Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

By Marsh Chapel

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Sometimes we arrive in worship with a personal, compelling need. We find our familiar pew. We turn at the appointed hour to the radio frequency. We enter a spirit of prayer. Sometimes we bring, or are brought by, a compellingly particular concern.

In fact, on many occasions of return to worship, after a hiatus, or an absence, or a distance, we come trying to sort something out. We are, after all, ‘persons becoming persons’ as Carlyle Marney used to say, and well say. We are in the process of becoming who we are, bit by bit, trouble by trouble, hurt by hurt, scrape by scrape. The more irregular rhythms of the summer, with its heat spots and rain storms and family visitors and office coverages, can sometimes become a kind of summer grace, allowing us to recollect, to reckon with our souls, to seek a summer grace in Word and Table, preaching and sacrament.

Sometimes the malady is major. Our dearest friendship can come in danger, if we do not keep our friendships in good repair. You may come to work to discover that an office mate, a trusted friend, whose friendship you may have taken for granted, has felt unappreciated, and so has gone on to greener pastures, now that there are a few more jobs around from which to choose—not enough, just a few more. Or a regular summer picnic may reveal an absence, someone whose presence you expected, and missed. You may come some Sunday, having realized on Saturday night that your marriage, seemingly so solid, has revealed a human but painful fracture. A most painful weight to bear, for sure. Our reading from Hosea, the loveliest passage in the Hebrew Scripture, comes from a book in the Bible written straight of the pain of infidelity. It can be a ready reassurance to hear that for a long time, and in the heart of sacred writing, there is a shared experience, for yours, the deep recognition of deep hurt. Hosea even makes of his own pain a way to understand the gracious, lasting, love of God—‘my compassion grows warm and tender’. In the cup and bread today, for you, there is a summer grace, a personal honesty about pain but also a personal witness to endurance. You can get through this. ‘I am the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come to destroy’.

Sometimes the trouble is a shared trouble, a time of trouble, a time in trouble. The poets often will warn us, even a decade in advance. So TS Eliot wrote The Wasteland in 1922, and envisioned 1932 and 1942. We disregard our poets to our peril. So summer can be a good time to remember them, and to memorize the biblical poetry of the psalms. In Robert Raines’ family the children were prized with a soda when they had memorized a psalm. Is that bribery or is that good parenting? Or both?  When we realize that at some deep level, the moorings are loosened in our community or culture, then we may come to church a little dazed, a little unbalanced, not quite sure why. Thirsty, in a way, hungry, in another way. I have been preaching and teaching through the summer, and regularly people will ask about Boston. How are you? How are things there? They are not referring—usually—to Whitey Bulger, or even—usually—to the Red Sox. One woman from the Midwest was wearing a shirt that said ‘Boston Strong’. As a guest preacher I usually say something general in response, using a collected vocabulary—‘pretty well…good people…very resilient…courageous women and men…yes, Boston Strong.’ But as a pastor I also have other thoughts, not so easily expressed in a less familiar setting. Yes, strong. But we also have our forms of wandering, as the psalmist puts it. We also know about the soul fainting, as the psalmist puts it. A photo of an innocent middle aged woman, now legless, is all it takes, at least for me, to recognize the truth of the Scripture and its repeated emphasis on cries in trouble. Not only sorrow, but anger, not only grief, but very human rage will bring us to the desert. It takes time, real time, and a long time, to process trauma, and when you least expect it, the desert can envelope you. That may bring you to listen to a sermon, or attend a church, to hunt out again the lasting love of God. If nothing, no one else: ‘Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures for ever’. Boston Strong? Maybe Boston Getting Stronger?

Sometimes the trouble is amnesia. I am getting to the point that I need a solution or two to daily amnesia. Where are my glasses? Keys? Sermon notes? I should say, when I lay them down, ‘I am putting my glasses on the bureau’. But we know a bigger, that is to say, a real sort of amnesia, too, that sometimes sits right with us in the pew, right beside us in the arm chair. What am I doing here? What is the point of all this struggle? I seem to have lost my way. I find it greatly comforting, on a daily and weekly basis, to see that in the very marrow of the Scripture, my wandering forgetfulness is known, shared, experienced, addressed. The recognition of a lost path, a way forgotten, an amnesia about something that really matters—this too is a summer grace. The student of Paul who honored Paul by writing pseudonymously a letter to the Colossians in his name had us in mind here, or had this in mind at least, our amnesia. Remember: you have been raised. Remember: seek the good big high great things. Remember: your life is hid with Christ in God. Remember: you are wearing a new nature, a renewed nature, which connects you in love to every other. ‘Christ is all, and in all.’

Then sometimes, too, the unexpected arrives, supplanting security with radical change, unplanned and unforeseen. A good morning to listen to the radio service, or, better, to find your way to church can be this very moment of cataclysm. It is only sparing help to recall that many others in the history of the race have woken up, suddenly, to discover that all the barns full of grain carefully and responsibly stewarded cannot get us past a great loss, a loss of life, a loss of self, a loss of soul. Faith is only faith when it is all you have left to go on. (repeat) Then it is faith, for that is what we mean by faith, walking ahead into the dark. Sometime go through the pages of the Scripture and just watch for the number of occasions when the people in the Bible are suddenly and unexpectedly accosted with trouble, through no fault of their own. In St Luke today, the man is a prosperous farmer. But in other spots he is a favorite son thrown in a pit, a patriarch wrestling with a demon, a leader dying in a cave, a scout frightened by grasshoppers, a prophet unheeded until too late, an Apostle who knows about a thief in the night, a disciple who thought his betrayal would go unnoticed, a king who expects wrongly that his son will be honored, a father whose son leaves home, an honest worker who loses his job, a woman who has to plead until blue in the face before a judge who could not care less. And then:  a Savior, a man of compassion, an embodiment of love, a healing teacher, a Lord, a Messiah—crucified. In the summer, for us, sometimes, it can be restorative to see that we have company on the days when night falls early. ‘One’s life does not consist in an abundance of possessions’. Or positions.

Right now our land and landscape are covered with a vast carelessness. A vast carelessness regarding the poor. A vast carelessness regarding the children of the poor. A vast carelessness regarding the other—otherwise oriented, otherwise abled, otherwise viewed. We have made some headway, by the Dow measurement anyway, in the building of better barns. (Nor should we, nor do I diminish the importance of bodily, physical, fiscal health.) But the parable today though brutally admonishes us that love is for the wise. The body is not the soul. Fool! Today your SOUL is required.

This month, later this month, we shall remember Martin Luther King’s great sermon from 50 years ago. August 28, 1963, a sweltering day in the nation’s capital. It was indeed a soul, a soulful moment. Some of you listening, some perhaps present, were there. Most have heard King’s words, more than once.  His was a life ‘rich toward God’. How? How so? What shall we recall fifty years hence? In its remembrance, this month, will our souls come alive that we might be rich toward God? Remember…

First, that King was a preacher. He was a preacher first and last. His words, rhetoric, angle of vision were formed in the life of the Christian church, the black church, the pulpit. Taylor Branch tells of an intense Sunday afternoon meeting, King and colleagues, when a knock came at the door. There, an older woman, in Sunday clothes, carrying a basket. She came with something to eat—chicken and biscuits I believe. And they stopped, the planning stopped, the work stopped. She had brought something for the preacher. It was a summer grace to receive it, as is our communion. Today. King was not first an academic, an organizer, a teacher, a prophet, a social leader. He was a preacher. May that be for those of you considering such a calling—then higher in status and lower in stress, now lower in status and higher in stress—a hard vocation, that is, one worth doing—leave the easier things for others, may that be an encouragement to you of what such a calling can mean. Marsh Chapel has every reason to commend and recommend King as a preacher. Further, the series this summer, the primary preachers from the primary northern Methodist pulpits, is meant as a sign for the future when the collapse of general agencies, general conferences, general superintendencies, and generalized discipline will give way, as it is already doing, to real, vocal, preached, pulpit leadership, like that represented in Foundry Church, Washington DC, Christ Church, NYC, Asbury First, Rochester, and Marsh Chapel, Boston.

Second, King was a personalist. That is, he was formed in the philosophical theology of Boston University, Boston personalism. Border Parker Bowne, Edgar Brightman—the quintessential, even revelatory uniqueness of the human personality as a clue to the divine. Now in our more naturalist age, personalism is less known, less favored. But you can hear it in King when, in Letter from Birmingham Jail, he talks about the clouds and dimness he sees in his little daughters’ eyes as they are told that they are not welcome in Funtown, an amusement park. We are all persons becoming persons. The freshmen who come here in a few weeks were all of eleven years old seven years ago when we began our Marsh Chapel work. They are persons, in whose personalities there is a reflection, a revelation of the divine. But they are far from formed, as are we all. Mature in body, perhaps, but not yet in soul. Sent with such high hopes—theirs, their parents’, their schools’, their siblings’. King battled a vast cultural carelessness because of the effect on personality such carelessness has.

Third, King worked at a profound depth. Notice in his sermon that he speaks of dream, not of ‘a really good idea’. That is the sermonic difference between the right word and the almost word, between truth and falsehood, death and life, inspiration and desperation. But there is something for us today, this summer, much harder and truer to his profundity. King was able to speak in a way that gathered a true solidarity to his cause, the cause of civil rights, racial justice, not later, but now. You hear it and recall it in phrases, ‘not by the color of skin but by the content of character’. His voice brought inspiration and solidarity to a movement. But that was not all. He also somehow had the magic and mysterious spirited rhetoric to evoke more than solidarity, to evoke community. That is, he was able to gather under the wings of his words those, even those, who may not at the moment have agreed with him. Not just solidarity to a cause. But hope, a dream of a beloved community, too. Now that is genius. You hear it in phrases. ‘That on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave holders will sit down at the table of brotherhood’. Not just solidarity for those who now agree, but the hope of community we those who are not yet with us. I wish I could find the tongue in our time, facing our own issue of humanity and justice, that of the full humanity of gay people, to do the same. Maybe one day that will come…

Sometimes we arrive in worship with a personal, compelling need. We find our familiar pew. We turn at the appointed hour to the radio frequency. We enter a spirit of prayer. Sometimes we bring, or are brought by, a compellingly particular concern.

You may come with a fractured relationship.

Draw near in faith, and take this holy sacrament, this summer grace, to your comfort.

You came as a still wounded city, not so much strong as getting stronger.

Draw near in faith, and take this holy sacrament, this summer grace, to your comfort.

You may come with amnesia about your salvation already wrought in Christ.

Draw near in faith, and take this holy sacrament, this summer grace, to your comfort.

You may come in the throes of a mortal struggle between body and soul, bigger barns and a farther shore, carelessness and care.

Draw near in faith, and take this holy sacrament, this summer grace, to your comfort.

~The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 08.4.2013 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

I John 4: 7-12

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John is the ‘spiritual gospel’. The gospel and the letters named for John, including our lesson read earlier, were given their shared name long ago.  So named in the second century by a person whom once we termed a ‘church father’ but term such an one such no longer, rather saying an ‘early Christian writer’, the Johannine literature has long inspired poetry.

From the doors just west of us on the Marsh Plaza emerge every spring a class of soon to be preachers, holding Bibles in their right hands and massive debt in their left.  By July 1 they are in pulpits, preaching, preaching every Sunday a Sunday sermon, ‘about God and about 20 minutes’, for forty years. Some of those sermons will come from John.

Come Saturday night they will begin to write their sermons.  They will find in the passages to be read from John various troubling, troublesome, troublous passages. It is a diachronic reading of John, one that looks at its place and time, its community of origin, its sitz im leben, or life setting, which frees, and which alone can give a measure of the promise of 8:32, ‘you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free’.  Coming down from the STH steps, Bible in one hand and massive debt in the other, our students, one hopes, will also have acquired some pious understanding of John’s history and theology.

They will have learned that the phrase ‘the Jews’ does not mean ‘the Jews’, but grew up in the year 90ad out of a painful separation of Christian Jews from Jewish Christians.  The community behind John contested with those whom they referred by this phrase, even though they, the Jews, were their own kin.  They themselves were Jews too! These passages in John are to be understood historically and theologically as a particularly dark moment in the Christian tradition of anti-semitism. Our students need to know this first, and more.

John’s Jesus makes several remarkable claims, given Philippians 2 and Matthew 5.  Are many of them historically reliable?  No.  They reflect a changed understanding of the Christ, hard won and hard earned.  The titles for Christ—Messiah, Son of God, Son of Man—come from different points it the community’s journey, history, and theology.  Our students need to know this first, and more.

John’s community has suffered trauma that has caused change.  Trauma brings change.  They have suffered the trauma of disappointment.  The end of the world which they expected did not come, disappointingly enough.  They found the courage to admit it, and change.  That is, in disappointment they discovered freedom.  They also have suffered the trauma of dislocation.  They have been thrown out of their religious home, de-synagogued if you will, and are wandering out in the street when they write.  They lost their mother tongue, mother land, mother tradition, which is huge dislocation.  They found the courage to face it, and change.  That is, in dislocation they discovered grace.  Paul, who did not write or know John, might well have said, see, I told you, ‘when I am weak, then I am strong’.  And, mirable dictu, in the cross of Christ and in the loss of John, this ancient faith community uncovered a way to love. Our students need to know this first, and more.

However.  Don’t you know that life is a funny old dog?  For six years I have along side me as teaching assistant a most brilliant, funny, young mother of two, Episcopal priest.  She is a literary critic.  She practices rhetorical criticism.  She loves poetry.  Twice a term I ask her to bring her exotic medicines, the alchemic mixtures of literary criticism to bear on our text.  I like to be magnanimous, don’t you know.  I believe in the liberal balance, don’t you know.  I honor freedom of speech in the university, don’t you know.  Plus, the students love her. The students appreciate her approach—AS AN ADDITION MIND YOU TO THE MAIN WORK OF THE COURSE.  And, I must say, I too appreciate her and love her work.  Even teachers can learn.  As that great Yankee Yogi Berra said, ‘you can observe a lot just by watching’.  ‘The old owl sits in the oak tree, the more he speaks the more he hears, the more he hears, the less he speaks, why are we not like that old owl?’

The Rev., now Rev. Dr. Regina Walton every term shows our students three poems which grow out of the Fourth Gospel and illumine its meaning.  For today’s Father’s Day sermon, I determined to have you hear them as well.  They are light, joy, truth, power, meaning, and love.  Gospel.  They are beautiful.  They are rhetorically beautiful religious language.  What other than such beauty, epitomized by our lesson from 1 John, will drive out the demons of hateful religious rhetoric? And they can help us, here in Boston, here in Marsh Chapel, here today.

The poet George Herbert lived from 1593 to 1633.  The English Civil War occurred soon after his death, leading to ‘disestablishment’. Herbert was an ‘orator’ at Cambridge, and sickly.  From a young age he knew that he was called to write devotional poetry.  He knew John Donne, who was a friend of his mother’s.  He employs both trochaic and iambic meters.  He writes, among other things, of the soul’s call to God, and of the claim the believer has on God.  That is, in his work there is a Johannine courage.  Love made me welcome, but my soul drew back…You must sit down and taste my meat…Herbert wrote of love.  Here is a poem (you beautifully sang it a moment ago) that draws directly on John 14:17, John 6:6, and John 16:22:

The Call

Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life:

Such a Way, as gives us breath:

Such a Truth as ends all strife:

And such a life as killeth death.

Come, my Light, my Feast, my Strength:

Such a Light as shows a feast:

Such a Feast as mends in length:

Such a strength as makes his guest.

Come my Joy, my Love, my Heart:

Such a Joy as none can move:

Such a Love as none can part:

Such a Heart as joyes in love.

Such a heart as joyes in love.  As a pastor in this community, Marsh Chapel, I have the privilege of seeing women and men struggling to live in faith, and doing so by inspiration.   In our community we are expecting a birth or two, fairly soon, a joy in love.  In our community we have couples who are in the throes of making marriage work and work better, a joy in love.  In our community we have dads and moms whose sons and daughters are in armed service, and they are praying for their safe returns, a joy in love.  In our community we have some who struggle with the challenges, physical and personal, of aging, and are finding healing care, a joy in love.  In our community we have students who are learning to learn what they most want to learn, not someone else’s fantasy of what they might learn, a joy in love.  In our community we have women and men, the salt of the earth, who reflect and radiate Christ’s joy in love.

The poet Henry Vaughn lived from 1622 to 1695.  He fought on the Royalist side during the great war.  Vaughn is known as one of the best followers and imitators of Herbert.  In 1649, Charles I executed Oliver Cromwell.  The Church of England was disestablished and the Book of Common Prayer was outlawed.  The King was understood to be anointed by God.  Incidentally, his brother was an alchemist.  Vaughn lived during a dark time, and his poetry evokes his time.  He recalls the great Pseudo-Dionysus and the Cloud of Unknowing.  He celebrates night and the darkness of God, in way that I believe connects truly to our time as well.   It is no accident that he bases this poem on Nicodemus at night, John 3:2ff.  Here some verses from this wondrous work:

The Night

Through that pure Virgin Shrine

That sacred veil drawn o’er thy glorious noon

That men might look and live as glow-worms shine

And face the moon:

Wise Nicodemus saw such light

As made him know his God by night.

Most blest believer he!

Who in that land of darkness and blind eyes

Thy long expected healing wings could see,

When thou didst rise,

And what can nevermore be done,

Did at mid-night speak with the Sun!

O who will tell me, where

He found thee at that dead and silent hour!

What hallowed solitary ground did bear

So rare a flower,

Within whose sacred leaves did like

The fullness of the Deity…

Dear night! This world’s defeat;

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

The day of Spirits; my soul’s calm retreat

Which none disturb!

Christ’s progress and his prayer time;

The hours to which high Heaven doth chime…

Were all my loud evil days

Calm and unhaunted as is thy dark Tent,

Whose peace but by some Angel’s wing or voice

Is seldom rent;

Then I in Heaven all the long year

Would keep, and never wander here.

But living where the sun

Doth all things wake, and where all mix and tire

Themselves and others, I consent and run

To every mire,

And by this world’s guiding light,

Err more than I can do by night.

There is in God (some say)

A deep but dazzling darkness; as men here

Say it is late and dusky, because they

See not all clear;

O for that night! Where I in him

Might live invisible and dim.

Nicodemus—like the the beloved disciple, like the paraclete, like the logos, like the ‘judeans’—helps form a bridge from the community of faith to the community of life, from religion to culture, from church to world.  And back. Most blest believer he! Who in that land of darkness and blind eyes, Thy long expected healing wings could see. At Marsh Chapel we yearn for a faith amenable to culture and a culture amenable to faith.  We desire such not because it is immediately present or likely with ease in our time to arise.  It is not and it will not.  But as Vaclev Havel said, ‘I hope for the good not because it will necessarily succeed, but because it is right and true.’  When the faith you personally cherish walks by night without fear across this whole great land, and when the culture you inhabit visits the community of faith without fear, by night or day—when Jesus and Nicodemus embrace—then a bit of heaven has come to earth.   For example, when the beauty of the people and voices of the Marsh Choir, who embody salt and light, find purchase in a great hall with a culturally iconic band, not particularly otherwise known for religious observance by the way, then you have an apocalyptic moment, a place of faith amenable to culture and culture amenable to faith.

You will not be surprised, many of you, by the choice for our third poet.  The poet T.S. Eliot was born in America, yet lived most of his life in England until his death in 1965.  He was the greatest poet of his age, and one of the greatest of any age.  While our generation does not cling to him as did an earlier one, and this itself is a pity, nonetheless he touches us too.  To him we owe the rediscovery of the metaphysical poets.  Eliot found God’s presence in God’s absence.  Like Herbert’s mature claim upon God, like Vaughn’s love of night, Eliot’s presence in absence seems strikingly close to the spirit of our own age.  I dedicate this reading to my dear dad who died three years ago, an authentic lover of the word.  The following poem owes much to John 1:1 ff:

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent

If the unheard, unspoken

Word is unspoken, unheard;

Still is the unspoken word, the Word, unheard,

The Word without a word, the Word within

The world and for the world;

And the light shone in the darkness and

Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled

About the centre of the silent Word.

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Where shall the word be found, where will the word

Resound?

The Word within the world and for the world. This summer, starting next week with Ms. Jessica Cheeka, you will hear voices from our strongest sister pulpits in the north, Asbury First in Rochester NY, Christ Church in NYC, Foundry Church Washington, and ours from Marsh Chapel in Boston.   Of all the seven national preacher summer series we have now offered I am most glad for this one, for many reasons, but let me mention just one.   In Methodism our pulpits historically, since Wesley, Asbury, Cartwright, Shaw, Sockman, Tittle and all, have led the way.  Now, in our time of ecclesiological fragmentation, much farther advanced than most realize, we shall need to rely not so heavily, certainly not exclusively, on the superintending voices, important as they are, but on the deeper streams of mercy still fed by the healthy communities of faith, and by their pulpits.  Wesley loved the Easter Orthodox traditions, those of the patriarchies, not of the bishops of Rome and elsewhere, not a bad memory for a Father’s Day.  The communities, in the East, led and lead—Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch, Constantinople.  We need to look East, in this sense, to listen first to the remaining vibrant pulpits.  In the next decade, we shall need these four arrows together in a quiver—Marsh, Christ, Foundry, Asbury—as we minister the Word within the world and for the world.  The superintending is rooted in 1 John, but the vocal leadership, the spiritual leadership, the Spirit, is rooted in John.  Have a great summer!

Here are three poems, three moments  of Johannine inspiration, Herbert, and Vaughn and Eliot.  One for those in need, celebrating the One who joyes in love.  One for those at night, celebrating the one who marries faith and life.  One for those troubled by absence, celebrating the coming, the return of voice and word.  Amen. Amen. Amen.

Beloved let us love one another!

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.16.2013 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

John 17: 3

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1. Summit

High atop the world’s greatest writings there sits our Holy Scripture.  Such knowledge is too wonderful for us.  It is high.  We cannot attain it.

Within the Scripture itself are conjoined the sibling testaments, the older and newer, the Hebrew Scripture and the Christian Writings.   For us just now, the 27 newer books stand a little bit higher.

The Gospels and the Letters and the Apocalyptic Writings are all inspired and inspiring, all sufficient for faith and practice.  The gospels though have a certain priority, in our liturgy, and in our hearts.  They lie just a step or two higher, atop higher ground.

You love all the Gospels.  One there is though which from antiquity has been known as the sublime, the spiritual gospel.  We shall ascend today to the craggy paths and rarified air of the Fourth Gospel.

High above the rest of John, above the seven signs to begin and above the passion and resurrection to end, there lies the strangest moonscape in the Scripture, and so in all literature, and so in life.  I mean chapters 13-17.    We are about to place our homiletical flag on the very summit, the highest of high peaks, the textual Matterhorn, Everest, Mount Washington, Pike’s Peak:  John 17:3

And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.

2. Where We Least Expect To Find It:  Freedom In Disappointment, Grace In Dislocation, Love In Departure: John

Your own participation in this sermon is cordially invited, and fully required today.  We affirm, with the ancient Gospel according to St. John the Divine 17:3, that we find freedom in disappointment, we grasp grace in dislocation, and we learn love in departure.  Look back at all your experience to date.  What is your greatest disappointment?  It is a clue to freedom.  What is your hardest dislocation?  It is a signpost for grace.  What is your most grievous departure?  It is the way of love.

The community of the beloved disciple knew about disappointment.  After three generations, and some, the community had awaited the primitive hope of the church to be realized.  They awaited the return of Christ.  The resurrection of the dead from their graves.  The end of time.  The apocalypse of God.  It did not come.  He did not come, at least not in the way once hoped.   I find it the most remarkable feature of the New Testament that John, rather than being lost in a sea of disheartening failure, in the very eye of his most stormy theological hurricane, found freedom.  In theological disappointment he found freedom.

In our time, speaking of theological disappointment, we are bidding a reluctant farewell to God.  To a certain, junior, perception of God.  God reigns.  This we affirm with the church militant and triumphant.  But God’s way among us is away from us.  He is risen.  He is not here.  See the place where they laid him.  And you?

The community of the beloved disciple knew about dislocation.  They had lost their family of origin.  They were sent out from their mother religion.  The church that wrote John had been thrown out of the synagogue.  The life they grew up with had cast them out.  It took three generations for them to grasp the joyful grace in dislocation.  Count it all grace, brethren, when various dislocations beset you!

In our time we have also known sociological dislocation aplenty.   Children bear the brunt of unemployment in the home, for instance.  A certain sense of civic self was dislodged, here in Boston, this year, for instance.  And you?

The community of the beloved disciple knew about departure.  The layers of grief culminating in chapter 17, while ostensibly a rehearsal of Jesus’ own departure, may also have been crafted by the heart and voice of their aged John, the other and beloved disciple, whose own departure, in the midst of disappointment and dislocation, itself provoked these layers of grief.  Is it not ironic that the sharpest, most rarified language of love in all of the New Testament—in all of literature—arises in the hour of departure?

In our time,  as has every generation, we face the departure of persons and groups. ‘Nothing can make up for the absence of someone whom we love’ (Bonhoeffer). The departure of the Christ makes space for love. As I have loved you, so you also ought to love one another.   ‘Be yourself, but be your best self, dare to be different and to follow your own star.’  You snowflake, you.  And you?

The measures of freedom and grace given to us become real possibilities, real freedom and real grace, only when we have the gracious freedom to decide for faith.  The same is magnificently true of love.  This is the message of John, at the end.

But how does this happen?  Freedom, grace and love come through variance, in John, difference, in John, the courage to act differently, think differently, in John.   Let me see if an analogy will help.

3. Brother John

We are four siblings in my family of origin.  The older three have brown hair.  The youngest is a redhead, whose name is John.  John’s bright red locks are unlike, quite unlike, the less remarkable curls of Bob, Cathy and Cynthia.  He stands apart, does John.  It makes you wonder where he came from, with such a distinctive aspect.  John is like his Gospel namesake, the Fourth Gospel.  The youngest of the four, he stands out, so different from his synoptic siblings Matthew, Mark and Luke.  They with their shared brown hair, their shared parables and teachings, their shared emphasis on the humanity of Jesus, their shared trips from Galilee to Jerusalem, they just don’t look at all like their younger redheaded brother.

In the summer, it happens, as it may in your family, there is a family reunion for one part of our tribe.  Occasionally, we would go, growing up.  Like yours, ours is something of standard reunion.  It is held on a farm near Albany, which has been in the family since before George Washington rode a horse.   After the usual light meal of beef, corn, potatoes, bread, sausage, pies, and pickles and so on, the extended family (or those who having eaten so can still move) will sometimes stand for a photograph on the long farm house veranda.  I ask you to look at the photo.  I am holding it here.  Can you see it?  Well, even if you cannot see it across the radio waves, you can probably guess what it shows.  Of these eighty people, do you see how many have red hair?  About 60—young or old, tall or short, heavy or slight, male or female, they mostly have red hair, like John.  75% are redheads.  In fact, in the photo, it looks like a sea of red hair.  Maybe a red heads convention out in the farm fields of Cooperstown, NY.  John isn’t the odd ball.  His siblings are.

John is not the second century Greco Roman odd ball.  His synoptic siblings are.  When you put the Fourth Gospel, with all its red haired radical difference, on the farm house veranda of second century religious family literature, he fits right in.  He stands shoulder to shoulder with all the Gnostic writings that are so like him, especially in these late chapters. It looks like a redheads convention. He looks and sounds quite like the rest of his second and third cousins, once or twice removed:  The Paraphrase of Shem, the Treatise on the Resurrection, the Odes of Solomon, the Apocryphon of John, the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Mary.  How else will we ever hear this voice of Jesus from John 17?

And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom though hast sent.

Six Synoptic differences!   Eternal life, not kingdom of heaven.  Know, not believe.  The only true God, not Abba.  Jesus Christ, not Rabbi or Master.  Sent, not begotten.

This voice is NOTHING like that of the Sermon on the Mount, or that of the parable of the Good Samaritan, or that of the cry from Psalm 22 on the cross.  Not human, but divine, here.  Not earthly, but heavenly, here.  Not low, but high, here.  Not immanent, but transcendent, here.

The community of the Gospel of John had a radical experience of Jesus, as God on earth.   To render that experience meaningful, they had the radical courage to take language from the heretics around them, the Gnostics, and use it as their own BECAUSE IT FIT.  It worked.  It explained to the huddled humans clinging to Christ what they had experienced in him:  divine grace and divine freedom.  It rendered the sense of consecration, the sense of holy living and dying, the sense of consecrated joy, which they had found, with the Light of the World, with the Bread of Life, with the Good Shepherd, with the Resurrection, with the Word made flesh.

The community of the Gospel of John feared not the culture around them.  They feared not truth, even when that truth was best expressed outside of their particular religious circle.  They had the guts to use language belonging to pagans, outsiders, heretics, Gnostics to celebrate and consecrate their faith.  In doing so, they opened up the church to the world, to the future, to the culture around them.    They changed their way of speaking of Christ, and pointed to Christ above, in, and transforming the culture around them.  They changed.  They had the courage to change.

In age, our own, when the Gospel of John, served raw, without cooking, without historical interpretation, can be made to sound like the voice not of tradition but of traditionalism, we do well to remember John’s courage to change, to reach out to the culture around, to put the gospel in word and music on the air waves of a pagan culture, out on the radio waves of a secular world, and where possible to use that same culture

Raymond Brown: ‘Some scholars may ponder on the luck of the Beloved Disciple that his community’s Gospel was not recognized for the sectarian tractate that it really was.  But others among us will see this as a recognition by Apostolic Christians that the Johannine language was not really a riddle and the Johannine voice was not alien…What the Johannine Christians considered to be a tradition that had come down from Jesus seems to have been accepted by many other Christians as an embraceable variant of the tradition that they had from Jesus’.  (TCOTBD, 18)

4. Where We Least Expect To Find It:  Freedom In Disappointment, Grace In Dislocation, Love In Departure:  Today

Freedom

A poor man went to a Methodist church for worship.  The congregation welcomed him and he returned week by week.  After a while the women’s circle took up a collection and bought him a nice new suit, with a blue tie.  He happily received the gift, but they never saw him in church again.

A while later, on the street, one of church members saw him and asked what had happened.  Did he not like the suit?  Did it not fit?  Was he afraid to wear it?

“Oh no, I love the suit.  I look great in it.  When I say myself in the mirror, I looked so good I thought, ‘I look like a million bucks.  I look too good to go just to the Methodist church.  I think I’m dressed well enough to go the Episcopal church.  I think I will go there.  And that is what I did”.   Disappointment led to freedom!

Some years ago we sat at dinner with several other couples, in a beautiful home, over a majestic meal, graciously served.  Because the couples new each other well, and were in trust to each other, there was the chance for hard and serious conversation, consecrated conversation you might say.  This evening the debate swirled around gay marriage.

There are tipping points in the way a culture moves.  Some of them occur at dinner, in beautiful homes, over majestic meals, graciously served.  The host was opposed, to gay marriage that is.  The conversation widened, and then narrowed, and then widened again.  We can surely agree that there are many ways of keeping faith, and many honest, different, points of view, on this and on many issues.

Across the table sat Carol, mother of two fine teenagers, married with joy to a business leader, baseball player, Red Sox fan.  She had battled cancer once before, and now it returned, and she fought it again.  We could not see it then, but in seven months she was gone.

Over some heat and some laughter, much disagreement but little discord, the conversation, consecrated you might say, moved on.  Carol spoke fully, and at one point said:  ‘You know, I have learned how precious life is, how fragile, what a gift every day is.  Here is what I feel:  if two people truly love each other, deeply commit to each other, and want to consecrate their vows, that is they want what Doug and I have, why would I ever want to stand in their way, why would I ever want to deprive them of that happiness that I know so well.’  I heard some minds changing as the dessert came out.  The embodiment of the embraceable variant.

Pasternak loved Shakespeare’s Sonnett 66. It is said that whenever he read aloud the crowd would not let him leave until he had rehearsed it for them.  “Give us the 66^th…”  Its evocation of daily anxiety bears remembering.  The poem is unequaled in its announcement of disappointment, but also of freedom to wrestle with it.  When life gives you the 66^th remember Shakespeare, but especially his last couplet.

Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,

As to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplac'd,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgrac'd,
And strength by limping sway disabled
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly--doctor-like--controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tir'd with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

‘Captive good attending captain ill…’  Can you hear that?  It begs to be heard.  Stand with your people in tragedy, honest and kind in word and deed.

Grace

Our churches are in the throes of dislocation.  Lyle Schaller had our number 25 years ago when he said:  “These denominations will gladly accept 2-3% annual decline in exchange for the tacit agreement that there be no significant change”.  And so, in 25 years, in the Northeast, United Methodism has lost 50% of its membership.  Today more 511 of the 930 pulpits in my home conference, Upper New York, are occupied by non-elders:  the preaching and ministry are done by people without full or proper education, preparation, examination or ordination.  In what other sector of serious life would we permit this?

Sometimes a dose of realized eschatology can clear the mind and strengthen the soul.   In a way, every day is our last.  In a way, heaven and hell are here and now.  In a way, the end time is all of time.  John puts it this way: ‘the hour is coming AND NOW IS’.

The freedom of the gospel has gradually embraced multiple variants.   The poor.  The immigrant.  People of color.  Those once enslaved. Women.  Gay people. Others.  The Other.  In fact, the lesson of the gospel of grace enshrined in John is the spiritual expansion of grace, through the throes of dislocation, found in the embrace of the embraceable variant.

In grace, our healthy future will come from a resurrection of thought, word and deed:  of traditional worship, of traveling elders who excel in preaching, and in tithing to support the church we love.

I bear witness:  All of the lastingly good features of my life have come through grace in dislocation:  name in baptism, faith in confirmation, community in eucharist, partnership in marriage, work in ordination, love in pardon, and hope in Christ for this life and the next.  All these are found in the healthy life of healthy, vibrant, discreet communities of faith.  In our dislocation we discover grace, an embraceable variant, which makes all the difference.  Our New England poet had it right:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Love

Be sober, be watchful.  Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. (James 5: 1)   While we may shed the inherited demonic mythology in the verse, knowing and honoring its origins in the distant past, we nonetheless fully recognize the spiritual truth here:  we know not what a day may bring, but only that the hour for serving is always present. 1 John 4: 7-12 captures love divinely:  Beloved let us love one another…

New occasions teach new duties

Time makes ancient good uncouth

One must upward still and onward

Who would keep abreast of truth

We too want to discipline ourselves and keep alert.   So we pray.  Do you pray?  So we commune.  Do you receive the eucharist?  So we study.  Have you devotionally read your Bible this week?  So we converse with one another.  Have you opened home and heart recently in Christian conversation?  So we fast—park your car, save your money, do not reply all:  fight pollution, debt and dehumanization.  We too want to discipline ourselves and keep alert.

When we buried Lu Lingzi, last month, her family bowed, ceremonially, and from the waist, at the very close of the service, a recognition of real love in real departure.

O LORD, thou hast searched me and known me!

Thou knowest when I sit down and when I rise up; thou discernest my thoughts from afar.

Thou searchest out my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways.

Even before a word is on my tongue, lo, O LORD, thou knowest it altogether.

Thou dost beset me behind and before, and layest thy hand upon me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain it.

Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?

If I ascend to heaven, thou art there! If I make my bed in Sheol, thou art there!

If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,

even there thy hand shall lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.

If I say, "Let only darkness cover me, and the light about me be night,"

even the darkness is not dark to thee, the night is bright as the day; for darkness is as light with Thee.

Sursum corda!  Lift up your hearts.  The variance, your distinctive self is utterly embraceable.  That variance, and your courage to live it, bring saving wholeness.  There is a clue to Freedom in disappointment.  There is a signpost to Grace in dislocation.  There is a way of Love in departure.

This is eternal life, that they may know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.9.2013 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Galatians 1: 1-12

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When St. Paul writes that the gospel came to him by apocalypse he intends neither a sole reliance on experience to the left nor a rejection of experience to the right.   The gospel comes by apocalypse at the incursion of spirit in life, of love in experience, of experience inside out, a touch of grace.  So our experience matters, and our awareness of experience invaded is largely all we have.

May 2 our friend and teacher retired in New York City.  Dr. Christopher Morse lectured on the history of Christian theology in September of 1976, and before and after.  The lectures , built in part upon the lectures of Robert Calhoun at Yale a decade earlier, in may have been, are today still shimmering in memory, forty years later.   Speech matters.  On a bright May morning, some from near and some from far drove to Riverside Drive, parked behind Grant’s tomb, wondered again and aloud who was buried there (J), peered in at the dark, historic, gothic emptiness of Riverside Church, hunted down friends at the Interchurch Center next door, sat in the venerable Union Theological Seminary courtyard, fragrant and cloistered and quiet, then in James Chapel, now filling with five decades of friends and students.  The honoree asked not to preach, but only to celebrate the Eucharist, in clear Methodist fashion, as we do today.   Doctoral students sang an anthem musically summarizing Morse’s theological principles.  (Hear these words set to guitar and folk music:  coherence, catholicity, conformity…(J)).  A young student preached.  Prayers were offered by another, strong, sonorous, spirited prayers by another young student, the son of a prominent NYC Methodist preacher.  A simple luncheon followed, with a portrait unveiled, no eulogies or roasts or remembrances.  Just 90 minutes, noon on, of grace.  Then the drive home, along the coast and through New Haven, a drive most richly populated by ghosts, haunted by recollection and reckoning, riddled with gratitude.  Friends, an excellent 80 minute lecture lives, feeds, and lasts a lifetime, maybe even three such.  By the way, the young man who prayed so well, a cradle Methodist, a parsonage child, a brilliant future preacher, is gay.  Said a proud, heart broken dad, ‘He will not lie.  He will not stay.  He will find another denomination’.  But the father’s smile through pain was a real, though fragile, real though apocalyptic touch of grace, a holy Eucharist, love made real.

Boston

May 16 started six days of Commencement gladness, here at Boston University, across a campus and city still bruised and hurting from spring terror and death.  We shall sorely and truly need together the ongoing development of a spiritual discipline against resentment (acknowledged, admitted, accepted—and then wrestled with, like love with an angel).  More than 80 graduates were anointed by word and sword with a scarlet key.  The dental school celebration—large, colorful, global. A certain choir learned that they would sing with the Rolling Stones, a band active when Christopher Morse was in college.  Of course, with gladness, we happily recall the great, big moments of Commencement 2013.  Morgan Freeman photographed with Jan Hill.  Morgan Freeman cheered by students, ‘speech, speech…’  And in extatraditional mode, he did.  The Marsh Chapel choir, soon to sing with Mick Jagger, resplendent, redolent at Baccalaureate.  The thrilled celebration of hooding like that of the theology school here in the Chapel.  Music from ‘A Chorus Line’—perhaps generationally specific in thrill—with the Boston Pops.  A magnificent Advisory Board meeting with a world class presentation on global health.  Greek and Latin orations, from memory, in the original, at the BU Academy graduation, with a fine sermon given there, on ‘closing the opportunity gap’ on the text, ‘to whom much is given, from him much is required’ in St. Luke.  All these and others were wonderful and more than wonderful.

But come with me to an out of the way, smaller gathering, and a particularly powerful one every year.  For us, the most meaningful graduation moment each year is not under the big tent but among several dozen in Faneuil Hall, where 20 or so soldiers are commissioned as second lieutenants.  In crisp attire and crisp liturgy, young men and women assemble before the portraits of Sam Adams, John Hancock, and George Washington, in the cradle of the cradle of liberty.  “The President of the United States has placed his trust and confidence…” “Do you promise to preserve, protect, and defence…”  Then the loved ones—parents, or siblings or spouses—place the apulets upon the commissioned officers, sending them potentially into harm’s way for our sakes.  Freedom is not free.  To see mom and dad, brother and sister, husband and wife struggling to get the shoulder boards in place, every May, is the marrow of commencement, where a courageous present enters an uncertain future.  This year—by apocalypse came the gospel said Paul—one fine woman was aided by two other young women, her sister—and her partner.  In Boston, Faneuil Hall.  Before Adams, Hancock, and Washington.  She is going to place herself in mortal danger for us.  And we are going to question her practice of love?  It was a very full moment, an apocalypse if you will.  A touch of grace.

Montreal

By May 22, after the last of 27 different Commencement events for us, this the gracious retired faculty and staff association luncheon, an organization long chaired by two Marsh Chapter stalwarts, pointed the car due north toward ‘le Europe prochain’, Montreal, the Europe next door, the second largest French speaking city in the world.  A BU class was there arranged on urban mission and ministry.  While students pondered the pattern and significance of the work of Jean Vanier, founder of L’Arche, and his emphasis on ‘belonging’, his longing for belonging, and remembered our own decade in and out of Quebec.  The Faculty of Religious Studies Birks Building, pristine and waxed and gothic and beautiful and summer empty, welcomed us with open arms.  Part school part church, part library part chapel, part study part sanctuary, part office part altar, part lectern part pulpit, part mind part heart.  The current faculty, many friends—Green, Kirkpatrick, Aiken, Baum, Hall, Golberger, Henderson, Sharma, Pettem—had place there books on display, and their faces restored a part of our being.  Our friends give us back ourselves.   Shadows, shades of memory greeted us too.  NT Wright, in 1981, in chapel announcing the death of Anwar Sadat.  Dean Eric Jay, long retired, admitting that the early church rejected patri-passianism, ‘but just barely’.  Dean RBY Scott, whose hymn we sing here.  Deans Johnston, Mclelland, and Runnells, Johnston stating at a oral that Q was a missionary, teaching tract.  Wilfred Cantwell Smith, like Howard Thurman, more than 100 years ahead of his time more than fifty year ago.  The day of registration and of defense and of graduation.  Forms of real contest at a time of young hope, fear and life.  The Canadian self-deferential self mockery, of which we could use a steady dose here:  ‘We could have had the best of British culture, French cuisine, and American government, but we got instead British cuisine, French government, and American culture’.  Funny, but not true, expect in the tone of self deprecation.

When GB Caird came to McGill he spoke of the Unity of the New Testament, and in his portrait we saw resembled  a Methodist minister, Dr Thomas Ogletree.  Tom is nearly 80.  Let me  describe him for you:  courtly, gracious, soft spoken white bearded, grandfatherly, bespectacled.   The former dean of Yale Divinity, and athe other of much of the theological substance in our current UM Book of Discipline.  I expect that if you look in the dictionary to find the definition o ‘Christian gentleman’, you will discover his photograph.  Last year he solemnized the marriage one of his five children, a son—to another man.  Now the winds of reaction, abetted by the mistaken misguidance of the current general superintendent in NY, are bringing him to trial.  The measure of our current failure to live up to the much ballyhooed Methodist tradition of social justice and holiness, can no more accurately be taken than by this dark image of Ogletree on trial before Methodism.  ‘Al contraire’ we thought in Montreal.  It is Ogletree who has brought Methodism to trial, not the reverse.  Here he is—gentle, forebearing, honest.  A touch of grace.

Syracuse

Our Annual Conference in Syracuse concluded yesterday.  Among many other earthly delights it included a fire alarm—no harm, no injuries—during opening worship.  Imagine 1500 Methodists fleeing and stampeding out of a convention center, ‘fleeing from the wrath to come’.  No flames, just apocalyptic mirth and moments in the sunshine for fellowship, and for conference.  It was also a truth moment.  A fire alarm is ringing, right now, across Methodism.   Since 2010 from Albany to Buffalo my beloved conference has lost 11% of its people.  For those under 45, the disaffection is highly specific.  We refuse to affirm the full humanity of gay people.  Can we be surprised that people of conscience go elsewhere?  What kind of future could you honestly want or expect for an excluding denomination?  During the fire alarm, I took the occasion to find and meet a pastor from Binghamton, whose blog post I had read the week before.  I close with Stephen Heiss’s words, for they are truly my very own:

To Bishop Mark Webb, my brother in Christ!

In the spirit of the One who said the truth will set us free, and emboldened by the freedom given by grace for which Jesus lived and died, I want and need to share with you how God has led me (and many of our colleagues) in ministries to help set at liberty those who have been held captive by the tyranny against people who are gay.

In the last few years I have officiated at several weddings for brothers and sisters who are lesbian or gay. One of those weddings—the highlight of my ministry—was for my own daughter and the woman who is now her wife. They are so happy!

Further, much to my delight, I have plans to officiate in the near future at yet another wedding for two women, that their joy may also be complete.

Bishop Webb—the long bitter era of scorn and hatred against gay people is dissolving before our very eyes. Christ has broken down the walls.

Those who have lived within the law and those who have lived outside the law are sitting down together at the table of grace.

The parable of the Kingdom of God as a wedding banquet has become an event in real time for hundreds of gay couples across our state. Finally, like the guest list in Jesus’ parable, those on the outside are invited to the inside of God’s grace.  They must come!

Nevertheless, some yet refuse the invitation.

They make excuses.

They cite Scriptures, yet offer no interpretive principle by which their claims are validated.

They prefer the “tradition of the elders” to Jesus’ teachings about “not judging the other.”

They screen for the gnats of sexual correctness while the elephants of consumer materialism, environmental degradation, and global starvation pass right by, completely unnoticed.

We cannot judge them, of course, for they too are given grace.

Who among us can say we have always accepted every invitation toward grace and away from judgment?

And so, grace abounds!

Further, the harvest of that grace is found everywhere—even in the church!

With regard to homosexuality, we who count ourselves as United Methodists have been wandering in the wilderness of uncertainty about all things gay for 40 long years.  Now the Promised Land is coming into view.

During those 40 years we have attempted to trap gay folks in nets of shame.

We stalked them with bible verses.

We legislated against them – whereas this, and whereas that.

We sent them to trials.

In righteous rage we lifted stones against them.

Now, in our own time, we are dropping those stones, one by one -

at first -  mothers, dads, sisters, brothers, school mates, talk show hosts, the neighbor next door.

We were learning.

Then—psychologists, pediatricians, sociologists, school teachers, neuro-scientists, biologists, counselors.

We were learning.

Then—Anglicans,  Episcopalians, Lutherans, United Churches of Christ, Presbyterians, Reformed Jews.

We were learning.

And now – baseball players, bible scholars, theologians, professional ethicists, Sunday school teachers, pastors . . .

and bishops.

We are learning.

We are finally learning that

being gay harms no one.

No one.

No one.

We are learning it is not a sin to be gay nor was it ever “incompatible with Christian teaching”.

We are learning that it is really OK with God if one is gay -

(just as eating shrimp is OK,  regardless stern biblical injunctions to the contrary!)

And so a new circle is forming.

A new circle is being created,

and it is being drawn wide.

A circle of understanding.

A circle of compassion.

A circle of truth.

The complex name for that circle might be:

“the fellowship of those who are no longer

throwing stones at people just because

they happen to be gay, lesbian,

bisexual or transgender”

A simpler name for that circle might be:

“those who are trying to live in the light of God’s grace”

But the name of the circle I most hope for, is this one:

The United Methodist Church

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.2.2013 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

John 14: 23-29

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Situation

Come with me for a moment, if you will, and by the mind’s eye, by the imagination, as we walk a little bit across our beloved city.

We can leave Marsh Chapel and head to the left, due east.  The trees and flowers are fragrant and in bloom.  We will saunter and wander down the Commonwealth Mall, past the statues and benches and people enjoying a free Sunday.   At Dartmouth we will turn right, due south.  Now you will want to pause at Copley Square.  Take a moment with me to stop by the office of our sister congregation at Trinity Church.  We will leave a calling card and say a prayerful word of greeting.   Take a moment with me to stop by the office of our brother congregation at Old South church.  We will leave a calling card and say a prayerful word of greeting.  Take a moment with me to read the cards and notes, see the flowers and gifts, in the people’s memorial, there, across from the library.   Remembrance, thanksgiving, presence—you feel them all, these emotions of living grace, these sacramental emotions of living grace.  I want to give us a moment to pause here.  By the living grace of God we can face grief with grace, hatred with honesty, and death with dignity.  There is a spirit of truth loose in the universe, to guide us on our walk this morning.   Many of us have already, personally or individually, made this same hike, but we have done so together, until now, and now we do so, together, by the mind’s eye, by the imagination.  There are some things we need to face, again.  Here.

Now we will head back to Marsh Plaza, walking west on Boylston.  These blocks have become brick to brick familiar to the whole globe, not just to those of us in the ‘hub’.  It is important for us to take this walk, and it is important for us to take this walk together.  You may want to look at some running shoes in Marathon Sports.  Or if you like the gracious narthex of the Lennox Hotel, we could rest there a moment.  We will stand for a moment in front of the Forum Restaurant, and there, look for a moment, at another makeshift memorial.  By the living grace of God we can together make our way into the past, in memory, and into the future, in imagination.   We see ourselves being filmed from the camera atop Lord and Taylor.  We greet a friend who is seated in a nearby restaurant.  The eyes film over, somehow.  But we are walking together, and we can walk on.  You can walk fast, or, like me, walk slowly.  It is after all your own imagination.  Take things at your own pace.  Coming back, up Boylston, across Hereford, left on Commonwealth, and on to the Chapel, there are some things we need to face, again.  Here.

Two young men of limited abilities, armed with the Internet, $100, and some kitchen utensils, brought the fifth largest metropolitan region in the country to a many day standstill.  Coffin:  God gives us minimum protection and maximum support.  In our neighborhood.   Loss of life and limb, of property and security.  Here.  Present together to receive the living grace of God in Eucharist, present together across the airwaves to receive the living grace of God in the spoken word, we face together all the potentials of an open future and the extent of human freedom.  This is our shared situation.  We need to level with each other about this.

Scripture

Our Scripture, today in particular and every day in general, promises the presence of the spirit of truth, loose in the universe.  The potential for harm is, like death itself, ever present.  The potential for living grace, like life itself, is ever present.  The psalmist sings of a living grace.  Lydia embraced such a living grace.  John, ever unique, names this grace with a new name, the paraklete, the counselor, the advocate, the holy spirit, who abides in the experience of peace.

For all the familiarity of these lines from John 14, the actual meaning, in history and theology, is darkly or obscurely understood.  In particular the novel figure of the paraclete, related in some manner to the holy spirit, to this day is a source of wonder and perplexity for those who study these passages.  We are standing on high precipice, ice beneath our feet, wind swirling about our temples, as we receive the promise of the counselor.  The living grace of the living God we know in living.  Our scripture assumes that we shall be in need of some counseling, some advocacy, some aid.  We are.

Today such sustenance is given in a living grace, a lively grace that teaches and reminds.  Let me show you.  Let me remind you.  We need to learn and remember, though, the clear statement here.  You will be taught, reminded.  This is you plural, friends.   You all.  The gift of the living grace is made to the gathering, the community, the whole.  Not to you but to YOU.  These things I have spoken to YOU (plural).  While I am still with YOU (plural).  The spirit sent will teach YOU (plural).  Reminding of all that I have said to YOU (plural).  Peace I leave with YOU (plural).  My peace I give to YOU (plural).  Not as the world gives do I give to YOU (plural).

Living grace makes of us a community by making of us an addressable community, speaking to us together:  speaking us together. We may deconstruct the Scripture, but Scripture reconstructs US.  The gospel, spoken and heard, reshapes us into a living grace.  Reclothes us in our rightful minds…That is, in our situation, our SHARED situation, we are promised something, but the promise is to the plural YOU.  YOU, YOU ALL, ALL YOU ALL.  Our way forward, that is, on the strength of this Gospel, lies in forms of partnership—meaning is found in community, belonging is found in fellowship, empowerment is found in friendship.  Each one’s death diminishes me for I am a part of humankind.  The dark mystery of the Counselor remains, but there is nothing unclear about the spirit’s attention—focused on the common, the commonwealth, the common good.

The far too familiar lines of this strange moonscape of a passage come to a crashing conclusion.  ‘Let not your hearts be troubled’.  Heart-S.  We are, at heart, gifts of one another to one another, hearts whose heartbeats are felt by one another, souls whose soul is born in soulful connection to one another, meant to live for one another.

On television sometimes I hear some commentator say, ‘Let not your heart by troubled’.  I want to write in the S at the end.  It changes everything.  Heart-S.

Living grace is the grace to live together, which takes wisdom, power and goodness.  This is why, may I gently say, connecting with a community of faith is so primary, so irreplaceably important.  We worship TOGETHER come Sunday.  Together we search for wisdom, power, goodness.

Wisdom forms design, power allows action, goodness does good.  Research, policy, practice.  Teaching, deaning, pastoring.  Preaching is over all.  Eucharist is over all.  Grace is over all.

Let us receive some wisdom about anger.  Our anger is real, and needs to be felt, seen, heard, understood and processed as real.  I refer you to the sermon of April 21.  You will not get away from the marathon bombing without facing your anger, your hatred, even, for those who did this.  Be angry, the Bible says, but let not the sun go down on your anger.  Hate what is evil, the Bible says, but overcome evil with good. We need to acknowledge that anger, even confess it, even speak it, so that we do not repress it.  Beware, my friend, beware the return of the repressed.  You have reason to be angry. Oklahoma, Nineleven, Columbine, Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, Boston.  But you also have resources with which to deal with it.

Let us receive some power regarding hatred.  Romans 12: 9 I get…It is the later verse, 20, ‘feed your enemy…and so pour burning coals on him’ that is harder to interpret.   We may in part finally understand, at a gut level, Paul’s admonition.  Is there any other way to channel the anger and honest hatred of evil that we feel?  What a wise leverage, a Syracusan, a Archemedian leverage of anger for good, of hatred for love.  Let us together try it.  We have the possibility of regeneration right here, a living grace.  Shmuel Eisenstadt distinguishes irreversible collapse from ‘collapse with a possibility of regeneration or renewal’ (eg UMC)…’ability to reflect on themselves…reference to shared, lofty visions…allows reshaping…allows continuity…eg Roman Empire and Han Dynasty’ This is why, may I gently say, connecting with a community of faith is so primary, so irreplaceably important.  We worship TOGETHER come Sunday.

Let us receive some goodness for the journey.

One wrote: We just wanted to thank you all for your kindness and hospitality.  On Marathon Monday, when our race came to an end at Mile 25, we were so disoriented about what was going on.  Without any cell phones or money, we wandered the streets a while confused about what to do and worried about our loved ones at the finish line.  We met wonderful people that day,.  Some gave us money to get a taxi, but there were none to be found, others told us to go to the chapel and walked us to your doorsteps.  Everyone at the Chapel was so nice and helpful, bringing us food, hot tea, and letting us use your phones.  We felt safe!  You helped us to reunite with our families.  Thank God that they were OK and thank God for all the wonderful and kind people who we met that day at Marsh Chapel.  With love…

Another wrote: I want to express my gratitude and that of my entire family for the comfort and care provided to us on 4/15.  We sought refuge and we received that and more…Your staff was wonderful and their comfort was most appreciated.  It is hard to understand how someone can cause so much pain.  The benefit of being reminded in tangible ways of the goodness and kindness of others helps to create a sense of balance—thank you for that.  Sincerely…

It will take the wisdom, power and goodness of another generation to design, build and desire a better world.  Here is our prayer for them, the class of ’13, but it is truly a prayer for us all:

Seniors:  “13 prayers for the class of ‘13”

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

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

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

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

May you honestly face death, as we have done this spring, and so discover the precious value of every breath, as we also have done this spring.

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

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

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

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

May you have a life long, rapturous, torrid love affair—with Boston, dear old Boston, the home of the bean and the cod, and take your first born to Fenway Park, and remember the radiant, sun-dappled happiness of this morning all your days.

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

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

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

May it be so.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 05.5.2013 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

John 10: 11-18, 27-30

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Preface

The Shepherd is present and loving and good.

But today we are city, and a world around, drenched in sorrow.  Some of that sorrow lies at the feet of those killed, Martin and Lingzi and Krystle and Sean.  Some of that sorrow arises from the thought of those physically injured.  Some of that sorrow dimly recognizes the many others, near and far, harmed in other less visible ways.  Some of that sorrow kindles anger at the video image of assassins who lingered to view the potential effects of unspeakable actions on fellow humans.  This weekend we are a people drenched in sorrow.

We are also a University working through sorrow.  Monday began with brunch and celebration, and ended with terror.  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.  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 the President, 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.  Tomorrow we will again gather for a memorial service, for our deceased BU student, Lu Lingzi.  But today is Sunday, when we come to church, to pray, sing, and hear the Word.   Quietly, now, as a visible congregation in the pews and as a virtual congregation in the region, we might want to allow our Gospel to help us, to speak a pastoral word to us, to live in us, in three ways.

Here

The Gospel of John, more than any other ancient Christian writing, and in odd contrast to its prevalent misunderstanding across the continent 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’, hic et nunc.  In distress,  we hold onto divine presence, on word, the Shepherd-- here.

Two BU students were maimed on Monday.  One survived, in part because an Iraqi war veteran ran to her, held her, acknowledged her shock, staunched her bleeding, kept her from focusing on the carnage at hand, and made it his business to be present to her, on Boylston street.  His experienced prediction later that evening, that she would “make it”, proved true.  The Shepherd is here, present, in the shepherding acts of people like him who put on the equivalent of a pastor’s robe, to aid others.

It is not trite and not redundant repeatedly to honor the first responders, those first present.  It is faith, good faith, and theology, good theology.  God has no hands but yours.

In quieter hours, we may simple say, “God is here”, “the Shepherd is here”, referring only to the brute, undeniable experience of breathing, of life, of something, of something not nothing.  But in sorrow, and in the distress causing sorrow, we know presence through the Shepherd.  Next to us, it may be, we hear a voice: “Hold my hand.  Look down not out.  Focus on my eyes.  That pain in your leg is a good sign.  Breathe in and out.  I am here”.

We are a community devoted in witness to the One in the stained glass behind you, the Shepherd.   It is a good and healthy thing to enter a gothic nave whose form is a thousand years old, an Indiana limestone chapel built to last another thousand years, with a form of worship as ancient and historic as it is beautiful and true, and music from the ages, and readings 2000 years in use, all in a place of graceful space.  A physical recollection that we are not the first, nor will we be the last, to face inexplicable horror. I do not know of a week when one does not need that, but this week, in particular, we do.  John’s community had none of that in Ephesus in 90ad.  They had only voice.  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.

It is an old word.  The Shepherd is here.

Love

The Gospel brings a second old word.   One writer said he used the old short words.  ‘I know the other ones, the big words, but the short ones say it better.’  Love.  God so loved the world, to give God’s only Son.  I try to remember that when a boy who looks like my son did at age 8 is taken.  It is as if God walked over, and put a hand on my shoulder, and said, ‘You know, I do understand.  Yes.  I had a son once, too.’   The reason the community of faith, John’s church, could hear the ‘here’ of the Shepherd is that they had experienced his love.   With them, I am a Christian more for the cross than for the empty tomb. The Gospel of John knew the reality of love, and called love God.  Love is God, said the later letter bearing the name of John.

But it is a strange, somewhat unfamiliar kind of love. (The gospel makes the familiar strange, and the strange familiar.) Not the love of family or kindred, those with whom you watched TV on Friday.  Not the love of lover and beloved, to whom you rightly repaired on Monday.  Not even the religiously frequent reference, across the globe, to a principle, idea or virtue.  Ours today is rather a love that gives, and gives of self, which they knew in Ephesus, and we know today, in loving hands.  God has no hands, none, but yours.  We all need loving hands.

To recall love, when you see others, in brutality, shredded by insidious evil, you will need to pronounce love in life.   It is also repeatedly said, not tritely, that the only thing evil needs to succeed is the inattention and inaction of good people.  This passage, ‘the Father and I are one’, created a new religion--in love.  The verse is usually thought to convey a heightened Christology, the raising of Jesus to divine status.  But for the first century Christians it arguably may have meant the very opposite, the lowering of God to human status.  It meant the lowering of the Father, not the raising of the Son.  It meant, well, love.   The Shepherd loves, is loving, is love.

Love is God.  That is all we have of God, as we breathe and listen and live.  Love means love of self, family, kin, but also of neighbor, other, friend, but also, remarkably, of enemy.  Now John does not get quite that far.  I am not sure that I have.  But the Christian Gospel as a whole does, and more.  I will try to remember that when I feel my anger welling up, or when I am tempted to disparage groups for the behavior of individuals, or when I want a faster solution to a thorny problem.

That is why you come to church every week, to be prepared for love.  You cannot develop a worldview, a religious perspective, a depth of faith, or a disciplined life, in the 3 minutes following a bombing.  You have to get started a lot earlier in order to have, in crisis, the nourishment, the power, you will need, really to live.  Love means taking responsibility.  Love means taking responsibility.  And taking responsibility means finding, soon, a community wherein you can know and show meaning, belonging, empowerment, where you can learn from others to pray, to tithe, to keep faith.

I encourage you to continue in ways many have already begun, to find effective modes of help for those well beyond our community who have been hurt, one way or another.  A card, a note, a check, a gift, a prayer—we all have things we can do to lean forward and help those harmed.  One of our students is active in bringing a blood bank to campus in the next few days.  It is healthy and it is helpful, in many directions, to find one thing or two things creatively to do, to bring some good to bear in the face of tragic violence.  So you will don a shepherd’s gown, hoist a shepherd’s crook, live a shepherd’s life, for the moment, in love.

It is an old word.  The Shepherd is love.

Good

Here is one other old word.  Good.  The Shepherd is good.

But, let us be frank.  There is a kind of nihilism abroad today, which is not good.  You can hear it, in the word ‘whatever’: and see it in inebriation, in amoral sexual practice, in materialism, in incapacity for human communication, in incapacity for moral discernment. These features of current life, exploding all about us on a daily basis, are just not good.

As our fellow preacher the Rev. John Holt, of Osterville, wrote two weeks ago:

I’m troubled. Really troubled. Disturbed because compassion is scarce. Too often, we live in a “what’s in it for me” world.

You remember, from last Sunday, my friend describing life, in one word as ‘good’, and in two words as ‘not good’.  Well, no early Christian document surpasses John in plumbing the depths of that duality.   A bright Monday, bombs.  A sunny Patriots Day, carnage.  A glorious marathon, death.  As my teacher Robert McAfee Brown said, ‘This is God’s world.  But is a crummy one.  We have to live with both realities.’  I remember Anglican Bishop Hapgood, circa 1975, facing a group of idealists and saying, ‘Go ahead, keep your dreams, be dreamers.  Just remember that others dream, too, of gulags, and genocide, and terror.’

From this pulpit four years ago, (Nov 29, 2009), we tried to be alert to the probability that, at some point, another nineleven would befall us.  How little we knew how close it would be, both in time and in space.

The best of days, the highest of moments, the most charmingly gracious of cityscapes, the culmination of the American experiment on Patriots Day--trashed by hateful, killing violence.  When another takes what you hold dear, count precious, think lovely, and bombs it, you cannot avoid anger, and the sorrow at the heart of anger.

Some may wonder whether anything religiously cast, any preachment, can carry any truth, any good.  Religion, like the weather, is just so mixed--good and bad and other.

One response:  Do you have good religion, or bad, asked the spiritual?  Are you putting on that shepherding robe, that pastoral gown, to fend off the cold?

Unamuno wrote, “ Warmth, warmth, warmth.  We are dying of cold, not of darkness.  It is the night that kills, it is the frost.”

Religion that brings good relationships can bring much good.  You can see and hear that right here in the pews of Marsh Chapel.  Come and join us!

Our passage about the Shepherd shepherded into experience something new, over time, the relational community of God.  Yes, we are monotheists, but not really fully so.  God is not One, for us.  God is Three, or, at least, Three in One.  That is, the good Shepherd, is good-- in relationship.  God is in relationship, with God.  We might want to think about that, as we measure our relationships into the future.  ‘The Father and I are One’ was step toward Chapter 14 and the Spirit, and beyond that to Nicaea.  Ours are the hands with which to touch, hold, greet and honor.

By the way.  I do not believe in a God who wills that some are hurt and others spared. Who would worship such a God? I see rather random chance in life, both freedom to will and the freeing of the will, to be present, to love, and to do the good. Jan and I did not turn left on Boylston, Monday at 2:30, we went around the back way.  Not because we are more beloved, smarter, or more faithful.  No, random, just random. Rain falls on the just and unjust.   But through it all:  There is good, there is good, there is good in every day.  Part of that good is found in relationship, blessed by the relational God of John 10.  Some of that good is right here in Boston,  ‘the Hub’--in relationship.  Hugs in cold of First Night, cheers for the music come July 4, waves to the rowers come Head of the Charles, and, yes, next year, celebration come Patriots Day.  Connected in relationship.

No orthodox Bostonian
Is lonely or dejected,
For everyone in Boston
With everyone’s connected.
For Boston’s not a capital,
And Boston’s not a place;
Rather I feel that Boston is
The perfect state of grace.

(EBWhite)

It is an old word.  The Shepherd is good.

Coda

How then will you live?

Will you find your way, through the crowd and the rubble, to the Shepherd—who is here, who is love, who is good?

We will want to live with presence, love and goodness.  Thankfully, from Monday itself, we have a shining example of people modeling dimensions of healthy spirituality, of the runners and the race (a metaphor not unknown to the biblical mind by the way—Psalm 19, 1 Cor 9, Hebrews 12).   I picture all the runners practicing months and weeks.  I see the lacing of the running shoes.  I hear the starting whistle and the throng surging forward.  We saw at Kenmore, the brightly attired elderly man, the young guy with blue hair, the student running in a tuxedo, the troop from a nearby college ROTC program, the woman running—as so many—in memory, the folks in wheel chairs, the straining forward, by mile 25, of striving, disciplined energy.  They all are models for us of running the spiritual race and finishing the spiritual course. We can lace up and run, too, in our own ways.  God’s goodness, love and presence beckon us onward.

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

Text from Prayers of the People:

Good Shepherd,

Hear our voices:

The voices that are hoarse from shouting,

The voices that are unsteady from weeping,

The voices that are sharp with anger,

The voices that are quivering with fear,

The voices that are dull with weariness,

The voices that are quiet with uncertaintiy,

And the voices that have fallen silent.

You, Good Shepherd, you know all of us and call us each by name. We have come to know the names of some of our flock, our community, our city, who have been taken from us by violence this week:

Martin, Lingzi, Krystle, and Sean

We mourn their loss and we pray for all those around the world who are victims of violence, for those whose names we do not know, but who are known by you.

While violence can tear people from our arms all too soon, we are confident Lord, that nothing, nothing and no one can snatch them from your loving hand.

We are all called to follow you, and this morning we give thanks for those who  follow your call by embodying your shepherding, those first responders who run into danger to rescue the injured, those nurses and doctors who knit wounds and bring healing, and those members of law enforcement who help to keep us safe from the dangers that surround us.

Good Shepherd, this week our thoughts turn to the green pastures of the Common and the Public Garden, the still waters of the Charles river, this city of Boston which we love so deeply. This week our beloved city has also felt like the  valley of the shadow of death. Good Shepherd, restore our souls so that we again may feel rest, safety, and delight in this our beloved city.

And Good Shepherd, even though it is difficult, even though it is so difficult, we ask for your grace this morning to be able to pray for the lost sheep, for those who have wandered far from us, for those who have perpetrated violence against us. We know that you pursue every lost sheep with your grace, love, and mercy. Give us the strength to follow you so that we may do the same, so that we may forgive those who trespass against us.

And when our words fail, when we lose our voice, we are grateful that you, Jesus Christ, have given us familiar words which we can fall back upon to pray:

Our Father…

Amen.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 04.21.2013 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

John 21: 1-19

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John

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The deep resonance of Handel’s Messiah, its third part sung gloriously today, undergirds our good and not so good life with triumph, with the triumphant song, with the triumphant promise, with the triumphant promise of redemption, heaven, hope, healing, wholeness, God.  In a word, today, triumph.

Life

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

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

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

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

It is not I believe that the Fourth Gospel diminishes or discounts invitation and compassion, evangelism and pastoral care, laity and clergy.  It is just that the writer(s) had bigger fish to fry and sheep to tend of another fold.  So along came—someone—who wrote 21 for us, to remind us.  In a word—good.  In two words—not good.

Triumph, triumphant joy, triumphant promise comes your way.  Put them to work this week.

I know that my Redeemer lives.

Behold I tell you a mystery.

The trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised.

Death is swallowed up in victory.

But thanks be to God who gives us the victory.

If God is for us who is against us?  If God is for us , who is against us?

Blessing and honor and glory and power be unto him.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 04.14.2013 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

John: 20:19-31

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Gospel

My Lord and My God

Resurrection Grace offers us gracious allegiance and resurrection reverence

Jesus Christ our Lord who commands allegiance

Jesus Christ our Lord who inspires reverence

A way to live and a way to love, doing and being

David sings so in the Psalms:  my Strength and my Might

Peter preaches so in Acts:  He is exalted as Leader and Savior

John teaches so in the Apocalypse:  Alpha and Omega

Strength and Might!

Leader and Savior!

Alpha and Omega!

Lord and God!

Have we received Him this Easter with song, and word, and lesson, and love?

Lord and God.

The Gospel of John is so different:  four resurrection stories, the figure of Thomas, Thomas doubting faith, his seeing that is believing and believing that is seeing, his friendship with the estranged, he (alone) gets the meaning of the story right.

To live in resurrection grace is to find, to be found, by the true Lord and the real God, to accept allegiance and reverence.

Allegiance

You will pledge allegiance to someone, and maybe, already, you have.

Beware the dark danger of allowing lesser loyalties to eclipse the one great loyalty.

You are pilgrim not a tourist, a pilgrim not a tourist.

You are here on a journey not a lark.

We are a pilgrim people, stumbling our way forward, as Robert F Kennedy tried to remind us 45 years ago, weeping with those who wept in Indianapolis, the night King was murdered.  Kennedy preached:

“We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization - black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love.

For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.

But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond these rather difficult times.

My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote: "Even 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."

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.”

Something, or someone, will claim your allegiance.  Beware giving the sacred dimension of your heart to something less than worthy of your heart.

Ask:  Who are you?  What do you believe?  How do you love?  To what are you called? Whom shall you forgive?

To what do you give your highest allegiance.  The old Boston personalists counted cooperation as the highest good.  Bodily cooperation—health.  Social cooperation—civilization.   Climactic cooperation—nature.  Personal cooperation—the beloved community.

Love is the norm, not a mere virtue.  Love is the power that makes virtue possible.  Love is who we are meant and made to be.

Have you truly selected one just need, one issue in justice, and applied and invested yourself with allegiance?

Reverence

You will finally worship somewhere, somehow.  The human being is irretrievably religious—not such good news in the face of pride, sloth, falsehood, superstition, hypocrisy, and idolatry.

Nonchalance about non attendance in public, ordered worship expands the circles of nonchalance about others, about different others, about the hurts of different others, about the willingness to neglect the hurts of different others, about the capacity to harm different others.  There is a straight line from absence in church to drone warfare.

If on Easter Sunday you saw and heard only your own kith, kindred and kind, beward.  Brunch with your wife’s family, dinner with your parents, a nap in the Easter afternoon. Lack of physical engagement with the physical presence of others, in reverence, narrows the personal imagination about what life is for others.

People all people belong to one another.

We may take five days of prayer.  One in a prison.  One in a hospital.  One in a school.  One in a psych unit.  One on a farm (R Shankar).

That is John’s difference, ironically, universality.  Our puny, trumped up differences of size, gender, race, religion, color, orientation, age, creed, tongue, waist and shirt measure—what we see—falls away before what we believe, in love.  Love is God.  We are loved, so we may love.

We think this week about Martin Luther King and the Letter from Birmingham Jail.

Some of us are habitual.  Some of us are spiritual.

Some of us are habitual:  morning prayer, daily reading, Sunday worship, tithing, gathering, all.    But are we spiritually habitual?

Some of us are spiritual:  present, alive, free, gracious, loving, open, all.  But are we habitually spiritual?

Let those of us who are habitual, be spiritually so.  May we have the power not only the form of faith

Let those of us who are spiritual, be habitually so.  May we have the form not only the power of faith.

Who is your Lord?  Who commands your allegiance?

Who is your God?  Who inspires your reverence?

Coda

Be happy

Stay happy

Be confident

Have fun

Create fun

Enjoy

Count it all joy

Shine

Live in Love

You so will benefit others

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 04.7.2013 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 24: 1-12

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Click here to hear the sermon only.

Preface

Wonderfully created, more wonderfully restored…

Often our experience falls short of our expectation, even very short.  We hope for love and find companionship.  We desire friendship and find alliance.  We expect vocation and land a job.   We have high expectations, but low experience.   So, over time, our expectations can diminish, and we find ways both to accept that outcome and to militate against it.  Experience ever trumps, and often disappoints, expectation.  We want an A and get B.  We want a Porsche and get a Ford.  We want a full church, and get half of that.

How different Easter!  The Easter gospel is so strangely, hauntingly different.  It is not just a matter of a church being full (though that is very nice).  It is the experience of the women, who come to the tomb, in the face of their expectation.  Luke begins and ends this gospel of restoration power with the women.  A gathering of women engaged in a traditional task of preparing a body with spices and ointment.  Luke revises, not to say restores, Mark’s earlier account.  Christ has triumphed over the cross and that triumph is based on appearances—experiences—of the risen Lord, experiences of restorative power.

For St. Luke, the resurrection of Jesus brings the restoration of life, the redemption of the world, the re-creation of the church.  Hence his location of all these stories in Jerusalem, where the spirit will come upon the church come Pentecost.

The Women

We might ponder especially this Easter the women in Luke 24, the prototypes of faithful people in the church, your own progenitors:  sent on a thankless mission…heading for the stench of death…facing a corrupted corpse and a corrupted hope…dreading the visual and spiritual encounter…worried too about the practicalities (spices, cloths, stone)…together, at least, in their dread and sorrow, together…leave the messy things to the women…carrying with them, at daybreak, the memory of Passover loss…perhaps hoping for one last earthly moment of connection with One who brought meaning, belonging, and empowerment… Jewish women of the first century, not exactly the Lords of creation…three for whom the ministry of Jesus was in ruins, consigned to failure…it is a tomb after all to which they march, conscripted into the army of the least, last, and lost…

‘I dread the sight of him, torn and bloody.  I dread the lifting of him, and the stench.  I dread the cold of the stone, the darkness of the crypt—it makes me shiver shake.  I dread to touch him.  I dread facing him and the future, and facing the future without him.  I dread how awful the world is, and now that light love glimmer doused.  I dread the walk home, full of emptiness.’

Come Easter we recall:  something happened, with power, to restore the life of a desolated community, and to restore the lives of particular women and men, who have given us the record of the Easter restoration.  Easter is about restoration, resurrection, rebuilding, re-creation.

They expected a corpse and found an angel.  They expected a stone and found an opening.  They expected and ending and found a beginning.  They expected death, real pungent death, and found life.  No wonder they were perplexed.

The women breathed apocalyptic air.  The church breathed messianic air.  The evangelist breathed dualistic air.  We are recovering naturalists.  Some assembly required here, that is, some translation, from worldview to worldview.  These are symbols to be interpreted more than doctrines to be propounded.

Easter: Wherein our worst fears are not realized in dread, in bread, and in spread. Wherein, for once, our experience if far better than our expectation. For the Easter news of Jesus Christ is not about creation, but about redemption, about restoration. The good news of Jesus Christ is not about building, but about rebuilding.  The good news of Jesus Christ not about the beginning, but the next beginning.  The good news of Jesus Christ is not about creation but about a new creation.

It raises a personal question for those in their later sixties:  with time remaining, what do you hope to restore? Endow? Rebuild?

As said EE Cummings “I thank you Lord for this most amazing day…”

As Tug McGraw so well said, “You gotta believe.”

As Butch Cassidy told the Sundance Kid, “Kid, I’ve got vision and the rest of the world wears bifocals.”

‘I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, most of which never happened.’  M Twain.

As Judy Collins sang,  “I’ve looked at life from both sides now, from win and lose and still, somehow, it’s life’s illusions I recall.  I really don’t know life at all!”

Exemplum Docet

You can hear restorative words every week:

“Hello, my name is John, I am an alcoholic…”  Restoration.

“I enrolled to start my education again…”  Restoration.

“I just called, Dad, it’s Easter.  I know we haven’t gotten along very                                   well. But I wanted to be in touch…”  Restoration.

“She joined the Y last month.  She had to start again toward health.”

Restoration.

“This meeting is about changing our company to save it.”  Restoration.

“We are here to try to prepare our church for the next century.”

“I took communion because I wanted my life to change.”  Restoration.

“In the time I have I will share my heart with those I love.”

“Hi Mom.  I went to church today.  It felt good to be there.: Restoration.

“I’m 45 years old, and I’ve never been able to commit to anything or

anyone.  With you, I am going to try.”  Restoration.

“For 30 years there has been a woman inside me waiting to come                          alive, to be.  I have crying other people’s tears.  No more.” Restoration.

“I made a mistake when I was 19.  I have been beating myself up for it

ever since.  I guess I’ll move on.”  Restoration.

“Today you made me happy.  I haven’t laughed like that since school.

Where have I been all these years?” Restoration.

New Creation Augustine

‘Twas not the creation which settled Augustine’s heart. Here is restoration from our neighborhood.  It was the grace of restoration.  No, he saw too well who we are by nature, and the restoration turn the redemptive God of Easter gives our souls:

Sloth poses as the love of peace: yet what certain peace is there besides the Lord?

Extravagance masquerades as abundance: but God is never ending store of sweetness.

The spendthrift makes a pretence of liberality; but God is the most generous dispenser of good.

The covetous want many possessions for themselves: but God possesses all.

The envious struggle for preferment: but what is to be preferred before God?

Anger demands revenge: but what vengeance is as just as God’s?

Fear shrinks from any sudden unwanted danger, for its only care is safety: but to God nothing is strange, nothing unforeseen. (Confessions,50).

It was grace, redeeming power: "not in reveling and in drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy.   But put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires. (Rather arm yourself with the Lord Jesus Christ; spend no more thought on nature and nature’s appetites. )(Rom13:13)’”.  For in an instant, as I came to the end of the sentence, it was as though the light of confidence flooded into my heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled.” (Confessions, 178). “ That’s restoration.

Anderson Deliverance

Here is restoration from my neighborhood:  Several years ago, a young man from my neighborhood, upstate New York, one Batavia boy, set out for the Marines.  He did a couple of tours.  Then a job opened up in journalism. He was young!  First he went to South Africa.  And then to Israel.  Later, he chose to transfer to Lebanon.  Free, healthy, successful, gaining influence—what a life.  Then one Saturday he went early to play tennis in Beirut.  Along the way, a black sedan pulled him to the curb.  He was blindfolded, stuffed in the truck and whisked away, carted from basement to tenement to apartment.  He spent all day and all night hooded and chained.  For six years.

It’s one thing to build a life—free, healthy, successful, influential.  Another to redeem a life.

I remembered Terry Anderson’s story again this week.  In the darkness, in the bondage, through the terror, out of the misery he found … a new life, a new creation.  He found faith.  Or faith found him.  He read the Bible, cover to cover, more than 50 times.  It was his only story.  As it is ours.

50 times, he watched Moses slay the Egyptian.

50 times, he saw Israel run from Pharaoh.

50 times, he heard the chariots chasing God’s folk.

50 times, he wondered at the Red Sea parting.

50 times, he gasped as the returning water drowned Pharaoh.

50 times, he fidgeted as Israel just wandered and wandered in

wilderness.

50 times, he heard the promise of milk and honey.

50 times, he sat with Moses on Mt. Nebo.

Then, as Moses lay dying for the 50th time, a knock came at Anderson’s door.  And again he was whisked away, but this time, by grace, to freedom.  Do you remember his landing in New York?  Do you recall his walk across the tarmak?  Do you recollect his drive—they closed the highway to all traffic—to Midtown?  Do you remember his words?   “I have faith in God”.

It’s one thing to grow up in Batavia and build a life.

It’s another thing, hooded and chained and trapped in later life to see life redeemed.  And some bondage comes to us all. That’s power.  That’s restoration.  That’s power.

I Expect Great Things

45 years ago, Martin King was killed.  But he transformed our land.  His words transformed our rhetoric.  His marches changed our culture. His leadership fashioned a new middle class.  His hope kindled our hope.  His courage inspired our own.  45 years ago.   I love a story he told many times about power, redeeming power.  So hidden we miss it, in borrowed upper room, in a tragic crucifixion, in a temporary tomb, in a woman’s report of resurrection, in little hands, scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing to finish the new creation…

The gnarled hands—the cross, Good Friday.  The expectation—the resurrection, Easter. (No matter who you are today, somebody helped you to get there.  It may have been an ordinary person, doing an ordinary job in an extraordinary way. )  Here is restoration from your neighborhood:

There is a magnificent lady, with all the beauty of blackness and black culture, by the name of Marion Anderson that you’ve heard about and read about and some of you have seen.  She started out as a little girl singing in the choir of the Union Baptist Church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  And then came that glad day when she made it.  And she stood in Carnegie Hall with the Philharmonic Orchestra in the background in New York, singing with the beauty that is matchless.  Then she came to the end of the concert, singing Ave Maria as nobody else can sing it.  And they called her back and back and back, and she finally ended by singing, ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen’.   And her mother was sitting out in the audience, and she started crying; tears were flowing down her cheeks.  And the person next to her said, “Mrs Anderson, Why are you crying? Your daughter is scoring tonight.  The critics tomorrow will be lavishing their praise on her.  Why are you crying?

And Mrs. Anderson looked over with tears still flowing and said, “I’m not crying because I’m sad, I’m crying for joy.” She went on to say, “You may not remember, you wouldn’t know.  But I remember when Marian was growing up, and I was working in a kitchen till my hands were all  but parched, my eyebrows all but scalded.  I was working there to make it possible for my daughter to get an education.  And I remember Marian came to see me and said, “Mother,  I don’t want to see you having to work like this.” And I looked down and said, “Honey, I don’t mind it.  I’m doing it for you and I expect great things of you.”

And finally one day somebody asked Marian Anderson in later years, “Miss Anderson, what has the been the happiest moment of your life?  Was it that moment in Carnegie Hall in New York?”  She said, “No, that wasn’t it/”  “Was it that moment you stood before the Kings and Queens of Europe?” “No that wasn’t it”.  “ Well, Miss Anderson, was it the moment Sibelius of Finland declared that his roof was too low for such a voice?” “No, that wasn’t it.”  “Miss Anderson, was it the moment that Toscanini said that a voice like your comes only once in a century?” “No, that wasn’t it.” “What was it then, Miss Anderson.”  And she looked up and said quietly,  “The happiest moment in my life was the moment I could say, “Mother, you can stop working now.”

Marian Anderson realized that she was where she was because somebody helped her to get there.  (MLKing, “A Knock at Midnight”). That’s restoration.  In the mother’s gnarled hands—the cross.  In the mother’s voiced and great expecations—the resurrection.

Endnote

You are a people soaked in a sense of restoration!  The church:  women at the tomb!  The church:  loving rebuilding not just building! The church:  you present today, voicing redemption!  The church:  waiting six years with Terry Anderson in prison!  The church:  giving Augustine grace!  The church:  singing with the voice of Marian Anderson!

Wonderfully created, more wonderfully restored…

Come ye faithful raise the strain

Of triumphant gladness

God has brought his Israel

Into joy from sadness.

Loosed from Pharaoh’s bitter yoke

Jacob’s Sons and Daughters

Traveled with unmoistened foot

Through the Red Sea waters.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.31.2013 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to hear the full service.

Luke 22:14-23:56

A Meditation on the Palms

Seeing With the Heart: Meditations from Marsh Chapel, 2010

The Dean:   If we believe that life has meaning and purpose

People:   And we do

The Dean: If we believe that the Giver of Life loves us

People:   And we do

The Dean: If we believe that divine love lasts

People:   And we doThe Dean: If we believe that justice, mercy, and humility endure

People:   And we do

The Dean: If we believe that God so loved the world to give God’s only Son

People:   And we do

The Dean: If we believe that Jesus is the transcript in time of God in eternity

People:   And we do

The Dean: If we believe that all God’s children are precious in God’s sight

People:   And we do

The Dean: If we believe grace and forgiveness are the heart of the universe

People:   And we do

The Dean: If we believe that God has loved us personally

People:   And we do

The Dean: If we believe in God

People:   And we do

The Dean: Then we shall trust God over the valley of the shadow of death

People:   And we shall

The Dean: Then we shall trust that love is stronger than death

People:   And we shall

The Dean: Then we shall trust the mysterious promise of resurrection

People:   And we shall

The Dean: Then we shall trust the faith of Christ, relying on faith alone

People:   And we shall

The Dean: Then we shall trust the enduring worth of personality

People:   And we shall

The Dean: Then we shall trust that just deeds, merciful words are never vain

People:   And we shall

The Dean: Then we shall trust the Giver of Life to give eternal life

People:   And we shall

The Dean: Then we shall trust the source of love to love eternally

People:   And we shall

The Dean: Then we shall trust that we rest protected in God’s embrace

People:   And we shall

The Dean: Then we shall trust in God

People:   And we shall.

A Meditation on the Passion Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill

Deliver Us From Evil, 2005

The Dean:   To the question of evil let us live our answer by choosing the cruciform path of faith.

People:   Let us meet evil with honesty, grief with grace, failure with faith, and death with dignity.The Dean: Let us carry ourselves in belief.

People:   Let us affirm the faith of Christ which empowers to withstand what we cannot understand.

The Dean:   Let us remember that it is not the passion of Christ that defines the Person of Christ, but the Person that defines the passion.

People: Let us remember that it is not suffering that bears meaning, but a sense of meaning that bears up under suffering.

The Dean: Let us remember that it is not the cross that carries the love but the love that carries the cross.

People:   Let us remember that it is not crucifixion that encompasses salvation, but salvation that encompasses even the tragedy of crucifixion.

The Dean: Let us remember and that it is not the long sentence of Holy week, with all its phrases, dependent clauses and semi‐colons that completes the gospel, but it is the punctuation to come in seven days, the last mark of the week to come in 168 hours, whether it be the exclamation point of Peter, the full stop period of Paul or the question mark of Mary—Easter defines Holy Week, and not the other way around. The resurrection follows but does not replace the cross. The cross precedes but does not overshadow the resurrection. It is Life that has the last word and there is a God to whom we may pray, in the assurance of being heard: “Deliver us from evil”

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.24.2013 at 11:00 am