind blowing.  Again, we find ourselves on the great lake, so like a great lake in shape, in depth, in length, here Tiberias, here the Sea of Galilee, a fresh water glory, a fresh water gem.  But when the wind blows?  We need the voice of the Lord to command, to announce, to call.  Once more to the lake, as E B White put it in his old story title, once more to the lake. 

We, you and I, you and all, will need some faith to go on, the announcement of faith to rely on, the call to faith to count on, in 2024.  Any clear look to the future, to the next sixth months say, abounds with a need for faith, a need for faith, a need for faith.  So Jesus in today’s Gospel speaks to us in three words.  

First, says the Lord, come eventide, ‘let us go, let us go across, let us go across to the other side’.  Once more.  We have been on the lake, and now are back.  And the wind is blowing.  Hard.  You have an unforeseen illness.  You have a congregation awaiting growth.  You have an institution in the throws of inevitable but challenging change.  You have a beloved, now freed but weakened religious denomination, facing hard financial and personnel choices.  You have a country and a culture that does not seem to want to face or honor the difference between right and wrong, between truth and falsehood, between service and self-service, between greed and good, between morality and immorality, between personal conviction and criminal conviction.  The wind is blowing!  You did not cause it, you cannot control it, and you cannot cure it.  But just here, it may be, the dominical word, read and spoken and heard today, may be your safe harbor, your port of entry, your crossing to safety on the other side. Crossing to safety…hm…Wallace Stegner’s exquisite novel of that name…Robert Frost’s poem of that theme…hm That is, the next six months are going to come and go, one way or another, like a hard lake wind.    We can do our part, and row as hard as we can, and aim for a safe harbor.  As we go, it will take some faith, it will take some faith. 

 EB White you remember wrote Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, The Trumpet of the Swan and other children’s books.  He also, along with his Cornell Professor Dr. Strunk wrote the unsurpassed book on writing, ‘Elements of Style’, including the marvelous three-word admonishment, ‘omit needless words’.  Omit needless words!  As true for preaching, one must confess, as writing of any sort.  White also wrote about skating in Boston on the frog pond  (a habit we continue on February 2 each year, and did so this winter, with the fruitful invitational support of our colleague and chaplain for student outreach Mr. Lee). With his uncle White left his shoes on a bench, for an hour of skating.  He returned to find his shoes gone, and had to limp up Beacon Hill on the tips of his skates.  But his uncle said, ‘whoever took them needed them a lot more than you’, and White remembered.   Somehow, we have to find a way to remind ourselves and to teach another generation about generosity of spirit, and we are long way from the shoreline on that quest. Somehow, we have to find a way to remind ourselves and to teach another generation about generosity of spirit, and we are long way from the shoreline on that quest. 

Second, says the Lord, and now comes the second word, the second dominical utterance: ‘peace, be still’.  Jesus has been asleep in the stern, comforted by cushions—a nice touch, and a good nautical practice to have nice cushions in your boat—and he has no worries, no cares, no furrowed brow.  He awakes and commands.  And the wind ceases!  For he says, ‘Peace.  Be Still’.  And all is still.  Once more to the Galilean lake we come, today, to receive a gift of peace, of stillness, of inner calm, both individual and communal.  Whence this story, what its origin, what its history, what its historical grounding—who can say?  Not I for sure.  It may have arisen amid first century persecution of the nascent church.  But the main point in the Scripture is crystal clear.  The Lord Jesus Christ offers, brings and confers peace.  The wind is blowing!  Yet, right in the heart of it, right in the teeth of the gale—a stillness, a peace, a quiet, a quiet heart.  With all the storming micro bursts of this season, we may well covet such peace.  ‘Breathe through the pulses of desire thy coolness and thy balm’, your Boston poet wrote.  I wonder…Upon this summer Sunday, may we, for a moment, receive a gift of peace, hold onto a sense of peace, accept the blessing of peace?  EB White said of his marvelous writing, ‘All I have written is a love for life’.  Peace. Peace. Peace.  Be Still. Be Still. Be Still. 

In a way, this is what the Apostle to the Gentiles conferred upon the Corinthians, a wayward lot were they for sure.  It is in and within each of our sermons in the summer series, ‘A Look to the Future’.  And it has been at least in the background of the sermonic work each summer and our work for this summer: the Upper New York Conference of the United Methodist Church, May 30-31; Asbury First United Methodist Church, June 1-2; Union Chapel, NH, July 21; and sermons for Marsh Chapel on June 23, August 4, and August 25.  

As Paul wrote: We are putting no obstacle in anyone's way, so that no fault may be found with our ministry, but as servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way: through great endurance (and he gives examples)…by purity (and he gives examples)… as having nothing, and yet possessing everything. We have spoken frankly to you Corinthians; our heart is wide open to you. There is no restriction in our affections…open wide your hearts also. His letter echoes Jesus announcement of peace. 

Yet it is the third moment of speech which Jesus confers in the midst of the storm which includes or builds upon the others, and carries in full the Gospel, the state of grace, for this day.  The Lord calls us, calls all, to faith.  Faith as contrasted with fear.  Faith, daily faith, by which the buffeting winds and serious frightening storms—and they are serious and they are frightening—are faced down.  We my friends are going to need some faith, hour by hour, this year.  In season and out, faith.  In failure as well as success, faith.  In defeat, should and as defeat should come, as well and more so than in success.  This is why the Corinthians passage fits so well with the Gospel.  Life includes trouble, mistake and failure.  In and through these, the gift of faith brings perseverance.  When it gets dark enough, you can indeed see the stars. 

We may today return, once more to the lake. God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.  The faith of Jesus Christ and the freedom of Jesus Christ we celebrate today.  Our forebears were disinclined to leave the pursuit of freedom to others.  They lived with faith that the center could hold. They seized freedom in their own hands and by their own lives.  They did not wait on others.  They did not pause to seek a secret blessing.  They did not wait until some ethereal sign emerged.  They did not expect some magic insight.  They preferred deliverance to diffidence. Real love means taking historical responsibility. 

In earshot of our Lord’s teaching, there awaits us every Lord’s day a personal question:  as a Christian person, what are you going to do to continue to expand the circle of freedom, spirit, life and love in our time?  Speaking of lakes, with Hiawatha, where is your tribal council to create?  With Harriet Tubman, where is your slavery to escape? With Frederick Douglass, where is your North Star to publish?  With the Shakers, where is your libertinism to avoid?  With all, where is your hope to share?   

As one wrote long ago, along another shoreline: “This is what one thirsts for, I realize, after the smallness of the day, of work, of details, of intimacy – even of communication, one thirsts for the magnitude and universality of a night full of stars, pouring into one like a fresh tide…I would like to achieve a state of inner spiritual grace from which I could function and give as I was meant to in the eye of God.” 

So too, may it be for us, here in Boston on Commonwealth Avenue, and with friends around the world… 

When I am out of funds and sorts
And life is all in snarls,
I quit New York and travel east 

To Boston on the Charles.

There’s something in the Boston scene
So innocent, so tranquil,
It takes and holds my interest
The same as any bank will.

