Sunday
May 14
This I Believe 2023
By Marsh Chapel
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Text of the reflections is unavailable at this time.
Archive for the ‘The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel’ Category
Sunday
May 7
Communion Meditation- May 2023
By Marsh Chapel
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This morning we think of our students, as classes end and exams begin, and especially our seniors, with whom we gather up in prayer the experiences of four years and lift them all in a spirit of grace and peace.
This morning we embrace the graduates of 2023, who began in 2019, as they commence with the rest of life, and lift them all in a spirit of grace and peace.
This morning we open ourselves to the world around us, and pledge ourselves to live not only in this world but also, and more so, for this world, for this world in a spirit of grace and peace. Speaking of grace, this morning we offer you a prayer, a grace, written by John Wesley. Wesley was the founder of Methodism, the religious tradition that gave birth to Boston University in 1839.
His grace exemplifies that tradition:
The words are simple: that is significant
The language is universal: that is significant
The tone is thankful: that is significant
The phrasing is memorable: that is significant
It is a prayer fit for use morning by morning, day by day, year by year, all in a lifetime: that too is significant:
Gracious Giver of all good
Thee we thank for rest and food
Grant that all we do or say
May in thy service be, this day
Next week, our honored ‘This I Believe’ speakers will continue this tradition, in a spirit of grace and peace: Allison Brown, Madison Boboltz, Hannah Hathaway, Allison Imbacuan, Marian Karam Diaz—congratulations!
This morning we think of our congregation, our community of faith, brought together by the gospel, and its preaching, by the gospel, and its sacrament, by the gospel and its resurrection mystery.
We are children of those who shared with us the gifts of wonder, morality and generosity. In mystery.
John is a mystery. It is odd that John has no record of the Last Supper, in his account of the passion. It is odd that John demotes Peter from his regular central role. It is odd that the gospel carries no remembrance of parables. It is odd that hardly anything of the standard ministry of Jesus, usual gospel fare, appears here. It is odd that the humanity of Jesus has virtually disappeared into the bright eternal light of his form in John, “God striding upon the earth”. It is odd that the New Testament would include a Gospel so fully at odds with its three synoptic cousins. Cousins, not siblings. It is odd that John, by the main, has no use for the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist. Where would the church be without birth to cleanse and guilt to absolve? It is odd that the Gospel we read today is shaped around seven stunning miracles, and four impenetrable chapters of teaching. It is odd that a Gospel so wildly different from the rest of those in the Bible should have made the cut, and been included. If you think having Ecclesiastes—which rejects, contradicts and humiliates much of the rest of the Hebrew Scripture—included there is a strange thing, then multiply that odd presence by 20 or 50 and you have a sense of how different is John. Nor in church nor in academia have we yet begun to account for the radical freedom and difference of this nonconforming gospel. It is odd.
What remains, as we consider our church, our chapel, our community, our common table?
A testimony to the power of relationship remains. John 14 sets aside predictions, instructions, and demonstrations, found here in the other gospels. Here relationship, relationship alone, remains. The relationship of Father and Son. The relationship of departed and devoted. The relationship of doubter and disciple. The relationship of community and pastor. The relationship of faith and works. The relationship of Jesus and his own.
Things that really matter are ultimately relational, whether that relationship is with others, with self, or with God. Our friends give
us ourselves. Our instincts give us ourselves. Our sense of presence gives us ourselves. So this morning let me directly ask you to think about your close relationships, your work relationships, and your relationship to God. In these relationships you may overhear the humming, mysterious allure of service.
Your relational gits, Marsh Chapel community, and your communal duties are significant and challenging. They include needs, plans and hopes, all part of our shared communal duties:
Needs: Boston University needs from Marsh Chapel, Religious Life (5)
* Sunday Worship Excellence, *All University Events Ceremonial Leadership, *Pastoral Care at Death, *Religious Life Ministry, Program and Oversight, *University ‘Identity’, in History and Hope
Plans: Marsh Chapel and Religious Life Strategic Plan 2023 Summary (5)
The envisioned mission of Marsh Chapel is be a heart in the heart of the city, and a service in the service of the city. Our use of President Merlin’s epigram means city as the global city, and service as worship and work. Our foci guiding this envisioned mission are voice, vocation, and volume. As in other iterations of our strategic plan (2006, 2009, 2012, 2017), we take our lead from the new, refreshed Boston University Plan, especially its own five-fold foci: academics, research, globality, diversity, community.
Hopes: 75th Marsh Chapel Dedication Anniversary (‘25) Goals (5, 200, 100, 1, 4)
$5M deanship endowment completed. 200. 200 students in worship. 100. 100,000 weekly contacts (building use, worship, newsletter, website, radio listenership, internet listenership, pastoral contact, other). 1. One annual BU Religious Life Day (perhaps climate related). 4. Infrastructure advances (Live Stream; Digital Ministry; Organ; Elevator etc.).
These needs, plans and hopes involve us all, including those listening from afar.
This morning with glad hearts we think of the three children to be baptized just following our service today. Please stay and join us in the chancel, after our greeting in the narthex. Bring along a hymnal. We will speak then of baptism, a sacrament…
We will remember an ancient, beautiful teaching, the Didache, which word simply means teaching, composed in the early second century, it may be, a younger cousin of the gospels of John and Matthew:
There are two ways, one of life and one of death, but a great difference between the two ways. The way of life, then, is this: First, you shall love God who made you; second, love your neighbor as yourself, and do not do to another what you would not want done to you. And of these sayings the teaching is this: Bless those who curse you, and pray for your enemies, and fast for those who persecute you. For what reward is there for loving those who love you? Do not the Gentiles do the same? But love those who hate you, and you shall not have an enemy. Abstain from fleshly and worldly lusts. If someone strikes your right cheek, turn to him the other also, and you shall be perfect. If someone impresses you for one mile, go with him two. If someone takes your cloak, give him also your coat. If someone takes from you what is yours, ask it not back, for indeed you are not able. Give to everyone who asks you, and ask it not back; for the Father wills that to all should be given of our own blessings (free gifts). Happy is he who gives according to the commandment, for he is guiltless. Woe to him who receives; for if one receives who has need, he is guiltless; but he who receives not having need shall pay the penalty, why he received and for what. And coming into confinement, he shall be examined concerning the things which he has done, and he shall not escape from there until he pays back the last penny. And also concerning this, it has been said, Let your alms sweat in your hands, until you know to whom you should give.
This morning we think of this season, Eastertide, the season of resurrection. The resurrection of Jesus is more than resuscitation. The witness of the church, of this church too, is that God has decisively acted in history by Christ to forgive sin and to vanquish death. Nor is Christ's being raised a form of healing, only, or translation, only, like the experiences of Lazarus or Elijah. No, this is the first fruit of the new creation, the beginning of the new age, whose outpost is the church. God's invasion, beachhead, incursion into history, the divine d-day is announced today
It is in this vein, 60 years after the first Easter, that our fourth Gospel writer preaches. All the aforementioned, bodily resurrection, he receives and assumes. But he has other fish to fry, morally spiritual fish to fry. For the author of John, the accounts today of absence and presence have become moral stories. Directions for some to believe and go home, for others to recognize and say something. There is a "finesse" to venerable memory that, in its delicate lightness, touches truth more truly than younger recollection. Johns shows us some of this kind of "finesse". Some historians avoid an historic, that is bodily, or mystically vocal resurrection, because they focus on causation. Resurrection is not a historical category in the general sense. Philosophers, sociologists, scientists, cannot fathom resurrection, because it challenges the basic categories of their work. Which it does. Many others, avoid resurrection for another reason, the primary reason for the rejection of the Gospel in any case. Resurrection creates responsibility. If we are all merely creatures of biology, sociology and history, conditions over which we have no control and upon which we have no influence, then we are not free and therefore we are not responsible. We are not subjects. There is a reassuring side to this thought. While we receive no praise, we also avoid any blame. Nothing much changes anyway. Our conditions cause our behavior. "I really do not want to go to church because I know at some point somebody will ask me to do something."
But conditions are not, necessarily, causes. Our sinful human condition is not necessarily a warrant for ongoing sin. Our mortal human condition is not ultimately an unalterable death knell. Easter means forgiveness and heaven!
Contrary to historical determinism, in the historic teaching of the church, on resurrection, the opposite is true. God has freely acted in raising Jesus, and has thus opened the way for response. We are free to respond. And there is the rub.
It is not, finally, we who have the power to question the resurrection. It is the resurrection that questions us.
"Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going."
Thomas said to him, "Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?"
Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him."
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
Sunday
April 30
The Bach Experience- April 30, 2023
By Marsh Chapel
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RAH: The name of God's act is resurrection. Without it our faith is in vain and we are still in our sins, trapped, enslaved, the creatures of various conditions beyond our control or understanding that steal our freedom, and so our humanity. More. Without resurrection there is no response, because there is no responsibility at all. But with resurrection there is joy, there is freedom, and there is response.
John 10 today shows us the fullness of emptiness, presence in absence. John has always more than one opponent or contestant. He is fighting always on two fronts. So much for tradition, so much for culture. So much for depth, so much for breadth. So much for Judaism, so much for Gnosticism. So much for church and so much for community. So much for memory, so much for experience. John contrasts the freedom of Christ with fragile, formulaic faith. Things do not always fit into little boxes. The Hurricane winds of change, the reaches of pandemic and post pandemic, say, rearrange every manner of dwelling.
The Gospel of John, more than any other ancient Christian writing, and in odd contrast to its prevalent misunderstanding abroad today, knew the necessity of nimble engagement of current experience, and the saving capacity to change, in the face of new circumstances. The community of this Gospel could do so because they had experienced the Shepherd, present, ‘here’, here and now. In distress, we hold onto divine presence, we hold onto the Shepherd– hic et nunc. Speaking, and hearing. They found that in speaking of the Shepherd: ‘he is here’. ‘I am…’ That is all, still, we have, the voice. Utterance. ‘I am…’ The ‘here’ is in the hearing. Can you hear that? It begs to be heard, here. Come in and go out and find pasture. A resurrection moment.
Which may bring us to the Cantata this morning, a joyful, even jolly, happy piece, befitting its Christmas birth, and also embracing our Easter rebirth. Mark this day! So shouts the Cantata, and so it reminds us of the precious gift that is every one day. Dr. Jarrett, how today does the music shape, form, mold and teach us?
SAJ: The name of God’s act is Resurrection. And what is resurrection? Rebirth, renewal. The chance to grow. The chance to grow again. This is the Grace of God, freely given. This last Sunday of April, a gentle rain falls outside, nourishing the earth’s annual rebirth. The rain falls freely to the earth, just as God’s grace. Freely given.
By God’s grace, woman and man were created in a garden long ago. And by God’s grace, he created them free, and free they have remained. Freed daily to choose Grace. What would you choose?
God’s grace revealed anew in a Bethlehem manger, a second Adam: Light and life to all he brings, ris’n with healing in his wings. Mild he lays his Glory by, born that we no more may die, born to raise the sons of earth, born to give them second birth.
The name of God’s act is Resurrection. Second Birth, a covenant renewed. Verbum caro factum est et habitavit in nobis. The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. Will you follow him? Will you choose God’s grace?
Grace is the central theme of Bach’s Christmas cantata written in Weimar in 1714. “For the dawning radiance reveals itself to you as the light of grace.”
“Let us then ever trust in Him and build upon His grace.”
“May we ever walk in grace.”
As with the two fronts of John’s Gospel, so too, our cantata embraces the paradox of God’s majesty clad in the humility of the manger; our Salvation born of a lowly Virgin, homage paid by the Shepherds. And in the fullness of time, our Prince of Peace, will arrive in Jerusalem not on a mighty steed, but a humble donkey. Ride on, King Jesus! “Ride on in majesty! In lowly pomp ride on to die; bow thy meek head to mortal pain, then take, O God, thy power and reign.”
The name of God’s act is Resurrection. A saving Grace. A healing Grace. Freely given, that we might be freed of sin and death. Christians, etch this day in metal and marble stone. Mark this day. Mark this day, for God’s grace. Will you choose God’s grace, will you embrace it?
How will you respond to cynicism? Negativity? Hopelessness? Fear? Will you simply acknowledge? Why not “Yes, and . . .” Choose it, yes, and proclaim it. Freely given that we might be free. So Christian, Mark this day. Choose Grace. Choose Resurrection. Proclaim Renewal. Live in Resurrection.
Soar we now where Christ has led, Following our exalted Head,
Made like him, like him we rise,
Ours the cross, the grace, the skies.
Alleluia. Alleulia.
RAH: As one for whom Christ died, and for whom God has raised him from the dead, now in the hearing of this good news, you have responsibility. You are free. You have the power to respond. Our past has been forgiven and our future has been opened (Christ has overcome sin and death). But that leaves you holding the bag, if not the burial cloth. Ability to response, response-ability, is forever set loose on Easter.
I heard again our own Inner Strength Gospel Choir, in their 50th anniversary celebrations and fellowship and concert this weekend, in their honoring of our own Herb Jones in 20 years of leadership, and their response and responsibility to one another, over decades, and to faith welling up from that resurrection ‘inner strength’. Mark this day!
I talked with a young couple not long ago, just after their son was born. Early in the morning the contractions began. Panting and blowing and praying and waiting, the birth progressed. Suddenly-miracle! - ruddy and pink and crying and blinking there appeared a new born. You can revisit that moment, that sense of the miraculous. Mark this day!
I remember devotions in a meeting, given by a young man who has a telescope. When he was nine his neighbor taught him about the heavens. On a clear night he would call over next door, "Mikey come on out. I've got my scope. It's clear. Let's listen to the stars." Listen to the stars…Mark this day!
I read Isaiah Berlin on his life mission. "Collisions, even if they cannot be avoided, can be softened. Claims can be balanced, compromises can be reached; in concrete situations not every claim is of equal force: so much liberty, so much equality; so much for sharp moral condemnation, and so much for understanding a given human situation; so much for the full force of law, and so much for the prerogative of mercy; for feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, healing the sick, sheltering the homeless. Priorities, never final and absolute, must be established." Is there a time in history in which, we would have been more receptive to the mission of softening collisions? Mark this day!
I hear the voice of Harry Belafonte, bringing us southern charms, warm breezes, music for dancing and dreaming, a voice for the ages, now given over to heavenly rest, to joy, to resurrection. Mark this day!
Therefor let us ever trust Him
And build upon his Grace
For He has bestowed upon us
What now delights us forever
-Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music
Sunday
April 16
After Ten Years
By Marsh Chapel
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Our shared faith provides a particular kind of memory, a powerful kind of prayer, and a persistent kind of love as hallmarks of Easter morning. Do they mark your life? Do memory, prayer and clothe life for you?
The gospel is resurrection in memory, in prayer, and in love. What empty space, what unoccupied tomb, abides in your life for these three, and the greatest of these—love?
We set forth to do the work of facing grief with grace, failure with faith, hurt with hope, and death with dignity. And thee? Is that work begun, continued, or completed? The Word brings you life, uplift, a lift for living, even into the teeth of death, so you may face, face down, and live down death.
Death makes us mortal. Facing death makes us human. The last enemy destroyed is death. We all, finally, shuffle off this mortal coil… God is at work in the world to make and keep human life human. (J Bennett).
Seek ‘the Living One’, He who is more alive than all life, whose life is the marrow of being alive. Why do you seek the Living One (ton zonta)—a title perhaps, a Person, for sure, an announcement of Christ, crucified and risen. All appearances to the contrary notwithstanding…
‘The marks of the new age are present hidden in the old age. At the juncture of the ages the marks of the resurrection are hidden and revealed in the cross of the disciple’s daily death, and only there…this is what the turn of the ages means, that life is manifested in death’ (JL Martyn, of blessed memory, in 1967, Epistemology at the Turn of the Ages).
We need not over-preach. We still walk by faith not by sight. We still see in a mirror, dimly. We still have this treasure in earthen vessels. We still hope for what we do not see. The resurrection follows, but not replace the cross.
Paul gives no indication that he is familiar with the doctrine of the empty tomb. There is not the remotest reference to it in any of his letters, and his conviction that the resurrection body is not the body of this flesh but a spiritual body waiting for the soul of man in heaven makes it improbable that he would have found it congenial (Gilmour, IB, loc. cit.)
Grace comes with the morning, every morning. So walk with the women, walk with me too, let us walk together through the Gospel in sermon. And if you get done with the sermon before the sermon gets done, if you are finished with it before I am, have no fear, do not worry. Just wait a bit, and I will catch up with you! Some of you will arise inspired, and some of you will awake refreshed, and both outcomes are worthy outcomes!
We do not know what a day will bring. True this is of every day, but truer of some days than others. Focus for a moment on the ‘gravest’ of days you have known. Someday I would like to hear of it.
Patriots’ Day 2013 was such a day, 10 years ago. We learned first hand in this neighborhood about the visitation of death, tragically known again in Brussels and around the globe this week. Spelled D…E…A…T…H. Not your imaginary friend, but an equally omni-present invisible enemy…
That Monday began with brunch and celebration, and ended with terror, and needless slaughter and (humanly speaking) unforgivable horror. Our staff opened the chapel later for the throngs walking, T-less, by. Water, refreshment, prayer, counsel, they gave. One runner came very cold and was shrouded with a clergy gown, all we had to offer, a shepherd’s outfit. What a week. Tuesday brought us to the plaza, come evening, in vigil, to honor and reflect. Wednesday, in this chapel, and also at other hours in other settings, gathered us for ordered worship, prayer, music, liturgy, Eucharist and sermon. Thursday we heard President Obama, on a familiar theme, ‘running the race set before us’. Friday at home we watched televised news. Saturday we listened for the musical succor of Handel’s beautiful Messiah, right here. The Monday next we gathered again for a memorial service, for our deceased BU student, Lu Lingzi.
Death makes us mortal. Facing death makes us human.
You remember death. Your neighbor. Your hourly companion. You spell his or her name D…E…A…T…H. Easter morning is about intimations of life, the Living One outlasting death. Paul: As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. Behold: a glimmer of light in the dark, a rumor of life in death, an angel reclining in the tomb.
Memory gives us life.
If there has been ever an age that more needed better memory than ours, I know not what it would have been. Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it. The past is not dead, it is not even past (Faulkner, whom I have been re-reading this year)
During that week journalists from around the globe contacted us, and others, across the university. Many, perhaps most, called or wrote from Asia. Some needed commentary for radio news or other newscasts. The main newspapers across the country also sent reporters.
On Wednesday, the office took a call from the Philadelphia Enquirer. Could someone meet their man and his photographer at the steps of the chapel, to help convey something of the nightly vigils, services and informal prayers of the week. We picked a mid-afternoon hour. In the April sunlight the interview began. Suddenly the photographer dropped his camera and shouted: Bob. Bob. Bob. His name is Clem Murray, a high school classmate and friend. He and his girlfriend Mimi Sinopoli were the ‘class couple’ because they were the most beautiful couple, a truly stunning twosome. I had seen neither for forty years (1972-2013). I had heard that they married in college. Somehow, he recognized enough of my former self, hidden behind the current condition of my condition, and recognized my name. He let go of the camera for a hug. We finished the interview and photo. I turned then as they were going to ask, ‘So how is Mimi?’ You only know the really awkward moments too late. They come up after you, like alligators out of the Florida swamp. Clem said nothing. He didn’t need to. I could see what he was holding back in his face and eyes. He just shook his head and shook. “Two years ago she died of cancer”. In the midst of life we are in death, every moment. All I could see of her was a white graduation gown, a little cap and tassle. Three decades of marriage, three children, all things bright and beautiful, and then a malignancy unto death. Clem waved goodbye. A kairos, not a chronos moment…
We held, together, a memory of life, that made life, that gave life, that made alive. In the very presence of death. It was a resurrection memory. A living memory takes you out of the present and into a living past. It was a resurrection memory. And perhaps the most powerful personal conversation I have known.
Marcel Proust with his madeleine moment teaches us best: a single minute released from the chronological order of time has re-created in us the human being similarly released…situated outside the scope of time, what could one fear from the future...(these are) resurrections of the past (Proust, RTP, II, 992, 996).
Memory gives us life.
Prayer gives us life.
A week after the Marathon, you may remember, we memorialized our student, Lu Lingzi. This service was held, as had been the memorial for President John Silber the autumn before, in the George Sherman Union. Two thousand attended, with an unknown number around the globe watching and listening by cyber cast. The service proceeded, word and music, after careful attention and planning by musicians and clergy. We heard the Gospel of Mark and the Analects of Confucius. We listened to instrumental and choral music. We grieved, remembered, accepted, and affirmed, together. The family, eighteen or so, and dressed in black, sat in the front row. As the service ended, from the next row, I could see and hear a susurration along the family pew. They then were meant to move to the gathering and greeting room, but no one stood. Further conversation moved up and down the row, in a language I could not of course understand. I feared: have we forgotten a eulogy, or left out a reading, or skipped over an anthem? No. It was something else. After a moment, the family, dressed in black stood as one, moved as one, turned as one, and faced the congregation and the world. A long quiet ensued. Then, as one, they bowed at the waist, and held the bow. To honor the gathering, to honor the moment, to honor the life, to honor Life, they bowed, in silence. It is the most powerful liturgical moment I have ever known. It was a resurrection prayer. And it is perhaps the most powerful liturgical moment I have seen.
‘Different are the languages of prayer, but the tears are all the same’ (A Heschel). We should repeat this three times a day.
Prayer gives us life. Prayer is a mode of existential gratitude.
Love gives us life.
The next Sunday, April 28, turned out to be a nice, warm early spring day. As the sun came up, we looked forward to a day of rest and worship, a chance for a return to normal.
About 1 hour before the Sunday service, our chaplain came in to the office to say, ‘We have another one’. It took me some moment to understand and internalize the fact of another death. She had died tragically in a fire, caught in an upper room. Her mother would be coming up from NYC on the bus later that evening. The police would have informed her of her daughter’s death. Our Dean of Students, Kenn Elmore, and his associate and I planned to meet the bus. That evening we awaited a delayed Greyhound, talking a bit about the week past. We pondered how best to greet the grieving mom. It was decided I would meet the bus, and greet her as she came down the steps, to offer our heart felt condolences, and start the trek over to the hotel. The noise of the terminal, the lateness of the hour, the long weeks of terror and loss, and the approximate presence of death itself settled on us, and gave us that quiet of the soul that sometimes overtakes us.
In the bus rolled. The mother came down the steps carrying a beautifully decorated box, holding it with both hands.
“I want to greet you for the University and express our deepest sympathy and heart felt concern” I said.
She replied, “Where is my daughter? What hospital is she in? Please take me to her, so I can see her and talk with her. I want to go and see her. Where is she? How is she doing? I brought a rice cake. See. In the box. It is her favorite. Rice cake. I know it will make her feel better.”
Honestly, at every phrase I tried to say, with honesty and kindness, that her daughter had in fact died the night before, caught in an awful fire. Apparently she did not understand the police, or they did not speak clearly, or someone else in the family took the call. I tried everything. But she could not understand, or could not hear, until, at last, she looked up and hard and asked, ‘You mean…she…is dead?’ Yes.
There is a phrase in the Christmas gospel about Rachel weeping for her children. That Bus Terminal echoed with the chilling, haunting, painful cries of a mother who rightly could not and would not be consoled, as Rachel could not. The reverberation of her sobbing across that urban nighttime cacophony I can hear still. Nothing I said helped. Nothing I did helped. Nothing I could offer her could she receive. We sat on a bench, the wailing stronger still, the cake and box on the floor, the gathered friends lost in grief. Then she stiffened, her arm in mine becoming taut and cold. Perhaps she was going into shock. Everything I tried—counsel, prayer, listening, scripture, all—was of no avail.
Then from her other side Dean Elmore simply surrounded, enfolded her. He put all of his body and arms all around her, as she wailed and stiffened. He held her. He rocked her. He embraced her. And little by little, sob by sob, she began to relax. And little by little, breath by breath, she began to loosen up. And little by little, held tight, she came through it. Her lament lessened, her limbs loosened. Out up from the tomb she came. A physical unspoken compassion brought her through, from death to life. It was a resurrection love, compassion, embrace, grace, freedom, care, acceptance, mercy, pardon, peace, inclusion. It was a resurrection love. And it is perhaps the most powerful very public, pastoral ministry I have witnessed.
Unamuno: warmth, warmth, warmth; we are dying of cold not of darkness; it is not the night that kills, it is the frost.
Six years, at the time of our dad’s death, Elie Wiesel sent a note. It was love physical, compassionate and personal, and as with all resurrection love it made a difference. It concluded: we have a saying in our tradition, ‘may you be spared another further hardship’.
Love gives us life.
Memory. Prayer. Love.
‘The marks of the new age are present hidden in the old age …this is what the turn of the ages means, that life is manifested in death’ (JL Martyn, Epistemology at the Turn of the Ages).
Easter, this season, is memory, prayer and love, creation, redemption, sanctification, Father, Son, Spirit, life in death. And life in death holds out a promise of something grander still, life after death.
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
Sunday
April 9
Let the Glory Out- Easter 2023
By Marsh Chapel
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Defeat may serve as well as victory
To shake the soul and let the glory out. (E Markham).
Holy Week Poem
After the falsehood of Palm Sunday. After the shadows of Tenebrae. After the betrayal of Maundy Thursday. After the torture of Good Friday. After the silence, the emptiness, of Easter Vigil. Now. Come Sunday. Come Easter Sunday…The Lord is Risen! He is risen indeed.
But let us take care in our comprehension of our intention of our inspiration for our consideration of our inclination toward our apprehension of resurrection. On this glorious day. The resurrection follows but does not replace the cross. As the poet wrote:
…Defeat may serve as well as victory, to shake the soul and let the glory out…
My predecessor Dean Robert Cummings Neville, who preached beautifully last evening and is with us this morning, bequeathed me in 2006 the former desk of the former—fourth—President of Boston University, Daniel Marsh, now the desk for the Dean of Marsh Chapel. Rectangular, 4’by 2’, the desk has only two drawers, one filled with hand written notes of thanks, encouragement, rejoinder, critique and love; the other one filled with a potpourri of desk type things—pen, calculator, tape, scissors, all. In the back corner are pocket sized books. I was flying to meet our son for his birthday, an annual mid-winter joy, and wanted a very small gift for him, meaningful but fit for flying without adding to him a burden going home. Somehow President Marsh’s desk beckoned. In the back corner I found an old pocket collection of prayers and poems, which had been my dad’s during his early days as a military chaplain, given to him in 1958 by the Methodist minister in Denver Colorado. It seemed perfect for our son’s birthday, and portable, and a further connection to his grandfather. And a kind of binding of the generations, which becomes more important, as the years progress.
Looking through the book, on route to our birthday celebration, I was startled by a poem by Edward Markham. Memory does not afford how, originally, I came to know the poem. Markham was a faithful social activist, poet laureate of Oregon, who died in 1940, and best known for his social gospel poem, The Man with the Hoe. But this prayer book poem, short and terse, somehow brought clouded memory, somehow past connection:
Defeat may serve as well as victory
To shake the soul and let the glory out…
Only the soul that knows the mighty grief
Can know the mighty rapture,
Sorrows come
To stretch out spaces in the heart for joy.
Easter is the victorious faith to live on, to struggle on, in the aftermath of defeat. It is the music lesson that teaches you to sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land. So, our exiled Jewish forebears wept, but remembered, cried aloud, but stayed true, gave gruesome lament, but still, but yet, held on, with the faith and power together to live with and through defeat:
By the rivers of Babylon—
there we sat down, and there we wept…
when we remembered Zion.
and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How could we sing the Lord’s song
in a foreign land?
Hear Good News!
God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.
Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his mercy endures forever.
If you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.
(Fear not for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here. He is risen as he said.)
“One Easter I went with my grandfather to a small Presbyterian church in northern Idaho where I heard a sermon on the discrepancies in the gospel accounts of the resurrection…I was a young child… yet I remember that sermon…I can imagine myself that primal Easter, restive at my grandfather’s elbow, pushing my nickels and dimes of collection money into the tips of my gloves…memorably forbidden to remove my hat…It seems to me I felt God as a presence before I had a name for him…I was aware to the point of alarm of a vast energy of intention all around me…and I thought everyone else must also be aware of it…Only in church did I hear experience like mine acknowledged, in all those strange narratives, read and expounded…”(The Death of Adam, 227-229, Marilynne Robinson)
From mid-March on, the Markham poem haunted. And as Holy Week approached, more so still. More so this week. After…the falsehood of Palm Sunday. After the shadows of Tenebrae. After the betrayal of Maundy Thursday. After the torture of Good Friday. After the silence, the emptiness, of Holy Saturday. Now.
I believe in the resurrection, both its history and its mystery. But to convey its power as well as its meaning, the church has been trying to do for 2,000 years, come Easter, come Sunday. Resurrection is resurrection…of the dead, from the dead. Yet, the reality of death in all its masks never, ever leaves us, and should not be left at the door come Easter, for the sake of the preaching of the resurrection itself. The resurrection follows but…does not replace…the cross. Defeat may serve as well as victory, to shake the soul, and let the glory out.
Maybe that is particularly stunning and gracious news for a culture that bows the knees at victory, even when the facts show defeat.
Betrayal, disrespect, ingratitude…these things are real and are not washed away, not even at Easter. Sin, death, meaninglessness…these things are lasting and are not erased not even at Easter.
To repeat: Easter is not mere victory. Easter is the victorious power to live with defeat. Easter is not mere victory. Easter is the victorious faith to live on, to struggle on, in the aftermath of defeat. Easter is the music lesson that teaches us to sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land.
Your mother said, ‘when life gives lemons, make lemonade’. She did not mean that lemons are sweet. They aren’t.
When Martin Neimoller cried out… First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me…his cry was an honest lament of faithlessness, of utter defeat, amid a faithful call to justice. He did not thereby claim that injustice had ended, or would. It abides.
Robert F. Kennedy stood in the rain in Indianapolis, 55 years ago, to speak with tragic honesty about the murder of Martin Luther King: My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: "In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." He did not forecast the coming of the kingdom in short order. And it did not come, and King’s death presaged his own two months later.
John Fetterman of Pennsylvania checked himself into the hospital this winter for depression, and is returning to life. He does not thereby deny the horrid anxiety and loneliness of despond. It remains. Anxiety and depression and alienation and disconnection remain, and must be battled in resurrection spirit.
Strangely, after days, the memory of where we may first have heard the poem, or a snippet of it, emerged. From December 2000. Al Gore indirectly cited Markham’s poem 23 years ago after the drama of dangling chads and the 566-vote loss of the Presidency in 2000, mentioning that his own father had often cited it. That must have been part of my dim memory of the verse. He did not deny the hurt in defeat. He had the greater motive: to sense in defeat a portal to glory, and in his case it came, over time, in his work, early work, even early prophetic work, on climate. In the winter of 2008, along with Professor Peter Berger, of blessed memory, Marsh Chapel hosted a screening of Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth. He did not mean that political dishonesty had ended. It hadn’t.
We have all known defeats, whether in relationship, in illness, in acceptances, in elections, in selections, in trusts, in, well, in life. Yet they have a far side beyond all the trouble. After one defeat, with grace and love, a mentor sent a note saying, ‘You were not denied…you were spared. Not denied but spared’.
And yet, in all these moments, for all their trial, there was…what shall we call it? Call it resurrection.
Easter is the unkillable possibility of the Christian life, the power and empowerment of authentic human life, the un-maskable potential in every space and every place, for love. Easter is the resurrection of possibility.
In a strange resurrection way, those who have given us our greatest blessings, our lasting victories, have done so knowing in full the lasting sting of defeat, in our own past.
Those who gave us Boston University in 1839.
Those who gave us the Chautauqua movement in the 1870’s.
Those who gave up the names and properties of their own denominations in Canada to forge with others the United Church there in 1925.
Those who gathered the bruised and beaten religious survivors of World War II, and created the World Council of Churches in 1948.
Those who kindled the student movement of the 1950’s.
Those who welcomed the globe into the ‘aggiornamento’ of Vatican II in 1963.
Their faithfulness in and through suffering gave life, to many, and to you and me. Without those five movements we would not be here today, not in this shape anyway.
One friend brought an Easter memory this week:
“As I conducted the Good Friday Communion Service in (one) stark setting, I always noticed that the scent of the Easter lilies (always delivered Friday morning) drifted across the hallway into the sanctuary. What marvelous symbolism! While looking at the veiled cross and stark communion table, worshippers could not avoid breathing in a sweet reminder of Our Lord’s victory over tragedy and death.
Over the years, I have been privileged to know a good many people who have been able to sense Easter during the Good Friday’s of their lives, and were therefore enabled to move through dark days with dignity and hope. Thank God for the scent of Easter!” (The Rev. Gordon Knapp).
Sursum Corda! Hear the Easter Gospel! ‘Defeat may serve as well as victory
To shake the soul, and let the glory out’!
In the words of the Canadian Creed:
We believe in God:
who has created and is creating,
who has come in Jesus,
the Word made flesh,
to reconcile and make new,
who works in us and others
by the Spirit.
We trust in God.
We are called to be the Church:
to celebrate God’s presence,
to live with respect in Creation,
to love and serve others,
to seek justice and resist evil,
to proclaim Jesus, crucified and risen,
our judge and our hope.
In life, in death, in life beyond death,
God is with us.
We are not alone.
Thanks be to God.
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
Sunday
April 2
Going Public- Palm Sunday 2023
By Marsh Chapel
Click here to hear the full service
Click here to hear just the sermon
Is it time to go public?
Look around at the parade. A throng has gathered, to worship the Christ. Some are holding palm branches, and waving them. There are musicians, lifting voice and heart in praise. Children have their place as well.
We cannot see everything clearly. Is he riding one beast (Mark\Luke) or two at once (Matthew)? Was the parade his choice, or did we just come of our own volition? What is the point of this public display, this pyrrhic victory when we can foresee Friday? Why was transportation left to the last minute—doesn’t anybody plan anymore? Everything is in a cocked hat, at sixes and sevens, in confusion.
Is this really a time to go public?
Jesus meets us today in the public realm, in the city, in the heart of our actual life, smack in the middle of it all. Picture his entrance into Jerusalem—amid confusion, riding on the humblest beast, acclaimed by those who will later crucify him, a lone figure, in a small city, in a forgotten time. Humble is his public appearance.
“He who believes in Christ must find riches in poverty, honor in dishonor, joy in sorrow, life in death, and hold fast to them in that faith which clings to the Word and expects such things.” (Luther). repeat
And today? In our cities of urban might, air travel, commuter congestion, teeming business, overweening human achievement—utterly humble in comparison is the Christ of Bethpage, carried on a donkey, who appears with nothing to commend himself—except the preaching of his Word. Nothing to support him. Except. Preaching. Nothing but the preaching of the Word.
It is risky to go public.
For several summers as a lifeguard in far off land and a far- away time, along a beautiful long glacially cut Finger Lake, I watched boys and girls at summer camp meet and get acquainted and then become friends. And then sometimes, well, become more than friends. And then, sometimes with a mixture of reluctance, dread, excitement and worry they would declare their attachment and hold hands and go public. We see the same thing on an afternoon walk at Boston University, along Commonwealth Avenue in the springtime. Hand in hand, two by two, making a statement, going public, going public, going public. A risky business.
Going public is a risky business. Going public is risky.
This Lent we have considered faith and life. We have learned from the cautions of Augustine of Hippo:
He taught us, face God by fully facing yourselves.
He taught us, love God with fierce, physical, muscled, sensuous, jealous, eager, personal love.
He taught us, you are what you read.
He taught us, freedom of the will requires the freeing of the will.
He taught us, the city of God is not merely the city of man with the volume turned up. It is history and mystery. If you can depart college with some appreciation for both, the years will not have been in vain.
Going public with the gospel of love and forgiveness is risky business. Going public with concerns about our time is risky business. Going public about one’s identity and sexuality is risky business. Going public about death is risky business. Private struggles can be hard enough. Think what happens when they become public.
Long ago in another setting, twenty-five years ago, we started broadcasting our worship service on a small radio station, and had our first written response, some weeks later, two pages of kind eloquence, penned
longhand. I grant this one did not expand our congregation immediately because he wrote from the County Jail. He was in the slammer, the hoosegow, the calaboose, the pokey, the big house, the gray bar hotel, in stir, up the river, doing time, behind bars, jailed, imprisoned—but… aren’t we all, one way or another. Aren’t we all to some measure, doing time in our own private self-made cell block? It’s risky to go public. You just don’t know who might respond, do you?
An energetic couple wants to expand their business. So, they place their stock for public purchase to raise the capital they need, the IPO goes out on Monday and they are capitalized by Friday—and thereby risk their control of the company, their future solvency, their own wellbeing. Is it time to go public, and take a measure of risk?
Forty years ago, a phone call came to the parsonage at 2am. A young father of four, a local businessman, was closing up his restaurant business for the night and wanted to talk. The two men met at 2:30am in the church itself, right down in the front of the sanctuary. He was as agitated a man as you have seen before or since. He asked to smoke, and, anxious and confused himself, the pastor allowed it. He was known in the church board meetings—he arrived late and spoke loudly. Though he was one of the leaders, he was a private person. But that night he decided to go public with his besetting problem. It was destroying his business and his health. That night he risked going public, and so crossed from death to life. He spoke to somebody. He confessed. He went public. And, by grace, he found a new and good life. He became a new man. Saved. But it took the risk of speaking, of self-disclosure, of, well…going public.
Meanwhile, back at the Mount of Olives, Jesus is riding through his time and ours. He rides, and, as he rides, he evokes, then and now, a spirit of mystery, holiness, awe, wonder and heartfelt hosannas. Why does he risk the public hour? Will he risk death, rather than be untrue to his calling? Why does he appeal to a public that will not hear? Why does he approach religious leaders who will not listen? Even today, the public realm does not need to recognize him, if he is inconvenient. He is still on the donkey today. Nobody has to go to church. It’s not like jury duty, where once every three years you get summoned. No. Nobody is required to go to church. But everybody is invited. Not required, but invited.
Is this any time to go public?
Have we deeply understood the meaning of this morning? God has gone public today, with a lavish and happy love. God has gone public today, coming and coming, standing in the heart of life arms wide and saying: “Here I am. Love me.” God has gone public---behold the risk, behold the risk of rejection, behold the danger, behold the cost, behold the power, behold the glory, behold the Living Christ!—gone public in order to redeem us. This is a personal, public appearance. This is Palm Sunday.
God does not holler advice from a comfortable distance.
God does not wage war by pressing buttons and drinking vodka as death arrives by missile hours away.
God does not even stay sheltered in the comfortable confines of a religious tradition. God does not depend on our religious traditions, as meaningful as they may be. Not on Palm Sunday. On Palm Sunday, God goes public.
God gives us freedom from fear, freedom from death, freedom from slavery to time, freedom from identity worries, freedom from guilt, freedom from a joyless heavy conscience. And what one of us would not want what God gives—a happy heart, a glad face, a clear conscience? Today, in Jerusalem, God goes public.
And in Boston, so may we, beginning today.
We have been willing to attend the concert but not buy the series. We have been willing to audit the course but not register and be graded. We have been willing to sit in the stands but not put on the uniform. We have been willing to hear the sermon but not to live it, as Justice Holmes did and remember the sermon all week with five additional words: “I applied it to myself.” We have been willing to give but not tithe, greet but not welcome, ATTEND BUT NOT INVITE. Until today.
When I listen to the congregation sing, and Justin play and Scott’s choir offer praise, and the Thurman choir bring joy, and my colleagues read and pray, and this congregation raise hymns…When I look at this magnificent sanctuary and its stained glass and beautiful appointments and majestic transcendent arches…When I feel the spirit of joyful service and earnest learning that attend our meetings on the Lord’s Day…When I think of those we have buried these past three years, and how
they lived and died to represent the heart of the gospel and the heart of this Chapel….I have only one question: Why would a single seat be empty?
Today, we are on the verge of going public. You can feel it. You are ready, or nearly so, and Matthew 21 gives you a nudge.
I think it has to do with the slightest word in the lesson from Matthew: “your”. “Behold your king is coming to you, humble and mounted on an ass.” Your. Your. Your. There comes a time when we suddenly realize something. Faith becomes personal. This confused parade… is for you. This humbled King rides…for you. This week of life and death and life beyond death is…for you. When your heart receives Jesus, then it is made strong, fearless, ready for every day and every night. And then you will go public. Not from compulsion. Not by compulsion. No. But with ease and grace. Faith bears fruit in good works of every kind.
Is it time to go public?
Hope that is seen is not hope. And faith that is merely private is not faith. When it come to faith, as with money, you only have what you give away. Here is the Palm Sunday Gospel: come to church next Sunday, Easter Sunday, going public. Come to Easter worship because the message of Palm Sunday has sunk in. Come to Easter service because you have happily and genuinely invited someone else to come, too, and you promised to be here to greet them. Christ has come to us in public that we may go public for others. Faith is always and forever faith shared.
Is it time to go public? Then—go. Jesus has come to us, we can go public too. How? Not with drama. No drama needed. No drama required. But going public means doing so in a genuine easy way that comes to hand. Through a note, a prayer, a phone call, a curbside conversation, a watercooler suggestion. Like our friends the Laubach family used to say of literacy, each one reach one. In faith, let…Each one reach one. Each one reach one. Each one reach one. You need not worry about the result. God will take care of that. But to ride into Jerusalem, the Lord needs a donkey or two, a colt or two, the humbler the better.
Is it time to go public?
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
Sunday
March 26
Augustine: City of God
By Marsh Chapel
Click here to hear the full service
Click here to hear just the sermon
Recently, it may have happened, that one friend stopped another on Marsh Plaza, Lent 2023, just in front of the sermon sign board. To his friend he said, Have you heard Hill’s last sermon on Augustine? Not pausing for more than split second, the friend replied, I sure hope so! I really do hope so! With gladness, let us report you have only 19 minutes before that hope is fulfilled.
Regarding hope, as it happens, Augustine himself, in his magnum opus, The City of God, had much to say: “As, therefore, we are saved, so we are made happy by hope. And as we do not as yet possess a present, but look for a future salvation, so is it with our happiness, and this “with patience;” for we are encompassed with evils, which we ought patiently to endure, until we come to the ineffable enjoyment of unmixed good; for there shall be no longer anything to endure.” (Bk 19, Ch 4). As the Visigoths finished the sacking of Rome in 410ce, and then moved on to the rest of the Empire, Augustine wrote (413-422) this magisterial teaching about the future, about history, about good and evil, about the city of God, the heavenly city, in contest with the city of ‘man’, the earthly city. As Augustine moved on from his earlier interests in Plato (‘the individual teacher does not make the truth, he finds it) in Aristotle, Cicero, in the Manicheans, in the Neoplatonists, on conversion he began to immerse himself in the Holy Scripture, under the preaching of Ambrose, and his thought took on steadily and continuously the shape of a full biblical theology. (In our time, we sorely lack a full throated, liberal biblical theology: its lack is among other things at the very root of the fracturing, right now, of my beloved United Methodist Church). Our last Lenten sermon in conversation with Augustine is thus in conversation with his last work, lengthy work, work of a lifetime, The City of God: “Accordingly, two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self.” (Bk 14, Ch 28)
In Augustinian fashion, we come toward him, and with fervent desire we trust to the saving Gospel itself, this morning, through the blessed land of Holy Scripture, and Augustine’s prized favorite, the Gospel of John.
For the Gospel of John, allowed a meager few weeks interjection into our lectionary this month, by interruption of Matthew, is centrally, even solely, an announcement of presence, divine presence, the presence of God. Really only this theological, interpretative insight will make sense for you and me of John 11. In 90ad, 60 years after the cross, some in the Johannine community spoke in the voice of Jesus. Especially this is so in the ‘I Am’ sayings. If Jesus on earth did not say these things–who did? Answer: the Johannine prophet (s). The preacher in John 11 announces presence. I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live. You are a person of faith? Practice that presence. You are a Christian? Practice that presence. You are a Christian yearning for a faith amenable to culture and culture amenable to faith? Are you? Yes? Practice that presence. The ancient, troubled, community of the beloved disciple, that of John, has your back. Even—especially—in a virulent epoch, or even, as today, for us, in a post-virulent one, where the virus has not, yet, let go.
Remember, what carries Jesus to the cross, in the Gospel of John, is the raising of Lazarus from the dead. Not the cleansing of the temple, but the resurrection to life of Lazarus, in the Johannine narrative, brings the advent of the cross. Jesus is crucified, here, because he claims divinity, and embodies divinity, in this Gospel. This makes a bit of sense of the placement of this reading just before Holy Week, rather than just after. ‘No good deed goes unpunished’ does not capture the gravity and eternity of the moment, but it does give the average hearer a point of orientation to John 11. John Ashton wrote fiercely of this Gospel:
Conscious as they were of the continuing presence in their midst of the Glorified One, no wonder the community, or rather the evangelist who was its chief spokesman, smoothed out the rough edges of the traditions of the historical Jesus…(His portrait of Jesus) arose from his constant awareness, which he shared with members of his community, that they were living in the presence of the Glorified One. So dazzling was this glory that any memory of a less-than-glorious Christ was altogether eclipsed…(They) realized that the truth that they prized as the source of their new life was to be identified not (only) with the Jesus of history but with the risen and glorious Christ, and that this was a Christ free from all human weakness. The claims they made for him were at the heart of the new religion that soon came to be called Christianity (199) The Gospel of John and Christian Origins. The new religion that soon came to be called Christianity…
Ashton: The difference between John’s portrait of Christ and that of the Synoptists is best accounted for by the experience of the glorious Christ constantly present to him and his community (204) (The Gospel of John and Christian Origins). For the two basic historical problems of the New Testament are ancient cousins, first cousins to our two fundamental issues of salvation today. The first historical problem behind our 27 books, and pre-eminently embedded in John, is a form of dislocation—our shared condition March 2020—March 2023, dislocation–for John the movement away from his mother, his motherland, Judaism. How did a religious movement, founded by a Jew, born in Judea, embraced by 12 and 500 within Judaism, expanded by a Jewish Christian missionary become, within 100 years, entirely Greek? The books of the New Testament record in excruciating detail the development of this second identity, this coming of age, that came with the separation from mother religion.
The second historical problem underneath the Newer Testament is disappointment, the despair that gradually accompanied the delay, finally the cancellation, of Christ’s return, the delay of the parousia. Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet. Paul expected to be alive to see the advent of Christ. Gradually, though, the church confessed disappointment in its greatest immediate hope, the sudden cataclysm of the end.
These two problems, historical and fascinating, create our New Testament: the separation from Judaism and the delay of Christ’s return. In the fourth Gospel the two come together with great ferocity. What makes this matter so urgent for us is that these very two existential dilemmas—one of identity and one of imagination—are before every generation, including and especially our own. March, Lent 2023: how shall we live in faith? How do I become a real person? How do we weather lasting disappointment? How do I grow up? How do we become mature? What insight do I need, amid the truly harrowing struggles over identity, to become the woman or man I was meant to become? What imagination—what hope molded by courage—do we need to face down oour ennui, our sloth in imagination. More than any other document in ancient Christianity, John explored the first. More than any other document in Christianity, John faced the second. Both mean choice. Both bring us to the summit of freedom. Once every three years, interrupting Matthew, we hear the great passages—Nicodemus, the Samaritan Woman, the Blind Man, and, today Lazarus. Hear the Gospel, John 11: We…YOU!...have the freedom, a bit in contest with Augustine, to choose…and to move:
- From fear to love.
- From spiritual blindness to spiritual sight.
- From life to spirit.
- From isolation to community.
- From home to health.
- From rainbow to firmament.
- From control to freedom.
- From spiritual hunger to hungry spirituality.
- From nationalism to patriotism.
- From denominationalism to ecumenism.
- From death to life.
What we have experienced, endured since March 2020, now three years ago, may be as rugged and necessary a preparation as possible for Augustine’s last work, The City of God.
Here Augustine sets out his greatest hope, that what was hidden may become clear, what delighted not may become sweet…this belongs to the grace of God. He sees and foresees a lasting, perhaps interminable, conflict between two cities, one of love and one of self, one of heaven and one of earth, one of grace and one of sin, and, over time, for him, ne’er the twain shall meet.
Here Augustine--in the shadow of the goths ascendant it is hard to forget-- conveyed an increasingly dark view of the future, of the potential perils and calamities of human activity, long and very long before the splitting of the atom, long and long before the blood-soaked victims of modern weaponry today in Ukraine, long and long before the sudden advent of potential technological dangers in AI, long and long before the measured advances of climate change, long and long before the myriad consequences of social media, Augustine saw through a glass darkly: All human beings sin, some are afraid to correct the sins of others, God inflicts suffering on all to correct. “They are punished together, not because they have spent an equally corrupt life, but because the good as well as the wicked, though not equally with them, love this present life; while they ought to hold it cheap, that the wicked, being admonished and reformed by their example, might lay hold of life eternal.” (Bk1, Ch 9).
Here Augustine sets out his fullest theology of history, his greatest expression of hope: “But God foresaw also that by His grace a people would be called to adoption, and that they, being justified by the remission of their sins, would be united by the Holy Ghost to the holy angels in eternal peace, the last enemy, death, being destroyed; and He knew that this people would derive profit from the consideration that God had caused all men to be derived from one, for the sake of showing how highly He prizes unity in a multitude.” (Bk 21, Ch 22)
Yet, more emphatically, here Augustine severely doubts the capacity for human goodness, for the human being to do good. As Joseph Buttinger put it: For Augustine, God alone is the cause of every human movement toward good…Augustine pointed to the inescapable conditioning of all moral activity by the situation of the agent, outside of whose control are in general not only the presentation of the object, but also the kind of feeling that the presentation excites. Augustine found it increasingly difficult to leave room in his doctrine of grace for a genuinely free response on man’s part to the Spirit’s gift. (Encyclopedia Brittanica, vol. 14, Macropedia, 329—a priceless set, given me long ago, by a complete stranger). In that this pulpit diverges from him. It makes one wonder whether, as old age advanced, Augustine reverted or returned to his youthful sojourns with the Neoplatonists and Manicheans, his dualistic earlier loves. For them, as for the late Augustine, the human will is not efficient, but deficient.
Here Augustine presages what our fifth-generation personalist BU PhD Professor Lloyd Easton at Ohio Wesleyan, long ago reminded us of Karl Marx saying, history moves with iron necessity towards inevitable results. And George Santayana, at Harvard: those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it. And William Faulkner: The past is not dead. It is not even past. You may fear or dread ‘The City of God’ because of our fallibility, because of its length and inscrutability, and because of our pervasively human spiritual disability, evident, daily, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. Augustine, remembering the pear tree, would understand.
Our grandmother had a pear tree in her back yard, and long-stemmed pear picker, which at her death came my way. It was a beautiful tree, surrounded in memory by glad hours of her presence, her sense of presence. Augustine remembered a pear tree, not for a sense of presence, but for a sense of absence. For from his youth he carried the simple memory of boys shaking down a neighbors’ pear tree, not from need or hunger, but rather: For of what I stole I already had plenty, and I had no wish to enjoy the things I coveted by stealing, but only to enjoy the theft itself, and the sin…we took away an enormous quantity of pears, not to eat them ourselves, but simply to throw them to the pigs…our real pleasure consisted in doing something that was forbidden…the evil in me was foul, but I loved it. (Book II 4). We too know the shadow that shadowed Augustine all his days. Like Citizen Kane and ‘Rosebud’, his religious genius also carried an existential shadow, which is, on the one hand, his blessing, and on the other hand, his curse, for us; on one hand his arrow hitting the mark, and on the other his lasting mistake, his ‘noxious legacy to theology’ (Buttinger). One day on a Montreal sidewalk long ago, and just months before his own death, British Bishop and New Testament Scholar JAT Robinson said, to me, what lingers for me is the sense of shadow, the shadows that continue to stalk us. Shadows stalked Augustine too.
I take a slightly different message from my own experience of a pear tree. Our grandmother, a rather more modest Methodist one. It was a beautiful tree, surrounded in memory by glad hours of her presence, her sense of presence. Presence in daily goodness. Presence in humble service. Presence in enjoyment of family. Presence in a little harvest, a little fun, a little enjoyment of the very simplest of pleasures. I wish that Saint of Hippo, Augustine, had known her. Maybe in the great beyond they have met, and talked, and learned together. At least she did know, and use daily, his prayer, with which we began this Lenten series, and now with which we end it: Great art Thou O Lord, and greatly to be praised. Great is thy power, and thy wisdom is infinite. Thee would we praise without ceasing, for our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
Sunday
March 19
Augustine: Pelagius
By Marsh Chapel
Click here to hear the full service
Click here to hear just the sermon
*Due to the length of the worship service, the original text of this sermon was condensed. Therefore, the recorded sermon will differ from the text below.
John 9 is about dislocation. It is about the expulsion of a small group of Jewish Christians from a traditional synagogue. One word, 9:22, holds the whole gospel of the day, ‘out of the synagogue’. They were cast out of the synagogue, dislocated, a fearsome hurt now known by many directly, in illness, in separation, in isolation, in loneliness and dislocation. And known better, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear, by those of us who may just acquire a little more sympathy, a little more compassion, a little more care, for those in need, as we swirl through this season of need.
‘The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash’. Then I went and washed and received my sight.’
John 9 describes the healing of a man born blind, and the communal controversy surrounding that healing. Like the rest of the Gospel, this passage reports two layers of healing, of blindness, of community, and of controversy. On one hand, the passage remembers, perhaps by the aid of a source or as part of a source, a moment in the ministry of Jesus (30ce), in which a man is given sight. On the other hand, the passage announces the spiritual unshackling of a hero in the community (90ce), who bears witness to what Jesus has done for him, no matter the repercussions from others, from parents, from family, from community.
The preacher in the Johannine community of the late first century is telling the story of the Son of Man. To do so, he celebrates the courageous witness to healing, and the courageous endurance of expulsion, of a man born blind. Here, he says, is what I mean by faith. The story he uses comes, through un-trackable oral and written traditions, from 30ce. The story he tells comes from 90ce. Every character in the story has two roles. Jesus is both earthly rabbi and heavenly redeemer. The blind man is both historic patient and current hero. The family is from both Palestinian memory and diaspora synagogue. The opponents are both the contemporaries of Jesus and the nearby inhabitants of the synagogue, the Johannine community’s former home. When Jesus gives sight, Christ gives freedom. When the blind one is cured, the congregation sees truth. When the man is cast out of his synagogue, the community of the beloved disciple recognizes their own most recent expulsion. When others criticize Jesus, the synagogue is criticizing the church. When the healing story ends, the life of faith begins. His voice both addresses you and emanates from you. Not your voice, his is nonetheless…your voice.
John 9 illumines the central struggle of the community, their bitter spiritual itinerancy from the familiar confines of Christian Judaism, out into the unknown wilderness of Jewish Christianity. History and the history of religions bear manifold witness to this kind of crisis in communal identity, and the long hard trail of travel from primary to secondary identity. In retrospect, as a community gathers itself in its new setting (think of the pilgrims in Boston, the Mormons in Utah, the Cherokee in Oklahoma, and every entering class each autumn at Boston University) the story of the tearful trail itself becomes the heart of communal memory and imagination.
What is here unearthed in John 9 can also and readily be applied to the rest of the Gospel of John as well: to the wedding at Cana, to Nicodemus, to the woman at the well, to the healing on the water, to the feeding of the thousands, to the controversies with the Jews, to the raising of Lazarus, to the farewell discourse, to the trial and passion. All of these reflect the experience in dramatic interaction between the synagogue and John’s church. This includes, later, the mysterious figure of the Paraclete, the Spirit, who functions as Jesus’ eternal presence in the world, Jesus, God ‘striding on earth’ (Kasemann). In this way, the Paraclete himself creates the two level drama. Where the world is mono focal, and can see only the historical level of Jesus in history or only the theological level of Jesus in the witness of the Christian community, the Paraclete binds the two together. The Word dwelling among us, and our beholding his glory, are not past events only. They transpire in a two-level drama. They transpire both on the historical and contemporary levels, OR NOT AT ALL. Their transpiration on both levels is itself the good news, an overture to the rapturous discoveries of freedom in disappointment, grace in dislocation, and love in departure. Especially, in John 9, through dislocation. Tell me sometime about your worst lived dislocation.
Into our existential dislocations today strides this year’s Lenten conversation partner, Augustine of Hippo, in and through his own momentous conflict with Pelagius, a conflict let us say between Pelagius and the freedom of the will, and Augustine and freeing of the will, freedom vs. freeing. Our teacher Professor David Lotz, UTS 1976, guided us skillfully through Augustine’s conflict with Pelagius. One readily remembers the thrill of the lectures, the skill of the lecturer, and the chill of a new and challenging claim to truth. With gratitude I rely today on the abiding memory of his classes, and the scrawled penciled notes of his presentations. Take heart, BU teachers, lectures, well honed, live for decades, as do Dr. Lotz’s today
Pelagius’s biography is scarce. He was apparently a monk of either British or Irish origin, who appeared in Rome near the year 400ce, lecturing as a moral theologian. Pelagius was shocked by the overly pessimistic views of the human capacity for good, which he found prevalent in Rome at the time. Rather, he judged that human beings could know and do God’s will. His refrain was, Give what you command, Lord, and command what you will.
Pelagius insisted on human responsibility and moral choice. Such responsibility and such moral choice, inevitably entailed unconditional free will. Without freedom of the will, there can be no truly human responsibility, nor any serious moral choice. If sin is inevitable, he reasoned, then the nerve of moral responsibility is severed. Furthermore, both the Old and New Testaments (the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, Moses, Jesus) expect and command…perfection. So far, he sounds like a pretty good Methodist to me. And therein lies the problem.
Pelagius argued with vehemence that commands, and commandments, would not have been given, if they were not able to be followed, if they were not followable. That would be cruel and unusual. He further argued, here one could say like Immanuel Kant, that an ‘ought’ entails a ‘can’. If you ought to do it, then you can do it. Again, anything other would be cruel and unusual. The human being has the freedom to obey or to disobey the divine command(s). Posse peccare, posse non peccare, the ability to sin and not to sin (Augustine will later counter that this was true of Adam, but no longer true, not true of you and me). Even further, Pelagius rejects the idea that the human will has ‘an intrinsic bias toward wrong-doing…after the fall’. He, Pelagius, is thus a ‘creationist’, believing that the soul is immediately created by God at birth. He does admit that with the human creature there has come along, has come down over time, a ‘habit of disobedience’. There is no congenital evil, there is no congenital sin, in the child. Hence, for Pelagius, and now we come to the crux of the matter, the heart of the argument, the sacrament of baptism was a sanctification, but not a means of grace, not a means of regeneration.
We might jump in here to say that in the Empire wide argument that followed, Pelagius lost the day. He lost to…your friend and mine for Lent 2023, Augustine of Hippo. Why did Pelagius lose and Augustine win? The answer in part is that Augustine took to heart, took seriously, and made heartfelt and serious sense of…baptism. And to some further extent of…the virgin birth. Augustine made sense of the church’s practice, the church’s cultus.
Now Pelagius did not assert human autonomy. The argument between Pelagius and Augustine, at least to this human sermonic interpreter, with whom, saints preserve us, you are stuck for the moment, for these 22 minutes, their argument was far more nuanced than sometimes it is made out to be. For Pelagius, grace is necessary…to achieve perfection. And this is the crux of the disagreement. For Pelagius, the ability not to sin, posse non peccare, comes straight from nature, from the ‘necessity of nature’, which is…get ready for it…implanted by God the Creator as a GIFT. Whoever disparages nature disparages God, because God is the Creator, the maker of heaven and earth, of nature itself. For Pelagius, in addition, grace is also the revelation through reason of God’s law, which is instructive in holiness. Like a good Renaissance philosopher, like a good modern liberal, like, well, let us admit it, like a good Methodist of any stripe, Pelagius sees God in all creatures great and small, in the words of James Herriott. Further, he finds in the human reason, in human rationality, evidence of man as God’s image. For Pelagius, grace works in a limited way, as forms of external aids (Moses and Jesus), to the human will. The human being is good and free, free and good, but can always use a little help from friends. Going further, Pelagius’s understands predestination (what will later become for Augustine even double predestination, and an entirely different matter) as (simply, merely) foreknowledge of merit.
The bottom line: One can if one will, one can if one will, observe God’s commandments without sinning. You can if you think you can. (Here we notice a hint or echo of that powerful positive thinker Methodist and graduate of BUSTH, Norman Vincent Peale: You can if you think you can…of whom, remember, Adlai Stevenson said, ‘I find Paul appealing…and Peale appalling’). Sinlessness can gradually and progressively be attained by…strenuous efforts of the will. Sinlessness remains a possibility, especially as it is infused by an intense awareness of God’s majesty. Go and sin no more. Should you need an example, you have before you Jesus Christ. Christ sets the norm of holy living. You will have to admit that on this rendering, Pelagius makes a pretty good case for what many of us, much of the time, mostly believe. We believe in and celebrate the freedom of the will.
Pelagius writings were distributed and widely read between 380ce and 410ce. His supporters included Celestius, and, one of Augustine’s most formidable opponents, Julian the Bishop of Eclanum.
Enter Augustine of Hippo, 354-430ce. Augustine’s own thought had been worked out long before the Pelagian controversy. The fight with Pelagius merely allowed him to fill out the implications. That is, Augustine thought that Adam, Adam was created perfect, and Adam’s will, Adam’s will was in conjunction with God. Vita ordinate…an orderly life, an ordered life. The body is ordered by the soul and the soul is ordered by God. Adam, Adam possessed the ability not to sin. God had granted Adam a grace of perseverance. And grace was already and fully operative in paradise. Otherwise, Adam would soon have sinned, early rather than late. Adam’s only weakness, his only malady or imperfection or shortcoming was his creatureliness. This was an ontological weakness. So how could Adam fall, sin, fall short? Because he is a creature, his nature is that of a creature, he is imbued with creatureliness: Adam is contingent, mutable, ex nihilo, made out of nothing. So, in that fateful moment of weakness, and on the prompting of his own pride, on the prompting of his own pride chose to turn away from God. And that curse has now passed to the whole of humanity. The human being, man is massa damnata, ‘a condemned crowd’.
The essence of Adam’s sin, according to Augustine, is that we all participate in sin and guilt, we all participate in sin and guilt. In that we are all actually one with Adam. Augustine does not explain actually how sin is passed on, whether by ‘the seed’ (‘traducianism’) or otherwise, expect to say that the soul is handed down ‘by parental conception’. As Romans 5: 12 says, ‘in whom all have sinned’. (Except that the Greek text reads, ‘because all have sinned’ (here at least Augustine’ argument is based on a mistranslation.)
For Augustine, though, creation is not evil. Creation is good. Creation is not evil but good. Yet creation is sullied by Adam’s fall. Adam’s accident, let us say. Sin is lack, sin is non-being. Nature has been scarred but nature is not depraved. Yet as a result of the fall, as a consequence of Adam’s sin, we have lost our freedom. We have lost the ability not to sin. We are not able not to sin. We have lost our liberty (libertum), but not our ‘liberum arbitrium’. We continue to choose. We know this from our experience. But…free will always and inevitably on its own chooses the evil, due to its perverse nature. Hence…grace is an utter necessity, an absolute necessity, without grace we are absolutely lost. Grace is the divinely given power to avoid and conquer sin. Not freedom, but grace. Not creation, but re-creation, then, is what we need, not creation but redemption. Not the freedom of the will, but the freeing of the will. And this can come about only through God’s grace. For grace prevents us from doing evil (gratia praevenia), prepares us to do good, and helps us in the actual doing of good (gratia cooperans, gratia sonneans (healing grace). After all, remember Romans 7: ‘the good I want I do not, but evil I do not want, that is what I do’.
Here Augustine finishes the case. We experience healing grace throughout the course of our lives…in the church’s sacraments. It is grace therefore which equips us to do the good. Perfection is never wholly attained (here Wesley goes out the window). The disease of being human, of being alive is never completely cured. Justification is progressive sanctification. Through Scripture! Through Apostolic Tradition! Through Faith! Through Personal Experience! Here Augustine, a most autobiographical theologian, faces God by facing himself, and sees without a shadow of doubt that as he looked back on his life he could not explain the shape it took…without recourse to grace. ‘Let me be chaste…but not yet’. Augustine, in this sense, is the supreme Methodist, an utterly autobiographical theologian. Not his own freedom, but God’s freeing love, saved him. With Augustine, though we may not entirely see things his way, at a minimum this Lent, let us cherish God’s freeing love, God who is loving us into love and freeing us into freedom. God who is loving us into love and freeing us into freedom.
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
Sunday
March 12
Augustine: Take and Read
By Marsh Chapel
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Take and read, take and read. To live the gospel, to love the gospel, to hear and receive the good news, the gospel, means to read, to take, to take and read. May your reading life in faith, your faithful life in reading, be rekindled today, forever fixed today, made happy and whole today. You are what and how you read.
John 4, as we read it today, may be the loveliest, finest narrative in the Fourth Gospel. The woman at the well, the Samaritan woman, meets Jesus and meets us in conversation. She is the quintessential conversationalist. And she is a woman of power, to be reckoned with, a strong contralto voice daring to challenge, willing to differ with, honest by courage and hard experience, a right true voice not only for Women’s History Month in 2023, but also, and staggeringly more so for her presence and prominence in the Gospel of John, written in 90ce.
And what a wonder is there in the faintest conversation, let alone this dominical discussion! Ours today, from John 4, is holy, telling conversation, full of the unexpected, full of surprise, full of the utterly personal, full of revelation, full of boundary breaking courage, full of what is saving, healthy, lasting, meaningful, real, and good. Conversation thrives when you know your content, your work, and your audience. There is a mystery lurking under the disarming surface of the simplest conversation. My friend says her favorite two words are ‘awe’ and ‘conversation’. We could add that the two are not very far removed, or apart from each other.
It may have been that the community which gave birth to the Gospel of John included some Samaritans. This would explain the prominence of this long, intricate passage, devoted to the conversation of Jesus with a Samaritan woman. The Samaritans were outsiders. Here, one of their own takes center--stage. In our time when those outside—immigrants, refugees, the poor, the different, the other—are steadily subjected to heightened measures of exclusion, we benefit from reminders, like this from John 4, that we are called as people of faith, called as Christian people, to care, succor, attention and protection of the ‘least’ among us. The larger question, and it is very much an open question, is whether the humiliation spreading out right now through civil society and culture–wherein inherited, precious forms of civil society are daily shredded with a gratuitous cruelty–coming now to us over the next decade, will chasten us, will humble us, will in that way strengthen us by the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. He it is, today, who announces His own presence, and Lordship, in the course of a meandering conversation: I am He, the One who is speaking to you…A spring of water gushing up to eternal life.
Close reading is crucial to health.
One day, we visited a dear saint in her home. It was a Christmas morning, following the morning service, with a light snow, and 10 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale. She had been in hospital that week, and sat recuperating in her parlor. Her family was with her. And she had a story to tell. It is a story to commend and recommend close reading, reading every word, reading as the zenith and apex of spiritual life, even in our age wherein since 2012, at our beloved school (and many others) majors in the humanities have dropped by 50%.
Earlier that week, on that Tuesday, she had prepared to be taken, by ambulance, from one hospital to another, for a particular procedure. She was a fine, older Methodist lady, so she prepared herself for the trip with what dignity one can muster in a hospital bed, robed in a hospital gown, and alone in the corridor of life. A little makeup, a comb and brush, some careful adjustments of remaining raiment, glasses perched, smile shining.
She could see the elevator door open, and her stretcher moving out. Then the attendants clearly mentioned her name as they signed the paper work at the desk. The nurse motioned across the hall in the general direction of her room. She poised herself, prepared to be a good, courteous patient. Down the hall the men came, and she waved. They returned the gesture. To her door they rolled—and then, remarkably, rolled on by! They passed to the next room, 129 not 128—such a small difference, a difference for which one needs close reading, a room inhabited alone by a frail, kindly woman who was deaf as a post. Her name was not Smith. “Mrs. Smith?” “YES” she replied, her volume in inverse proportion to her accuracy. Into the stretcher went the wrong woman, and down the hall they moved. My dear parishioner called out, used her buzzer, flailed her arms like a gypsy at the campfire. But in a New York minute they were gone, carrying away the wrong person. On the way home, following the procedure, someone apparently had the presence of mind to look at the stretchered woman’s wrist band, name tag. I wonder how the reader felt not to see the name Smith. A rare moment of revelation. In this case, little lasting harm occurred. Our hospitals, in fact, to my eye, given their hourly commitment to excellence and attention to detail, put other institutions to shame. In this and many ways, the physicians out do the metaphysicians, in the main.
Yet metaphysical distinctions matter, really matter, as well. There is a crucial difference between sacrifice and misery. There is a crucial difference between holiness and compassion. There is a crucial difference between law and love. There is crucial difference between representation and redemption. There is a crucial difference between incantation and incarnation. There is a crucial difference between innocence and integrity. There is a crucial difference between independence and interdependence.
These are crucial distinctions. How are we ever going to make them, and learn consistently to make them well, to…read closely.
You go and read. Our conversation partner this Lent, Augustine of Hippo, did so, to his saving benefit. Augustine was saved by reading, neither the first so redeemed, nor the last. Take, and read. Augustine is best known for a moment in reading, in a garden.
You may especially want to read those who have lived through other times of ruin. Reading frees you from the 21st century. Reading cuts you loose from your own time and place. Others too have taught and preached in the ruins of the church. We imagine we are only generation to live, preach, tithe and die during the withering away of the church. Not so. You can, with some reading, read about it.
You may acquire a love of reading this Lent. I picture a bright late winter day. You are walking the emerald necklace, with lunch and a bag full of books. You are taking a walk, Boston such a magnificent pedestrian city.
*You start out a Charlesgate, thinking about reading today….
In our time, ‘literacy’ has a new meaning, referring not to those who can read, but to those who do read.
*You sit beside the lawn at Emmanuel College, to pray…
In prayer, we can trust the unseen God to give confidence, faith, and your lived capacity to withstand what you cannot understand. Sometimes that is all you have, the faith to withstand what you cannot understand. We are on the edge of eternity in every moment of life. You, teacher, you preacher, you pastor, are living testimony to the Eternal Now. The one number, the one digital reference you need, at all is this one: three score and ten, or if by reason of strength, four score.
*You find a quiet corner along the river and think about the impact of careful reading, and its absence…
Read now. You remember a history lecture from another year. Robert Kennedy did not have the freedom to do a research paper on Aeschylus the night Martin Luther King was killed, April 4 1968. He either had read or he hadn’t. He had. His 3 minutes in the Indianapolis rain were his greatest words, as George Eliot would have said, ingenious, pithy and without book, because he had read. There is but little left of the historic Protestant church in the Northeast. What there is clings for life to…words, to the Word..to words, to the Word.
*In the glade you wonder about the nature of reading itself…
And what relationship shall the reader have to the read? Who among us does anywhere near enough to deconstruct our own various contexts? Is the text to have the sole divining voice, or is the reader king? What of the relationship between the unsaid and the uttered? In reading, how do ranges of power dance with colors of truth? Is the truth of Scripture the sole truth—the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth? Or one truth among many? Or primus inter pares? Or an anachronism altogether? How then do you read?
Be careful how you read, for how read is how you think, and how you think is how you act, and how you act is who you are.
*You may circle the pond at Jamaica Plain, eat lunch, and read especially from those who have read and preached in various conditions of difficulty, of trouble, of troubles.
Here is an early spring Saturday in the sun. Take, Read.
From another generation, I have loved Frank McCourt, for McCourt in his Angela’s Ashes is really giving you a hymn to language. He sits by the hospital bed of his eleven year old girlfriend. She teaches him a poem, “The Highwayman”…the highway man came riding… and yes,…she dies. He is so hungry that he finds a soiled newspaper, with the remains of fish and chips, and licks the grease…and the words…off the paper. That is, McCourt’s lovely bildungsroman, Angela’s Ashes, ends with the young boy escaping his past, escaping his family of origin, escaping the biology that threatens always to become full destiny, and feeding himself. He is so hungry that he finds trashed newspapers in which the daily fish and chips have been wrapped, and he licks the papers clean of scraps and bits and crumbs and oil, until the words on the paper fill his mouth. His whole book is about his deliverance, how he learned to live…by reading, how he learned to love…through words.
*At last, as the afternoon is fading, you had back to BU, you pause for a minute on the way home, to read this last passage from Augustine’s Confessions…
I was saying these things and weeping in the most bitter contrition of my heart, when suddenly I heard the voice of a boy or a girl I know not which–coming from the neighboring house, chanting over and over again, “Pick it up, read it; pick it up, read it.” [”tolle lege, tolle lege”] Immediately I ceased weeping and began most earnestly to think whether it was usual for children in some kind of game to sing such a song, but I could not remember ever having heard the like. So, damming the torrent of my tears, I got to my feet, for I could not but think that this was a divine command to open the Bible and read the first passage I should light upon. For I had heard how Anthony, accidentally coming into church while the gospel was being read, received the admonition as if what was read had been addressed to him: “Go and sell what you have and give it to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven; and come and follow me.” By such an oracle he was forthwith converted to thee.
So, I quickly returned to the bench where Alypius was sitting, for there I had put down the apostle’s book when I had left there. I snatched it up, opened it, and in silence read the paragraph on which my eyes first fell: “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof.” I wanted to read no further, nor did I need to. For instantly, as the sentence ended, there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty and all the gloom of doubt vanished away. (Outler translation, Book V111)
At dinner someone may ask what the most recent Lenten Sunday sermon was about. You would say, well, it mentioned Augustine. And, I think he was singing a song of love for reading; I think he was raising a hymn of praise for reading; I think he was lining out a psalm of affirmation for reading…
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
Sunday
March 5
Lenten Communion Meditation
By Marsh Chapel
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Great art Thou O Lord and greatly to be praised. Great is thy power and thy wisdom is infinite. Thee would we praise without ceasing. For our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.
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.
The fourth gospel, with stories like of Nicodemus today, bears down on those who are almost people of faith. Like Nicodemus, who have some but not the depth of the gift of faith, and later the Samaritan woman, and later the man born blind, and later Lazarus, and, in full and truth, later, the disciples themselves, who do not hear the gospel until after the cross. We, many of us, are like that, are we not, especially in different seasons, when we slip on the ice, the ice of anxiety and depression, of alienation and disconnection. John holds out for us for the fullness of faith, for a fervent love, like that of St. Augustine, our conversation partner, this Lent.
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. Spirit!
The stark strangeness, the utter difference of John from the rest of the Bible we have yet fully 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 John 3, we see chiseled there in ice and covered fully with wind and 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 in John, starting with Nicodemus, 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’ –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 though to Spirit. That is, for John, what Moses, the Law, the historical Jesus, the Sacraments or anything else cannot ever fully offer, Paraclete SPIRIT 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).
The world does not lack for wonders but only for a sense of wonder (Chesterton). Your life does not lack for mystery but only for a sense of mystery. Your week does not lack for worth but only for an hour of worship. “I love the silent church, before there is any speaking” (Emerson). Pause just a moment in prayer.
When you come to worship you place yourself in prayerful sight of beauty. When you come to worship you stand and sit in the company of real courage, heroines and heroes of old. When you come to worship you at last find a way—language, imagery, symbol, all—to express an ultimate concern for ultimate reality. When you come to worship you see the whole horizon, the whole ocean, from birth through love to death…and beyond. When you come to worship you place all the rest of your life in the loving embrace of Love, capital L. When you come to worship you are reminded that you are a child of God, no matter what else or other your boss, co-workers, neighbors, family, friends or roommates have said or intimated. When you come to worship you enter the space of Grace. People have such ragged reasons for skipping worship. Make it your plan, as you walk along, to find a church family to love and church home to enjoy and a church service to attend at least one hour a week. In prayer, at least now, at least here, at least here and now.
Yet sometimes worship goes wrong. When it does, for you, say so, to whomever. If it does so regularly or spectacularly, go elsewhere, pronto. Life is short. We need make no excuses for prizing our time.
This Lent 2023 our Catholic theological conversation partner is St. Augustine. In 1991, having at long length and at last completed the PhD, I went down the street to a young Jesuit College, Lemoyne 1946, in our neighborhood, and whence some of our student members had come over the years, to see about teaching. A very loving and very knowledgeable (her adage, ‘as humans we are lovers and knowers’) former religious Dr. Nancy Ring, greeted me. I explained my visit. To which she responded…’So…you…you want to teach?’ She seemed, rightly, dubious. Yet the next semester began a relationship of 25 years, teaching part time the mostly first-generation college students there, and the full discovery of a second spiritual home, in no small part due to Dr. Ring, whose own academic work focused on Paul Tillich. She would happy to know that some students at Merrimack College nearby, on the encouragement of their professor, STH graduate Dr. Maria Teresa Davila, are joining us by radio for worship this Lent. The Professor wrote: As an Augustinian school, I believe that the Religious and Theological Studies department at Merrimack College would greatly benefit from incorporating this into our classes either as extra credit or further formation for our students and faculty…can you forward me any schedule or description you might have?
For St. Augustine of Hippo at long last found himself, his soul, and his true vocation, by finding a personal relationship to God. Yes, Augustine entered the ministry. He became priest and bishop in North Africa. In an age, like yours, of intercultural conflict, Augustine made sense of faith’s highest vision…the city of God. In a culture, like yours, that wore the nametag of Christianity without fully understanding its meaning, Augustine celebrated…the grace of God. In a political climate, like ours, that honored highly individualized freedom and the power to choose, Augustine praised God’s freedom to choose, and acclaimed…the freedom of God. In a highly sexualized age, like ours, Augustine colorfully confessed his own wandering, his own mistakes, which, he attested, did test but did not exhaust the …patience of God. In a religious climate, like ours, which buffeted a truly biblical belief, Augustine praised his maker, and so reminded the church of the proper…praise of God. His Confessions—perhaps part of your summer reading—his great autobiography, is a prayer—for the city of God, by the grace of God, in the freedom of God, to the patience of God, as the praise of God. Augustine found a relationship with God and was ordained. And vice versa.
A long time ago, Augustine of Hippo started into pastoral work, in North Africa. He had many troubles. He fought fundamentalism, for instance, as we do in our time, shouting, ‘love understanding wholeheartedly’. He also argued and wrestled with the Donatists, an ancient, spirited and disciplined form of Christianity. One side of the spat was the question of the extent of the church.
How much real estate is church and how much is not? How much humanity is church, or potentially so, and how much is not? Should the church focus on quality or quantity? Are only those baptized by good Bishops baptized well, or at all? What makes the hotentot so hot? What puts the ape in apricot? Is the church, as the Donatists argued, a select remnant, a pure priesthood, a leaven in the lump, a company of resident aliens, a band of holy Methodists fleeing from the wrath to come? If so, then church is always and ever separated from, alienated from the culture in which it exists. Christ against culture.
Or is the church, as Augustine argued, and as I do today, itself a mixture of wheat and tares, saints and sinners, holy and not yet holy, yet all and objectively founded upon and protected within spirit, divine grace, a set of networks and invisible relationships in the world to redeem the whole world, to transform culture, and the society from which culture comes, and the language that is the very root of that society? Christ transforming culture.
Is church us in worship or does it include unemployed men, whether in worship or not? Is the church the circled wagons of resident aliens? Or is the church found in all humanity, ‘nothing human foreign to us’? How you answer, on this Lenten Sunday will determine whether you think Christ and his church have anything in common with men without work.
Our friend and colleague at the Howard Thurman Center, Mr. Nick Bates, gave recently a summary of where and when and from whom he learned about love. He spoke about ‘A Love Ethic’. His guides and sources included names familiar, central and sacred to us here at Marsh Chapel: hooks, King, Thurman. His exemplars, his guides, especially Howard Thurman, gave him a way to reflect on love and to reflect love, both. Love is commitment. Love is growth. Love is suffering. Love is prayer. Love is reconciliation. Commitment, growth, suffering, prayer, reconciliation. That is the what of love, one could say. And the how? A mixture of desire, imagination and---what for it—leisure. Desire, imagination, leisure.
Augustine of Hippo exchanges his very earthy and earthly passions in love…for a love of God. Here is a phrase we use—love God, love neighbor—but without always a personal, or true, or real sense of the loving in that love. If you say to your spouse, ‘I love you with all my heart and soul and mind and strength’, you can feel that verse becoming a universe. You feel it because you see him or her, as you hold your lover in the arms. Or you feel it because the memory is so piercing, maybe now because the love is in heaven, but the love you feel is still on earth. In a way it should not surprise us that Augustine (‘Lord please make me chaste…but not just yet’) can turn to now the Love of God and the Love in God and the Love to God, with a fierce and physical, poetry of love. Do we think when we allow ourselves the thought of the love of God, of our love for God, that such a love and its expression should be every bit as fierce, as our best earthly love, best human love? As fierce, as physical, as muscled, as sensual, as jealous, as eager, as personal? You say you love God…you have a pretty tame way of showing it! I say I love God…I have a pretty tame way of showing it. Here enters Augustine of Hippo, a passionate lover if there ever was one. His invitation, the Gospel invitation, the sacramental invitation before you this morning, along the center aisle saw-dust trail, is as personal and as fresh and as real as can be: will you love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, and your neighbor as yourself?
Great art Thou O Lord and greatly to be praised. Great is thy power and thy wisdom is infinite. Thee would we praise without ceasing. For our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
