Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 7: 24-37

Jeremiah 29: 4-14

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This morning we welcome the Rev. Ms. Jennifer Quigley to our pulpit, to participate in this dialogue sermon, which, like all sermons, is about God and about 20 minutes.  Jen earned BA at BU, and MDiv at BUSTH and received a marriage certificate from Marsh Chapel, along with her fine husband Soren. She is thus a triple terrier!  As Chapel Associate here she exemplifies one fine way to thrive here, and she exemplifies our Marsh envisioned mission, to be a heart for the heart of the city and a service in the service of the city, through the voice of the chapel, decisions about vocation here, and daily attention to fanning the flames of volume in participation, particularly come Sunday.  Welcome Jen!

1. Dean Hill

In every journey there are moments when we feel like turning back.  We are jogging, early in the day, and feet are heavy and lungs are burning:  maybe we will go back to bed.  You are part way into a history of early America, and the pages are blurring and the narrative becomes unclear:  maybe we should just go out for a while.   You have a report due tomorrow, or a presentation in business, and the needed inspiration for the moment needs inspiration, but none comes:  maybe another visit to the refrigerator or cookie jar will help.  Your business or career, your school or community, your church or your country have made some progress over some time but the way forward appears to be longer and rockier than you thought:  maybe we should just turn around.

Underneath the lassitude of such a moment there may lurk a suspicion that this current course is not part of God’s generous grace.   Were not things simpler, better, easier at home?  Are there not serious wrongs in the current environment?  Perhaps I should look at some other setting?  Early in a new job we can feel so.  During the first several weeks of college or graduate school we can be acquainted with this dour perspective.  When the hard foundation work of building—a house, a project, a campaign, a fund drive, a relationship—makes the back muscles weary, we can start to feel overwhelmed.

The people of Israel, to whom Jeremiah writes, knew this condition.  They had been sent off as vassal servants to Babylon in the sixth century bce.  Some looked with resignation at their poor condition.  Others looked with fanatical expectation to the heavens, awaiting immediate, magical relief.  They were not the first nor the last people to be found quivering between the Scylla of resignation and the Carybdis of fanaticism.  As a matter of fact, people of faith, your two main adversaries, on any given day may be the opium of resignation and the cocaine of fanaticism.

All your holy supports have been taken away.  For the Jews in Babylon that meant one set of losses.  The holy land long ago given in promise—gone.  The holy city constructed and protected by kings for generations—gone.  The holy community and its rituals, devotions, leadership, altars, days, seasons—gone.  The history and memory ever embedded in space and place—gone.  The identity there formed, there fashioned—gone.  For the Jews in Babylon, there was one sixth century bce set of losses.  For those starting a course of study that means another set of losses.  The places of earlier success in academics and athletics—gone.  The support of friends of lasting trust and several years—gone.  The mixed blessing but blessing nonetheless of family of origin, extended and nuclear—gone.  The fragile but living identity of preparatory schools and years, won with struggle and effort—gone.  And all around a sea of anonymity, unfamiliarity, ambiguity, uncertainty.   Does this evoke for you any thoughts about the beginning of a college career?

2. Rev. Jen Quigley:

The first time I went to do laundry my freshman year at BU, I was prepared. My mom had made sure I had washed clothes at home at least enough times to know how to properly sort them, measure out the detergent, choose the correct setting, shake out the wet clothes, insert a dryer sheet, and, again, choose the correct settings. I even knew to check the lint trap! Laundry seemed like a complicated but easy process; as long as you followed the correct steps, your clothes would become clean without your socks turning pink. I waited a little longer than I should have, so my hamper bag was pretty full that Sunday afternoon the week after school began. As I walked into the laundry room in the basement of 188 Bay State Road, I froze. First, these machines were front-load, not top load. How could I tell when to stop loading clothes to avoid overstuffing the washer? Worse, the settings were all different. They seemed deceptively simple…did my laundry qualify for the “normal” setting, or were they “delicate?” What makes clothes “heavy” anyway? Worse still, it took forever to find where to put the detergent. Was I just supposed to toss it in from the side, hoping it spread evenly over my clothes? After about three minutes of sheer panic, I found a little detergent drawer, and poured it in what I hoped was the correct one of three separate trays. If you have ever tried laundry at BU, you know that the detergent seems to magically disappear down that tray, and as soon as you pour it in, it looks like you haven’t put any in at all. Worried I hadn’t used enough, I put in some more, and then began to truly freak out as I saw the ominous sign above the washing machine: DO NOT USE TOO MUCH DETERGENT. Had I gone overboard and now used too much? I had heard rumors about a kid who had used too much detergent on West and flooded the entire laundry room…

But worst of all, well, I didn’t realize the worst part until I had already loaded the clothes, and committed to the use of too much detergent. I looked for the place to swipe my Terrier Card, which my parents had conveniently outfitted with enough convenience points to help get me started with some of the basics, especially laundry. This machine did not take convenience points. It wanted cold hard cash, specifically quarters. Despair set in. Where could I get quarters on a Sunday?!? I could get cash from the ATM, for sure, dipping into my very spare reserves in my college checking account, but the banks wouldn’t be open to give me change! Who would give me change? I left the laundry in the machine, leaving a note saying I would be right back, and went on an adventure. The cash was easy enough, but the convenience store in Warren told me they had a firm no change-making policy. I received rejections from several more business establishments before a student employee took pity on me, asking why I didn’t just go use the change machines in Towers? Finally armed with so many quarters I jingled as I walked, I returned to 188 Bay State Road.

There, I hesitated over one last, seemingly minor decision. Someone, who shall remain nameless due to my uncertainty over BU’s statute of limitations, had told me there was a trick to manipulate the machines, something with thread and tape on the quarter, so that you could turn 25 cents into $1.25 simply by tugging on the string and releasing the quarter a few times.

Should I try this trick? If I did, how exactly did it work? Where should I attach the string, for example? Did this trick amount to petty theft? Would the washing machine know and somehow send notification to the police? If I just paid the full amount, in cash, my spending money would dwindle to nothing in a few short weeks! What would happen if I couldn’t afford quarters anymore? Would I have to lug my laundry to Warren every week, just to use convenience points? This last, small, but not morally insignificant decision pushed me over the edge, and I found myself paralyzed by a washing machine a week into my freshman year of college. After ten minutes, a housemate brought his laundry downstairs, and gruffly asked me how long I needed. This forced a decision, and I jammed all five quarters into the machine and retreated to my room, overwhelmed by my emotions. One thought kept ringing in my ears. If I couldn’t even do laundry here, how was I supposed to make it at Boston University? For the first, and not the last time that year, I felt homesick.

It was not as though I didn’t know how to do laundry, I just didn’t know how to do it here, on these machines, in this setting. You may be and feel completely prepared to go to college, but the fact is, no matter how prepared you are or feel, it is different from home and very different from high school. Those differences can cause a paralysis of sorts, and those differences expose you to the reality of your displacement, your dislocation; those differences make you long for home. The longing for home is visceral, deep, and no matter what anyone tells you about the joys of your college years, absolutely true.

Now I know that caring for laundry may pale in comparison to the struggles of the ancient Israelites, but I can tell you for this time and place they are very real.

3. Dean Hill:

Actually the two experiences are both connected to a deep desire to live out our own truest longings.  The experience of exile and the feeling of exile are not such distant cousins.

We here at Marsh Chapel can further appreciate the added or heightened burning sensation of life as part of a largely secular culture.  As one wrote about Jeremiah’s verses:  Uprooted from all familiar circumstances by the barbaric deportation the exiles found themselves…suffering a kind of paralysis in relation to their environment….The community was thrust out into the alien situation in the world…The deported people were snatched overnight out of this cluster of protective sacral orders (von Rad, 101-102).  They are thrust into an all-pervading secularity whose rhythms, priorities, demands and rewards are alien to the perspective and the people of faith.   We can empathize, looking about us this morning, in our current location, here and now.  Sunday is not a shared day of communal rest.  The human body is not always viewed happily as the temple of the Lord.  Funds and goods are not held and had in common.  Speech is not steadily governed by the warnings within the letter of James heard last week.  The horizon of hope is more earth than heaven, the material not the spiritual, the body not the soul.   An occasional radio broadcast of historic worship, or an occasional entrance into remaining, vestigial congregations, breaks awkwardly into the reigning secularity of the dominant culture.  On a college campus (whose weekend day begins at 4pm) on a Sunday morning in the Northeast within a large city that has its share of snowfall—to resist and grow together just here, just now in faith is to run into the very teeth of a very cold secular wind.

You will have heard what Jeremiah, the prophet, said to his forlorn flock way off in Babylon in chains.  It is a truly striking word that strikes the heart.  It is a word that can kindle in you a truer longing.  Jeremiah tells the people to put their hearts and minds and souls and labor into the very secular, cold setting into which they have been thrust.  Their well being now depends upon their overseers, who do not share their faith or their values.  So:  build there.  So:  grow there.  So: plant there.  So: marry, bear children, bear grandchildren, live and die—there.   Jeremiah is reproving homesickness, that is, the homesickness that looks backward as well as forward:  he is speaking against that dissatisfaction, that age-old human will to revolt that can wear so many different garbs (von Rad, 102). Resignation and fanaticism:  Jeremiah speaks against both the doubters and the dreamers.  His word celebrates the doers.  Jeremiah leads his readers to the validity and the duration of this their present…How objective here is the summons to simple involvement in society, against a fanaticism that believes that this interim situation does not at all deserve to be taken seriously!…Jeremiah’s directions are amazing:  they contain a justification of what is secular, worldy; indeed, they propose to offer encouragement to what is worldly (101).

Your salvation evokes a capacity to receive the divine generosity, the gift of faith, and so to let go…of home.  Your salvation relies upon your hearing of another word—student, professor, retiree, laborer, all!–the promise of a truer longing, a desire to plant here, grow here, build here, covenant here, and so let go of homesickness.  Fear not the secular setting in which you find yourself. Draw by faith on the gifts of God—in Word and Sacrament—for the people of God.  Then leave behind the dreamers, and leave behind the doubters, and align yourself with the doers.  For this exile, this deportation, this time in an alien place and a foreign culture, has its limit.  It does not last forever.  It is circumscribed, bound by a foreordained limit.  For Israel, that was the fall of Babylon two generations later, 538bce.  For others, that will be the baccalaureate service of May 2016, following, after a brief interlude, on last Sunday’s matriculation service of September 2012.   In the mean time, I wonder what in particular about this place will help us all nurture a sense of truest longing.

4. Rev. Jen Quigley:

Within the rhythms and rituals of this setting, Boston University, where the work of the mind is the ordered and ordering principle of the place, there is good news; in rhythms and in rituals you find the best remedy for homesickness, because as you develop your own rhythms and rituals in this place, the unfamiliar becomes familiar, the paralysis relaxes into a stretch, and so slowly you hardly even notice the change, in this new place, with these new people, in this new way of thinking, with this new faith, you feel less homesick and more home.

If you are new to this place, or if you are sensing some new discomfort or dislocation in this fall season, the advice of our Scripture this morning is this, to plant gardens, build houses, to see your children married. The Prophet Jeremiah urges the people of Israel to get to know the Brave New World of this strange Babylon, and to not hesitate to put down roots. For our time, in our place, perhaps not exiles but feeling a little exiled nonetheless, we might try to learn how these three things are done at Boston University, and to try them ourselves: Do laundry, read, and develop relationships. Here at the Chapel and around the university, there are people eager to help you learn how each of these is done at BU.

1. Do Laundry: I was saved from bankruptcy, despair, and theft alike by the community of saints in 188-190 Bay State Road. As a community, we eventually agreed never to use that trick with the tape and string, because the tape would get stuck and the washing machine would break. Instead, an enterprising student with some electrical and computer engineering skills reprogrammed our drier to dispense 99 minutes of drying for every quarter spent. I am not endorsing what still probably amounts to petty theft, but rather saying that there are people around you who can help you find quarters, share an extra dryer sheet, tell you how to fix your blinds, and explain where to hang your towel in Warren so that you neither soak your towel nor flash your entire communal bathroom. Ask your RA, ask your roommate, ask the sophomore or junior or senior in your building. Learn the best ways to do the little, ordinary, everyday things; often they make all the difference. Our habits make for a better home.

2. Read: There are certain well-loved, well-worn works around Boston University, and reading them will help you learn some of the parlance of this place. Spend an afternoon with Jesus and the Disinherited by the Reverend Doctor Howard Thurman, former Dean of Marsh Chapel, while sitting in the Howard Thurman Center in the basement of the GSU. Read a Letter from Birmingham Jail in the MLK reading room, on the third floor of Mugar Library, surrounded by King’s letters, photographs, and schoolwork. Pick up a copy of Maya Angelou’s On the Pulse of the Morning, and, as Dean Elmore suggests at the start of every school year, rally a few others to join you at sunrise on the BU beach, where the rock, the river, and the tree meet, to take turns reading lines from the poem. Wondering what to read next? Ask your professor, your TA, a chaplain, what work inspires them, their work, and their passions?

3. Build Relationships: Relationships in college develop in those ordinary and extraordinary moments. You might meet your soul mate at orientation or your best friend in a random roommate assignment, but you won’t figure out whether you have or not until you go to the dining hall with them, talk with them about anything other than schoolwork in your common room, proofread each other’s papers, and get lost in Boston together. Your financial investment in college is significant, but your personal investment in the people you meet has just as much value.  And if in the midst of all these adventures, you have a question about your deeper longings, you can always come and see a chaplain.

Dean Hill:  So the chaplains are one of the resources available in this particular time and place.  What would happen if I went to see one of these people?

Rev. Jen Quigley:  Well, just what are chaplains anyway?

Dean Hill:  My question exactly! We could say they are people who believe in the value of helping you connect your greatest passion with the world’s greatest need.

Rev. Jen Quigley:  Precisely.

Dean Hill:  Are you one such?

Rev. Jen Quigley:  I am!  In fact my title is:  Chapel Associate for Vocational Discernment.  What about you?

Dean Hill: I am as well.  As for my titles, well, they are many, but one’s life does not consist in the abundance of positions!

Rev. Jen Quigley:  In conclusion, we hope and pray that those searching for their truest longing will find their way in the college experience.  If they need a friendly guide along the way,  we are here for fellowship, discernment, conversation—and even some expert advice about laundry!

Call to Confession:

Over the last 72 hours my prayerful mind has hovered over one meditation:  the vast goodness around us, and especially the vast goodness in this University, the vast goodness in its history, people, thought and service.  Boston University.  Since 1839 a history of learning, virtue and piety.  A long proven inclusion of women, Jews, blacks, and immigrants.  An endowment of voice soaring past color of skin to quicken content of character.  Healthy movement in thought, from Methodism to personalism to pragmatism to naturalism.  Today, this morning, many here with us:  a brilliant student body who are growing in moral discernment, resisting substance abuse, rejecting amoral sexuality, setting limits to material greed, and developing empathy for the least, the last and the lost.  The real story here is far less salacious and much more hopeful than sometimes we think, thanks to good people, good leadership, and the underlying goodness of God.  We are in good hands, and so may gladly bear one another’s burdens.  As fallible people, honest about our failures, let us offer our prayers of confession

posted in The Rev. Dr. Jennifer Quigley, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 09.9.2012 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

James 1: 17-27

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Welcome to a new year.  There are various points at which a new year may be celebrated, according to various religious, national, familial and personal calendars.  Matriculation is the University new year festival.  Welcome back. (Yesterday on Bay State Road there was family with son and daughter, and a car with chairs and stuffed animals hanging out the windows.  On that street there were good people—police, resident advisors, custodians, administrators, chaplains, faculty, staff—around to say hello, as in the song:  ‘you say yes, I say no, you say stop and I say, you say goodbye and I say hello’ (one Dad started to sing the old Beatles tune!).

We will begin with a pastoral epistle, a little spoken letter, spoken from heart to heart, we trust.  Both of our primary readings, but particularly the passage from James, lure us in this direction.  You will think too of advice you gave, or were given, encouragement you gave, or were given, when a new day dawned, and a new horizon opened.  Your mother simply cried and asked you to call once in a while.  Your dad said to remember where you came from.  Your girlfriend said she would see you at homecoming, if you came home.  Your younger brother just smiled and waved.  All of these too were pastoral epistles, probably more significant because more personal.

When faculty enter or return to campus, they come with a sense of the new.  When administrators come or return to see the wave of others now present though months absent, they come with a sense of the new.  When business people and retirees and the many searching for work come to the chapel on labor day, in a season that really does not overly respect labor anymore, they come longing for a sense of new possibilities.  And you?  What brought you here, to sacrament and sermon?  We are so glad you have come.

On arrival, come the new year, it can seem that this is someone else’s place and somebody else’s time.  Especially in the heart of pretty fair sized city, with the noise and traffic of the urban landscape, you can get the feeling that other people know the place better and other people have a better sense of the time here.  There is a kind of comforting, though false, sensation that goes with this sensibility.  Others know better.  I am new, or new again.  This is not really my space.  I don’t even know what they mean by esplanade, by Fenway, by beach, by garden.  They must know better.  And I don’t really have any idea what is transpiring around me here.  I guess I will just sit and watch, or sit in my room, or sit by and wait.

The word from this pulpit and chancel this morning is not meant to dissuade you entirely from a bit of caution.  Caution when you cross the street.  Caution when you choose your friends and locations.  Caution when you are invited, as steadily we all are, to live in a way that is bitterly beneath who are you meant to be.  Caution when you make your plans.  Be slow to speak, slow to anger, slow to forget who you really are.   Two years ago a tiny young fresh woman from a small South Carolina town came in after a car had hit a cyclist out front.   She just sat and trembled.  She was remembering who she was.  No, we do not discountenance the importance of caution.

Yet that is not the gospel this morning, as important as it is.  Be careful.  But be caring too.  Be protective.  But be proactive too.  Be self critical.  But be self confident too.  This is your time.  This is your place.  The God of wholeness (‘the perfect law’) and the God of freedom (‘the law of liberty’) is loving you into love, gracing you into grace, and freeing you into freedom.  If you hear that, and I hope that you do, then go and do it.  Be careful.  But be caring too.  Be protective.  But be proactive too.  Be self critical.  But be self confident too.  It may seem or feel otherwise, but hear the good news:  this time is your time, not somebody else’s time.  These days and months that will fly by are not somehow primary reserved for other people, or somehow better grasped by other people.  That fellow who has been teaching thirty years, and you are just starting, is not somehow more fully drenched by this present moment.  No.  This day, autumn, year, decade—they are your time.  Carpe diem.  Sin is not taking what is offered:  that is the definition of sin, not taking what you are graciously given.  We need to work, and to respect those who offer work.  I know ours is a capitalist not a laborist system, capitalism not laborism.  But this is Labor Day weekend.  Perhaps we could remember for a moment those great voices who protected the wives and children of coal miners, of factory workers, of dock yard laborers.  Lincoln:  Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital.  Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed.  Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration (First Message to Congress, 12/3/61) Here is life!  Live it.  Here is learning! Love it.  Here is friendship! Embrace it.  Here is challenge!  Face it.  Here is failure!  Admit it.  Religious experience is not primarily religious, in the sense that it is not primary found in the hours of church or tutelage or liturgy or devotion.  Of course I am contractually obligated and also personally and profoundly committed to imploring you to get yourself to church on Sunday.  This you will want to do.  But religious experience comes through life, not church only, or mainly.  It comes in seizing the day, and embracing the time.   Life: L I F E.  When you come to church the next several weeks, come thankful for times when time stood still for a moment.  In an honest debate.  Reading Kant.  Pouring yourself into an experiment.  Rowing.   Seeing the sunrise across the ocean.

Nor, by the way, is this massive space, the 350 buildings of Boston University, and the 350 years of Boston, the home of the bean and the cod, somehow somebody else’s.  They are yours for the knowing.  This great city opens its heart every day to anyone with a good pair of shoes.  Your plan is to make this historic city yours.  Buy a standing room only ticket to see the remains of the Red Sox.  I mean the Red Sox season.  On the first day it snows, walk through the public garden.  Take the fast ferry to Cape Cod, once at least.  Whenever you hear music coming from a classroom, an auditorium, a concert hall or a chapel, like this one, stop and listen.  Make one of the Italian restaurants in the North End a personal favorite.  Make that two.  On Columbus weekend, walk or jog the whole of the Emerald Necklace.  Find your way once each term to the seashore.  Do not assume that others, sleeping off steady drinking, or endlessly watching as in a mirror (‘one who observes his natural face in a mirror’) some cyber image, or carelessly involved with someone else’s body, or making plans for future acquisition, or simply hiding out somewhere, do not assume that such others know this place or own this place more than you do. You will be invited to live in ways that are bitterly beneath you.  A pastoral letter:  hope to grow in the capacity for moral discernment—good and bad, right and wrong, better and worse;  avoid a staple, steady diet of addictive substances, drugs or alchohol—stay and be healthy, with some sense of balance;  intend to honor others, in this BU home of personalist philosophy that guided MLK and others, by wanting to honor others, especially in their spirit, soul, body, and person, including those most intimate encounters and involvements—honor the other in the other; step aside from the tide of greed in our era:  there is more to living than becoming the richest woman in the graveyard;  learn from others the habit of empathy—feeling another’s hurts and understanding another’s fears; find some places—nature, worship, friendship, quiet, reading, prayer—where your ownmost self can come up for air.

Life is what you DO in it.  You might keep in mind the widow and orphan, the lonely and the needy.  Life will provide you many examples.  Be no hearer that forgets but a doer that acts.  This is your space,  your place, your current and your personal  location.  Take a second seat to no one.  You can and should sit in the front of the bus.

Time. This is your time.  Space.  This is our space.  It has been my summer prayer, thinking of our faculty returning, and our administrators on the qui vive, and our staff in full throttle, and our students arriving, and our community coming home from the days of sunshine and family, it has been my prayer to send you this pastoral epistle.  Now is your time.  Here is your place.

Listen to Robert Frost’s poem about a star…

What will this year bring?  It is up to you.

Let us pray:

Gracious God, Holy and Just

Thou Silent Mystery, beckoning deep

In whom we live and move and have our being

Grant us peace, we pray

Give us grace, we pray

In the eyeblink of these four years

Give us peace to resist what we would regret

Give us grace to receive what will make us rejoice

Four years hence, diplomas in hand

May we be heavy with joy and free of regret

Help us to avoid the regret that follows abuse of ourselves,

Of our environment, of substances, and of others.

Warn us away from what, lastingly we will regret.

Fill us with a daily sense of adventure to embrace

What lastingly we will enjoy:

Friendship, discovery, reading, effort, achievement, accomplishment,

Self-giving, devotion, and love.

Grant us peace to resist what we would regret and grace to receive what

Causes us to rejoice.

Amen

~The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill,

Dean of Marsh Chapel

posted in Matriculation, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 09.2.2012 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

John 6: 56-69

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Jan and I stood alongside our burial plots last Wednesday afternoon.  (I trust it will many decades before we need to use them!).

Our post retirement home is nestled in a long forgotten, old village cemetery in Eaton NY.  Eaton is the northern tip of Appalachia, economically and culturally and geographically and historically.  Its rural poverty has come rather lately to its 250 year history, but is as harsh and weather beaten as any such rural immiseration.  Its country culture receives some odd jostling from Colgate University and Hamilton College, both a very few miles away.  Its spot on the edge of the great cliff of the Allegheny plateau places it at 1200 feet above sea level, with lakes and great lakes 1200 feet below within a thirty minute drive.  Its history includes nearby Peterboro, a town built in the 1850’s by Gerritt Smith for freed slaves, some of whose descendants live there still; and the Oneida Community next door, whose three hundred Perfectionists lived ostensibly without sin and within complex marriage for thirty years, 1845-1875; and the shores of Gichigumi the shining big sea water, near the wigwam of Nicomis, daughter of the moon, the homeland of Hiawatha, 1200 feet down north.

Our burial neighbors will include some born before the Revolution, some several who died in the Civil War, many veterans of the wars of the 20th century, and one fellow, who was interred in 1962, but in whose youth fought with Teddy Roosevelt in the Spanish American War.  One wonders about the ongoing work of mowing and trimming, and moreso about the volunteer leadership needed to keep managed a venerable, small graveyard.  Our hostess told us there had been no burials this calendar year, to date.  They bury until November 1 and then after May 1 or as soon as the ground thaws in the spring.

Jan said she liked the spot.  I volunteered that this was good since we would be there for a while.  Actually, when you amortize $400 per plot over the course of eternity, the cost is really very little.  The rent is too high across the country, but not in the Eaton Village Cemetery.  Of course I had sometimes mused about having a bit more upscale social location, going forward.  Maybe something on the East Coast—Chatham, Castine, the Cape, North Hampton—something with an ocean view, and ‘east coast standards’ of comportment and attire and presentation.  Jan reminded me that I am a Methodist preacher, a country preacher at that, and can not afford ostentation, neither fiscally nor spiritually.  Besides, she counseled, see all the beauty here…Yes, see it, and hear it…

Beauty is heard as well as seen.   We jog past this place so I know what the music of that meadow brings.  The rooster, or more than one, as dawn breaks.  The cattle, feet away, lowing, as cattle do.  The wind in the evergreens and the two Oak trees.  An occasional auto, a more occasional truck, a very much more occasional airplane.  Visitors with crosses and flags and flowers and tears.  And then the sound of nothing, of silence.  Hush, hush, somebody’s calling my name.  In the deep winter the deep silence is sonorous.  I think of the fourth months of real winter, and the covering, the bed cloth of four feet of snow, and it is well with my soul.

Let me reveal that I begin this way for a discreet homiletical purpose.  I preach as a dying man to dying men, as Luther counseled.  More so, our series of summer sermons has addressed hope in the face of death.

Apocalyptic language and imagery in the New Testament is a language of hope in the face of death.  The cosmic resurrection of Christ and the life he offers is a word of hope, spoken into the teeth of cosmic, universal, individual, personal death.  All of our sermons this summer have been very human attempts to announce this unseen hope, embedded, deeply embedded in New Testament apocalyptic language and imagery.

Sometimes, at our worst, we move through life with the supposition that death comes to others, to other people and peoples.  It something that befalls others.  This very human daily supposition is not limited to young adults, to this new wave of temporarily immortal 18 year olds soon to wash up upon the BU beach.  Nor is it limited to distracted, over technologized middle aged parents, trying to keep a household afloat amid the Great Recession of our era.  Nor is it limited to the mature, or the very mature, we who should probably know better.  Time flies?  Ah no. Time stays.  We go.

A pastoral digression. I assign you an exercise for this week or some week.  It is patented, informally, by me, but I give it freely.  It is the RAH OOPS formula for preparation for post retirement.  O: write your obituary, at least a first draft which others can redact as needed.  O: compose your funeral order of worship with hymns and texts and participants and memorials.  P: select a photograph you do not mind being used in days of grieving, in the newspaper or in the funeral home.  S: locate your last location, your place and manner of burial or cremation.  Place these materials, in the same box or safe deposit box in which you already, already, have placed your DNR, your living will, your will (you may choose to remember Marsh Chapel in your will by the way), and any other significant materials.  How your family will thank you! But, as you are mortally aware, all of this preparation, good as it is, is not good enough, not enough.

For all of this preparation lacks the main thing needed in the face of death, in the face of the power of death William Stringfellow so ardently and artfully described, and at the grave, at the end.  What matters at last at death is hope.  Hope.  The best thing about apocalyptic, about Apocalypse Then, is hope.  If someone asks you in the grocery store what you heard this summer at Marsh, or from Marsh, you could say, “They preached on the theme of Apocalypse Then, and I heard a word of hope.”

Which brings us to the conclusion, the END, if you will, of this summer’s Marsh Chapel national preacher series on the theme ‘Apocalypse Then’.  I am personally and deeply grateful to my colleagues here at the Boston University School of the Theology for their leadership and voice and presence this summer.  They gave two summer Sundays.  They gave hours of preparation.  They gave the best of their hearts and minds.  They gave a willingness to treat the hardest material with the finest of skill.  Their very presence brought us hope.  It happens that we all share an interest in New Testament Apocalyptic.  With you I thank Dr Jennifer Knust, Dr James Walters, Br. Larry Whitney and Dr. David Jacobsen for their preaching this summer.

So what have we learned?

Apocalyptic theology in the New Testament is a language of hope lifted in the face of death.  At least, this is how I would conclude and summarize our announcement of the Gospel this summer.  Apocalyptic followed the prophetic hope for justice on earth, and preceded the late platonic hope for life in heaven, building on the former and preparing the way for the latter.  We need them all, to some degree.  The prophets hoped for a righteous earth.  The Gnostics hoped for a glorious heaven.  The apocalyptic hope in the face of death is hope ‘on earth as it is in heaven’, a hope for the apocalypse of heaven on earth.  As Paul wrote, ‘Hope that is seen is not hope.  Who hopes for what he sees?  But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience’. (Rom.8)

The first Sunday, we recognized the delay of the parousia, the failure of the primitive apocalyptic hope of the earliest church, and its origins in Jewish Apocalpytic.  We saw how this material is often consolation literature, developed among those outcast, those downtrodden, those forgotten, the least and the last and the lost.  Apocalyptic gives voice to the hopes of the disinherited: “ We are not free to project our anxieties about the dilemmas of the current age—an age by the way that was supposed to have seen ‘the end of history’!—out onto a far-off falsehood, like the raptures of fancy, fiction or facsimile—in order to avoid what we of course have to do in every other sphere of life:  negotiate, compromise, discuss, trade, and muddle through.

“Most especially—places like Marsh Chapel with a rich heritage of hope must also expect of ourselves a rich offering to the future that comports with our inheritance, to whom much is given, from him much is expected—we are not free to neglect a common hope.

Here is our freedom.  Pray daily for the hope of the world.  Think creatively about the hope of the world.  Act specifically, week by week, in communion with a reliable hope.  The future is up to you.”

The second Sunday, we saw in the very word, revelation, which is rendered apocalypse, the inbreaking of God’s love in earth, as when Paul said he had received the gospel by ‘apocalpyse’, by revelation.  Apocalpytic gives voice to the hope of faith. Why…we will become a beachhead in the invasion of God’s new creation.

Here: a New Creation.

Here: a community that listens.

Here: a gathering of mutual concern.

Here: people of glad heart.

Here: people of happy passion.

Here: not I must I shall, but I may I can

Here: love divine, all loves excelling….

The third Sunday we saw again how communal and common the ancient eschatological material was in its casting and framework.  Apocalpytic gives voice to the voiceless, those left out by the reigning regime, including those left out of decent health care in our time (those unfortunate enough to live in a state other than Massachusetts!)  “Yes, there will be bad news, there is no use pretending otherwise, but do we really need to hurry it along? Why not be harbingers of hope and allies of health and people who wish well for others.”

The fourth Sunday we were treated to a careful interpretation of the beheading of John the Baptist, its apocalyptic foreground and background, its history in theology, and its comparisons to contemporary, common, family dysfunctions.  The horizon of hope remains, the hope of blueberry pies cooked and enjoyed against a better series of familial arrangements than currently we experience.

The fifth Sunday we were taught again about the profound pessimism out of which Apocalyptic comes, the despair at seeing anything finally righted or rightwised in a crooked world, and the shout of anger and courage faith kindles in such darkness.  Hope has two beautiful daughters, anger and courage, wrote Augustine.  Apocalyptic gives voice to the anger and courage present in those who despair, including those injured by handguns in this country, and those willing to question the pervasive dangerous presence of guns (300 million) in our land.

The sixth Sunday we were shown the emergence of Paul’s apocalyptic gospel, and the centrality of his apocalyptic hope for the rest of his work, especially that found in his magnum opus the Epistle to the Romans.  Apocalyptic gives voice in the face of death to the power of God’s overcoming grace.  Resurrection is resurrection…from the dead.

The seventh Sunday we explored the horizons of endings and beginnings, and how the apocalyptic world view both aids and distorts our contemporary vistas. Apocalyptic gives voice to thinking about the environment, about nuclear energy and weaponry, about choices and decisions in the global community.

The eighth Sunday we were reminded of the crucial influence across the New Testament of Apocalpytic, which one called the ‘mother of Christian theology’.  It’s not nice to neglect mother, we determined!  Apocalpytic gives voice to honesty about real evil, in real time, from the Holocaust to Ruwanda: “Mark’s Jesus offers the beginning of his apocalyptic gospel.  It is a song in darkness, a seed cast across a dark landscape.  Yet, amidst the darkness, Mark’s gospel speaks…a promise of dawning light.

The ninth Sunday we listened again for the gospel in the hour of Jesus’ Crucifixion:  the dark hour in which the light of God’s presence somehow continues to shine: “Mark’s gospel of an apocalyptic cross is therefore not just an orientation to a past, but a costly opening to a future, a new age, that draws us in our lives forward even in death’s deepest shadows.”

We have both the freedom and the responsibility at Marsh Chapel to ring the bells of learning and piety, of mind and heart together, in a way that will inspire and guide another generation by the best insights of the faith we share.   We have aimed high and stretched out.  One year on new dimensions in ministry, another on leadership in the Methodism, another on Darwin and faith, another on worship and preaching, another on church renewal, and now, Apocalpyse Then.    You will find these sermons published in our annual e-magazine MOTIVES, located on our website.  While there are few University pulpits remaining across the country,  your radio support, your generosity, the ongoing support of Boston University, and the hard labor of my staff and colleagues here continue to allow us to treat hard topics with tough love.

Apocalpytic is a song of hope, a hope of heaven on earth, a divine hope.  It asks of us a certain height, a certain inclination, a change.  It moves our self, our being to a new center, one in the green pasture, the great meadow of hope.

In the year of my birth, 1954, Howard Thurman, then in his first year as Marsh Dean, gave lectures at what was to become my alma mater, Ohio Wesleyan.  These later were collected in a book, THE CREATIVE ENCOUNTER.  With his minimal Christology, tangential connection to Paul, perennialist inclination against narrow religion, and distrust of large portions of the biblical tradition, Thurman would at first seem an unlikely interpreter of apocalyptic material.  Yet his typically digressive, imaginative reflections, that winter’s OWU Merrick lectures, at one point touch the marrow of our theme for this summer.  Thurman is trying to examine and explain the religious experience (notice his phrase).  I wonder you have had such?  Its measure for him is not unlike the apocalyptic hope lifted this summer:

“There is a point at which for the individual the surrender of the self in religious experience gives to the life a purpose that extends beyond one’s own private ends and personal risks…What happens then when there is a new center of focus for the life?  The answer to that, in part, is this.  At such a time as the new center becomes operative, the individual relaxes his hold upon himself as expressed in the self-regarding impulse.  A different kind of value is placed upon his physical existence.  Death no longer appears as the great fear or specter.  The power of death over the individual life is broken… The individual operates from a new center with all that is derived therefrom.  The expression is the alteration of his private life growing out of a new value content.  God has become the custodian of his conscience.  This is of great significance.  The center of loyalty allows meaning for the personality; the shift is from some primary social group loyalty…to loyalty to the command of God. (73-81, passim, THE CREATIVE ENCOUNTER).

I wonder.  Are you sensing the divine generosity inviting your one life to circle around a new center?  Prayer will guide you.  Even suffering will perhaps prod you.  A moment in worship may lift you up. A friend, a word, a kindness, a note, a sunset, a kiss, a laugh—these are intimations of religious experience that are not religious.  But real they are.  I wonder.  Is your center shifting?

I believe, in a way I cannot understand in full or articulate in full, that God’s love outlasts death, is stronger than death, and overpowers death.  But is something I do not see.  It is something I sense, though I cannot see it.

But who hopes for what he sees?  We hope for what we do not see.  And wait for it with patience!

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 08.26.2012 at 11:00 am

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 07.1.2012 at 11:00 am

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Galatians 3: 23

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Something Unearthly and Final

1.  Later in the summer evenings, seated in the dark natural womb of our hedged backyard, you can hear a strange cacophonous chorus.  A small Toyota drives past, its muffler nearly superannuated.  There are crickets, humming from nearby, yet from nowhere.   A prop jet cruises overhead, spraying its round steady roar.  Then there is the neighbor’s radio, and a couple who murmur and mutter as they stroll out front.  Somewhere a screen door bangs shut.  And yet another car, stereo pounding. But then, lovely and strange it comes, and as from a foreign shore or the far bank of the river Styx, one faintly overhears—how unspeakably sweet—the long, low mellifluous whistle of an unseen train.  A train whistle at dusk:  is there not something unearthly and final in such a sound?

2.  Every dawn breaks differently from the last, as the older and sicker and more lonely among us can see, better than others.  Some may watch from the dawn for spiritual reasons.  Most who see it daily, one suspects, see it through the lenses of sheer loneliness, or throbbing and sleep stealing pain, or nightmarish angst.  You are awake, again.  And there again is the tempting, promissory light of yet another day.  See it break!  A luminous haze.  Or a streak of dull yellow.  Or even a sky now confederate gray, now federal blue, now…orange! and crimson! and rose! and all manner of Fire.  The color of dawn:  is there not something unearthly and final in such a sight?

3.  To touch.  To touch and to speak and to speak with touch and to touch with speech.  For four years you have been in uniform and at last you lie down again beside the mother of your children.  Such a touch.  Or maybe you were crippled, nearly killed, in an atrocious accident and slept, years, downstairs in a makeshift hospital bunk until, at last, you lie down again against the husky shoulder of husband become nurse become husband again.  Such a touch.  Or, maybe, you are estranged for years when Grace reunites you two and again you rub cheek to cheek.  Such a touch.  The touch of human love and desire:  is there not something unearthly and final in such a feeling?

4.  The footrace is overlong and you are past the wall, the wall of endurance.  You have hit the wall.  Now, only out of dumb habit do your legs move, still, forward and forward.  Another hill, another mile.  You ache and you hurt, but mostly you thirst with an arid dusty mouth and cracked lips.  Now!  Someone has thrust a cup of cold, clear water to you.  You lift it and you drink.  The force of water upon thirst:  is there not something unearthly and final in such a taste as this?

5.  There is a scent, an aroma that  your friend wears, partly natural, partly cosmetic, partly a strange mixture.  You can sense it in his sweater, in her office, in his car, in her closeness, in his intimacy.  It has no name.  But it is a fragrance which outlives her, or him, if only for a few weeks or months.  Of all things, it makes cleaning the room unbearably and sweetly awful and hard.  This is a fragrance to end every other.  Such a scent:  is there not something unearthly and final about such a fragrance?

Come with me for just a moment this morning out to the very edge of life.

For the human senses all have their own horizons, their own outer limits, their own twilight zones:  sound, sight, touch, taste, scent.  They all have their zenith, nadir, and apex—their horizon.  Each, bittersweet, is a foretaste, a harbinger and a chilling reminder of the brute limits of our life, even—no especially—at its very very best.  They take you out to the limit.  To the end of the pier.  To the crest of the hill.  To the edge of the cliff.  To the brink of…eternity.

Come with me for just a moment this morning out to the very edge of life.

The Apocalypse of God

Where human experience ends, God begins.  Like a tangent touching a circle.  On the far side of that train whistle and that orange dawn and that erotic touch and that slaking taste and that heavenly scent—there, God.

A preacher some years ago spoke in a rowdy college auditorium.  Posters lined the walls.  One read, “God is other people”.  The preacher began:  “I have come to put in the comma.”  And he walked to the wall poster and penned in a comma:  “God is Other, people”.

God is Other.

When Paul spoke to the Galatians, he preached the revelation of God.  The greek word is apocalypse.  The apocalypse of God.  The God beyond god.

This is why, in the first instance, the earliest Christians worshipped Jesus’ death and not his life.  For in the cross of Christ comes God’s final, martial apocalypse.

God’s last word.

In Jesus Christ, and Him crucified, in this marauding and final act—the revelation, the apocalypse of God—God speaks and acts.  And we today, east and west, may be with appreciation of millenium and holy war viscerally closer to the New Testament than almost any other generation, save that of Jesus and Paul and John.

Behold a mystery, out at the very edge of life.  The apocalypse of God finishes all millenial fear and all jihadic anger.

The apocalypse of God:

Permeates

Invades

Steps in

Attacks

Transforms

Eclipses

Seizes

Graces

The apocalypse of God:

Is not freedom of the will but freeing of the will.

Declares war on this territory of tyranny

Repairs, rebuilds, replaces…all else.

And there is no religious addition, no postscript to the redemptive, apocalyptic act of God in Christ.

This is why St Paul can be so outrageously, shockingly bold to say—it is a baptismal formula—that in Christ there is no longer any difference based on religion (Jew\Greek), or on economics (Slave\Free) or on sex (Male\Female).  He says it with the finality of the millenium and with the ferocity of Holy War.

The Apocalypse of God invades our twilight world.  Even in church—the last refuge of a scoundrel.

See, hear, taste, touch, smell it.

First, this church opens its doors every day to religious and unreligious, alike.  The apocalypse of God is, simply, the end of religion—the end of distinction based on tradition alone, or doctrine alone, or tribe alone or habit alone.

Second, every year we pool our money in community.  It is an uncanny event, to collect and disburse a million dollars and more, from each according to his ability and to each according to his need.  The apocalypse of God is, simply, the end of money—the end of distinction based on wealth alone, or position alone, or inheritance alone, or success alone.

Third, this month we begin to hear again the event of the preached Word.  The apocalypse of God is, simply, the end of sex—the end of distinction based on body alone, or gender alone, or orientation alone, or physique alone, or appearance alone.

Oh, I know.  You can so easily miss the apocalypse, since it appears in a mere open door, a mere collection plate, a mere soprano voice.  You can miss it, for it lies over the edge of our experience, and touches us as if from nowhere, on a cross.

I dare you to watch for what is real.  The erasure of religion, the toppling of money, the disappearance of sex.  All killed.  All defeated in God’s millenial jihad.

Without religion to separate us, without money to enslave us, without sex to divide us, what will become of us?

Why…we will become a beachhead in the invasion of God’s new creation.  Real Millenium.  Real Jihad.

Here: a New Creation.

Here: a community that listens.

Here: a gathering of mutual concern.

Here: people of glad heart.

Here: people of happy passion.

Here: not I must I shall, but I may I can

Here: love divine, all loves excelling….

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.24.2012 at 11:00 am

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Mark 13:1-8

1. Preface:  Andrew Young on Faith and Religion

A few years ago Boston University was graced by the voice and presence of Andrew Young—activist, pastor, theologian, congressman, ambassador, mayor and close confidant of Martin Luther King.  One pastor said:  “He is one of our ‘wise men’”.   We were honored to be at breakfast with him, across a round table in the Howard Thurman center, guests too of the office of the Dean of Students.  BU students, Ken Elmore, and Kathryn Kennedy provided the hospitality.

For those of a certain generation—those of us now with bifocals, aging joints, haphazard memory, thinning hair—Andrew Young is a wise man and an icon too. We are aware, too, that for ranges of humanity in other generations, his name is slipping from its household word quality into more of a vintage mode.  C’est dommage.

Mr. Young answered several questions.  One:  “What should the relationship be of politics and religion?”  You might be surprised at his answer.  It recalls Paul in the 15th chapter of Romans, extolling the virtue of those, his enemies, who nonetheless were preaching Christ.  There is wisdom in magnanimity, and there is magnanimity in wisdom…

Every great revolution in the history of this country was supported by a religious revival or enthusiasm—the Revolutionary war, the Civil War, the Civil Rights movement…No, I do not agree with Pat Robertson and those folks, but I also recognize that they are doing some good in the world…they are sending missionaries and feeding the hungry and other good things.  Faith and politics invariably go together.

2. American Eschatology:  21st Century Consolation Literature

It is a particular, peculiar, and potent intersection of the two which concerns us this morning.  In our time, religion and politics have intersected at an unusual point, that of the doctrine of the last things, of eschatology, or the doctrine of the Christian hope.  As we have propounded for six years from this pulpit, on a reliable hope hangs our future.  But to approach such a globe saving, history opening hope—I speak here of salvation in the little and in the large—we shall need to clear the ground of unreliable hope.  The remaining historic churches (orthodox, catholic and protestant) have done a poor job in contesting the region of hope.   We have not steadily and repeatedly reminded both church and culture about what, historically, and so theologically, we may understand regarding biblical teachings about hope.  We have not done our job, to translate tradition into insight for effective living.  To some degree we have turned aside from the apocalyptic language and imagery of the New Testament, in turn embarrassed, frightened, offended or simply baffled by the ancient hope, like that in Mark 13, read some moments ago.

And what has become of the void of interpretation we have left behind?  It has become filled by material about being ‘left behind’!  Of all the dangerous literalisms which can infect the pseudo-interpretation of scripture, none has become more damaging than the literal, non-historical, rendering of apocalyptic material in the New Testament.

A summer or two ago, one of our Marsh Chapel members came by the office.  He told me about his workmates who were reading popular apocalyptic material, from The Late Great Planet Earth to Left Behind.  “Can you do something to address this part of Christianity for the rest of us?”  His question is the basis for our national summer preaching series this year, 2012.  Over ten weeks we shall do our best, with a little help from our friends at Boston University, to respond.  I thank in advance the Dr Knust, Dr Walters, Dr Jacobson and Br Whitney for their support in the preaching of the gospel on the theme, ‘Apocalypse Then’.

This summer we are excited to present sermons, in June, July and August, which intend to provide reasoned, historical and theological reflection on some of the apocalyptic passages and themes in the New Testament. Our hope is to provide publicly accessible yet theologically responsible perspectives on these texts, in contrast to some other current and popular forms of interpretation. We are privileged to present preachers from the Boston University School of Theology, each of whom brings particular interest and expertise in this area.

For many people living culturally outside the range of religious reality that encourages literal apocalyptic language, the broad reading and public enjoyment of such literature can seem unbelievable.  How did 20 million homes accommodate copies of the fictional accounts of rapture, in the Left Behind series alone?  How did this series become the primary lens through which, for many, the Christian hope is seen?  Kevin Phillips recent work, American Theocracy, in his two chapters, Radicalized Religion, and Defeat and Resurrection, put a full spot light upon this phenomenon, including its connections to political agendas.  According to Phillips, 55% of all Americans believe the Bible is literally true and  59% of all Christians expect the events of the Book of Revelation to occur (p 102).  When combined with the sort of covenantal ‘exceptionalism’ and ‘righteous remnant’ perspective that often accompanies such a reading of the Scripture—found in Ireland, South Africa and the American South at crucial junctures—the influence of literal apocalypticism has become significant.  ‘Lost Cause’ religion becomes the seedbed for left behind theology (p110ff).

Further, these affirmations and perspectives are often tinged with a particular kind of understanding of God’s will.  A few years ago, during the outing of  a bright, effective large church pastor who homiletically condemned but also apparently practiced homosexuality, several evangelical commentators reflected on ‘God’s timing’ in bringing forth this ‘revelation’ about Pastor Haggard.  ‘God just decided that it was time to bring this to people’s attention’ is a comment typical of this position.

Timing is everything , but is everything God’s timing?

On this (mistaken) view, God is free, but we are not.  God is free to be, but humans are slaves of providence.  God is making the choices about when outings occur, not actual humans.  At crucial points, there is, on this worldview, a hearty willingness to let go of human freedom, human responsibility, and human wisdom gained through hard experience, and to let God take the blame.

Which, of course, is the sad heart of literal apocalyptic.  In apocalyptic, the future is not open, not evolving, not influenced by the myriad choices of individuals and groups--and so not my responsibility.  I let that go.  No, in apocalyptic, the future is assured by God, controlled by God, chosen by God and so is God’s sole responsibility.  So, in letting go, I let God be, well, God.   It is a temporarily consoling perspective for those who crave such fleeting consolation.   It is a darkly fascinating rendering of the slogan, let go and let God.

But it is not true.

Not to our reason, not to our experience, not to our tradition, and finally, in careful interpretation, not to our Scripture either.

3. Ancient Christian Apocalyptic Eschatology:  1st Century Consolation Literature

On the basis of sound biblical interpretation, it is time to leave behind ‘left behind’ thought.

Our gospel lesson, Mark 13 was probably written in or near the year 70, in the shadow of that century’s judeo-christian version of 9/11, the final destruction of the temple in Jerusalem.  Our chapter today assumes that the reader—‘let the reader understand’ (v14) will intuit the imagery of buildings and stones.  More, the later Gospels are written in the ever lengthening shadow of a truth hard to swallow, at least for the early church.  The end was not in fact in sight.

Jesus, Paul, the earliest church and most of the New Testament carry the common expectation that within days or years, but soon, the apocalyptic end of the world will occur.  All were mistaken.  Even 2 Peter, who changes the math, and makes a day equal to 1000 years, has grudgingly to wrestle with the delay, the postponement, of the first Christians’ fervent hope.  Recite 1 Thessalonians 4: 13-18 several times and you will get a sense of what this apocalyptic hope entailed.  It is early Christian mythology.  As with all myth, it carries meaning, including meaning for us.  But as a world-view, as a view of history, it is wrong.

It did not happen.

What Jesus predicted, and Paul expected, and Mark awaited—did not happen.  The end did not come.  And centuries of further sparkles of expectation, from the Montanists, to the Medieval mystics, to the Millerites of upstate New York, to the Jonestown community of 1978, to the Y2K enthusiasts of just a few years ago, did not make it so.  December 12 2012 will also come and go with the sun rising and setting the next day. This biblical apocalyptic may be mythologically meaningful, but it is chronologically corroded.

Further, the language and imagery of the New Testament are apocalyptic through and through.  Apocalyptic is the mother tongue of Christian theology, especially of Christian hope.  So our beloved Bible must be interpreted anew, in a non-mythological way.

Fortunately, the New Testament itself begins to do so.  Some of that reassessment is beginning in our passage this morning—‘the end is not yet, this is but the beginning’.  Some of the ethical application and communal reinterpretation of this will come in a few verses:  you have no idea if or when the end will come so, in scout fashion, be prepared.  But most of the courageous imagination in this regard is found in the Gospel of John, aided somewhat by the later Paul.

The fictional, pseudo-biblical, consolation literature of our 21st century apocalyptic literalism needs to be left behind.  It is not true:  not to the Bible, not to the church, not to the mind, not to your experience.  Humans may make of this earth the scenery of the new novel, The Road.  We pray, pray it may not be so.  But even if it were to occur—the end is not yet.  You cannot escape your responsibility for the future of planet earth by hiding behind the skirts of an unfounded, ultimately unbiblical apocalypticism.  It will not do, in this sense, to let go and let God.

We are not free to avoid our responsibility to the environment, with the excuse that the Lord may return in a generation or two anyway, and who needs gasoline in the rapture?

We are not free to avoid our responsibility to seek a common global peace, cognizant of the hard won insights of pacifism and just war theory both, on the bet that time is running out for the late great planet earth.

We are not free to construe current events in the Middle East on the templates of colorful but unhistorical apocalyptic myths, for the consoling succor of somehow thinking that God handles the Middle East any differently than Asia or the Alaska.

We are not free to project our anxieties about the dilemmas of the current age—an age by the way that was supposed to have seen ‘the end of history’!—out onto a far-off falsehood, like the raptures of fancy, fiction or facsimile—in order to avoid what we of course have to do in every other sphere of life:  negotiate, compromise, discuss, trade, and muddle through.

Most especially—places like Marsh Chapel with a rich heritage of hope must also expect of ourselves a rich offering to the future that comports with our inheritance, to whom much is given, from him much is expected—we are not free to neglect a common hope.

Here is our freedom.  Pray daily for the hope of the world.  Think creatively about the hope of the world.  Act specifically, week by week, in communion with a reliable hope.  The future is up to you.

And for goodness sake, leave behind ‘left behind’.

4. Coda:  Andrew Young’s Worldview

We could see at breakfast that Andrew Young had aged.  He walked more slowly.  His skin is weathered.  He carried some more weight.

But he is a wise man, our wise man.  And he lives in hope.

Asked about his education, he recalled a single informal study group, led by Professor Bill Bradley of Hartford Theological Seminary.  The students gathered for hours of conversation, encouraged by their teacher.  “That group gave me hope.  They gave me my worldview.  The worldview I have to this day.  It is a worldview centered in Christ”.

Young’s worldview owes something to Reinhold Niebuhr, with whom we close:

“Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.”

~Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill

Dean of Marsh Chapel

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.17.2012 at 11:00 am

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Three weeks ago, Katie Matthews was awake at 2am.  Her good friend, she learned hours earlier, had died in New Zealand, one of three Boston University students lost in a car accident.  Katie wondered what to do.  She could hardly believe Austin was dead.

Katie was about to graduate: an education major, a future teacher, a native of Albany NY, a parishioner at BU Marsh Chapel, a leader, a person of faith.  She felt something needed doing.  Could she do something?

Katie thought maybe 20 or 30 of her closest friends could get together on the plaza of Marsh Chapel, Boston University, a space centered on the monument to Martin Luther King, Jr., to honor her friend. The Chapel website has a page about vigils.  She made some notes.  She froze for a moment.  Could she carry this off?  She began to reach out on Facebook in the wee hours of the morning.  Could she do something?  She decided she would try to do something. One of the chaplains at BU saw her positing and pledged support.

At 10am the next morning, unbeknownst to Katie, 20 BU administrators met to consider the dreadful tragedy of 3 deaths a half a world away, and just a week before Commencement.  They began to plan for various responses. Could we do something, they wondered?  The chaplain reported that a student group was planning a vigil that night at 8pm.  Would they like some help?

By 8pm not 20 but 300 students, faculty, and staff were gathered with candles on Marsh Plaza.  The President spoke.  The Provost spoke.  The Dean of the Chapel spoke.   Students spoke.  Live streaming carried the moment around the globe, especially arranged for those other students studying in so many places around the world. And for their parents. Katie spoke too. 'I knew I had to do something' she said.  Here are some other things said at the vigil:

Tonight we are One BU in mourning.

We lift the names of those who died:  Austin, Roch, Daniela.

May we help one another find our way to some solace.

Our hearts go out to their parents and families.

We want to face loss with love, grief with grace, disappointment with honesty, and death with dignity.

May we find the power and faith to withstand what we cannot understand.

Standing beside the monument to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., let us remember him not only as a prophetic national leader, but also as a wise and caring pastor, who said in a similar time of tragedy and loss. ‘when it gets dark enough you can see the stars’.

Against a dark backdrop, brightness stands out. The brightness of friendship, relationship, youth, hope, dreams, faith, and love…

It is important to speak.  But as the dusk settled in the Cradle of Liberty, Boston MA, and as the stars came out in the dark, and as the candles flickered in the gentle breeze, speech gave way to presence.  Speech is important.  Presence is more important. The vigil lasted 40 minutes, the gathering around candles lasted 2 more hours.  Stories. Hugs. Tears. Hugs. Stories. Will somebody light my candle?... I wish we had Southern California weather, we could use this plaza like this all year long, this way...Do you remember that time we were in Rhode Island and…

Dusk comes.  When dusk comes it is good to gather together, to grieve, to remember, to accept, to affirm.  Our limited tenure walking on this green earth—our mortality, our fragility—is not easy to face, especially if we try to do so alone.  That may be what Katie Matthews felt at 2am.  So she found a way, just before Commencement, at a time of great joy, to help to gather our community in grief, in a time of great sorrow.  Maybe she remembered the Apostle, ‘rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep’ (Rom. 12:15).  Maybe she recalled the psalmist, ‘weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning’ (Psalm 30:5).  Or maybe she was thinking of her fellow Bostonian Robert F. Kennedy, ‘one person can always make a difference’.

At Commencement on Sunday May 20, Boston University tried to strike this same spiritual balance of celebration and mourning, in opening words, in invocation, and in benediction.  Katie Matthews had led the way.

She leaned forward into grace, sanctified, made a bit more whole, or holy, by grace.  Maybe some of the history and memory of her University, of this place and plaza and pulpit, was active and at work with her.

‘My grace is sufficient for thee’, wrote the Apostle Paul, ‘for my power is made manifest in weakness’. (2 Cor 12: 29)

By the grace of God, we are gathered this morning, a divine grace working to make us whole, holy.  A sanctifying grace.

Isaiah acclaims holiness, the ancient apprehension of holiness enshrined in our ancient Scripture.  The heavens are telling the glory of God.  Creation.  Holy, holy, holy…The mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the mystery in which we live.  The fingers of a child in the first day of life—mysterium tremendum.  The sudden sense of awe at daybreak—mysterium tremendum.  The uncanny arrival of a thought or image, just as it is needed—mysterium tremendum.  Parents placing shoulder boards, epaulets, on their sons and daughters in the hour of commissioning—mysterium tremendum.  The gifts of the table, bread and cup and thanksgiving and memory and presence—mysterium tremendum.    As we watch the celebrations in London this weekend, we recall the rainy night, the strange dark night in late May 1738, in which a troubled cleric, John Wesley, found himself nearly alone in a Sunday evening vesper.  Quiet readings from Romans 8—our chapter today—and from Martin Luther.  A hymn and the London fog to follow.  But then, there, strangely, he found his heart strangely warmed, and had awakened in his soul a sense of personal faith, the prevenient first step on the path of grace.  ‘I felt my heart strangely warmed’, he later wrote.   Will we open our hearts to a personal nudge this morning?

John acclaims such a nighttime encounter, a birth from above.  The baptism of water is a place to start.  But the encounter with spirit, holy spirit, is the doorway to the divine.  Nicodemus moves out of the shadows, one in a long train of several persons in this gospel.  For all the universal power of John, his gospel is a catenae of personal encounters.  Mary at the wedding.  Nicodemus at night.  The woman at the well.  A healing personally delivered.  A man born blind.  Lazarus scratching his way up and out.  We are meant, in this gospel, to picture our own encounter, our own moment.  Holy Communion is the altar call of sanctifying grace.  Step and step.  Hand and cup.  Hand and bread.  Step and step.  A reporter called recently to ask if in Methodism, the historic root of Marsh Chapel, one who has greatly strayed can be forgiven?  A current news story raised the issue.  Hear the gospel:  God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.  The marrow of the divine is loving and giving.  The effects of our sin remain, often incalculable and unexpected.  Sin remains—but does not reign.  Yes, one who has greatly strayed may be forgiven.  In fact Mr. Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, made his signature question to be:  ‘Do you know God to be a pardoning God?’  So you say yes?  And God forgives you.  And your neighbor forgives you.  Now comes the hard part:  you will need to forgive yourself.  Can you forgive yourself? For being that thoughtless, that unheeding, that overweening, that unsuspecting?  The spirit blows where it wills, free and loving and gracious.  Are you ready to have done with lesser things, to take up the cross and follow?  Here is a just and justifying place to start:  Do you know God to be a pardoning God?

Paul acclaims a leading spirit, making children of earth into children of God.  A shout shall lead them!  Abba! A spirit bearing witness with our own best selves, our ownmost selves, that we are children of God.  We have the capacity—immersed in grace prevenient, absolved in grace rightwising—to be clothed in sanctifying grace.  Ours is an apocalypse, a cosmic grace, grace as divine freedom to choose, to change, to take a chance.  John Wesley asked his preachers:  ‘are you going on to perfection, and do you expect to be made perfect in love in this lifetime?’  Perfection meaning wholeness, holiness of heart and life.  Completion, a roundedness of heart and life.  And he would add:  if you are not going on to perfection what you are going on to?  Imperfection?  We are not finally perfectible, but we can go on, grow on, learn and grow.  Start with the ten commandments (no other God, no graven image, no taking of the name of God in vain, remember the Sabbath day, honor father and mother, do not kill, commit adultery, steal, bear false witness or covet).  Start there.  Step up to the beatitudes (happy are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, the hungry for justice, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted for righteousness—and you when falsely condemned).  Step up there.  So day by day learn to:  Love God and love your neighbor.  It is not that we lack direction.  We lack desire and stamina and willpower and persistence, yes, but not direction.  We know the way, back toward One who is loving us into love and freeing us into freedom, by means of a sanctifying grace.  Are you going on to wholeness?

Katie Matthews said, ‘I just knew I had to do something.’  You will come forward to the table of grace in a moment.  What do you need to do this week?  Come to receive, but come with a response, too.  What do you need to do this week to sense the holy, to feel forgiveness, to grow in grace?  Come to eat and drink, knowing, though, with Katie, that this week you will want to do something.

Breathe or breathe thy loving spirit

Into every troubled breast

Let us all in thee inherit

Let us find that second rest

Take away our bent to sinning

Alpha and Omega be

End of faith as its beginning

Set our hearts at liberty

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.3.2012 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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Paul on Spirit

In the passage of 1 Corinthians read earlier, the apostle Paul has exhorted his energetic Corinthians to sense the Spirit.

We could use a measure of Spirit, too.  In this religious mudslide across the country that has deposited determinism, quietism, pessimism into our common life, we especially hunger for what Paul writes.  We truly hunger to pick up what he is putting down here.  Are picking up what he is putting down?  It’s not heavy.

The future?  The future is open, and at least in good part the future of our planet will be forged by the freedom of individuals and groups to make choices for health and life.  The present? The present is a good time.  The best time to plant an oak tree is a hundred years ago.  The second best time is today.  The present is second best, and that is pretty good.   The past? The past is not in charge.  The past is not dead, and therefore not past, but the past is not ruling the roost.  You are.  What you choose not to do matters.  That is why we continue happily to harp on the crucial centrality of tithing, and of inviting.  Give away 10% of what you earn, and invite some person every week to church, and you will be like the child born on the Sabbath day:  happy, witty, bright and gay.

It is the one Spirit, the same spirit, from which we drink this morning.  You know this well, but a few reminders for those who may have been absent on Pentecosts past, or asleep like Elijah’s Baal, on Sunday’s past, or just not really interested in Spirit.  First, for Paul there is absolutely no separation between spiritual life and life.  Spirit is in life and the much prized division between material and spiritual, prized in ancient Greece and prized today here, Paul humiliates.  The same spirit roves and ravages in what is said, what is predicted, what is healed, what is remembered, what is done, what is given.  For him, there is no distinction between religious and secular.  The same Spirit inhabits all.  Second, the Spirit is the Lord.  And the Lord is the Church.  It is like a body.  Many parts, one body.  Did you notice just where you expect Paul to say “church”—so it is with...---he says Christ.  For him the church is the body of Christ, in some mystical, magical, mysterious, miraculous way.  Christ has actual feet.  Yours.  Actual hands.  Yours.  Actual muscles.  His.  Actual voice.  Hers.  Actual presence.  Third,  Paul distinguishes gifts from fruit.   Fruit if general, lavished upon all—love, joy, peace….Gifts are individual, to one this, to one that.  Fourth, the reason for the gifts.  You have particular gifts.  What are they?  Name one.  You have at least one, and Paul in know way means his glory hole collection list here to be exhaustive.  I do find it compellingly interesting that his list is almost all related to hearing and speaking.  It is curious, and not explicable, that he names faith as a gift that some have, and others, apparently, share by extension.  You may go to church for many in your family and neighborhood, too.   Fifth, the Spirit brings freedom the Spirit evokes grace, the Spirit spreads love.  Sixth, and most significant, in the opening of the gifts of the Spirit, for Paul, all of these manifold gifts have one central purpose:  the common good.  The common good.

In most ways, the conditions in Corinth could not be more globally different from our own.  They in tatters, we in Sunday best.  They in a borrowed upper room, we in a fine Gothic nave.  They in untutored simplicity, we in educated elevations.  They in uproarious shouting, we in decency and order.  They at the salt water edge of the Mediterranean, we fresh water fish all, along the Genesee.  They expecting that the form of this world is passing away, we not expecting that, unless by nuclear incident.  And what could we possibly have in common with such a community so torn by Gnostic speculations, incestuous relationships, lawsuits filed member against member, questions about the morality of marriage, selfish inhospitality at table, and a boundless enthusiasm that like earlier Methodism must have seemed “noise and nonsense” to those all around?

One thing we share.  As a global village, and as a church, we are perennially threatened by the various shadows and filters that can muffle the sense of full, same Spirit of which Paul speaks here in Corinthians.

Our particularities, in church and nation, can become the sideshows that eat up the circus, the varieties that threaten to obscure the same Spirit at work in all.

The Sound of Spirit

Notice the vocabulary of the gifts Paul names.  They all have voice.  Our age has become one of email communication: visual communication.  Email is a wonderful tool, as long as its visual features are kept in mind.  It is immediate, indelible, irretrievable, international, infinitely transferable.  And it carries no voice, no body, no sound.  Paul has tuned his ear to the speaking of the Spirit, in many voices.

The Spirit speaks in any utterance of wisdom.  Note, this is not any religious as opposed to unreligious wisdom, but simply whatsoever things are true.  Truth finally needs no defense, even as falsehood finally has none.  It is an utterance which Paul connects first with Spirit.

The Spirit also speaks in the utterance of knowledge.  Paul does not equate wisdom with knowledge, a lesson for the knowledgeable to bear in mind.  He may have in mind the knowledge so prized by his spirited opponents, the Gnostics, who like most predominant religious expressions in most ages, including our own today in America, gain adherence through certainty, whether knowledge of the stars, or the planets, or the spheres, as in Paul’s time, or whether knowledge of eternity, or calling, or determination, as in ours.  There is a reason that determinist, certainty promising religions, Gnostic or sacramentalist or fundamentalist, generally do well.  To certainty Paul opposes confidence, as in the next gift.

The Spirit also speaks in faith.  Faith comes by hearing, hearing by the word of God.

The Spirit also speaks in healing, that is in words of healing:  ‘Rise, take up your pallet and walk’;  or, ‘your faith has made you well’; or ‘Lazarus, come out’.

The Spirit speaks in the dynamite of change, of miracle that is the unexpected, whether understood naturally or supernaturally.  All nature sings…

The Spirit speaks in prophecy for the common good.  The Spirit speaks in conversation about other speaking, discernment.  The Spirit speaks, even, Paul allows here, in ecstatic utterance, glossallalia,, as long as other speech is able to hear some meaning.

The sound of Spirit has reverberated in every rebirth of the church, from the noise of Pentecost day, to Paul and his noisy Corinthians, to Augustine and his noisy sermons, to the noisy whispering in the medieval monasteries, to Luther’s noisy shout, “I can do no other”, to Wesley’s noise and nonsense, as his detractors said, in band, class, meeting, conference, worship, sermon and music, all the way to Azusa Street and the birth of post-Methodism, the Pentecostals. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is noise, sound, freedom, speech.  And this in great variety.

We too have varieties of gifts, right here.  We are gifted with various passions in our speech to one another at Asbury First.  There are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit, varieties of service, but the same Lord, varieties of activities, but the same God.  To one is given the gift of… music, mission, management, money, Methodism…all for the common good.  Let each one match his passion for a particular gift, with the shared commitment to the common good, known in our faith by tithing and invitation.

Gifts Activated for the Common Good

When conviction is quickened by imagination there is action that makes a difference.

Jesus of Nazareth spoke by imagination when he said, ‘blessed are you poor, for God’s reign is for you’.  John Wesley spoke with imagination when he said, ‘there is no holiness save social holiness’.  Vaclev Havel spoke with imagination when he said, ‘Hope is not prognosis, but a willingness to work for what is right’.

We may differ in our choices of tactics.  On supports governmental programs.  Another advocates work by private companies and charities.  A third prefers a blend.  But all are supported by the same Spirit, at work for the common good.  God is at work in the world to make and keep human life human.  The world can work.  It can.  We need not discount environmental decay, nor nuclear accident, nor global warming, nor fundamentalist terror, nor rampant disease.  All these and other horsefolk of the apocalypse have long been spied.  Still, the word can work.  The future is open.  The present is a really good moment.  The past is not in charge.

When imagination is quickened by conviction there is action that makes a difference.  Imagine for a moment, a spirited moment directed toward the common good…

Wouldn’t it be nice if the prisons in this country were half-empty and the streets free of homeless vagrants?

Wouldn’t it be nice if every generation received a better education than the one that preceded it?

Wouldn’t it be nice if every man and woman who wanted a job could get one, and so we did not waste a single person or view any person as ‘redundant’?

Wouldn’t it be nice if schools and hospitals and churches and charities had more money than they knew what to do with?

Wouldn’t it be nice if men and women were getting along so well that abuse and abortion were virtually unheard of?

Wouldn’t it be nice if budgets, public and private, were set with a clear, frugal eye to the future, and without being based on borrowing from the next generation?

Wouldn’t it be nice if the measure of success in this great country were formed not against the question of individual achievement, but against the desire for the common good?

Wouldn’t it be nice if we really took seriously, really believed in a final judgment, the day of the Lord, in which hearts are sifted and measurements made—against the prospect of the common good?

Wouldn’t it be nice if warfare ceased, and if what remained only occurred within the bounds of Christian just war doctrine?

Wouldn’t it be nice if democracy, not only of voice and vote, but also of education and endowment and employment and environment were our song?

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could go to bed at night, not as those who all day have been rivals for position and power and privilege, but as those who have worn an easier yoke and a lighter burden, that of the broken Master, that of real community, that of the common good—I mean as those who have helped each other?

Wouldn’t it be nice if the criterion for medical care were simply, “how sick are you”?

Wouldn’t it be nice if the communal virtues, the gifts of Spirit that work for the common good, the very signposts of salvation—responsibility, industry, frugality, respect for authority, a sense of limits—replaced those of mere success?

Wouldn’t it be nice if every kid in this country had enough to eat tonight?

Wouldn’t it be nice if the love of Jesus Christ, and the fear of disappointing him, and the hope of meeting him in glory, and the joy of working in his fellowship were all that we really wanted and needed?

Wouldn’t it?

Too idealistic?  Really?  Jesus, John Wesley, Vaclev Havel, did not think so.  Where has our early love gone?  Where is the love revival of our first kiss of faith?  Have we begun with the Spirit to end with the flesh?  Where is our imagination?

George Bernard Shaw, as usual, had it right:  “You see things as they are and say ‘Why’?  But I dream things that never were and I say ‘Why not’?

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 05.27.2012 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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1 John 4: 7-12

Mark 16: 1-8

‘To be mature is build schools in which you will not study, to plant trees under which you will not sit, to grow churches in which you will not worship.’ (Ernest Campbell).

John would agree:  John Dempster.  John Appleseed.  John Wesley.  1 John.  John would agree.

The cataract of Easter, its shattering, thunderous, calamitous, munificent, apocalypse of love, leaves parcels and morsels strewn about the lawn of life.  Our Holy Communion in Eastertide is forever an unfinished grace.  We stumble about, following the Easter kiss of grace (gnadenkusse), the Easter quickening.  We bump into bits and pieces left behind the resurrection tornado.

For one thing, the gospel for this Easter, Mark 16, re-read this morning, ends in mid-flight, end in mid-sentence, its last word a preposition, ‘for’.  A weak case (from the critical moderate viewpoint0 finds a couple of other sources in antiquity, in ancient Greek literature, which end with this dangling preposition.  But the much more muscular view, as usual, is that of the moderate critics, not that of the critical moderates.  The end of the scroll (as often happened to beginnings and endings of these documents) probably was torn and lost.  The Easter gospel is literally (not a word I usually associate with the Bible) unfinished.  Its ending is unending.  For….what?

If you doubt this, let me remind you that all the subsequent editors of Mark tried to fix up the finish.  Beginning with Mark.  There are three different endings to Mark.  The unfinished original, and two finished unoriginals, the shorter and the longer.  They are not improvements, except in a grammatical sense.  Next come Matthew and Luke, writing 20 years after Mark.  They also both replace the unfinished finish, with a finished finish, not original, but, like a nice addition to an old house, appropriate to the space.  The Fourth Gospel enlarged Mark’s sketch (a version may have influenced John), with three other stories (of Mary, of the disciples, and of Thomas).  And of course Paul knows nothing of any of this, so had nothing to add.  Whether or not you want to think about unfinished grace as the metaphorical unfinished symphony of Being is your choice.  The fact stubbornly remains:  Mark 16 ends unfinished, in mid-sentence, ‘they were afraid for…’

Life is open.  Freedom is real.  Easter causes us a little humility about what we think we know.  Unfinished grace cautions us at Easter.  Life is unfolding in unfinished grace.  If, for instance, you have attended a recent lengthy conference or meeting which was by all accounts an unmitigated disaster, and you are tempted to despair, beware.  Grace is afoot, alive, active, and unfinished.  There is more future than you may think in the future.

For another thing, in the aftermath and after glow of Easter, sometimes when we come to our senses we deeply realize unfinished work, unresolved issues, unappreciated love.  Every year, studying the Gospel of John, this hits like a trailer falling out of a tornado.

I am speaking of Nicodemus.  We didn’t hear about him this year, for he is only in John.  You remember his awkward appearance at night in John 3.  He disappears, but reappears at the very end, John 19:29, and helps Joseph of Arimethea to bury Jesus’ body.  ‘Nicodemus, who first came to Jesus by night, also came, bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes’.  So poignant, this, so true to life, so accurate about us.  We don’t know what we have got until it is gone.  At last—too late but not too late—Nicodemus responds in love to the Christ who loved him to death.  He shows up at the burial.

Some returning faithful souls from Tampa Florida may this month suddenly realize what has been lost in the Methodist church.  You don’t what you’ve got until its gone.  For 200 years in various forms our church supported a security of appointment, a modest kind of connectional tenure.  In this practice was located the basis for the covenant of the clergy in conference.  In this practice was located the functional basis for itinerancy, in appointment and apportionment.  In this practice was located the final protection of the freedom of the pulpit from harm and muffling by Episcopal leaders for whom such freedom is uncomfortable.   I

In short, the church said to those entering ministry: ‘you study for four years in college, three years in seminary, work for three years under supervision, and agree to go anywhere you are sent at the appointment of the Bishop, along with your family by the way, and live in a parsonage and earn $40,000 a year.  We will at least guarantee you a place to preach, however modest that may be.  But now, the demands on the young clergy are the same, but the responsible balance, the fair deal from an earlier day is gone.  All the weight is on one end of the teeter totter.  Beware of mendacious and predatory Bishops:  power corrupts, and absolute power, now in view, corrupts absolutely.  It is the equivalent of eliminating tenure on the Charles River campus in one vote, with no full debate.

Maybe the judicial council will rule this too out of order.  You don’t know what you have got until it is gone.

Nicodemus doesn’t know what he has until it is gone.  Still, there is a way—100 pounds of treasure way—for Nicodemus to find faith.  Part of the joy of Easter is that this spiritual street theater involves audience participation, a play unfinished until you, like Nicodemus, step upon stage, take your cues, memorize and deliver your lines.  Unfinished grace includes us—if we will allow it—at Easter.

Yet another thing:  as bread and wine await.  1,000 of us worshipped here in the triduum—an explosion.  Odd, I looked up at Frances Willard, Easter day.  She is found standing perpetually alongside Abraham Lincoln, here in our western stained glass.  To finish Marsh Chapel, sixty years ago, Daniel Marsh had to decide on one final figure, for the last stained glass window.  The choice became a cause célèbre, with letters and advice flying fast and furious.  In a day when people felt strongly about Connick stained glass windows.  Who should it be?

Marsh finally chose Frances Willard, the female force behind prohibition.  Interesting.  A quintessential Methodist choice, in one sense, and a lingering, awkward physical presence on a secular, urban, large, cold, Northern, anything but temperate let alone abstinent, campus.

Here is what President Marsh wrote about Frances Willard:

‘I dare to prophesy that as the years go by and the history of the New World comes to be read…the name of Frances Willard will stand by the side of Lincoln’ (Lady Somerset of England).  Dean of Women at Northwestern…Her upbringing, her religious convictions, her natural bent for reform…put her in the temperance movement…President of the WTCU…A statue of her stands in the rotunda of the Capitol…It is a monument to a beautiful life. (Charm of the Chapel, 182)

Willard said: ‘temperance is moderation in the things that are good and abstinence from things that are foul’; ‘I will not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum’;  ‘the struggle of the soul is toward expression’ She was born near Rochester (Churchville).  She gave 400 speeches a year in the company of her longtime companion, Anna Adams Gordon: ‘there is no village that has not its examples of ‘two hearts in counsel’ both of which are feminine’.  For Willard, temperance was primarily a movement at advancing the cause of suffrage (to my mind anyway), ‘ Yet eighty years after the experience and failure of prohibition (with thanks for Ken Burns’ recent portrayal) Francis Willard is still here, and we still have unfinished work, unfinished imaginative labor to do regarding alcohol.   I am not in favor of prohibition and not a t-totaller, although I grew up in a dry home.  But as a Dad, granddad, pastor, chaplain, Dean and minister, if the choice is between prohibition and sexual exploitation, I take prohibition in a New York minute.  Our work on college campuses regarding alcohol is unfinished.

I will linger with Willard a brief moment longer.  Notice her way of living.  She lived all her life with her life long partner.  One day, our denomination will honor the emerging Frances Willards in our midst, the 10% of those 8 and 9 year old kids who know that somehow they are just a little different from the majority, who know they have a God given and different orientation.  We will bring them to Marsh Chapel and introduce them to one of their forebears, Frances Willard, a feminist, suffragette, international leader, dean, temperance advocate, pioneer, and very probably a gay woman of the 19th century.   She didn’t see her main goal, voting rights for women, in her lifetime.  That happened twenty years after she died.  But it happened.  If you are limping home from a General Conference that was an unmitigated disaster, take a little heart from those who labored for causes that came to fruition only long after they had died.  Just so, unfinished grace challenges us at Easter.  Grace challenges us to remember that real change takes time, but it will come.  It is coming.  It is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave…

‘To be mature is build schools in which you will not study, to plant trees under which you will not sit, to grow churches in which you will not worship.’

John would agree:  John Dempster.  John Appleseed.  John Wesley.  1 John.  John would agree.

Beloved let us love one another, for love is from God and one who loves is born of God and knows God.  He who does not love does not know God for God is love.  In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.  In this is love, not that we loved God but that God loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins.  Beloved if God so loved us we also ought to love one another.  No one has ever seen God;  if we love one another God’s love abides in us and is perfected in us.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 05.6.2012 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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John 10: 11-18

Dean Hill

The description of the faithful life, the life of the community of faith, professed by John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, is our theme on this Good Shepherd Sunday, in which we hear again, for the last time this school year, the beauty of Bach, in a cantata of praise:  ‘watch over one another in love’.   On these Sundays we hope to hear the music speak, preach, announce the Gospel of grace.  On these and all Sundays we also hope to hear the words sing, harmonize and beautify.  Music that speaks and words that sing:  for these in the enchantment of worship we do hunger and thirst.

The Gospel of the beloved disciple, and the first letter in that same tradition, are themselves canticles of love.  A new commandment we are given:  love one another.  Love one another says the Risen Christ, even as I have loved you.  By this they will know who you are, if you love one another.  There is no diminution of authority, as the Shepherd lays down his life.  What he lays down, he has the power also to lift up.  Our image of the good Shepherd is good enough, but not strong enough.  His embrace embraces the globe, sheep of multiple folds, other sheep not of this fold.  Not all faithful people are Christian, Protestant, Methodist, Boston University Marsh Chapel people.  There are many ways of keeping faith.  Our feeling for the good Shepherd is good enough but not powerful enough.  He knows, he knows his own, even as he is known by God.  Our image of the good Shepherd is good enough but not full enough.  One flock, one shepherd:  take away from the noise of your differences.  When we love we are one, one flock, one Shepherd, one God who is above all and through all and in all.

First John came along to sharpen up what the Gospel left open.  The Gospel of Spirit became the Letter of commandment.  The Gospel of community, beloved community, became the Letter of authority, ecclesiastical authority.  The Gospel of inspiration became the Letter of instruction.  The Gospel of freedom became the Letter of love.  The Gospel of Incarnation became the Letter of responsibility.  There is no mistaking the announcement of grace, a call to obedience, in 1 John.  To love is to take responsibility.  To love is to be responsive, responsible, to take responsibility.  By this we know love…If any one has…and sees…and closes his heart…how does God’s love abide in him?...We should believe and love one another.  Would you love?  Then you will take responsibility. It is wonderful to have the Gospel.  It is good also to have the Letter.

Dr Jarrett, speaking of love and responsibility, I wish every student at our University, and every listener in earshot of our voices, could know the intimate, communal, choral, consanguinity of singing in this choir.  I wish all could have some measure, some version, of this choral community in grace, freedom, love and responsibility.  It is an experience of really being alive, an experience of love, an act of joyful responsive, responsibility that together we take.  We hunger for words that sing.  We thirst for music that speaks.  Help us to listen in love for illuminating moments in today’s music…

Dr. Jarrett

Though written to celebrate Pentocost Sunday, this morning’s cantata has everything to do with watching over one another in love and grace, in the model of the Spirit’s habitation of the soul. Cantata 172 ‘ Erschallet, ihr Lieder, erklinget, ihr Saiten’ was written in 1714 during Bach’s tenure in the town of Weimar.

The themes are grace – in particular Gnadenkuss, ‘the kiss of grace’ – the reviving of the soul – listen for the word ‘erquicken’ – and the broader theme of friendship. In the 14th chapter of John, Jesus prepares his disciples for his departure from earthly life. ‘Friends, if ye love me, keep my commandments, and I will give you another Comforter’. The other Comforter – our constant friend and companion in Grace – the Holy Spirit.

The cantata opens in celebration, complete with festival trumpets and timpani. They continue in the bass aria, heralding the presence of the triune God and the fulfillment of Jesus’ promise in John chapter 14. The nature of the spirit among us is explored in the fluid, breezy lines of the tenor aria which follows. The companionship of the Holy Spirit is revealed in the duet for Soprano and Alto. Here, the Soprano gives voice to the human Soul, and the Alto sings as the voice of the Sprit. Note the text sung by the Alto – I will refresh you, my Child – erquicken – Take the Kiss of Grace from me – GnadenKuss – and finally, and perhaps most beautifully, I am yours, and you are mine! Interwoven in this texture, listen for the solo oboe unfolding in intricate ornamentation the famous chorale. ‘Komm Heilige Geist, Herre Gott’. The chorale which follows is fast becoming a personal favorite for me. The intimacy and life-refreshing presence of the Spirit is detailed in this, the fourth stanza of Phillip Nicolai’s Wie schön leuchtet”

Take me with friendship in your arms, that I might become warmed by your grace!

The cantata concludes with a reprise of the opening movement in full celebration of the Spirit’s Kiss of Grace, and the possibility of life’s fulfillment with the Spirit in, around, through, and among us.

Dean Hill

We shall go forth together.  We shall live together the commandment of belief and love.  We shall trust the shelter of the Shepherd.  We shall bring salt to the meal of life.  We shall bring light to the dwellings of life.  We shall be sheep in another’s fold, little children who love not in word or speech but in deed and truth.  With God’s help, we shall so order our lives that we learn, better and better, day by day to watch over one another in love.  Of us, pointing to us, here and now, over time, we shall hope, others will see and say, they do watch over one another in love.

You, you Marsh Chapel, you are leading the way.  You are taking responsibility.  Others will follow.  You are leading the way in the affirmation of the full humanity of gay people.  Others will follow.  Not for you the earlier habits of treating some as 5/5ths and others as 3/5ths human.   Not just baptism, confirmation, eucharist, penance and unction for all, but marriage and ordination for all, too.  You are leading.  Others will follow. You are leading the way in heavenly worship.  Not for you a contemporary worship which is neither contemporary nor worship. Not for you the substitution of entertainment for enchantment.  Not for you the occupation of pulpits by unordained, untrained, uneducated, unconnected ministers.  Not for you the elaborated expenditures of denominations and church leaders who lose their grounding in the basic ministry of the church:  the Word of God, the Sacraments of Grace, the service of neighbor.  You are leading the way.  Others will follow.  Why, your example and its shadow will be felt as far into the future as a truly open church, as far down into the trembling depths of every phobia that every closed a heart, or a mind, or a door, as far out into the globe as every poor child.  Today I add: as far away, in every way, as a United Methodist General Conference in Tampa, Florida.  You are leading the way.  Others will follow.

May God give us a mind for words that sing.  May God give us a tongue for songs that speak.   So fed, may we watch over one another in love.

Come Almighty to deliver, let us all thy life receive

Suddenly return and never, nevermore thy temples leave

Thee we would  be always blessing, serve thee as thy hosts above

Pray and praise thee without ceasing , glory in thy perfect love

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

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 04.29.2012 at 11:00 am