Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

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

Community Announcements

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prayers of the People

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our Father…

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

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

Sunday
June 10

A House Divided

By Marsh Chapel

Preface

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

Mark

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

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

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

Mark 3: 20

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

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

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

A House Divided

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

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

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

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

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

Bobby

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

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

Sunday
June 3

Heart and Voice

By Marsh Chapel

1 Samuel 3:1-20

2 Corinthians 4:5-12

Heart and Voice

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

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

Heart and Mind

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

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

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

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

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

Heart and Service

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remember the School of Hospitality emphasis on servant leadership.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.3.2018 at 11:00 am
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Sunday
May 6

Easter Remembrance

By Marsh Chapel

John 15:9-17

A text copy of this sermon is not available.

-The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

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

Sunday
April 29

Easter Alleluia

By Marsh Chapel

John 15: 1-8

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

A Broken Alleluia in Worship

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

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

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

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

A verbal, spoken, uttered opening upon Ultimate Reality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Broken Alleluia in History

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

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

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

Morrison Morrison

Weatherby George Dupree

Took great

Care of his Mother

Though he was only three.

James James

Said to his Mother,

"Mother," he said, said he;

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

you don't go down with me."

On April 8, the Gospel in chapter 20 revealed the Spirit, elsewhere called Paraclete or Advocate, come upon us, received and with it received the forgiveness of sins. But at the heels, nipping, comes along 1 John in chapter 2, which names the Paraclete or Advocate not as Spirit but as Jesus Christ—the righteous—whose commandments all are to keep, on pain of disobedience become lying, and truth taken flight. Both read on the same Sunday, within minutes of each other, even as they face each other with daggers drawn.

On April 15, the Gospel still lingering with the Lord and God risen, the letter in Chapter 3, on the qui vive and on the attack, spells out again in no uncertain terms that the righteous do the right, handsome is as handsome does. Both read on the same Sunday, within minutes of each other, even as they face each other with daggers drawn.

On April 22, the Gospel in chapter 10 acclaiming the pastoral image of the Good Shepherd, whose one glorification on the cross is meant to obliterate the need of any other such, the letter, worried, worries out in chapter 3, a long and sorry recollection of Cain—Abel’s one-time brother—and the demands of love from one who laid down his life, and with whom and for whom we are then meant to do something of the same. ‘Let us not love in word and speech but in deed and truth’, says 1 John 3, when the whole of the Gospel says the opposite, that words outlast deeds, and that speech, that of the glorious Risen, ever routs works. Both read on the same Sunday, within minutes of each other, even as they face each other with daggers drawn.

And now today, April 29, when and where our one Great Gospel, the Spiritual Gospel, counsels ‘abide’ and ‘remain’ in chapter 15, just here the letter of 1 John in chapter 4, fearing antinomial abandon, frolicking, deadly afraid that someone somewhere might be at peace or, worse, having fun, appends to his own most beautiful love poem, the charge again of lying, of lack of love of brother, of schism that surely created this letter, 1 John, as the spiritualists and the traditionalists, the Gnostics and the ethicists, parted company, one toward the free land of Montanus and Marcion, the other toward Rome and the emerging church, victorious, against which the Gospel was born, bred, written and preached. Both read on the same Sunday, within minutes of each other, even as they face each other with daggers drawn.

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

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

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

There may well come a time, for you, as a person of faith, to say something or do something, a time when some somewhat risky and uncomfortable mode of social involvement will beckon you. There’s a blaze of light in every word.

A Broken Alleluia in Ljfe

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, I've heard there was a secret chord

That David played, and it pleased the Lord

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

It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth

The minor fall, the major lift

The baffled king composing hallelujah

Hallelujah

You say I took the name in vain

I don't even know the name

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

There's a blaze of light in every word

It doesn't matter which you heard

The holy or the broken hallelujah

Hallelujah

I did my best, it wasn't much

I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch

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

And even though it all went wrong

I'll stand before the lord of song

With nothing on my tongue but hallelujah

Hallelujah

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

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

Sunday
April 15

The Bach Experience

By Marsh Chapel

1 John 3: 1-7

Luke 24:36-48

Personal Faith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bach

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

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

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

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

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

Social Involvement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ah, would that I had a thousand tongues!

Ah, would that my mouth were

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

Than what was geared to God’s praise! 

Then I would proclaim the Highest’s goodness,

For all my life he has done so much for me

That I cannot thank Him in all eternity.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean. & Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music

posted in Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music, The Bach Experience, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 04.15.2018 at 11:00 am
Tags: Bach Experience, Robert Hill, Scott Jarrett

Sunday
April 1

Easter Antinomy

By Marsh Chapel

John 20: 1-18

Frontispiece

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

The Lord is Risen. Hallelujah.

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

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

Absence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Faith when you cannot see ahead.

Faith as a walk in the dark.

Faith when you are defeated.

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

Faith to risk.

Faith to open a door.

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

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

Presence

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

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

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

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

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

Are we lovers anymore?

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

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

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

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

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

Are we lovers anymore?

Coda

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

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

Sunday
March 18

Merton and Vocation

By Marsh Chapel

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

Click here to hear the full service

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