For Boston’s not a capital,
And Boston’s not a place;
Rather I think that Boston is
A sort of state of grace. 

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.23.2024 at 11:00 am

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The Bach Experience- April 28th, 2024

Cantata: O ewiges Feuer, o Ursprung der Liebe, BWV 34 

Dean Hill:

Through this Easter season, Easter tide, you have perhaps noticed, noted, or winced to hear the letter of John, 1 John, amending, redacting, muting and amplifying the gospel of John.  You are keen listeners, practiced and adroit, so you will have wondered a bit about this. Why does 1 John nip at the heels of John?

The two ‘books’, John and 1 John, were written by different authors, in different decades, in different circumstances, with different motives.  The Gospel acclaims Spirit.  The Letter adds in work, ethics, morals, community, tradition, leadership and judgment from on high, rather than judgment by belief and by believer.  We may just have, it is important to say, the Gospel as part of the New Testament, with all its radicality, due to its brother named letter, vouching as it were for the sanity of the Gospel.  The letter, like James Morrison Witherbee George Dupree, takes good care of its Gospel mother, the very cat’s mother, you see.

The Gospel in chapter 20 revealed the Spirit, elsewhere called Paraclete or Advocate, come upon us, received and with it received the forgiveness of sins.  But at the heels, nipping, comes along 1 John in chapter 2, which names the Paraclete or Advocate not as Spirit but as Jesus Christ—the righteous—whose commandments all we are to keep, on pain of disobedience become lying, and truth taken flight.  Both read on the same Sunday, within minutes of each other, even as they face each other, in loving disagreement.

The next Sunday, the letter in Chapter 3, on the qui vive and on the attack, spells out again in no uncertain terms that the righteous do the right, handsome is as handsome does. Both read on the same Sunday, within minutes of each other, even as they face each other in loving disagreement, maybe even at daggers drawn.

A week later, the Gospel in chapter 10 acclaimed the pastoral image of the Good Shepherd, whose one glorification on the cross is meant to obliterate the need of any other such, even as the Letter, worried, worried out in later chapter 3, a long and sorry recollection of Cain—Abel’s one-time brother—and the demands of love from one who laid down his life, and with whom and for whom we are then meant to do something of the same.  ‘Let us not love in word and speech but in deed and in truth’, says 1 John 3, when the whole of the Gospel says simply ‘love’, says that words outlast deeds, and that speech, that of the glorious Risen, ever routs works. Both read on the same Sunday, within minutes of each other, even as they face each other in loving disagreement, a family row.

And now today, when and where our one Great Gospel, the Spiritual Gospel, counsels ‘abide’ and ‘remain’ in chapter 15, just here the letter of 1 John in chapter 4, fearing antinomial abandon, appends to his own most beautiful love poem, the charge again of lying, of lack of love of brother, of schism that surely created this letter, 1 John, as the spiritualists and the traditionalists, the Gnostics and the ethicists, parted company, one toward the free land of Montanus and Marcion, the other toward Rome and the emerging church, victorious, against which the Gospel was born, bred, written and preached. Both read on the same Sunday, within minutes of each other, even as they face off.

Of course, both are right.  Or we would not still need or read them, let alone together.  But you are right, too, to feel some neck pain, some whiplash, as Gospel soars and Letter deflates.  It is as if the Song of Solomon were being sung by Obadiah.

Still.  We are meant to live in Easter, not in Lent.  All the disciplines of Lent, the forty and days the ten worship services of Holy Week, and the four of Triduum, and all, they are preparation for the real.  The real is joy, the real is love, the real is Easter.  Here our outstanding, Pentecostal cantata, inspires, guides and shapes us.

Dr Jarrett, tell us what to listen for and how, now in Easter, with our Sunday Cantata.

Dr. Jarrett:

Today’s Cantata was written for Pentecost, the Christian Holiday that celebrates the Coming of the Holy Spirit and is observed on the 50^th Day of Easter, hence Pentecost. In the New Testament, we find record of the first Pentecost in Acts 2. The Holy Spirit arrives by the wind appearing as cloven tongues of fire. And despite the many and varied languages spoken by the early followers of Jesus assembled in Jerusalem, the expression or accent of the Holy Spirit was understood by each hearer according to his own tongue. The Tower of Babel rebuilt. The new Church, the new Body of Christ, of the risen Lord, was to be for all. In John 14, Jesus explains our family tree, so to speak, first by explaining that he himself is of the Father, and that though he will soon return to the Father, another Comforter, also of the Father, will be sent to indwell in hearts of all those who keep the commandment, the Word, and love one another.  A radical new intimacy with the Father, through Christ Jesus, will connect the new Church, like vines and branches, as a Body of and in Christ. The Gospel reading for Pentecost that Bach was working with was John 14: 23-31, which culminates in two sayings of Jesus: “Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make. Our abode with him. (Verse 23) and”Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you” (verse 27). 

Setting side the brilliant opening movement of today’s cantata, the other four movement are structured around these two sayings of Jesus: Recit No 2 around the idea of Indwelling, with the only aria of the cantata a pastoral rumination of how glorious this will be – Eden restored in each of us. The second recit, No. 4,  broadens the indwelling to the new church, with the sign of Peace. The whole of the new church interrupts the baritone’s recitative to take up the new greeting shared by all who choose Love:  Peace be with you.

Music of the high Baroque is much like a Swiss clock – there is extraordinary beauty in the clock itself – face and casing – but admiration becomes awe when the extraordinary number of component and moving parts are found to create such clarity and beauty.   As an aural guide for Cantata 34, listen for how Bach sets the word Ewiges – or eternal, and at the same time the flickering, darting line sing for the word Feuer – or fire. Notice how Bach sets the word for ‘ignite’ – entzünde – you can almost feel the music spark each time the choir sings it. The trumpet signals the arrival of Christ, as bride-groom, of this most royal of weddings.

The central movement of the cantata, focuses on the rapture of the individual whose body becomes Christ’s Holy Temple. There is a perfection and naturalness of beauty here – directly from the sublimity of Eden’s garden.

The cantata ends in thanks and praise, but not without significant emphasis on Christ’s pronouncement, ‘Peace upon Israel.’

Today we observe two masters whose musical settings give voice to Christ’s wedding invitation. An invitation to all, without amendment or exclusion.

We prepare ourselves for cantata and covenant, in wonder and vulnerability and self-awareness…

Dean Hill:

There may well come a discreet time, for you, as a person of faith, to say something or do something, a time when some somewhat risky and uncomfortable mode of social involvement, or existential engagement, will beckon you.

After 40 years not just 40 days, such has come I believe to my beloved Methodist church, now in General Conference in Charlotte.  There is a great whoosh of new life, coming into a church formerly fraught with conflict, and a great excitement of love to love and include ALL.  It is the first such quadrennial gathering I have not attended with one exception since 1992.  And the most successful.  Maybe you just need the right people in the room and outside the room!  Maybe it was my fault!

With this cantata, Methodism, at its best, built into the walls of Marsh Chapel, is love divine all loves excelling.  Memorize the lines from 1 John 4: 7-12 today.

