Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

Come summer in the north, we are closer in some ways to nature, than we are otherwise. You may be listening this morning, toes in the surf or sand, or high up a mountain trail, or along a lakeshore, or in the back lawn, coffee in hand. We need the summer to survive the winter. You are wise to embrace it.

In the evening hour, with a tenebrous cool after a long, hot day, you may have, this summer, looked out on a horizon, blue and pink and moving. The day has a beginning at sunrise, and an end at sunset. To know the day you need to know both, as to know a person you need some information regarding whence and more regarding wither. To know people, and to know a people, the far horizon, tenebrous at dusk, is keenly, crucially meaningful. Quo vadis? Where are you headed? Dime a donde andas, y te dire quien eres.

A question for those to be married: where will you be ten years from today? A question for those to matriculate: to what end is your education? A question for those entering retirement: are there now different shores on which to land? A question for those newly diagnosed, suddenly alone, shorn of routine, anxious about the unseen: what is the ‘telos’, the point, the soul forming meaning of your disappointment, dislocation, or departure? Our gospel affirms lasting meaning in life.

In particular, the Gospel of Luke paints a compassionate horizon. The third gospel has a passion for compassion. In a broad compassion Luke locates our ultimate destination.

The National Preacher Series

Today concludes the tenth year of our annual Marsh Chapel Summer National Preacher Series. Our intention has been to bring the best preachers—the best whether or not the best known—to address, either in some indirect or in some more linear fashion, a shared theme. Listen again, on the website to some of our past sermons. Consider ‘the Gifts of Summer’ in 2007, including the missionary witness of Mark and Lynn Baker. Hear again (now) Bishop Mike McKee on the Call to Ministry in 2008. Pick any of the ten sermons on Darwin and Faith from 2009, say that of Wesley Wildman. Receive the Gospel from (now) Bishop Ken Carter, on the theme of Grace in 2010. Hear Rev. Dr. Robin Olson on student ministry in 2011, or enjoy again the venerable voice of our saintly (now)deceased friend and neighbor, Professor Peter Gomes, earlier that year. Learn about New Testament Apocalyptic, say with Dr. David Jacobsen, in 2012. Enjoy the Peter Falk like voice of Dean Snyder, so wise and true, on Hope in the Church, 2013. Reckon with Professor Jonathan Walton, summer 2014, on Emerging Adulthood. Or reflect again on the Beloved Community, from last summer 2015, with the Rev. Dr. Regina Walton. Our is a University Pulpit, and with your aid, support and engagement we shall continue to unite the pair so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety.

The Summer Series 2016

Your 2016 series made some news earlier this summer. Our local reporter, Mr. Richard Barlow of BU Today wrote about the 2016 series:

The series kicks off Sunday, July 3, with the first of seven sermons on Luke’s Gospel and its central theme of compassion. The Lukan Horizon, as the series is named, seeks “to remember the compassion—the passion for compassion—in the person of Jesus the Christ,” says…dean of Marsh Chapel. The Gospel stresses humanitarianism and forgiveness; it’s the only one of the four Gospels with the stories of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, and it is full of sympathetic portrayals of women.

This message… contrasts with the “less than appealing and frankly appalling conditions of some parts of our culture that have been revealed in some ranges of (our recent experience).”

The compassion motif also echoes several recent Commencement addresses, Hill says, including the Baccalaureate talk this 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). (We could quickly add the magnificent speech given this spring at the Boston University Humphrey Scholars graduation program May 9, 2016 by Hubert Humphrey’s niece, Dr. Ann Howard Tristani, who quoted her uncle’s famous 1948 spell binding Philadelphia aspeech: ‘There will be no hedging, no watering down, of the instruments and the principles of the civil rights program. My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say we are 172 years late…To those who say this bill is an infringement on state’s rights, I say the time has arrived in America. The time has arrived for the Democratic party to get out of the shadow states rights and walk forthrightly intot he bright sunshine of human rights.’ It is both stunning and tragic to recognize how much of what he addressed then is still with us this great, but troubled land, in today’s issues of urban violence and its state level address, in affordable health care usage (or not) state by state, in the lasting not just lingering formative power of slavery in the making of American Capitalism, in the willingness or lack thereof of those who have much, to provide for others who have little, in the use of a word like ‘liberty’ to mean its opposite, its very denial to tens of millions of poor children.

Luke 13: Gospel and Tradition

Luke was written nearly a generation later than Mark, by most estimates, Mark in or near 70, Luke in or near 90 of the common era (in fact, possible much later). Traditionally ascribed to Luke the physician, its author and that of its sequel, the Acts of the Apostles, is finally unknown to us. We know him only through the writing itself.

What do we find?

Luke is made up of a mixture of ingredients. First, Luke uses most of Mark. An example is the memory of our passage today, Luke 13. Like Matthew, Luke knew and repeated most of the earlier gospel of Mark. But he made changes along the way, or construed the gospel according to his own desires and emphases. This is hopeful for us, in that it is an encouragement for us to take the gospel in hand, and interpret it according to our time, location, understanding, and need. In fact, we are summoned and ordered to do so, and not free not to do so. Second, Luke uses a collection of teachings, called Q, as does Matthew. An example is our Lord’s Prayer, later in the service. Luke’s version is slightly different from that in Matthew, as is his version of the beatitudes and other teachings, found in the ‘sermon on the plain’, rather than the ‘sermon on the mount’. Third, Luke makes ample use of material that is all his own, not found in Mark or elsewhere. The long chapters from Luke 8 or so through Luke 18 or so, where we find ourselves this morning, are all his. Examples include some of your favorite parables, like the Good Samaritan, and like the lost sheep, and like the Prodigal Son, and like the Dishonest Steward. We have Luke to thank for the remembrance of these great stories. Luke brings us a unique mixture of materials, and makes his own particular use of them.

What does Luke say?

This will take us the rest of the fall and more to more fully unravel. We shall do so, on step at a time, one Sunday at a time, one parable, teaching, exhortation, miracle, or, as today, one traditional episode at a time. Still, there are some outstanding features of the Lukan horizon, which we may simply name as we set forth. First, Luke displays a commitment to and interest in history, and orderly history at that. Both Luke and Acts are cast in a distinctive historical mode. Second, Luke employs and deploys his own theology, or theological perspective, including this emphasis upon history and the divine purpose, or better said, divine meaning, in history—on this more in a moment. Third, Luke highlights the humanity and compassion of Jesus in a remarkable way. The Christ of St. Luke is the Christ of magnificent compassion, embodied in the humility of a birth among shepherds. The poor, women, the stranger, the injured, those in dire need all stand out in Luke, as the recipients and subjects of Jesus’ love, mercy, grace and compassion. Fourth, Luke carries an abiding interest in the church. Ephesians says that ‘through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the principles and powers’. That catches the spirit of the author or the third gospel and of the Acts to follow. It is this feature of Luke, the Lukan Horizon, the Lukan passion for compassion, upon which our preaching has centered this summer. So we are taught: know history, think for yourself, love the church, have compassion.

Compassion in interreligious dialogue framed and formed the sermon by Br. Lawrence Whitney on July 3: ‘ritual restrains our tendency toward indifference and causes us to recognize one another’. Compassion for those at the margins of society, including those who have suffered in this year’s tragic killings of various sorts and in various places, inspired the sermon of Chaplain Jessica Chicka on July 10: ‘the Samaritan does not allow himself to be constricted by rules or fear’. Compassion for those searching for meaning, and a direct challenge to find such in spiritual inwardness, self-discipline, and struggle gave the heart to Dean Lawrence Carter’s July 17 address. Compassion for those of ‘another flock’ gave wings to his July 24 acclamation—the witness of Ghandi, the voice of King, the advice of Thurman, the wisdom of Buddhism, the mothering of Hinduism and the stark reminder: it is not Christian belief but its realization that finally matters. Not belief but realization! Compassion and concern for our shared home, our natural habitat—a worthy and frequent theme in this pulpit—empowered Dr. Davies’ homily on July 31: dominion is not domination, both optimists and pessimists can at least be meliorists, our children’s children will ask questions of or to us, about how we have cared for our environment. Compassion of a substantial, material, physical, even financial kind—‘forgive us our debts’ carried the burden of the Communion Homily on August 7. And last Sunday, beginning and ending with Tutu, probing the power of relational rather than authoritarian power, finding examples in hospitality near and far, the Rev. Susan Shafer, in the heat of the day, interpreted a tough passage from Luke and memorable line from our Vice President: ‘the world needs from us not the example of our power, but the power of our example’. It happens, perhaps providentially, but certainly in a timely way, that our lectionary readings this year hail from Luke. Toward what horizon are we hiking? Onto what shore do we hope to land? By what compass and map, what star, what conscience call, what soulful spirit shall we be guided? ‘Quo vadis?’ Whither? Where are you headed? Is yours, at twilight, a compassionate horizon?

Today’s Gospel, it happens, presents this theme under the cloud of smoke and pillar of fire of a familiar, pan Gospel, episode, Jesus’ compassionate willingness to heal on the Sabbath, to judge the Sabbath by its human or humanizing effect, to forever trump tradition with gospel, and to make religion necessarily subject to judgment in the categories of pride, sloth, falsehood, superstition, idolatry and hypocrisy. Is religion a good thing? It can be. Is the weather a good thing? It can be. It depends.

In our passage from St. Luke chapter 13, the Gospel writer has sharply implanted his own emphasis, on compassion. The similar Sabbath passages are in Mark 2, Matthew 12, and John 5. Luke explicitly heightens Jesus’ authority by placing him in the synagogue, in the synagogue teaching, and in the synagogue teaching on the Sabbath. Luke changes the gender of the afflicted person, from male to female. Luke quantifies the hurt, to 18 years of suffering. Luke accentuates the verbal condemnation, ‘hypocrites’. Luke connects the healed one to Abraham, and amplifies the size of Jesus’ legal victory, shaming adversaries and causing rejoicing by all. Clearly, this is a story that has developed, that has lived a while, that has been marinating in the sauce of the church’s own growth, advance, and expanse. Sadly, there is here the hint, the glimpse, the clear though far-off hymn, that hails—triumphalism. Not Jesus the minority view rabbi, arguing uphill against a majoritarian Torah tribe, but rather Jesus the conqueror, the great debater, the winner of arguments about Torah. We might do well to re-hear and rehearse Elie Wiesel’s lecture on this from 5 years ago.

The Far Horizon

One final note about Luke today. The gospel itself, and its sibling book the Acts of the Apostles, written also by Luke, make heavy use of a short, Greek verb. The three letters, delta-epsilon-iota—not a fraternity or sorority as far as I know—mean simply ‘it is necessary, it is needful, it was necessary, it was needful’. For St. Luke there is a necessity at work in the church’s expanding involvement within the culture around, and hence its need for story as legend, for leadership in unity from Peter to Paul, for organizational forms, bedrock heroes, and ways of thinking about others, and others within others. Yet Luke’s spirit is one of compassion. His theology is determinist to some degree. He sees purpose, necessity, even fate if you will, behind most trees, and behind many bushes. You may not see things that way, as many in late modernity do not. In interpretation, you will then perhaps need to hear Luke’s song of necessity transposed into the key of meaning. Purpose in the sense of meaning, not in the sense of destiny. Not so much ‘God has a purpose for your life’ as ‘God has life for your purposes’.

At Marsh Chapel we have the privilege to solemnize weddings on a regular basis, especially come summer. You need summer to survive winter, here in the north. There is grace in every wedding. There is unspoken, volcanic power in the hearing and speaking of the vows in every wedding. There is real change, which is real hard, heralded in every wedding. A privilege—what a privilege—to be present at the creation, nay the new creation, of such a moment. In a play otherwise precious and beautiful, Thornton Wilder had his dour New England minister say, as he prepared to marry Emily and George, speaking of his wedding experience, ‘Once in a thousand times it is interesting.’ That is the very opposite of my experience. Over 40 years at 20-25 weddings a year on average, I have not reached, but may be closing in on his number. Every one in the thousand was not just interesting but unutterably so. A while ago we married one couple, who were standouts in spirit and soul. Their four parents rose to greet them after the vows. Her parents, the mother from Japan and the father from England. His, the mother from India and the father from Italy. Buddhist, Methodist, Hindu, Catholic. Sometimes it feels like the world is coming apart at the seams. And then you go to a wedding, and, as every other time in a thousand, it is not only interesting, but unutterably so. This world can work. It may take a little compassion. But it can work.

Which brings us back to the very beginning. Your purposes. Your horizon. Your outlook, perspective, your end point and its hope. The offer of the Third Gospel, the horizon in Luke, is the possibility of a life of faith, girded in compassion. Will such a life be ours?

My life flows on in endless song,
above earth’s lamentation.
I hear the clear, though far off hymn
that hails a new creation.

No storm can shake my inmost calm
while to that Rock I’m clinging.
Since love is Lord of heaven and earth,
how can I keep from singing?

Through all the tumult and the strife,
I hear that music ringing.
It finds an echo in my soul.
How can I keep from singing?

More: Will you consider—it is offered with love and care—perhaps reconsider, maybe accept an invitation to lead a faithful life? To practice—nay, realize—the Christian faith? To walk steadily toward a horizon of compassion–a Lukan Horizon?

– The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 08.21.2016 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
August 7

Heart’s Treasure

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 12:32-40

Treasure

Last Sunday we worshipped in a Baptist Church, the Mother Church of Colgate University, in Hamilton, NY. The pews, windows, edifice, organ, and structures have not overly changed in fifty years. The kindness, grace, joy, reverence, humility, and care of the congregation roundly resemble those from decades ago. It is a rare chance, a gift of some significant dimension, to be welcomed into a community of faith, come Sunday, particularly when such opportunities each year, given one’s vocation, are limited. The Baptists welcomed us, mere Methodists, as they have regularly in the summer in the past in the Spirit.

It should be noted that the welcome required the welcome of six children/grandchildren as well, who happily explored the pews, hummed the hymns, joined in the children’s moment and, with some sharp exceptions, impeded not the liturgy of the day. It takes courage to open your doors in a Baptist church, or any, come Sunday, not really knowing what sort of Methodist others might descend upon you, a baker’s dozen with their kids.

The children are immersed in summer, with its changed schedules, alternating child-care systems, and various other forms of mayhem. They are busy with 8 year-old things, and the things of childhood, wonderfully overheard in their jokes. You know these, but maybe you have forgotten. What time is it when an elephant sits on your fence? What is the biggest pencil in the world (or biggest boss or biggest ant)? Why is six afraid of seven? And endless ‘your momma’ jests. See me following worship if you have forgotten these. Those who care for children, such a noble and beautiful career and calling, deserve our salutes, particularly come summer. Thank you. Thank you Aunt Millie. Thank you Uncle Fred. Thank you in the day care. Thank you at home child care. Thank you Mom. Thank you Dad. Thank you Gramma. And thank you for those who agree to work at summer camp, especially church camp.

The bell tolled, as it does on the hour, every hour, in that small town. We sang familiar hymns—Crown Him, Seek Ye First, O Zion Haste. We heard the interpretation of the Scripture from a venerable pulpit known to Harry Emerson Fosdick, Adam Clayton Powell and Colgate students beginning in 1819. (Colgate that began with ’13 dollars, 13 men, and 13 prayers’.)

In the prayers for the day was included the Lord’s Prayer, as you would expect. Also, by tradition, the wording was slightly different therein to the venerable usage employed here at Marsh Chapel, and elsewhere. That is, we prayed forgiveness for debts, not trespasses. Forgive us our debts. And following worship, we returned home, as we say, the Baptists to their debts and the Methodists to their trespasses. (☺) Except that there is something truly good about hearing a familiar prayer in a different mode. These good American Baptists use a version of our shared prayer that emphasizes the substantial, material, physical nature of what is to be forgiven. Yes, it misses the larger, varied multiplicity of the more common translation—trespasses—it is more narrow, more hedgehog than fox, say—but, for all that makes a strong point. There is a treasure, a heart’s treasure, a treasured physicality in the grace of the gospel. When you have to throw yourself on the mercy of the court, it is a great gift to experience that mercy present to you in all its substantial, material, physical nature. Speaking of which: We are coming to the Lord’s Table, to bread and cup, to thanksgiving, presence and memory, after all. Forgive us our debts…

A Lukan Horizon on Treasure

Given the cultural prominence in America this year of the rhetoric of racial hatred, religious animosity, and rhetorical ugliness, the ‘gift’ to our time and culture from one particular candidate and now, sadly, too, his party of record which has disowned what can only be disowned, a grand, even an old party, we may be open to a reminder, a gentle one, about the heart’s treasure, about treasure in and from, from within the heart. Life is brief, rounded by a little sleep. What we say lasts longer than what we do. So, damage already done, it is a travesty and a tragedy to have a beloved culture arrested and assaulted this this year by the rhetoric of demagoguery, birtherism, demagoguery, America Firstism, demagoguery, misogyny, demagoguery, racism, demagoguery, xenophobia, demagoguery, bigotry. You perhaps remember that this candidate, given to vitriol, recalled demolishing his earlier adversary, saying, yes, that was great, I really got him, with one phrase, ‘low energy’, that phrase destroyed him, that was ‘a one day kill’. A one day kill. And then: words are beautiful things. My, oh my. And people seem to like it. One wonders what the children in New Hampshire and Ohio and elsewhere will hear, remember, and make of this, and how they will think of their parents and grandparents, regarding this, in years to come. ‘Grandpa, what did you say, what did you do, in 2016?’

The Gospel of Luke, a multi-layered Gospel of compassion, today takes us to a moment of preparation, and to a holy call, to a holy calling, to a holy experience, to a holy readiness, estando listo, a word for you today, to a quickened courage even in the face of dark death, cultural and existential. Luke has prepared us. You know how to live. Fear not. Sell and give. Hold onto what lasts. Foxes have holes but the Son of Man no place. A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho who fell among thieves. Give us this day our daily bread. Woe to you, if you neglect justice and the love of God. This night your soul is required of you. So we are not entirely surprised by today’s gospel. The way has been prepared.

Treasure is important to life. The heart’s treasure is the importance of life. Treasure has its place in life. The heart’s treasure is the point of life. Treasure makes a way for life. The heart’s treasure is the way of life. Eternity gracing time—here is the heart’s treasure.

Horizon and Shadow

Purses that do not grow old…treasure in the heavens that does not fail…so you also must be ready…

We are cleaning through, now, the papers and photographs in our mother’s home, since she has been moved to assisted care. Many of you have done the same. Which pictures do you save? Which documents? Which furniture?

When I was 13, my mother chastised me for something I had said to our neighbor, a woman of her own age. The infraction itself is blessedly forgotten, but not the cure. ‘You must go and apologize to her’, she said. I did so, reluctantly. But I did so, at her direction. ‘You must tell her that you are sorry’. I did so, not happily, but in person, up the porch, to the door, knocking and speaking. (Later she became quite a good family friend. In meeting the couple, my parents went to dinner in their home with others. The host was carving a turkey, having no success. To make light of the moment my mother said, ‘What we need is a surgeon.’ Silence followed all around followed by my father’s laughter and honest whisper: “He is a surgeon”. (☺) ) All the materials in our mother’s house, letters and books and yearbooks and newspaper clippings and cards and Christmas cards and photos and photo albums, all of it, and all of them, and we are still moving through them, are as nothing compared to that word—go, apologize. Forgive us our debt. There is a word that is substantial, material, physical.

The heart treasures forgiveness, either given or received, because pardon comes by grace alone. Like the gift of life, and like the promise of eternal life, forgiveness is the gift of God’s grace. This gift we receive again this morning in Holy Communion. Whether the forgiven is debt or trespass, the forgiveness is lasting treasure, treasure buried in a field, the imminent and immanent presence of God.

Your Treasure

Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. Sometimes the forgiven is substantial, material, physical. Even financial.

This summer, near and far, people are giving of their time, energy, talent and money to give children a week at summer camp.

And what a gift it is! To see a boy or girl learning to swim, learning the prone float for the first time; to see a girl or boy who has never held a fishing pole before, catch a fish or two or three; to see a boy or girl view the whole firmament at night for the first time; to see a group of young people across many divisions of background, race, gender, orientation, class, temperament and personality come to friendship; to hear prayers and songs and hymns and psalms lifted in young voices morning and evening—what a privilege, what a gift.

Our granddaughter spent her first week at camp, at a campground at which her great grandfather, her grandfather and her mother had worked long before her arrival. A place, you might say, for the discovery of the heart’s treasure. It is not a small thing for a nine year old to go away for a week, to sleep away at camp. It requires levels of trust, confidence, and assurance in multiple directions.

She went with a friend, whose family had only recently become involved in church. Her friends parents themselves had an experience at camp. It happened this way. The parents went to pay their bill. Like many, they had paid half the tuition, but had to complete their payment. So they stood in line in front of a desk, out on a lawn, looking on a beautiful long lake. In front them was a mother, alone. Her turn came. They watched as she went slowly to the desk, and stood, silent. The camp worker waited. The mother said nothing, but finally held out her hands, empty. She had paid the first half, hoping to have enough to pay the second, but, as happens, pay check to pay check, something happened. She couldn’t pay the bill. But she had brought her daughter, hoping. Hoping that her daughter could go to camp like others were going. Making the drive, taking the chance, hoping against hope, that there might be a way. Love has a hidden strength. Or, she might have reasoned, it is a church camp, even a Methodist camp. When you throw yourself on the mercy of the court, you just hope there is some mercy there. She just stood, hands out, and whispered, ‘I’m sorry’.

In a fast motion, the woman at the desk came forward, took her arm, saying, ‘This is no problem. Just come with me. Your daughter is going to camp this week. You come with me. What is your name? Where are your from? Do you have a home church? We will take care of this.”

I have a lover’s quarrel sometimes with my church. But then, sometimes, sometimes in the summer, sometimes in the simple things, sometimes there is a reminder of who we hope we are, who we think we are, who we have promised to become. Do you know God to be a pardoning God? Do you know God to be a pardoning God? Do you know God to be a pardoning God?

I know you can’t run an economy on these terms. I know people have to pay their bills. I know you can’t run a business or a school or a city, or even run a church if people don’t pay their pledge. You can’t keep a campground open very long if that is the way things go. I got it. I know. But you know what? Sometimes people need a little help. Sometimes there needs to be a space made, an opening, a little forgiveness. I am really proud of that church camp, Camp Casowasco, where we grew up, worked, learned, and over three summers lifeguarding chose to go into the ministry, because of the ministers we met there. ‘Somebody let you grow up’ my parents would say. There was room, there. There was a place, there. There was a forgiveness, there, not just of trespasses, whatever they are, but also, sometimes, of debt. Forgive us our debts.

It was the story of the bursar line, by the way, the account of a passionate moment in the lineage of faith, like that in Hebrews, the moment of a mother’s faith when faith is really faith which is when faith is all you have to go on, her faith that somehow her daughter would get a bunk and take the swim test and sing at campfire and be like the rest of the kids, it was that account that her friend’s parents recalled and retold. ‘No problem. We will take care of this. Come with me.’

What is going on with us in this country, anyway? Have we forgotten who we are? A cultural amnesia? A Christological amnesia? Have we forgotten the love we had at first? Have we forgotten how to make a place for someone left out, someone somewhat different, someone ‘other’? Have we mixed up our heart and our treasure? What is our heart’s treasure? What do we stand for, when push comes to shove? There is a reckoning coming for us, as people and as a people.

If you leave that camp ground on Owasco Lake, and drive southeast for a while, either on the road four hours or in the mind’s eye four minutes, you may come down to the Hudson River, and then right out toward the Atlantic Ocean. There is harbor down there. In the harbor there is a statue. On the statue there is a statement. It reads as follows:

Give me your tired, your poor

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free

The restless refuse of your teeming shore

Send these, the lost, the tempest tossed to me

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 08.7.2016 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
June 26

A Summer Pause

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 9:51-62

The text for this sermon is currently unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.26.2016 at 11:00 am
Tags: no text, Robert Hill

Sunday
June 19

Ahab’s Shadow

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 8:230-29

Introduction

“I will not give you the inheritance of my fathers.”

On this Father’s Day many of us think of our parents who rest now in greater light and on a farther shore. You think today of your inheritance, your real, that is spiritual, that is familial, that is named inheritance. What is yours? What is that quintessential something, that no one else perhaps has to carry forward, that is yours, that you will not, cannot, should not, give away? And what about our shared inheritance, as a globe, as a country, as a church?

“I will not give you the inheritance of my fathers.”

With this terse refusal, Naboth lost his garden, his head, and, in fact, the very inheritance he hoped to protect. For Ahab—though he sulked, and though he fasted, and though he moaned, and though he allowed Jezebel to take charge—King Ahab at last had his wish, his vineyard. Just here, Ahab’s shadow begins to fall.

Israel nine centuries before Jesus went sliding down a slippery slope, pushed and pulled by the influence of increasingly poor leadership. Poor leadership. After David and Solomon, the nation’s fortuned declined steadily, under other, lesser kings. Who remembers Jereboam? Or Nimri? Or Omri? Or, today, Omri’s son, Ahab? BUSTH has a long history of excellent teaching in Hebrew Scripture: Elmer Leslie, Harrell Beck, Kathe Darr. They have remembered, and helped us to do so, too. Old Samuel had told them years before: You want a King? You want a King. Everybody else has one, so you want one, too. All right, you will get your king, and with your king, a whole basket of lasting trouble.

Ahab is remembered in Scripture because, in hindsight, he symbolized the progressive disintegration of Israelite society. The failings of the leader, somehow, uncannily, were seen in retrospect to represent a deeper and far wider malaise, in a society that year by year increasingly placed the poor at the mercy of the rich. Ahab’s shadow, part of the lengthening shadow of predatory, mendacious leadership in ancient Israel, has had a long, long reach--right up to today’s newspaper.

Ahab shadow—what was his capricious craving all about?

He desired, coveted, his poor neighbor’s little plot. And, in a way, why not? After all, he was the King! Hey. Rank has its privileges. To the victor go the spoils. What do you give a 500 pound gorilla? (ANYTHING HE WANTS!) I mean—this was a personal matter. It had nothing to do with public policy. The nation was prosperous and safe, thanks to shrewd management and the alliance with Tyre and Sidon, sealed with Jezebel’s kiss. This was a small matter. Kings have stolen a whole lot more.

What did Ahab want with that little, secret, private pleasure?

What would provoke a King, like Ahab, so to desire a tiny vineyard, like Naboth’s?

Ahab’s Shadow: Looking back at David

Perhaps…the stresses of public life caused Ahab to desire a little personal pleasure. After all, he might have reasoned, even in the Camelot days of David, there was the matter of the beautiful blonde, Bathsheba. Even in the halcyon glory days of an earlier generation, still there was a dark side, and Urriah the Hittite and Psalm 51. If David could have Bathsheba, surely Ahab could desire a little vineyard, the inheritance of Naboth and his faith, and turn a little profit, plowing under the vines and planting a regular garden. Like they do in Egypt, say. Did Ahab desire to be like David?

Ahab’s Shadow: Tired of the Trivia

Perhaps…the trappings of power and leadership changed Ahab. As Roy Smyres used to say about episcopal leaders, “They hear every day what wonderful people they are and what a great job they are doing—and, amazingly, some of them—START TO BELIEVE IT!” Visibility, power, position: they corrupt. Maybe it takes one to know one. You get distant. You don’t visit in the home as much, pace

J Wesley. You become insulated. You rise above. You look down. You forget what it takes. Bishop Herbert Skeete, once a kindly and compassionate pastor in Harlem, came up here to lead in New England and then retired. He referred in his 1996 valediction (July, U Mass, NEJurisdictional conference) to the vast majority of his little New England churches as (I quote him exactly) “eurocentric havens of mediocrity”. A little exhaustion, a little frustration? My, my. I guess you get bitter, hardened. The hurts and gifts of the Lilliputians under you fade. “L’eglise—C’est moi”. Yes, General Superintendent. Yes, King. Those lay folks, clergy don’t need the encouragement of my example. Naboth can get along without a vineyard. The heck with his inheritance, the cultivated vineyard. The heck with their history, of live free or die. It doesn’t matter that much, really, now, does it? Did Ahab get tired of the small stuff?

Ahab’s Shadow: Accomplishment

Perhaps…the endless contention and intractable difference of leadership in a republic—in any institution really—“got to” Ahab. After all, he was King! Couldn’t he even organize and execute, on his own, the purchase of a vineyard? Some years ago thirty UM pastors from large churches gathered in Minneapolis. We worshiped at Hennepin church. Rod Wilmouth, the lead pastor there, preached a great sermon on the theme of faith that moves mountains. His sermon title, though, was accidentally printed not as intended, “Faith that Can Move Mountains”, but, rather, as “Faith that Mountains Can Move”! He said, “And I thought I was in charge here!” As a public leader, sometimes, you can’t win. You don’t succeed. You fight city hall, tooth and nail---and you are the mayor! Did he just want a sense of accomplishment?

Ahab’s Shadow: Marital Dynamics

Perhaps…this all has to do, then and now, with family dysfunction. Jezebel, an early enabler, acts out for her sulking mate his lust for the vineyard. Isn’t that a picture? I can imagine the political cartoons of the day—“Impeach the King--and her husband too!” She orchestrates the media, the courts, the public opinion of the day, the powers that be. So the nation becomes a messy place. A place where it’s hard to tell who is telling the truth. A place where the spoken public word is not always verifiable. A place where innocent are found guilty. A place where the apparatus of state is used for personal gain. ‘Hard to imagine such a nation, isn’t it? Or is it?

Jezebel is not really to blame here. She just executes her husband’s, her King’s desire. The shadow is his, not hers.

Be careful dear friend. We become the servants, unwittingly, of those whom we most want to please. It is important for Jezebel and for you to know whom we are trying to please in life. We are slaves of that one.

Faith in Christ, the faith of Jesus Christ better said, is God’s gift and frees us, radically and truly frees us from all forms of enslavement to pleasing others. Paradoxically, the faith of Jesus Christ does so by re-enslaving us—to Christ alone. In Him. See where you are—in the cosmic apocalypse of Christ. See what time it is—the time when new creation supplants creation. Hear the Gospel: There is no longer Jew nor Greek, there is no longer slave nor free, there is no longer male or female. There is no longer gay nor straight. No one can serve two Masters. The life we now live in the flesh we live by the faith of Christ. You are His.

Who do you want to please? Did Ahab become caught up in unhealthy family systems?

Ahab’s Shadow: Convenience

None of these, finally, is the marrow, or the buried treasure of the Scripture today, nor the truth of our own time either.

In spite, or perhaps because of his military success and material surplus, Ahab desired…at depth…and this is the tragedy of his tale… a more convenient God. Ahab desired a less inconvenient deity. Ahab desired, through all these other lesser cravings, a more compliant Lord. One more in the mold of the nations, more Jezebel and less Elijah. And here the shadow truly lengthens and fully falls.

Ahab shadowy desire, apocalyptically revealed here as truth, in the manner detected and discerned by the wise through the ages, by W James, L Martyn and St Paul, in the odd moment, by apocalypse truth happens, his desire was for a less austere God, one less inclined to invade human space with haunting, troubling questions about life and death and meaning and love and…especially… JUSTICE.

A little Elijah goes a long way. He walks into the King’s court and shouts, “One of us is cursed and I think it’s you!…Look…there…dogs will lick your blood.” A little of that goes a long way.

Is this really-- MORE ABOUT US THAN IT IS ABOUT HIM?

Ahab’s Shadow: Our Own?

Israel remembered Ahab’s shadowy desire for a more convenient God, not out of reverence for Ahab, but because his desire somehow revealed the waxing national desire for a little lower heaven, a little lighter covenant, a little more convenient God. As the distant mirror of the Scripture may teach us, we are so interested because we know this figure and this desire so well.

We, too, want a little more convenient deity. One who will affirm our proclivities and ignore our cruelties

We know this Ahab well. Always a little sideways to the truth…Politically able, morally twisted…at heart faithless…looking for more convenience than the “inheritance of the fathers” allows…at heart hoping for an easy chance, the lottery of life, something for nothing, a quick pleasure, a garden delight.

We get the leadership we deserve.

On the horizon today we hear and see demagoguery—America First, Birtherist, Misogynist, Racist, Xenophobic, Narcissistic (don’t you love all these Greek rooted words?) bigotry. I sure did that well. ‘Low Energy’. That was a one day kill. Words are beautiful things.

Some express surprise, a sense of mistake, regarding the nomination in question. Yet there is no surprise or mistake about the nomination in question. 80% of voters in one party—grand?, old?--agree with these three propositions: Muslims should be banned. A wall should be built along the Rio Grande. Undocumented immigrants of all ages and stages should rounded up, arrested, jailed, and deported. (New York Review of Books, p 8-10, June, 2016) If you are in conversation with a member of such a party, chances are 4 out of 5 that you are in conversation with these views. No surprise. No mistake. You see? The shadow falls on us.

Over time, we get the leadership we deserve.

Today we pray for the Orlando dead. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do so, as in gathering, and vigil, and silence, we have done all week. First, and foremost, we turn our spirits toward their loved ones and families and friends. We return to the very themes preached exactly one year ago here, following Charleston, regarding gun violence. Our BU SPH Dean Sandro Galea has furthered that argument, with strength, this very week.

Yet, as a Chapel in the Methodist tradition, we also have a particular reckoning, now. United Methodism has been part and parcel of a part of our shadowed culture that has fomented and augmented dehumanization of gay people, bigotry against sexual minorities. Only two active northeastern bishops (Johnson, Devadhar) put their name this May to a shared letter rejecting in no uncertain terms this abject denominational failure. Silent, silent were the vast majority of active general superintendents. Now the chickens have come home to roost. It’s time. The time for discussion is over, washed away in the blood of Orlando. Local churches in Charge Conferences need to stop funding that supports bigotry, as, in one possible example, in three general funds: world service, the episcopal fund, and Africa University. Annual Conferences need to go ahead and ordain and deploy gay people, as many are doing, the silence of their bishops not withstanding—seven now across the country, including the actions taken in New England this week. Bigotry (largely of southern US and Africa Methodists) is, from this day forward, globally, generationally, and grittily rejected. Orlando is to Methodism and the Gay issue what Kent State was to America and the war in Vietnam, an apocalyptic moment when those who may still have thought otherwise, people of sound mind and heart, now turn. It’s time. What the sad incompetence of the General Church, the General Conference, and the silent General Superintendents has ignored, look! by apocalypse!, the local churches and annual conferences now address. We at Marsh Chapel adamantly and vigorously marry gay people and employ and deploy gay clergy. Where we can support others to do so, we shall.

One northeastern bishop this week callously sent out a letter about Orlando without even mentioning the targeting of the gay population. A minister in his conference wrote him the following:

I was shocked that no mention was made in your statement about the key issue the country

and our church are wrestling with: the oppression of gays. As long as our denomination and its leaders

not only continue the oppression of gays, but ignore their pain in the midst of being slaughtered….

we will have truly made ourselves irrelevant in the healing of the world in this day and time.

With a heavy heart…

No, we want a little lower heaven, a little lighter covenant, a little less inconvenient God.

Israel saw in hindsight that Ahab’s shadow had become their own—the easier worship of a less inconvenient God.

It isn’t about Ahab, it’s about Israel. It isn’t about others, it’s about us.

Elijah, Are You with Us?

Elijah, in the end, speaks. Elijah never dies. His voice is active, coming in forms we least expect, and sitting in empty chairs left vacant by faithful hearts. Elijah—rumpled and tousled. Elijah—skeptical of concentrated power. Elijah—with a passion for compassion. Elijah—concerned for the left—out. His voice irrupts now and then. So we are right to leave a chair, some space, vacant for him.

I have not heard his voice in a while, but he does not die.

Almost forty years ago this spring, on at least one evening, you heard him full of compassion. This spring has overtones from 1968, all the way to the California primary.

On June 5, 1968, at 8am our phone rang, at breakfast. My dad had gone to Chicago for a denominational meeting. Breakfast with three younger siblings at age 13 is not exactly heaven on earth. ‘It’s for you’ my sister said. Now that is a first, a phone call, for me, at breakfast. My father said: You probably don’t know this yet, but your favorite, your hero, Robert Kennedy was shot last night in California, and probably will die today or tomorrow. I know how much he meant to you, and I am sorry for our loss. It is tragic, but we will get through this. As a pastor he always had a knack for showing up where he was least expected and most needed, least expected and most needed. Wouldn’t every minister want to be so remembered?

Two months earlier, on April 4, Robert Kennedy was on his way to accept victory in the Indiana primary, five painful years after his brother’s death and just weeks before his own assassination, a few hours after the killing of Martin Luther King. Galatians 6:14 speaks of a triple crucifixion. One redeeming feature of our own hurt is that it helps us proffer compassion to others who hurt.

Elijah keeps heaven high and the covenant heavy and God, God. ELIJAH! We wait for your voice today!

Kennedy spoke to an inner city rally of black and Polish voters. They had not heard the news, which he gave. There is a generation deep moan that barks from the crowd. I hear it still. He stands, rumpled shirt and tousled hair before a single microphone, note-less and alone. What courage to stand there that night, and then, Elijiah-like, to speak:

*I have some very sad news for you…

*In this difficult time it is perhaps well to ask what kind of nation we are, and what direction we want to move in…

*Do we want bitterness, hatred, a desire for revenge, greater polarization of black and white?…

*Or, with ML King, do we seek understanding, comprehension, to replace violence and the stain of violence with compassion?…

*For those tonight who feel hatred and mistrust, I can also feel in my own heart that same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed…

*But we have to make an effort in this country to understand, to get beyond this time…

*Aeschylus wrote: “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our despair and against our will comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

*What we need in this country is not division, hatred, violence, and lawlessness, but love and wisdom and compassion and justice…

*We need to “tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.”

Conclusion

We still need to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.

We still need to see thing as the never were and say, “Why not?”

We still need to see wrong and try to right it, see suffering and try to heal it, see war and try to end it.

Perhaps Elijah will take his place, fill his chair, and lift his voice again in our time, and shine some light through Ahab’s shadow?

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.19.2016 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
June 12

Forgiven

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 7:36-8:3

Introduction

Please forgive the intrusive nature of this sermon. For I want to begin by taking a walk with you into the attic of your soul. Though we are friends, it is not my right to initiate such a visit. Though we are pastors and parishioners, it is not our right to force such a trek back up through the mist of time. You would need to make an invitation, yourself. Even to suggest the climb, without any initiative on your part, is rude of me. I apologize.

The Gospel, however, intrudes upon our very souls, whether the preacher has a right or not. As kingfishers catch fire, and dragonflies draw flame, so truth—that light in which we see light—advances upon us. So we go ahead. We walk together upstairs to the landing. You kindly have turned on the hall light. Thank you. I wonder if this is a sign from you that you will welcome this joint venture? We pull down in the chain that loosens the attic portal. You know how that little door in the ceiling falls open, and slowly a flank of wooden stairs comes down, and down, and down, and touches our feet. We are ready to climb up into the darkness.

Watch your step. You have not been up into the cobwebs and the dust of memory, the mothballs and the coverlets of history, the grime and the darkness of the past. It is a little slow going. This is your attic, though. You know it as well as you know your own past. In fact, it is your past, box by box, and crate by crate. I have no right to be here, and if you ask me, I will leave. A man has a right to his own regrets. They are not common property. They are yours, these boxes and labels and shoes and hangers and records and amulets and souveniers from the dusty past. One of you is looking over at an old service uniform from the great war—brown and rumpled. Another sees bobby sox and a political poster—I LIKE IKE. She has stumbled past three old Beatles albums—greatest hits, Abbey Road, the White album. I notice a Jim Croce tape. I wonder if it still plays? He thumbs through a pile of other newer albums. Of course there are lots of photographs. What kind of an attic would it be without boxes and records and photographs?

This is the attic of memory. No, we won’t stop at the wardrobe

Today. The wardrobe is for another day, a day of hope and imagination. Lions and witches come from wardrobes. Today we are looking back, though. We are going to stumble and claw our way over into the back corner. There is not much light here. It is a long time since anyone came back in, all this way. Dust, cobwebs—it makes you sneeze.

Over in the corner there is a small, low box, carefully closed, and tied around with a little bailer’s twine. This is yours. No one else knows it is here, or if they do they have forgotten or never understood or just don’t care. But you know and remember and understand and care. I really do not want to be here, and you probably don’t want to either. I—for it is not my business. You—because in black ink, now dusty, is penned across the top of the box a single, awful, hellish word—regret. Regret is a short synonym for hell. And up here in the attic of memory, off in the corner, sits this stupid box, which means nothing to anyone, except to you. There it is—a single box labeled “regret”.

Open it.

Go ahead. Try it. If you want. I think you have wanted to come up here, but just never had 20 minutes of quiet to do so. Remember last summer when you thought about the box? And remember that early morning dream? That was a strange thing. I want to encourage you to open it. Hold it in both hands. Untie the twine. Loosen the top. Turn it over, and let it all fall out.

That was a gutsy thing to do. Good for you.

The reason the box was marked “regret” is that this is one thing you regret. You have a regret. That is part of being human. Can you live with being human? Can you live with being a little lower than the angels? How do I know all this? As my great aunt would say, “If you’re so smart how come you aren’t rich?” A real good question. I know because I have boxes in my attic too. They too are covered with cobwebs. I too make my visits, my attic climbs, very seldom. And, yes, I know about regret. Not just vicariously, either. There is nothing quite as bitter. If only…

I asked to come up here with you for a reason. Up in the attic here, with that swinging bare light bulb and the Johnny Mathis record and all this dust, we may feel God.

Look at the box again, and all its contents spread across the floor. In the dark I cannot see the floor, but after 22 years and 7 pulpits I truly doubt if any of it would surprise me. After reading the Bible and Shakespeare and a few decades worth of the New York Times, there is not much that surprises. But it is different for you. This is your attic, your memory, your box, your regret. It is YOURS. In a way, this box is more yours than any of the others.

In this box are the articles of impeachment brought by life against us. They are multiple and they are damning and unlike civil and criminal law, the laws of the soul do not give way to lawyerly cunning. And there is no vote, no 2/3 majority needed.

What is that you say? Not you? Never a cutting word? Never a selfish deed? Never an unhealthy habit? Never a compulsive trend? Never a myopic judgment? Never a temptation accepted? Never an ungenerous year? Never a non-giving decade? Not you? Never a misspent dollar or day or dream? You don’t go to enough funerals.

But the box doesn’t lie. Nor does the conscience. Nor does the memory. Nor does life.

It simply spells “regret”. That, I regret.

God Forgives You

There is something that both can and must be said, as we pack up the regret box. It is not a human thing to say, though we are the only saying beings around so we do the best we can. It is a God word. And only God speaks God words.

First, looking down at the dusty cardboard of past regret—something that if not removed can fester and infect and cripple—first there is this. God forgives you. It is, according to the Scripture, the divine promise and intention to forgive and to forgive. Abraham felt it. Joseph practiced it. Hosea proclaimed it. Jesus taught us to pray for it. And for 2000 years the church has tried to exemplify, embody this one word. God forgives. John Wesley asked his preachers one initial question. “Do you know God to be a pardoning God?” Now that, in the face of a box marked “regret”, that is good news. In the face of the worst rejection and the most regrettable misjudgment on earth, God practices a powerful forgiveness.

You know in the midst of all the harshness of the religious right and the flightiness of the New Age, it can be hard to hear the central truth about God and about us. God forgives.

God forgives before we are up in the attic at all. God forgives when we realize what we have to regret. God forgives as we carry the regret around. God forgives when we hear and when we do not and it does not depend on our hearing.

Do you know God to be a pardoning God? If so, you know God, the God of Jesus Christ.

Here are Scriptures worth memorizing about God who forgives….

If you forgive others their trespasses, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you.

Lord how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? As many as seven times? … I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven.

Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ has forgiven you.

Other People Forgive You

But maybe that is not what keeps you awake, not what makes you linger today in the attic. You may well believe and trust that God forgives. But what about those you have regrettably hurt?

This can be particularly hard for those who have grown up around especially hardened parents and other adults. If you have not heard an encouraging word much growing up, it can be hard later in life to believe that those other humans around you can be gracious.

They can be.

As a matter of fact, most of the time they are. More than most of the time. People forgive, more than you know and more than you may think you deserve. It really delights me. People have a profound capacity to forgive and forget. It is God given, and it is real and it is good.

I think of the waiting father and the prodigal son.

I think of Paul forgiving Peter’s two faced behavior.

I think of Augustine’s mother forgiving his selfishness.

I think of Erasmus forgiving the wayward Popes.

I think of Grant and Lee at Appomatox.

I think of Abraham Lincoln walking through Richmond.

I think of the Marshall Plan and rebuilding of Germany in the 1940’s

I think of women and men, night after day, for millenia.

You may have to ask sometime for forgiveness. You probably should. Say, “I’m sorry”. Like the Fonz, who could never utter the word, “I was wrong..” But my experience is that most people most of the time when confronted with a heartfelt, sincere apology from a person of integrity will say, “Don’t worry about it. I forgive you.” It is one of the greatest things about other people. You may have to give it a little time. You may have to pray about it. You may have to trust a little. But—other people will forgive you.

Forgiving Yourself

But that may not be what holds you here in the attic. As a matter of fact, I bet that the box is still up here, wrapped in twine and covered with dirt and marked regret, for another reason. It’s one thing for God to forgive you. It’s one thing to accept another’s kindness. But in the end that still leaves you a few sandwiches short of a picnic, and a few french fries short of a happy meal. God has forgiven you! Your neighbor has forgiven you! Now comes the hard part.

You have to forgive yourself. You have to let yourself off the hook. You have to find a way to admit to yourself that you are not 101% perfect. You have to, well, accept your own acceptance. And that can be a lot easier said than done. Because we have a way of holding onto what poisons us. We have a way of just wrapping ourselves in a miserable kind of self-conceited self-condemnation. Up in the attic.

Lent is a good time to dump your guilt. God doesn’t want it. No neighbor finally has much use for it. So why is it still in the box? What good is it? Get rid of it. When it doubt, throw it out.

God forgives you. So does your neighbor. Forgive yourself.

Matter of fact, while we are here, up in the attic—let’s just take that box out of here. I’ll hold the ladder for you while your coming down. You can carry it, with a little homiletical help. If we hurry we can get out on the curb before noon, and the heavenly garbage truck always comes by this part of your mental world Sunday at noon. There, it’s out on the curb, and soon it will be gone for good. William Blake:

And throughout all eternity

I forgive you, you forgive me.

And throughout all eternity

I forgive you, you forgive me.

And throughout all eternity

I forgive you, you forgive me.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.12.2016 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
June 5

In Communion

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 7:11-17

There is no text available for this sermon. We apologize for the inconvenience.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.5.2016 at 11:00 am
Tags: no text, Robert Hill

Sunday
May 22

Blessed Trinity

By Marsh Chapel

John 16:12-15

Triune God

For this Sunday our lessons evoke a Triune God, God in three persons, blessed Trinity. I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers. We have peace through our Lord Jesus Christ. The Spirit of truth will guide you into all truth.

My friend attended another, here unnamed, divinity school, which at the time was blown about by many if not every wind of doctrine, so much so that my friend, with a bit of whimsy and humor, described their theology thus: ‘God in seven persons, blessed heptopoly’.

Here, today, we shall limit ourselves to three, the three persons of the traditional Godhead. Psalm 8 evokes God as Creator. Romans 5 evokes God as Redeemer. John 16 evokes God as Sustainer. Father, Son, Spirit. These are choice, endlessly lovely passages, any one of which, and any verse from any one of which should deserve 22 minutes of preaching attention and acclamation. Memorize them.

The Christian doctrine of Trinity is of course a deeply mysterious matter, out of reach of most of us most of the time. How can God be, both one and three? Faith we must guess involves more than math. Not less than math, but more than math. If nothing else, about the Trinity, we remember this: God is relational, on this teaching. At the heart of the divine there is relationship, of First to Second to Third to Second to First. This is what the early church found in Jesus: the God to whom Jesus prayed, the God who guided and inspired Jesus, and the God in Jesus. This is what the early church found in the Scripture: Psalm 8, Romans 5, John 16. This is what the early church found in Life: the rush of creativity, the joy of love, the breath of spirit. In our Gospel today, the Scripture goes even further, in a way giving privilege, at least here, to Spirit that guides into truth. Once the creation has emerged; once redemption has been offered; then it is a matter of spirit, Spirit, wind, breath, gusting Spirit of God.

We preach and pray at the crossroads of faith and culture. This is true for every congregation, pulpit and place, but especially and keenly so right now at Marsh Chapel. In a new, perhaps conflicted way, across the country, we may be listening this summer for words of grace, out of our holy scripture, out of our traditions, out of our sacred history, and wondering, hoping, perhaps doubting but still hoping, that these as preached may help us make some sense of what is becoming of us, as a people and as a country, in our time.

We desire a faith amenable to culture, and a culture amenable to faith. For what good is a baptized cleansing if we are simply thrown back into the mire? Personal and social holiness are married to one another. Loving faith expects loving culture.

For all the attention we—rightly—give to politics and economics, it is really the cultural realities that have most impact on individual lives, over time. When an 8 year old bursts through the back door, crying, saying that her school friend, from Mexico, we will be deported, hers is a culturally inflicted wound; when an 87 year old woman, in a nursing home, rues the collapse of her life long party, and surveys its demise and damages with the word ‘dismaying’, hers is a cultural assessment; when a candidate, given to insulting his competitors, and branding them with epithets, reflects on defeating one by calling him ‘low energy’ and, months later, in reflection, saying, ‘that was a one day kill’ and then adding, ‘words are beautiful things’ (as my Dad said, ‘its one thing to be tough, but its another to be mean’), we suffer a cultural decline; when a great Christian denomination lacks spiritual leaders, general superintendents, who could simply say, ‘gay people are people’, and then keep silent (only one active UMC Bishop in the Northeast, Peggy Johnson, did so this week), this is a cultural measurement; when only 24% of 17-24 year olds are eligible to seek admission into armed forces (the other 76% ineligible due to obesity, lack of a high school diploma, drug use, criminal record, failure of physical exam or other), here we trace cultural influence; when forms of worship, meant for enchantment, give way over two generations to a pseudo-worship aimed at entertainment, with direct connections to features of Reality TV, professional wrestling, and beauty contests—the same social expressions now driving some political selection and debate--we face a cultural deficit; in short, when a culture, like ours, has a mirror held up to it, as has happened this calendar year, and the image is more appalling than appealing, then some among us may begin to return to, revert to, a reconsideration of our more ancient repositories of wisdom: scripture, history, thought, and scrutinized experience. In an age of broad cultural malaise, some may seek more steadily the reassurance, peace, insight, and resolve to be found in moments of truth, goodness, beauty—and ordered worship. Those in the pulpits across this country have our work cut out for us in 2016. How shall we invoke and evoke faith fit for culture and culture fit for faith? How will we address incivility in a civil way? How do we oppose demagoguery with democracy? How do we contrast buffoonery with beauty? How does one supplant cultural disorder with liturgical order? How do we combat fear with faith? We have our cultural work cut out for us this year.

Thank goodness we are not alone! Blessed Trinity blesses us, especially as Trinity leans to Spirit.

There is a self-correcting Spirit of Truth loose in the Universe, leading us. Next week we shall begin hearing, along with Luke, from Galatians, chapter by chapter, speaking of spirit and truth, speaking of relationship, speaking of the new creation. The Trinity leans toward Galatians, on this Trinity Sunday. Here is your preparation for the Holy Scripture of the next month, your shake down cruise for the trip to Galatia, your introduction to Paul, Freedom, Spirit and New Creation, and the Magna Charta of Christian freedom. Such beautiful verses: I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me, and the life I now live I live by the faithfulness of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast therefor and do not be enslaved again. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faith, gentleness, self-discipline. Bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. Here is the story behind the Epistle lessons you will hear through June.

New Creation

Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians is one of the great high peaks of the New Testament. It is about a whole new life, a new creation. In fact, it may be the highest peak in the whole range, the Mount Everest of the Bible. It is written to address this question: “Must a Gentile become a Jew before he can become a Christian?”. Is there a religious condition to be met, prior to the reception of God’s apocalypse in Christ?

After Paul had been converted to Christ, he spent 17 years in unremarkable, quiet ministry. We know nothing of these two decades spent in Arabia. All the letters we have of Paul come from a later decade. Paul was converted to Christ, as he says earlier in this letter, “by apocalypse”. Christ revealed himself to Paul. Thus, for Paul, the authority in Christ, is not finally in the Scripture, nor in traditions, nor in reason, nor in experience. Christ captured Paul through none of these, but rather through revelation, the apocalypse of God. In short, Paul was not a Methodist.

There is a singular, awesome freedom in the way Paul understands Christ. We have yet, I believe, in the church that bears His name, to acknowledge in full that freedom.

After these 17 years, Paul went up to Jerusalem to meet with the pillars of the church. Can you picture the moment? All in one room: Paul, Peter, Andrew, James, John, Titus, Barnabas. And in that room there was argument, difference. Paul preached the cross of Christ to unreligious people, and they heard. What would the Jerusalem elders say? Jesus was a Jew, and had been circumcised. So also were all the first Christians, including Paul himself. But God had done something astounding. It was the Gentiles, not the Jews, who fervently believed the Good News. Should these unreligious children of God be brought back into the Covenant of Circumcision? No, they all agreed, no. God had done something new. So, Peter went to the circumcised, and Paul went to the uncircumcised. Peter went to the Jews, and Paul to the Gentiles. They agreed to disagree, agreeably. And the meeting ended and it was settled.

But you know how sometimes it’s not the meeting but the meeting after the meeting that counts? What was settled in Jerusalem was unsettled later. Peter couldn’t be counted on to hold the line, and Paul told him so, to his face. Peter was inconsistent about freedom—sometimes he ate with the unclean Gentiles—that’s all of you by the way. Sometimes, when somebody was watching, he backed away. And Paul caught him at it and as he ways, “opposed him to his face”. I wish all opposition in church was so clean, direct, personal, and honest. “One of us is wrong and I think it’s you!” Paul doesn’t talk about Peter, he talks to Peter. There’s a life lesson. Said Paul: ‘In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither Slave nor Free, there is no Male or Female’. Not religion, not wealth, not gender—no, all these give way before Spirit.

In the resurrection, in Christ, in faith, in the new creation, there is no gender. At least, according to Paul in Galatians. In Christ, there is no ‘male and female’. Gender is swallowed up in victory. The Oneidas and the Shakers could sense this, odd and contrasted as were their ways of living it out.

We have yet, I doubt, to take seriously the Good News of liberation found in these passages. Your identity does not come from your sexuality, your gender, your orientation.

In this passage, in the Bible, Paul points to a clue, as well, to one of our great arguments today. Here, your identity is not to be inferred from creation….but from new creation! This apocalyptic baptismal formula declares the erasure—who says there is nothing radical about Christ?—of the distinction we so heighten, that between male and female.

So, my teacher, J L Martyn: “In Rom 1: 18-32, Paul uses an argument explicitly based on creation, drawing certain conclusions from the “things God has made” in “the creation of the cosmos” (Rom 1:20). In effect, Paul says in this passage that God’s identity and the true sexual identity of human beings as male and female can both be inferred from creation.

“What a different argument lies before us in Gal 3:26-29, 6:14-15! Here the basis is explicitly not creation, but rather the new creation in which the building blocks of the old creation are declared to be non-existent. If one were to recall the affirmation ‘It is not good that man should be alone” (Gen 2:18), one would also remember that the creational response to loneliness is married fidelity between man and woman (Gen 2:24, Mark 10:6-7). But in its announcement of the new creation, the apocalyptic baptismal formula declares the erasure of the distinction between male and female. Now the answer to loneliness is not only marriage, but rather the new-creational community that God is calling into being in Christ, the church marked by mutual love, as it is led by the Spirit of Christ (Gal 3:28). The result of such a radical vision and of its radical argumentation is the new- creational view of the people of God...It is Christ and the community of those incorporated into him who lie beyond religious distinctions...Baptism is a participation both in Christ’s death and in his life; for genuine, eschatological life commences when one is taken into the community of the new creation, in which unity in God’s Christ has replaced religious-ethnic differentiation. In a word, religious and ethnic differentiations and that which underlies them—the Law— are identified in effect as the “old things” that have now “passed away”, giving place to the new creation (2 Cor 5:17).” (Martyn, in passim, Anchor Bible Commentary: Galatians).

God is calling into existence a new community of faith working through love. There is your identity. Not what is natural but what is heavenly about us forms our primary identity. That is, the Bible itself, from the vantage point of this great mountain passage, opens the way for an understanding of identity that is not just nature or creation, but new creation. This is the community of faith working through love. Here, there is a place where God may be doing something new, revealing something new. And, most strangely, it may be those who are not so easily confined by the creational categories of male and female, those who are both or neither, who are on the edge of the new creation. I know what Paul writes in Romans, but you still must ask yourself, at this point, which is Mount Everest: Galatians 3 or Romans 1? I think it is Galatians 3. I have come to believe that gender and orientation do not provide our primal identity. No male and female means no gay and straight, no homosexual and heterosexual. God is doing something new, which includes all in the community of faith working through love.

We worship on Trinity Sunday. The Triune God summons us to relationship and complexity and courage to seek the truth. The Spirit of God leads us into all truth: Come Trinity Sunday we recall that there is, by God’s triune grace, a self-correcting spirit of Truth loose in the universe. The trajectory of Paul’s preaching in Galatians, and thus in total, makes ample space in our churches for gay people. If you love Jesus, and especially if you love the Bible, then you may just find courage not only to defend a moral life in a post-moral culture, but also to preserve freedom for those who have found a whole new life, and so are very harbingers of the new creation.

God in three persons, blessed Trinity. I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers. We have peace through our Lord Jesus Christ. The Spirit of truth will guide you into all truth.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 05.22.2016 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
May 1

A Topography of Love

By Marsh Chapel

John 14:23-29

“Jesus answered him, ‘Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.’”

You are invited to walk in the land of love, from this day forward. Walk in love. Walk across the landscape of love. Make love your aim. Love one another. Here is a Johannine topographical map for your travels in just one verse alone, John 14: 23.

Our earth science teacher had a way of finding a way to excite 13 year olds with the mysteries of topography. A. He traced the advance and retreat of glaciers, and their deposits, in kells and drumlins and valleys and lakes. He reminded us that we are ice people, up north here. He pointed out the undersides of the mountains and the different geological formations underneath the similar beauties of the Adirondacks and Catskills. B. With great energy, he showed us how rivers formed and wound around and changed course. He reminded us that Susquehanna means ‘winding river’, and then would drift off into meditations upon other native names: Onondaga, Tioghnioga, Canandaigua, Oneida. These place names, a part of one local topography, in his merriment and memory became lodged in us, placing us in their places. The best of the days were those spent pouring over the maps, and the ways that rivers remake landscape. There is a flow to things, a watery fluidity underneath and sometimes well above the apparent surfaces of life. C. He took us beyond the constellations—Ursa Major and Minor, Draco the Dragon, Orion the Archer, Cassiopia on her throne—which we had already located in scouting, and spread out the universe, 14 billion years of age, endless ranges of galaxies, meteors sailing, suns exploding, darkness and light. He was trying to say something to us, looking back, about our place in the great Place of the Cosmos. D. He gestured to the winds, the gusting climactic climate about us. Freezing points, dew points, compass points—all good points. Behold the topographical mysteries!

Ours today is a topography, not of earth but of heaven, not of earth science but of heavenly science, not of land but of love.

Love. Are we lovers anymore?

It can feel blasphemous to speak of love at all. In a world where warfare continues to bubble up and out of Tutsi and Hutu history; in a world where Ecuadorian huts and barrios are wrecked in natural catastrophic earthquakes; in a world in which Columbian children are kidnapped and made child warriors; in a country, our own, in which there is lasting dispute about whether non-rich children should have full access to education and health care to age 21; in a country in which democracy—as both the ancient Greeks and our constitutional founders soberly feared—suddenly seems to give way to demagoguery (largely it must be underscored, due to the habits of mind, forms of rhetoric, and decades of contention exported from one party and this year from one candidate); in a country that comes to resemble, in spirit, the ancient Israel decried by Amos, and others, shot through with personal depravity, vapid worship, rampant neglect of the poor, and haughty, foolish overreliance on military might; in a culture that prizes counting but not reckoning; in a culture which emphasizes knowledge to the exclusion of relationship producing citizens who are often knowledgeably advanced but relationally delayed; in a culture, bounded by misogyny, blinded by racism, bordered by greed, which sees no longer any eternal horizon, nor values any longer the traditions of self-giving which themselves gave the culture its very birth; in a week of further gun death, including that of a two year old shooting his mother from the back seat of the car; in a week of violence in city after city; in a week of smaller slights, hidden swindles, and personal abuses which all fill in the Latin phrase, homo homini lupus, man is a wolf to man; in such a world, country, culture and week it can seem the height of hubris, or naivete, to utter in public the word ‘love’ at all. It can seem blasphemous to speak of love at all.

Nevertheless….

Here we are! Here you are! Bearing witness, giving thanks, offering prayers and tithes, seeking the Lord together. Sursum Corda: Lift up your hearts!

Our Gospel does so speak. Of love.

Are we lovers any more?

Do we let love be our aim? Do we think daily, and act weekly, and practice monthly the scales, vaults, verifications, and measurements of love? Do we love God and love our neighbor, loving the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and loving our neighbor as ourself? Are we going on to wholeness, to becoming healthy and whole in love in this lifetime (Are you going on to perfection? Do you expect to be made perfect in love in this lifetime?) For what do we live? If you are not going on to wholeness in love, what you are going on to?

Are we familiar with a topography of love—its glacial forms, its meandering rivers, its celestial stars and lights, its wind blowing where it wills?

Are we lovers anymore? Are you ready to get the lay of the land? God’s nature and name is love. Are we loving people?

Our topography of love is a verse in four phrases.

"Those who love me"

Ages ago glaciers cut lakes and hollows and mountains into lasting shapes. Love has done the same, cut lakes and hollows and mountains into lasting, existential shape.

Faith is a gift. Faith is not a task, not an achievement, not a work, not an accomplishment. Faith is a gift, through which we live out our lives in thanksgiving. Faith is a gift. You gain no praise in receipt of such a gift, and you incur no blame in the lack of such a gift.

For those who have been seized by the love of God, the faith of Christ, the confession of the church—is this who you are?—love is the form, the topographical outline of life. Walk in love.

It must be stressed that, at least here in the Holy Scripture, and at least here in the Gospel of John, John 14: 23, there is no argument that some should jump across a line, or make a personal choice. It is geological, glacial force at work, here. Those called to love, those called to love Him, are those called to love, those called to love Him. Is this you (pl.)?

The verse affirms that there are those who have a revelation that they are meant to love. They have the gift, the faithful gift of love. Some have the gift of strength, some the gift of music, some the gift of philanthropy, some the gift of insight. Faith (pistis) is such a gift. Love (agape) is such a gift.

For the first readers and hearers of this passage, our verse revealed a mystical union, a mystical audition, a mystical shift, a mystical experience, whose essence in retrospect became: We are meant to live in love, as those who love Him.

"Will keep my word"

The lakes and rivers that filled with water, over long, flowing, fluid, time, kept alive a saturation, a potential to slake the thirsts of life. Especially their propensity to meander, to wander, to saunter, to wonder, to move and live and have being, that propensity to fluidity makes a lively, loving word.

We may want to wrestle a bit with both the verb and the noun here.

To keep is not to obey, to keep is not to hold, to keep is not to hear, to keep is not to possess, although it is all those things and more.

In a small upper room, perhaps in Ephesus, maybe in the year 90ad, possibly with 30 or 40 present, a word is spoken and heard. It is a voice that speaks like no other, ‘so equable, magnanimous, and serene’ (J. Ashton). To hear it one needs to listen. One needs to learn to hear, to practice listening, to train the ear, as some music schools do.

A word is not text, ancient or cyber, nor a verse, however venerable or holy, nor a doctrine, even a powerful doctrine. The word is near your heart and your lips, too. How will you hear a word of God without listening for such a word? In Scripture, in Prayer, in Worship, in Conversation, in Meditation, in Sacrament, in Silence—day to day pours forth speech. But have we ears, ears to hear? There is a kind of turning of the back upon the world commanded by this word, His word.

(In an age sorrowfully awash in vulgar words, hateful words, misogynist, xenophobic, racist, artfully hateful words, in an age sorrowfully awash in a culture that languishes in the doldrums of a pervasive malaise, a pervasive amnesia, a pervasive torpidity, a pervasive ugliness, now unleashed, to our shame, in the political events of this year, one especially needs the care and cultivation of hearing.)

Good news: you may have confidence that such a word, yours to keep, yours for the keeping, may be spoken and heard. Here. Now.

"My Father will love them"

Now the celestial lights are before us. The planets, the stars, the meteors, the darkness and the light, the evening sky—these illumine our few days upon the earth.

We this week had sign board on the plaza for students to use to write out what they hoped to do and be in life. The word love was not absent, but almost so, as my friend pointed out. Many other words were written on the chalk board, but not love, not often. One wrote: I hope to find someone to love. Another: I want to love as I have been loved. But these sorts of sentences were few in number.

The day before we held vigil, again, for a student who died three years ago. Her mother, her friends, her former housemates gathered, three years on, at the monument, the King monument. You look for something sturdy in grief. We stood with flowers, wreaths, and photos. We ‘said some words’ (interesting locution). We waited in quiet. We wept, some at length and with profusion. We lit candles, shielding them from a light wind. When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

Again, there is no transaction here, no quid pro quo, no love for love trade. Here is eternal love, ‘my Father will love them’. Topos is place; graphe is writing—the depiction of a space, a topography of love. No one has ever seen God. But if we love one another God’s love abides in us and is made whole in us.

Huston Smith, when teaching at MIT long ago, said: we are in good hands, and so it behooves us to bear one another’s burdens.

"We will make our home with them"

To see which way the wind is blowing you need an anemometer. A glacial form, a river bed, a sacred canopy—earth, water, stars—make up our topography of love, with one addition, by the strength of this verse, John 14:23.

There is to be an indwelling, a making oneself at home, Father and Son will come and take up residence, be present, become presence. Here our humble sacraments, of holy baptism and holy communion, of bath and meal, of washing and eating, of cleansing and nourishment may bring a helpful reminder, with thanksgiving, of presence, His presence.

Yet the earliest hearers and readers of our verse felt something more. They felt Him making a home in their midst. They felt Him living with them. They felt Him dwelling among them. I have seen Him in the watch fires of a hundred circling camps. They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps. I can read his righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps. His day is marching on.

Here is Paul in the seventh heaven. Here is Lydia opening her life. Here is the Psalmist at peace. Here is Augustine in the garden. Here is Aquinas calling a lifetime’s writing, ‘so much straw’. Here is John of the Cross, en una noche oscura. Here is Luther in agony. Here is Wesley in the rain of Aldersgate Street. Here is Harriet Tubman, walking north to freedom. Here is Martin Luther King, signing books on Manhattan, suddenly wounded and bleeding. Here is Francis, Bishop of Rome, in our time, imploring all to honor the conscience of the believer, which is inviolable. Here is Howard Thurman, on the beach. Here you are—formed by love, guided by love, embraced by love, now touched by love. You may recall in prayer: I am loved. So I can love. The topography of love carries a mysterious, no a mystical, wind, breath, breeze…spirit.

Are we lovers any more?

Are we familiar with topography of love—its glacial forms, its meandering rivers, its celestial stars and lights, its wind blowing where it wills?

Are we lovers anymore? Are you ready to get the lay of the land? God’s nature and name is love. Are we loving people?

“Jesus answered him, ‘Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.’”

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 05.1.2016 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
April 17

The Bach Experience

By Marsh Chapel

John 10:22-30

Dean Hill

So let us keep the festival whereto the Lord invites us; Christ is himself the joy of all, the Sun that warms and lights us. By his grace he doth impart eternal sunshine to the heart; the night of sin is ended. Alleluia! (So wrote Martin Luther in 1524).

You will see down the street a block, outside the BU Academy, a new photograph commending the Academy. A young woman, with face upturned, radiantly smiles and casts a long look, eyes beaming, into an unseen future. It is a striking, even staggering image, the look of Easter. Behold there the look of promise, hope, freedom, openness, courage, excitement, joy, and peace.

Lent is for preparation and discipline in living. Easter is for living. We are not meant to live in Lent. We are meant to live in Easter. For this reason itself and alone, it will have been excellent practice for us to have heard all Easter cantatas all year, here at Marsh Chapel, where we are blessed with the finest University Chapel music anywhere in the country. Your life is made for and meant for and marked for meaningful freedom, joyful growth, loving service, and personal peace. You are a child of God, one for whom Christ died, and in whom His resurrection is intended to dwell. If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, then you will be saved. Confession is an act, uttered by the lips, and lived in the spirit. Belief is a matter of the heart, embraced in the dark, and carried forward in the light.

Think about the novelty of Marsh Chapel Community Ecclesiology, one of several ‘new ways of being church’. You are in one sense‘The Church of the UnChurched (students, radio listeners, occasional attendees, those returning to faith, pod cast people, all)’. God is doing a new thing. You come Sunday, you listen Sunday. Sunday opens the rest of the week for living. Then you live in community and University in the three other ‘ships’, other than worship—discipleship, fellowship, and stewardship. This wide berth of freedom can be a great challenge, but is also a magnificent gift, for those with ears to hear. As WS Coffin so often said, ‘God gives us minimum protection and maximum support’.

Our Holy Scripture, the prototype of every type of struggle in life, breathes us life.

Psalm 23 forever proclaims a Good Shepherd, a shepherding goodness forever available, always possible, eternally present. Goodness and mercy shall follow me, all the days of my life. But such shepherding, incarnate, requires human time, effort, voices, notes and donations.

Acts 9—we still are reading Luke, but have jumped to the second season for a time, his full history, the Acts of the Apostles—accounts a dramatic healing, a raising like that of Lazarus, but this time at the hands of Peter, not of Jesus. Our teacher reminded us that the one-to-one things are the most important, the personal things count most. Tabitha! Rise! Please do not become lost in the mystery or magic of these multiple acts in Acts. Here the Scripture attests strongly and simply to real healing, the potential for real help, in real time.

Revelation 7 begins with tribulation, suffering. There will be a time, a place, a setting when the Shepherd will guide the thirsty to springs of living water, when the Shepherd will meet the sorrowful and wipe away every tear from their eyes, when the Shepherd will find the hungry and feed them all, when the Shepherd will embrace the thirsty and slake their thirst, when the Shepherd will wash with mercy and peace the robes of tribulation and suffering. Now this is aspiration not actuality, right now. We are hoping for what we do not see; we are seeing in a glass dimly; we are holding treasures in earthen vessels

John 10:22-30 makes audible the voice of the Shepherd, and so the sheep may know that voice, they may hear and they may know and they may follow. This Spiritual Gospel of John is so lastingly redolent with the Divine Presence! We are in good hands, and so we are able to bear one another’s burdens (H Smith).

John Wesley taught us: “Do all the good you can, at all the times you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can”….and… “Do you not know that God entrusted you with that money (all above what buys necessities for your families) to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to help the stranger, the widow, the fatherless; and, indeed, as far as it will go, to relieve the wants of all mankind? How can you, how dare you, defraud the Lord, by applying it to any other purpose?”

Dr. Jarrett, for what shall we listen, this Eastertide, as the beauty of Bach’s Cantata addresses us?

Dr. Jarrett

Our cantata this morning is one of the most famous in all Bach’s output. One of his earliest cantatas, Christ lag in Todesbanden, or Christ lay in Death’s Bonds, sets all seven verses of Martin Luther’s 1524 hymn in a remarkable display of invention and variation, within an overall symmetrical design of proportion and elegance so familiar to us from this composer.

The text depicts the epic battle of life over death, redemption versus destruction -- the Paschal lamb roars as the Lion of Judah. Bach scored his cantata for strings only, including two viola lines, and achieves an astonishing degree of variety and color with such limited instrumental resources. Here are few things to listen for this morning:

Each verse ends with a refrain of Hallelujah. Note the variety and possibility of emotion explored with each of these refrains, from the frenetic energy of the first alla breve, the doleful Hallelujahs of the soprano and alto, the chorus’s scurrying refrain as the epic battle falls away; or the pealing, rounded Hallelujahs of the soprano and tenor in the final festive duet.
If you follow a translation or word book, note the opportunities to stay fixed visually, aurally, and theologically on the Cross. The Cross becomes the ultimate emblem of victory over sin.
In the central choral movement, listen for the fantastic depiction of the battle: soprano, tenor, and bass voices scrape and thrash around each as Death Gobbles Death in scathing mockery.

In many ways, Christ lag is the best connection of the joy of Easter with the glory of Christ’s passion. The focus is not on the disciples, mourning the loss of their leader, nor is the focus on our human frailty clinging to the hem of Christ’s garment. The victory of the cross and the triumph of love is our theme, Christ as Victor.

“So we celebrate the high festival with joy of heart and delight, which the Lord radiates upon us, He himself is the Sun, that through the splendor of his Grace illuminates our hearts completely, the night of sin has disappeared. Hallelujah!”

Dean Hill

The few Bach Easter works, as Mr. Kostrzewski reminds us, exude and exemplify ‘an air of humility that remains ever present, the music and the libretti constantly referring to the Passion as the gateway to the Resurrection’. Yes. The Resurrection follows but does not replace the Cross. Luther: crux sola nostra teologia, the cross alone is our theology. Mr. Wesley was converted to full faith under the hearing of Martin Luther’s exposition of Romans 8, on rainy Sunday evening in London, May 23, 1738. We still live in two worlds.

We live in a glorious, wonderful world. There are at least 100 billion galaxies besides our own (NYRB, 3.16). The universe is expanding, and the rate of that expansion is increasing. Every second over 600 billion particles called neutrinos penetrate every square centimeter of your body. The visible universe is the sideshow: the important stuff is invisible. We live in a glorious, wonderful world.

We live in a suffering, violent world. Examples abound. Dr. Jonathan Haidt ‘denies that reason ordinarily plays any part in motivating moral judgments, seeing it rather as a post-hoc means of justifying the intuitions we form quickly and unreflectively.’ He reminds us that we struggle with: Care vs harm; fairness vs cheating; loyalty vs betrayal; authority vs subversion; sanctity vs degradation; liberty vs oppression. Our world sometimes boils down to Hobbes’ single hope, during a life that is ‘solitary, nasty, poor, brutish and short’: avoid conflict. After 83 waterboardings of Abu Zubaydah, what was the result?—NOTHING. 70 million in USA have some form of criminal records (Globe 4/12/16). 30% of NFL players suffer dementia. We live in a suffering, violent world.

Easter, in Gospel spoken and sung this morning, Easter in resurrection and cross, cross and resurrection, resurrection and cross, promises us that we can do what we need to do: we can live in both worlds, transforming the latter and translating the former, transforming suffering and violence by translating glory and wonder into insights for healthy, happy living.

In a season when our country seems to be going through a form of political and cultural psychosis, we may be able to help others by modeling together this balance, living in both worlds, with this Resurrection song, bell and tale: ‘The worst thing is not the last thing’ (F Beuchner). The Marathon survivors in worship on Friday at Old South Church, so attested, and so heard in the sermon by former Governor Duval Patrick. Balance. As Pope Francis argued last month: the conscience of the believer is inviolable, so we want to form consciences not replace them; Eucharist (say worship, say faith) is not a prize for the excellent, but nourishment for the weak. Balance. As Luther wrote, ‘faith holds the door against death’.

It was a strange and dreadful strife when life and death contended; the victory remained with life; the reign of death was ended. Stripped of power, no more it reigns, and empty form alone remains; death’s sting is lost forever. Alleluia! (So wrote Martin Luther in 1524).

- 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 04.17.2016 at 11:00 am
Tags: Bach Experience, Robert Hill, Scott Jarrett

Sunday
April 10

Breakfast With Peter

By Marsh Chapel

John 21:1-19

In pastoral work, day by day, we come back to a familiar story.

One man asked another, ‘Tell me, in just one word, how is your life?”

His friend replied, slowly, “In one word? In one word, my life is, well…good”.

Sensing something, the man asked again, “Then tell me, in just two words, how is your life?”

His friend replied, slowly, “My life, in two words? In two words, my life is, well…not good”.

Both the brevity of life and the strange estrangements of our experience in life, place us, if we are honest, come Sunday, somewhere between the first and second replies, between good and not good.

We know the thrill of victory and the agony of betrayal. We know the joy of birth and the pain of death. We know the exuberance of growth and the hurt of departure.

The Gospel of John ended last week, with its concluding sentence, ‘These things are written that you may believe that Jesus in the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name.” Jesus: Lord and God, doorway both to allegiance and to reverence. Jesus: word incarnate, good shepherd, feeder of thousands, alchemist of water and wine, healer of the blind, raiser of the dead, doorway to grace, freedom, love, spirit, community, and friendship. Only believe, only believe. Live in tune with the universe.

Startling then, today’s lesson, added ten or twenty years after the Gospel’s original conclusion. A simple meal, of 153 fish, breakfast with Peter. Different language and imagery here. A different, now heroic role, for the robbing and disrobing Peter, here. A different voice for the beloved disciple here. A different reflection on death and life here. A different prediction of Peter’s martyrdom here. What is the meaning of this strange breakfast?

Just this: for all the grace, freedom and love, all the spirit, community and friendship rightly trumpeted in the Fourth Gospel, people are still people. This chapter is about fishing and farming, about catching and tending, about boats and fields, fishermen and shepherds. In church language, that is, 21 is about evangelism and pastoral care.

You are leading a Christian life, you are committed to the way of discipleship, the path of love. Then, and so, you will need to receive and give invitation and comfort.

Life

In a word, resurrection. In two words, evangelism and pastoral care, work and structure, laity and clergy, world and church.

Breakfast is a simple meal. The worst hour of the day, the worst food of the day, the worst attitude of the day, everything and everyone more human than not. Carried by resurrection, we re-enter the world of invitation and compassion, the world of the preacher and the pastor. Every week, you are encouraged to make one invitation to another about what you find lastingly good. Come to worship with me. Every week, you are encouraged to offer one compassionate word to another from the source of lasting compassion. I will pray for you.

Public worship places us in the necessary presence of others who are not our own kith, kin and kindred. With the child behind us, the student beside us, the professor ahead of us, the widow across from us, we worship God. We perceive again the utter variety and actual need of others. It is a cautionary move against the prevailing winds about us, including tornadoes, including dehumanizing techno-communication and distance drone aerial bombardment. A woman will receive that email. I might have seen her, or her kith, kin and kindred, in church. A child could be harmed by that weapon. I might have seen his kith, kin and kindred, in church. Public worship places us in the necessary presence of others who are not our own kith, kin and kindred. So crucial, saving, significant, then the simple invitation: join me for worship.

Compassionate pastoral care, personal kindness, a willingness to listen—feed, tend, sheep to sheep—connects us to the deeper dimensions, those for which life is given. Fifty years ago M L King sat writing in a prison cell in Birmingham Alabama. He wrote the famous Letter, which bears your re-reading this afternoon, addressed to pastors, fellow clergy, who could not or did not or would not hear: “when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness”. While most of us will not regularly write such a momentous letter, in our pastoral that is personal correspondence, we will write. You know of another’s inattention, another’s pain. You can sit down, put pen to paper, and select some caring words—sorry, condolence, hope, help, prayer. You can imagine another opening the mailbox, holding the letter, seeing the penmanship, removing the page, reading the card. Feed my lambs. Tend my sheep. Feed my sheep.

It is not that the Fourth Gospel diminishes or discounts invitation and compassion, evangelism and pastoral care, laity and clergy. It is just that the writer(s) had bigger fish to fry and sheep to tend of another fold. So along came—someone—who wrote 21 for us, to remind us. In a word—good. In two words—not good. Your life in Christ requires invitation and compassion, beginning again every day at breakfast. The good news is that a restored Peter is there at breakfast with you.

Jesus

Jesus speaks to us today from the edge of the shoreline. His voice, although we often mistake or mishear or misunderstand it, carries over from shore to sea, from heaven to earth. For the souls gathered here today, that voice—His voice—makes life worth living. Within earshot of His voice there are no merely ordinary nights or days or catches of fish or meals or questions or answers or friendships or loves or losses. Within earshot of His voice there are no merely ordinary moments. When the Master calls from the shoreline, “children…have you…cast the net…bring some fish…have breakfast”, no one who hears will dare ask, “And who are you?”. We dare not. For we know. Jesus speaks to us today from the edge of the shoreline.

His disciples stumble through all the magic and grit of a fishing expedition. Many of us still find some magic in fishing, though few of us have had to depend on this sport for sustenance. Still—we know the thrill of it! And the disappointment. The roll of the boat with each passing wave. The smell of the water and the wind. The feel of the fish, the sounds of cleaning, the sky, a scent of rain: this is our life, too. All night long, dropping the nets, trawling, lifting the nets with a heave. And catching nothing. The magic comes with the connection of time and space—being at the right place at the right time. How every fisherman would like to know the right place and the right time. It’s magic! The tug on the line! The jolt to the pole! The humming of the reel! A catch. And woe to the sandy-haired, freckle faced girl or boy (age 12 or 90) who cannot feel the thrill of being at the right place at the right time!

John Stewart Mill once wrote that understanding the chemistry of a pink sunset did not diminish at all his profound sense of wonder at sunset beauty. In fact, we might add, real understanding heightens true apprehension.

Easter is a season of new beginnings. The promise of resurrection is upon us. Resurrection disarms fear. Resurrection ignores defeat. Resurrection displaces and replaces loneliness. Resurrection will not abide the voice that whispers, “There’s nothing extraordinary here. There’s no reason for gaiety, excitement, sobriety or wonder.” Resurrection will not abide the easy and the cheap. Resurrection takes a day-break catch, a charcoal fire, a dawn mist, fish, bread, and hungry, weary travelers, and reveals the Lord present, and Peter at the table.

The failing of this world, whether we see it more clearly in the superstition of religion, the idolatry of politics, or the hypocrisy of social life, has its root in blindness to the extraordinary. Because we are unholy, we think God must be, too. But hear—and today taste—the good news! The King of love his table spreads. And the humblest meal becomes—Breakfast with Peter!

Therefore Christian people, as we work and fight, play and pray this week, let us resist with joy all that cheapens life, all that dishonors God, all that mistakes our ordinary sin for the extraordinary love, power, mercy and grace of God.

New Beginnings

Real change is real hard but it happens in real time when real people in real ways really work at it. Or, at least, that is the good news of John 21, a late addition to a late edition of the fourth gospel, and its menu of freedom over Breakfast with Peter.

Take a look at the soteriology next door. You may be at a point where a different chapter or a different verse may bring healing. You have been raised Roman Catholic and left the church, but now seek elsewhere a measure of meaning, belonging and community as your faith develops. You are looking toward a soteriology next door, a way of salvation next door, a religious perspective and posture next door, a healing next door. You may have been raised an evangelical and left that church, but now seek elsewhere a measure of meaning, belonging and community as your faith develops. You are looking toward a soteriology next door, a way of salvation next door, a religious perspective and posture next door, a healing next door. You may have been raised in a mainline church but having left that fold now seek elsewhere a measure of meaning, belonging and community as your faith develops. You are looking toward a soteriology next door, a way of salvation next door, a religious perspective and posture next door, a healing next door. Good for you. Find your way forward. Sometimes a new look at salvation, for a new need in life, is the very gospel. John 21, if nothing else, gives biblical currency to such courageous change on your part. We are with you, and we are for you, as you walk up the steps to another house within the lasting, loving neighborhood of salvation. There are many faithful ways of keeping faith.

Hear the good news that forgiveness is about the future, not the past. Stephen Bauman reminded me of this last week. The past is finished, and unchangeable. There is no changing what has happened. We may revisit, by memory travel, and we may relearn by historical excavation, but the past is what it is. Done. Forgiveness is not about the past. That is what the church discovered at Easter. Easter is not about Mary’s misunderstanding, nor about Thomas’s doubt, nor about the disciples’ fear, nor about the worst of horror, the cross. All that is set, forever, in the past. Forgiveness opens the future. Forgiveness does not change the past, but opens up a new future, a free future, a joyful future, in spite of the past. That is what makes Easter such a miracle. That is what makes Peter fit company at breakfast. He is good company over the fish. He has a new life, a new open future. He has a new future, in spite of, in spite of, in spite of, the past. Hear the good news that forgiveness is about the future, not about the past.

Reclaim the power of conversation in a cyber held world. Would that we could, including breakfast, understand the power and lasting meaning of fellowship at tables. Our bodily nourishment requires this pause, this consumption, this energy. Our spiritual nourishment requires the words spoken and heard during this pause, this consumption, this energy. If you have been recently, around a convivial meal, around a conversational table, around a gathered companionship—well, you know. Friendship is conversation. Love is conversation. Marriage is conversation. Community, real communion, community, real consanguinity, is mightily and in some ways totally conversation. So the disciples are around a fire, charcoal fire, eating breakfast, 153 fish, with a restored leader, Peter. If you are not indulging in at least one decent conversational meal a day you are missing the mark. Fast food is real, but not fast conversation. Reclaim the power of conversation in a cyber held world.

Feel free to shake the dust from your employment feet and find another job. You know, now that the economy is a little better, at least for some, it is a little easier to say what needs saying in any case at any time. You have one life to live. You need to make a living, but you need to make a living in a way that makes a life. If what you are doing with your body is killing your soul, it is time to quit. There are sixty ways to leave your employer, as Paul Simon said, sort of. Make a little plan, Stan. Easter breakfast with Peter is just the time to converse about this, in a forgiving mode, in light of the soteriology next door.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 04.10.2016 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill