Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

Our Gospel this morning, sung in hymns, including children’s hymns, read in Holy Scripture, including the Fourth Gospel, approached in thought and speech, including in a twenty minute sermon, and, in full, lived out in the exuberance of a summer Sunday, accents the glory and revelation in the least among us, the littlest among us. The Gospel of John exalts the glory of God revealed in the divine presence, throughout and through all of life. Our passage from John 6 is one of seven great miraculous accounts recalled in the preaching of the earlier church, and collected in the first half of the Gospel of John, as a way to ring the bell, and sing the song, and tell the tale of the divine presence. It is miraculous that 5,000 have gathered. It is miraculous that all are fed in one setting. It is miraculous, more miraculous still, that not only are they fed, but they are satisfied. That is a glorious morning, when all are satisfied. It is miraculous that in this revelation, there arises, for the author of John in reflection, a sense of what this must mean, that one from beyond has entered within, that one from above has descended below, that ‘a prophet’—such a strange appellation—has come into the world. To be sure, John has received this story from tradition (as in Mark 6), but he has changed it to celebrate a glorious revelation, which takes him well beyond any simply sacramental concern. And of all John’s changes, perhaps, the greatest is the agency he gives to one of the least of those present. In John, unlike in Mark and the other gospels, there is a new figure in the story, a boy, a lad, a little fellow, who is the only one who remembered to bring a lunch along. There was, John avers, a lad with 5 barley loaves and two fish. John smuggles into the morning’s Gospel a new character in the ongoing story of Gospel, of divine presence. In radiant exuberance, the revelatory joy of Jesus’ presence, then and now, on the hills of Palestine and in the hills of New England, John alerts us to this one little lad, the boy with the lunch to share. This is good news packaged in the lunch pail of the least of these among us.

On the streets of Boston in the summer, we too are alert to the least of these among us. Summer takes our city and makes it young, younger still, young again. This is a time when people from all over the globe come and pay us a call, come and visit us here. Just look at the license plates of the cars driving past you some time on the highways north, south and west. Just listen to the languages spoken as you saunter down a summer day in this magical city, as you ‘flaneur dans le rue’. It is an unutterable happiness to be graced with those who want to visit, who come from afar, who save and plan and travel to get here to see something, to learn something, to touch the hem of something.

For this is dear old Boston, the home of the bean and the cod, where the Lowells will speak only to the Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God. Boston, in so many ways the city of origin, the point of departure. Boston, birthplace of the republic: Haymarket Square, Old North Church, Bunker Hill, Old Ironsides.

Boston, home to heroes: Paul Revere, Abigail Adams, John Hancock. Boston, where in 1832 the city heard a children’s choir sing, “My Country tis of thee”, written a year earlier, and sung first at Park Street Church, just a few blocks from here. This afternoon, on the Freedom Trail you can talk with “Ben Franklin” attired in the garb of 1780. On the subway you can stop at the Scollay Square station and remember the man who never returned. Take the train to Fenway park and peer at the green monster. Try not to make the mistake of wearing a Yankees hat. Walk through downtown and the flower gardens in the glorious Public Garden. Spend a minute along the old streets, and feel the freshness of a country being born, being formed, being built. Visit the children’s science museum. Boston your home town takes the world and makes it young again!

One of the best spots in this young city, this birthing room for freedom, is the Aquarium. Right on the port shoreline your city has built a magnificent structure, a several tiered tank. Coral has been transported from the Caribbean, and then also reproduced. Fish of dozens of colors, shapes, sizes swim in the blue green cylinder. Divers in fins, wetsuits and air tanks maintain the giant manmade ocean tank. Stingrays swimming in a separate pool–you could touch them! And around and around the outside of the cylinder walk mesmerized children and adults, looking on the splendor of the Neptune’s kingdom. There are six kinds of sharks in the Aquarium. The sand shark and others. At the top level you can watch them jump and swim. Boston returns one to the great ocean deep from which life at last emerged across the millennia. Boston takes the world and makes it young again!

A generation ago, with three children in tow, in the summer heat and on a limited budget, it is a happy glory to recall, our then young family visited the Aquarium. The place was mobbed, packed with kids and parents, classes and groups. The colors and shapes and sizes of the humans walking clockwise around the tank mimicked nicely the variety of fish swimming counterclockwise inside. We saw a little girl pressing her nose against the glass up toward the tank top, just as the sand shark swam by. Two women photographed the coral. A boy screamed as he patted the stingray. There were maybe 3000 people inside the Aquarium. All of a sudden, the loudspeaker crackled. “Please be quiet, all of you.” Soon the tall structure, full of children and parents, was nearly silent. The announcer continued, “I must regrettably report that a little boy is lost. He is three years old. He is wearing jeans and a white sweatshirt that says Boston College on the front. He has red hair. Please take a minute wherever you are and look toward the tank and then along the walkway.” In a moment, you could feel the atmosphere in the building shift from lark to worry. Every parent’s worst nightmare had hit. The tension around the tank was palpable. The thought that one child, even one, out for a day of learning and play would disappear, or worse, held the gathered company on a tight leash.

In a single moment, the joy of the many had been overshadowed, darkly overshadowed by the need of just one. All knew instinctively that there are no extra children, none to spare, not one to give up, to throw to the sharks. In that kind of dramatic moment, it so very clear: every child is precious, every one dear.

We have wondered a little this summer, remembering our long ago visit, about the way the announcement so disturbed those of us who could see our own children. Of course you can think of many reasons. But one central reason the announcement “child lost…white sweat shirt..” pierced the group that day is that we are dimly aware that there is a kind of revelation in the least of these, like the lunch for the road of life brought along by the lad with the 5 barley loaves and 2 fish. Children have not had a chance in full at life yet. They have not had their time yet in the batter’s box. They give a sharp measure of how what we say stands up to what we do, of what our walk is like in earshot of all our talk. Children suffer the effects of poverty most strongly. Children endure the effects of family demise most squarely. Children miss the care of physicians and dentists most keenly. Children feel the impact of bad diet most sharply. Children are too little, too weak, too powerless, too small in every way to watch out for themselves. Children measure the depth of morality around us by measuring the amount of time, energy, commitment, and money within us, ready to be devoted to children.

As a country, just a few weeks ago, we had a shared, convulsive, similar moment, did we not? We know the need for laws, for borders, for the institutions that make up a civil society, including proper, legal, fair immigration practices. Across different perspectives, we can largely agree that law is central to safety and peace, that law is meant to make us more human and humane rather than less. And we also, by vast majority, know and affirm the centrality of immigration in the birth and life and health of our land. But law, like scripture, requires interpretation, and application, and therein lies challenge. So when as country, we faced the shame and humiliation, within this decade of humiliation, of seeing children taken from their parents, seeing parents deprived of their children, seeing what can befall the least among us, and especially those 2,000 directly affected, in our own time, at the borders of life, there was a common revulsion, a common reaction, a common response. Nota bene. There is in that one moment a sign, a sign of a common hope. Like the presence of the little lad who shared his lunch, across the lake from Capernaum, and so both took and gave the measure of that Gospel moment, so the least of these measure us.

As a church, let us readily confess as well, we have yet to achieve the kind of caring for children which we profess. The pious words of a recent Methodist Church statement (“Durham Declaration”) are ones we all share: “We believe that caring and providing for one another includes welcoming children into the family of the Church. As members of the Body of Christ, we know that children are gifts from God. In this we follow the example of our Lord, who, during his earthly ministry and in the face of opposition, welcomed children to his side. And we conform to the example of the early church, which, though living in the midst of a pagan empire that casually practiced abortion and abandoned children (usually to slavery, prostitution or death), helped to provide refuge for unwanted ones and their needy parents.” There was even a footnote to the Didache. Well, good. Good words. But anyone who has been around the church for very long knows that we do not endlessly, fully practice what we preach, in this as in so many areas. We sometimes devote more language to love of children in church than we do actual time spent with children. Vacation Bible School (we have run one every year since 1979, including a small one here June 24) is one bellwether for our commitment. Sunday School is a close second. We are still more than rightly judged by the sort of people we produce, the sort of children we raise, in the communities of faith.

One day this summer, after a round of golf, two friends stopped at the home of a third to have supper. The host is a retired physician, a family doctor from the bygone days of “fee for service”. Redolent with exercise and at ease in the company of friends, the doctor reflected on his life and work. A summer evening, a twilight supper, a moment before the light begins to fade and the cool air returns–this became an hour for thoughts before the autumn twilight of life, a moment before a great change of season.

He spoke about service and care. He ruminated regarding “the young doctors coming up”. He unabashedly celebrated great-grandchildren, grandchildren, and children (both adopted and biological). A large family portrait hung on the living room wall. Mostly, though, this veteran of decades of stewardship campaigns talked about his church. He reckoned: “I try to tithe because in the church children get what they cannot get anywhere else. They catch a sense of wonder–wonder at the world, wonder at love, wonder before holiness. They see real kindness–kind people, kind ideas, kind words, kind works. Most of all, they learn about generosity–generosity in church that makes a world of difference. In the church seeds are planted: seeds of wonder, kindness, and generosity. I am happy to hope that my tithing has made a difference.”

It made me happy to hear him say so. It makes me happy, on this summer Sunday, to think of all the good women and men, near and far, who are offering themselves, offering yourselves, to, and with, and through the least of these. A student teaching church school. A woman running a child care center. A man hiking with scouts. A musician volunteering with a children’s choir. A graduate student preparing to work with, to counsel children. A couple who lead confirmation classes. The blessed ones who will volunteer to lead youth groups. Summer camp counselors, overworked and underpaid. And more broadly, the citizenry of this land, which still dimly perceives that the lad with the fish and loaves, the least of these among us, measures us.

Someone helped you grow up. Someone helped you discover discipline, hard work and a passion for education. Discipline to reflect the ordering power of God. Work to reflect the creative energy of God. Education to reflect the life-giving newness of God’s spirit. Children, the least of these, are made “in the image and likeness of God.”

People know that there are no extra children, none to spare, not even one to throw to the sharks. When the need is clearly presented, the problem is almost solved. So it was on a July day in dear old Boston, a generation ago, that after twenty minutes of looking and waiting, the tourists at the Boston Aquarium again heard the crackling loudspeaker, and again heard the announcer’s voice, and at last heard the report, the child is found, the lost is found. Several thousand people stared at one another and many fish and cheered instinctively, just as we will stand and cheer when every child across this great land and around the world over has what she needs to make a life.

One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him, “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?” Jesus said, “Make the people sit down.” Now there was a great deal of grass in the place; so they sat down, about five thousand in all. Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted. When they were satisfied, he told his disciples, “Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.” …When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.”

– The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 07.29.2018 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
July 8

The Drinking Gourd

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to listen to the sermon only

Mark 6:1-13

There is a dark temptation in the assumption that the common hope of freedom is really in the hands of somebody else, someone other than you and me. It is falsely reassuring to judge that the real big advances in liberty have been, are, or will be the work of somebody else.