We once went to preach in a little church high in the Adirondacks, Mountainview UMC.  It was one of the churches in the string served by a lone itinerant preacher.  Listen to the names.  Chasm Falls.  Owls Head.  Wolf Pond. Mountainview.  My, my… (Owls Head, the ice box of the north, is where the New York Times for decades found the coldest temperature on record each winter). Reality squared, just in the names.  A story, an old Methodist story, a Pentecostal cantata story, from the 1930’s comes, if memory serves, from Mountainview, a little town at the end of the rail line, where the locomotive turned around to head back downhill.  Some farmers, a teacher or three, the druggist, some retirees, a small but loving congregation.  They had been saving for ten years to build a new church building to replace their old one, and were just about able to break ground.  But after Easter, as annually they did, they had a missionary come, this time from China.  He was a gentle spirit, in the manner of Pearl Buck and others.  He simply but directly told the Mountainview folk what he had seen in China of sheer poverty, of abject need, of kindness in the face of suffering, of living on nothing, and, too, of the difference faith can make.  Over three days, with meals, and sugar on snow for dessert with the last marks of winter, with three days of conversation, something happened.  After the missionary went to bed, the folks sat in the twilight, in silence.  You don’t have to say much in a small town anyway because everyone knows what everyone thinks already.  Finally, a farmer with gnarled hands, who would be milking at 4 in the morning, leaned in and said, Well. I sure would love a new church. We have waited a long time.  But…but…this fellow and his people need that money a whole lot more than we do.  Let’s draw out the building money and give him a check before the train leaves tomorrow. We can make do with this place another decade.

Let us live in Easter, let us love one another!

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

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music

posted in Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music, The Bach Experience, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 04.28.2024 at 11:00 am

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 04.7.2024 at 11:00 am

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On Easter we receive and are received by a new resurrection family, the family of Jesus, crucified and risen. 

Ponder this resurrection family, reaching from Mary to you, from Mary’s heart in the garden, to yours in the pew.

Your resurrection family is a heart-to-heart hearth, an I and Thou fellowship. We know Jesus now through his cousins become ours by faith. Resurrection is, if nothing else, relational, personal, familiar.

Mary in the garden, John 20, shows us so. You ask me how I know he lives? He lives within my heart. Known by name. Through historical mist, through mysterious tradition, through numinous utterance, through biblical legend, through the possibility of impossibility, through the impenetrable imponderable, given to the least, Mary. Mary: wayward, female, alone, poor, powerless… loving…Mary Magdalene, come to the garden alone.

From Mary to the 12, from the 12 to the 500, from the 500 to the least of the apostles, from Paul to Rome and the church and the gentiles and me and you and even all the mere Methodists fleeing from the wrath to come. 

From Mary to Marilynne Robinson, to Raymond Brown, to Ernest Fremont Tittle, to your mother, to Nancy Marsh Hartmann, to Marcel Proust to Charles Webb to you.  My spiritual nourishment comes from reading, from faithful stories of struggle from our laity, and from worship, all of it, every smidgin of it---organ, hymn, choir, anthem, reading, sermon, prayer, sacrament all. It’s all I need.  It’s all we need,

Charles Webb, who reshaped and reframed our second hymn, was the longtime organist at the Bloomington Indiana First UMC, and Professor at the School of Music at IU.  An editor of our hymnal, he worked to improve the musical harmonies, and the musical cadences of the revival tradition hymns, a fairly large piece of work as the frequency of his name in the hymnal attests.  I met him, once, when preaching in Bloomington.  In his nineties now, he enjoys visits from his former pastor and our dear friend, and sometime summer preacher, Dr. Philip Amerson. We mortals face loss, misfortune, disaster, death.  But we also see the glow that comes, say, in the nineties, when one’s hour in the sun is coming to an end. We also hear the power of the spoken word, in conversation, in State of the Union, in Sunday sermon.  And we also recall William James, My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.

On Easter we receive and are received by a new resurrection family, the family of Jesus, crucified and risen. 

Hear Marilynne Robinson, our guest at BU last year, and perhaps again next year: One Easter I went with my grandfather to a small Presbyterian church in northern Idaho where I heard a sermon on the discrepancies in the gospel accounts of the resurrection…I was a young child… yet I remember that sermon…I can imagine myself that primal Easter, restive at my grandfather’s elbow, pushing my nickels and dimes of collection money into the tips of my gloves…memorably forbidden to remove my hat…It seems to me I felt God as a presence before I had a name for him…I was aware to the point of alarm of a vast energy of intention all around me…and I thought everyone else must also be aware of it…Only in church did I hear experience like mine acknowledged, in all those strange narratives, read and expounded… What should we call the presiding intelligence that orchestrates the decision to speak as a moment requires?  What governs the inflections that make any utterance unmistakably the words of one speaker in this whole language-saturated world? 120 (Our) theology is compelled and enthralled by an overwhelming awareness of the grandeur of God …heaven’s essence…is that it is inconceivable in the world’s terms, another order of experience…Amen (the preacher) said, having blessed my life with a lovely thing to ponder… (Death of Adam 221-229)

On Easter we receive and are received by a new resurrection family, the family of Jesus, crucified and risen. 

I washed up on the shores of Union Theological Seminary in 1976, clumsily paying the cabbie double what I owed for the short ride from Grand Central to Grant’s Tomb, and, in retrospect, largely clueless about what was around me and before me.  I had been raised in a Methodist parsonage, attended MYF Sunday by Sunday, worked three summers running a waterfront at a Methodist Camp (no drownings of record), and been graduated from Ohio Wesleyan, a small Methodist college for small Methodists.  Yet I knew very little about the Bible.  In short order the strange world of the Bible, and its mystery, its complexity, its strange, strange, strangeness captivated me, mesmerized and embraced me.

My advisor, a rumpled world famous Roman Catholic Biblical Theologian, from whom we have heard this Lent, invited me to meet with him, and proceeded over three years to guide, teach, and encourage me, far beyond any evidence I could give at the time of the value of his investment in time, forgiveness and attention.  He daily wore a worn black suit and clerical collar.  On our first meeting, at the end he said, ‘Mr.  Hill, Dr Cyril Richardson is teaching this fall a course on the Early Christian Writers.  He is excellent.  Normally his course is reserved for second year students.  But if you can somehow get a seat in the course, take it.  I just don’t know how long we will have him here at Union.  He spent last year at home in England.’  Brown was so right.  It was an outstanding course, taught with high excellence, under the booming British stentorian voice of the world’s preeminent Patristics scholar. ‘Today we shall consider St. Athanasius, who makes Paul Tillich look like a pup, a rain-soaked puppy’.  He had a love-hate relationship with my beloved Tillich.  The course had 12 lectures.  Richardson gave 10.  Between 10 and 12, he died.  At his funeral, a memorial Richardson himself had composed for a friend was read:  Richardson said most of us do not fear death, but fear the death of our loved ones and death of our dreams.  What a priceless resurrection gift, fifty years ago, to study under him, thanks to a member of the resurrection family, to my advisor, Raymond Brown.

