Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

Mark 10:2-16

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

Preface

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

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

Prayer comes in ACTS, and its languages are the tongues of adoration, confession, thanksgiving and supplication.

Our theme this year, in the life of Marsh Chapel, particularly in our preaching and teaching, is prayer. ‘Pray without ceasing’, we are taught in the 5^th chapter of the earliest document in our New Testament, 1 Thessalonians. Without ceasing.

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

Then: Sunday evening in Eucharist, Monday noon in meditation, Wednesday morning in theological community, Wednesday evening in communion, Thursday noon over an outdoor common table, and privately, meal by meal, morning by morning, we pray.

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

Adoration

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

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

Both Jews and Greeks made welcome space for divorce, as even our text attests (‘Moses allowed…’). The church did too, before and after our passage, 1 Cor. 7 and Matthew 19. Paul before and Matthew after also make allowance for divorce. We too, out of our experience, know fully, for the sake of the institution of marriage itself, that sometimes divorce is the only course. Here in Mark 10, though, the early church remembers, from Jesus or for us, a very high view, an aspirational hope for human love. A prayer in aspiration, that the joining of two, together, might make way for the One among the Many. That upon this earth there yet might be—real friendship, real fellowship, real love, real marriage, the reality of the union of hearts, for which we are made. For a union: a hint of the eternal, a glimpse of the divine, a glimmer of joy without shade.

All this takes time and practice. We learn to follow each other’s thoughts, but imperfectly. A month ago I bought new sneakers, but made the mistake of hanging them, in a plastic bag, where I normally hang the trash, to be taken down for disposal by the next traveler down stairs. Jan did what she normally does, and should do, taking the bag and leaving it for disposal. Off they went, those new shoes. Oops. Or so we thought, until a kind, wise custodian, sensing something not right about the bag, found them, kept them, and returned them. There is a lesson here, a moral to the story. Our aspirations take the support and help of a community to last.

So, in the same breath, and in the same paragraph, the Jesus of Mark’s gospel, and the Lord of Mark’s community, adores children, and offers their innocence (not their ignorance) as aspiration. He lifts them in his arms. A little child shall lead them, the holiness of aspiration, and adoration.

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

So we sing a hymn each Sunday.

Adoration. A language of prayer.

Confession

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

Today our choir sings, only for the second time in public, a lovely anthem, whose three stanzas lament sin and pray for peace.

1 O God of love, O King of peace,

Make wars throughout the world to cease;

The wrath of sinful man restrain;

Give peace, O God, give peace again.

2 Remember, Lord, Thy works of old,

The wonders that our fathers told;

Remember not our sin’s dark stain,

Give peace, O God, give peace again.

3 Whom shall we trust but Thee, O Lord?

Where rest but on Thy faithful word?

None ever called on Thee in vain,

Give peace, O God, give peace again.

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

We depend on this reminder of our fragility. It keeps us from becoming naïve about the fragility all around us. Especially the disguised fragility of beloved institutions. Many churches are one pastor away from demise. Some countries are one government away from demise. Our schools, halls of government, businesses, families—all these are far more fragile than they sometimes seem. They take constant tending, mending, and befriending. They take daily, careful leadership. And when over time the fabric begins to fray, devastation may ensue: see the 200,000 dead and 4 million seeking refuge and the 7 million displaced in Syria today. They take attention to small things. ‘Yard by yard, life is hard. Inch by inch, it’s a cinch’.

So we offer confession, KYRIE ELEISON, each Sunday.

Confession. A language of prayer.

Thanksgiving

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

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

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

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

The Props assist the House

Until the House is built

And then the Props withdraw

And adequate, erect,

The House support itself

And cease to recollect

The Auger and the Carpenter-

Just such a retrospect

Hath the perfected Life-

A past of Plank and Nail

And slowness-then the Scaffolds drop

Affirming it a Soul.

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

The heavens are telling the glory of God. The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom then shall I fear? God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Sing to the Lord a new song, sing to the Lord all the earth. Make a joyful noise to the Lord, serve the Lord with gladness. I lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence does my help come, from the Lord who made heaven and earth. O Lord, thou hast searched me and known me. Let everything that breathes praise the Lord.

So we read a psalm each Sunday.

Thanksgiving. A language of prayer.

Supplication

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

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

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

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

How shall we do so?

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

Congress regularly supports the so-called gun lobby, fearing to contradict the NRA. Oddly, though, they are mistaken about what Americans, and particularly gun owners, think about gun restrictions and gun safety. They mistake the representative voice for the people’s voice. ‘85% of Americans and 81% of gun owners favor gun show background checks, which Congress rejected…Since 1960 1.3 million Americans have died from fire arms, which amounts to 80 gun deaths a day.’ The broad swath of the American people, in harmony with the Book of Hebrews, offer prayers of supplication for an angelic deliverance. And here and there, there is change: ‘In 1970 ½ of all US homes had guns. In 2012 it is less than 1/3.’ Our tendency to conformity, our over-eager deference to authority, and our too willing adaptation to imposed roles weaken us over against these and other challenges.

In supplication, we are reminded of who we are and whose we are. Hebrews:

What is man that though art mindful of him, the Son of Man that though dost care for him? Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels.

As it is, we do not yet see everything subjected to them (the angels). But we do see Jesus.

So we offer our common prayer every Sunday.

Supplication. A language of prayer.

Coda

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

Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication. ACTS in prayer.

In 1983 we hurried across an open field, arriving a little late to the edge of the Pacific Ocean in Vancouver. There was a great tent. Inside were many hundreds of leaders of the World Council of Churches. There they sang a hymn, and offered a confession, and uttered a thanksgiving, and cried out in supplication. Emilio Castro. Paolo Freire. Connie Parvey. NT Wright. Philip Potter. Another generation. Gathered in prayer. Yet their prayer is not yesterday, nor just today, but the fullness of tomorrow:

In Christ there is no east or west

In Him no south or north

But one great fellowship of love

Throughout the whole wide earth

In him now meet both east and west

In him both south and north

All Christ like souls are one in him

Throughout the whole wide earth

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posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 10.4.2015 at 11:00 am

Sunday
September 27

The Bach Experience

By Marsh Chapel

James 5:13-20

Mark 9:38-50

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

Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill

Dr. Jarrett.

(Dean Hill)

Dr. Jarrett.

Alumni Weekend itself is a two level drama, a stereoptic, bifocal collision of past and present, of hope and fear, of what we expect on the one hand, and what we experience on the other, expectation and experience never quite becoming equivalents.

On Alumni Weekend you walk past a classroom where you heard something new. As was once said by a famous baseball player, ‘It’s déjà vu all over again’. You see a teacher’s office where you learned the hard news about a midterm result. You pass by a tree under which you hugged or kissed your then boyfriend or girlfriend. Your memory is quickened by the spatial, locational power of a sunset on a river, or a trolley bell ringing, or the crack of the bat and the roar of the crowd. You watch and you see.

As Yogi Berra also said, ‘You can observe a lot just by watching’.

But all these memories are held in a new way, in a second level recollection, that of today as today looks at yesterday. You enter a restaurant and where others simply see a television, you see a television on which you watched and heard 7^th BU President John Silber interviewed in 1980 on 60 minutes by Mike Wallace. You look out over Nickerson field while others watch soccer, and you remember a football game. (Oops…). You sit in Marsh Chapel as the sermon meanders on toward its inevitable conclusion, or what you hope will be its proximate conclusion, but you hear some other voice once uttered here, or a song once sung here, or a prayer once dropped with a full heart into the prayer request box.

Three honored alumni yesterday spoke in this manner. ‘BU became my passport’. ‘At BU I grew up’. ‘Here I was taught that the authority of the highest idea should prevail over the idea of the highest authority’. (Not who has the idea, but what idea is best; not power but truth.)

Time and space are not quite as absolute in determination of our being as sometimes we think. It helps to have a bifocal, stereoptic vision, a two level drama, of sorts.

That is the nature of the New Testament, shot through from Matthew to Revelation with apocalyptic language and imagery. Our Holy Scripture, both Holy and Scripture, is both heaven and earth. It is both sacred and secular, at the same time, both divine and human. Its Word walks with human feet and sings with divine voice. Its word faces earth: Syria—200,000 dead, 4 million refugees, 7 million dislocated. Its word sings with a divine voice: each one of these is a child of the living God.

(By the way, the apocalyptic warnings of Mark 9 are not to be taken literally. We know this. We know about hyperbole. Even the convoluted hyperbole of a famous ballplayer describing a once favorite restaurant: ‘Nobody goes there any more—it’s too crowded’. Let us pause one good moment to recognize that, and why, we do not understand the Bible as utterly inerrant and divine. The Bible is inspired and so inspires us, and is our first point of reflection, prototypical but not archetypical—first but not exclusive in the church’s long history of the search for truth. These verses, harsh and judgmental, need careful interpretation. So Matthew cuts half of them, in his use of Mark 20 years afterward. So Luke cuts all of them in his use of Mark 25 years later. Even Mark himself shifts the weight from fear to hope, even in this passage, as he wrestles to interpret what he has inherited, from whatever source: be salt, have peace among yourselves, who is not against us is for us.)

So it is particularly appropriate this special Sunday that we hear a cantata, a beautiful gem of sacred music, that begins its life as an ornament of secular gaiety, that began its life as music by which to feast and dance and revel. It began as joy. And then it was transformed, so that ‘our joy could be complete’ (Jn 15:11).

Charles Wesley wrote hymns, many of which we still sing, and found the music, the melodies and harmonies, in the sung music of his day, did he not? St John of the Cross, the greatest of Spanish mystics, whose poetry strikes the heart to this day, composed his lyrics with the help of Italian, pastoral love poetry, did he not? The author of the Song of Solomon, who wrote a torrid, fierce, erotic ballad of human of love, would perhaps have been bemused to see how quickly Judaism made of it by analogy the love of God for the covenant people, and how quickly Christianity by analogy made of it the love of Christ for his church, we she not?

In our time, wherein the attempt to embrace the secular with the sacred, to express a faith amenable to culture and a culture amenable to faith, to unite the pair so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety, has become so marginal, pitiable, nearly a lost cause, of a sudden, this Sunday, Come Sunday, we have Bach’s secular music magically, alchemically made sacred, in this beautiful 18 minute poem. For all our fears, of heaven and of earth, it does ring out a note of hope, does it not?

Dr. Jarrett, for what shall we listen today, we who remember St. Augustine’s proverb, ‘Hope has two beautiful daughters, anger and courage’?

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett

Dean Hill.

(Dr. Jarrett)

Dean Hill….

This year at Marsh Chapel, our annual cantata series surveys Bach’s musical-sermons for Easter, beginning today with Cantata 66: ‘Rejoice, you hearts, fade away, you sorrows.’ Our cantata dates from Bach’s first year as Cantor of the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, a period of remarkable industry and accomplishment. Bach’s greatest achievement in those weeks was surely the composition and first performance of the St John Passion heard just days before the cantata we perform this morning. For Easter Sunday morning that year, Bach revived an earlier work – Christ lag in Todes Banden, which we will perform later in this series. For Easter Monday, he again drew on earlier material, written in 1718 for the birthday celebrations of Prince Leopold of Cöthen. With a reordering of movements, the addition of a final chorale, and fitted with a new text, the resultant cantata marks the splendor of Easter with great joy, dance, and, as we shall see, no shortage of the human dialectic – hope and fear.

Bach’s text was the story of Jesus’s appearance to the disciples on the road to Emmaus from the 24^th chapter of Luke. As you’ll recall, the story depicts some fairly thick-headed disciples, in shock over the fate of their Jesus rebellion, and still grief-stricken from his betrayal and ultimate demise. Only when the traveler breaks bread with them do they realize he is their risen Lord.

Marsh Chapel congregants have come to understand that the cantatas, just like sermons, follow a structure, not just musically – choruses, recitatives, arias, and chorales – but also theologically: from opening an chorus of praise and joy, to more explicit exegesis from soloists, moving toward reflection on the human condition both personal and corporate. Typically, the cantata concludes with a four-part chorale setting attaching the newly composed music to cherished and beloved hymns of the faith.

The key element of the older cantata from 1718 was a dialog of two allegorical characters, Bliss and Fame. For Easter Monday 1724, these characters became Fear and Hope. And in their material, we find the central human predicament – a willing spirit, thwarted by the will of the flesh; a spiritual aspiration weighed down by a human frailty; the promise of redemption tinged by doubts that we are unworthy. Or as in Mark 9, we wish to be salt, but have we lost our saltiness?

As you listen this morning, note the joy of the opening movement a bright dance in a triple meter. Caste as a large-scale da capo chorus, the middle section sung by alto and bass foreshadows the theme of anxiety and fear, heard poignantly in descending chromatics. In the bass aria – the most direct nod to the Emmaus story – listen for the lighting bolts of string arpeggios at the words, “Jesus appears”. And as the alto and tenor sing their dialogue, observe the remarkable layering of these voices and their texts at the same time – truly reflecting our own complicated condition. In the final duet, listen for the spirited violin obbligato, played today by our concertmaster Heidi Braun-Hill. It’s as if the violin is the voice of the Refiner’s Fire, enflaming our hearts towards Love’s fiery-hue. The final chorale, though exultant with threefold Alleluias, concludes with a solemn Kyrie eleison, as if to say, “Look up from the Grave, but stay fixed on the Cross.”

After the atonement and self-reflection of Lenten and Holy Week observances, only the radiance of the Risen Lord can redeem. The tomb is empty, the stone is rolled away. Will my faith be strong enough to roll the stone of my own heart away? Can Christ restore my saltiness? Or will my fear outshine my hope?

Rejoice, you hearts, fade away, you sorrows, the Savior lives and rules within you. You can drive away mourning, fear, anxious despair. The Savior revives his spiritual kingdom. Alleluia!

Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill

Dr. Jarrett.

(Dean Hill)

Dr. Jarrett.

Hope indeed has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage. Anger at the way things are. And courage to see that they do not remain as they are (Augustine of Hippo).

Our collegium, and our choir, and our congregation offer out into the unseen world around a dynamic dialogue, of heaven and earth, of sacred and secular, of divine and human.

It has become quite difficult to do so. A Christ against Culture fits easily and well with a popular Christianity, Bible drenched, which rejects the world around. Harder it is to think, speak and sing of a Christ in Culture, a Christ transforming Culture. So slips away the religious commitment. So also, from the side of the society, there grows an unwillingness to admit of the value of propositions that are not verifiable but may well be true. Harder and harder it is to say ‘if thine heart be as mine, then give me thine hand’, or ‘in essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, and in all things charity’. Or, as today, ‘have peace among yourselves…who is not against us is for us’

Yet here these are today, interwoven. As we hear at the end of the cantata, fear and hope, both so deeply human, sing around and around each other. As we hear in the Scripture—who is not against us is for us; be at peace with one another.

Maybe, among other things, this is why the current Papal visit has made such a resounding though perhaps only partly articulated impact. Here is a religious voice, speaking in the halls of government. Here is a sacred person, addressing the nations as united, in the United Nations. Here is a representation of the Holy, riding the streets of the most secular of cities. Not the church mumbling its prayers behind closed doors; not the culture, its government and its authority and its society, stumbling ahead with its decisions apart from a final horizon. But sacred and secular singing together.

Maybe, among other things, this is why there are still a few University pulpits, whose calling it is to remember and to remind that the point of education is helping people. What makes this University unique is its capacity to harness learning to help people. Education is meant to help people. Period.

That is. One one hand, it is good to know as Einstein showed that gravity is a manifestation of the curvature in space-time resulting from the presence of matter and energy. On the other hand, it is great to see that insight and others like it making space, in new inventions and discoveries, for safety, for progress, for care, for health. Helping people.

Just for a moment. A heavenly hope embracing an earthly fear, both real, both true. Just for a moment, this morning, prayer, soul, eternity, faith, heaven, judgment, salvation, love, God.

I truly fear the darkness of the grave\I do not fear the darkness of the grave

I lament my Savior is now torn from me\I hope that my Savior is not torn from me

RAH: I truly fear the darkness of the grave\SAJ: I do not fear the darkness of the grave

RAH: I lament my Savior is now torn from me\SAJ: I hope that my Savior is not torn from me

This music, this Scripture, this day, this week, this life, just now, they do give you a sense, for all our fears, that hope survives and may just prevail. After all, did not Mr. Berra also say, ‘it ain’t over ‘til its over’?

A colleague and friend, Rev. Rick Black, said this week: ‘When people hear us they should think, Things are not as bad as we think they are, and these folks are helping to make things better.

Herein perhaps we find the valence of the dominical sayings,

He that is not against us is for us. He that is not against us is for us.

and

Have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another.

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music, Marsh Chapel

For more information about Marsh Chapel at Boston University, click here.

For information about donating to the Chapel, click here.

posted in Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music, The Bach Experience, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 09.27.2015 at 11:00 am
Tags: Bach Experience, Robert Hill, Scott Jarrett

Sunday
September 20

A Tradition of Principled Resistance

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 9: 30-37

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

As the songwriter says, ‘good experience comes from seasoned judgment--which comes from bad experience’.

Michael Deng was the son of two immigrant Chinese parents. He worked hard to enter Baruch College in NYC. In order to find some support at the largely commuter college, he signed up for a fraternity. The fraternity was attractive to Michael and others because it offered friendships, a sense of community, some solidarity over against the rest of culture, and the prospect of mutual support through the rigors of college life. Community, meaning, belonging, empowerment.

Michael’s photo shows a bright-eyed young man, smiling, eager, energetic.

He died on December 9, 2013, outside a rented house in Pennsylvania. The house looked like a fraternity house. The brothers went there to haze new members. Michael was blindfolded, forced to wear and sand loaded backpack, lifted and dropped on his head, and ‘speared’ by a classmate running at him full tilt with his head down. The ritual was called the Glass Ceiling, a reference to constraints against advancement for Asians in America, something the fraternity apparently wanted to challenge. An icy back yard, a snowy evening, a cold night—and an unintended, tragic, loss.

According to one account, Deng drew the ire of others because he ‘resisted’. He realized, too late, that what was happening was wrong, dangerous, and perhaps potentially fatal. So he resisted, and thereby became the focal point of heightened abuse. No reporting, yet, has identified how many others may have been spared, or saved, due to his resistance, and, tragically, the necessary attention given to his unconscious state, his labored breathing, his bruised torso, and, finally, his death. No reporting, yet, has placed this incident quite fully in the fuller narrative of the rigors and perils of American student life. But most notably, no reporting, yet, has tried to understand Michael’s last moments, his decision to resist, his resistance—bringing his demise and perhaps sparing others some measure of hurt—within a tradition of principled resistance.

Sometimes you follow a story, as clearly I have this one. It has bothered me, hounded me, for many days, for a variety of relatively easily named reasons. And I have wondered about its meaning. Stephen Weinberg famously wrote that ‘the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more its seems pointless.’ Comprehensible. Pointless. It is a serious ‘point’. Yet comprehension requires the mind, alone. We deem pointless what seems pointless, though, as a choice. It is if you think it is. Pointless. It is if you choose to live like it is. Pointless. There is a dualism of decision haunting this world, not just in the pages of Scripture, but also upon every day.

At the very end, it seems, from what little we comprehend, that Michael Deng made a choice to resist. He pointedly and in a tragically costly moment decided to fight back, to object, to refuse, to resist. And there, in that moment just now, in light shadow, in a whisper, in a ghostly echo, one may sense, we may choose to sense, just a measure of meaning in the heart of an otherwise awful and pointless story.

That is where you come in, this morning. Yours is a tradition of resistance, and you have that tradition to offer. In fact, you have offered moments of entrance to the tradition of principled resistance for a month. In a kindly way, of course. One Sunday, you gave the conclusion to a summer national preacher series on ‘The Beloved Community”. Come, you said, join with Thurman and King and us. One Sunday, you hosted a Matriculation gathering. Come, you said, ‘read, take and read, read’, join with Augustine of Hippo and us. One Sunday, you marked Labor Day with the Lord’s Supper, and a opened a year long theological overture to prayer. Come, you said, join with Jesus, the crucified, and the church and us. One Sunday, you celebrated International Sunday, and extended a particular Methodist handshake to students and others from abroad. Come, you said, join with Wisdom, wisdom that offers power to withstand what we cannot understand, and Luther and Pope Francis and us. Next Sunday, you will open our musical year, beautiful it promises to be, with a full morning bathed in beauty, bathed in musical experience. Come, you say, and join with choristers and orchestra, and learn from Bach how to meditate upon the cross and resurrection, and wing with us.

For those, perhaps few, with eyes to see, and ears to hear, you offered the shelter of a particular tradition.

The Gospel of Mark, read more than preached these weeks, announces, affirms, and extols this tradition. For Mark is written with the cross in mind, and is written, at least in part, to make sure earlier Christians, the community of faith, fully understood the call to resistance. Jesus is raised from the dead. Yes. But. Life in him means bearing a cross, bearing up under suffering, and resistance all that cheapens life ‘in this adulterous and sinful generation’.

So, early in Mark 7, you heard Jesus teaching resistance to falsehood, to lips that move but hearts that lie.

Then, later in that chapter, you heard the gentile woman resist Jesus’ exclusion of her—‘even the dogs get crumbs’ she said—and Jesus’ own reversal, his inclusion of her, his healing of her daughter.

And, in Mark 8, you heard the hallmark word of resistance, which the church placed on Jesus’ lips, ‘If any man would come after me let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world lose his soul, his life?’

Like today, in Mark 9, you just heard resistance to heavy-handed leadership proclaimed in the affirmation of servant leadership, and resistance to the tides of disenchantment proclaimed in the figure of childlike innocence. Would you lead? Then serve. Would you love? Then hold a child.

Your tradition is one of principled resistance. On Sunday morning in worship at 11am you resist the temptation to sleep the day away. On Sunday evening in worship at 6:30pm you resist the anonymity of student life with the offer of a beautiful oasis, dinner and eucharist. On Wednesday morning in worship at 11:10, with the School of Theology, you resist the separation of learning and vital piety. On Wednesday eveningat 5:15pm in worship, in the Episcopal eucharist, you resist the midweek Christological amnesia that can emerge in a post Christian culture, in an secular University, in a sprawling big city. On Thursday noon, served communion on Marsh Plaza, you resist the temptation to forget God, to forget love, to forget faith, to forget the humanity of your neighbor. In all, some 300 gather in these services, a mere 1% of the number of students at BU, but a witness, salt an light, a reminder of your tradition of principled resistance.

I say at funerals, perhaps like that offered Michael Deng, ‘one who has loved, one who has been loved, is never lost’. Maybe I should add, ‘one who has resisted, who has lived the tradition of principled resistance, is never lost’.

Faith is resistance. Faith is the power to withstand what we cannot understand.

We are in worship this morning to attest to something. Faith is the power to withstand what we cannot understand. Worship is the practice of faith by which we learn to withstand what we cannot understand. God is the presence, force, truth, and love Who alone deserves worship, and worship is the practice of the faith by which we learn to withstand what we cannot understand. Worship prepares us to resist. So we see Jesus again in the wilderness. To resist all that makes human life inhuman. So here you are, come Sunday, come this Sunday.

This week you may, suddenly, find that a choice is required of you, through no fault, intention, planning or device of your own. Further, the choice you want to make perhaps could involve refusal and resistance: refusal of a request from an archetypal authority, resistance to a popular mood, resistance to an ingrained habit, refusal of the pleas of a friend. Russell Lowell predicts that at least once to every person and group comes such a moment to decide.

With all your heart you may want to refuse, to refuse. An invitation, a suggestion, a promotion, a direction, an order. Your heart may say: This is not me, not right, not good. Resistance always costs. Resistance means sacrifice. Resistance hurts. The slings and arrow of fortune's discontent draw blood. Resistance, refusal. Does such principled denial have a place in Christian living? Dare ask: Does God evoke and use refusal? Does Christ, God's everlasting Yes--in whom Paul says there is no longer Yea and Nay, but only Yes--Does Christ desire resistance and refusal?

For Daniel, refusal to give up his family name, his religion, his faith landed him, with the others, in trouble. You enjoy the story, I know. Daniel resists the order to blaspheme, and accepts punishment, even death. Bound in the heart of fire, the prophet of God is protected, strangely, by God who answers prayer.

For Naboth, refusal came more dear. Old King Ahab had every vineyard he wanted but one. He asked for the land. Naboth refused. He asked again, this time presumably in a more kingly voice. Naboth refused. Ahab asked again, with a hint of threat on his tongue. Naboth refused. And Ahab went whimpering to bed. Not so, Jezebel, who simply took Naboth aside, and cut off his head. Refusal can either cost you a king's friendship, or your head, or both.

John of Patmos did something to put himself out on the rocky prison isle, a first century Papillon, as he wrote his Revelation, our last Bible book. Refusing to worship Caesar? Names jeeringly attached to Rome--beast, satan, whore? Resistance to the more established synagogue?

What if I were to shout to you this morning that this church had received a magnificent bequest, a precious gift left us by an ancestor? Further, were I to announce that this one gift was worth more than all our buildings and all our current endowment and all our church program put together? Would you not dance, sing, soar?

You inherit a tradition of principled refusal, a pearl of great price, a treasure hidden in a field, a precious gift. A tradition of principled resistance.

Several summers ago an older woman was robbed at gunpoint in her own home. The newspaper, perhaps accurately, has quoted her in full as regards her view of this crime: "We are raising a generation of hooligans."

Pummelled still, even in old age, even in closeted retirement, the violent spirit of the age pounds at her, lacing her with blows left and right. Yet she resists! You may recognize her, now.

This was Rosa Parks. A younger Mrs. Parks found herself, seated midway back in a Montgomery bus, on December 1, 1955, pummeled again by the hand of aggression, the Strong Man of this world. For some reason, she refused to move. Bus stopped. Police came. Crowd gathered. Anger, shouting. The Montgomery bus boycott began. A tradition of principled resistance--this is your native land, your mother tongue, your home territory.

The prophets of old knew this. They spoke about God's unbending holiness. They spoke about God's own refusal to set a divine seal on any present moment, any present setup, any present arrangement of power. They spoke about human suffering, about how God sees, hears, knows, remembers, and intervenes for the suffering. They spoke about God's justice, critical of every established power. They refused. Here it is: "Prophetic speech is an act of relentless hope that refuses to despair, that refuses to believe that the world is closed off in patterns of exploitation and oppression." (Brueggeman).

My son had only one request for a gift one year. He showed me a catalogue that pictured a little grill, for cooking meat, “ A lean, mean fat reducing machine, guaranteed to reduce each average hamburger by 3 oz of fat--$59.95” Then I noticed the sponsor of this culinary instrument—George Foreman. And I inflicted a story on my son, as parents do.

In 1974, one of the greatest boxing matches of the century pitted Mohammed Ali against the world champion, George Forman. Kinshasha, Zaire. November 2. Ali predicted: "The most spectacular wonder human eyes have ever witnessed." 60,000 cheering fans, shouting, "Ali Bu Mal Ye", which antiseptically translated means, "Go get him".

Scenes: Forman charging, rounds 1-6. Forman 25, young, strong, powerful. Recently defeated both Frazier and Norton. Ali: 32, guile fitness and will. After 5 rounds, Forman arm weary and bewildered. 3rd Round, Ali leans to crowd: "He don't hurt me much". 5th round, Forman tantalized by the stationary target, angry, frustrated. Angelo Dundee had loosened the ropes! Ali, later: "The bull is stronger but the matador is smarter". Then, 8th round: "Ali is leaning back against the ropes, inviting the champion's hardest blows suddenly in the next instant he springs forward and brought Forman down. Down the strong man went, the first time ever he had been knocked out.

Those who may need to resist and refuse today are part of the spiritual rope strategy, the wearying of the Strong Man, the resistance of evil, the binding of evil. It's not pleasant. Hurt, setbacks, delay, confusion. But there is an eighth round coming! There is an eighth round coming!

How hungry the church is today to perceive this truth. God is at work, in part, to encourage and give stamina to those on the ropes, using Ali's rope a dope strategy, binding the Strong Man. The historic Christian church in this country has been on the ropes for a generation, 30 years of blows to the midsection. God's spirit is not in a mode of lightening triumph, for those who would still maintain a real connection between deep personal faith and active social involvement. But the eighth round is still coming…

A tradition of principled resistance.

I can imagine an objection or two.

Well taken, is your perhaps silent objection thus far: some refusal is Godly, but some is not. Too often those who resist or refuse are simply petulant, immature, arrogant, slothful, idiotic, selfish. Agreed…But we speak here not of forms of hypocrisy, so many they are. Rather, we speak of principled resistance, which shows its character by enduring body blows, by leaning against the rope and aching.

Or, maybe you doubt that refusal takes a part of small stage play. Perhaps only the civil disobedience of Ghandi or the peaceful resistance of Martin Luther King or the risky French Resistance of Albert Camus stand out, great historic refusals, great moments of common endurance. But you would be wrong, I suggest, to think so. Most resistance is hidden, unheralded, unknown, unrewarded. Most principled refusal is known only to the one sagging against the ropes, the one catching the body blows. Most real principled resistance is very ordinary.

Prayer is primarily a form of spiritual refusal, refusal to accept the world's time clock, where all time is meant for work or play. (Our theme, for this year). Marriage and loyal friendship are primarily forms of spiritual refusal, refusal to accept the world's low estimate of intimacy, refusal to accept the unholy as good. Choosing carefully is primarily a form of spiritual resistance: "We live in a society that primarily starves our soul...we have to really resist the culture to care for the soul...but...if we choose with care our professions and ways we spend our time and our homes in which we live, if we take care of our families and don't see them as problems, and if we nurture our relationships and friendships and marriages then the soul probably will not show its complaints so badly." (Moore) Tithing is primarily a form of spiritual refusal, refusal to accept the world's understanding of success and refusal to accept the implication that all that we have is ours alone. Education is primarily a form of spiritual refusal to view the world as pointless, as in our BU School of Public Health which right now, this month, resists HIV in 37 million, resists the denial that health care is a right, resists kidney disease in 20,000 in Central America, resists the danger of alcohol for 20 years olds, resists the 32,000 deaths from bullets annually in America (Dean Sandro Galea, in presentation, 9/18/15, Boston)

In 350, Philip of Macedon wanted to unite Greece, which he did except for Sparta. He did everything he could. Finally he sent them a note: If you do not submit at once I will invade your country. If I invade I will pillage and burn everything in sight. If I march into Laconia, I will level your great city to the ground. The Spartans sent back this one word reply; "if". (laconic).

You are a part of a tradition of principled resistance.

You might want to remember that. On a cold night when some activity seems not quite right, and you need to summon a courage to resist. On a day when a choice in vocation arrives, unannounced, and you need to summon a kind of confidence to resist turning aside. On an evening when you know the driver has had too much to drink, and you need to ask to be let out of the car. On a weekend when you see something and need to say something.

On the other hand, you may not need this word right now. But you may want to remember it, especially if you are young. For one day, one day, you may want to use some of your spiritual bequest, your prophetic endowment. You may need to draw on the tradition of principled refusal, principled resistance..

Good news has it that along the ropes, and upon the cross, Jesus has bound up the Strong Evil, subverting by being subject to, and so empowered us to resist.

A year before he was executed by the Nazis, languishing in a small prison cell, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote this hymn:

"By gracious powers so wonderfully sheltered

and confidently waiting, come what may,

We know that God is with us night and morning

And never fails to greet us each new day.”

For more information about Marsh Chapel at Boston University, click here.

For information about donating to the Chapel, click here.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 09.20.2015 at 11:00 am

Sunday
September 6

The Senses of Prayer

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 7:24-37

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

Be opened. Ephphatha. Be opened.

Jesus’ utterance today, in the swirl of two strange stories,

commands an opening of the senses, a new opening of the senses in prayer.

Today the Gospel asks you about your soul, about your inner life, about

prayer.

Prayer is a kind of shadow boxing, the struggle of the soul for

one’s own life, over against all the forces outside arranged against us.

As Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote in Gift from the Sea, “Every

person, especially every woman, should be alone sometime during the year,

some part of each week, and of each day.”

Prayer is the possibility of an inner life, of communion with

God—whether in the graveyard, the library, the symphony hall, the art

gallery, the study, the beach. Or, in church.

A sanctuary is a place to be quiet, in order to reconstitute our

real life: “the very best prayers are but vain repetitions, if they are not the

language of the heart.” (J Wesley)

The soul, personal or collective, is boxing with its shadow in

prayer….

Before the firelight of a hard decision, as your soul sees its

shadow lengthen into something like fear

Before the blue haze of the computer glass, as your soul sees its

shadow lengthen into something like listlessness—acedia

Before the searching, searing floodlight of clear and painful

memory, as your soul sees its shadow lengthen into something like hatred

Prayer is one great battle, your soul locked shadow boxing in

combat with what maims and harms life.

What are the senses of prayer?

Sound

Prayer tunes out many of the frequencies of this world. Prayer

is deaf as a post, stone deaf to the text beep, to the telephone, to the radio, to

the world around.

One older, beloved hospital patient, who had only one working

ear, found peace and healing at a fine medical facility by lying with his good

ear straight down, planted firmly in bedding, muffled in the starchy pillows.

He turned a deaf ear to the orderlies and nurses and heavy constant

dehumanizing noise. Prayer is like Beethoven at the end. So in prayer, if

you will steal away, you will hear another music.

The song of the soul

The chance for an inner life

The language of the heart

Ears to hear THE REAL YOU, your own-most self

Listen…Breathe…Listen…Breathe…Listen…Breathe…Be

Opened…

Remember Job, “Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your

heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are

on earth, therefor let your words be few.”

Taste

Prayer has different taste buds. An inner life makes room and

has a taste for even what is sour and bitter. No sweet tooth for prayer, but an

openness to hurt, to empathy. Such an unlikely taste in taste.

In prayer we can taste the grief of a husband’s death.

In prayer we can taste the anger over a co-worker’s cancer.

In prayer we can taste the emptiness at a mother’s passing.

In prayer we can taste the fury in conflicts of vision.

In prayer we can taste the ashes of defeat, which salt us all.

In prayer we can taste the sting of adolescent and adult

mistakes. We all make mistakes. No one is good at everything.

In prayer we can approach the sense of violation another carries

after vandalism, literal or spiritual.

In prayer we can taste the awful bitterness of lament.

So central, then, in worship, are the psalms, for they are, simply

said, of two types: thanksgiving, or lament, thanksgiving, or lament. To

them we return every Lord’s Day.

Scent

There is the smell of the desert in prayer, the arid and heated

dryness of the desert.

Some of you have traveled to Israel. Do you remember going

to Qumran at the Dead Sea? Down in the Dead Sea valley, 1000ft below sea

level, did you see the remains of that ancient Essene community, 100

degrees Fahrenheit in the winter. Do you recall the scent of the desert—a

land stark, lonely, without any potable water, without any green, not a sign

of life. Wind, sand, stars, heat.

Why in the decades before Jesus lived, would 100 men come to

the desert? Why, they had that scent of prayer. They smelled the difference.

They came to prayer, in secret, to the Almighty God who sees in secret.

They came to enter the closet of Palestine, and to shut the door. They knew

about boxing with the soul’s shadow. They knew that life is short. They

came to struggle in mortal combat for the possibility of an inner life. They

craved that “purity of intention without which none of our outward actions

are holy” (J Wesley). There is such a thing as inward holiness. God’s heart

is open to you there. There is such a thing as inward holiness. Prayer is its

womb.

Inward holiness prompts you right now to find and hold a

particular moment in worship, as God’s approach to you, and your response.

Mine is the hymn. Hers is the prayer. His is the sermon. Theirs is the

offering. In coming to worship we pray for, we anticipate, an experience of

the genuine. Of beauty, truth and goodness in music, word, and prayer.

Touch

To be touched at the heart is to be forgiven.

The heart of prayer is forgiveness. The point of prayer is

forgiveness. The goal of prayer is forgiveness. Yes there is much

else—entreaty, expostulation, confession, thanksgiving, recollection, praise,

adoration, meditation, intercession. Still, the heart of prayer for the

followers of Jesus is forgiveness. Jesus prayed, according to Matthew, at the

critical moments—in the wilderness, in teaching, in the garden of

Gethsemane, on the the cross—“Father, forgive them for they know not

what they do.”

Do you seek forgiveness?

Are you earnestly awaiting its touch?

Are you adept at its arts and ways?

Do you pray for it?

In specific cases?

Among nations and groups as well as persons?

In rumination this summer I wondered about the two phrases,

‘Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you.’ (Matthew 5: 44). It

had never occurred to me before that they might, perhaps should, be read in

apposition. Here is how you love your enemies: you pray for them.

Sight

Did you ever wonder why now and then in the prophet Isaiah

there is the comment about seeing and yet not seeing? There is a kind of

blind sight that is all too common to us.

Some years ago, we buried a man of faith and of sight. He was

a photographer. In his last year he wrote out what the sight sense of prayer

can be. For those of us who see and see and yet do not perceive, this is a

gift.

“A photographer’s function is to see so clearly that others will

see the work that they have not noticed previously. By analogy with guide

dogs for the blind, we can think of photographers as seeing-eye people. We

are helping people that don’t see much. Unfortunately, that’s most people,

because we don’t pay attention and see clearly much of the time. We can

get a lot of help from photography, which doesn’t censor reality as much as

our unaided minds do, and forces us to focus.

“Practicing the art of seeing should become a habit in all of us.

In that practice, I soon learned that there is beauty in almost everything if we

only will look… In order to see God’s work, humans have to make

themselves “see” the detail in creation, to become aware of the fact that God

is truly around us all the time.”

It takes a practiced blindness to the rush and blur of the way we

live to sense the sight of prayer.

Perhaps this is why, at the end of his faithful, shared life, Oliver

Sacks wrote about Sabbath, and about his memories of Sabbath. His mother

exchanging her surgeon’s attire to make gefilte fish. The ritual candles. The

fresh clothes. The silver wine cup. The chants and blessings. ‘The

observance of the Sabbath’—he quotes Robert John—‘is extremely

beautiful…It is not a question of improving society, it is about improving

one’s own quality of life’. (NYT 8/16/15)

Call to Prayer

Beloved

A Deaf Ear to Dehumanizing Noise

A Touch of the Heart in Forgiveness

There are Senses of Prayer

The Arid Scent of Inner Holiness

A Taste for Empathy and Lament

A Sight that sees the details

Be opened. Ephpatha. May our lives be opened to the senses of prayer.

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For information about donating to the Chapel, click here.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 09.6.2015 at 11:00 am

Sunday
August 30

Take and Read

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

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

Gracious God, Holy and Just, Whose Mercy is over all thy works

We invoke thy blessing today as we embark on this new journey

Guide us as we sail out for points unknown, ports unseen, and horizons unexplored

Be our North Star, our compass, sextant

Keep a clean wind blowing through our lives to make us happy and humble

Help us to seek shelter when the gusts of loneliness and failure threaten to capsize

Bless and help us to be a blessing to those commissioned to sail this ship, to the set our course, and to the lead the way

And a special intercession today for all sailors and crew on the good ship 2019

For those on the bridge—wisdom

For those learning the ropes—patience

For those working the in the rigging—a light heart

For those who bid farewell at the gangplank, our parents and sponsors—thanksgiving,

thanksgiving for the birthpangs that brought life, the hands that prepared us to sail, the hearts that forgave and conditioned and seasoned us, for the tear filled eyes and proud hearts that wave to us as the ship leaves the harbor, our mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, and our communities of meaning, belonging and empowerment—thanksgiving, thanksgiving.

O Thou who stills waters and calms seas, grant us fair winds, bright skies and an adventurous voyage

Amen

Here is a matriculation account. Vernon Jordan went to Depauw, a small Methodist school in Indiana, lead by various BU graduates. His dad, mom, and younger siblings drove him up and dropped him off their in Greencastle, “up south”, Martin King might have said, from their home in Lousiana. Weeping, his father said, “Vernon, we are not coming back until four years from now. You are here where your future opens. At graduation we will be here, sitting in the front row. This is your time. I have one word of advice. Read. When others are playing, you read. When others are sleeping, you read. When others are drinking, you read. When others are partying, you read. When others are wasting precious time and encouraging you to do the same, you read.” He did. Read, that is. Last week, on Martha’s Vineyard, Mr. Jordan celebrated his 80th birthday, in the company of Presidents Clinton and Obama.

Speaking of Presidents, Boston University’s third President, Lemuel Merlin, left Boston for Greencastle Indiana, to become the President of Depauw, nearly 100 years ago. All of our Presidents—Warren, Huntington, Merlin, Marsh, Chase, Christ-Janer, Silber, Westling, Chobanian, and Brown—would salute this Augustinian slogan, ‘take and read’.

For like our gospel lesson today, they and this University, have been interested in what makes a person human, in what makes a human be human, in what lies not outside, but inside, not in measurement but in meaning, not in the visible but in the soulful, not in making a living, only, but in making a life, fully. Our gospel lesson today from Mark 7 is about the inside. Set aside the details. Set aside the religious conflict about kosher laws as Christianity moved out from Judaism. Set aside the cups, pots, and kettles. Set aside the ancient language that depicts what is evil. Licentiousness is not a word we use a lot, however present the reality to which it points. The inside. The passage is about the priority of what is inside, about the priority of the heart, about the priority of the soul, about the commandment of God which ever trumps tradition. Gospel ever trumps tradition.

You hear echoes of other verses. One does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God…Cleanse the inside of the cup….What will it profit to gain the whole world and lose one’s soul?...Enter in at the narrow gate…

Your challenge in these fours years is not only to earn a BA. Your challenge is to do so without losing your soul. Your challenge is to do so gaining your soul, tending to the inside, walking in the light, becoming your own best self, finding the place where your heart, ‘the inside’ comes alive, uniting the pair so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety, and uniting vocation with avocation, ‘as two eyes make one in sight’. Frost:

Yield who will to their separation

My object in living is to unite

My vocation with my avocation

As my two eyes make one in sight

Only where love and need are one

And the work is play for mortal stakes

Is the deed ever really done

For heaven and the future’s sakes.

Take and read. You read.

Each Synoptic passage is like a choral piece, including four voices. There is the Soprano voice of Jesus of Nazareth, embedded somewhere in the full harmonic mix. In Mark 7, Jesus conflicts with the Pharisaic attention to cleanliness. There is the alto voice of the primitive church, arguably always the most important of the four voices, that which carries the forming of the passage in the needs of the community. Here the community is reminded about the priority of the ‘inside’. The tenor line is that of the evangelist. Mark here, marking his own appearance in the record. The baritone is borne by later interpretation, beginning soon with Irenaeus, Against Heresies: “What doctor, when wishing to cure a sick man, would act in accordance with the desires of the patient, and not in accordance with the requirements of medicine?” (in Richardson, ECF, 377) (If our church music carries only one line, we may be tempted to interpret our Scripture with only one voice, and miss the SATB harmonies therein, to our detriment.)

Take and read.

Our focus this year at Marsh Chapel is prayer. Adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication. An hour a day, a day a week, a week a quarter, a quarter a year. 8am, Friday, school break, summer. But prayer is mostly resistance. Resistance to what harms the inside, to what eclipses the soul, to what makes us less than human. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to earn your degree, as you will want to do with all life’s future earnings, in a way that leads to life. In a soulful way. In a hearty way. In a healthy way.

Here is what we mean. For a moment, we will take an imaginary walk, along with my colleagues Ms. Jaimie Dingus and Ms. Kasey Shultz. We will set out and walk down the Esplanade, enjoying the sights of sailing and sculling. When we come to the statue of Arthur Fiedler we will stop, and read, perhaps a passage from Chaim Potok. In ‘My Name is Asher Lev, the young artist recalls a moment with his father. The artist is six years old. A bird has died and lies along the curb.

Kasey

“Is it dead, Papa?” I was six and could not bring myself to look at it.

“Yes”, I heard him say in a sad and distant way.

“Why did it die?”

“Everything that lives must die”.

“Everything?”
“Yes”.

“You, too, Papa? And Mama?”

“Yes”.

“And me?
“Yes.”, he said. But then he added in Yiddish, “But may it be only after you live a long and happy life, my Asher.”

I couldn’t grasp it. I forced myself to look at the bird. Everything alive would one day be as still as that bird?

“Why”, I asked.

“That’s the way the Ribbono Shel Olom mad this world, Asher.”

“Why?”

“So life would be precious, Asher. Something that is yours forever is never precious.”

Then we will walk a little farther, stopping for a moment in the Public Garden, as lovely a common space as there is. We see Commonwealth Avenue, what Winston Churchill called the loveliest street in America. We notice and name the flowers, enjoy the shade, perhaps take a boat ride. Then we open a volume of poetry from Gerard Manley Hopkins:

We are not far from the Public Library. We enter, and go up the stairs. We notice the civil war remembrances. We look at the frieze that includes the Hebrew prophets. John Updike came regularly to this great reading room—to read, and then, to write. We pull up a chair for a moment. At hand is a copy of David Brooks’ new book, The Road to Character.

Kasey

“Recently I’ve been thinking about the difference between the resume virtues and the eulogy virtues. The resume virtues are the ones you list on your resume, the skills that you bring to the job market and that contribute to external success. The eulogy virtues are deeper. They’re the virtues that get talked about at your funeral, the ones that exist at the core of your being—whether you are kind, brave, honest, or faithful; what kind of relationships you formed (p. xi).”

The day is bright and cool—beautiful autumn in New England. We choose the path along the Emerald Necklace, an unusual place to stroll, to saunter—saunter, a saintly walk. A bench beckons. We sit. A Boston surgeon’s book is in our bag, Being Mortal. We stretch and read his meditation upon medicine and meaning in the twilight of life.

Jaimie

“People with serious illness have priorities besides simply prolonging their lives…avoiding suffering, strengthening relationships with family and friends, being mentally aware, not being a burden on others, and achieving a sense that their life is complete…our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet those needs” (p. 155)

Take and read: an awareness of wonder may greet you on the Esplanade, an awareness of beauty in the Public Garden, an awareness of virtue in the Library, an awareness of mortality by the Emerald Necklace. So that when you return to campus, you may take a seat for a moment in Marsh Chapel, under the window of St. Augustine, just here, who amid tears, misery and lamentation reclaimed his own soul by reading:

I was saying these things and weeping in the most bitter contrition of my heart, when suddenly I heard the voice of a boy or a girl I know not which–coming from the neighboring house, chanting over and over again, “Pick it up, read it; pick it up, read it.” [”tolle lege, tolle lege”] Immediately I ceased weeping and began most earnestly to think whether it was usual for children in some kind of game to sing such a song, but I could not remember ever having heard the like. So, damming the torrent of my tears, I got to my feet, for I could not but think that this was a divine command to open the Bible and read the first passage I should light upon. For I had heard how Anthony, accidentally coming into church while the gospel was being read, received the admonition as if what was read had been addressed to him: “Go and sell what you have and give it to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven; and come and follow me.” By such an oracle he was forthwith converted to thee.

So I quickly returned to the bench where Alypius was sitting, for there I had put down the apostle’s book when I had left there. I snatched it up, opened it, and in silence read the paragraph on which my eyes first fell: “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof.” I wanted to read no further, nor did I need to. For instantly, as the sentence ended, there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty and all the gloom of doubt vanished away.

Take and read…

Take and read.

Take and Read!

Boston University, proud with mission sure

Keeping the light of knowledge high, long to endure

Treasuring the best of all that’s old, searching out the new

Our Alma Mater Evermore, Hail BU!

For more information about Marsh Chapel at Boston University, click here.

For information about donating to the Chapel, click here.

posted in Matriculation, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 08.30.2015 at 11:00 am

Sunday
August 23

Chariot of Fire

By Marsh Chapel

John 6:56-69

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

For a year we have embraced spirit. Listen again to the prayer response in a moment. Spirit. Presence. Awareness. Conscious embrace. St. Mark revealed Spirit. Jonathan Edwards preached Spirit. The Beloved Community awaits Spirit. The Gospel of John adores, prioritizes, lifts the Spirit. Our word 2015 has been Spirit.

Today, to conclude, we bring a familiar story and a spiritual question. The story is that of Elijah. The question is that of your legacy.

The story.

In (or near) the year 850 bc, Elijah, the prophet, stood against the prophets of Baal on Mt. Carmel. He alone stood against 450. The enemy prophets called on Baal to bring fire. Baal did not. But Yahweh did, at Elijah’s imprecation. Cry aloud, for he is a god. Either he is musing. Or he is inside. Or he is on a journey. Or he is asleep—he needs to wake up. Maybe he does not hear well. Try again. Elijah also announced the end of a great drought. On the way to the river Jordan.

In the year 820, Elijah went up a high mountain, not unlike that on which Jesus stood some weeks ago in Mark, and listened for God. He heard God. Not in fire, or smoke, or whirlwind, or techno wizardry, or techno frenzy. For God was not there. But in a still small voice. In silence, the silence before hearing and speech. In conscience. In mind and will. The Lord passed by, and a great strong wind rent the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire—a still, small voice. On the way to the river Jordan.

In the year 800bc Elijah, the troubler of Israel, saw King Ahab, through his wife, Jezebel, take the garden of a poor man, Naboth, and kill Naboth in the process. I will give you a better vineyard for it. But Naboth did not want another, but his own. And Ahab sulked, vexed and sullen, and lay down on his bed, and turned his face, and would eat no food. But Naboth held onto his vineyard. But Jezebel said, ‘Do you govern Israel? Arise and eat bread and let your heart be cheerful. I will get you the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite. But Naboth resisted her, too. So they took him outside the city and stoned him to death. And Jezebel said, go and take Naboth’s vineyard, for he is dead. But Elijah confronted the king. Have you killed and taken? Then I tell you—In the place where dogs licked up the blood of Naboth shall dogs lick your own blood. Elijah, the troubler of Israel. It is one thing to desire another’s property, and another to take it by force. Elijah held a mirror before the country that wanted such a king, and the influence of such a queen. On the way to the river Jordan.

In the year 30ad, we saw this winter, Elijah’s spirit awakened Peter, who went up a high mountain, with Jesus, to see Him changed. Elijah brought reason and morality to the religion Moses founded. Lent is meant to remind us of the priority of worship. Find a way to get to worship. Worship brings the insight of personal need, lifted in prayer. Worship brings the insight of another’s hurt, lifted in communal, singing, four part harmonic hymns. Worship brings the insight of clarity, a word fitly spoken, lifted in the sermon. Worship brings the insight of choosing, the choice of faith, not thrill but will, lifted in the invitations, to devotion, discipline, dedication. Worship brings the insight of loyalty, of heart, lifted every Sunday in the offering of gifts and tithes. Elijah brought hope, prophetic hope, into the tradition and minds of his people. On the way from the river Jordan.

In the year 90ad, our Gospel today acclaimed Spirit. Notice the theme of ascent in the Fourth Gospel, through and through. You notice here that John turns the tables on flesh. All chapter 6, you are expected to recall, accounted for feeding, the feeding of 5,000. 2 fish and five loaves and all satisfied. Or was it five fish and two loaves and all satisfied? Then ancient discourse upon the food that perishes, and the One who is the bread of life. Then, too, more traditional language, in chapter 6, we are expected to remember, about ‘the last day’, about bread of life, about flesh given for the life of the world, about ‘munching’ the flesh of the Son of Man, and then our passage, starting, ‘my flesh is food indeed’. And then? All, come John 6: 56-69, all the above is set aside, abrogated, trumped. By…Spirit. No not flesh, no not bread, no not eating, no not muching, no not tradition, no not table, no not eucharist. ‘See the Son of Man ascending’, LIKE ELIJAH LIKE ELIJAH LIKE ELIJAH. ‘It is the Spirit that giveth life, the flesh is of no avail; the words that I have spoken to you are Spirit and life.’ There is no last supper in John. Yes, 1 Cor. 11. Yes, the pastoral epistles, TTT. Yes, the Synoptics MML. But not John. He prefers the actual service of foot-washing, and eliminates the Eucharistic meal, supplanting it with—Spirit. There is no last supper in John because for John the supper does not last (repeat). Your words will long outlive your deeds. What you say and the way you say it have much longer life than what you do. Odd as that may seem. What lasts? Spirit. What ascends? Spirit. Elijah, on the way from the river Jordan.

In the year 1735, we saw this winter, the spirit of Elijah rested on the New England community of North Hampton, and the ministry of a Puritan divine, Jonathan Edwards, our Calvinist interlocutor this Lent. Edwards saw the divine light shining in the human soul. Edwards saw that the material universe exists in God’s mind. Edwards saw faith in the willingness of saints to be damned for the glory of God. Edwards saw religious affections, inclinations, dispositions, all gifts of God in faith, the love of God that kindles joy, hope, trust, peace and ‘a sense of the heart’. Edwards saw the centrality of the experience of faith: a person may know that honey is sweet, but no one can know what sweet means until they taste the honey. Edwards saw that ‘God delights properly in the devotions, graces, and good works of his saints.’ Jonathan Elijah Edwards, our New England precursor, walked along the Connecticut River, on the way from the river Jordan.

In the year 1865, in our nation’s capital, the spirit of Elijah touched the tongue of Abraham Lincoln. Months and days before Lincoln died, Lincoln cried out, with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us finish the work that we are in. Real cost, real costs, occasion our very freedom to gather in community for worship this morning. The same spirit, of 850bc, that presence, that quickened consciousness, that affection, that devotion, that inclination were present with Lincoln, and are with us today. You have the brute fact of the brute creation. You have too the spirit.

In the year 1951, the spirit of Elijah rested in the mind of Ray Bradbury. He wrote a book, Fahrenheit 451 (this is the temperature at which paper burns), an eschatological prophecy about the end of books, the end of reading, the end of memory. The novel ends along a river. Montag finds himself with hoboes around a campfire, along the river bank. He is surprised to find that fire, the mode of book destruction he has resisted, can ‘give as well as take, warm and well as burn’. He waits in the shadows. The men around the fire summon him out of the dark, and take him in. He learns that each one of them has committed some book to memory. One is living Plato’s Republic. One is the work of Thomas Hardy. One has memorized several of the plays of Shakespeare. Byron, Machiavelli, Tom Paine, and the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—all these are carried in the minds of hoboes, walking libraries, the remaining memory of the art of the race. “What have you to offer?” they ask Montag. “Parts of Ecclesiastes and of the Revelation to St. John”, he replies. In 2015, an age that has eschewed reading for scanning, books for blogs, google for memory, and earning for knowing, Elijah Bradbury’s word resonates. On the way out from the river Jordan.

In the year 1965, we recalled this year, in early March, 50 years later, the spirit of Elijah walked across the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama. John Lewis was there, ‘not angry, but full of righteous indignation’, as he said. Through the history, offices and gifts of Boston University we sat next to him over dinner three years ago. He wanted to be a preacher, growing up: I would come home and preach to the chickens, he remembered. If nothing else, perhaps 50 years hence we could remember that real change is real hard but comes in real time when people really work at it, on the ground, in personal conversation, then in small groups, with gifted leadership. Down on the way from the River Jordan.

In the winter of the year 2015, Elijah, the spirit of Elijah brooded over the face of New England snow fields. The sore muscles of a shoveling people, the tired torsos of a commuting community, the undaunted willingness still to help a neighbor, the gritty determination to get through the blizzard, the awareness of needs for investment in the communal forms of transport, the gladness of children and the extra time of adults, the same spirit visited. But also. The sore memory muscles wrestling with the horror and mayhem—needless and cruel—of Marathon 2013. The blizzard of feeling and thought inevitably brought by a current courtroom trial to the surface. The rush of anger alongside the search for the better angels of one’s nature. You may not daily recognize Elijah. But he is present. Morning in reading. Mealtime in prayer. Evening in quiet. Sunday in worship. (People have such odd reasons for avoiding worship.) On the way forward from the river Jordan. Elijah: elusive spirit, mysterious ghost, the divine present absence, personified.

In the year of spirit, 2015, the spirit of prophet Elijah hovered in the nave of Marsh Chapel, Boston University. The chapel has given, to you and others, over many decades—beauty, grace, preachment, music, recollection. Some here have found God, and some here have been found by God. Marsh—a gift. And so you have responded. By listening on the radio—good. By joining us one Sunday—good. By giving to and through this ministry—good. By inviting someone to listen, too. By inviting someone to come with you. Good. By dreaming of an even more permanent place, and even stronger witness, and even more vibrant voice at Marsh. One of you may choose to endow the deanship of this chapel. Good. Elijah awaits us. On the way from the river Jordan.

In the summer of 2015, the spirit and voice of the prophet Elijah echoed here. We together ruminated about ‘beloved community’, whose root is the Gospel of John, whose trunk is Bostonian Josiah Royce, and whose branches include the hope of Martin Luther King. David Romanik had some homiletical advice: Larry Whitney gave some ecclesiastical advice: the beloved community is not easy. Chapin Garner added a warning, not ‘your God is too small’, but ‘your God is too tame’. Bob Hill added footnotes on intimations in social history and influences of personal faith. Regina Walton taught us to ‘abide’, and pointed out that we are branches, tangled, not potted plants, aloof. And Brittany Longsdorf ended with a poetic hymn to love. In a phrase, what shall we hold from this summer? Beloved Community. On the way from the river Jordan.

In the year 20??, I apologize, I have mislaid the exact date, the prophet Elijah will be on my doorstep, and knocking on your door. Perhaps at midnight. Maybe at noon day. Possibly at dawn. Or in the wee hours of the morning. The eschatological prophet, the prophet of the last things, the one invited by Peter to a booth with Jesus, Elijah, the prophet of God, will make a pastoral visit. In the last hour of my life, and yours. There will be the river Jordan. There will be a mantel slapped on the water. There will be a parting of the ways. There will be a step forward. There will be a chariot, a sweet chariot, a swinging sweet chariot, a firey, swinging, sweet chariot. There will be a presence. Could it be that the weeks of cascade, the days of Nevada, the snow and snow and snow of our 2015 New England winter of discontent should carry an evocation, a query, a reminder, a call, premonition, a measuring, a warning, a promise? Most of what we spend our time on, and our money, doesn’t matter at all. It is the spirit that giveth life.

In the summer of 2015, going back a half step, an Elijah spirit ushered us toward a new book of Harper Lee, a surprise and an adventure. In this newly discovered book, I understand, Scout is grown up, and Atticus Finch is old, and the setting is not the depression but the early civil rights movement. We know whence Scout emerged. Maybe we will re-read ‘Mockingbird’, including its spiritual conculsion. TL Butts preached:

“Near the end of Nelle Harper Lee’s wonderful novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, there is a touching and unforgettable scene. Jean Louise (Scout), young daughter of the courageous Atticus Finch, has persuaded her father to let her come to the courtroom to hear the verdict in the controversial case in which he is defending a black man. She chose to sit in the balcony with the black people. The inevitable “guilty” verdict is rendered. It is over. Atticus Finch gathers his papers, places them in his briefcase, and begins a sad and lonely walk down the center aisle to the back door. Scout hears someone call her name, “Miss Jean Louise?” She looks behind her and sees that all of the black people are standing ups as her father walks down the aisle. Then she heard the voice of the black minister, Rev. Sykes: “Miss Jean Louise, stand up, stand up, your father’s passin’.” Can you hear that? It begs to be heard.

Here is one way to live. In Spirit. Elijah’s way. The spirit way. The way of confidence born of obedience. The way of the journey of faith, the obedience of faith. In this way, we live with the trust to see things through. To cross over. To cross the river. To trust our past. To trust our experience. To trust the spirit. To trust our Elisha’s, our friends and successors. To trust that in some way spiritually similar to Elijah at Jordan, a sweet chariot awaits. So, Elijah’s story.

Now, the question.

Yes, to end, we promised a question. A story, Elijah’s. A question, yours.

Elijah leaves Elisha a double portion of his spirit? What do you hope to pass on? What do you hope to leave behind? What legacy is yours? You are 22 and you have been to college and you have 15 year old sister heading that way? Any advice? You are a young parent watching your toddlers toddle. What do you want to give them that they will never lose? You are a grandparent, and you have some things you would like to bequethe. What are they, and what will you give in management, money and material to make it happen? It is the spirit question, the Elijah question, the community question, and it is yours. For me, the answer is simple. I want to pass on the possibility of preaching, of a word fitly spoken, of a saving intervening word, Spirit in speech, for the next generations. As the chariot approaches, what do you want to leave behind?

And here it comes…A chariot of promise. A chariot of freedom. A chariot of hope. A chariot of deliverance. A chariot of salvation. A chariot of heaven. A chariot to carry us home.

And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England’s mountains green

And was the Holy of Lamb of God on England’s pleasant pastures seen…

I shall not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand

Till we have built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land

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posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 08.23.2015 at 11:00 am

Sunday
August 2

Personal Faith and the Beloved Community

By Marsh Chapel

John 6:24-35

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

To lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called…

Among the powers that drew us here to Boston, was the chance to labor in the shadow of Howard Thurman and to preach from the pulpit he once filled. Thurman was the Dean of Marsh Chapel, 1953-1965. This summer, read his autobiography, With Head and Heart. In the work of grieving and departing from one setting, Rochester, and entering another, Boston, I was telephoned by a friend and parishioner. She wanted to set an appointment to talk, before we left Rochester. A saintly woman, Donna Adcock, made an appointment, a good formal appointment, to see me. ‘A chat after church won’t do for this’, she averred. That Wednesday she brought in a poem which she had typed out from an original handscript. Typing is an ancient technology, no longer in use, but some years ago, even, still around. (I do not linger to define keystroke, white out, ribbon, carbon paper, or Smith Corona (not a beer, by the way)). ‘This poem Howard Thurman your predecessor at Marsh Chapel recited in a sermon in Kansas City, my home, in 1950’, she said. ‘I was years old, 56 years younger when that sermon changed my life. I spent the next 50 years in ‘full time Christian service’, through the YWCA. I heard something that summer day, in Kansas City, in 1950, that changed my life. I want you to have this poem. You do not need to live in New England to love it, but it does help. The fact that I heard it through Howard Thurman’s beautiful voice adds to it for me”.

The ‘little duck’ is a poem about the freedom of a duck floating on the waves, written in 1947 by Donald Babcock. Here are verses from that poem…

There is a big heaving in the Atlantic

And he is part of it

He can rest while the Atlantic heaves, because he rests in the Atlantic

Probably he doesn’t know how large the ocean is

And neither do you

But he realizes it

And what does he do, I ask you? He sits down in it

He reposes in the immediate as if it were infinity—which it is.

That is religion, and the duck has it.

He has made himself part of the boundless, by easing himself into it just where it touches him.

I like the little duck.

He doesn’t know much.

But he has religion.

To lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called…

Three years ago we hosted the memorial service for Dr. Ken Edelin. Marsh Chapel was full. At one point we asked the congregation to recite together the 23 Psalm. Family and friends in the first pew did so. Colleagues and physicians across the nave did so. Leaders of national organizations near and far did so. In the balcony, twenty white coated medical students together did so. Either at that point or another in the service they stood silently together, to honor the life and faith of the deceased. That day I met a friend a personal physician of Arthur Ashe, whose life, prowess, faithfulness and service have always so inspired me. Read again this summer his autobiography, Days of Grace. “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”

In the collation following the service, Charlayne Hunter Gault introduced herself. You will remember her, as we did, from her many and fine contributions to the News Hour, with Jim Lehrer. She said, ‘I need to talk to you later about the 23 Psalm’. I was so pleased to meet her, and then so worried that I had somehow offended her, that the collation time passed anxiously. It needn’t have done. She wanted to recall a memory. A memory of her younger self. At 18. The first African American to integrate the University of Georgia. The daughter of a Baptist minister. Alone in a big place, a strange place, a new place. Walking home the third night, there were taunts and threats. The University that day had suggested she might want to go home, at least for a while. She went into her room. She closed the door. She turned out the lights. And she waited, until quiet came. And then—it was the only thing that came to her mind—the prayer of David in Psalm 23 came to her. And she spoke the psalm, alone, afraid, uncertain, at night. ‘Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord, forever.’

Sometimes words are all we have. A regular radio listener from Rhode Island telephoned a few weeks ago. He said, ‘sometimes words are all we have’.

To lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called…

In late June from this pulpit we invited those moved to consider the possibility, to spend a Sunday worshipping in an African Methodist Episcopal Church this summer. ‘Take with you the greetings of Marsh Chapel’, we suggested. This sort of visit is not for everyone, and can take many forms. It has been interesting, and encouraging, to see that this summer some of you have done so. One friend, regular in attendance here, did so a few weeks ago. He has a story to tell, and has made a personal connection or three. One radio listener, virtually present by radio or podcast week by week, went further. She is arranging a neighborhood gathering, she hopes, and hopes we can help her. Real change is real hard but happens in real time when real people really work at it. There is a latent goodness, a common faith a common ground and a common hope, all about us, like the ocean holding the duck, like the still waters that restore the soul. My friends, you are bringing a personal to bear upon the emergence of a beloved community. Look at what Robert Gates has done, in the right time in the right way, in leading the Boy Scouts of American in a new direction.

To lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called…

Coming to communion you come with your lost loved ones in mind and heart. This last winter we bade farewell to a father in law, Charlie. When we receive the Lord’s Supper we do so with the communion of saints all around us. Charlie was a lover.

He loved nature. Garden. Seed time. Harvest. Planting. Weeding. Watering. Like the parables of Jesus. He had a green thumb. Most plant benefitted by the touch of his hand.

He loved work. With his hands. Carpentry. Also some good company in carpentry, if I remember the Bible that they had us memorize at church camp. 14 features of our cottage have known the touch of his hand.

He loved the poor and the other. In his study group. In work with Abraham House, Retired Teachers, and Habitat for Humanity and various churches and causes. He loved others, and I mean others. Of other religions, other places, other races, other backgrounds, other orientations. He loved. Others, and they felt the touch of his hand.

He loved his country. He was not a member of any organized political party. His patriotism, his love of country was not only liberty and justice, but liberty and justice FOR ALL. And with his own hands he lived that.

He loved his church. Its committees, its pastors, its building needs, its study groups, its quirks and oddities. Especially he loved the reading he did with others.

He loved his family, and expressed that love in rocking horses and tools given and evergreens planted and windows replaced and sincere, repeated words of love.

He touched us in the most touching of ways.

He loved God by loving the things of God, the creation of God, the tasks of God, the people of God, the church of God.

He was our ‘dad’ and we learned from him. We all need models of personal faith, people who can show us by example the dimensions of spirituality we so desire.

To lead a life worthy of the calling to which we have been called…

Some years ago, Jan and I went out onto the bay in Mallorca one Sunday. Once a year we try to go somewhere, alone, together. In that bay a boat called the ‘Marco Polo’ will take you ten kilometers or so south, or north, dock for a half hour swim, then bring you back to port. We embarked covered with sunscreen.

In the stern a dozen Germans were gathered, stoic, and after a while they began to sing, in German. Sort of like our Marsh choir sings some Sundays. Madrilenos, Catalans, Natives of Andalucia, other Spaniards, sat up front with the youth, maybe a dozen young people. Thence much laughter. Sort of like our Marsh Community lunch. We sat under cover, mid-ship, with the British enfrocked in bonnets, sweaters, long stockings, sunglasses. We sat against an open window, beautifully open to the sea in the middle of the earth.

Like a large sea gull, we bobbed along, in the summer beauty, summer sun, summer heat, summer grace and freedom and love. An earnest relationship with work you may find in America, among Americans. Vacation belongs to the Europeans. A hearty relationship with vacation they have. Anne Murrow Lindbergh, a European at heart, to paraphrase, said, ‘A vacation is a month, at least. Take a month, at least, or don’t bother’.

Above us in the ‘Marco Polo’ was a roof covered with life jackets, an old anchor, some rope, other flotsam and jetsam. We sat with the dour British—Spanish laughter a fore, German song aft, and watching the tide role away. There is just something about the ocean.

A gull floated along with us. Wind, sand, stars—ocean. St. Exuprey. Of a sudden, to the right appeared several feet! Small feet, young feet. Left foot, right foot, hay foot, straw foot. The young had commandeered the roof, dangling their feet, kicking, drumming, jostling, lounging and lifting their feet out toward the sea in the middle of the earth. Then, gone. The lifeguard must have appeared. It made me think of Paul, in Corinthians, ‘shall the head say to the feet, I have no need of thee?’ And of Isaiah, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring glad tidings’. And of Jesus, washing in humble service the feet of 12 men, disciples, whom he called ‘friends’.

Of a sudden! To the left, across the cabin, outside the other window, feet, numerous feet, numinous feet, kicking and leaning and pushing. Young people can take the world and make it young again. Dangling feet, dangling prepositions, dangling thoughts—you will make the world playful, youthful, happy, hopeful. Just don’t fall overboard, but that is another sermon.

To lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called…

One of our fellow seekers of the beloved community offered this prayer, with which we conclude.

Adonai, we pray that all may come to the understanding that one person’s grief is a shared experience that we will all face, one person’s love is a love that all will someday experience, one person’s exclusion or shunning is one that we all hope never to experience. One person’s success does not in any way diminish us. Friendship with someone new does not change the friendships that are already part of us. A person being praised and appreciated does not mean that we are not, it is just not your turn, or that there are reasons why they needed those words more at that moment. Consequences of actions born of love have a way of transforming who we are. Until each human being realizes that inflicting harm to another either intentionally or unintentionally or participates in such group dynamics that do, we will not have peace on this earth. Yet when a whispered prayer reaches out to you Adonai, and you reach back to us. We have reached the center where we know that we are loved, and nothing on heaven or earth can change that. In the name of Jesus Christ we pray. (TERRY BAURLEY)

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posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 08.2.2015 at 11:00 am

Sunday
July 12

Intimations of a Beloved Community

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 6:14-29

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

Our gospel is a grim reminder of the prophetic precursor to Jesus, whose own death prefigures the Lord’s. My friend Jennifer, a celebrated New Testament scholar, once referred to the passage as ‘the only mother and daughter scene in the NT’ a way of sidestepping its bloody horror with a mordant, wry wit, a not unusual reaction to such a gruesome passage. Mark is foreshadowing the coming cross of Christ, by remembering John the Baptist.

We can do the same. There are those who at cost have paved the way, affirms our Scripture today. As we gather in summer worship this morning, here in historic Marsh Chapel, we may take some sustenance from such a reminder, and be inspired to remember those who paved a way for us. Who stands as a true precursor for your life and faith? As in these months and weeks, across this great land, a country yet filled with latent goodness, we brood about violence and prejudice, we may take some sustenance from such a direct reminder of the prophetic spirit, truth spoken for love in the face of adversity. Who risked friendship for the sake of you, as a friend? As, this summer, we meditate together upon the mighty theme of the Beloved Community, we might recall earlier intimations, prophetic voices, which paved our way, cut our trail, made a space and place in grace for our own hopes.

I have driven to you at dawn this morning along the Mohawk River. It is the same route John Dempster took on his way to New England to give life to Boston University, in 1839. Let your mind wander with me, this morning, ‘fifteen miles on the Erie Canal’. Think back and think west. Think precursors. This region bears the distinction of having given rise to many women and men who did not leave freedom to somebody else. Its price of eternal vigilance they provided in very daily, very personal, very local, very immediate ways. In the same manner by which we take for granted Niagara Falls, so close and so grand, we take these mighty stories for granted, saving stories of freedom and faith.

The Mohawk River, the Erie Canal. This is the land of Hiawatha (“who causes rivers to run”). Such musical names adorn this landscape: Canandaigua, Tioghnioga, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Cuyahoga. Hiawatha, the great native leader of the Iroquois showed in the 15th century the critical need for union, for space and time in which to live together. His leadership was focused on common space, on collegial relations, on counsel together, and so he is harbinger of all the examples of faith and freedom to come up along the Mohawk and the Erie Canal. In nineteenth century verse:

All your strength is in your union

All your weakness in discord

Therefore be at peace henceforward

And as brothers live together

This is the land of Harriet Tubman. You may want to visit her home in Auburn, NY. (Her neighbor William Seward, Lincoln’s rival and Secretary of State, also from Auburn, bought Alaska, considered at the time a folly, an “ice-box”.) Tubman’s grand niece, Janet Lauerson, was on my church staff for a time in Syracuse, after we both migrated down from the far north country, not far from the burial place of John Brown. His body lies moldering under a ski lift near Lake Placid. He and Gerritt Smith, founder of Peterboro, were not compatiblists regarding slavery. As Lincoln would later say, they felt those who most affirmed slavery should start by trying it for themselves. Brown, Smith, Seward and others were the chorus before which Tubman could sing out the life of freedom, following the underground railroad. Remember her wisdom: “When I found I had crossed that line (on her first escape from slavery, 1845), I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything...I started with this idea in my head, ‘There’s two things I’ve got a right to…death or liberty’…’Twant me, ‘twas the Lord. I always told him, “I trust you. I don’t know where to go or what to do, but I expect you to lead me, and he always did.”

Now that we are as far west as Auburn, you will expect to hear something of Frederick Douglass, buried in Rochester. His burial plot is across the street from Strong Hospital. As one patient said, looking through the window, “it gives you something to think about”. Douglass printed his newspaper, the “North Star”, in Rochester, and through it developed a voice for a new people in a new era. At Syracuse University, 100 years later, it was Professor Roland Wolseley who developed the first national program in Black Journalism. Wolseley was formed in the faith under the great preaching of the best Methodist preacher in the 20th century, Ernest Freemont Tittle, when Wolseley’s young wife was Tittle’s secretary. Wolseley was my pastor parish chair for 10 years. Digressing, for a moment, where the vale of Onondaga meets the eastern sky, you might look in the Carrier Dome at the moving tribute to Ernie Davis, a young man from Elmira, who, a century after Douglass, and in the lifespan of Wolseley, gave tragic, courageous, and lasting embodiment to the common hope of racial justice, harmony and integration. He also played football. The voice of Douglass rings out against the harmonic background of Tittle, Wolseley, Davis and others. In the North Star, Douglass wrote: “The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle…If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its mighty waters.” Or maybe we should give the honor to his ally Sojourner Truth: “That…man…says women can’t have as many rights as man, cause Christ wasn’t a woman. Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman. Man had nothing to do with him!”

Susan B. Anthony did not leave the project of freedom to others. I wonder what sort of dinner companion she might have been. Her constant consort with governors and senators across the Empire state made her an early Eleanor Roosevelt. My grandmother grew up in Cooperstown and graduated from Smith College four years before she had the right to vote. My mother was born in Syracuse only a few years after full suffrage. My wife is a musician and teacher, my sister is a corporate attorney, many of my closest colleagues in ministry are female. I scratch my head to imagine a world without their voices. Syracuse produced Betty Bone Schiess, one of the first women ordained to ministry in the Protestant Episcopal church. One of the Philadelphia 11. We study her now in Introduction to Religion. One rainy day when my daughter Emily was 13 and had the flu, we met Schiess, at the druggist. The pharmacist called her name. I clamored over to investigate whether it were she, the famous Schiess. “Who wants to know?” she replied. As she left, after good banter, she turned in her slicker and totting an umbrella pronounced this blessing: “One day you will be a Methodist bishop”. I was about to reply when I realized she was speaking to Emily. ‘Thank you’, my daughter replied. Think about precursors whose prophetic voices and costly faithfulness paved your way. We may need such a brief reminder, this summer, that real change is real hard but it comes in real time when real people really work at it. So. You may visit the birthplace of suffrage and feminism in Seneca Falls. Anthony’s witness stands out among the witness of so many others: your grandmother, your mother, your sister, your wife, your daughter, your pastor, Betty Bone Schiess, and so many others. Who can forget the motto of Susan B. Anthony: “Failure is impossible” (on her 86th birthday, 1906), or her warning, “Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation.”

Sometimes the freedom train derailed. Not everything along the Mohawk River was perfect or turned round right. Exuberance can produce minor collisions. I want to talk to you about sexual experimentation, that is, a long time before the summer of love. Woodstock paled by comparison with the communal experiments along the Erie Canal during the nineteenth century. The Shaker Community and the Oneida Community perhaps can bracket our discussion. Under Mother Ann Lee, and starting in farm country near New Lebanon (Albany area), not far from from Tanglewood, and our BU musical program there, one of the current sponsors for WBUR, the shaking Quakers firmly and unequivocally addressed the matter of sex. They forbade it. Like the desert fathers and Qumran communities of old, they took Paul at his word and meditated fully on 1 Corinthians 7, ‘let those who have wives live as if they had none’. In the Shaker community, women and men came together only once a week, in worship, on Sunday morning, for ecstatic singing and dancing, like David in the ephod before the ark--hence their name, ‘shakers’. This made church attendance somewhat more than casual liturgical observance. I understand attendance was quite good. However, the practice did not amplify the community itself: infant baptisms lacked the requisite infant, and so were infrequent. Consequently the Shakers moved to Cleveland where they blended into Sherwood Anderson’s new Ohio, returning to the old ways of industry, monogamy, and frugality. In short, they became Methodists. Hear again the Shaker tune:

When true, simplicity is gain

To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed

To turn, turn, will be our delight

‘Till by turning, turning, we come round right

Now, the Oneida’s. You may want to read the book, Without Sin, the best review in our generation of their somewhat different experiment. Also along the Erie Canal the Oneida community set out to find heaven on earth, the end of all oppressions, and even the hope that, as John H Noyes read from Revelation, “death itself will be no more”. Although I went to High School in Oneida I do not recall a full lesson on the matter of stirpiculture, the heart of the Oneida experiment. The Oneidas practiced “complex” marriage, in which every man was married to every woman and vice-versa, and sexual relations were freely permitted as long as the men practiced ‘continence’ to avoid pregnancy. Procreation was planned, through a deliberated, committee processed, but nonetheless free-love sharing of the marriage bed in the hope of producing a better race, a finer human being. (For those of you for whom this is more information than you require, I apologize) Three hundred in number at their greatest growth, the community produced bear traps and then silver, continuing, in some fashion, until just a few years ago. Of all the utopian experiments, the Oneida project is the most fascinating. After word got out about the doings and practices in Oneida, clergy in Syracuse banded together and ran them out of town, first to Canada and then to the Midwest. Noyes died on the trip, and the community disappeared, except in the silver on your dinner table, in wedding gifts, and in quality restaurants. Let us remember the love of freedom, as Noyes expressed it, even if we cannot affirm his methods: “I am free of sin and in a state of Perfection”.

Precursors remind us of what can be done. Another drum along the Mohawk you will find perhaps an unlikely name to include, that of Norman Vincent Peale. When we were at Union Seminary in New York the faculty there, both regularly and rightly criticized the inadequate theology of the Marble Collegiate Church. I remember James Sanders sternly referring to this famed congregation as the “First Church of Marduke”, (not an accolade). Of course you know that for fifty years, a graduate of Boston University, and Ohio Wesleyan, and a proponent of the power of positive thinking held forth, without notes, from the so-called Marduke pulpit. His son in law, Arthur Caliandro, followed him, with notes. You may not trust his theology. I myself am a critic, schooled as I was in the dour, German realism of Tillich, Niehbuhr, and company. You may find it too shallow. Everybody has their criticism of Norman Vincent Peale. Even Adlai Stevenson had gripes. When attacked from Marduke Stevenson defended his Christianity on the basis of the Apostle to the Gentiles, all this in 1956, and rounded out his peroration thus: “Sir, I am a Christian. As such, I find Paul appealing, but Peale, appalling.” You too may find Paul appealing and Peale appalling. But hold one thought. Peale began his preaching a stone’s throw from where my morning drive and this morning’s sermon began, this morning. In Syracuse, at University Methodist Church. He found there a happy people. He found there a positive people. He found there a hopeful people, an optimistic congregation. Why, they were so good to him that he relaxed and fell in love and married an SU coed, Ruth. My old, good friend Forrest Whitmeyer, a graduate of Boston Latin, knew them both well. It was that native buckeye spirit (Norman) married to that native orange soul (Ruth), and it produced the power of positive thinking, itself a form of faith and freedom not to be entirely forgotten. A time or two in the course of a full ministry, we might just remember Peale, positively. The Peales, Ruth and Norman both, did not leave the project of freedom to somebody else. It is biblical and faithful to remember Peale’s seven most important words: “You can if you think you can.” Yes, you can.

Intimations of a Beloved Community. God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Gimself. The faith of Jesus Christ and the freedom of Jesus Christ we offer you today. As Paul’s student writing in Ephesians put it: ‘In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance…so that we might live for the praise of his glory’. Our forebears were disinclined to leave the pursuit of freedom to others. They seized freedom in their own hands and by their own lives. They did not wait on others. They did not pause to seek a secret blessing. They did not wait until some ethereal sign emerged. They did not expect some magic insight. They preferred deliverance to diffidence. They glimpsed and then followed after intimations of a beloved community.

In earshot of our Lord’s teaching, in remembrance of the freedom and faith in our shared past, and especially on this Lord’s day, there is no avoiding a very personal question: as a Christian man or woman, what are you going to do to continue to expand the circle of freedom in our time? Where is your tribal council to create? Where is your slavery to escape? Where is your North Star to publish? Where is your franchise to find? Where is your libertinism to avoid? Where is your hope to share? How will you lift a hand?

And take heart. Have you watched the dawn come? This morning I drove due east, along the Mohawk river, into a full black sky, darker than a hundred midnights, down in the cypress swamp. It seemed forever before there was any light. But somewhere around 5am, imperceptibly, very gradually, black became dark blue, and dark blue a misty gray, and gray a lightened blue, and blue a bright sun. Little bit by little bit by little bit. Dawn came. Like the glory of the morning on the wave…

All that Mohawk river water falls finally into the ocean, running at the feet of Emma Lazarus’ poem:

Give me your tired, your poor

Your huddled masses yearning to breath 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.

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posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 07.12.2015 at 11:00 am

Sunday
June 21

Still Point

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 4: 35-41

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

As we gather in worship this morning, along with countless others in countless churches across the country and beyond, our hearts and minds are brooding over the tragic slayings in Charleston, what Cornell William Brooks, President of the NAACP, who spoke from this pulpit one month ago, has aptly called ‘racist terrorism’. We think of these nine lost lives. We lift them and their families in prayer. We lift their AME church, and the AME connection itself, in prayer. We wonder just how to say something that is both honest and hopeful, both hopeful and honest. Honesty about the storm. Hope in the Still Point who is ‘the Teacher’, our Lord.

Others have done so before. In Rome, about 70ad, a preacher, it may be, stood before a small group of men and women, gathered in a home or courtyard. Though varied in aspect, they who gathered were similar, for they came from various margins, the margins of life. Some were women. Some were Jews. Some were slaves and former slaves. Some were rich, but most poor. Some were educated, but most not. They shared Jesus Christ, crucified. They shared Jesus Christ, risen. Together they had already been seized by an allegiance to him, the still point in a turning world. They were walking in faith. As we are. But they were alarmed, angered, frightened and saddened. As we are today. They were haunted, perhaps by the memory of the Emperor Nero, who famously fiddled as Rome burned, but who found time for an Empire wide persecution of those on the margins, including the early Christians, and if legend serves, including to martyrdom both Peter and Paul. We are not haunted by Nero. We are though haunted by months and years and memories of violence, racism, terrorism, gun culture and untimely death.

In this borrowed upper room or small courtyard, it may be, the preacher acclaimed Jesus, whose word is Peace and whose voice says Be Still. The raised crucified, the still point in a churning world. The preacher, perhaps, remembered from of old and from afar, his days on the Syrian sea, Tiberias, the Sea of Galilee. He imagined in his sermon a night scene. He offered in stylized memory an account of a boating mishap. Some recollection of the book of Jonah may have stirred him. The preacher looked straight into the hurt and heart of his storm tossed church, if you can use that word for that gathering at that time. He could see their fear of drowning, of perishing. He painted into his story portrait other ‘boats’, boats always a symbol of the church. He told of Jesus sleeping. He fixed his hearers’ anger and sadness right in the belly of the whale of the sermon: ‘we are perishing’, they cried. We know that cry, that crie de cour. Then he stood solemnly. Facing all storms, offering in a prophetic spirit the very voice of Christ, he said, ‘Be still’. And the sermon ended. And there was a fullness. And there was a dead calm. A word had been spoken and heard, in resurrection time and space. Around the Still Point, they paused, in silence.

Jesus meets us today right in the teeth of the gale, in the heart of the storm. He speaks to us the eternal word. Peace. He speaks to us the saving word. Be Still. He is the still point in the turning, churning world.

Eliot: ‘At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is’

His is a timely word, a fit word, a word fitly spoken, for us. For we are a people drenched in sorrow, anger, worry, and exasperation. The boat is heaving from side to side, stem to stern, port to starboard. Newtown, Marathon, Ferguson, Staten Island, Baltimore, North Charleston, and McKinley. And now this Charleston church killing, this unspeakable horror, this malevolent mixture of guns and illness and ideology and racism.

This one verse in our Gospel today that we have no problem understanding is the angry cry of Jesus’ frightened fellow travelers: Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?

Here we are. The storm is raging. The winds are blowing. The waves are swamping our little ship. The raging tide of racism. The towering undulation of gun availablity. The windstorm of violence pressing upon us from all sides. We get this today.

Like the little Roman church addressed in today’s Gospel, for whom the lakeside story, the nature imagery, the threat of drowning, the savior’s voice, the mysterious and miraculous heeded command, Be Still, were offered in the soulful, caring preaching of the early pastor, if one can use that title, we too dread drowning.

We dread drowning in a sea of guns. We dread drowning in a tide of deeply embedded, persistent, perduring, encultured racism. We dread drowning in a great windstorm, with waves beating upon us, and the boat half swamped as it is. After a week like this, it is hard to know what to say, if we truly want to be both honest and hopeful.

For these nine dear Methodist souls in Charleston, praying in church, died because of a persistent, pervasive racism that covers this land like a flood tide. They died because of a sea of guns, available to anyone, well or ill, well intended or ill intended, at any time, without any consequence, financial consequence, to the seller, the procurer, those who profit. These nine died because of an ongoing ignorance about the pervasive continuing impacts of chattel slavery 150 years ago, impacts measurable in economic, social, educational and civic life. These nine died because of a fiercely advocated and heavily funded broad agenda to privilege states rights over human rights, gun ownership over human survival, and individual freedom over the common good.

Charles Pierce wrote honestly this week:

What happened in a church in Charleston, South Carolina on Wednesday night is a lot of things, but one thing it's not is "unthinkable." Somebody thought long and hard about it. Somebody thought to load the weapon. Somebody thought to pick the church. Somebody thought to sit, quietly, through some of Wednesday night bible study. Somebody thought to stand up and open fire, killing nine people, including the pastor. Somebody reportedly thought to leave one woman alive so she could tell his story to the world. Somebody thought enough to flee. What happened in that church was a lot of things, but unthinkable is not one of them.

What happened in a Charleston church on Wednesday night is a lot of things, but one thing it's not is "unspeakable." We should speak of it often. We should speak of it loudly. We should speak of it as terrorism, which is what it was. We should speak of it as racial violence, which is what it was.

We should speak of it as an attack on history, which it was. This was the church founded by Denmark Vesey, who planned a slave revolt in 1822. Vesey was convicted in a secret trial in which many of the witnesses testified after being tortured. After they hung him, a mob burned down the church he built. His sons rebuilt it. On Wednesday night, someone turned it into a slaughter pen.

Yes, at least this one verse in our Gospel today that we have no problem understanding, the angry cry of Jesus’ frightened fellow travelers: Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?

But the gospel does not end there. Maybe it would be easier if it did. The Scripture brings us both honesty and hope. The hope is harder to hear and to live. The hope requires of us ears and minds to discipline ourselves, to prepare ourselves with a spiritual discipline against resentment, to train ourselves for the long distance run, to hope against, for hope that is seen is not hope. Who hopes for what he sees? We hope for what we do not see.

In the ancient sermon, in Rome, in 70ad, a still voice, a voice to still the storm was heard. Can we hear that voice this morning? Can we hear a rumor of angels? Can we at least hear that none of this historical tragedy is inevitable? It is not inevitable. Because it is not, it can be changed, changed for the better, changed in the future. You can lend your voice to that of the man who stilled the water, to that of the man who calmed the sea. You can make a difference.

You can continue to pray, to vote and to act.

By pray I do mean daily meditation, including the shouting, actual or metaphorical, of lament in the face of horrific evil. But I also mean the intentional gathering, come Sunday, with others who seek a measure of meaning, belonging and empowerment. You can do this. One of our members, a native of Charleston, asked to read a lesson today, which he did. You can engage and support others. You need the pew fellowship, the breathing community of different others. If week by week you only regularly see family, co-workers, or those who share your own interests, you will not meet with difference, which you need in order to grow, and which this great land, full of latent goodness, needs in practice and for practice. But in the pew you have every prospect of meeting with others who are not relatives, not employees or employers, and not inclined to your own particular enjoyments. Not your mom, not your boss, and not your golf partner. Others--who are other. Somehow as a people we think that we can muster the will to address communal issues on the grand scale, when so often our communal orbits of relationship are with people who are like us, are like ourselves. This is like desiring to recite Shakespeare without knowing the alphabet, or diving into the Calculus without mastering multiplication tables, or running a marathon without first jogging two miles. This summer our preaching series considers Martin Luther King’s ‘beloved community’. But to stretch toward that Johannine, Roycean, and Kingly vision, we have to start by sitting for an hour near people who are other than we, in the presence of God.

King: "The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the Beloved Community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opponents into friends. It is this type of understanding goodwill that will transform the deep gloom of the old age into the exuberant gladness of the new age. It is this love which will bring about miracles in the hearts of men."

By vote I do mean election-day ballots. One of our BU administrative leaders here, when asked at year end what advice she might have for graduates of 2015 said, simply, ‘vote’. Yes, go to the polls. But I also mean the direct engagement with elected officials and others over time that makes a difference. Personal engagement. Susan, one of our most beloved and vivacious friends here in Boston died suddenly of cancer four years ago. How we miss her. One day we were walking together on the Esplanade. We were talking about gun violence. In the middle of the talk, she pulled out her cell phone and dialed her congressman. She said, in her usual spirited voice: ‘They know me there. I have them on speed dial’. She poured out the contents of our conversation to some staff person. Well that may not be your style, or mine, but it was hers, and she voted every day with her time, her energy, and her money. She was a great person. We need to be speaking and listening, in person, by voice, to and with one another, to a degree well and far beyond what we are doing now.

By act I do mean doing something, within your sphere of influence. Several gathered here on Marsh Plaza for a vigil on Friday noon. Others attended other events. A pastor gathered a multi faith service in Medford last night. There is another at Charles Street tonight. You may have decided to attend an AME church one Sunday this summer, to be present, to be in communion. Good. Tell them Dean Hill sent you. So, let us find ways to act. There is a danger of freezing in the face of seemingly intractable difficulties, in the face of seemingly endless unsolvable contentions.

You can recite the litany. 300 million guns there are across the land. The top 20% send 84% of their children to college. The bottom 20% send 8%. The average asset value of the majority household in this country is $110,000(car, house, savings). The average asset value of the minority household is $9,000. The number and percentage of young men of color imprisoned, at all levels, is itself a crime. The agenda of individual rights, like gun possession, and states rights, like denial of health care, has seized control of state house after state house across the middle of the country. Look sometime at a photo page of elected officials in Kansas. Yes. Yes. I know. These and other facts of the present can freeze us, if we are not careful. But you know, life is full of change, even surprising change. In her late 80’s my grandmother had a sign up on her kitchen door. It read: ‘Do one thing. There. You have done one thing.’ I have a voice, and I will use my voice. You do too. Use it.

You can continue to pray, to vote and to act.

A couple of weeks ago a woman in our community sent me a prayer. Prayer is much on my mind, just now, as a form of action as well as contemplation. It gives me some measure of hope to have received this prayer. I asked permission to use it, with attribution, and with its honesty and hope we conclude. Here is Terry Baurley’s prayer:

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posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.21.2015 at 11:00 am

Sunday
June 14

A Grain of Mustard Seed

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 4: 26-34

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

Our little boat motor idled well and even carried the pontoon boat forward, but at a snail’s pace. All boats disappoint just like all dogs bite. The summer on our like is a series of boat breakdowns. I wondered. Old age finally taking the motor? Carburetor? Choke? Throttle wires? I am no mechanic. This usually means taking the boat out of the water and towing it 30 miles for repairs. The motor casing came off easily. In a few minutes, it was apparent even to a non-mechanic that a single connection, throttle to gas line, had slipped undone. Just as easily, without tools, it was reconnected. The motor purred, and purrs still. Small things, little things, can make a big difference.

We have no cable TV. We have no dish. We have no outsized antenna. We get what you get with today’s equivalent of rabbit ears, a free-standing antenna. Four channels not four hundred, and hardly anything worth watching. But we like the local news, some for content, more for delivery. One evening the TV stopped connecting with anything. And we worried again about another expense, task, day of home repairs. But it happens that in the wind the antenna sometimes moves, slightly. Just a little jiggle to the south, and all channels darken. Which means, as you guess, that a little jiggle north brings our motley four channels back. Small things, little things, a slight little shift can make a big difference.

Our out cottage, a broken down old fishing camp, built probably on weekends by one guy with tools, a six pack and a rod and reel, has a pump. On that well and pump depend cooking, eating, cleaning washing, showers and other forms of relief. It is outside, so subject to weather and other beings. The pump stopped one afternoon. I am no plumber, but I know a good one. We called him. You worry when your family needs water and you have no way to provide it. A new pump? Line problems? Dry well? What is wrong? But it was something very little. Ants had found their way into the electric box and broken the connection. Two minutes of expert attention, ants erased, problem solved. Small little things can make a big difference.

The dock itself is new, partly brand new. The dock is our island into the lake, our portal into boating, our entrance into swimming, our bridge into fishing, our outpost of land in water. It is just a wonderful territory in itself. But in order to get from the hillside down onto the dock, a makeshift staircase is required. It is a fraction of the size of the dock, a farthing compared to a pound. It is a humble set of six stairs in wood reaching out onto the majesterial dock. Without the stairs, though, the dock is useless. All the weight, all the space, all the expanse, all the expense of the four piece dock lies permanently adrift from the mainland without the simple steps. Small things, little things, make a difference, and open up the possibility of much, much greater things.

Back from the fishing camp, and a warm water pumped shower there, now out on the dock beneath the stairs, ready to board the boat for a motor powered rid, our 7 year old granddaughter caught something in her younger brother’s rhetoric. Brother said, “Eric told me yesterday that he would take me tubing behind his boat today’. Sister said, “I know that is what he said, but that is not what he meant.” There is a short, short way from birdie to bogie, from right to almost right, from what is said to what is meant. To be able to hear that difference is a spiritual gift, a small, little, powerful, spiritual gift. “I know that is what he said, but that is not what he meant!” Small things, little things, make a difference, and open up the possibility of real understanding

It is a Sabbath reminder for us. Little things can change the world. Think about the Archduke Ferdinand. Read about Asa Kent Jennings. Look again at the events in Boston of 1775. Recall the old lines: For the want of a…nail, shoe, horse, rider, battle…Read once more Barbara Brown Taylor’s A Preaching Life. Or return to read again Arthur Ashe’s memoir, Days of Grace. Remember when someone said something to you that intervened, helped, saved. Sometimes the best medicine is whatever gives you the courage to take one more step forward. You have the mind, heart, faith and voice to speak such an intervening word this week. You also have the mind, heart, the faith and will to hear such an intervening word this week. Will it make any difference? Small, little things, make a difference, and have the power of faith, like a grain of mustard seed.

A grain of mustard seed. Our Lord meets us today within his chosen realm of discourse and rhetoric. The realm of nature. The realm of story or parable. The realm of nature parable. Notice, as a clue to the intimacy of these words and Jesus himself, the odd phrase ‘birds of the air’. A redundancy, a connection it may be, to the Aramaic of Jesus’ own speech. What other kinds of birds are there, anyway? He taught them nothing, without a parable. Most of those, at least those not dealing with money and labor, are nature parables, like ours today. Jesus has used the memorable image of the tiny mustard seed before. ‘Truly I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move hence to yonder place’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you’. He has used the mustard seed before. He has used hyperbole before. He has used parable and nature and nature parable before. Our Lord meets us at the intersection of parable and nature today.

Faith is a little thing. It is not as easily measured as some other things. Faith is like a grain of mustard seed, in and through which, over a long time, great and big changes come. You may disregard such a little thing, at least for a time. After all, it is the smallest of all seeds. Faith is a little thing. Yet in the odd mysteries of secrecy and of growth, of growth in secret, of which nature and the parables of nature do remind us, in Jesus’ teaching, we are given again an intriguing hint of faith.

An old hymn, sung with sincerity, authenticity and a sense of irony, can give that kind of hint of faith, in worship. An anthem, true and fine, offered to the praise of God, out of a different time and clime, can give that kind of hint of faith, in worship. A strange story, of a boy become king on the credit of his ruddy cheeks and the spirit of the Lord moving, can give that kind of hint of faith, in worship. A cascading waterfall of tumbling words in ancient writ, a warning that we walk by faith not by sight, and that outward appearance is nothing compared to the heart, and that we see no longer by flesh only or by spirit only but according to the cross of a new creation, in which the old is gone and new is come, can give that kin of hint of faith, in worship. A friendly word on entry, a gentle greeting on departure, an example of another’s compassionate faith from another place in the pew, all can give that kind of hint of faith, in worship. Compared to the great assemblies of the age on the screen or on the stage or in the ballpark or on the green, a little mustard seed, a tiny little seed for the future, a moment in worship, come Sunday, must seem so very small. Yet it carries a hint of faith, which may be, some dark night, all that you need and all that you have to go on.

That difficult hour may be upon you today, or this week, or this summer. In decision, in change, in struggle, in loss, in despair. Faith isn’t faith, in a way, until and unless it is all you have to go on. Jesus meets us today with a word of hope. In a nature parable, in the chosen medium of his diction. Watch. Take heart. Look. Listen. You matter. You count. You are for real. You can do this. You can.

That difficult hour may be upon us today, or this week or this year. In Boston, we are still struggling through the trauma and consequences of April 2013. How could we not? The court verdict for the person responsible for the killings and injuries continues to reverberate in our collective conscious and unconscious. How could it not? In America, we are still struggling through and with shocking reminders of majority power and minority pain, sometimes bubbling to the surface of our shared consciousness by means of little things, like photos, like videos, like cell phone recordings. How could we not? We are not finished, but unfinished as people, and as a people. Across the globe we are still struggling with containment of conflict emerging from religious and economic and cultural difference. How could we not? These and other struggles can have the capacity to freeze us in place, to keep us from moving well and forward into an unseen future, unless we are freed up, given flexibility, creativity, and hope, through a tiny measure, an abiding sense of faith. Faith has the audacity to say ‘we walk by faith, not by sight’.

Difficult hours may be upon us today, or this week, or this summer. In decision, in change, in struggle, in loss, in despair. Faith isn’t faith, in a way, until and unless it is all you have to go on. Jesus meets us today with a word of hope. In a nature parable, in the chosen medium of his diction. Watch. Take heart. Look. Listen. You matter. You count. You are for real. You can do this. You can make a difference for good, in what you say, in what you do, in what you choose, in where you go. Sometimes, by the dominical saying before us today, it is the little things, these very little things, that are hints of faith, and that make, over long time, manifold difference.

A grain of mustard seed. Sometimes a bit of the future is hidden in a little change. In your marriage or family life, is there one small change for the better which might lead to a great harvest later on? In your work life, is there one small change you could engineer for the better, which might lead to a great harvest later on? In your community life, is there one small change which, by odd and untraceable influences, might make all the difference over the long haul? In your personal life, is there one summer alteration, one slight step forward, that might with the gathering momentum of time and season, pave the way for a peace that passes understanding, a meadow into which you can go in and out and find pasture, a joy that is closer and closer to becoming complete? Think about it.

With what may we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use for it? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth, yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.

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posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.14.2015 at 11:00 am