Today, in this week of Independence Day, we want to remember that the history of our nation tells another story. Our land was populated by people who saw the expanding circle of hope as their own responsibility. With Reinhold Niebuhr, they defined love as taking responsibility.

For the week past, we have been as a family at home, in the farmlands of the Empire State, due west. On the Fourth of July we sat in a boat, three generations watching, as fireworks adorned the sky, north, south, east and west. And then, the quiet, and the dark. And then the firmament, the black sky dotted with bits of white. And there, the ‘drinking gourd’, the Big Dipper, the constellation whose outer stars point to the North Star. The way home, the way north, the way out, the way of hope. Our forebears have left us some travel tips on the journey of hope. Walk with me for a few minutes, due west. Here is a Sunday morning summer vacation trip, free of charge, and lasting only twenty minutes, a remembrance of hope, perhaps hopeful for us, just now, in our own time of trial. I am taking you back home with me this morning. I want you to ‘meet the folks’.

Once a southern Methodist preacher paid this complement. “I mean this, about your area. The south is a different place than it was seventy years ago. Totally different, and the difference comes from Rochester and Syracuse. Two things have completed changed the southern jurisdiction: civil rights and air conditioning! Civil Rights from Rochester and Air Conditioning from Syracuse!” The story of air conditioning we leave for another day.

Our land has given rise to many women and men who did not leave freedom to somebody else. Its price of eternal vigilance they provided in very daily, very personal, very local, very immediate ways. In the same manner by which we might take for granted Niagara Falls, so close and so grand, we take these mighty stories for granted, saving stories of hope and freedom.

Due west is the land of Hiawatha (“who causes rivers to run”). Such musical names adorn this geography: Canandaigua, Tioghnioga, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Susquehanna. The great native leader of the Iroquois showed in the 15^thcentury the critical need for union, for space and time in which to live together. His leadership was focused on common hope, on collegial relations, on counsel together, and so he is harbinger of all the examples of faith and freedom to come up along the Mohawk River and the Erie Canal, as Longfellow rhymed:

All your strength is in your union

All your weakness in discord

Therefore be at peace henceforward

And as brothers live together

This also is the land of Harriet Tubman. You may want to visit her home in Auburn. Her neighbor William Seward, Lincoln’s opponent and ally, also from Auburn, bought Alaska, considered at the time a folly, an “ice-box”. Tubman’s grand niece, Janet Lauerson, was on our church staff for a time in Syracuse, after we both migrated down from the far north country, not far from the burial place of John Brown. Brown’s body lies moldering under a ski lift near Lake Placid. He and Gerrit Smith, founder of Peterboro, a village for freed slaves, a short 15 minutes north of our July 4 fireworks, were not ‘compatibalists’ regarding slavery. As Lincoln would later say, they felt those who most affirmed slavery should start by trying it for themselves. Peterboro, a small village of people of color, in our childhood, stood out, under its civil war statue, one hundred years later, as a beachhead of freedom. Brown, Smith, Seward and others were the chorus before which Tubman could sing out the life of freedom, following the underground railroad. Following the Drinking Gourd.Remember her wisdom: “When I found I had crossed that line (on her first escape from slavery, 1845), I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything...I started with this idea in my head, ‘There’s two things I’ve got a right to…death or liberty’…’Twant me, ‘twas the Lord. I always told him, “I trust you. I don’t know where to go or what to do, but I expect you to lead me, and he always did.”

You will expect to hear something of Frederick Douglass, on this trek, who is buried in Rochester. His cemetery plot is across the street from Strong Memorial Hospital. As one patient said one day, looking through the window, “it gives you something to think about”. Douglass printed a journal, the “North Star” in Rochester, and so developed a voice for a new people in a new era. 80 years or so later, at Syracuse University, it was Professor Roland Wolseley who developed the first national program in Black Journalism, across the mid to late 20^thcentury. Wolseley was formed in the faith under the great preaching of the best Methodist preacher in the 20^thcentury, Ernest Freemont Tittle, when Wolseley’s young wife was Tittle’s secretary. Wolseley was our pastor parish chair, and measured sermons according to their likeness or otherwise to those of Tittle. Wolseley lived around the corner from the Carrier Dome and therein a moving tribute to Ernie Davis, a kid from Elmira, who, a century after Douglass, and in the lifespan of Wolseley, gave tragic, courageous, and lasting embodiment to the hope of racial justice, harmony and integration. He also played some football. The voice of Douglass rings out against the harmonic background of Tittle, Wolseley, Davis and others. In the North Star, Douglass wrote: “The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle…If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its mighty waters.” Or maybe we should give the honor to his ally Sojourner Truth: “That…man…says women can’t have as many rights as man, cause Christ wasn’t a woman. Well, where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman. Man had nothing to do with it!”

Susan B. Anthony did not leave the project of freedom to others. I wonder what sort of dinner companion she might have been. Her constant consort with governors and senators across the Empire state made her an early Eleanor Roosevelt. Think a bit about where we have traveled in hope under the Drinking Gourd. Pause and slake some thirst by remembering real progress in history. Our grandmother grew up in Cooperstown and graduated from Smith College four years before she had the right to vote. Our mother was born only eight years after full suffrage. Yet today, my wife is a musician and teacher, my sister is a corporate attorney, my other sister a teacher in medical care, and across a life in ministry my top colleagues have been female. I scratch my head to imagine a world without their voices. For instance, Syracuse produced Betty Bone Schiess, one of the first women ordained to ministry in the Protestant Episcopal church. One of the Philadelphia 11. We study her in Introduction to Religion. One rainy day when my daughter Emily was 13 and had the flu, we met Schiess, at the druggist. The pharmacist called her name. I clamored over to investigate whether it were she, the famous Schiess. “Who wants to know?” she replied. As she left, after good banter, she turned in her slicker and totting an umbrella, and looking at us, pronounced this blessing: “One day you will be a Methodist bishop”. At first I thought she was speaking to me. But no. “Thank you very much”, my daughter replied. Think of Schiess when you visit the birthplace of suffrage and feminism in Seneca Falls. Susan B. Anthony’s witness stands out among the witness of so many others: your grandmother, your mother, your sister, your wife, your daughter, your pastor, Betty Bone Schiess, and so many others. Who can forget her motto: “Failure is impossible” (on her 86^thbirthday, 1906). And her challenge: “Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation.”

Sometimes the freedom train derailed. Exuberance can produce minor collisions. When we get so focused on the speedometer that we forget to drive the car safely, then trouble arises. Woodstock pales by comparison with the communal experiments in this region during the nineteenth century. The Shaker Community and the Oneida Community perhaps can bracket our recollection. Under Mother Ann Lee, and starting in farm country near New Lebanon, in the Albany area, just across the Massachusetts line, the shaking Quakers firmly addressed the matter of sex. They forbade it. Like the desert fathers and Qumran communities of old, they took Paul at his word and meditated fully on 1 Corinthians 7. Women and men came together only once a week, on Sunday morning, for ecstatic singing and dancing, hence their name. This made church attendance somewhat more than casual liturgical observance. However, the practice did not amplify the community itself: infant baptisms lacked the requisite infant, and so were infrequent. Consequently the Shakers moved to Cleveland where they blended into Sherwood Anderson’s new Ohio, returning to the old ways of hard work, monogamy, and frugality. In short, they became Methodists. Hear, again, the Shaker tune:

Tis a gift to be loving

Tis the best gift of all

Like a gentle rain love falls to cover all

When we find ourselves in the place just right

‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight

When true, simplicity is gain

To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed

To turn, turn, will be our delight

‘Till by turning, turning, we come round right

Now, the Oneida’s. You may want to read again Without Sin, the history of their somewhat different experiment. Just a few miles west of New Lebanon, the Oneida community set out to find heaven on earth, the end of all oppressions, and even the hope that, as John H Noyes read from Revelation, “death itself will be no more”. Although I went to High School in Oneida I do not recall a full lesson on the matter of stirpiculture, the heart of the Oneida experiment. The Oneidas practiced “complex” marriage, in which every man was married to every woman and vice-versa. Procreation was planned, through a deliberated, committee process. (For those of you for whom this is more information than you require, I apologize) Three hundred in number at their greatest growth, the community produced bear traps and then silver, continuing, in some fashion, until just a few years ago. Of all the utopian experiments, the Oneida project is one of the most fascinating. However, after word got out about the doings and practices in Oneida, clergy in Syracuse banded together and ran them out of town, first to Canada and then to the Midwest. Noyes died on the trip, and the community disappeared, except on your dinner table, in wedding gifts, and in quality restaurants. Let us be charitable and remember their hope, their love of freedom, as Noyes expressed it, even if we cannot affirm his methods: “I am free of sin and in a state of Perfection”

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 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. And it is their hope of freedom that is our greatest remembrance of them.

They followed today’s dominical teaching of Mark 6. (Notice, today, that here Jesus fails in preaching but succeeds in pastoral leadership.) When you journey toward hope, keep your friendships in good repair (6:7), travel light (6: 8), keep faith close which is the confidence that better things can come out of worse, waste no time (6:10), when rejected shake the dust from your feet and move on (6:11). And keep the main thing the main thing: Jesus Christ is come to guide us true north, guide us by the Drinking Gourd, guide us on the journey of hope, and we are not there yet. Of course not. It is hope that we seek. And hope that is seen is not hope. Who hopes for what he sees? We hope for what we do not see, and wait for it with patience. Real love is taking historical responsibility on the journey of hope.

In earshot of our Lord’s teaching, in remembrance of the freedom and hope of our forebears, there is no avoiding a very personal question: as a Christian man or woman, what are you going to do to continue to expand the circle of freedom in our time? Where is your Polaris, your North Star, your Drinking Gourd? Where is your tribal council to create? Where is your slavery to escape? Where is your North Star to publish? Where is your franchise to find? Where is your libertinism to avoid? Where is your hope to share? Are you to celebrate independence by singing and smiling only? Or will you lift a hand?

From the rear of Marsh Chapel, if the windows could speak, you would hear our 16^thPresident, himself a beacon of hope:

(Gettysburg Address, recited)

May it be so:

Follow the drinking gourd,

For the old man is a-waiting for to carry you to freedom,

Follow the drinking gourd.

Left foot, peg foot, traveling on,

Follow the drinking gourd.

The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 07.8.2018 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
June 24

Grace and Peace

By Marsh Chapel

2 Corinthians 6:1-13

Mark 4:35-41

Grace opens our hearts. Peace stills our hearts. May this summer 2018, for you, be a summer of Grace and Peace.

First, Grace

Grace opens our hearts.

A friend recalled Marilynn Robinson: “Theologians talk about prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave—that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. And therefore, this courage allows us, as the old men said, to make ourselves useful. It allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying exactly the same thing.” (p. 246, Gilead, paperback, 2006).

Let us make ourselves useful to the cause of grace. Christ molds us, using our faults, even, He molds us in the cruciform of love. We are not perfect, for we are not perfectible. So, Shakespeare: ‘They say best men are molded out of faults, and, for the most, become much more the better, for being a little bad’.