Brown was glad enough to see my enthrallment with the Bible.  But a year or so later, he looked through the piles of courses taken, and in plan, mostly Bible.  He said, ‘Mr. Hill.  You are going into pastoral ministry, are you not?’  ‘Well, yes’, I said, ‘I mean I think so I hope so, if they will have me’. ‘Well’ Brown said, ‘I am glad for all these Biblical courses you are taking, including those with me, but don’t you think you might want to take a course in Psychology and Religion?  You are going to be a pastor, are you not? Ann Ulanov teaches some good courses in this area.’  So, well, I did.  And it was hard, hard for me, psychology and religion.  Not the content, but the, the, well, the depth.  It was bracing.  And good and right. What a priceless resurrection gift, fifty years ago, to study under her, thanks to my advisor, Raymond Brown.

At noon or so, I would cross Broadway to Teachers’ College (think John Dewey), to swim in their reasonably adequate pool.  Coming out I often crossed paths with Dr. Brown, who celebrated the noon mass at Corpus Christi church on 121^st street.  You remember that Thomas Merton a generation earlier had an apocalyptic conversion experience it that same little church.  There was Fr. Brown at 1pm, in the same rumpled black suit and collar, carrying a brief case back across the street to his seminary office.  He taught on the west side of Broadway, and he preached on the east side of Broadway.  Week by week.  As a Methodist I should have known, but didn’t at that time, the incarnation Brown gave to Mr. Wesley’s beautiful hymn, the music under the words, and the words under the words, of our Boston University motto about learning, virtue and piety: Unite the pair so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety, learning and holiness combine, truth and love (for all to see). What a priceless resurrection gift, fifty years ago, to study under my advisor, Raymond Brown.

         On Easter we receive and are received by a new resurrection family, the family of Jesus, crucified and risen. 

I have never seen or met Jesus.  I never heard him speak, nor embraced or was embraced by him in person.  I know him through the resurrection family.  I know his resurrection through the family cluster and family systems of those who did know him, unto and through the cross and resurrection.  Mary is preeminent.

         In the same vein, I never did meet Ernest Fremont Tittle.  I never heard him preach, nor in his lifetime ever attended his Evanston First UMC, the largest in our denomination at the time of his death in 1960.  I read about him, but never greeted him.  But I know him, keenly through the company of his lineage, his part of the resurrection family.  I preached once in his venerable pulpit in 2010…including to the Garrett class of 1950, whom I embarrassingly and mistakenly, though not without some reason, greeted as the class of 1850!

         Like my namesake Allan Knight Chalmers, and unlike me, Tittle was an outspoken pacifist through the whole second world war, from the highest of pulpits inthe mid-west.  Fearless.  For three decades he preached to Chicago, to the country and to the world.  On Sunday evenings he gathered a steady fellowship of graduate students for dinner, to talk about faith and life, death and resurrection.  I never saw him, never shook his hand, never viewed his youth or age.  I was not present at his death.  But his life was and is alive to me.   Alive through the family of the resurrection, through those who as young adults worshipped with him and dined with him and prayed with him.  They had everything in common.  They were distinctively vital, active, liberal Christian Methodists.  I give you Dr. Robert V. Smith, chaplain at Colgate, a Garrett graduate, and protégé of Tittle, whose example from Hamilton NY kept alive for me and many others the importance of university preaching, campus ministry, and theological education.  His growling voice enunciated resurrection in the spirit of Tittle. For he had enjoyed Sunday dinners with Tittle.  Smith worshipped here at Marsh Chapel some years ago. I give you Professor Roland Wolseley, Professor of African American Journalism at Syracuse University, a beloved faithful liberal pacifist, lay leader and parishioner in our Syracuse NY Erwin UMC.  His editorial ear and kindness evoked kindness in the spirit of Tittle. He had Sunday dinners with Tittle.  I give you Ruth Lippitt, the leading heart and mind in our Rochester Asbury First UMC, who stood up and stood out and stood for faith and hope and love.  She and her husband David met at Sunday dinner with Tittle, and her unwavering courage evoked resurrection in the shadow of Tittle.  I give you Dr. Christopher Evans, of Boston University, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Tittle, during his work at Garrett, and whose steady example in learning, virtue and piety reclaim by familial resurrection the daily example of Tittle.  Hamilton, Syracuse, Rochester, Boston.  These did not know each other, never met, but with so many others share a common familial resemblance, a family resurrection.

On Easter we receive and are received by a new resurrection family, the family of Jesus, crucified and risen!  Sursum Corda! Lift up your hearts!

If we believe that life has meaning and purpose

And we do

If we believe that the Giver of Life loves us

And we do

If we believe that divine love lasts

And we do

If we believe that justice, mercy, and humility endure

And we do

If we believe that God so loved the world to give God’s only Son

And we do

If we believe that Jesus is the transcript in time of God in eternity

And we do

If we believe that all God’s children are precious in God’s sight

And we do

If we believe grace and forgiveness are the heart of the universe

And we do

If we believe that God has loved us personally

And we do

If we believe in God

And we do

Then we shall trust God over the valley of the shadow of death

And we do

Then we shall trust that love is stronger than death

And we do

Then we shall trust the mysterious promise of resurrection

And we do

Then we shall trust the faith of Christ, relying on faith alone

And we do

Then we shall trust the enduring worth of personality

And we do

Then we shall trust that just deeds, merciful words are never in vain

And we do

Then we shall trust the Giver of Life to give eternal life 

And we do

Then we shall trust the source of love to love eternally

And we do

Then we shall trust that we shall rest protected in God’s embrace

And we do

Then we shall trust in God

And we do.

The Lord is Risen! He is Risen indeed!

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.31.2024 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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Preface

It is not so long ago that we greeted Jesus at his nativity, humming carols at home and lighting candles of hope in winter windows.  It is not so long ago that we witnessed his growth in wisdom and stature, in the knowledge and love of God, while as a teenager he taught in the temple.  It is not so long ago that this mighty young man Jesus stooped, fully human, for baptism in the surging river Jordan, the river of death and life.  It is not so long ago that we saw him take up his ministry among us, preaching and teaching and healing.  It is not so long ago that with Peter and James and John we saw him ascend the Mountain of the Transfiguration.  With him, we have hiked this Lent, step by step.

Even beset as we are by climate, Ukraine, Gaza, political chaos and all manner of personal challenge, come Sunday we are delivered from captivity, from the power of fear, in the announcement of the Gospel. It is the word of faith that delivers from enslavement to fear. From separation anxiety, survival anxiety, performance anxiety, anxiety about anxiety. The good news carries us home, to the far side of fear.  It breathes into us yet again the breath of life

In New England we do not often enough recall the Boston sages, like Holmes: Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing. While we are permitted to scorn nothing but indifference..

Letter

Life, the breath of life, a passionate thing.  With passion, today Paul writes, alone in prison. His own missionary work, as we can overhear from the length of Philippians, is under revision and redirection by others who claim he has failed in certain key areas. His own personal future is more than cloudy, including the possibility of death, and again, his ruminations in Philippians bear this out. He acclaims deliverance for the captives, you and me, a saving drumbeat along the river of life, breathing the breath of life. He has a sight line to the far side of fear.

And, note, he is unafraid, this Apostle to the Gentiles, to quote his opponents.

Philippians 2 sounds like a Gnostic hymn. Paul may have lifted and used it, because his hearers know it and because it suits his message. It is a plundering of the Egyptians, a use of the cultural language of the day to convey great tidings of good news. You need not fear. You need not fear. God has broken in upon our fear, and invaded this life with liberation to live fully and lastingly! God’s beachhead is the cross. The cross is the presence of God in suffering. The cross is the love of God in suffering. The cross is the power of God in suffering, to free the captives—to free every human being—from fear.

I wonder if we can recapture, by the imagination, Paul’s decision to recite for himself and for his correspondents, a hymn to the faithful love of God that carries us over, to the far side of fear. Here is Paul.  Here is the outspoken leader of a religious movement charged with atheism, with rejecting the gods of the empire. Here he is alone in prison. Here he affirms what can only be affirmed by faith, the victory of the invisible over the visible, of God beyond the many gods, of Christ the failed messiah over the cross of his failure. He does so in measured, nearly serene tones.

His attention is captured by the servant Christ, here so like the figure in Isaiah. To be a human being, for Paul, is to be captive under the control of malignant powers, to live in a world in which the human being has too often fallen prey to powers that are aligned and arranged against what is truly human. Yet, as one himself immersed in fear, Paul, seized by Christ, is set to singing in his prison cell. Maybe today, given our fears, we may hear something of his happy news. Meditate this Palm Sunday on what in the past has brought you strength, what brings you home, what breathes life, brings the breath of life.

In New England we do not often enough recall the Boston Poets like Whittier:

I know not what the future hath of marvel or surprise

Assured alone that life and death God’s mercy underlies

And so, beside the silent sea

I wait the muffled oar

No harm from Him can come to me

On ocean or on shore

I know not where His islands lift

Their fronded palms in air

I only know I cannot drift

Beyond His love and care

Gospel

It is not so long ago that we greeting Jesus at his nativity, humming carols at home and lighting candles of hope in winter windows. And now it is time to come down from Galilee and to face Jerusalem, to take the full measure of this Man, the Son of Man, and to have the courage to let Him take our full measure, too.  The crisp air and vistas of the north country have fed our souls.  But now it is time to head home, and turn our face to Jerusalem.

The road home can tax the traveler.  It reminds us of earlier homecomings.

Odysseus walking the last few miles to Thebes.  Socrates walking to the center of Athens and the cup of hemlock.  Richard the Lionhearted sailing the English Channel, heading home.  A prodigal son, scuffling up the last mile of country road toward a dreaded homecoming.  You, returning at last to whatever you have long avoided, wandering as you have in the Galilee of the rest of life.  For at last, there is the road home.

What was Jesus’ state of mind, what was on his mind and heart, as he entered the Holy City?

It is perilous, even arrogant, at this late date and from this great distance, to try to imagine Jesus’ state of mind as he descends the Mountain and enters the City.

Albert Schweitzer, before he went of to heal the jungle sick, showed convincingly how inevitably errant are all such attempts. For we paint our own inner lives into the life of Jesus, when so we try to see what cannot be seen in Scripture.  Still, particularly at this point in his journey, on Palm Sunday, at the entrance into the Holy City, and on the threshold of his own death, we are haunted, (are we not?) by the desire to see what Jesus saw and feel what he felt and sense what he did sense, coming home.

Now Jesus is walking down into the city, down off the mountain, and down into the heart of his destiny.  He is going to his grave.  He has the breath of life, but only for a moment. Like you and me.

Some of the Gospel today, as Jesus heads home, is too true to be good.  For He is not at home, not at home, in a world of injustice, abuse, violence, and death.  For him, in such a benighted world, there is really no place like home.

Jesus is heading home. As are we all, though, it seems sometimes to be a conspiratorially well-kept secret.  We all are walking down the Lenten mountain and into our lasting, our last future.  Every one of us is mortal.  We are going home.  We might want to balance our attention to identity with our awareness of mortality. We might want to balance our attention to identity with our awareness of mortality.

Here are two possible but unverifiable sentiments in Jesus’ heart and mind as he enters the city. 

On one hand, it may be, he looks back upon his ministry and feels that he is homeless. He has found no lasting nest on earth, no lasting crib, no lasting domicile.   He has found opposition and rejection.  He has encountered misunderstanding and criticism.  To a harsh world he has brought a gentle manner.  To a wolfish world he has brought the labor of love.  To a selfish community he has brought the summons to service.  To an inconsistent dozen disciples, he has brought the steady presence of peace.   He has not found a home, no home for Jesus, descending the Mount of Olives.   He has even said of himself, “foxes have their holes, and birds of the air their nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”

And those of us who have been shot out of the saddle, riding for a righteous cause, as we dust ourselves off and bind our wounds, we do so in the best of company, in the company of the crucified, for whom, on this green earth, as yet, there is no place like home.   Today you may feel shot right out of the saddle.  But let me ask you something.  What other saddle would have rather ridden?  Some losing causes are worth support even in defeat.  I would rather be shot out of the right saddle than to canter comfortably all the live long day in the wrong one.  So, dust off, bind the wound, and get ready to ride again.

On the other hand, it may be, Jesus looks forward to his passion and feels that he is going home.  He is not yet home, but going home. He has the breath of life, yet, briefly.  He has come and now he must go.  He tarries for a while, but he is going home.  There is something else alive in this homeless homecoming.  Frederick Buechner compares the feeling of faith to the feeling homesickness, that longing for the feeling of home.  Faith is a heartfelt longing for the comforts of home.

Only the greatest of the Gospels, that of John, fully and resoundingly displays this sentiment.  But it is present, muted, in Mark as well.  Jesus must endure the cross, just as we inevitably must endure tragedy, accident, betrayal, injustice, failure and death.    We have the finest of company, the Lord Jesus Christ himself, when we endure life’s damaging darkness.

Some have lost loved ones to death, this past year.  Some of lost beloved institutions to death, this past year.  Some have lost beloved dreams to death, this past year.  Jesus walks beside you.  Jesus walks beside you. In fact, this is his peculiarly chosen path, his way, his way of the cross.  All of the passion, all of the passion music of Lent, all of it, all the way to the cross itself, acclaims, in passion, the compassion of God in Christ our Lord.  God has a passion for compassion.  God has a passion for compassion.   So Jesus looks forward—does he not?—to the completion of his mission, to the last word in the soliloquy, to the transition to glory.  Again, only John has fully held this diamond.  Only he sees the cross as glory, without remainder.  Only he has Jesus say, on the cross, “it is completed”.  But Mark too senses Jesus’ homesickness at his homeless homecoming.  His longing for God.  And we sense it too, because we feel it, too.

Jesus on Palm Sunday, both homeless and going home.

Some of the Gospel today, as Jesus heads home, seems too good to be true.  This greatest of passionate tragedies, the cross of Christ our Lord, is the passageway, strangely, wonderfully, to our heavenly home.  He dies as we die.  And we die with Him.  We all die.  We are not even temporarily immortal.  Yet, attendant upon this road down the mountain and into the city, there resounds, softly at first, a carol of grace, a carol of love, a carol for all, like we, who are going home.   And we are.  Going home.  As my friend said, ‘we may tarry here awhile, but we are going home’

This homesickness, this spirited sense that home is over the next street, up the winding trail to the cross, this hunger for home, this is what Paul meant elsewhere:  this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison…this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison. 

Coda

So let us lift up our hearts. While we have breath, breath by breath, let us praise God with the very breath of life.

To the question of evil let us live our answer by choosing the cruciform path of faith.

Let us meet evil with honesty, grief with grace, failure with faith, and death with dignity. (Let us carry ourselves in belief).

Let us affirm the faith of Christ which empowers us to withstand what we cannot understand.

Let us remember that it is not the passion of Christ that defines the Person of Christ, but the Person that defines the passion.

Let us remember that it is not suffering that bears meaning, but a sense of meaning that bears up under suffering.

Let us remember that it is not the cross that carries the love but the love that carries the cross.

Let us remember that it is not crucifixion that encompasses salvation, but salvation that encompasses even the tragedy of crucifixion.

Let us remember that it is not the long sentence of Holy week, with all its phrases, dependent clauses and semi‐colons that completes the gospel, but it is the punctuation to come in seven days, the last mark of the week to come in 168 hours, whether it be the exclamation point of Peter, the full stop period of Paul or the question mark of Mary—Easter defines Holy Week, and not the other way around. The resurrection follows but does not replace the cross. The cross precedes but does not overshadow the resurrection. It is Life, the Breath of Life, that has the last word and there is a God to whom we may pray, in the assurance of being heard: “Deliver us from evil”

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.24.2024 at 11:00 am

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John 12:20–33

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Frontispiece

Some years ago, in the aisle of a darkened sanctuary, and following a dark re-enactment of the events of Holy Thursday and Good Friday (think three dozen parishioners dressed as Roman soldiers and carrying torches, roles for some of the disciples, one member each year selected to carry the cross and place and stand it on the front law, usually with a light or not so light snow falling), a ten-year old, guided by his mother, came forward along the shadowed side aisle of the nave and asked, of the Jesus so depicted, ‘What did he do that was so wrong?’ ‘What did he do that was so wrong?’ A child’s way to ask, ‘What was the linchpin for the move to the cross?’

Well, I said, or perhaps mumbled, something about blasphemy and something about treason.  In the dark, the young man followed little of it, but the darkness he understood.  I tried to say that the Jews found him blasphemous and dangerously so, the Romans found him treasonous and dangerously so.  (Remember:  the Romans crucified Jesus, for they alone held that power of capital punishment, not the Jews, not the Jews, but the Romans crucified him.) I don’t think the ten-year-old heard very much of what I clumsily said.  But the darkness of that nave and of the acted out cross with 80 participants, that darkness he got. And the darkness of the Lenten mystery remained, and remains.  It remains today.  What indeed did he do that was so wrong?  Here and herein abides the darkness of Lent, the darkness of Holy Week coming, the darkness of unfathomable mortality, the darkness of unwanted illness, the darkness of the quiet crying of the soul at 4am, the darkness of Dostoevsky and Raskolnikov, the darkness of the lasting inability to forgive, the darkness of impending sickness and death which will not be defeated, the darkness of having to live out life all alone, the darkness of doubt in any meaning or sense thereof, the darkness of the best of people being treated with the worst of life, to die a hero’s death, said Sherman, and have your named misspelled in the papers.

John 12: 20-33

Jesus’ fate as you know has now been sealed, just before our Gospel reading, in the preceding 11^th chapter.  Unfortunately, many times our lectionary lessons can be hard to follow, because they are cut away from what precedes or follows.  Jesus has raised Lazarus from the dead, a few verses back.  This seals his doom.  In John, it is not the cleansing of the temple that puts Jesus on the cross.  That has been done 11 chapters ago, an age in biblical time.  No, what gets him in ultimate trouble is resurrection, his power, his love, his presence, and especially his voice that brings people from one location to another, in this case out of one religion and into another, out of the synagogue and into the church, out of tradition and into gospel, out of law and into grace, out of discipline and into love.   For Lazarus, this is good.  For Jesus, not so good.  Voice can get you into trouble still. (Try preaching for a living…)

Then Mary wipes Jesus’ feet with her hair.  Then Judas plots his downfall. Then Jesus rides the donkey.  Then Jesus calls the crowd, who saw what happened with Lazarus.  Then—notice—the Greeks come and ask for him (meaning, all the nations, meaning, all the unreligious, meaning the future of the planet).  And his voice is still what the planet needs:  in warming, in warfare, in collateral death, in historical political ignorance, in the abiding Covid shades of isolation and loneliness and anxiety and depression and our forgetfulness about communion, about common life, about conversation, about smiles and greetings and nods and a willingness to return to gathering and fellowship an a common life and a common good.  Then Jesus prays for glorification, meaning crucifixion.  The cross is the turning point between past and future, death and life, miscommunication and understanding.  It is glory in John.  Even the ever so human quaking prayer of Jesus in the garden, ‘LET THIS CUP PASS FROM ME’ is gone in John.  What, shall I ask to be saved?  No, I have come for just this purpose, this HOUR (again, like glory, in John, HOUR is a code word for cross).

The Greeks, THE GREEKS precede the religious, like the harlots preceding the Pharisees in the other earlier Gospels.  “We would see Jesus” they say.  What happens is different.  They see, but more, they hear Him.  They hear a compelling voice.  They hear and heed a compelling voice, for which they have no other manner of description than to use words like heavenly and thunderous.   This is a highly charged, very meaningful passage, if very short, as R. Bultmann might have reminded us.  We are Greeks, ourselves, that is, not raised within Judaism, so our access to Jesus, and its depiction here, are crucial.  At the last minute, we too are included.

They, the Greeks, and we, also Gentiles, come to Jesus by way of the apostles, Philip and Andrew (not Peter and Andrew, Philip and Andrew—John has Peter on a pretty short leash all along).  That is, we come to life through a set of traditions, but the traditions themselves are not the life itself.   We have to translate the traditions into insights for effective living, if they are to allow access to life. We have to translate the traditions into insights for effective living, if they are to allow access to life.

Then, the matter of what this closeness to Jesus means is considered.  And what is it?  It is not a heightened religious experience.  It is not a mystical reverie.  It is not an emotional cataclysm.   It is service.  One finds Him in service with and to Him.  One knows Him walking alongside him.  One gains access to him by loving Him and in Him loving others.  In His service there is freedom, even perfect freedom.  Service, step by step, and day by day, finally gives way to and leads to death, the rounding and finishing of life.  Have we together found our path, our shared ways of service?  Are we walking in the light?

With angel voices and thunder and a prophecy of being lifted up, the community of the beloved disciple sees, again, in retrospect, as we do each Holy Week and Easter, the paradox of victory in defeat, of life in death, of love conquering the ‘ruler of this world’.  The ruler of this world is not a reference to God the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ.  The phrase is ARCHON TOU KOSMOU, the ruler of this world, the demigod who in gnostic thought mistakenly and haphazardly created the world.  Jesus casts out the archon, the ruler of this world, and so can be offered to and understood by Greeks tinged with a hint or more than hint of Gnosticism.  I guess you could interpret this passage without reference to Gnosticism, but just how would you do that? I guess you could interpret this passage without reference to Gnosticism, but just how would you do that?     The service of love renders insipid and impotent the ruler of this world and all his minions.  Service in love is eternal, eternal in the heavens.

