Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67

Romans 7:15-25a

Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

Upon this summer Sunday, let us meditate together on imagination, and its influence in discipleship. Our gospel turns to the playful imagination of children in the marketplace. St. Paul wrote in a similar way to his Corinthian congregation:

One

19 For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.

20 Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?

21 For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.

22 For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom:

23 But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness;

24 But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.

25 Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

26 For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called:

27 But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty;

Discipleship requires more than wisdom alone. The walk of faith evokes and involves imagination, the free play of insight, the province of children and saints.

Two

What a gift are the parables of Jesus! He taught them in parables, says the Scripture, and without a parable he taught not one thing. Here, in a story form, is the same sentiment just remembered from Paul, God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise.

Jesus stands in the marketplace. He sees two warring groups of children. All community is endless contention and intractable difference. One group wants to play a game called ‘weddings’: we have our pipes, we are ready to dance, come and join us, and let us play the game of weddings. Another group wants to play a game called ‘funerals’: we have our tears, our wailing, our gathered mourning clothes and forms, come and join us and let us play the game of funerals. One game for the enjoyment of life preferred by Jesus himself, one game for the dour, self-discipline for life, preferred by John the Baptist. Come and join!

Yet neither group will give way. Groups, as Reinhold Niebuhr taught us in Moral Man and Immoral Society, have a hard time changing direction, or giving way, or forgiving, or summoning an imagination ready for discipleship. That requires a childlike heart. It requires an imagination soaked discipleship. It requires the person whom you are meant to become.

Did you ever know and love somebody who was always a bit on edge? I mean a beautiful person with a heart of gold, who was run raw by the gone-wrongness of life? This can be a rough world for a sensitive soul. Someone who has an unquenchable passion for getting things right and for knowing when things are wrong. A little of that can go a long way. If your very hunger is for what establishes the soul, you can sometimes go hungry.

Imagine with her eyes: Every child in the community was attending a safe, well-lit, quiet school, where virtually all could read at the sixth grade level by the time they finished the sixth grade level. Every sick person in the community had ample medical care, most of it preventive, and all of it shot through with a heavenly infusion of time, talent and money. Every person of color in the community felt confident entering the public spaces—theaters, churches, stadiums, stores—in every corner of the community. Every man was free to be a man. And every woman was free to be a woman. Every person is seen and heard as a real human being.

Three

Here at University, we are blessed with intelligence, youth, freedom, and reason.

We want to be careful, and caring, so we pause here. We educators sometimes tend to leave civil society to the rest of society. We have much freedom, but how we choose to use it, in relation to the rest of community and society, is another matter. We after all have that next paper to write, 50 pages of small print not including footnotes, titled with some version of the title, ‘Obscurity Squared’. To do that, one needs a capacity to spend 12 hours a day alone in a library or in front of a computer screen. To do that, to write that series of scholarly papers become books become resume become tenure become professor, can risk leaving aside, if we are not careful, or leaving to others, if we are not careful, the imaginative stewardship of forms of civil society. Girl Scout cookies. Umpire work for the Little League. Pinewood derby leadership. A seat on the PTA. Sunday worship. Neighborhood watch. Refugee resettlement work. These we have to leave in the hands of others, or at least we think we do, those basic cultural building blocks that rest on a willingness to sit quietly in dull meetings, hoping against hope for the blessed refrain, ‘I guess we’re done for tonight’. In civil society we have the chance to influence others, and to be influenced among others, in lasting, personal ways. You want to speak to others, to convince others, to educate—good. But. You cannot speak to others until or unless you speak for others. To be speak to requires first to speak for. Others will not hear or heed you, and should not, in your speech to them, if they do not, with utter confidence, feel, feel, that you speak for them as well. To speak for, you have to be with. At breakfast. Playing golf. In book club. In church. At the YMCA. Then, only then, will you enough funds in the relational bank when you need to withdraw some to say something that may then be audible. If you want people in Wisconsin to hear you, candidate, you have to go and be with people in Wisconsin. If you want people to hear you, preacher, you have to go and be with people, in visitation, on their turf. If you want to speak to others, educators, you will have to find a way to speak for others, not just to others. This is the whole genius of American civil society, from the time of De Tocqueville. Whether we will find, in the humiliations of an era whose leadership is shredding inherited forms of civil society on an hourly basis, the humility to go out and suffer with and for others, over the better part of the next decade, in order then to speak, is an unanswered question. To get to an answer we may just need some imagination in our discipleship.

Four

Wisdom is vindicated by her deeds. Our Gospel lures us and lures our imagination forward, for discipleship. Have we yet learned the lesson that what one means—by an act, a word, a statement, a vote, say—is not all that such an act means? We have experienced this lesson this year. The lesson, that is, that what you in your heart meant by an act, a word, a statement—a vote, is not in fact the limit of what that act, word, statement or vote meant: in fact it is a small part, the greater part of the meaning being found in the effect, the impact, the historical influence of the deed. Wisdom is vindicated, known, in her deeds. The meaning of a text is found in the future it opens, the future it imagines, the future it creates. (Ray Hart). So too, the meaning of an act, a word, a statement, a vote, say, is found in the future, bright or dark, which it creates. What you meant is not what it means. For that, you have to listen to those harmed, or helped, by it. Meaning is social, not individual, hence our use of words, our developed language, our investment in culture, our life in community. You may have meant it one way, but its meaning is found along another. Such hard, tragic lessons, to have to learn and re-learn.

Jesus is our beacon not our boundary. Imagination is a dimension of discipleship that is waxing not waning, needed not superfluous, crucial not peripheral. Our passages today, Genesis, Psalms, and Romans, draw our imaginations to forms of authority, and our engagement with them. In Genesis, the authority in ancestry. In Psalms, the authority in government. In Romans, the authority in conscience. In all these, the writers struggle to imagine a way forward, following the light of the beacon across the challenge of the boundary.

Five

Pause and meditate a little this summer on your own enjoyment of play. Our esteemed colleague and beloved mentor, now of blessed memory, Peter Berger did so, with imagination for discipleship, years ago in his little book, A Rumor of Angels. 1. I see grown men enthralled on a green field following a wee little white ball, which seems to have a mind of its own, for three or four hours in the hot sun. 2. I see grown women shopping together without any particular need, but immersed, self-forgetful, in the process of purchasing, God knows what. 3.I see emerging adults fixed and fixated, days on end, in the World of Warcraft. 4.Can you remember playing bridge in college all night long, to the detriment of your zoology grade? Peter Berger: A. In playing, one steps out of one time into another…When adults play with genuine joy, they momentarily regain the deathlessness of childhood. The experience of joyful play is not something that must be sought on some mystical margin of existence. It can readily be found in the reality of ordinary life…The religious justification of the experience can be achieved only in an act of faith…B. This faith is inductive—it does not rest on a mysterious revelation, but rather on what we experience in our common, ordinary lives…Religion is the final vindication of childhood and of joy, and of all gestures that replicate these. One said: “I played basketball today, on the intramural team—it was awesome.” Talk about it a bit, parents and children.

Six

Imagination in discipleship forms a wisdom vindicated, justified by her deeds. (Luke has changed the ending to ‘justified by all her children’—maybe an even closer memory to the marrow of imagination.)

Hear again the imaginative wisdom of Boston University’s own late personalist philosopher, Erazim Kohak, The Embers and The Stars, with ten of whose epigrams we conclude, this summer morning, to kindle the imagination:

‘We shall dig again the wells of our Fathers.’

‘Humans grow angry so easily, so heedlessly venting their anger at those nearest and most vulnerable, needlessly, wantonly injuring what is most precious and most fragile’.

‘Humans are not only humans, moral subjects and vital organisms. They are also Persons, capable of fusing eternity and time in the precious, anguished reality of a love that would be eternal amid the concreteness of time. A person is a being through whom eternity enters time.’

‘There is self-discovery in remembrance.’

‘We have a sense of history. But we have lost a sense of eternity.’

‘The authentic relation between beings is the personal encounter of mutual’ respect. 208

‘Most of the time we possess and covet far more than we can care for and cherish.’ 212

‘Generosity personalizes as greed depersonalizes.’

‘We need to rediscover ourselves as persons, not as need gratifying organisms.’ 215

‘The chief task of philosophy is to write footnotes to the text of experience’ 219

But to what shall I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn’…Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.

– The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 07.9.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
June 25

Word to the Wise

By Marsh Chapel

People of faith, hear the Gospel, a Word to the wise: God’s grace shines through and over all human weakness; human failing cannot eclipse divine grace; the moonlight of the Grace of God still illumines, even if dimly at points and darkly at times, the very shadowlands of life. True in Scripture, true in life. Let us lift up our hearts and hear the Gospel: God’s grace, light, and love, shine upon us this Lord’s day.

Scripture

Pause for a moment, as summer begins, to ponder and to wonder at the strange world of the Bible. Our own reckoning with law, prophecy, and wisdom, with gospel, epistle, and revelation, in our brief lived experience, occurs, and stands out before, the strange world of Scripture, whence we turn—where else shall we go?—come Sunday. And the works of our time and times we most prize, at some times we name ‘biblical’ in portion and proportion. And the challenges, the momentous lived responsibilities of our time and times (love means taking responsibility after all) we most anxiously apprehend, at some times we name ‘biblical’ in portion and proportion. Think of an age wrestling with health, like ours, for instance. Our wise women and men over time have begun to prepare us.

Consider WIT, a play by Margaret Edson who teaches elementary school near Atlanta. Some years ago she wrote this one play. It was a success. She was asked to write more, but she demurred. ‘We are busy people here in 3^rd grade. We are busy people here in Georgia, in the third grade. What with the periodic table, and the solar system, and the multiplication tables, and the dissection of frogs, and the poetry of America, and a bit of recess every now and then—we are busy people here. I won’t have time to do another stage play anytime soon, thank you very much. I have all I want to do with these young minds here. One play is enough’. We gladly remember her on the day of our own annual Vacation Bible School.

Her work is biblical in proportion, about death and life, a sort of commentary if you will on Matthew and on Matthew 10. And apt for Marsh Chapel, here at the intersection of academic wisdom and human mortality. The protagonist is Vivian Bearing, a world class John Donne scholar, and the product of a world class doctoral program. At age 50, a single strong determined poetry professor, she discovers 4^th stage metastatic cancer is killing her. Her young physician is a former student, who failed to get an A in her course. Her savior is a nurse, who loves her, loves her physically with hand lotion and hugs, loves her verbally with honesty and grace, loves her personally with kindness and care. ‘This treatment will be very hard’ she hears the doctor say. ‘I love hard things’ she retorts. In 90 minutes she is dead, the curtain falling on the reading of Margaret Wise Brown’s Runaway Bunny. Is Donne’s line ‘Death be not proud” to be followed by an exclamation point or a comma? It comes down to that. For the physician, it may be, the exclamation point. For the nurse, it may be, the comma.

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee 

Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so; 

For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow 

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me. 

*******

One short sleep past, we wake eternally, 

And death shall be no more;

Death, thou shalt die.

Her performance is the kind of saving collision that can befall earnest faithful men and women, a choice encounter of human striving with physical pain and proximate death. It is a play worth reading or seeing again, just now, in the cross currents of debate about health, healing, salvus, salvation: God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty;

Biblical, in proportion, yes ‘biblical’.

The rugged biblical texts read this morning convey to us this existential dilemma. With Hagar we can sometimes find ourselves at the point of no return. With Paul we do face our endless and inevitable sin, yet are not free to wallow in it. With Matthew we are confronted by a stark twist to the fifth commandment, to Honor Father and Mother, to admit that there are times, when to do so is to do the opposite--in order to do so. One best honors an abusive parent with dishonor. Whatever comes not from faith is sin. The height of human longing, the starkness of proximate death.

Pause for a moment with Hagar, Paul, and Matthew. Our dear friend, colleague, now suddenly deceased and of blessed memory, with us in a greater light and from a farther shore, Professor Dale Andrews, regularly taught us, taught all, to consider, among other things, the social, the cultural contexts of the texts we read. We honor him in memory, but so let us honor him in spirit, word, and deed. Set these rugged texts in context, if you please.

The project of Genesis (beginning), is the beginning of creation, covenant, and providence. Our passage lies squarely in the most central of the beginnings, that of the people of faith, the story of Israel, the covenant people. To make way for Isaac, what will become of his half brother? What of the other peoples alongside the ‘chosen’? The earthy cry of a mother for a child braces and embraces us, like Rachel weeping for her children. There is no avoidance of the real costs of decision, choice, preference. God visits Hagar. Theology is learned over time in the school of visitation, of confession, of prayer, of conversation, of pastoral presence in the presence of Presence. God has mercy and shows mercy, an extra mercy, if you will, hearing and heeding. ‘God was with the boy’. At least here, at least for a moment in this passage, there is in the context of Scripture a divine expanse, an universal embrace, an extra mercy. And there is no substitute for visitation, no substitute for hearing the voice of pain, no substitute for seeing in the flesh the need of the other.

Paul’s work in Romans, as well, and whether or not for the moment you agree with Luther that this is the one, main text of the New Testament or not, likewise emerges in context. ‘Paul among Jews and Gentiles’ is the way our neighbor Krister Stendahl regularly phrased it. How are we to live by grace as people who are utterly mortal, regularly prone to harm others, in the deepest sense finally unable to rehabilitate ourselves? His vocabulary may differ a bit from ours, but Paul’s probing of the depths of life is very much our own as well. How are we to live both as healed and as sinful, both as saved and as broken? Well, here the context in full makes every difference. Paul is writing to answer this and other questions, but the writing is not his final answer. Is this your final answer Paul? No. What is? His final answer is coming. He is coming to make a visit, pay a call, stop by and see, pause in Rome and talk with his confreres. For the moment let us give Luther a nod, and, for the sake of argument, agree that Romans is THE book in the New Testament. (Or is it Galatians?). No, let us say Romans for today. But look: the whole of the letter is MERELY an introductory note to the main event, his coming visit to Rome, which he does make, and which leads then to his martyrdom. How important visitation.

Matthew has placed a harrowing set of demands, strictures, commands before us. He too was facing a decade of humiliation, though his in the latter years of the first century ad. He wanted his people steeled, ready, perseverant, of happy heart, of glad spirit, but of disciplined capacity for faithfulness. After all, those who took up the journey would be in regular visitation among others of different perspective. We do well to recall, as we did in February, regarding some of the hyperbole in the dominical teaching, particularly as recorded in Matthew, the wise, word to the wise, interpretation of Amos Wilder:

Jesus meant the requirements very explicitly…but the radical formulation of the requirements is to be explained by the imminence of the kingdom of God. The judgment was immediately at hand and an extraordinary ethic was proper for an extraordinary emergency. We have then in Schweitzer’s term ‘interim-ethics’ immediately relevant only to Jesus’ disciples in the brief period before the end…his insight that the teaching is significantly governed by the drawing near of the new age is today generally accepted. (IBD 161) As did Matthew, we are under obligation to appropriate (Jesus’ words) in a free and responsible way, applying them to our own situation…bearing in mind the disparity between his situation and ours (IBD 164) (Amos Wilder).

We read the text in context, as our beloved Dr. Andrews and so many others would have us to do.

Life

As in Scripture, so in life. Pause for a moment, as summer begins, to ponder and to wonder at the strange world of our lived experience.

The weekly ministry of the gospel, as basically constituted, in most settings and painting with a rough broad brush, requires a sermon, as good as one can do fifty times a year, and two dozen pastoral visits—home, hospital, nursing home, work place, third place. The two are intricately interwoven, the speaking the listening, the visiting and the proclamation. One significant portion of the visitation necessarily includes hospital and nursing home visits. In a week of national debate about health care, these rise to the surface of memory and reflection. Not only Scripture but also our lived experience, this Lord’s Day, in the announcement of the Gospel, strikingly recall us to the power of visitation. Have we not learned so in our own struggle?

On an August Sunday, in 1975, there is a 20-year old recovering from an appendectomy, in a rural hospital. There are four beds in the modest room, 1975. Into the room come four people, a minister in the AME tradition, dark and in dark suit and collar, and his wife and two deacons. They are there to visit the roommate on the left. In the heat the talk quietly and briefly. The fans buzz. Most of the afternoon—hours—they spend in silence. Once a bit of hymn, once a furtive reading out of a prayer book. A prayer at the end. As it happens, this one cameo becomes one of the myriad pushes into ministry for the fellow in the bed beside.

Here in the summer of 1976, oddly in the same rural hospital, is a 21 year old untrained minister making a first pastoral visit on a 22-year old man, who for three years has hoped to be a State Policeman in the Empire State. His life dream. But in the prior weekend he crashed a motorcycle, risking life and limb. His life was spared, but not the future full us of his left leg, his limb. He would heal in time, but not in a way that would allow him to hold his life dream any longer. What does one say?

That same summer, in the overheated house nursing homes of small villages, many soon to be and rightly summarily closed by the state, one saw and heard, and experienced with all the senses, the plight of the sick. In four decades much progress has been made, but we are still a long way from Tipperary. Have you been in a nursing home of late?

In the early 80’s, a call in the evening, pre-surgery. “Are you ready to go?” (meaning intended, ‘are you ready for the procedure’) “I certainly am not. I will survive”. (meaning heard—and what else do you think of when the minister shows up—‘are you ready for the end’.)

In the late 1980’s on Halloween and Thanksgiving and Christmas, accompanied by growing children, there were visits in homes and nursing homes, maybe on those holy days a dozen in the afternoon before dinner.

Then a decade later, and moving quickly, a fuller string of stops to make, some so quick that others referred to them not as visits but as sightings. Even moving quickly though, things happen, one conversation turning into another, and a roommate and a relative and another room and the day can just go. Today, one’s own mother, who would have expected this, resides in one of those places.

This year, one of our dear friends spent some time in such a home, and in recovery had struggle. One shadowy day a boy came and sat with her, a ten year old on the lam from his own family down the hall. “What’s your name?” he asked. “What do you do?” And from there, a long magic mystery in the gift of grace in human conversation, an intervention, a visitation, an appreciation, a recognition of the humanity of one older person through the humanity of one younger person. Healing ensued.

If you were to ask the changes, hospital and nursing home, in all these years, there have been many and very many. If you were to ask the abiding realities, what is the same, what is constant, unchanging, that is very simple to state: then as now, most people have no visitors. Most people in hospital and nursing home have next to no visitors. Even the inbred, trained, generations deep pastoral habits of visitation, in fact, and including those of one’s own denomination, have themselves atrophied, given the ever attractive lures of the computer screen.

So, now, with a decision on the table in our nation’s capital, whether or not to eliminate 25% of Medicaid support, when 60% of nursing home residents depend on Medicaid support, we are at sea a bit, because we have not been regular in our visitation. It is much easier when you no lived experience of what cutting from three nurses a day to two nurses a day will do to those who have no visitors.

One wrote a month ago: ‘Have we really degenerated into a nation so lacking in compassion and mercy that those of us who have more than we need are no longer willing to extend a hand to those who don’t have enough?’ (NYT, letters, 5/25/27).

Real religion is to visit widows and orphans in their affliction and remain unstained from the world, wrote James (1:27). Each one of us this week could make a visit in a nursing home. Call on a neighbor, a parishioner, a family member, or just show up on the second floor with some Oreo cookies and stay a few minutes. This is one of those sermons with an altar call, a call to decision, an invitation to discipleship. You are hereby happily invited sometime within the next seven days, to help set our common conversation about health and care in the context of actual faithful experience, of pastoral visitation (never the sole privilege of the clergy, though their example matters greatly). Visit some or someone in a nursing home this week. Make a personal visit. Erazim Kohak: ‘Humans are not only humans, moral subjects and vital organisms. They are also Persons, capable of fusing eternity and time in the precious, anguished reality of a love that would be eternal amid the concreteness of time. A person is a being through whom eternity enters time.’

People of faith, hear the Gospel, a Word to the wise: God’s grace shines through and over all human weakness; human failing cannot eclipse divine grace; the moonlight of the Grace of God still illumines, even if dimly at points and darkly at times, the very shadowlands of life. True in Scripture, true in life, let us lift up our hearts and hear the Gospel: God’s grace, light, and love, shine upon us this Lord’s day.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.25.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
June 4

Gift on the Altar

By Marsh Chapel

John 17: 1-10

A gift on the altar. Your life is a gift on the altar. What gift in what way on what altar?

The month of June each year provides a space and time for various gifts shared and received:

A Community Luncheon today (Marsh Room):

Featuring a presentation on planned giving by Sharon Wheeler, Associate Director of Planned Giving at Boston University. Then…a wedding of two members of our community, to which all are cordially invited.

June 11 a Summer Reading Discussion Group, convened by Ray Bouchard, at 9:45am.

On June 18 our Annual Father’s Day Brunch, 9:30 to 11:00am, meant for ALL.

Then on June 25, from noon to 1:30pm Vacation Bible School: “Pizza and Psalms” For children, youth, and the young at heart. Led by Bob and Jan Hill. Come and join us. Jan says everyone can sing. And she actually knows something about teaching.

You and you all who have chosen to bear witness to faith, here on a University Campus, live out gifts on altars. You welcome freshmen, as they arrive, eager and sometimes lonely. You bid farewell to them four years later, after they have both warmed and stolen your hearts, and the good bye hurts because it so good. You take up your place in the heart of an academic enterprise, to recall with joy that learning and meaning are both important, that head and heart are both utterly human, that all of us are better when we are loved, even if we don’t get an A. Some graduate Summa, some Magna, some Cum, and some of us just graduate THANK YOU LAUDE (LORDY)! You have to be willing to say hello, and to say good bye, here, and you are, and you do. What a gift on the altar of life!

A gift on the altar. Your life is a gift on the altar. What gift in what way on what altar?

In a few minutes we will bring our ordered hour of worship to a climactic close. Ushers will come forward out of the gathered people of God. A hymn of praise will be sung. Two of our fellows, a man and a woman, maybe a couple, a mother and daughter, two old friends, perhaps two youth, will stand before the altar, collection plates in hand. A gift will be placed upon a beautiful altar. We will offer a prayer. Almost every week, as we conclude our one hour of common prayer, we do this together.

Why do we do this?

Our physical statement, a regular occurrence in most worship services, particularly adorned and beautified in the habits of this congregation, is meant to be a ringing affirmation, in this moment of a gift upon the altar.

Pentecost causes us to consider this, as does today’s Gospel, John 17:1-10

More than we regularly acknowledge, issues of life and action that may not seem theological at first, at depth really are. How shall we offer our time, energy, and money? What is the Christian understanding of warfare? Is personal possession, ownership of property, a proper feature of a good life? What is the status of those at the start, children? What value do we ascribe to frail, mature life? How are women and men to relate? What are faithful uses of money?

At length, or depth, all of these questions, on which our daily lives founder or are founded or both, require a theological horizon, demand a theological response, deserve a theological assessment.

The great strength of our now passing post-modern, or even post-Christian era, has been a sense of limits, a sense of humility, even ignorance before the question of truth. Our time more than any other has honored the biblical and human perception that truth is very difficult to determine, nearly impossible to ascertain, as Solzenhitzyn better than most did remind us. In life there is much gray. The great weakness of our now passing post-modern, or even post-Christian era, has been this same sense of limits, sense of humility and ignorance before questions of ultimate reality. Too readily we have let the sense that truth is difficult to ascertain become a despondent acceptance of the impossibility of affirming truth. Too readily we have let the sense that truth seems nearly impossible to ascertain become a fatalistic denial that any truth at all is preferable to any other. The truth of relativity has given way to the falsehood of relativism.

To this the word of truth responds.

A gift on the altar. Your life is a gift on the altar. What gift in what way on what altar?

Listen again to the strange, stark mystery of today’s Gospel, come Pentecost, come the day of spirit, come the presence of the Comforter, the Advocate, the Paraclete.

‘The hour has come, glorify your Son’. In John, glory means the cross. Jesus’ glorification is the completion of his life in death, ad gloriam dei.

‘Eternal Life’. This is eternal life that they may know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent. Notice how different in five ways this simple verse is from Matthew, Mark and Luke.

‘I glorified you by finishing the work’. The word is the same, the last upon the lips of Jesus in this gospel, ‘finished, it is finished’.

‘Before the world existed’. Eternal life precedes created life. God is not in time, time is in God. Eternal life, love, resurrection are both prelude and postlude. Love is God’s first name. Or, Resurrection is God’s first name, Creation God’s middle name, and…Surname…Inspiration. In this Gospel at any rate.

‘They have kept thy word’. In our time, an emerging time of the famine of the word, words to speak and hear are hard to find. The Risen Jesus whose voice emanates from 2000 years ago, out of the imagination of a dear soul beloved community preacher calls out a word and for a word kept.

‘All mine are yours and yours are mind and I have been glorified in them’. He speaks from beyond. The words of glory come before the moment of glory, the cross, in which all is finished. Eternal life. Life, Love, Light.

A gift on the altar. Your life is a gift on the altar. What gift in what way on what altar?

Someone recently proposed that we resist alienation by way and by means of participation. Resist alienation through participation.

We are 6 months into a decade of humiliation. The path ahead requires steady participation, personal discipline, the service of God with gladness, a sure hold on a common hope. For this, we shall need each other, and the regular engagements of worship.

Each of us oversees a mental parking lot, over which we have no control for entry and exit. Worries come and go, parking and leaving. Fretful cares come and go, parking and leaving. Anxieties come and go, parking and leaving. Just when you think the lot has emptied out for a bit, another jalopy, hooptie, pulls in. Though the parking lot is imaginary, and the worries are invisible, these cars are real, real metal, vinyl and rubber. In quiet, come Sunday, we can simply watch, as the traffic pulls in and out. Automobiles of anxieties global, national, cultural, denominational, vocational, personal, all. Some days the lot is filled. Others, closer to empty. You have little to no control over these parking patterns. That may be good news. Just let the traffic flow.

You do have a life, a gift on the altar, in faith, to offer, in the song of the Apostle, Have no anxiety about anything but in all things in prayer and supplication with thanksgiving lift your needs to God.

A gift on the altar. Your life is a gift on the altar. What gift in what way on what altar?

Our community has become a generous, giving one, over many years. The Lord loves a cheerful giver, and the Lord loves you. You Marsh Chapel folks are known as giving, generous, tithing people. You are not alone in this, but you are exemplary in this. This past week many of us spent in our Annual Conferences, doing various Methodist things like singing lustily, and like eating endlessly, and like arguing vociferously, and like finding ways to hug one another and pray for one another, even after our words have stung. There was a woman, now a minister in the Adirondacks, who as a child, with her parents, in a very modest home in the Finger Lakes fed a simple dinner to an untrained and uneducated and unprepared young preacher, 1976. It both bothers and moves me to remember that the ‘table’ was a cardboard box, upended and covered with a white cloth. A gift on the altar. One retiree recalled her first church of 21 people, whom she asked, ‘Do you use the lectionary’? The lay leader said, ‘Sure, you can use either pulpit or the lectionary to speak from’. She was telling others to translate the tradition, not to serve it raw. And there were bitter differences, growing more painful by the years, largely over the fundamental gospel issue of the full humanity of gay people. But as the proceedings wandered along, and now not as 21 year old preacher in name only, but as an aging, rookie, grandfather in training (‘dad, you are just another old white guy with a comb over’), my mind could not help but wander across the landscape of love in the churches in that room. It does not take long to go from being a young turk to becoming an old turkey.

I remember a widow with four teenagers who somehow still found the time to run a Wednesday dinner for all the neighborhood kids.

I remember a recovering alcoholic, living alone in a trailer, who took on the job of raising $4000 for preachers’ retirements, out along the blue highways of the North Country.

I remember a couple who decided to run an old car two more years, so that they could help to build a new church, out along the blue highways of urban upstate New York.

I remember two retired teachers, loving housemates forever, who singlehandedly started an endowment fund, out along the blue highways of the Finger Lakes.

I remember the story of a janitor at the University of Pennsylvania who the left the school $2 million dollars in his will, along the Quaker state blue highways.

I remember reading about a maid in Mississippi who never graduated even from elementary school, who cleaned student rooms for 40 years, and left this world heavily endowing a scholarship fund for minority students at Ole Miss, out along the blue highways of the sweltering south.

I remember a Colgate graduate who put the church’s endowment into his will, and so put his estate into the endowment. Someone here could do that, Colgate graduate or not.

And now, coming home to Marsh Chapel, I remember Daniel Marsh. I tell you, without the tithing of other generations, we would be worshipping in a pup tent. But they gave us something, a beautiful, reverent, charming Chapel. They made it their gift. So much so that Daniel and his wife are buried right here, their ashes right in the shadow of the altar, right before the pulpit.

A gift on the altar. Your life is a gift on the altar. What gift in what way on what altar?

My friend Doug Mullins told me once about another gift on the altar, with which to end:

Belinda was a single parent, trying to take care of herself and raise a five year old Ryan. She was a single parent because when her husband learned that the requisite surgery for her cancer would leave her disfigured, he left. One evening Belinda tucked Ryan into bed and was reading a book to him. He interrupted her to ask if she had bought that book for him.

“Yes”, she said.

He then inquired if she had also bought the bed in which he slept.

Again the answer was “Yes”.

Had she bought the house they called home?

Yes, she said.

And what about the new sweater he liked so much?

“Yes”, she said, she had bought that too.

He thought about how good she had been to him, supplying all his needs, and finally he said, “Mommy, get my piggy bank. There are seven pennies in it. Take them and get something you really want for you.”

You know, everything we have is a gift from God. Life, breath, faith, forgiveness, and hope of eternal life. Cross, altar, gift. Life, light, love.

This summer think, again, about tithing.

A gift on the altar. Your life is a gift on the altar. What gift in what way on what altar?

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.4.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
May 7

Alma Mater

By Marsh Chapel

John 10:1-10

‘I am the door. He who enters by me will be saved and will come and in and go out and find pasture.’

On the journey: we covet prayer, we remember names, we commune in hope.

Prayer (Prelude)

The Covenant Prayer is perhaps one of John Wesley’s most known prayers. Do you feel that it is an important prayer for believers to pray in modern day? It is often a prayer recited at church in special worship services. Do you feel that it is a prayer believers should pray on their own to affirm their commitment to God?

Mr. Wesley in prayer sought a combination of enthusiasm and enlightenment, as he did in general in the practice of faith. He could feel the presence of the Spirit, as on May 24, 1738 on Aldersgate Street. He also could sing with his brother, Charles, at the opening of an elementary school in Kingswood, England, 1762, ‘unite the pair so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety, learning and holiness combine, truth and love (for all to see)’. The Covenant Prayer is one such sought combination of enthusiasm and enlightenment.

How important do you feel it is for believers to examine themselves with John Wesley’s self-examination questions (https://www.hopefaithprayer.com/john-wesley-holy-club-questions/) and which of the questions do you feel are most important for people to focus on?

All the questions are good ones, though they would benefit from an admixture of first person singular (‘I’), with first person plural (‘we’). The questions help us to stay alert to what is new in every morning. What a wonder there is in what is new! I have been re-reading David Hempton’s book, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit, this year, in which he explores the mysterious birth and growth of the Methodist church, especially in circumstances of harsh confinement—sailors on shipboard, prisoners in cells, soldiers in confined barracks, poor settlers in small prairie dwellings. There is a mystery at the start of something new.

One of John Wesley’s self-examination asks, “Am I enjoying prayer?” Do you have any advice to give on how one can enjoy prayer?

Prayer is the joy of sitting silent before God. Enjoy the quiet. There will be plenty of rumble, din, cacophony, dissonance and just plain noise in the rest of the day.

If John Wesley were here today, what do you think he would recommend for people who feel that they need to revive their prayer life?

Remove yourself from email on a regular basis. When you have to use email, remember that it is irretrievable, international, eternal, and immutable.

We know that John Wesley was very disciplined about prayer. He would wake up at 4:00 AM for his daily prayer time. In order to wake up so early, he made sure to go to bed early. What are some ways you suggest that Christians can become more disciplined about prayer?

One practice suggested by the Rev. Vernon Lee, some years ago, was to use the quiet time of dressing, in the morning, to pray, in particular and in person, for others. The Rev. Susan Shafer gave us a collection of Bonhoeffer’s prayers and writings, 100 words each, one for each day, to be used in the morning. Howard Thurman, though, preferred prayer at night, as he remembered his walk on Daytona Beach: “the ocean and the night surrounded my little life with a reassurance that could not be affronted by any human behavior; the ocean at night gave me a sense of timelessness, of existing beyond the ebb and flow of circumstance; death would be a small thing, I felt, in the sweep of that natural embrace”.

John Wesley would often write out prayers. Do you feel that writing, drawing or other creative modalities help some to better connect with God through prayer?

Yes.

John Wesley advocated for fasting as a way to make prayer more powerful and he himself fasted every Friday; at one point in his life, he fasted every Wednesday and Friday. Do you advocate for fasting? If so, how often?

Regular—daily—physical exercise is as prayerful, meditative, healthy, spiritual and meaningful a practice as one can find. At Marsh Chapel, we host a spiritual yoga group at 5pm.

John Wesley was deeply connected to God. In what ways do you feel he developed this strong connection? How can Christians today strengthen their connection to God?

Mr. Wesley, in his Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament, at several places offers hints, glimpses, and premonitions of his sense of divine presence. Commenting on Matthew 6:9ff, the Lord’s prayer, he writes, ‘He who best knew what we ought to pray for, and how we ought to pray, what matter of desire, what manner of address would most please himself, would best become us, has here dictated to us a most perfect and universal form of prayer, comprehending our real wants, expressing all our lawful desires; a complete directory and full exercise of all our devotions’. Notice the word ‘universal’. For Wesley, as for his tradition at its best, Jesus is our beacon, not our boundary, and in Him, God is loving us into love and freeing us into freedom. Love for all, freedom for all. And all means all.

My mother taught me my first verse of Scripture: A wise man built his house…

Identity (Sermon)

Class of 2017! Are you happy, glad, joyful?

Then, if so, you have entered the deep mystery of a most ancient invocation, that of the Psalmist, from more than 2000 years ago: Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the lands, serve the Lord with gladness!

There is a remarkable sentiment, that gladness itself, happiness itself, joy itself are ultimate service. Gladness serves. Come into his presence with singing! Know that the Lord is God. It is He that has made us, and not we ourselves. We are his people, the sheep of his pasture. Enter his gates with Thanksgiving, and his courts with Praise, give Thanks to Him and bless his name. For the Lord is good. His steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.

Calvin Trilling: “For thirty years my mother served us nothing but leftovers. The original meal was never found.”

The land of Emma Lazarus and the Statue of Liberty is now led to applaud, and celebrate the loss of health care for 24 million. This is an early wave in a tide of humiliation coming our way this decade. The church of Charles Wesley, he of gladness of heart, who helps us to sing, ‘finish then thy new creation’, is now led to affirm the rejection of the consecration of a fine, well prepared, regularly ordained elder, simply because she is gay. This is another wave in a tide of humiliation coming our way in these years.

That gladness of heart is lasting, meaningful service, in faithfulness to ALL generations.

No surprise, that. For you are Boston University graduates, with a name, and from a tradition, of glad hearts. Not some but all. Not home town but universe. Not nation but world.

With gladness of heart, Howard Thurman said, people all people belong to one another. Not some, but all.

With gladness of heart, Martin Luther King said, the moral arc of the universe is long, but bends toward justice. Not country, but universe.

With gladness of heart, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, which gave birth to BU, said, The world is my parish. Not nation, but world.

Not some but all; not home town but universe; not nation but world.

Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the lands, serve the Lord with gladness.

May 14, the day on which you can hear your classmates speak of faithfulness and life, that same day is….Mother’s day. Make a plan. Buy a flower. Choose a gift. Send a note. And do so—with gladness!

My mother was a Latin teacher, for whom reminders were instruction (we tend to need more reminder than instruction)

Hope (Communion)

Come now up the sawdust trail. Receive the Lord. ‘Ye that do truly and earnestly repent of your sin…

We await a common hope, a hope that our warming globe, caught in climate change, will be cooled by cooler heads and calmer hearts and careful minds.

We await a common hope, a hope that our dangerous world, armed to the teeth with nuclear proliferation, will find peace through deft leadership toward nuclear détente.

We await a common hope, a hope that our culture, awash in part in hooliganism, will find again the language and the song and the spirit of the better angels of our nature.

We await a common hope, a hope that our country, fractured by massive inequality between rich children and poor children, will rise up and make education, free education, available to all children, poor and rich.

We await a common hope, a hope that our nation, fractured by flagrant unjust inequality between rich and poor children, will stand up and make health care, free health care, available to all children, poor and rich.

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

We await a common hope, a hope that our families, torn apart by abuse and distrust and anger and jealousy and unkindness, will sit at a long Thanksgiving table, this autumn, and share the turkey and pass the potatoes, and slice the pie, and, if grudgingly, show kindness and pity to one another.

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

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

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

My mother understood the difference between cultural and financial wealth. And taught us how to change, leave, journey, and itinerate. England, Spain, Geneva WCC, Montreal McGill, Boston.

‘I am the door. He who enters by me will be saved and will come and in and go out and find pasture.’

Calvin Trillin: “For thirty years my mother served us nothing but leftovers. The original meal was never found.” On the journey: we covet prayer, we remember names, we commune in hope.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 05.7.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
April 30

The Bach Experience

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 24: 13-35

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill

‘They told what had happened on the road, and how he had been make known to them in the breaking of the bread’.

There come episodes in the course of a battered lifetime that place us deep in the shadows. If the shadow is dark enough, we may not feel able to move forward, for our foresight and insight and eyesight are so limited. We may become bound, chained, held. Those enmeshed in the strife of warfare today come quickly to mind. Those concerned about the condition and direction of their land and country come also to mind. Those whose church or denomination seems to have slipped into a spiritual amnesia, forgetfulness about the heart of the good news, abiding love, forgetfulness of the God who come Easter is addressed by God’s first name, Resurrection, come personally to mind.

You may have known this condition—of confusion or disorientation or ennui or acedia. You may know it still. The death of a loved one can bring such a feeling. The loss of a position or job can bring such a feeling. The recognition of a major life mistake can bring such a feeling. The recollection of a past loss can bring such a feeling. The disappearance of a once radiant affection, or love, for a person or a cause or an institution can bring such a feeling. The senselessness of violence inflicted on the innocent can bring such a feeling.

And how to speak and think of these things? Over the years you may have grown frustrated by your own mother tongue in various ways. English places such a fence between thought and feeling, when real thought is almost always deeply felt, and real feeling is almost always keenly thought. We need another word like thoughtfeeling or feltthought. When C Wesley sang ‘unite the pair so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety, learning and holiness combined, and truth and love let us all see’ he described something bone marrow close to life, happiness, hope, ministry, faith. And he also was wrestling with the limits of our beautiful language. Anyway, you, well beloved, by nature and discipline live the thoughtfeeling gospel, and for that we are lastingly thankful.

Be it then thought or feeling or thoughtfeeling, there do come episodes, all in a lifetime, that place us, if not in the dark, at least well into the shadows. You may have known all about this at one time. You may know it still.

Come Sunday, some snippet of song, or verse, or preachment, or prayer, or, especially today a line from the Cantata, it may be, will touch you as you meander about in the dim shadow twilight. Hold onto that snippet. Follow its contours along the cave of darkness in which you now move. Let the snippet—song, verse, sermon, prayer, line—let it guide you along. So you may be able to murmur: ‘I can do this…We can make our way…I can find a handhold or foothold…We can hope and even trust that the Lord heals the brokenhearted…I can make it for now, at least for now, for the time being.’ It is the power and role of beauty, verbal or musical or liturgical or communal, to restore us to our rightful mind, our right thoughtfeeling.

Today the epistle, the Gospel and the psalm lift a hymn of faith, a song of courage in the face of adversity. It is this lift for living which beauty, especially the beauty of holiness, and particularly, this morning, the beauty of holy music is meant to provide. Here, at Marsh Chapel we want to accentuate Truth, for sure, and Goodness, for sure. But we don’t want to leave behind beauty. Beauty can heal. In our work with demons. In our quiet and contemplation. Beauty, in the case of this morning, the beauty of Bach, often has the power to shake us loose, to set us free. To make us, as in Luke 24, not just followers but also witnesses.

Dr. Jarrett, how shall we listen, both on the radio and in person, most fully to be immersed in today’s Bach experience?

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett

Thank you, Dean Hill. I’d be delighted. But first, knowing your love of the Gospel of John, would mind reminding us of the highlight’s of the Fourteenth Chapter:

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill

Well, as you know Dr. Jarrett, John Chapter 14 finds Jesus in elevated conversation with his disciples where he predicts and explain the events to come, namely his Passion and Resurrection. Let’s hear the words again:

Vs. 1 “Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me.”

Vs. 2 “In my father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you.”

Vs. 6 “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me.”

Vs. 15 “If ye love me, keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and shall give you another Comforter; even the spirit of truth.”

Vs. 27 “Peace I leave with you . . . “

And two verses featured in this morning’s cantatas:

Vs. 23 “Whoever loves me, and keeps my Word, my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him.”

And finally, Vs. 28 “I am going away, and I am coming back to you. If you loved me, then you would rejoice.”

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett

It is a rich chapter, indeed, and full of verses that form the tenets of our faith and understanding of Christ in our lives then and now.

Bach’s cantatas take their names from the first line of text, and today’s cantata, No. 74 sets verse 23 of John 14: ‘Wer mich liebet, der wird mein Wort halten’ or Whoever loves me, and keeps my Word. Bach originally conceived of the cantata for use on Pentecost Sunday in 1725, where we find the Holy Spirit come down to ignite the movement among the Disciples that would become the Church. The Disciples and followers of Jesus had remained stunned, suspended in disbelief that their movement and leader had been cut down so devastatingly. Today’s lesson of Jesus’s appearance on the road to Emmaus finds the Disciples in the initial stages of their grief, no doubt deep in their own ‘thought-feeling’.

Though a cantata for Pentecost, there is surprisingly little reference to the Holy Spirit, but rather a focus on Jesus’s promise to return, and that faith will create a dwelling for Him in our hearts. The cantata is rich with arias – four total. The first two arias are the more personal – almost a dialogue between the ardent believer and the reminder of the words of Jesus. These mutual assurances exchanged, the final two arias turn outward t the Church and beckon us to follow suit in making room for Jesus within our hearts. Both of these arias find their vigor with representations of the earthly trials each of us face in a life of faith, but also a reminder of the sufferings Jesus himself endured. You can’t have a Bach cantata without a reminder of the Passion and the snares of Sin, afterall.

Musically speaking, Cantata 74 is many things. The opening movement is unified by the motive of the first words, rather than a Chorale tune defining a structure. And for a movement with festival trumpets and timpani, the bluster is replaced with elegance and confidence of stride. At the outset there seems an error in order or at least an imbalance of arias and recitatives, but there is a clear internal structure that features a single recitative between each of the two aria groupings. Those two recitatives serve as musical and theological connectors to the arias on either side.

Within these eight movements, we hear extraordinary variety from Bach, from the winsome Soprano solo, and anxious Bass continuo aria that hints at our own doubt of Jesus’ promise, to the Tenor aria that nearly takes flight, and the blazing bravura of the final Alto aria. Here we have musical and theological reminders of both Penance and Atonement, but also the assurance of Love and Grace.

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill

Given the snares, cold night terrors, noonday destruction, evil, scourge, wild beasts of this very day, it could be that a sober reading and interpretation of our lessons, including our psalm, one of the great trusting hymns of a faithful heart, will sustain us this morning.

Likewise, our Gospel lesson from Luke, brought as an interlude into our yearly reading of Matthew, reminds us of the healing power in ordered worship. First, in a recitation of the gospel. Second, in an interpretation of that Gospel. Third, in a communal engagement of the gospel, in the common bread of the church, in the common cup of the church, in the common life of the church. ‘They knew him in the breaking of the bread.’ For some, the emphasis in Protestant fashion, will fall on the knowing; for others, the emphasis in Catholic fashion, will fall on the thanksgiving, the Eucharistic bread broken. For some, the what. For others, the how. For all, come Sunday, come this Lord’s day, the possibility of new life, even if dimly perceived, even if shadowed.

For those, that is, who have walked past a graveyard or two, for those who have walked the valley of the shadow of death, for a world searching to match its ideals of peace with its realities of hatred, for a nation struggling to rebalance cultural poverty and financial wealth in cultural wealth and financial poverty for you today if you are in trouble, and who are worried today about others and other graves and other yards, and who have seen the hidden traps, unforeseeable dangers, and steel jawed snares of life, there is something encouraging about this Easter song: “They knew him in the breaking of the bread”

For those today, for example, who mourn the current condition of the United Methodist Church, gospel and word and companionship give some help. Remember that what is not the Gospel will not over the long term make very good administrative procedure or church law. Remember that Methodism has long struggled to honor both its preaching voice and its administrative face. Think of Peter Cartwright confronting his presiding elder, Ernest Tittle denouncing the central conference, and Georgia Harkness rebuking the wrongheadedness of the 1972 Discipline. Read, of course, the administrative reports. But first remember to listen to the pulpit voices: in San Diego, in Chicago, in New York, in San Francisco, and Rochester, and Boston. Remember that it is the Gospel that comes first, and matters most. Superintending presumes something, someone to superintend. Preaching precedes, guides, and leads administration (in a healthy church). (The experience of Emmaus Road was not forged in a committee meeting.) Remember that the Gospel of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, affirms the full humanity of gay people as in Galatians 3, John 14, and Matthew 5. So stay on the road, walking in the journey, hearing the good news, heeding its interpretation, and being nourishing in the consanguinity of love.

For those today, for instance, in the thick of transition, the Word has this support for you: the gift of getting by, getting through, getting out, and getting home, not pausing to worry about the small stuff. This song is one for that point on the road when you just have to go ahead and risk and jump. You have made your assessment, you have made your plan, you have made your study, then you have prayed. You are not sure. But you sense a presence, and receive the courage to take one more step.

Emmaus Road brings a hymn of the heart, one you sing when you are not sure, but you are confident. Not certain, but confident. You can be confident without being certain. In fact, a genuine honest confidence includes the confidence to admit you are not sure. Faith means risk. Isn’t that part of what we mean by faith? Once you are on the road, you have to choose between walking forward and slinking away.

Step forward. Go about your discipleship: pray, study, learn, make peace, love your neighbor, agree to disagree agreeably, let every one be convinced in his own mind. The random remains random. We shall face our challenges in our time. Just this: we need not face them alone, but in the company of the Gospel, and its interpretation, and its community engaged together, one day in Eucharist, say, one day in music, say, one day in service, say, but every day with an uncanny sense of the presence of One Risen.

In the name of the Resurrected Son, and of the Creating Father, and of the Abiding Spirit: Now with the mind of Christ set us on fire, that unity may be our great desire. Give joy and peace, give faith to hear your call, and readiness in each to work for all.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean. & Dr. Scott 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 04.30.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Bach Experience, Robert Hill, Scott Jarrett

Sunday
April 16

A Quickened Life

By Marsh Chapel

Romans 4: 17b

Preface

“God, who gives life to the dead, and who calls into existence the things that do not exist”

The gift of resurrection is faith. The rightness of God, is given, from faith to faith, from the faith of Christ, the faithfulness of Christ, to you. In the darkness, light. A quickened life by faith, of faith, in faith.

St. Paul, in his magnum opus, Romans, beckons by faith to faith your faith and my faith. Some of us have been auditing the course in life and faith long enough. This is Easter. It may be time for you to quit auditing the course, and sign up and register and pay the tuition go to class and do the homework and sit for the final and receive a grade. I’ll settle this morning for attendance and tuition, Sunday worship and tithing, to start. However will you hear faith without worship? However will you find faith without community? However will you know faith without study? However will you receive faith without giving in faith? Let this be your first Sunday of worship over the next year, not the last.

A Quickened Life by Faith

Some years ago, well before winter dawn, I had crossed the border into Canada, driving north and east, 90 minutes, in the driving snow, in pursuit of a McGill PhD, and headed for the Mercier Bridge—such a nice name for such a rickety bridge—‘prier pour mois, je conduit sur le pont Mercier’. At the border there were pronounced the usual four questions. Your life, your faith, bring answers to them, every day, one way or another. Life is short. We will leave to Dr. Hobbes the question whether life is also and more so ‘solitary, nasty, poor, and brutish’. Short, no doubt. And another day, and the border questions, including Easter Morn: ‘What is your name? Where are you from? Where are you going? Do you have anything to declare?’ One day, in full, we shall answer. Today, Easter day, we answer in part, affirming our faith.

That 30 below zero snow cascading morning, those foolish enough to drive did so with care, inching along beside the St. Lawrence river. Ahead loomed the headlights of a tractor trailer. The lights flashed, and the truck slowed to stop, and the driver opened his window. ‘Pardone moi: Ou est le frontier?’ Glad to see some other lights in the tundra, glad to have tracks in the snow road to follow, glad to hear a human voice, I picked through my meager basket of French words to cobble up a response. ‘Bon, Le Frontier est prochaine, ouest…’ But before I could finish my soliloquy, worthy I expected of Marcel Proust at his dour best, the driver smiled and laughed and said, ‘Oh, buddy, thank goodness, you’re an American! I can tell by the way you don’t speak French! Excellent. How do I get out of this wilderness?’

The gift of resurrection is faith. The rightness of God, is given, from faith to faith, from the faith of Christ, the faithfulness of Christ, to you. In the darkness—surprise!--light. Romans announces the Gospel. The Gospel reveals itself only through faith, and it leads to nothing other than faith. Think slowly through the Gospel, in the full letter to the Romans:

To bring about the obedience of faith among all the nations

I am not ashamed of the Gospel. It is the power of God for salvation to all who believe, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith. As it is written, ‘the righteous shall live by faith’

God gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.

Therefore, since we are justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ…Suffering produces endurance, and endurance character, and character hope, and hope does not disappoint us because of the love of God shed abroad in our hearts by faith through the Holy Spirit.

Hope that is seen is not hope. Who hopes for what he sees? We hope for what we do not see, and wait for it with patience.

‘What then shall we say to this? If God is for us, who is against us? Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?

Shall tribulation or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.

For I am sure that neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities nor things present nor things to come nor powers nor height nor depth nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed, by the renewal of your mind.

Let love be genuine. Hate what is evil. Hold fast to what is good. Love one another with mutual affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. Never lag in zeal. Be ardent in spirit. Serve the Lord. Rejoice in your hope. Be patient in tribulation. Be constant in prayer. Contribute to the saints. Practice hospitality.

A quickened life, by faith.

A Quickened Life of Faith (Romans 4: 17b)

And of faith—a quickened life of faith.

This month, among other pursuits, the icy back roads of an utterly foreign dominion, The Epistle to the Romans, have beckoned, coming to Easter. Paul has something to say to us at Easter. Something about faith. The resurrection frees up the church’s gospel preaching, the offer of the gift of faith. Have you faith? Do you know God to be a pardoning God? Are you moving on to wholeness? Do you expect wholeness in this lifetime?

Tucked away in the winding, ice laden back roads of Romans, you come upon a sharp, almost a U-Turn, at Romans 4: 17b. The next stretch of highway is no picnic, either. You tell me what it means to believe ‘in hope against hope’, for example. But here, in an astonishing curve, Paul lets slip a side angle view of God. Tell the truth, said Dickinson, but tell it slant. Slant Paul says it here. The verse, one must honestly admit, as does your preacher this Easter, finally resists at depth a final rendering. That is why it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace…in the presence of the God…(get ready for it)…who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Pause for just an Easter second right here. Paul spells God by resurrection first, and creation second. Paul names God in resurrection first, and creation second. Greek, like German can abide varieties of sentence word orders (In German all is fair as long you remember the verb at the end of the sentence to put!) Here, Romans 4: 17b to be exact, Paul at the pinnacle of his powers, cedes the first word about God to the resurrection, and makes creation a sub-set of resurrection. Who raises the dead, and creates out of nothing.

Your resurrection is too small, to paraphrase JB Phillips. A quickened life is a faith life of height and breadth and depth—resurrection above all, resurrection in all, resurrection under all! Here you are given a fatter Easter, a more robust raising, an ampler hope, a wider mercy. I love the word ‘stout’. Here is resurrection, stout. Bigger than…all outdoors. I wonder if our resurrection faith could stand a little expansion, a bigger suit size, 42 not 40 long, say, another notch out in the belt, say, an un-hemming of the hem, say?

On closer inspection, Romans 4: 17b that is, there is more. For an unexplained reason, Paul does not use his usual go-to verb for raising here, eigeiro, which everywhere else in letter he does. He uses another, zoapoiountos. This means enlivens, quickens, gives life. And there is more! The rest of the verse, ‘non-being into being’, is a reckoning, beckoning, harkening to the creation ex nihilo, the creation from nothing. Under every frosty evergreen, along every pre-dawn snow belted path, in and through all creation is the power of something from nothing which is best known in resurrection. The Easter is not an add on to whatever other remarkable things one can hear in life, learn in college, and remember in dotage. Resurrection is everywhere, everything, all the time, without measure, itself subsuming the creation, as does the creation of the creation. Alkier: ‘Faith…without any validation. Barth (ETTR): ‘faith brings the known condition and status of human life into relation with the unknown God.’…

Paul speaks sparingly but stoutly of resurrection in Romans (e.g.1:4, 4:24, 6:5, 7:4, 8:11).

Resurrection stands up faith. Be upstanding, faithful ones, be upstanding. As we stand for the Gospel every Sunday here at Marsh Chapel, you be upstanding in life, abstaining evil, practicing good, worshipping God. Go to church on Sunday and tithe, for starters. And great ready to cross the existential border!

A quickened life, of faith.

A Quickened Life in Faith

And in faith—a quickened life in faith.

What is your name?

Our name is given in baptism.

In baptism. One part cross, one part resurrection.

In baptism. Recall the trials of the week past. Betrayal (Judas). Denial (Peter). Judgment (Pilate). Struggle (bearing the cross). Pain (Crucifixion). Trauma (Crucifixion). Humiliation (Crucifixion). Suffering (Crucifixion). Injustice (Crucifixion). Defeat (Crucifixion). Torture (Crucifixion). Despair (Why?). Rejection (burial). Scorn (burial). Death (burial).

In baptism. Today is Easter, the day of resurrection. We celebrate with gladness Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, in concert with the church universal, the church militant, and the church triumphant. Our hymns evoke gladness, our prayers hope, our gatherings promise. Today in faith we affirm the triumph of the invisible over the visible. We hear the voice that is no voice, the words that have no hearing, the range of declaration that stretches out through ‘all the earth’, as our psalm says. The resurrection of Jesus makes possible the preaching of the church.

We all have ways down the road we can learn and teach, teach and learn, the care of the earth. Someone gave you a name, in baptism and in birth.

Where are you from?

We are from, out of, a cloud of witnesses, the church, the church militant and the church triumphant, the church of the majestic brass—militant, and the church of the lilies in honor and remembrance—triumphant.

The church. Hunsinger: Indicative not imperative; gift not possession; conformation not imitatio Christ; resemblance not equivalence; suggestive not technical; ecumenist not ‘modernist’

The church. (Theater) gets us in a room, breathing the same air, thinking about how to be human together (NYT Laura Collins-Hughes 4/10/17).’ Worship does the same, along with other things.

The ‘church’. Abraham Heschel: “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ....get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.” …“When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.”

The church. My father-in-law Pennock, Malone NY, 1965, preached on the theme The Need of Intensity. And he is here today?

Where are you headed?

We are on a journey, headed for a promised land, earthly and heavenly. We are walking on a journey together.

A journey. Our baccalaureate speaker last year, heard the resurrection music in the hallway downstairs, and went on to run the peace corps. The Baccalaureate talk last spring by Peace Corps director Carrie Hessler-Radelet (CAS’79, Hon.’16), who called on BU graduates to “embrace the cause of humanity with optimism and enthusiasm.” (BU Today, June 2016).

A journey. Arts of Democracy: Active listening; Creative conflict; Mediation; Negotiation; Dialogue; Evaluation.

A journey. Think of Eugene Lang, PS 121 NYC, who paid for college for any of the 6^th graders he spoke to at their graduation, 1981. Half of the 69 6^th grade graduates went to college.

Do you have anything to declare?

Out of the marathon bombing horror in 2013 came acquaintance, friendship, love and marriage. Hope springs eternal in the human breast. Roseann Sdoia (lost leg 4/16/13) met Michael Materia (took her to hospital). ‘He was kneeling on the ground, trying to hold me from sliding, trying to hold himself, and trying to hold the tourniquet. And then here I am, telling him to hold my hand. So the poor guy had a lot going on’. After a couple of months, a friendship between the two bloomed into romance. ‘There was an interest growing in each other, kind of quietly, until we talked about it’ (Roseann). Nantucket, 12/4/16 engagement. Then, in full gear he, and slow and steady leading with the left leg she, climbed 1576 steps to the observation deck of the Empire State Building, 86^th floor. We’ve spent a lot of time together and from that we got to see each other’s characters and really just bond. (NYT, 12/16).

Coda

The gift of resurrection is faith. The rightness of God, is given, from faith to faith, from the faith of Christ, the faithfulness of Christ, to you. In the darkness, light. Faith is a quickened life. A quickened life, by and of and in faith.

“God, who gives life to the dead, and who calls into existence the things that do not exist”

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 04.16.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
April 2

In Conversation with Nouwen: Here and Now

By Marsh Chapel

Ezekiel 37: 1-14

John 11: 1-4, 28-45

Preface

Throughout the year 2017, at Marsh Chapel, we are engaged in ministry with attention to conversation. Our regular weekly gathering and preaching affirm conversation. Our Summer National Preacher Series will engage in conversation about new directions in discipleship. Our Lenten Series, concluding today, has engaged in conversation with Henri Nouwen. Over the past decade, 2007-2016, Lent by Lent,we identified a theological conversation partner for the Lenten sermons, broadly speaking, out of the Calvinist tradition. For this next decade, we turn to the Catholic tradition. Over the next decade, beginning this Lent 2017, the Marsh pulpit, a traditionally Methodist one, will turn left, not right, toward Rome not Geneva, and we will preach with, and learn from the Roman Catholic tradition, so important in the last 200 years in New England, and some of its great divines including Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Ignatius of Loyola, Erasmus, Hans Kung, Karl Rahner, and others, one per year. Perhaps you will suggest a name or two, as a few have done this past week, not from Geneva, but from Rome? For those who recall, even if dimly, the vigor and excitement of Vatican II, there may well be other names to add to the list.

So, our sermons, largely in teaching format this Lent, have engaged Father Nouwen. We conclude today, attentive to conversation, and looking toward holy communion. Over these five weeks we have relied on Nouwen’s books, Compassion, Reaching Out, The Life of the Beloved, The Wounded Healer, and, today, Here and Now. Continue to read with us, as you have time, energy, interest and capacity.

With the ancient Hebrew prophets, like Ezekiel, and in harmony with the Gospel of John, the Spiritual Gospel, Nouwen invites, nay implores us, to practice the presence of God. Here and Now. Hic et Nunc. Here and Now. In worship. In prayer. In sacrament. In means of grace. In study. In fasting. In conversation. And perhaps in some forms of spiritual discipline new to and particular to our time? Ours is a particular, challenging time, now, and here.

Ezekiel

Ours in not a normal time. The events of this year are not within the norm, are not habituated to the contours of normal American history. From the current leadership of this country now come steadily the beginning features of civil humiliation inaugurated on November 8 and January 20. Ours is not a normal time, but a time of lasting, painful humiliation. More than a decade will be required to undo the damage done already. Ours is become a valley of dry bones.

In the 6^th century bce the prophet Ezekiel announced a vision, a communal resurrection, for his people. As did the other prophets, he directly addressed the waywardness of Israel. Whereas Hosea, Jeremiah, and Isaiah contrasted the wickedness of contemporary Jerusalem with a better past, Ezekiel portrays the entire history of Jerusalem and of Israel as one of continuous rebellion and sin against Yahweh (IBD, Supplement, 316, W Zimmerl). Intones Ezekiel, offering a vision out of exile: There were very many upon the valley, and lo they were very dry. What would he say today?

Now we are presented, by our ostensible, putative national leadership, with a denial of climate change, and a coarse willingness to dismiss reasoned scientific consensus. Now we are presented daily with a steady drumbeat of hateful rhetoric and action regarding immigrants, refugees, Muslims, Mexicans, and others. Wait and watch the list grow. Now we are presented with the shameful need for further judicial review, and perhaps a doubled rejection, of misguided executive action. Now we are presented with a low level disdain for the highest, most proven forms and institutions in journalism across the nation. Now we are presented with a willingness, only temporarily stymied by legislative mayhem, to steal away health insurance, and thus health care, from 24 millions of our own citizens. And he said to me, Son of Man, can these bones live? Now we are presented with multiple varieties of gratuitous cruelty, including the insidious, callous, baseless slander of the former by the current president. Now we are presented with a national budget that increases military spending 10% and by the same percent decreases human funding. Now we are presented with apparent prevarications regarding remarkable, until this year what would have been unbelievable, machinations in support of collusion with Russian oligarchs. Now we are presented with falsehood morning, and falsehood evening, and a happy willingness to let the consequences of such falsehood abound. Now we are presented with a period in our own national history in which Shakespeare’s 66th sonnet lives, and groans, sauntering like a wild beast, across a humiliated land: strength by limping sway dislodged, art made tongue-tied by authority, folly doctor like controlling skill, simple truth miscalled simplicity, captive good attending captain ill. Things are worse than we begin to imagine. The creaky quasi resistance (let us give some credit where some is due) by courts, by journalists, by congress, by civil society (including a very few churches, one in twenty) that in limited measure we have seen thus far, comes from within the country. Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. Behold they say ‘our bones are dried up and our hope is lost and we are clean cut off’.

But we are mistaken naively to consider that with which we have been presented thus far as the great danger of our time. It is not. No, the great dangers are in foreign policy, where there are such few checks and balances, such few filters, such few even enfeebled civic capacities for resistance and rejection. The great danger is in choices made and then executed, bye executive action, with regard to war and peace, military activity, diplomatic silence, and, thus global harm. No. The motto of our leadership now is not America First, as horrid as that is in its own right, and given its own etymology. The real motto, rightly pronounced, is America First and America Last and America Only. Remember this, and well, when the next terror tragedy occurs. And one there will be.

A far better route is not only possible but proximate. We need only look north to Canada, with few exceptions, to compare and contrast our acute, abject fulsome humiliation here, with what a sane national policy and life can actually be like. Right next door. I shall put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land. Then you shall know that I the Lord have spoken, and I have done it, says the Lord.

Nouwen

To endure, over a decade to come, we shall need, profoundly need, the daily practice of the presence of God, here and now, as Scripture and Tradition steadily teach. Nouwen, now, is our guide.

We remembered last week the theological contours of Henri Nouwen’s teaching: compassion, redemption, presence, hospitality, and the figure of the ‘wounded healer’. His compassionate voice, and his capacity for community, make him a reliable and restorative conversation partner, in our time. So, now, Nouwen may help to ground us in our life of faith, work of love, and commitment to Christ crucified. Toward the end of his life, Nouwen took up residence in a community dedicated to shared, common care for disabled persons, located in Toronto, a L’Arche community named Daybreak, including a patient named Adam. In a moment one our Chapel leaders will say something about L’Arche, a movement developed by the blessed Canadian Christian leader, Jean Vanier, who for many of us, has stood out as an inspiration for ongoing life in Christ.

In a way it is not surprising to think of Nouwen leaving behind both academic gown and monk’s cowl to take up a wash basin, a towel, a cloth, and to practice the presence of God, as did Brother Lawrence, in the simplicity of service.

Most of us today, one judges, given the condition our condition is in, could benefit from a straight forward reminder, in Nouwen’s terms, of living in the present, in the ‘here and now’. My friend, a strong lay leader in our church, once said, ‘Wherever you are: be there. Wherever you are: be there.

Here are Nouwen’s seven guidelines, for such a manner of life, practice, discipline and presence. 1. Remember that every day is a new beginning. Imagine that we could live each day as a day full of promises (HJN, Here and Now, 16). 2. Dispense with unnecessary ‘oughts’ and ‘ifs’. The past and the future keep harassing us, the past with guilt, the future with worries. (18) 3. Celebrate birthdays. On birthdays we celebrate the present…we lift someone up and let everyone say, ‘we love you’. (20) 4. Live in the present. Prayer is the discipline of the moment (22). 5. Use repetition in prayer, repetition of a word, a phrase, a line, a prayer. Such a word reminds us of God’s love. We can put it in the center of our inner room, like a candle in a dark place (24). 6. Pray for others, pray specifically for particular people in unique ways. To pray for one another is, first of all, to acknowledge, in the presence of God, that we belong to each other as children of the same God. (26) 7. Stay close to the hub of life, that is to the center from which all else emerges. When I pray, I enter into the depth of my own heart, and find there the heart of God, who speaks to me of love (28).

Nouwen goes on, emphasizing the here and now, to name some of the substance of prayer. Joy. Suffering. Conversion. Discipline. Spirit. Compassion. Family. Relationships. Identity. In a way, his whole life work, might well have been an addendum to the Fourth Gospel.

John

For the Gospel of John, allowed a meager three-week interjection into our lectionary this month, by interruption of Matthew, is centrally, even solely, an announcement of presence, divine presence, the presence of God. Really only this theological, interpretative insight will make sense for you and me of John 11. 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). The preacher in John 11 announces presence. I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live. You are a person of faith? Practice that presence. You are a Christian? Practice that presence. You are a Methodist yearning for a faith amendable to culture and culture amenable to faith? Are you? Yes? Practice that presence. The ancient, troubled, community of the beloved disciple, that of John, has your back.

John 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…(His 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…(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 o the Synoptists is best accounted for by the experience of the glorious Christ constantly present to him and his community (204) (The Gospel of John and Christian Origins).

Nouwen invites, nay implores us, implores you, to practice the presence of God. Here and Now. Hic et Nunc. Here and Now. In worship. In prayer. In sacrament. In means of grace. In study. In fasting. In conversation. And perhaps in some forms of spiritual discipline new to and particular to our time? Say, in spiritual yoga?

Yoga

R: Welcome! It’s nice to see you here at our lectern this morning.

A: Thank you.

R\A: What is your name? Amy Aubrecht. Where are you from? Buffalo Where did you go to college? Cornell. Did you study theology? Yes, right next door.

R: Am I right that you served in a L’Arche community in Syracuse some years ago, and if so, what was that like?

A: Yes. In good Nouwen fashion, it combined compassion and community.

R: Thank you for being here. And thank you for living out and so reminding us of L’Arche, Vanier, and Nouwen. One more question. Do you lead spiritual yoga, as a prayerful discipline, every Thursday here at Marsh at 5pm? And if so, can others join?

A: Yes, and yes.

R: Open to all?

A: Yes.2017

R: Even an aging white guy with a comb-over?

A: Probably.

R: Five O’Clock Thursdays?

A: Yes.

R: We believe in God who has created and is creating….

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in Lenten Series 2017: In Conversation with Nouwen, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 04.2.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
March 26

In Conversation with Nouwen: The Wounded Healer

By Marsh Chapel

John 9:1-11

‘The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash’. Then I went and washed and received my sight.’

Let us draw wisdom from Scripture, insight from theology, and encouragement from experience this Lord’s day.

Scripture

(The Two Level Drama of the Fourth Gospel)

Let us draw wisdom from Scripture.

John 9 describes the healing of a man born blind, and the communal controversy surrounding that healing. Like the rest of the Gospel, this passage reports two layers of healing, of blindness, of community, and of controversy. On one hand, the passage remembers, perhaps by the aid of a source or as part of a source, a moment in the ministry of Jesus (30ad), in which a man is given sight. On the other hand, the passage announces the spiritual unshackling of a hero in thecommunity (90ad), who bears witness to what Jesus has done for him, no matter the repercussions from others, from parents, from family, from community.

The preacher in the Johannine community of the late first century is telling the story of the Son of Man. To do so, he celebrates the courageous witness to healing, and the courageous endurance of expulsion, of a man born blind. Here, he says, is what I mean by faith. The story he uses comes, through un-trackable oral and written traditions, from 30ad. The story he tells comes from 90ad. Every character in the story has two roles. Jesus is both earthly rabbi and heavenly redeemer. The blind man is both historic patient and current hero. The family is from both Palestinian memory and diaspora synagogue. The Jews are both the contemporaries of Jesus and the nearby inhabitants of the synagogue, the Johannine community’s former home. When Jesus gives sight, Christ gives freedom. When the blind one is cured, the congregation sees truth. When the man is cast out of his synagogue, the community of the beloved disciple recognizes their own most recent expulsion. When the Jews criticize Jesus, the synagogue is criticizing the church. When the healing story ends, the life of faith begins. His voice both addresses you and emanates from you. Not your voice, his is nonetheless your voice.

John 9 illumines the central struggle of the community, their bitter spiritual itinerancy from the familiar confines of Christian Judaism, out into the unknown wilderness of Jewish Christianity. History and the history of religions bear manifold witness to this kind of crisis in communal identity, and the long hard trail of travel from primary to secondary identity. In retrospect, as the community gathers itself in its new setting (the pilgrims in Boston, the Mormons in Utah) the story of the tearful trail itself becomes the heart of communal memory and imagination.

What is here unearthed in John 9 can also and readily be applied to the rest of the Gospel of John as well: to the wedding at Cana, to Nicodemus, to the woman at the well, to the healing on the water, to the feeding of the thousands, to the controversies with the Jews, to the raising of Lazarus, to the farewell discourse, to the trial and passion. All of these reflect the experience in dramatic interaction between the synagogue and John’s church. This includes, later, the mysterious figure of the Paraclete, the Spirit, who functions as Jesus’ eternal presence in the world, Jesus, God ‘striding on earth’ (Kasemann). In this way, the Paraclete himself creates the two level drama. Where the world is mono focal, and can see only the historical level of Jesus in history or only the theological level of Jesus in the witness of the Christian community, the Paraclete binds the two together. The Word dwelling among us, and our beholding his glory, are not past events only. They transpire in a two level drama. They transpire both on the historical and contemporary levels, OR NOT AT ALL. Their transpiration on both levels is itself the good news, an overture to the rapturous discoveries of freedom in disappointment, grace in dislocation, and love in departure.

Wisdom from Scripture.

Theology

(The Voice of Henri Nouwen on the Wounded Healer)

Let us draw insight from theology.

In a season of general, national interest in wounds and healing, it is timely, serendipitous even, for us to hear about the healing of the man born blind in John 9, and more so to hear from our celebrated, honored Roman Catholic theological conversation partner for Lent 2017, Henri Nouwen, of blessed memory, on his most revered theme, that of the ‘wounded healer’. His book of that title reminded another generation, and can teach us all still, about the interconnection between our own wounds and the healing of others. Nouwen explored in that monograph, The Wounded Healer, four different doors of entry into ministry: the suffering world, a suffering generation, human suffering in general, and the condition of the suffering minister. While Nouwen’s work is sometimes criticized as ‘theology lite’, its accessibility has provided many with a profound sense of the relational dimensions of gospel, of philosophy, of preaching, of ministry and of therapy.

His chief concern he identifies clearly (p 47): ‘The task of Christian leaders is to bring out the best in everyone and to lead them forward to a more human community; the danger is that their skillful diagnostic eye will become more an eye for the distant and detailed analysis than the eye of a compassionate partner. And if priests and ministers think that more skill training is the solution for the problem of Christian leadership, they may end up being more frustrated and disappointed than the leaders of the past. More training and structure are just as necessary as more bread for the journey. But just as bread given without love can bring war instead of peace, professionalism without compassion will turn forgiveness into a gimmick, and the kingdom to come into a blindfold’.

Compassion, not analysis, comes first. Compassion, suffering with: It is not the task of Christian leaders to go around nervously trying to redeem people, to save them at the last minute, to put them on the right track. For we are redeemed, once and for all. Christian leaders are called to help others affirm this great news, and to make visible in daily events the fact that behind the curtain of our painful symptoms, there is something to be seen: the face of God in whose image we are shaped (48).

The manner by which compassion comes into life is, for Nouwen, utterly personal. While he was not a Lutheran—far from it—he would probably have agreed with Luther that the preaching of the Gospel is ‘one beggar telling another where they both may find bread’. In fact, there is hardly a more personal calling than a calling to pastoral ministry. And what a privilege it is to enter and live in such a calling. A privilege to be able to be with people at the dawn of life, in the twilight of life, under the shadows of life. To hold murmuring infants, to confirm squirming teenagers, to bless nervous not to say clueless grooms and brides, to wring hands and pray at the bedside when the outcomes are uncertain at best, to listen in tears to the pain of loss, divorce, failure, emptiness, to stand over the open grave in quiet. You can make a lot more money doing something else, and you can achieve a lot more influence, of a certain sort, doing something else, and you can have a lot more free time doing something else, and there are many worthy callings, many ways to keep faith. But there is nothing quite like the privilege—the joy, the hurt, the rigor, the demand—the privilege of pastoral ministry. And how hungry our people are for it. There is nothing else like it in all of life. ‘The emptiness of the past and future can never be filled with words, but only with the presence of a human being’. (69).

Perhaps Nouwen is best remembered for this phrase, ‘the wounded healer’. ‘Since it is their task to make visible the first vestiges of liberation for others, (ministers) must bind their own wounds carefully, in anticipation of the moment when they will be needed. They are each called to be the wounded healer, the ones who must not only look after their own wounds but at the same time be prepared to heal the wounds of others. They are both wounded ministers and healing ministers.’ (88) Now, when the balance between the two goes off-kilter, and wounds eclipse health, we have a problem. But the appellation is true enough, when truly pursued. It is perhaps most apparent in loneliness. The ministry is lonely, but only lonely in a way representative of all faithful life. In the last few years, the utter uniqueness of grief, for each person, the individuality of the way we grieve—the very opposite of one size fits all—has stood out, for me. Your grief, though shared and made common in the community of faith, is nonetheless idiosyncratic—your own most self in tears, your spiritual fingerprint, your religious voice, your manner of walking in walking the faith. All the cautions of Nouwen’s book are worthy. But the capacity for hospitality, the power in hospitality, that comes here into ministry is unmistakable. Hospitality makes anxious disciples into powerful witnesses, makes suspicious owners into generous givers, and makes close-minded sectarians into recipients of new ideas and insights (95)….Ministers are not doctors whose primary task is to take away pain. Rather, they deepen the pain to a level where it can be shared. When people come with their loneliness to ministers, they can only expect that their loneliness will be understood and felt, so that they no longer have to run away from it, but can accept it as an expression of the basic human condition.

Insight from theology.

Experience

(A Thought on Entering Ministry, 1953, Rev. Mr. Irving G. Hill)

From experience we may draw encouragement.

Here is a memory, written in 2006, drawn from 1953. That is, sixty-five years past, it is about the same distance from us in time as was the Gospel of John from the events in the life, death and destiny of Jesus of Nazareth. The writer, my father, was soon to graduate from the School of Theology.

“One balmy spring evening, in the early fifties, I was returning to our apartment at 17 Yarmouth Street in Boston…

As I walked across Huntington Avenue, I looked to my left and saw the lighted dome of the Christian Science Mother Church. I had seen it many times before. I had taken our youth fellowship there to visit and walk through the giant globe that is there. But this evening as I made that familiar crossing I was struck, not by an auto, but by the reality that in just a few days I would receive my theological degree and become the pastor of the Brewerton Methodist Church.

How could this be? What was I to do? I was only 24 years old. I had never dealt with death except in theory. I had never sat with a couple after the death of a child. I had never counseled a couple preparing for marriage except in a classroom setting. To my recollection I had never spoken with a person who had no belief in God or saw any reason for one. I had never thought how a church budget was raised or more significantly how my salary would be paid. In a few days, I would be facing all of these things and more.

I recalled a conversation that occurred at the just past annual conference with a committee from the Brewerton church. One of the saints said to me, “Young man, if you get a better offer, you had better take it, I don’t know how we will be able to pay your salary.” How about that?

Now, I had grown up in the church, attended church school, taught church school. I had been active in the youth fellowship at the local level and the conference level. Marcia and I had spent one summer as life guards at Camp Casowasco. But now I was to be the pastor of a church in a community that I had only driven through.

Of course, I had graduated from a Methodist related university and had the privilege of studying at one of the better theological schools for three years, but on that June evening in the middle of that empty thoroughfare, I was totally lost.

Then I heard, “You don’t think you are going to do this all by yourself do you? Surely I will be with you.”

I heard that voice as clearly as I have ever heard anything and it has remained with me for these past 53 years.

It has taken the form of a loving, supportive wife, a devoted family, dedicated and caring lay people, inspired bishops, superintendents, and brother and sister clergy, group commanders, wing chaplains and people of God, just like you.”

Encouragement from experience.

Scripture. Theology. Experience. Wisdom. Insight. Encouragement.

‘The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash’. Then I went and washed and received my sight.’
Amen.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in Lenten Series 2017: In Conversation with Nouwen, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.26.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
March 19

In Conversation with Nouwen: The Life of the Beloved

By Marsh Chapel

John 4:5-42

Life for All

‘A spring of water gushing up to eternal life’.

The gospel is our spoken gift of faith.

Some will have seen the recent film ‘La La Land’, and recall the haunting soulful tune that knits the story together. That phrase of music is the refrain from which the story takes wing and to which it returns, moment by moment, as your life and soul life return, again and again, to the gospel, a spoken gift of faith, the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved us and gave himself for us. Spoken, sung.

Sung. Every bird sings faith, over the globe, through all time. Thurman loved penguins, odd and remote, and their dress, and their song. Listen. Along the Charles, in the spring, we make way for goslings and ducklings. Early in the summer mornings, out in the farmland where we live in the summer, the northeastern tip of Appalachia, and where we will be buried, where we are at home, at dawn a rooster. Two eagles—they too mate for life, as in Christian marriage—soaring--imagine their music. The owl at night. A swan song, a silver swan, who living had no note. The gospel is a bird in song, and all nature sings. Even if or when the preaching of the gospel by human imperfection abates, as it does threaten to do, birdsong will carry the tune. God can preach God’s gospel through birdsong.

Spoken. Derek Walcott, of Boston University, a Methodist: I seek, as climate seeks its style, to write verse crisp as sand, clear as sunlight, cold as the curled wave, ordinary as a tumbler of island water.

John

Father Raymond Brown judged our passage today, John 4, to be the loveliest, finest narrative in the Fourth Gospel. The woman at the well, the Samaritan woman, meets Jesus and meets us in conversation. She is the quintessential conversationalist.

And what a wonder is there in the faintest conversation, let alone this dominical discussion! Ours today, from John 4, is holy, telling conversation, full of the unexpected, full of surprise, full of the utterly personal, full of revelation, full of boundary breaking courage, full of what is saving, healthy, lasting, meaningful, real, and good. Conversation thrives when you know your content, your work, and your audience. There is a mystery lurking under the disarming surface of the simplest conversation. My friend says her favorite two words are ‘awe’ and ‘conversation’. We could add that the two are not very far removed, or apart from each other.

It may have been that the community which gave birth to the Gospel of John included some Samaritans. This would explain the prominence of this long, intricate passage, devoted to the conversation of Jesus with a Samaritan woman. The Samaritans were outsiders. Here, one of their own takes center stage. In our time when those outside—immigrants, refugees, the poor, the different, the other—are steadily subjected to heightened measures of exclusion, we benefit from reminders, like this from John 4, that we are called as people of faith, called as Christian people, to care, succor, attention and protection of the ‘least’ among us. The larger question, and it is very much an open question, is whether the humiliation spreading out right now through civil society and culture--wherein inherited, precious forms of civil society are daily shredded with a gratuitous cruelty--coming now to us over the next decade, will chasten us, will humble us, will in that way strengthen us by the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. He it is, today, who announces His own presence, and Lordship, in the course of a meandering conversation: I am He, the One who is speaking to you…A spring of water gushing up to eternal life

Lenten Conversation

Throughout the year 2017, at Marsh Chapel, we are engaged in ministry with attention to conversation. Our Summer National Preacher Series will engage in conversation about new directions in discipleship. Our Lenten Series, beginning today, will engage in conversation with Henri Nouwen. Over the past decade, Lent by Lent, we have identified a theological conversation partner for the Lenten sermons, broadly speaking, out of the Calvinist tradition. For the next decade, we turn to the Catholic tradition. Over the next decade, beginning this Lent 2017, the Marsh pulpit, a traditionally Methodist one, will turn left, not right, toward Rome not Geneva, and we will preach with, and learn from the Roman Catholic tradition. We began March 5 with Henri Nouwen, and Sacrament, continuing last week with Nouwen and Reaching Out. Today, Nouwen and the Life of the Beloved.

Nouwen (from the ‘Nouwen Society’)

“The internationally renowned priest and author, respected professor and beloved pastor Henri Nouwen wrote over 40 books on the spiritual life. He corresponded regularly in English, Dutch, German, French and Spanish with hundreds of friends and reached out to thousands through his Eucharistic celebrations, lectures and retreats. Since his death in 1996, ever-increasing numbers of readers, writers, teachers and seekers have been guided by his literary legacy. Nouwen’s books have sold over 8 million copies and been published in over 28 languages.

Born in Holland, 1932, Nouwen felt called to the priesthood at a very young age. He was ordained in 1957 as a diocesan priest and studied psychology at the Catholic University of Nijmegen. In 1964 he moved to the United States to study at the Menninger Clinic. He went on to teach at the University of Notre Dame, and the Divinity Schools of Yale and Harvard. For several months during the 1970s, Nouwen lived and worked with the Trappist monks in the Abbey of the Genesee, and in the early 1980s he lived with the poor in Peru. In 1985 he was called to join L’Arche in Trosly, France, the first of over 100 communities founded by Jean Vanier where people with developmental disabilities live with assistants. A year later Nouwen came to make his home at L’Arche Daybreak near Toronto, Canada. He died suddenly on September 21^st, 1996, in Holland and is buried in Richmond Hill, Ontario.”

Nouwen believed that what is most personal is most universal; he wrote, “By giving words to these intimate experiences I can make my life available to others.”

Servants of God

Nouwen dedicated his life to the practice of genuine conversation, genuine faithfulness. He eschewed the false formal and prized the personal in piety. A story, from the same period, from Charles Rice at Drew, Nouwen would hae loved. A few years ago Rice spoke about the servant of the servants of God. He told about an Easter when he was in Greece. He sat in the Orthodox church and watched the faithful in devotions. There was a great glassed icon of Christ, to which, following prayers, women and men would move, then kneel, then as they rose they kissed the glassed icon. Every so often a woman dressed in black would emerge from the shadows with some cleanser, or windex, and a cloth and –psh, psh—would clean the image, making it clear again. Washing clean the image again, and freeing it from so much encrusted piety. And he had a revelation about service and power and authority and leadership. As he watched the woman in black cleaning the icon, he realized that this was what his ministry was meant to be. A daily washing away from the face of Christ all that obscured, all that distorted, all that blocked others from seeing his truth, goodness and beauty. Including a lot of piety.

Life of the Beloved

Years ago, by accident, Nouwen met a man named Fred, a journalist who wanted to write a novel. (We had a saying in our family, when intrusive questions arose; ‘Are you a journalist or writing a book?’) Well, Fred was the former and hoping to do the latter. But he feared a shift in vocation, for all the usual suspect reasons. Henri though persisted in encouraging the man to leave his job and write his book. He went out of his way. Nouwen procured him a grant to do so! So the man entered a new season of vocational discernment, and though he never finished the novel, he did find a deeper level of living, a sense of meaning, and, in the bargain, a great friend in Nouwen.

We might pause to wonder a bit about our callings. Is this your final resting place in vocation—where you are now I mean? You have heard some sort of call, and heeded, or you would not be where you are. But what about the second call? Is there a knocking at your spiritual door, asking you to consider a second call, another call? Fred was a good journalist, but he heard a second call, to write, and in hearing, and in heeding, though not in his case in succeeding, he found himself closer to his own most self. Life is a series of invitations, and a process of discernment. We might pause right now, in front of God and everybody, to wonder about our callings.

Last year at commencement we had a speaker who told about a second call. Not all commencement addresses need or even deserve remembrance. But it had a diamond embedded in it, a treasure buried in a field. The speaker graduated from BU as an actress and went to La La Land. She did what aspiring actors do. She waited tables. For a year. And another. And a third. Then she got a job, part time, on the business side of show business. You know what? She liked it. And it liked her. Then she said: “I looked at my acting career lived out in waiting tables, and I made a decision. I decided my calling was to something else. I decided to (here is the gem) EDIT MY DREAMS.” She decided to edit her dreams. So Nina Tassler, waitress, became the head of CBS entertainment. Yes. Sometimes a second call comes along and invites you to edit your dreams.

Henri Nouwen invited Fred to edit his dreams. And he did. Then Fred invited Henri to edit his dreams, in this way. He asked Nouwen to write a simple book about the spiritual life in a secular world, a book for ordinary people, not academics, ordinary people, not clergy, ordinary people, not even religious people. This took Nouwen out of his comfort zone, but out of that zone he went. He wrote a book, The Life of the Beloved.

Our Gospel today, John 4, has a radiance of love within it, as does Nouwen’s book. Here, in brief, is what Nouwen wrote, this esteemed Roman Catholic theologian, this Yale academic, this profoundly erudite priest. It is portable, what he wrote. You can carry it home after the sermon. You are beloved! You are loved. God loves, and loves you. And you need not do anything to prove it, to earn it, to achieve it, to deserve it. You: beloved. That is, in a single word, the life of the spirit. Beloved.

But of course Nouwen went on to develop this theme, the trails and traces of the spirit in the single word. He put together a quadrilateral, what we can call the love quartet today. First, wrote Nouwen, to become beloved, we need to acknowledge that we are ‘taken’. Chosen. Wanted. And grateful for it! Second, to become beloved, we want to acknowledge that we are ‘blessed’. You are precious in God’s sight, blessed, beloved. As you are, not as you might be later on. Right now, as you are right now. You claim your blessing through the practice of prayer and through attention to presence. My friend says her two favorite words are conversation and awe. Well. There. Memorize a prayer or three (The Lord’s Prayer, Wesley’s Table Graces, the Prayer of Assisi). Third, to live as beloved we want to acknowledge our brokenness. “Each human being suffers in a way no other human being suffers.” (87) It will not do to repress our sadness, our resentment, our fear, our anger. No. We are human, beloved human beings, and so are honest about our fractures. Nouwen then wrote about AIDS, a crucial subject in that time (1992). To heal we have to step toward our pain. Here we can all learn from the 12 step programs, as long as we realize that there are many ways to be addicted that can have nothing to do with substances. You might be surprised to know that Nouwen’s most personal example was his grief at the death of Leonard Bernstein. Fourth, we are given, as beloved ones. We are loved, but not just for our own sakes. As Huston Smith—similarly an academic, similarly a theologian though a Methodist, similarly a cleric—put it, thinking perhaps of his parents who were missionaries in China: ‘we are in good hands, and so it behooves us to bear one another’s burdens’. When we enjoy others, and with joy give ourselves to others, and engage in enjoyment among others, then, in reality, we are given, because we are giving. You only truly have what you give away. Starting—and ending—with your time. Here Nouwen concludes, and rightly, by drawing us toward our own death, and the way we give of ourselves not just living but dying. (You remember my OOPS advice, as we prepare for the end of life: obituary, order of worship, photograph, special papers.) But Nouwen means something more: ‘the spirit of love once freed from our mortal bodies will blow where it wills’. (125). Chosen, Blessed, Broken, Given. “Eternal Life is the full revelation of what we have been and have lived all along” (137).

By grace we too, you and I, have been chosen and set in time and space, to live in faith. By grace we too, you and I have been blessed, sometimes with happiness and sometimes with loss, sometimes with fulfillment and sometimes with unrequited love. By grace, we too, you and I, in honesty, in confession, must add, we have been broken, our brokenness best sung maybe by Leonard Cohen—ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in…forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in…there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in…that’s how the light gets in. By grace we too, you and I have been given, to be gifts and become givers, to choose, tomorrow, one pure act of kindness, to imagine it, plan it, pray over it, do it, and watch it recede in the rear view window.

In the student union, Thursday, a young pianist, of limited ability, but of great heart, played a tune, the haunting soulful tune you may have heard, remembered, from a current film. That phrase of music is the refrain from which the story takes wing and to which it returns, moment by moment, as your life and soul life return, again and again, to the gospel, a spoken gift of faith, the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved us and gave himself for us.

A spring of water gushing up to eternal life.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in Lenten Series 2017: In Conversation with Nouwen, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.19.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
March 12

Reaching Out ad interim

By Marsh Chapel

Genesis 12: 1-4a

Psalm 121

John 3: 1-17

Sunday’s Palms are Wednesday’s ashes as another Lent begins;

thus we kneel before our Maker in contrition for our sins.

We have marred baptismal pledges, in rebellion, gone astray;

now, returning, seek forgiveness; grant us pardon, Lord, this day!

We have failed to love our neighbors, their offences to forgive,

have not listened to their troubles, nor have cared just how they live;

we are jealous, proud, impatient, loving overmuch our things;

may the yielding of our failings be our Lenten offerings.

We are hasty to judge others, blind to proof of human need;

and our lack of understanding demonstrates our inner greed;

we have wasted earth’s resources; want and suffering we’ve ignored;

come and cleanse us, then restore us; make new hearts within us, Lord!

-Rae E. Whitney, 1982

This Lent, as every Lent, and truly all our days, we undertake the work of turning and returning to God. We strive to live our lives reflecting the righteousness God graciously bestows upon us through the sacrifice of Godself in Jesus. For us, unlike for God, righteous action is never pure or absolute. Rather, our actions are situated, contextual, relational, and so reflected as if through a glass, dimly.

In this year’s cycle of the lectionary, our Gospel readings come primarily from Matthew. As we have been exploring over the past couple of months, in conversation with Albert Schweitzer and Amos Wilder, the ethic offered particularly in the synoptic gospels, that is, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, is an interim ethic, an ethic for a time between times, an ethic for an already but not yet eschatology that eagerly anticipates the immanent return of Jesus next week, tomorrow, or perhaps even this very afternoon. Today, however, we interrupt your regularly scheduled Matthean programming for a Johannine advertisement. As Dean Hill has so carefully taught us over the past decade of his ministry here at Marsh Chapel, the Gospel of John is situated and contextualized in a community struggling to cope with their disappointment that Jesus had not, and for us, indeed, has not, returned with anything like the immanent expectations of his earliest followers.

And so, here in the third chapter, we find Jesus teaching Nicodemus, who is struggling to understand how to live a spiritual life in the way of Jesus. He desires the kingdom of God, but is desperately confused as to how to get there, or even what experiencing the kingdom of God might really mean. Jesus’ answers are not terribly clarifying to him, as Nicodemus in a sense represents the synoptic expectation of Jesus’ immanent return and John’s community’s disappointment and struggle to adapt to a new reality.

Here, then, in John, is not the abolishment of the interim but rather a shift of understanding to a different sort of interim, an interim demarcated not so much temporally as socially. The Johannine community is living in the interim between the synagogue and the church. This is not an interim of time but an interim of values, of ideas, of policies, of programs. What is needed, then, is not an ethic for preparing for the end times but rather an ethic, or better yet a spirituality, of resistance to values, ideas, policies, and programs that undermine the kingdom of God we are being born into and that is being born in us. “You must be born from above,” and “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

We too are experiencing life ad interim. We too are being afflicted by values, ideas, policies, and programs that undermine the kingdom of God. We too, urgently, need to seek out resources for constructing an ethic and a spirituality of resistance to these demonic afflictions. “I lift up my eyes to the hills; from where is my help to come? My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.”

In this Lenten season we are invited to consider the wisdom of Henri Nouwen, Roman Catholic priest, pastoral theologian, teacher, pastor, spiritual guide. Saint Henri, I have found, provides timely and salient resources for resistance, an ethic and spirituality of resisting by reaching out, in a small book by that title. Deeply informed by the pastoral psychology of his day, Nouwen invites us to make three spiritual conversions that we might resist in a manner that is effective, sustainable, and lives out the values of the kingdom that we seek to replace with the demonic values of the interim moment.

First, Saint Henri invites us to convert our loneliness to solitude. Loneliness characterizes much of life in the interim, characterized as loneliness is by a sense of anxiety at having been excluded, shut out, cut off, denied, rejected, and abandoned. Anxiety leads to frustration leads to agitation. Loneliness is a state of desperate and yet seemingly unattainable desire for connection.

How on earth could we possibly be lonely, surrounded as we are, especially in the city, by so many people? Apparently, the real question is actually how can we not be lonely? Surgeon General Vivek Murthy regularly points out that the most serious health issue in the United States is neither cancer nor heart disease nor obesity but isolation. The Boston Globe Magazine, on Friday, ran the headline, and pushed it to its subscribers by email, “The biggest threat facing middle-age men isn’t smoking or obesity. It’s loneliness.” Dear friends, loneliness is real and it is decidedly not all in our heads but in our hearts and our bodies, our physiology.

Converting loneliness to solitude is thus an urgent public health issue. It entails first a turn inward to recognize that our overwhelming and anxious desire for outward connection is likely rooted in a lack of inward connection among the various parts of ourselves. We, you and I, each and every one of us, are not singular selves but a community of selves with various needs, desires, longings, aspirations, loves, fears, apprehensions, insights, and confusions. Solitude, then, is the cultivation of inner relationships among these parts of ourselves, it is a becoming present to our selves. Solitude generates a calm, centered, quiet, restful way of being in the world by arranging the voices of ourselves into a consonant harmony.

Cultivating solitude is not only good for our own health. After all how could we possibly expect to harmonize our marriages, our families, our friendships, our workplaces, or our communities if we are shouting dissonant juxtapositions of lonely anxiety? Indeed, solitude is the groundwork of resistance, as Nouwen points out, by in turn converting “fearful reactions into a loving response.” Demonic values, demonic ideas, demonic policies, and demonic programs will never be defeated by fear and anger. They can only be overcome by love. “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love” (1 John 4: 18). The love that emerges from solitude is the groundwork of a creative response to the demons of our interim moment, and as Howard Thurman reminds us, “meaningful and creative experiences between peoples can be more compelling than all the ideas, concepts, faiths, fears, ideologies and prejudices that divide them.”

Second, Saint Henri invites us to convert our hostility to hospitality. In a very real sense, the movement from loneliness to solitude is a movement from inner hostility to inner hospitality, and so this second conversion is simply its outward expression. Of course, moving from loneliness to solitude is merely being hospitable to ourselves; oh, how the shift from inner to outward becomes exponentially more fraught! Even in 1975 Nouwen noted that, “Our society seems to be increasingly full of fearful, defensive, aggressive people anxiously clinging to their property and inclined to look at their surrounding world with suspicion, always expecting an enemy to suddenly appear, intrude, and do harm.” Not only saint, but prophet, was Henri.

Boston College philosopher Richard Kearney is wont to point out that the distance between hostility and hospitality is really quite small, rooted, as both words are, in the Latin word hostis. Alas, over time, the demonic has driven a wedge between them, our growing fearfulness increasingly cutting off any inclination toward “the creation of a free and friendly space where we can reach out to strangers and invite them to become our friends.” Hostility is rooted not only in fear but in the need and desire to own and to control, whereas hospitality finds its grounding in freedom and so in service to the stranger.

Like solitude, hospitality is part of the groundwork of resistance. Hospitality, dear friends, is not merely a posture of receptivity toward strangers. Hospitality also involves confrontation. It is not hospitable to welcome a stranger into your house and then to leave. Hospitality means welcoming the stranger to freely be themselves in the presence of an other, of difference, of strangeness. “Confrontation results from the articulate presence, the presence within boundaries, of the host to the guest by which the host offers her- or himself as a point of orientation and a frame of reference” (239).

Now, dear friends, it would be easy to think, especially this week, in the wake of a second attempt at an executive order restricting immigration from certain Muslim-majority countries, that all of this talk of hospitality toward strangers should be a guidebook for welcoming refugees and immigrants. Indeed, we have much yet to learn about welcoming those who have been driven from their homes by violence in fear and anguish. We must learn to bless Abram that he may bless us, else we must surely be accursed by God.

But do not be fooled! Our need to convert hostility to hospitality is not primarily to the immigrant or to the refugee. It is to each other! To one another, to you and to I, to us, here, in this place, on this campus, in this city, and across this great nation. Resistance is not hospitality to demonic values, demonic ideas, demonic policies, and demonic programs. Resistance is hospitably receiving those whose choices, whose decisions, whose actions, whose votes enabled the demonic to take hold, and of confronting them in articulate presence by saying, “This is not who we are.”

Finally, Saint Henri invites us to convert our illusion to prayer. Perhaps particularly when suffering from frantic loneliness and fearful hostility, but even regardless, it is easy to become convinced that our value, our worth, is manifest in “the things we own, the people we know, the plans we have, and the successes we ‘collect’” (251). Nouwen refers to this misplaced conviction as the “illusion of immortality,” but we might better think of it as the illusion of materiality, the illusion that the things of this life are somehow directly transferable to eternity.

To convert such illusion to prayer is to recognize, to remember, to re-encounter the transcendent source, goal, and ground of our value, of our worth, of our dignity. In Lent we remember that we are dust, yes, but our dustiness is still in the image and likeness of God. Prayer, then, is the practice of recognition, the practice of remembrance, the practice of encounter with the true source, the true goal, the true ground of our value, and thus, our very being.

Prayer is the third element of our emerging ethic and spirituality of resistance because prayer is the language of community. Community is what is built when strangers encounter one another hospitably, honoring the harmonious solitude of each constituent member. In order for community to communicate, however, the medium of their communication must transcend any particular communicant. Communication must arise from what a community has in common, namely the source, the goal, and the ground of the value of the communicants individually and together.

Resistance is not possible alone. No one person, by themselves, lonely, hostile, and suffering under illusion, can make one bit of difference in the face of demonic values, demonic ideas, demonic policies, and demonic programs. Resistance requires community, it requires creativity and partnership, it requires fellowship to sustain it for the long haul. Resistance requires community, community requires communication, communication happens in language, and prayer is the language of community. Resistance, then, is impossible without prayer.

Dear friends, will you resist with me? This Lent, will you cultivate an ethic, a spirituality of resistance to the demonic values, the demonic ideas, the demonic policies, and the demonic programs of our interim moment? Will you resist by reaching out? Will you reach out to your selves to nurture and cultivate their disparate voices into a harmonious solitude? Will you reach out to the strangers you encounter and offer them a receptive and confrontational hospitality? Will you reach out to God, in whose image and likeness you are, that in community you may find partnership and strength for the journey?

In the conclusion to Reaching Out, Saint Henri prophetically notes that, “We are living in this short time, a time, indeed, full of sadness and sorrow. To live this short time in the spirit of Jesus Christ means to reach out from the midst of our pains and to let them be turned into joy by the love of the One who came within our reach. We do not have to deny or avoid our loneliness, our hostilities and illusions. To the contrary: When we have the courage to let these realities come to our full attention, understand them, and confess them, then they can slowly be converted into solitude, hospitality, and prayer” (282).

We are indeed living in this short time, an interim moment full of sadness and sorrow when values of love, freedom, courage, compassion, and justice have given way to hate, fear, cowardice, anger, and control. Resist! Reach out! Reach out to yourself. Reach out to one another. Reach out to God. Resist! Resist! Resist the demonic spirit of this interim moment by reaching out, and so be born from above that you may see the kingdom of God. Amen.

- Brother Lawrence A. Whitney, LC†, University Chaplain for Community Life

posted in Br. Lawrence A. Whitney, LC†, Lenten Series 2017: In Conversation with Nouwen on 03.12.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Lawrence Whitney