In her study of religious congregations, the subject of several of her award-winning books, Boston University Professor Nancy Ammerman says she’s witnessed two big changes. One is the diversifying of the American religious landscape, as immigrants have seeded the country with Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, and other religions. The second is the growth of the “nones”(the religiously unaffiliated). Their mushrooming is a response to dismay with both the growing politicization of religion (especially evangelical Christians linking up with the right), she says, and scandals such as Catholic clergy sex abuse. These developments prompted the rise of self-described spiritual-but-not-religious Americans. But “the bottom line of my research is that they’re probably neither,” she says. (April 25 2018, BU TODAY)

What does it mean, here and now, to be a Christian, to grow in grace and learn the arts, the habits of the spiritual and the religious?

In this week when we have watched as the welfare of 2300 immigrant children has been hanging in the balance, the question has a direct and sudden personal immediacy, even if in retrospect the moment has been amply foreshadowed in the last two years. We hear the force of the Apostle’s warning, existential warning, not to accept the grace of God in vain.

Yes, you have reason and obligation to be concerned about the persons and personalities driving cultural and political formation, concerned about rhetoric and language and behavior, concerned about voice, and what voice and voices do speak for the land you love, the country you cherish.

Yes, you have reason and obligation to be concerned about the policies, which emanate from those personalities and persons, those forms of rhetoric and language and behavior. Government is just what we decide to do together.(D Patrick, 4/8/18) Policies affecting now these 2300 children, and others that cause 5-year old children in Mississippi to lose their teeth due to lack of medical care, or policies that may ignite and incite the wreckage of warfare, or policies that enrich the few and impoverish the many by forging a hierarchy of zip-codes, or policies that forget the stranger in our midst, or policies that diminish some by means of race or gender or nationality, in particular: about this you have reason and obligation, as Christian people, to be concerned. You have no option about the concern, however you finally judge the policies. You are free to run your marathon, in personal faith, but just make sure you see the social engagement all along the route, from Heartbreak Hill to Kenmore Square, that makes your run possible. Grace begets a combination of deep personal faith and active social involvement.

Yes, you have full reason and obligation to be concerned about public good, about the forms of culture and civil society across our land, painstakingly built up over 250 years, that are not government and not politics, but are more fundamental and more fragile than both. You have reason and obligation to be concerned about flagrant falsehoods and the celebration of untruth (contrary to regular assertion, there are by percentage fewer incidents of crime among immigrants, legal or undocumented, than in the rest of the population, for instance) about the denigration of women by callous mistreatment, about the mockery of the one hundred years of devotion to moral development by the Boy Scouts, about the disdain for courts of justice and the rule of law, about discourtesies to transgender people, about accommodation of white supremacists, about the rejection of diplomacy amid long standing global partnerships as a matter of course, about verbal and visual insults of Puerto Ricans, about forms of spurious half-baked nationalism, about the hourly shredding of the inherited role and influence of national leadership, about racist disdain, in scatological expression, for countries of color, about unapologetic, flagrant, unbiblical and public misuses of sexuality, about the dismemberment of public discourse centered on objective truth, about the un-enforcement of fair housing laws, and so on—in short, about all manner of the lowering of standards and forms of civil society.

Grace, the struggle to live by grace and not in vain, grace is the antidote to what is graceless. Grace opens the heart, as Paul teaches the early Christians in Corinth. Grace for persons, policies and public good. Beloved: You have not accepted the grace of God in vain. You have accepted the grace of God in faith. This very past week, in particular, have you accepted grace to lead you on and lead you home. If grace can change the heart of John Newton, a slaver, who gave us our hymn, Amazing Grace, then grace can continue to open hearts, open minds, and open doors. Our radio congregation, this week, has led the way. A message from Vermont hails the determination of the United Methodist Church to bring charges against a member, the current US Attorney General, who may have fallen under the graceless shadows of child abuse and racism (as the charge alleges). (In forty years of ministry, this disciplinary paragraph has been used, in my experience, only once, prior to this week. Charges are brought against clergy with regularity, but almost never against laity. Rare, but there.) A message from Boston calls us to faith, to protest, and to compassion, by the grace of God. A message from regular weekly congregant listeners in Georgetown Texas, calls on the Methodist Church to remember its own disciplinary teaching: The official United Methodist policy is stated clearly in the Book of Discipline: “We oppose immigration policies that separate family members or that include detention of families with children.” (Para. 162.H, emphasis added). A message from New Haven Connecticut, and the campus of Yale University, admonishes us all to civility, recalling Hannah Arendt, to meet the graceless with grace: After a while, people come to “believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true,” wrote Arendt, the German-born philosopher, in describing how truth lost its way in her native land.

Grace opens the heart. Here is what the Holy Scripture helps us see, regarding grace. From Vermont, to Boston, to Texas, to New Haven…you are not alone. You see and know the ongoing struggles, in grace for grace, by grace to undo the graceless, as did St. Paul in his frank accounting of his own struggles, in admonishment to the Corinthians. In fact, we too will perhaps develop a catalogue of hurts, which then can be used to say, ‘You see. I have been for you, into injury. I am for you, even to hurt. So now, maybe, I can speak to you’. You see two years of past humiliation, and probably most of decade into the future, before the shadows fully lift, before the tide fully turns. You have endurance (UPOMONE) which may be allowed to stand for all the rest in Paul’s catalogue of hurt. You have endurance, in part, because you know that you are not alone. We have still in our mind, our memory, our heart, and our soul, as a people, a capacity for grace.

Grace opens the heart to a little worldly wisdom, let us say: I was once told the whimsical story of an Ethiopian tribe, Dorze by name, who, knowing that the leopard is a Christian animal, believe that like all good Christians in their region the leopard fasts on Wednesdays and Fridays; despite this belief, they are just as anxious to protect their herds and themselves from the leopard’s marauding on these days as on the other five! Wise as serpents, innocent as doves…

So do one thing. My grandmother had a sign on her kitchen door that read: ‘Do one thing. There. You’ve done one thing.’ Support one campaign, somewhere in the country where it makes a difference: by acquaintance, by prayer, by encouragement, by giving. For example.

Grace opens our hearts.

Second, Peace

Peace stills our hearts.

You have little trouble to understand why this wonderful passage, Mark 4:35, about the wind, and the sea, and the boat, and fear, and the dominical gift of peace, were so loved and cherished and remembered that Mark recalled and recorded the moment fully 30 years after the earthly ministry of Jesus. Peace! Be Still! While this narrative is embedded in the career of Jesus’ preaching, teaching, and healing, its meaning is a moment of resurrection, of lasting peace, a foretaste of heaven, within the vicissitudes of earth.

The Gospel of Mark is heard, written, read and interpreted, after resurrection. While the hearer knows the story, a passion narrative with a long introduction, as Wilhelm Wrede aptly said, the passion of the story is resurrection, in the light of which, after which, as a consequence of which, chapters 1-15, including our passage today, appear. You read Mark 4 in the bright light of Mark 16. You hear the account of the rocking boat in earshot of the account of the risen Lord. Why are you afraid? Have you no faith? Perfect love casts out fear, does it not? Which, that is, takes you back to April 1, to Easter. What do you remember from Easter? Do you recall Easter at all? Hug Easter. Life is meant to be lived in Easter, not Advent, not Lent, not Good Friday.

Remember an angel on the right, clothed in white. Remember the Crucified, going before, continuously before. Remember those great Greek Gospel words, you can hear their English cousins, tromos and ekstasis(trauma and ecstasy). Remember that they were afraid, but that resurrection gave Mary Magdalene the strength to move out of her past, and Peter the strength to admit faithful disappointment. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the preaching of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The chance for. The possibility of. The hearing of.

Now Markis not great literature, but it is Holy, it is Holy Scripture. It is not Plato, not Cicero, not Homer. Nor is the Greek of the gospel a finely tuned instrument. It is harsh, coarse and common. The gospel was formed, formedin the life of a community. Its passages and messages were announced as memories meant to offer hope. Its account of Jesus, in healing and preaching and teaching, all the way to the cross and beyond, is offered to a very human group of humans who are trying to make their way along His way. The Gospel is a record of the preaching of the gospel. To miss this, or to mistake this, is to miss the main point of the Gospel, and to miss the gospel. It is in preaching that the gospel arrives, enters, feasts, embraces, loves, and leaves. It is in preaching that you hear something that makes life meaningful, makes life loving, makes life real. It is in preaching that the Gospel of Mark came to be, as a community, over time, heard and reheard, remembered and rehearsed the story of Jesus crucified (his past) and risen (his presence). We should not expect narrative linearity, historical accuracy, or re-collective precision here. And in fact, we find none. Let me put it another way around. Most of the NT documents are, in one way or another, attempts to remember, accurately, the nature and meaning ofbaptism. Well, Mark fits that description. How are we to live with a measure of peace, one of the fruit of the spirit?

Peace stills the heart. Here is a story about Barbara Bush, of blessed memory. Her pastor at her funeral remembered Barbara Bush’s playful peace. He sat with her on the shore at Kennebunkport as she washed out her shoes in the rocky surf. A family came up and the mother said, ‘You look a lot like Barbara Bush.’ Barbara smiled and replied, ‘I get that a lot’. Peace.

Peace stills the heart. A consolation note, from one woman to another, carried this line: “I know your grief. Yet once my own grandmother died, in a way she was closer, more present, to me than in life, because neither of us was any longer twisted up in all those family conflicts. She became more really herself to me”.

Peace stills the heart. Years ago, here at BU, in an otherwise somewhat routine luncheon following a service for families of women and men in military service—I somehow think Sr. Olga hosted--a guest, the former national head of all Catholic Chaplains was introduced. Unsolicited, he offered a few excellent, brief comments. In sum, he said his work in Washington had largely been about finding ways to tell people ‘no’ without hurting them, to tell them ‘no’ without permanently damaging them. His example: 25 priests all feel called to be stationed in San Diego…but only 5 are needed. I found the reflection deeply true of life, of ministry, of administrative service, and simply but clearly put, peacefully put, in a human, honest, responsible, mature and caring way. His little speech carried truth that had been forged in the white heat of life, shaped and molded then by some semblance of reflection and prayer, and stated cleanly and happily. I think everyone there will remember his words, when all other 22 speakers are forgotten. He spoke from his lived experience. And he spoke with in a spirit of peace.

In peace, then, in conclusion, here are some humble, practical summer suggestions, on the way of peace. To struggle for grace, over the long term, you will need the nourishment of an inner peace. Find that peace in attentive embrace of what is beautiful and true and good. Yes, that means regular Sunday worship, wherever you can find the true and good and beautiful, as much as possible in equal measure. (For the Christian, worship is not optional, any more than is faithfulness in partnership or in disciplined giving). It also means morning prayer. Follow in the morning, if you like, Martin Luther and recite each morning the decalogue, the creed, and the Lord’s prayer (or add a psalm or two, or add the beatitudes, or add verse of St Paul, say Romans 12: 9). Or use a book of daily readings. Take a moment, maybe just a week, to start, to journal, to write down something that strikes your fancy, a quotation, a memory, a conversation, a poem. Share meals when possible:Half of all meals now eaten in the USA are eaten alone.Limit your consumption of news, and vary your sources for news. The average American spends 170 minutes a day watching television and 170 minutes a day searching the internet. That may be a little too much immediacy, in an age hungry to death rather for transcendence, don’t you think? That may be a little too much entertainment, in an age hungry to death for enchantment, don’t you think? Think of Kierkegaard and the divine incognito. Think of Ricouer and the second naivete. Think of Wesley and the reservoir of human goodness all around.

Make your song something like this: My life flows on in endless song, above earth’s lamentations; I hear the clear though far off hymn that hails a new creation; no storm can break my inmost calm, when to that rock I’m clinging; if Love is Lord of heaven and earth, how can I keep from singing?

Grace opens our hearts. Peace stills our hearts. May this summer 2018, for you, be a summer of Grace and Peace.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.24.2018 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
June 17

I Looked Over Jordan

By Marsh Chapel

2 Kings 2:1-12

The text for this Sunday's sermon is unavailable. Please enjoy this service's Community Announcements and Prayers of the People by the wonderful Reverend Doctor Jennifer Quigley and Reverend Soren Hessler.

Community Announcements

Good morning, and welcome to Marsh Chapel at Boston University. On this Father’s Day, we are glad that you are joining us for a moment of pause, rest, and worship, either here in the nave at 735 Commonwealth Avenue, listening via radio or internet waves at 90.9 WBUR or wbur.org, or later via the podcast. As we strive to be a service in the service of the city – Boston – and a heart in the heart of the city, know that you are welcome here – immigrant, refugee, or 8^thgeneration New Englander, black, brown, white, gay, straight, bi, trans, something else, or simply not sure. You are welcome here. Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Green Party, Independent, you are welcome here. If you are new to Marsh Chapel, we hope you may identify yourself to one of the chapel’s staff after the service so that we can introduce you better to this vibrant and diverse Christian community or add your name and contact info to the red pads at the end of each pew. If listening from afar, check out our website: www.bu.edu/chapel or send us an email at chapel@bu.edu. We are delighted to get you better connected.

While academic year chapel activities remain suspended for the summer, the chapel offices remain open on weekdays and Sunday mornings. We continue to be here for worship at 11am every Sunday and coffee hour following the service. We hope you might join us downstairs following the service today.

Next Sunday, June 24, following the morning worship service, join the Dean and Jan Hill for a Vacation Bible School experience beginning at noon complete with pizza, bible verses, music, and fellowship. For more information, contact chapel@bu.eduor speak with the Dean.

The following Sunday, July 1, the chapel’s annual Independence Day cookout will happen following the morning service. You are welcome to bring a dish to share.

Finally, on a more personal note, I am pleased to share that the Rev. Dr. Jennifer Quigley has accepted a two-year post-doctoral fellowship with the Louisville Institute and will be placed at Drew University Theological School as Assistant Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Studies. Jen and I will be moving to Madison, New Jersey, August 1. I will continue as Associate Director of the Miller Center for Interreligious Learning & Leadership at Hebrew College, working primarily remotely from Madison. We are both grateful for a decade of shared ministry with the community at Marsh Chapel, the last nine of which have been as members of the chapel staff. We are deeply indebted to the Marsh Chapel community, our colleagues on the staff, and especially the Dean and Jan. This community has formed us and transformed us and will continue to shape who we are and how we serve as we shift into new venues for ministry. Thank you for the warm wishes and glad tidings that were extended before the service today. We anticipate continuing to worship at the chapel through the end of July and hope to greet many of you individually before we move.

A complete list of chapel activities and worship opportunities is available on the chapel website www.bu.edu/chapel where there is also the opportunity for online giving to support the mission and ministry of Marsh Chapel. As the choir continues to lead us in worship and prayerful meditation, please remember it is a gift and a discipline to be a giver.

Prayers of the People

As we come to a time in our service where lift our hearts, our minds, and our spirits to God in prayer, I invite you to find a posture that will help you be in a spirit of prayer, by remaining seated, coming to the communion rail to kneel, or standing as the choir leads us in the call to prayer: lead me Lord.

Loving God, we come before you this morning as your children. Our brother Jesus taught that unless we change and become like little children, we will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Loving God, we ask that we may be transformed by your grace to become more childlike so that we might enter the kingdom of heaven.

Transform our hearts this morning. When our cynicism has gotten the best of us, when we are weighed down by the burdens of this world, when we are too numb to feel, give us the hearts of children who weep when others are weeping, but who find ways to laugh infectiously when no one else can crack a smile. Open us to unbridled joy and delight in simple things and the gratitude of one for whom all of creation can still be new.

Transform our minds this morning. Give us a constant hunger for learning, so that we might commit ourselves to studying scripture. Give us the eagerness for the story, to read the next verse, the next chapter, and the next book, so that we might not prooftext to justify whatever position we might already hold, but so that we might be open to the whole story of your persistent grace and your redeeming love. Give us the humility to learn from our mistakes, to acknowledge when we and our sisters and brothers who have gone before have read poorly and have harmed others with our interpretations of scripture. Give us the persistent curiosity to ask why. Give us a childlike sensitivity to inequality and injustice and let us ask why? Give us the energy to ask why over and over again when we see children harmed and families separated.

And transform our spirits this morning. When we feel deadened to the world around us, enliven us with a childlike sense of wonder. Inspire in us awe at the beauty of creation, from the vast blues of the ocean, to the green of tiny blades of grass, to the shimmer of bird’s wings. Give us a childlike tireless energy for life, and the peace to sleep soundly at the end of each day. And give us the childlike ability to be assured in hope and confident even in unseen things; give us faith.

And on this Father’s day, we pray for all those who are fathers, who serve as father-figures, for those who are single parents. We also pray for those for whom this day is difficult, for those who have lost their fathers, for those who have lost children, for those who are estranged from, have been harmed by, or do not know a father. No matter how we relate to one another as human families, we are grateful for the parental love that you unconditionally offer us, God, and that you allow us to call you by many names so that we might have better relationship with you. And we conclude our prayer this morning by calling on you in one of the names that our brother Jesus taught us.

Our Father…

-The Reverend Doctor Robert Allan Hill, The Reverend Soren Hessler, and The Reverend Doctor Jennifer Quigley

posted in The Rev. Dr. Jennifer Quigley, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel, The Rev. Dr. Soren Hessler on 06.17.2018 at 11:00 am
Tags: Jennifer Quigley, Robert Hill, Soren Hessler

Sunday
June 10

A House Divided

By Marsh Chapel

Preface

Driving west on Route 90 you may have seen the new billboard which honors Abraham Lincoln, and extols civility, and quotes today’s lesson, ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand’. The billboard makes it seem that President Lincoln coined the phrase, but, as you know, he did not. This is Jesus’ word, entering the world of conflict and tragedy, denying any part in Satan’s divided household, and claiming to have, like a wily thief, entered that house, and trussed up the strong man Satan, and conquered him in apocalyptic fury. Jesus’ family calls him crazy. Jesus’ disciples discard his teaching. Jesus opponents set religious rhetoric on fire to condemn him. All within syllables of the disciples themselves being named. His ministry begins in a whole heap of trouble, in this third chapter of St. Mark.

Mark

We know not who wrote Mark, only his name. He wrote for a particular community, whose location and name are also unknown. He even mentions by name members of his church, Alexander and Rufus(15:21). The book is meant to help a community of Christians. It is written to support and encourage people who already have been embraced by faith. While it purports to report on events long ago, in the ministry of Jesus in 30AD, its main thrust is toward its own hearers and readers forty years later in 70AD. So it is not an evangelistic tract and it is not a diary and it is not a biography and it is emphatically not a history.

You will want to know what we can say, then, about Mark’s community. If the community gave birth to the gospel, and if the community is the primary focus of the gospel, and if the community is the gospel’s intended audience, you would like to know something about them. For one thing, the community is persecuted, or is dreading persecution, or both. Jesus suffered and so do, or so will, you. This is what Mark says. This gospel prepares its hearers for persecution. For another thing, the church may have been in or around Rome, or more probably somewhere in Syria. It is likely that Mark was written between 69 and 73 ce. For yet another thing, Mark’s fellow congregants, fellow Christians, are Gentiles, in the main, not Jews. He is writing to this largelyGentilegroup. He writes for them neither a timeless philosophical tract nor an ethereal piece of poetry. His is rather a ‘message on target’. It is the preaching of the gospel. Further, Mark’s composition, editing, comparisons, saying combinations, style and Christology all point to Mark as the earliest gospel (J Marcus).

We have used the word gospel. You have heard the word many times, and know that it means ‘good news’. It is an old term. You could compare it to ‘ghost’. Gospel is to good news as ghost is to spirit, you might say. Yet Mark calls his writing a ‘gospel’. He creates something new. Mark is a writing unlike any other to precede it. It is not popular today any longer, no longer fashionable, to say this. It is however true. Mark is not a history, not a biography, not a novel, not an apocalypse, not an essay, not a treatise, not an epistle. Examples of all these were to hand for him. Mark might have written one of any one of them. He did not. He wrote something else and so in form, in genre, gave us something new. A gospel. His is the first, but not the last.

Mark 3: 20

In particular, we have entered a very strange gospel land this morning, in the reading of our gospel, Mark 3: 20. Call it the landscape of apocalyptic. Jesus is beside himself. There is mention of a certain Beelzebub. The teaching has recourse to a parlor debate about demons, and the prince of demons. Jesus refers to their, the demons’, casting out. One wonders—don’t you?—about the binding up of a strong man. We have frightening words about the end, about blasphemy, about forgivenessof all sins (hurray!), except for one, the sin against the Holy Spirit (not helpfully defined, and, by the way, (boo hoo!). Here is an unclean spirit. There are family members disdained. Jesus enters ministry in blistering conflict with his own followers, with his religious debating partners, and with his own family. Friends, Scribes, and Family have this in common: conflict with Jesus Himself. That is, Jesus is an apocalyptic preacher, announcing the coming of the end, the turn of the ages. We can be sure of very little about the historical Jesus, but we can be sure of this.

In fact, the point of the oddly arranged set of sayings, is that Jesus has arrived to shift the world from the old age to the new age. He has brought the end of the old and the start of the new. He has set his standard on the field of battle, and having done so, as Divine Power, he has in effect already won the war. Hence, disciples are to be disciplined. Hence, family, when in revolt, is to be discredited and rejected. Hence, and especially, the old religion is to be transformed. All, that is every and all, sin is finally forgivable, with various modes of atonement. But full on, flat out opposition to what is good in favor of what is not, to what is life in favor of what is death, to what is holy in favor of what is hellish, to what is spirit in favor of what is emptiness—this is by definition not forgivable, the sin against the Holy Spirit. Forgiveness is yours as long as you do not deny the reality of forgiveness. If you do, by definition, you go unforgiven. If there is no forgiveness, for anyone anywhere at any time, then, again, by definition, there is none for you. There are none so thin as those who will not eat.