(Puzzling, though, is the phrase, ‘I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again’.  What is this?  The second glory is the cross.  But the first?  Simply an assertion that the God of the future is also the God of the past?  I do not, all these years later, I do not quite understand it.)

At all events, in the community of the beloved disciple, people have found a way, much truth and new life.  A voice, heavenly and thunderous, has spoken to them, a voice given ‘for their sake’.   As last week, the judgment once reserved for the end of time or for the eternal realms, or for both, has come, is now.  The bottom line or cash value of resurrection is speech, the possibility of saying something that can be heard, of saying something saving that can ‘savingly’ be heard.  While not limited to preaching in the narrow, and certainly not limited to an ecclesiastical voice, still judgment and salvation, in the here and now, by this Gospel, and this chapter of this Gospel are a dire matter, a crucial matter of hearing and speaking.  It is the marrow of wisdom, speaking of which…

Wisdom

Most of us most of the time need more reminder than instruction. So say each of these twice every morning…

Faith is not a prize to achieve but a gift to receive. 

The gospel is not about success and failure but about death and resurrection.

Cultural, racial and religious divisions are hard and real, today, and in first century Palestine. They must be faced and addressed.

Sometimes the divine voice is and has to be harsh, like when a Father warns his son not to touch a hot stove. 

Food matters, really matters, and so, as in the sacrament is at the heart of our faith and faithfulness.

Love brings happiness as those four young men from Liverpool reminded us: all you need us love. Love is the way to happiness.

You can listen to 799 services on podcast, starting with August 2008. You can listen for 47 days and 7 hours straight. Ideal requirement for STH students. 

Sometimes an anthem can and will interpret the Gospel for the day, alongside the sermon.

Love includes. Faith does not exclude. Hope includes. Love, faith and hope are like worship at Marsh Chapel. All are included.

Nostalgia can block out curiosity. Nostalgia can eclipse curiosity.  (R Walton).

Brown Writing

My teacher of blessed memory, Raymond Brown, taught that we could trust the spirit. ‘Since we hold through faith that the Holy Spirit was at work in that growth (of the early church) and since there was real continuity from the first stage to the last, there is no real difficulty with the affirmation that Christ founded the church’. (Senior, 202)

My teacher of blessed memory, Raymond Brown, taught that we could trust the spirit, the Gospels were the result of evolutionary development in the early church with their roots in the life of Jesus and his mission but their content and tone influenced by the preaching of the early community and ultimately set in writing through the composition of the evangelists in the context of their communities (Senior, 204).

My teacher of blessed memory, Raymond Brown, taught that we could trust the spirit.  So he was not too worried about Protestants like me would did not share his affirmations of the celibacy of the priesthood, the sacrifice of the mass, the infallibility of the pope, or the sub-ordination of women.  He was willing to take and live one day at a time, one epoch at a time, one generation at a time.

My teacher of blessed memory, Raymond Brown, taught that we could trust the spirit. What is key is the recognition of the right of the Spirit-guided teaching authority of the church to develop and articulate anew Christian doctrine.  Perhaps more than any other aspect of modern biblical scholarship and modern biblical theology, this understanding of the legitimate development of doctrine, moving in harmony with but also moving beyond the express formulations of the New Testament, guided Brown’s exegetical work and, at the same time, was a point of consternation for his critics (Senior, 229).

My teacher of blessed memory, Raymond Brown, taught that we could trust the spirit.  There is something so lastingly true, good and beautiful, in and within the viva voce experience of teaching and learning, something so glad hearted and loving at its best.  And it is happening right on our doorstep, right on the grounds near and far of Marsh Chapel.  What a privilege to be a part of such a centuries deep form of living and, to name this in the Johannine sense, a centuries deep form of service.

Coda

To end, even in the darkness, there is the promise of light.  As Dr King said, ‘when it gets dark enough—you can see the stars’. On Monday morning our Marsh Senior staff gathers for the weekly staff meeting, always beginning with devotions.  Recently one of our number brought a reflection on hope, that carried, rightly, darker and lighter hues.  The prayerful presentation ended with a suggestion that, even when hope seems a long way off, there remains what he, quoting another called, the power of ‘persistent possibility’.  That kind of persistent possibility, and holding onto that possibility, may just be what we need, what you and I may need, to gather ourselves and receive the benediction, and take another week-long walk in faith.  After all, as Martin Luther taught us, ‘faith is a walk in the dark’.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.17.2024 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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John 3:14–21

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For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. 

Scripture

Just before our gospel reading, Nicodemus, thrice mentioned in John, has departed.   You remember his interview with Jesus.  He asks about being born again.  He asks about resurrection life.  He asks about spirit.  In the nighttime interview, Jesus answers him:  You must be born anew.  Your religion, your religious health, counts on this.  Our gospel today takes the same theme further.

Saith the Scripture: God is love.  (Or Love is God.) Eternal life is trust in God who is love.  The doorway to eternal life is trust.  We learn this in our experience.  This trust is a gift, God’s gift.  With open hands we receive the gift of God.   We do not achieve or earn or create this trust.  It is given to us.  The gift comes wrapped, belief and trust and faith and knowledge come gift wrapped in meaning, belonging, empowerment—in the beloved community.

To make sure the hearer and reader of his gospel get the full measure of his point, the author of John uses a great old word, Judgment.  KRISIS in Greek.  You hear our own word, CRISIS, there.  Until John, more or less, Judgment was reserved for the end of time, the eschaton, the apocalypse.  John, as is resonantly clear here, says something different.  Judgment is not at the end of time.  Judgment is now.  Judgment does not await the arrival of the Son of Man on the clouds of heaven, or the millennial reign, or wars and rumors of wars, or signs of the times.  No.  The critical moment is now.  John has replaced speculation with spirit.  John has replaced eschaton with eternal life.  John has replaced Armageddon with the artistry of every day.  John has courageously left behind that to which most of the rest of the New Testament still clings.  John has replaced then with now.  Then with NOW. What courage!  The upshot of this change, as recorded in our Scripture today, is the near apotheosis of our lived experience. It is what we have, all we have, to go on. And as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience, Who He is (Schweitzer).

In other words, the ancient near eastern apocalyptic, of heaven and end of time judgment, still present in various religious traditions (and in much of the rest of the New Testament) as we have tragic and sorrowful occasion to see in our own time and struggles with violence, is replaced.  In your experience.  This is the judgment.  The light has come into the world.

As my grandmother used to ask, ‘Are you walking in the light?’  Walter Fluker, our friend and neighbor and colleague, said the same every day.  Are you? ‘Are you walking in the light?’ 

Likewise, we notice that the letter to the Ephesians, written by a student of Paul, makes a complementary affirmation.  By grace you are saved through faith (he writes this twice, or an editor has added a second rendering).  The phrase, both in its repetition and in its cadence, seems clearly to be a prized inheritance for the Ephesians.  God is loving you into love and freeing you into freedom.  God first loved us.  You are not made whole by your doing.  You are God’s beloved, and so are made whole, made healthy, made well, ‘perfected’.   Both in our successes and in our failures, we truly depend upon a daily, weekly hearing of this promise and warning.  Hence the centrality, the enormous importance of Sunday worship. In our experience, we are given to trust God.  Our response in actions will then forever be overshadowed by real love, by God’s love.

Then look at Numbers.  You will remember that Moses stuttered.  Moses had a speech impediment.  But sometimes people so afflicted become the greatest of speakers, the greatest of rhetoricians, the greatest of eloquent preachers.  We were reminded of this in the redolent, powerful State of the Union address last Thursday.  There is a radical power in speech, an un-uprootable power in speech. There is, still, for our electronic gadgetry, an abiding outlasting power in the spoken word.  And the truth will out, the truth comes out, over time, over time, over time. So, Moses prayed for the people.

Our Sunday hour of worship is meant to carry us backward, meant to carry us down deep, meant to remind us of what matters, counts, lasts and works.  The single word for meaning, in faith, is grace.  For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. 

John

Which brings us to the Gospel, that today of St. John 3, which features Jesus in mortal combat over all of these. You are veteran listeners to and readers of the Gospel.  You have paid attention and you have done your reading.  So, you know how the Gospel of John flows.  Jesus demarcates the limits of individualism during a wedding in Cana. Jesus pillories pride by night with Nicodemus. Jesus unwraps the touching self-presentations of hypocrisy in conversation at the Samaritan well. Jesus heals a broken spirit. Jesus feeds the throng with two fish and five barley loaves. Jesus gives sight and insight, bifocal and stere-optic, to a man born blind. Jesus comes upon dead Lazarus and brings resurrection and life.

He brings the introvert out of the closet of loneliness. He brings the literalist out of the closet of materialism. He brings the passionate out of the closet of guilt. He brings the dim-witted out of the closet of myopia. He brings the church out of the closet of hunger.  He brings the ministry of the church out of the slough of despond.  Speaking of the church, of ministry, of congregations, of communities, of denominations, of organized religion (although, to be playful, as a Methodist I am not interested in organized religion, but in WELL organized religion), yes, there are a lot of things wrong.  But there are a lot of things right, too.  The Jesus of the Gospel of John commands us to hear so. That is: in all, He brings the dead to life.  Jesus brings the dead to life.  The dead to life.

This Lent we honor Fr. Raymond Brown, the preeminent Roman Catholic Biblical Scholar of the 20^th century.  He was a pastor, a scholar and teacher, and he had his own personal ways of teaching.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. 

Brown Teaching

Although I had been raised in a Methodist parsonage, had attended weekly MYF gatherings, had worked for three years at a Methodist church camp running their waterfront (no drownings), and been graduated from a small Methodist college for small Methodists, nonetheless on arrival in Seminary, I had very little knowledge of or grasp of the Bible.  That changed, rather suddenly and with intensity, under the tutelage of Fr. Raymond Brown, then a young middle-aged professor, and his colleagues (Martyn, Koenig, Shephard, and Landes).  It really changed in full because of the fascination I immediately sensed and felt in the strange world of the Bible.  I took every course I could.

Now Raymond Brown was my advisor.  We met a couple of times a year, and looked at the courses I might take. My first semester he said, You know Cyril Richardson is teaching his course on Early Christian Writers (Patristics) this fall.  It is usually a second-year course, but if you can get a seat you should take it this year.  I just don’t know how long we will have him here teaching, and he is excellent.  Richardson, indeed excellent, gave 11 of his twelve lectures, and died the day before the 12^th.  What a gift Brown gave me, by a slight thoughtful word of advice.  Later on, he saw the pile up of Biblical courses I was choosing and, though a biblical scholar, said, Mr. Hill, you are going into pastoral ministry.  Don’t you think you should have some courses in counseling and in psychology of religion?  Well, again, he guided me with reason and care.  For all his rightly celebrated scholarship, he had and took the time to offer some practical ministerial advice, to me, and I am sure to many.

He taught.

‘His main objective was to demonstrate the positive contribution of historical-critical biblical methods in support of traditional church teaching’. (102)

‘A hallmark of all of Brown’s publications was his desire not to overlook the pastoral impact of his books and articles, even the most academic ones’ (153).

He argued: ‘I contend that in a divided Christianity, instead of reading the Bible to assure ourselves that we are right, we would do better to read it to discover where we have not been listening.’ (REB), (180).

‘Brown was also convinced that the problems created by later interpretation of John should not be addressed by editing offensive words or passages out of the New Testament…but rather, by informed teaching and preaching about the Johannine text and by condemnation of Christian anti-Semitism’. (194).

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. 

Love

In all this, there is before us a Lenten caution, a Lenten warning. A nominal belief is not much better than no faith at all.  Not a nominal belief in God, but an active awareness of God is born of the Spirit.  The Spirit creates an active awareness, actually at work in our life, influencing your thinking and deciding.  The Holy Spirit, God with us, is at work today, to refresh your heart and to quicken your life and to banish your fear.

Spirit is calling us today to move on from a nominal belief in God to the faith of a new birth, an active awareness, actually at work in our life, influencing our movements and our attitude.  Such a rebirth, the wind of God inspires. ‘Let us not doubt that by the Spirit of God we are re-fashioned and made new (people), though the way he does this is hidden from us’ (Calvin).

The Gospel of John is calling to you.  At every turn this strange, enigmatic Gospel is calling to you.  I mean you. To take up a step up in faith. To move up a step up in faith.  To receive a new birth in faith. Are you telling me you have gotten as far as you can in faith?  Nicodemus thought that until he saw he was wrong. The woman at the well said so, until she, her own-most self, was revealed.  Those feasting on fish and loaves learned something else. Those in harsh debate with Jesus did as well. The man born blind, given sight, thought maybe all he would have was his illness and the pool of Bethsaida:  not so. And Lazarus, to top it all, was dead, down in the catacomb, four days.  Then came a voice like no other: Lazarus! Come out! The Gospel of John is calling to you. At every turn this strange, enigmatic Gospel is calling to you.  I mean you. To take up a step up in faith. To move up a step up in faith. To receive a new birth in faith. Are you telling me you have gotten as far as you can in faith? Take a step up.

The writer of our majestic, spiritual Fourth Gospel has turned to the earlier Testament, and alighted on a strange magical account of Moses making magic in the wilderness.  He compares, he analogizes.  Like the serpent on the pole in the wilderness, so Jesus on the cross on Golgotha.  And then the majestic, spiritual word, the word of grace. A word about God, about love, about cosmos, about giving, about believing, about death and about life.  It is the gospel, in nuce.  God is loving us into love and freeing us into freedom.  God is loving us into love and freeing us into freedom.  God is loving us into love and freeing us into freedom.  Hear the good news: For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.  And over time, over time?  Truth and light merge.  The doing of the truth and the seeing of the light merge. 

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. 

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.10.2024 at 11:00 am