Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

Mark 3:20-35

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

“God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit” (Romans 5: 5)

Ride On

At conference, over lunch, a pastor from Buffalo told us about children at church camp. One 9 year old in pig-tails chose horse camp last year. I didn’t know Methodists ran horse camp. We do. But on Monday she fell off, or was frightened or something. She cowered through the week, unable to get back on the horse and ride. Her counselor just kept on encouraging. Friday was the rodeo. I guess that is horse camp graduation. All week she wrestled, her fear of falling grappling with her desire to be in the rodeo. Dawn broke on Friday, as it does. I loved, really loved, the way the minister told us about the rodeo. The girl in pig-tails put herself on the horse. This was an old horse, not American Pharaoh. The old glue factory mare stumbled around the little circle made of six orange cones. First the girl hugged the horse’s neck and kept her eyes closed. But then, after a little while, she opened her eyes. Then she looked up. Then she sat up. Then she leaned back. Then she straightened her back. Then she dug her knees into horse flesh. Then she clicked her tongue. Then she slapped the reins. The old glue factory mare plodded along. But the jockey beamed. She waved to the crowd. She nodded response to her counselor’s encouragement. She rode around the circle again. And again. And again. She wouldn’t stop. The rodeo went 30 minutes over schedule. With a little encouragement, a little girl grew up a little.

All of us ride better when we’re loved.

Swing Batter

It made me think, later that day, about encouragement. A few years ago somebody came up with the idea that the Little League champs should play their dads on Labor Day. A picnic was arranged, with watermelon and chili dogs. The right fielder’s dad tried not to come. He was just terrible at baseball. First he said he had to work. Then a trip was planned. Then he felt ill. But his son kept after him. Dad was at middle age and he had always been a simply lousy batter. He could not hit the broad side of a barn, when he was young. Now he was bald. And his glasses were thick, very thick. And, speaking delicately, he carried frontside a bit, let us say, of a paunch. The thought of facing fast pitching made him squirm. His son, though, was not to be stymied. Dad prayed for rain, or a hurricane, or untimely death. Anyone’s. But dawn broke on Labor Day, as it does. Not a cloud in the sky. Not a breath of wind. 72 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale. It could have been San Diego. Distraught, Dad went. The dreaded moment came, his “ups”. He stood in the box, remembering every strike out of 30 years ago. He thought of running. He adjusted his coke bottle glasses, and sweated. All of a sudden from right field he heard, in the full throated innocent confidence of his son’s voice, “Come on Dad, you can do it, I know you can.” He took a ball, and stood tall. “I know you can!” He took a strike and felt a little better. “Come on Dad, I know you can hit it.” Over the plate came a fast straight pitch. Do you know how good he felt to see that little Texas leaguer dropping in behind second base? Rounding first, and stopping, he wiped his glasses. He felt good. Behind him, from right field, a whisper, “I knew you could, Dad, I just knew you could.”

All of us swing better when we’re loved.

Be Like 43

After thirty years of losses one High School basketball team competed in sectional semi-finals. It is a mystery how this happened. A team shorter, skinnier, weaker, smaller, and less experienced than nearly every opponent, somehow succeeded. They grew steadily in ability and confidence. They failed and lost, and in this they learned. Sometimes they won, and in this they learned, too. Every so often you would see, as visible as a cocoon giving way to a butterfly or a snake shedding its skin or a calf standing after birth, one of the players find himself on the court. It was something to behold. The parents, as ever, attributed all losses to bad officiating, and all wins to marvelous genes. Before the post season, the coach sent a personal, hand written note to every one of his players. He thanked them for their willingness to play. He honestly commended their improvement. He admitted how much he enjoyed their company. Then he challenged them to rise to the post-season challenge. They did. He wrote personally to one young man, number 43 on the team, “my own son is growing and learning to play ball, too, and when he asks me how to play and how to be, I just say, you look on the court and you watch 43 and what he does you do –be like 43”. Be like 43. Dawn broke on the day of the sectional game, and they won.

All of us rebound better when we’re loved.

Go OWU

One October my brother and I trained to run in the Washington DC Marine Corps Marathon, around the Pentagon twice, through Georgetown, past every good monument, and out onto the peninsula. The day before I had breakfast with two dear friends, encouragers they, at the Pentagon City Ritz Carlton, infamous in another, Presidential and relational connection. Dawn broke on Sunday, a rainy cold morning. I thought I was ready. I was wrong. Maybe it was the driving 40 degree rain, or maybe I was just older than I thought. My brother finished more than an hour before I did. I hit the wall at mile 16. In the rain, I was passed by young men, young women, old men, old women, waddlers, cradlers, wigglers, people in wheel chairs, moms, soccer moms, and man from Denver running backwards. It was not pretty. Somehow though, I finished. In part, looking back, through the encouragement of anonymous curbside exhorters. I was wearing a red Ohio Wesleyan sweatshirt. It was encouraging to hear a shout, “Go red guy!” It was more encouraging to hear, “Keep going Ohio!” It was even more encouraging to hear, “Good going, Ohio Wesleyan!” But most encouraging of all were the occasional alumni voices, “Go OWU!” The more personal, the more particular the encouragement, the more powerful it is. I made it to the Iwo Gima monument. My son and I bade farewell to my brother and we drove home.

All of us run better when we’re loved.

A Real Community

At dawn I was thinking of our President and Provost who were here a few weeks ago. They led and read in service. Mostly, though, they listened and watched. Their presence encouraged us. Then they had some kind things to say. On email, this week, from afar we received a kind encouragement. In a note this week, from a visitor last week, we received a kind encouragement. They said, all the above said, in a word, “good for you.”

It takes a lot of love to build and maintain the community of faith. A worship service doesn’t just happen by accident or magic or dream. You build it.

It takes someone to print the bulletin. Good for you.

It takes someone to bake the bread. Good for you.

It takes someone to rock and hug babies. Good for you.

It takes someone to send notes to shut-ins. Good for you.

It takes someone to usher. Good for you.

It takes someone to visit the ill. Good for you.

It takes someone to write the e newsletter. Good for you.

It takes someone to go to meetings. Good for you.

It takes someone to speak. Good for you.

It takes someone to listen. Good for you.

It takes someone to help others up the stairs. Good for you.

It takes someone to recruit someone for all the above. Good for you.

It takes work, and a decision to role out of bed on Sunday and come.

If you think marriage is hard, try church.

A question, respectful but serious, for us: how are we ever going to grapple together with the great, tragic and unsolved problems of our time, without real community? How will we find the courage and strength to wrestle ahead with the Tsarnaev verdict, with the balances of security and freedom, with police protection and the protection of our urban youth, with the environment and the middle east and the distribution of wealth and education, without a restorative community of meaning, belonging and empowerment? For all these issues, the real point of departure, this said with respect and love is this: where are you on Sunday at 11am?

All of us serve better when we’re loved.

Paul Writes to Rome

In similar apparently and beguilingly simple terms, Paul wrote to the Romans, in chapter 5. Our reading today could well be memorized and recited, daily, for the course of a lifetime. Our reading this morning might properly be printed and framed for the office desk or the kitchen counter. Our reading this Sunday could rightly be imprinted upon the heart, written on every human heart. This is the great watershed of the faith of Christ, simply stated for you and me, for the dying.

What dim reflections we find of Love, here in the dark, come from the death of Christ. The great peaks in human history dimly reflect this love: Alexander snf the glory of Athens, Augustus and the pride of Rome, Michaelangelo and the beauty of Florence, Franklin and the birth of a nation. The great peaks of spirit do too: Dionysius the Areopagite, Augustine’s mother, Katie von Bora, Joan of Arc, Teresa of Avila. Love is not for the simple, only. Love is for the wise. One of our dear friends, a poet, Carol, now dead, alone caught the humor of a single phrase, years ago: we think of ourselves as ‘temporarily immortal’.

You remember the basic points in Romans: 1:16, the Gospel of which Paul is not ashamed…2:21, our condition, foolish faithless, heartless ruthless…8:33, hope that is seen is not hope…10:9, if you confess with your lips…12:9, let love be genuine…

You hear and receive Paul’s basic terms in this central high peak, chapter 5: faith, the gift of God in Jesus Christ; peace, the closeness of faith and the absence of barrier; hope, not seen; glory, heaven yes but also the full humanity for which we were made; spirit, that which confers and conveys and conducts all the above, and all of them circling agape, the initiative of God loving us into love and freeing us into freedom. So Mark 3 similarly acclaims, after its several apocalyptic terms (Beelzebub, demons, Satan, house divided, strong man, and the unclean spirit) it is the will of God, the divine love, and love’s outworking in life, that make us together, family. Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.

Our business here is dying. Life is about learning to die. Call it, with the ancient church, meditatio mortis. How are we ever going to manage? Our almost interminable avoidance will not, in itself, cut it.

John Knox: ‘to be saved is to be incorporated “in Christ”, that is , to belong to this new and heavenly order, primarily eschatological but even now proleptically present, just as the day is present in the dawn’

It is Love alone that justifies. Love alone that brings peace. Love alone that provides space in grace. Love alone that hints at glory. Love alone that outlasts suffering. Love alone that is stronger than death. Love alone that stoops to reach out for the weak and lost. Love alone that bleeds on your behalf. Love alone that reconciles enemies.

To our young adults, our millennial generation, so searingly formed in 9/11 and the Great Recession, we might say, love alone has the grace and power savingly to soften the inevitable collisions (Isaiah Berlin) of personal and social life.

The first Christians even found in suffering something productive. It was their manner of suffering that impressed others. It was their manner of dying, it was Paul’s manner of dying, perhaps in Rome, that others noticed:

All of us live and, especially, die, better when we’re loved.

Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

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 06.7.2015 at 11:00 am

Sunday
May 31

Sweet Spirit

By Marsh Chapel

John 3:1-17

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

Strange Spirit

The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes. So it is with every one who is born of the spirit.

Scripture and tradition depend on reason and experience. Spirit involves reason and experience. A question for you, day by day as mortality approaches, is whether you can find the courage to trust your own experience and whether you can find the capacity to rely on your own reason. Opportunities to subcontract both are amply available. But in order to live a life that is yours not almost yours, Spirit is needed.

We feel a measure of this spirit every year at Commencement. Especially in one of the latest and very smallest of graduation exercises each year. Monday last week, May 18, was a gracious sun kissed beautiful Boston day. The morning was cool and bright, gracious and breezy, with more than a hint of salt in the sea air. Gracious and salty, as the Bible says our speaking ought to be: ‘let your speech be gracious, yet seasoned with salt’.

19 young women and men stood up, in Faneuil Hall here in Boston, the cradle of liberty. They stood to take a vow, to make an oath. And though their numbers and their simple ceremony were not as large as the great winds of pageantry on Nickerson field, or traditional liturgy in Marsh Chapel, or hooding and hand shaking in the 17 schools and colleges in the days preceding, there is something in this spirited moment, small and modest, that takes the measure of all the others. As if, with these 19, the question is posed for all the rest, whether what we are doing is worthy, and worthy of these few.

With their loved ones all around, they promise to preserve and protect the Constitution of the United States—if need be, with their lives. In the quiet, among families and friends, there are waves of tears, waves like those lapping at the shoreline a few hundred feet away. With reason, and in their experience, they are bearing witness to a hard decision. So tears flow. ‘Different are the languages of prayer, but the tears are all the same’ (A Heschel). Every year this is the smallest but the finest moment in all the graduation ceremonies at BU. Stumbling in tears and emotion, loved ones place shoulder boards upon the newly minted Army second lieutenants. It is awkward to figure out how to button these shoulder boards--but the fumbling is more about water and eyes and a spirit moment. Water and spirit. And then the photos of the 19—male and female, black and white, short and tall, gay and straight. It is an induction utterly and fully inclusive. And a prayer and song and a salute. And it is beautiful, and powerful.

Nicodemus finds himself, at night, in such a spirited moment.

The Jesus of John counsels Nicodemus to be born of spirit and water, to be born from above, to be like the wind.

Wind at midnight. Wind from the sea. Summer wind came blowing in. The wind blows where it wills. Wind of God.

Nicodemus appears two other times in the Fourth Gospel, two tantalizing entries into the flow of the Gospel. He is there to remind us of our growth in spirit. Our understanding of Jesus’ teaching with Nicodemus, his later appearances remind us, requires the whole gospel. Especially when it comes to spirit, strange spirit, John Spirit, Night Spirit, Sweet Spirit.

The strangest of strange outcroppings of Spirit in all of Scripture is located on the windswept steppe of John 14, the ice covered snow peak of the Bible, the haunted moonscape of planet Gospel. Once you have ascended John to the last discourse, John 14ff, you are clearly in a strange, strange land and landscape. The venerable preacher who originally spoke to the late first century community in Ephesus (say) if nothing else had absolute confidence in his own experience. It lead him, and thus his church, to establish a different religion, what became later emerging Christianity. He did not let the door hit him as he swung out. Here, Nicodemus. Here, a Samaritan Woman. Here, blind man healed. Here, Lazarus—raised. Here, Beloved Disciple. Here, Thomas. Here, Logos. Here, especially, Spirit, by another name.

If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him or knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you…These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you. But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.

Spirit in John

John had the courage to face the awful disappointment behind the New Testament: Jesus did not return, not on schedule, not as expected, not soon and very soon, not maranatha, not yet. But John looked at his own experience, and in biblical measure, with traditional tools, reasoned. In place of apocalypse, he celebrated the artistry of the everyday, and in place of the speculation about the end, he celebrated the Spirit of truth, and in place of parousia, the coming of the Lord, he nominated Paraclete, the presence of the Lord. He sang: You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. One way to solve problems is to face them, to name them, to admit them. No parousia. Paraclete.

The stark strangeness, the utter difference of John from the rest of the Bible we have yet to admit. My beloved advisor, perhaps the greatest John scholar of our era, Fr. Raymond Brown, got only as far as saying that John is best understood as ‘an embraceable variant’ emphasis on embraceable less emphasis on variant. But when we get to the summit, John 14 and following, we see chiseled there in ice and covered fully with wind snow, an enigmatic, mysterious riddle: Spirit, sweet Spirit, Paraclete. The endless enemy of conformity. The lasting foe of the nearly lived life. The champion of the quixotic. The standard bearer of liberty. The one true spirit of spirited truth. Yet we cannot even give the history of the term, nor fully define its meaning, nor aptly place it in context, nor finally determine its translation. Paraclete eludes us. Paraclete evades us. Paraclete outpaces us. Paraclete escapes us.

Notice that the Spirit is given to all, not just to a few or to the twelve, definitely not. Notice that it is Spirit not structure on which John relies. Notice it is Spirit not memory which we shall trust (good news for those whose memory may slip a little). Notice that Spirit stands over against what John calls ‘world’ here—another dark mystery in meaning. Notice that the community around John’s Jesus is amply conveyed a powerful trust in Spirit.

Other parts of the New Testament take another trail. The Book of Acts offers confidence by way of hagiographical memories of Peter and Paul, and of false but loving assertions of the utter agreement of Peter and Paul. Trust your memory and when you cannot create a new memory. The Pastoral Epistles—and to some degree 1 John in opposition to his gospel namesake—rely not on memory or memories and not on Spirit, but on structure: presbyters, faith once delivered to saints, deacons, codes of conduct, stylized memories of orderly transmission of tradition. We need memory. We need structure. Neither can hold a candle to Spirit. That is, for John, what Moses, the Law, the historical Jesus, the Sacraments or anything else can not ever fully offer, Paraclete provides. By Spirit we hear the word God. God reveals by Spirit. God self-reveals by Spirit. Here the stakes are very high.

Again, Raymond Brown: This is the ultimate self-revelation of how the word of God gets translated as God. To a community living in time and space, the Spirit of Jesus is proving the world wrong. People who live by the spirit is the only way others will be convinced of the victory of Jesus (Hill, Courageous, 82).

Night Spirit

When we come to Nicodemus, we come with our own reason and experience, like that of the great poet Henry Vaughn.

Henry Vaughn lived from 1622 to 1695. He fought on the Royalist side during the great war. (Vaughn is known as one of the best followers and imitators of George Herbert.) In 1649, Charles I executed Oliver Cromwell. The Church of England was disestablished and the Book of Common Prayer was outlawed. Vaughn lived during a dark time, and his poetry evokes his time. He recalls the great Pseudo-Dionysus and the Cloud of Unknowing. He celebrates night and the darkness of God, in a way that connects truly to our time as well. It is no accident that he bases this poem on Nicodemus at night.

The Night

Through that pure Virgin Shrine

That sacred veil drawn o’er thy glorious noon

That men might look and live as glow-worms shine

And face the moon:

Wise Nicodemus saw such light

As made him know his God by night.

Most blest believer he!

Who in that land of darkness and blind eyes

Thy long expected healing wings could see,

When thou didst rise,

And what can nevermore be done,

Did at mid-night speak with the Sun!

O who will tell me, where

He found thee at that dead and silent hour!

What hallowed solitary ground did bear

So rare a flower,

Within whose sacred leaves did live

The fullness of the Deity

No mercy seat of gold,

No dead and dusty Cherub, nor carved stone,

But his own living works did my Lord hold

And lodge alone;

Where trees and herbs did watch and peep

And wonder, while the Jews did sleep.

Dear night! This world’s defeat;

The stop to busy fools; care’s check and curb;

The day of Spirits; my soul’s calm retreat

Which none disturb!

Christ’s progress and his prayer time;

The hours to which high Heaven doth chime.

God’s silent, searching flight:

When my Lord’s head is filled with dew, and all

His locks are wet with the clear drops of night;

His still, soft call;

His knocking time; the soul’s dumb watch,

When Spirits their fair kindred catch.

Were all my loud evil days

Calm and unhaunted as is thy dark Tent,

Whose peace but by some Angel’s wing or voice

Is seldom rent;

Then I in Heaven all the long year

Would keep, and never wander here.

But living where the sun

Doth all things wake, and where all mix and tire

Themselves and others, I consent and run

To every mire,

And by this world’s guiding light,

Err more than I can do by night.

There is in God (some say)

A deep but dazzling darkness; as men here

Say it is late and dusky, because they

See not all clear;

O for that night! Where I in him

Might live invisible and dim.

The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes. So it is with every one who is born of the spirit.

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 05.31.2015 at 11:00 am

Sunday
May 3

The Marsh Spirit

By Marsh Chapel

John 15:1-8

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

The Marsh Spirit…

Inquiry

We are a learning community, a teaching and learning community of faith. As branches to a vine, we attach ourselves to Way, Truth and Life, Learning, Virtue, Piety, Knowing, Doing, Being. Notice the great teachers held with permanence in our Connick stained glass windows. Select your favorite: Comenius, Alexander Graham Bell, Osmon Baker, Borden Parker Bowne. Perhaps best Augustine of Hippo, whose heart was restless until it found rest in Him. Theological Inquiry asks about God, the nature of God, the essence of God. Our services this year, in pursuit of spirit, have utilized a prayer response, in that spirit, written by Robert Cummings Neville. We feted this week Ray Lee Hart, and his teaching and his scholarship. We heard again Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty. Learn something every day, at whatever age! Read a book a day! Yours is a spirit of inquiry.

Hymnody

We are a singing community, those who sing to pray twice, qui cantat bis orat. As branches to a vine, we attach ourselves to Way, Truth and Life, Melody, Harmony, and Diction. Notice the musicians about you. Carved into the chancel wood. And about me. Here is Handel. Here is Bach. And last weekend we heard Handel. And two weeks before, Bach. And in between? Gospel! Our ISGC sang, filled the room, mid April. I have in my possession photographs of the dinner our church matriarchs—Sandra, Cecelia, Carolyn, Melvena—served the choir before their performance. Not just pulpit, nor just sermon, not just preaching, nor just proclamation: yours is a musical spirit, a spirit of hymnody. Sing when the spirit says sing! Sing lustily! Sing with the saints of glory! Yours is a spirit of hymnody.

Recollection

We are a remembering community, a place with history, a future but also a past. As branches to vine, we attach ourselves to Way, Truth, and Life, and Justice, Righteousness, and the better angels of our nature. Stands down there, as I walk toward him, Abraham Lincoln. Those who recommend slavery might try it for themselves. Those who ignore brutality might think, try to imagine, being bound hand and foot, and thrown headlong into the back of a closed van and driven not to three but four separate places, and to arrive, at last, dead. We began this school year with a forum on Ferguson, right here. Autumn sermons and winter addressed the need ‘to strive on to finish the work we are in’. We read Jesus and the Disinherited. Our summer preacher series acclaims The Beloved Community. We learned about business ethics from our esteemed Questrom Dean. Many of you have commented on the blog about Ferguson, slavery, response, and the need for investment in community, particularly worshipping community, as we slog on toward freedom. Cornell Brooks, head of the NAACP spoke here in Marsh Chapel in November. He will speak for us again two weeks from today, Baccalaureate Sunday, right here in Marsh Chapel. Where else would or could possibly place yourself, social location being so important, at 11am on May 17? You will want to be here, right here! Many things are optional. Not worship. Worship is not optional for the person of faith. Come Sunday, Come! Here. Yours is a spirit of recollection.

Patience

We are a longsuffering, a patient community. As branches to vine we attach ourselves to Way, Truth, and Life, Creativity, Organization, Expanding the circle of freedom. Daniel Marsh has his own window in his own chapel. And well he might. It took him a generation to get to build the building his most wanted, this one. He came in 1926. Marsh was built in 1949—after arrival, after depression, after World War. At last. Labor Omnia Vincit. Think about that, working for 25 years at last to get where you want to go. Academic communities do tend to have lengthened cycle times, it is true. But all of us benefit from patience. You come for prayer before worship, and patiently sit. You pause for postlude after worship, and patiently sit. Friday, honoring the Hubert Humphrey scholars, we heard Humphrey’s niece speak, in ‘the Castle’, about his patience. Hubert Humphrey. His voice is one we need today. ‘There will be no hedging. We need come out of the long dark shadow of states’ rights and into the bright shining sunlight of human rights’. That is Philadelphia, 1948. Could someone whisper that to the nine justices in Washington today? It is every bit as apt. ‘People have a right to health, education, employment, protection, and a peaceful old age.’ Humphrey worked on Medicare for 20 years before its adoption in the mid sixties. Yes, he could excoriate his opponents: ‘uh uh, o no, go slow, veto—that is the way of our opponents’, he could rant. But he also had patience. To build coalitions. To create alternative structures. To legislate. He worked at it. No surprise. He was a Minnesota Methodist, grandson of Methodist preachers. And he lives on this campus, in the program given his name. I mean he really lives in these scholars from all over the globe! Yours is a spirit of patience.

Life

We are a living community, tracing the spirit of life, in this and every new dawn. Even when weary feet refuse to climb. As branches to vine, we cling to life, the spirit of life, Way, Truth and Life, Children, Students, All. It is the life of Jesus Christ, the Living One, which is our true vine, and we the branches. James Bashford—bishop, college president, preacher, watches us from his balcony window every Sunday. I have stood beside his in Oak Grove Cemetery, Delaware, Ohio. A kind man. Our commencement speaker will be Meredith Vieira. You know of her roots in Rhode Island. You know of her honest, happy form of journalism. You know her face and voice. Her celebrity. But we think of her differently, in our family. She is a close friend of a close friend. Our step father, who adored her, and who has been ill, until his recent death, received, unexpectedly, a signed photograph from her, a lengthy note, a personal greeting, which stands still above his desk. Ministry is service. Ministry is to place oneself at the disposal of others. Ministry is to give life by giving life, beginning with time and kindness. Don’t you have a phone call you might make? Don’t you have a letter you might send? Don’t you have a visit you might offer? Don’t you have a check you might write? Yours is a spirit of life.

Secularity

We are a secular community, tracing the sacred in and within the secular. As branches to vine we affirm that nothing human is foreign to us, and hold onto Way, Truth, Life, Community, Fellowship, Culture. Notice The Star of David. In his spirit, stretch your legs and walk Commonwealth Avenue, wonder and wander through the commonwealth of the Gospel. The Marsh Spirit awaits a faith amenable to culture and a culture amenable to faith. Yours is a cosmopolitan spirit, one that envisions Christ transforming culture—not just Christ against Christ above or Christ in or Christ across culture. Christ who brings not just theological reformation but also cultural revolution. Christ the Extraordinary incarnate in the ordinary. There is a particular spirit of this place and community. You honor both the lectionary of the church and the lectionary of the culture. You know that there are many ways of keeping faith, as our THIS I BELIEVE Sunday again this year will emphasize. Our Hillel community at BU is in a season of resurgence, in part through a reconnection to the community, the society, the culture of Boston and Boston University, through its Director, David Raphael. Yours is a spirit of secularity.

Rigor

We are a rigorous community, unwilling to let the pale cast of thought completely overcome the native hue of resolution. As branches to vine, we cling to Way, Truth and Life, Courage, Change, Heart. One of my favorite windows is that of the four chaplains, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, who gave their life jackets and their lives that others might survive a naval tragedy in WW II. Their tradition in chaplaincy, and in self-giving, was continued here a generation later by James Carroll. You know him as a writer—Boston Globe columnist, esteemed novelist, historian and cultural critic. But as he told us this week, he really came alive here at BU, and found his way here. He left the priesthood, but not the church. He married and raised children and grandchildren, but also stayed wedded to his faith. He directly and valiantly opposes religious wrong, but also rejoices in religious right (though not THE religious right!). He was our Catholic Chaplain here for six years, through 1974. With Robert Hamill, third Marsh Chapel Dean, he brought the weekly Catholic Mass from Morse Auditorium to this nave, where it lives still today. Couples, one Protestant and one Catholic, can come to Marsh Chapel for 11am Protestant worship and 12:30pm Catholic Mass, and be home by 2pm. Your remember his elegant pastoral sermon here, for the class of 1970, in 2010. With rigor he has followed in the footsteps of the Master. And, as he reminded us, God is Compassionate Love. You can believe in God as Compassionate Love! You can worship at that altar. And you do. Yours is a spirit of rigor.

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God's love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.

Morning Prayer

“15 prayers for the class of ‘15”

May you finish your papers, wake up for your finals, and pass your courses

May you find a job when you are hunting for one, and be found by a calling when you are not (hunting for one)

May you remember your mom on Mothers’ Day, nine days from today

May you recall that there are two ways to be wealthy: have a lot of money, or, have very few needs.

May you honestly face death, as together we did two springs ago, and so discover the precious value of every breath, as together we also did two springs ago.

May you, with the Greeks, see in tragedy the seedbed of nobility.

May you bring a sense of purpose to days and events which lack both (sense and purpose).

May your return your overdue library books. May you find your overdue library books.

May you with Samuel Johnson keep your friendships in good repair, with John Wesley and Mother Theresa remember the poor, with Lord Baden Powell do a good turn daily, and with Bill Coffin take yourself lightly so that you may fly, like the angels, and with Martin Luther King have a dream

May you as a generation live a common hope, find the wisdom to design a better world, acquire the power to build a better world, and have the goodness to want a better world.

May you have a life long, rapturous, torrid love affair—with Boston, dear old Boston, the home of the bean and the cod, and bring your first born child to Fenway Park, and remember the radiant happiness of this Senior Breakfast all your days.

May life be good to you, and may you be good to life.

My dear ones, my dear friends, who so resemble my own dear children, may you be safe, may you be well, may you be happy.

May it be so.

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 05.3.2015 at 11:00 am

Sunday
April 26

Easter Remembrance

By Marsh Chapel

John 10:11-18

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

Frontispiece

What if the power of Easter, the point of Easter is more about our past than about our future?

What if Easter, and the gospel of resurrection, means more to us about our remembrance than about our expectation, more about our recollection than our anticipation, more about whence than whither, more about what God has done than about what God will do?

You may find this an odd, or contrarian point of view. After all, you rightly reason, the promise of Easter is the promise of new life, eternal life, resurrection life, hope, joy, and peace in Christ whom God raises from the dead. All, seemingly, in the future. Fair enough. But consider, for a brief few minutes this morning, Easter remembrance. Consider, if you will, what Easter means for what has been, what Easter means for your remembrance.

So many people can live chained to a broken remembrance, to a mistaken remembrance, to a Lenten remembrance. (Lent is good discipline, but life is not meant for Lent. Life is meant for Easter.) So many can live caught in a bear trap of implacable memory, trauma, or hurt. So many live haunted by ghosts of days and nights and people and harm from the past. Easter comes around once a year to free us from the past, not in forgetfulness but in resurrection, not in a futile attempt to change the facts, but in a spiritual discipline of right remembrance.

Proust and Memory

As some of you know, in the summer of 2003 I went with a friend to a country book store, and for 25cents bought the first 1200 page half of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. About six years later I spent another quarter at the same shop for the second 1200 page half, of which I have now read 500 pages. Proust tests memory. He probes our habits and deceits and perspectives with regard to remembrance. It is detailed, lively, and exhausting to read, for me, about 3 pages or so a couple of times a week. That is plenty. But the project itself is life long, and may take in my case a lifetime of reading. Proust wrote: But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowledge and our words which we suppose to be false forecast an imminent reality (II, 31).

The author of the Gospel of John is also, and mightily, engaged in remembrance. Imagine a home, in Ephesus, 60 years after Golgotha, at night, candle lit, with forty people present. Prayer, singing, a shared meal, and quiet all precede a moment of speaking. Then in remembrance, somewhere near the year 90ad, 60 years after the first Easter, a preacher stands in the room and speaks. He speaks for Jesus. He speaks in the Spirit. His voice is that of the Risen One. He says, ‘I am the Good Shepherd’. And in that utterance, that prophetic utterance, a new remembrance is born. The community of the beloved disciple determined that their original memory of Jesus was wrong, or not right enough, or not big enough to describe what He had meant for them, become for them, revealed to them. They loved him and they remembered him and--they worshipped him. His personal presence, I AM THE—Way, Truth, Life, Shepherd, Door, Resurrection, Bread of Life, all—gave them a new way to remember, a better, truer, clearer memory.

I wonder, this Easter tide, as you think of the Good Shepherd watching over his beloved in love, as we too are to do with each other and for each other, though not to each other, I wonder if there is some maturation in memory, your memory, emerging for you? What is back there holding you back? What is rattling around loose in the back of your mind that needs minding, or mending? Is there something you want to leave behind, to let go? Or something you want to restore, to reclaim, to recast? Sometimes our hoarding of things is minor compared to our needless and useless hoarding of cluttered, disordered, mistaken memories. And sometimes our memories need a spring cleaning or two. It is not a matter of forgetting. It is a matter of placing things in an Easter light.

How? In a morning quiet prayer. In an honest chat with a trusted friend. In a private moment of pastoral conversation. In a more formal, planned hour of counseling, of therapy, of spiritual grief work. In worship, come Sunday.

Martyn on Minear

Some years ago one of my teachers did so, as he remembered one of his own teachers. He shared the memory with me in 2007. Sometimes, when I remember to, I take it out and look it over again. This is J L Martyn preaching at Yale at the funeral of Paul Minear. (Memorial Service for Paul S. Minear, 3/24/07;A Personal Word of Thanksgiving (J. Louis Martyn))

In Paul Minear’s testimony there was no

pious escapism from every-day life.

There was in fact a stark realism.

But it was emphatically a double realism.

A disturbing realism about the multiple forces that choke the life

out of huge numbers of God’s children,

and a daring realism about the power of God

to bless those who mourn,

and to make even the paralytic stand up and walk.

Let me give one example.

As he was teaching us to read the Bible,

he spoke to us in unforgettable terms about time.

Time was clearly a Biblical subject that fascinated Paul, and

his fascination with that subject proved to be contagious.

How are past, present, and future related to one another?

We often think about our present as the child of our past.

And to some degree the past is the generative parent of the present.

But what, then, do we actually mean,

when in churches such as this one

we speak to God in the Lord’s Prayer,

saying “Let thy kingdom come”?

Could it be that when we pray the Lord’s prayer,

with that clause -- “Let thy Kingdom come” --

we confess the power of God’s grace in a new way?

Is God’s grace evident precisely in its coming toward us from the future?

Are we, in God’s grace, led to sense that

the ultimately determining parent of our present is not our past

but rather God’s future? Could it be that

we bear witness to that fact when Sunday by Sunday we say to God,

“Let thy kingdom come”?

A good number of you will remember the period in which

Rudolf Bultmann was in Germany – in fact, in Europe –

the scholar who had pointed out that

the New Testament documents reflect what many moderns call

a mythological world view.

When we read the New Testament, we encounter angels

who speak and act among human beings on earth.

We hear of demons who take up residence in certain tormented people.

We find references to Satan, to principalities and powers,

and to “the god of this world” as a powerful actor in human affairs.

Recognizing these so-called mythological elements

in the New Testament,

Bultmann devised an interpretive method

that involved what was called “demythologization.”

When this highly respected colleague came from Germany to Boston,

the local Christian theologians arranged a meeting for general discussion,

and they selected one of their own number to provide

a final focus to the conversation. That climax came, then,

when Minear said with deep respect:

“There is between us, Mr. Bultmann, much in common.

And, as is always the case, what we have in common

makes plain the major difference between us.

You have as one of your chief concerns

to demythologize the New Testament,

while I have as one of my chief concerns

that the New Testament demythologize us.”

It was a respectful comment.

It was also a telling summary,

for in Minear’s work

the New Testament does demythologize us,

doing so in part by

its Golgotha earthquake,

that is by moving the ground under our feet

in unsettling ways,

in order to open up to us a new world,

the utterly real world,

bringing, in fact, the dawn of what the Apostle calls

God’s New Creation in Christ.

We are not afterward the same.

After 35 Years

Our experience, our own experience, is what we have, and in one sense all we have. Your experience is meant to be honored, respected, cherished, trusted, and then given over to an Easter Remembrance.

A few weeks ago, speaking of remembrance, a note came from the church we served in Ithaca NY, beginning in 1979. They are rehearsing their history at their 100th anniversary. The writer is a Cornell professor’s spouse, who came into the community at that time. They are giving a vignette in worship each week, a remembrance of things past. My own memory of those busy years of young adulthood focuses on work, worship, activities, children born, things to do and do. In some ways, those years stand out for overly active but not necessarily fruitful service. But her recollection, jarring, and difficult, in its difference from my own, is an Easter remembrance, and a lesson, or a warning, about what lasts, in memory:

#12, April 19: The Chapel was served by part time ministers until its 64th year, when Bob Hill, newly graduated from seminary, served as our very first full time minister from 1979-81. (Bob was, young, full of the most wonderful enthusiasm, rode his bike around the neighborhood (according to Sue Cotton), drew a young congregation and the Chapel thrived.) Today he is Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University. I especially remember him for something only related to his ministry here, namely his presence at a performance of Brahm’s German Requiem, given by the Ithaca Community Chorus in 1981. He stood quietly in the back of the concert hall, and wept when he heard these words: “Behold, all flesh is as the grass, and all the goodliness of man is as the flower of grass. For lo, the grass withers, and the flower decays. Now therefore, be patient O my brethren unto the coming, the coming of the Lord. See how the husbandman waits for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience, till he receive the early rain and the later rain. So be YE patient also.” (Elizabeth Mount)

Last night, here in Marsh Chapel, as the choir and collegium finished THEODORA with magnificent and mellifluous duets, with orchestral and choral flourishes, I thought again of that different memory, that different perspective in memory. Just what are we doing here? It may be, Marsh Chapel, that your presence, your standing presence, your presence in weeping and rejoicing, your musical and beautiful presence, here, in Easter Remembrance at least, is what matters, lasts, counts, and has meaning.

Easter invades our past, or our sense of the past, or our partial understanding of the past.

Coda

What is Easter and its mysterious power doing in your life this year? Does this Easter tide bring a rearrangement in remembrance for you? A willingness to let the Good Shepherd help you to let something go? A recognition of a dimension in memory partly neglected? An honesty about trauma but also about grace? Has God’s future in the Easter gospel somehow invaded your past, and offered another reading, another angle of vision, another perspective? A saving one?

It would not be the first time. At Easter, Peter remembered his cowardice, but remembered it with courage, on which the church then was built. Paul remembered his falsehood, but did so with a confidence in grace, on which the church was then built. Mary remembered her blindness in the garden, but did so with a keen sight, on which a vision of a different kind of church then was built. And you? And you and your remembrance? And you like old Citizen Kane clutching his snow sled Rosebud? Are you ready, right now, just now, in this here and now, to bask in the light of an Easter Remembrance? Bask gently. Emily Dickinson wrote:

By a departing light

We see acuter quite,

Than by a wick that stays.

There’s something in the flight

That clarifies the sight

And decks the rays…

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant --

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind –

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

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posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 04.26.2015 at 11:00 am

Sunday
April 5

Easter Sunday: Whence Benevolence?

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 16:1-8

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

Frontispiece

Whence benevolence?

How did a sprawling, violent creation, 15 billion years in the making, and within it life emerging out of natural selection through random mutation leaving for the devil the hindmost, make space for goodness?

In a world in which a suicidal pilot takes with him 148 innocent victims. In which religious adherents to ancient eschatologies leave video games in Minneapolis for firearms in Syria. In which bigotry through race and orientation fill the internet and the pages of newspapers. In which measures of personal and material success become around the globe themselves the measures of meaning itself. In which drugged or drugging young adults shoot point blank our faithful policewomen and men. In which a healthy young man places a home-made bomb directly behind 8 year old boy and detonates it in our very neighborhood. In which a war of all against all, a world in which homo homini lupus, man is a wolf to man appears to be the default reality all around us, especially the cyber reality all around us. In such a world, whence benevolence? Where does good come from?

‘Love is benevolence or good will to others…the disposition which one has who desires and delights in the good of another’. The disposition one has who desires and delights in the good of another…So, Jonathan Edwards, 1745.

Bene...good. Volo…will. Good will. The will to know, do, be…good. Whence?

I wonder.

I wonder in such a world if I have any right to ascend a fine pulpit and speak about God and about 20 minutes, and extol the grace of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, the promise of heaven, the power and durability of love? Where is true benevolence in the teeth of such and lasting evil, all around us? How do we prove to be honest about evil and still celebrate good? How do we preach and live a dual realism, of cross and resurrection?

It makes me wonder.

And then, something happens, to nudge us forward. Tuesday I was passing by the TV—I wish I had made notes—and I heard something like this:

“You are going to give your kidney to a woman who needs a kidney, but you are giving it to someone you don’t even know? Why are you giving your kidney to someone you don’t even know?”

“Well, I tell my kids they should be good to other people. I try and tell

them that. Do good to others. But then, I think, how can I tell them that if I don’t do that myself? How can I teach them right from wrong if I don’t do that myself? So I decided to give the kidney to someone who needs it.”

Whence benevolence?

Traditions

From tradition. From inheritance. Benevolence comes from traditions that honor and cradle the good.

All three of the New Testament accounts of resurrection, those of Peter and Paul and Mary, so attest. Think carefully, for just a moment, about these witnesses. In John, Mary mistakes Jesus for a gardener, her brilliant witness forever clothed in ignorance. In Corinthians, Paul recounts what he has heard and said, and ruefully, mournfully confesses that he is not ‘fit to be called an apostle, because he persecuted the church’. In Mark, in the long week past as recorded in Mark, Peter, later the rock on which the church is built, is himself shamefully remembered, in the firelight, as the one who denied, who forsook, who failed.

And the cocked crowed, again, and again, and again… The rooster sounding out and sounding forth the birth, the creation of a new day and carrying in song the honest recollection of the prior night.

Let us look closely, particularly, at Paul this year. What he gives he has received, and what he preaches he has been told, by others. His account is utterly different from Mark’s: didactic not narrative, theological not spiritual, male not female witnesses, appearance not disappearance, presence not absence. Yet his confidence in resurrection, which is the basis for his obedience of faith, is every bit as strong as the story of the empty tomb in Mark. There are many ways of keeping faith. There are many ways of teaching faith. There are many ways of preaching resurrection. All of them, somehow, cause us to consider the possibility that resurrection is more real than our experience, that resurrection questions us, not the other way around.

It is not only the physical agony and social disgrace of Jesus on the cross at the heart of our traditions today and everyday, but also, and more so, if one may say so, the soul wrenching agony and personal disgrace of Peter and Paul and Mary, in cowardice and false zeal and ignorance, which is at the bedrock heart of Easter. In the blinding brilliance of cross and resurrection, the tradition sturdily and starkly records, our humanity is naked. Such pain.

Maybe that is part of why we avoid going to church. We know about cowardice, and about falsehood, and about ignorance, and we know about it from our own actions, our own prejudices and our own mistakes. They are grievous to recall, as our religious traditions, especially at Easter, force us to do.

Richard III was reburied last week after 500 years. His spine is still crooked, his skull still crushed, and his cruelty still recalled. He was buried out of an Anglican church. Of course he was. Where else would you be able, with honesty, to take him, before burial, but to a cathedral, where the traditions, sturdy and stark, can bear it. The seaside? Stonehenge? The white cliffs of Dover? The lake district? Not enough sand. Not dark enough, stark enough, with bark enough…

In our traditions, Peter found a way forward, through betrayal, Paul found a way forward, through violence, Mary found a way forward through blind sight. And we can, too. And I can, too. And you can, too.

Tradition does not give life, but tradition does give a way to life, in the Risen One, the Living One, the Sovereign One. Tradition is not life. Music, Scripture, Sermon, Communion are not grace. They are the silver and china, but not the meat and milk. They are means, not ends. The end? Love. And love, ‘Love is benevolence or good will to others…the disposition which one has who desires and delights in the good of another’.

In fact, what little lasting goodness there may be around us at this late date, rises up come Easter out of our traditions. Where does good come from?, Huey Long in Robert Penn Warren’s ALL THE KING’S MEN is asked. From bad. Good comes out of bad.

Our traditions, at their best, at their truest, and at their toughest, tell a painful story. Benevolence comes out of the pain of failure, out of the cross. It comes out of what we see in our own souls, when we are most honest, most vulnerable, and most naked.

That is why ministry is so connected to self-disclosure.

We minimize our traditions at our peril. A great university without its history, its traditions, its considered past, its chapel, say, is no longer a great university. And a great education, summa cum laude, out of earshot of the same, is no longer great.

Whence benevolence? Tradition. Tradition empowers benevolence.

Church

And from church. From relationships. You could say community. Or fellowship. Or society. Or even culture. But people would miss the point. Pau’s word here is church.

Benevolence, good will to others, appears, against significant odds, including our own carelessness and wan, glib neglect, in church.

Here is a place where a birth can be celebrated with proper joy, shared happiness, and musical grace. Here is place where children and young adults can grow up without having to be instantly perfect or prematurely finished. Church is for the unfinished. (Like you. And me.) Here is a place where meaning, belonging, empowerment, community, the things that make human life human as opposed to measured, or productive, or efficient, can thrive. Here is a place where older people can remember and share memory and be remembered and given help. Here is a place where death can be faced with dignity, with honor, with grace and with kindness.

The Jesus of Calvary was so born, and did so grow, and was so loved, and did so die.

Starlings swirl together in ‘murmurration’. They swirl together by the hundreds in spirals, cone shaped and lovely. It is a form of protection. A predator has no easy target against that spiral, that communal form, and that shared meaning, that hereditary empowerment, that protective belonging. You are worth more than many starlings.

Our friend Dean Ray Hart, in his great book UNFINISHED MAN AND THE IMAGINATION, teaches us about the hermeneutical spiral, the beautiful movement of spiraling interpretation in the quest for meaning, and belonging and empowerment, and truth.

I believe in the resurrection of the body, asserts the creed. That is a reference to the Body of Christ, that is, the church. I am not smart enough, strong enough, or sensible enough to get along without the church—fellowship, community, congregation, society, culture, others.

Students need the love known and shared in the church. Sunday by Sunday and term by term. In prayer. In music. In fellowship. In teaching. In gathering. In example.

My father died nearly five years ago. On his desk there was book, whose theme was benevolence, of a piercing sort. He had many books, taught here at BU by Allan Knight Chalmers to read a book a day. The book, short and little known, carried the argument that one should experiment with the attempt to give oneself over to the projects of others, including those people whom we detest, but whose work we may value. Where will find a book like that? In Silicon valley? In the heart of autocracy? In the heights of academia? Where will you find the steady measured argument that encourages you to desire and delight in the good of others, including those whose very presence makes you sick? You might find a hint of it in the body of the crucified, or in the musty library of a deceased preacher.

I think of the great hearted people whom we have served with over the years, and their benevolence. Their teachers and families empowered their benevolence. Their communities, families, and marriages embodied their benevolence. Their own spiritual journeys provided examples of benevolence. Some teaching out of the distant past. Some formation out church, community, of true loving relationship. Some experience of trustworthy people.

After one huge gift to a church, my wife Jan said, I don’t know how I would think about giving that huge amount of money, or how I would feel, or how I would decide or how I would do it. As you would have, I replied, Isn’t that great! Just think, you won’t ever have to worry about that! You won’t have to face that anxiety! You married me! I have spared you all that and so much more!

But actually, we do all have inheritance and community and experience for our benevolence to use. Maybe not a kidney. Maybe not a fortune. But something. Beginning, it may be, with our most precious possession. Our time.

Our mentor J Louis Martyn preached at the funeral of Paul Minear, his fellow NT scholar, some few years ago. He remembered a visit to Boston from Rudolph Bultmann, and Minear’s respectful response:

“There is between us, Mr. Bultmann, much in common.

And, as is always the case, what we have in common

makes plain the major difference between us.

You have as one of your chief concerns

to demythologize the New Testament,

while I have as one of my chief concerns

that the New Testament demythologize us.”

The church tries at Easter to say a benevolent, true word. It is not we who question the resurrection, but the resurrection that questions us.

Whence benevolence? Church. The church embodies benevolence.

Experience

And from experience. From life. A couple of weeks ago I heard this sentence: ‘Love is benevolence or good will to others…the disposition which one has who desires and delights in the good of another’. I preached it, quoting J Edwards. But, by ricochet, I also heard it. In my own experience. You will not find benevolence apart from benevolence. You will not experience benevolence apart from benevolent people.

Here is the weight of Paul’s letter. In the names, the people, his predecessors. And in the verb, OPHTHEY, ‘appeared’. Mark this. Resurrection happens inside this world not outside this world. The absence of the empty tomb and the presence of the Living Appearance both, by Paul anyway, happen here. Paul’s argument is to his context, his community, wherein there is difference, disagreement and doubt. We are not the first, come Easter, to know these masters of disillusionment.

Paul sings Resurrection in Life!

A few years ago a neighboring minister, highly effective in his work, came to say that he had gone through several cycles of goals in pastoral work and preaching, but that now he was not going to set any more of his own, and not going to try to achieve any more of his own. He said: I decided I would go and work on someone else’s. He asked if there was anything he could do for me. I must say that although I did respond, to this day I have not fully responded. It sort of took my breath away…

I have written enough books. Let me help you with yours. I have built enough companies. Let me help you with yours. I have earned enough degrees. Let me help you with yours. I have had enough jobs. Let me help you find yours. I have had enough successes. Let me help you achieve yours. I am not fully there yet, not fully benevolent yet, I guess. It is a different kind of thought, and life. But I can sure feel the power of it, especially in receipt. Can’t you? So Dietrich Bonhoeffer simply said of Jesus: A Man for others.

Think of someone who has desired, truly desired, and delighted in, genuinely delighted in, your good. Whoever, and wherever, and however--thence benevolence. Conjure a moment when you truly desired and delighted in the good of another. At a little league game. At a concert. At a wedding. At a graduation. In lovemaking. At a retirement dinner. In a prayer. ‘Love is benevolence or good will to others…the disposition which one has who desires and delights in the good of another’.

Benevolence is our path for life following death.

Now deceased—that move across the little comma, the light punctuation separating the independent clause of life from the dependent clause of death—a Colgate and BU grad, then minister in Oriskany Falls, Russell Clark, offered condolence and asked his friend how she somehow survived her husband’s sudden death. She said: Nothing has ever been so hard. But as you know I have chickens to feed. When the sun comes up, they get up. They call to me. And I get up. I might want to stay in bed, but they need to be fed. Their life is really mine, or mine theirs. Don’t take this the wrong way, Rev. I love my traditions and my church. But it was the clucking of those hens that got me through. The clucking of those hens meant more to me than all the hymns of Easter.

Whence benevolence? Experience. Experience exemplifies benevolence.

Coda

Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, is the marrow of tradition, as the cock crows. Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, is the very body of the church, as the starlings swirl. Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, is the lived experience of love, as the chickens cluck. Whence benevolence? You need hunt no farther. ‘Love is benevolence or good will to others…the disposition which one has who desires and delights in the good of another’.

Now make a life with that disposition.

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord: Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary; suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried. He descended into hell; the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven, is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of Saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting.

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 04.5.2015 at 11:00 am

Sunday
March 22

Finding Our Way

By Marsh Chapel

John 12:20-33

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

Preface

From Limestone, Maine, to Churubusco, New York, to the shores of the Upper Peninsula, Michigan, today sap is boiling. Forty gallons of Maple sap for every gallon of syrup, boiled in the steamy hot house of March, with delicious doughnuts alongside. The fire is stoked, steaming, warm, and beautiful. We warm our hands this morning on that kind of fire, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, crucified, in Scripture and Doctrine and Application.

Scripture

Jesus’ fate as you know has now been sealed, just before our Gospel reading. Unfortunately many times our lectionary lessons can be hard to follow, because they are cut away from what precedes or follows. Jesus has raised Lazarus from the dead, a few verses back. This seals his doom. In John, it is not the cleansing of the temple that puts Jesus on the cross. That has been done 11 chapters ago, an age in biblical time. No, what gets him in ultimate trouble is resurrection, his power, his love, his presence, and especially his voice that brings people from one location to another, in this case out of one religion and into another, out of the synagogue and into the church, out of tradition and into gospel, out of law and into grace, out of discipline and into love. For Lazarus, this is good. For Jesus, not so good. Voice can get you into trouble still.

Then Mary wipes Jesus’ feet with her hair. Then Judas plots his downfall. Then Jesus rides the donkey. Then Jesus calls the crowd, who saw what happened with Lazarus. Then—notice—the Greeks come and ask for him (meaning, all the nations, meaning, all the unreligious, meaning the future of the planet). Then Jesus prays for glorification, meaning crucifixion. The cross is the turning point between past and future, death and life, miscommunication and understanding. It is glory in John. Even the ever so human quaking prayer of Jesus in the garden, ‘LET THIS CUP PASS FROM ME’ is gone in John. What, shall I ask to be saved? No, I have come for just this purpose, this HOUR (again, like glory, in John, HOUR is a code word for cross).

The Greeks, THE GREEKS precede the religious, like the harlots preceding the Pharisees in the other earlier Gospels. “We would see Jesus” they say. What happens is different. They see, but more, they hear Him. They hear a compelling voice. They hear and heed a compelling voice, for which they have no other manner of description than to use words like heavenly and thunderous. This is a highly charged, very meaningful passage, if very short, as R. Bultmann might have reminded us. We are Greeks, ourselves, that is, not raised within Judaism, so our access to Jesus, and its depiction here, are crucial.

They, the Greeks, and we, also Gentiles, come to Jesus by way of the apostles, Philip and Andrew (not Peter and Andrew, Philip and Andrew—John has Peter on a pretty short leash all along). That is, we come to life through a set of traditions, but the traditions themselves are not the life itself. We have to translate the traditions into insights for effective living, if they are to allow access to life.

Then, the matter of what this closeness to Jesus means is considered. And what is it? It is not a heightened religious experience. It is not a mystical reverie. It is not an emotional cataclysm. It is service. One finds Him in service with and to Him. One knows Him walking alongside him. One gains access to him by loving Him and in Him loving others. In His service there is freedom, even perfect freedom. Service, step by step, and day by day, finally gives way to and leads to death, the rounding and finishing of life. Have we together found our path, our shared ways of service? Are we walking in the light?

With angel voices and thunder and a prophecy of being lifted up, the community of the beloved disciple sees, again, in retrospect, as we do each Holy Week and Easter, the paradox of victory in defeat, of life in death, of love conquering the ‘ruler of this world’. The ruler of this world is not a reference to God the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. The phrase is ARCHON TOU KOSMOU, the ruler of this world, the demigod who in gnostic thought mistakenly and haphazardly created the world. Jesus casts out the archon, the ruler of this world, and so can be offered to and understood by Greeks tinged with a hint or more than hint of Gnosticism. I guess you could interpret this passage without reference to Gnosticism, but just how would you do that? The service of love renders insipid and impotent the ruler of this world and all his minions. Service in love is eternal, eternal in the heavens.

(Puzzling, though, is the phrase, ‘I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again’. What is this? The second glory is the cross. But the first? Simply an assertion that the God of the future is also the God of the past? I do not, all these years later, I do not quite understand it.)

At all events, in the community of the beloved disciple, people have found a way, much truth and new life. A voice, heavenly and thunderous, has spoken to them, a voice given ‘for their sake’. As last week, the judgment once reserved for the end of time or for the eternal realms, or for both, has come, is now. The bottom line or cash value of resurrection is speech, the possibility of saying something that can be heard, of saying some saving that can ‘savingly’ be heard. While not limited to preaching in the narrow, and certainly not limited to an ecclesiastical voice, still judgment and salvation, in the here and now, by this Gospel, and this chapter of this Gospel are a dire matter, a crucial matter of hearing and speaking.

Doctrine

It is then, as we move from Scripture to Doctrine, surely to speaking and preaching in the ministry of Jonathan Edwards to which we turn. Each Lent from the Marsh pulpit we engage a Calvinist interlocutor, this year Edwards of Northampton Massachusetts, 1703-1758.

Jonathan Edwards preached the beauty of God, or God as ‘perfect beauty’. In our time when the true and the good tend to outweigh the beautiful in preaching, this may be a healthy recollection. He made full use of the psychology and science of his day, of Locke and Newton. In our day when only sporadic connections between faith and science, preaching and Darwin and Einstein occur, this may be a fruitful reminder. Edwards provided that rare combination, ‘an ability to reason metaphysically about human nature in subtle philosophical terms alongside a deep commitment to evangelism and church renewal (D. Brainard, ‘Princeton’, 294). That is he could no more affirm philosophy without faith than he could countenance faith without philosophy. Head and heart he distinguished from one another but did not oppose to one another. I find this personally a welcome encouragement, along a trail that sometimes seems a bit lonely. Jonathan Edwards, in concert with John Calvin, and to a full degree in concert with the great traditions of the church, understood the purpose of life to be found in seeking God’s glory. So, a daily question would be, ‘Can I do this, or say this, or desire this to the glory of God?’ If I read him and his interpreters properly, though, Edwards did lean a little more fully toward the affections: ‘feeling and sense make up the more profound level of human experience’ (here Edwards, W James, J Wesley, and S Kierkegaard, among others, agree). We need most the beauty of holiness, that is, and ‘spiritual understanding consists primarily in a sense of the heart of that spiritual beauty’ (‘Princeton’, 113). For our year long inquiry about spirit, we may take here from him the confidence that ‘ the Holy Spirit makes possible a new, sensible knowledge’ (ibid, 69). Its consequence, a stout reminder to us: ‘love is benevolence or good will to others…the disposition which one has who desires and delights in the good of another’. I find that a fair summary of Christianity. To sum up, in the words of John Smith, ‘God wants out of the depths of his love to have in the creation a being capable of appreciating the beauty, the ‘excellency’ and the splendor of the divine Gloria as it appears in the creation.” (171)

Edwards spent his life speaking, and writing to prepare for speaking, and publishing both his thoughts and his senses. He stands as a bulwark against any capitulation of the pulpit in the church to anything short of divine ‘excellency’, glory, beauty, and love.

Application

We go to Stockbridge MA, the location of Edward’s last pulpit, sometimes for a night or two. It helps us to find our way.

In these Lenten sermons, talking with Edwards in light of the Gospel in Scripture, we have moved from Scripture to Doctrine to (as now) Application. Edwards’s evocation of the beauty of creation, and his Johannine efforts in voice and speech, readily take us straightway to the issues of our lives. Day by day, we are finding our way.

Fyodor Dostoevsky gives dear Alyosha one of our verses, as his signature in The Brothers Karamazov: ‘except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit’. In service, we are finding our way.

The little, daily death of service, the service of Christ, and the responsive service in Christ, is that which finally bears fruit. We shall wonder on our way home about the performative adequacy of our service in Him.

For instance, the full humanity of gay people and current discrimination against them in the United Methodist church, of which from this pulpit we have spoken numerous times, continues to engage our service.

With some courage several church leaders this year published a book of divergent views regarding Christian faith and homosexuality in United Methodism, titled FINDING OUR WAY. With respect for these writers, several of whom I know personally, and a couple of whom I count as real friends, and one of whom you have heard from this pulpit not so many years ago, I present a book review, attached to the print form of this sermon, and available on my blog, and also in copy form in our office today, along with a few copies of the book reviewed, and copies of a resolution that I have submitted which has approved for consideration in my home conference, Upper New York.

With respect, and out of love, I differ with most of what is written in FINDING OUR WAY. The review will give the details. But the singular heart of that difference is the gospel itself. Our gospel reading today, taking its place within the full gospel of John, and thereby within the eternal day of grace in Jesus Christ, celebrates the liberality of the gospel, the good news of a Father’s house in which there are many rooms. A page over from our lectionary reading—they have to be read in context—we have the announcement, ‘in my Father’s house there are many rooms’. This is the liberality of the gospel of grace, freedom, pardon, acceptance, forgiveness, mercy and love. Many rooms. One for the sisters, cousins and aunts of John Wesley, we hope. But others for Mahatma Ghandi, Anwar Sadat, Elie Wiesel, the Dalai Lama, Pope John 23, and, yes, John Calvin. There is no traction, no space in such a gospel for bigotry on the basis of status, class, race, gender, embodiment or orientation. Many rooms.

After naming the rooms, in John 14, the Johannine Jesus goes on to say that he is Way, Truth and Life. That is, wherever there is a way, wherever there is truth, and wherever there is life, there He is. So no one comes to the Father except through a way that in truth leads to life. And wherever anyone truly finds that way and truth and life, there and then they have found, or been found by Jesus Christ. We used to sing, growing up, give me ‘land lots of land beneath the starry skies above’. That is a musical setting, it could be, for the liberality of today’s gospel. In finding our way, the rest of the Bible can help us, and teach us, too. Jesus could teach us in Matthew 25, about caring for the least. Paul could teach us in Galatians 3, about the end of social distinctions. John could teach us, as he does today in John 12, and also later in John 14, about the priority of love. That is, as we continue to pray and work for the acceptance and full affirmation of sexual minorities in our time and in our churches, we do so listening to and for the gospel.

Again, today, you will be puzzled that there is no ethical teaching in John, no moral exhortation, no sermon the mount or sermon on the plain. None. With one exception: ‘love one another, as I have loved you’.

I grew up among people whom I think of when I go to the quiet mountains of Stockbridge, MA whence Jonathan Edwards was banished in about 1750. It is about half way home, I guess. They were practical people. They loved God by loving the things of God. The loved Nature. They loved Work. They loved other people. They loved OTHER people, people down on luck, different, in the minority, outside, excluded. They loved Country. They loved Church. They loved Family. At their best, their love was as high as Mt Marcy, and as deep as Seneca Lake, and as shimmering as Glimmer Glass, and as powerful as Niagara, and as steady as the Hudson, and as wide as Ontario and all outdoors. They knew from harsh experience the brevity of life, the horror of loss in death, the stinging pain of grief. They trusted the giver of life to give eternal life, and then tried to live eternal life here and now, in service. I see them, these loving people, many now dead. Instinctively they eschewed exclusion, owing to a dim memory of their own times of being excluded. I wonder over time if we could see our way clear to do the same?

Coda

In a few weeks, most of the sugar season will end, the fires will be banked until another March, the snow will partly melt, the sap become syrup will be shaped into candies, and bottled and sold. Some churches, poor by worldly standards, poor by urban standards, will hold a spring supper—the most delicious of foods—ham and beef and everything you can want or imagine. For dessert they will bring you a bowl of snow, your victory over what you have battled all winter, now served up to you, to the victor go the spoils, you now Lord for a moment of nature and winter. A hot pitcher of steaming syrup someone will pour upon the snow, and it will crackle and congeal and become a heavenly sweetness, and you will enjoy a foretaste of spring, as, we hope, on Sunday, in Scripture and Doctrine and Application, you savor a foretaste of heaven.

Attached the addenda promised above:

Book Review

Book Review: Finding Our Way: Love and Law in the United Methodist Church. Rueben P. Job, Neil M. Alexander, eds. (Nashville: Abingdon, 2014)

I move in five steps here: summary, overview, review, conference\discussion, and concluding thoughts.

Summary: After a personal introductory frame from Job and Alexander, seven UMC general superintendents offer 10-20 page statements about Methodism and gay people, following which Job concludes with a call to prayer. Two write directly about the full humanity of gay people, one in affirmation (Talbert) and one in denial (Yambasu). Three offer administrative worries (Palmer—the discipline must be upheld), (Lowry—the center cannot hold), (Carter—the connection needs support). Two offer mildly inclusive reflections on recent conference level experience (Ward, Wenner).

Overview: The most striking feature of this collection is its nearly complete lack of theological reflection, biblical interpretation, and homiletical assessment. Does the gospel offer grace, freedom, love, acceptance, pardon, and hope to sexual minorities or not? Does the gospel disdain silent or spoken bigotry against sexual minorities or not? Where do the Scriptures (John 14, Galatians 3, Ecclesiastes, Amos 5), or the tradition (Bristol, Appomatox, Seneca Falls), or human reason (diagnostic library, psychological research,) and experience (case studies and stories of gay children harmed by religious bigotry) intersect with these chapters? Hardly at all, granted occasional interjections, more from Talbert and Carter than others. One major exception is the attention Lowry pays to Acts 15 (and so Galatians 2, which he somehow neglects), the Jerusalem Conference. He is right to do so. His reading of the passages however is exactly the full opposite of their meaning (see, for example, J. L. Martyn, Anchor Bible Commentary, Galatians, among many others). Lowry argues that the point of the Jerusalem Conference was order. It was not. It was freedom, the freedom for which Christ sets free. Other than our own current debate the Jerusalem Conference (Acts 15, Gal. 2) is the historical high water mark of religious interest in detailed sexual debate—circumcision then, gay love now. In the Bible, Paul leaves behind tradition for gospel and Peter accedes. (Freedom not order.) The uncircumcised are the recipients of the gospel (then) as are gay people (today). Lowry: ‘the famous debate at the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 is a debate over order, the doctrinal discipline of the church’ (74). No. No it is not. In choosing to leave behind religious order, textual rigidity and an inherited holiness code in order to preach the gospel to the ‘genitally unclean’, men who were not circumcised on the eighth day, the church decided that gospel ever trumps tradition, and grace ever trumps order. It is the perfect biblical citation for this debate, only Lowry reads it upside down. We will not ever ‘find our (administrative) way’ until and unless we first reflect theologically, interpret biblically, and assess homiletically. In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, there is no male or female. Nor gay nor straight. Are gay people people or not? 5/5 or 3/5 human? (We have a bad habit in this country, of finding ways to fractionalize the marginalized.)

We baptize, confirm, commune, forgive and bury gay people. We somehow cannot find our way to marry or ordain them? We baptize, confirm, commune, marry, ordain, forgive and bury those who have undergone surgical abortion, and offer the same to those who oppose abortion. Can we not live ‘in all things charity’?

Review: Palmer’s distinction to affirm ‘uphold’ more than ‘enforce’ (his assigned theme), in interpretation of the book of discipline has some merit and more grace, and reflects his own sincere, irenic temperament. Ward does honor the ‘brave witness’ of a lesbian couple who suffered the bigotry of the Mississippi conference to bear witness to their love for each other. Talbert has said and done the right thing, well prior to this collection, and his essay is the truest of the seven. He and his African colleague are the only two who directly state what they personally think regarding the full humanity of gay people. (Carter rightly affirms that every person is created in God’s image, and laments theological incoherence.)

Conference (that is, Discussion): Carter. Carter calculates (perhaps accurately, but there is no documentation) that small progressive jurisdictions (we could read here, ‘northern’ could we not?) have more presence, voice, vote and leadership on boards and agencies than do larger and more moderate (we are meant to read here, ‘southern’, are we not?) jurisdictions. Talbert. Talbert simply and categorically states that the discriminatory language about gays in our church is wrong and cannot claim allegiance, loyalty or support. The UMC today provides ‘liturgical resources for pastors who may choose to use facilities of congregations to bless animals, fowls, inanimate objects, and more. Are not our LGBT sisters and brothers of sacred worth like all God’s creatures’? (37) Yambasu. Yambasu equates homosexuality with promiscuity, sexual slavery, and adultery, describes the Bible as infallible, and places the denigration of gay people on par with the venerable inheritance of the ten commandments (87). The voice, or at least a voice, of Methodism in Africa. To the extent that his view represents African Methodism, it is a communicative benefit to have his remarkable and disappointing perspective stated in the raw. Lowry. Lowry implores us to keep covenant with one another, as he stated in a recent interview, ‘covenant is Old Testament 101’. Many would respond that the question is not whether to keep covenant, but in and about what to keep covenant. If the gospel of Jesus Christ, crucified, requires the affirmation of the full humanity of gay people and the full rejection of bigotry against sexual minorities in the name of scriptural authority, then the point of covenant is mutually to commit to that gospel. Covenant on behalf of rules of discipline that deny the gospel is false covenant. In the recent interview Lowry admits that a substantial USA UMC majority now affirms same gender marriage and ordination for gay people; he speaks wisely and protectively of the guaranteed appointment; he deplores the waste of resources in time and money which are going into this ongoing debacle. Wenner concludes: “I pray and work for a future where we will find ways to embrace diversity on many issues, including human sexuality, allowing us to think differently. Perhaps we may even be able to live with different answers concerning clergy who live in faithful and loving homosexual partnerships and those who choose to conduct same-gender marriages.”

Thoughts: 1. The Book of Discipline affirms a moderate pro-choice position regarding abortion. But when it comes to marriage and ordination, we do not exclude those who practice surgical abortion, nor those who reject such practice. We have a position as a church. But we allow for differences in practice, practices that both agree with and conflict with our stated position. We do not deny ardent pro-life preachers ordination because they refuse to practice or affirm others to practice abortion. Nor do we exclude from ordination women who have had abortions or men who have provided pastoral help to others in the course of such a procedure. If we can find a way to live together, regarding marriage and ordination, when it comes to abortion, we should be able to do so regarding homosexuality. 2. The first task of an interpreter is to honor and affirm the texts interpreted. In this case, rightly, our general superintendents, interpreters of the book of discipline, affirm the value of the book to be interpreted. Once the general conference has passed off a version of the discipline for another four years, it falls to the bishops, along with others to interpret and apply it. It may help our leaders to rehearse again some of the basic modes of interpretation of texts, biblical texts and others, taught and learned years earlier. Most passages, including your favorite scriptural passage, parable, story, psalm or teaching, allow more than one faithful reading. There may for sure be out of bounds readings, but multiple legitimate ones, too. Simply on a non-literalist hermeneutic, diversity of readings of the discipline itself should be expected. So the dozen affirmations in the discipline of the requirement of pastoral care for gay people may rightly be read as a requirement for pastoral ministry for gay people who are getting married or discerning vocations. Gay marriage and ordination may be understood as not only permissible, but required, to the fulfillment of these paragraphs. 3. We further do admit that while all abhor war, some are pacifist and some are not and all are part of the UMC. Why we can allow latitude regarding issues of life and death, abortion and warfare, but not regarding love and marriage, is a mystery and truly says much about the remains of the mind of the church (UMC). 4. Marriage: UMCBOD Para. 340 2.a.3.a. (Duties of pastor) To perform the marriage ceremony after due counsel with the parties involved and in accordance with the laws of the state and the rules of the United Methodist Church. The decision to perform the ceremony shall be the right and responsibility of the pastor. So. Do we mean this? Are we going to ‘enforce’ as Br. Palmer says ‘enforce the discipline’? Here the burden of responsibility is clearly, unequivocally placed upon the pastor whose ‘right and responsibility’ it is to decide to marry a couple. There is no shading here, no hem or haw. The pastor decides. After due counsel (pastoral care) and in accordance with state law and church rules. No comment here is offered to the situation when state law and church rules, both of which are to be upheld, are different. Rightly, the BOD leaves these difficult (pastoral) decisions in the hands of the minister. “The decision to perform the ceremony shall be the right and responsibility of the pastor”. Not the General Conference. Not the General Superintendent. Not the District Superintendent. Not the Charge Conference. The pastor. As it should be.

Resolution Concerning the General Conference and Homosexuality

WHEREAS, according to The Social Principles of the United Methodist Church, “The United Methodist Church does not condone the practice of homosexuality and considers this practice incompatible with Christian teaching” and,

WHEREAS, two "agree to disagree" proposals were soundly defeated during separate votes by the nearly 1,000 delegates gathered for the United Methodist Church's 2012 General Conference in Tampa, FL, therefore keeping the current discriminatory disciplinary language, and

WHEREAS, One defeated 2012 proposal would have changed the Book of Discipline simply to say that gays and lesbians are "people of sacred worth" and that church members “differ about whether homosexual practices (are) contrary to the will of God” and,

WHEREAS, at least 15 regional Annual Conferences have rejected the denomination’s stance on homosexuality, and

WHEREAS, 35 states now allow gay marriage, and the United Methodist Book of Discipline (para. 340 2a.3a) states that the decision to perform the ceremony shall be the right and responsibility of the pastor “in accordance with the laws of the state and the rules of the United Methodist Church.” and

WHEREAS, “one of the top reasons 59 percent of young adults with a Christian background have left the church is because they perceive the church to be too exclusive, particularly regarding their LGBT friends” (Kinnaman, David, You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church...and Rethinking Faith), and

WHEREAS, many United Methodists in the United States, as well as persons from other countries, acknowledge that the church is divided on this issue but feel that current discriminatory disciplinary language is harmful not only to the groups that it attacks but to the future of the church, as such language is alienating to both present and future members, and

WHEREAS, a resolution very similar to this one was presented and passed by the North Carolina Conference in 2013,

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the Upper New York Conference of 2015, gathered in Syracuse, NY, implore the 2016 General Conference to change the language used in The Social Principles, and to affirm the place of LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) members within the church, including access both to marriage and to ordination.

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posted in Lenten Series 2015: Jonathan Edwards, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.22.2015 at 11:00 am

Sunday
March 15

Religious Affections

By Marsh Chapel

John 3:14-21

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

Scripture

Our newspaper reported this week about a man who built an igloo out of the snow mountain on his front lawn. The mounds of snow, several feet high and deep and wide, offered him an architectural opportunity. Remembering his growing up years, he built igloo. (He grew up, the paper said, in upstate New York.) His igloo included four rooms. His wife decorated the rooms with art-work and the window sills, open to the elements, with candles. He was photographed and looked happy with his work. It may have been that he recalled in the excavation some part of his growing up years, the habits he had acquired at an early age.

“It is no small matter whether one habit or the other is inculcated in us from early childhood; on the contrary, it makes a considerable difference, or, rather, all the difference.” (repeat).

This is the voice of Jonathan Edwards, with whom we converse, to some measure, in these Lenten sermons. Real religion involves religious affections, or so Edwards taught. Give some consideration this morning to your own religious affections. Your experience. Your dispositions, inclinations, predilections, and affections.

Just before our gospel reading, Nicodemus, thrice mentioned in John, has departed. You remember his interview with Jesus. He asks about being born again. He asks about resurrection life. He asks about spirit. In the nighttime interview, Jesus answers him: You must be born anew. Your religion, your religious affection, counts on this. Our gospel today takes the same theme further.

God is love. (Or Love is God.) Eternal life is trust in God who is love. The doorway to eternal life is trust. We learn this in our experience. This trust is a gift, God’s gift. With open hands we receive the gift of God. We do not achieve or earn or create this trust. It is given to us. The gift comes wrapped, belief and trust and faith and knowledge come gift wrapped in meaning, belonging, empowerment—in the beloved community.

To make sure the hearer and reader of his gospel get the full measure of his point, the author of John uses a great old word, Judgment. KRISIS in Greek. You hear our own word, CRISIS, there. Until John, more or less, Judgment was reserved for the end of time, the eschaton, the apocalypse. John, as is resonantly clear here, says something different. Judgment is not at the end of time. Judgment is now. Judgment does not await the arrival of the Son of Man on the clouds of heaven, or the millennial reign, or wars and rumors of wars, or signs of the times. No. The critical moment is now. John has replaced speculation with spirit. John has replaced eschaton with eternal life. John has replaced Armageddon with the artistry of every day. John has courageously left behind that to which most of the rest of the New Testament still clings. John has replaced then with now. What courage! The upshot of this change, as recorded in our Scripture today, is the near apotheosis of experience. And as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience, Who He is (Schweitzer).

In other words, the ancient near eastern apocalyptic, of heaven and end of time judgment, still present in various religious traditions, as we have tragic and sorrowful occasion to see in our own time and struggles with violence, is replaced. In your experience. This is the judgment. The light has come into the world.

As my grandmother used to ask, ‘Are you walking in the light?’

Likewise, we notice that the letter to the Ephesians, written by a student of Paul, makes a complementary affirmation. By grace you are saved through faith (he writes this twice, or an editor has added a second rendering). The phrase, both in its repetition and in its cadence, seems clearly to be a prized inheritance for the Ephesians. God is loving you into love and freeing you into freedom. God first loved us. You are not made whole by your doing. You are God’s beloved, and so are made whole, made healthy, made well, ‘perfected’. Both in our successes and in our failures, we truly depend upon a daily, weekly hearing of this promise and warning. In our experience, we are given to trust God. Our response in actions will then forever be overshadowed by real love, by God’s love.

Doctrine

The Marsh pulpit in this decade has conversed come Lent with Calvinism, a sibling tradition, different in emphasis from our own, but one deeply embedded in the long history of New England. My joy in learning more this winter about Jonathan Edwards, 1703-1758, a contemporary of John Wesley, I have shared only to encourage you to know something about him, too. If in Northampton MA, you could visit his old haunts. If reading about our American history, you could appreciate him through the critical and criticized masterpiece of Perry Miller. If meditating you could re-focus in faith by recalling his emphasis on beauty, on excellence, on grace. A University pulpit, like any, strives weekly to preach the gospel, as Augustine noted, ‘to teach, to delight, and to persuade’. In slight measure, our duty here may accentuate, at least come Lent, and its seasonal discipline of disciplines, the first, to teach.

Today, as a doctrinal consequence upon our Holy Scripture, we shall simply, or singularly, approach Edward’s consideration of experience, what he called the ‘religious affections’. He made his most careful study in this area, after the Great Awakening of 1740. The evangelistic success of his preaching in Northampton, which brought George Whitefield to the farm country of western Massachusetts, strangely caused him consternation. He had occasion to question his own success. That is, he wondered just how truly religious some of the newly acquired affections were, in North Hampton and beyond. I find that in itself a remarkable, even heroic, spiritual move—to find in your success an occasion for self-criticism.

Edwards, good Puritan he, made two lists of twelve signs each, one a list of false signs of religious affection, and one a list of true.

In an earlier version of the sermon I had these ready to give to you. You may be relieved to know that what follows is a summary instead.

Edwards distrusts appearances, when it comes to religion, with good Protestant and Biblical warrant, as you recognize. He distrusts, you may be surprised to hear, given his fatherhood of the Great Awakening: emotion, eagerness, excitement, biblical literacy, volubility, comfort, religious effort, self-confidence, verbosity, elocution, and impact on others. This list he offered after, not before, the great religious upswing, known the world over, of 1740. The fullness of love can actually be counterfeited, he judged (or maybe, he saw with his own eyes).

Today we might say: religion is not a good thing, or not necessarily a good thing. Religion is like the weather, and theology in that way like meteorology. It can be good. But. If it causes the brother to stumble…If the Sabbath is not made for man…If the inside of the cup is not cleansed…If all that glitters is not gold…If, with Cervantes and the Quixote, appearance threatens reality, then religion is not good. Many great troubles today are religious, from Ferguson to Tikrit to Gaza to our own home and our own town.

Rather, this quintessential Yankee Puritan Calvinist trusts reality, not appearance: the divine source, the nature (insert Love) of God, holiness and beauty, intellectual understanding, humility, self-criticism, gentleness, tenderness, harmony—in short, whatever is Christ-like. He lived through the aftermath of two cycles of religious fervor, out in Northampton, and came out with a balance of wisdom like that of a serpent as well as innocence like that of a dove.

Today we might say: when you go to pray, enter your closet, and shut the door, and if you fast, wash your face and smile, and be not a saint abroad but a devil at home. Prefer a tithing Christian to a born again Christian every time.

Edwards, then, puts a major daily question before us about religious affections, and about religious experience: what here is appearance and what here is reality?

Application

Moving, in good Puritan form, from Scripture, through Doctrine, to Application: how shall we apply this to our own life today?

On one hand, we might look at the modes of representation, of appearance, that intend or pretend to connect us in reality.

For all our vaunted IT, are we any closer to IThou? IT or IThou? Not only for our soon to return undergraduates, but seriously for them, as well as for all of us, the question of this relationship looms. Daily. How much do the newer technologies aid us in the timeless challenge of becoming fully human?

The Buddhist says: Wherever you are, be there.

Are we? Are we ever truly anywhere anymore? Are we ever unplugged to sufficient measure that we can relate to one another, to self, to world, to God?

Are we ever fully free, heart and spirit, to see and be and be awed by the sunrise, to look at and be entranced by the night sky, to love and be in love with the beloved, to swim in the fresh water of freedom, grace and love? Do we live to work or work to live? Is there still a way through the snow pile to an igloo?

The world does not revolve around my inbox, or yours.

This is good news—wisdom to the mighty, honor to the brave. And it is good sense. And even good business. One writer noted: ‘Every business person, regardless of national origin, is more likely to transact business with a colleague or counterpart he has worked and socialized with.’ Real commerce happens in real time, among real people, who really know and like and want to work with each other.

Does e-mail and its cousins help make and keep human life fully human? Consider the mode: No voice or face, nor body, nor personhood, nor privacy, nor life? Who—really—beyond 15 minutes a day—wants to communicate, or live, this way? To say nothing of the practice of ministry. How do we approach I/Thou in the reign of I/T?

How do we conjure and remember the wisdom of Martin Buber?

“Love does not cling to the I in such a way as to have the Thou only for its " content," its object; but love is between I and Thou...

The basic word I-You can only be spoken with one’s whole being. The basic word I-It can never be spoken with one’s whole being…

On the other hand, we might look at our more intimate relationships. Five times this year we have spoken from this pulpit about safety on campus for women. We shall continue to do so, so that Marsh Chapel, with partners near and far, will continue to be a sacred space that is a safe place. The bifurcation of appearance and reality endemic to cyber culture—think Yik Yak—has consequences in many directions, one of which is the peril of losing the muscle and habit of interpersonal conversation, discourse, and—affection. It takes practice to learn to listen well and deeply. It takes time to develop the vocabulary and tongue to speak from the heart. It takes live experience, living engagement to see and hear others as multi-dimensional not one dimensional beings, real people not appearances. All of us, older and younger, continue to learn and grow, and over time, a new and healthier national and collegiate culture will emerge.

A recent review of the documentary, The Hunting Grounds, by Ty Burr, raises the same point, in its conclusion: Emotional intimacy can be found everywhere online while vanishing from the physical world. The (movie) does a fine and fierce job of portraying campus sexual assault as a national disease. It never dares to suggest that it’s a symptom. (BG G6 3/13/15).

Nietzsche famously argued that if God is dead everything is allowed. With a wisp of John 2, and faith and trust and belief still in the air, like a harbinger of a spring not quite here, we might put it otherwise, and in a positive mode. If the language of worship, of divine love and a responsive human love, can be learned and lifted and shared, then there is a capacity, a cultural capacity, a cultural syntax and grammar and spelling that gradually can offer an alternative to our current malaise. Affection, real emotional intimacy in word and deed, might find its wellsprings in Religious Affections, real emotional intimacy in word and deed:

God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.

Then…

Because God made the stars to shine. Because God made the ivy twine. Because God made the ocean blue. Because God made you, that’s why I love you.

With joy, right here, in these years, we have seen young life become new life, as we have in some beautiful weddings this winter. This happens in college. One of the sources of healing on campus is worship. Against all odds, in the Hunting Grounds, it may just be the one thing needful. One who knows in experience the love of God has then the heart with which to love another. And the language. And the sensitivity. And the humanity. And the capacity. The capacity to defeat rapacity.

Hear the Gospel! Scripture: Your experience counts. Doctrine: Reality not appearance is at the core of religious affections. Application: Balance IT and IThou, and let your affections be formed and informed by your religious affections.

“It is no small matter whether one habit or the other is inculcated in us from early childhood; on the contrary, it makes a considerable difference, or, rather, all the difference.”

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

For information about donating to the Chapel, click here.

posted in Lenten Series 2015: Jonathan Edwards, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.15.2015 at 11:00 am

Sunday
March 8

Sweet Chariot

By Marsh Chapel

John 2:13-22

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

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, 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 1735, 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 1959, down in the southern third of Alabama, the spirit of Elijah rested on the mind of Harper Lee. She wrote a book, a great book, a book great because it changed people’s minds and hearts. Like Augustine’s Confessions. Like Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Like The Diary of Anne Frank. Like Elie Wiesel’s Night. Like what Tom Hanks tried to do with Philadelphia. The prophet’s magic mantel, which divides the river Jordan, pierces the heart. Lee’s pastor, our friend, Thomas Lane Butts, spoke of her to me some years ago. All on the way from the river Jordan.

In the year 1965, in early March, 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.

On March 8 of 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 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 year to come, sometime, going back a half step, an Elijah spirit will usher us toward only the 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. One of my predecessors in Rochester was a southerner, Andrew Turnipseeed, a friend of Dr King’s. At Turnipseed’s funeral 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. 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.

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.

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

For information about donating to the Chapel, click here.

posted in Lenten Series 2015: Jonathan Edwards, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.8.2015 at 11:00 am

Sunday
March 1

The Marsh Spirit

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 8:31-38

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

‘Because it is Hard’

Rigor. The Marsh Spirit is a rigorous one.

A visitor today to the cradle of liberty, the home of the bean and the cod, coming by air will walk underneath a bright portico at Logan Airport, adorned with the countenance of a familiar President, whose term of office was tragically foreshortened. He is pictured pointing out a rocket on the launch pad. You cannot help but pause. John F Kennedy. Boston Airport. A new frontier. A profile in courage. (To boldly go where no one has gone before, a phrase we recall this weekend especially.) An entrance into a new place. A New England place. Like the Gospel itself, a new space, a newness of life. The familiar Presidential Boston voice simply says: ‘We do not choose to go to the moon because it is easy to do so. We choose to go to the moon because it is hard.’ (It recalls OWHolmes: Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing. While we are permitted to scorn nothing but indifference…)

The Marsh Spirit, your way of being, visible and virtual both, embraces challenge, with rigor.

Stretch your legs and walk Commonwealth Avenue, wonder and wander through the commonwealth of the Gospel. The Marsh Spirit awaits a faith amenable to culture and a culture amenable to faith. Yours is a cosmopolitan spirit, one that envisions Christ transforming culture—not just Christ against or Christ above or Christ in or Christ across culture. Christ who brings not just theological reformation but cultural revolution. Christ the Extraordinary incarnate in the ordinary. There is a particular spirit of this place and community. Rigor is a feature of this spirit, which we probe today, as in other months, Inquiry, Hymnody, Recollection, Patience, Life, and Secularity. You honor both the lectionary of the canon and the lectionary of the culture, in this winter of our discontent.

We salute, by the way, in this most rigorous winter, those among us who have with most rigor endured the winter. The UPS woman climbing a snowdrift. The janitor plowing at 4am. The childcare worker arriving early and leaving late. The man brewing coffee after 3 hours on the T. All have been inundated by the same amount of snow, but not all have struggled the same amount with the snow.

But in earshot of the Gospel, a question looms.

What if the real ice of 2015, the actual storm and snow of this winter of 2015, the existential blizzard of this season where not meteorological but theological, not weather but whether or not, not snow and ice but thinking twice, not nature but grace?

What if the snow is the easy part? What if the real storm falling upon us is nihilism, nihilism sweetened by hedonism? What if our challenge is not meteorological but theological, not natural but cultural, not material but existential, not physical but spiritual?

Scripture: Paul and Mark

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

That spring, commuting to finish courses, I met my teacher Lou Martyn in the Union Seminary Quadrangle. He handed me a book as gift, one of John Knox’s books on the early church (Knox of 20century not of the sixteenth). I cherish the gift now forty years old, which became a kind of sign for the future, then altogether unforeseen.

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

I marvel at the beauty and mystery of this section of Romans 4, on which Rev. Fleming Rutledge preaches so bravely here last spring: ‘who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist’ (resurrection first, then creation). Hoping against hope. (such an odd phrase)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark sounds similar:

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

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

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

Doctrine

What if our cultural storm is as much a challenge as our natural one has been? What if the real snowstorm is this: our cultural languishes in the doldrums of a pervasive malaise (repeat)? What if the real ice and wind are in an invisible nihilism, not just the nihilism of academic and student life, but a blowing ice wind of nada…a sense that nothing matters, a sense that nothing counts, a sense that nothing lasts, a sense that nothing is real, a sense that no one is for real (repeat)? At its worst, academic and student life can become a nihilism, a nihilism sweetened, if that is the word, by hedonism. But students and teachers come from homes and families, like everybody else, and their culture, this culture, is only a dim reflection of a larger one, a subset within subsets.

The Marsh pulpit brings into duet mind and heart, the academic and the religious, the university and the church, knowledge and piety. We are not alone in this, or at least, not quite alone just yet. So, come Lent, each year we lift up a conversation partner for our preaching, one out of a different tradition from our own, one out of the Calvinist tradition, so embedded in New England. So in other years, Marilynn Robinson, Jacques Ellul, Atonement Doctrine, Karl Barth, Himself (John Calvin), and this year Jonathan Edwards.

The Calvinist emphasis on divine freedom and divine predestination and divine creation and divine scripture are different emphases than those within Methodism on human freedom and human will and human history and human interpretation of scripture, by tradition and reason and experience. But we learn most from our adversaries, our conflicts and our mistakes. So, come Lent, we wrestle with others, like Edwards.

Edwards is remembered, for instance, for a fine sentence, a rigorous one at that: Resolved, never to do anything, which I should be afraid to do, if I expected it would not be above an hour, before I should hear the last trump. Yet his hourly eschatology, Johannine in shape (‘the hour is coming and now is’), like the favorite phrase of our dear and recently departed professor and colleague David Carr, ‘our present future’, has a much deeper root in the mind of Edwards, perhaps America’s greatest native theologian. It is rooted in his glorious understanding of grace, and the proper response to grace, his glorious vision of beauty, and the proper life in response to beauty.

Today we will simply remember his painful denouement in ministry. He preached for thirty years from his grandfather Stoddard’s strong Northampton pulpit, and lit the fires of the great awakening there. But he departed from his grandfather’s decision about holy communion, and that cost him his pulpit. Edwards began to require a confession of faith, an examination for church affirmation of faith and membership, and thus access to the Lord’s table. For this decision, His congregation and the larger church threw him out. He spent the last years of his life in ministry to a few farmers and many native American in Stockbridge MA—not the big church you see on the main street there, by the way, but a little chapel in west Stockbridge. He was an outcast at the end, perhaps the greatest theological mind in our history. In his last year he agreed to take on the Presidency of a small college in New Jersey, Princeton by name, and straightway died in his first month of smallpox.

Is Holy Communion, to paraphrase Pope Francis, to be understood as a reward for the perfect or medicine for the weak?

One of the statutes—this may sound odd to you—of one brand of practical theology so called today, is that for theology truly to be theology it must be utterly divorced from the life of the church. As we begin, with Edwards, we note that his work arose exclusively within the experience of pastoral life, the demands of weekly preaching, and the rigor, the rigor of ministry on what was then the western front.

Rigor, he knew.

Application

Friends, look about you. Look around. Listen. All around you hear voices calling you to new life, rigorous life. See and hear what is even more blessed than hours of video games, even more enjoyable than another tour of Facebook, even more beautiful than surfing the interweb (☺) even more serious than cyber-culture.

Rachmaninoff

Many of you heard such a voice in the choir’s heroic singing last evening of Rachmaninoff’s ‘Vespers’. I pity any who did not hear the singular power and powerful beauty of the music. Serve the Lord with fear and rejoice unto him with righteousness.

Tower of Learning

Or just look around you for a moment. It is cast in stone, in the architecture of Marsh Chapel, so like the Pittsburgh buildings, Heinz Chapel and the Tower of Learning, completed ten years before the beginning of plans for Marsh Chapel in Boston. Daniel Marsh was from Pittsburgh. We learn by imitation. He was imitating what he saw and remembered. Pitt Tower of Learning: They shall find wisdom here and faith - in steel and stone - in character and thought - they shall find beauty - adventure - and moments of high victory.

Wit

Or consider this week’s Boston University production of WIT, a play by Margaret Edson who teaches elementary school. Some years ago she wrote one play. It was a success. She was asked to write more, but she demurred. ‘We are busy people here in 3rd grade. I have all I want to do with these young minds here. One play is enough’.

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

Boston University’s Judy Braha gave a sterling, rigorous performance of Vivian Bearing at death, here on Tremont Street in Boston this past week:

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee 

Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so; 

For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow 

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

*******

One short sleep past, we wake eternally, 

And death shall be no more;

Death, thou shalt die.

Her performance is the kind of saving collision that can befall earnest academic men and women, a choice encounter of human striving with physical pain and proximate death.

Bob Dylan

Or think of Christopher Ricks of Boston University, after years of labor, who now has published 960 pages of Bob Dylan’s poetry, the lyrics to his decades of songs. I wonder how long it took? You might want to read it in the Library since it weighs 13.5 pounds, is 13 inches square and three inches thick (NYRB 2/19/15).

Between the windows of the sea

Where lovely mermaids flow

And nobody ever thinks too much

About desolation row

Sometimes we have to hear something more than once. I noticed for the first time this winter how the triads of the fruit of the spirit, in Galatians 5: 22, fall out in rhythmic cadence, one and two and three beat, step, syllable: 1. Love, Joy, Peace. 2. Patience, Kindness, Goodness. 3. Faithfulness, Gentleness, Self-Control.

Rigor. Yours is a rigorous spirit, Marsh Chapel.

Resolved, never to do anything, which I should be afraid to do, if I expected it would not be above an hour, before I should hear the last trump.

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

For information about donating to the Chapel, click here.

posted in Lenten Series 2015: Jonathan Edwards, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.1.2015 at 11:00 am

Sunday
February 15

High Peaks

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 9:2-9

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

Whence Saving Insight?

When and how does a moment of insight come? What are the steps up along the mountain trails, the high peaks of life that give a moment of clarity that can save us?

Peter has just heard our Lord’s ageless command: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow.” Then Peter is led, step by step, up a high mountain, where something…unearthly…occurs. He sees what cannot be seen. And, from this mountain view, for a moment, there is insight and there is clarity.

When and how does such a moment arrive, a moment of clarity that can save us from an anger that leads to murder, or a heartache that leads to suicide, or a despair over a gun-totting nation drenched in violence, or a chagrin about a country that ever more closely approximates Fosdick’s verse, “rich in things and poor in soul”?

Today’s Gospel offers us a mountain view, clarity and insight, found step by step along the rocky trail of life, that can lift us up above sin and death and the threat of meaninglessness. It’s five step program was inspired by Josiah Royce’s little Boston book of 1912, The Sources of Religious Insight.

In earshot of insight on the mountain of transfiguration…Walk along with me, if you will, for just a few minutes…up the mountain path we go…and take, Come Sunday, a divergent road. Insight is born in worship.

Insight Through the Thicket of Personal Need

One step toward insight lies through the thicket of personal need. Careful, step carefully here. Here you recognize your mortality. “It is a great life, but few of us get out alive.” We truly do not know the hurts and needs others face. Every heart has secret sorrows. Here you admit that the acts of desperation in news reports come from conditions you also know. Fear, anger, jealousy, hatred, dread. Here—step lightly—you see the shadow, and your shadow in the greater shadow. One called this “the feeling of absolute dependence”. Here we are confessional. We say, “Hello. My name is John Smith and I am an alchoholic.” We say, “We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.” We say, “There but for the grace of God, go I.

The first time I was left alone with our first child, to give her mother a night out. She had been the most pleasant of children, happy and bright, sleeping through the night. She hardly cried. But that hot August night, at the very moment the door closed and the car drove off, she began to wail. Not to whimper or weep, but to wail and shriek and scream. Five, twenty five, fifty minutes. I was really shaken, terrified, angry and frustrated, at my wit’s end, and probably at the edge of some irrational behavior. Over the din of the howling daughter, I heard the doorbell. In came our church’s lay leader, Bernice Danks, a veteran nurse and teacher of nurses at Cornell who wordlessly took the child and somehow the howling ceased. “Oh, I like to make a few house visits a week. It’s a little routine of mine…You know I tell my nursing students that we call the things that are most important, ‘routine’…and I came by the parsonage and for some reason I decided to stop. I hope you don’t mind the intrusion…What a pleasant baby she is!”

Maybe in this winter of our snowy discontent, we who are more ambulatory, as we skitter through the snow, will realize how my friend Tim in a wheelchair confronts the drifts, and especially the iced, choked, formidable street corners. Insight comes through an experience of personal need.

When we are helpless, insight can come.

Wesley is still with us to ask, “will you visit from house to house?” Insight sees inside the closed door of personal need, and measures the distance between public appearance and private reality. We recognize personal need with every Sunday, at an Marsh Chapel with gusto, in confession and kyrie, cry for forgiveness.

Insight Over the River of Others’ Hurts

A second step toward insight lies over the river of another’s hurt. Here, we’ll jump the river at the portage path, where we bear each other’s burdens like canoes carried in tandem. A moment of clarity can come when you truly see another’s plight, and feel it in your heart. Some insight comes from serving others, some from sensing others’ hurt. It is really a matter of understanding power, this insight about others. Think of the Prince and the Pauper, or of Lazarus and Dives. Insight happens in the chorus of the common life, when we sing out, “so that’s what is like to be you…”

The social gospel tradition, theological and political,(Douglass, Anthony, Gladden, Rauschenbusch and others) may be criticized as a “johnny one note” presentation. But if you have to choose just one note to play, this is one to pick. Jesus means freedom. Real religion is never very far from justice. To learn about the nature of power, and the effects of power, we listen to the powerless.

Men, listen to the women about whom you care, as they describe being pulled over on the highway in a winter night. With red lights flashing…sirens wailing…car door thudding…a tall male figure in uniform and wide brimmed hat…a revolver in the belt… “May I see your license please?”…Men, listen to women.

Majority, listen to the minority describe the feeling of being stopped on the front porch step, at night, after a long day of menial work, and questioned, with Ferguson and Staten Island and other scenes in memory. Do you remember the New York tragedy of some years ago? With the lights flashing and the uniforms and hats and, when you reach for your wallet some one yells.”Gun!”. 41 bullets later a tragedy—unintended to be sure—has occurred. Not a gun but a wallet. Such a tragedy for all. But maybe such tragedy can begin to help all to gain insight, to begin to feel what others feel. Majority, listen to minorities.

Insight comes through the life long common song that recognizes another’s hurt.

In February of the year 2015, perhaps, Elijah, a chair left open for him guarding a shoveled parking spot in south Boston, the spirit of Elijah that is, broods 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. You may not daily see Elijah. But his spirit is present, in the stamina, perseverance and goodness of a good, prayerful, New England people. Morning in reading. Mealtime in prayer. Evening in quiet. Sunday in worship.

You know, we recognize this chance for insight every Sunday as we sing hymns together, in four part harmony, to recognize that we are all in this together, especially on a Snow Day.

Insight Scaling the Cliffs of Reason

A third step toward insight lies over the cliff of reason. “Come let us reason together” says the Psalmist. God has entrusted us with freedom, and with minds to think through our use of freedom. While reason has its limits, it is reason, finally, that will help us learn the arts of disagreement—at home, at work, in church, in the community. We say, “try to be reasonable”. And reason often prevails. If you ever doubt the power of reason to bring insight, remember the words of the Psalmist, and the voices of great minds through the ages. Josiah Royce’s Sources of Religious Insight, is itself a gem of such reasoned discourse. Come let us reason together…

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

It takes something like this capacity to reason together to develop a healthy marriage. On this snowbound weekend two beautiful couples, one yesterday and one this afternoon, take their vows right here in the nave of the chapel. One couple met in the undergraduate BU class of 2006. The other are post-docs, one from England and one from France. (Welcome to Boston!) For better, for worse…To love and to cherish. Well, to find a way to reason together.

Our BU assistant vice president of the Office of Marketing and Communications and executive editor of BU Today, Art Jahnke, kindly asked about the service and sermon this morning.

You know, we recognize this chance for insight, this moment of clarity, every Sunday through a sermon, a word (we hope) fitly spoken, as in, right now.

Insight Across the Gorge of the Will

A fourth step toward insight lies across the great gorge of the will. Look before you leap. We are here ever closer to the mountaintop. Real insight comes in a moment of decision. Some say we learn to choose. But our experience is that we learn by choosing. Viktor Frankl spent his whole life developing the “logotherapy” around this one conviction: we grow by deciding. Choose. You cannot lose, in the fullest sense, and in the long run. Choose. Either way, you have learned, you will grow, you have changed, you will improve, you have developed. Choose.

Faith is not a matter of emotion or feeling or soul or heart or intellect only. First, faith is a decision. “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow.”

As Kierkegaard put it, “either\or”… Either God or not. Decide. Either you see God in Christ or not. Decide. Either Jesus Christ has a claim on your life or not. Decide. Either every day is a chance for love or not. Decide. Either the way of love means particular consequent acts regarding your time, your money, your body, your community…or not. Decide.

Faith is not as much thrill as it is will.

You share with me a desire to honor those who have chosen to help us today. Our choir and musicians, somehow present and accounted for. Our support staff, Tim who shoveled out the plaza, and David who cleaned and warmed the sanctuary, and both who have come to worship! The dedicated choices over decades by Boston University, to support this broadcast, and WBUR to carry this broadcast, and our engineer Eddie to manage the broadcast, and our ushers in the back, our readers in the front, and all manner of friends in between. Thank you.

You know, we recognize this chance for insight every Sunday, in a moment of invitation—to devotion, to discipline, to dedication.

Insight Upon the Summit of Loyalty

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

And real loyalty is magnanimous. Real loyalty is bighearted enough to honor an opponent’s loyalty. At the summit, there can be a reverent respect for another’s loyalty, truly lived, even when it clashes with our own. Maybe especially then. US Grant felt this at Appomatox as he took the sword from RE Lee. It is chivalry, this honoring of loyal opposition. We were once known for this kind of chivalry, a reverent respect for divergent loyalties, as long as they did not eclipse the one great loyalty. I overheard this kind of chivalry from a local football player this week, a burly formerly bearded lineman, who said, “They played better than we did.”

Such a memory could help our political conversations, reminding us that at depth loyalties converge out of difference. Surface difference can occlude deeper agreements. Loyalty has a magnanimous depth that honors others’ divergent loyalties.

One of the strangest turns in the New Testament is found in 1 Corinthians 15. After Paul has reached the very summit of our faith, and sings of the resurrection in such heavenly tones, then, immediately, he turns to—do you remember?—the collection! A matter of loyalty.

Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

You know, we recognize this chance for insight every Sunday, through the presentation of gifts, an expression of loyalty, at the altar of grace and freedom and love.

High Peaks

Several years ago, we worshipped in the tiniest church in our area. A little Adirondack chapel, at the end of the trail, high up in the northern mountains. Beyond Owl’s Head, and Chasm Falls and Wolf Pond, there is the summit of Mountainview, with its chapel and pump organ and wooden pews and simple pulpit, and humble service, still though a service like this one or any --- a chance for saving insight as we recognize personal need, others’ hurts, the power of reason, the importance of will, the force of loyalty—in the prayer of confession, the music of community, the preaching of the Word, the invitation to decision, and the loyal offering of gifts.

This Lent: Let insight abound on the curvaceous slopes of personal need! Let insight abound on the majestic mountains of social holiness! Let insight abound on the prodigious cliffs of reason and will! Let insight abound on the purple mountain summit of loyalty—from every mountainview, let insight abound! So that, to paraphrase the spiritual, we might sing, insight at last, insight at last, thank God Almighty, we have saving insight at last!

Somehow we were deluded to think that worship is optional. Many things are optional. For those, however, who desire to see life as human and keep life human, worship is essential, essential, essential to insight, essential to the insight that keeps life human. How can we be human without seeing our own frailty, without knowing another’s pain, without learning to reason together, without the courage to decide, without the love of loyalty? So let us improve in Lent.

Let us worship God together. As you are doing, do so more and more.

Let us make it our earnest desire to worship God each Lord’s Day.

Let us make preparation for our ordered worship in daily prayer and reading.

Let us sing lustily, as Wesley taught, and pray with energy, and listen with care.

Let us do as OW Holmes regularly did with every sermon, ill or well though the sermon was: “I applied it to myself”.

Let us shake off our timidity and seize every opportunity to include others, friend and neighbor and relative in worship.

Let us savor the memory of Sunday all week long—humming familiar verses, reciting familiar phrases, chewing on various themes.

Let us expect and experience of love, of presence, of God.

Let us enter silence with grace and song with freedom.

Let us prepare to worship, Lent 2015.

To Quicken the Conscience by the Holiness of God

To Illumine the Imagination by the Beauty of God

To Open the Heart to the Love of God

To Devote the Will to the Purposes of God

Words at the Kyrie Eleison

Confession in Snow: 2/15/15

Our Kyrie Eleison, and prayer of confession, are meant to open us to transformed, changed perspectives, to greet this as a day of new beginnings, to help us to think in a different way. For example: what if the Bible had been written in snowy New England rather than in the sunny Near East?

Imagine…

And God separated the snow banks from the snow banks, those from under the firmament, from those over the firmament, and God called the firmament heaven. And there was evening and morning, a second day.

And Abraham took his huskies to drink by the frozen lake, and there met Rebecca, who came to break the ice and draw water. And he said, “Pray, put down your pick ax and let me drink from the icy flow”.

And Pharaoh’s daughter saw a sled come by downhill, in which there was wrapped in a snowsuit, a little boy, named Moses. Pharaoh’s daughter took him home, and warmed him by the fire.

After the children of Israel had skated across the frozen Blue Sea, and Pharaoh’s army was in close pursuit, the Lord God sent a heat wave that melted the ice and Pharaoh, and his chariots and his army plunged down into the briny deep.

By the icicles of Babylon we sat down and wept as our tormentors said to us, sing to us one of the songs of Zion.

Save me O God! For the avalanche has cascaded upon me…I have fallen into deep drifts and the snow sweeps over me.

Many snow drifts cannot bury love, neither can blizzards smother it.

Let Justice roll down like an avalanche, and righteousness as an unending blizzard.

I baptize you with snow, but One is coming who will baptize you with fire

Except a man be born of snow and the spirit, he will not enter the kingdom of heaven.

God sends his snow upon the just and the unjust alike

The wise man built his house upon the rock. The snow fell, and the blizzard came and the lake effect wind blew and beat upon that house, but it did not fall, because it was built upon the rock.

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posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 02.15.2015 at 11:00 am