We are not the first age to hear and to see lived out the extremities of familial, religious, and cultural enmity. Our house and our houses, across the lower 48 and beyond, may well be divided. But division we did not invent.

A House Divided

Across these years of division, a time of humiliation, and a time taste testing a sort of fascism, and so fully in need of Samuel’s warning about having a king (‘you want a king’, says Samuel, ‘then you shall have one, and with him much misery’) we too, like Jesus with his followers and Jesus with his sagacious opponents, and Jesus with his family, will enter conversation, discussion, discourse. To do so with grace, with both honesty and kindness, is a grave but unavoidable challenge. At least, so engaged, we might do well to be true to our own, actual experience. If we can honor our own lived experience, with some authentic recollection, then we may have a better chance to engage that of others. Here is one example.

A few weeks ago a mildly conservative columnist, whose work otherwise one often appreciates, wrote broadly of ‘tens of millions of Americans’. He was referring to middle America—red, smaller town, rural, fresh water, America, and trying to explain why we have the divisions we do. He wrote, ‘tens of millions of Americans rightly feel that their local economies are under attack, their communities are dissolving, and their religious liberties are under threat’, and went on to encourage attention to social problems. (David Brooks, NYT, 4/18).

Our experience, across ten pulpits, and four decades in ministry, years of upbringing and happy experience in the areas he is trying to describe, is the opposite. Most of our upbringing and of our ministry was invested in red, smaller town, rural, fresh water, America. Here is an afternoon spent planning a stewardship campaign riding on the back of a tractor. Memory carries the happiness of calling in the barns at milking time. There is an evening spent listening to vocation and job choices at the kitchen table. One morning visit offered the chance to learn the family history of a middle sized tool and die company, in a small city. After the committee meeting there was time to hear the history of a once prosperous manufacturing and imaging company. This was a life in ministry spent seeing the seasonal rhythms of seed time and harvest, of the first day of trout fishing season and the last day of deer hunting season. Bluntly put, I hardly met a Democrat, before I went to college, and in the succeeding years our churches were largely colored red.

Our friend was right to encourage robust attention to social problems. In the rest of this paragraph he is mistaken. “Tens of millions” of Americans in red, smaller town, rural, fresh water America are not living as if under economic attack. In our own lived multi-decade experience they are, rather, sturdily and steadily enduring the unstoppable shift to a fully global economy, with courage and creativity and long-suffering. With some little exception, our current national divisions are not welling up out of the angers of licensed nurses, truck drivers, farmers, school teachers, plumbers and firefighters. Here is our experience, to the contrary. Here is a north country farmer putting livestock and machinery to auction and becoming an electrician, with courage and grace. Here is the grandson of a family company, suddenly globalized, becoming a photographer. Here is a middle-manager in a down-sizing corporation taking retirement and doing what he always loved, being with children, and driving a school bus. One hopes that their religious formation in the Methodist tradition that celebrates itineracy, moving about on the planet, gave some support, some wind beneath the wings. Further, “tens of millions” of Americans are not whimpering about the loss of community. With some little exception, our house is not divided because den mothers and choir directors across the near mid-west think their communities are dissolving. They do not and they are not. They are busy and faithful in their service to neighbor and divine, as much as ever, and not dawdling around whining about ‘dissolving communities’. Nor are “tens of millions’ of Americans hand wringing about religious liberty. With some little exception, the people in our lived experience, in our five rural churches, our two college town churches, our two smaller city churches are not wailing and bemoaning that their religious liberties are under threat: the Johnson Amendment has been used exactly ONCE since its 1954 inception (in a Binghamton NY case involving Operation Rescue of all places and groups). No. There is more religious liberty and religion in rural, small town, agricultural, America than there is pretty much anywhere else, and people know it, and people are glad for it. There is not a lot of rural whooping about selling cakes or not for gay weddings. No. ReadHillbilly Elegy as often as you like: it is still inaccurate as a broad brush description, as beautifully written and as true as it may be in the singular narrative, if our own lived experience in ministry is any guide. Not economic attack, not communal demise, not religion falling away. These sorts of mis-descriptions caricature good people in false ways. They wrongly and unnecessarily denigrate the faithfulness and courage of many of our siblings, cousins, compatriots, and fellow citizens. If we are going to find a way toward common hope, we will need to do so, from red to blue and blue to red, unencumbered by and unshackled from, such falsehoods. Across this summer, and into this autumn, we will need everything we can muster to speak a word of faith in pastoral voice, toward a common hope: a word of faith in a pastoral voice toward a common hope. If we can honor our own lived experience, with some authentic recollection, then we may have a better chance to engage that of others.

Speaking of common hope, and speaking of a pastoral voice, we conclude with a breakfast scene from fifty years ago.

Bobby

June 5 1968 began with the usual commotion in our Methodist parsonage. Two younger sisters and one younger brother, arranging books, breakfast, the day’s plans. Pancakes and argument and some humor. One mother overseeing the relative chaos. I, hoping to be ready, for once, when friends arrived to walk together to school.

That spring I had gained a fervent connection, at age 13, to Robert F Kennedy. For some reason I strongly and emotionally engaged with him, our Senator then in the Empire State, and with his campaign as it unfolded. For one thing, there was a common hope therein (yes, borrowed from G.B. Shaw): some people see things as they are and say, why; I dream things that never were and say why not. My father supported another candidate, but was willing to respect a different, my own, point of view. Earlier in the year I remember sitting with him, watching President Johnson, jowly and bespectacled, telling us through the grainy black and white TV that he would not run. Just before Johnson said it, my Dad said, “he’s going to do it, he’s going to drop out…” (He was after all a graduate of BUSTH, the school of the prophets.) Less fully, I remember the announcement of Martin L King’s death, and only later heard RFK’s words from that night, words in eloquence and care of a heavenly sort. No, I was busy with eighth grade. Eighth grade in a still new school system was all consuming. I still had not finished raking the lawn across the street that I had contracted to do in the fall, the deal being with a member of our church, a kindly, patient pediatrician. There was a decision to make about a dance coming up—I remember feeling odd and uncertain about that. I spent my time on homework, scouting, sports, and friends, to the extent I had located some.

But there was also RFK. It was many years later until I heard the tape of his Indianapolis speech, late at night, bringing tragic tidings to hundreds gathered, black and white, on the night of King’s murder. I use the tape in teaching. Aeschylus, Scripture, his own loss, all rolled into a plea for calm. “To those of you who may be tempted to anger and vengeance tonight, I can say that I had a brother whom I lost… What we need in this country now"What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice towards those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black."

My dad was in Chicago that week, June 5 1968, for some long forgotten denominational meetings. It was 7am our time, so 6am his. The phone rang, and after a brief word with mom, he asked to speak to me, which was a little odd for that hour. He wanted me to know, and to tell me himself, that early that morning in California RFK too had been shot and killed.

He sensed how much that news would grieve me, though we still have yet fully to sense how much his loss cost us. Maybe at an unconsidered, sixth sense level, dad wanted to prevent any unnecessary cynicism, on my part, or hardened bitterness, that might sprout up, and of which there already was plenty abroad. Mostly, he was trying to be a good dad. And he lived and worked without every forgetting the humble grace, the quiet power of a word of faith in a pastoral voice toward a common hope.

Fifty years later. I partly appreciated the call, then. I really appreciate it now. Fifty years later.

The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.10.2018 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
June 3

Heart and Voice

By Marsh Chapel

1 Samuel 3:1-20

2 Corinthians 4:5-12

Heart and Voice

Goodness is close at hand. Goodness is close to you. Goodness is not far, not out of reach, not gone, not gone forever. Goodness, what makes life liveable, and godly, is within reach. Are you ready to reach out and receive?

Goodness is right close at hand, even when we do not see her. Even when the days bristle with ugliness, with mendacity, with the lack of virtuous example in leadership, with a willingness to use ugliness, mendacity and lack of virtue to hurt and maim by what we say and what we do. This is the clue to the long reading from Samuel, wherein all looks bleak for the ancient Israelites: but goodness has not quit the field just yet. Eli will be chastened, but there will be heart and voice, still. In Samuel. This is the clue to the beauty of Psalm 139, wherein should we even travel to heaven, to hell, to uttermost parts of the sea, even there goodness will find us, the right hand will guide us, the light will shine in the darkness. Are you at a point to listen, and then to notice, and then to abide in goodness? This is the clue to the choicest of Pauline passages, 2 Cor. What a shame that we do not always know and hear the Holy Scripture for what it is: Holy. True and loving, honest and kind. We are indeed cast down. But not forsaken. Not driven to despair. Is that not a good reason, goodness knows, to bestir yourself and come Sunday come to church? There are many reasons not to worship, but far more to get up and come your hair and come to church. Goodness is lurking, waiting, watching, reaching out, ready with a helping hand for you. This is the clue to Mark 2, and the debates about Sabbath. Sabbath is good. What heals the human heart and lifts the human voice is goodness. Good that gets in the way of goodness is not good, like religion that gets in the way of God is not godly. Behold the strange, beautiful, saving, powerful, loving world of the Bible, the good book.

Heart and Mind

The paper carried a story last week about a woman who was found out by goodness. (NYT, 5/25/18). Goodness saved her as goodness can do. Maybe at home. Maybe in holy communion. Maybe in prayer. Maybe in the meandering melody of a summer sermon.

Her name is Louise Penny. She is a Canadian crime novelist. For those of us with a little Raymond Chandler roving the back roads of our imaginations, she is a companion, compatriot, confrere, an ‘unfailingly cheery detective writer’, centered on Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, hero of her 13 books. In the writer’s house is a throw cushion with the words ‘goodness exists’.

At age 46, she had written not a single book. In fact, her life was hanging by a thread. She was depressed and lonely, and had turned to alchohol for self-medication. She said: ‘Gnawing loneliness, self-loathing, fear…I know what it is like to hate yourself so much that you have to murder yourself. Coming out on the other side gave me a profound belief that goodness exists’.

How did she get out? All of our churches have been winsomely populated and supported by many who found goodness in the way she did. First, she found community, in her case, Alchoholics Anonymous. Every one of our churches has had a group meeting of this or similar sort. Second, she found a friend, actually a doctor who later became her husband. Friendship is a rare gift in life, sometimes only touched like the hem of a dress passing by.

Encouraged by community, encouraged by friendship, Louise Penny started to do what she loves and to love what she does. Do what you love and love what you do. She writes spell binding crime novels set in a little Quebec village. She said: ‘My books are love letters to Quebec’. One preacher said his sermons are ‘love letters to New England’. Friend: right here, close at hand, in the pew and in the nave, there is community for you and there is friendship for you. Community. Friendship. Don’t take only the preacher’s word for it, or only the church’s witness to it, or only the religious longing for it. People like Ms. Penny have found it, along the struggling path of life, in community and in friendship. We pause to ask you a question, speaking of heart: have you made space enough in life, your life, your one and only life, for community and friendship?

