Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

By Marsh Chapel

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Matthew 4:1-11

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Great art Thou O Lord and greatly to be praised.  Great is thy power and thy wisdom is infinite.  Thee would we praise without ceasing.  For our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.

Every journey begins with a single step.  Our Lenten journey 2023 begins with such a reminder, and a step forward, in the reading of the Gospel According to St. Matthew.

We could not begin at a better Scriptural doorway than with the Matthean account of the Temptation. As one has said, ‘The accounts illustrate Jesus’ habitual refusal to allow his sense of mission to be influenced by concern for his safety or for merely practical interests’ (OAE, 1174). Jesus fasts for forty days in the wilderness, according to this legend which Matthew and Luke share. The passages from Hebrew Scripture remind us that the Messiahship of Jesus is set in the history of God’s chosen people, Israel, and the sort of disputation read today was quite common among the rabbis of old. The temptations Jesus faces have been perennial temptations for the community of faith, and for the children of Israel. The devil appears here, in good apocalyptic fashion, and in a way similar to his roles in other texts of the time. Jesus resists the charms of wealth, power and fame. Rather, he says, quoting scripture: One does not live by bread alone. You shall not tempt the Lord your God. Serve God alone. (repeat). Let us read, mark, learn and inwardly digest…We shall pass by the long consideration we might give these dominical sayings as they arise in our time, culture and setting, which are not at all foreign to interests in wealth, power and fame.  We are not unfamiliar with, even connected in some measure to earthly, even worldly wealth, power and fame. We may aspire to learning, virtue and piety, but we also know the influence of wealth, power and fame.  And in truth we need to, have to become bilingual, able to speak both languages, along the road of life…without forgetting which is our mother tongue, and without letting the penultimate eclipse the ultimate.

That is, come the forty days of preparation, come this season, come Lent, In our tradition, we begin our spiritual discipline with a long hard climb, up a high mountain, straight into the headwind of temptation. There is a cost in discipleship. There is discipline in discipleship.  James Weldon Johnson sang it best, a hymn with so much else and other that is a gift to all out of the history of our African American siblings, but which, in depth, speaks for and to all, bringing a durable unity to our natural diversity.

Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
‘Til now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

That is, our Lenten Sermon Series, beginning today, will engage in conversation with St. Augustine, a passionate Christian if ever there was one.  Let us recall where we have been, whence we have come, come Lent. In this Marsh Chapel pulpit, from 2007-2016, Lent by Lent, we identified a theological conversation partner for the Lenten sermons, broadly speaking, out of the Calvinist tradition, so important to the first 200 years in New England.  With Calvin we encountered the chief resource for others we engaged over ten years—voices like those of Jonathan Edwards (2015), John Calvin himself, (2014), Marilyn Robinson (2013) (whom with gladness we shall greet in the flesh here at Boston University April 11, please come), Jacques Ellul (2012), Dietrich Bonhoeffer (a Lutheran cousin) (2011), Karl Barth (2010), and Gabriel Vahanian (2007), and themes like Atonement (2009) and Decision (2008), summarized with the help of Paul of Tarsus (2016).

For the next decade, we have turned to the Catholic tradition, so important in the last 200 years in New England.  That is, in this decade, beginning with Lent 2017, the Marsh pulpit, a traditionally Methodist one, turned left, not right, toward Rome not Geneva, and we have preached with, and learned from the Roman Catholic tradition, and some of its great divines including Henri Nouwen (2017) Thomas Merton (2018) John of the Cross (2019), Teresa of Avila (2020),  St Patrick (2021), and Dorothy Day (2022). In future years, it may be Ignatius of Loyola, Erasmus, Hans Kung, Karl Rahner, or others, one per year.  Perhaps you will suggest a name or two, not from Geneva, but from Rome?  For those who recall, even if dimly, the vigor and excitement of Vatican II, there may well be other names to add to the list.

Yet something about these past three years and their hurts, something about Covid life in Boston and around the globe, it may be, something about the events and outcomes of this winter, something about immersion in the home of the bean and the cod for several years, something, a connection say with our many Roman Catholic friends, listeners, correspondents, partners in the fellowship of the Gospel, this year brought Augustine of Hippo onward.  His may be a very timely voice for us, in winter, 2023.  For this Lent we mark three years of Covid, costly, costly years.  Our physically present Sunday congregation has slowly and gradually come back near to the levels of 2019, though the very, actual people present are some 70% different people from three years ago.  One has yet to see, to read a piercingly full analysis of just what has happened, by Covid, to patterns of gathering, to habits of assembly, to rhythms of worship, to life.  One undergraduate described her two high school Covid years in a single word, ‘disconnected’.  It is that disconnection, shared disconnection, that we have yet fully to understand.

Yet life abounds.  Yesterday, on route to Coach Jones’ BU basketball contest with Lehigh on West Campus—Senior Day by the way, and attended by among others the Boys and Girls Club of Dorchester, with the Associate Dean of the Dental School passing out tooth brushes and tooth paste, for whatever reason—we paused to photograph our Marsh Chapel choir ascending their bus to New York City, outside Nickerson Field, headed to sing this afternoon, 3pm in…yes, Carnegie Hall, for listeners present and live streamed.  We are very proud of them.  But, you ask, how is it that we also and still have a robust, excellent choir here today—I tell you in full measure, I have absolutely no idea, but I am delighted, and well you are too not to have the preacher singing a solo: it is musical magic conjured by Ms. Weckworth, Dr. Jarrett and Mr. Blackwell.  After the game, Coach Jones victorious, The Pharos Quartet offered a full afternoon program in Marsh Chapel, and then the ROTC annual formal party and dance, all present dressed in tuxedos, uniforms and gowns, dressed ‘to the nines’, filled out the evening with prayers, speeches, and nourishment. Yet life abounds.

As part of that life, right now, we are viscerally engaged in our own struggles.  We are seeking to support, for instance, what is right and best in Ukraine, with measures both of resistance and restraint, resistance to merciless brutality, and restraint before the prospect of expanded conflict. Further, right now, we are seeking to be engaged in healing for the victims of an horrific earthquake. One pastoral word, among others, might be today to keep us focused on our own circles of influence, the places where we can actually make a difference, over against the global and endless circles of concern which we carry. (One such point of influence, of leverage, is the United Methodist Committee on Relief, UMCOR.).  Amid such struggles, our guide, our interlocutor for Lent 2023, will be Augustine of Hippo, born in 354ce, taught rhetoric reading Cicero 375ce, become Professor of said discipline in 383ce, in Milan, where fatefully he heard the preaching of St. Ambrose, baptized in 387, then ordained priest (and later Bishop), who subsequently wrote 113 books, 500 sermons and 200 letters before his death at age 76 in 430ce.  We have no time, ability or need to offer a comprehensive comprehension of him, in our wrestling with the Gospel.  Rather we pause, along the trail, in earshot of his mind and heart, to listen, to listen, to listen, and to learn.  As a great theologian once said of the purpose of preaching…’to teach, to delight and to persuade’.  Said Augustine.

That is the sermon teaches us to sing out for what yet may be, what yet can be:

My Lord, what a morning

My Lord, what a morning

Oh, my Lord, what a morning

When the stars begin to fall

To begin, quintessentially for Augustine, we begin with Holy Scripture, and within Scripture with the Apostle Paul.  Augustine loved Scripture, taught and preached it, plumbed its very depths, and famously was utterly converted to allegiance to Jesus Christ in the reading of a passage from Romans.  But we are getting ahead of ourselves.  To begin, for today, let us offer an attempt at an Augustinian rendering of this morning’s epistle.

Romans 5:12-19

It befits Augustine that our Lenten Epistle readings start with Paul, and within Paul Romans 5, the ‘great watershed of the New Testament’.  Romans 5 takes some cooking, some preparation prior to consumption.

It befits Augustine that here Paul explains sin, explains death, explains, sin and death, explains the world, explains the law: 

As sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned…

Meaning that existence, our existence, is troubled existence from the very start, from Adam.  Life is troubled life, beginning with Adam.  Troubled by sin, that is distance from, estrangement from God, the good, the good life.  At a gathering earlier this month someone asked, ‘How do you deal every Sunday with something else—Tyrie Nichols, Michigan State, Ukraine, Earthquake, Train wreck’.  We might add and name tragedies closer to home and to our own homes.  How indeed?  Sin may be out of our lexicons but is surely not or our lives.  Sin is the gone wrongness in life, present to us every day.  It is cosmic, far more than personal.  It is our condition.  Sin and death.

It befits Augustine that here Paul explains Adam and Christ, freedom and trespass, grace and gift:

But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many.

Meaning that our religion, our religious existence, is troubled existence from the very start, from Adam.  Religion is troubled, beginning with Adam and the garden variety search for truth.  We tend to prefer to search in height and breadth, in what we can see and what we can count.  Give us the visible and the measurable, not history and not mystery.  Visibility and countability, not invisibility and accountability.  So, we miss the hidden, we miss the subterranean, we miss the dusky dim, we miss the haunted, we miss the elusive, we miss the darkened, we miss the mysterious, we miss the mysterium tremendum, we miss the aural and vocal, we miss the divine, we miss…God.   How do you measure a full heart?  How do you measure love?

It befits Augustine that here Paul explains Adam and Christ, trespass and righteousness, grace and gift, condemnation and justification, the one and the many:

Therefore, just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all. For just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.

Romans 5 on Adam and Christ is challenging reading, but not that endlessly challenging.  It is readily explained.  It is hard but not that hard to render.  Life is trouble, beginning to end, trouble, cradle to grave, trouble, first tooth in to last tooth out, trouble, much to our dismay and dislike, but evident to our experience and suffering: God enters trouble in love, God enters life in Christ.  Religion is trouble, beginning to end, much to our dismay and dislike, but evident to our experience and suffering:  the grace of God reforms even religion in the power of love, God restores religion in Christ, whose gospel, as Bonhoeffer told us, can even be summarized, sung and loved as ‘religionless Christianity’.  Faith, the love of God, begins with a hard look at our actual condition.  That is why the hymns of faith, like those of James Weldon Johnson, grab us so:

God of our weary years, God of our silent tears

Thou who hast brought us thus far along the way

Thou who has by thy might led us into the light

Keep us forever in the path we pray

Lest our feet stray from the places our God where we met thee

Lest our hearts drunk with the wine of the world we forget thee

Shadowed beneath thy hand, may we forever stand

True to our God, true to our native land

The Sunday common lectionary readings, if nothing else, are utterly, thoroughly and painfully realistic.  Their trenchant realism is their ticket of entry into your heart, soul, mind and strength.  You and I may not always understand, or agree with, or enjoy them, but there is no doubting their existential and religious honesty and accuracy.  That is their claim to and for your trust.  As Ray Hart once said, apropos of I forget what: you have to give them something to trust.

In other words, if you want understanding of and explanation of the Holy Scripture, well…look around you.  A part of our lack in depth of understanding of our condition, in life and religion, is a mirror image of our lack in depth of understanding of our condition, in Scripture and tradition.  In that sense, the old spiritual is right, it’s all been written in the book…

Sometimes, a good, hard, honest look at our actual condition is the first, a first Augustinian step in faith.  From such utter realism, as we shall see in the coming weeks, St. Augustine found his way to God.  We can too.  We can too.  We too, at long last, can find a way to sing, to pray as Augustine did:

Great art Thou O Lord and greatly to be praised.  Great is thy power and thy wisdom is infinite.  Thee would we praise without ceasing.  For our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.

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

posted in Lenten Series 2023: St. Augustine, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 02.26.2023 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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Matthew 5:38-48

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We are given one day at a time.  This is one.  One day within the great and everlasting day of divine love, one pause to remember and hope in the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, in whom, as the Apostle pronounced, it is not ‘yes and no’, but in him it is always Yes (2 Cor. 1).   One day in which to hear and consider perhaps the most challenging passage in all of Holy Scripture.

          We might summarize Matthew 5: 39 in words from 158 years ago: With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in.

            If the roads are clear, this season is a fine time to travel in the mountains, north and west, and all the way over and into Lake Placid NY.   Near there you find a most exotically named preaching assignment, a four-point charge:  Owls Head, Chasm Falls, Mountainview, and Wolf Pond.  I have preached in three of the four. You might pass through the strangely frightening prison town of Dannemora.  We remember visiting near there the hunting lodge of a friend.  He stood snow splattered in his meadow watching and listening to Nature in her farthest reach and said, “It’s so wild up here”.

            Lake Placid, like Mount Washington, itself seems like the top of the world, especially in the winter.  Winter is usually our most visually beautiful season here in the north.  We are in fact ice people, no bad thing.  The world needs both fire and ice.  Here is Mirror Lake.  Here is the Olympic Pavilion.  Here is the ski lift from which to view the grandeur of the mountains, the poverty of the north country, the stark serenity of Old Man Winter, usually acolossus striding upon the earth.  You are on top of the world, or at least as far up as we get around here.

            Before you go off to dinner or the hot tub, here is a further little visit.  Out behind the ski lift, a long way from the road and not overly well marked, there is a gravesite.  Trudge a few paces into the snow and take a look.  There, if you brush back the powder, you can make out the name and dates.  Under mountain shadows, hidden in the ice box of the north, usually covered at least half the year with a beautiful white blanket of snow, there lies the body of John Brown, 1800-1859, whose flint like personality, bent to violence, and fiery rhetoric helped ignite the civil war, which began 162 years ago.  His is a fitting rough grave lost in the outback of the Empire State.

            Gardner Taylor once said that we have not allowed the greatest tragedy of our history as a people, the Civil War, to teach us as much as it might.  600,000 men lost their lives in four years,  beginning 162 years ago.

           162 years is not that long ago.  Some of us can remember very sharply the events and remembrances of the 100^th anniversary of the Civil War in the early and middle 1960’s, a third of the way back.  We have a shared history, in this country from well before and after 1861. In February, we tend to think a bit about that history.  It is out of that long history that we pause for a moment this morning to listen to the Gospel of Matthew 5:39.  While there are easier sentences which might tempt us here in this reading, we shall listen to the hardest for interpreters, ‘Do not resist one who is evil’.

             As today’s reading reminds us, we are from a deep, though intricately varied ethical tradition that enshrines selfless love, christocentric love, cruciform love as the cherished ideal of human behavior.  “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.  But I say to you, Love your enemies’.

            We have here in Marsh Chapel over some years tried to hear the beautiful chorus, the four-part harmony of the Scripture in the Gospels.  So today.  The flickering soprano melody, the voice of Jesus of Nazareth, teaching us to love, to love others, to love all, to love with malice toward none, yes, to love our enemies.  The contralto struggles of the primitive church, waiting and waiting for the promised, expected, proximate return of the Lord, and developing a missionary tract, found here and in Luke 6, for use in teaching. The tenor, Matthew, our gospel writer, who has collected and composed, and waits too, waits long, substituting ‘you must be perfect (whole, complete, true)’ for Luke’s ‘be ye merciful’. And the bass, stretching from the Mediterranean community of the first century, to this Charles River gathering of Marsh Chapel, anno domini 2023.  Jesus. Church. Writer. Legacy.  Soprano. Alto. Tenor. Bass.

            If anyone smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.  Coat, cloak.  One mile, two.  If you love those who love you, what reward have you?

            Again, we might with these verses stay with the heavy emphasis they clearly have on personal relationships, where the ice is thicker and we are safer.  For an individual, alone and with no responsibilities to others, there are many options for self-less self-sacrifice.  But the hard question, and the spot on the pond where the ice gets thin, or at least thinner, is ‘how far the principle can be applied to groups, and especially political life’ (IB loc cit).  Our recognition that the dominant alto\tenor voices of the early church and evangelist, expecting the very soon return of Christ, and hence shading this ethic as an interim ethic, helps but does not mute the soprano melody, ‘resist not’.  Hear is a ringing question placed against the ethic of retaliation that dates to Hammurabi, to Roman Law, to Aeschylus, and is epitomized in the lex talionis, eye and tooth.  Resist not, says 5: 39.

            So how shall hear this verse?

            Especially, how shall we hear this verse in relation to the brief span of human history given to our keeping?  Including, say, at this very hour, a war in Ukraine.

            Over 20 centuries, and speaking with unforgivable conciseness as one must in a twenty-two minute sermon, two basic understandings of war and peace have emerged in Christian thought.  As you know, these roughly can be called the so-called pacifist and just war understandings.

            Pacifism preceded its sibling, and infinitely extends to all times the interim ethic of the New Testament (which even here in Matthew, a late writing, expects that the coming of Christ will soon make moot our ethical dilemmas, and so tends to err on the side of quietism, or, in the case of arms, pacifism): “to him who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also”.  Many utterly saintly Christian women and men have and do honor this understanding with their selfless commitment, including many in this congregation today.  My own pulpit hero, Ernest Fremont Tittle, the best Methodist preacher of the 20^th century, did so from his Chicago pulpit through the whole Second World War.  Think about that for a minute.  I did for more than a minute when I preached from that very pulpit some years ago. While personally I have not been able, to this date anyway, to agree with him, I never compose a sermon on this topic without wondering, and to some degree fearing, what his judgment might be.  Likewise, Allan Knight Chalmers, the BU professor of preaching in the 1950’s, for whom I was named, sided with Tittle.

            The multiple theories of just war, or war as the least of all evil alternatives, have developed since the Fourth Century and the writing of St. Augustine, whom we shall preach about this Lent 2023.  Here the command to “be merciful, even as God is merciful” is understood tragically to include times when mercy for the lamb means armed opposition to the wolf… tragically to include times when mercy for the lamb means armed opposition to the wolf. The New Testament apocalyptic frame and its interim ethic are honored, to be sure, but supplemented with the historic experience of the church through the ages.   Many utterly saintly Christian men and women have honored this understanding with their selfless commitment, including some present here today, and some who are not present because they gave their lives that others might live.   Just war thought includes several serious caveats.  We together need to know and recall these, rehearse and remember them, in five forms:  a just cause in response to serious evil, a just intention for restoration of peace with justice, an absence of self-enrichment or desire for devastation, a use as an utterly last resort, a claim of legitimate authority, and a reasonable hope of success, given the constraints of “discrimination” and “proportionality” (usually understood as protection of non-combatants).  Response.  Restoration.  Restraint.  Last resort.  Common authority.

            Prayerfully, we each and we all will want to consider our own understanding, our own ethic, our own choice and choices between these two basic alternatives.  But the careful listener this February of 2023 will want a thought or two about how, together, how as those who influence culture together, we might positively and proactively sing the four part chorus of love, and live out Matthew 5:38ff.  We could use some help here.  Couldn’t we?

            We will pause now to welcome a visitor to our service.  Welcome.  You will find him to my right, and down the west aisle of the chapel.  He is standing alone, and has been with us before.  Actually, his worship attendance has been perfect for 73 years, a far better record than he had in life.  For he is enshrined in one of our Connick stained-glass windows, one of the many novel choices the fourth President of Boston University, Daniel Marsh, made in designing our chapel.  Lincoln may be able to offer us some assistance today, on his birthday, February 12.  Happy Birthday, Mr. Lincoln.

            A year before John Brown entered his post retirement home in Lake Placid, in the fall of 1858, two men as different as life and death stood beside each other on debate platforms in Illinois.  To the right was the carefully groomed, smooth speaking, dapperly dressed Senator Stephen Douglas.  To his left, looking like a bumpkin, stood a gangly, homely man, overly tall and saddled with a high pitched, irritating voice.  They debated for the heart of the country, and Lincoln lost.  In his career he lost and lost and lost.  In 1858 he lost, even though virtually every point he made in his speeches proved true.  A house divided against itself cannot stand.  Accustomed to trample on the rights of others you have lost the genius of your own independence.  Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.  True, true, true.  He won in 1860, but in 1862 his party was thrashed (he said, ‘I am too big to cry and too badly hurt to laugh’), in 1863 the horror of Gettysburg quickened his finest address, in 1864, challenged by his own subordinate, he barely won, and in 1865, on Good Friday, he too was dead.  Lincoln spoke of his beloved country, our beloved land, in a soaring phrase, ‘the last, best hope’.

                        I believe that we as a people can, in some measure, live out Lincoln’s majestic hope, of this land as a ‘last, best hope’.  I offer, I believe in continuity with the Scripture as read today, two promissory notes.  Our culture languishes in the doldrums of a pervasive post-Covid malaise.  But a quickened excitement for the power of forbearance and the peace of a discipline against resentment can help us live out a faith engaged with culture, and help us build a culture amenable to faith.  Forbearance.  A spiritual discipline against resentment.

                        We may be entering an Epoch of Forbearance.  You will remember something of forbearance, patient restraint, a great power for doing good.  Sometimes it is better to have patience than brains.  If we can restrain ourselves, in the future, from making scapegoats of some in order furiously to retaliate against other hidden foes, that is, if we can forbear, we shall find that the community of peoples will see in us a last best hope.  We may model, as a people, a path forward into a time of freedom, pluralism, toleration, compromise, and peace.  Here Lincoln holds a key for us, a dream and hope of ‘malice toward none’.

                        We may also be entering an Epoch of Spiritual Discipline Against Resentment.  Here I simply refer to a great American and a greater historian, Christopher Lasch: "The only way to break the ‘endless cycle’ of injustice, Niebuhr argued, was nonviolent coercion, with its spiritual discipline against resentment.  In order to undermine an oppressor’s claims to moral superiority, (one) has to avoid such claims on their own behalf."

                  Again, in the confines of a sermon, I can only sketch. Lasch’s essay distilled this theme, a spiritual discipline against resentment, from the lives and writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther King, the Boston Personalists, and many others.   He saw, as we too may see in the Matthean passage earlier read, the necessity of holding at bay those deeply human sentiments that easily, and tragically, attach themselves to us when we are fearful, attacked, and violated.  For a future to emerge that is more than simply a repetition of the patterns of the past, a people must develop a ‘spiritual discipline against resentment’.  If we can model as a people this discipline, others around the globe will find cause to agree with Lincoln’s assessment of this land as a last, best hope.  Here Lincoln holds a key for us, a dream and a hope of ‘malice toward none’.

            What is this discipline?  What does it look like? How is one to find its power?  Truly I see no other source than a confessional reliance on the Christ of Calvary, and no better sentences than those uttered by Lincoln long ago.

                        An Epoch of Forbearance.  A Spiritual Discipline against Resentment.  I am not at all sure that I can define these for you, but I can give you an example, in life and speech.  It was the genius of Lincoln, which best bespoke this twin hope, especially in his second inaugural.  Within two months of writing and offering these words, he was dead.  Yet listen to his wise admonition to forbearance and discipline against resentment:

March 4, 1865 (in passim)

At this second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first…

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it…Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came…

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes…

 With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 02.12.2023 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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Matthew 5:13-20

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The text of this sermon is unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel, Uncategorized on 02.5.2023 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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Matthew 5:1-12

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For the text and translation of the cantata, please open the January 29, 2023 bulletin in a new tab. A portion of the sermon is available below.

Dean Hill:

By grace, with the encouragement of truth in Scripture, of goodness in the women and men of this faithful congregation, and of beauty in the highest reaches of musical splendor in Bach this morning, we are gathered and addressed.  There is much about us that occludes, that shadows, the lastingly true, the sturdily good, and the elegantly beautiful.  Our culture is awash, sometimes overcome, with these shadows.  We see photos of young widows in Ukraine.  We watch reports of gruesome gun violence in California.  We mourn a racist, heedless, needless death in Memphis.  Sometimes it threatens to become enough to take away our confidence, our courage, our willingness to lift another foot, to take another step forward.

So, Sunday. Sunday comes to bring encouragement, including this morning.  Matthew adorns our shared life with beatitudes, inverted blessings, which invert the expected blessings, finding makarios, happiness, blessing, on the underside, weakened, distaff side of life. So, worship of God on the Lord’s day is not a matter of indifference, not at all.

For we have left St. Luke, now to follow the trail of Jesus’ life, death and destiny, this year, 2023, in the Gospel of Matthew.   Matthew relies on Mark, and then also on a teaching document called Q, along with Matthew’s own particular material, of which our reading today is an example.  He has divided his Gospel into five sequential parts, a careful pedagogical rendering, befitting his traditional role as teacher, in contrast to Luke ‘the physician’, whose interest was history.   We have moved from history to religion, from narrative to doctrine.  Matthew is ordering the meaning of the history of the Gospel, while Luke is ordering the history of the meaning of the Gospel.  You have moved from the History Department to the Religion Department.  Matthew has his own perspective.

Every word is meant for a particular time, but not for all time.  For all time, and for our time, we have the staggering responsibility to fit the teaching to a new era, another epoch.  Whether or not ethics is situational, it is certainly epochal.  Our response and resistance to a megalomaniacal regime can be guided by but not directed by these precious verses of Holy Scripture.  Their application is, to use a marvelous American idiom, ‘up to you’.   And this will be inevitably be difficult.  Experience, freedom, presence—the invisible divine in life—are demanding and difficult.

Matthew has his own perspective.  Remember: ‘A literary work or a fragment of tradition is a primary source for the historical situation out of which it arose, and is only a secondary source for the historical details for which it gives information’ (45).  (Wellhausen.)

Some of that perspective involves a developing and developed Christology, an understanding of Christ.  Matthew is apparently fighting on two fronts, both against the fundamental conservatives to the right, and against the spiritual radicals to the left.  In Matthew, Gospel continues to trump tradition, as in Paul, but tradition itself is a bulwark to defend the Gospel, as in Timothy.  Matthew is trying to guide his part of the early church, between the Scylla of the tightly tethered and the Charybdis of the tether-less. Our forebears taught us so.  That is, with Matthew, they wanted to order the meaning of the history of the gospel.  They aspired to do so by opposition to indecency and indifference.  They attempted to do so by attention both to conscience and to compassion.  That is, they lived daily with a yearning to transform the culture around them in the spirit and into the form and face of Jesus Christ.

For example:  we today hear a reading and rendering of the Sermon on the Mount, perhaps the most beloved and best remembered of Jesus’ teachings.   At the outset, we face a raging river to cross.  For when were these teachings meant?  For all time, for Jesus’ time, for Matthew’s time, for our time—for the time being?

Let us let the beauty of the moment bathe us for a moment.  How today Dr. Jarrett shall we hear Bach?

Dr. Scott Jarrett's portion is not available at this time.

Dean Hill:

Gracious God, loving and holy and just,

We lift our hearts in thanks and praise this morning.

We come to this sanctuary ready again to live as glad hearted women and men.

With glad hearts, curious minds, and eager spirits we offer ourselves in worship.  Bless us, we pray, by thy presence, which we invoke in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Are we as ready to receive the gifts of grace as we should be?

Have we been prepared, in these days, to notice the bountiful goodness by which Divine Love has touched us?

Do we need to confess a little slowness, a little occasional lack of perception, shortness of spiritual breath, a slight or not so slight disregard for what we have been given?

O Lord, as a people of glad heart, we confess that we have not always been fully a people of open hands.  Open us in these moments of silence, to a new rebirth of wonder.

Great art thou, O Lord our God, and fully to be praised, morning by morning.

We pray for thy blessing in this hour, thy gifts of confidence, certainty and sureness for the days to come.

Help us to receive, with confidence, the many surprising gifts embedded in our personal lives.  Help us to notice the unexpected possibility, the new friend, the unusual word, the strange connection.  Help us to see more than we plan to see, to receive more than we expect to receive, with the confidence born of obedience.

Teach us to claim some certainty in the midst of uncertainty, as a church and and as a congregation.  Teach us we pray the path we best should trod into the unforeseeable future.  Teach us rightly to connect yesterday with tomorrow, in the light of thy certain love.

Shower with cool saving rain and moist power the leaders of this world, with sureness to seek justice and peace.  Help those in the torn out conflicts of our day to continue daily, surely, to seek the promise of the Prince of peace.  Kindle daily in the hearts of great leaders an even greater desire for peace, with a sense that surely goodness and mercy shall follow.

Through Jesus Christ our Lord,  Amen.

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

-Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music

posted in Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music, The Bach Experience, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 01.29.2023 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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Matthew 4:12-23

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Today we see Jesus walking the shore of his beloved Sea of Galilee.  He sets out at dawn, as the fishermen begin, casting and mending.  This stylized memory from the mind of Matthew kindles our own memory and hope, too.

That first light of the day, daybreak, carries a power unlike any other hour’s hue.  The excitement of beginning.  The promise of another start.  The crisp, cold opening of the year in January.  Like the skier, mits and poles at the ready, we adjust our goggles, and we lean, and…

Here is Jesus, midway from Christmas to Easter, from manger to cross, from nativity to passion.  Along the beach, along the shoreline he strides, one foot in sea and one on shore.

He meets two brothers at first light, and they meet him, God’s First Light, the light that shines in the darkness.  Notice how Simon, called Peter, and Andrew, his brother, are sketched.  There is little to nothing of history here, but what there is says so much!  There is no parental shadow lying on their fishing nets.  One hears no maternal imperative, no paternal dictate.  These boys are on their own.  They have left home already, maybe leaving the city to the south to find a meager middle-class existence farther north, with their own means of production.  They are small business men, boat owners, fishermen.  Neither the amhaaretz nor the gentry, they.  Not poor, not rich.  Working folks.  Young, young men.  Simon already has a nick-name.  A sign of joviality, of conviviality, of gregarious playful fun.  Peter, the Rock.  Is this for his steady faithfulness or his failure to float?  On this rock…Sinks like a Rock…You sense that these brothers play in the surf a little, kick up the sand a little, flirt with the Palestinianas a little, take time to take life as it comes.  Brown are their forearms, and burnished their brows.  They love the lake and life, and have made already their entrance into adult life.  For they have left home.  One envies their youth and freedom.  They have taken to the little inland sea, and with joy they meet each dawn, like this one, at first light, as they see Light.

You can feel the sand under their feet as they take a moment to play and laugh.  You can feel the chill of the water as they swim, while breakfast cooks over the fire.  You can feel their feeling of vitality and joy as they greet another day at first light.

I wonder whether we allow ourselves to drift a little too far from that sense of presence and gladness, that first light feeling.  Those nearly pure dawn moments of almost rapturous illumination.  Those moments of connection.

The day your BU acceptance letter came.

The afternoon of BU Commencement, four fast years later, 25,000 in attendance.

The evening you came out to your parents.

Your first child, tiny, red, crinkled, fists waving, crying and then asleep, literally in your hand.

Your daughter, or son, taking the vows of confirmed faith, in the church’s chancel.  Yes, there was some part child and another part adult in what was said.  But they were there, in tie and dress.  They were there, in public and in church.  They murmured, and they murmured piously.  And how did that feel Dad? Mom?

Your day of matrimony.  Down the aisle they come, or you come, father and daughter.  Do you? Do you?  I do. I do. They do.  My, my. And what was once a simpler world, now has further complexity and creative power.  A new creation.

Your retirement party.

There must have been some moment, sometime, when you felt an intimacy with the universe, a closeness, a sense of purpose.  That too is a kind of daybreak, dawn, first light.  That is an inkling of gladness, of presence.

A simple trust, like theirs who heard beside the Syrian sea, the gracious calling of the Lord, let us like them without a word rise up and follow thee…

Our denomination once had a thriving ministry in China.  When we forced out of China in the 1940’s, something vital left our church.  But you can still feel the first light of mission in the halls and rooms at Scarritt College in Nashville.  Oriental ornaments, paintings, sculpture, gifts, symbols of connection and love.  We grew up with the family of Tracy Jones, in Syracuse, who himself had been raised as missionary child in China.  As had Huston Smith, who taught across the river at MIT. Our first parsonage, in Ithaca, had once housed Pearl Buck while she and her husband were back on furlough, from China.  Have we begun with the Spirit to end with the flesh?  Have we forgotten the love we had at first?  Have we stayed close enough to that dawn light, and those first light experiences, to stay fresh?  Have we an inkling of, of…the gladness of faith, the presence of God?

Our malaise, our ennui, should we have such, our “acedia”—spiritual sloth or indifference, literally, our “not-caring”—so often is due to our turning away from the dawn, daybreak, that elemental experience of love that energizes everything else.  Said the saint, ‘love…and do what you will.’

Peter and Andrew, of course, are casting, casting nets.  They have no furrowed brows, no endless worries, no pessimism, no angst.  They probably have left unattended some holes in their nets, these two happy brothers.  They are not perfect and not perfectible. They are willing to accept that their casting will be imperfect, as all work, all life, all evangelism is imperfect.  But that imperfection will not keep them from enjoying the labor of casting.  To miss the dawn, the first light, is to miss the fun of faith!

Invite that neighbor, the one across the street whose porch light is always on, to come along to worship with you.  Do you enjoy, benefit from, appreciate worship here, come Sunday?  Then, of course, you will want to share that enjoyment, benefit and appreciation, by inviting someone to come too.  Here at dawn…those first stirrings, first longings, first intimations of something new and good….

Meanwhile, back on the beach, Jesus heads south, cove by cove, with Andrew and Peter frolicking in tow.  They had already left home.  So, maybe they are ready to take a flier on some new trek, not fully sure how it will work out.  It is a miracle that they are remembered, perhaps with a little hagiography, as having responded “immediately”.  Still, every little scrap of memory of these two brothers tends in the same direction—full of vim, vigor, vitality and pepperino.  Yes, they will follow!

But down the shoreline a little, there rests another boat.  A different story, a different set of brothers altogether.  James and John.  Known as the sons of Zebedee.  Simon has already earned his own name and nick-name.  But these two are known by their father’s name.  They haven’t left home.  They have not yet acquired that second identity.  When you won’t leave, won’t move, you won’t find, you won’t grow:  you’ll miss, you’ll miss the experience of really being alive. Here they are, as usual at dawn, stuck in the back of the boat.  All these years they have watched the Peter and Andrew show.  All these years they have envied the fun and frolic down the beach.  The late night parties.  The bonfires.  The singing.  The swimming.  And here they sit strapped to the old boat of old Zebedee.  They are lathered, covered with the ancient equivalents of chap stick and Coppertone.  And they are trapped.  Under the glaring gaze of Zebedee, whose thunderous voice has so filled their home that their own voices have not even emerged.  Every day, in the back of the boat.  And what are they doing?  Why you could have guessed it, even if the text had not made it plain.  Are they casting?  No.  Are they fishing?  No.  Are they sailing?  No.  They are mending.  Mending.  Knit one, pearl two… Their dad has got them into that conservation, protection, preservation mode.  Mending.  At dawn!  Of course, nets need mending, but the nets and the mending are meant in a greater service!  The fun is in the fishing!  The joy is in the casting.  The happiness is in the evangelism.  And there they sit, sober Calvinist souls, mending.  Deedle deedle dumpling, my son John…

Today we are mid-way between Christmas and Easter.  This passage has a little passion (the Baptist) and a little nativity (Nazareth). The two stories of Jesus, of his birth and of his death, are meant to complement and interpret each other.

Here is a pronouncement of a broad peace, on earth.  On earth.  With Gandhi along the Ganges.  Beside Tutu on the southern cape.  Along the path of the Dalai Lama in farthest Tibet.  In Tegucigalpa, back when, with our missionary friends Mark and Lynn Baker. This is no predestinarian quietism, which has taken over parts of American Christianity, from its seedbeds in the Orthodox Presbyterian and Anabaptist communions:  cold, careful, efficient, first mile, changeless, fearsome, depressed grace.  No, this is Christmas:  warm, open, effective, second mile, free, growing, angry, and hopeful!  Augustine:  Hope has two beautiful daughters:  anger and courage.

The early church told two stories about Jesus.  The first about his death.  The second about his life.  The first, about the cross, is the oldest and most fundamental.  The second, about the manger, is the key to the meaning of the first, the eyeglasses which open full sight, the code to decipher the first.  Without Christmas you can’t see Easter right.  Jesus died on a cross for our sin according to the Scripture.  That is the first story.  But who was Jesus?  What life did his death complete?  How does his word heal our hurt?  And how does all this accord with Scripture? One leads to the other.

This second, second level story begins at Christmas, and continues in Epiphany, and is told among us to interpret the first.  Christmas\Epiphany is meant to make sure that the divine love is not left only to the cross, or only to heaven.  Epiphany is meant to open out a whole range of Jesus, as brother, teacher, healer, young man, all.  Christmas is meant to provide the mid-course correction that might be needed if all we had was Holy Week.  And the Christmas\Epiphany images are the worker bees in this theological hive.  Easter may announce the power of peace, but Christmas names the place of peace.  Jesus died the way he did because he lived the way he did.  Jesus lived the way he did, and so died the way he did.  That is, it is not only the Passion of Christ, but the Peace of Christ, too, which Christians like you affirm.  What lovely news for us at the start of a new year.  The passion too of Christ.  Theologically, globally, politically, militarily, ecclesiastically —we have seen passion this year.  Now comes dawn, the light, Epiphany, Christmas\Epiphany again to announce that there is more to Jesus than the passion.  There is the matter of peace as well.

The real miracles of this account lie in the second invitation to the second set of brothers.  It is a miracle that Jesus stopped and invited them, so somber are they.  I wonder if he took in the timbre of Zebedee’s voice, and saw them quaking in the back of the boat.  Perhaps his heart went out to James and John.  No, I am sure Jesus’ heart went out to James and John, as it does now to so many 20 year-olds.  So, he stops, Jesus stops, and he asks, Jesus asks.

That is the great thing about an invitation.  All you can do is ask.  Do ask.  Ye have not because ye ask not.  And for the first time in their lives, James and John are invited to live, to live and to leave…and so to live. Too many people live half asleep.  Too often we don’t live life, life lives us.  Like these two knitting in the back of the boat.  Half asleep.  Then dawn comes, and day breaks, and that first light shines!  And a voice like no other, so equanimous and so serene, casts its spell upon them.  Maybe upon you, this morning.  Do you hear Jesus’ voice this morning? Watch.  It is a first light moment.  See James, see John.  First one, then the other, stands and moves.  Under the shadow of that paternal presence, under the sound of that maternal imperative of home.  They rise.  And they move toward First Light.  They are about to grow up.  AND THEY LEAVE HOME! Wonderful!  And what do they leave behind?  You would have known even if the Scripture had not laid it right out.  They leave behind the boat…and their father.  We best honor the adults in our lives when we become adults ourselves. (repeat)

Will this world grow up? Will we find a way to live together, all eight plus billion of us, and to drink from the same cup? This text, strangely like the Gospel of John, claims for Jesus that Jesus is light.  Not color, now.  Light.  Color is great, and good.  But we all want finally to be able to drink from the same water fountain, we want our children in one school, we want to sit at one table, we want to drink from one goblet.  It is light that we will need into the 21^st century.  We finally all drink from the same cup.

I am told of a man who stopped in his new neighborhood to buy lemonade from a freckle faced 7 year old girl and a mahogany skinned 6 year old boy.  He paid his dime and drank his beverage and stayed to talk.  After a while the girl asked if there was anything else he wanted.  No, he said, why?

Well sir, we are running a business here, and we have had a busy morning, and we hope for a busy afternoon, but that cup you are holding is the only one we have, we only have one cup, so if you don’t mind, we’d like it back.

We all finally drink from the same cup. The more funerals you attend, the more clearly you will remember.  We forget it at our worldly peril.  If we walk in the light as He is in the light we have fellowship with one another.  We have more in common, as climate change, nuclear danger, European warfare, governmental malfunction, denominational turmoil, and personal angst remind us, all around the globe, than we do in difference. We have far more in common, in unity, than we do in difference, in diversity.  Give us light.  Give us light.  Give us light. Dear God, give us light.

Have you faith?  You are going to need some this coming year, 2023.

At first light, at dawn, we may with happiness remember this.  The protagonist of M Robinson’s Gilead, (we will have Robinson here to speak April 11) an old pastor in the Iowa town of this name, spends Sunday mornings, at dawn, praying alone in his church.  He loves the morning hour.  He waits with baited breath for the church to begin to fill up, to fill in.  He basks in the first light of day.

He knows, you do too, that we are going to need some faith.  Some faith, some faith, some faith… this year.  Others will, too.  How will they find faith in Christ without a church family to love them, without a church home to nurture them:  without you taking a moment to say, ‘I will be at Marsh Chapel on Sunday at 11am—why not meet me there?’

That is the dawn, Peter and Andrew, that is the real joy of faith:  sharing it.  That is the dawn, James and John, that is the real joy of faith:  sharing it.  Would you like to have some fun this week?  Look around for dawn breaking out, on the beach, and kick up some sand.

Sursum Corda!  Lift up your hearts!

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 01.22.2023 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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Matthew 2:13–23

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The dawn is breaking, slowly, over the snow-blanketed city.  You have assembled yourself for the morning, with your coat and hat and mittens.  You stand like a medieval knight with his standard, you with your broom or shovel in hand, and dawn is breaking slowly, say in upstate NY, say in Buffalo, a week after the great snowfall.

Shakespeare knew the beauty and terror of the dawn:

The grey eyed morn smiles on the frowning night

                  Chequering the eastern clouds with streaks of light

                  And flecked darkness like a drunkard reels

                  Form forth days path and Titan’s fiery wheels

                  Now ere the sun advance his burning eye

                  The day to cheer and night’s dank dew to dry

The great poet and playwright knew, as was said of our Lord in his earthly ministry, knew the heart of man.  He knew the complexity of moral judgment.  He knew the ambiguity of corporate and governmental life.  He knew the strange subterranean interplay of spirituality and sexuality.  He knew the elusive mobility of truth, which, to be spoken, requires a lifetime of rapt attention, and sometimes years of isolated pain and imprisonment. What this country may need to start a new year is neither a chicken in every pot nor a good 5 cent cigar nor a plain, new, fair, or square deal, but, a rivetingly taught course or two in Shakespeare!  Or Paul of Tarsus.

As you start, at whatever dawn you face, ponder this Good News:  Christmas gives strength to start.  A new year?  Strength to start.  A new path?  Strength to start.  A new relationship?  Strength to start.  A new diagnosis?  Strength to start.  A new commitment?  Strength to start.  A new situation? Strength to start.  Christmas offers strength to start.

In the first place, we may plainly affirm that together we find a shared strength at Christmas.

We listen to the words of St Matthew, the story of the Magi, and we hear them as God’s Word.  The words of Scripture are “holy” in that they stand over against us, they take the measure of our self-deception, they outlast our passions and defeats and very lives.  These verses will live longer than we, and rightly so. They will still be heard when we will not be. They will be heard when YOU will not be. So,  they have the power to help us to begin the service, the day, the week, the year, looking out in Christmastide at a new year.

The words of Scripture start with the whole of life in view and with the end of life in view.

We too must make our various beginnings, and so we are not displeased to find here an inspired manner of entry.  By example the Kings assert strength to start.

The passage opens the year with joy, and leads us into a new vocabulary of love and delight. Words of wisdom, that the Kings celebrate, and which will adorn the Gospel as the gospel unfolds.  These words are meant to become our living vocabulary, dictionary, glossary.  We are to learn them again as the New Year unfolds:

Grace

Peace

Thanksgiving

Saints together

Gifts-charismata

Guiltless

Fellowship

In Christ

God is faithful

Oh, that we would bathe ourselves at the outset of each day in such a shower of strength!

For you, all of you, have been found in a new situation.  You are “in Christ”. You have been seized, at least for a worship hour, and so maybe for a lifetime, by the confession of faith that is the confession of the church.

Start the day strong—much will befall to challenge by dusk.

Start life strong in childhood—much comes later to unsettle.

Start with laughter and play in summer—much in autumn proves more difficult.

Start this New Year with strength, and like a skier carried along by gravity, you will pass by and over and around the bumps.

Start this week and each week with the hearing of the Holy Word—much that is less than holy will greet you later.  Go to church on Sunday.

In the second place, we may plainly affirm that the gifts of Christmas are reliable in time of need, are firm in the face of danger.  They make us confident when we need to be and inwardly secure when we have to be.

Whether we are young or mature or old, whether we are babes in Christ or approved in Christ or wise in Christ—we make our starts with strength, recognizing that, as one author began one famous book, ‘life is hard and life is a struggle’.

For the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the people of skill, but time and chance happen to them all.  I once said to my father, a graduate of Boston University in 1953:  ‘this is not fair’.  He replied as you would have done:  ‘whoever told you life is fair?’

Life is not fair, not by a country mile.

Not fair to those who suffer untimely loss

Not fair to those stricken with unexpected illness

Not fair to those whose limbs are taken and torn

Not fair to those who should have been chosen

Not fair to you

Time and chance happen to all.

Not fair to those of whom our south Texas weekly internet congregant, and theological poet, Rev. Milton Jordan, writes:

Imagine Joseph’s difficult decision. He and Mary have a child less than two weeks old. They do not have any documents to prove they are married. Visitors who have heard rumors of this new heir in David’s line have come to see for themselves, and they report that Herod has also heard these rumors. Joseph knows what this means, and he knows how few options he has.

With few resources, perhaps a gift or three from some of the visitors, Joseph takes Mary and their newborn child and strikes out across the country looking for safety in another land. Imagine them now, their few resources long spent, at a crowded border crossing asking for asylum in this foreign land.  

Is this not fairly the heart of the simple gifts we shall share in a moment at the Lord’s Table, and at the Lord’s behest?  It was a borrowed upper room, not a paid for condo, in which the meal was shared.  It was a circle tinged with betrayal, not a safe protected team, within which he washed feet and lifted cup.  It was an evening before defeat, not a twilight of victory past, during which wine and bread were given.  It was lack that gave way at last to hope, treachery that was the doorway to a later hope, suffering, the suffering of the cross, that made way for the hope in which we now stand.  It was Jesus giving himself to us in sacrificial love, in a week when we may have known disrespect, betrayal, and insult.

Whatever harsh word you now have reason to hear and overhear, hold on.  It is not the last word.

Start with that trust and strength.

Paul suffered shipwreck and lash and hunger and despond.  Yet he could still sing with confidence:

 If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation…

                   He who has begun a good work in you will complete it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ…

                   Have you begun with the Spirit to end with the flesh?…

                   It is the God who said ‘Let light shine out of darkness’ who has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ…

                   He is the beginning, the first born from the dead that in everything he might be pre eminent…

                   For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we preached among you, was not Yes and No, but in him it is always Yes.  For all the promises of God find their Yes in him…

Resolve to choose and memorize one of these verses of hope wrought in struggle, in 2023.

Whatever silence and despair now accompany you, hold on.  Your lasting friendship is in Christ.

Martin Luther recounted his many attempts to find peace with God through self-discipline, through religious duty, through acts of contrition, through his own works, until at last he collapsed.

At last, he found his way out from the harsh word of command from authority to obedience, and out into the meadow of hope in a calling word from wisdom to happiness, from the Kings to the Christ.

“But this availed me nothing; nor did it free me from a fearful and dreadful conscience…This is God’s Word… this one thing God asks of you, that you honor him by accepting comfort; believe and know that he forgives your transgressions and has no wrath against you.”

We learn late or early that without explanation rain falls on the just and unjust alike. In time of trial, though, you may start again with strength.  You have the love of God, the Gospel of Christ, the Grace of the Lord, the baptism of the church, the prayers of the church, the Lord’s prayer, the ten commandments, the sacrament of communion, the word of absolution, and the decision of faith.  Use them, rely on them, let them buoy you up, in time of trial.  What more do you need?

In the third place, we may plainly affirm the strength that comes from beginning with the end in view.  Though they found him an infant, one who does not speak, they saw him a King, One whose voice rings out to all the world.

This Christmas Sunday reminds us that the Lord Christ is both Alpha and Omega.  When at last we set down our various tools and trades, when at last we have lost our eyes and ears, when at last our final paycheck has come, when at last the various dawns have given way to dusk and dusk and dusk—here too we are in Christ and nowhere else, of Christ and no one else.  Somehow all the little subplots and sufferings of this present time are going to find their full place and point in a greater story, the day of God, the life-span of Jesus Christ.  Today is God’s, and tomorrow is God’s, too.  Earth is God’s, and heaven is too. Somehow, somehow, somehow…

So, we need and want to be together, with and for each other, come Sunday, right here, right now.  To know one another, to love one another, and then, at last, to remember one another. As our Haines, Alaska internet listener, and obituary composer, State Writer Laureate Heather Lende put it:

Writing about the dead helps me celebrate the living, my neighbors, friends, husband and five children, and this place, which some would say is on the edge of nowhere, but for me is the center of everywhere (If You Lived Here I’d Know Your Name , p, 9)

Only such a hope can sustain travelers like us, who seek wisdom and who seek love, even as that hope has sustained the church for sixty some generations. Such a hope strengthens the Magi:  unsung saints and heroines, and those whose names recall a sure Christmas strength.  Some are enshrined in Scripture:  Matthew, Paul, Mary, John. Some are known in Tradition: Ghandi, Heschel, Sadat, Teresa.  Some are from closer experience: John Dempster, Frances Willard, Daniel Marsh, Lawrence Carter. And one, more sung than unsung now, greets us on this plaza every morning, with birds in flight, emblematic of a real Christmas strength. Only such a hope could have strengthened Martin Luther King on August 28 1963 in Washington and all the long bitter way to April 3 1968, his last earthly night: “I just want to do God’s will.  And he has allowed me to go to the mountain.  And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised land…So I’m happy tonight, I’m not worried about anything.  I’m not fearing any man.”

At Christmas, you start with confidence about the end. You are strengthened to start in the hope of Jesus Christ.

Christmas strength.

Strength in Christ.

Strength in times of trial.

Strength with hope for the end.

Put on the whole clothing of Christ!

As you stand at the dawn of the rest of life…

We will put it in terms familiar…

Put on the whole wardrobe of Christ, as you seize your shovel:

Put on the sweater of grace

Put on the boots of peace

Put on the mittens of thanksgiving

Put on the tuke of fellowship

Put on the scarf of faithfulness

Put on the snowsuit of sanctification

Pick up the shovel of salvation

And the ice-pick of hope

And the salt of happiness

For today, by grace, you are given a Christmas strength.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 01.1.2023 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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John 1:1–14

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Merry Christmas!

The text of this sermon is unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel, Uncategorized on 12.25.2022 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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Matthew 1:18-25

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You may be trying to find your spiritual footing. 

Other than the emergence of language itself, the stumbling child’s movements in learning to walk are perhaps the most tender in memory.    Adults learn to walk in various ways too.  I watched my father, nearly killed by an infection, and bed-bound for months, learn to walk again.  While I can see his first steps, baby steps at age 80, I would not be fully able to convey the power of those steps.  

You too may be trying to get your balance, to find your religious footing.  As with so many things, the decision to try is the main thing.  We learn to walk at different ages.  

On Ground Hog Day each year I set aside an hour to skate with students on the Frog Pond, though this year at the rink at 41 Park.  Some of those from South Carolina and Texas are just learning to skate.  They have the most fun.  

One day this late autumn the wind was swirling on Bay State Road, catching up the leaves in little multi colored cyclones, and twirling them around.   It was raining red an orange, yellow and brown, whipping the leaves to the cheek.  Then coming toward me a young woman, seeing the swirl, herself dropped her books, made a pirouette, and twirled in tandem with the leaves.  One loop, two loops, three…  I judge it was the right response to the wind. 

In an age and setting that demeans and diminishes mystery and history, she danced.  She found her footing, along our street.  She was learning to walk, in the spirit. 

 Yes, it is important to take it slow as you begin.  On the open path among leaves no step has yet trodden black, it makes sense to takes things slow.  A sermon about taking such primordial steps, should take a slow pace.  Don’t you think?  A sermon about, say, the beginning of the Gospel. 

Many women and men who do not regularly darken doors of churches are nonetheless trying to find spiritual footing.  I believe that a Sunday sermon, of all things, can bring the balance needed for the walk of faith.  In fact, if the sermon cannot, what can?  Like the bullfighter with the cape waving, like the boxer circling to find that one opening, like the private detective waving the flashlight in the cellar, here we are, everything at stake.  As Paul sang, To all God's beloved in Rome, who are called to be saints: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. 

Will somebody please lend a hand?  Someone is trying to learn to walk.  I have been humbled to see people to learn to walk, especially in the imagination.  As a matter of fact, I think I saw some of you there. 

 If you are going to walk, you will need light to see your way.  It is dark in December, dark in Advent, dark as the readings shift from sunny Luke to dark Matthew, dark as the church begins another liturgical year, dark as finals befall, dark, dark, outside it is dark.  Dark as when Joseph slept, and an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream. 

 So let us look for light in which to walk. 

 Look up.  Light falls to illumine the path, THE WAY, ahead.  Look.  Let us walk in the light of the Lord.  How many times this week have you touched something nearly 3000 years old?  Well, Isaiah’s words are that old, or nearly so.  Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel 

 Year by year as I hear again read these Isaian prophecies, they seem annually ever farther off.  They just seem so improbable.  I give you pollution, pandemic, Putin, prejudice, pistols, politics and pain.  And yet, the aspiration remains, the promise and prophecy endure: Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel 

 Isaiah is not exclusively full of promise, though promise is the heart of today’s reading.  Isaiah predicts doom for the people of God.  Isaiah is like Amos and Hosea and Micah.  These were old and popular verses, to which both Isaiah and Micah repaired.  The oracles of judgment upon the people of God, which both precede and follow our lesson today, underscore one particular ailment within the body of God’s people.  This is a lesson we may do well to keep steadily before us.  One primary impediment to relationship with God is injustice.   Repeatedly all of these early prophets return to this single theme.  The relationship between God and people is torn, rent asunder, by mistreatment of the poor.  We will want to hear this as clearly as possible, as we find our footing, along the walk of faith.  It is not only true that justice is desirable.  Justice itself is marker along our path, a way of walking in the light.  But it is not an end in itself.  It absence is not desirable, but for a fuller reason.  Injustice impedes our walk in the light.  Injustice interferes with our relationship with God.  Doing justly is meaningful because…it leads to God. As bad as injustice is in its own right, its damage to our relationship with God is far worse. 

I believe this is why the pulpit of Marsh Chapel has resounded for so many decades in attention to the weight matters of justice:  Littell and the holocaust, Thurman and race, Hamill and war, Thornburg and cults, Neville and creation, Hill and a common hope.  My predecessors knew well that you have to look up in hope, look up in dream, look up in desire, look up in expectation.  To find our footing going forward we need the light that comes from a sense of possibility, a sense of promise.   Along comes Isaiah to remind us: 

There will come a day when the swords of terror are beaten into the plowshares of learning, the swords of conflict into the plowshares of cooperation, the swords of division into the plowshares of communion, the swords of despair into the plowshares of promise.  That is, in Isaiah, judgment is not the last word.  Without a sense of a final horizon of hope, without a sense of the love of God, without a sense of the prospect of lasting meaning hidden somehow in history, without a word to guide us about the latter days, no matter how far off, the muscle for the daily struggle deteriorates.  You’ve got to have a dream.  If you don’t have a dream, how are you going to have a dream come true? 

 Look up in hope, in promise. 

 Look down.  Look down every now and then, too.  In the quiet of late autumn, in the dusk of late Advent, we will want to look down at ourselves, not on ourselves but at ourselves.  We are listening to three ancient lessons, trusting that in their interpretation, we may find some light for the path ahead. 

 In his great letter to the Romans, whose greeting lines we hear today, the Apostle Paul offers his wisdom for living, to a church he has yet to visit.  As in Isaiah, the words are meant as advice for groups, for the chosen people of God and for the called people of God, for Israel and the church.  The Apostle’s advice is very earthly.  It causes us to look at our shoes, our actual manner of walking.  In fact, the advice sounds like it had been written as a challenge not only to culture at large but also to college culture.  The verses form a cautionary tale.  I think that almost every week there is someone here or listening from afar who may be ready to hear Paul’s greeting.  In fact, Marsh Chapel and places like it may simply stand as silent witnesses to the hope that students may emerge from their studies, and professors from their teaching, without undue regret, without too many regrets.  We all carry regrets.  None of us is perfect.  Including you.  And me. But if we love one another we will want them to be fewer rather than more.  Paul warns in his greatest letter, about regrets. 

What warning would we add today? 

For those of us working nearby young adults in this era, the manner and meaning of instrumental communication is a serious issue, or set of issues.  We are the grownups on the lot, and yet we are largely immigrants to a land far more native to our students.  In some cases, we are still back in the old country.  How are we going to bring to bear the wisdom of the ages, in the twitter age?  Are we attentive, curious, honest, straight, kind?  Or do we hang back, and let things take their own course?  I pose this not as a question for sudden answer, yours or mine, but as a lingering, daily, annual point of meditation.  How much blackberry and how much blackberry pie?  How much Facebook and how much face time?  

 For St Paul, learning to walk, to find faith, a personal faith, the walk of faith, for him salvation is close at hand.  He still feels the heat of the apocalyptic end, coming he expects in his lifetime.  Yet note for the all specificity of his warnings in the letter later (drunkenness, debauchery, quarreling) just how open, how free is his advice:  ‘put on Christ’.  And what, we may ask, does that look like?  He has no need to say, for he has said so just prior to our reading; ‘love your neighbor as yourself.  Love does no wrong to the neighbor, therefore love is the fulfilling of the law’ (13: 10) 

Look down.  Polish your shoes.  Watch your step.  A walk in the light requires a careful step, as responsible stewardship. 

And look out.  Look out!  Isaiah lifts our gaze.  Paul lowers our gaze.  Matthew lengthens our gaze. 

I believe that many people, perhaps you among them, are looking for ways to find their spiritual footing.  You may nod a quiet affirmation, with Isaiah, to the need for promise.  You may whisper a quiet agreement, with Paul, for the need for discipline.  But our third lesson, our Gospel, may at first seem less helpful.  It may in fact be less helpful. 

 You may wonder why a church, or this chapel, would have read such odd passages during the month of Advent, in these last few weeks, about the days of Noah, about sudden disappearance in field and mill, about thieves in the night, about the coming of the Son of Man.  Why do these ancient, foreign, strange chapters from the history of our religious families still occupy our attention?  After all, the fervent first century hope that the end would come before the first generation had passed away was disappointed.  Why listen any longer to these predictions?   

 The meal is over, and we are left with leftovers. 

 The apocalyptic language and imagery which appear here in Matthew and in Luke, and may have simply been taken over from contemporary Judaism, are made to serve, in this Gospel, another purpose than in their original serving.   Eschatology becomes ethics.  Expectation about the end is made to serve a moral point:  be ready; watch.   In our funeral service we repeat in our prayers, ‘we know not what a day may bring, but only that the hour for serving thee is always present’.   

Like Christmas dinner with an ornery uncle or disapproving great aunt, these Advent passages, which were the ancestors of the language of our whole New Testament, can prove hard to have around, but they also have stories to tell, and wisdom to share.   

 Like a strange uncle, they can remind us of how unexpectedly things can change.  “I lost everything I had in the depression”.  Like a feisty aunt, they can challenge us to be ready, “I never thought that day that I would meet my husband on a train to St Louis”.  Like a cousin we seldom see, they can jolt us because they look like us and sound like us when they say, “If I had known then what I know now I would have acted more quickly”. 

 You need those family memories, those familial warnings.  Look out!  Be watchful and mindful and careful. 

 You just never know what a day will bring. 

 It is not enough to generalize or specialize. We have to improvise.  You will probably need to ‘look out’ and improvise a bit too, now and then. 

 You may be trying to find your spiritual footing.  It is in fact hard to get started, in anything, and really hard in anything that really matters.   

 Walk in the light of promise.   

 Walk in the light of discipline. 

 Walk in the light of readiness. 

 If we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another. 

 Today’s sermon is a sermon for those of us who are trying to find our spiritual footing, to get started, to learn the walk of faith. 

 Sometimes the people who say or think they have the least faith in fact have the most.  I am not most interested in how many psalms you can recite, though I implore you to learn some.  I am not most interested in how many hymns you know by heart, though when you are ill or alone they could be saving companions.  I am not most interested in how many religious books you have read, though learning and piety are meant to live together.  I am not most interested in how many church services you have attended, though there is no better way to grow in faith, no better way to learn to walk, none.   

 But I am interested in this.  Are you putting one foot ahead of the other?  Are you trying?  Are you concerned about it?  Are you walking?  Are you walking in the light?  Are you letting some of the sunlight of promise fall on your shoulder?  Are you letting some of the inner light of discipline carry your feet along?  Are you watching for that unexpected ray of inspiration, burst of imagination or challenge to investigation? 

 Not:  are you running?  Not: are you winning?  Not:  are you starring?  Not:  are you succeeding?  Not:  are you finishing?  Just this:  Are you walking in the light? 

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 12.18.2022 at 11:00 am

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Matthew 3:1-12

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 12.4.2022 at 11:00 am

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Matthew 24:36-44

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The gist of today’s gospel is clear enough.  We cannot see or know the future.  We ought to live on the qui vive.  Health there is, to be sure, and succor in a full acceptance and recognition of such a humble epistemology and such a rigorous ethic.  Let us admit to the bone our cloud of unknowing about the days and hours to come.  Let us live every day and every hour of every day as if it were our last.  Song and Scripture, sermon and prayer, they will guide us along this very path come Sunday morning, come this very morning. 

What is less clear is the meaning of the coming of the Son of Man.  What is the nature of this coming?  Who is the person so named?  What difference, existential difference, everlasting difference does any of this make?  What did Jesus actually say here?  On what score did the primitive Christian community remember and rehearse his teaching?  Did Matthew have a dog in this fight?  How has the church, age to age, interpreted the passage?  We shall pose these four questions to verses 36 to 44 in the 24th chapter of the Gospel bearing the name of Matthew, and then apply the verses to ourselves. 

Jesus.  Jesus may have used this phrase, though most judge that it is a later church appellation. It may have been both. This phrase, coming out of Daniel chapter 7 (did Jesus hear this read and hold it in memory?) and the stock Jewish apocalyptic of Jesus’ day, was as much a part of his environment as the sandals on his feet, the donkey which he rode, the Aramaic which he spoke, the Palestinian countryside which he loved, and the end of time which he expected, in the contemporary generation.  Did he understand himself to be that figure?  We cannot see and we cannot say, though I think it unlikely.  That is, Jesus used the phrase, most probably, but not of himself, most probably. It is Mark and the author Enoch who have given us the ‘Son of Man’ in its full sense, and it is Matthew alone among the Gospel writers who uses the ‘coming’ in a technical sense (so Dr. Perrin, IBDS 834, and others).  The soprano voice of Jesus is far lighter in the gospel choruses than we would expect, than we would *think or like. 

Church.  Mark, Luke and Matthew carry forward these standard-end-of-the-world predictions.  Our lectionary clips out the mistaken acclamation of 24: 34, just two verses ahead of our reading, but we should hear it:  Truly I tell you this generation will not pass away until all these things take place.  Like the waiting figures in the Glass Menagerie, the earlier church has hung onto these blown glass elements while awaiting a never returning person, like that telephone operator, ‘who had fallen in love with long distances’.  They preserve the menagerie in fine glass of hopes deferred that maketh the heart sick.  That generation and seventy others have passed away before any of this has taken place.  We do not expect, literally expect, these portents any longer.  Nor should we.  They are part of the apocalyptic language and imagery which was the mother of the New Testament and all Christian theology since, a beloved mother long dead.  The Son of Man was the favorite hope child of that mother.  A long low alto aria this.  Yet we should, and do, hear these apocalyptic passages.  They are a part of our shared, family history. 

Matthew.  To his credit and to our benefit Matthew makes his editorial, redactorial moves, to accommodate what he has taken from Mark 13.  The point of apocalyptic eschatology is ethical persuasion, here and in the sibling synoptic passages.  Watch.  Be ready.  Live with your teeth set. Ready and steady, ready and steady. Let the servants, the leaders of Matthew’s day, be found faithful.   After 37 excoriating verses directed against the Pharisees in chapter 23, white washed tombs which outwardly appear beautiful but within full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness—the hard truth about religion at our worst--and after 43 further verses in chapter 24 of standard end time language, Matthew pulls up.  He stands and delivers his sermon.  You must be ready.  Steady and ready, steady and ready. The figure of the future is coming at an hour you do not expect.  Hail the Matthew tenor. 

Tradition.  Immediately the church scrambled to reinvent and reinterpret.  Basso profundo. One example, found early in the passage, will suffice.  Of that day no one knows, not even the Son.  Except that some texts take out ‘even the Son’, in deference to Jesus’ later and higher Person.  It is, finally, and except for occasional oddball readings, like that of the Montanists in the second century and the fundamentalists in the twenty first, the church’s view that apocalyptic language and imagery convey the future as unknowable and the present as unrepeatable. The future as unknowable and the present as unrepeatable… 

To sum up: As soon, here at Advent 1, the edge of the church’s new year, as we reach out to grasp the future, it has slipped past us, already flying down the road to the rear, into the past.  The present itself is no better, because its portions of past and future are tangled permanently together.  We do have the past, neither dead nor past…or do we?  Memory and memoir spill into each other with the greatest of ease.  One agnostic admitted that music, performed, was his closest approximation of God, the presence of God, the proof of God.  Gabby Gifford showed her history of healing this past week, crowned in music, music that resurrects memory and empowers speech.  Somehow, she persevered.  In week with 6 dead in a Walmart in Virginia, 5 in a gay night club in Colorado, 4 on campus in Idaho, and 3 on a team bus in Virginia, all far more preventable than we have yet found the national will to make them, we think on those so maimed and those so lost.  We need music to carry us, to carry us toward the true and the good and the beautiful.  And to keep us steady and ready, waiting for an opening, a moment when something can be voted, passed, done.  Music can carry our deep memory, including in worship.  The ordered public worship of Almighty God on the Lord’s day is not a matter of indifference.  It carries the models of saving intervening words and soulful intervening notes that may just see us through.  We shall listen in a moment to a beautiful anthem, with rapt attention.  One trusted Christian—it may have been you—sensed grace and grace in the grace of worship, unlike any other. Every moment is a veritable mystery.  Music is a veritable mystery.  So next week, we shall hear:  My body and My blood, these are veritable mysteries, so named mystery, sacramentum, to this day.  How shall we respond? 

Sleepers awake!  There is not an infinite amount of unforeseen future in which to come awake and to become alive!  There does come a time when it is too late, allowing the valence of ‘it’ to be as broad as the ocean and as wide as life.  You do not have forever to invest yourself in deep rivers of Holy Scripture, whatever they may be for you.  It takes time to allow the Holy to make you whole.  Begin.  You do not have forever to seek in the back roads of some tradition, whatever it may be for you, the corresponding hearts and minds which and who will give you back your own-most self.  It takes time to uncover others who have had the same quirky interests and fears you do.  Begin.  You do not have forever to sift and think through what you think about what lasts and matters and counts and works.  Honestly, who could complain about young people seeking careers, jobs, employment, work?  Do so.  But work alone will not make you human, nor allow you to become a real human being.  Life is about vocation and avocation, not merely about employment and unemployment.  You are being sold a bill of goods, here.  Be watchful.  It takes time to self-interpret that deceptively crushing verse, ‘let your light so shine before others’.  Begin.  You do not have forever to experience Presence.  It is presence, spirit, good for which we long, for which, nay for Whom, we are made.  It takes time to find authentic habits of being—what makes the heart sing, the soul pray, the spirit preach.  Your heart, not someone else’s, your soul, not someone else’s, your spirit, not someone else’s.  Begin. 

You must be ready.  For the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect. 

For example.  How do you deal with hurt that comes from a person you deeply love, a relationship you truly enjoy, an institution you firmly affirm, or a friendship you lastingly cherish? Was yours a contentious Thanksgiving feast?  It is one thing to think about pain, permanent or passing, that comes in collision with others whom we do not know well or care for.  These traffic accidents are perhaps to be expected in the rush hours of relational experience.  When we do not know one another, or not well, we can miss cues and generate miscues that those more familiar would avoid. Not knowing you I did not know and would never have expected that you are an avid Yankees fan, and if I had I would never have said what I did, directly, about the Yankees.  Well, I probably wouldn’t have done.  But what about the church you deeply love, when disappointment comes from the pulpit? What about that lifetime friend who says something unpleasant and hurtful?  What about that employer, whom you revere and admire, to whom you give both creativity and loyalty?  What about that community group whose organizational needs you have selflessly met, that then makes a statement or takes a decision that causes you pain? Or, what about the country you love, when its voice, its choice, deeply disappoint?  In short, what happens when those you love hurt you?  How do you deal with that? 

You must be ready.  For the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect. 

Perhaps you will irrupt in the moment, lash out in reaction, without any due process of reflection, because the moment needs it, and you have or feel you have no choice.  Let your yea be yea and your nay be nay.  Be angry, and let not the sun go down on your anger.  This may cause more problems than it solves, of course, but you may have had no choice.   

Or, you may sense that you just want to put some distance between yourself and your source of pain, institutional, relational, or personal.  A little time, a little distance, a little pause, a little absence.   Thence a cooling off, it may be, not a squaring off.  In some measure that may suit you and the challenge.  You did not start it.  You do not need to take responsibility for it.  Shake the dust from your feet.  Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day. (You see how tough it can be even, especially when you know the Bible, to pick out the right Bible verse!)  The trouble is still there, though it may just dissipate on its own.  Not all battles have to be fought.   

Or maybe you want to just listen. You know, like animals do, they just curl up and become a log or a part of the scenery.   Let life go along, and let the conversation play out.  You do not need to oppose.  You do not need to repose.  You can just pose in silence.  You can offer the silent treatment—present but quiet.  This could work, though there is a quality of falsehood about it.  It may depend on just how substantial the fender-bender was, how hurtful the collision, how extreme the traffic accident.   Silence alone has limits to its beneficence.  Still, as the man said, ‘I would rather remain silent and be thought a fool than to open my mouth and remove all doubt’.  Sometimes it is better just to keep your own counsel, and play dead. 

You must be ready.  For the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect. 

On the first Sunday of Advent, you are reminded, you have though at least one other option.  Fight, flight, play dead if need be.  Yet you might also, well, wait.  We are approaching Advent, are we not?  Wait upon the Lord.  That is, you might think through what happened, both putting the best and worst lights upon it.  You might pray about it.  Hold it in prayerful thought.  You might think out a couple of sentences that you would caringly use, should the institution, relationship, or person provide an opening for that.  And then you would have to ‘hurry up and wait’.  Be kind to one another, tender hearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ has forgiven you.  “You know, I have had that interchange in mind since it happened.  Honestly, for whatever reason, it did hurt.  But given the love, joy, happiness, meaning and help you give me over so much time, it is just one brief solar eclipse that comes once a decade, when all else is sunshine. Thanks for mentioning it.” 

Call it an Advent Gospel, an advent admonition:  

You must be ready.  Steady and ready.  For the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect. 

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 11.27.2022 at 11:00 am