Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

By Marsh Chapel

John 12: 1-8

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Frontispiece

Our mentor and friend Rev. Russell Clark, a Colgate and Boston University graduate, served a small church in Oriskany Falls , NY for many years.  He dodged and weaved as appointments elsewhere were offered, to bigger churches and salaries.  He stayed.  He fell in love with a quieter life, natural beauty, the intrigue of pastoral ministry, the mystery of the cotidian. The Clark home sported a large twirling book shelf in the living room, filled with novels and histories and poetry.

His lay leader died after some years, to the regret and lasting hurt of the community.  People are not replaceable.  The widow, usually of regular perfect attendance in worship, stayed home, for some time.  At last in Lent she appeared.  Russell asked her how she found her way through the morass, the mess, the maze of grief, and got back home to church.  “Well, it was not the scripture, though I love all the scripture.  It was not the hymns, though I sing them to myself day by day.  It was not your visits, though they were most gracious.  It was not the family care and feeding or that of the neighbors.  It was not my personal faith in the resurrection, though I do have faith.   It was not even prayer, though I practice formal prayer, evening and morning, at meals and at bedtime.

“It was just this:  the chickens had to be fed every morning.  So I had to get up every morning.  Once I was up, the rest of the day—and at last, over longer time, the week and month, including Sunday morning—seemed to fall in line.  It was the chickens.  The clucking of those hens.  The clucking of those hens meant more to me, in healing, than all the hymns of Easter.  The regularity of feeding them, early in the morning, restored me, over time.  The clucking of those chickens meant more to me than all the hymns of Easter.”

Robinson

Come Lent, here at Marsh Chapel, we converse each year with our sibling Christians out of the Calvinist tradition.   We grow and learn, from and with, the slight differences, in sibling traditions, wherein we do not always agree, but agree to disagree agreeably.  Our interlocutor this year, 2013, is Marilynne Robinson—essayist, novelist, Calvinist.  Her love of Scripture, her sense of the eternal, her rendering of John Calvin, her prophetic defense of wonder in our time, her unwillingness to buy the cheap goods of a culture that languishes in the doldrums of a pervasive malaise, her celebration of quiet life, pastoral ministry, providential grace, and the deeps of love:  all these human gifts we gratefully receive from her this year.  Especially her sense of the extraordinary in the ordinary, health in the clucking of hens, helps us this year.

On Scripture:  One Easter I went with my grandfather to a small Presbyterian church in northern Idaho where I heard a sermon on the discrepancies in the gospel accounts of the resurrection…I was a young child… yet I remember that sermon…I can imagine myself that primal Easter, restive at my grandfather’s elbow, pushing my nickels and dimes of collection money into the tips of my gloves…memorably forbidden to remove my hat…It seems to me I felt God as a presence before I had a name for him…I was aware to the point of alarm of a vast energy of intention all around me…and I thought everyone else must also be aware of it…Only in church did I hear experience like mine acknowledged, in all those strange narratives, read and expounded…(227)…Amen (the preacher) said, having blessed my life with a lovely thing to ponder

On Speech: What should we call the presiding intelligence that orchestrates the decision to speak as a moment requires?  What governs the inflections that make any utterance unmistakably the words of one speaker in this whole language-saturated world? 120

On Sin: It took, for instance, three decades of the most brilliant and persistent campaign of preachment and information to establish, in the land of liberty, the idea that slavery was intolerable. 249

On Salvation: (Calvin’s) theology is compelled and enthralled by an overwhelming awareness of the grandeur of God…his sense of things is so overwhelmingly visual and cerebral, that the other senses do not interest him 221…heaven’s essence for him is that it is inconceivable in the world’s terms, another order of experience

On Service: We should maintain an appropriate humility in the face of what we think we know…encourage an imagination of humankind large enough to acknowledge some small fragment of the mystery we are… The Judeo Christian ethic of charity derives from the assertion that human beings are made in the image of God, that is, that reverence is owed to human beings simply as such….Our civilization believed for a long time in God and the soul and sin and salvation, assuming, whatever else, that meaning had a larger frame and context than this life in this world. 84…I do not think it is nostalgia to suggest that it would be well to reestablish the setting apart of time traditionally devoted to religious observance… 99 Science cannot serve in the place of religion because it cannot generate an ethics or a morality.71…  137

Driver

Speaking of speech, my former teacher Tom Driver recently remembered:

“I was twenty-five years old in 1950, a bachelor newly arrived in New York City to attend graduate school. I bought a single ticket and went alone to see director Harold Clurman’s production of The Member of the Wedding, by the southern author Carson McCullers. With the rest of the audience, I was put under a spell by Ethel Waters singing “His Eye is on the Sparrow.” There came another spell at the final curtain. The play’s central focus has been the longing of a pre-adolescent girl to escape from her loneliness. Young Frankie Addams (played by Julie Harris) wants to be part of the forthcoming wedding of her older sister. This privilege is not readily granted, but In the last scene, the way becomes clear, and she exclaims with joy: “The wedding will be the we of me.” Curtain.

“I will never forget what happened next. There was long applause and several curtain calls. And then we just sat there. No one wanted to leave. The strangers sitting next to me were just as slow to move as I was. After a few moments we hitherto strangers began to talk to each other. The theater had become the “we” of us. The performances on stage (and everything that Harold Clurman and the crew did to enable them) had performed something over and above the dramatis personae roles. They had created for that brief moment in time — less brief than most such occasions — a community of people whose lives otherwise did not cross. It is called theater magic, which means no one quite understands it and can never predict just when it will occur. But when it does, our joy is immense. It is similar to an experience of religious transcendence.

“In an age in which the term “public” has been denigrated in favor of “privatization,” when housing is increasingly “gated “if it is affordable at all, when public education and health care and transportation and all manner of intrinsically social services are either neglected or attacked as impingements upon “liberty,” when guns are thought to be necessary almost everywhere in the name of freedom and self defense — in such a time, the liminality engendered by ritual, theater, and religion, carries an important potential.”

Our gospel then raises for us the question of authority.

Authority

Religions wrestle with authority, all the time, everywhere.  The current change in Rome, and the ascendancy of Francis, our brother, whom we honor, encourage, and celebrate, recalls for us centuries of struggle over authority.  To the Calvinist right, all authority is vested in Scripture.  The Bible is the only full authority, ‘sola scriptura’, an historic, in some ways tragic manner of interpretation of life and love.  To the Catholic left, final authority is vested in the Bishop of Rome.  Before we, or more specifically I, become too critical of these vested stations, we, or I, must also recognize that at some point, some one has to break the tie, make the decision, guide the church, be ‘primus inter pares’, whether in the form of a breathing holy person or in the form of a spirited, breathing holy text.  My own tradition attempts to have it all or both ways, not always with shining success.  Methodism combines catholic tradition, reformation message, puritan discipline, Anglican liturgy, and pietist feeling.  Methodism interprets Scripture through Tradition, and Tradition through Experience, and Experience through Reason.  Such a separation of powers, by the way, has great advantages in a university setting, like this one.

Fragrance

But what of our gospel?  What form of authority does the Gospel of John prefer, select, elect, prize?  Ah, glad you asked.  No church in John, just a communal experience of Christ.  No leadership in John, just the deeds and words of the risen, I mean crucified, I mean incarnate, I mean spirited One.  No worries about ethics in John, no catalogue of virtues or vices, just a single command, to love.  No hierarchy, patriarchy, oligarchy, ecclesiology in John.  Just this:  Spirit.  Another Counselor.  With you forever.  A guide into all further truth.  How is that going to work?  Exactly.  That is why we have the letters of John, uno dos y tres, because, clearly, it did not.  The letters add in:  leadership, orthodoxy, ethics, teaching, form, all.  They wake from the Johannine dream.  But what a dream!  A spirited dream of spirit befitting any high Calvinist view of Scripture and any high Catholic view of clergy.  A dream of Spirit, leading to truth, over time.  A fullness of fragrance, spirit in life.  As in Proust, ‘What matters is to transform common occurrence into art (NYRB, 3/13).’

You will recognize the story of the anointing at Bethany.  Sort of…

It is like the familiar parable (sic):  A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and saw a man who had fallen among thieves, so he went and he asked his father for his inheritance.  The father gave him seeds to plant, but most fell on rocky ground.  He appealed to a judge, who would not listen, and then to a dishonest steward, who would listen, but who stole the rest of the seeds, and then planted them and they multiplied thirty, sixty and a hundredfold.  But he left 99 of the fold and went after a lost sheep.  On the way, he stumbled on a lost coin, and put it in his tunic.  This will be like a mustard seed, he thought, which is small but grows a big plant.  He went back to his father and said, I am not worthy to be a son, but make me a worker in a vineyard, and pay me as much as you pay those who started at dawn.  Which of these do you think proved neighbor to the man who fell among thieves?

I know you remember that one.

That is, John has somehow combined a story which was also known to Mark, and used by Matthew, with a story from Luke, unused by Mark or Matthew, and has added his own special ingredients, Johnannine special sauce if you will.  Or maybe a redactor re-edited portions of this passage.  For the record: John has added Judas as the stingy knee jerk liberal; John has added Judas’ motive, not so liberal, of greed;  John has not kept Mark’s ethical admonition, ‘For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you want you can do good to them’. (But Matthew also apparently erased that sentence, for who knows what reason.)  John also has misplaced or erased the fine conclusion, which Mark writes and Matthew copies, wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her. John also neglects to repeat that Jesus said of Mary’s act that she has done a beautiful thing for me.  In other words, what has been told in John was not so much in memory of her, though perhaps in the rest of the whole world it was so.  Most delicately, Mark and John both use a rare adjective, rendered her by the English word ‘pure’, which comes in the original from the same root as the word ‘faith’.  The gospels repeated an admonition from Deuteronomy 15, ‘the poor are ever present’, not at all to discountenance care of the poor (so important to us, and rightly so), but to lift the fragrance, the wonder at the heart of the gospel, to the highest level. (Bultmann, perhaps rightly, hears here a reference to the full fragrance of gnosis spreading throughout the world.)

John, alone, fills the room with fragrance.  That is his point, here.  Incense, the sense of the holy, the mysterium tremendum, the idea of the holy, the presence.  Resurrection precedes crucifixion in this reading.  Crucifixion is merely a coming occasion for incarnation in this reading.  Incarnation is a lasting fragrance in this reading, the fullness of fragrance.

Friends

My friend Rev. John Holt says of his work in ministry:  ‘we are trying to help people discover their spiritual side so that they can make a difference for good in the world’.  That is what I am trying to do in and from this pulpit, trying to help people discover their spiritual side so that they can make a difference for good in the world.

Our poetic friend George Herbert wrote:

Love bade me welcome: yet my sould drew back, Guiltie of dust and sinne.

But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning, If I lack’d any thing.

A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here : Love said, You shall be he.

I the unkinde, ungratefull? Ah my deare, I cannot look on thee.

Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them : let my shame Go where it doth deserve.

And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame? My deare, then I will serve.

You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat. So I did sit and eat.

A friend, of some more years than I, brought her children to worship on Christmas eve.  Afterward, she asked each one—6,8, and11 years old—what they most liked.  Said 6, ‘I especially liked the candle, except the wax dripped on my finger and that hurt.  Said 8, ‘I liked communion and the way the choir music drew us forward, together, into it.  Said 11, ‘I like the way you feel after you have been to church’.  6,8,11—they came to themselves.  And grandma did too.

Our neighbor Ron Dworkin wrote before his death: I shall take these two—life’s instrinsic meaning and nature’s intrinsic beauty—as paradigms of a fully religious attitude to life…These are not convictions that one can isolate from the rest of one’s life.  They engage a whole personality.  They permeate experience:  they generate pride, remorse and thrill.  Mystery is an important part of that thrill. (NYTRB, 68, 3/13).

My friend Frank Halse has written of the presence, recently, a letter and seven poems.  Frank is a double Terrier, CLA\STH, now in his late eighties, a widower, living alone in the great snows of the Tug Hill Plateau.  He was the Protestant Chaplain at Syracuse University from 1965 to 1975.  He drew a short straw and did marvelous ministry.  He is a poet, and now his poetry is all about presence:

Dear Bob,

Joyce’s death left me empty.  Stunned even.  That emptiness stayed for the 1^st year.  Then, two years ago, I began to be bumping into something that I finally put a name down. ‘The Presence”.  My first experience with the mystic corners of our world.

I felt unprepared and awkward, but in time, I began to experience what can only be described as whisperings quietly in my ears.  So I began to struggle with poetry as I think I was hearing:

God is as close as my breath

My heart pulsing my breast

No search reveals the Presence;

Only exhaustion, tragedy, and

Failure will temper my vision to

The point where I can sense the

Presence who responds to my

Needs with gifts of patience

From:  F Halse, Epiphany at Kennebunk Pond, 8/16/01

Coda

On the Sacred, Marilynn Robinson:  So I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes.  I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation.  With all respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us.  The eternal as an idea is much less preposterous than time, and this very fact should seize our attention.  In certain contexts the improbable is called the miraculous.

What is eternal must always be complete, if my understanding is correct.  So it is possible that time was created in order that there might be narrative—event, sequence and causation, ignorance and error, retribution, atonement.  A word, a phrase, a story falls on rich or stony ground and flourishes as it can, possibility in a sleeve of limitation.  Certainly time is the occasion for our strangely mixed nature, in every moment differently compounded, so that often we surprise ourselves, and always scarcely know ourselves, and exist in relation to experience, if we attend to it and if its plainness does not disguised it from us, as if we were visited by revelation.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Not everything measurable is meaningful, and not everything meaningful is measurable.

The greater the sea of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of mystery surrounding it.

The world does not lack for wonders, but only for a sense of wonder.

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

posted in Lenten Series 2013: Marilynne Robinson, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.17.2013 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 15: 11

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Frontispiece

Have you ever found yourself on the edge, verge or cusp of a new insight, or maybe even on the edge of a new life?

How much do you need (to acquire, to achieve, to conquer) before you are open to God? Open my eyes that I may see…

Maybe this winter morning, this Lenten hour, you too will have a prodigal thought, and you will come to your self.  Such an interesting phrase.  But when he came to himself…On coming into his true self…

There was a man who had two sons.  Notice all that is not here, before us today.  No incarnation.  No pedagogy.  No transfiguration.  No temptation.  No trial.  No passion. No crucifixion.  No resurrection.  Only a story about a man with two sons.  One who stays home.  And one who goes away.  Most of the listenership and most of the congregation today know this story, or at least have a vague lingering memory of some of it.  With the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son is the most famous of Jesus’ parables, and rightly so.  It is the account of the lavish love, the personal love, the uncritical love, the joyful love, the parental love, the patient love, the courageous love, the magnanimous love, the ecstatic love, the gracious love—the love of God. For you.  God loves you.  You are loved, so you can love.  Because God loves me, I too can risk love.

A Turn of Phrase

Prodigal means extremely—extremely something:  wasteful, generous or abundant.  The verb is (an Aorist participle):  and coming (in) to himself (a moment in time, a process in thought).  “For till then he was beside himself, as all men are, so long as they are without God in the world.’ (J Wesley).

But notice that the gospel, love, is hinged today on a single phrase.  After his travel and squandering, and before his return and reception, the prodigal has a thought, a prodigal thought at that.  All of the gospel this Lord’s Lenten day turns on a thought.  When he came to himself…When he thought to himself…

Three pulpits ago Professor Roland Wolseley endured this minister’s more youthful preaching.  Now deceased, Dr Wolseley was the preeminent scholar in the field of African American journalism.  Through his post at Syracuse University he almost singlehandedly created the discipline, through the publication of many books, the guidance of doctoral students, and a dogged, fierce love of his field, the struggling saintly newspapers and journals of the black community.  Roland went to Medill in Chicago, at Northwestern.  There, in his twenties he fell under the spell of my own greatest pulpit hero, Ernest Freemont Tittle, at Evanston First UMC, then the largest UMC in the country.  Tittle, a pacifist, as was Wolseley, gathered a group of graduate students for fellowship and reconciliation.  Wolseley met his wife, Bernice, there, and she went on to be for many years Tittle’s secretary.  You can read about Tittle in Robert Moats Miller’s older biography, or in Christopher Evans more recent monograph.

In those Syracuse years, Roland, a person of deep faith and quiet humor, would trace the work of Tittle in contrast and connection to what he was hearing.  Occasionally, too occasionally, he would say, leaving church, ‘Tittle would be proud  of that one’.   Another of those early 1940’s graduate student couples, it happened, awaited us when we moved to Rochester, where Ruth and Vernon Lippitt then lived.  These people, young in the forties, were mature the eighties and nineties, but had lost nothing of their early conviction, a combination of deep personal faith and active social involvement, found decades earlier, in the arm of a University congregation.  Marsh Chapel:  the seeds you plant today will flower and blossom and grow for decades, with telling affect.  Faint not, fear not, flag not!

Roland also kept us alive during administrative meetings, using punctuative humor.  Our trustees usually hired the same painter, a fine painter named Bogus, when the decay of the building outran their native parsimony.  When they couldn’t wait any longer to the paint a room, they made a motion to ‘hire Mr. Bogus’.  After the motion and second, with practiced timing, and with all knowing what was coming, yet unable not to laugh when it did—some things are just funny for no real reason—Dr. Wolseley would compliment the recent extravagance of the trustees in hiring Bogus, then add, speaking of Bogus, ‘Is the is guy for real?’  In eleven years I think I heard that question thirty times—‘Is Bogus for real’?—and yet it always made me smile.  After three hours of administrative board meeting, it doesn’t take much, that is true.

Roland was a careful listener.  He wanted the best for preaching and preacher, and, from Tittle, he knew the best, and he knew the rest.  Once the sermon including the phrase “I thought to myself”.  Afterward he asked sharply, ‘Why the redundancy?  Just say, ‘I thought’.’  He was probably thinking of William Strunk, ‘omit needless words’, a fence I have long since jumped, as you have the scars to attest.  But I took his advice.

Except, today, with love and real affection for Roland who is now in heaven, we wonder…When he came to himself.  There is something in that lingering middle voice construct in a language like ours that has no middle voice, only active and passive, but has lingering forms like this one.  The phrase shows the mind circling on itself,when he came to himself.   We do this in memory, come to ourselves.  We do this in discovery, come to ourselves.  We do this in prayer, come to ourselves.  Give some Lenten minutes to memory, discovery and prayer.  We do this in those moments when we realize there is more to life than meets the eye.  When he have a prodigal thought.  A new, wayward, slightly reckless, excessive, extravagant, prodigous thought.

Gnostic Thought

Now I put it to you:  how long has it been since you have had a prodigal thought?  The prodigal son is prodigally reckless in departure.  But he is prodigally excellent and ecstatic in return.  His negative prodigality in descent is eclipsed by his positive prodigality in resurrection.  How long has it been since you have come to yourself?

Though no one says so, and to my knowledge no one has yet so written, Luke 15 may be the most Gnostic of chapters in the New Testament.  It is about gnosis, self knowledge, coming to oneself. As the Gnostics taught, we are trapped in a far country, a long way from our true home, like a man who has squandered his birthright, and moved from light to darkness.  As the Gnostics taught, we are meant to get home, to get back home, to get back out from under this earthly, fleshly, pig slop bodily existence, and back to higher ground, to heaven, to the heaven beyond heaven, to the land of light, to the loving father, like a prodigal son returning to the home that is truly his.  As the Gnostics taught, there is just one way to get back home, one key to the magic door.  That way and that key is knowledge, self knowledge, the knowledge of one’s own self—whence w come, wither we go.  As the Gnostics taught, salvation comes from this sort of esoteric, personal, soulful knowledge.  When he came to himself…

It is jarring, I give you that, to admit that this most traditional and most popular and most orthodox of parables may well have grown up outside the barn, outside the fences of mainstream Christianity.  But there is nothing orthodox about the prodigal and his coming to himself.  His is truly a prodigal thought.  I need to get back home.  Back to the land of light.  Back to the pleroma.  Back to the God beyond God.  No ‘Christ died for our sins’, here.  No ‘lamb of God’, here.  No settled orthodox Christology here.  No cross, no gory glory, no Gethsemane, no passion of the Christ, here.  It all comes down to self awareness, to awakening, to a moment of clarity.  When he came to himself.The parable of the Prodigal Son is the most Gnostic, most heterodox, most Johannine of them all.  Stuck here in the middle of Luke, read here in the middle of Lent, interpreted here in the middle of March.

The Gospel challenges us to come out from hiding.

You cannot hide behind a distrust of organized religion today.  The prodigal thought soars beyond that.  You cannot hide behind a disdain for clergy, for formality, for robes and choirs and altars and candles.  This prodigal thought pierces all that.  You cannot behind the hideous moments in religious and Christian history—many there be—as a way to fend off the gospel, at least not this morning.  The knife cuts deeper, to the deeps, to your very soul.

You cannot hide on the left behind a critique of Catholicism today.  Prodigal thought soars beyond that.  You may reject the celibacy of the priesthood, the sacrifice of the mass, the subordination of women, and the infallibility of the pope.  But many, very many, Catholics do the same.  No, the gospel undercuts your smart but narrow critique, and asks about your soul.  You do have one you know.

I cannot hide on the right behind a critique of Calvinism today.  Prodigal thought soars beyond that.  I may reject Calvinist total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints.  Not all saints persevere, grace is resistible, atonement limitation is not divine, election has a human dimension, and depravity, well, it certainly is present, but not total.  But you know, many Calvinists, very many, would agree.  No, the gospel undercuts my own smart but narrow critique, and asks about my soul. I do have one, you know.

It asks whether you are coming to know yourself?  Are you?  This is the parable, oddly enough, that calls the seekers’ bluff.   Today the Gospel attacks where you have finally no ready defense.  It moves to your mind, your soul, your own most self.

Calvinist Interlocutor Lent 2013 M Robinson

As our Calvinist Lenten preaching partner this Lent, M Robinson, writes in The Death of Adam, and in Absence of Mind, prodigal thought is soul thought, and meant to change your life. She is a powerful voice today honoring the mind. A prodigal thought is a tussle between the mind and the world, the mind and the soul, the mind and itself.  Give her voice some space in your mind:

It all comes down to the mystery of the relationship between the mind and the cosmos. 3…

Consider…The deeply pensive solitudes that bring individuals into congregations and communities to be nurtured by the thought and culture they find there 9…The mind as felt experience…

We suffer today the exclusion of the felt life of the mind 35…A central tenet of the modern world view is that we do not know our own minds, motives or desires 59

The mind is an illusion according to modern theory… The renunciation of religion in the name of reason and progress has been strongly associated with a curtailment of the assumed capacities of the mind… 75

Yet we have… A singular capacity for wonder as well as for comprehension 72…

For the religious, the sense of the soul may have as a final redoubt, not as argument but as experience, that haunting I who wakes us in the night wondering where time has gone, the I we waken to, sharply aware that we have been unfaithful to ourselves, that a life lived otherwise would have acknowledged a yearning more our own than any of the daylit motives whose behests we answer to so diligently

Soul is…a name for an aspect of deep experience  116… The self that stands apart from itself, that questions, reconsiders, appraises. 119…

How does your soul fare?  Are you open to the challenge of a prodigal thought—in memory, in discovery, in prayer?

When He Came to Himself in Memory

In my fifties I have come to myself, at least in one sense.  I realize I now have time for opportunities I no longer have.  Once I had opportunity but no time.  Now I have time but no opportunity. I walked on the Charles River the other wind swept day, along the northern bank, along Memorial Drive.  The wind blew hard and cold.  Now seven years into a delightful deanship, with things rolling, no tenure to earn, ten books out, 1000 sermons written and delivered, and so on, I have the real mental and spiritual freedom easily to converse with my dad.  But he is dead.  Now that I have time I don’t have him.  When I had him I didn’t have time.  Now I have the time.  Stepping along the river bank, in the heart of the city of Boston he so loved, across the river from the University he so loved, thinking of him whom I so loved, I came to myself.  And what would I not give for another conversation with him?  You know this in your own experience.  I am driven to memory, and saved by memory.

When He Came To Himself in Discovery

Our son is a thirty five year old lawyer in Albany, NY.   He wrote a letter to the editor of the paper there, about a man in his church who had died:

“The front page article ‘Religion? More reply ‘none’”, Oct 21, about the decline in our community, particularly in my demographic, forced me to think about why I still go to church, despite its flaws.  As I continued through the paper, I found my answer in the obituaries.

“I met Dr. Wesley Bradley at Trinity UMC about five years ago.  I was immediately drawn to him—to the earnestness of his handshake, to the comforting advice he offered me as a new dad, to the way he proudly strolled down Lark Street with his lovely bride as if it were their first date

“Although I did not know the extent of Dr. Bradley’s professional accomplishments until I read his obituary, I knew the greatness of his grace.  I witnessed the faith that had sustained him and I learned from his humble and caring example.

“The church provides a time and place for God’s grace to touch and connect us.  But for church I would not have known Dr. Bradley.  My soul, which now grieves his passing, would have remained unaffected.

“I go to church to feed my soul.  It’s not the only way to do it, but I think Dr. Bradley’s life of faith is worth my generation’s consideration.”

When He Came To Himself in Prayer

We stood with 500 eighteen year olds gathered Thursday evening past, in the wake of the death of our 18 year old student.  For many, in their teens, a first harsh encounter with death.  In a secular gathering they offered a secular prayer.  Some came to themselves that evening, thinking:

“We mean to be thoughtful, and to be together in our thoughtfulness.

We are not alone in our thoughts.  We have each other to lean on.

We will lean on our friends,  those with whom we can share a hug.

We will lean on our groups, classes, dorm and hallway neighbofrs, those who know our names and call us by name.

We will lean on our own traditions of memory and hope, so significant, now, those words and events and stories that place all experience in ultimate perspective.

We will lean on our religious traditions, wherein we sing and kneel.

We will lean on our faith, that dimension of life that is deepest and truest to our own most self, our soul, the dimension of deep experience.

We will lean on some snippets and memories of words and phrases—goodness and mercy will follow me, let us love one another, love is God, let us watch over one another in love.

We may be moved to wonder again, at life, the meaning of life, the boundaries of life, and our own choices and actions and words therein.

We will be thoughtful and we are not alone in our thoughts.”

Coda

Memory. Discovery. Prayer. What will it take for you?  How much more do you need (to acquire, to achieve, to conquer) before you are open to God?  God is patient.  He waits.  Like a dad who has time when his son does not.  He waits.  He waits at home, hoping for little dust rising on the trail a long way off, sign of a boy coming home.  He waits at home, knowing the pig husks we can mistake for real food.  He waits at home, having already given more than enough in inheritance.  He waits at home, awaiting that moment that may come—today?—in a far country, in a rough circumstance, in an unwelcoming place.  That moment of prodigal thought….But when he came to himself…My life flows on in endless song…

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

posted in Lenten Series 2013: Marilynne Robinson, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.10.2013 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 13: 1-9

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This Lent in our preaching we converse with Marilynn Robinson.  Each year we have chosen a voice from the Reformed tradition, a tradition different from the Methodism of Marsh Chapel, with whom to learn and grow, from whom to develop a fuller sense of discipleship, in whom to find ways to expand our circles of faithfulness.  So these years we have heard also from Bonhoeffer, Barth, Ellul, Edwards, Calvin and from varieties of interpretation of the Atonement.

Robinson is a contemporary novelist and essayist, and a Calvinist, perhaps the strongest living American exponent of Calvinism.  Her depiction of the Rev. John Ames, in the novels Gilead and Home, has been deeply meaningful to many of us.  Her writing celebrates the privilege, terror and joy of pastoral ministry.  Her writing celebrates the goodness of village life.  Her writing celebrates providential grace.  Her writing celebrates the power of story, of parable.  Her writing celebrates the beauty of the world around us.  Listen to her voice in that of the Rev. John Ames, depicting dawn in Iowa:

“I love the prairie! So often I have seen the dawn come and the light flood over the land and everything turn radiant at once, that word ‘good’ so profoundly affirmed in my soul that I am amazed I should be allowed to witness such a thing. There may have been a more wonderful first moment ‘when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy’, but for all I know to the contrary, they still do sing and shout, and they certainly might well. Here on the prairie there is nothing to distract attention from the evening and the morning, nothing on the horizon to abbreviate or to delay. Mountains would seem an impertinence from that point of view.”

Jesus taught in parables, stories with a point.  Two today, the latter which affirms a second chance to love, the former which acknowledges random hurt. They challenge us to follow their form and tell our own parables, two today. The first challenges us not to take for granted those closest to us.  That is the point of the parable:  care for those closest to you.  The second reminds us of the hurts hidden in each human soul.  That is the point of the parable:  remember that every heart has secret sorrows.

Let us care for those closest to us…

Some time ago, in a small upstate village, there lived a man and a woman. They were of middle age and middle class. In fact, they ran their own business, a “mom and pop” store. Through the village, the man was known for the attention which he showed his partner. He doted on her. He opened doors and bought flowers and made compliments. For her part, she also was devoted to her man. She stood by her man. She baked and sewed and entertained. In church, they sat in the front pew, holding hands for the Sunday observance.

The pastor in the town for years admired them, and during wedding services would quietly pray, Lord make these young people like them, devoted to each other. One night the pastor was invited to visit the home of these two lovebirds. After the usual chitchat, it became clear that something was afoot. Wringing his hands and sweating, the man awkwardly asked, at last, whether the pastor would have any qualms about performing a wedding ceremony. “Not at all,” the parson replied. “For whom?” Silence followed, the man coughed, and the woman blushed. Dimly, the pastor realized that the wedding was to be theirs. Yes, they had come to the village many years ago, had fallen in love and worked together, and then lived to together, first in aid of their business, and then as the townsfolk began to refer to them as MR and MRS, they began to relax and enjoy one another. They were very happy.

The wedding ensued, quietly performed in the parsonage living room.

Exactly one month to the day after the wedding, late at night, the parsonage phone rang. The man, panic stricken began in a rush, “It’s all over.” Our marriage doesn’t work. Please come and help us.” The pastor took the two aside to hear their confessions. “For years, you were so happy, and now, married, you are not? What has happened?” The man began, “Well, it used to be, you know, I just never knew whether she would stay. We weren’t really married. She was free to go. So every day was special. I watched what I said, and I watched what I did, and I watched her. I wanted to please her. But somehow, after that ceremony, I let down. I guess I figured she was there to stay now, so it didn’t matter. I think I took her for granted.” And he cried. The woman also reported, “It used to be that every day was an adventure.  I knew he could leave at any time. Every meal might be our last. Then we actually got married and I let down. I guess I figured it didn’t matter as much now. I think I took him for granted. Pastor, what are we going to do?” After more hours of tears and talking, the pastor finally prepared to leave the home. As he left he commanded the couple to promise each other that from that moment forward, they would live as if they were not married. He said to the husband, “You are to live as if you have no wife.”  So he interpreted Scripture, I Cor. 7:25.

Marilynn Robinson in two fine novels, Gilead and Home, over the past several years, has given you a sympathetic reading of determinism (fundamental or radical), which, ultimately, though cautiously, she rejects.  Here is the climax of Home:

This second book places the apparently damned Jack in earshot of a young woman who has married an old preacher:

“Just stay for a minute”, she said, and Jack sat back in his chair and watched her, as they all did, because she seemed to be mustering herself.  Then she looked up at him and said, ‘A person can change. Everything can change’…Jack said, very gently, ‘Why thank you, Mrs. Ames.  That’s all I wanted to know’. (p 228)

(and)

There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error…You must forgive in order to understand.  Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding…If you forgive…you may indeed still not understand, but you will be ready to understand, and that is the posture of grace (p 45)

Luke 13, a second chance with the fig tree to love.  Luke 13, a remembrance of shared, random hurt.  One lesson:  do not take for granted those closest to you.  A second: every heart has secret sorrows.

Remember that every heart has secret sorrows…

Several decades ago, a poor boy was growing up in a small town along the Finger Lakes. His family worked hard, but had little extra, and so he would work himself on a neighboring farm. There he became friends with the farmer’s son, a boy about his own age. They became fast friends, cleaning the barn, and milking, chasing the cattle in the summer, filling the hay mow. At Christmas the farmer gave both boys trumpets. They sat down together and carved their names into the handles. Then they fell to practicing, and found the joy of music. Every night, after chores, the poor boy would cross the valley and ascend the hillside where his home lay. Then, as night fell, he would turn and face across the valley toward his friend, and slowly play a melody. Then, with the other trumpet, the friend would reply. “Day is dying in the west…” For some years this was their habit, and the farm folk and villagers in this Finger Lake region came to rely on the trumpet duet as a call to evening prayer.

Then, the farmer’s son was drafted and, in short order word came that he had died in the great world war. The poor boy was devastated. He had known little of the comfort of life, and little of friendship, and now, what he had known, was taken away. He became bitter, and his life drifted on, building itself around the heartache at the center of his soul. He grew old. One day the pastor came to call. The pastor dreaded the visit in this home, because there was so much hurt, and so little comfort. On this day he happened to ask if there was any good memory, any happy memory that the man could share. After some silence, the man replied, and told the story of the two trumpets. He told of his friendship, his love of music, his acceptance in the farmer’s home, his bitterness at the tragic loss. The pastor asked to see the trumpets, and then asked if he might borrow them.

Some weeks later, the old and bitter man was seated rocking on the porch, in the summer heat. Suddenly, a familiar tune came his way. From his left afar off he heard, “Day is dying in the west…” and then from the right “Holy Holy Holy…” It came closer… and closer… and with every verse, somehow, a bit of the faded memory came clearer. Two boys, high school age, came playing the trumpets, grateful for their use, prompted by the pastor to offer this tribute. What a precious gift a friendship is, the old one thought. How lucky I am to have known even briefly, its power.   The parable interprets for us the meaning of the psalmist, Psalm 100.

Marilynn Robinson could put it this way:

Come to the table of remembrance, and of presence, and of thanksgiving.

Greet and so be greeted, here, by the Lord Jesus Christ, our Lenten Grace, of whom we sing, ‘Blessed is He whom comes in the name of the Lord.

As those who have known betrayal, in the active and the passive tenses and senses, come for mercy.

Join the angelic chorus, singing hosannas, in the highest, meaning the very height of heaven.

Make of this moment a readiness to join lasting banquet, the heavenly banquet of grace, freedom, and love.

As Christ offers Himself, come to offer yourself, to love, for God and neighbor.

Come, partake.  Receive with grace the Lenten Grace.

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

posted in Lenten Series 2013: Marilynne Robinson, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.3.2013 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Romans 10

Luke 13

Psalm 31

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Frontispiece

There come wintery episodes in the course of a snow battered lifetime that place us deep in the shadows.   If the shadow is dark enough, we may not feel able to move forward, for our foresight and insight and eyesight are so limited.  We may become frozen, snowed in.

You may have known this condition—of confusion or disorientation or ennui or acedia.  You may know it still.  The death of a loved one can bring such a feeling.  The loss of a position or job can bring such a feeling.  The recognition of a major life mistake can bring such a feeling.  The recollection of a past loss can bring such a feeling.  The disappearance of a once radiant affection, or love, for a person or a cause or an institution can bring such a feeling.  The senselessness of violence inflicted on the innocent can bring such a feeling.

(Over the years I have grown frustrated by my own mother tongue in various ways.  English places such a fence between thought and feeling, when real thought is almost always deeply felt, and real feeling is almost always keenly thought.  We need another word like thoughtfeeling or feltthought. When C Wesley sang ‘unite the pair so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety, learning and holiness combined, and truth and love let us all see’ he described something so bone marrow close to my own life, happiness, hope, ministry, faith.  And he also I think was wrestling with the limits of our beautiful language.  Anyway, you by nature and discipline live the thoughtfeeling gospel, and for that I am lastingly thankful.)

Be it then thought or feeling or thoughtfeeling, there do come episodes, all in a lifetime, that place us, if not in the dark, at least well into the shadows.  You may have known all about this at one time.  You may know it still.

Come Sunday, some snippet of song, or verse, or preachment, or prayer, it may be, will touch you as you meander about in the dim shadow twilight.  Hold onto that snippet.  Follow its contours along the cave of darkness in which you now move.  Let the snippet—song, verse, sermon, prayer—let it guide you along.  So you may be able to murmur: ‘I can do this…I can make my way…I can find a handhold or foothold…I can abide in this shadow…For now I can abide here…I can make it for now, at least for now, for the time being.’

This Lent we shall await a word about war and peace, about drones and defense, about our beloved country in this year of our Lord.  We will rightly desire a word of interpretation about a passage in Scripture—Old Testament, Gen. 22, or Epistle, Rom 10. or Gospel, Luke 4.   This Lent we will rightly desire a communication about how to live, in discipline and obedience and faith, during a time of penitence and preparation and we will want a word from our Lenten conversation partner Marilynn Robinson.  All in due time.  Today , first, though, the word, near to us, on our lips and in our heart, is a word of faith, the given courage to abide in the shadow. Health is such a word, and very salvation, for those who are stumbling a bit and stumbling about in the dark today.  On this plea for faith all our other attentions depend.  So says the 91 Psalm.

Today the psalmist lifts a hymn of faith, a song of courage in the face of adversity.  He speaks from his experience.  He teaches, like a grandfather teaching a grandson.  Spinning a fishing fly.  Boiling the sap down in the sugar house.  Watching a basketball game.  Watching the sun set.

Given the wintery snares, cold air illness, icy night terrors, and snow bound disease, noonday destruction, evil, scourge, wild beasts of this very day, it could be that a sober reading of the 91^st psalm, a trusting hymn of a faithful heart, will sustain us this morning.  In this psalm we are promised divine deliverance in five ways…So…

1. Deliverance from snares…

Our singer is a person of simple faith.  He has one, and only one, word for us:  You are covered.  Abide in the shadow.

We could make many complaints about this hymn and its singer.  He has a dangerously simple view of evil, especially for the complexity of a post-modern world.  He has a way of implying that trust, or belief, are rewarded with safety, a notion that Jesus in Luke 13 scornfully dismisses, and we know to be untrue.  He has an appalling lack of interest in the scores of others, other than you, who fall by the wayside.  He seems to celebrate a foreordained, foreknown providence that ill fits our sense of the openness of God to the future, and the open freedom God has given us for the future.  He makes dramatic and outlandish promises not about what might happen, but about what will be.  As a thinking theologian, this psalmist of psalm 91 fails.  He fails us in our need to rely on something sounder and truer than blind faith.  He seems to us to be whistling past the graveyard.

And yet… for those who have walked past a February graveyard or two, for those who have walked the valley of the shadow of death, for a country at war for a decade now, for a world searching to match its ideals of peace with its realities of hatred, for you today if you are in trouble, and who are worried today about others and other graves and other yards, and who have seen the hidden traps, unforeseeable dangers, and steel jawed snares of life, there is something encouraging about this simple song:  “he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler”.

2. Deliverance from illness…

Our writer is not a philosopher.  He is a musician, perhaps, but not a systematic thinker.  He has one interest:  getting by, getting through, getting out, and getting home.  So he does not worry about the small stuff.  In fact, I have a sense that the psalmist is desperate.  His song is one for that point on the road when you just have to go ahead and risk and jump.  You have made your assessment, you have made your plan, you have made your study, then you have prayed.  Yet you see all the pestilence about you in homes and institutions and nations, so you wonder, is it worth the risk?  You are not sure.

This hymn of the heart is one you sing when you are not sure, but you are confident.  Not certain, but confident.  You can be confident without being certain.  In fact, a genuine honest confidence includes the confidence to admit you are not sure.  Faith means risk.  Isn’t that part of what we mean by faith?  Our writer is at that point, the point of decision.  Once you are there, you have to choose between walking forward and slinking away.  It becomes very simple.  Either God lives or not.  Either God is in Christ or not.  Either God in Christ touches us by Spirit or not.  Either we move forward in faith, or not.  Choose.  And the Psalmist wants his student or grandson or parishioner to choose in faith.  So he urges:  abide in the shadow of the Almighty ... “He will deliver you from the deadly pestilence.”

3. Deliverance from night terror…

Our psalmist is speaking just here to our immediate need.  Fear not the terror of the night.  Go about your discipleship:  pray, study, learn, make peace, love your neighbor, agree to disagree agreeably, every one be convinced in his own mind.  The night is not as terrifying as you fear…”You will not fear the terror of the night”.

4.  Deliverance from noonday destruction…

It is in the heart of the Psalm that one senses the singer’s desperation.  There is an irrational side to his message.  ‘Thousands will fall but you will be spared.’  It will not help us to ask about the ethics of this promise.  Nor will it help us to question the sense of destiny involved here.  I hear this psalm in another way.  I hear it as a father’s prayer, or a mother’s dearest hope.  I cannot help but think that this psalm perfectly captures the hope, the visceral hope, which this decade has been on the minds of our own parents of soldiers and sailors.  Noonday destruction will not come near you.  I pray that noonday destruction will not come near you.

I remember a Day Care center where I used to see notes pinned to the coats and sweaters of daycare toddlers.   This psalm is a note pinned to the shirt of a loved one heading into danger.  When there is nothing else we can give our daughters and sons we want them to have faith.  Faith to go forward, bravely, without being sure of what they will find at noonday.  And we are passionately desperate for one hope: that they will come home.  And we sing the song without any chords of doubt, because we want to admit none.  We make no uncertain sound because we want our beloved to carry no worry, but to be armed with the confidence of the Lord.  This is a battle hymn.  It is the kind of song you sing to yourself when all about you there is mayhem.  If I were a chaplain it is the kind of psalm I might give to a soldier to memorize by day and recite by night in the face of mayhem.  “You will not fear the destruction that wastes at noonday.”

5.  Deliverance from evil…

The teacher implores his student to make God his place of dwelling, his home.  To rest in God, so that all else is secondary.  Evil will not befall, or at least will not define, such an one.  How can someone escape all evil?  We know better.  We know that evil touches us all.  But this misses the meaning of the poem.  The writer is praying!  In the same way we pray, every Sunday.  Deliver him from evil!  Not from some, or most, almost all evil, but from evil!  Religion is a matter of the heart before it is a matter of the head.  As Wesley said, the mind is the bit and bridle, but the heart is the great horse, the mighty steed of faith.  “He will give his angels charge of you to guard you in all your ways.  On their hands they will bear you up, lest you dash your foot against a stone.”

Coda:  “I will deliver him…”

Deliverance from snares, illness, terror, destruction, and evil.

Our psalm ends, as does this sermon, at the edge of a remarkable announcement.  Like lightening flashing over a darkened sky, or like a burst of sunlight separating clouds, the voice of the poem shifts.  God speaks directly to the human heart.  It is a shift devoutly to be desired.  All of the speaking, from teacher to student and grandfather to grandson, all of the instructional lines are now interrupted, and on a grand scale, and on a profound scale.  Like Yahweh addressing Job, the psalm ends with a divine word.  It is a shift, yes, devoutly to be desired.  It is what we hope will happen with every one of our children.  It is what we hope will happen in every one of our worship services.  Frankly, it is what we hope will happen in every sermon.  All the rest gives way to…God.  Now the fumbling voice of the teacher is replaced by a divine voice. Now the Lord speaks in the first person, and his word is a lasting joy:  “I will deliver him…I will protect him…I will answer him…I will be with him…I will rescue him…I will honor him”

When we have nothing else to go on, there is something irreducibly solid, something strong and good—the divine voice in the faith of Christ---to which we may cleave and cling.  Finally, this is what brings you to the pew and me to the pulpit and us to the church, the hope that something may be said and heard that is divine, saving, satisfying and true.  In the silence that follows all our speaking, like the priestly verses that follow the human voice in this psalm, we may hear something that changes everything.  So Charles Wesley, as ever, in perfect pitch:

Let us plead for faith alone

Faith which by our works is shown

God it is who justifies

Only faith the grace supplies

Active faith that lives within

Conquers hell and death and sin

Hallows whom it first made whole

Forms the Savior in the soul

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

posted in Lenten Series 2013: Marilynne Robinson, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 02.17.2013 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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For those new to our service of worship, present here or listening from afar, we warmly offer an especial word of grace and welcome, on this blizzard weekend Sunday.  Your own church may have been closed today, and so you are listening.  Your hockey game, or neighborhood gathering, or personal commitment may have been cancelled due to weather, and so you are with us.  In other words, snow, like grace, may have interrupted or intervened or interceded into the otherwise well laid plans of life.  Good! Welcome.

New to all this, you may not have heard our regular dialogue sermons, come Bach Cantata Sunday.  Allow, then, a brief explanation.  Our envisioned mission at Marsh Chapel, to be a ‘heart for the heart of the city and a service in the city’, extends by radio and internet to the whole globe, the heart and service of the city of the whole earth.  We lift the praises of God with the guidance and support of JS Bach.  Why Bach?  Because Bach is the best.  Bach is world regarded as the very best.  In Europe, in Asia, in the Americas, around the globe, Bach is the best, and we want the very best for our service of worship.  Bach brings the globe together.

In order then to make the Holy Scriptures read for the day, and the Cantata for the day, as meaningful and accessible as possible, to as many as possible, from the 19 year old undergraduate in the third pew to the 89 year old widower listening in Scituate, Dr Jarrett and I have over several years now offered a dialogue sermon on these Cantata days, meant to merge music and word in the very Gospel, the word of God.  This form of preaching is, if not unique to our Marsh work, at least unusual and special, and in that we take great joy.  It is one gift we lay upon the altar, in heart and service.

Today we bring you a word of faith, a word about faith, a word in faith for those who may, like the Samaritan of old, feel themselves outside of the formal community of faith.  Faith is God’s gift to you today.

Yet if there are 60,000 people now listening to our radio broadcast service, 40,000, it may be, well identify with a phrase from this past week’s Washington prayer breakfast.  The speaker (President Obama) inclusively addressed those of various faith traditions, and those ‘of no faith that they can name’.  It could be that 2/3 of our listeners faithfully and honestly understand themselves as people ‘of no faith that they can name’.  Of a faith that has no name.  Is that you?

This past Wednesday many of us gathered, undergraduates with the Dean of the Chapel, to discuss ‘God on Campus’.  If there has been a more spirited, honest, and enjoyable conversation among 20 people recently, in this area, that would be news.  One young woman, speaking for thousands, said, ‘I just don’t have that kind of rote faith anymore’.  It could be that 2/3 of our students faithfully and honestly understand themselves as young people ‘of no faith that they can name’.  Of a faith that has no name.  Is that you?

Over the course of ministry in four decades, nine pulpits, one brief superintendency, one briefer presidency, and one delicious deanship (the best job anywhere by the way), various defeats and victories, and Thursday evening meetings of the cradle role committee, the greatest thrill and joy has come from those who are just outside the visible community of faith.  Prospects, constituents, the unchurched (such an uncharitable phrase)…call them neighbors.  To spend time with those just outside the bounds of religion so called is the pure joy of ministry.  It could be that 2/3 of our neighbors, from Brookline to Bar Harbor to Bangladesh, faithfully and honestly understand themselves as people ‘of no faith that they can name’.  Of a faith that has no name.  Is that you?

It could be that 2/3 of our actual and virtual congregation faithfully understand themselves as people ‘of no faith that they can name’.  Of a faith that has no name.  Is that you?

Outside Israel there lies Samaria.  Along the road from religion to life, from Jerusalem to Jericho, there lies a man in pain.  Love lifts him in the person of a person of no faith that he can name.  The hero of our cantata this Transfiguration morning, the Samaritan, later called GOOD, stands, in this passage, as a person of a faith that has no name.  In a moment, the waves of musical beauty will roll over us.  What, we may wonder, shall we hear, shall we listen for, shall we await….?

To the faithful, honest, prayerful agnostic, to the various goods and various Samaritans around about, we offer, in brisk and brilliant revelation, come Transfiguration, a way of thinking and feeling, a thought feeling, a felt thought, a form of faith where there is no faith.

Our experience of the Samaritan, as his gift of love attends us, is the faithfulness of God.  Where others profess too much and too quickly, where others believe blindly and shallowly, where others pronounce themselves holier, humbler, more religious than thou, where others rush in where angels fear to tread, behold the goodness of the northern Samaritan.  His life, in loving and giving, in knowing and loving, in giving and knowing, has become his faith, a faith that has no name. Yesterday he shoveled the widow neighbor’s walk, uncovered a neighbor student’s car, brought milk and eggs to a homebound neighbor’s kitchen, chipped ice from an elderly neighbor’s roof, included in family sledding a busy neighbor’s son.  Come blizzard weekend,  a faith with no name may be the truest faith of all.  Is that faith yours?

A generation ago, our dear teacher Paul Tillich called such faith the state of being ultimately concerned.  Are you deeply concerned?  Do things concern you? When we come upon a man whom bandits have stripped and beaten and left by the side of the road for dead, does your heart quicken?  You see this victim of violence, harmed by others who have since disappeared, as with wily politicians who are ‘eager to dominate but reluctant to offend’ (so, FDR, NYRB, 1/13).   Before gun violence, or unfettered drone flight, or children untutored, or wayward greed, or amoral sexuality, or steady drunkenness, or moral indiscretion—somewhere the road from religion to life, from Jerusalem to Jericho—are you concerned?  Your concern is your faith.  In deep concern you discover grace and freedom and love.  Your concern is your faith.

But now Tillich is long dead, and his concern may not fit twenty year olds.  In our generation, then, we might call such a state of faith the state of being ultimately connected.  Are you deeply connected?  Does life connect you to others?  When you come upon a man whom bandits have stripped and beaten and left by the side of the road for dead, does your heart quicken? When a fog surrounds you brought on the collision of the warm winds of love and frosty glacier of wrong—what?  Do you connect?  Do you text, then, or tweet, then, or post, then, or email, then, or call, then, or write, then, or visit, then?  Does the plight of another move you toward others?  Along the road then from religion to life, from Jerusalem to Jericho—are you connected?  Your connection is your faith. In your deep connection you discover grace and freedom and love.  Your connection is your faith.

Live your faith.  Live your faith.

No other God, no graven image, no name in vain

Remember Sabbath, honor father and mother

Do not kill, commit adultery, steal, witness falsely or covet

Live your faith.  Live your faith.

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, soul, mind and strength.

And thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself

As did the Samaritan….

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 02.10.2013 at 11:00 am
Tags: Bach Experience, Robert Hill

By Marsh Chapel

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Snow makes things slow

As R Warren wrote in her new poem: ‘a silhouette rimmed in snow-light’, we too follow Christ, our beacon not our boundary

Its tactile and visual embrace gives us a winter grace

With Jeremiah, come winter, we may pause to listen

Not to do, but to be

To listen for the divine in the word, as did the ancient prophet who labored until the fall of Jerusalem (snipped from our reading) and then some

I will touch your lips, saith the Lord, who called a young man, another young man, as would occur again, later, in Nazareth

We learned in a bucolic age, to spill water and freeze it, to shovel snow and clear it, to skate, backwards and forwards, to play, stick in hand, to learn, when Colgate finished its Reid Athletic Center that hockey could be played indoors too

An old flexible flier, veteran of the snow ice hillsides

Skiis, boots, goggles

An old black and white photograph of snow drifts above the telephone lines

Winter is the season of spirit, Summer the season of flesh

Those who taught us more by example than precept to be:

Trustworthy

Loyal

Helpful

Friendly

Courteous

Kind

Obedient

Cheerful

Thrifty

Brave

Clean

Reverent

At 10:30 every Sunday, here in the nave, you may join others, with Rev. Holly, in silent prayer

Listen…

David too, or the psalmist, had his memories of youth, which brought laughter and song

O LORD upon you have I leaned from my birth

When we are affronted, confronted with misery in mystery, as some today,  we too take our refuge in continuous praise, song and laughter, in WHOSE presence there is fullness of joy

A rock.  The home of wise man.  A rock.  Thou art Peter.  A rock.  A mighty refuge.

Even Ground Hog Day offers something solid, something good.

Every heart has secret sorrows

Monday’s child is fair of face

Tuesday’s child is full of grace

Wednesday’s child is full of woe

Thursday’s child has far to go

Friday’s child is loving and giving

Saturday’s child works hard for a living

But the child that is born on the Sabbath Day

Is happy, witty, bright and gay!

After church next week you may want to sing with the Thurman Choir, under the baton of SAJarrett…

Laugh and Sing…

Snow makes things slow

Paul offers his teaching to us, if we learn from him

About love

Love is God

Because I am loved, I can love

Behold the superiority, the nature, and the permanence of LOVE

The religious norm, the norm of faith is love, joy of heaven to earth come down

Trustworthy, loyal, helpful….

Learn to love

Come and join our undergraduates, confer with them and others

Learn, by day, by night, by day, to love

Learn…

Now the community of Jesus’ growing up years cannot fully accommodate his grown up voice

There is a wintery harshness in the moment he leaves

In love, directly, he says they are not special, not unique, except as is every snow flake, and they are angry, and he departs.

Every departure foreshadows the last

We are more mortal than we regularly realize

Our own departure, our ability to leave, to leave this frozen earth, this or another community, our families and family, in the bleak winter quiet, the austere winter quiet, we may passingly, suddenly recognize our omega point, dimly perceptible, afar

Jesus chooses two stories in which prophets take care of outsiders.  Blessings are to fall, not on the home town community, but on outsiders—Syrian, Syrophoenician, the ritually unclean, non-Jews

Now the community of Jesus’ growing up years cannot fully accommodate his grown up voice

There is a wintery harshness in the moment he leaves

In love, directly, he says they are not special, not unique, except as is every snow flake, and they are angry, and he departs.

Cyril Richardson had taught at Union Theological Seminary for 50 years.  His course on Patristics was famous, the finest of finely honed hour long lectures on Clement, Ireneaus, Origen, Athanasius.  He sat to teach.  He would cast about, and mention P Tillich, whom he described as if Tillich were still a promising but odd graduate student, from the continent, who would have benefitted from better early church history (‘Athansius was there before Tillich was’).  Out of order I appealed to take his course, my first term.  ‘Who knows how long he will teach?’, one said.  There is a living relationship between the 45 minute lecture and the 22 minute sermon.  If one lives, both do.  Richardson brushed aside the fads of the day—team teaching, contextual education, liberation theology, praxis—and lectured with a winter grace.  He died with one lecture only to go.  Mr Ruppe, his assistant, read the faded penciled yellow pad lecture, with tears.

I am proud to have been Richardson’s student.

At his funeral, the Episcopal priest demurred to preach, and read instead a sermon of Richardson’s own, delivered at the death of a friend.

In it the deceased, now quoted, had said, simply, what disturbs us about death is the prospect of the deaths of our loved ones, on the one hand, and the death of our dreams, on the other.  Let us face both prospects, he said.

It is a winter grace to face our fleshly limit.  To prepare, Sunday by Sunday, to prepare to leave, as one day we must, one day we shall.

There are no ordinary days, no insignificant holidays.

You will remember that she and George were graduated from High School in Grover’s Corners.  On the basis of a frank talking to over a soda, in which Emily criticizes George for being less than fully humble, George decides not to leave home, not to go to college, but to start working an uncle’s farm right away, and to marry Emily, the girl next door.  You remember their wedding.  “ A man looks pretty small at a wedding, all those good women standing shoulder to shoulder, making sure the knot is tied in a mighty public way.”   You remember that Emily, after just a few years of profoundly happy marriage and life, tragically dies in childbirth.  You remember that George finds no way to manage the extreme grief of his loss.  Simple Yankee English.  Simple reckoning about love, life, death and meaning.

Maybe you also remember, in the playwright’s imagination, Emily from the communion of saints looking out on her young husband and wanting to go back.

Others warn her away from the plan:  “All I can say Emily, is, don’t…it isn’t wise…(If you must do it) Choose an unimportant day.  Choose the least important day of your life.  It will be important enough.”

She chooses February 11, 1899, her 12th birthday.  She arrives at dawn.  She sees Main Street, the drugstore, the livery stable, and breathes the brightness of a crisp winter morning.  Simple.  She looks into her own house.  Her mother is making breakfast, her father returning from a speech given at Hamilton College.  Neighbors pass in the snow.  Simple.  She sees how young and pretty her mother looks—can’t quite believe it.  It is 10 below zero.  There is fussing to find a blue hair ribbon—“its on the dresser—if it were a snake it would bite you”.  Simple.  Papa enters to give a hug and a kiss and a birthday gift.  And others from mother and the boy next door. Simple.  “Just for a moment now we’re all together.  Mama, just for a moment now we’re all together.  Just for a moment we’re happy.  Let’s look at one another.”

Simple.  This is the gospel of Ground Hog Day, the best holiday of the year, the holiday of the extraordinary ordinary, of the uncommonly common, of the sunlit winter, of the eternal now.  Simple.  Grover’s Corners.  Papa. Mama.  Clocks ticking.  Sunflowers.  Food. Coffee.  New ironed dresses.  Hot baths.  Sleeping.  Waking up. “Earth, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”

Reverence for Life is the beginning of wisdom, as Schweitzer said.

Jesus left Nazareth

Jeremiah left Jerusalem, David left Israel, Paul left Judaism, Jesus left Nazareth

We too shall leave

This table is opened to your comfort

As we take our leave

As we prepare to leave

To leave…

Remember your creed…

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 02.3.2013 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 4: 14-21

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Click here to hear the sermon only.

Preface

Today we hear from a prophetic text, Luke 4, regarding Jesus and his home town community, and we hear it following a good week of good words about a modern prophet, a patriot preacher, Martin Luther King, our BU alumnus.  As Ernest Freemont Tittle said, ‘the preacher can find always something innocuous to talk about’, but do not time and text require some prophetic word for us, from us today?  If we are to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly, we shall then need to summon the courage to listen and speak with courage, and to do so regarding not only the endless circle of concern around us, but also the smaller circle of influence, the community in which we live.

I will bear witness.  Born a Methodist, ordained to the Methodist ministry, I will die a Methodist, a superannuated Methodist preacher. All the lastingly good things of my life have come as gifts of grace, in and through this very church.  Name in baptism. Faith in confirmation. Community in Eucharist. Deepest friendship in marriage.  Job in ordination.  Daily pardon in prayer.  Eternal hope in unction.  I am a singing Methodist and will continue to greet life with an openhanded Methodist handshake.   And my grandaughter’s  mother, grandmother, two great grandmothers, and great great grandmother  all married Methodist ministers.  I love my church and I am part of a multi generational investment in its preaching ministry!

That is, I pray to speak as one who speaks for my people, and so, I hope, has earned the right to speak to my people.  If you speak for people, then you can speak to people.  God is for us, so God’s word can speak to us.   I love the Methodist church.  Any church though is human, very human.  As Tillich wrote long ago, ‘the church is always both a representation and a distortion of the divine’.   This past year has proven that again.

Some background.  Methodism lives on four levels, or through four forms of conference.  (A conference, incidentally, is a time and place in which to confer with one another.)  Each of the four has one discreet, specific task.  Our general conference, 1000 global delegates gathered once every four years, is responsible to write and rewrite our Book of Discipline, our church law.  The jurisdictional conferences, split up regionally across the country, meet every four years to elect general superintendents, our bishops whose job is to appoint clergy.  The annual conference, a smaller gathering of representatives from hundreds of churches, in each jurisdiction, has the single job of recruiting and retaining ministers, and ordaining them every year.  Our charge conference, our local church, is in the work of making disciples, people of faith who love and give in the spirit of Jesus.   Disciple, Minister, Bishop, Discipline:  these are the products of our conferences.

A. And Are We Yet Alive?

One:  Our general conference met in Tampa, in late April.   Rather than affirming the full humanity of gay people, and granting the 10% of children who are gay all the graces I have happily received (see above), the Conference wrote a Discipline that excludes them from marriage and ordination. We have learned the horrific habits in this country, of finding ways to fractionalize the marginalized.  It has been heavy lifting over decades to affirm that all people are people, imbued with integrity by the grace of God—former slaves, women, the poor, people of color, the stranger, the otherwise abled, all.  Integers not fractions. The US constitution before amendment accounted some as 3/5 human.  No wonder that great Boston abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, called the document, ‘a compact with the devil and a covenant with hell’.   I wonder what he would say about our 2012 General Conference and Discipline?  But I must ask, in reflective discernment:  where did Tampa come from? Some of Tampa, our General Conference, came from the results of the other conferences, over many years.

Two:  Some of it came from our Jurisdictional conferences.  In July, our jurisdictional conferences met in five cities across the country to elect general superintendents.  In some cases they were chosen on the basis of proven ability, leadership experience, measures of churches grown or people rescued or dollars raised or buildings constructed, ministers from strong churches and significant pulpits, who had shown the ability to speak well to large groups and to lead complex organizations.   But in some cases   elections were based not on ability or proven strength, but on representation, to show a ‘rainbow’ of representative general superintendents, apart from preparation or capacity to do the job, and, ironically, even tragically, in consequence, whether or not their tenure will have any positive impact for underrepresented others.  The gospel is about redemption, not representation.   Now I will continue to speak for, and so to, the inclusion of all at every level of church life--that is part of the redemptive work of the Spirit in the church.  But in what other walk of life do we select significant leadership on a narrowly representative basis?  Dentists?  Pilots? Surgeons? And what good will it do to open up the church, especially for those most in need of such openness, if the church itself shrinks, ages, weakens and dies, for lack of building up?  Our jurisdiction has off loaded 60% of its membership since my confirmation at age 13 in 1968.  The chief reason for this is poor leadership, starting with the top.   It is not somehow God’s will to shrink the church we love.  That is a direct consequence of our poor leadership:  moribund preaching, mediocre pastoral care, and unimaginative congregational life.

Three: Some came up from our annual conferences.  My own annual conference, a new and unformed body across New York State, met in June.   Two overarching issues should have been engaged, because they affect dramatically the present and future quality of the clergy.   Other than my questions, posed in the few minutes still allowed at annual conference for conference, that is, for a time to confer, no one addressed them.  The first is the proposal, supported, let it be starkly recalled, by every north eastern bishop, to eliminate the security of appointment, or guaranteed appointment,  a modest form of tenure, for ordained clergy (who have 4 years of college, 3 years of seminary, 3 years of supervised work—all before ordination;  who earn a modest annual salary plus housing; who agree to move, potentially every year, at the direction or whim of the general superintendent and cabinet; who are responsible to raise apportionment dollars equivalent to 25% of their church budgets (even the Mafia is kinder in percentage pickup); and who will work, if they are to be effective, 60-80 hours a week, 48 weeks a year, for 40 years:  and we cannot even tell them that they somehow, in whatever tiny rural parish or other, will at least be able to feed, house and care for their children?)  The second is related.   Unwilling to invest in elders, the superintendents are driven to hire non-elders, people who are not trained, not educated, not ordained, not in covenant, not traveling elders.  In our yet to be fully born conference, this means that 540 of 931 pulpits are occupied, occupied by good hearted people, but people who have not studied the Bible in depth, do not know the history or teaching of the church, have had no preparation in counseling, in sacramental understanding, in worship and preaching, in administration, in pastoral care.   It is one thing to have laity Sunday once a year.  But every Sunday?  Do you go to laity Wednesday when the emergency room lets people who would like to be doctors administer drugs, set bones, and use ct scanners?  Do you go to laity Friday when people who would like to be bankers get to open and close the vault,  establish accounts, and make investments of your savings?   How about housing?  Do you sign up aspiring carpenters, who think they might have some talent in digging foundations and setting roof lines to build your house?    Is it OK with you if the principal of your daughter’s junior high school never graduated from high school himself?   Granted: education alone is not enough.  Heart and head we need together in the influential, delicate, personal, salvific work of pastoral care and preaching.   Not 540, but 40 non-elders is all we should accommodate.   Have the elders preach multiple times:  better one good sermon preached 7 times, than 7 bad ones once each.   Our annual conference provides everything but the one thing needful—a chance to confer.  Our annual conference attends to everything except its job—providing excellent clergy.

Four:  And some came too from our local charge conferences. I went for worship this summer to a beloved church.  In 1995 this was a vibrant congregation, 230 in worship in 2 services, a 7 day full building, the second strongest salary in the conference, a warm formal worship service not unlike ours here at Marsh, and, most proudly, a fine parsonage.)  What did we find that Sunday?  We found a worship service that is hardly a worship service, at least to my mind, with 60 present, and learned that the church was in the process of selling the parsonage.  They need the money and lack the vision to hold on to it.  And worship? I grieve to ask:  Is it worship when the minister roves the sanctuary (ceiling paint peeling, by the way) with a microphone, like Phil Donahue?  Is it worship when beautiful four part hymn harmonies are ditched in favor of follow the bouncing ball screen pseudo music?  Is it worship when the sermon is a potpourri of miscellania, unrelated to text, to setting, to mission, or to soul?  Is it worship without a choir, without order, without reverence, without silence, without offering, without a sense of Presence?  No, it has become a hodgepodge of vain attempts to be entertaining, which are not even entertaining.  And enchantment?  Gone.  People do not need the church to be their Rotary Club, their neighborhood cookout, or their reality TV show.  They need the word of God rightly preached, the sacraments duly administered, and service rendered to the poor.  When this happens, Sunday by Sunday, then churches grow.  You cannot preach without theology, and you cannot worship without preaching.  In short the general conference in Tampa had wellsprings, of sorts, in jurisdictional, annual and charge conferences.

B. Methodism 2013

So what are we in my beloved church to do in 2013?

After Tampa, in May, I determined to spend six months in prayer, and visitation.  By phone or in person I spoke with 31 trusted friends. I meditated on their counsel, and came to only four fairly meager conclusions. 1. We need steady ongoing conversation, conference among elders, in season and out. 2.  We need to follow the money. 3. We need to focus on pastoral care for gay people.  4. We need to focus on pastoral embrace for lay people.  Many young elders are leaving the church.  Many middle age elders want to split the church.  Many older elders are using covert, hidden means to address the situation. I will not leave, split or dissemble.  So that means finding another path.  I will have to go deeper.  Four thoughts.

One: There is something in this journey that will call me out and down further into faith.  The language of the psalms fills my heart.   I prayed and heard this:  You will have to go down deeper.

Two:  One part of the path is in regard to our ministry, the other part, regards money.  In a way, the first part is easier.  That is, most churches over time can come close to doing what we do regularly here at Marsh Chapel:  marry gay people, hire gay clergy, minister directly to the gay community, and speak frankly, as today, about the full humanity of gay sisters and brothers.  The second part is harder, about money.  We will need means to keep from sending money, by apportionment, to fund the dehumanization of gay people, whether in America or in Africa.  Fortunately, our general funds are several, not single, and local church treasurers, at the direction of the lay vote in the charge conference, can send to some and not to others.  This will take some careful planning.  My own investment will be to continue to lift my voice, to continue in eight words that form the future for my church: Gay people are people.  Lay people are people.

Three:  Gay people are people, at least 5/5 human, endowed by their creator, and ours with Life, liberty, happiness—they deserve to enjoy these too, including ordination and marriage. Jesus can teach us this if we will let him.  Remember he said to consider the lilies of the field, and how much God loves even these slight floral creatures in God’s garden.   Gay identity is creation, not fall, God’s gift, not human sin, as is straight identity.   Love the Lord your God, and your neighbor as yourself.  Try to imagine what it must be like to be a 9 year old, who knows he is in the sexual minority. Paul can teach us this if we will listen to him.  Paul?  Yes, Paul.  He places the pinnacle of the good news at Galatians 3:28:  ‘in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, no male and female’.  And no gay and straight.   The gospel is about redemption, not about tradition.  Gospel finally and ever trumps tradition.  Gay people have integrity, are beloved, by God’s grace, just as you are and just as you do. John can help us, if we will read what he says.  He says there will be another advocate, even a spirit of truth, which will lead us, lead us out into further truth, which is not in that gospel, or, even, in the Bible.  There is a self-correcting spirit of truth loose in the universe.  Truth involves continuity with past teaching and also discontinuity through new insight, by the gift of the spirit of truth.  Our failure regarding gay people is theological.  Our doctrine of creation could use a recollection of Jesus.  Our doctrine of redemption could use a re-reading of Galatians.  Our doctrine of the Spirit could use the voice of John.  Gay people are people: the Bible tells me so.  This is not only an issue of justice, nor only an issue of clerical integrity, nor only an issue of theological truth.  It is most profoundly an issue of pastoral care. The physician has responsibilities to many institutions—her practice, her board examinations, her hospital, and her community.  But in the end, all these and others are eclipsed by the care for the patient, the health of the patient.  The pastor also has many responsibilities to institutions, or conferences—charge, annual, jurisdictional, and general.  But in the end, all these are eclipsed by the requisite care for the parishioner, for the 8 and 9 year old children who are among the sexual minorities.  Gay people are people.

Four:  Lay people are people.  Beloved, it will do us no good only to open up the church.  We also have responsibility to build up the church.  The needs, longings, reports and voices of lay people count, matter, last, and have meaning.   The church exists for mission, as fire for burning.  Fishing and planting, evangelism and stewardship—these are the joy of faith.  And the fun, too.  Lay people deserve and desire enchanting worship.  We have every reason to provide vibrant, warm, ordered, traditional worship.  Sixty minutes of fire and love, every Sunday.  We will want to draw on the deep well of tradition—not traditionalism but tradition.  Listen to the lay people.  They have no need for bongo drums, shallow hymns, neglected liturgy, or bad music.  They respond to excellence. They deserve it.  Traditional worship is what we owe them.  Likewise, lay people deserve loving, intelligent, devoted, competent pastoral ministry and preaching.  We once knew that so deeply we needed no reminder.  Traveling preachers, taking grace and freedom and love from post to post—this is what we once did best.  Please:  no more lay pastors, local pastors, deacons than absolutely necessary.  Give us excellent ministers, educated and ordained, the brightest and the best!  And are some of these local pastors excellent?  Excellent!  Then educate them and ordain them.  Put up or shut up.   And lay people deserve the best that money can provide, and the best exemplary teaching about money we can provide.  If nothing else, our tradition provides stellar disciplines about giving.  Our people need to be taught, by the example of the clergy, to tithe.  Well led, they will and do well follow.  Tradition in worship, Traveling elders in the pulpit, Tithing all day long—I cannot begin to tell you how much difference these three currently neglected features of spiritual life make when they are practiced, and especially when they are practiced together!

Coda

Let us open up the Methodist church by living the gospel:  Gay people are people.  Let us build up the Methodist church by living the gospel:  Lay people are people. I plan to slog ahead.  I will find means to advocate for the disciplinary inclusion of all people, like the ministry we have here at Marsh.  I will gather a group at some point for further conference.  I will find ways to encourage the real leadership of the church to be identified and selected for leadership, just as we are doing here at Marsh.  I will find words to convey my ongoing respect for the noble calling, the challenging adventure, that is, gospel ministry, in my annual conference, in the same fashion we do here at Marsh.  And I will continue to grow the churches of the church, to live up to the Harry Denman evangelism award, and to appeal to all who have received seven helpings of faith, once in while to think of inviting a neighbor who has not had the first course of the religious meal, to come worship at Marsh.

I take heart from voices I overheard this week.

Walter Fluker:  ‘We need fresh water to swim in.’

Melvin Talbert (quoting Burke): ‘All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing’.

Sonya Chang-Diaz:  ‘When you pray, move your feet.’

Deval Patrick:  ‘People may be of limited means, but of limitless possibilities’.

Elizabeth Warren:  ‘When (the President) makes his solemn oath, I will make my own silent one in my heart’.

Barack Obama:  ‘Freedom is not just for the lucky, nor happiness for the few…From Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall…our journey is not complete…we must act knowing that our work will be imperfect’

Rev. Luis Leon:  ‘Que Dios Os Bendiga’

So that one day, as was said of old, it may be said, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing’. (Luke 4: 21)

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 01.27.2013 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Matthew 2: 1-2

Click here to hear the full service.

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Frontispiece

The gospel is the beauty of a bird in song.

We begin.  As J Edwards said, ‘Resolved:  to do nothing I would be afraid to do in the last hour of my life.’

I don’t believe I quite heard or overheard your seasonal resolution(s).

You still may be hunting, searching.

The gospel is the gift of the Christ child to us, God’s gift of faith, of fellowship, of freedom—beyond thought and beyond intuition and beyond demolition.  If God is for you, who is against?  The gospel also is our gift to the Christ child.  Odd, no?  The gospel heard and spoken and lived is our gift to Christ, like the story which Matthew narrates, Mt 2, is his gift to wordflesh.

Search and hunt they did, these wise men.  The very presence of the wise at the outset of the gospel is the rejection of fundamentalism near and far.  Swinging like an angel sword before the garden of Eden, here come the magi, making sure that any gospel worthy of the name fears nothing human, fears nothing known or knowable, fears nothing true.  Biblicism be gone, say the kings.  Their presence is the celebration of the liberal gospel, the gospel of liberality, your birthright, Marsh Chapel.  The gospel (not that there is any other) that honors what we know, while admitting what we do not.  The gospel that remembers our history, including its horrors.  The gospel that eschews easy measures of the divine, which by definition is un-measurable.  The gospel that has arms big enough to embrace the big bang, and evolution, and real random chance, and the unknowable God in whose love, alone, we are at all known.  To be good news, the gospel must be true, all truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  Otherwise it is not good, and not news.  Searching can exhaust the searcher, star at night, out to the east, following forever.  Truth. Science. History. Psychology.

Our five grandchildren and their overseers visited us at Christmas.  The oldest is five, leader of the pack.  I heard them playing hide and seek.  She taught them a song, a birdsong.  When they ran out of hunting energy, and were stumped, humans at the edge of knowledge, ministers at the edge of energy, she would call out, in song, ‘can you give a little tweet-tweet?’ And repeat, and repeat.  Then, from under the bed, would come the birdsong response, ‘tweet, tweet’. The gospel is not only the Christ gift.  The gospel is our gift to the Christ.

1. Gold

The gospel is our spoken gift of faith.

Every bird sings faith, over the globe, through all time.  Thurman loved penguins, odd and remote.  Listen.  Along the Charles, in the spring, make way for goslings and ducklings.   Mid-island in Bermuda, I hear the song:   Early in the summer mornings, out in the land currently under the death cloud of possible fracking, where we live, at dawn a rooster.  Two eagles—they too mate for life, as in Christian marriage—soaring, I only imagine their music.  The owl at night.  A swan song, a silver swan, who living had no note.  The gospel is a bird in song, and all nature sings.  Even if or when the preaching of the gospel by human imperfection abates, as it does threaten to do, birdsong will carry the tune.

Just as there are so many, sorry, reasons to skip church, so too there are many, sorry, reasons, in the space of 4000 earthly Sundays, to skip faith.  Faith is only real gold, real faith, when it is all you have to go on.

The first of December was covered with snow.  The next line?  Good night you moon light ladies.  Rock a by sweet baby James.  The next line?  Can you give me a little tweet tweet?

Ignatius would love the star, but Luther would mark the voice, the sound, the birdsong of searching, inquiring, wise, questing, serious, real faith: ‘Where is he, who has been born king of the Jews?’

The first to find Him are not Jews at all.  Gentiles, they.  Some of our most natural gospel hearers and speakers today are atheists.

Matthew, though usually (mis) understood otherwise, is a Gentile gospel.  The magi come first. Light centrally shines, chapter by chapter. The book is written in Greek.  Its mound sermon celebrates greek wisdom and greek discipline. The wise man built his house on rock.  A ruler’s daughter is healed.  The Sabbath is overrated.   The only sign the natives deserve is that of Jonah.  The disciples dish traditions of elders.   The greatest faith is the gentile woman willing to take the dog crumbs that the table guests despise.  The faithful followers will judge the 12 tribes.  And, by the way, make sure to render your taxes to Caesar. (J). Matthew’s endless explanation of kosher requirements is made for greek ears.  I will not even pause to recite the damnation of woe given to scribes and Pharisees.   Its concluding universalism would make Plato blush.  Matthew?  Jewish?

2. Frankincense

We begin.  As J Edwards said, ‘Resolved:  to do nothing I would be afraid to do in the last hour of my life.’

I don’t believe I quite heard or overheard your seasonal resolution(s).

There are no free-lance Christians.  If nothing else, for sure, the child the wise visit makes space in life for real fellowship.  The church is a working fellowship.

Isaiah foretold it.  Here in third Isaiah, who remembers the birdsong of second Isaiah, and carries the tune back into Jerusalem, after the return from exile, after 538, when another wise Persian, Cyrus, set the people free.  The birth of the Christ, by symbol of gold and frankincense, is connected to a universal liberation.

We are here to ring the bell, to sing the song, to sound the trumpet, to lift the voice.  You may need, this week, to see the examples in salt and light, of faithful people. Here are some in these Marsh pews.  Kind people.  Kind women.  Kind men.  Doing unto others, as they would have done to themselves.  Seeking.  Seeking lasting wisdom.

With joy.  Come on MLK Sunday, and hear our friend Dr Fluker, and on Monday and celebrate the King of Marsh Plaza.  Come February 9 (our usual Ground Hog festival, date and place moved) and ice skate on Marsh Plaza.  Come and sing hymns in the Lynn home of Alice and Yrjo—a midwinter delight!  Come for brunch and the marathon on Patriots day, to our home.

Resolve this, 2013:  I will be in church on Sunday.  Wise men still seek Him.  You find faith in fellowship, and vice versa.

St. John of the Cross: En una noche oscura…

At Marsh we minimize meetings, committees, structures, organization.  We find our fellowship, across the University, as above.  We take our education in the University.  We partner in service with our schools and colleges of the University.  We refuse to sit on a whale and fish for minnows.  Come and join us!  It is a great way to give, to live, to give and live, the gospel.

Here gay people are people.  Here lay people are people.  The eight words Methodism will need for survival:  gay people are people, lay people are people.  I refer you to the sermon coming January 27, 2013.

3. Myrrh

We begin.  As J Edwards said, ‘Resolved:  to do nothing I would be afraid to do in the last hour of my life.’

I don’t believe I quite heard or overheard your seasonal resolution(s).

Resolve, 2013:  to leave behind debt and regret.

On January 1, 1863, here in Boston, at the Boston Music Hall, F Douglass and many others sang.  The Handel and Haydn society sang.  One of their members, Harriet Beecher Stowe, sang.  Why their birdsong, good news of great joy? In the cradle of liberty?  Emancipation.  Real change is real hard, but change does come.  Lincoln said (12/62): ‘The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present’

Stowe wrote:  he is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave…

Regret is the shortest definition I know of hell.  Let your regrets be few.  Prize your time, your body, your heart.  ‘To thine own self be true’ (that’s Shakespeare by the way, not the Bible).  Let us leave behind the regret of gun violence, the regret of dehumanization of gays, the regret of environmental predation, the regret of children in poverty, the regret of unruly rouge nations, the regret of selfish living. Let your freedom be not only the freedom of the will, but the freeing of the will, to love.

Debt is the surest measure I know of hell.  Debt is an actuarial prison.  ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’ (again, Uncle Will, not the Holy Book).  An undergraduate degree is a wonderful thing, but not worth a mountain of lasting debt.  Travel light, cloak and staff.  Go where they will pay you to study, if you can. (J)

Yes, I am concerned about national debt.  I am.  A $4T budge with $3T income—this does not compute.  Even churches balance their budgets (I have 35 Decembers of fist fights, I mean finance meetings, to show).  Debt is a bad gift to grandchildren.  But I am even more concerned about your personal debt.    Lord forgive us our debts!

Get rid of your debt.  Get rid of your regret.  This year.

Find the freedom to live in love.

You are hiding out there.  I know you are.  I am hunting for you.  You are out there.  In a Beacon St. apartment. Up on the north shore.  Munching bagels on the Cape. Out in Newton, enjoying the Marsh Choir.  I have been searching for you, for six years.  Against the fierce New England wind of post Christian secularism, righteous anti religious fervor, mixtures of bad Calvinism or Catholicism, Sunday hockey, and a kind of intellectual life that is always just a bit short--of wonder, mystery, and magi wisdom.  I am hunting for you.  But I don’t find you yet. I search,but you are too well hidden.

CAN YOU GIVE YOU ME A LITTLE TWEET TWEET?

Congregation? Clergy? Choir? Radio?

CAN YOU GIVE YOU ME A LITTLE TWEET TWEET?

Coda

The father of neo Biblicism, Karl Barth, said:  ‘the gospel is the freedom of a bird in flight.’

We sing it this way, in our faith and our fellowship and our freedom:

The gospel is the beauty of a bird in song.

The gospel is the beauty of a bird in song.

The gospel is birdsong.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 01.6.2013 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 1: 39-45

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Preface

A long time ago, a young woman headed out, uphill, into the uplands, the highlands, the hill country.  It is striking that we see her walking alone, given her condition, given the human condition, and given the conditional blessing she carries to us and to others.  She is alone.  There are many forms of solitude, including the joy of birth and the grief of death, and the power of dreams.  You will picture her, in an awkward tunic, walking at dusk, up into the hills.  We know (remember the Good Samaritan) that those roads harbored bandits.  She goes quickly, perhaps for that reason, and with haste enters the home of the husband of a second cousin thrice removed.

Self-Mockery

One thing we learn from these two women, right away, is regard for a sense of self-mockery.  You could say self- awareness, or you could speak of the centered self, but Elizabeth and Mary, like their forebears, Sarah and Hannah, have gone further and have learned to smile at their own fragile limitation.  They model self-mockery. They can laugh at themselves. ‘Who am I that the mother of my Lord should visit me?’

It is possible that their self-abandon gives Elizabeth and Mary the ears to hear a divine promise.  One of the interruptive intentions of Sunday worship is to offer you, and you, and you all, such an awareness.  “Take yourself lightly, so that you can fly like the angels.” (W.S.Coffin).  A little spiritual distance, a little self differentiation, a little non anxious presence—these go a long way when you are hungry and thirsty for a reassurance of meaning, a reassurance in the face of our deeply violent and violating culture, a reassurance that life yet bears meaning.

The Gospel According to St. Luke reverses our expectations.  Those outside are on the inside, when the gospel comes.  The commoner has the inside track in this monarchy.  Who first hear resurrection news twenty four chapters and twenty four  weeks later, come March and Easter?  Women.  Who follow unstintingly, across Galilee and into Jerusalem?  Women.  Who, today, first hear the plan for redemption, the coming birth of the Dream Child?  Women.  (In case you miss the point, Luke brings in the shepherds Monday at 7:30pm).

How could it be?  How could these things be?  Who am I?

Over time, you begin to project less, on the world, and see more.  Projection only gets you so far.  After three or so decades of seeing what you hope to see and want to see, you begin to stop and look and listen, and lessen projection--unless you are one of these women.  Not of them the saying, ‘Too soon old too late smart”.  They get it early, earlier.  Schleiermacher would be proud.  They have that sense.  Some things only the women seem to get right.  They have that feeling.   Do you?  Do you?  However are you going to survive slaughter news without it?  John the Baptist leaps in Elizabeth’s womb, at the sound of Mary’s voice, Mary the mother of Jesus.  Good Greek mythology, and helpful to a church trying to keep the Baptists in the pew, at 90ce.

Mary is blessed.  Why?  Because she has believed, had faith. In what?  Here, as in the verse identifying the singer of the psalm, there is some textual doubt.  Is it that she has faith that she has been promised to deliver a child, and now sees that she will?  Perhaps.  I judge the stronger promise to be the stronger, though.  She is blessed because she has faith that these promises WILL BE fulfilled (that is the verb, simple future, not conditional, not subjunctive).  She trusts that a day will come: WHEN THE DREAM CHILD WILL COME AND HIS REIGN WILL NEVER END.  And her faith is ours.  Her faith is the gift of the Dream Child to us at Christmas.  You have the gift of faith and love and hope that--in the teeth of slaughter--you can affirm that one day, one day, one getting up golden morning, one fine dawn day, one glistening day, the dream of the Dream Child will neither slumber nor sleep.  Do you hope for that?  Do you?  Without it, however are you going to survive slaughter news? Mary’s blessing is not the birth of a child but the birth of the Dream Child.

Vulnerability

Another more obvious thing we learn from Mary and Elizabeth and from birth in general is a respect, a healthy regard, for human vulnerability.

I learned this week that there are 120 ‘centers’ at Boston University.  Each is the dream child of some professor, who has an idea about connecting ideas and money, and marrying them up in an academic center.  I may open my own, someday, ‘The Robert Allan Hill Center for Wonder, Vulnerability and Self-Mockery’

I had my first real job, and first real boss.  I ran the water front, under the stern eye of Koert Foster, who ran the campground.  Koert never went to college, but he became President of his Rotary Club.  He never went to college, but he flew and owned a Cessna 172.  He never went to college but he talked theology nose to nose with those who did.  He never went to college, but he was a scratch golfer and a prince of peace.   Here:  when one of the 250 campers per week was injured, he would slow down, as he walked toward the broken arm.  He did not rush to calamity.  He walked, and he walked more slowly than he usually did.  ‘Take your own pulse first”, his slow, steady approach taught me.

Koert was a deer hunter, as were most of the men around whom I grew up in the uplands, hills, hill country of upstate New York.  I went my junior year to Spain—give me another such some lifetime!—to read Antonio Machado and Miguel de Unamuno,  and prepare to teach college Spanish.  One December day a tiny thin aerogram, in my mother’s hand, came to Segovia, to the Campos de Castilla.  ‘Bob, Koert died in a hunting accident.  He was shot by accident by his best friend, the town mailman, on the hairpin turn, halfway to the lake’.

I had not planned to go back to work the followings summer at the summer camp, but Koert was dead, and we all went back, and ran it.  At age 20.  Occasionally a busy Methodist minister would check in to see if things were OK.  They were.  20 years olds can do a lot.  We worked from 6am to 8pm and then, in the twilight went waterskiing up and down that long finger lake, across from the nudist colony.   I was driving the boat, and throwing the ski rope.  Peg, Koert’s widow was the spotter.  ‘God called him home’, she said.  ‘Did God call him home?’ she asked.  Coiling the rope, I shrugged, and hurling the ski rope I said I didn’t think so.  ‘If you go to seminary, figure it out’, she said.

Friends, we need to be clear about not going over the theological cliff, in horrific tragedy.  You were here last week, when we said:

As we sing carols let us soberly remember.  Faith does not exclude us from calamity, but faith prepares us to fight it.  Faith does not give us the capacity to understand, but it does give us the courage to withstand.   Faith is not an answer to every question, but it is a living daily question of ultimate concern.  Faith in God is faith in God, not in another creaturely being.  Our faith in God is cruciform, faith in the crucified God, who has chosen to make our vulnerable condition his own. I know the early church rejected patri-passionism.  But barely.  And developing the capacity to meditate on profoundly unanswerable questions is why three times a fall we go and listen to Elie Wiesel. Faith does not protect us from calamity.  Gravity, bullets, floods and earthquakes respect nothing about faith, and faith from them offers no protection.

By apocalypse, evil shows us a part of who we are.  We are revealed, this week, in Newtown, as a people, to be other people than we pretend and other people than we intend.  We pretend to protect the weak, but we do not.  We intend to protect the innocent, but we do not.  That is, our penchant for acquisition, our desire to acquire rather than to be a choir, makes some other things expendable.  As in a mirror, and not so dimly, a dark inner part of our common life is illumined.  Not just one deranged killer, but a culture of guns and a culture of violence and a culture of acquisition, and a culture of apathy, these are brought to light, in this unfathomably tragic, unspeakably awful, sinfully evil crime. We are reluctant to give up even a slim measure of our power to purchase, to acquire, in order to protect children.  Foolish we are, with a foolishness that brings tragedy.  I think of the years I spent in Canada and the months in England, and I think we have some things to learn from both sibling cultures.  Here in the USA, there is a cheapening and coarsening of life happening all around us, all the time, and we, though sometimes we find the temper to resist, are the worse for it.  A decade of warfare has numbed us, made us tolerant of violence in ways we never were before.  Take a walk with me some day on a college campus.

Over forty years, as a culture, as a people, we have more and more given ourselves over to acquisition.  We no longer preach to the choir, we preach to acquire. To acquire one turns sometimes to violence.  Our culture is drenched in violence.   We from New England need to remember the stern hope in the New England theological tradition from Edwards to Emerson.  Edwards:  “Resolved, never to do anything which I should be afraid to do if it were the last hour of my life.”  Emerson:  “Men are ‘convertible’ and this is the work of education, to awake the slumbering soul from its habitual sleep.” Last week Night came, but unattended by repose. After a holocaust, there is no faith so whole as a broken faith.  We need models of living with a broken faith.  We need to become, one by one, and as the faith community of Marsh Chapel, a model of living with a broken faith.  How?

To begin, in faith, we leave behind who were, and take up our cross, and follow.  Our cross, in our time, as has been steadily acclaimed from this pulpit, includes the hard heavy lifting of ridding this country of gun violence and of protection that does not protect.  Granted that foolish and harmful things are done all the time, we need not participate in them.  Our cross, in our time, as has been steadily acclaimed from this pulpit, includes the hard heavy lifting of growing, improving attention to mental health.  Our cross, in our time, as has been steadily acclaimed from this pulpit, includes the hard heavy lifting of setting aside some cyber-cultural influences.  We shall not cease from mental fight, nor shall our sword sleep in our hand, til we have no guns, mental health and a clean culture, in this green and pleasant land.  You have a voice, you have a wallet, and you have a vote.  Do you know this?  Do you?  How else will we ever face slaughter news?

A digression:  careful limitation of ammunition, requiring of its purchasers what we now require of those taking an airplane ride, full and personal and complete and discomfiting inspection, may be our best strategy.  Buy your guns, if you must, but if you want ammunition for them, that is another story.  If I can be groped at Logan airport to fly to Chicago, you can be checked and monitored, bullet by bullet.  Yes, too, to : bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, tightening rules for sales at gun shows and re-examining care for the mentally ill.  It is a collective self defense, fit for the 21^st century, which we need, not an individual self defense, forged in the 18^th.

A second digression: Fundamentalist readings, harmful and foolish they are, are not limited to readings of Holy Writ.  Fundamentalist readings, equally harmful and foolish, and similar in scope and reasoning, are also given to national writ, constitution and bill of rights.   What words meant in 90ad, in Luke, require current, contemporary, living interpretation.  What words meant in 1800ad, in the bill of rights, require current, contemporary, living interpretation.  What is most novel may oddly be truest to the tradition, and what is least traditional may be truest to the meaning of the tradition.

Wonder

Our heroic women, Mary and Elizabeth, teach us something else, too.  Every day is our last, until the next, and they live so.  They sing so.  They live on tip toe and sing on pitch.  They magnify the Lord.  The world does not lack for wonders, but only for a sense of wonder.  How is it that Luke, 20 centuries ago, eclipsed the men and evoked the women?  How is it that, come Christmas, people who sleep on Sunday will come to worship? How is it that in the candle lit dark of Christmas Eve, 7:30pm, there is a dim, palpable sense of the numinous, so easily forgotten all year?  How is it that the beauty of the carols and anthems and hymns, even against the steady cold wind of the merely material, manages to get through, come December?

All this is true, because of the proper translation of Luke 1:45:  Mary had faith that God’s promise will be fulfilled.  You have that faith, have been given that faith, have been seized by the church’s confession of that faith. Down under, down deep in the American psyche, there is a surging heart felt generosity, unknown, untapped, uninvited, unbidden, unwelcomed by our ostensible leaders.  Ernest Campbell:  “To be mature is to:  build schools in which you will not study; plant trees under which you will not sit; grow churches in which you will not worship”.  Ah, to worship.  Let me end with a little jeremiad about worship, for your consideration as look to 2013.  Think of it as a recommended resolution.

If you do not have one hour, each week, in which to face your own mortality, your own fragility, your own dependence, what is any other hour worth?  Luke alone tells these stories.  Why?  He is struggling, as we are,  to build the church.  Some, inside the church, whom he wants to hold onto, are followers of the Baptist.  So Luke recalls a story that honors not only the Baptist, but also his holy birth.  Others, outside the church, whom he wants to embrace, are Greeks who like their religions sprinkled with birth legends like those of the Greco Roman Gods.  So Luke recalls a story that has an altogether Greek birth miracle, like the Virgin Birth story itself.

A culture of violence will not disappear on its own.  A community of faith will need to erase it.  That means coming to church on Sunday.  A disregard for mental health will not disappear on its own.  A community of faith will need to heal it.  That means coming to church on Sunday.  A homeland sized addiction to firearms will not disappear on its own.  A community of faith will need to bring sobriety.  That means coming to church on Sunday.  To this hard work, you will bring the spirit gift of perseverance.  My friend said:  “90% of life is showing up.  The other 10% is perseverance.”  Show up on Sunday.  Persevere on Monday.

If singing the hymns of faith is not worth doing, what is?  If preaching the gospel of kindness is not worth doing, what is?  If supporting friends in community is not worth doing, what is?  If this one lone Sunday hour is not worth your time, your attention, your commitment, your devotion, just what is your time, attention, commitment and devotion really worth?  If the love of the Dream Child is not worth dreaming about, what is?

Coda

A long time ago, a young woman headed out, uphill, into the uplands, the highlands, the hill country.  It is striking that she is alone, given her condition, given the human condition, and given the conditional blessing she carries to us and to others.  She is alone.  There are many forms of solitude, including the joy of birth and the grief of death, and the power of dreams.  You will picture her, in some awkward tunic, walking at dusk, up into the hills.  We know, remember the Good Samaritan, that those roads hid bandits.  She goes quickly, perhaps for that reason, and with haste enters the home of the husband of a second cousin thrice removed.  We will remember her, as Christmas moves to Christmastide.

When the song of the angels is stilled

And the star in the sky is gone

And the kings and princes are home

And the shepherds are back with their flocks

Then the work of Christmas begins

To find the lost

To heal the broken

To feed the hungry

To release the prisoner

To rebuild the nations

To bring peace among brothers

To make music in the heart

(Dean of Marsh Chapel, Howard Thurman)

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 12.23.2012 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

1 Thessalonians 3:10

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To mend your faith, the apostle wrote, to mend, to mend faith…

A noun and a verb, faith and mend.

Faith is our personal reliance on God.

Faith is our willingness, both in doubt and in trust, to live each day.  You honor life by living it.  You find faith by receiving it.  Faith is the state of being grasped by the Spirit, of being grasped by the Holy Spirit in love and justice and truth.  Any real faith has got some doubt in it, to keep it honest.   Faith is the experience of being fully alive, of living with courage, of being willing to risk, to fail, and to start again. Faith is where and who you are when you are your own-most self.  Faith is freedom, real freedom.  Of course we seek the ultimate, the infinite, the divine!  Of course we do!  Whatever else is life for?  This is why I tend to think that everybody, or very nearly so, has some kind of faith.  You may not have it dressed up in fancy linguistic garments.  That’s all right.  You don’t have to be Paul Tillich to have the courage to be.  You don’t have to read his Dynamics of Faith to have faith.

And, you have grown up so you know what faith is not.  Not blind trust.  Not knowledge of all mysteries.  Not exception from the laws of nature, physics, gravity, motion.  Not obedience to authority for the sake of obedience to authority, religious or otherwise.  Not capture by false ultimacies like success or nation or even religion. Not protection from calamity. Born, we are old enough to die. Rain falls on the just and unjust.  This is what the cross is all about—the measure and correction of false faith, what faith is not.  Real religious faith is unsparingly self critical.

But your faith gives you the courage to withstand what you cannot understand.  Your faith lives in the courage to be, over against all the frightful existential anxieties of sin, of death, of meaninglessness.  On the street, right on the street, where you live. You may be at a point to hear this word, after a week of rending, of tearing, of cuts and bruises and untimely death.

Jesus has taught us that we are children of God, heirs of life eternal.  Jesus has made us children of God.  In word and sacrament, today, you are reminded and mended.  Mended.

The gospel in this word illumines and inspires.  You will have heard and read our phrase from last week’s lesson, ‘mend your faith’, before.   In a way you heard it again, moments ago, in Luke and Philippians.   The gospel, down under, down in the valley, expects a filling up to come, a kind of geological mending, mountains and hills lowered, crooked ways straightened, rough places smoothed out.  A mending of the earth, of nature, and a right beautiful reading.  The letter, composed in the slammer (add your favorite prison term—pokey, calaboose, hoosegow, grey bar hotel, municipal motel, stir, up the river, the joint), expects a freedom from behind bars, and more, a partnership of the gospel.  A mending of the yoke of bondage,  of history, wherein love abounds, and knowledge too, and discernment too, and excellence and glory! And praise!, and a right beautiful reading. You heard it here, this morning.

But you heard it last Sunday, in a sliver of a silver line.  Paul said he hoped to be with his favorite congregation, ‘to complete was is lacking in your faith’.  That at least is what you heard last week, from the NRSV.   A while back, a generation ago, from the RSV, you would have heard, ‘supply what is lacking in your faith’.  And at the building of Marsh Chapel, in the KJV, you would have heard ‘perfect what is lacking in your faith’.   Complete sounds like a final exam.  Supply sounds like an economic theory.  Perfect sounds cold to the bone.  Paul yearns to make things right, and the rendering of his yearning is carried to us in these translations.  Every person of faith, you and he and all, and certainly every minister of the gospel, at our best, yearns to complete, to supply, to perfect.  Because we are so unfinished! Because we are so famished!  Because we are so fragmented!  But there is a better way to render the original verb, better than complete or supply or perfect.  Happily, the concordance and references closely define the word, KATARTISAI, as ‘mend’.

Last Sunday before worship some of us sat quietly to read the lessons of the day.  One student quietly read 1 Thess. 3:10.  But he read—not from NRSV or RSV or KJV—but from NEB, another translation.  ‘To mend your faith”, his version read.   The slight change is a sliver of a silver lining.   Our faith needs mending.  Every one’s faith needs some stitching up, now and then.

Betrayal tears at the fabric of faith.   Faith needs mending. The former governor of California sat for years over many meals across a shared table, without mentioning that one of the caretaker’s sons was his.   After that, faith needs mending.  The former assistant to John Edwards, who testified energetically against him for his betrayal, knew early about betrayal.  His father, had been the Dean of Duke Chapel, but a sometime visitor at  a nearby Red Roof Inn, in the company of a non-spouse.  That early betrayal cut deeply into the fabric of later life.  Both his dad and his boss had been false.  Sometimes, come Sunday, faith needs mending.  A current leader learns the hard way that no email is ever private, ever.  Put anything you want in email as long as you are glad to have it on your tombstone, or on the front page of the Times.  But the public cacophony is pale, by comparison with the rending of the garment of faith for the loved ones.  Faith for sure, to be sure, will need a stitch or two.

And what about the bigger betrayals, when nature and history let us deeply down?  Some mending required.  When violence between middle eastern nations goes on endlessly, generation to generation.  Mending required.  When a good nation somehow quietly slides into  unexamined drone warfare, wherein a man in a blue shirt drives from Manlius to North Syracuse, to sit in a screen room, and push buttons, with deadly consequence, a world away.  And then to stop at Wegmans on the way home, to pick up Cheerios and an extra Christmas ornament—a quiet evening in the suburbs.  Some mending required.  Or, harder and more immediate, when the specter of untimely death descends upon a commonwealth on commonwealth avenue, and an early, unfair, unjust and tragic loss evokes a piercing question: “ Where was God?  I thought God loved us?”  Or, in the nature of things, when a formal and false accusation, untrue but lastingly cutting, maims one we love, we know about needing a needle and a thread and a stitch and a little tuck, a little mending, of our faith.

The route to Bethlehem goes through the river Jordan, the icy, cold, real, existential river Jordan.

As my student fellow student of the Bible remembered, Paul was a tentmaker.  He knew about canvass and holes and leaks and cuts and could mend as well as make.  That is what makes the NEB translation so mendingly meaningful.

Our son had a stuffed animal for many years.  The animal was a raccoon.  His name was Rooster.  Rooster raccoon.  I have no idea how such a name came to be his but his it was.  Rooster raccoon went with us on vacation.  Rooster—the raccoon I mean—went with us on boat rides, on tobogan rides, on car rides.  Rooster had his own seat in the way back of the van.  He swam at Marconi beach.  He rode over the Mercier bridge into Montreal.  He learned to swim, the hard way, by falling overboard.   He slept outside in a snow fort.   He was the first one up in the morning, and the last one to bed at night.  Sometimes the dog would take him by the collar and run around.  We sometimes asked him to say the grace at dinner.   He would offer a resonant, silent prayer.  After a few years he looked like he was about finished.  For stuffed raccoons, one human year is the same as 14.  By accident, near Christmas, one evening, rooster raccoon found himself seated a little to close to the macaroni and cheese on the stove, and up he went in smoke.  Or at least in part he went up in smoke.  He was left missing the left part of his left part.   I see the child’s hand holding up the smoldering dog eared raccoon, with no words, only tears, and an unspoken question.  ‘Can’t you do something?’  And then a quick, confident maternal murmur:  “Just let me have him.  You wait and see.  He will be good as new.  We can mend it.  We can mend it.”  And she did.  And rooster raccoon was and is the best looking stuffed raccoon, without a left side, that you could ever want.  He is the most oddly named, and now most oddly shaped, stuffed raccoon, this side of the Mississippi.

Now you will rightly say that some things cannot be mended.  At least not perfectly, not completely, not with full supply.  ‘Dean Hill, some things cannot be mended’ you will say.  And I will reply:  ‘Don’t I know it’.  The damage is done.   Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it is hard to get it back in.  But the longing to mend?  That never ends.  The desire to mend?  That is everlasting.  The willingness to sew and trim and patch and weave and make it do or do without?  That urge to mend the tears in your loved ones’ faith?  That goes from heaven to earth.  And there is something in that wanting, to mend, that, like the Eucharist, brings heaven here.

Faith is our willingness, both in doubt and in trust, to live each day.  You honor life by living it.  You find faith by receiving it.  Faith is the state of being grasped by the Spirit, of being grasped by the Holy Spirit in love and justice and truth.  Any real faith has got some doubt in it, to keep it honest.   Faith is the experience of being fully alive, of living with courage, of being willing to risk, to fail, and to start again. Faith is where and who you are when you are your own-most self.  Faith is freedom, real freedom. Your faith gives you the courage to withstand what you cannot understand.  Your faith lives in the courage to be, over against all the frightful existential anxieties of sin, of death, of meaninglessness.

“We pray most earnestly night and day to be allowed to see you again and to mend your faith where it falls short” (1 Thess. 3:10)

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 12.9.2012 at 11:00 am