Heart and Service

Goodness is close at hand. So close, so close that if it were a snake it would bite you. Plain as nose on your face, and plainer still, plain as the nose on my face. Why it is right here, all around us. Yes, right here, for a moment, we pause to give thanks, right here, right now for some of the goodness here at Boston University. You know, healthy good institutions really matter, and where by heart and voice, in heart and service, we see goodness, we want to name it, to claim it, to celebrate it.

President Brown said this spring: Boston University is an institution with a long history of outreach and engagement. (President Robert A. Brown, 3/12/18.)

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

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

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

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

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

Remember the School of Education’s 25-year commitment to the Chelsea city schools, but also ongoing delightful efforts like their work in literacy through the 20 years of gift to urban school children through BUILD (Boston University Initiative on Literacy Development), and the outreach to Boston Public Schools so strongly enhanced by the Wheelock merger.

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

Reflect on the curricular and co-curricular engagement in the School of Theology, with current issues like race, gun violence, immigration, and poverty, the ongoing voice of ‘The School of the Prophets’.

Remember the School of Social Work engagements with neighboring hospitals and schools, in internships and partnerships.

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

Reflect on the Engineering School support for Women in Science, Math and Technology, and the Inovation Lab for a better world.

Remember the School of Hospitality emphasis on servant leadership.

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

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

Remember the Law School, and its honored graduates, like Barbara Jordan, who have defended the legal system of this country, ‘a country of laws and not of men’; and Cornell William Brooks, former head of the NAACP.

Rejoice at the varied commitments through School of Communication to the development of an educated populace, on which the rest of democracy depends.

Reflect on the Sargent School lectureships on physical and occupational therapy, open to the public, and applicable to the work of many other schools and colleges as well, with focus on the care of the whole person.

To these vital forms of outreach and engagement in schools and colleges, add co-curricular projects (brought into more prominence by the new ‘HUB’ initiative). That is, add the influence of the Howard Thurman Center in race and conversation across difference; the special scholarships for city students (Menino), for Catholic students (Medeiros), and for Methodist Students (Clergy offspring); add the voice of Marsh Chapel, across the region and around the globe, every Sunday morning; add the 6 University Chaplaincies and 25 campus ministries, all with some portion of service; add the ROTC program for women and men preparing to ‘preserve and protect the Constitution of the United States’ (including with their very lives); add the Hubert Humphrey Scholars international students and families program (one of the original programs in the country); add occasional work like the space given to 1,000 Tulane students for the year 2005-6following Katrina; add the Community Service Center and its multiple programs and FYSOP; add the Pardee Center and its ecumenical and hopeful labor; add the Elie Wiesel Center; add PILOT; add the BU Initiative on Cities; add the Sustainability Center: all of these to some measure reach out beyond the University to serve and help the larger community, across the region and around the globe. Boston University exemplifies a culture of ‘outreach and engagement’.

Friends, as Peter Marshall used to say, ‘There are a lot of things wrong. But there are a lot of things right.’ Clasp goodness today, in word and song and sacrament, as nourishment for the week to come.

The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.3.2018 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
May 6

Easter Remembrance

By Marsh Chapel

John 15:9-17

A text copy of this sermon is not available.

-The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 05.6.2018 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
April 29

Easter Alleluia

By Marsh Chapel

John 15: 1-8

Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God; for God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No man has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

A Broken Alleluia in Worship

An Easter Alleluia is a broken Alleluia. The Alleluia of Easter, sung in worship, awaited in history, and made flesh in your precious life, is ever a broken one. The resurrection follows the cross, but the resurrection does not replace it. We walk by faith not by sight. We have this treasure in earthen vessels. We hope for what we do not see. And what we do see is what we see in a mirror—dimly. We need not over-preach, even in the glorious season of Easter. An Easter Alleluia is broken Alleluia. The Alleluia of Easter, sung in worship, awaited in community, and made flesh in life, is ever a broken one. The resurrection follows the cross, but the resurrection does not replace it. Can you sing a broken alleluia?

For here we are, just for a moment, in worship. Singing the hymns of Easter. Hearing the Easter word. There’s a blaze of light in every word.

For a moment, move by the imagination to a borrowed upper room, say in Ephesus. Candles burn. A meal has been offered and received. There is among the fifty, say, there present, a gradual settling, a quiet. It may be a long quiet, starting from that late first century numinous circle and ending—here, now. Acute pain abides in this circle, the pain of the loss of a beloved leader, the pain of the loss of a venerable religious tradition, the pain of the loss of a prized eschatological hope—love, faith, and hope, lost. Broken.

Yet as the circle settles, a prayer and reading and a further silence and a long hymn sung, ALL Who has held them SPEAKS. In the silence and in the singing and in then the antiphonal, mournful and joyful, worship antiphon.

A verbal, spoken, uttered opening upon Ultimate Reality.

How shall they call upon him in whom they have not believed…?

I am…light, life, resurrection, way, truth, Good Shepherd, door, bread, water.

I am…the true vine. You shall know…’the truth’. That they may know Thee the only ‘true’ God.

Every heart has secret sorrows. Every land has cavernous grief. For the antiphonal, ancient singers of our scriptural broken alleluia, the hurts are dislocation, disappointment and departure.

Antiphon: ‘Abide in me…As I abide in you’. Stay. Remain. Settle. Dig in. Locate. Vines take a long time to grow. But so?More than any other living scholar, John Ashton (The Gospel of John and Christian Origins) has pierced the meaning of this passage, and others like it.

Ashton: John’s portrait of Jesus arose from his constant awareness, which he shared with members of his community, that they were living in the presence of the Glorified One. So dazzling was this glory, that any memory of a less-than-glorious Christ was altogether eclipsed.

Ashton: ’The fear and anger of the Johannine community, as they see themselves exiled from the synagogue by those they call the Jews, is…projected back upon the life of Jesus’…’They had a burning conviction that they had been given the truth (led into all truth) and that through this truth they would come to enjoy a freedom that would release them from the constraints to which they were subjected: ‘the truth will set you free’’(95)

Ashton: Conscious as they were of the continuing presence in their midst of the Glorified One, no wonder the community, or rather the evangelist who was its chief spokesman, smoothed out the rough edges of the traditions of the historical Jesus and expanded the points into stars. (They) realized that the truth that they prized as the source of their new life was to be identified not with the Jesus of history but with the risen and glorious Christ, and that this was a Christ free from all human weakness. The claims they made for him were at the heart of the new religion that soon came to be called Christianity. (199) The difference between John’s portrait of Christ and that of the Synoptists is best accounted for by the experience of the glorious Christ constantly present to him and his community (204)

Ashton: Some in the Johannine community spoke in the voice of Jesus. Especially this is so in the ‘I Am’ sayings. If Jesus on earth did not say these things who did? Answer: the Johannine prophet (s).

Can you sing a broken alleluia? Every hymn, for all its joy, carries a guttural memory of acute hurt. In worship, can you sing for joy without forgetting the brokenness out of which that alleluia comes? Let Charles Wesley, let Charles Tindley, let the poor of your past guide you.

A Broken Alleluia in History

Or what about your place in history, our communal responsibility in real time? A surface glide across Holy Scripture will not allow, cannot provide gospel insight. You want to sift the Scriptures. You want to know them inside and out, upside and down, through and through and through, and then, it may be, by happenstance or grace or the clumsy luck of a very human preacher, you may hear a steadying, saving word. Look back an Easter month. There’s a blaze of light in every word. Not activism alone, but engagement matter most in history.

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’ are 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 Witherby George Dupree, takes good care of its Gospel mother, the very cat’s mother, you see. Milne: James James

Morrison Morrison

Weatherby George Dupree

Took great

Care of his Mother

Though he was only three.

James James

Said to his Mother,

"Mother," he said, said he;

"You must never go down to the end of the town, if

you don't go down with me."

On April 8, 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 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 with daggers drawn.

On April 15, the Gospel still lingering with the Lord and God risen, 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 with daggers drawn.

On April 22, the Gospel in chapter 10 acclaiming the pastoral image of the Good Shepherd, whose one glorification on the cross is meant to obliterate the need of any other such, the letter, worried, worries out in 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 truth’, says 1 John 3, when the whole of the Gospel says the opposite, 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 with daggers drawn.

And now today, April 29, 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, frolicking, deadly afraid that someone somewhere might be at peace or, worse, having fun, 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 each other with daggers drawn.

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 is being sung by Obededom.

The blessed Scripture bears incontrovertible, conflicted witness. Easter is a broken Alleluia, and was so already 20 centuries ago, as the resurrection cross of Jesus was raised up, in mournful joy, in a real joy made real by its honesty about sorrow. History is endless contention and intractable difference, including religious history, perhaps especially including religious history.

You then, in real time, as we read the newspaper as well as the Bible. You have reason and obligation to be concerned about what you read. You have reason and obligation to be concerned about the persons and personalities driving cultural and political formation. You also have reason and obligation to be concerned about the policies, speaking of polis,which emanate from those personalities and persons, those forms of rhetoric and language and behavior. You have full reason and obligation to be concerned about public good, about the polis, about the forms of culture and civil society across our land, painstakingly built up over 250 years, that are not government and not politics, but are more fundamental and more fragile than both.

There may well come a 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 will beckon you. There’s a blaze of light in every word.

A Broken Alleluia in Ljfe

The more ample capacity of our northern neighbors to live in dialectic, including an Easter one, may help us today.

Montreal self-deprecating Canada joke: Montreal could have had the best of all worlds—British culture, American government and French cuisine; instead it got American culture, French government and British cuisine. When you cross the border there are questions: What is your name? Where are you from? Where are you going? Do you have anything to declare? Can you sing a broken Easter alleluia? There’s a blaze of light in every word.

On the Canadian border, Jan, 1982 or 3, after the 9am service: ‘Was that an Easter sermon?’ We tried unsuccessfully to raise it from the dead before 11am. A broken alleluia.

And speaking of Montreal, Leonard Cohen, said of his broken alleluia: "It explains that many kinds of hallelujahs doexist, and all the perfect and broken hallelujahs have equal value.I wanted to push the Hallelujah deep into the secular world, into the ordinary world.” John was there before him, by 20 centuries. There’s a blaze of light in every word.

You can’t get very close to Jesus (or Martin King or Howard Thurman or John the Divine) without prayer, hymnody, meditation, reading, study, Scripture, worship, preaching—RELIGION.

Hear the Gospel! Christ is Risen, absent and present, waiting to be heard at bedside above the rancorous cacophony about, shorn of his burial clothes, speaking to and through the spiritual confusion, the spiritual Alzheimer’s affliction of life. There’s a blaze of light in every word. Word broken or word holy.

Now, I've heard there was a secret chord

That David played, and it pleased the Lord

But you don't really care for music, do you?

It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth

The minor fall, the major lift

The baffled king composing hallelujah

Hallelujah

You say I took the name in vain

I don't even know the name

But if I did, well really, what's it to you?

There's a blaze of light in every word

It doesn't matter which you heard

The holy or the broken hallelujah

Hallelujah

I did my best, it wasn't much

I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch

I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you

And even though it all went wrong

I'll stand before the lord of song

With nothing on my tongue but hallelujah

Hallelujah

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 04.29.2018 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
April 15

The Bach Experience

By Marsh Chapel

1 John 3: 1-7

Luke 24:36-48

Personal Faith

The Christian life is a daily combination of personal faith and social involvement (repeat).

While personal faith is not merely individual faith, nonetheless, it is in persons, like you, that faith is received, and known, and nourished. There is no hiding here, no hiding behind an unconsidered ignorance, nor behind a well-tempered philosophy, nor behind a mountainous and real hurt, nor behind sloth. Your faith is yours, especially when it is about all you have left to go on.

So, you will continue, brightened by Easter, to develop and practice your faith. We are not meant to live in Lent. We are meant to live in Easter. The difference Easter makes comes in part by way of a full body embrace of your own personal faith.

Do you know God to be a pardoning God? Do you hope to be made whole in this lifetime?

Knowing pardon, can you creatively and even at some risk, work with another whom you think needs your pardon, I beg your pardon, but who may himself think you need his? Just how sharp is your faith in its faithful practice of what we pray, Come Sunday, ‘forgive…as we forgive’?

Longing for wholeness, can you creatively and even at some risk, take up work that you have long left behind, but you know is part of personal faith development—reading, prayer, giving, serving, listening? Pardon? Wholeness? It is up to you.

Here the faithful Lutheran, JS Bach, can indeed help us, by means of his own example in faith. His own Bible, we have recently been further taught, was laden with notes in the margin, questions, renderings, and ruminations.

One may choose to play the piano again. Another may take a language study. One may find a daily devotional reader, like the one my friend gave me by CS Lewis, which sits on my bureau so I can read it while tying my tie. Another may sit in the quiet of the sanctuary for a while before worship, as did Emerson, I love the silent church before there is any speaking. One may wander, saunter, flaneur dans le rue, walking for a bit every day (we even have a health group on the staff here doing so right now). Another may start to journal, to record dreams, and to record insights, and to record angers and to record escapes. Teaching and learning are spiritual adventures in pursuit of invisibles and intangibles (W. Arrowsmith, as remembered by V. Kestenbaum). Or, if nothing else, you can hardly do better than a conversation, in loving care, with another person of faith, over lunch, over coffee, over a beer, over the phone. One may look hard at his sexual life, sexual activity, to see whether it becomes the gospel, and whether it approximates the very general guidance in the wisdom saying, In singleness integrity, in partnership fidelity. At least one, probably, will choose to listen to the Marsh Chapel service, Come Sunday. Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to them, "Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things."

Dr. Jarrett: in terms of today’s music, and text, what witness do you sense Bach brings us, of personal faith, within the setting of this lovely cantata?

Bach

Today’s cantata, is, indeed, a lesson in faith, assurance, and the promise of God’s goodness in our lives. Cantata 69a – “Praise the Lord, o My Soul” was first performed on August 15, 1723, like all the cantatas in this year’s series, during Bach’s first three months as Cantor in Leipzig. We have seen in these cantatas not just a remarkable display of compositional craftsmanship, but also an authoritative theological understanding through both the compilation of the libretto and the setting of those texts. Cantata 69a features from beginning to end an exuberant and joyful hymn of praise of God and the good works that enable a life of faith. Opening with full festival forces with trumpets and timpani, Bach sets the words of Psalm 103, vs 2 in a marvelous double fugue. The music is absolutely radiant, brilliant, and brimming with the praise of all God’s faithful. With this rich texture, we can well imagine the sound of Wesley’s thousand tongues to sing the great Redeemer’s praise.

For Bach, the Gospel lesson of the day was from Mark 7, the account of Jesus healing the deaf man at the Sea of Galilee. As the cantata turns from corporate to personal praise, the soprano and tenor soloists join the voices that witnessed Jesus’s miracle proclaiming the goodness of his deeds, and the glory of God. The cheerful tenor aria is delightfully score for recorder and Oboe da caccia. Listen for the extended line that Bach writes for the word erzähle or “declare”, and like the man whose tongue Jesus loosed, the tenor promises a “Gott gefällig Singen durch die frohe Lippen” or a “God pleasing singing though joyful lips.”

With the following alto recit, we turn inward to remember our human frailty and shortcomings. With further reminder of the Gospel lesson, the alto calls on God to utter his mighty ‘Ephphata’ just as Jesus did in Mark 7:34. From the singing of that Aramaic word meaning “Be opened”, the otherwise syllabic recitative opens to a lovely melody on the words, “so wird mein Mund voll Dankens sein!” “ Then my mouth will be full of thanks!”

The bass aria which follows affirms God as Redeemer and Protector. The believer, here the voice of the bass, pens himself to Christ’s Cross and Passion, pledging to praise at all times. In the same way that Christ gladly took up the cross, thereby exalting his Passion, we, too, will rejoice and sing praise in our own Cross-bearing and suffering. Note the stark contrast of the lines for Kreuz und Leiden (Cross and Suffering) with “singt mein Mund mit Freuden” (My mouth sings with joy).

The final Chorale echoes the close of Mark 7 proclaiming “He hath done all things well!” “Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan, darbei will ich verbleiben.” Because God holds me in a fatherly embrace in his arms, I will let him alone govern me. Confidence, assurance, affirmation, and ultimately, faith to live in freedom, and freedom to live by faith.

Social Involvement

The Christian life is a daily combination of personal faith and social involvement (repeat). Of deep personal faith, and active social involvement.

On the front porch of our beloved Marsh Chapel stands John Wesley, preaching, who reminds us that there is no holiness save social holiness (repeat). In the tradition which gave birth to Boston University and to Marsh Chapel and so to our worship on this and every Sunday, personal faith and social involvement go together, and, in truth, are not found, except hand in hand.

As all of our eight days of worship, teaching, fellowship and remembrance, in honor of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. have evinced among us, pistis and polis, faith and culture go together. Here Bach may help us, if especially in the surge of beauty his music showers on us a sense of grace and in so doing gathers us as one. The older Lutheran preference for the two kingdoms, Christ and Culture in paradox, is at some lesser closeness to the transformational aspiration in Wesley’s social holiness. Yet Bach’s very vocational choice to embed himself in congregational musical life is itself a harbinger of transformation. More, the universal regard for the beauty of Bach itself places on the edge of a way forward, as a global village.

As Christian women and men, we are not free to celebrate faith apart from life, to affirm faith in ignorance of the polis, the city, the culture, the political. The Bible itself is a 66-book declamation of social justice, at every turn, by every writer, with every chapter, at every point. Moses, Amos, Micah, Matthew, Luke, Paul, All. Try and read the Bible without being confronted, accosted, seized and shaken by its fierce acclamation of the hope of justice. Real religion is never very far from justice, even though justice alone, a crucial part of the Gospel, alone is not the heart of the Gospel. The Gospel is love, which is more than justice—though not less.

You then, in real time, read the newspaper as well as the Bible. You have reason and obligation to be concerned about what you read. You have reason and obligation to be concerned about the persons and personalities driving cultural and political formation. You also have reason and obligation to be concerned about the policies, speaking of polis, which emanate from those personalities and persons, those forms of rhetoric and language and behavior. You have full reason and obligation to be concerned about public good, about the polis, about the forms of culture and civil society across our land, painstakingly built up over 250 years, that are not government and not politics, but are more fundamental and more fragile than both. You have reason and obligation to be concerned about the use of military force, either as Christian pacifists, or as Christian activists watching for the just war adjectives: responsive, multilateral, proportional, non-imperial, just, and limited.

As a runner, say, you have reason and obligation to be concerned about the route itself. Run with joy the race set, but neglect not to engage by precept and example the social support, the cultural forms required for the race. The route. The roads cleared. The police. The first responders. The supporting cheerers. The rules and traditions. The many, thousands, standing by you, and standing with you, and standing for you. Personal holiness is the run. Social holiness is the route. They go together.

Five years ago, today, we began Marathon Monday with our Marsh Chapel traditions. The Dean’s breakfast. The meal of eggs, bacon, muffins and juice, with invitations to all undergraduates to arise before the race comes through Kenmore Square. Music to sing, written in Boston long ago for a children’s choir, “My Country ‘Tis of Thee, Sweet Land of Liberty”. Longfellow cited, one if by land if two if by sea, and I on the opposite shore will be. The Gettysburg address recited, Fourscore and seven years ago. Then, out to the race and the day and the 26 mile family picnic on Boston’s best morning. But as you know the day ended differently than planned, as our Wednesday April 11 remembrance this past week here at BU recalled. Just recall the social involvement of those who expected to treat blisters and ended up placing tourniquets. Just recall the social involvement in the lives saved, hundreds saved, by prepared, well supported, team oriented hospitals and physicians. Just recall your social involvement in the vigil that Tuesday evening on our plaza, the Wednesday evening worship service in our sanctuary, the Thursday morning service at the Cathedral with the President speaking words of grace, the Friday lock down. Just recall the Monday global service for our own Lu Lingzi, which ended with her family, 18 together, bowing at the waist before the University and the world. Dime con quien corres, yo te dire quien eres. You tell me WITH WHOM you run, and I will tell you who you are.

The Christian life is a daily combination of personal faith and social involvement (repeat). So, our song this Lord’s day, is just this:

Ah, would that I had a thousand tongues!

Ah, would that my mouth were

Empty of idle words!  Ah, would that I said nothing other

Than what was geared to God’s praise! 

Then I would proclaim the Highest’s goodness,

For all my life he has done so much for me

That I cannot thank Him in all eternity.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean. & 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 04.15.2018 at 11:00 am
Tags: Bach Experience, Robert Hill, Scott Jarrett

Sunday
April 1

Easter Antinomy

By Marsh Chapel

John 20: 1-18

Frontispiece

Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.

The Lord is Risen. Hallelujah.

A few years ago, I stood at a friend’s hospital bedside. Disoriented by hospital surroundings, harsh scents, frequent and sharp noises, brusque treatments, odd sights and the wholly unfamiliar atmosphere into which she had been cast, my friend the patient spoke anxiously about something only she could understand. It was gibberish. She told clearly and convincingly a story that was gibberish. Her production of the tale was I think a way of fending off the threatening environment around. We listened, family and pastor. Her daughter simply stood alongside, rubbing her arm, as she talked. The narrative became more and more wild and unfastened. I wondered what might be said, argued, to quell the storm. Nothing came to mind. Opposite, port side, her daughter calmly rubbed her arm, soothed her brow, straightened the bedding, listened, and, saving-ly, said, at last, ‘Yes, mom, it is hard, sometimes, to know what is real and what is not real’.

Easter claims, in the teeth of death, that faith and love are real. Death makes us mortal. Facing death in faith makes us human. Death makes us mortal. Facing death in love makes us human.

Absence

Christ absent, Christ present. Face your fear in faith. Absence. Go to church in love to. Presence. Absence\Presence. Faith\Love. Choice\Church. Risen! Hallelujah!

You know by hard experience that my preference come Sunday at 11am is to preach about sin and death and the joy of tithing. But. This is Easter. So, that is all we shall say about my favorite themes.

For today is Resurrection Day, a glad, joyful day. For today, rubbing our arm and mopping our brow and turning down the bedding on those more regular themes, is One who, absent and present, in faith and love, by the bedside of your befuddlement, puzzlement, and confusion murmurs, whispers, ‘It is hard to know sometimes what is real and what is not’.

The Gospel tells of two modes of resurrection, two experiences which the earliest Christians prized and preached, two senses of resurrection, both read today in John 20.

Two contradictory meanings of the chief article of Christian belief, as Calvin named resurrection. Thus, an Easter Antinomy, a paradox, a combination of contradictory truths, both true, different, opposite, complementary, dialectical: an Easter Antimony.

Peter and the Beloved Disciple (and with them the whole company of Christians militant and triumphant, including you and me) have one first experience of resurrection. This is the experience of Jesus’ absence.

An empty tomb. Discarded grave clothing. Silence. Emptiness. Nothing.

In other gospels, an angel voice and message, but not here: He is risen. That is: he is not here. See the place where they laid him.

The first meaning of Jesus’ resurrection is that he is absent from this world, absent from our eyesight, absent from our apprehension, absent from the cave Plato so loved, with its dancing shadows. Not here. See the place. Peter and John—for all their differences, Church and Spirit—had in common the race to see Jesus (which Peter lost and the Beloved Disciple won, as gospel ever trumps tradition and spirit ever trumps institution.) Peter and John went to find him and did not find him there. He is simply not to be found, AWOL, gone. Our early sisters and brothers faced this absence and its fear, head on. They faced down fear in faith.

You see. The empty tomb creates an opportunity, a possibility, a challenge. In fact, it forces—Jesus’ resurrection absence forces—an encounter with faith. Resurrection means the power of an intervening word to be spoken and heard. Only a Risen, that is Absent, Christ, a hidden, silent God, the God beyond God, can also give the full possibility of faith. If we knew everything, we would not need faith.

He is risen means he is not here, so you must decide for yourself whether to live in faith or not, whether to face your fear in faith, or not. It means that no one else is out there, or in there, or there, writing the script for your life, or for our shared life. You have to write the script yourself. And. You have to write the script, set the stage, get the props, choose the cast, direct the show and star in it at the same time. Acting alone won’t cut it. And that is plenty, plenty scary. It means that God raised Jesus from the dead, now absent from your life, to give freedom, and to let the chips fall where they may.

Last month I hurried out of the office in late afternoon, hoping to ‘miss the traffic’ on the way to Needham. This is our lot in Boston, to live to miss the traffic. Half way to the car, I realized I had taken the wrong folder, and had to return to the office to pick up the speech I was to give that night at the 100-year-old Boston Minister’s Club (the age of the club, not of the members). I came again out of the office and was met by a wonderful young woman, perhaps a senior, saying: “I need to talk to you. It won’t take long. I need to ask for a prayer. You see: I have just found the perfect job, and interviewed for it. I pray they will send me on to the next level. It is the perfect job.” It has been a while since I have used ‘perfect’ and ‘job’ in the same sentence, but, pray we did. What a joy to be taught again by bright students about the thrill and possibility in life!

But notice: After Good Friday service, I found a note perched like a bird on my office door window. She had indeed succeeded! But more: her mother had said to her, mom to daughter, ‘Let your faith be greater than your fear’. A note with that line, 40 hours before a two point Easter sermon, the first of which is ‘face your fear in faith’: that is serendipity a little close to the bone!

An article last week recalled Desmond Tutu, a happy warrior, whose good humor in the face of real difficulty made others smile. Reagan smiled to remember him, and when asked “How is Bishop Tutu?”, with a little whimsy replied, ‘Tutu—Soso”!

That is the touch of humorous Novocain before the needle: Tutu knew well about the faith forged in freedom. Desmond Tutu had it right: God sure must love freedom because he has given us the freedom to go straight to hell if we so choose (repeat).

The ‘silent as a tomb’ tomb puts before you today the matter of faith.

Faith faces fear and embraces freedom. It is God’s gift, received on the human side by a singular leap.

Faith to live the good news of a loving God in the face of a stark cross, and an empty tomb.

Faith in a silent, invisible God, hidden God, when so many visible idols tempt.

Faith when you cannot see ahead.

Faith as a walk in the dark.

Faith when you are defeated.

Faith to try something new, to take a new path.

Faith to risk.

Faith to open a door.

Faith to face down fear. It’s up to you!

Jesus’ absence, which the disciples courageously took as a call to faith, is the first resurrection experience. That is, the first thing the Gospel, and the Scripture and the Church have said about Easter is: he is absent, he is not here, see the place where they laid him.

Presence

Christ absent, Christ present. Face your fear with faith. Absence. Live in love in church. Presence. Risen! Hallelujah!

The Easter Gospel tells a second truth. The second truth stands contrary to the first, contradicts even the first, but does not eliminate the first. Jesus is present. Mary says; “I have seen the Lord’. And several others chime in, finally and definitively Thomas, a few verses hence from today, doubting and fingering and swearing” “My Lord and My God!” Others, along the Emmaus road: “Did our hearts not burn within us?” And all the early chapters of Acts. And the breakfast of fish with Jesus to come to Chapter 21.

Without batting an eye, the earliest Christians affirmed, mightily and happily, an Easter antinomy. Even as Peter proclaimed the tomb empty, Mary shouted back: “I have seen him”. Jesus’ presence, too, not just his absence, is felt, seen, and known. Risen Christ Present—He is with us to open yet another possibility, challenge, and opportunity. Risen Christ present assembles the church, teaching love. Resurrection is known in participation before doctrine (Tillich).

A dramatist, celebrating Broadway, once wrote, “the only thing more frightening than being alone is being with someone”.

Resurrection means the resurrection of the body—of Christ: the church. The body of Christ, the church carries the pronouncement of the intervening word, in her ministry of love, love of God, love of neighbor, and so lives as a community of faith working through love.

Are we lovers anymore?

The resurrection body of the church, the Body of Christ, breathes love.

After twenty years of funerals, I was finally asked to be a pall bearer. In ministry, you do weddings before you are a bride, you marry others’ children long before you marry off your own and have that expense I mean joy, you bury others’ dads and moms before yours die. And you instruct pall bearers before you ever lift a casket yourself. We gathered in an old village church, with a light dusting of snow that morning, and sun filling the sanctuary. Hymns were sung, prayers offered, a short, true eulogy. Flowers. A verse of ‘It is well with my soul’. A reading of Romans 5, the love of God poured into our hearts. The casket of a dear old Methodist lady, grandmother and friend. An invitation to lunch at the Grange. My children did not know what a Grange was. Choir, do you? Again, the scent of flowers, the heft of the casket, to await burial when the ground had thawed. Christ present, surely, oddly, truly present, with us in grief and hope in the community of faith working through love.

The church is so fallible, always both a representation and a distortion of the divine. But when divine, so divine! At the Grange—look it up—over lunch, a north country memory emerged, true and loving. Mrs. Skinner, an elderly minister’s widow, told about their assignment long ago to Conifer NY, in 1933. Here is an Adirondack logging town with one road in and one road out, as of then no church building. The congregation met in—the Grange. They raised money in the depression to build a church. But a missionary visited, and told about the needs in China. So, the little congregation thought about it. (Are we lovers anymore?). They looked around the Grange Hall where they had been worshipping a while already. And they decided they could do so a while longer. They sent the money raised for the church building—to China. ‘That was a loving church’ she remembered that cold funeral day. That was a loving church in humble Conifer NY, 1933. You only have what you give away in love. Just when you think the church has broken your heart for the last time, Mrs. Skinner comes along to remind you of what love can mean.

Are we lovers anymore? Risen Christ Present schools us in how to be together in love for others.

Speaking of school: the church goes beyond the church. One April long ago I had breakfast in the High School where decades earlier I had eaten school lunch, where Jan and I met singing in the choir. Once one of the best schools in the country, it had fallen on harder times. But that morning a group of neighbors and parents and others were running a breakfast like our Easter breakfast this morning. They flipped flap jacks. They fried bacon. They sold tickets. They took names and donations. They baked and talked and worked. Said one secular saint—I don’t forget it, so many years later—as she worked to support my Alma Mater: ‘I have to believe this school can work if we love it enough, if we just love it enough’. You fill the blank for school: library, neighborhood, college…country? I believe it can work if we love it enough, if we just love it enough. Christ wanders around outside of church. Present, oddly present, surely present, in work, in mission, in longing—in love.

Are we lovers anymore?

Coda

In absence, Christ gives faith. In presence, Christ gives love.

In absence, Christ teaches us to be our own-most selves. In presence, Christ teaches us to be together.

In absence, Christ begets faith, which is personal. In presence, Christ begets love, which is communal.

In absence, Christ forms courage in the heart, as he did for Peter on Easter. In presence, Christ forms a company of lovers, a community of faith working through love, as he did through Mary on Easter.

Faith and love are real. Faith and love are the Easter Antinomy. Faith and love are real resurrection experiences.

The Easter Antinomy, two contradictory truths, snug as a bug in a rug together: Jesus absent and Jesus present. In oxymoron, in paradox, both are true though they contradict one another, or, perhaps, because they contradict on another.

Some mornings you wake up and sing with Mary, ‘I have seen the Lord’. Some mornings you lose the foot race with Peter, but shout: ‘He is not here. He is risen.’ Every day, things change: what made life, life, becomes absent; what will make life, life, becomes present.’

Praise God! Easter morning, now, both presence and absence radiate Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. Christ absent, Christ present. Face your fear with faith. Absence. Live in love in church. Presence. Risen! Hallelujah!

Can you live, as taught Luther, praying as if it all depends on God and working as if it all depends on us? Praying in presence and working in absence?

Bitter cold winds, and an icy afternoon swept us into a warm little restaurant, in Kingston Ontario, of a February weekend a decade or three ago. It is good to come in from the winter cold, to wait from the promise of warmth in spring. The fire crackled. The space and time for freedom in faith and joy in love heartened alongside the hearth. Then, over the radio waves came a deep, hurting, baritone voice, that of Leonard Cohen, welling up out of Montreal, out of pain, out of life. A broken hallelujah, the only kind fit for the Christian on Easter, the only sort ample enough for the Easter Antinomy: Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in?
Risen? Indeed! For it is the God who said ‘Let light shine out of darkness, who has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the Glory of God, in the face of Jesus Christ our Lord’.

-The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 04.1.2018 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill