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Sunday
October 23

Where is Your Passion?

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to hear the sermon only.
Matthew 22: 34-46


 

The Passion of St. Matthew

 

Rolling down through the ages there cascades a gospel shout:

 

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

 

St. Matthew’s fiercest passion, hidden from you in this sermon for a moment in order to build some interest and suspense, wells up out of the scripture for these weeks in autumn 2011September. Matthew holds a very high view of the church, far higher than we expect, far higher than yours and mine, I could add. For Matthew, the church is empowered: with the means of lasting forgiveness with a mind for sound ethics, and especially with the real presence of Christ.

 

Matthew trusts this risen Christ and this voice of the risen Christ to free him to follow his bliss, to succumb to his passion. And what is Matthew’s passion? What passion pulses through the parchment of this popular gospel? What force of energy is on the “kiviev” on the lookout, on the wing, hanging ten, parachuting in, ready to climax here today? It is the passion of an evangelist who finds every blessed possible way to connect Jewish Jesus with a Greek world. It’s the passion of an evangelist who enlists an old missionary teaching tract (“Q”) to spread inspiration, truth, and joy. It is the passion of an evangelist who portrays your Savior among pagans, amid harlots, appended to the cross, about the resurrection work of compassion. It is the passion of an evangelist who sums up his Gospel this way: “Go make of all disciples”. Here is this autumn’s Gospel: the point of St Matthew the blessed evangelist is that he is an evangelist. The whole point of the gospel of St Matthew the evangelist is that he is an evangelist. Matthew’s passion? Seeking the lost! Expanding the communion of saints, the circle of divine love!

 

And yours?

 

Sunday is the day for that kind of question. Where does your deep gladness meet the world’s great need? (So, F Beuchner).

 

Matthew, the writer of our first gospel, exudes a passion. Others have caught it.

 

I turn the historians among you to the poetry of Dionysius the Aeropagite, the archaeological preservations of St Helena, the mystic fervor of St Theresa of Avila, the fecundity of Susanna Wesley, the marvelous zeal of Sojourner Truth, the compassion of Jane Addams, the tenacity of Frances Willard, the alacrity of your mothers and aunts.

 

Some men helped along the way too.

 

This same passion moved Wesley from the Anglican Tree, shipped Asbury out from Brittany, placed the Gospel in a far country, and saved the souls of you and me.

 

One oustanding fact: by far and very far, Matthew is the most frequently quoted gospel in the first three centuries of the church’s life.

 

You shall love the Lord your God
With all your heart, not just your head
With all your soul, not just your body
With all your mind, not just your brain

 

Others have summarized the commandments in various numbers and lists: Moses 631, David 11, Isaiah 6, Micah 3, Amos 2, Habbakuk 1, Rabbi Hillel also summarizes with Lev 18:19.

 

Our granddaughter was sheepish around me at age 3. She didn’t know how to address me. One day I left for work, and she did not see me go. After a while, she came to her grandmother, puzzled: Where is somebody? I am looking for somebody. Do you know where somebody is? You mean grandpa? (I finally became SOMEBODY!)

 

You are a person. Somebody. This is good news. You have a heart, a soul, a mind. You come to worship to remember that. These ancient words have serious contemporary meaning.

 

You have a heart.

 

Kardia—cardiac…Bauer: the seat of physical, spiritual, mental life, seat of the inner life…organ of enlightenment…center of will, of moral decisions, (THEN ONLY of emotions, wishes, desires, love)…something like conscience, dwelling place of the heavenly powers.

 

You have a soul.

 

Psyche—psyche…Bauer: soul, life…’impossible to draw hard and fast lines between the meanings of this many sided word’…earthly life, center of life that transcends the earthly…that which makes alive…what one loses or saves

 

You have a mind.

 


Dianoia—mind…Bauer: understanding, intelligence, mind, seat of reason, thinking disposition, purpose and plan, ‘gird up the loins of the mind’… and the verb: perceive, apprehend, understand, gain insight into, think, imagine…understand the commandments, the parables, heavenly things, what is invisible
 
(But not isxus—strength…Bauer: strength, power, might be in possession of one’s powers, be competent, able, have power, be mighty…Why did Matthew not keep strength, as Mark had it? Bultmann: The tradition has repressed the prophetic-apocalyptic character of the mission of Jesus in favor of his activity as a Rabbi. Matt.Jesus casts doubts on the veracity and value of the Davidic descent. Was Matthew a Gentile? He wrote in Greek. He bring the Kings to the nativity. He has much to say about kosher cleanliness, as novel and new. And here, he throws David under the bus.)

 

I know the taste—I have savored it before. I can recall the landscape—I have seen it before. I want you to come with me. It is a long way from here and many days journey, some at night, and some in the rain. There are mountains to ascend and rivers to ford. Some grasshoppers will look, for a time, like giants. It may take up to 40 years. You will feel like you are in a wilderness. I cannot do it for you and I will not do it to you. But I can do it with you.

 

But have you forgotten the love you had at first? Have you begun with the Spirit to end with the flesh? Hear the Gospel! St Matthew the evangelist, all this fall, will invite you to succumb to another passion, one you have not yet fully known.

 

Discover, careful now as you unwrap the gift, the pure joy of a passion for compassion, a desire, of the first water, to love the neighbor.

 

A Passionate Invitation

 

Where is your passion?

 

Aging it may be, brings the preacher to the point of having the temerity to offer any advice of any kind on anything. To know Christ is to know His benefits, said the reformers. Counting those benefits may be one of the joys of aging.

 

Parents today will tell you that aging can be bittersweet.

 

Like the day after engagement when you are told about registering for china and appliances for wedding gifts. You feel older. But I just wanted to get married! What is all this merchandizing?

 

Or when you turn thirty, from twenty nine. A day that will live in infamy, a day of darkness and not of light. Who may abide the day and its coming? It is like a refiner’s fire. Illness descends.

 

Like the decision to buy a van, and to sell a convertible. The shift from sports car to van or station wagon—need I say more? Is there a surer measure of aging?

 

Time flies—ah no. Time stays—we go.

 

Like when you watch a 3 hour movie and realize that the stars look to you like they are teenagers. I prepare you for the pain.

 

Or when you find yourself asking people to repeat what they have said because you did not quite hear them. “Could you repeat that?” “Would you care to repeat what you said?” “Excuse me, but, huh?”

 

Or, on more serious note, you begin to feel the onset of age as you see that the great reforms you had hoped might occur in your own lifetime lie still buried under heaps of sloth and falsehood and pride.

 

Blame some aging for the urge to advise.

 

And the sheer beauty of a brief moment, a weekend, when the generations meet, for a moment. Parent’s Weekend.

 

Over donuts, on a tour, listening to two choirs and an organ, and walking the campus, I saw parents and children: some arm in arm, some playing and racing each other, some enjoying the sunshine and boats, some quiet, gentle in respect for the moment.

 

It made we wonder when the last day was that I lifted up my daughter in my arms—she who now has a daughter of her own. It made me wish I could remember the last day, the last time I lifted my son from sidewalk to shoulders—he who now lifts his own child so. It made me wish I had noticed, and recorded the last time our youngest was small enough and I strong enough to lift him and hug him—he who now can lift and hold me.

 

That is sacramental moment. But we don’t know when it comes, and we don’t record when it goes by. We expect, I suspect, that there will be another.

 

So, with time’s winged chariot hastening on, a word or two of interpretation, of advice. In loco parentis.

 

You can discover your passion in college, if you will remember six words. (They may just apply to life, eternal life, real life in life, as well…)

 

Study.

 

An often underrated part of the student life is found in this verb. One reasonable way to undercover your passion in college is to study. Force yourself. Train yourself. Flog yourself. And when all else fails, talk with a mentor. Find a way to use your time wisely. As George Fox told the Quakers, quoting Hebrews, “Prize your time now you have it, for God is a consuming fire”. If possible, work some study time into your schedule every day. The benefits will accrue immediately. Your parents will be pleased. Your grades will be better. You will be happier with yourself. And, you may graduate!

 

Les nearly failed his way out of Oswego State 30 years ago. He had a wonderful time and mad probation mid-way through the fall semester. Then he met Diane, bowling. They had such fun. It made all his other revelries pale. Friendship and humour and love and joy—and she was a good bowler too. After a long and late Friday night, Les asked to see her again on Saturday. “Sure”, she replied, “we can study together. One night a week of parties is plenty.” Les walked home on cloud nine, waiting for tomorrow, certain she was kidding. But 8pm Saturday night came and Les walked along Lake Ontario toward the dorm. He was dressed for the evening, but Diane met him at the door in jeans with a stack of books. So Les went to the library for the first time that semester. He squeaked by the fall and spring, picked up speed and graduated with his class. Diane and he were married just before he went off to Princeton seminary. There half his teachers asked him if he was born again and the other half if he was in tune with the universe. Les will tell you, “I had not realized how big a part of college studying can be, if you let it.”

 

Let the main thing be the main thing.

 

Walk.

 

Silence is rare in dorms. Students, like Jesus sitting in the temple, are beginning to think on their own, but they need time to do so. One dorm advisor who worked in a 600 student dorm made just one suggestion at orientation: take a walk every day. Thinking is the process of integrating information and insight, experience and judgment. To think you need time and freedom to step back from the 599 others and their stereos. Otherwise the mental muscle will not develop, and you will go too easily with the flow.

 

Late one night a sophomore knocked at her resident advisor’s door. She was the most socially active girl on her hall—soccer, sorority, floor meetings, ski club, marching band and, even, classes. The advisor was at first surprised to hear her whisper: “I’m so lonely here.” Fleeing her own becoming person, she had grown weary. At last she stopped and faced her fear. Said her advisor, “You are lonely because, now, you are alone. Stop running from yourself. Every afternoon walk up the hill to the Ag Quad and back. Twenty minutes of pure solitude and you won’t feel so lonely.” She quoted Pascal about sitting alone, too.

 

In walking—we have not spoken of prayer yet—you can hear your soul grow and change, remember and foresee. You can overhear what others are too busy or noisy to hear, even the deeper truth of their own lives. And behold I bring you glad tidings of great joy: Boston is pedestrian heaven; with some good walking shoes you can acquaint yourself with America’s most historic city, Boston, the cradle of liberty.

 

No!

 

Here is another underrated word.

 

But like a river needs banks, a life needs limits. Otherwise the current of Being spills out all over the plain and there is no direction, no force, no power to the river. You just drift and glide. A good life needs boundaries, river banks. When parents sandbag, the responsibility lies elsewhere. Amos says we are to hate evil as well as love good. You will define yourself as much by what you oppose as by what you affirm.

 

Not every body of water is fit for swimming, for you.

 

Every “no” is an upside down “yes”.

 

If you say no to steady drunkenness it is for the joy of bodily health.
If you say no to religious discord you point out the path of future peace.
If you say no to $250 sneakers it is an affirmation of things invisible.
If you say no to nuclear arsenals it is too affirm the sacredness of life.
If you say no to flagrant abuse of the gifts of sexuality, you are trying to affirm covenant and integrity and future happiness.
If you say no to a life focused only on obtaining, you make room for enjoyment and love.

 

Every no hides a yes, and you can be negatively positive.

 

We all find some of our passion by finding our “no’s” and sticking to them.

 

Fun.

 

Have some fun along the way.

 

One depressed junior spoke to his teacher who simply asked him what he liked to do for fun. The list was made. Do you do any of these things regularly. No, I am too busy. The teacher sentenced the junior to a daily game of bridge, two basketball games a week, several monthly movies, and poptarts every morning for breakfast. He sentenced the student to use his own list. All work and no play makes Bob a dull boy.

 

Explore.

 

Try not to explore in ways you will regret, for regret is the forecourt of hell. But explore nonetheless!

 

Three sorts of exploration make good sense in college.

 

One is travel, far and wide, national and international.
Another is into the past, mainly by reading.
A third is across cultures.

 

Geography, history and culture are more open to you now than they may ever be again. As is theology.

 

RAH: No one has ever seen God. God is not our own best self writ large across the sky. God is not a clockmaker, a designer, a timekeeper, a being among other beings, a cause of causes, a definition of definitions. No one has ever seen God. God is other, people. Let’s make sure we put in the comma. Rationality is good, especially by comparison to irrationality; efficiency is good, especially by comparison with inefficiency. And then? And so? And yes? So what? In its lifetime the goose looks down upon the lowly mushroom, and lords it over the lowly mushroom, but in the end, come mealtime, they are both served up on the same platter.

 

Explore, with the single aim of finding what is good, of integrating this good into your vision of the truth. “Liberal education flourishes when it prepares the way for a discussion of a unified view of nature and man’s place in it.” (A. Bloom).

 

Friend.

 

Last, not least, open yourself to real friendship.

 

The friendships formed in these years will last a lifetime if they are well Planted and watered. The freedoms and struggles of that first real experience of independence can also provide the nutrients for the growth of real friendships. In friendship, as in love, there is terror and mystery.

 

Several stages are visible in the growth of a friendship.

 

Deciding when and how and who leads and follows.
Learning to give up something for another.
Making a really big life mistake.
Talking about making a really big life mistake.
Disagreeing.
Encouraging.
Parting.

 

Chapters in a book.

 

Friendships developed now can last a lifetime. One graduate of Smith College in the year 1914 corresponded through the 1980’s monthly with her college roomate. Illness and age prevented visits, but the letters still came and went.

 

Friendships developed now can transform.

 

I remember fondly the story of Jack Bruen, Colgate University basketball coach. Bruen died at 48. We have knew his kindness to our children over many summers of basketball camp. Said one former student, “Besides my father, his is the only shoulder I’ve ever cried on”. Read some books in college, but read the human documents too. They will change your life.

 

For the best of them, through friendship, will recall the spirit of Jesus, whom we affirm, this day, as
our transforming friend. The Lord who calls us up to love and calls us out to our own truest passion.

 

Study. Walk. Say No. Have Fun. Explore. Befriend.

 

You will find your passion, your calling, your voice, your vocation, your ownmost self. You will Be Somebody.

 

Some ways to find passion in college. And in life. And “in God”. Lao Tse: The reality of the vessel is the shape of the void within.

 

Where is your passion?

 

Sursum Corda:

 

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
~The Reverend Dr. Robert Allan Hill,
Dean of Marsh Chapel

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 10.23.2011 at 11:00 am

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Sunday
October 16

An Embraceable Variant

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to hear the sermon only.
John 17: 1-11

1. Summit

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

You love all the Gospels. One there is though which from antiquity has been known as the sublime, the spiritual gospel. We shall ascend today, on ascension Sunday, to the craggy paths and rarified air of the Fourth Gospel.
High above the rest of John, above the seven signs to begin and above the passion and resurrection to end, there lies the strangest moonscape in the Scripture, and so in all literature, and so in life. I mean chapters 13-17. We are about to place our homiletical flag on the very summit, the highest of high peaks, the textual Matterhorn, Everest, Mount Washington, Pike’s Peak: John 17.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

The community of the beloved disciple knew about disappointment. After three generations, and some, the community had awaited the primitive hope of the church to be realized. They awaited the return of Christ. The resurrection of the dead from their graves. The end of time. The apocalypse of God. It did not come. He did not come, at least not in the way once hoped. I find it the most remarkable experience of the New Testament that John, rather than being lost in a sea of disheartening failure, in the very eye of his most stormy theological hurricane, found freedom. In disappointment he found freedom.
The community of the beloved disciple knew about dislocation. They had lost their family of origin. They were sent out from their mother religion. The church that wrote John had been thrown out of the synagogue. The life they grew up with had cast them out. It took three generations for them to grasp the joyful grace in dislocation. Count it all grace, brethren, when various dislocations beset you!

 

Our time has also known dislocation aplenty. We should hunt more for grace in the financial dislocation that is endemic in our time. I have yet to serve a church that was not financially challenged. Every religious institution in our region—church, conference, seminary, campground, school, all—is under water in financial terms. More: middle aged families are sinking into the quicksand of debt. They are buying groceries on credit. Debt is work undone. Savings is work done. We have work to do.

 

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

 

In our time, we are bidding a reluctant farewell to God. To a certain, junior, perception of God. God reigns. This we affirm with the church militant and triumphant. But God’s way among us is away from us. He is risen. He is not here. See the place where they laid him. The measures of freedom and grace given to us become real possibilities, real freedom and real grace, only when we have the gracious freedom to decide for faith. The same is magnificently true of love. This is the message of John, at the end.

 

The departure of the Christ makes space for love. As I have loved you, so you also ought to love one another.

 

3. Brother John

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Freedom

 

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

At a wedding dinner this month, in a beautiful room, with fine food and gracious hosts, gay and straight danced the night away together, gay and straight. It was right, normal, easy, organic, natural—the way things are meant to be. The embodiment of the embraceable variant.

 

Grace

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

All of the lastingly good features of my life have come through grace in dislocation: name in baptism, faith in confirmation, community in eucharist, partnership in marriage, work in ordination, love in pardon, and hope in Christ for this life and the next.

 

Love

 

Once to every man and nation
Comes the moment to decide
In the strife of truth with falsehood
For the good or evil side
Some great cause, God’s new Messiah
Offering each the bloom or blight
And the choice goes by forever
Twixt that darkness and that light
New occasions teach new duties
Time makes ancient good uncouth
One must upward still and onward
Who would keep abreast of truth

 

Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour.” While we may shed the inherited demonic mythology in the verse, knowing and honoring its origins in the distant past, we nonetheless fully recognize the spiritual truth here: we know not what a day may bring, but only that the hour for serving is always present. Our dear Springfield mother, caught in a tornado, covering her daughter and so saving her in a bathtub, knew not what a day would bring, but only the presence of mind to save her beloved. 1 John 4: 7-12 captures love divinely: Beloved let us love one another…

 

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

 

1 O LORD, thou hast searched me and known me!
2 Thou knowest when I sit down and when I rise up; thou discernest my thoughts from afar.
3 Thou searchest out my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways.
4 Even before a word is on my tongue, lo, O LORD, thou knowest it altogether.
5 Thou dost beset me behind and before, and layest thy hand upon me.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain it.
7 Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
8 If I ascend to heaven, thou art there! If I make my bed in Sheol, thou art there!
9 If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
10 even there thy hand shall lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.
11 If I say, "Let only darkness cover me, and the light about me be night,"
12 even the darkness is not dark to thee, the night is bright as the day; for darkness is as light with Thee"

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 10.16.2011 at 11:00 am

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Sunday
October 9

Let Love Be Genuine

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to hear the sermon only.
Matthew 22: 1-14

To stand in a beloved familiar pulpit evokes, must evoke, some sense of humility rooted in pride, some sense of understanding rooted in wonder, some sense of life rooted in an awareness of death, some sense of love rooted in need.

Especially following the six Sundays since August, it feels good to pause and be thankful for your observance of the Lord’s Day. On August 28 there was a hurricane! Then matriculation, first for Chapel and then for University, on September 4. We engaged in a full day of observances on 9/11. Then came a special Thurman Sunday here, and a visit to the Congregational pulpit in Concord MA, the next Sunday. September 25 brought us the beauty of Bach and a farewell to our ‘shepherdess’, as she identified herself, our director of hospitality, Elizabeth Fomby Hall. Together we celebrated World Communion last Sunday. Much has befallen us in these three fortnights.

We also have tried to absorb our Yankee shared grief. You know the reference I make here. Ecclesiastes is right that the end of things is better than their beginning, unless you are referring to a baseball season like this one. Ecclesiastes certainly we feel was right to say ‘the race is not always to the swift…’ . A hundred year old poem came forcefully to mind…(Casey at the Bat).

After all of this, it is good to stand for a moment, to be thankful, to stand up in a venerable, historic, significant, beloved, familiar pulpit.

It is good also to stand in earshot of a well-worn text. To ‘stand in’ a beloved familiar text evokes, must evoke, some sense of humility rooted in pride, some sense of understanding rooted in wonder, some sense of life grounded in a premonition of death, some longing for love, genuine love, rooted in the struggle, acedia, ennui, loneliness of need. Romans 12: 9, and verses following, is a beloved familiar passage now to be opened, divided, interpreted aboard the great ship Marsh Chapel, and from—as Father Maple would have it—the ship’s promontory, bow, beak, nose—its pulpit. The pulpit rules the world, said he, in the opening pages of Moby Dick. We turn to Romans 12: 9-13.

We have an inserted copy for you to take home with you.

A bright sun dappled summer day can cut the haze of life. And so can a hurricane. This baker’s dozen commands can, like sun or wind, cut the haze of experience. Here, here, here! Here is how you do it, says the apostle to the gentiles, who is more regularly given to pastoral theology than practical advice.

Two years ago at the December University Leadership Council, a formal recommendation to create a PhD in Practical Theology was affirmed. Following the vote, a member asked, in good December spirit: “What may I ask would impractical theology be?”. Laughter subsided, our President said, ‘We will ask Dean Hill for a response.” I said, “I’m not sure, but Lessons and Carols is Friday evening, and I hope you all will come.”

Paul leaves speculative, less practical theology and jarringly tells us how to live. You would not expect such from one who traced our cosmic condition (our sin) from creation through conscience, in Romans 1 and 2. Impractical theology, there, though most treasured and precious. You would not expect such from the Apostle who poured out the great watershed (our salvation) from Christ to cross in Romans 3-5. Impractical theology there, though pearls, great in price, field hidden. Nor would you expect the 13 lightening bolts of 12:9 from the epileptic, tee totaling, bachelor, tent making, spitfire—what a friend we have in Paul—who unveiled Spirit (Holy Spirit) in the freedom of grace, in Romans 6-8, or who wept and pouted and conjured and pleaded about his own extended religious family, Judaism, in Romans 9-11. Impractical theology, there and there, though the high water mark of all his writing, a Spirit interceding for weakness, speaking of genuine love and honest need.

Imagine your shock. Not sin, not salvation, not Spirit nor synagogue, come 12:9. Rather, some utterly practical (in the normal English usage) theology, utterly applicable theology.

People—you?—will ask now and then for a basic primer, a summary of Christianity—faith, hope and love. Over 35 years of ministry I have often said either, ‘There is none—you would as hunt for a cliff notes version of dying, or growing up, or falling in love, or remembering the dreams of youth, or burying your spouse on a cold November day, or of anticipating and enduring child birth. You live it, then you learn it”; or, more practically, I have said, ‘Try C S Lewis, Mere Christianity, or N T Wright, Simply Christian, or Leslie Weatherhead, The Christian Agnostic, or The Gospel of Luke, or D Bonhoeffer, Cost of Discipleship, or Augustine of Hippo, Confessions or J Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, or Dag Hammarskjold, Markings, or Karl Barth, Epistle to the Romans, or P Tillich, You Are Accepted, or R Niebuhr, Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic or my own Village Green. The first answer is too little, and the second is too much.

Oye! Oye! The Pauline 13 may be your best—not too little, not too much—threshold, liminal line, front door in response to the question, ‘can you help me get going on this faith business?’ What does it mean to be a person of faith?

It means to let love be genuine.

Let love be genuine.

All these, note well, are plural directives. You all. All you all. The command in Genesis ‘be fruitful, multiply, fill the whole earth” is not an individual command, meant for you and your household alone. Your family does not need to do so alone, though Samuels and Susanna Wesley certainly did their double dozen best. It is a communal command. You all. All of you. In fact, given our limitations (I am being kind), there is no way for us to accomplish such commands on our own. Let love be genuine. Unhypocritical, in fact. Unfeigned, guileless, hearty, real, reflecting God’s own creative, salvific, reconciling love. God gives us life, eternal life, and forgiveness: ‘to create us, to draw us to eschatological consummation, and when we have alienated ourselves from God to reconcile us’ (D Kelsey).

Not all love is, genuine that is. Not all from the heart, nor true, nor durable, nor real. So one hymn we used to sing made reference to ‘by the light of burning martyrs’.

What does it mean to live in faith?

Hate what is evil.

It means to hate what is evil. Notice the firmness in Paul’s flexibility, the vagueness in his certainty. In sin, salvation, spirit he has now confidence that –for our time—we shall know the place of hatred and the outline of evil. He gives no list, he makes no single sculpture image, his art is not representational or personificational, he does not limit or quench. How would he know what 2011 looks like? He trusts in the freedom of birds in flight, the gospel, the grace and liberty of genuine love to guide us. He trusts Spirit to bring salvation out of sin. Implied here, b
y the flock of birds in flight, his verbal memorial to love, is this, from a hymn we used to sing: new occasions teach new duties. Not all of student social life is good. Some is, like the public garden. Some is not, like the Charles river. We are free, nay called, nay called out, in our own setting, to ‘hate what is evil’. I think of Amos: ‘I hate, despise your feasts. Let justice roll down like waters.’

Can you get me going on this way of faith? What does it mean?

Hold fast to what is good.

It means to hold fast what is good. Notice the firmness in Paul’s flexibility, the vagueness of his certainty. As David Kelsey reminds us: life is neither evil, nor a problem, nor a predicament. Life is good, and we are living it on ‘borrowed breath’. Of one scriptural admonition (like perhaps the coarse ending of our lesson, ‘heaping coals of fire’), K Stendahl once said, ‘It may be the word of God, but it is not the word of God for me’. We used to sing together, ‘time makes ancient good uncouth.'

Love one another with mutual affection.

It means to love one another with mutual affection, brotherly affection, a bond that is fraternal, sororial, militant if not military, visceral. And reciprocal. Real affection, genuine love, is reciprocal, mutual. Affection wherein one party has all the votes and the other pays all the bills (note here, a subtle reference in my own Methodist denomination to the current bad marriage between American bill payers and African voters) is not affectionate. It is not loving. It is affectionless, affected, not effective. Phil Wogaman identified last week the three biggest issues of our time as poverty and unemployment, interfaith dialogue, and religious legalism. He concluded: ‘whatever your issue, when you die, I want to find your body there’.

Outdo one another in showing honor.

It means—living by the faithfulness of Christ that is—to outdo one another in showing honor. From 1500 BC the Hindu Vedas were transmitted orally, father to son, with precise perfection, as Dr Doniger recently reminded us. Creative generosity, happy hospitality, continuously counting others better—here is our way. Forebear one another in love. You rule the roost. Good for you. Your wife rule the rooster. Light, salt, sheep: people need to see your giving hands, taste the spice of your commendation, and expect a willingness to be shorn. As our own Ed McClure put it his week: ‘We need balance. We need to balance what I want and what you want with what we need….If you don’t know how to talk to people you will need a stick or a gun.’

Never lag in zeal.

To live by faith means not to lag in zeal, to be ardent in Spirit, and to serve the Lord. These three dicta largely place before you the directive to get yourself out of bed, into some relatively clean clothes, over to Marsh Chapel, and into a seat in the fourth pew, come Sunday. A walk in the country or on the beach is good, but not good enough. With Thoreau, you may see: ‘I walk toward one of our ponds but what signifies the beauty of nature when men are base? Who can be serene in a country where both the rulers and the ruled are without principle? The remembrance of my country spoils my walk.’ Turning on the radio is good, but not good enough. People have so many reasons not to go to church. They range from the hilarious to the pitiful. But, on a Sunday when there is not another hurricane, think about this. Your sister here needs you, needs to see you, needs to lean on the encouraging support of your zealous passion. Your brother here needs the example of your ardent spirit. Serve the Lord! His service is perfect freedom and the worship service is all of one hour. We can become so lackadaisical about worship: and I am not only speaking about theologians ()! In a lifetime you have 4,000 Sunday, 1,500 haircuts, 60 income tax returns, and 529, 600 minutes a year (42, 368,000 total minutes). Come Sunday: zeal, spirit, service, baby!

Be ardent in spirit.

It orders your life. As Steve Jobs recommended, ‘simplify, simplify, simplify’.

Serve the Lord.

And here, we may touch the hem of Matthew’s dark parable, too. Again this week we hear (22: 1-14) a dark, baffling parable. Here is outpouring, divine generosity. Here is unawareness and resistance. Here is divine righteous indignation, and harsh judgment. Here is repeated outpouring, divine generosity. Here is speechless lack of awareness. Here is a riddle about the called and the chosen. You may read Luke’s lighter, happier version this afternoon. But Matthew has in his mind the culmination of the Jewish War in 70ad, and the destruction in that year of Jerusalem. Matthew has in his mind the tepid response to Jesus, certainly among his own people, and also in the wider Roman world, whose first century writes record not a single clear mention of Jesus. Matthew has in his mind the need for self protection in the late first century church, following the persecutions of Domitian. Matthew expresses an odium theologicum here, not unlike that of the Fourth Gospel. All this he marshalls to emphasize the importance of repentance and righteousness. Ardent, zealous service, he would affirm, with Paul.

Rejoice in your hope.

Faith means to ride the waves in community of hope and pain and prayer. Hope carries us beyond pain through prayer. We will gather for a wedding today, remembering all the sardonic lines from Thornton Wilder about weddings (‘once in a thousand times it’s interesting…a man looks pretty small at a wedding’) His sardonic preacher nonetheless solemnizes a marriage in great hope. It is an hour of great hope. This afternoon our wedding prayer will have us say: ‘Give them such fulfillment of their mutual affection that they may reach out in love and concern for others’.

Be patient in tribulation.

Patient here is longsuffering endurance. It is a hard recognition that life includes inexplicable hurt. Such pain drives us hard back onto hope in prayer. Prayer brings us up, out and forward through it all, whether in hope or pain. Faith is faith especially when it is all you have left. Some of us today are driven had back through our pain onto hope in prayer. With adorable beauty, nonetheless, the combination of Voltaire and Bernstein in ‘Candide’ brought us up short: ‘To give birth in anguish to miserable and sinful children, who will suffer everything themselves and make everyone else suffer! What! To experience every sickness, feel every grief, die in anguish, and then in recompense be roasted for eternity! This fate is really the best thing possible?’ (Voltaire, 1764). When we have hope, we celebrate, together. When we have pain, we endure, together.

Be constant in prayer.

Be constant, steady, regular, punctual, reliable, disciplined in prayer. Tutu wrote: ‘Goodness is stronger than evil. Love is stronger than hate. Light is stronger than darkness. Life is stronger than death. Victory is ours through him who loves us.’ How do I get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice…

Contribute to the needs of the saints
.

The Apostle reserves the two toughest, communal, challenges for last, one about money and one about time. Fellowship, partner with the needs of the community. I will take one tithing Christian over every 100 of the born again variety. I will take one Christian who remembers the church or some form of shared service in her will over every stadium full of politically praying types. Maybe you would agree to the desire for less hat and more cattle. Wouldn’t be interesting to know what our potential Presidential candidates actually gave away last year? You cannot love what you do not support. Contribute to the needs, not the irresponsibility but the needs of the community, at 10%. Our BU business and hospitality schools serve the same ends: the nature of community. Leaders of both, I am proud to say, lead also in Marsh Chapel. You may wonder: if we can send (and pay) men and women in uniform to Iraq, why can we not send (and pay) women and men to schools, parks, road repairs, urban neighborhoods, and hospitals—why is there no WPA today when 14 million need work? Isn’t this question what is gurgling under the street encampments here and elsewhere?

Practice hospitality.

Hospitality is to time what generosity is to money. Hospitality is how you spend your time (such an interesting phrase in our mother tongue, to spend time). Hospitality—making the bed of friendship, cooking the meal of companionship, pouring the bath of empathy, cleaning the linens of suffering, embracing those completing a portion of the whole of the journey of life—“Welcome home! How was the trip! Let’s see your photos!”. Hospitality is to time what generosity is to money. Practice. Practice! You will get better with time. Our BU Dean of Hospitality identifies six touchstones in this realm: be both a customer and an owner, both an innkeeper and an innovator, both a servant and a leader.

Will you let love be genuine? Are we lovers anymore? Will you look for love, genuine love, this week?

If this were a Methodist revival, I would end by lining this out like a hymn, and having you sing. If this were the black church, I would call you to response in call and response, response and call, in rhythm and rhyme, rhyme and rhythm. If this were Fenway Park I would start the wave or Sweet Caroline. But this is Marsh Chapel, which in one sense is none of these, and in another sense is something like all of them together. So I will ask you, as a manner of encouraging our memory, just to repeat after me:

Let love be genuine

Hate what is evil

Hold fast to what is good

Love one another with mutual affection

Outdo one another in showing honor

Never lag in zeal

Be ardent in spirit

Serve the Lord

Rejoice in your hope

Be patient in tribulation

Be constant in prayer

Contribute to the needs of the saints

Practice hospitality

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 10.9.2011 at 11:00 am

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Sunday
October 2

Grace Note

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to hear the sermon only.
Matthew 21: 33-46

Jesus meets us today to challenge us, to confront us and to inspire us with the hope of something new. Faith in Him, and love for his community, and a life directed toward a final hope—all these lie before us in this holy meal.

Some years ago, in our first year after seminary, a very small act of mercy on the part of a colleague began to show me the power of the new life, found in the doing of the faith. As the psychologists say, the heart follows the hand.

We had only been married a couple of years, and had more recently entered the working world. Some of you are there today, others remember those days, others expect them, one day. Our little house was gradually filling up, or being filled up, with the materials of early married life. A car in the driveway. Clothing on the line out back. A crib. Dog food bowls in the kitchen corner. Wedding and family photographs in new albums. It all happens so quickly! Marriage, degree, job, house, child, car, dog, clothes. All of a sudden. It hardly seems real, or possible.

One day during this period in our early life together there came a most surprising bit of information. This news was delivered in the course of a simple supper, as the dog barked and the drying clothes flapped in the breeze and the baby upstairs cried on to sleep. The information was in sum a medical bulletin, one of those little messages from doctor to patient to patient’s family, an insignificant bit of news as far as the televised world news was concerned, just another report, and a report on a lab report. Soon there would be another mouth to feed. What excitement! It hardly seemed possible, or real.

But reality did set in.

And reality did set in, was ushered in, not surprisingly, by means of the checkbook. Ah the checkbook. Stern reminder of the limits of life. Unerring measurer of the various pursuits of happiness. Implacable judge of the ways of humans. The checkbook. Clothes, dog, child, car and all finally had to be paid for, from one source. Reality did finally set in. Both Paul and Matthew, by the way, in their own way, are trying to convey a sense of reality.

So it was in this period of early marriage, the period of judgment by way of the checkbook, when, I recall, a great kindness was done.

Among many other unmanageable expenses, our car needed new brake pads. I did check to see the price that would be charged to have them installed. I wondered how we would afford it. Which is where things sat on a late summer evening, in a small cottage-like parsonage, nearby one of the great Finger Lakes, with the clothes flapping on the line, the dog well fed and ill behaved, and the baby crying to the moon above.

That evening I met with a new neighboring minister, a man about 15 years older than I. We did our work, and then set to talking about life in general. The topic of cars and brakes and brake pads somehow wiggled to the surface, and with it all the manifold cares and worries of this life, about which the Scripture says, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof”. This fellow minister then suggested that the next day, early in the morning, I bring the car to his house, where and when he would teach me how to change the brake pads on the car. This we did together. In the course of the morning we also talked through various strategies open to young married couples to avoid the stern, grim judgment of the checkbook. There are ways, it turned out, and he had been there.

I know this backwater tale of an unimportant act of kindness done in 1980 hardly constitutes earthshaking news. I guess it is just a matter of vineyards and harvest, of the prize of the upward call, of the way we ought to be, as people of faith. Such a recollection of such a simple generosity hardly seems worth mention.

And yet it meant a great deal, and hovers in memory, years later, as the very grace of God. Here is one doing what he and we ought to have done. Here is an act of compassion. Here is an act of mercy. Here is something new. Here is what Emerson meant: “virtue alone creates something new”.

Today, World Communion Sunday, I sense a hunger, a sharp hunger in the souls of women and men from all different walks of life. It is a hunger that does not abate with the ministrations of all that position and fortune and plenty can provide. It is a hunger that reaches for God. It is a hunger for God. There is a hunger for God today in the souls of men and women that will not be filled by anything else. It will not be filled by anything other than God. Finally, the hunger and thirst for righteousness—and I believe there is such a fine, fine hunger in your own heart—can only be filled by God, by love, by freedom, by grace. By the faith of Jesus Christ and by love for his community and by a life directed toward a final hope of glory.

We can and will proclaim this hunger from this pulpit. We can and will announce God’s gracious love from this pulpit. But in the end you will find it, or it will find you, in your own experience. One by one. Two by two. You are likely to be shocked to faith by no more than one real encounter with one real act of mercy at the hand of one real person. Or, said negatively, as dour Matthew might, if one real kindness does not point you to new life, will a hundred, or will a thousand? One grace note, rung and heard, is all it takes.

Here is the vineyard, still. Here is the wine press, still. Here is the harvest, coming still. There comes a time when our time is no longer our own. So today: Let your own hand guide your own heart. Act in kindness and you will find that you are kinder too. Act in generosity and you will discover a generous spirit within. Act with faith and faith will find you. Your heart will follow your hand.

We come to meet Jesus who meets us in deed, now, not only in word. He meets us in the central moment of life, the full giving that is real loving, the real loving that is full giving, the offering of life for life.

Are we ready to receive Him today?


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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 10.2.2011 at 11:00 am

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Sunday
September 25

A Change of Heart

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to hear the sermon only.
Matthew 21: 23-32

Bob

This Sunday we are confronted by one of the most endearing, and most alluring little parables in all of Scripture, maybe in all of literature.

How it fits with the rest of the lesson is not entirely clear, at least to me. Nor is it clear how the lesson in Matthew fits with the other assigned readings for the day, Philippians and our Psalm and so on. Dark sayings from of old, indeed.

But the collision of order and answer, of beckoning and response, has to haunt.

A man has two sons. Already, the plot is thickened, with rivalry, with competition, with family intrigue.

Then the preaching of the gospel occurs. The vintner—I prefer vintner to father here—tells something, it is a statement that beckons, not formally a question nor even an invitation. Simply a command. Go.

He commands. Schweitzer would be pleased.

Go and live, go and work, go and love, go and prune, go and pluck, go and tend your garden. Go. Up and Go!

Every day and every Lord’s Day, the word arises to us, singeing our nostrils. Go. The day accosts us with a challenge to the good, to a choice if Dewey is right between goods.

You know, I have a feeling about a feeling abroad.

I think some of us sometimes have the sinking feeling that things are not going so well, that things are drifting or worse.

We see war wounds that do not heal.

We see environmental gashes that we rue, ice melting, melting melting

We watch another attempt to bring expanding gambling to the commonwealth and wonder, is this the best we can do, the our selves at our best?

We see an economy that leaves out, as James Walters said this week, 14 million people, the equivalent of the total population of New England. Maybe twice that when you get everybody counted.

We see a beloved country and respected government that cant seem to organize a two car funeral.

And on top of it all, the Red Sox are not always winning.

You know, I think there is an ennui abroad, a languishing in doldrums of pervasive malaise.

So when the word comes. Come Sunday: Up! Go! You! Work! Vineyard! Today!

We pull up the covers and sleep in, or call in sick, or drive in late, or just are not really sure we can do anything about all these irremediable driftings.

What difference does it make what I do?

So, says son one, I will not go. Son two doesn’t go, he just evades, the compliant not the defiant one. He says Yes Mrs Cleaver, but he doesn’t go. He never meant to. He just doesn’t like conflict. Well who does?

But the first son has a change of heart.

Now I find this so encouraging, heartening, lovely. Up front, he says, no way, no way Jose. He is defiant, and willing to say it. I don’t think so, Mr. Vintner, Mr Father, Mr Voice, Mr Life, Mr. Daytime. I think I will just turn in my ticket. Thanks but no thanks.

But he has a change of heart.

Will you notice with me that the main thing we want to know is not told to us?

We want to know, what changed the heart? What did the trick? What sealed the deal? What moved the lever?

And the Bible says, ‘Address Not Known’. In other words, it is shrouded in mystery.

So we are a little free to speculate, and I plan to take that freedom in full today. We do not know what brought the change of heart.

But I know what can be a change of heart.

Beauty.

An experience of the beautiful can change the heart. A thank you note. A sunrise. A poem. A violin sonata. A student writing on our memory board, ‘I saw the planes hit from my fourth grade window’—there is a beauty in that memory of innocence lost.

When you come to church on Sunday, you may be saying no. NO I WILL NOT. You may be not willing to have any change, let alone a change of heart. It is in that very condition that John Wesley went in the rain to Aldersgate Street. NO I WILL NOT GO TO THE VINEYARD, not today baby.

But…

You get to church and…

Beauty.

Sun through stained glass. Organ meditation. Word fitly spoken. Bach.

Music can say things that words never can.

Beauty is like that.

Scott

Actually, Dean Hill, Bach suggests his own answer for the source of Son Number One’s change of heart. With the spirit of beauty, perhaps it was indeed ‘a spirit’ of Beauty – the angels encamped about Son Number One. Angels – the very picture of beauty!

Today’s cantata celebrates these spirits of Beauty and Light – the Angels. Originally written for the Festival of St. Michael, celebrated on September 29th, our cantata today commemorates the victory of Michael, the arch-angel, over Satan as depicted in Revelation. The first movement brims with joyful celebration complete with trumpets and timpani, in a light dance style. Any jagged depictions of the battle are replaced by the brilliance of the celebration. Here, there are no fugues or demanding complexities – we hear the voice of Bach’s finest expressions of jubilation.

As the cantata proceeds, Bach’s takes the turns we now anticipate – ‘We acknowledge and celebrate the great things the Lord has brought to pass’, and we now mark the ways in which the Lord continues to work on our behalf in our living, in our working, in our sleeping, in our loving, and, yes, in our departing. The central aria of the cantata – ‘Gottes Engel weichen nie’ / God’s Angels never retreat – depicts these airy beings as they watch over our every need, preventing us from danger and temptation. Notice the lightness of the string writing, and the angelic voice of soprano Margot Rood. The second half of the cantata reminds us that in our departing, God’s angels will usher us to Abraham’s bosom, just as he did with Elijah and his fiery chariot. Bach is always teaching us a Bible lesson! Our dependence on the angels becomes clearer in the final duet, ‘Seid wachsam ihr heiligen Wächter’/ ‘Be vigilant, you holy watchman’. The bassoon takes the role of the lonely watchman in his nightly rounds, protecting us from Satan’s snare. The Cantata concludes with the famous chorale, Herzlich lieb, which some Marsh Chapel congregants will recognize as the chorale that concludes the St John Passion. In the Chorale, God’s angels usher us to Heaven when we meet our end – ever present, and ever vigilant.

Who can tell the source of beauty behind Son Number One’s change of heart? Perhaps God’s Angels, or perhaps as Lincoln said, ‘the better angels of our nature.’ Or perhaps it’s all the same – a shared and common beauty, ready and available.

Bob

You know, sometimes, we come saying no and leave saying yes.

What changes the heart?

What pierces, transforms, moves the heart?

Beauty does.

It does.

It says, whispers, reminds:

There are a lot of things wrong. But there are a lot of things right. Somebody wrote this cantata—sheer beauty. Someone practiced and taught it---sheer beauty. Someone sang it and played it—sheer beauty. And here I am. I heard it. I heard it.

Music can say things that words never can.

Maybe number one son huffed no. Then he saw moonlight on Tiberias. Or his wife was singing as the children went to sleep. Or he remembered a part of a Psalm. Or he remembered the loving and lovely self giving of a loved one—maybe th
at of his father. Or a friend came by or came through.

Then he thought…

Well, maybe, well, maybe

Maybe things are bad, but maybe they can get better, and maybe better is the only good there is.

Maybe that is what you will think, leaving today.

Beauty stands beside me

Beauty stands beside me

I hear, I hear, I hear

Maybe I will say yes after all

~ The Reverend Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music, Marsh Chapel Choir

posted in Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music, The Bach Experience, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 09.25.2011 at 11:00 am

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Sunday
September 11

Transcending Boundaries

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to hear the sermon only.

A. Sin
1. Thirteen Fears

We are a people somewhat dampened by fear.

For some the drenching is total like the water now cascading down from Vermont and Northern New England. For others the damp moisture is more like the relative sprinkling we in Boston received two Sundays ago. But the rain has fallen on all, the northern and southern, the just and unjust.

We have used our umbrellas and it has been a long time coming.

Since the day our freshmen went to kindergarten…

A cloudburst in 1998 about impeachment and redefinitions for simple words like ‘is’, like ‘sex’.

A thunderstorm in 1999 about Y2K. Some communities even had Y2k committees. Our church did.

A donnybrook in 2000 over a close election, decided finally by the Supreme Court. Can you spell ‘dangling chad’?

The hurricane in 2011 of 9/11/01, whose memory we mark today.

An autumn rain in 2002, a move from patience (‘we shall meet violence with patient justice’) to pre-emption, a full blown doctrine thereof.

A tornado in 2003, a tragic invasion of Iraq.

A tempest in an Ohio teapot in election2004and a Tsunami across the pacific.

A whirlwind in 2005, Katrina.

A change in wind direction in 2006, abroad, surge, at home, election.

An early morning rain starting to fall in 2007, falling on housing near and far.

A cataract in 2008, the Great Recession, unabated still. 14 million, 14 million, 14 million hunting for work.

Cloudbursts in 2009—tarp, stimulus, health care, and 401k to 201k, oil spilled in the gulf.

Steady rain since 2010, a country divided along the lines of liberty and justice, freedom and compassion, conservative and liberal.

We are a people moistened by fear. But it has been raining, after all. If you feel a little moist, you may have some reason.

2. Religious Troubles

My dear dad—a graduate of BU—used to say, with a smile, ‘just because you are paranoid does not mean they are not out to get you’. Since that sentence has several negatives, let me say it again: ‘just because you are paranoid, does not meant they are not out to get you’.

It was his way of saying that we need to be both realistic and self-aware.

To some friends, I might emphasize the word paranoid. To others, I might emphasize that that does not mean nobody is out to get you.

It is not the case that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. There are real, serious threats to security, collective and individual, which cannot and should not be avoided or denied.

Some of these are religious in nature. Religion qua religion is not necessarily good. It can be. Often it is not.

A surgeon who worshipped with us, a fine southern gentleman, would greet me at the door, following worship, in this way: How is your protoplasm Dr Hill?

In his memory I ask you: How is your eschatology, your pneumatology? Your sense of hope, your sense of presence?

It raises the issue sung out in the old spiritual: Have you got good religion, or bad?

An eschatological vision that promises paradise as reward for violence is religious, for sure, and bad. Bad eschatology is not the exclusive province and possession of only one religious tradition, to be sure. A pneumatological understanding of boundaries that makes of one set of cultural practices a necessary target of hatred is religious, for sure, and bad. Bad pneumatology is not the exclusive province of only one religious tradition, to be sure.

Good religion transcends boundaries, whether of hope or of spirit, whether of heaven or earth, whether eschatological or pneumatological.

Today I want to probe sense of presence and sense of hope.

B. Salvation

What we have heard in our Scriptures today is not unlike what may be found in the world’s great traditions: Bahai: ‘be generous in prosperity, thankful in adversity’; Buddhist: ‘may those frightened cease to be afraid’; Hindu: ‘may there be peace on earth’; Jewish: ‘swords into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks’; Muslim: ‘if thine enemy incline toward peace, do thou also’; Christian: ‘blessed are the peacemakers’.

But this common ground, when flooded with fear, can be difficult to hold, to walk. Our boots slide in the wet mud.

How are we ever going to dry out, drenched as we are? How will we get the roads rebuilt, the bridges repaired, the sewers flowing, the mud cleared, the clothes ironed?

Today the sun is shining. Briefly let us bask in the its light and warmth.

Religious people bear responsibility for religious problems.

1. Paul

Paul wrote so to the Romans.

Some think of this passage as advice for the church, the church alone. Jews and Gentiles. Get along, welcome one another, liberal Protestants embrace conservative Catholics, march together under the banner of Christ. The strong (the liberal) are to be forbearing of the weak (the conservative). Church advice for church people. Days and diet, Sabbath and sweets.

Is this what he means? If so, why is the word Christ all but absent? Paul says Lord, not Christ, with one exception.

No, Paul has bigger fish to fry than ecumenical relations. He is preaching about cosmic transformation. He is speaking about the Lord. Who is the Lord? The Lord is the Spirit. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. What this world needs is not a religious revival but a cultural revolution.

No age needs Romans 14 more than ours does. Here is the announcement, healing for nineleven, of the religion of unreligion.

You will need to channel your inner perennialist, in order religiously to enter the 21st century. Your human BA comes before your spiritual MA. The petty narcissism of small religious differences won’t survive the drenching of the eternal now, now. At the human level, the undergraduate level, the level of real human relationship, unnecessary boundaries based on outmoded religious distinctions need to go. When Daniel Marsh built a chapel without a permanent cross in it, with a star of David in it, with Abraham Lincoln enshrined in it, he took heat—radical moves for 1949. Humans have more in common than not with one another.

In other words, before we move on to the graduate school of human religious difference, let us complete our undergraduate study in human religious likeness.

All six billion of us.

We all survive the birth canal, and so have a native survivors’ guilt. All six billion.

We all need daily two things, bread and a name. (One does not live by bread alone). All six billion.

We all grow to a point of separation, a leaving home, a second identity. All six billion.

We all love our families, love our children, love our homes
, love our grandchildren. All six billion.

We all age, and after forty, its maintenance, maintenance, maintenance. All six billion.

We all shuffle off this mortal coil en route to that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns. All six billion.

I need to remember that I am first a man, second a witness, and third a minister, in that order, not in the reverse order.

2. Matthew

Even Matthew—dark, dreary Matthew—challenged his church so.

We have reason to be careful, to see that our loved ones, that children, that people all people are protected, secured, made safe. We need make no apology for defending human life from religiously inspired hatreds or any others.

But you cannot win the game by playing defense alone. The Red Sox cannot win with pitching alone.

There is only one way forward, with regard to past hurt. There are many ways backward: regret, revenge, resentment come to mind. To move forward, we shall need, in Niebuhr’s under-heralded phrase, to become adept at a spiritual discipline against resentment. We shall need to learn the arts of forgiveness. The only antidote to religion is mercy. So, the Scripture, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’.

God’s delight is forgiveness. That is the gospel. The question then is, what is ours, what is our delight? What do we desire?

Mercy is a great mystery; forgiveness, when it happens, a grace. To err is human, to forgive, divine. Or, as thesis advisors suppose, to write is human, to edit, divine.

Our first Marsh Chapel preacher and Dean, Franklin Littell, so reminded us:

Just as the child is aware of the mother before it is self-aware, just as it commonly says mama before it says I, so the awareness of God and his work in history is primordially known to the person of faith. But the world of techne, in its aversion to the mysterious and the open, has sealed off that dimension of human experience. From the elementary school, the young person is taught to think in the symmetry of the closed, the traditional mathematical model, and by the time he has finished with the university he may be a skilled technician—but he is rarely a wise man. (13)

It is the threshold of the mind and heart of Howard Thurman, the great former Dean of Marsh Chapel. He wrote, “A beautiful and significant phrase, “Island of Peace within one’s own soul. Well within the island is the Temple where God dwells – not the God of the creed, the church, the family, but the God of one’s heart. Into His Presence one comes with all of one’s problems and faces His scrutiny. What a man is, what his plans are, what his authentic point is, where his life goes – all is available to him in the Presence.”

Our third Dean, Robert Hamill, said much the same:

To anyone who is seriously seeking for this final truth, it will come to him, often unannounced, sometimes unnoticed. It may come through some reading in Scripture or elsewhere, or some glimpse of beauty, or some encounter with a friend, or with an enemy, or by some shattering engagement with yourself, with failure, or guilt, or unspeakable joy. It may happen to you especially in some act of obedience, when you seek not so much to obey the commandments which bind, but to obey him who liberates. (motive, 1/61)

In this spirit, our fourth, Robert Thornburg, wrote recently about prayer:

Coming to the 10th anniversary of “9/11”, I had a really scary dream. What would happen if I were to be asked to say a prayer at some public occasion near ground zero? I pondered that possibility in other dreams. I envisioned looking through my file of “prayers for public occasions”. Those were interfaith enough, and written to include the widest circle of folk. But surely not adequate for a time so filled with sorrow, anger, love and hope--- all those feelings that bubble up at the mention of those two numbers. When all else failed, I began instead to ask myself “what would I prayer for?” “For whom should I pray?” and remember: this is a prayer we are uttering to the Eternal God, not a political manifesto.

Easy at the start: pray for those who were killed and their families, then add first-responders, both those who died trying, and others still suffering the effects. But what about those “other” people: Muslims who want to pray nearby, others who are even thinking of destruction again. I think that is the kind of situation our Master had in mind when he said: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Could I believe that prayer changes things, and that the Almighty God might move in all of us to change things by the power of incredible love and profound hope.

Then I woke with a start. What was I thinking about? If our faith and all the religions of the world has any hope of helping the terrible mess our world finds itself in, then we had all better pray without ceasing and include the widest possible circle of both friends and those who probably think of themselves as our enemies. (8/20/11)

Dean Five, Robert Neville (do you sense an emerging pattern of Roberts?), wrote:

For us religious people the most frightening dimension of the recent terrorism is its idolatry. If our speculations about the motives of the terrorists are right, or we take Mr. Bin Laden’s statements at face value, a political cause has been cloaked in ultimacy that belongs to God alone. Any political cause, just or unjust, or any ambiguous mixture of the two that is associated with divinity is idolatry. (9/20/01).

C. Service

What good difference will our worship today, and our observance later today, make?

We are a flawed and bruised people. We are long way from perfect. We are a little moist, a little damp.

Some time ago our Religious Life Council and leaders began to prepare an observance for this day. I met with my colleague, Rabbi Polak, among others, to seek his counsel. As we talked he invited a student working at the front desk to sit with us, and to tell us what she recommended for 9/11/11.

“Well, I would want to remember what the day was like for me and for my family. Then I think I would want some simple, quiet way to honor losses from that day, and to honor those lost. And then I would want to see if there are ways I could do something positive, to remember by serving.”

She echoed what others had said, and outlined what we have done: boards to write out memories, like those used ten years ago; an observance at noon on the Plaza, like those 5 and 10 years ago; and suggestions for service, listed and announced, like this one:

In 1995 I married a great couple, Jim the husband a Methodist minister and religion professor, and Betsy the wife a health specialist and first responsder. After 9/11/01, in the loss and rubble and fear, she and a small group of others decided to do something positive, to remember by serving, as our student put it. In Syracuse NY, bit by bit, she and they developed a network of women—Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Agnostic, Other—who began to meet together on a monthly basis. They formed bonds of friendship—‘belonging’ as the religious sociologists might name it. They read and talked together—‘meaning’ in sociological terms. They chose limited but fruitful conjoint acts of public service that made a difference—‘empowerment’ in sociology. In their small city, week by month by year, they brought a little bit of compassion
, understanding, and hope up and out of the ashes of ground zero. They are still at it. Today, in the New York Times, you will find a supplement devoted to this date. It is a realistic, even pessimistic, darkly challenging segment. But there, right there, right there in the middle of today’s news, stands Betsy. There is the account, a glimmer of light and a ray of hope, of her friends who came together and formed Women Transcending Boundaries. They have 470 members. As Elie Wiesel has taught us: one who hears a witness becomes a witness.

What boundaries will you work to transcend this year? Religious people have a religious task, a religious responsibility. That is to transcend boundaries, eschatological or pneumatological, of hope or presence, which threaten to undo us.

The World Trade Center may fall, but no terror can topple the Truth at the Center of the world.

The World Trade Center, hub of global economies, may fall, but the economy of grace still stands in the Truth at the center of the world.

The World Trade Center, communications nexus for many, may fall, but the communication of the gospel stands, the Truth at the center of the world.

The World Trade Center, legal library for the country, may fall, but grace and justice still stand, through the Truth at the center of the world.

The World Trade Center, symbol of national honor, may fall, but divine humility stands, through the Truth at the center of the world.

The World Trade Center, material bulwark against loss, may fall, but the possibility in your life of developing a spiritual discipline against resentment (Niebuhr) still stands, through the Truth at the center of the world.

Speaking of eschatology, there is a self-correcting spirit of truth loose in the universe. Speaking a pneumatology, there is a self-correcting spirit of truth loose in the universe.

George Buttrick once remembered an evening in Boston:

All we know is that each man’s witness is needed, since each man is a person, in separate and distinctive gift a child of God. Recently at a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert the man with the triangle was required by the music to sound one note. Minutes before that note he stood ready, like a runner on his mark, triangle and hammer uplifted and poised. To most of us the note would not have been missed, but Conductor Muench would have missed it. We are responsible to the music and the conductor, not mainly to the listener. The man drew my eyes—and my concern. Suppose he should come in too early or too late! Suppose he should swing his little hammer and miss! But true to time and score: ping! I would like in the hereafter to be able to tell the Conductor that I pinged my little ping, in the right place and at the right time. (motive, 2/58, p.16)

Me too, George, me too.

Come! Live with us! Be a witness to the Truth at the center of the world! You can make a small, lasting difference!

L Cohen: Ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 09.11.2011 at 11:00 am

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Sunday
September 4

Grace

By Marsh Chapel

There will be no sermon text this week, but see below for Dean Hill's Invocation for Matriculation, 2011.

We bring forward our thanks today,

For the study of medicine, dentistry, physical therapy

Whose fruit is public health

For the study of law

Whose fruit is justice

For the study of management, business and economics

Whose fruit is community

For the study of art—music, dance, drama, all

Whose fruit is beauty

For the study of communication

Whose fruit is truth

For the study of engineering

Whose fruit is expanding safety

For the liberal, metropolitan and general study of art and science

Whose fruit is freedom

For the study of hospitality

Whose fruit is conviviality

For the study of education

Whose fruit is memory and hope

For the study of military and physical education

Whose fruit are security and strength

For the study of social work

Whose fruit is compassion

For the study of theology

Whose fruit is meaning

In this year may the 40,000 member city of Boston University—students, faculty, administrators, staff, alumni, neighbors all—become, by grace:

healthier, more just, more connected, fairer, truer, sturdier, freer, gentler, deeper, safer, more compassionate, and more aware

O Thou who loves us into love and frees us into freedom.

Amen.

posted in Matriculation, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 09.4.2011 at 11:00 am

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Sunday
August 28

Let Love Be Genuine

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to hear Sermon only

Romans 12:9-21

Matthew 16:21-28

There will be no sermon text this week.

 

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 08.28.2011 at 11:00 am

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Sunday
August 7

Fear Not The Fallow

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to hear Sermon only

Romans 10:5-15
Matthew 14:22-33


Jesus meets us today dressed in summer attire.

Water, wind, boats, mountains, crowds, quiet, waves, sea—these are the forms of raiment he wears coming toward us this morning, out of the unforeseen, out of the future.

We has sent the crowds away.  He has ordered the twelve into a boat, with a destination given ‘on the other side’.  He has gone up, gone out, gone away, onto the mountain to pray.  Day came and then evening, morning and then night, and he was there on the mountain alone.

Soon there will be much and more work to do.  The wind will come up, the team will be afraid, the waves and wind will rise, and he will be called out at the fourth watch of the night, late at night, the wee hours, ‘dark thirty’.  And all of this will arise, we are taught in the Scripture, as an invitation to faith. ‘O Man of Little Faith…’

Just for now, though, just for a minute, there is a clean summer wind blowing across the top of the mountain, whence Jesus bids us come.

One year, some miles west of here, within a time and space of joyful ministry, we passed a year in which snow fell on every major holiday and Sunday.  Snow fell on Halloween.  Snow fell on Thanksgiving.  Snow fell on Christmas Sunday, on Christmas, on New Year’s, on Ground Hog Day, on Palm Sunday, on Easter.  To top it all off, snow also fell on Mothers’ Day.   In our region, when summer comes, we recognize a different, necessarily different, season.  A fallow time.

Howard Thurman, by the report from Oregon in email this last year, once gave a sermon with this title.  We find no record of it, nor need we one.  The title tells it all.  There are full times, with much snow, and there are fallow times, wherein we are restored, free from snow.  These fallow times, mountain times, lake times, breeze times, quiet times, and faith times, we need not fear.

In the summer, in the north, we often gather for family reunions.  Here we are connected vertically, by generation and time, rather than horizontally, by work and space.  You may have some reason for caution and for anxiety, heading for such a party.   Our families of origin bear within them difficult memories, hard words spoken, past hurts, settled, negatively settled, relationships.  Yet, in the fallow time, we go to the place where ‘when you have to go there, they have to take you’.  Fear not the fallow.  You may discover someone, something, a story, a memory, an uncle, a gift, which could only come your way in a quieter mode, up a mountain, apart from the economics of work  and the rest of life.

In the summer, in the north, we may have more time for friendship.  If you are forever fiddling with the latest blackberry or other quasi communication, as is part now of our technological turf,  you may be uncertain, even anxious, with the quieter rhythms of friendship:  listening, more listening, speaking, quiet.  Fear not.  Our friends give us back our real selves, our own best selves.  They both require and deserve our undivided attention, come summer.

In the summer, up here in the north, we too may take to the high mountain.  It is the attention, the mind, once freed, which illumines the natural world.  The monarch butterfly is always there.  In the quiet, with enough warmth to get around and to watch and look, we of a sudden may be able to appreciate the miraculous wonder of the created order.  Fear not the fallow.  It is the forecourt of prayer.

In the summer, in the north, we may find the idler rhythms, the fallow mode, if we can shake off the natural fear of a different way, a different habit: in travel, in exercise, in reading, in devotion, in silence.    Our being, our human being, is not fully exhausted, though we may be, by our fretful and grasping construction and expenditure, the getting and spending by which we lay waste our powers.   An hour a day, a day a week, a week a quarter, a quarter a year, a year every seven:  these are not times meant only for a few.  We are human beings not human doings.

From this pulpit, in this summer, we have prayerfully paused to listen for the gospel under the theme of ‘Evangelism in the Liberal Tradition:  South, North, Youth.’   From Kentucky, Rev. Wade brought us deeply to consider faith, in the binding of Isaac and the Ethiopian Eunuch.  From New England, Rev. Garner and Rev. Thomas announced with us the goodness of God and the presence of God.  Next week, and the week following, Rev. Olson will bring us her wisdom regarding the gospel and young adults.  Voices from South, North and Youth ask us to consider the grace of invitation.

Jesus, by the record of St. Matthew, ‘went up on the mountain by himself to pray’.  By his example he invites us to join him, as Frost wrote, I am going out to clean the pasture spring.  I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away, and watch the water clear, I may.  I shan’t be gone long.  You  come too.

We pause by the table of grace, with bread and cup prepared.   A natural, urgent objection, opposition, response, may arise as we see Jesus in summer attire.

What of our sisters and brothers, near and far, for whom the fallow is the fullest time there is?  What of those who are waiting, without idols but without fruit, for a harvest time, a morning time, a full time, a work time?

Here is a man, whose day, every day, is fallow.  He watches from the hospital bed, blank eyed.
Here is a woman who has known the power and happiness of real work.  She again scans the screen, the paper, the mail, the news, looking for a place to invest her real gifts.

Here is a couple who have much in memory to share, much in life earned wisdom to share, and no visitors.  My grandmother had a sign on her kitchen door:  Do you know who I would like to cook a big chicken and dumpling dinner for?  Anybody.

Those who can remember, can help those who are learning to remember.  Frost:  When to the heart of man was it ever less than a treason, to go with the drift of things, to yield with a grace to reason, to bow and accept the  end of a love or a season?

Look about you.  14 million Americans who are looking for work are not finding work.  The income of the top 1% of the population exceeds that of the bottom 50%.   Average household wealth for Caucasian families is 20 times that of families of color.  We may lack to some degree the pastoral or personal imagination such a time requires.   We may need films, novels, sermons, books, which quicken the heart, in an appreciation for what such a fearsome fallow time can mean. Do we remember what it feels like to be left out?  We need an Uncle Tom’s Cabin of unemployment, and a Harriet Beecher Stowe of loss of work.  We need a Grapes of Wrath of unemployment, and a John Steinbeck of loss of work.  We need an Ironweed of our current unemployment, and a William Kennedy of loss of work.    We need a Cesar Chavez of unemployment, and a workers movement for loss of work.   For those who have not been vocationally excluded, who have jobs, and who have good minds and hearts, we need a rhetoric which will touch the heart, open the heart, warm the heart, change the heart and move the heart.

Can you remember what it feels like, what it is like, to lack what others have, and to want it badly?  In meditating on today’s Gospel, the figure of sinking Peter brought a memory.  You know, Peter means ‘rock’.  Usually we think of this as a reference to his found
ational strength in the building of the church.  In this passage, as he goes under water, his name perhaps has more direct reference to his sinking qualities, ‘sink…like a rock’.  For some years, I taught swimming and ran a waterfront at a church camp, along the shores of a most beautiful lake.  Those years, and the men and women I met there, caused me go to seminary.  It was not what they knew, or what they professed, or what they did, even, that drew me.  It was the way they lived, in freedom and love.  I pray that here, year by year, somehow, others will see in you, and me, such freedom and such love.    I looked this week at a now very worn BOOK OF WORSHIP, a gift from one such soul who inscribed: To Bob the lifeguard, firs you saved lives, now you’ll save souls.  God bless you. Some gifts do last a lifetime.  In those summer years, we had a firm rule:  no drowning. Yet with the right preparation, you really should not have any, drownings that is, anyway, which thankfully we did not.  But occasionally, we had to dive in after somebody.  One of the most poignant, frightening, and repeated instances occurred, you will think this odd, during the swimming tests.  Young teenagers had to show that they could swim 50 yards, and tread water, in order pass the swim test and swim in the deep water.   Most did fine.  But every now and then, a fourteen year old who did not know how to swim, and who did not want to admit it, but who did not want to be left out, and who did not want to be seen as different, would get in line, stay in line, and then, I guess hoping for who knows what, would jump in, and begin to sink.  They just did not want to be left out.  In the eyeglass of memory I look at those young people. Can you remember what it feels like to be left out?  Can you remember what if feels like, to lack what others have, and to want it so badly?  Can we remember, come autumn, what it feels like to be in our teens?   Today, can we gain a little measure of empathy for 9.1% of the population looking for work?

Our gospel commends faith, the antidote for fear.   Humans do not easily walk on water, as Peter, the Rock, reminds us.  My own experience with gravity, is not unlike your own.  Rocks rolling down the hill go all the way.  Consistently.  Cars on ice slide down hill. Consistently. Boat hoist wheels once loosed and holding the boat spin uncontrollably.  Consistently.   Swimmers who do not know the prone float sink.  Consistently.  Matthew 14 was not written to erase the need for a swim test.  Granted that we are not ever in a position to say what God can and cannot do, our experience with gravity holds.  So too does our need for faith.  So too does our need to face the fallow.  Fear not the fallow.

Why do we fear to face the fallow?  We are uncomfortable with silence, with solitude, with quiet, with lack, with anything that interrupts the 24/7/365 din of information falling like a not so gentle rain upon us.   The fallow is meant as a season, not as a permanent condition.  It is meant as Sabbath, preparation, restoration, reinvigoration, as the balance that provides a living critique of our idolatry of work.  The fallow is meant not to last but to lean upon us, to shift our body weight, to raise a question.

In the summer I pass by daily a farm still operated, forty years later, by an elementary school friend.  We were caused one year to perform a stage version of Tom Sawyer’s playful entrapment of Huck Finn along the fence.  Do you remember this typically Twain send up of work?

Tom is told to paint the fence.  He begins, when up comes Huck, who is curious.  Tom couldn’t possibly give up the joy of the job.  The more he smiles, the more intrigued Huck becomes.  Finally Tom relents, and says he will graciously allow Huck to paint the fence for him, which delights Huck.  Only, Tom finishes, Huck will have to pay for the privilege of work.   He has only an apple to his name, which Tom seizes and departs.

How deeply have we thought about just how much we adore work?  Has Twain’s story caught us at all?  It should.  Work is crucial, especially for those who lack it.  Work is perilous, especially for those who cannot see its limits.

Man does not live by bread alone.  Bread alone will never begin to bring us to terms with life or death, with loss or betrayal, with choice or failure, with sin or death or the threat of meaninglessness.   More, bread alone will not ever help us set the theological balances by which we live and die:  how much creation, how much fall; how much  grace, how much sin;  how much freedom, how much constraint; how much divine, how much human;  how much mind, how much heart;  and, in today’s encounter with Jesus, how much full time and how much  fallow, how much work and how much prayer.

We need not fear the fallow, if we face the fallow, and fix the limits of the fallow, with a measure of personal empathy, of sympathy for those for whom the fallow is all they have.

A measure of faith may help.   To move from fear to faith means learning how to float.  You know, sometimes, after failing the swim test, and through the rest of the week, a young person would come for lessons, to learn to swim.  The difference between sinking and swimming is floating.  To float is to learn to trust that the same water in life that can sorely threaten you will also hold you up.  No analogy is perfect.  But the trust that allows one to float, to learn the prone float, is like the trust that keeps one afloat in life, and moves one from fear to faith.  Lessons in the strokes come later.  First there comes a moment when you stretch your arms and lie face down in the water, and a wait for your feet to rise.  You see?  You can float.  You have faith.  The water will hold you up.  We are in good hands, and so it behooves us to bear one another’s burdens, as Huston Smith once said.

We may thereto find a way to mark out a new way of living, perhaps not quite walking on water, but one that carries us forward by faith in one who stills the waters and calms the sea.   Then our fullness will be fallow, and our fallow full.  So Frost, Yield who will to their separation, my object in living is to unite my vocation with my avocation, as my two eyes make one in sight.  Only where love and need are one, and the work is play for mortal stakes, is the deed ever really done, for heaven and the future’s sakes.

A long time ago, in a borrowed upper room, a gathering of very human beings was fed by One they came  to know as Son of God.  What they were fed gave them the courage to face the full and the empty, and especially the faith to ‘fear not the fallow’.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 08.7.2011 at 11:00 am

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Sunday
June 26

Two Persistent Women

By Marsh Chapel

 

1. Persistence in Luke

We begin today in the town court of Nazareth, the honorable UnJ Judge presiding. We are courtroom focused in Boston this week, so we can imagine the scene. Hear ye, hear ye. Hizzoner awaits. And Behold the Lord Jesus Christ dressed today in the apparel of a poor woman: He told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.

It is a story about a persistent woman, who had her voice and her persistence to go on, and not much else. She prevailed.

We may be ready, this summer, for such an encouraging word.

We fear, and try to find our security in larger automobiles or drug supplies or stock collections or homes or layers of disconnection, gated communities of the mind and heart. But security comes not through possession, but through relationship. Do you want to be safe and secure? Invest your self in a lifetime of building and keeping healthy relationships. There is your security, where neither moth nor rust consumes.

Jesus pointed to the Town Court of Nazareth and therein to the simple figure of a persistent woman. See her at the bench. Watch her in the aisle. Listen to her steady voice. Feel her stolid forbearance. Says she: “Grant me justice.” We leave her there for a moment.

2. A Summer Run

Instead, jog for a moment along a familiar village green. For there is a second persistent woman today, not of Scripture but of experience. It is largely in the interplay between these two women, Scripture and Experience, that we discover truth. You can see her in your own past, your own gallery of saints. Name the most persistent woman you ever met. Bella Abzug. Betty Bone Scheiss. Florence Nightengale. Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Eleanor Roosevelt. Esther. Barbara Streisand. That uppity Syropheonician woman. Harriet Tubman. Sojourner Truth. Susanna Wesley. Your grandmother. Whomever. I was thinking of one such persistent woman on a 90 degree day several summers ago. For that summer day, hot and humid and happy, I took the car from our lake house into the neighboring little village of Hamilton, NY (the home of Colgate University) for repair. They needed much skill and two hours and some money to do the job. So in the great heat I was free to run through a familiar village, and across a village green, where long ago I was raised in a patchwork complex of relationships, durable and healthy.

Running along, with no deeds to do no promises to keep, I recalled an earlier age…There is a lanky Baptist preacher, heralding the promise of truth; and a musician on the bandstand, singing for justice; and a postmaster protecting communications; and a library, awaiting the emergence of justice; and a church and a store, and a graveyard with night falling. All in the mind’s eye.

Through the familiar streets I ran thinking, steadily and especially, of my teacher, Marjorie Shafer. In the sixth grade she opened the world to us--by teaching us to read. June 25 is good Sunday to remember teachers who made us who we are. As a teacher, she used the resources she had available, namely, her time and her voice. She persisted, through those years, prayerfully using the common resources of time and voice. You have time and you have a voice, too. You have need of persistent prayer, too. You have a desire not to lose heart, too. I was impressed, with the dogs barking in the summer heat, by the persistent memory of her persistence. It was good to remember the time given and the voice lifted, in 1966 in the 6th grade—SRA reading, sock hop, changes in classmates, baseball—Sandy Kofax and Orlando Cepeda, the Beatles, James Bond, memorizing the map of Africa, a mock debate about Vietnam, and the long great story of Bilbo Baggins. And, suddenly, awareness of another gender:

Three things I do not understand
Four are too wonderful for me
The way of a ship on the high sea
The way of an eagle in the sky
The way of the serpent on the rock
And the way of a man with a woman

So continued this reverie, in a summer run, on a hot day, along a village green, several years ago.

3. An Unexpected Christ

Meanwhile, back in Bethlehem town court, all rise hear ye hear ye the honorable U J Judge presiding, another persistent woman employs time and voice. You have time and you have voice. Like Christ himself, she implores the implacable world to grant justice. Like Christ himself, she comes on a donkey of tongue and patience. Like Christ himself, she continues to plead, to intercede. Like Christ himself, she importunes the enduring injustice of this world. Like Christ himself she prays without ceasing. Like Christ himself she persists. She is an example to us of how we should use whatever time we have and whatever breath remains--to pray. It is prayer that is the most realistic and wisest repose of the anxious of this season of our several fears—global, political, economic, personal. By prayer I mean formal prayer, yes. But by prayer I mean the persistent daily leaning toward justice, the continuous pressure in history from the voice of the voiceless and the time of the time bound.

What drove Luke, alone, to remember or construct this parable? The lengthening years, without ultimate victory, since the cross? The long decades of living without Jesus? The uncertainties of institution and culture and citizenship and multiple responsibilities? The daily stresses of managing a budget? It is the primitive church that can give an example to an America trying to balance liberty and justice, courage and compassion. Things take time. They waited for Jesus to return. And he delayed. And he delays, still. And there is rampant, hateful hurt, across God’s village green earth. It is enough to make you lose heart.

Though with a scornful wonder we see her sore oppressed
By schism rent asunder by heresy distressed
Yet saints their watch are keeping their cry goes up ‘howlong’?
And soon the night of weeping will be the morn of song.

It is a long wait. And that is just the point. Like the bridesmaids who waited with lamps trimmed, we feel the length of the wait.

Notice, waiting with us, is a poor widow. She lacks power, authority, status, position, wealth. She has her voice and all the time in the world. Like Jesus Christ, whose faith comes by hearing and hearing by the preaching of the word. We shut the courtroom door for a moment.

4. Persistence in Life

Meanwhile, back along the village green of experience, not the town court of Scripture, the heat hangs heavy on happy halcyon Hamilton, NY. I run over to the Golf course, up the willow walk, past the artesian well, around the library, by the road to Chapel House, down Fraternity row, along the swan pond. I am carried by the wings of love and faith, and Rev. Al Childs now dead runs with me and Rev. Dale Winter now dead runs with me. Goodness and mercy—got my back.

This summer my friend said: “In my life I want to focus on relationships and flexibility”. I said: “yes, on love and faith, relationships and flexibility.”

I decided, with still more than an hour left of repairs, to run over to the school, down Kendrick Ave.

This one persistent woman, Marjorie Shafer, gave us a love of books—Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, the Hobbit, Harriet the Spy, the biographies of the Presidents, the Gospel of Luke. I suppose she looked out for the day when every voice would be lifted in praise. I perceive in hindsight that she, and your own favorite feckless female, persisted by faith. She was already old when she taught us. She was at least 40. I suppose she was one of those saints waiting with persistence. I guess maybe she rode down to Washington on a bus a few years earlier and heard a good sermon:

One day every valley shall be exalted…
With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope…
With this faith we will be able to work together…
This will be the day when all God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning…

And she taught for several more decades, persistent, tough, helpful, kind.

She found a corner of the world in which she could have some influence for good, and invested her time and her voice in another generation. She persisted.

5. Persistent Prayer and Justice

We enter again the Nazareth Town Court. The Honorable U J Judge presiding, and falling asleep. Our Bishop fell asleep at Conference a few years ago. It was a memorable moment. There was more awareness in that somnolence than in many other moments.

If we are not to lose heart, in the seemingly unending search for justice, we shall need to pray always, to “relax into the truth”, and to give ourselves over to the divine presence in our midst. Maybe this summer, starting today, will be a summer of prayer, for you. And me.

Ernest Fremont Tittle was the greatest Methodist preacher of his mid twentieth century generation. Tougher than Sockman, truer than Peale, Tittle preached in Chicago until he died at his desk, writing about Luke. This is his book, only at best half written, and published after his death. It reads like someone cleaned off his desk into a printer. Yet I prize this volume. Here is what he thought about persistence and prayer:

There is special need for persistence in prayer when the object sought is the redressing of social wrongs. God will see justice done if the human instruments of his justice to not give way to weariness, impatience, or discouragement, but persevere in prayer and labor for the improvement of world conditions. Here we can learn from the scientist. Medical research is a prayer for the relief of suffering, the abolition of disease, the conservation of life—a prayer in which the scientist perseveres in the face of whatever odds, whatever darkness and delay. More especially we can learn from great religious leader like Luther, Wesley, Wilberforce, Shaftsbury, who year upon year prayed and fought for the causes to which they dedicated their lives. The need for persistence in prayer arises not only from the intransigence of the oppressor, but also from the immaturity and imperfection of the would-be reformer. We have a lot to learn and much in ourselves to overcome before we can be used of God as instruments of his justice. Recognizing this, Gandhi spent hours each day in prayer and meditation, and maintained a weekly day of silence.

The importunate widow continues, simply continues, and by her continuation comes to personify the divine. All this, behind the humble door of the Nazareth Town Court.

6. Surprise!

And meanwhile, jogging on the village green, the sun is getting higher as noon approaches. It is time to head back out toward the garage, and pay the piper. I have been running in such a sweet reverie, a happy retrospective, that the hour has come too fast. I have been thinking all morning of my old teacher. Now the school is a block away. She must be in her mid-eighties now. I wonder if she is still active. I remember how it felt to walk to school at age 12, excited for the start of every day, arriving 20 minutes early, entering the school that marked the portal to the future. What a persistent presence in so many lives she was! Behind the school there is a large parking lot, and a long park. The park sometimes is used for family reunions. Almost choosing otherwise, I decide to run out to the back, to see the park. This has been a long run, and I am tired. It has been a long run in the ministry. It has been a long run in the church. It has been a long run in the conference. It has been a long run in the academy. I am feeling the burning in the calves, some ache in breathing. It is hot.

Where do we find the persistence that keeps us going through adversity so that we do not lose heart? Do we not find it, given to us in prayer? Is this not our source of sustaining grace? How shall we have any lasting life without prayer, worship, study, tithing, service, song, fellowship, loving conversation?

Do you ever have a feeling that something is going to happen and then it does? A kind of premonition? I turned down into the back lot, empty for summer vacation, and saw just one lone car. It was hot and I was sweating, so I could not see too clearly for a time. And there was a kind of haze in the hot air. I saw the car move and stop, move and stop, two women in the front seat. I slowed, the car paused. I paused, the car waited. I looked, and then I looked again. There in the rider’s seat, to my utter astonished amazement, sat Mrs. Shafer, as old as could be, teaching, still teaching, using her voice and her time, this morning teaching her granddaughter to drive. I had not seen her in many years. “Hello Mrs Shafer” I said. “Hello Bobby”, she bemusedly replied, “it’s nice to see you.”

Sometimes you just need keep going, to run one block more. Sometimes, with a little persistence, just a little more running, just one more street, keep going just one more block don’t stop for quitting for suicide for divorce for giving up for leaving, you run headlong into Presence. “In thy presence there is fullness of joy.”

I ran on to get my car, confident that at least one sermon illustration had been offered on a hot day, in a long run, in a little village.

Hear the gospel of two persistent woman, Scripture and Life, a first century plaintiff and a twentieth century teacher, who both say to us:

7. Coda

 

Pray always
Labor Omnia Vincit
Do not lose heart
Work conquers all
Pray always
All of us are better when we are loved
Do not lose heart
Early to bed and early to bed and early to rise
Pray always
A stitch in time
Do not lose heart
Waste not want not
Pray always
Rome was not built in a day
Do not lose heart
Only the devil has no time
Pray always
God is time and voice
Do not lose heart

 

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.26.2011 at 11:00 am

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