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Mark 16: 1-8

Preface

The Lord is Risen!  He is Risen Indeed.

Let us ask ourselves how we shall live with these mysterious tidings.

St Mark famously concludes with either an open or a lost ending, either an intentionally ambiguous ending or a lost fragment from the end of a codex.  Either way, we face the Gospel challenge:  how shall we live with these wondrous tidings?  Either way, we pick up where Mark leaves off…

Scientists:  Do they kindle in us a sense of enchantment?  Historians:  Will they firm up in us the freedom to escape?  Philosophers: Could they require of us a respect for eternity?

Is there awaiting us a resurrection from the dead which brings real learning and virtue and piety?

Enchantment

Thirty years ago today, at 6am, our parsonage phone rang, an odd sound in the Easter dawn.  I was already somewhat awake.  The sermon I had hoped to finish the night before lay in jumbled bits on the dining room table.  I was counting on finishing the job early in the morning.  But the morning had thoughts of its own.  This is why we do not advise students to leave the sermon to the last minute.

Over the phone line I could hear a light sobbing.  In our North Country village, it was not common or considered good form to use a formal greeting, such as, ‘Hello, this is Marion’.  It was assumed that one would know from the sound of the voice who was calling.  If you did not, you were clearly ‘from away’, and would be sensed to be an outsider until such time as you did recognize, without formal introduction, the voice and so the personhood of the caller.  This expectation carries to this day, so that, when our dear friends from south of Montreal call and say ‘How are you?’ we are to know who it is who asks.   In the main, we do.

This Easter sunrise sobbing did have no familiar hold to it, so, in the first of several failures that day I had to ask who was calling.  From under the muffled sadness, a name arose.  I will use the name Marion.  Marion was calling because she and her husband, a nearby farmer and a dear friend, were at odds.  6am is not early, by the way, when milking starts at 4am.  The distance from the farm kitchen to the barn, a visible path by sight connecting sink to milking parlor, is not great, in this case thirty feet.  But when there is acrimony that 30 feet, given the daily closeness and interdependence of a bustling farm, might as well be the circumference of the earth.

With this young couple and family we had shared many utterly joyous meals, and some of the finest food ever consumed.  In the autumn, just before dessert, we and our two little children left the dinner table with the farmer and family to help a calf into the world.  Then back to the ice cream and mince pie.  Here we had found real friends, in a winter world at 40 degrees below Fahrenheit zero.  In this home our children had stayed while we spent time in the city, and here they would return many years later to learn to work in the barn in haying season.   I can taste the roast, smell the coffee, feel the warmth, hear the cattle lowing, and see the path from barn to kitchen, right now, as if it were last week.

But there was a breach, a break, something gone wrong, and badly enough to ask a friend for help.  When we went north, the District Superintendent said, ‘They may pound on you a little to see if you are for real”.  They did.  But once they did, and once they trusted, they trusted in full.  A place and a time when a relationship of trust could the bear the weight of an expression of need.

With the sermon lying in tatters, I went down the road two miles, and past the kitchen and into the barn.   The appearance of the minister on Easter morning, in the barn, is a recognition or sign that something is ajar.  John eyed me with that realization, and we had I think a good talk.  It seemed like a moment of reflection and honest hashing out of some not very uncommon marital difference, at least for the moment, worked out.   Into the sunlight I went, with a wave toward the kitchen window.  On the radio I could hear in the barn Louis Armstrong, his unique voice, and a simple tune, its unique melody, saying in full what I felt that Easter:  I think to myself, what a wonderful world.

Our assignment included two churches, the one with the farm family and others and our parsonage just mentioned, and the one ten miles away, ‘the out appointment’.  You know where you stand in the scheme of things when you are the ‘out appointment’.  I hustled back to pick up the sermon scraps, get dressed, and pile us into the car.  I had the great good fortune to have married a certified and excellent organist and choir director, who, two little one in tow, ran the music in both churches.  That was the good news.  The other news was that her dad, with a PhD on Paul Tillich from Iliff, was an excellent preacher, all his life.  She new from music, and she also knew from sermons.  Driving from the ‘out appointment’ back home, she said, ‘Was that an Easter sermon?’  The rest of the ride I remember as remarkably quiet.

Now the second Easter service in the bigger church was starting, and I needed somebody to come and talk to me about my marriage.  No one did.  I looked in vain across the congregation, hoping to see the young farm couple, but they were not there.  I began to collect my sorry self and sorrier sermon, as we sang ‘In the Garden’.  I offered the prayer and began the questionable homily.  Then they came in, and sat, as you have to when you come late on Easter, right down front.  Somewhere in the course of the non Easter, Easter sermon, I noticed something.  His hand just slid over a bit, and sat on top of hers, his left hand on her right, and a holding clasp.

All the hymns of Easter, all the lilies of resurrection Sunday, all the bonnets and suits and parading joys of the end of Lent in all the rest of these thirty years, all the anthems and all the celebrations cannot eclipse the enchantment of a healing, a reconciliation, a hand clasp, in small country church, a long time ago.  A wonderful world, a world of enchantment.  Over dinner, Jan said, well the second went a little better.

M Robinson wrote a bit ago, of her experience in church as a child,  Only in church did I hear experience like mine acknowledged, in all those strange narratives, read and expounded, for all that opaque as figures of angels painted on gold. (DOA, 228)

Escape

Up from the dead can also refer to escape from prison.  In fact, in the long history of Christian faith, inspired by the Word of faith, a sense of liberation, of freedom, of freeing, of escape has been paramount.   Easter morning brings an escape hatch, a map to freedom, a key for the jail cell.

It can happen to individuals, all of us sharing as we do some experience of entrapment. ‘In Adam’s Fall, we sinned all’.

Now with some advantage of reflection, and a few years on which to reflect, I can see by memory, by the mind’s eye, women and men and communities for whom Easter has meant escape.  I wonder if it will be so for you this Easter morning?

Here is a woman whose husband was working but drinking, drinking too much.  Spring came and she confronted him.  He looked for help in the church, and found escape from addiction.  You will find AA groups quite near here, Monday to Friday.

Here is middle aged fellow who had his heart set on a certain job, which he did not get, not even close.   Holy Week, with its recognition of change and failure and loss, connected to him.  He came to church on Easter and heard something.  He was liberated, freed from a false hope.  He set his sights on other jobs, and found one.

Here is woman who has done something for which she is ashamed, unhappy, guilt ridden.  Whether she should have felt any of that is another issue.  She did.  A stone moved away from a grave, and an empty tomb presided over by angels in white, these images said something to her, down deep.  She went home feeling better, and cut herself some slack.

Here is a young person who is pretty sure he has disappointed his parents.  College can instill a lengthened adolescence. In the lilies, trumpets, hymns and words of Easter something jars loose for him.  So what?  I will honor my parents, but with the long life that gives me, I will live my life, not my version of what I think they think my life should be.

But you have to lift the escape hatch.  My friend had an office mate who hated his lunch.  Every day when noon came he opened his bag and said, ‘Oh, this again. Awful.  What a terrible lunch.’  My friend sympathized and then asked one noonday:  ‘Who makes your lunch?’  And the reply:  ‘Oh, I make my own lunch’.

Christ unhelled Hell, and said Margaret Fuller:  ‘each should fulfill her own peculiar secret on her own’.  My chains fell off, my heart was free, I rose, went forth, and followed thee!

It can also happen to groups.

18 to 23 year olds, according to C. Smith of Notre Dame, lack any capacity for moral discernment, are steadily drunk or drugged, practice amoral sexuality, are severely materialistic and greedy, and with only 4% excepted are entirely apathetic about the hurts and lives of others.  To all these issues, argues he, with a shoulder shrug, emerging young adults respond, ‘Whatever’.  But you know, a problem identified is a problem soon solved.  There is an escape route away from the kind of narcissism, the kind of selfishness that easily entraps many of any age.  That route lies through a daily response, a daily set of responses.   Practice in ethical discussion:  intentional moderation, temperance in use of spirits, a spiritual use of spirits if you will: a recollection that the body is the temple of the Lord:  some experience in the joy of giving:  daily practice at listening, connecting with the needs of others.  Of course I think this is what happens, in the main, on every Sunday morning.  Easter opens the prison house door.  We can learn not always to ‘reply all’.

As M Robinson recently put it: Science cannot serve in the place of religion because it cannot generate an ethic or a morality (DOA, 71)…The banishment of the word ‘liberal’ was simultaneous with the collapse of liberalism itself. (DOA, 260).

We are getting a taste for preemption in our country, you might notice.  Yet nagging at our conscience, at our memory and judgment both, is a sense that attacking others who have not attacked you cannot be lastingly good, nor good judgment.  We can change.  You do not have to be a pacifist to insist that your country, your government not throw the first punch.  We can learn together to save our resources, bank our cash, and look for a more peaceful future.  Love is for the wise.

We can strive for a better life, world, and society.  Adrienne Rich looked for the creation of a society without domination.  We can too.  Marx said ‘History moves with iron necessity toward inevitable results.’  But you don’t believe that, nor do I.  There is at least as much historical evidence for freedom as there is for necessity.  We may need move away from sensation and closer to reflection, to sit quietly with Pascal in his solitary room, and think about the wagers we are making…  We can park our car and care for our planet.

Recently Elaine Pagels, known mostly for her scholarship with regard to Gnosticism and the New Testament, spoke about stopping for a moment in the vestibule of a church at worship, and realizing that “here is a family that knows how to face death” (Pagels, Beyond Belief, 3).   Honest lament and faithful thanksgiving are both parts of facing the uncertain present in light of God’s future.

Can we recall what we affirmed last week?

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

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

Eternity

In the Chapellear Drama center at Ohio Wesleyan University, on which stage our daughter and future son in law met and fell in love, there are several photographs of plays past.  One is from the opening of the center, in 1972, with Shakespeare, of course, The Tempest.  Others show our daughter and her husband, in the 1990’s, with the leads in Sweeney Todd, Once Upon A Mattress, Skylight, the Adding Machine, Antigone, Galileo Galilei.   There are also nameplates for alumni of the theater department, going back into the history of the school, nearly to its founding in 1842, making it the oldest incorporated Methodist school in the country.  I’m just sayin…

It turns out that many future physicians, scholars, lawyers, and others began as thespians.  I stood one evening under the nameplate of one such, Ralph Sockman.  Sockman preached for decades at Christ Church on Fifth Avenue in NYC.  I sometimes pull down one book or another of his sermons, and I sit back and I read and I smile.  They are lastingly good, eternally so one might say.  And, I feel a certain responsibility to support my fellow OWU alumnus, now that he is long dead and largely forgotten, outside of the small circle of devotees to a certain kind of Methodist preaching, at its zenith, nadir and apex.

I tried to hold my children’s attention, that evening, under the nameplate of Sockman, to some little avail.  He tried to give people a ‘lift for living’ this life, by reference to an eternal horizon:  help in time by way of reference to eternity.  They are long, carefully braided sermons, polished and refined.  He spoke though from memory, I am told, without notes, as the British say, ‘ingenious, pithy, and without book’.  He wore a morning coat, I am told, and looped his index finger under the vest button, beside his watch chain, and in that posture he preached.  With beauty.

This winter, one of the few cold late afternoons, I fetched one of his old now out of print volumes.  Whence the book?  I have no idea.  My office over the years has become a last resting place for clergy preaching gowns, old Bibles, various home communion travel kits, and, as in this case, the overflow and unneeded spillage of clergy books.  Someone left it off.   We have a saying in the itinerant ministry, a way of describing somebody who has done what he could in one setting and is waiting for another appointment:  he is packing his books.  Anyway, I read through some of the sermons, and then turned to the last in the collection.

Sockman was preaching about eternity.  It read like a valediction, like maybe the last sermon he gave in some setting, or the last in a year’s efforts, or, maybe, the last of his life.  It raises a good question.   What would you say if you knew this were your last—sermon, letter, conversation, book, paper, speech?  My fellow Battling Bishop, graduate that is of OWU, in four moments, gave his thoughts about heaven.  You may have heard BU’s magnificent rendering of Rachmaninoff’s favorite work, The Bells, also in four parts:  sleigh bells, wedding bells, alarm bells, tolling bells.  Sockman’s last will and testament rang with those sounds.  I give you his symphony, his four bells ringing out a lasting trust in eternity.

Sockman said he had an intuition, a sense of heaven, based on integrity, in four octaves.  He believed in the integrity of personality.  So do I.  He believed in the integrity of creation.  So do I.  He believed in the integrity of Jesus Christ.  So do I.  He believed in the integrity of his own intimations.  So do I.  You can hear him at his best in a single sentence: The larger the body of knowledge we survey, the longer the shoreline of mystery surrounding it. The larger the body of knowledge we survey, the longer the shoreline of mystery surrounding it.  Mystery increases with knowledge, and so, at least possibly, piety with learning, faith with understanding, spirit with mind, and love with education.  The more we know the more we do not know.

I ask you something, especially if you are drawn to faith but not yet convinced.  Can you appreciate the difference between absence and evidence?  Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  The thing about faith is that there is always a leap involved.

When I see a newborn child I feel eternity.  When a couple takes and gives their vows in marriage, I hear the bells of eternity.  When I think about how much I would give to see my Dad again, I think of eternity.  When I hear St. Paul place this life in the context of another life, I yearn for eternity.  When I observe tragedy that has no earthly recompense, and so to have any at all would depend on heaven, I long for eternity.  When I worship on Sunday at Marsh Chapel, I sense eternity.

As m Robinson recently put it: Our civilization believed for a long time in God and the soul and sin and salvation, assuming, whatever else, that meaning had a larger frame and context than this life in this world (DOA, 84).

“All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.” – Thornton Wilder, Our Town

As many of you know, Dad nearly died in September of 2008.  We had two extra years with him before he died in 2010.  In  November of 2008, as he recuperated, I saw him one morning learning to walk all over again, with my mother every present and loving alongside.  It was a miraculous sight, as was the rest of his healing.   He told us in those days about a vision or dream he had had, in the coma.  I share it with you to close, not as evidence of eternity, for heaven neither needs nor admits of evidence from us, but rather as evidence of a longing for eternity, and so a comfort and an encouragement.  He said that in the hours near death he saw a kind of light, shining through what he described as a lattice work.  “Behind and around me I could hear voices”, he said.

Coda

Do you remember what we said last week?

If we believe that life has meaning and purpose

If we believe that the Giver of Life loves us

If we believe that divine love lasts

If we believe that justice, mercy, and humility endure

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

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

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

If we believe grace and forgiveness are the heart of the universe

If we believe that God has loved us personally

If we believe in God

Then we shall all trust God over the valley of the shadow of death

Psalm 46 will carry us home:  God is our refuge and strength…

~The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill

Dean of Marsh Chapel

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 04.8.2012 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

John 13:31-35

Joan Humphrey grew up on a farm in Kansas.  She was born, the third of four children, to Donna and Jake Humphrey.  The Humphrey farm of 480 acres, near Woodlawn Kansas, raised cattle and crops.  Joan attended a one room school there until the eighth grade.  She was a cheerleader at Sabetha High School.  She also was an officer in her school’s chapter of ‘Future Homemakers of America’.  She graduated second in her class.  A class of 48.  Here is the caption under her yearbook picture:  “keen sense, common sense, no room for nonsense”. *

Joan then attended Wheaton College, because her pastor was a graduate.  Later on, she entered law school at Northwestern University.  Her classmates there teased her about her slow prairie speech.  They also envied her lack of stress over exams.  In law school she met a boy named Michael.  They worked summer jobs on behalf of the poor:  disability benefits, evictions, food stamps.

Joan and Michael were married in 1975.  He wore a white suit.  She wore daisies in her hair, and a white Moroccan caftan.

Joan and Michael then began to raise their own family of four daughters.  Every morning, he brewed coffee.  He pre-heated her cup with boiling water, filled it with coffee, and carried it to the bed where together they could talk about the day to come.

Joan’s life had two paradigms, professional woman and devoted mother.  She cooked dinner every night.  She established a daycare center in the courthouse where she worked.  She packed lunches for four daughters, making sure to use Tropicana orange juice to limit the girls’ sugar intake.  The newspaper quoted Joan as saying, “I wanted my family to be a family that shared their food and the mom could cook like my mom could cook.”*

Joan’s temperament and industry brought her, in the year 2000, to the federal bench.  She became a judge in the US District Court in Chicago.  It was the culmination of a fine career, a position that had eluded her on other occasions.  Then in 2002, one of her rulings angered white supremacists.  One of these was convicted of plotting to have her killed.  They did not succeed.   But on February 28, 2005, Joan’s husband Michael and her mother, both on crutches, were murdered.  They were both shot in the head and chest with .22 caliber bullets.*

Holy Week, every year, brings us to the precipice of a most disturbing question.  At some point, we grow up or wake up enough to ask the question that Joan’s daughter Meg asked her last week.  “Mom, why is the world so evil?” * Holy Week—with its fleeting laud and honor, its temple conflict, its night of betrayal, its day of trial, its hour of tragedy, and its subsequent, lasting silence—brings us right to this matter of evil. Why?  Why Mom?  Why is the world so shot through with evil—sin, death, the threat of meaninglessness?

After 250 of his students died in a plane crash near Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, Chancellor Melvin Eggers brought the question, via a newspaper interview, to his religious leadership at Syracuse University’s Hendricks Chapel.  I will never forget his interview, the pain of it, the grief in it, the troubled angst of it, which never left him over the few remaining years of his life.

After 2500 died on 9/11, that next Friday, hundreds of people filled this sanctuary, without invitation or liturgical preparation.  Here they were, truly hunting for the language and heart with which to assess the same question.  What in the world is wrong with this world?

After 250,000 were lost in December on the day after Christmas, 2004, out of a numbed and fogged stupor, there has gradually emerged a serious question, a question about bearing, perspective, and, ultimately, about faith.  What kind of world is this?  Who is the God who has breathed life into such a place?  “Mom, why is the world so evil?”

The same reckoning can arrive in a far more cotidian fashion.   One middle aged morning in the winter you may wake up to list the smaller showers of estrangement that meet us every day, long before we ever are drenched in the great thunderstorm of evil:

Premature resignation

Partial self-awareness

Indirect criticism

Cold honesty

Inflated responsibility

Excessive enjoyment

Needless worry

Wasted time

Careless haste

Misguided loyalty

Postponed grief

Avoided maturation

Partial planning

Unconscious entitlement

Pointless earning

Self-serving posture

Thankless reception

You meet them every day…

In our time, people of conscience are truly alive, suddenly and earnestly alive, to this question, which is, again, the whole content of Holy Week.  It is a question that, in the main, is a matter of grief, trouble, and loss.  Which is, of course, the whole content of the church’s experience and memory of Holy Week.  It is a matter of deep, abiding grief to face the gone-wrongness in life.  And, while we have tried, in our churches, to feed the hunger in this question, to slake the thirst in this question, to provide compelling responses to this question, to a great degree, across the land, we have failed.  And failure is the whole content of Holy Week.  It is a grief to this preacher that our pulpits, including this one, have thus far failed to meet the grief and loss and especially fear that pervade our time like a mist in London along Aldersgate Street, like an invisible unholy ghost,  just on the edge of our awareness.  Like a dawn that just will not come.

We have not been able robustly and preparedly and piercingly to remember, to call to mind our biblical, Christian, tragic sense of life, when most we have needed it.  To hear Job on the ash heap:  “What is my crime?”; and Second Isaiah: “A man of sorrow, acquainted with grief”; and Jeremiah’s lamentations;  “all the rivers run to the sea”;  and the tears of the David, “all flesh is grass”; to evoke Ecclesiastes, speaking of 9:11, “the race is not always to the swift….but time and chance happen to them all”;  and the affliction of Paul, “persecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed”; and best of all Jesus himself,  “if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me”.   You cannot read all of Barbara Brown Taylor on Job the night of 9/11.  It has to be read ahead.  You cannot do all of an STH course on Jeremiah the night after Tsunami.  It has to be read ahead.  You cannot absorb all that Lou Martyn says about Galatians, the afternoon of Lockerbie.  It has to be read earlier.  In wrestling we used to make weight, trying to lose 5 pounds in two hours by jogging in sweatsuits through the school showers.  Bodily life, Christian life, does not easily allow such last minute maneuvers.

This morning, we try again:

Jesus meets us today along this very road of tragedy in life: of evil, grief, loss, estrangement, and failure.  His church, this church, lives still as a community that knows in its bones how to face evil with honesty, grief with grace, failure with faith, and death with dignity.  H R Niebuhr warned his generation to suspect the false sense that somehow a “God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross”.   Oddly, it is the starkness of the cross, the coarseness of Jesus’ death, the tremendous sense of loss and failure and grief of Holy Week (so boldly evoked in our youth production last weekend) that is your best gift to a frightened world.  His cross truly names the tragedy of evil.  His cross permanently enfolds that tragedy in the larger goodness of life and the lasting goodness of God.  His cross, especially, of course, in John, radiates a thin measure of hope, that there is life beyond brokenness.  In our passage today this is carried on the word “glory” and the dismissive treatment of resurrection—of Lazarus, the only reason for the quisling gathering of the counterfeit parade.

Remember your baptism and confirmation.

The world is good, the good handiwork of a divine goodness that passes all understanding and endures forever.

Yet, the world is just not right, but somehow off track, wrongheaded, with something ‘loose’ rattling around in side it—the shadow of sin, the specter of evil, the sorrow of death.

We have to face both and to pray for deliverance from the latter to the former.  So we teach our children to say both of these phrases:  Hallowed be thy name…and…Deliver us from evil.

Robert McAfee Brown said so memorably (how I miss his voice):  “Friends, this is God’s world, but it is a crummy world, and we have to live with both realities”.

To Meg’s question “Why?”  I have no completely finished, final answer for you.  But the good news is that you have an answer for me. And if you think I do not see it you are mistaken.  And if you think I do not appreciate or admire it you are mistaken.  And if you think I do not respect it you are mistaken.  You live your answer by choosing the cruciform path of faith.  You meet evil with honesty, grief with grace, failure with faith, and death with dignity.  You carry yourselves in belief.  You remember that it is not the passion of Christ that defines the Person of Christ, but the Person that defines the passion.  You remember that it is not the suffering that bears the meaning, but the meaning that bears the suffering…that it is not the cross that carries the love but the love that carries the cross…that it is not crucifixion that encompasses salvation, but salvation that encompasses even the tragedy of crucifixion… and that it is not the long sentence of Holy week, with all its phrases, dependent clauses and semi-colons that completes the gospel, but it is the punctuation to come in seven days, the last mark of the week to come in 168 hours, whether it be the exclamation point of Peter, the full stop period of Paul or the question mark of Mary—Easter defines Holy Week, and not the other way around.  The resurrection follows but not replace the cross, for sure.  But the cross precedes but does not overshadow the resurrection.  It is Life that has the last word and there is a God to whom we may pray, in the assurance of being heard:  Deliver us from evil…

Maybe that is why Joan Humphrey—you may know her by her married name, Joan Humphrey Lefkow—she like Dorothy Gale of the Kansas farm, she like Billy Graham of Wheaton College, she like Ernest Fremont Tittle of Northwestern University, she like your own mother in kitchen and coffee and packed lunch, answered her daughter’s question (sursum corda!) in faithful witness (hear the Gospel!) to tragedy and goodness and hope.

I confess that I read her statement, weeping, in the middle of an utterly boring Board meeting, and was for several moments unsure of where I was, or whether these few sentences were read from the printed page as human comments, or were resounding in the mind and heart as divine utterance.  Which is this voice?  Human or Divine?  You be the judge.

Joan says to her daughter, and God says to us:

I  am so sad…It is a human tragedy…Honey, most people are good, most people would not think of doing this…Remember the sermon years ago at the Episcopal Church in Evanston, where you girls sang in the choir and I made sandwiches for the homeless once a month…The priest said, ‘Some things are just broken…they’re broken…just broken…They’re broken and you go on from there…Don’t think you can repair them but get up and go on from there’…But whoever did this, I want to look them in the eye and say…How could you?...How could you do that to me and my family?”*

*New York Times, 3/10/05, pps. A1, 20

~The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill

Dean of Marsh Chapel

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 04.4.2012 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to hear the full service.
Mark 14:1 - 15:47

A Meditation on the Palms

Seeing With the Heart: Meditations from Marsh Chapel, 2010

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

People:   And we do

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

People:   And we do

The Dean: If we believe that divine love lasts

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

People:   And we do

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

People:   And we do

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

People:   And we do

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

People:   And we do

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

People:   And we do

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

People:   And we do

The Dean: If we believe in God

People:   And we do

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

People:   And we shall

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

People:   And we shall

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

People:   And we shall

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

People:   And we shall

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

People:   And we shall

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

People:   And we shall

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

People:   And we shall

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

People:   And we shall

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

People:   And we shall

The Dean: Then we shall trust in God

People:   And we shall.

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

Deliver Us From Evil, 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~The Revered Dr. Robert Allan Hill

Dean of Marsh Chapel

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 04.1.2012 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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John 12: 20-33

Preface

Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.

Today, John gives us the marrow of GMHopkins’ hope:

Thou mastering me

God giver of breath and bread;

World’s strand, sway of the sea;

Lord of living and dead;

Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh,

And after it almost unmade, what with dread,

Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?

Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.

(GMH)

We turn to the poetry of experience and Scripture and tradition and reason to help us.  For five Sundays, concluding today, we have journeyed together, from activity to awareness, from motion to mindfulness, from sensation to reflection.  In particular we are trying faithfully to gain some ground, some purchase, in the interplay of technology and faith, of culture and Christ.

Over six years, in Lent, from this pulpit and nave, together we have tried to engage the best thought of those whose own expression of faith may differ from ours:  those who affirm a Scripture Alone (sola Scriptura) understanding of authority, though we do not here; those who lean more toward Paul and less toward the Gospels, though we do not here; those who privilege the death tradition of Jesus over the life tradition, the cross over the cradle (fit considerations for Lent in any case), though we do not here.  In 2007, then, we grappled with John Calvin in Lent; in 2008 with St. Paul; in 2009 with Derision and Decision; in 2010 with Atonement; in 2011 with Dietrich Bonhoeffer; and this year with Jacques Ellul, who coined the phrase, think globally act locally.

1. Experience

First, we look again to our own experience, trusting our experience.

This week a radio listener sent me a cartoon.  God is sitting on a cloud, holding a computer and talking to an angel.  God says, ‘I just answered a prayer and mistakenly hit ‘reply all’.

Park your car.  Save your money.  Do not ‘reply all’.  So you will have good influence on the environment, the economy and the culture.

In our own experience, we are testing the spirit of truth, trying to move from fingertips to mindfulness, from sensation to reflection in the heart of the digital age.

Midway from sensation to reflection, we test ourselves by practice this coming week:

1. On Monday, aver: wherever you are, be there.
2. On Tuesday: before you check your face book, face your checkbook.
3. On Wednesday, decide: orders need borders:  respond to voice in one day, email etc in three days, writing in one week.
4. On Thursday, choose: make a Lenten exception: answer your non emergency email all on Wednesday each week.
5. On Friday, raise the bar: respond to facebook and twitter with text, to text with email, to email with voice, to voice with letter, to letter with visit.
6. On Saturday, remember:  electronic communication  is international, irretrievable, immutable, eternal, so whatever you write make sure are happy to have it appear on the front page of the Boston Globe or chiseled on your tombstone.
7. Come Sunday, of course:  attend or listen to Marsh Chapel.

We have come into a time when, across wide stretches of common life, it is thought that sending an electronic communication alone constitutes doing something lasting or fruitful.   Yet no one is born or dies on screen, literally or spiritually.  No one connects with someone, in a heart sense, on screen.  No one sees through the window of the soul on screen, nor feels a touch of physical love on screen, nor senses the breath and closeness of being human on screen.  Most significantly, no one speaks by email.  There is no speech nor are there words, their voice is not heard. Language, your mother tongue, takes years to acquire, even at an elementary level.  The use of language, your mother tongue, in the company of others, takes even longer to learn.  You cannot learn in front of a screen how to hear.  Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God, as the Scripture affirms.  How do you watch the mind and tongue play forward and backward with a thought aborning when there is no tongue to hear, no head to see, as the shifting and sifting occur?  How do you learn the habits of deep listening, when all you do is scan?  How do you experience the delight of unexpected humor, the force of interruption, the concentration of heart to heart with an unforeseen agreement?  Honor your father and mother (tongue) that thy days may be long upon the earth.

2.  Scripture

Second with reverence we listen to the Holy Scriptures.

Our gospel is from John 12. In John, Jesus demarcates the limits of individualism during a wedding in Cana.  Jesus pillories pride by night with Nicodemus.  Jesus unwraps the touching self-presentations of hypocrisy in conversation at the well.  Jesus heals a broken spirit.  Jesus feeds the throng with two fish and five barley loaves.  Jesus gives sight and insight, bifocal and stereoptic, to a man born blind.  Jesus comes upon dead Lazarus and bring resurrection and life.  He brings the introvert out of the closet of loneliness.  He brings the literalist out of the closet of materialism.  He brings the passionate out of the closet of guilt.  He brings the dim-witted out of the closet of myopia.  He brings the church out of the closet of hunger.  He brings the dead to life.

Here the Gospel affirms Jesus’ coming crucifixion as his glorification, one of the most important and repeated emphases in the fourth gospel.  The seed falls, dies, is buried, and wondrously comes forth with fruit.  In our community, here at Boston University, not a day goes by that I do not rub shoulders with this Gospel.  Those who teach the younger do so in a generative mode.  They are willing to let a seed fall, be planted and die—a lecture given but perhaps not appreciated; a suggestion made but not heeded; a great hope proferred but not embraced.  To teach is to die, hour by hour, in the hope that a long time from now—decades from now—the seed will bear fruit.  That takes faith.  That takes a cruciform self understanding.  So you who learn and teach may hear John today.

But why are we hearing John today?  Because we used the lectionary, a shared schedule of readings, used by most Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant churches.

For five reasons we continue to use the lectionary here.

First, both the ecumenical consensus and the United Methodist history of Marsh Chapel encourage us to do so.  Particularly this choice and golden gift to present and future church unity is a treasure to be protected.

Second, the readings provide a basis for coherent development of an hour long service—20 minutes of sermon, 20 minutes of music, 20 minutes of liturgy—on a common basis.

Third, Marsh Chapel provided some of the influence and early work on the lectionary itself, which history and labor we want to honor.

Fourth, we preach to some 50,000 radio listeners per week, many of whom have already attended their own church—or are about to do—wherein the same lessons are read;  this gives us a vital connection to our virtual congregation.

Fifth, it keeps thematic preachers like this one speaking to you today, from only riding his or her favorite themes and texts, say Grace and Love, and avoiding less attractive themes, say Hell and High Water. We intend to continue to utilize the common lectionary here.

There are nonetheless serious problems with lectionary use.  Let us name five of these, too.

First, and speaking as non-lectionary preacher, the small bits of scripture make difficult larger preaching lenses—a sermon on the book of Jonah, for example, or a great theological topic like Redemption, or, as we are doing again this lent, a series of sermons on a major theme—our Faith and Technology theme say—which encompass more than four fragments of scripture.

Second, the lectionary greatly aids those who already know their Bible, but confuses those who do not.  If you know that Genesis is the first book in the Bible, is part of the Pentateuch or Books of Moses, is the origin of thought on creation and covenant, and precedes all the other 65 Biblical books, you have a way of hearing a snippet from Genesis 17 in a way that makes sense.  But if you have no idea about Genesis, the passage is opaque.  First you have to have arithmetic—the six portions of Scripture (OT:  Law, Prophets, Writings; NT: Gospels, Letters, Apocalypses), the names of the books, the flow of the whole Bible from Genesis to Revelation—before you can do algebra (compare Numbers to John, Psalm 107 to Psalm 100, and so on).  The lectionary cannot teach you the Bible.  For that you need to study one book at a time (so, our study of Mark with Rev. Yoon following worship here), or study the whole Bible in a year (so, the still excellent UMC DISCIPLE Bible Study) or read the Bible, a passage a day, from cover to cover.  You need to add and subtract before you take on quadratic equations.

Third, there is more than one lectionary.  Yes, the churches’ selection of readings and seasons is one, and we could say primary.  But there are others.  Every local congregation has its annual ‘lectionary’—from annual meeting to stewardship Sunday to children’s day.  For us here this includes monthly luncheon, fellowship in September, on Parents’ Weekend, at Christmas, in Hymn Sing (this Sunday!), at Easter Breakfast, and on Patriots Day (in addition to various subgroup gatherings for Adult Classes, for Men, for Women, for Students, for Families with Children, and people shall we say ‘at mid life’) and Bach Sunday.  Also, every congregation has a denominational lectionary, provided by the prevailing judicatory (so for Methodists that includes annual conference, student Sunday, one great hour of sharing, and Aldersgate Sunday).  At Marsh Chapel, our judicatory is Boston University, so we observe Matriculation, Parents’ and Alumni Weekends, Lessons and Carols, Martin Luther King Sunday, This I Believe, Baccalaureate, and Commencement.  Yet there is still another lectionary—not Liturgical Calendar nor Local Calendar nor Denominational Calendar, but national calendar.  Like it or not, the fourth of July has symbolic and liturgical meaning, as to some degree do Thanksgiving, Mother’s Day, and Ground Hog Day.  Think of last year: ‘9/11’ needed attention. Consequently, the Scriptural lectionary is in creative tension with these other three.

Fourth, it is usually difficult fully to interpret three or four lessons in one 22 minute sermon. So, some are either lightly or under interpreted.  This can leave people puzzled, leaving church tangled up with a dark psalm, or an apocalyptic prediction, or a gender unfriendly proverb, or the pronunciation of Methusela.  If you do not teach people, for instance, that the Gospel of John includes an ancient form of anti-semitism abhorrent to real Christianity, (so well recounted in last evening’s program for the brilliant St John Passion) they can leave church, or the hearing of the sermon, mistaken about the gospel.  One great failure of our pulpits in our time is the failure of our preachers regularly and creatively to root our sermons in the known history, the understood sociology, and the particular theology of each passage.  But to do so takes sermonic time (and much more time in sermonic development).

Fifth, and last, as my old Navy chaplain assistant minister used to say: How can somebody in Nashville know what passage my congregation most needs to hear this week?  The lectionary makes lazy preachers, who do not regularly sift and scour the whole Scripture. One size does not necessarily fit all.

3. Tradition

Third, we turn to our tradition.  Our Lenten interlocutor this year, similar in choice to those over the five previous years, has been Jacques Ellul, whose writing on technology and theology foreshadowed a generation ago some of our own current experience.  By ‘thinking globally’ in this over used phrase which has become his grave marker, Ellul meant that we should think sub specie aeternitatis, think eternally if you will.  Hence the importance for him of Scripture and of his favorite interpreter, Karl Barth.  By ‘acting locally’ Ellul meant for us to live as salt, light and sheep, as those who practice Christianity;  it captures our sense of hope. Faith offers:  1. Transcendence 2. Promise 3. New Creation (present now).  Here is the last and briefest of the Lenten litanies offered to evoke Ellul’s thought.  Hear it as you would a psalm or an aria, listen with the ear as well as the mind:

In our time intelligence is set free from dogmas but has become a slave to means.

‘In my own life, I confronted the demands of Marx and the demands of the Bible and put them together.’ Marx spoke to the economic situation.  Yes.  But he did not have all the answers to the greater matters—life, death, love.

I set up a Parallel (camping) university, and focused my volunteer work on  1. Delinquent youth  2. Environment.

A person needs to become someone who can use the technologies and at the same time not be used by, assimilated by, or subordinated to them…prepare to live in technology and at the same time against technology…develop a critical awareness of the modern  world’ 83

‘The Christian is one who brings as much free play as possible into the parts of society …that are linked to one another’ 110

Two strong teachers from my own past embody this same dialetic:  Lloyd Easton at Ohio Wesleyan, a BU PhD and fifth generation personalist philosopher, and expert on the writings of the young Marx on society and culture (so his book of that title); and Christopher Morse of Union Theological Seminary, a great student of both Calvin and Barth, who taught them in a place and time when they were all but forgotten in the hey day of Cone, Guttierez, Harrison, Koyama, and liberation theology in general

4. Reason

Fourth, we set our reflective reason to work.

On a personal level, something triggered for me one night last week, in the grace of table fellowship.  That is, the emergence in a welcoming home, over a nice meal, in a meaningful setting, of a combination of fellowship, education, and service, in a natural, organic way (not to say without preparation, planning and work) is an apocalypse of what the grace to which the church bears witness is all about, I think.  There was something real and really afoot, and for that I was really thankful.  In every dimension this radiant table fellowship militated against impersonal communication.  It is the communion, the companionship for which we hunger.

Let us be mindful.  Let us reason together.

Hit and run electronic communication produces a mindset that tends to emphasize the short run.  (Mayor Bloomberg in NYC said as much this week). Aerial bombardment forms of electronic communication tend to draw the mind to the very present.  Click and stick rejoinders, used repeatedly through the day, from screen to screen, voiceless and voluminous, can produce a mind, or absence of mind, that then can influence ranges of behavior beyond the technical.  That is, our forms of electronic interaction can have a coarsening effect on our culture.  Such communication, as silent as deadly, can enfeeble our relations, make us unprepared and ill practiced in the art and so in the voice of acquaintance, friendship, and love.

We are so sensationally habituated to distanced, cold, hard, electronic, visual, voiceless intercourse, that our human and even most intimately human intercourse—ourselves ostensibly at our warmest and best—becomes itself distanced, cold, hard, electronic, visual, and voiceless.  Where is the voice of the Song of Solomon in our residences and dwellings?  Or the voices of Juliet and Romeo? You may not want to hear this or trust it unless I send it by email.  But it is still the case.  Our technology is swamping and drowning our theology.  And it is the youngest, most nubile, those moving from nubility to nobility, and so most innocently vulnerable among us who are most harmed.

We at Marsh Chapel have both an avuncular and a pastoral role to play in teaching and helping, by how we live and by what we say and by how we say, and what we live for.

As we at Marsh Chapel attempt to model dimensions of health and safety, across our community and campus, and particularly in a time fraught with difficulty in the areas of sexuality and violence, let us persevere in three discreet directions.  Ellul would identify them as salt, light and sheep.  First, let us keep the feast, and be present on Sunday to witness to faith, and to be nourished together by the salt that brings savor.  Your bodily presence in worship helps others.  Second, let us walk in the light, come to the light, and walk in the light, by listening for God’s word, for good, and naming and claiming the good.  Third, let us make of this sacred space a safe place, sacred space—safe place, as those who have a Shepherd who knows and loves his sheep.

Coda

Experience, Scripture, Tradition, Reason. You have taken a road less traveled, a path from sensation to reflection.  May the mindfulness of Lent prepare you for the mystery of Easter.  We turn to the poets to help us.  John Henry Newman:

"Let us preach You without preaching;

not by words but by our example;

by the catching force, the sympathetic influence of what we do,

the evident fullness of the love our hearts bear to You." (J H Newman)

Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.

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

posted in Lenten Series 2012: Technology, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.25.2012 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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John 3: 14-21

Preface

My grandmother’s way of expressing faith took an interrogatory form. She asked of herself, and others: Are you walking in the light?

My favorite phrase is ‘I don’t know’.  It is small but it flies on mighty wings.  It expands our lives to include spaces within us, as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny earth hangs suspended...(Wislowa Simborka)

We are on a Lenten journey together, from sensation to reflection.   We want to be and become mindful, mindful of who we are, who are meant to become, what we are doing.  We want to match our eager activity with an equally vibrant awareness.  We hear the words of Scripture, so let us also come to the light and inwardly digest them.  We respect the tradition behind us, including our Lenten conversation partner Jacques Ellul, so let us learn there the things in whose light we see light.  We reason together, here and now, so let us reflect on the here and now, on ourselves in community, as we walk in the light.  We have experience, sometimes surprising experience, of moments of light, and we shall name one here today.

Scripture

The third chapter of the Gospel of John places the Incarnation of the Light of the World, Jesus Christ, at the heart of the Gospel.  God loves the world—not just the church, not just the disciples, not just the religious, not just religion.  God loves the world.  The Bible tells us so.

The two basic historical problems of the New Testament are ancient cousins, first cousins to our two spiritual issues, the two existential battles in your salvation today.

The first historical problem behind our 27 books, and pre eminently embedded in John, is the movement away from Judaism.  How did a religious movement, founded by a Jew, born in Judea, embraced by 12 and 500 within Judaism, expanded by a Jewish Christian missionary become, within 100 years, entirely Greek?  The books of the New Testament record in excruciating detail the development of this second identity, this coming of age, that came with the separation from mother religion.

The second historical problem underneath the Newer Testament is disappointment, the despair that gradually accompanied the delay, finally the cancellation, of Christ’s return, the delay of the parousia.  Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet.  Paul expected to be alive to see the advent of Christ.  Gradually, though, the church confessed disappointment in its greatest immediate hope, the sudden cataclysm of the end.  John led the way.  John is the most courageous Gospel.

Let us move slightly, right now, from sensation to reflection.  How does it happen that we hear from John today?

We hear from John today because of the lectionary.  The lectionary is a shared selection of Biblical readings, used by most Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant and mainstream churches.  For each Sunday one Old Testament lesson, one Psalm, one New Testament Epistle, and one Gospel reading are chosen, and used, as regularly we do here at Marsh Chapel. Next week we shall reflect further on the lectionary.

We pause here on the trail from sensation to reflection in order to reflect on our own sensible experience—including in worship, here and now, in the hearing of the Scripture.

Tradition

From Scripture we move to tradition. This Lent we are in conversation, at the intersection of Christ and culture, and particularly of faith and technology. One voice from a generation or more ago may help us:  that of Jacques Ellul.

Jacques Ellul was born in 1912 in Bordeaux and spent most of his life there. He was a professor of law and history at the University of Bordeaux, and lay theologian in the French Reformed Church.  During WWII he was active member of the French Resistance and later became mayor of his home town. He authored three dozen books on law, culture, technology, theology, faith, prayer, the Bible and history.  Like Bonhoeffer and Barth, he opposed the Nazis.  Like Bonhoeffer and Barth, he held firmly to a high and rugged Christology.  Like Bonhoeffer and Barth, he decried the willingness of more liberal theologians in Germany and elsewhere to knuckle under first to the Kaiser and then to the Fuhrer.  Like Bonhoeffer and Barth, he saw in his own experience the dire need for a Christ against Culture, as well as a Christ transforming Culture.

Ellul, though far less well known than Barth and Bonhoeffer, nonetheless well suits our annual Lenten attention to theological voices and perspectives more conservative than our own here.  Ellul identified Karl Marx and Karl Barth as two lifelong conversation partners, and the importance inherited from both of a dialectical or spiraling hermeneutical manner of thinking and speakings.

That is, you can learn a great deal from those with whom you disagree—sometimes more from them than from your fellow travelers.  When it comes to opponents, as Yogi Berra said, ‘you can observe a lot just by watching’.

Ellul predicted the cultural impact of emerging technology.  He bears some re-reading in our time.  Most of what he predicted early on (1964 in English Translation) in his The Technological Society, has become the shared air we breathe.  Listen as we did last week to a second Ellul litany of sorts, in more autobiographical tones, a compilation and exemplification of this thought, placed here in the form of a psalm or an aria, and to be heard in the manner in which we hear those
The man of the present day does not believe in his own experiences, judgment or thought.

Our age is distinguished by a Lack of awareness, and by Enslavement of the intelligence to technical methods.

We need to Rediscover the meaning of the neighbor, of the ‘Event’ and of the Holy: The intervention of God in human history in Jesus Christ.

In youth I was  poor, and our home had no music, but…

‘I learned what unemployment is with no assistance, with no hope whatsoever, with no help from anywhere.  I learned what it is to be sick with no government medical care and no money to pay the doctor or the druggist.  I remember my father spending his days looking for work.  Given his abilities, I felt that was an absolutely stupefying, incredible injustice that a man like him was unemployed.’ 5.

Dialectics includes contraries, does not exclude them.  A new historical situation emerges, integrating the two preceding factors with one another…both have vanished giving birth to a radically new situation.

The goal is to live the human freedom within the freedom of God. Logically the two cannot be reconciled, but dialectically, one can live with them.

Our own growth here at Marsh Chapel has affinities with these lines from Ellul.
Our emerging ecclesiology at Marsh Chapel blends a Tillichian rapport with culture with a strong view of the Word, the Sacraments and means of Grace, and the Sabbath.  We protect Sunday and its emblematic, exemplary, epitomizing gifts, but within a fuller six days of grace—service, education, and fellowship—embedded in the culture at large, and particularly the University culture.

Our emerging pneumatology at Marsh Chapel blends a regard for the movement of Spirit in art, music, science, theater, poetry, and all the lasting gifts of civilization, with a strong and protective sense of the church:  the church challenging the failures of culture, applauding the heights of culture, entering the heart of culture, enjoying the graces of culture.

Our emerging pastoral theology at Marsh Chapel blends a high regard for the myriad gifts and services available, near and far, for those in need, with a limited but irreducible affirmation of the sacramental rites and sacerdotal duties shared in the community and lead by the clergy.

Our emerging ethics of technology at Marsh Chapel blends a full use of all the means of production available to us (we are nearly completely paperless, with the exception of the printed Sunday bulletin and the printed semester termbook, both of which could be replaced in the future, though we are not currently planning to do so), with a profound recognition, more reflection than sensation, more awareness than activity, more mind than fingers, of the need to harness these tools to the benefit, not the belittlement, of the human being.

Reason

Let us apply our Lenten theme to ourselves here in the intersection of actual and virtual congregations that is Marsh Chapel.  While we do not stop usually to x-ray the body of our divinity here, we are nudged to do so today.  Marsh Chapel is both like and unlike other churches within the Great Church of Jesus Christ around the globe.  In the same way that you and I are both unlike and like each other (unlike say in gender, race, ethnicity, age, shoe size and bank balance; like say in mortality, fragility, longing, need, sin, salvation, service), so Marsh is both like and unlike other communities of faith.

We are most similar on Sunday.  John Wesley identified the true church as the place where the Word of God is rightly preached, the Sacraments are duly administered, and service is rendered to the neighbor.  Our life here strives to reach his definition.  So a 60 minute of worship.  So means of grace in Adult Study before worship, in Bible Study and fellowship after worship.  We hope that the thanksgiving, confession, affirmation and dedication of our worship service exemplify, define, epitomize, perfect and guide our living for the next six and one half days.  In addition, these gifts are extended around the globe and across New England by internet and radio.  While this series of sermons seeks to challenge us to be mindful about the intersection of faith and technology, there is hardly a place or community more actively, regularly committed to their mutual enhancement than Marsh Chapel.  Hence, we who are so invested in the newer forms of technology—radio yes, but also podcast, Facebook, texting, twitter, and all—have the most responsibility to see such use become as faithful to Christ as possible.

We are most dissimilar during the week.  Let me be specific.  We fear the danger of sitting on a whale fishing for minnows.  The whale is Boston University, and we are riding its torso.

Take teaching, didache, a crucial matter in most congregations.  Yes, I could as I have done elsewhere offer three Monday nights of instruction on a theme, say Judaism in the modern world, following a light dinner.  Or, I could offer a light dinner three Monday nights in November, and then take you to hear Elie Wiesel on Judaism in the modern world, some 100 yards away, and for free.  The first is fishing for minnows, the second is riding the whale.

Or take service, diakonia, a crucial matter in the life of faith.  I could organize a schedule of service days for our students and encourage attendance.  Or, as we have just finished doing, we could send our students for seven days of community service through the Office of Community Service, which by the way grew out of the Chapel, during the tenure of Dean Thornburg 25 years ago.  Our own—minnow; the Universities—whale.

Or, take fellowship, koinonia, a crucial matter in church life.  We could sequester ourselves—Monday night men, Tuesday women, Wednesday children, Thursday couples—or we can grab the whale by the ears and sail, taking men to a basketball game, women to the Sloan House, children to a Palm Sunday event.   We can immerse ourselves in the life of the full community, so that the boundaries between church and society, faith and culture, Christ and community are ever more blurred and fluid.  The other night ten of us were at a University dinner.  All had some connection, from active to peripheral, with Marsh Chapel.  Afterword one creative soul lead us to some further, not fully Methodist, refreshment.  There were people in that circle who never in a month of Sundays would have engaged fellowship with a church group on a Saturday night.  But in that organic and genuine invitation, even the least ‘churched’ fellow had true koinonia, true shared fellowship, with some of the most faithful people in Boston.  Didache, diakonia, koinonia—these crucial inherited forms you are renewing, week by week.  The Marsh Chapel experiment in church renewal is happening on your watch.  It is quite distinctive.  If you are not watching you may miss it.

Will this relatively or somewhat unique model of church growth work?  We are seeing strong evidence that it can and will—in worship attendance, in annual giving and tithing, in deepening relationship, in experiences of vocation, in  recognition of the chapel’s voice.  There are dangers and challenges.  This model inevitably takes a long time—it is covert, it is shaped by a University calendar, it is very free.   You do not have to come to an Administrative Council meeting for three hours on Tuesday, by the end of which, in exhaustion, you will vote for anything just to get home.   You do not have to raise funds by a rummage sale, or argue about the pastor’s health insurance, or vote on a budget.  But you do have to ride the whale.  And that means seizing the moment to learn, to serve and to love.  After the postlude today, take a minute in or near your pew to greet someone and speak a word.  You may learn something.  You may serve some cause.  You may help someone.  For someone else that three minute conversation may be their most personal and healing of the week.

This Monday night, in a dinner that included learning, service and fellowhip, I saw, I mean I saw what the model of renewal at work in Marsh Chapel today can be.  But it will take a heap of time.

Experience (Frank Deford, NPR)

The light of Scripture, of Tradition, of Reason illumines also our own experience.  We know it when we see it.  When reflection outpaces sensation, when thoughtful mindfulness embraces action, we know in experience about coming to the light, whether in church or in culture.  College athletics are a crucial part of higher education.  One can learn, grow, improve on the court as well as in the class.

An apocalypse of grace can arise outside of church, right in the heart of the culture.  Athletics, college athletics, instituted as important part of college experience on the basis of the Roman proverb, ‘mens sana in corpore sano’, can provide the setting.  Maybe you heard Frank Deford’s story last week:

When last we left the NCAA, it was February madness, colleges were jumping conferences, suing each other, coaches were claiming rivals had cheated in recruiting — the usual nobility of college sports.

And then, in the midst of all this, the men's basketball team at Washington College of Chestertown, Md., journeyed to Pennsylvania to play Gettysburg College in a Division III Centennial Conference game.

It was senior night, and the loudest cheers went to Cory Weissman, No. 3, 5 feet 11 inches, a team captain — especially when he walked out onto the court as one of Gettysburg's starting five.

Yes, he was a captain, but it was, you see, the first start of his college career. Cory had played a few minutes on the varsity as a freshman, never even scoring. But then, after that season, although he was only 18 years old, he suffered a major stroke. He was unable to walk for two weeks. His whole left side was paralyzed. He lost his memory, had seizures.

But by strenuously devoting himself to his rehabilitation, Cory slowly began to improve. He was able to return to college, and by this year, he could walk without a limp and even participated in the pregame layup drills.

So for senior night, against Washington, his coach, George Petrie, made the decision to start Cory. Yes, he would play only a token few seconds, but it meant a great deal to Cory and to Gettysburg. All the more touching, the Washington players stood and cheered him.

That was supposed to be the end of it, but with Gettysburg ahead by a large margin and less than a minute left in the game, Coach Petrie sent Cory back in.

Nobody could understand, though, what happened next, why the Washington coach, Rob Nugent, bothered to call time out. The fans didn't know what he told his players there in the huddle: that as quickly as they could, foul No. 3. And one of them did. And with 17 seconds left, Cory Weissman strode to the free-throw line. He had two shots.

Suddenly, the crowd understood what Coach Nugent had sought to do. There was not a sound in the gym. Cory took the ball and shot. It drifted to the left, missing disastrously. The crowd stirred. The referee gave Cory the ball back. He eyed the rim. He dipped and shot. The ball left his hand and flew true. Swish. All net.

The crowd cried as much as it cheered.

The assistant vice president for athletics at Gettysburg, David Wright, wrote to Washington College: "Your coach, Rob Nugent, along with his ... staff and student-athletes, displayed a measure of compassion that I have never witnessed in over 30 years of involvement in intercollegiate athletics."

Cory Weissman had made a point.

Washington College had made an even larger one.

Coda

My favorite phrase is ‘I don’t know’.  It is small but it flies on mighty wings.  It expands our lives to include spaces within us, as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny earth hangs suspended...(Wislowa Simborka)

We are on a Lenten journey together, from sensation to reflection.   We want to be and become mindful, mindful of who we are, who are meant to become, what we are doing.  We want to match our eager activity with an equally vibrant awareness, rooted in Scripture, Tradition, Reason and Experience.

My grandmother’s way of expressing faith took an interrogatory form. She asked of herself, and others: Are you walking in the light?

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

posted in Lenten Series 2012: Technology, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.18.2012 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to hear the full service.
Click here to hear the sermon only.
John 2: 13-22

Preface

‘The heavens are telling the glory of God and the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge.’ (Ps 19:1)

Together we are on a Lenten journey. We are moving from sensation to reflection, from the depths of a technological culture to the heights of a reflective faith. We in Marsh Chapel today are on this journey. We listening from afar are on this journey. We around the globe in later audition are on this journey, all together. We are climbing, hiking, marching together. We are moving from activity to awareness. We are on the way from sensation to reflection.

Experience

"Let us preach You without preaching;
not by words but by our example;
by the catching force, the sympathetic influence of what we do,
the evident fullness of the love our hearts bear to You." (J H Newman)

In CC, 7/1/08: ‘One of the main goals of most religions is to open up self-absorbed individuals and connect them with a broader community and with the source and goal of all reality’. (M Volf)

In particular, this Lent, we are trying to announce the Good News of the Gospel, the gift and grace of faith, in a way that creatively redeems the technological culture of our time. We are moving from cyber sensation to careful reflection, from fingertip activity to spiritual awareness. We want to be aware of who we are and what we are doing. On this journey we may run into trouble, now and then.

One day you encounter e-trouble.  My son knows I think the world gets better one conversation at a time, and worse one email at a time.  He clerks for a federal judge.  One morning my son called me with this story.  “I knew you would enjoy it Dad”, he said.  “It involves trouble and email”.  Well, apparently in the judicial employment system, when one falls ill and runs out of sick days, others can take from their account and give to the need.  A worker received days from about twenty others, healed, and went back to work.  The colleague who organized the sick day bank support assayed to write a thank you note, which she did.  It was a very simple note, graciously thanking the donors, reporting on the healing, and wishing all well.  This would have been no problem.  Except that in mailing the thank you note, she hit the wrong key, and sent to the wrong list, not a list of twenty donors, but a general list of 200,000 judicial employees. Here is a trouble, a day’s own trouble, organically designed for the tweeter, list serve, email, website 21st century.  Oops.  Yet even this would also have been no problem.  Except that a lawyer in Arizona took umbrage at the e-incursion, and said so in a curtly written note:  ‘not my issue, not my problem, you invaded my space, thanks but no thanks, plus I really do not agree with this whole socialist sick day swapping anyway.’

Which would have been alright, too.  Except that she hit ‘reply all’, and, in the next hour, said my son, he had 100 emails in his box.  Yes, Sick Day Bank! No Arizona! Yes Thank You Note! No To Rude Response! Yes to Liberty, No to Obama (I have no idea how he got in there)…Until one kindly attorney from the St Lawrence River area shouted out:  “STOP.  This is what makes people suspicious of lawyers in general and federal workers in particular.  We have better things to do with our time.”  This also would have been no problem.  Except.  Except that before he signed off he wrote:  “PS, while I have your attention, I want you to know that I am an amateur chef, and I would like to take this opportunity to share with you all MY FAVORITE RECIPE FOR COOKING SALMON”.  Yes, he hit reply all.  And on the day went:  Salmon Yes! Salmon No! Amateur Chef Yes! Email recipe, NO!…

Remember the way the Bible begins. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep. And… God… (what?)…God…said…Speech creates, redeems and sustains. God speaks in Genesis 1and creates a world. God promises in Genesis 17 and creates a people. God commands in Exodus 20 and defines a Decalogue. God authorizes through the judges and admonishes through the prophets and teaches through the writers and prophecies through the seers. To Elijah, we recalled last week, he speaks in a still, small voice. God…speaks…God’s word. In the parables of Jesus. In the sermon on the mount. In the thunder outside Paul’s Antioch.In the child’s voice in Augustine’s garden. In the silence of the dark night of St. John of the Cross. In the lectures of Luther, the sermons of Calvin, the hymns of Wesley, the shouts of the Baptists, the wails of the Pentecostals, the prayers of the Anglicans, and the quiet of the Quakers. Day to day pours forth speech. All the way to this moment, this morning, this sermon.

You know, you do not know where this sermon will end. After an early sermon my Dad commented, critically, ‘well it had two of the essential ingredients of a good sermon—a beginning and an ending’. Where this ends, and how, you do not know. You hope I do. Me too, though we leave a measure to the Holy Spirit. You do not even know IF this sermon will end! (It will.)

There is a sonorous mystery to speech, all speech, to words, to voice. Voice can frighten. S Terkel interviewed a 20 year old who abhorred the telephone, because, said he, ‘I just don’t know how to end a conversation.’ That is the way with speech. You cannot scroll ahead to the end, or read the last chapter first, or speed through the sub headings. You don’t know how it will turn out. You do not know how or if the sermon will end.

I wonder what the mystified congregation in Duke Chapel, May 1975, thought when they heard William Stringfellow say the following?

Technocracy cannot tolerate human creativity because that cannot be quantified, programmed and forecast; so it must be suppressed, destroyed or displaced. As often as not, it is substitution which happens, and then the nomenclature of the art is misappropriated and applied to the anti-art, so as, after a generation or two, to even deprive human memory of the art. Meanwhile, it barely requires a footnote, a ridiculous parody of this whole process is technocratic totalitarianism by which the disciplines are corrupted and dehumanized as rendered in the realm of sports, both in the university and in society generally, especially in the political use assigned to commercialized sports to supply distraction or vicarious involvement to habituate persons as spectators to fill up the time, or otherwise to nurture public passivity and enforce ignorance. (William Stringfellow, May 1975, Duke Chapel (Willimon, 163))

Scripture

This year we will scale a far greater promontory, the highest peak in the Bible, which is the Gospel of John. With every cut-back trail, at every rest point, atop every lookout, with every majestic view, this spiritual gospel will address you with the choice of freedom, with the ongoing need to choose, and in choosing to find the life of belonging and meaning, personal identity and global imagination. More personally, this Gospel helps those who struggle with dislocation and disappointment. The Bride in Cana experienced dislocation, and so have you. The Bride of Christ experiences disappointment, and so have you.

John features Jesus in mortal combat over all of these. Jesus demarcates the limits of individualism during a wedding in Cana. Jesus pillories pride by night with Nicodemus. Jesus unwraps the touching self-presentations of hypocrisy in conversation at the well. Jesus heals a broken spirit. Jesus feeds the throng with two fish and five barley loaves. Jesus gives sight and insight, bifocal and stereoptic, to a man born blind. Jesus comes upon dead Lazarus and bring resurrection and life. He brings the introvert out of the closet of loneliness. He brings the literalist out of the closet of materialism. He brings the passionate out of the closet of guilt. He brings the dim-witted out of the closet of myopia. He brings the church out of the closet of hunger. He brings the dead to life.

The two basic historical problems of the New Testament are ancient cousins, first cousins to our two fundamental issues, the two existential battles in your salvation today.

The first historical problem behind our 27 books, and pre eminently embedded in John, is the movement away from Judaism. How did a religious movement, founded by a Jew, born in Judea, embraced by 12 and 500 within Judaism, expanded by a Jewish Christian missionary become, within 100 years, entirely Greek? The books of the New Testament record in excruciating detail the development of this second identity, this coming of age, that came with the separation from mother religion.

The second historical problem underneath the Newer Testament is disappointment, the despair that gradually accompanied the delay, finally the cancellation, of Christ’s return, the delay of the parousia. Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet. Paul expected to be alive to see the advent of Christ. Gradually, though, the church confessed disappointment in its greatest immediate hope, the sudden cataclysm of the end.

Two problems, historical and fascinating, create our New Testament: the separation from Judaism and the delay of the parousia. In the fourth Gospel the two come together with great ferocity. What makes this matter so urgent for us is that these very two existential dilemmas—one of identity and one of imagination—are before every generation, including and especially our own.

How do I become a real person? How do we weather lasting disappointment? How do I grow up? How do we become mature? What insight do I need, amid the truly harrowing struggles over identity, to become the woman or man I was meant to become?

What imagination—what hope molded by courage—do we need to face down the profound despair of nuclear twilight and break free into a loving global future? More than any other document in ancient Christianity, John explored the first. More than any other document in Christianity, John faced the second.

Tradition: Jacques Ellul

Here is an Ellul Litany:

Christian: salt, light, sheep
It is impossible for us to make the world less sinful, and impossible for us to accept it as it is
Ethic: temporary and apologetic
Every moment of man’s life is not historic but apocalyptic
A Bomb: fact that had to be accepted
Present time judged in virtue of a meta historical fact, the incursion of this event into the present
Lordship is objective; hope subjective
‘A thing is only good or bad in its own time, according to its situation in the light of the Kingdom fo God, according to its conformity to the work of God for the coming of the Kingdom, an according to its possible us for the glory of God
Become aware, first
Live don’t act

‘Thus man who used to be the end of this whole humanist system of means, man, who is still proclaimed as an ‘end’ in political speeches, ha s in reality himself become the ‘means’ of the very means which ought to serve him: as for instance in economics of the state. In order that economics should be in a good condition, man submits to t he demands of an economic mechanism, becomes a total producer, and puts all his powers at the disposal of production. He becomes an obedient consumer, and with his eyes shut he swallows everything that economics puts into his mouth. Thus, fully persuaded that we are procuring the happiness of man, we are turning him into an instrument of these modern gods, which are our means. 51
Technical means become more important than the search for truth.

1. Man is no longer to any extent the master of his means
2. Technics extends to all spheres of life
3. Ends proposed are useless
For the Christian what actually matters in practice is to be not to act
Real action is simply the testimony of a profound life
Life is not efficient
Thus what we need is to rediscover all that the fullness of personal life means for a man standing on his own feet in the midst of the world, who rediscovers his neighbor because he himself has been found by God. 78
The man of the present day does not believe in his own experiences, judgment or thought.
There is no discussion with the radio or the press (or email)
Technics: precision, rapidity, certainty, continuity, universality—which are all characteristics of efficiency
The intelligence of modern man is no longer nourished at the source of contemplation, of awareness of reality and is more and more absorbed by the instrument which it has created, an instrument whose principal aim is the control of the material world
Intelligence is set free from dogmas and is a slave to means
Lack of awareness. Enslavement of the intelligence to technical methods.
Rediscover the meaning of the neighbor, of the ‘Event’ and of the Holy.
The intervention of God in human history in Jesus Christ.
What the church ought to do is to try to place all people in an economic, intellectual—yes also in a psychological and physical –situation, which is such that they can actually hear this gospel—that they can be sufficiently responsible to say yes or no, that they can be sufficiently alive for these words to have some meaning for them.

Reason

Who was Ellul?:

Youth: poor, no music. ‘I learned what unemployment is with no assistance, with no hope whatsoever, with no help from anywhere. I learned what it is to be sick with no government medical care and no money to pay the doctor or the druggist. I remember my father spending his days looking for work. Given his abilities, I felt that was an absolutely stupefying, incredible injustice that a man like him was unemployed.’ 5.
Dialectics: includes contraries, does not exclude them. A new historical situation emerges, integrating the two preceding factors with one another…both have vanished giving birth to a radically new situation.
The goal is to live the human freedom within the freedom of God. Logically the two cannot be reconciled, but dialectically, one can live with them.
Marx: economic situation. Yes. But not all the answers—life, death, love.
‘In my own life, I confronted the demands of Marx and the demands of the Bible and put them together.’
Then, Barth: ‘once I began reading Barth, I stopped being a Calvinist…obviously I could no longer be a Calvinist once I understood the dialectical movement of Barth’s thinking…Calvin constantly offers answers, solutions, or a construction, while Barth launches you on an adventure…
Parallel (camping) university. 1. Delinquent youth 2. Environment

In reasoned measure, by the reason, he reminds us of our capacity to neglect.

We succumb to willful neglect of vast stretches of reality. We are complicit in willful ignorance of broad swaths of actual human experience. ‘Nothing human is foreign to us’ may be our hope but it is not our reality. Yet a sober Sunday morning moment of contrition is quite enough to show us our willful neglect of vast stretches of reality.

We willfully neglect the amount of time each of us will be dead. In fact we live as if we are ‘temporarily immortal’. Yet regarding flesh and bone we shall each of us be dead an extremely long time, a vast long length of time when compared to the three score and ten years of our living. Our life is limited, but our death is limitless. We live though as if the opposite were the case. Given such a willful neglect of this one stretch of reality, it may not then be surprising to note how much more we also find ways to ignore.

100,000 Iraqis have died since 2003, as a consequence of our actions then, full of mixed motives. 4 million Iraqis are today refugees, many of them children, as a consequence of our actions then, full of mixed motives. We have spent $1 trillion dollars on this macabre misadventure. A trillion is a million millions or a thousand billions or a billion thousands. A trillion dollars is real money. And we wonder why our economy is sagging, shrinking, weakening?

There are 20 million other than legal alien residents of our country today. That number begins to approach 10% of the US population. But other than remembering that three of them twice mulched Governor Romney’s lawn, we are blithely ignorant of them, unless we have need or a run in.

Coda

Together we are on a Lenten journey. We are moving from sensation to reflection, from the depths of a technological culture to the heights of a reflective faith. We in Marsh Chapel today are on this journey. We listening from afar are on this journey. We around the globe in later audition are on this journey, all together. We are climbing, hiking, marching together. We are moving from activity to awareness. We are on the way from sensation to reflection.

In particular, this Lent, we are trying to announce the Good News of the Gospel, the gift and grace of faith, in a way that creatively redeems the technological culture of our time. We are moving from cyber sensation to careful reflection, from fingertip activity to spiritual awareness. We want to be aware of who we are and what we are doing. On this journey we may run into trouble, now and then.

The heavens are telling the glory of God and the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge.’ (Ps 19:1)

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

posted in Lenten Series 2012: Technology, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.11.2012 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to hear the full service.
Click here to hear the sermon only.
Mark 8: 31-38

Preface

H Thurman:  the ocean and the night

Journey from sensation to reflection

Seven days a week discipline, faith and technology

Justifying grace:  in trouble, at connection, by humility, as abandon

Scripture and Struggle

Mark 70ad

Disciples ‘behind’

Moderate Critics (Weeden), Critical Moderates (Marcus)

Must Jesus Bear the Cross Alone?

Thou with a scornful wonder

Cruciform character of divine love

A little rain, Ecc. 9:11

Church always both a representation and distortion of divine

Starkness of cross

Sterness of cross

A friend in need

Faith finds us in trouble

Grace in trouble is justifying grace

Tradition and Connection

To this place, our part of the parade

Hello again, Hello

Faith and technology, faith and culture

Absorb and Utilize

10 BU presidents

Alexander Graham Bell

Connection! And with new media too

Crackling connection

Grace in a moment of connection is justifying grace

Reason and Humility

Others faith, and my own?

Old teacher who speaks to but not for and so not to

From independence to dependence (life, friendship, faith, love, hope, heaven)

Margaret Fuller’s 4 questions

God be merciful to me, a sinner

V Havel, 2 quotes

Intelligence unleavened by kindness is dangerous

Dangerous piercing, tattooed by compunction

I Kant:  Critique of Pure Reason

M. Robinson, E Kohak

Grace in a sense of humility is justifying grace

Experience and Abandon

Oceanside, Pelican

Waves, Surf, Tide, Surfer, Swimmer, in and out, in and out

That undulating, grounding, supportive grace

Dad, Malibu, walking, nourished by the waves, in and out, in and out

Teaching beginners:  square knot, English idioms, Greek alphabet, swimming

Prone Float:  Justifying Grace

Altar Call:  first time, or in a long time, or on the long journey

The beginning of faith is learning to float, trust, depend, believe

Coda

Summary: trouble, connection, humility, abandon

New Beginnings

Invitation to justifying grace, to Eucharist

Ye that do truly and earnestly repent

H Thurman:  the ocean and the night

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

posted in Lenten Series 2012: Technology, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.4.2012 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to hear the full service.
Click here to hear the sermon only.
Mark 1: 9-15
Genesis 9: 8-17

Preface

In the autumn each year I have the true pleasure to teach a course on the Gospel of John.  For five years my teaching assistant, a priest and poet, has helped our students to prepare their research papers.  She meets early in the term with each of the twelve or so disciples.  She uses my school of theology office to do so, over a fortnight or so.  We share a key that for those weeks I leave in the Marsh Chapel office, so that the one needing the key, now she now I, may take and use it.  The system works well, or, well, works when it works.  That is, do you know how many times I traipse to my third floor school office, and do what I normally do, fish for the key ring, and pull out the—wait a minute, oh no, oh yes, the key is in the other building.  Over to Marsh I go.  The body and its habits, in collusion with the unconscious and its rhythms, takes me where I habitually go, to do what I ritually do.  Do you know how many times it has taken to become aware of what I need to do to enter the study in the school?  Too many.   We are creatures of habit, guided along by our suppositions and assumptions.  Lent arrives to wake us up, to make us aware.  Lent arrives to challenge us to move from sensation to reflection, from activity to awareness.

Jesus meets us today in the long experience of the wilderness.  The wilderness where reflection quickens.  The wilderness where discipline begins.  The wilderness where the great questions—freedom, immorality, God, all—may touch us.  The wilderness where there is quiet, space, silence.  I invite you this Lent to journey with me, one beggar among others, to travel from sensation to reflection.

We begin this morning, taking stock of our sources (or media?) of authority, upon which we shall base our coming Lenten teaching.  In the Gospel, Jesus hears Scripture, Thou art my beloved Son, with thee I am well pleased.  That is Psalm 2: 7.  You are meant to recognize the divine voice echoed here from Holy Scripture.  In the Gospel, Jesus honors tradition—baptized by John in the Jordan.  In the Gospel, Jesus is driven by the spirit, the breath of God, the spirit of truth, reason and reasoned.  In the Gospel, Jesus struggles, and suffers, he experiences depth and height, as do we:  tempted, endangered, in need of angelic support.  These are the sources of authority on which the gospel is proclaimed—scripture, tradition, reason, experience.

Your move today from sensation to reflection involves a recognition of sources for authority.

That is, your love of Christ shapes your love of Scripture and tradition and reason and experience.  You are lovers and knowers too.  We are ever in peril of loving what we should use and using what we should love, to paraphrase Augustine.  In particular we sometimes come perilously close to the kind of idolatry that uses what we love.  We are tempted, for our love Christ, to force a kind of certainty upon what we love, to use what is meant to give confidence as a force and form of certainty.  It is tempting to substitute the freedom and grace of confidence for the security and protection of certainty.  But faith is about confidence not certainty.  If we had certainty we would not need faith.

1. Scripture and Errancy

Your love for Christ shapes your love of Scripture.  You love the Bible.  You love its psalmic depths.  #130 comes to mind. You love its stories and their strange names.  Obededom comes to mind.  You love proverbial wisdom.  One sharpens another comes to mind. You love its freedom, its account of the career of freedom.  The exodus comes to mind. You love its memory of Jesus.  His holding children comes to mind. You love its honesty about religious life.  Galatians comes to mind.  You love its strangeness.  John comes to mind.  You love the Bible like Rudolph Bultmann loved it, enough to know it through and through.

You rely on the Holy Scripture to learn to speak of faith, and as a medium of truth for the practice of faith. Today in worship, we share this reliance and this love.  The fascinating multiplicity of hearings, here, and the interplay of congregations present, absent, near, far, known, unknown, religious and unreligious, have a common ground in regard for the Scripture. A preacher descending into her automobile in Boston, after an earlier service, listens to this service to hear the interpretation of the gospel.  A homebound woman in Newton listens for the musical offerings and for the reading of scripture.  On the other side of the globe, way down in Sydney, Australia, a student listens in, come Sunday, out of a love of Christ that embraces a love of Scripture.  Here in the Chapel nave, on the Lord’s Day, scholars and teachers and students have in common, by their love for Christ, a love for the Scripture, too.  In this way, we may all affirm Mr. Wesley’s motto:  homo unius libri, to be a person of one book.

We want to be aware, though, to move from mere sensation, the stumbling around and rattling of mistaken keys, to reflection, to an awareness, a sturdy, honest awareness of truth.

So we acknowledge that the Bible is errant.  It is theologically tempting for us to go on preaching as if the last 250 years of study just did not happen.  They did.  That does not mean that we should deconstruct the Bible to avoid allowing the Bible to deconstruct us, or that we should study the Bible in order to avoid allowing the Bible to study us.  In fact, after demythologizing the Bible we may need to remythologize the Bible too.  It is the confidence born of obedience, not some certainty born of fear that will open the Bible to us.  We need not fear truth, however it may be known.  So Luke may not have had all his geographical details straight.  John includes the woman caught in adultery, but not in its earliest manuscripts.  Actually she, poor woman, is found at the end of Luke in some texts.  Paul did not write the document from the earlier third century, 3 Corinthians. The references to slavery in the New Testament are as errant and time bound as are the references to women not speaking in church.  The references to women not speaking in church are as errant and time bound as are the references to homosexuality.  The references to homosexuality are as errant and time bound as are the multiple lists of the twelve disciples.  The various twelve listings are as errant and time bound as the variations between John and the other Gospels.

The Marsh pulpit, and others like it, are not within traditions which affirm the Scripture as the sole source of religious authority.  We love the Scripture as the primary but not sole source of authority in faith. We do not live within a Sola Scriptura tradition.  The Bible is primary, foundational, fundamental, basic, prototypical—but not exclusively authoritative.  Do you hear that?  It begs to be heard.  Today’s passage from Mark 1 is an idealized memory of something that may or may not have happened in the way accounted, somewhere along the Jordan river.  It looks back forty years.  What do you remember from January of 1972?  Nor was it written for that kind of certainty.  It is formed in the faith of the church to form the faith of the church.

If I were teaching a Sunday School class this winter I would buy the class copies of Throckmorton’s Gospel parallels and read it with them.

We grasp for certainty, but confidence grasps us.

2.Tradition and Equality

You love the tradition of the church as well.  Though with a scornful wonder we see her sore oppressed…John Wesley loved the church’s tradition too, enough to study it and to know it, and to seek its truth.  The central ecclesiastical tradition of his time, the tradition of apostolic succession, he termed a ‘fable’.  Likewise, we lovers of the church tradition will not be able to grasp for certainty in it, if that grasping dehumanizes others.  The Sabbath was made for the human being, not the other way around, in our tradition.

An ecumenical summary of this trend toward equality was remembered for us this week: The needs of the poor have priority over the wants of the rich.  The freedom of the dominated has priority over the liberty of the powerful. The participation of the marginalized has priority over the structures of exclusion.

Boston University has long and strong history of expanding the circle of equality to include the poor, laborers, immigrants, former slaves, women, and, in our time, with work still to be done, gay people, those otherwise abled, the interreligious community, and the citizenship of the globe.

It is theologically tempting to shore up by keeping out.  But it has no future.  Equality will triumph over exclusion.  It is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave…

If I were convening a Lenten study in suburban Washington DC I would have the group read S Turkel, Alone Together, for some perspective on the way traditions change.

3. Reason and Evolution

You love the mind, the reason.  You love the prospect of learning.  You love the life of the mind.  You love the Lord with heart and soul and mind.  A mind is a terrible thing to waste. You love the reason in the same that Charles Darwin, a good Anglican, loved the reason.  You love its capacity to see things differently.

Of course reason unfettered can produce hatred and holocaust.  Learning for its own sake needs virtue and piety.  More than anything else, learning to last must finally be rooted in loving.  Our voice here at Marsh Chapel is meant to call the University community, Sunday by Sunday, like a minaret or shofar or village steeple, from sensation to reflection.  Our voice here is meant reasonably to recall for young people that people are to be loved not used.

We are meant to use our minds to explore the world, our selves within it, and the promise of the God who created it.  We shall need to reason together.The universe is 14 billion years old.  The earth is 4.5 billion years old. 500 million years ago multi-celled organisms appeared in the Cambrian explosion.  400 million years ago plants sprouted.  370 million years ago land animals emerged.  230 million years ago dinosaurs appeared (and disappeared 65 million years ago).  200,000 years ago hominids arose.  Every human being carries 60 new mutations out of 6 billion cells.  Yes, evolution through natural selection by random mutation is a reasonable hypothesis, says F Collins, father of the human genome project, and, strikingly, a person of faith.

If I were the chaplain of a small private school in New England I might have my fellowship group read this winter C. Smith, Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood. He can teach us to reason together.

It is tempting to disjoin learning and vital piety, but it is not loving to disjoin learning and vital piety.  They go together.  The God of Creation is the very God of Redemption.  Their disjunction may help us cling for a while to a kind of faux certainty.  But their conjunction is the confidence born of obedience.  Falsehood has no defense and truth needs none.

4.Experience and Existence

You love experience.  The gift of experience in faith is the heart of your love of Christ.  You love Christ. Like Howard Thurman loved the mystical ranges of experience, you do too.  Isaiah, in looking forward, can sing of the joy of harvest.  We know joy.  Joy seizes us.  Joy grasps us when we are busy grasping at other things.  You love what we are given morning and evening.

You love experience more than enough to examine your experience, to think about and think through what you have seen and done.

Give yourself some room to move this Lent from sensation to reflection.

We need to examine our experience, and particularly this Lent, our experience with technology.  Ellul: ‘Technology has two consequences which strike me as the most profound in our time.  I call them the suppression of the subject and the suppression of meaning…The suppression of the subject is transforming traditional human relations, which require the voice, which require seeing, or which require a physical relationship between one human being and the next.  The  result is the distant relationship…the suppression of meaning:  the ends of existence gradually seem to be effaced by the predominance of means…the meaning of existence of ‘why I  am alive’ is suppressed as technology so vastly develops its power…

We want to move from techo sensation to techno reflection.  How?

1. On Monday, aver: wherever you are, be there.
2. On Tuesday: before you check your face book, face your checkbook.
3. On Wednesday, decide: orders need borders:  respond to voice in one day, email etc in three days, writing in one week.
4. On Thursday, choose: make a Lenten exception: answer your non emergency email all on Wednesday each week.
5. On Friday, raise the bar: respond to facebook and twitter with email, to email with voice, to voice with letter, to letter with visit.
6. On Saturday, remember:  email is international, irretrievable, immutable, eternal, so whatever you write make sure are happy to have it appear on the front page of the Boston Globe or chiseled on your tombstone.
7. Come Sunday, of course:  attend or listen to Marsh Chapel.

If I were reading with a group this month I might read Ellul’s Presence of the Kingdom.

There are indeed theological temptations in the unbalanced love of Scripture, tradition, reason or experience.  As we come soon to Lent let us face them down.  Let us face them down together.  Let us do so by lifting our voices to admit errancy, affirm equality, explore evolution, and admire existence.  The measure of preaching today in the tradition of a responsible Christian liberalism is found in our willingness to reflect on our sources of authority, our love of STRE, and to reflect therein on errancy, equality, evolution and existence.

So we shall join the long parade of those who for generations have faithfully tried to rise above sensation and live in a mode of reflection.  Noah gives us a reminder of the promise of divine care.  You well remember this first biblical covenant, that of Noah, set and sealed in the rainbow.  The covenant with Noah brings promise.  The covenants with Abraham, Moses, David and Jeremiah do the same.  They make way in us for the new covenant, the new testament, the fulfilling of time promised in today’s Gospel.  I set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be sign of covenant between me and the earth.

Wednesday I walked west on Commonwealth Avenue.  A friend came alongside and we enjoyed a several block conversation.  A sermon is like the kind of stepping alongside for conversation.  Then he turned at a corner to head for his office, and we parted and departed.  But two blocks later, he came alongside me again, saying, You know, I have turned at that corner so often to go to my office, that I completely forgot that my office is no longer where it was.  It is up ahead here on the left.  My habits, body and unconscious took me one way, but I should have been going with you. Yes.  We benefit, come Lent, from the journey away from sensation and out toward reflection—kindled in authoritative intervention by Scripture, tradition, reason and experience.  Yes, your divergence reminds me of the experience I had this autumn with my school office key, shared with my teaching assistant, a series of moments when sensation would have benefitted from a little reflection…

We are on a Lenten journey, from sensation to reflection.

We are on a Lenten journey, from sensation to reflection.

We are on a Lenten journey, from sensation to reflection.

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

posted in Lenten Series 2012: Technology, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 02.26.2012 at 11:00 am

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Mark 1: 40-45

What are the better angels of our nature? One is conscience, and another is compassion. ‘Conceived in liberty’—that is conscience. ‘Dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal’—that is compassion. Are you ready to brush these two angel wings? They have been brought to us with a price.

This week, suddenly, we realize again how much we owe to those who won our freedom, both temporal and spiritual, both civic and religious. Discussion of liberty and equality arises, February 2012! Yet so much of it proceeds with almost no sense of memory, and thereby little to no depth. Perhaps just for a moment this morning we might reflect on freedom. Our Gospel declares, ‘He went out and began to talk freely’. We are people who talk freely about freedom, temporal and spiritual. Maybe today, February 12, we might remember some of the great words about conscience and compassion, liberty and equality, which we inherit. For in fact our discourse about freedom has long involved the interplay of temporal conscience and spiritual compassion, of civic liberty and religious freedom. We are heirs both of temporal and of spiritual freedom. Abraham Lincoln from his western window perch in this nave can help to remind us.

A. Temporal Freedom Means…

Freedom from the Tyranny of Kings

We think of Washington’s army, shivering along the Hudson River, in the first cold winter of Independence, 1776. Thomas Paine:

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; ‘tis dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed, if so celestial an article as Freedom should not be highly rated.”

Freedom from the Bondage of Slavery

So, Lincoln. We think first of Abraham Lincoln in 1861, hopeful as he began his presidency. We think second of Lincoln in 1865, exhausted and soon to die, riddled with worry, conflict, risk, chance, decision and death for four years. Out of affliction came a great hope. Abraham Lincoln, his hopeful first inaugural and his chastened second:

First, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Second, “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work that we are in…to do all that may achieve a just and a lasting peace for us and for all the nations.”

Freedom from the Threat of Dictatorship

We think of Franklin Roosevelt, bound to his wheelchair, yet out of that bondage finding the rhetoric and courage to lead his people from fear to faith. Nothing to fear but fear itself. A day that will live in infamy. A world founded on four freedoms. Arsenal of democracy…FDR:

In 1941: “We, too, born to freedom, and believing in freedom, are willing to fight to maintain freedom. We, and all others who believe as deeply as we do, would rather die on our feet than live on our knees…

In 1945: “We have learned that we cannot live alone, at peace; that our own well-being is dependent on the well-being of other nations, far away. We have learned that we must live as men, and not as ostriches, nor as dogs in the manger. We have learned to be citizens of the world, members of the human community”

Freedom from the Despotism of Ideology

We think of John Kennedy, wearing the anxiety of the cold war, and meeting that cold with warm words, warmly worded. A profile in courage. JFK, 1961:

“Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world…Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.”

Freedom from tyranny, slavery, dictatorship, ideology: for temporal freedom we are thankful.

B. Spiritual Freedom Means…

But I must ask you: if the value of our temporal freedom is now so clearly and even starkly visible, how much more, then, is the higher value of our spiritual freedom even more clearly and more starkly visible? If the ringing rhetoric of our national heritage can so move us, today, how much more are we transformed by the freedom we have received in Jesus Christ? For it is this freedom, wrought by Almighty God, upon which we depend for our salvation, for eternal life, for forgiveness, for heaven, and for heavenly peace on earth. This is God’s own work, enacted in the life, death and destiny of Christ, whom we both follow and adore. As God’s act for us, for us men and women, and for our salvation, a divine and new RE birth of freedom it is not susceptible, finally, to assault of any kind. It is the delight and desire of God to cleanse.

So today: here is the Healing of a Leper. Jesus, moved with pity, stretched, touched, said: I will.  Be clean.  One writes, “Our passage then foreshadows both Jesus’ eschatological freedom… (Marcus, loc cit, 211)

Freedom from the Tyranny of Religion

We think of Paul of Tarsus, a.d. 50,who was seized by this same freedom, and who could fly free from the fetters of his inherited religion. Religion, untamed, can do so much harm. The life, death and destiny of Jesus set Paul free, to love and to serve. “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. The life I now live in the flesh, I live by the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me.”

Freedom from the Bondage of the Flesh

We think of Augustine of Hippo, a.d. 400, who wrestled, grappled with the desires of the flesh for much of his life. A man of great learning, he nonetheless found himself unable to put away temptations that he was powerless to resist. Then, once in a garden, he heard a voice, like of a child, saying, “take and read”. He picked up a copy of the letters of Paul that he had been reading, and he saw these words: “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof." From that moment he found peace of mind.

Freedom from the Threat of Judgment

We think of John Wesley, who though he had as much or more formal religion than any of his contemporaries, was made to wait until middle age before he exchanged the form of religion for its power. Wesley on Aldersgate Street: “About a quarter to nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me, that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”(5/24/1738) Take this sacrament to your comfort, as an altar call to freedom from the threat of judgment.

Freedom from the Despotism of Defeat

We think of one pastor, a.d. 1939, bringing a proposal for a new church to his doubtful Board of Trustees, and doing so amid depression and war. He dedicated his idea to the glory of God and the service of women and men. On the front page, as I have learned thanks to a friend’s research, he placed this quotation, an inscription he had found on a country church in England: “In the year 1643, when all things sacred were either demolished or profaned, this Church was built by one whose singular praise is to have done the best things in the worst times and to have hoped them in the most calamitous.” If you preach in a post modern, post Judea Christian era, take heart here. If you preach in a minimally religious region, take heart here. If you preach where faithfulness somehow has become disconnected from Sunday worship, take heart here. If you preach where the shallow in worship has overcome the high and true and deep, take heart here: your singular praise is to have done the best of things in the worst of times and to have hoped them in the most calamitous.

Freedom from the Fear of the Future

We think of Ernest Freemont Tittle, Evanston Illinois, a.d. 1960, the month of his own death, who more than most in his generation fifty years ago, saw the contours of the future. Tittle: We of this generation are confronted with the revelation of divine purpose given in a human interrelatedness and interdependence that justifies the term “one world”. We find ourselves in a situation where no one nation can prosper unless all prosper, no one people can dwell secure unless security is assured to all. This situation was brought about through human agents, through the activities of scientists, inventors, traders, imperialists; but it is not a result of human planning. Not even the most ardent imperialist will claim that empire was devised as a means of drawing the world together, nor will anyone claim that science or invention or international trade was carried on with a view to bringing about the interdependence of nations and peoples. The situation in which we now find ourselves, so far from being a result that we human creatures purposed and planned, has to a large extent been brought about despite our purposes, which for the most part were selfish and shortsighted enough. It has come to pass through the providence of God, who, through science and technology, through improved means of transportation and communication, through the extension of trade and credit, has brought it to pass that we have got to act with due consideration for the rest of mankind if we ourselves are to prosper and dwell secure. Something beyond us, a superhuman purpose and power, is working in history, bringing about the increasing interdependence of men and nations, so that our sheer survival becomes ever more contingent upon the establishment of justice and fair play in all our relations to one another.”

Freedom from religion, flesh, judgment, defeat, fear: for spiritual freedom we are deeply thankful.

Lincoln strangely knew them both.

Today is Abraham Lincoln’s Birthday, February 12. In his honor we close with a recitation of his most famous statement, the Gettysburg Address:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 02.12.2012 at 11:00 am

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Mark 1: 29-39

Preface

The phrase, ‘prevenient grace’, a favorite of John Wesley’s, identifies God’s grace as active prior to our awareness, prior to our acceptance, prior to our engagement, prior to our knowledge, prior to our own conscious response.  This grace comes to us, comes toward us.

We think of ourselves as marching forward, into the future.  And well we might, and well we should.  But grace is the future coming toward us, marching into us, toward us.  It is incursive, it is incarnate.  It is invasive.  It is coming toward us.

The cosmic apocalyptic theological perspective which shapes our Gospel of Mark is not our own.  Beelzebub—not a family name.  Children of light and of darkness—not the way we define the world.  The end time, the last days, the day of the Lord—not our primary religious or personal lexicon.  Satan—not a ready or readily understood figure.  The cosmic apocalyptic theological perspective which shapes St. Mark does not shape us.

But one part of it does, or should.  Time is coming toward us.  The future is settling in on us.  It is not we who march forward into time so much as it is time marching toward, into, through and past us.  There it goes…

Healing on the Sabbath, for an individual, out among a whole city, and in the pastures of prayer.  Coming right at us, like a..

What similes, metaphors, analogies come to mind today, about the future descending upon us?  Like a…

Like a linebacker vaulting into the pocket, or a punt descending out of the sky, or a kickoff falling earthward, or a return team moving to tackle, or an hour of contest approaching. ()

The future is coming toward us.  That part of cosmic apocalyptic we can readily receive, if we will pivot just a bit.

Prevenient carries a sense of coming before, of preparing, of guiding.  Prevenient grace finds us when we are not expecting to be found, or to find.   Prevenient grace enters the home, through the front door.  This grace attends to the needs of the identified patient in the family.  Then prevenient grace flings open the door to the home and gathers the whole community, to heal the sick and cast out demons.  An early grace reaches us and reminds us that who we are is connected to where we are.

And what comes toward us?  Grace, in seven servings: baptism, a name in a church; confirmation, a faith in a tradition; eucharist, a morsel in a community; ordination, a calling in a context; marriage, a partnership in a pattern; forgiveness, a pardon in a gathering; unction, an eternal hope in an historical experience.  What comes toward us?  Prevenient grace.

Prevenient Grace:  Personal

Said John Calvin:  Now the evangelists seem to have narrated this miracle with some emphasis, not for being in itself more distinguished than the others, or more deserving to be remembered, but because in it Christ gave a homely and closer example of his grace to his disciples...The healing of one woman gave him the opportunity for many miracles (Commentary, loc.cit.)

Our gospel ends in prayer.  But the two healings of the narrative buttress each other.  The first, the healing of Peter’s mother, comes to an individual.  The second, attested in odd combinations of words—all, many, all, many, the whole—distributes the healing to the community.  Jesus is moving toward his hearers, and toward us, now to the individual, now to the culture at large.  His preparation is showing the way to personal and social holiness.  They go together.  Holiness of heart depends on holiness of life.  Where we are affects who we are.  As Ortega memorably put it, “Yo soy you y mis circunstancias”—I am myself and my circumstances.

There is a spirit of health loose in the universe, a spirit of healing, touching persons and pervading communities.  We do well to attend to the eruptions of health, in our place and time.

Peter was married.  I’m just sayin... You acquire a mother in law in a time honored fashion.  Did you notice that Simon has a mother in law?  That must mean… Simon is no longer out on the beach with Andrew, free and easy, as he was just two Sundays ago.  He has a home, he has a family, he has an extended family.  Behind every great religious leader is a surprised mother in law.  That is, Simon was married.  Peter was married.  I am not camping out on this verse.  I don’t plan to stay here for the whole sermon and build a campfire and dwell forever on the domestic details of Peter, the rock on whom the church was built.  I’m just saying…

Never doubt that a few people, a teacher and two sets of brothers for example, can change things.

How we live makes a difference to others.  In particular, this Lent, we shall meditate on how we cyberlive.  Every half hour we are making choices in our means and mode of discourse, to enhance toward human being our way of being, or to degrade our way of being from human being.  Technology is not neutral.  It is a complex of choices.  And yes, we choose, but we do not choose our choices.

Notice some of the detail in this holy, inspired, inspiring passage.  Matthew leaves out the prayer scene, in his use of Mark, and Luke retains it.  Why?  Simon’s mother in law is singled out, without others from the family named.  Why?  The demons again know Jesus and again are silenced.  A  bigger, Why?  The crowd comes to healing at sundown.  To respect the Sabbath?  But Jesus has already healed on the Sabbath (see last week), and again with Simon’s mother in law. So, Why? How alike are healings and exorcisms?  And the word for city is really town\city, komepolis: ‘not just a select few, but the whole city’ is gathered for healing.  There is a broad human longing well represented here. It is our longing, too.  Jesus ‘comes forward/out’ in order to preach. Jesus and his opponents are engaged in battle over disputed territory.  Mark is the book of secret epiphanies.

We remember best what is most personal.  So, still, 20 centuries later, the most important aspect of pastoral ministry, the sermon aside, is every week the 25 visits one makes to listen to the faithful:  at work, in town, at home, in hospital, on the phone, on the screen, all.  Your job is threefold:  visit the people, visit the people, visit the people.

How I miss Peter Gomes.  I miss his voice, his presence, his grace.  But you remember his admonition about ministry.  You ask me the secret of my success in ministry at Harvard over forty years?  I give it to you in a single word: ubiquity.  I am everywhere.  I go everywhere.  I attend everything.  I enter every building and dorm.  I walk through every yard and hill and valley and molehill.  I go where I am invited.  I go where I am not invited.  I go where I am expected.  I go where I am not expected. Surprise!  It’s me.  You ask my secret?   I give it to you in a word: ubiquity.  I am ubiquitous.

Would you practice, enjoy and master ministry?  Remember that word.

Prevenient Grace:  Social

Said John Wesley:  And the whole city was gathered together at the door. O what a fair prospect was here!  Who could then have imagined that all these blossoms would die away without fruit?...Rising a great while before day...So did he labor for us both day and night...From this time they forsook their employ and constantly attended him.  Happy they who follow Christ at the first call. (Notes, loc. cit.)

Every now and then, upon a quiet morning or evening, we have an awareness that a lot more is going on, in and among and around us than we often recognize.
  
One leader from our area encouraged his colleagues: “The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, the dream shall never die”
 
We need such a social imagination:  a common faith with Dewey, a common ground with Thurman, a common hope with Hill, a commonwealth in the Bay State.  We need such a robust social imagination, a social holiness to yoke with a personal holiness.  Proust:  ‘How could I be expected to believe in a common origin uniting two names which had entered my consciousness, one through the low and shameful gate of experience, and the other by the golden gate of imagination?” (RTP, 676)
 
Our personal healing relies on our social healing.  The employment of one worker requires the health of the company, and beyond that the health of the community.  Listen to this leading voice from 1988: ‘we have vastly underestimated how deeply ingrained are the organizational and cultural rigidities that hamper our ability to execute…structures that repel top talent…we evaded relentless focus on quality’ (a GM executive)

The poor now receive some comment in our hearing, across our land.  This is to our benefit, though our lack of memory and the capacity to imagine what poverty feels like weakens our effort.  We need to recall our parents and grandparents accounts of potato soup during the depression.  We need to remember the reports on homeless children, living today in cars in central Florida.  We need to take to heart the account of the daughter of university professors now living as a single mother in Chicago and saying, ‘I have fallen out of the middle class’.  We need to think about the couple in western Maine without heating oil, depending on the electric stove and an income of $1,200 a month (NYT, 2/4/12)

Blessed St. Chrysostom could teach us about the poor: ours for them should be a just, useful, and suitable intercession…the rich need the poor:  the poor are necessary for the spiritual well being of the rich…your brother is more truly God’s temple than any church building…show a natural compassion…it will make you more humane for your own salvation…enjoy luxury in moderation, then give the rest away…some are sent out to be dependent upon the hospitality of others;  theirs is the ministry of the mendicant…the sign of the mendicant church calls forth generosity…serve the poor under all conditions and circumstances…the poor are the bearers of God’s spirit in a way that the rich are not…all goodness in the world is a reflection of God’s grace…

We might remember Border Parker Bowne:  ‘I am determined to protect the independence and variety of experience’.

And Martin Luther King:  Love: that force which all the great religions have known…somebody must have religion enough to cut hate off…redemptive good will toward all humankind…a love centric view is what we need (MLK)

As a nation we don’t learn from the past and we don’t plan for the future:  we are persons in community!  The person and who she is depends and the community and what it is.  We need to remember: Human dignity requires the love of ideals for their own sake, but nothing requires that the love will be requited (S Nieman).  For our most diffucult work and for most perilous projects (Niehdl?) we most need:  moral governance, transparency, self-critique, regard for the poor, and continuous leadership and group discussions.

Coda

Let us pray (a prayer from Vatican II):
We stand before you Holy Spirit
Conscious of our weakness and sinfulness
But aware that we gather in your name

Come to us, remain with us,
And enlighten our hearts.

Give us light and strength
To know your will,
Make it our own,
And to live it in our lives.

Guide us by your wisdom,
Support us by your power
For you are God.

You desire justice for all:
Enable us to uphold the rights of others;
Do not allow us to be misled by ignorance
Or corrupted by fear or favor.

Unite us to yourself in the bond of love
And keep us faithful to all that is true.

As we gather in your name
May we temper justice with love
So that all our decisions
May be pleasing to you
And be worthy of the reward
Promised to good and faithful servants.

You live and reign with the Father and the Son,
One God, forever and ever.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 02.5.2012 at 11:00 am