Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

John 12:20-33

‘If anyone serve me, he must follow me, and where I am there my servant shall be also’. (John 12: 26)

Graham

One’s sense of calling develops over a lifetime. Vocation can emerge apart from religious distinctions, often outside inherited personal or spiritual boundaries. In that way, as Thomas Merton reminds us, vocation is the essential and quintessential ecumenical gift, or charism, or grace. This Lent reminds us of courage, gratitude, spirit and gladness—the nourishment you will need to survive and prevail into the next decade.

To begin, though, this season of March, not Marsh, madness recalls that in 1987 our Rotary Club in Syracuse, which doubled as a cheering section for the college basketball squad, was in misery. By just a single point, a last second basket, Syracuse had lost the NCAA championship to Indiana, a day that will live in infamy. We began the next Monday’s Rotary meeting as usual with a prayer, memorably offered that day by Judge Schultz: We know Lord that we learn most from our troubles, and from our defeats. We accept this and will try to hold fast to your presence, even in the face of (now here the prayer began to turn sideways—it happens in sermons too!) of unfairness, in the face of bad officiating, in the face of the unspeakable behavior of a chair throwing coach of the opposite team whom I will not mention Lord in prayer by name, in short, we bow before you and accept what has happened. We don’t always have to win…BUY WE DO DEMAND JUSTICE. Oh, and, uh, AMEN.

A couple of springs later, in 1989, the Rev. Billy Graham spoke at our club, its fiftieth anniversary, following a Graham revival in the Carrier Dome. I offered the prayer that day, and he said (and I should have noted this in my journal to save this memory for preaching at Marsh Chapel in March of 2018), ‘that was a fine prayer, Rev.Hill.’ He was about 3 or 4 inches taller than I, quiet, gracious and a kindly presence. And he sure knew what he was talking about regarding prayer. Of course, in that club we had a well-established tradition of pious and heartfelt prayer already, as Judge Schultz’s prayer did attest: WE DO DEMAND JUSTICE. My sister, then Vice President and Corporation Counsel at Oneida Silver, gave him a beautiful silver tea tray (which unfortunately was overshadowed by the wife of the owner of Stickley Furniture who gave him a sofa). These will BOTH go nicely in our home, he graciously responded.

The congregation was of two minds about whether to support the Graham crusade. I still see the hurt in the eyes of those who felt deeply and strongly that doing so validated Graham’s support of the war in Vietnam, his support of Richard Nixon, his particular form of Calvinism (his conservatism, his audio-taped anti-Semitic remarks (for which he did apologize) and his Unitarianism of the second person of the Trinity. A few left that vibrant growing church when we decided to support the cause.

Anyway, we chose to participate. As a theological liberal and a Methodist, to me Graham’s theology made little sense. But right down the street, right across from the parsonage, on a cold winter night, 80,000 people would be singing hymns, some of our favorites: In the Garden; Just as I am; Great is Thy Faithfulness; How Great Thou Art. Catholics, Orthodox, Protestant and Free Church people would work together to bring a little revival, a little salt, to the salt city of Syracuse. There would be a call to decision to lead a Christian life. Some would respond visibly and some not, some invisibly and some not, and some would regret the one and some the other, and some not. And there would be a 500-voice choir (I comment not at all on the notes sung). It was right in our neighborhood. Walking distance. You know what? It was great and great fun. I would sooner work with that organization than with most of the denominational boards and agencies I have known. The Graham people were honest and kind. They said a thousand times: go to church on Sunday. Plus, as much as I love basketball, a Dome full of simple hymns sung from the heart by 80,000 (and a 500-voice choir) made me really smile.

So, when the Boston Globe called last month to ask for a Billy Graham memory, I told them this: In 1989 the Graham committee promised city pastors that the names of those people who came forward in the crusade, would be given, for follow up and follow through, to the churches in the city, neighborhood by neighborhood. I am not sure I fully trusted this. But a week later a big box of names came to the church office. They were not from the campus and faculty side of our neighborhood, in the main; they were not from the student and bohemian side of our neighborhood, in the main; they were not from the corporate and civic leadership side of our neighborhood, in the main. They were from down the hill, in the projects, the 1960’s urban housing that we had tried for five years in vain to engage. And now we had name after name, and an expected standing invitation, and a way to visit on the sixth floor, and an entrée for meals on wheels, and an invitation list for Vacation Bible School, and a way to set up midnight basketball, and get to know some new friends, some of whom joined in for worship, because, on that cold winter night in the full Carrier Dome, they heard the word: Go to church on Sunday. (And I couldn’t help add: About his son I make no comment(:).

That is. We listen and learn with a Roman Catholic monk named Thomas Merton, during Lent 2018. Why? Because. You can learn a great deal from other traditions. Love your ecumenical neighbor as yourself. There are many ways of keeping faith. Love your religious neighbor as yourself. You may learn something in with and under the teaching of a neighboring denomination or pastor or congregation. In my Father’s house, there are many rooms. If you want a friend, be one; if you want ecumenicity, live it. You may be ready for the soteriology next door. Especially students, and young adults. As this morning’s (how is that for timing!) New York Times, in an article on a Trappist Monastery, did put it: Young adults may be drawn to (their) culture of mindfulness, stillness, and inward experience. Here is the way, in brief, Thomas Merton spoke of vocation:

Merton

Saints…(are) sanctified by leading ordinary lives in a completely supernatural manner. 62

Souls are like athletes that need opponents worthy of them. 92

The quietness and hiddenness and placidity of the truly good people in the world all proclaim the glory of God. 142.

The only way to live was to live in a world that was charged with the presence and the reality of God. 208.

That happiness which makes upper New York state seem in my memory to be so beautiful. 219

Virtue—without which there can be no happiness. 223.

The intellect is only theoretically independent of desire and appetite in ordinary, actual practice. 225

While we were sitting there on the floor playing records and eating this breakfast the idea came to me: ‘I am going to be a priest’. 277 (But: I had a kind of conviction: I was going to be a Trappist). 366.

What was the difference between one place and another, one habit and another, if your life belonged to God, and if you placed yourself completely in his hands? 406

Thomas Merton this Lent has given us courage for the wilderness, gratitude for the Sacrament, the Spirit for contemplation, and, today, at the last, a gladness in vocation.

North Country

That same courage, gratitude, spirit and gladness we knew for decades in rural, agricultural, small town, country living, the people and voices and communion of which we cherish by heart. Some of our graduates this May will themselves go and live for a while in the woods. As did Thoreau. Those fine seminarians with us this morning, finishing their three years of study, and about to be assigned to a pulpit on July 1, take with them our heartfelt love and encouragement, and our reminder that all vocational searching, and all astute theological reflection, is not confined to urban schools of theology. We left our friend, last week, remember, riding her horse away from church in August of 1982. She left a letter, acutely and rightly critical of the Methodism she was learning. She was a premier wood carver, making light beautiful wood crosses for all families who suffered a loss. Her spiritual, vocational, and theological reflection—out in the woods—compares her love of wood carving with her difficulty with religion. The corrects, here, a mistaken, though well-intentioned, overemphasis in Methodism. All the celebration in my own tradition of experience of God’s presence, if not tended, drown out the genuine and regular experience of God’s absence: doubt and faith are twin daughters of the divine. Listen to this wood carving Native American lay woman, and astute theologian in her own right, from years ago, comparing wood carving and religion:

And as I was thus discovering why I liked working with wood, I thought why I do not like working with religion. I would gladly give it up if it were not for this bothersome and rather uncontrollable compulsion to try jus at little longer, just one more time, just one more approach. I have found with most things, given the proper tools, I can, with dogged patience and perseverance, attain a state near enough to perfection to be at least satisfying.

But religion, worst of all, because I cannot determine where to lay the blame. Worst of all, because I do not know if I am striving for something that is unattainable for me, because of basic lack or insufficiency or incompleteness. Or is my technique wrong—my approach—my tools—my plans—my information? As I work on a piece of wood, progress is made, I can see it, I can feel it, taking shape, and if I must begin again, I do, because I know in the end that piece of would will become what I want it to become—I will be satisfied, even with the nick of shame it will surely carry—it will be good enough.

But religion—unattainable faith—unfathomable understanding—untouchable God. Even if he knocks, I feel, I have come to wonder if it is that my door has not been furnished with the normal and necessary attachment—a door knob. For if I try—really try—it should get better—but it doesn’t. If I begin again, determination will see it take shape, but it doesn’t.

I read just last week something in the small book, “Understanding the United Methodist Church” which I found disheartening. But it said, in reference to ‘The Witness of the Spirit’:

“It means that the Holy Spirit in the heart of the believer and does give him a first-hand assurance that he is a child of God”…and again…”United Methodists rejoice in the knowledge that God does certify unmistakably to each believer when his salvation is sure”…

Not hope. Or think. But know. That is the perfection. And I am not satisfied with less, nor am I able to make any progress toward that goal. Nor can I throw it all away like a chunk of wood. For it worries me like a dog worries a bare and useless bone, unwilling to spit it out and let it go. Perhaps there is yet some marrow in it worth digging out.

I would, had I the choice, stick with the wood.

All of our traditions, including the perfectionism of Methodism, have some things that need, as this carpenter saw, to be sanded away. Paul Tillich had her answer: doubt is a part of faith, and faith with no doubt is no faith at all but false faith. I hope I was able to preach or teach or say that, so many years ago. Seminarians will take their first pulpits July 1 of this year. Maybe they think that real, true, hard, theological work, interpretative work, will not be needed or required in those small, rural, poor, less formally educated, agricultural, multiple appointments. Maybe they think for all that they will need an urban pulpit, or a college community, or a smooth suburban lawn-scape, or an advanced degree. Maybe they think there is no real ammunition in the verbal and spiritual rifles of first appointments or second appointments or poor churches that cannot pay their apportionments. Maybe they think it won’t matter whether they read their Tillich or not, read their Ecclesiastes or not, read their Galatians or not, read their Merton or not. It will. Big league. In the rough and tumble of pastoral life, the sturdiest vocation will be tested. And should be.

Coda

This is a sermon with a question for you. What is the color of your parachute, the shape of your sail, the grain of your wood, the you that is not what another says of you, the self at your own most self? What is your vocation, your calling, your life as it most fully can become? A little Lenten reflection, alongside a bright young Roman Catholic fellow who had to climb up a seven storey mountain to find his answer, may be a bit of help to each and all of us.

‘If anyone serve me, he must follow me, and where I am there my servant shall be also’. (John 12: 26)

– The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in Lenten Series 2018: Thomas Merton, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.18.2018 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

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Sunday
March 11

Merton and Contemplation

By Marsh Chapel

Audio of the service is currently unavailable.

John 3:5-8, 14-21

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Frontispiece

America is discovering the contemplative life. (TM, SSM, 453).

In the North Country (New York State just south of Montreal) I knew where I could find my people, mostly men, some women, in a mood to talk. In the month of March, between milking times, you could find a circle gathered in the sugar house. The shadow of the roof made all seeing dim. The steam from the boiling tank made of the hut a sauna, a steam bath, a welcome warming in the frigid March air. There is something so purely, and pleasantly sweet about the scent of the boiling sap: have a donut, dip the donut, drink the syrup. Fathers and sons, aunts and nieces, talking. This is the month for north country, maple syrup…contemplation.

One of our dearest north country friends bore five children in a border farm house and raised them there, including the month or so of ‘sugaring’ each year. The children danced in the steam and sweet air of forty gallons of sap becoming a gallon of pure Vermont maple syrup, brewed in New York State, but canned and bottled due east, to gain the Vermont mark-up. She had been raised on an Indian Reservation in Washington State, was graduated from Bellingham College, and then scooped up by Senator Scoop Jackson to work in his Washington DC office, from 1968 to 1975 or so. How she met her dairy farmer husband and moved to the banks of the frozen river St. Lawrence was never clear. One winter evening, with a light snow (6 inches) and some cold (10 below) she hosted our family at a lavish, gourmet dinner. Her farm house, astride the barn, and 3 miles south of the Canadian border, had bare studs for the walls and an ancient linoleum flooring, warmed with a great hearth. The table sat their seven and our four and was laden: with pickles, with flowers, with simple china and silver, and with a king’s meal. Ham lavish and delicious and presented with beauty. The vegetables of all varieties. Dessert, not just a pie, but some elegant tort. In the impoverished cold, she set a magnificent warm meal. It must have taken days to prepare. You can have all the money in the world, with shining golden buildings across the globe emblazoned with your name, and still make life ugly and tawdry and small. Or, with her, having nothing, you can create beauty. She worshipped every Sunday, in season and out, with family or without. In the summer, with good weather, she rode her horse to church. She practiced contemplation of the Merton variety by writing long letters, hand delivered to the minister, after the benediction. In a fortnight of enforced hibernation this January, there emerged some time, digging through old boxes, to find those contemplative letters, to reread and rethink them. One of them, in part, will conclude not this Sunday’s but next week’s sermon, which is set in some contrast, or at least in contemplative dialogue with today’s. We leave her just now, saddling her horse and heading home after church, August 1982.

Barry

In contemplation, many of you, this Lent, have been reading Thomas Merton’s autobiography, THE SEVEN STOREY MOUNTAIN. As a way of honoring your communal contemplation of this, we quote here on of our congregation, David Barry, who writes, “This search for peace continued periodically for Merton, until the day he surrendered to it completely and decided to become a monk at twenty-six. Years earlier, still young and looking through a picture book on the French countryside, he was captivated by the beauty of the ruins of old churches. He felt drawn to the peace and solitude of these old places. He describes, “… my heart was filled by a kind of longing to breathe the air of that lonely valley and listen to its silence” (48). The physical has awakened the spiritual…

“(One night Merton) had a powerful sensory experience. He felt the presence of his father and believed that his father’s spirit was trying to help him to escape from the directionless life that he had been living. “The sense of his presence was as vivid and as real and as startling as if he had touched my arm or spoken to me” (123). Merton thought of the visit from his father as a “grace” (124). “I sat outside, in the sun, on a wall and tasted the joy of my own inner peace, and turned over in my mind how my life was going to change, and how I would become better” (125). Basking in the glow of the sun and remembered religious experience, he had found some peace at last.”

Merton’s Contemplation

Step by step, up the seven storey mountain, Merton finds his way. One foot ahead of the other, or, better, on phrase ahead of the other, he plods along. Howard Thurman had a sermon, not a famous one, but a good one, title, ‘Fear not the Fallow’. It is sometimes in the quiet, snow covered, cold, non-descript patches of time as well as space, that something new and decidedly good is preparing to emerge. But you cannot see it or hear it or sense it or feel it or touch it. Here, again, a leap of faith is needed. Listen to a few of Merton’s contemplative steps, phrases preparing him for the contemplative life, which begin to appear, in his autobiography, about 2/3 of the way through the book:

I was living. I had an interior life, real, but feeble and precarious. And I was still nursed and fed with spiritual milk. (303).

After Latin, it seems to me there is no language so fitted for prayer and for talk about God as Spanish (306).

It was as if I had been suddenly illuminated by being blinded by the manifestation of God’s presence (at Mass in Havana, following the performative language in the creed, at the Consecration) (311).

It was the light of faith deepened and reduced to an extreme and sudden obviousness (311).

God often talks to us directly in Scripture (321).

God began to fill my soul with grace in those days, grace that sprung from deep within me. (331).

O America, how I began to love your country! What miles of silences God has made in you for contemplation! If only people realized what your mountains and forests are really for! (339)

And over all the valley smiled the mild, gentle Easter moon, the full moon I her kindness, loving this silent place (351).

Renewal of Spirit

Contemplation is attention to spirit.

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

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

The Gospel of John is calling to you. At every turn this strange, enigmatic Gospel is calling to you. I mean you. To take up a step up in faith. To move up a step up in faith. To receive a new birth in faith. Are you telling me you have gotten as far as you can in faith? Nicodemus thought that until he saw he was wrong. The woman at the well said so, until she, her ownmost self, was revealed. Those feasting on fish and loaves learned something else. Those in harsh debate with Jesus did as well. The man born blind, given sight, thought maybe all he would have was his illness and the pool of Bethsaida: not so. And Lazarus, to top it all, was dead, down in the catacomb, four days. And a voice: Lazarus! Come out! The Gospel of John is calling to you. At every turn this strange, enigmatic Gospel is calling to you. I mean you. To take up a step up in faith. To move up a step up in faith. To receive a new birth in faith. Are you telling me you have gotten as far as you can in faith? Take a step up.

And how so?

First. The new birth, a gift of the Holy Spirit, refreshes our hearts and makes us new people. It is a pity that this passage, born from above or born anew, has so often been shouted out harshly, as a command. You must. Yet the verb is passive, ‘be born’. You had little control over or management of your physical birth. You did not choose it, profess it, decide it desire it, plan it or supervise it. Without your reasonable advice and comment, you were born. One wonders how it could possibly have gone off all right without our advice. Just so, affirms the Jesus of John, you are reborn by the Spirit, without which rebirth you will not see the area of God’s peace and love. This is not a harsh word, but a gentle one, not a hurricane command but a light Lenten wind, gentle to refresh your heart today.

The leaves on your tree will never dance if they are forever sodden with the cold rain of the mind alone. The mind rides the horse, but the power of Godly living, the horse herself, the great steed of the new birth, is the heart. ‘An entire change of heart as well as of life is necessary’ (Wesley). The spirit is moving you from a nominal belief to a sense of transcendence, an active awareness actually at work in your life.

Second. The wind of Christ is gusting and blustering around your house now, quickening you and bringing you truly into the present moment. Some parts of the past need to be blown away for a new day to dawn, for you. Let bygone hurts be bygone. One has been hurt by love, another by family, another by job, another by church, another by nature, another by accident, another by words, another by deeds. As my friend wrote, ‘if everyone had a sign on his or her back listing all of their personal sorrows, we would all be kinder to one another’. We can and should show each other our scars. Pain shared is therapeutic. But let the dead bury the dead. Pain is shared in order that it be buried, not given wings, be killed not perpetuated. The Scripture warns us about the past, unfettered. It is no substitute for the present. Lot’s wife is turned into a pillar of salt for looking back. Jesus taught, ‘he who puts his hand to the plow and turns back is not fit for the kingdom of God’. New occasions teach new duties. The Spirit is giving us another birth, shoving us away from nominal belief and toward an active awareness, actually at work in our life, influencing our thoughts and decisions. The past is no substitute for the present. Nominal belief traps us in the past.

Third. The Spirit gives you rebirth as the Spirit banishes fear, and replaces fear with faith. A nominal belief, a kind of superstition, only multiplies our fear. In faith, we have an active awareness of God in Christ, which is actually at work, influencing our thought and choice. “He who is born of the flesh fights to defend himself, looks hither and thither, employs his reason to make a living. But he who is born anew reasons thus: ‘I am in God’s hands, who has preserved me and nourished me before in a wonderful manner: he will also feed and preserve me in the future, and save me from all sorrow and misfortune’.” (Luther).

Coda

A faith that takes you away from the adventure of life is a false faith. You desire—and if you desire it one day you shall have it—a faith that sets sail on the adventurous sea of life, a faith that does not long lie in harbor or at anchor, a faith that lives freely, a faith that really lives, a faith willing to change, to risk, to move, to grow, to face life and to face death fearless and free.

It is faith you can ride to church on, and ride home on, and ride all week long. So, saddle up, and ride back next week!

America is discovering the contemplative life. (TM, SSM, 453).

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in Lenten Series 2018: Thomas Merton, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.11.2018 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
March 4

Merton and Sacrament

By Marsh Chapel

John 2

John 2

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

Scripture

Martin Luther taught daily devotions, morning by morning, to include recitation of the ten commandments, which we just heard, of the Apostles’ Creed, contours of which round out the service, and of the Lord’s Prayer, to be lifted in a moment. To which, this morning, we append a mediation on John 2.

Right away, we sense something loose in the Scripture. We are used to something ‘loose’, because day by day we know from our bones and ears that there is something loose in the universe, as Gardner Taylor used to say. Yes, we believe in God, Maker of Heaven and Earth. (That by the way in its creedal asperity is all Luther’s favorite creed says about God the Creator). But along with the brute reality of all there is and all that is there, to honor both Plato and Aristotle, we know in our bones and ears that all this creation around us shakes, and rattles, and rolls, and has abiding in it something big and loose. The Decalogue, come Lent, brings us up short. Creation is one Christian doctrine, or set thereof. And so is Fall. Creation, and Fall. The goodness of Creation is shot through with the fallen-ness of Creation: sin, death, meaninglessness, pride, sloth, falsehood, superstition, idolatry, hypocrisy. Something loose, in the universe. With blood soaked floors in public high schools far and public libraries near, we in tears do quietly nod. We weep as we pray. What a world. It is God’s world. That’s creation. It is a crummy world. That is fall. Somehow, by the gift of faith, in the light of Christ, we try to live with both. Hence, Sacrament.

Part of what was shaking loose in the community of the Gospel of John echoes here in John 2. There is a really odd way of speaking about the Jews in this Gospel. ‘The Passover of the Jews was near’… That is a strange way of saying something, like…When the Fourth of July of the Americans was near…When the Christmas of the Christians was near…When the Patriots’ Day of the Bostonians was near…When the Spring Break of the College Students was near…When the Bastille Day of the French was near…The Passover of the Jews…Well, it is not like fifteen different religious traditions in antiquity or in modernity celebrate the feast of Passover. I know of no Mormon Passover. Nor of any alive among Southern Baptists. Hindus, Muslims, and many others have marvelous traditions in festival, but no Passover. So, even in this early passage, where the term, ‘the Jews’ carries an untypical, non-normal, frightfully odd meaning, the Gospel does not handle the term with ease, or grace, or courtesy. Yes, John, here may be helping his Gentile readers with reminders about Judaism, its feasts, for instance. But there is, as the Gospel unwinds, a fuller, and tragic manner of speech, here. You think of Yankees fans mentioning those who have season tickets at Fenway, or the way we speak of them: ‘Others’. You think of Robert E. Lee, referring to the inhabitants of Boston and other places due north of him as ‘those people’. You think of a humorous play from a few years ago, in which one woman says something about men to three other women, one of whom responds, ‘Oh…them’. There is a lurking animosity here, and behind that a great dark shadow, something loose in the universe. Bishop Hapgood once said ‘the only factually demonstrable Christian teaching, about which there can be no doubt, is the doctrine of original sin’. There is something loose in the universe.

And there is more that is loose, this morning. Now you are keen Bible readers, so you know that normally in a Gospel the cleansing of the temple happens right at the end of the Gospel, just before the cross, and is the spark, the catalyst, or the cause of Jesus’ crucifixion. As in Matthew. As in Mark. As in Luke. Well, here the writer has brought up the temple, with its cattle and sheep and doves, with its money changers and tables overturned, with its sheer public conflict right in the heart of ‘the Passover of the Jews’, has brought the temple right up to the very beginning of the Gospel. This should teach us something. A Gospel is a stylized memory, a preaching of the resurrection by way of reminiscence about Jesus, not a history nor a biography nor a deposition on the way to a legal brief on the way to an indictment. You know this. Even if you didn’t, you would know it now, because of what was read a moment ago: after he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered…and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken. It is the resurrection that carries the Gospel and the Gospels, not the other way around. You could call it a saving reminiscence, embedded in the simplest of elements. Resurrection precedes Gospel. And all else.

By the way, along the way, in the reading of the Gospel of John, we pick up some sideways hints of what sort of community produced this sort of Gospel. And one of the little hints, glimmering in the big dark, is that this Gospel has a bone to pick with some folks it is close to, a bone to pick with, of all people, its close knit extended family, ‘the Jews’. ‘The Jews’ then said, ‘this temple…’. Please. Who else at Passover in Jerusalem in 30ad was around to talk to? Other than Jews? Methodists? Flat Earth Believers? Methodist Flat Earth Believers? Everyone in this scene is Jewish, from Jesus on up or on down. You see. There is something odd, something sliding around, something loose, something revealingly strange about the way this Gospel, including by the way, right here, in chapter 2, speaks of Jesus, of his family and friends, of the twelve disciples, of John the Baptist, of the earliest Christian church community, of Paul of Tarsus, and many, many others…all Jews. Something else is going on here, and it is crucial for us, year by year, carefully to hear it. NOTA BENE: It is likely, highly probable, that the author has in mind not ‘Jews’ in general, but, rather, some other familiar group, closer at hand, down the street, in the synagogue, out of which John and his small early church group of Jesus worshippers, have been exited, due to the, by Jewish standards, dire heresy of ditheism, and with whom they are engaged in something of a family feud. You know. Others. Those people. Them. Those we oppose. You cannot read merely with a flat nasal honkey reading any of the usages of the phrase, ‘the Jews’, in John. And our failure, as Christians, as a religious community, our failure in teaching the Scripture rightly over centuries, right up to this morning, our failure to see and perceive and interpret and communicate about what is loose in this Gospel—its depiction of ‘the Jews’—has had monstrous consequences. While the horrific historic tragedy of Christian antisemitism has more roots than those in this fourth Gospel, it has no deeper roots than these.

Those who wrote John in 90ad, who bowed before the Risen Christ, whose glory and magnificence and exaltation and divinity they had only dimly perceived for some time, and whom they had only painfully come to recognize as ‘My Lord and My God’, were coming out of an experience of odium theologicum, theological and religious sheer hatred, conflict, difference, with—well, with whom do you get angriest?—their family, their kin, their closest friends, their former prayer partners. Let us pause for some contrition, lament, compunction, confession, this Lent, in the same year that we honored Elie Wiesel from this pulpit and across this University on September 17, 2017.

Merton

The advantage of our conversation this Lent with Thomas Merton, who died fifty years ago, sails into view here. His autobiography is titled ‘Seven Storey Mountain’, and his lengthy, vital account therein, with one notable exception, explained in the Introduction, gives full measure to his own experience of the fallen-ness of Creation. On one hand, his journey courses through the most beautiful and culturally gracious spaces from his time, and, to some degree still, from ours. Southern France, the Long Island Sound, London, Cambridge, Oxford, New York, Columbia (the University), Bermuda, and Upstate New York. You could argue that his relative ignorance of New England is a failure. But in his study and reading, as well as his travel and culture, he stays with the best. All of it, finally, fails him, and, it must be emphasized, fails him not for his own failure to embrace, hold fast, honor, respect what is there and what there is. His parents die young. His brother dies before he can really know him as an adult. His young friendships wither and fade. He departs Oxford without a degree. His various relationships with women, faintly even coyly recollected, provide no happiness. His reading, apart from William Blake, disappoints. His teachers, apart from Mark Van Doren, fall short. His inherited religious backgrounds in Quaker silence and Episcopal liturgy leave him empty and discouraged. His critique of Protestant Christianity, as practiced, is scathing, but not for that matter unfair. He mistakenly or ironically or both refers to Riverside Church as Rockefeller Church. But he finally comes home to Sacrament, he finds, finally, a home, in Sacrament.

This happens on a little side street in the Upper West Side of New York City, quite familiar to those of us who attended Union Theological Seminary. Through a strange course of influences, he finds himself one hot August Sunday in 1938, sitting in a pew at Corpus Christi Catholic Church on 121^st street. From that very sanctuary, I weekly or bi-weekly saw my teacher, Fr. Raymond Brown, emerge, having said the Wednesday mass. There was a time when most theologians were also ordained, and so pressed into service, when and as that was possible. He would amble down the slight hill there in Morningside Heights, circa 1978, as we now remember in 2018, in black suit and white collar, and pause to talk, to check the progress of his advisee, to smile, and return to the intricacies of John 2, read a moment ago.

On that August morning, 1938, Merton was overcome by grace, by community, by prayer, by liturgy, by sermon, and by Host, so overcome that he stumbled out into the bright New York sunlight without receiving the sacrament. He knelt next to a young woman, perhaps a fellow Columbia student, who was clearly and sincerely praying.

It has been forty years since I have stood on the steps of Corpus Christi on 121^st street. It seems a day ago, though. This is the strange thing about time, about recollection, about the passage of time, about memory, about how close things are that nonetheless are at a great distance. For Thomas Merton, his emergence from purgatory came in Sacrament. May this be so, this morning, right here, just now, for you. Here is the burden and the delight of ministry on, at, or near a University campus. You just never know who may be coming home, now in Word, or now in Sacrament, in the very quotidian, utterly simple, spare, nothingness, really, of prayer, of worship. Of Sacrament. Touch helps, familiarity helps, music helps, some words help, repetition helps, taste helps. There is a physicality that helps. We understand God, if or as we do, in a ‘supermental’ way, as Cyril Richardson regularly put it. In a supermental, sacramental way, we might say, today. In prayer. Today: in Sacrament.

Like those who wrote John 2, Merton was astounded by the Height of Christ. They began to see, once they saw. And he began to see, once he saw. That is, once the resurrection glory, in the cross of Christ, gradually became clear to this Gospel of John group, once they began fully to realize who this Jesus was and is and was for them—both human and divine—then things began to fall into place. That is, once the resurrection glory, in the cross of Christ, gradually became clear to Thomas Merton, once he began fully to realize who this Jesus was and is and was for them—both human and divine—then things began to fall into place. And out of this drastic dislocation, in John, came a new religion (there is really no other way to put it), the Christianity of the Christ, which would then take wing in the second and third and fourth centuries, in direct dialogue with the terms set by John. And out of this drastic sacramental dislocation, in Merton, came a new spiritual life, the Christianity of the Christ, which would then take wing in the next five decades, in direct dialogue with the terms set by the Sacrament.

Reminiscence

On Thursday evening this past week, about 6pm, at the cooling end of a bright warm day, I walked slowly across the lawn here next to the Chapel, known lovingly as the BU ‘beach’. As usual I was lost in some errant thought or three when I stepped forward, and found my foot resting on top of a scittering Frisbee. Two kind students, far left and far right, called out, one saying ‘you can throw it to us’. It was not clear—you need friendship to know inflection and implication in speech—whether that meant ‘please feel free to throw it’, or ‘against all appearances you seem like you might actually be able to throw it’, or ‘we are not playing some game where you have to leave the Frisbee where your right foot stepped upon it’. It did not matter, because I had every intention of throwing it, long left or long right, and that was not premeditated deliberation. I bent down, picked it up, and threw it, to the right, before any thinking. It sailed out and up, and there was bemusement that it did so, so well, or even at all.

It took another block of walking before I was melted into emotion and reminiscence, brought out of that simple touch, that old feel, that muscle memory from fifty years and more ago, that gliding motion, so unfamiliar and yet so utterly familiar. We spent all summer, in 1962, at age 8 throwing a Frisbee. It is all we had, and all we needed. You had breakfast, and were expected home, in that small college farm town, when the street lights came on. You could come back for lunch and dinner if you wanted, but it was assumed someone would feed you. The iron matriarchy that ran Hamilton NY decreed only one inviolable summer law: get home, when the street lights come on, or else. And so, ball and bat. And so, Frisbee. And so, decades later, this week, in a throw, the far off rural, agricultural, bucolic small town world, is become, by revelation, not only at hand, but in hand.

In Grace, God holds us by hand, at hand, in hand. Sacrament told Merton who he was. Reminded him of who he was meant to be. Made sense of his memories! Brought a recollection, in touch and muscle and taste and sight and hearing, of God, incarnate in Jesus Christ. You could call it a saving reminiscence, embedded in the simplest of elements.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in Lenten Series 2018: Thomas Merton, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.4.2018 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
February 25

Power, Mutuality, and #MeToo

By Marsh Chapel

Genesis 17:1-7

Genesis 17:15-16

Mark 8:31-38

Would you pray with me? May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

Some years ago, I was at a clergy training. For those of you who have attended daylong trainings, you will have some sense of what this felt like: forgettable food, unlimited caffeine to counteract the effects of a too-warm room, and wide swings between sparkling presentations and somniliquy. But one brief moment from that day is seared into memory. The trainer had just finished explaining the practice of having open door or glass-door one-on-one meetings with congregants. We were using a video series from the FaithTrust institute, which offers the gold standard for ethics and boundaries training for faith leaders from a variety of traditions, from rabbis to ministers to Buddhist monks. The trainer decided to go a bit off script, and he shared that a male bishop he worked with would not drive to any district meeting, church visit, or other event alone with a woman. This male bishop would share a car for the ride with a male clergy colleague, but in order to be “above reproach,” he would make sure to take separate cars when driving to a meeting with a female clergy colleague. In this midwestern setting, the circuits were long and the districts far apart; this is the part of the country where travelling 100 miles can take 100 minutes, with flat farmland as far as the eye can see. True heirs of the Wesleyan heritage, the bishop and the cabinet would often put 50,000 miles a year on their cars.

Something felt wrong about the comment, and I felt the sudden urge to ask “why?,” but a number of ways in which I had been socialized held me back. He stood at the front of the room as the teacher, and I sat in the back, a student. Unless I could explain why his statement was problematic, I would be interruptive, and besides, I could sidetrack the conversation and drag out an already long day. He was my elder, and I was surrounded by clergy with decades more life and ministry experience. I was barely of legal drinking age, and the forty and fifty-something second career pastors seemed to not even blink at the comment. I must be too young to get it. As a child, I had been an incredibly curious and loquacious little girl who had learned that asking why too many times was a great way to annoy your parents. I had learned to be more precise in my language, and that adults responded better to a question with more detail and less emotion. This reaction felt too sudden to be rational. And he was a man, married for nearly two decades, and I was a woman, a newlywed, who had recently been given a hotel room with twin beds instead of a queen at annual conference after a snafu where the front desk could not understand why I hadn’t changed my last name. What did I know of what made a marriage over the decades? And what did I know of the world of men and the choices they made to act ethically and keep boundaries?

All these thoughts and more ran through my mind so quickly that it would take months to disentangle them from one another. All of these anxieties were tamped down internally, and I said nothing. The moment passed, as these sorts of moments so often do, in silence.

And later, as I fumed in my room, the “why” of why I had felt the urge to shout “why” finally emerged into the forefront. Why was the bishop only moving through a world of men? At the time of this training, a single district superintendent was a woman, and the cabinet, nearly two dozen conference level officials, had just three women on staff, one of whom was the bishop’s assistant. Why were there so few women on the conference staff? Even if it was not deliberate exclusionary practice, and I didn’t think it was, this bishop would regularly spend hours upon hours one-on-one with his fellow male clergy. Three hours each way to a district meeting leaves a lot of time for talking about ministry, for asking advice, and for networking. Those hours add up, and leaders frequently choose those whom they know, trust, and have spent time with to elevate to positions of authority. This attempt to behave “above reproach” had hurt the career opportunities of countless female clergy. Why couldn’t the bishop just keep a policy of not travelling one-on-one in a car with anyone? To travel in groups or alone? This attempt at ethical leadership was not ethical and not leadership, and it propagated a more homogenous clergy, a more homogenous cabinet, and a more homogenous church.

But weighing my options, I decided not to speak up. I was not even commissioned, let alone ordained, and I did not have the security of an appointment. I did not expect any kind of formal retaliation, but I did not want the headache of the confrontation. The comment itself, and the hundreds of micro-decisions I needed to make about whether or not to respond in the moment, were exhausting. I did not want the additional exhaustion of drawing out the moment. Besides, the moment had passed, and I had not spoken up in the moment. Silence often begets silence.

But the gospel, the good news, is a spoken word, a good, true, spoken word. And God speaks to us in a good word of relationship, of covenantal relationship, of the potential for relationship with God and with one another. The God who spoke us into being and sent a Word to live among us gives the freedom and enlivening Spirit to speak to one another. And the time is always right to speak right.

Our text this morning from Genesis 17 is the foundation of the covenant God makes with Abraham and Sarah. “I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless.” From God’s offer of relationship with us, we learn three important things about how we are to live with God and with one another. First, God offers covenantal relationship to women as well as to men. It is not just that Abraham is our father in faith, but that Sarah is our mother in faith, the mother of the covenant. When we limit the imagination of our leadership in our faith communities and in our other work communities we close off the divine imagination that calls women and men equally.

Second, covenantal relationship is based on mutuality and freedom. The covenant into which God calls Abraham and Sarah is the definition of an unequal power dynamic. After all, God is God and we are not. But God does not abuse that power. God doesn’t force Abram and Sarah to do what God wants. God calls and invites humanity into divine relationship, and we are given the freedom to respond, to live up to the high calling to which we are called, to “walk before God, and be blameless.” God honors the divine image that we bear. God offers to and does hold up God’s end of the covenant. God also offers us divine freedom for humanity to do what God asks of us.

Third, God models how to have relationship with others when there is a power imbalance. Whether it is a doctor-patient relationship, a teacher-student relationship, a pastor-congregant relationship, an employer-employee relationship, or any other of the myriad ways in which we humans have structured ourselves into intrapersonal dynamics where power is not shared equally, we are called to exercise authority with responsibility. Power does not naturally lead to abuse, but power that is abused does. God, in relationship with Abraham and Sarah, does not demand a cult of personality, but instead offers a covenant of mutuality.

Jesus in our Gospel also has something to say to systems of abusive power. The cross, the method of execution used by an abusive, oppressive state, was intended to crush those whom it killed and the hopes of those who watched. The cross was meant to cut off air to resistance, to speech, to breath, and to life. Jesus has something to say about that. To Peter, who attempts to change the subject, who denies the possibility that an abusive system could ever harm his teacher, Jesus says, Get behind me Satan! No one is too smart, too kind, too anything to be above risk when abusive systems of power and abusive persons are elevated to positions of power. To those in authority who abuse their power, who create a system to prop up their own power by crushing others, Jesus, asks, pointedly, For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and lose their soul? And to those who would hope to lead, who might be at risk, in taking power, to abuse it, Jesus warns, “Deny yourself, take up that cross.” Too often, this catchprase has been used abusively, by pastors urging people to stay with their abusers. To them, I say, As one of my colleagues, a brilliant pastor and biblical scholar puts it, “you ain’t reading it right.”

The cross is an attempted abuse of power. To pick up a cross, to push against its strain and weight, and to keep breathing, is an act of resistance, it is a speech-act, and it breathes life even in the midst of death. Following Jesus requires not abusing power, and it also demands that we strain against those human systems we have created which attempt to crush through abusive power. For Jesus also tells us here that the cross is not the end, and that the grave is not victorious. The façade of abusive power will, at some day, even if it is on the great lasting day, crumble and fall.

The #MeToo movement, first begun by Tarana Burke in 2007, has brought to the fore thepervasive problems of sexual abuse and harassment. From hotel cleaning staff to assembly line workers, from judicial clerks to academics, women have been speaking out against the ways in persons have abused their power and the ways in which systems have ignored and enabled that abuse to continue, sometimes for years. And faith communities have not been above the fray. One only has to follow the hashtag #churchtoo to hear stories from women and men who have been harassed and abused within their church communities.

#MeToo is about the basics. It is about naming the problem of power. Sexual harassment and sexual abuse are ultimately about power, not sex. And sometimes it is good for the church to go over the basics. Religious organizations need to be able to talk about the problem of power, to teach that it is wrong to abuse power, and to develop theologies about power. We need to teach our children these things, but sometimes we need to remind ourselves as well.

The things that we know are wrong, we should still take the time to say are wrong. The things we don’t think need repeating do need repeating. We must remind ourselves, and teach our children, that abuse is wrong. Physical abuse is wrong. Emotional, spiritual, verbal, and psychological abuse is wrong. Intimate relationships must have mutuality as their basis; one should be able to share strength and vulnerability in equal measure with a partner. This is why it is unethical for a person who is in an authority position over another to enter into an intimate relationship with a person who is reliant upon them, whether for medical treatment, classroom learning, spiritual guidance, athletic coaching, or a paycheck.

There is another facet of the #metoo movement, and it relates to the problematic ways in which men have tried to “protect” women. How can a military man, for example, who bemoans a time when “women were considered sacred and looked upon with great honor” praise the integrity of a man who has been accused of physical abuse by three former partners? It seems to boggle the mind, but with a theology of mutuality, of covenantal relationship, we are able to see through the fog of obfuscation and name the ways in which this statement and those actions are two sides to the same coin.

“Women are considered sacred and looked upon with great honor.” This lament for a halcyon bygone era is a description better suited to objects than people. You might describe a precious possession this way, perhaps a family heirloom set on display, a piece of art hanging ona wall, or an artifact donated to a museum. In this logic, women are first and foremost objects to be protected, not colleagues who are presumed to be persons of integrity, whose word should be believed. In a workplace dominated by men, with certain expectations of what roles women play in society and in the workplace, a man’s word is seen as stacking high against the claims, even of multiple women. This, of course, is an extreme example, but behind every #MeToo story of extreme abuse and harassment lie hundreds of smaller moments, of opportunities missed, invitations not extended, and mentoring overlooked, hundreds of off-handed comments at daylong trainings which reveal the problems we have concealed for too long.

The Lenten season is a time for introspection and preparation. It is a good time to take stock, to look squarely at the troubles of the world, and to prepare ourselves for the great mystery of Holy Week that encompasses all of the hurt and hope of creation. Perhaps, this Lent, you can think back to your own relationships, both personal and professional. Is there a place of hurt that you have buried? Perhaps this Lent, think about speaking, to a therapist, to a close friend, to yourself in a journal, or perhaps just to God in prayer. Is there a relationship in which you did not act in mutuality, where you took for granted or even took advantage of the power you had over others? Perhaps this Lent you will take time and space for an examination of conscience, repentance, and change.

In preparation for this sermon, in this Lenten series, I’ve been doing a lot of swimming around in Thomas Merton, who was a truly prolific writer. One only needs to consider the bibliography page on the Thomas Merton society website to get a sense that there are far more stories than seven in the Merton mountain. But when I think about power, mutuality, and the complex ways in which we relate to one another and to God, I found comfort and meaning in Merton’s famous prayer on direction and discernment. Would you be in prayer with me?

My Lord God,
I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
nor do I really know myself,
and the fact that I think I am following your will
does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you
does in fact please you.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.

And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road,

though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore will I trust you always though
I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear, for you are ever with me,
and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

-The Reverend Jennifer Quigley

posted in Lenten Series 2018: Thomas Merton, The Rev. Dr. Jennifer Quigley on 02.25.2018 at 11:00 am
Tags: Jennifer Quigley

Sunday
February 18

A Word in the Wilderness

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 1: 9-15

May the Gracious God, Holy and Just

From whom we come and unto whom our spirits return

The source of Wisdom, fount of Wisdom, well spring of saving Wisdom

Make of us, this Lent, 2018, an addressable community

That we might listen

That we might hear

That we might understand

That we might listen, hear and understand before we analyze or criticize

May God make of us an addressable community

May God make of us a benevolent community

That we might polish our proclivity for the second thought, the second try, the second chance

That we might expect to uncover a latent goodness, latent in others and in ourselves and across this great, though troubled, globe

That we might become good in ways that become the Gospel

May God make of us, we pray, a benevolent community

May God make of us, we pray, a soulful community

Alive to spirit, alive to love, alive to grace

And take away from our souls all strain and stress

Let us breathe again, breathe deeply, breathe the soulful breath of life

Make of us a soulful community

For we have gathered and bear witness to Jesus, our beacon not our boundary.

Today we are again a land, culture, people and country drenched in sorrow, now due to the unspeakable horror, the unnecessary American carnage in Parkland, Florida. In a decade of deepening humiliation, wherein our current elected leadership readily chooses to exchange long term moral judgment for short term political opportunity, we can but rise up, come Sunday, and face God. One way, this morning, will be to start simply by naming those dead, those children and others sacrificed on the altar of hideously exaggerated individual gun rights:

Alyssa Alhadeff, 14

Scott Beigel, 35

Martin Duque, 14

Nicholas Dworet, 17

Aaron Feis, 37

Jaime Guttenberg, 14

Chris Hixon, 49

Luke Hoyer, 15

Cara Loughran, 14

Gina Montalto, 14

Joaquin Oliver, 17

Alaina Petty, 14

Meadow Pollack, 18

Helena Ramsay, 17

Alex Schachter, 14

Carmen Schentrup, 16

Peter Wong,15

Wilderness Theology

Lent is indeed a time of wilderness travel, reflection, theology and preaching. Over a past decade, 2007-2016, Lent by Lent, here at Marsh Chapel, we identified a theological conversation partner for the Lenten sermons, broadly speaking, out of the Calvinist tradition. For this current decade, 2017-2026, we turn to the Catholic tradition. With Calvin, that is, in the earlier decade, we encountered the chief resource for others we engaged over the last ten years—voices like those of Jonathan Edwards (2015), Paul of Tarsus (2014), Marilyn Robinson (2013), Jacques Ellul (2012), Dietrich Bonhoeffer (a Lutheran cousin), (2011), Karl Barth (2010), and Gabriel Vahanian (2007), and themes like Atonement (2009) and Decision (2008), and, of course, himself, John Calvin. But beginning with Lent 2017, the Marsh pulpit, a traditionally Methodist one, did turn left, not right, toward Rome not Geneva, and we in these years will preach with, and learn from the Roman Catholic tradition, so important in the last 200 years in New England, and some of its great divines including Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Ignatius of Loyola, Erasmus, Hans Kung, Karl Rahner, and others, one per year. Perhaps you will suggest a name or two, not from Geneva, but from Rome? For those who recall, even if dimly, the vigor and excitement of Vatican II, there may well be other names to add to the list. We began with Henri Nouwen (2017). We continue with Thomas Merton (2018). Next year, St. John of the Cross (2019).

Thomas Merton was born in 1915 and died in 1968, fifty years ago. This Lent we follow his thought by following his life, most famously recounted in his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (storey being an English way of spelling what in American English we call story—meaning the same, meaning a level in a house or building). His compelling account of conversion and vocation, placing him for life in a Trappist monastery, holds us in part because of his global engagement with global and local culture, and personal and family life. He reads. He loves art. He travels. He learns. He fails. Most heavily, he loses to death his mother and his father at quite early ages. Another sermon or another occasion might compare and contrast his testimony to that of Augustine of Hippo from the late fourth century. More immediately, though, his personal travels along the terrain of spirit and spirituality, far more in vogue today, we might say, than they were fifty years ago, may illumine a dark corner for a frustrated undergraduate, or challenge a heedless pride for a wise academic, or inspire a new-found energy in a lapsing person of faith, or, say for you, call you again to faith, to the gift of faith, to the reception of the gift of faith. We travel with Thomas Merton this Lent.

Wilderness Scripture

As Merton reminds us, the body and its habits, in collusion with the unconscious and its rhythms, takes us where we habitually go, to do what we ritually do. We are creatures of habit, guided along by our suppositions and assumptions. Lent arrives to wake us up, to make us aware. Lent arrives to challenge us to move from sensation to reflection, from activity to awareness. Hence the overwhelming response this past Wednesday by Boston University students and others to eight Ash Wednesday services, all heavily attended, half Protestant, half Catholic. This affirmation of ritual in worship will need further attention from us, in the days ahead. Our millennials are teaching us and telling us something.

Jesus meets us today in the long experience of the wilderness. The wilderness where reflection quickens. The wilderness where discipline begins. The wilderness where the great questions—freedom, immorality, God, all—may touch us. The wilderness where there is quiet, space, silence. I invite you this Lent to journey with me, one beggar among others, to travel from sensation to reflection.

We begin this morning, taking stock of our sources (or media?) of authority, upon which we shall base our coming Lenten teaching. In the Gospel, Jesus hears Scripture, Thou art my beloved Son, with thee I am well pleased. That is Psalm 2: 7. You are meant to recognize the divine voice echoed here from Holy Scripture. In the Gospel, Jesus honors tradition—baptized by John in the Jordan. In the Gospel, Jesus is driven by the spirit, the breath of God, the spirit of truth, reason and reasoned. In the Gospel, Jesus struggles, and suffers, he experiences depth and height, as do we: tempted, endangered, in need of angelic support. These are the sources of authority on which the gospel is proclaimed—scripture, tradition, reason, experience.

Your move today from sensation to reflection involves a recognition of sources for authority.

Tread lightly. Your love of Christ shapes your love of Scripture and tradition and reason and experience. You are lovers and knowers too. We are ever in peril of loving what we should use and using what we should love, to paraphrase Augustine. In particular we sometimes come perilously close to the kind of idolatry that uses what we love. We are tempted, for our love Christ, to force a kind of certainty upon what we love, to use what is meant to give confidence as a force and form of certainty. It is tempting to substitute the freedom and grace of confidence for the security and protection of certainty. But faith is about confidence not certainty. If we had certainty we would not need faith.

Wilderness Bath

Here is a Lenten question: Did you ever feel the need to take a spiritual bath? The layers of accumulated anxiety and estrangement call out for removal. A little steam, a filling tub, some quiet and peace, moments of grace. Did you ever feel the need to take a spiritual bath?

Even as the early church had need and experience to remember Jesus as the one who first experienced our communion, in the last supper, so for the same communal reasons, this early legend of Jesus’ baptism met the needs of the primitive church, and so, we may hope, shall meet our own. They too knew alienation. They too estrangement. They too sin and ennui. All that separates you from yourself, from others, from God—this is sin. All that separates you from your best hope, the real hope of others, and the divine hope in which the world was made—this is sin. The early church found it soothing, healing to be immersed in the water of baptism, and to think of Jesus as the first baptized. Ours is not a biographical account, but a story of faith.

Surely, with many generations fore and aft, the early church would have remembered the cleansing holiness of the ten commandments, as they read these words.

Likewise, with two thousand years of saints to follow, this same church would have remembered the cleansing compassion of the beatitudes.

When they heard the splash of water, they might have thought again of Noah, and the flood. The promise of God’s care, to follow such hurt, they would have seen again in the rainbow: I establish my covenant with you and your descendents after you…This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all generations. I have set my bow in the clouds…the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.

When they heard the banishment to the wilderness, the school of experience, of hard knocks, to which every great religious leader from Moses to the Buddha has been sent, they would have recalled another blessing. The blessing of nature in the rainbow would be matched by that of experience in the Psalms. Lead me in your truth, and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; for you I wait all day long…Do not remember the sins of my youth…according to your steadfast love remember me…

When the moment of baptism came, John holding Jesus, both of the prophetic tradition, both of a certain courage and calling, both to have tragic fates, both to know and need each other—brothers, really—they would have had something to say, now, a blessing of an emerging sacrament. Every sacrament and every symbol need interpretation. For that reason, the whole of 1 Peter is written as an essay on baptism. Remember what the letter says: And baptism, which the ark of Noah prefigured, now saves you—not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience. Baptism—an appeal to God for a good conscience. How timely.

When the story, the faith legend of Jesus’ baptism was then told, in a small Mediterranean church, they again would meet their Lord. As do we. Jesus, from Galilee. Jesus, baptized. Jesus, related to John. Jesus, spirit touched. Jesus, beloved. Jesus, tested and tempted. Jesus, tough against wilderness and beasts and Satan. Jesus, guarded by angels. Jesus, preacher. Jesus, preaching good news. Jesus, whose time has come.

Wilderness Failure

Jesus particularly meets us today in supplication. In supplication, today, we feel or murmur or mutter, perhaps through clenched teeth, a prayer of supplication, a confession of failure: Free our land of horrid, tragic, gun violence. How will this happen? We see no easy way.

But then our minds begin to move. Gun violence is a matter of public health. You have lifted your voice in chorus with those who attack gun violence not as an issue of individual right or freedom, but as an issue of public health and safety. We have had success in other improvement to public health. Reductions in death from smoking. Reductions (some) in death from drinking. Reductions in highway deaths. Here is a different evil, so we shall need to think differently.

How shall we do so?

Maybe we shall restrict the sale of ammunition: keep and bear arms all you want, but ammunition we will lock down. Maybe we shall make those who make money on gun sales pay a stiff price for every misuse of their product. Maybe we shall hold households and home insurance responsible for mayhem that emerges from a house.

Congress regularly supports the so-called gun lobby, fearing to contradict its champions. Oddly, though, they are mistaken about what Americans, and particularly gun owners, think about gun restrictions and gun safety. They mistake the faux representative voice for the people’s voice. ‘85% of Americans and 81% of gun owners favor gun show background checks, which Congress rejected…Since 1960 1.3 million Americans have died from fire arms, which amounts to 80 gun deaths a day.’ The broad swath of the American people, in harmony with the Book of Hebrews, offer prayers of supplication for an angelic deliverance. And here and there, there is change: ‘In 1970 ½ of all US homes had guns. Today it is less than 1/3.’ Our tendency to conformity, our over-eager deference to authority, and our too willing adaptation to imposed roles weaken us over against these and other challenges. Yet…

You have agency and influence. As you pray. As you think. As you speak. And as you vote. You have power, agency and influence. You cannot see the unforeseen future. You do not know what may, against all current expectation, suddenly emerge. Decades ago we lived in a little cottage parsonage in Ithaca, once inhabited by Pearl Buck, she of THE GOOD EARTH, while her husband took a degree at Cornell. It was fifty yards from Fall Creek, a good size river, frozen solid for the cold months. No amount of waiting and watching would shift that ice, and for those years it was Easter, usually, before anything happened. Just block ice, wind, snow, cold, silence. No movement. And then, with no warning, like a sudden angel thunder from heaven itself, in a great cataclysmic whoosh, all that ice would pound down the hill into Cayuga Lake, in ten minutes. It was terrifying to hear, and to see. What combination of underwater thawing and freezing, what combination of sun and shadow, what combination of tiny little changes finally ushered in that apocalypse? Who can say. But you never know when change, even big change, may well arrive.

Wilderness Faith

We now receive Jesus. Because we are loved, we can love. Marsh Chapel, you have been love for this community for many generations. What you have said and done, stood for and stood by, we now repeat, even as we kneel before God and unknown. In fact, I believe that if you were to write a creed together, it might sound something like this:

God is love.
Love is both mercy and justice, both compassion and holiness.
Compassion is more important than holiness.
God loves the world (not just the church).
The church lives in the culture. The church lives in the culture to transform it. (Not above it to disdain it, not below it to obey it, not behind it to mimic it, not before it hector it).
The church is the Body of Christ.
Christ is alive. Wherever there is way, truth, life…
Life is sacred.
Life is a sacred journey to freedom.
The Bible is freedom’s book.
The Bible is a source, not the source, of truth
The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath
Women and men, people all people, need each other
There is a self correcting spirit of truth loose in the universe.
God’s love outlasts death.

Let us bring who we are to this moment, remembering the wilderness desire, theology, Scripture, bath, failure, and faith, along with promises and gifts of faith, and trusting in Almighty God to heal and sustain in this new season.

Merton wrote, I was to become conscious of the fact that the only way to live was to live in a world that was charged with the presence and reality of God (SSM, 208)

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 02.18.2018 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
February 11

The Bach Experience

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 9:2-9

Hill

Last Sunday our worship service of Word and Table conclude with the singing of an old hymn, written by a Massachusetts minister J. Edgar Park, who was President of Wheaton College, Massachusetts. He was born in Belfast, Ireland, March 7, 1879 and had his theological studies at New College, Edinburgh, The Royal University, Dublin, and Princeton Theological Seminary. His principal pastorate was in the Second Church of Newton, Congregational, West Newton, Massachusetts, which he served 1926 to 1944, going from there to the Presidency of Wheaton. He was the author of many books, including one of the Lyman Beecher Lectures at Yale.

You may not in fact remember the hymn we sang, to conclude our service, which is not any detriment to or criticism of you. The hymn title is ‘We Would See Jesus’, number 256 in our venerable Methodist Hymnal, which Hymnal is about to be revised this coming year with all the attendant disagreements, disputes, and ultimately, we trust, a happy and useful outcome for the use of singing Methodists near and far. One of our own faculty here at Boston University is a member of that committee.

The hymn fits our readings from Mark, and fits Epiphany, the season out of which we come, and traces the ministry of Jesus.

We would see Jesus, lo! His star is shining, above the stable while the angels sing

There in a manger on the hay reclining, haste let us lay our gifts before the King

We would see Jesus, Mary’s Son most holy…

We would see Jesus, on the mountain teaching…

We would see Jesus, in his work of healing…

We would see Jesus, still as of old he calleth ‘Follow me’…

In a few simple verses, the hymn traces the earthly ministry of Jesus, birth, growth, teaching, healing, calling. This is the Jesus most of us most of the time are most comfortable with, and the Jesus, one could add, that most seminarians prefer to study, the Jesus of parables, of the lilies of the field, of the various healings, of the preachments in valley and on mountain—in short, the human Jesus. This is the Jesus known and heard in Matthew, Mark and Luke, with some occasional exceptions, like today’s reading. We can fairly readily approach this Jesus, we would see him as the hymn says, in the verses and chapters of the Synoptic Gospels.

Now pause, for a moment, and hear again the Gospel today, which is none of this. The Mark 9 Transfiguration is like an invasion of the gospel of John into an other-wise happy earliest Gospel of Mark. A high mysterious mountain. Strange choices about booths. The sudden acclamation of Elijah and Moses. A blinding light. MYSTERIUM TREMENDUM. The Holy. Suddenly not just a teacher or preacher or healer or rabbi, but…This is the Jesus of your life and death. Death makes us mortal, facing death makes us human. This is the Jesus of whom it is said, ‘My Lord and My God’. This is the Jesus to whom we turn in the Lenten challenges, whether or not they come in Lent, the Lord of life and death. So, our Charles Wesley hymn, in a few moments, is quite different: Christ whose glory fills the skies, Christ the true the only light, Sun of Righteousness arise, triumph o’er the shades of night, Dayspring from on High be near, Daystar in my heart appear

It is this holy grace, this gracious holiness, to which we turn our ears, not our eyes, on the Sundays, like this one, upon which we hear the Gospel as spoken, but also as sung: A day is coming that will judge the secrets [of humankind], Before which hypocrisy may tremble. For the wrath of His jealousy annihilates What hypocrisy and cunning contrive.

Dr. Jarrett: how shall we listen, this morning, with particular and careful attention, to today’s cantata?

Jarrett

Thank you, Dean Hill. At first read, the texts of today’s cantata surely align more with the MYSTERIUM TREMENDUM depiction you’ve just described. Cantata 136 warns of the day of judgement when our own hypocrisy and cunning-ways threaten to undo us. The bass soloist tells us that the heavens themselves are not clean, and that all are struck by spots of sin, brought upon us by Adam’s Fall. These depictions endure for much of the cantata, until, mercifully, we are reminded that Jesus’s wounds cleanse and redeem. In the final chorale we sing that even a drop of the Blood of Jesus can cleanse the entire world. The image is one of humankind ensnared in the Devil’s jaws, set free and at liberty by the blood of the lamb.

Bach’s anonymous librettist was surely trying to amplify the themes of the lessons heard earlier in the Leipzig service — for Bach these were lessons from Romans and Matthew. They call the Christian to live according to the spirit, not the flesh, along with an admonishment to beware false prophets and hypocrisy. These are the subjects of the internal movements – two recitatives, an alto aria, and a duet for tenor and bass. Bach highlights a few words here with extended melismas for the singers: erzittern or tremble referring to the sinner on judgment day, vernichtet or annihilate describing the wrath of God’s jealousy. In the duet, as if to number our spots of sin, Flecken is set as a melisma. Later in the duet the redeeming Strom or stream of Jesus’s blood is similarly treated, all of which offer aural anchors throughout these two remarkable movements.

A typical cantata libretto draws on several sources for texts. The internal movements were most often newly written poetic texts by someone in close working relationship with Bach. It’s in these texts we find the most theological exegesis worked out. Most often the cantatas concluded with a Chorale by one of the famous Lutheran hymn writers, frequently by Luther himself. The opening movements were typically direct quotes of Scripture, drawing on the Psalms more than any other Biblical source. Bach follows this exact design in Cantata 136, opening his cantata with the 23^rd verse of Psalm 139: Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me and know my thoughts. In the German: “Erforsche mich, Gott, und erfahre mein Herz; Prüfe mich, und erfahre, wie ich’s meine.” Modern German translations of the Luther Bible replace erfahre with erkenne. Regardless, listeners can recognize these four imperative verbs that begin each line, imploring God’s true examination of our inmost thoughts.

Hill

I rely with gratitude on John Ashton, a great NT scholar, to keep the Jesus of Mark and also the Jesus of John, who makes an invasive appearance here in Mark 9, both before us. Both Christmas and Easter. Both Life and Death. Both teaching and crucifixion. Both healing and resurrection. Jesus both human divine, both Mark and John, both Mark 1 and Mark 9. Both ‘We would see Jesus’ and ‘Christ whose glory fills the skies’. Both last Sunday and this Sunday.

No doubt the Synoptic Gospels held their place; but for them Christianity might well have rapidly vaporized into some form of speculative Gnosticism. It did not; the parables of the kingdom and the Sermon on the Mount continued to be regarded as indispensable elements of the Christian message, and—more importantly—the Jesus who preached them remained ever present to the Christian consciousness.

To most modern eyes the portrait painted by the Synoptists is both both simpler and more attractive. It is the portrait of a man with a special relationship with God, whom he addresses by the intimate name of Abba, Father…He was a man of his time; his teaching and preaching, even his healing miracles, can readily be placed in the context of first century Palestinian Judaaism. If he were suddenly to reappear as he really was he would no doubt seem to us, in Albert Schweitzer’s phrase,’ a stranger and an enigma’, but a recognizable human being nonetheless.

Not so the Johannine Christ (we add, here, not so the Christ of the Transfiguration). He does not belong to this world at all: it is almost true to say that he enters it with the purpose of leaving it. He is a pre-existent divine being whose real home is heaven. He enters an alien world with an unprecedented confidence and assurance, knowing who he is, where he comes from, and where he is going…He orchestrates his own passion…he can read Pilate’s heart. There is about him no trace of uncertainty. Master of his fate, captain of his soul… his head bloodied but unbowed, he never had to confront either the fell clutch of circumstance or the bludgeonings of chance. (Ashton, 1991, Understanding the Fourth Gospel, 239)

Well beloved, that is, there is a full and deep mystery here, an unfathomable, an uncanny deep, right here in our Gospel, of the sudden appearance of a Jesus who would fit well in John, but not so well in Mark. And is that not, for us, come Sunday, this Sunday, in the hearing of the word and music, a part of our needed reminder, a reminder about the limits of life, about the mystery of life, about the God gift of life, given us well beyond our capacity to understand it? Perhaps we can carry from the beauty and holiness of these precious gospel and musical moments, a sturdy reminder of the great strangeness, the great mystery, the great, tremendous, yes, unearthly voice and presence and grace of our Lord, who comes to us, this morning, interrupting the rest of his more human appearance in Mark, with this scene befitting John, and interrupting our forgetfulness about mystery. In that spirit, let us pray:

Gracious God, Holy and Just

Thou from whom we come and unto whom our spirits return

Thou source of Wisdom, fount of Wisdom, well spring of saving Wisdom

Make of us, we pray, an addressable community

That we might listen

That we might hear

That we might understand

That we might listen, hear and understand before we analyze or criticize

Make of us, we pray, an addressable community

Make of us, we pray, a benevolent community

That we might polish our proclivity for the second thought, the second try, the second chance

That we might expect to uncover a latent goodness, latent in others and in ourselves and across this great, though troubled, globe

That we might become good in ways that become the Gospel

Make of us, we pray, a benevolent community

Make of us, we pray, a soulful community

Alive to spirit, alive to love, alive to grace

Take away from our souls all strain and stress

Let us breathe again, breathe deeply, breathe the soulful breath of life

Make of us, we pray, a soulful community

For we have gathered and bear witness to Jesus, our beacon not our boundary.

-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 02.11.2018 at 11:00 am
Tags: Bach Experience, Robert Hill, Scott Jarrett

Sunday
February 4

A Winter Communion

By Marsh Chapel

Psalm 147

1 Corinthians 9

Preface

‘Different are the languages of prayer, but the tears are all the same’.

So, Abraham Heschel, whose mighty labors to interpret the Hebrew Prophets were drenched themselves in tears—the joyful tears of adoration, the bitter tears of confession, the heartfelt tears of thanksgiving, the worried tears of supplication.

Prayer is at the heart of communion, especially a winter communion, and its languages are the tongues of adoration, confession, thanksgiving and supplication.

‘Pray without ceasing’, we are taught in the 5^th chapter of the earliest document in our New Testament, 1 Thessalonians. Without ceasing.

We pray in silence before our worship begins, come Sunday. Here, in this sacred hour, we set ourselves for the week to come, and set before ourselves what we hold dear, and all in which we are dearly held.

Then: Monday noon in meditation, Monday evening in Compline, Wednesday morning in theological community, Wednesday evening in communion, Thursday noon, both in sanctuary silence and then over an outdoor common table, and privately, meal by meal, morning by morning, we pray.

Prayer is to sit silent before God. Prayer is to give utter attention. Prayer is to think God’s thoughts after God. Prayer, like a poem, is ‘a momentary stay against confusion’ (Frost). Prayer is our winter communion.

Adoration

A language learned in prayer is that of adoration. Here is the tongue of aspiration, delight, hope, imagination, wonder and praise. In the dim-lit daily world, adorational language can be hard to hear, hard to find, for it is the exuberant utterance of ‘why not’?, of ‘how about?’, of ‘oh my’!, sentences concluding in question marks and exclamation points, more enchantment than disenchantment

Our gospel reading, at heart, is an aspiration, a high hope about human being, human loving, and human life—especially about healing.

Here in Mark 1, the early church remembers forty years later a very high view, an aspirational hope for human healing. A prayer in aspiration that demons--begone! That upon this earth there yet might be—real friendship, real fellowship, real love, real marriage, the reality of the union of hearts, for which we are made. For a hint of the eternal, a glimpse of the divine, a glimmer of joy without shade. How we need that hint in our time of humiliation. How we need that height in our culture of degradation.

All this takes time and practice. Our aspirations take the support and help of a community to last.

So, in the same breath, and in the same paragraph, the Jesus of Mark’s gospel, and the Lord of Mark’s community, heals the sick, and offers their innocence (not their ignorance) as aspiration. Innocence is not Holiness. Holiness comes after Innocence, in the aspirations known both in celebration and in defeat. Behold Jesus lifts them, lifts us, in his arms.

Hence, a few weeks ago we did sing, ‘Come Let Us Adore Him’. There is a prayer, a prayer in a wonder-land. What do you adore? Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Where your heart is, there will your treasure be also.

Our January preachers, with their manifold winter gifts, foretold it: remember your baptism, behold plenty good room, save what you love, adore restoration not destruction.

So we sing a hymn each Sunday.

Adoration. A language of prayer.

Confession

A language learned in prayer is that of confession. Such a dialect is much needed, in our time, in our generation. Contrition, compunction, regret, and lament. “I am sorry”. “Forgive Me”.

You probably one day suddenly realized the power of confession. Bishop James Matthews once said, in a memorable sermon, that he came to a day when he just wanted to write down in a list his most memorable shortcomings. (I was thinking of him the other day, visiting our own C Faith Richardson, now 102 years of age, who was his secretary). He wrote down his mistakes and his regrets. His regretful mistakes and his mistaken regrets. That he did, and tossed the list into the fire, and resolved to live a great good life unrestrained by what was past. “I gave the list to God and to the fire”, he said, “and I headed out into the future”. Then he added: “I’m sure you all have done the same, one way or another”. I wasn’t so sure we all had, but I basked in the confidence—in the living pardon—of his confidence in us.

We depend on this reminder of our fragility. It keeps us from becoming naïve about the fragility all around us. Especially the disguised fragility of beloved institutions. Many churches are one decade away from demise. Some countries are one government away from demise. Our schools, halls of government, businesses, families—all these are far more fragile than they sometimes seem. They take constant tending, mending, and befriending. They take daily, careful leadership. And when over time the fabric begins to fray, devastation may ensue. Institutions, like people, are nourished by attention to small things. ‘Yard by yard, life is hard. Inch by inch, it’s a cinch’.

So we offer confession, KYRIE ELEISON, each Sunday.

Confession. A language of prayer.

Thanksgiving

A language learned in prayer is that of thanksgiving. My friend says that all birds are either robins or non-robins. Well, the prayer book of the Bible is the Book of Psalms, and in that same oversimplified way, the psalms are either laments or thanksgivings, and there are more of the latter. So today the psalmist is singing aloud a song of thanksgiving.

We know gratitude in hindsight. Thanksgiving is the gift of the rear view mirror, of real retrospective. We learn, and we grow. But as Ralph Sockman repeated, and we now with him, ‘The larger the body of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of mystery that surrounds it”.

Eucharist is a word that means thanksgiving. It is the marrow this morning of our winter communion. Our Eucharist is a thanksgiving in remembrance and in presence. Eucharist is a thanksgiving in remembrance of our Lord Jesus, his ministry of preaching, teaching and, today, especially healing, his death upon the cross, and his radiant resurrection, our beacon and life. Our Eucharist is a thanksgiving in presence, an announcement of the divine presence, the real presence of God, here and now, in the humblest of forms. Eucharist means thanksgiving.

In the humblest of forms.

In the winter of 1982 the Maundy Thursday Holy Communion service was scheduled to occur in the sanctuary of the larger of the two churches, a two-point charge on the banks of the St. Lawrence River, two churches that shared a minister. And perhaps not too much else. In fact, to gather the two into one, in communion, was a rare event, with or without the sacrament. But Maundy Thursday was generally lightly attended, and, for once, all agreed to share the service, one congregation as host and one as guest. Notice the closeness, the kindred etymology of those to words, host and guest.

Well. The boiler died in the host sanctuary sometime that day, or perhaps the day before, though its demise was not noticed until about an hour before the service, noticed by freezing choir members there to practice. In those ancient days there was no mode or media to announce the dilemma, and relocate. So, after some consider, it was decide to move the service next door into the Methodist Parsonage. You knew this was the parsonage because of a sign on the porch saying so. This was an expansive if drafty country house, with two large living rooms, one a parlor with the piano, and the other with couches and chairs, and a large dining room and big country kitchen. Putting the coats on the porch and the children upstairs, we conjured that we could fit the light Lenten attendance. Sometimes you generalize, sometimes you specialize, and sometimes you improvise. A Trustee sat on the piano bench to turn hymn pages for the pianist. It was crowded. The children behaved upstairs, at least at the start. Later you could hear them rustling to run from east to west, giggling as their feet sounded like a small airplane landing nearby. Then quiet again.

Two churches of people who did not regularly sit together, of an evening, by historical accident and the ingenuity of some lay leaders, sat cheek to jowl. There was good close singing, in four parts, with the choir dispersed into the community. There was a warmth quite welcome at 10 below zero outside. At the time of communion all slowly moved from parlor to living room to dining room into the kitchen to serve and be served. And at the end a long full silence filled the house. A long silence, that is, full of thanksgiving.

Thirty-eight years is about the distance in time between the ministry of Jesus and the writing of Mark. The memory sifts to hold onto what matters, counts, lasts, has meaning. Of all the worship services in those years, from Christmas to Easter to Confirmation, the one most remembered is the crowded household communion, and the silence, and the thanksgiving.

If you are wondering how to pray, start with a word of thanks, a thanksgiving, a generous recognition of a cause of gratitude. You will not have far to look.

Sing to the Lord with Thanksgiving, Psalm 147. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some. 1 Corinthians 9.

So we read a psalm each Sunday.

Thanksgiving. A language of prayer.

Supplication

A language learned in prayer is that of supplication. We name what we need. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will open. Ask and it shall be given. Not always. Not frequently. Not in a timely way. But…

You don’t easily get what you don’t name as needed.

In supplication, today, we feel or murmur or mutter, perhaps through clenched teeth, a prayer of supplication. How will this happen? We see no easy way.

In supplication, we are reminded of who we are and whose we are. Supplication, the honest statement of what we need, the honest desire to return to a deep personal faith and an active social involvement, against all manner of winds blowing against, helps us build the future, a good future. Prayer is a kind of prop.

Emily Dickinson had her occasional happy moments and happy thoughts and choice, true words of thanksgiving (amid darker hues aplenty to be sure):

The Props assist the House

Until the House is built

And then the Props withdraw

And adequate, erect,

The House support itself

And cease to recollect

The Auger and the Carpenter-

Just such a retrospect

Hath the perfected Life-

A past of Plank and Nail

And slowness-then the Scaffolds drop

Affirming it a Soul.

So we offer our common prayer every Sunday.

Supplication. A language of prayer.

Coda

‘Different are the languages of prayer, but the tears are all the same’.

Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication.

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

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 02.4.2018 at 12:00 pm
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
December 31

Ruminations at Christmas

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 2: 22-40

The story of Christmas, the birthday of the Lord, begins with the nation of Israel, ‘the hopes and fears of all the years’, the longings and dreams of God’s chosen people for a clearer sense of His presence and a clearer vision of his purpose. In the reign of King Herod, only 60 generations ago, a poor carpenter and his pregnant wife went to Bethlehem to pay the state tax. Mary was close to her time, and so, rather than camp as usual with the other poor travelers, Joseph decided to get a room in an inn. He was too late. They camped in a cave that also was a covering for the innkeeper’s animals. And that night a child was born, among cattle, yet visited by Kings, a child whose mature life would change the course of time and history. ‘Behold I bring you glad tidings of great joy which shall be to all people!’. This story is very close to us. Bethlehem is not that far away. The year 1 is not that long ago. The conditions into which Jesus was born are not that different from the conditions into which poor babies today are born. This story is close to us. As Galatians teaches, ‘born of woman, born under the law’.

The message of the birthday story is a glorious one. The message: a simple Hebrew word ‘Emmanuel’, ‘God with us’, ‘God with us’, ‘Gott mit uns’. ‘Dios con nosotros’. ‘Dieu avec nous’. “God with us’. ‘Emmanuel’. It requires a lifetime, a full exposure to the patterns of grace, to know this truth. We hear of it in the greatest words in Western literature and language:

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. Those who dwelt in the land of deep darkness on them has light shined (Isaiah). Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, good will toward men (Luke). In Christ God was reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them (Paul). The Lord will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations (Isaiah, today). There is something shattering about this message, this mystery: that the Lord God Creator, the first, the last, beyond all thought, would stoop so low as to become a poor peasant child. But that is the simple, shocking, difficult message. ‘God above, man below, holy is the name I know’. ‘God with us’ is the message. Emmanuel. With us, as in today’s Gospel, in others: Simeon, Mary, Anna, others.

The meaning in the message of the Christmas story is that God is with us in our weakness, limitation, and smallness, in order that we might respond to Him, that we might become like Him…

God with us, miraculously, in weakness. God touching us before and without our response. This is the meaning of baptism. In the light of God’s care, one can never be or become a means to an end, become commodified. One baptized is an end in himself. He has been blessed by God. This is a saving act, being born again. Martin Luther knew it when, locked in the Wittenberg Castle and tormented by demons cried out, ‘I am baptized!’

God with us, miraculously, in our limitation. The most hateful aspects of life—we all know this—are its limitations: illness, poverty, society (warfare), mind (ignorance), heart (we do what we would not do), relationship (we glide past each other), nature (winter weather), and the final limit, death itself. God with us in suffering, with the victims of fire in the South Bronx, God with us even—especially—at the point of limitation (sin and death and the threat of meaninglessness).

God with us, miraculously, in the smallness of our lives, the pettiness, to be negative, and the delightful detail, to be positive, of our few days on earth. God taking on our smallness to give us a model of how to live. We all need models, like the French architect of the Statue of Liberty, who modeled that on his own mother. If we are to grow in the knowledge of God we benefit from a model, a model on our own level, of our own scale.

God with us, miraculously, in our response to Him. This is the church, the Body of Christ, God with us in our response to God. Where does change occur? In the church. At best, the church embodies ultimate reasons for real change.

The hope in the meaning of the message of the story of Christmas is the oreal hope for this world, that we will live together in the spirit of Christ, as Longfellow sang at Christmas: ‘till ringing, singing on its way, the world revolved from night to day, a voice, a chime, a chant sublime, of ‘Peace on Earth, Good will to Men’. This is the hope in our gospel in our fellowship, in our preaching, in our life together, now.

Included in our gospel as pronounced today are the sick, the broken of body. The rail at which we gather is their rail, too. The hymns and prayers are theirs, too. The spirit of love is present to the broken of body. In this political season, we may be subtly encouraged to forget the broken. In the rush to build and develop our church, or our nation, we may be encouraged to leave the weak behind. But for whom is this preachment, if not for the sick? For whom is the life of the church, if not for the sick? For whom has Christ died, if not for the sick? For whom has Christ died, if not for you in your brokenness? You have time to visit one sick person this week. The sick are included, centrally, in our Christmas gospel.

Included in our fellowship are the poor, those still left outside the party. This rail is their rail. Hymns and prayers are meant for them. The spirit of love struggles in our institutions to take from the rich and give to the poor. Right now we are set to take from the poor to give to the rich. Yes, the poor ye have always with you. Yes, the poor share responsibility for their condition (one dime on a dollar at best). Yes the poor—with us all—stumble in the sin of sloth. They are able to give us, we lucky enough to have so much more, nothing. But love becomes mercenary if it depends on the advantage each wants to gain. The poor depend on the free service of our wills, and so, strangely, and powerfully, can help us love. For whom is this preachment, if not for the poor? You can remember the poor this week. The poor are included in our fellowship at Christmas.

Included in our preaching come Christmas are the brokenhearted, who have lost an irreplaceable person or dream. The rail, hymns and prayers—and another day, the supper of the Lord—are comfort to the heartsick, to the poor in spirit. When we are heartbroken, heartsick, when we are poor in spirit, we lean on God. Faith is most faith when it is all you have left. We need God, heartsick, because, just now, we have a gaping hole, a crying need, a sorrow. In the desert, we learn to appreciate water. In the tundra, we learn to appreciate warmth. In isolation and loneliness, we appreciate a kind word. You can speak kindly to someone today and tomorrow. You can. Think how good tomorrow might be if you will brighten it with care, with kindness. The brokenhearted are included in our preaching here.

Here is hope at Christmas, and with powerful specificity, hope for the sick, the poor, and the brokenhearted. We give thanks for the story, the message, the meaning, and the hope of Christmas, the birth of the Lord.

My father died seven years ago. One of his set of gifts to me was his genuine, authentic unsentimental experience and endurance of poverty, of illness, and of sorrow. Those of us who have not known lack, poverty, loss, or need much in our own lives, keenly need to remember, in 2018, what life outside in the cold is like. We may need to delve into memories that are generation or two or more old, when we, our people, you, your people, knew what it meant to be poor. Much of our civil strife right know is enforced by this amnesia, this lack of memory of hurt. This month I came across a story my dad had told, for me and my congregation, on Christmas Eve, 1995, the day on which his sister died.

Christmas 1938 came a few days before December 25. Not only did my mother and uncle, with whom we lived, have to work on Christmas day, but my sister and I were to travel by train to Norwood, NY, to spend Christmas with my Grandfather Hill, another Aunt, and my Dad, separated from my mother for years. So on the evening before we were to go the adults in our family arranged to have a full fledged Christmas morning, in the evening!

After a holiday supper, my sister and I were allowed into the living room where our stockings were filled, presents were wrapped and under the tree, and carols were playing on the Victrola.

That Christmas was very special because we knew my mother did not want us to be so far away on this very special day, but she recognized that our father and his father and our Aunt needed to have the sound of our young voices on Christmas morning.

She arranged fantastic gifts: a Shirley Temple doll for my sister and a pair of hickory skis for me. I still have them. How she found the money in the depths of the depression for those fantastic gifts I’ll never know. How she could have let us go I’ll never know. But that was my mom.

In retrospect through this experience she taught Jean and me the meaning of giving and sacrifice, love and hope, joy in faith. It changed our view of Christmas.

My sister died this morning full of grace and now has answers that some of us will continue to search for!

Christ came into the world filled with grace and truth to show how God wants us to live from birth to death and beyond death and until we can demonstrate that we have learned these lessons we will be living by faith, through these difficult penultimate days—but we know God is with us!

(Irving Hill, Erwin UMC, Syracuse, 12/24/95)

How shall we resolve then to hear this gospel of love, to acquaint ourselves with it and adjust ourselves to it, and then, with gladness to live it, as 2018 opens out before us? Upon what actual, special interests and explorations shall we, shall you, shall I, bring our faith, lived in the glorious shadow of the faithfulness of God in Christ, this year?

Shall we attend to one or another of the issues of personal health which may have impeded our glad living, in the past?

Shall we give ourselves in extra measure to the growth of some dear institution, dear to us, now, for many years?

Shall we go ahead and go out and write a book, or write another book, under the apprehension that everyone has at least one good book in them?

Shall we bear down, and buckle down, and make a plan to make a plan to invest ourselves in the betterment of our culture, our society, our civilization, by joining up, attending to, giving for a just, participatory, and sustainable common hope, in our time?

Shall we learn another language, koine greek, or esperanoto, or Japanese, in order to see in detail another way to see in detail the detail of every day?

Shall we return in reading and thought to an abandoned farm, barns and fences all a-kilter, that of biblical theology, biblical theology, as a way of understanding not just sincerity and authenticity, but irony as well in the spiritual background and moral accompaniment of our time?

Health, growth, book, betterment, language, theology—et toi, and you, and me, and all? What ruminations have you this Christmastide, this New Year’s Eve?

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 12.31.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
December 24

Christmas Nuptials

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 1:26-38

Away in a manger no crib for a bed

The little Lord Jesus lay down his sweet head

The stars in the bright sky Looked down where he lay

The little Lord Jesus Asleep on the hay

Be near me Lord Jesus I ask thee to stay

Close by me forever, and love me I pray

Bless all the dear children in thy tender care

And fit us for heaven to live with thee there.

People imagine proposals and weddings at Christmas. Often the images are of cities, bright lights, jewelry, red dresses and handsome ties and mink coats.

But Samuel tells of a shepherd king. Mary sings of low estate. Luke recalls an exurban story, in one sense, a story like this one.

In the winter of 1982 we were stationed an hour and a half south west of Montreal. We lived in a large, ungainly, and drafty country parsonage. You knew it was a parsonage because on the front of the house there was a sign, to the left of the porch door, which read: Methodist Parsonage. Just so you know. Whether the sign was meant to apologize for the down at the heal condition of the house, or was meant as a point of clarification about ownership, or was, as it certainly proved to be, meant as a guide for hoboes in need of sandwiches, as they drifted through that little town, know one ever said. But it was more than adequate, more than reasonably adequate for two young parents, and two little children, and one child on the way.

The parsonage was big enough, with two living rooms and an ample dining room, to accommodate some 75 people at one time. We had learned this, and this number, because on the previous Maundy Thursday, the heat in the church had failed, at 10 below zero. So, the service of Holy Communion that evening was convened in the parsonage, with hymns played on the baby grand piano, and people scattered from couch to kitchen to pantry to stairs to window sills. One elderly gentleman sat with the minister’s wife accompanist, right on the piano bench. I think he felt honored. Most later agreed that it was not only the coziest but easily the most memorable communion service they could recall.

Sometime well after the snow had begun to cover the farms and valleys of Burke NY, sometime after November 1, that is, the minister had a phone call from a neighboring farmer. The man asked whether the preacher would conduct a wedding for a non-member. Certainly he would and had and the farmer knew this as well as the preacher so the question in the air or over the phone line was the unspoken question: what are we talking about?

Well, North Franklin County is not a place of endless talk. There is in fact little said, week by week, and month by month, in the north country. Most would agree there that this is the way things should be, allowing as how most things said don’t need saying at all, and those that do need saying need better saying than they mostly get. I personally knew a beautiful young couple, prosperous potato farmers with two children, for three years, and never once heard the husband say a single word. Further, when there is talking it mostly the women talking. The preacher is also allowed and expected to talk, there being I guess some uncertainty about how to categorize the status of the clergy. But even so, the briefer the better, if you please, pastor.

In any event, after a long while of hemming and hawing and not saying, the minister wrangled out of the farmer that the farmer’s hired man wanted to get married. Actually: he needed to get married. He wanted to get married, but he also was in a situation where he needed to get married, too. This took the not usually talkative farmer a long while to explain because he did not directly explain what he was trying to explain. Phrases like ‘unexpected circumstance’ and ‘things moving pretty fast’ and ‘sometimes these things happen’ and ‘they are really good young folks’ were clearly spoken but their actually footing on planet earth was hard, or not possible, to ascertain. Finally the preacher said simply, ‘send them up, I am glad to talk to them’. This led to a meeting in the church office, on a day when the oil furnace was working, and some lumbering, awkward planning for a service to solemnize their marriage.

The couple lived on the farm where the husband worked. They lived in a single wide trailer, which is a trailer exactly half as big as a double wide trailer. Hay bales stuffed around the edges and thankfully covered with much snow for half the year mostly kept the pipes from freezing. Housing was provided for the hired man, just like for the minister, but the trailer was a whole lot smaller and a whole lot more dangerous than the parsonage (at least in most physical ways). Milking at 4am and 4pm, every day, and work, all day, in between, every day. You could rent the movie Frozen River and then know quite a lot about this neck of the woods.

After some talk with his wife that night, the minister suggested that the couple be married on Christmas Eve day, at noon, in the parsonage. It would be a small wedding, and, as his wife thoughtfully suggested, they could put the children down for nap, early, and then use the piano, have some refreshments, and make something happy and pretty.

Christmas Eve day came, with a gust of bitter wind, a snow shower, and then a bleak barely visible sun at midday. A little late, the bride and groom appeared. But their friends, who would sign for them (New York, the Empire State, being one which requires witnesses other than the clergy) had somehow not appeared. The three year-old daughter could be heard crawling and listening from the top of the stairs. The wind blew and the snow fell. Finally, to make the matter potentially legal, a neighbor lady was invited to come and join the service. She and the minister’s wife later signed the license. The minister performed the ceremony. Two carols were sung, Away in a Manger and Hark the Herald Angels Sing. The three year old would appear, and disappear, as the service progressed, and appeared for good when the cookies were served. Other than the words of the wedding themselves, I do not recall that anything else was said. I refer you to the remarks made some moments ago about the paucity of speech along the great frozen St Lawrence river. But no words really were needed. The farm wife, young and pregnant, was simply dressed in a light dress. Her smile, her gleaming eyes, her red cheeks and smile, her evident enjoyment of the home and homely setting were a full epic poem of happy gratitude. And her husband, scrubbed and crammed head long into a tight black suit and wayward tie, was as dignified, reverent, true and terrified as any groom at any time in the 900 or so weddings the minister has thus far done. “Do you?” “I do”. The three year old’s face looked down from the stairs. “Do you?” “I do.” The piano played softly, a little meditation, Love Came Down at Christmas.

One loving neighbor, a jubilant three year old, a fairly green preacher, and his creatively generous wife, were present to attest to a wedding, a union of hearts and souls, on a cold winter day, in a forgotten patch of rough land, now some thirty five years ago. I can see that piano, taste the cookies, hear the carols, feel the hands, sense the candles as if it were an hour ago, and in some ways it was, just an hour ago.

There are a lot of fine and treasured forms of theological learning which one can and must acquire in the six brief semesters of divinity school. Augustine and Pelagius, Luther and Erasmus, Wesley and Calvin, Barth and Tillich, Amoun of Nitria, the documentary hypothesis, the second aorist, filioque and the teleological suspension of the ethical. All of these and all that stands in between one can and must receive, while there is the time and freedom to meet and know them.

The practice of ministry, the privilege of the practice of ministry, however, is learned on the piano bench, over cookies, in the smaller living room, at $9,000 a year, in a drafty old manse, with a toddler spying, and a tiny but ever so majestic event—declaration of love, ‘til death us do part. There is a temptation, when one is in school, to think reality begins and ends with the library or the internet or the reputation of a beloved teacher. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, reasoned like a child, thought like a child. When I moved into the parsonage, I had to give up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly. It is a big world, full of need and waiting for love.

When the boots were donned, and the gloves and coats put on, the bride, in the hour of her wedding, kissed the child and hugged the pianist. To the minister she gave her hand, and with that Methodist handshake gave the gift of meaning, lasting meaning, in the work and struggle of ministry, wherein one works and struggles to find and keep the grace to put oneself at the disposal of others. On the last day of Advent, in the year of our Lord 1982, at least one preacher was given the privilege of seeing the privilege of life in ministry. It was a sort of Advent Carol. An Advent Carol, lingering like lasting beauty always does, in the eternity of memory. What a privilege to live and be in ministry. There is nothing like it, not in all creation. What a privilege. Amos Wilder saw and said so, in his poem of a similar event:

Brother and sister in this world’s poor family,

Jack and Jill out of this gypsy camp of earth,

Here is where the injustice is greatest

And you feel it obscurely,

And you have a right to storm within yourselves

And seek sanctuary in one another’s shabbiness.

This boy and this girl with all their abandonment and futility,

Folly and dereliction,

Whirled from ignominy to ignominy,

Condemned to all the wretched chores of the community-

O tribute of forlorn humanity! Come for his benediction whom they have

blasphemed,

And somehow sense that they touch- what?

God, the Higher, all that they have missed:

Innocence and mercy and compassion…

But the Son of Man of the wedding feast haunts such occasions

and understands you.

He can turn water into wine and such shame and loss into gain

In some world, some time;

I heard the organ roll behind the snowfall

and saw in it the confetti of the heavenly bride chamber,

Glimpsed the sons of the bride chamber rejoicing

In that City which is full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof,

Before the Father whose face the angels of

little children do always behold.

That 1982 North Country Christmas Eve, the door closed, and the minister and his wife smiled and hugged each other, and sent the daughter back up to nap.

Then a knock came again at the door. There stood the groom, gloves off. He had something he had forgotten. He had something he wanted to give. Not to say, but to do. Not to speak, but to act. Not to describe, but to give. I refer you to the demography of verbal silence along the frozen St Lawrence offered some moments ago. He held out his hand, with bills rumpled and folded there in. He looked down, and then quickly up at the pastor. He gave four dollars. He was truly proud to give it. And I was truly proud to receive it. I only wish I had had the sense to put the bills away as a physical reminder of the day, that day of blessed, real Christmas Nuptials.

At every turn, as we come to Christmas, we are reminded that faith is born in trouble, like that little bit of faithfulness was born on Christmas Eve so far away and so many years ago. We are reminded of the lowly entrance our Lord makes into life. That night, at age three, our daughter sang in church, for the first but not the last time:

Away in a manger no crib for a bed

The little Lord Jesus lay down his sweet head

The stars in the bright sky Looked down where he lay

The little Lord Jesus Asleep on the hay

Be near me Lord Jesus I ask thee to stay

Close by me forever, and love me I pray

Bless all the dear children in thy tender care

And fit us for heaven to live with thee there.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 12.24.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
December 17

He Is the Way

By Marsh Chapel

John 1: 6-8, 19-28

Auden

He is the Way

Follow him through the land of unlikeness;

You will see rare beasts and have unique adventures

He is the Truth

Seek him in the kingdom of anxiety

You will come to a great city that has expected

Your return for years.

He is the Life

Love him in the world of the flesh

And at your marriage all its occasions shall

Dance for joy.

Advent accosts us with the command to remember and to hope, with promise in memory and in hope.

Remembrance

The Gospel of John gives us a form of remembrance, in the figure of John the Baptist, who came to bear witness to the light. The Baptist is present to remind us, in Advent, of the circumstances which did occasion the birth of the Son of Man. He recalls for us the long history of the law, prophets and writings, our bequest from Judaism. He recalls for us the contest and conflict which emerged, Law and Grace, Moses and Jesus. He recalls for us the struggles, the sheer bone jarring challenges, both in the ministry of Jesus and in the ministry of the church. He places us unmistakably in a particular place, at a certain time, within a specific tradition, and alongside a unique moment. Like no other. This is eternal life, that they may know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent. Je me souviens. I remember. I follow myself. I remember.

This year, with our emphasis on ‘voice, vocation, and volume’ in our shared life, we are using as a focus for our work the word remembrance. Our fall and spring term worship and community life are laden with moments of remembrance. 2017-2018 is a full season of remembrance. On September 17 we remembered Elie Wiesel. On October 29 (and again in November) we remembered Martin Luther. In Lent 2018 we will remember Thomas Merton. Then in April 2018, in the week following Easter, we remember the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Come and join us throughout this year in a special season of remembrance! And do remember…

Elie Wiesel said, ‘He who hears a witness becomes a witness’. He reminds us of who we are at Boston University.

Martin Luther said, ‘Here I stand, I can do no other, God help me’. He reminds us of who we are in Religious Life.

Thomas Merton said, ‘Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name’. He reminds us who we are as Christian people.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, ‘The moral arm of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice’. He reminds us of who we are at Marsh Chapel.

Come and join us! I mean it. Come and join us for this year in worship, fellowship, and discipleship. Come and join us in this season of remembrance!

Memory

With mother and grandmother, aunt and others, all teachers, there was an impatience with forgetfulness, in our growing up years. A good and loving impatience, but an impatience nonetheless. In the windswept, hot Las Vegas summer car port, after the castle of sand had fallen, at age 4, there came a maternal voice, dimly in memory from age four, ‘Remember, a wise man built his house upon the rock…’ Come age 9 and the multiplication tables, across the still covered dining room table, and before the dishwashing, ‘Remember, 7 times 7 is 49, 9 times 7 is 63. Then, a few years later, say age 12, on hearing strange words like itinerancy, bishop, new church, move, district, another house, also, a very loving word, “Remember, it will be fine, we will be together, we will help each other, there are good people everywhere”. Of course, by junior high school, say 14, the time came for Latin declensions, conjugations, aphorisms. “Remember, Agricola, agricolae…Remember hic, haec hoc…Remember, porto, portare, portavi, portatum…Remember, Veni, vidi, Vici…” Until this year, that maternal voice could carry full memory across decades, and disciplines, and declensions and decisions.

Now, without memory, she has only one full form of consciousness. She knows, and articulates, only, that she does not know. “Let’s see…I’m not sure…What am I supposed to be doing?...Jane will know…” What once was a precious cornucopia, waterfall, avalanche, fortress, and endless bank account of memory, now has gone, disappeared, evaporated, melted. She knows that she does not know, at least that she knows. Is that better than knowing nothing at all? Here is where we as honest Christians, as existential apophatic theologians, can also rest.

When it comes to God, what we know is the sheer cliff of one thing. We know that we do not know. God is hidden. God is mystery. God is the great deep, the dark ground of being, the cloud of unknowing. God is transcendent. And our spiritual reflection, biblical interpretation, philosophical theology, and homiletical cadence do best, just here, when we can, in utter even desperate but honest ignorance be truly apophatic. Like my mother, what we know is, only, that we do not know. Dionysius the Areopagite (thanks to Cyril Richardson, who died one week before the end of term): “That divine Darkness is the unapproachable light in which God dwells. Into this Darkness, rendered invisible by its own excessive brilliance and unapproachable by the intensity of its transcendent flood of light, come to be all those who are worthy to know and to see God.”

Coffin

We can in part to this Marsh pulpit, now our twelfth Christmas here, in part out of memory, a remembrance of what William Sloane Coffin had brought us in the pulpit of Riverside Church, along a similar river, alongside a similar University, along by a similar School of Theology, along with similar citizens and scholars, teachers and students, religious and un-religious. Coffin:

Faith is being grasped by the power of love.

God provides minimum protection and maximum support. Guilt is the last stronghold of pride.

The rational mind is no match for the irrational will.

There is more mercy in God than there is sin in us.

Romero said not ‘pobres’ but ‘apobprecidos’.

Pastoral concern for the rich must match prophetic concern for the poor.

I’m not OK and you’re not OK—but that’s OK!

They say religion is a crutch: what makes you think you don’t limp?

The religious norm is love.

Faith gives the strength to confront unpleasant truth. Faith puts you on the road and hope keeps you on the road.

A Humorous Interlude

Boy

John teaches memory. Isaiah teaches hope. To give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit…

Our friend Beth Neville tells this story of being pushed out of despair, and back into life:

“I never learned the young boy’s name but after our encounter I decided to call him, BOY. He was an attractive, open-faced kid about 10 years old, the same age as my grandson. So our ages were separated by about 70 years.

Sitting in the corridor at drab rehabilitation facility, struggling to recover from hip surgery, my spirits were low. At the end of the long corridor a large window opened out onto a beautiful view of fall colors, russets and tawny gold colors of fall Oaks against the autumn blue sky, it resembled a Gothic cathedral’s stained glass. But inside the rehab center, the color was gray. Old people in faded gowns sat in wheelchairs, some spending hours in a curled up state. The walls, bed covers, and people’s faces all faded to the same ashen grey, creating a miasma of age and sadness. Five days earlier, my worn out hip had been replaced by a piece of metal and the constant pain and discomfort was wearing at me. Before the surgery I began using metaphor of a Marathon to get me through the trauma. I was on a marathon and, every physical or emotional set back was a curve or a long stretch. But right now in the gray rehab I was on Heart Break Hill and I was beginning to loose site of the goal. After all I was almost 80 and had lived a full life, why bother to go on? I’d rather die than endure more pain. Old age was surrounding me, why not just stop here and drop out of the race? What more in life could I do to be useful? I wanted to quit.

Up the corridor came a boy and his father and they sat down next to me to enjoy the golden fall view. The boy never said his name but he had an inquisitive look . BOY’s opening question to me was a stunner, “Well, what’s your era, 1940’s?” Me laughing, “That’s close, I was born in 1937. Are you visiting your Grandmother?” BOY: “Yes. Well, what do you do?” Me: “I teach art.” BOY: “How do you do that?” Bemused, I explained an art lesson using the glowing trees outdoors as a painting example.” BOY: “Well, what else do you do?” Me: “I teach art history.” Boy, “Well, why did people start making art?” Now this was getting to be an interesting, a real challenge, Me,” People began making art because they were worried about having babies and keeping their families going, so they made female fertility figures. They chipped stone pebbles to make a pregnant woman, and maybe then they would have more babies. And people liked to decorate themselves with shells and beads.” He liked that answer. BOY, “Well, tell me about fire?” and we were on to the invention of fire, and carrying water in buckets, and cooking over fires. Boy, “Well, what about Mesopotamia!” Whoaa, this conversation is really getting interesting! Me: “I studied Mesopotamia in graduate school,” and we talked of the use of clay tablets for writing and irrigation” and off we went. BOY,” Well, what about cunnieform?” By now I’d stopped being surprised, and I dissected the use of writing with clay tablets versus Egyptian papyrus. BOY: “Well, why was Mathematics invented?” We discussed masthematics in keeping track of the seasons and crop yields. He wasn’t showing off, just interested. At one point I said, “I don’t know how yeast was invented, it is so important for making bread,” and BOY said, “Well, Yes! just one of ‘Histories’ Mysteries’ my teacher says.” Yes, I laughed, I’ll remember that line. His Dad put down his cell phone and said, “O.K. son, let’s go visit Grandma,” off they went.

BOY will never know it, but he had pushed me up and over Heartbreak Hill,! I felt I could still contribute something to life. It was time for me to get back to overcoming pain and start the exercises. Where did BOY come from that beautiful afternoon? I don’t believe in extra-terrestrial beings from either Mars or Heaven. But BOY did have an angelic look about him and he had pushed me out of despair, back to life and blessed me.

Birmingham

Sometimes hope takes time. Less than a month after MLK’s ‘I Have A Dream’ speech, four girls were killed in Birmingham by a bomb set at the 16^th Street Baptist Church there. There is much that we do not fully remember about those years, that era, the civil rights struggle, and, especially, those who suffered, and how they suffered, in that time. Over the next three decades, three KKK leaders and members were brought to trial, and convicted of the crime. In that way, it was case like that of the Scottsboro Boys, which my namesake, Allan Knight Chalmers, Homiletics Professor at BUSTH, tracked for several decades, earlier in the century. The names of the girls: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Denise McNair.

In 1977, as the principal bomber, Robert Chambliss, was put on trial, a young second year law student skipped classes to sit in the courtroom. Twenty years after that, the young lawyer worked to convict two of Chambliss’s accomplices. Decades passed before the convictions were decided early in this century. You may be aware that the young lawyer who skipped his classes in school to attend classes in life, and who later brought a measure of justice to others, was just recently elected to the Senate in Alabama. Doug Jones. There is a self-correcting spirit of truth loose in the universe. There is a self-correcting spirit of truth loose in the universe.

Hoping

We harbor a common, shared hope:

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

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

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

That our country, fractured by massive inequality between rich children and poor children, will rise up and make education, free education, available to all children, poor and rich.

That our nation, fractured by flagrant unjust inequality between rich and poor children, will stand up and make health care, free health care, available to all children, poor and rich.

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

That our families, torn apart by abuse and distrust and anger and jealousy and unkindness, will sit at a long holiday table, this week, and share the roast beef, and pass the potatoes, and slice the pie, and, if grudgingly, show kindness and pity to one another.

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

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

That women—our grandmothers, mothers, sisters, daughters, granddaughters, all—granted suffrage less than 100 years ago, will be spared any and all forms of harassment and abuse, verbal or physical, on college campuses, in homes and families, in offices and bars, in life and work, and long having suffered and now having suffrage, will in our time rise up to be honored, revered, and compensated, without reserve, but with justice and mercy.

A common hope, finally a hope not of this world, but of this world as a field of formation for another, not just creation but new creation, not just life but eternal life, not just health but salvation, not just heart but soul, not just earth, but heaven.

Thurman

When the song of the angels is stilled,

When the star in the sky is gone,

When the kings and princes are home,

When the shepherds are back with their flock,

The work of Christmas begins:

To find the lost,

To heal the broken,

To feed the hungry,

To release the prisoner,

To rebuild the nations,

To bring peace among brothers,

To make music in the heart.

Auden

He is the Way

Follow him through the land of unlikeness;

You will see rare beasts and have unique adventures

He is the Truth

Seek him in the kingdom of anxiety

You will come to a great city that has expected

Your return for years.

He is the Life

Love him in the world of the flesh

And at your marriage all its occasions shall

Dance for joy.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 12.17.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill