Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

By Marsh Chapel

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Preface

By grace we are gathered together, here, come Sunday, for meditation and communion together.  It is a high moment, a rare privilege, an unfathomable gift, a moment of grace. It is a high moment, a rare privilege, an unfathomable gift, a moment of grace.

Our own individual lives, and our personal lives caught entangled in the tragedies of the globe around, our being and being together, are, for a brief moment, one holy hour, touched, touched, touched by, well, the grace of God.  This touch will not erase, eliminate or conclude the dimensions of dreaded death about us—loss in family, illness near or very near, slaughter and retreat in Ukraine, hunger and hatred in Gaza, expanding chaos in our own American political, social and cultural life—or the evanescent but present, lingering awareness of our very mortality. But, still the touch, as we meditate at communion, may, strangely, personally, help us, give us hope, give us stamina, give us strength, give us the chance to rise and live and face another day.

John and Lent

Our lesson from the fourth gospel gives us a stylized memory, in and through which we prepare.

The long weeks of patience, wandering, and wilderness which form our yearly Lenten pilgrimage prepare us.

Notice that John has rearranged the furniture of the gospel. He has placed the temple cleansing at the outset of the story.  He decided to make a change.

We become who we are by daring to decide. We discover the power of imagination by daring to find the courage to decide.  Choose.  Choose!

Matthew, Mark and Luke, the gospels other than John, mark Jesus’ downfall at the temple. As he attacks inherited religion, as he cleanses the temple, his doom is sealed. In John, it is the resurrection of Lazarus, long chapters later, which seals his fate. But John too sees the power of decision in Jesus’ appearance in the temple. In fact, in the second chapter, today in our hearing—have we heard?–John opened chapter two with Cana, and the promise of incarnation enshrined in that wedding, and closes with the temple, and the forecast of the cross, the hour, the word, which is his abiding interest. Jesus is himself the temple which others will destroy. Here, he gives his new view of the future, not to be awaited somewhere in the clouds. It is taking place now in the life and destiny of Jesus. All throughout, throughout his life, and throughout your own, there is the struggle, this struggle, his struggle, for truth and grace. This is Jesus’ struggle. And it is your struggle too. He becomes himself, his own most self not his almost self, in dealing with decision, in this today’s decision to affront and confront inherited religion.

Faith is finding the courage to choose. Faith is dealing with decision.
Memory is our aid here. Remember Proust comparing ‘the low and shameful gate of experience, and the other… the golden gate of imagination’ (RTP, 401). Memory feeds imagination. Faith is finding the power, receiving the power to choose, to reflect on choosing, to take responsibility for the choice, to learn with choosing, and to address the consequences of choice. Dealing with decision means dealing too with regret and failure. This too is faith in action. Listen again to the regret in Yeats’ poem…

No single story would they find
Of an unbroken happy mind,
A finish worthy of the start.
Young men know nothing of this sort…
Observant old men know it well

This year, in our worship, intermittently when not reading Mark, we will scale a far greater promontory, the highest peak in the Bible, which is the Gospel of John. With every cut-back trail, at every rest point, atop every lookout, with every majestic view, this spiritual gospel will address you with the choice of freedom, with the ongoing need to choose, and in choosing to find a life of belonging and meaning, personal identity and global imagination. Yes, choosing diversity and equity and inclusion. Yes, and also, choosing unity and justice and love. More personally, this Gospel helps those who struggle with dislocation and disappointment and departure.  Is that you?

Now the Passover of the Jews was near.  There are three Passovers in John, not just one.  This is where the notion of Jesus’ three-year ministry comes from.  These feasts may be more symbolic than chronological.  This cleansing of the temple, here, is a moment of identity, for Jesus, and for his followers.  And so, for you and me.  In the other Gospels, it is the cleansing of the temple that takes Jesus to the cross.  Not here.  That comes with the raising of Lazarus nine chapters later.  Jesus begins his ministry, today, here in the temple, where in Matthew, Mark and Luke, he ends his ministry.  John makes the end the beginning and the beginning the end.  Earlier, in this chapter, the changing of water into wine is meant to symbolize that the old is over, and something completely new has come.  It is hard to hear, to read, the Gospel of John, and not shiver, and not quiver.

To Be

You have come here this morning in order to lead a life of faith, to lead a Christian life, to lead a life worthy of God.

So, you recognize the need, for time.  Especially for time, a sacred, discreet hour, every Lord’s Day, for worship.  For quiet, for meditation, for prayer.  For faith—the joy of faith, the language of faith, the community of faith, the communion of faith, the gift of faith.  Faith needs practice.  You cannot learn a language without practice.  You cannot play a sport well without practice.  You cannot master a musical instrument without practice.  It takes time.  Time it is said heals all wounds. But that is not fully true.  Time does not heal all wounds, though all wounds benefit from the healing in time.  As human beings, stretching to feel the reach of being human, we want and need to have the time for such.  Sunday at 11am in a church pew, alongside a community family, within a sacred space, in the hearing of holy writ, in the promise of the mystery of sacrament, that is a place and time and way in which to revere time, and to make time reverent.  A long time ago, in a benediction at the end of Sunday worship, I caught the eye of a friend.  Sixty years old, or so, she raised alone a needy son, while working full time at the neighborhood University.  The next Tuesday, without any warning, she suddenly died.  The precious hour of worship, and the little sentence of benediction, good word, have stayed present to me, in force, ever since.  We have one day at a time, no more, no less.

You have come here this morning in order to lead a life of faith, to lead a Christian life, to lead a life worthy of God.

So, you recognize the need for talent, for the right use of talent.  We read, some 800 of you daily, what has emerged now at Marsh Chapel as a significant means of grace, our electronically conveyed daily devotions.  We listen to the voices of our community, so varied and hopeful they are, in these brief writings.  Our colleague Alec Vaughn reminded us of this, in his passage on Thomas Merton.  Merton said that to be a saint is to be your own best self, your own true self, your own-most self.  Thurman said the same, don’t cut against the grain of your own wood.  And this means attending to the things, not only the things that make for a living, but that the things that make for a life.  You have seen people who showed you the way.  The mechanic who spent Saturdays teaching children carpentry.  The dentist who found time to sing in the choir.  The chemical engineer who made committee work an art form.  The retiree who conjured up a fishing derby for kids who had little.  The teacher who really came alive running a soup kitchen.  The insurance man who reluctantly became a scoutmaster.  Some of your personal talent is rightly expended in your work, your job.  And some is not.  Using that sum is the sum of the rest of parts of service.

You have come here this morning in order to lead a life of faith, to lead a Christian life, to lead a life worthy of God.

So, you recognize the need for treasure, for the use of means, of wealth, of money for the common good.  Said Wesley, gain all you can, save all you can, give all you can.  He who lived his adult life on 60 pounds sterling a year, and took to the street in the evenings appealing for funds for the poor.  The New England traditions of industry and frugality endure, to some limited measure, and that is good.  Every Sunday in worship we lay gifts on the altar.  It is a moment, symbolic and spiritual, that reminds us all that you only have what you have the power and freedom to give away, that you only finally possess what you have given to somebody else.  Possession is generosity, and generosity is possession.  Today alongside our present congregation there will be people by livestream seeing the lifting of those collection plates, on a communion Sunday, from 26 states, from 11 other countries, from near and far and very far.  A writer in Alaska, a poet in Texas, an academic in Rhode Island, a dozen households on Cape Cod, a man in Dublin Ireland, a teacher in London, a third grader in Albany.  And you and me, here and now. The moment of worship lingers in the imagination of the listener, near or far. From you, in your liturgical practice, others are teaching and learning about, well, about giving.  Thank you for your example.  You try to unite the pair so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety, learning and holiness combine, truth and love for all to see.

The path of faith is found along the walkways of time, talent and treasure, the investment of time in worship, the gift of talent in service, and the offering of treasure in community.  Lift up your hearts!

Coda

Near the cross! O Lamb of God,

Bring its scenes before me

Help me walk from day to day

With its shadow o’er me

In the cross, in the cross

Be my glory ever

Till my raptured soul shall find

Rest beyond the river

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.3.2024 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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Preface

In this Marsh Chapel pulpit, from 2007-2016, Lent by Lent, we identified a theological conversation partner for the Lenten sermons, broadly speaking, out of the Calvinist tradition, so important to the first 200 years in New England.  With Calvin we encountered the chief resource for others we engaged over ten years—voices like those of Jonathan Edwards (2015), John Calvin himself, (2014), Marilyn Robinson (2013) (whom with gladness we shall greet in the flesh here at Boston University April 11, please come), Jacques Ellul (2012), Dietrich Bonhoeffer (a Lutheran cousin) (2011), Karl Barth (2010), and Gabriel Vahanian (2007), and themes like Atonement (2009) and Decision (2008), summarized with the help of Paul of Tarsus (2016).

For the next decade, we have turned to the Catholic tradition, so important in the last 200 years in New England.  That is, in this decade, beginning with Lent 2017, the Marsh pulpit, a traditionally Methodist one, turned left, not right, toward Rome not Geneva, and we have preached with, and learned from the Roman Catholic tradition, and some of its great divines including Henri Nouwen (2017) Thomas Merton (2018) John of the Cross (2019), Teresa of Avila (2020),  St Patrick (2021), and Dorothy Day (2022), and Augustine of Hippo (2023).  In future years, it may be Ignatius of Loyola, Erasmus, Hans Kung, Karl Rahner, or others, one per year.  Perhaps you will suggest a name or two, not from Geneva, but from Rome?  For those who recall, even if dimly, the vigor and excitement of Vatican II, there may well be other names to add to the list.

Speaking of Vatican II, this year, 2024, we engage the work of Fr. Raymond Brown, the pre-eminent Catholic New Testament Scholar of the 20^th century.  The openings in life, culture, ecumenism, and ecclesial leadership that emerged from 1962-1965 directly coincided with his own excellent biblical scholarship, and gave voice to those within Catholicism, like Brown, who were champions of historical critical study, not unlike what had been achieved in Protestant biblical studies from the time of the enlightenment.  Brown was my advisor for three years at the Union Theological Seminary in the city of New York, from 1976-1979, a chore he accomplished with glad heart and over against much to be desired from his advisee, headwinds of ignorance, diffidence, inattention and sloth.    These are three ‘teaching’ sermons.  Augustine judged that sermons should ‘teach, delight, and persuade’.  Well, this Lent we shall have to hope that by teaching, the sermons carry also some delight and persuasion.  It is further hoped that those engaged the dance of teaching and learning, professors and students both of our community, may find something gracious and affirming here.

Scripture

In the midwinter of 1979 Jan at sixth months pregnant became very ill with an ovarian cyst.  The physician in NYC told me that he was not sure either—child or mother—would survive, but the surgery was not optional.  By the grace of God, both survived, and we moved suddenly away from school to church, to find our way into ministry and life.

That spring, commuting to finish courses, I met my teacher Lou Martyn in the Union Seminary Quadrangle.  He handed me a book as gift, one of John Knox’s books on the early church (Knox of 20century not of the sixteenth).  I cherish the gift now forty years old, which became a kind of sign for the future, then altogether unforeseen.  My advisor, Raymond Brown, gave me no book of this sort, but he gave me, well, The Good Book, he gave me a fascination with the Bible, a love of the Bible, and intrigue in the Bible, a respect and regard for the Bible, and a way of understanding it not only in the sense of what it once meant, but also in the sense of what it now means.

I returned this week to John Knox on Romans.  To hear what he did hear, here. Like my later teacher NT Wright, Knox took on the hard passages, including this one from Romans.  Like his successor, Raymond Brown, he took on hard passages.

For the students here or listening today, note where your mind is quickened by another’s teaching, where your spirit is enlivened by another’s mentorship, where your life is molded by another’s voice.  This week, happily, David Brooks so remembered Isaiah Berlin, though Brooks mistakenly used the word pluralism about Berlin, when the truer.   word is liberalism.

I marvel at the beauty and mystery of this section of Romans 4, ‘who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist’ (resurrection first, then creation).  Hoping against hope.  (such an odd phrase)

I marvel at the phrase, ‘hope against hope’.  I marvel at its assertion of a hopeless hope, of hope with no prospect, no rationale, no ready support.  Less hope for than hope in.  Less hope for than hope in.

I marvel that faith is faith, your faith is your faith, when it is what you are left with, all you are left with, like two young people awaiting surgery, or like an older poet awaiting death.

I marvel that faith is reckoned as righteousness, that what stands up in hope against hope is the faith of Abraham.  Abraham before circumcision, Abraham the father of multitudes not just the religious, Abraham the father then of believers everywhere.  No one can keep the whole law.  Every life includes failure, error, mistake, and misjudgment.  All of us stand in need of grace, pardon, forgiveness.

I marvel at the ordering here of resurrection first and creation second, in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Do you notice?  For Paul here resurrection comes first, then creation, not in a temporal but in an existential sense. Resurrection is the grounding of creation, the grounding of the ground of being.  When Paul writes of God, he writes first of the God who raises the dead, and only second of the God who creates.  I marvel at this.  Even if Paul has somewhat altered the original meaning of Genesis (Knox: This story of Abraham suits the purpose of the writer to the Hebrews, with his somewhat different idea of faith, better perhaps than the purpose of Paul).  The father of faith relies on humble trust in God’s mercy and power, as distinguished from reliance on good works. Hope against hope.  To continue to have hope though it seems baseless.

And with this welcoming word, Paul can sing and soar in Romans 5:

Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.  Through him we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God.  More than that.  We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.

Mark sounds similar:

If any man would come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow.  For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake and the for sake of the gospel, will save it.

You recognize that this is the voice of an early preacher, whose words Mark has placed in retrospect upon the lips of Jesus.   We see Jesus looking back through the cross, as did Mark.  We hear Jesus through the din of the passion, as did Mark.  We know Jesus through the rigor of trying to follow after him, even if we are long way behind, as did Mark.

He comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, He came to those men who knew Him not.  He speaks to us the same word, ‘Follow me!’  and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time.  He commands.  And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.’ (QHJ, 389

Brown

These Lent 2024 sermons rely, for details of Fr. Brown’s life, upon the recent, excellent biography of Brown by Donald Senior. 

Donald Senior reveals the unpretentious brilliance of Raymond Brown (1928-1998,  in the context of turbulent times in Catholicism.  He portrays a complex man of prodigious learning for whom scholarship and church life were mutually enriching.  Senior shows us a priest with a rich network of friends and a deep life of faith who nonetheless was burdened by harassment from right-wing critics.  His book traces the path by which Vatican officials came to embrace new modes of biblical scholarship; he describes the significance of this scholarship for the church, and for enhanced relationship with Protestants and Jews.  As one privileged to have known Raymond E. Brown, I highly recommend this book for the witness it bears to one of the most important teachers of the twentieth century—whose legacy continues to inspire.  (Mary Boys, Union).

Fr. Raymond Brown was without doubt a central figure in the development of twentieth-century Catholic biblical scholarship.  Combining rigorous historical criticism of Scripture with devotion to the church’s teachings, he produced highly respected works of meticulous scholarship sensitive to their theological implications.  Senior’s intellectual biography carefully reviews Brown’s scholarly accomplishments while tracing the history of his influential academic career and recording the controversies within Catholic circles engendered by his embrace of critical methods.  Anyone interested in the development of Catholic biblical scholarship since Vatican II will welcome this biography of, as Senior says, ‘the most well-known and most appreciated Catholic teacher of the Bible of his generation’ (Harold Attridge, Yale).

Fr. Raymond Brown was during his lifetime the leading biblical scholar\exegete in the United States.  His books were reviewed by the New York Times Sunday Book Review.  He helped save what could be saved of the Roman Catholic diocesan priesthood.  His thesis on how the Gospel of John, the three letters of John, and the extra chapter in John (chapter 21) all fit together is probably the boldest and most brilliant and satisfying thesis by any American scholar in the field of New Testament studies since the founding of the republic (Benedict Thomas Viviano, Fribourg).

Some few here or listening will remember our remembrance of Thomas Merton in 2018. Within those, some far fewer still may remember that while a student at Columbia, Merton came to a moment of deep conversion, during a service of worship and mass at Corpus Christi parish on 121^st street in Manhattan.  Thirty years after that inspired moment along Broadway in NYC, several times a week one could see Raymond Brown emerging after noon from that same church, Corpus Cristi (across the street from Union Theological Seminary, and a block away from Jewish Theological Seminary, and by a turn west on 122 street, a block and a half away from Grant’s Tomb.  (Who was buried in Grant’s Tomb?()).  Brown led worship and celebrated the noon mass there for many years, emerging in his black suit and clerical collar, robe and stole in hand, to return to this UTS office, research, teaching and leadership.  It was an embodied reminder of that for which we strive here at Marsh Chapel, in the words of Charles Wesley, to ‘unite the pair so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety, learning and holiness, combine, truth and love let all men see’. It was an embodied reminder of that for which we strive here across the 47,000 souls, 18 deanships, 3 campuses and nigh 200 year history, born in Methodism, in three words:  learning, virtue, piety…learning, virtue, piety…learning, virtue, piety.

Coda

Speaking of February and speaking of Lent, in this spirit, to close, we remember our own Howard Thurman this month, who said, ‘Jesus rejected hatred.  It was not because he lacked the vitality or the strength.  It was not because he lacked the incentive.  Jesus rejected hatred because he saw that hatred meant death to the mind, death to the spirit, death to communion with his Father.  He affirmed life, and hatred was the great denial’ (JATD, 88)

‘There is something more to be said about the inner equipment growing out of the great affirmation of Jesus that a man is a child of God.  If a man’s ego has been stabilized, resulting in a sure grounding of his sense of personal worth and dignity, then he is in a position to appraise his own intrinsic powers, gifts, talents and abilities.  He no longer views his equipment through the darkened lenses of those who are largely responsible for his social position’ (JATD, 53).

The basic fact is that Christianity, as it was born in the mind of this Jewish teacher and thinker, appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed…In him was life, and the life was the light of all people…Wherever this spirit appears, the oppressed gather fresh courage; for he announced good news that fear, hypocrisy, and hatred, the three hounds of hell that track the trail of the disinherited, need have no dominion over them. (JATD, 99)

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 02.25.2024 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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The Bach Experience

February 18, 2024

Throughout the Gospel of Mark, Jesus heals and then prays at some length. Including today in the wilderness.  Lent begins in the wilderness. What did Jesus pray? And how? And for how long? Was his prayer attendant upon his healings? Or caught up only with his pending decision to itinerate? Where was this that he went? What did he wear? Did he kneel? Is this history or theology in Mark 1?

There is a strong argument to be made that we really know very little about Jesus, including about how he prayed, how he struggled in the wilderness. James Sanders once gave us a list of 8 things we could know about Jesus, one of which was that he died on a cross, and the others of which were not much more startling.  Norman Perrin said, “This material had a long history of transmission, use and interpretation in the early Christian communities, and when it reached the hand of Mark any element of historical reminiscence had long been lost…The Gospel of Mark is narrative proclamation.” Yet this scholarly sobriety hardly slakes our curious spiritual thirst.  We long to see Him more clearly, love Him more dearly, follow Him more nearly.  Day by Day.  So, we want to know…

We want to know about Jesus, as much as we can. When you love someone, you want to know them, root and branch, hook, line and sinker. Every Christian at every time has known this desire. We listen for, and to Him, today.  We listen for his word, to his word, today.  His is a saving word, even in the hands of very human, very fallible preachers, congregations, churches, denominations and religions.

As one great scholar and dear friend has carefully argued (T. Weeden, Mark: Traditions in Conflict), Mark—not Jesus now, nor the early church now, but Mark—has an axe to grind.  Ted, my predecessor in our Rochester church, his 17 years preceding our 11, died this year.  How we shall miss him.  His work remains, carries on, though.  Here it is. Jesus was powerful but crucified. Christian life will involve glory–but also pain. Jesus was not only a wonder worker whom demons could celebrate or denigrate.  He also became a Messiah who disappointed, disappointed, his disciples, to the point of their, to the point of Peter’s, choosing betrayal. Jesus died on a cross, toward which he chooses to itinerate. Like all humans, Christians suffer, at least to some degree. Mark may want firmly to teach his generation that hurt is, tragically, a part of the walk of faith. Nero’s persecution may lie in the background. The Jewish war may lie in the foreground. A strongly competitive version of a glory gospel may lie in the background. Regardless, this gospel is about resolute discipleship. To be a Christian means to know how, and why, when you must, to pull up our socks.  To be resolute.

For this, this morning, we have some good news. We have ancient, good company in Mark. The writer’s community finds themselves at the beginning of the eighth decade AD faced with a crisis of faith. Forty years have passed since Easter morning. The eschatological age has not dawned…the joys of the kingdom are still only dreams…Mark’s church is beset by suffering…The focus of his spiritual reflection is the on the struggling, even suffering life of Jesus (Weeden, Mark: Traditions in Conflict, 159).

Some by example show us this. There have been some heroes and heroines among us, making the case for resolute discipleship, in what they say and how they live. One such, who comes to mind come February, who comes to mind come February, and come Lent, is Marian Wright Edelman, now 84 years old.  She must pray. She must. Otherwise, how would she have the discipline to stay on the trail for children for so many years, so many decades? She wrote once to and for her students:

“I want to convey a vision to you today, as you (move) into an ethically polluted nation in a world where instant sex without responsibility, instant gratification without effort, instant solutions without sacrifice, getting rather than giving, and hoarding rather than sharing are the frequent messages and signals of our mass media popular culture and political life.”

In other words, this particular walk, in faith, your personal walk of faith, means that you will not always be appreciated. This walk means that you will be required to be kind to those who do not afford you the same courtesy. This walk means that you will daily get nametags thrust upon you that are misspellings. You may die a hero’s death and have your name misspelled in the paper. Jesus’ in Mark 1 begins in the wilderness, and his beginning has one single outcome: a resolve to take a hard path.

Cantata (Scott)

Speaking of February and speaking of Lent, We remember our own Howard Thurman this month, who said, ‘Jesus rejected hatred.  It was not because he lacked the vitality or the strength.  It was not because he lacked the incentive.  Jesus rejected hatred because he saw that hatred meant death to the mind, death to the spirit, death to communion with his Father.  He affirmed life, and hatred was the great denial’ (JATD, 88)

‘There is something more to be said about the inner equipment growing out of the great affirmation of Jesus that a man is a child of God.  If a man’s ego has been stabilized, resulting in a sure grounding of his sense of personal worth and dignity, then he is in a position to appraise his own intrinsic powers, gifts, talents and abilities.  He no longer views his equipment through the darkened lenses of those who are largely responsible for his social position’ (JATD, 53).

The basic fact is that Christianity, as it was born in the mind of this Jewish teacher and thinker, appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed…In him was life, and the life was the light of all people…Wherever this spirit appears, the oppressed gather fresh courage; for he announced good news that fear, hypocrisy, and hatred, the three hounds of hell that track the trail of the disinherited, need have no dominion over them. (JATD, 99)

Beloved, as the music and its beauty this day overtake us, how will you live out the deep river truths? How will you combat daily, hourly, the remaining even growing desocialization flowing out of Covid still?  People became desocialized during Covid.  Nor is the church, nor are church people exempt here. How will you live down life’s opposition, however you understand it?  Have you truly intuited the brevity of life?  Have you really absorbed the capacity we have as humans to harm others?  Have you faced the dualism of decision that is the marrow of every Sunday, every prayer, every sermon, every service?  Are you ready to make a break for it?  Are you ready to discover freedom in disappointment and grace in dislocation and love in departure?  Are you set to place one hand in that of The Spirit and the other in that of the Presence?

May it be so, and so, we pray, a wilderness prayer:

God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest, our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee,
Shadowed beneath Thy hand, may we forever stand,
True to our God, true to our native land.

posted in Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music, The Bach Experience, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 02.18.2024 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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Of a sudden our lessons from St. Mark, for some weeks about the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, are interrupted, even upended, by the unexpected insertion of today’s gospel, the account of the high mountain, the wild and windy mount of the Transfiguration. We are taken up higher, we are guided to a promontory, to a peak, to a place of vision, of vista, of mystery, of presence, elusive but nonetheless powerful presence.  This is our seasonal way, one would say, of keeping perspective, of allowing the high calling in faith, with hope, for love, not to be clouded or overshadowed by lower lights.   And this is why, come Sunday, we come to church.  For you, for us, the ordered public worship of Almighty God upon the Lord’s Day is not a matter of indifference.  It is a matter of attention to the meaning of life, the high calling of living a transfigured life, a transfigured life.  Frost…

It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

For the month of February, broadly across American culture, there has come to be a healthy attention to Black History, a shared if quite variously engaged cultural project, a good thing. Especially it is a good thing within a time that has found media generated ways to normalize the abnormal, in politics but also in other things, to normalize forms of rhetoric and behavior, in national leadership, that prior 2016 were adjudged abhorrent and immoral, not normal.  There is of course a media financial incentive.  With humility and pride both, let us recall, we have at Marsh Chapel our owned lived history.  My dad graduated from BUSTH in 1956, preceded a year by Martin Luther King, become Dr. King 1955.

Martin, first and last, was a preacher.  Martin Luther King’s own favorite sermon, “The Dimensions of a Complete Life”, as Gary Dorrien reminded us (157, The Making of American Liberal Theology), was itself based on a sermon from Boston’s own Phillips Brooks.  King preached the sermon in 1954, to candidate at Dexter Avenue, and again at Perdue in 1958 before a national UCC convention, and again in 1964 in Westminster Abbey to accept the Nobel Peace Prize.  As you learn, guest preaching on the circuit, what is good the first time, can often be better preached, three times or more.  The opposite also may be true.  King, following Brooks, compared life to a cube, possessing the three dimensions of length, breadth and height.  The good life flourishes when all three interact in something like a great triangle.  “At one angle stands the individual person, at the other angle stand other persons, and at the top stands the Supreme Infinite Person, God”.  Length means achieving personal goals, breadth comprises the concern for the well being of others, and height signifies the desire for an upward moving longing for God.

         Today’s text is about the third dimension, about height, and personally asks you whether your life exhibits this, King’s third dimension.  Height.  Hast Thou Height?  Granted your personal achievements.  Given your communal engagements.  Have you a known, or been known by, ‘a mountain view’?  In Boston, during this winter of 2024, in the speaking and hearing of Mark 9, there could hardly be a more personal, pertinent question.  On it hang hope and health, yours and mine. The dimension of height, today acclaimed in the transfigured life of Jesus, is one of the gifts which the religious communities may offer to support our common hope across the globe. To survive, personally and communally, the next year and more, we shall need this height. 

         Today we hear of the Transfiguration.  Originally a resurrection appearance account, this legend eventually was placed, by Mark, in the year 70ce, back into the life of Jesus, as a confirmation of his Messiahship, a portent of Easter, and an affirmation of Peter’s earlier confession.  Our lectionary places this passage, given symbolical and other similarities, adjacent to other Old and New Testament readings.  But the truth is that there are as many reasons to disjoin as to conjoin texts, and it is generally better to avoid more than absorb the inherited usurpation by the Newer Testament of the Older, when and if at all possible. 

Mark has brought the trumpets of universals to the occasion.  All life longs for height!  Hear the resurrection gospel!  Light. Shining. Cloud. God. Tradition. Prayer. Silence. Presence.  White…white as snow…white as no fuller on earth could bleach…white as light…dazzling white.  What arrives to Mark is a Mountain View, an announcement of God.  This is my beloved…listen…to Him…

         Mark has brought you something profoundly hopeful and healthy.  Good life has height, as well as length and breadth.  Good life has height that is a part of human experience.     For Mark, the Transfiguration is not only about divine but also about human experience, not only about a divine voice but also about human ears. Mark’s passage is about heightened human experience.  We need this view today, a day when we recall that for all the rigors and excellence of sports, there was $115B in sports gambling in the USA 2023, and 25M million more people participated in 2023 than in 2018.

         It is striking that Mark, facing similar fright as do we, witness to the destruction of the Temple, wrote otherwise, here.  (May his courage, and the courage of the other biblical writers, ever infect us.) As if to say, there is more than one witness, the cost of discipleship, Mark’s unflinching honesty about the dark, itself, strangely heightens human experience, making even transfiguration fully human, making our life open to height.

         At least ask yourself, whether your life has height?  Human height?  Has it?

         Height allows an appreciation of multiple interests, the unspoken presence in every gathering. Reason recognizes multiple interests without demonizing the interests or the interested.

         Josiah Royce: Now I submit to you that this meaning of the word reason is perfectly familiar to all of you.  Reason, from this point of view, is the power to see widely and steadily and connectedly.  Its true opponent is not intuition, but whatever makes us narrow in outlook, and consequently prey to our own caprices.  The unreasonable person is the person who can see but one thing at a time, when he ought to see two or many things together; who can grasp but one idea, when a synthesis of ideas is required.  The reasonable man is capable of synopsis, of viewing both or many sides of a question, of comparing various motives, of taking interest in a totality rather than in a scattered multiplicity. (87).

         The tradition of responsible Christian liberalism, advocated at Marsh Chapel, understands and honors Mark 9.  Now those of us who initially studied theology forty years ago, heard very little of this.  We heard Neo-Orthodoxy, on the one hand.  We heard Liberation, on the other.  Both the liberationists and the Barthians are correctives to the larger liberal tradition, needed at times and good at times, but both espousing not only a responsible authority, but also a kind of authoritarianism, and both imbued with a lasting anger, which the transfiguration does not justify, as appealing as both are to the nighttime all around us. 

         The gospel offers another message.  Your life, in its struggle up the mountain, may open up, at points, to a humanly accessible mountain view, a saving human height!

Take a breath.  Up here, the air is rarified.  Up here, you may have a moment of clarity.  A transfigured life brings us to the altar of loyalty. We are in the thin air that requires a use of archaic words—loyalty, duty, chivalry.  Beware though the sense that loyalty is a matter of sullen obedience.  On the contrary!  Loyalty is the red flame lit in the heart’s chancel, lit with the admixture of personal need and social concern, illumined by the reason and ignited by the will.  Loyalty combines the conservative concern for morality with the liberal hunger for justice.  Loyalty is life, but life with a purpose. Real clarity, can come with a brush up with loyalty.  Tell me what you give to, and I will tell you who you are.  Tell me what you sacrifice for, and I will tell you who you are.  Tell me what altar you face, and I will tell you who you are. Dime con quien andas, y te dire quien eres

And real loyalty is magnanimous.  Real loyalty is bighearted enough to honor an opponent’s loyalty.  At the summit, there can be a reverent respect for another’s loyalty, truly lived, even when it clashes with our own.  Maybe especially then.  US Grant felt this at Appomatox as he took the sword from RE Lee.  My close friend, Jon Clinch’s new historical novel, The General and Julia, about Grant’s last few months of life, is a kind of homage to chivalry.  It is chivalry, this honoring of loyal opposition.  People of faith were once known for this kind of chivalry, an appreciation of multiple interests, a reverent respect for divergent loyalties, as long as they did not eclipse the one great loyalty.   A football player, a burly bearded lineman, explained a defeat saying, “They played better than we did.”  Our granddaughter is a Swifty, a fan of Taylor Swift, who last week in receiving an award said, ‘the work, the work is the real reward.’  Yes.

Such a memory could help our political conversations, reminding us that at depth loyalties converge out of difference.  Surface difference can occlude deeper agreements.  Loyalty has a magnanimous height that honors others’ divergent loyalties, best perhaps known in vibrant local communities, what Alistair Macintyre (Dean at CAS next door in 1972) called ‘the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained’ (LRB, 2/8/24, 17). Maybe he worshipped then at Marsh Chapel?

         In fact, if life does not retain a height dimension, life becomes a kind of death.  Without the mountain presence, the absence of the valley becomes the valley of death. I may ask you, a question.  Does your life have height?  Is the spiritual ceiling in your weekly house of sufficient stature?  How high is heaven, day to day?  Is there any place for a cloud, for brilliance, for presence, for the numinous?  Is there a room with a view?  Is there a place for special experience, even ‘special revelation’? A pastor asked a harried housewife what would make her life better, and she replied, ‘a window over the kitchen sink’.

Sometimes, as Karl Jaspers taught us, the third dimension of life, its height, may be opened to us in liminal moments:  change, loss, death, birth, relocation, illness, healing.  Let us remember Jaspers this Lent.

         Sometimes, as John Wesley taught us, the third dimension of life, its height, may be provided for us by means of grace:  a regular mealtime prayer (do you know one?), a memorized set of verses (do you have them?), a favorite hymn or two (do you hum one?), a pattern of worship (do you claim one?), a church family to love and a church home to enjoy (do you attend one?).   Personal goals, life’s length, do not come without effort.  Communal changes, life’s breadth, to not come from wishes.  Why should we think that a mountain view, a certain height, will come our way without attentive effort?  Let us remember Wesley this Lent.

Sometimes, as Ralph Harper taught us some years ago, we need the height of presence:  “When I am moved by a painting or by music, by clouds

passing in a clear nigh sky, by the soughing of pines in the early spring, I

feel the distance between me and art and nature dissolve to some degree,

and I feel at ease.  I feel that what I know makes me more myself than I

knew before. This is how the saints felt about God, and I see in my own

experience elements that I share with the saints and prophets, the

philosophers and priests.”  (On Presence, 6) Let us remember presence this

Lent.

Sometimes, we need to remember that you cannot cook on a cold stove.  What bakes bread is not only yeast but heat!  Let me hear you whistle!  Let me feel your body in the pew!  Let me notice you humming a hymn! Let me eat at your table and see your photographs!  Let me know your name!  Then there may come the chance for a certain height.  Let us remember this, this Lent.

‘Reality takes shape only in memory’, said Proust. In my junior year, spent abroad in Segovia, I had the good fortune to meet a friend.  We climbed the mountains of Castile together, though we never saw each other in church.  Then the week before Lent in 1975, the last year of Franco’s reign, we met each other in the plaza.  My friend was carrying, in good Castilian fashion, the Ejercicios Espiritualesof Ignatius of Loyola.  Surprised, I inquired about this reading for Lent, and participation in the visionary exercise of Loyola.  “Siempre se saca algo bueno de estas cosas” said the confirmed agnostic: “ah, one always gets something good from these things” said the passionate climber of mountains.  Another kind of mountain view…Hear the gospel: the gospel of height, the gospel of a high mountain view, the gospel of a transfigured life…and this gospel awaits you, too.

It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 02.11.2024 at 11:00 am

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 02.4.2024 at 11:00 am

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posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 01.28.2024 at 11:00 am

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He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside. He came to those men who knew him not. He speaks to us the same word: "Follow thou me!" and sets us to the tasks which he has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in his fellowship, and as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience who He is. (A Schweitzer)

One

Speaking of Jesus, here He is this morning, midway from Christmas to Easter, from manger to cross, from nativity to passion.  Along the shoreline he strides, one foot in sea and one on shore.  He makes two invitations.  As Howard Thurman said, ‘Christmas happens every time there is a birth, a mother, a child, a birth, new life’.  We need to give as much attention, extended attention, to Christmas, here at Marsh Chapel, as we do, here, to Lent, Holy Week, Triduum and Easter.  Our health, our salvus, our salvation, is in part in keeping that balance, of birth and of death.

He meets two brothers at dawn, and they meet him, He who is the light that shines in the darkness.  Notice how Simon, called Peter, and Andrew, his brother, are sketched.  There is little to nothing of history here, but what there is says so much!  There is no parental shadow lying on their fishing nets.  One hears no maternal imperative, no paternal dictate.  These boys are on their own.  They have left home already, maybe leaving the city to the south to find a meager middle-class existence with their own means of production.  They are small business men, boat owners, fishermen.  Neither the amhaaretz (the poor of the land) nor the gentry, they.  Not poor, not rich.  Working stiffs.  Young, young men.  Simon already has a nick-name.  A sign of joviality, of conviviality, of gregarious playful fun.  Peter, the Rock.  Is this for his steady faithfulness or his failure to float?  On this rock…or…Sinks like a Rock…You sense that these brothers play in the surf a little, kick up the sand a little,  take time to take life as it comes.  Brown are their forearms, and burnished their brows.  They love the lake and life, and have made already their entrance into adult life.  For they have left home.  One envies their youth and freedom.  They have taken to the little inland sea of Galilee, and with joy they meet each dawn, like this one, at first light, as they see Light.

You can feel the sand under their feet as they take a moment to play and laugh.  You can feel the chill of the water as they swim, while breakfast cooks over the fire.  You can feel their feeling of vitality and joy as they greet another day at sunrise.  Jesus invites, and they accept.  Follow me…

Meanwhile, back on the beach, Jesus heads south, cove by cove, with Andrew and Peter frolicking in tow.  They had already left home.  They are ready to take a flier on some new trek, not fully sure how it will work out.  It is a miracle that they are remembered, perhaps with a little hagiography, as having responded “immediately”.  Still, every little scrap of memory of these two brothers tends in the same direction—full of vim, vigor, vitality andpepperino.  Yes, they will follow!  But Jesus is about to make a second invitation.  Not to the defiant, but to the compliant.  Not to the independent, but to the dependent.  Not to the strong, but to the weak.  Not to the secular, but to the religious.

Down the shoreline a little, there rests another boat.  A different story, a different set of brothers altogether.  James and John.  Known as the sons of Zebedee.  Simon has already earned his own name and nick-name.  But these two are known by their father’s name.  They haven’t left home.  They have not yet acquired that second identity.  Here they are, as usual at dawn, stuck in the back of the boat.  All these years they have watched the Peter and Andrew show.  All these years they have envied the fun and frolic down the beach.  The late night parties.  The bonfires.  The singing.  The swimming.  And here they sit strapped to the old boat of old Zebedee.  They are covered with the ancient equivalents of chap stick and Coppertone.  And, more to the point, they are trapped under the glaring gaze of Zebedee, whose thunderous voice has so filled their home that their own voices have not emerged.  Every day, in the back of the boat.  And what are they doing?  Why you could have guessed it, even if the text had not made it plain.  Are they casting?  No.  Are they fishing yet?  No.  Are they sailing?  No.  They are mending.  Mending.  Knit one, pearl two… Their dad has got them into that conservation, protection, preservation mode. That worst side of churchgoing mode.  Mending.  At sunrise!  Of course, nets need mending, but the nets and the mending are meant in a greater service!  The fun is in the fishing!  The joy is in the casting.  And there they sit, sober souls, looking for a bad time if a bad time can be had, mending.  Both sets of brothers are invited, welcomed, called, as you are today, to follow, even amid the ‘certain normal predicaments of human divinity (James Agee).  Called in the struggles of life, to find new life, following Jesus, and so in his church.  This is the start of the church.

Two

My teacher Douglass John Hall wrote a book once, Lighten Darkness: ‘Darkness entered into, darkness realized, is the point of departure for all profound expressions of Christian hope. 'Meaningless darkness' becomes 'revelatory darkness' when it is confronted by the courage of a thoughtfulness and hope that is born of faith's quest for truth. (DJHall) The church shall need this word in 2024, through all of 2024.

Speaking of church, On Dec. 31, my United Methodist Church officially completed itsrecent realignment. Up to a quarter of American Methodist congregations may have left the denomination. While the percentage of churches and percentage of congregants is not the same — it may be a smaller percentage of actual members who split off — this schism has changed the shape of Methodism, and has made a way forward for the vast majority of members to affirm and love its gay members, family members of gay people, and friends and neighbors of gay people.

Like other Protestant denominations (for example, Episcopal, Presbyterian and Lutheran), the United Methodist Church has faced decades of conflict, largely over the full humanity of gay people. Also, like other denominations, after years of national and other meetings, the denomination has at long last come to a conclusive point.

This division is by no means a surprise, and in fact has been fully present since at least 1970. Over the past 50 years, it has been debated, avoided, postponed, and dreaded since before I entered the ministry in 1979. The determinations of the General Conference (the governing body of the UMC) have placed this time frame, with the stipulation that individual churches could leave the denomination at this time, over the gay issue.

Politics has played a clear role, as it has in church decisions for the more than 200-year history of Methodism. The United Methodist Church has always been the most national, most representative Protestant denomination, with at least one local church in every county of the 50 United States.

Notably, gay rights are not the only wedge issue dividing the denomination. Our current Book of Discipline affirms a moderate pro-choice position on abortion, as do I, one of things many of those leaving the denomination oppose.  Methodism has a long track record of advocacy for the rights of women, including the right to ordination, which some of those leaving the denomination oppose. Even broader cultural issues related to lifestyle, parenting and schooling have percolated not only through the body politic of the country, but also through the community and communities of faith.

That is, there is a direct relation and correlation between the denominational debates and national political currents. Some of that is simply the presence of John and Mary at the school board on Tuesday evening and then in worship together on Sunday morning. Some more of it is lodged in different perspectives on local vs. national authority, and state vs. federal authority.

Having had the privilege of preaching from 10 different pulpits, it has been quite impressive to me just how localized and culturally distinctive each congregation becomes, in matters great and not so great.

But while our faith communities, like our country, have become polarized across a wide range of issues, differing stances on gay rights have contributed most directly to the current denominational move forward. This is an issue that is biblically misunderstood. There are, in all 66 books of the Bible, both Hebrew Scriptures and New Testament, some 30,000 verses. Exactly six of those — six out of 30,000 —arguably have anything directly to say about same-gender relationships. It was not exactly a central theme for the biblical writers.

But what makes this matter so devilish for modern Methodism is not the utter paucity of any biblical material related to this theme, but rather the very clear, centrally admonished teaching otherwise, for instance in Galatians 3: 28, Paul (often a favorite for conservatives by the way) writes:  “In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female. “ Martin Luther called Galatians “the Magna Carta of Christian liberty.” In it Paul very clearly sets aside religious, economic and sexual distinctions, on the power of the unity of faith, of baptism and the Gospel of Christ. ‘There is no male and female’, but rather the unity of faith, hope and love in the person of Christ, crucified and risen. (See J.L. Martyn’s magisterial Anchor Bible Commentary on Galatians for more detail).

Thus, many of those now leaving the denomination, purportedly on biblical grounds, have apparently not read all of the Bible, or at least have not read some parts of it carefully, faithfully, and fully, especially Galatians 3:28 and similar passages within the full and fully liberating arc of biblical theology.

Nevertheless, the separation is happening. And for the future, that means hard work for Methodism. It means the ongoing struggle to support urban ministry with poor and underprivileged people, the struggle to support growing churches in Africa and Asia, the struggle to support summer camping ministries, campus ministries, elder care ministries, and many other forms of service that our connectional system has effectively and efficiently provided over decades, will have to go on with fewer people, churches, and far less money. We will have to cut in all these mission-driven areas and of course in many other administrative ones (number of Bishops, superintendents and other).

Politics is downstream from economics, which is downstream from culture, which is downstream from religion (and I here mean religion very broadly construed).   What happens in religion really matters and both conditions and reflects the broader American landscape, for good or ill or very ill.  Our divisions flow downstream into others.

The work of the church will get more difficult. But 2024 also brings a new day, a chance for creative repositioning, a moment for younger clergy coming of age to find their voice and influence, and the kind of freedom that comes with change.

Three

Speaking of change, and of the church, two hundred years ago Friederich Schleiermacher set out a new theology, in the service of the church, and in the wake of the Enlightenment.  ‘Fides quarens intellectum’—faith seeking understanding—guided his effort.  He founded all his great, long work, THE CHRISTIAN FAITH, upon a single insight, ‘the feeling of absolute dependence’.   Our faith, the faith once delivered to the saints, the faith of Jesus Christ, born in Bethlehem, at Christmas, he grounded in our experience of dependence.  By feeling he did not mean emotion or sensation, though these were of course included.  By feeling he meant experience, and preeminently the unfathomable but palpable, unutterable but unmistakable sensation of absolute dependence.  Where did all, all this, come from? Whence life, breath, freedom, existence?  Why something, not nothing?  By some miracle grace, here we are, dependent, absolutely dependent on the unseen for the seen, on the unknown for the known, on the dark for the light.  

Jesus enters our culture, jostled left and right to be sure by other and stronger prevailing winds, from Christmas into Epiphany, to leave a lasting impression upon us of our absolute dependence, of a feeling of absolute dependence: The essence of religion consists in the feeling of an absolute dependence.

What strikes the reader following him anew today is how very quickly Schleiermacher moves from the feeling of absolute dependence to the experience of fellowship in the communion of saints.  Straightway, after a few paragraphs, he moves from dependence to church.  The feeling of absolute dependence immediately propels one into the gathering of others of such feeling.  So, an experience of hope drives one to a common, a community of hope.  An experience of peace prods one to find out, seek out, a fellowship in peace.  A moment of joy kindles a delight in the shared evocation of joy.  And a longing for love places one in the midst of a group of others who have the same longing.  Are we lovers anymore?  I know we know a lot, especially in a University setting.  Good.  But are we lovers?  Do we love a lot? ‘The religious self-consciousness, like every essential element in human nature, leads necessarily in its development to fellowship or communion; a communion which, on the one hand, is variable and fluid, and, on the other hand, has definite limits, i.e., is a Church”.  In other words, the gift of faith may lead each one of us more strongly, regularly and personally to unwrap that gift, week by week, in church, in worship, in gathering, in assembly, on Sunday morning at 11am.  Come and worship!  Come and pray, come early, come and learn someone’s name, come and sign up to receive the newsletter, come and linger for coffee, come and warmly welcome a student.  Come and worship!

He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside. He came to those men who knew him not. He speaks to us the same word: "Follow thou me!" and sets us to the tasks which he has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in his fellowship, and as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience who He is. (A Schweitzer)

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 01.21.2024 at 11:00 am

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Luke 2:22–40

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Like other births, Jesus’ own occurs in the midst of trouble.   He is hardly born before another dream befalls Joseph, the poor fellow, a man drenched in dreams, and commands the Holy Family to flee to Egypt.   So the prophet had predicted.

Like most growth, Jesus’ own develops amid controversy.   Herod fulfills another prophesy by slaying the children of Bethlehem, who then as now are in peril every hour.  So, the prophet had predicted.

Like much childhood, Jesus’ own transpires amid governmental wrangling, religious strife, and existential uncertainty.  His family comes to make their home in Nazareth, down at the north end of the lake, and Jesus becomes a Nazorean.  So, the prophet had predicted:  Jesus is immersed in our full life.

The Christmas Gospel is this:  God has taken human form, entered our condition, become flesh.  For our present congregation, and especially come Christmas for our faithful virtual congregants, viewing and listening from afar, we gladly announce this good news!

He came that we might have life and live it abundantly.   In the next century after his birth, Irenaeus was to say, in summarizing his salvation: “the glory of God is a human being fully alive.”

The birth of Jesus penetrates all of the seasons of life.

Even dear, dour Ecclesiastes, who found so little to celebrate in life, at least made space, in his otherwise saturnine perspective, to honor time, the passage of time, the flow of time, and the regular return of times and seasons: 

For everything there is a season

And a time for every purpose under heaven

As we pause between Christmas and the New Year (and so between past and future, youth and age, life and death, heaven and earth, this age and the age to come), perhaps we too can incarnationally celebrate the seasons of life.  Look with me out at 2024, from a theological, liturgical, and religious perspective.  Listen from to the ecumenical voice of Marsh Chapel, wherein all the families of Christendom, and of the earth itself, find a real home.  Our time sorely needs a New Year’s ecumenical resolution.  On this date, 12/31/23, the day on which my own beloved United Methodist formally and finally splits, we may especially want to raise the possibility of a long-term ecumenical resolution, where, say, six churches on a village green become one. Marsh Chapel, you are a harbinger of things to come. For to every denomination there is a season, and a time for every perspective under heaven!  Here is what I mean.  Every theological insight is here, for you, liturgically on site. 

You may not think much about the Presbyterians.  They can be cold people, I suppose.  ‘God’s frozen people’, said one.   You may never have wanted to wade in the dark, icy water of Calvinist despair.  You may not see yourself through the lens of a Bergman film.  But there is a time and a season.  When Ash Wednesday arrives in a couple months, February 14, 2024 we are all Presbyterians.  Yes, if at no other point, on this day we do well to read Calvin.  For we are dust, and to dust we do return, as both the Bible and Ignatius of Loyola taught (more on him in a moment).  We do all sin, and do all fall short of the glory of God.  We are fully mortal and utterly prone to harm others.  In Calvin’s favorite, winning phrase, a personal delight of my own as well, we are, simply, “totally depraved”.  Yikes! His follower, Jonathan Edwards, described us as sinners in the hands of an angry God, held like filthy spiders over the pits of hellfire, and spared only by God’s strong wrist, who in holding us to save us, nonetheless averts his eyes from the hideous sight.  Yikes!  That is serious Ash Wednesday stuff! Really to sense this, you need the mind of John Calvin, the voice of Jonathan Edwards, and the heart of John of Patmos.   I admit, it is not a happy creed, but it is a sober one.   As my Scottish Presbyterian relatives from my mother in law’s side might say: “Bob, you are so often, so wrong!.” Marsh Chapel embraces Presbyterians, especially on Ash Wednesday.  Buy a Presbyterian lunch early in Lent, and appreciate the gifts of their season.

Speaking of Lent, you may be thinking about the Jesuits.  Perhaps you attended a Jesuit college, or teach in one. (I have, at Lemoyne College, to my great benefit). Maybe you have wondered about Ignatius of Loyola, born in Pamplona, a Spaniard and a warrior, who was converted through illness to a beatific vision of Jesus, the Christ, Lord and Savior.  Believe me, in Lent we are all Jesuits.  In the season of Lenten discipline and preparation, you know, March of ice and snow and cold, we rely on some form of Jesuitical discipline.  You may not precisely use his “Spiritual Exercises”, his daily devotion of silence and prayer and vision of Jesus.  You may be sorry that he set loose the Inquisition and Index as tools of the Counter Reformation.  You may feel he carried too much eye and too much military into a faith that is primarily auditory and irenic.  In that, you would be a Lutheran, you Lutheran you.  But in Lent, we are all soldiers in the Society of Jesus, ready to drill and train and prepare and exercise and submit.  As Teresa of Avila put it, “even when we are thrown from the mud-cart of life, God is with us.” Marsh Chapel embraces Jesuits, whether in the Vatican or on the street, especially in Lent.  Everyone is a Jesuit, come Lent. 

Since, though, you brought up Luther, we must also give credit where credit is due.  Come Good Friday, when we survey the wondrous cross, on which the Prince of Glory died, our greatest gain we count but loss, and pour contempt on all our pride.  I know that the ground at the foot of the cross is pretty level, but the view of the cross that is best is found from the perspective of the Lutherans, who stoutly recall, with Luther, crux sola nostra teologia.  Lutherans!  We love you at Marsh Chapel! The Cross alone, come Good Friday, is our teaching. We need to remember, especially on Good Friday, that all of our best intentions fall short.  Especially when we think we have it just right, whatever it is, we invariably have it just wrong.  It was Katie von Bora, a former nun, who in marrying Luther reminded him of his humanity and “brought out the most winsome traits” of the Reformer’s character. All our symbols, personal and familial and national and denominational, lie prostrate before the cross, all need right interpretation to avoid idolatry.  (Read again Dean Neville’s magisterial book, The Truth of Broken Symbols). Even the cross, our own central symbol, needs that interpretation, which is why we consent to a 20 minute sermon every week, even though the Baptists would rather shout and pray.  Did we in our own strength confide, our winning would be losing!   When it comes to the Cross, “nobody does it better” than Luther.

I have just mentioned the Baptists.   This, you worry, brings the camel’s nose under the tent. They are always threatening to become the sideshow that ate up the circus, you say.   You give them an inch, they will take a mile, you say.  Speaking of miles, they can seem a mile wide and an inch deep, you say. They give anarchy a bad name, you say.  But we must recognize that there is a season for everybody.  Especially the Baptists.  For in June, or late May, when the world is young again, we will celebrate Pentecost, the day of Spirit.   Every week I know you try to invite one person to join you in the joy of Marsh Chapel.  Baptists are embraced here. After 50 days after 40 days, that is 90 days from Calvin’s ashes, we pause again to remember that God is with us.  Wesley died saying, “the best of all is, God is with us!”  (Relax, I will get to the Methodists, in due time.)  Beware your caution about Baptists.  The Baptists are not all canoe and no paddle, not all axe-murder and no sheriff, not all fire and no hose, not all hat and no cattle, God love ‘em.   Not All Spirit, whatever the Trinitarian Orthodox say.   The Baptists may seem almost Unitarians of the Third Person of the Trinity!  I tell you though, come Pentecost, that’s the day, Lord, dear Lord above, God Almighty, God of love, please look down and see my people through.   When that wind of God is blowing (I do not refer to your preacher sermonizing), then you need some Baptists around to shake things up a little.  Yes, you do.  As one said, ‘Christians are always in a little bit of trouble’.    Isabella Van Wagener (Sojourner Truth) said, “That man says women can’t have as much rights as man, cause Christ wasn’t a woman.  Where did your Christ come from?  From God and a woman.  Man had nothing to do with him!”  See what I mean?! You need to shout when the Spirit says shout!

The Orthodox do not do a lot of shouting on Sunday.  Or on Monday.  They happily used to meet in Marsh Chapel every Monday evening, and there was very little hollering.  They’re not big shouters, except during their summer festivals, which happen to come, properly I think, about the time of Trinity Sunday.  The more liturgical churches, Orthodox and Episcopalian and Catholic, remember this Sunday, Trinity Sunday, better than others.  We love the Orthodox at Marsh, especially come Trinity Sunday.  This is the season when we remember that God is more than Almighty Creator (no matter what the Muslims say) and that God is more than Lordly Savior (no matter what the Holy Rollers say) and that God is more than Mysterious Spirit (no matter what the Californians say).  God is three, three, three Faces in one.  Leave it to the Orthodox to remind us.  Their wedding services last three hours.  One for each Person of the Trinity, perhaps.  When you come to June 15, go to a Greek festival and dance to the Triune God.  Go ahead.  Hug a Trinitarian in June!   A few blocks down Commonwealth, at Arlington Street, the ghost of William Ellery Channing may be angry about it, but you go ahead and love your Trinitarian neighbor as your own self.   As Constantine’s mother, Helena, may have said on her many 4^th century pilgrimages to Jerusalem,  “let us remember well those who have revered God before us.”

Now that we are knee deep in liturgy, let us honor the Roman Catholics.  Every third member of our Marsh community today comes out of a Roman Catholic background.  Our history, liturgy, nave, location and personality as a congregation have regularly made this move accessible to women and men of many different interests and backgrounds.  On World Communion Sunday 2024 we will all be Catholic! And when we look back with joy on Vatican II, and its explosion of aggiornamento—renewal.  Aggiornamento:  I love the chance to say a word in Italian. With the universal church we here celebrate the Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.  With the universal church we here acknowledge one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism.  With the universal church we here recognize the global character of the Christian communion.   It has been the Roman Catholic church, more steadily than most, that has defended the poor in our time.  It has been the Catholic church that has regularly regarded those of low estate.  It has been the Catholic church that has kept the long history of Christendom before us.  Our liturgical ties to the universal church should not be loosened by the very real doctrinal differences we have with Rome.  John Wesley preached a whole sermon on extending an olive branch, a sign of peace, to the Romans.  From our Anglican heritage, we are a moderate people.  We know the value of an olive branch.  On World Communion Sunday, come October, we shall affirm here at Marsh, one holy, catholic and apostolic church.  You remember, among so many others, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, whose simple deeds of service to the poorest spoke volumes to her time, and of her tradition.

 Now, I just mentioned the Anglicans.  Did you notice how the Anglican or Episcopal tradition found its way, on little cat feet, into our seasonal review?  Typical.  You will usually find an Anglican sidling up alongside you in discussion, listening and careful in discourse.  To the Episcopalian, a smile comes before a frown, a “quite so” before a “not so”.  Anglicans are like everybody else—only moreso.  They revere the variety and diversity of the communion of saints.  They agree to disagree, agreeably.  They are peaceable people, nearly Quaker in character.  Not for them the starch of Lutheran polemics, nor the bitter herbs of Calvinist dogma.  A little sherry in the afternoon, a little Handel, a little wooly conversation—jolly good!  Tallyho!  Pip-pip! Cheerio!   It is reason, rather than revelation alone, that has guided the Church of England, reason and a stiff dose of liturgy, including the veneration of Saints.  One a soldier, one a priest, one slain by a fierce wild beast.  On All Saints Day, we are all Anglicans.  (And on Halloween, too!!!).  Marsh Chapel loves Episcopalians.  They are princes of peace, these sons and daughters of George III.  They are optimistic people!  Said Queen Victoria, “we are not interested in the possibilities of defeat”.

Real peace, the waiting and quiet of peace in the heart, however, is ultimately the province of our Pennsylvanian neighbors.  In Advent, you are a Quaker through and through.  Oh, you worship God.  You know that in heaven we will be greeted by St Peter, not by Benjamin Franklin; that we will walk the golden streets, not Market Street in Philadelphia; that we will hear the angelic choir not the Liberty Bell; that we are disciples first and citizens second.  Still, the city of brotherly love, only a few hours south, the American home of the spiritual descendents of George Fox, that Quaking Englishman, is the home of a radical quest for peace, a waiting for peace, a longing for peace, a season of quiet that is utterly Quaker in nature.  “I have called you Friends”, said our Lord.  I tell you, when you have truly felt the power of the Society of Friends, you will be as ready for the peace of Advent as you were prepared for the discipline of Lent by the Society of Jesus.  It is enough to make you sing like a Methodist!  The Quakers may not have been always as militarily committed as others may have liked.  In faith, they may have stepped aside when others had to step forward.  Still, it was to them that Ben Franklin turned at the end of his life, in 1792, to implore the young nation to jettison slavery, and they alone, prescient and right, stood by him.  In Advent, we all are Philadelphia Quakers, eating Cheesesteaks and twinkies and sculling on the Scuykill River.  We all await peace.  We remember Mother Ann Lee and the shaking Quakers singing, “in truth simplicity is gain, to bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed; to turn, turn will be our delight, til by turning, turning, we come round right.”

Do you suspect that we have saved the best for last?  For come December 2024 it will be Christmastide, again.  Sing we now of Christmas, Noel, Noel!  A song greets the dawn.  It is the singing of the birds before daybreak that heralds a new morning, and it is the singing of the church of Christ, in season and out, that heralds a new creation.  You are here to invite somebody to come to worship with you in 2024.  So, you will ring the bell, sing the song, tell the tale of Christmas.  Christmas means invitation.  The birds sing while it is still dark, and the church sings while sin remains.  People do change, for the better, even when we are reluctant to notice. Emerson:  the human being is convertible. To come to Christmas, truly to come to Christmas, you must come singing.  In church, in the shower, at prayer meeting, in the choir, caroling, at youth group, by yourself.  To sing is to be a Methodist.  A singing Methodist, as our common speech declares.  All sing, but none so sweetly.  All sing, but none so vibrantly.  All sing, but none with a list of rules about how to do so pasted in the front of a hymnal, whose reproduction every generation is the church equivalent of World War III.  All sing, but none with the theological bearing of singing with the Wesley brothers. To sing the Wesley hymns is to plant one’s standard upon the field of battle and roar:  let the games begin! And what shall we sing?  Carols of course.  And which carols.  Those of the English tradition of course.  And which of these? There is but one of the first rank.    It is the doctrine of the Incarnation, more than those others from Crucifixion to Resurrection, which so marks the people called Methodist.  The primitive church told two stories of Jesus, that of his death (Holy Week and Easter) and that of his birth (Advent and Christmas).  You must sing both, not just one, or the other.  So the Wesley’s adored the Gospel of John, and “the word became flesh and dwelt among us”.  So, they hoped for a new creation, finished, pure and spotless.  (I love my church with all my heart, even in the teeth of all our difficulties.) So, they built churches, great and beautiful, but just for appetizers to the real meal---orphanages, mission societies, colleges, universities, medical schools, hospitals, including 128 US schools and colleges, with Boston University leading the parade. So, Susanna Wesley bore 20 children, 17 of whom survived, one of whom, John, died saying, “the best of all is—God is with us!”, another of whom, Charles, gave us the gospel at Christmas:

Born to raise the us from the earth

Born to give us second birth

Hark the herald angels sing!

Glory to the Newborn King!

 Can you hear this?  It begs a hearing.  If you do, I challenge you, call you, to a resolution, an ecumenical resolution.  Somehow find for yourself a church in 2024!  Worship God once a week next year!  Join us here at Marsh Chapel, in all its ecumenical resolution. And bring a friend with you! Or two!

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 12.31.2023 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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Luke 2:1–20

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Merry Christmas! The text of this sermon is not available at this time. We apologize for any inconvenience.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 12.24.2023 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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John 1:6-8, 19-28

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Here we are, again, at the River’s Edge, a few yards beyond the south bank of the Charles.  On the edge, at the edge, along the river’s edge. 

One winter night our car would not start so I called AAA. Triple A remains one of life’s great good deals. I could think of it as an almost universally useful last minute Christmas gift. Just a thought. It is highly effective, dependable, crucially necessary, and cheap. You know, it is what we can do together, when we eliminate the crushing need for greed. From each according to his automotive ability, to each according to his automotive need. All for $50.00 a year. Think of it. You can insure your driving support, nationwide, for almost nothing.  

After 20 minutes the AAA truck arrived. Out tumbled a heavy-set middle-aged man, in a stubbled white beard and crimson work shirt. His truck was full of packages, piled in the dark. He reminded me of the Santa Claus we had seen the night before. In fact, I wondered if he had two jobs. We walked to the car, lifted the hood, poked around, fiddled, fussed, and started the car. He did his job—automotive medical care. I did mine. So, I asked, “How are you?”  

“Terrible. I hurt all over. I am really sick. And my tooth hurts bad. I have a bad toothache. I have no insurance. So I can’t see the doctor.”  

But yet, I heard him declare, as he drove out of sight: Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.  

Over the next few days, I found it troubling that this little scene would not leave my mind. We are all aware of the level of pain present at the holidays. Sometimes a particular incident will illumine the whole landscape; a toothache will illumine a whole world of hurt. And we are, in the world right now, near and far, in a world of hurt. 

But the trouble with the moment did lie deeper. You have already guessed it. It took me longer, though. Here was a jolly happy elf, in the employ of one of the last truly communal agencies, bringing help in the moment on the cheap, who walked and is probably still walking, in dental pain. The one representing automotive insurance had no medical insurance. We insure our vehicles, efficiently and frugally. But not always the human body. We have limits. There are limits to what we find that we can do.  It really matters where and how we set limits. We set our limits, and then, in tragedy or in triumph, se live with the consequences. Which brings us, by the direction of the lectionary, for the second week to John the Baptist. The lectionary is a set of regularly used readings, collected in a three-year cycle. One year is based on Luke and another on Matthew. The third is left for Mark, with interruptions from John.  So, last week, (we did not hear it because it was our Lessons and Carols Sunday) the Baptist is portrayed by Mark in his usual mode, rough and clothed in camel’s hair, down by the river Jordan.  Today John takes the older material, similar to that in Mark, and, like a jazz musician, plays a brighter, newer tune. He adds his own riffs. Today’s is a word on limits.  

For the Fourth Gospel, John the Baptist is the master representative of limits. Like a river needs banks to be a river, life needs limits to be life.  

In the Gospel of John there is no single way of talking about God’s personal truth, that alone sets us free. The salvation which John preached called for many words, different words, a variety of ways of acknowledging the Lordship of Christ. Maybe John sensed idolatry in ways of thinking that limited people to just one set, and thus deadening, confession. No. There is more than one way to skin a cat. And if what is pointed out is nothing short of a truth fit for salvation, can we blame him for pulling out all the stops on his organ? Bread of Life! Word of God! Good Shepherd! Light of the World! Lamb of God! Messiah! Son of God! Son of Man! John dares to try them all. He has to be daring. He is trying to offer those who hear his voice (and now, from this moment on, that includes you) a reason for living, and a way of living with limits, a way of living at the river’s edge.  

I take it that “growing up”, if it means anything, at least means learning how to do some things, perhaps even how to do some things well. You are a baker. He is a builder. She is a musician. I am not a good hockey player because I am not a good skater. I guess I’ll play basketball. John the Baptist has a voice that rings with maturity and truth, partly because he is assessing what he cannot do, who he is not. “I am not the Christ…nor Elijah…nor the Prophet…” This too is maturity: learning one’s limits. A river with no banks is a very shallow river. But John’s life has banks to flow through. He knows what and who he is not.  

Sometimes others point this out to us, occasionally with wit.  A young priest was sent to Pittsburgh, and the town leaders said:  Father you have arrived at that majestic spot where two mighty rivers, the Monongahela and the Allegheny come to a great confluence to form the Ohio River.  To which the priest replied, with a twinkle in the eye, Well, I am just a poor, young man from Boston, a modest place where two mighty rivers, the Mystic and Charles come to a great confluence to form…The Atlantic Ocean. It was a John the Baptist voiced warning, cajolement, reminder of limitation, at the river’s edge. 

The Baptist is a man who knows who he is not. And while you cannot build a life on whom you are not, you can start there. Part of living is living with limits.  

Over time, one begins slowly to hear the rare rhythm of meaning in the Gospel of John. His is a strange cadence, repetitive, and complex. Again and again, in these 21 chapters, the various authorial hands at work in this ancient compilation will return to repeat their various themes. In this text, the theme is limits. And John the Baptist is the representative of the limits of life.  

He stands at the edge of the raging Jordan.  

He speaks at the end of the long tradition of Hebrew prophecy.  

He inhabits the outer edge of the wilderness.  

He comes up on the shadow of divinity.  

John the Baptist is out there.  

But unlike the other Gospels, this one has an extra interpretative point to make: make no mistake, John is not Jesus. A long time ago there was a vice Presidential debate in which one young candidate compared himself to John Kennedy.  To which his older competitor replied, if memory serves:  I worked with John Kennedy, I knew John Kennedy, I was a friend of John Kennedy, and you are no John Kennedy.  

Perhaps because of early religious competition, either between Christians and Jews, or between Christians and followers of the Baptist, this passage hammers away at what John is not. It celebrates his limits. Maybe it is because he truly knew his context.  Three college Presidents spoke endlessly about context this week, but the tragic irony, a full blown irony, was that they ignored the very context in which they were speaking—a global, national, congressional, address in the context of rising antisemitism.  Lectures about context…with no sense of context…. 

John was not the light. He bore witness to the light, but he was not the light. He came to testify to the light, but he was not the light. He was self-limiting, self-aware, circumspect. 

He said: “I am not the Messiah”. He confessed it. He did not deny it. He confessed it. Do you see what I mean by repetition?  

There is a lot more that John also is not. Is he Elijah? No he is not. Is he this figure the mysterious prophet? No he is not.  

So, they asked him: You are neither Messiah, nor Elijah, nor Prophet. So why are you here? Why do you baptize.  

One has the very distinct feeling that the traditional answer (water\spirit, not worthy to untie thong) falls flat for John.  

Do you see the way that the fourth Gospel has jazzed up the story of John the Baptist? This is like Louis Armstrong playing his trumpet and singing with syncopated menace some very old hymn or tune, “America” or “Rugged Cross”. It is like what Frank Lloyd Wright did to houses, for good or ill. Or long ago like our own Doug Flutie changing the role of the quarterback. It is like the black church in worship, singing "Marching to Zion," but not in Isaac Watt’s 4/4 time.  

I think this is why the lectionary reads us Mark, on the voice of one crying in the wilderness, and then John, on the voice of one crying in the wilderness. John gives us soul.  

We get our soul from our limits. The limit line of death makes life frightfully precious and deeply meaningful. The limit line of evening makes the day frightfully precious and deeply meaningful. The limit line of failure makes daily struggle frightfully precious and deeply meaningful. The limit line of winter makes our annual journey frightfully precious and deeply meaningful.  

Humility is giving credit where credit is due. But humility is also facing your limits. Have you faced them? John the Baptist seems to have done so. And you? Life has limits, spaces and places where you have to repeat to yourself: I didn’t cause it.  I can’t control it.  I can’t cure it. Here are some.  

• You cannot choose your family or genetic inheritance.  
• You cannot reselect another epoch in history in which to live.  
• You cannot add a cubit to your span of days.  
• You cannot force other people to behave the way you would.  
• You cannot determine your children’s lives.  
• You cannot control what the preacher will say next. Or how long he will rattle on. 

• You cannot single handedly erase a recession.  
• You cannot make it stop snowing.  
• You cannot become a gorgeous blonde or $700M baseball player by wishing it so.  
• You cannot choose your choices. You can choose but you often can’t choose your choices. 

But there is a bit of good news here, too. You can live with limits, by naming them and admitting them and accepting them and accounting for them.  

I wonder if this Advent period is meant for a survey of limits in life. I believe there is a limit to the number of gifts we want to give to our children. But is there is a limit to the number of people we should keep on health care roles, or kinds of care that people, particularly women may receive in need? I believe there is a limit to what we can do, unprovoked, as a military power.  Again, Andrew Bacevich last month in BU Today (November 3, 2023) warned us about this, about the hubris of the phrase, ‘the indispensable nation’.  It was a warning worthy of John Baptist at the river’s edge. I believe that sadly there is a sometimes a limit to what finally we can do for one another. I did what I could for you. You know who I am. You had your chance. And crossing any of these and multitudes of other limits frequently means idolatry—trying to play God. And we frequently do.  

Here is where John the Baptist, in the Johannine version, is so helpful. He says: here is what I am not.  

Most of us here today are not trained musicians. Once a season we live out this limit by sitting still before a group of people who are musicians. They remind us, with their beautiful voices, of what we are not capable of doing. And we do our part by saying quietly, “Thank you, God, for able musicians such as they, for I am not one.”   

Most of us today are not trained Spanish poets.  But in the season of light we live out this limit by reading quietly the poetry of Calderon de Barca, of Antonio Machado, of St. Theresa of Avila, who place limits, at the river’s edge.  As one wrote, ‘while others strive vainly for impermanent authority, let me lie underneath the shade of a tree singing’.  And another, Caminante No Hay Camino: 

Traveler, your footprints 

are the only road, nothing else. 

Traveler, there is no road; 

you make your own path as you walk. 

As you walk, you make your own road, 

and when you look back 

you see the path 

you will never travel again. 

Traveler, there is no road; 

only a ship's wake on the sea. 

Most of us today are not prophets, ancient or modern.  But in this Advent season, we live out this limit by remembering the Baptist: 

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light.  

This is the testimony given by John when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?” He confessed and did not deny it, but confessed, “I am not the Messiah.” And they asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” He said, “I am not.” “Are you the prophet?” He answered, “No.” Then they said to him, “Who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” He said, “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’”.  

Here we are, again, at the River’s Edge, a few yards beyond the south bank of the Charles.  On the edge, at the edge, along the river’s edge. 

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 12.17.2023 at 11:00 am