Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

By Marsh Chapel

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Luke 15:1-10

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“Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

Perhaps it is fitting that this week’s lesson presents Jesus, in his primary colors, not as teacher of righteousness, but as savior of sinners. One whose joy comes in finding the lost.

We long for, hunger for, good news, in a time of loss. Come September 11, a nation remembers 3,000 dead 21 years ago, a time of loss. Come Thursday afternoon past, the globe remembers the decades of selfless life and service of a Queen, and now grieves the death of a global Queen, a time of loss. Institutions near and far experience transition in leadership, with a sense of loss. A denomination reels from the shocks of sudden and coming division, and there is loss. A freshman, class of 2026, away from home for the first time, feels loss. You can feel lost in a time of loss. As Queen Elizabeth said in 1997: We have all been trying to cope in our different ways. It is not easy to express a sense of loss, since the initial shock is often succeeded by a mixture of other feelings: disbelief, incomprehension, anger and concern for those who remain (NYT, 9/9/22). Entering the autumn of 2022, together, for all our losses, we are intent on sewing together again, knitting together again, the fabric of our common life. Jesus’ parables tend to remind us, through thick and thin, of what matters, lasts and counts. As today. Those who follow and heed him, as we are trying to do, can rejoice in that: joy in the presence of the angels of God.

This Sunday, this year, ‘September 11’ we remember both in the opening prayers and in the sermon for today. Our bulletin for the day, as in other years, lists the names of those BU men and women lost on that tragic day, 9/11/01. In 2011, we telephoned the families of those who died that day, to express our continued remembrance of them, and our shared sense of ongoing mourning and grief. They were some of the most memorable pastoral conversations of my time here at BU thus far. Boston University memorial services have been held every five years at Marsh Chapel and on Marsh Plaza (2006, 2011, 2016, 2021). The service for 2011, held on the Plaza, included in leadership President Robert A. Brown, Robert Pinsky

(former Poet Laureate of the USA and current BU faculty), the University Chaplains, and the Marsh Chapel choir.

In addition, throughout this past week we have joined with others in welcoming a new class of students, the class of 2026. Throughout this past week on campus there has been a palpable, shared, expressed desire to connect, to know, to invite, to welcome. You make it evident right now in our service of worship. You all have more than done your own part in this: an opening brunch, a chaplains’ meeting, a Marsh Chapel matriculation service, the University Matriculation, a first class day breakfast, a greening of the dorms, a midweek worship service, a co-curricular programs fair, a religious life fair, a garden party, choir practices and auditions, staff gatherings, a completed term book, a reception for theological students, a big Saturday SPLASH, barbecue luncheon today following worship, and many individual greetings, conversations and prayers. All this in aid of helping, supporting, and guiding 18-year-olds toward places, spaces, and gatherings wherein they will be ‘found’, wherein they will find themselves at least in part, wherein there will be a shared joy, a heavenly joy, an angelic joy, joy in the presence of the angels of God.

St. Luke encourages us with a word about finding the lost. It is notable that here, in this congregation and listenership, the numinous oddities of language in Luke 15 you do understand and use. We hear you use these great words, and use them well. One says to his son, in the pew, as the Scripture is read, “I remember—a parable is a story with a message, and I remember that Jesus always taught using parables. He taught by telling stories. These parables were set in the countryside, and were about people and about justice. Jesus taught adults with simple stories.” You understand ‘parable’. Someone else, driving home today, interprets the word ‘joy’ for her rider: “Joy is God’s delight, given us by God’s spirit. Joy is one of the footprints, hallmarks, earmarks, landmarks, benchmarks of the Holy Spirit. What pleasure is to the body, joy is to the soul.” I might have thought that ‘repentance’ would throw you, but no. In the choir, disrobing, an alto tells a bass, “Repentance means to turn around, to head home, to dust off and try again, like that story about the son and the pigs.” And angel, you might add, means messenger, and presence means joy, and heaven means the message of the presence of joy. Then, at Monday evening community dinner, talking to a theological student, an engineering student might ask the definition of sin. The response: Well, it literally means to miss the mark, but it has two parts. First is the personal part, ‘lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, anger, envy, pride’. Or as Howard Thurman would say, ‘cutting against the grain of

your own wood…listen for the sound of the genuine, listen for the sound of the genuine…you are the only person like you, just like you, that the world has ever seen…listen for the genuine inside you’. Second is the pervasive part, the gone-wrongness in life. Sin is the power of death, throughout life. Sin is the condition of life under which treachery takes place. Sin is the absence of God. Sin is an orb of confusion in the world. Personal, pervasive. Well said!

We could add, sin is personal like that expressed in our epistle, 1 Timothy. Jesus comes for others, as 1 Timothy said, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the foremost”. When one is lost, as here and also in the later account of the Welcoming Father, one can become anxious, depressed, dislocated, and alone. Someone found is the cause of inexpressible delight, joy. Including the lonely, discovering the dislocated, reconnecting with the disappeared—these moments provide a heavenly joy, (vs. 7), a consequence of the discovery of the lost we are intent on sewing together again, knitting together again, the fabric of our common life.

We could add, sin is pervasive, like that expressed in our reading from Jeremiah. Sin has a corporate, expansive, even institutional reality. We mistake its power, if we see it only, say, in personal life. That of course is real, and true. Sin is like the advance or retreat of a great thunderstorm, a frontal advance, though theological not meteorological. Sin is like a city blacked out, a power far beyond any individual lamp turned down, any individual light switch hit. Sin is a shadow, the one great shadow. Whatever is not of faith, is sin. And that is quite a lot in this world. Sin is all that mutes the voice. Do we blame sheep—hardly by the way a comprehensively intelligent beast–for getting lost? It is his nature. Do we blame the coin—inanimate, hardly noticeable—for getting lost? It is Isaac Newton’s gravity at work. But we only see sin clearly when we are ready to see it, by revelation, and often only once we have left its borders behind. Like all lasting reality, we know it in retrospect.

Sin is what Jeremiah, in all the autumn readings of 2016, was warning us about, what we could and would not see in the coming religious, cultural, social and ultimately political condition of our country. It is hard but saving to have Jeremiah with us again all fall this year. Sin is what Jeremiah was warning us about in all the autumn readings of 2019, what we could not see in a coming pandemic, and an unprepared infrastructure and a mendacious national leadership, and ultimately, touching home right in these pews, the

deaths of a million just in our own land. It is hard but saving to have Jeremiah with us again all fall this year, and to hear his harsh warning again today.

That is, the power of sin vastly surpasses any individual, human attempt at cure. Individuals may behave morally or immorally, usually some of both. But corporate, pervasive sin lives on, as R Niebuhr taught so long ago: “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary”. Sin is that ‘inclination’. And, “if social cohesion is impossible without coercion, and coercion is impossible without the creation of social injustice, and the destruction of injustice is impossible without the use of further coercion, are we not in an endless cycle of social conflict?” Sin is that ‘impossible’.

As Wesley said, “sin remains even when it does not reign.”

We have much to do to wrestle with pervasive sin, with the global challenges of pollution, Putin, pandemic, prices, prejudice, politics, and pain. Jane Addams said it of our nation, but her insight now fits our world: “The blessings which we associate with a life of refinement and cultivation must be made universal if they are to be permanent. The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain, is floating in midair, until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life”.

Jesus’ parables tend to remind us, through thick and thin, of what matters, lasts and counts. We smile to recall Queen Elizabeth saying and repeating, as was remembered this week, ‘our determination to do the right thing will stand the test of time’. As today. Those who follow and heed Jesus, as you are trying to do, can rejoice in that. Daniel Marsh was one such. Boston University has had ten presidents since 1869, and the chartering of our school. Five were Methodist Ministers—Warren, Huntingdon, Murlin, MARSH, Case. The other five—Christ-Janer, Silber, Westling, Chobanian and Brown—were a lawyer, a philosopher, an historian, a physician, and a chemical engineer. Daniel Marsh came in 1926 from the Smithfield Avenue Methodist Church pulpit in Pittsburgh, and retired in 1951. In 1968 with his second wife, Arline, he was interred here in the chancel of Marsh Chapel, a long time by the way before cremation and columbaria were widely practiced. He built the buildings to the left and right of us, and he built the chapel later named for him. But he did so through thick and thin. A lack funds. A great depression. The second world war. Post war inflation. But he persevered. He wanted this great university to have at its spiritual, geographical, historical, architectural and

religious center, a chapel, devoted to gathering the lonely, healing the broken, comforting the afflicted, afflicting the comfortable, and especially, especially, finding the lost. He wanted the partnership of the gospel—the fellowship, sharing, commonwealth, partnership of the gospel to be spoken and lived, that those lost might be found, that those enmeshed in sin and death and the threat of meaninglessness, might be discovered, embraced and loved. Until her passing in autumn 2019, his daughter, Nancy Marsh Hartman, was in church in the front pew every Sunday—that is every Sunday, teaching others by example how to sing, sing lustily, the hymns of faith in the Methodist tradition. She could tell you about pursuing what matters, lasts and counts, through thick and thin. You know she must smile from on high, to see her chapel filling up in the autumn of the year. She would remind those in, or entering, ministry, that the minister is present for those who are not yet present. She would ask, without speaking, who is not here, not yet here who yet could be? She would whole heartedly share the sentiment of Queen Elizabeth, Christmas 1957, I cannot lead you into battle, I do not give you laws or administer justice, but I can do something else, I can give you my heart (NYT 9/9/22)

You beloved come from a long line of warm-hearted people. In the spring of 1973 at Ohio Wesleyan University, a small Methodist college for small Methodists, the telephone rang in the hallway of the TKE fraternity. You know that the telephone was invented in a Boston University laboratory by Alexander Graham Bell about 1880, a beautiful, human, vocal mode of discovery and communication. No one answered because, well, it was early morning. The phone was across the hall though and without voice mail to interrupt, it continued. Bleary eyed, I woke and answered. Is that you Bob? This is Professor Freiburg. Your biology final exam began 10 minutes ago. WHERE ARE YOU? The next ten minutes witnessed the fastest bicycle ride on Sandusky Street in recorded history, and the taking of the one empty seat and the taking of a last test in a great course by a beloved teacher, one who cared enough to find the lost. God is at work in the world to make and keep human life human, but good in history never comes without humans at work on it, without a faithful people of warm heart.

Hear Good News: Entering the autumn of 2022, together, for all our losses, we are intent on sewing together again, knitting together again, the fabric of our common life. With confidence. Our 10th President Robert A. Brown used that word, confidence, Latin con fide, ‘with faith’ this week: “I think we’re just a very different University today, not just for students, but for faculty and staff, too,” Brown says. “We’re much more mature. We’re

much more confident… I think the best is yet to come.” Jesus’ parables tend to remind us, through thick and thin, of what matters, lasts and counts. As today. Those who follow and heed him, as we are trying to do, can rejoice in that: joy, joy, joy.. in the presence of the angels of God.

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

posted in The Liberal Biblical Theology of St. Luke: Fall 2022, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 09.11.2022 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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Luke 14:25–33

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Gracious God, 
In this holy moment, a day of new beginnings: 
We summon the better angels of our nature to sit quietly before you in gratitude. 
For the gift of your love to inspire us in our freshman year, to quicken us to try, to join, to sign up, to get out, we are peacefully thankful. 
For the gift of your presence to sustain us in our sophomore year, to strengthen us to continue, to persevere, to stay up, to move on, we are simply thankful. 
For the gift or your power to embolden us in our junior year, to encourage us to achieve, to give, to change, to travel, to grow, we are spiritually thankful. 
For the gift of your peace to illumine us in our senior year, to steady us to plan, to finish, to complete, to leave, we are personally thankful. 
Help us to love what is lovely, to be present to what is real, to find strength in what lasts, and to know peace in what honors, but surpasses, understanding. Help us to listen to our lives, to learn deeply from our own experience. 
Inspired by your love, sustained by your presence, encouraged by your power, confirmed by your peace, day by day our life before you flows on in endless song. 
Empower us we pray to listen to our lives, with keen care to listen to our lives 
For the privilege of these coming few days, these fast four years, we are thankful. Amen. 

Beloved children of God, hear the Gospel, so befitting Matriculation, the Gospel According to St. Luke in the fourteenth chapter and the 25th verse. 

Count the cost.  Ahead of time, count the cost.  By way of illustration:  in business, and in war.  And in everything in between.  Count the cost.  How could we not think this morning of those suffering the terror of warfare in Ukraine?  How could we not think this morning of those—so regularly the least, the last and the lost—suffering the jolts and tides of inflation and coming recession? 

Do the arithmetic, study the detail, count. 

You, careful listener, you recognize that Luke 14: 25-33 is not Jesus talking, but Luke writing.  You realize that Jesus left no written record, like Socrates in that.  You recognize that he spoke Aramaic, not Greek, and whether or not he was literate.  You recall the arithmetic of his life, death and destiny, the years 4bce to 33ce, and the distance of those from our reading, Luke 14, in 85ce, at the earliest (some would date Luke much later).  What we hear this morning is, in the first instance, not the voice of Jesus but the composition of Luke.   Of course, and granted, there will be traces of Jesus’ voice, along the way, particularly in Luke 9-19, especially, and especially there in the parables, his own mode of teaching, without which nothing.  In all, though, and on the bigger whole, this is not Jesus’ voice but Luke’s writing.  This makes all the arithmetical difference in the world, these 50 years and 2 opposed forms of rhetoric. 

Now, it may be, gazing again at the bulletin, or ruminating on the remembered reading of the Gospel, the high-water mark of our worship each Sunday, you begin to wonder, to ponder, to question.  Good.  We learn most from the questions we ask, and most of us most of the time need more reminder than instruction. Sitting in the balcony, seated with your family, pondering whether to join the choir, or whether to return to Chapel for dinner or study.  Perhaps these are your questions, or some of them. 

Why this discussion of hatred, when the Gospel in other clothing is centrally about love?  Why this denigration of family, when the family is one of the protected entities in the Decalogue, the ten commandments:  protection of truth, of communication, of speech, of worship, of family, of life, of property, of marriage, of law, and of commerce?  Therein, whence the rejection of life itself, when otherwise the Gospel acclaims life, having life, and having life in abundance?   There seems to be some counting and accounting needed. 

More so:  What is the mention here of the cross?  Jesus in this narrative, in these chapters, is preaching, teaching, healing, going about in Galilee and Judea a free itinerant prophet.  All of a sudden, here comes a word from much later, ‘cross’.  Was Jesus making a prediction that only he could see and understand?  Or is this a clue to the fountain and origin of this passage, the church’ struggles and the mind of Luke?  Cross?  Cross?  I thought we were sharing parables and blessing children and rounding up disciples.  Moreso, the cross is ‘one’s own cross’.  The writer seems to assume that all will get the reference, including you, and me, to the cross.  How all this talk about the cross when Jesus just now in Luke is teaching in parables and healing the sick, a long way from Jerusalem and ‘the cross’? 

Even more so:  How is it that all of a sudden, everyone around Jesus is expected to be a monk?  Ridding oneself of all, all, not most, not much, but all possessions?  All.  That’s at a lot, even in an era of tunics, ephods, camels, donkeys, sandals, fishing, shepherding and travel by foot.  All?  What is transpiring here? 

Nor does this seem metaphorical, in a way that some current preaching would likely choose.   Hatred—well, you know, not exactly hatred but mature self-differentiation.  Life—well, you know, not exactly life in the sense of breath and nourishment, but in the sense of deep meaning.  Cross—well, you know, not exactly crucifixion in the bloody and excruciating physical sense, but self-discipline, more in the sense of yoga.  Possessions—well, you know, not in exactly the form of car, home, bank account and pension, but in the sense of a general materiality, of not letting your possessions possess you.  No, actually Luke 14 does not seem or sound metaphorical at all, regarding hatred, life, cross, or possessions.  It sounds literal, actual, straightforward enough. 

To faithfully interpret these kinds of verses we shall need in the next generation—your generation—a full and fulsome liberal biblical theology.  Maybe one or three of you will invest in such work. 

Forgive what is only an interpretative guess, even less than that, yet after many decades of hearing these harsh words, even in Luke–the Gospel of peace, the Gospel of love, the Gospel of church, the Gospel of freedom—these are phrases that sound like the esoteric, ascetic, anti-worldliness of the emerging gnostic movement.  It is as if here, in Luke and Matthew, by way of Q, some measure of the enthusiastic pessimism, the bodily asceticism, the turning away from the world which we know in full in full Gnosticism, has grown up alongside the gospel, wheat and tares together sown.    There are strong parallels, almost identical, in the Gospel of Thomas, a gnosticizing document of about the same time as Luke. And there are strong parallels in Poimandres, a fully gnostic document of about the same time as Luke (Fitzmeier, Anchor, 1064). 

Uncompromising demands regarding self, regarding family, and regarding possessions may well be part of the life of faith, warns Luke out of the gnostic shadows of his sources.  He warns us as we come to faith.  He reminds us of the gift of faith. Like all serious engagements, this spiritual one is not be entered into lightly, but reverently, discreetly and in the fear of God.  ‘Jesus counsels his followers not to decide on discipleship without advance, mature self-probing’.   It is as if Jesus is saying, ‘come along, I want to make this for you the hardest decision of your life’. 

So.  This may mean that the struggles under this passage of Holy Scripture, our sufficient rule of faith and practice, are from 85ad, not 30ad.  That there is in the emerging church a set of conflicts that require some arithmetic, some counting and accounting.  How much home, how much away?  How much kindness, how much honesty?  How much self-affirmation and how much self-abnegation?  How much materiality and how much spirituality?  Before you set out, to go to college or to take a job or to move in together or to get married or to sell the farm or to go to war or to build a tower, well, you might want to…do the math. 

St. Luke wrestled with formational questions in the first century: For whom is the gospel? What are the definitive texts? And especially, who shall hold authority?  What, How, Where. And Who? Here Luke wrestles with these costs and their accounting.  “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up,” said Paul.  

Aristotle taught us to attend to the true, the good, the beautiful. In the late fourth century there emerged a good, great leader of the church, Ambrose of Milan. In just eight days he went from unbaptized layman to Bishop. His rhetorical skill, musicianship, diplomatic agility and attention to the preparations for Baptism provided the power behind his lasting influence in Northern Italy.  

The greatest teacher of the earlier church, Augustine of Hippo, came to Milan a non-Christian. From the influence of Ambrose, he left baptized and believing and worked a generation to set the foundations for the church over a thousand years to come.  

Ambrose inspired Augustine.  A quiet, humble, modest, reserved, shy, gracious, mild-mannered, self-effacing, understated person, a plow horse not a show horse.  A plow horse not a show horse. A lot of progress can be made when we do not linger too long over who gets the credit.  

Some years ago, we went to a church meeting near Canada on a very cold night. It was led by our Bishop. For some reason I was not in a very happy mood, nor was I very charitable in my internal review of his remarks that evening. I do not recall his topic or theme. I remember clearly seeing him help to move hymnals, borrowed from other churches for the large crowd, so they could be returned. Snow, dark, long arms carrying a dozen hymnals into the tundra.  

Think of someone you have known who  properly counted costs, who lived with heartfelt passion for the common good, who lived in selfless ways, a ‘person for others’, to cite Bonhoeffer.   

Every one of us has some influence. If you have a pen, a smart phone, a computer, email, a tongue, a household, a family, a job, a community—then you have some influence.  

Who taught you, by precept and example, how to use it? How much of what you picked up needs keeping and how much needs to be put out on the curb?  

A simple passion for the common good of the servants of God is at the heart of faithful living.  What is new?  Here is what I need you to do for me.  What should I pray for you?  This is what we learn when we listen to our lives.   

This was the phrase Frederick Buechner, an exemplary chaplain of another era, who died last week, tried to summarize his hundreds of sermons and 95 years of life:  listen to your life.

Gerson wrote: When the late Frederick Buechner — novelist, preacher, Christian apologist — was asked to summarize the single essential insight of his prolific writing and speaking career, he would respond, “Listen to your life”.

“If indeed there is a God,” he explained, “which most of the time I believe there is, and if indeed he is concerned with the world, which the Christian faith is saying … one of the ways he speaks to us, and maybe one of the most powerful ways, is through what happens to us.”… “Pay attention to moments,” he said, when “unexpected tears come to your eyes and what may trigger them.” He was talking about those sudden upwellings of emotion we get from the sublimity of nature or art, when we see a whale breaching, or are emotionally ambushed by a line in a film or poem. We are led toward truth and beauty by a lump in the throat.  (M Gerson, WAPO, 8/22/22). 

May what Paul wrote of Philemon be said of us: When I remember you in my prayers, I always thank my God because I hear of your love for all the saints and your faith toward the Lord Jesus. 

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

posted in Matriculation, The Liberal Biblical Theology of St. Luke: Fall 2022, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 09.4.2022 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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Luke 12:32-40

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A written text of this sermon is currently unavailable.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 08.7.2022 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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Luke 10:25–37

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Against a dark background of economic need revealed in violent thievery, our Gospel sings out a majestic ode to mercy.

Against a dark background of cultural violence revealed in highway robbery, the taking of what is not one’s own, our parable pronounces a poetic ode to mercy.

Against a dark background of racial contest, revealed in the starring role of the Samaritan, our Lord acclaims a gemlike ode to mercy.

Against a full and darkly difficult background of taking what is not one’s own, Luke’s own biblical theology starkly epitomized in chapter 10, perhaps and rightly the best known and most beloved passage in Scripture, gives melodic voice to an ode to mercy.  We listen this beautiful Sunday morning, first for a moment to Luke, and second for a moment to the Samaritan.

What meets us in St. Luke this summer?

Luke was written nearly a generation later than Mark, by most estimates, Mark in or near 70, Luke in or near 85-90 of the common era (though there is now some significant resistance to this view).  Traditionally ascribed to Luke the physician, its author and that of its sequel, the Acts of the Apostles, is finally unknown to us.  We know him only through the writing itself.

What do we find?  Or what shall we find in prayerful conversation with Luke across the summer?

Luke is made up of a mixture of ingredients.  First, Luke uses most of Mark: like Matthew, Luke knew and repeated most of the earliest gospel, Mark. But he made changes along the way, or construed the gospel according to his own desires and emphases.  This is hopeful for us, in that it is an encouragement for us to take the gospel in hand, and interpret it according to our time, location, understanding, and need. This requires that so long left behind over fifty years, a sound liberal biblical theology.  Second, Luke uses a collection of teachings, called Q, as does Matthew.  An example is our Lord’s Prayer, later in the service. Luke’s version is slightly different from that in Matthew, as is his version of the Beatitudes and other teachings, found in the ‘sermon on the plain’, rather than the ‘sermon on the mount’.  Third, Luke makes ample use of material that is all his own, not found in Mark or elsewhere. The long chapters from Luke 8 or so through Luke 18 or so, very much including the pinnacle parable this morning, are all his. Examples include some of your favorite parables, like today’s Good Samaritan, and like the lost sheep, and like the Prodigal Son, and like the Dishonest Steward.  We have Luke to thank for the remembrance of these great stories. Luke brings us a unique mixture of materials, and makes his own particular use of them.

Luke weaves together his own perspective and materials with that of the rest of the Scripture.  Luke has a passion for compassion, and sings out as today a song, an ode, an accolade through and through to mercy.  To justice.  Real religion, by Luke’s measurement, is not ever very far from justice, from a concern for justice, for the just cause, the just word, the just deed, the just perspective.  Including today.  Luke draws from the whole, the whole of Scripture to craft his two books, the Gospel and Acts.  So, look for a moment at the rest of Scripture.  Tragically, sadly, in this last month, we may be closer than we have been in a long time to real, though harshly administered, reflection on matters of interpretation of ancient documents, whether the Holy Bible from thousands of years ago, or the US Constitution, from hundreds of years ago.  Interpretation really matters.  Biblical theology, a sound mode of interpretation, really matters, counts, and lasts. A purely originalist view, whether for Constitution or Scripture, will bring its own maladies, as bear witness following the Supreme Court decision, leaked earlier, but announced last month.  Are we to read these documents only as collections of topics from the past, cemented in antique times and places?  Or are we to read them regarding their themes, their living themes, not just their topics, and the lasting, growing, consequential outworking of these themes, in both history and theology, or in both history and philosophy?  Topics of themes?  Origin or meaning?  There is a biblical theme, today, undergirding the Samaritan, the most marvelous of parables, the theme of justice.  It lives throughout Scripture.

Read the books of the Law, like Exodus 23:9: “You shall not oppress a stranger; you know the heart of a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt….For six years you shall sow your land and gather in its yield; but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, that the poor of your people may eat.”

Remember: the Hebrew Scripture, our Older Testament, was largely composed in the dark days of a later slavery, the bondage of Babylon.  In that moment of memory, the community of faith recalled keenly their earliest history of God’s love and power, the God who brought them up out of the land of slavery to the land of milk and honey.   They mused:  We know what it means to be poor, to be oppressed, to be outcast, to be downtrodden. Once we were ourselves. THEREFORE, there will be justice in our land for the poor. You and you all know that too, and may need to search your extended family histories and memories for what happened to your people in the Great Depression.   We learned something, or were reminded of something, then, as were the Israelites dragged again in chains to Babylon in 587 bce. Luke writes in earshot of Babylon.

Read together the books of the Prophets, the very heart of the Old Testament.  In all of religious literature, in all human history, there is nothing quite as sobering, as piercingly and stingingly direct, with regard to justice, as these 16 voices, four the louder and twelve the lesser.   Malachi teaches tithing. Isaiah affirms holiness. Hosea preaches love. Micah shouts, ‘do justice, love mercy, walk humbly’. Together the prophets consistently rail against human greed, human selfishness, human covetousness, human apathy.  The harvest here for our theme is so plentiful it is difficult to select an exemplar, there are so many.

Perhaps Amos will do best, our lectionary guest this morning. In the eighth century BCE, a shepherd boy from Tekoa went down to the gates of the big city, Jerusalem, and cried out against it.  He pilloried the shallow religion of his day. He assaulted the reliance, the naïve over-reliance of his government on weapons of war, he bitterly chastised the amoral, post moral practices of human sexuality of his day.  But he saved his real fierce anger for injustice.

“I will not revoke the punishment, because they sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes—they that trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and turn aside the way of the afflicted” (Amos 2:6-7).  “I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies…Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness as an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5: 21-24). Recall Martin Luther King reciting these verses, down in the sweltering little jail house of Birmingham Alabama, 1963.

Read together the books of Wisdom, especially, as we do each Sunday, the book of the Psalms. Let us read together the books of Wisdom.  Love is for the wise, and justice is the skeleton of love.

“When the just are in authority, the people rejoice, but when the wicked rule, the people groan…The just man knows the rights of the poor; a wicked man does not understand such knowledge…(Proverbs 29)

‘Because the poor are despoiled, because the needy groan, I will now arise’, says the Lord; “I will place him in the safety for which he longs’ (Psalm 11: 5).    “You would confound the plans of the poor, but the Lord is his refuge’ (Psalm 14:6).

In an odd way, the most sobering judgment about justice is offered by Ecclesiastes, who speaks least directly to the theme.  But his philosophy is clear, his thematic emphasis.  He looks at all the toil of the sons of men, and sees—vanity.  He warns: that for which you strive will not last, that for which you suffer will not endure.  “What has a man for all the toil and strain with which he toils beneath the sun?  For all his days are full of pain, and his work is a vexation; even in the night his mind does not rest’’(Ecc. 2:23).  As an Indian proverb puts it:  ‘In his lifetime the goose lords it over the mushroom.   But in the end, they are both served up on the same platter’.  Each a reminder:  Justice lasts, not acquisition.

More: to understand, or interpret, the Good Samaritan, this magisterial parable, one needs more than origination, more than topics, more than the geography between Jerusalem and Jericho.   One needs to hear it in the heart of Luke, and in the fullness of Scripture.  One needs a sure grasp of the great themes of Scripture, not just the topics.

So, listen second, this morning again to the Samaritan.  Against a full and darkly difficult background of the taking what is not one’s own, Luke’s own biblical theology is starkly epitomized in chapter 10, perhaps and rightly the best known and most beloved passage in Scripture, which gives melodic voice to an ode to mercy.  An ode is:  something that shows respect for or celebrates the worth or influence of another (Webster).  An ode in the general sense, and one…full of surprises.  Surprises…Notice them…In Luke 10…

 The breadth of life promise, do this and you will live…

 The honesty about random peril, hurt, along the road of life…

 The abject failure of the clergy—priests, levites-- to respond…

 The heroism of the excluded, the heroism of the Samaritan…

 The touch, time, treasure, tenacity of the care (seeing, anointing, bandaging, carrying, paying, returning)…

 The timely, welcome open space at the inn unlike Christmas…

 The jarring turn of neighbor from object to subject (not who to care for but, who cares)…

 The questioning of the questioner…

 Such a Diamond! Gem! Masterpiece! Parable…

In our own moment, we may be nourished by such an ode.  How dearly we need that nourishment.

For we now awake every morning, unlike those mornings prior to November of 2016, when still there lingered the prospect of a common hope, arising to see in every direction--the taking of what is not one’s own.  Pollution, Putin, Pandemic, Politics, Prejudice, Pistols, and Pain.  Climate pollution, the taking of the green earth by one generation, when it surely belongs to future generations.  The taking of land by one country, in inch-by-inch slaughter of another.  The taking of public health, like water and air a common good, not one’s own, but taken nonetheless, mainly by not facing it as a whole, as a nation, together, as in the pandemic. The taking of political activity, engagement, and truth, and making of it into a seedbed for autocracy.  The taking of the tragic history of racial injustice—THE HALF HAS NEVER BEEN TOLD—and making of it into a mode of argument, jousting, contest.  The taking of freedom from fear of gun violence, a freedom owed children in schools and at parades, as if their freedom from trauma were ours to take.  And now, in addition, the taking of women’s bodies, and the coming frightful multiplication of needless and heedless pain.  Women’s bodies are women’s bodies.  The theme underlying all these: the sordid taking of what is not one’s own, the rapacious seizing of what is another’s, what belongs to another.

How utterly, staggeringly different, our Samaritan gospel today, the picture judging us from antiquity, the account of love of neighbor.  Yet, there are glimmers of encouragement, in every day and week.  We have had a week and more of reminders, like that of the Samaritan himself, of how good life can be.

One loves his northern neighbor by the honoring of Canada Day with a Maple Leaf flag…

One loves her next door neighbor with anniversaries and birthdays with strawberry pies… 

A community loves the neighborhood by funding block parties for dancing, county fairs for the dairy princesses, symphony concerts on village greens with the star-spangled banner all standing, some Strauss some dancing to it, the requisite John Williams compositions all nodding, and a Sousa march as cherry on top…

 Our own existential plumb line inherited from Amos and the truth of Holy Writ, of biblical theology, is not entirely forgotten, in our common culture, nor is our own existential call to mercy in the glorious example of the Samaritan.  And that is truly good news.

What shall we do?

 Jesus answers, a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho…

 What shall we do?

 But you are doing it.  By private prayer.  In attendance on ordered worship. In a ministry of outreach to the shut in and home bound.  In preparation for a holiday barbecue.  In the planning for choirs and programs, and study groups to come.  In offering a kind word. In charitable, generous giving. In noticing hurt and offering help.

 What shall we do?

 Jesus answers, learn from the Samaritan…

Jesus answers, show mercy

And Jesus gives us something we can do to preserve a glimmer of personal encouragement, the practice daily of the love of neighbor

 An Ode to mercy…

Go and do likewise…

 An Ode to mercy…

Go and do likewise…

 An Ode to mercy…

Go and do likewise…

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 07.10.2022 at 11:00 am

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Luke 8:26-39

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Jesus sent him away, saying, "Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you."

This summer we listen for good news in the biblical theology of St. Luke.  We do so with the aid of minds and voices of proven preachers, who have earned or are earning doctoral or graduate degrees in theology, our blessed and dear colleagues here at Marsh Chapel, Rev. Drs. Coleman, Chicka, Gaskell and Rev. Donahue-Martens, ABD, and Mr. William Cordts, who together bring a confluence of five rivers of loving grace, five tributaries and contributaries of loving freedom. Further, this summer, we follow the lectionary, or rather, the multiple lectionaries of our life here:  that of the Scripture, say Luke 8; that of the University, say Baccalaureate or Matriculation; that of our nation, say Juneteenth or Fathers’ Day; and that of the Chapel itself, say Independence Sunday and barbecue (July 3 this year).

What does Luke say, and how does he say it?

This will take us all summer and more to unravel.  We shall strive do so, one step at a time, one Sunday at a time, one parable, teaching, exhortation, miracle, or, as today, one narrative at a time.  Still, there are some outstanding features of the Lukan biblical theology, which we may simply name as we set forth. First, Luke displays a commitment to and interest in history, and orderly history at that.  Both Luke and Acts are cast in a distinctive historical mode. In fact, Luke has his own schemata for sacred history, in three parts: Israel, Jesus, Church: the time of Israel, concluding with John the Baptist; the time of Jesus, concluding with the Ascension; the time of the church, concluding with the parousia, the coming of the Lord on the clouds of heaven, at the end of time.  Second, Luke employs and deploys his own theology, or theological perspective, including this emphasis upon history and the divine purpose in history.   Third, Luke highlights the humanity and compassion of Jesus in a remarkable way. The Christ of St. Luke is the Christ of magnificent compassion, embodied in the humility of a birth among shepherds.  The poor, women, the stranger, the injured, those in dire need all stand out in Luke, as the recipients and subjects of Jesus’ love, mercy, grace and compassion. Fourth, Luke carries an abiding interest in the church.  Ephesians says that ‘through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the principles and powers.’ That catches the spirit of the author or the third gospel and of the Acts to follow.  History, theology, compassion, and church are hallmarks of Lukan biblical theology.

Our apocalyptic passage today, so colorful and wild, still, at heart, fully acclaims the gospel as did St. Luke so long ago.  That is, indicative precedes imperative.  Indicate precedes imperative, in history, theology, compassion and church. We first use the indicate mood, long before, and in some cases entirely without, our currently preferred theological mood, the imperative.  The gospel, happily, acclaims in the indicative, not the imperative.  The gospel is about what God has done, first, not about what we might do, a distant second, if that.  Indicative precedes and preempts imperative.  What God has done outlasts, outshines, overshadows, outranks, outdoes what we might do, or not.  That is what makes the gospel good news, rather than just news.  It is a large loss that so much biblical theology, including Lukan biblical theology, of our generation has lost this sense, and has eclipsed the indicative of the divine compassion with the imperative of the human.   What God has done.  What God has done. Jesus sent him away, saying, "Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you."

And let us hold most closely the divine compassion in Luke.  At every turn, there is a return to the least, the last, the lost; those at the dawn of life, those at the twilight of life, those in the shadows of life.

Notice, record, the way Luke puts it, beginning, middle and end:   He has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree, he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away…The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor…Blessed are the poor, for yours is the kingdom of God…What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?…Sell your possessions and give alms; provide yourselves with purses that do not grow old…When you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame and the blind…You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just…Said Zacchaeus, ‘behold Lord the half of my goods I give to the poor’…They contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty…

In all this, and more, Luke draws on the well-springs of inheritance from the Older Testament, the Hebrew Scripture.  The Bible, fore and aft, trumpets justice, economic justice, justice for the poor, and for all! If all we had were the poetry of that shepherd boy from Tekoa, Amos, that would be sufficient.

Compassion resides in the heart of St. Luke’s gospel, a passion for compassion that wells up into a yearning for justice, one the five rumors of angels our beloved Peter Berger, of blessed memory, did acclaim.  Justice delayed is justice denied.  Let justice roll down as waters.  We now have further voice and space to recognize the arrival of justice, in remembering and celebrating Juneteenth, now a national holiday

Our own Andrea Taylor, BU Senior Diversity Officer,  reminded us on June 13, 2022:

Juneteenth, also known as Freedom Day or Jubilee Day, memorializes June 19, 1865. On this day, Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, to inform enslaved Black people that slavery was formally abolished by President Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Still, two and a half years later, Black people in Galveston toiled under the horrors of slavery until Union soldiers came to enforce the President’s order.  

Dean Elmore views this change as a sign of hope.“I say I’m hopeful from the standpoint of people digging into the narrative and understanding the wisdom and knowledge Black folks have.” He believes the celebration can be an opportunity for individuals who are not familiar with the holiday to learn more about Juneteenth and engage with its history…   

…And, then, on  6/15/22: This year, as individuals and communities seek to reunite as we come out of the pandemic and as you enjoy normal family connections and gatherings, try to imagine the depth of feeling experienced by slaves in the 19th century when they were freed and able to reunite with family and friends separated by slavery and subsequent family disruption in the Jim Crow era. 

Or listen to our own Rev. Dr. Karen Coleman:

Juneteenth and Emancipation Day—both markers of history—signified freedom for enslaved people in America. What I thought as a child was that Lincoln freed the slaves and one day you were enslaved and the next day you were free. While in the beautiful mind of a child one would wish that was the truth, what I learned from my family’s oral stories was that, unlike the fast rate of speed of news stories today, it was word of mouth carried by those who journeyed trying to find their missing family members. But once former enslaved people heard the word, they mobilized into action and began to set a course for their independent lives.

As individuals, and as a country, we continue to try to grow in our own passion for compassion, now including the celebration of Juneteenth, and our ongoing appreciation and understanding of its meaning and significance.  It is a glimmer of hope, of some substance, to add this to our shared calendar.  For all our natural and inevitable worries, morning by morning, about pollution, Putin, pandemic, politics, prejudice, pistols and pensions, the seven or seven of our daily anxieties, yet we can recognize and celebrate that some change, some progress, some days, does come.  This is one.

Our forebears, our mothers and indeed our  fathers, whom especially we honor today, did guide us forward.

Senator Rafael Warnock, whose mentor Dean Lawrence Carter of Morehouse is part of our extended Marsh Chapel family, remembered his father the other day, in moving oratory.  It was a call for us to do the same, to see in those who raised us a measure of what God has done.  In prayer I trust you will do so this afternoon.

To wit, in the spring of 1973 six freshmen from Ohio Wesleyan University drove a large Oldsmobile in the rain, across eastern Ohio and Central Pennsylvania, bound for a lake cottage in upstate New York.  We had planned to meet my father there for a late dinner, and the beginning of a summer break.  But in the driving rain on route 80, the car went over an embankment.  Passengers and luggage went in all directions.  I had been bringing two white lab mice, in an open bucket equipped with a drip water dispenser, as some sort of gift for my younger sister.  After the crash the mice were gone, the car drivable but without windshield wipers, and the six freshmen rightly frightened.  We inched along in the rain in silence.  Memorably and humorously, about an hour into the silence a roommate in the front seat started shouting and screaming at the top of his lungs.  It turns out that at least one of the mice had survived, and was crawling up his left leg.  We inched along in the rain in further silence, one headlight, no wipers.  Near dawn we turned down the camp road to see lights burning, and a little smoke coming from the chimney.

Dad had paced all night, after we had called to tell him our delay, and greeted us with a fierce joy.  He fixed us a lumberjack breakfast.  As we went to sleep, I could see him stoking the fire, before going off to work, to meet the challenges of 1973, after a sleepless night.  The challenges of 1970’s, by the way, included war, reproductive rights, racism, nuclear weapons, impeachment, division, and inflation.  Hm. A familiar list. Just before dozing off, I heard him singing, heading off to work: “Every time I feel the spirit moving in my heart I will pray.  Every time I feel the spirit moving in my heart I will pray”.

This was a mere twenty years after he was graduated from BUSTH, 1953, having arrived in summer 1950, just six months after Marsh Chapel was dedicated in March 1950.  (We have an upcoming 75^th anniversary of this dedication to celebrate here in a few years).

That song at the hearth and from the heart still resounds, rings out, true of Dad’s life and faith.  It is important for us, and especially for the coming generations, to remember clearly how our forebears lived, and what they lived for. Take a moment to do so this afternoon.  COVID has stolen much of such communal remembrance. Lost are those who lose access to their own best past.  Happy are those who find access to their own best past.  In that personal song of spirit, experience, and prayer were many of the cherished beliefs and values for which he lived, by which many have lived, by which many of your forebears lived.

Here are some of them.

Dad lived in the openness, the magnanimous freedom of grace, the freedom for which Christ sets us free, on which we are to stand fast, and not to be enslaved again.

He lived convinced of the lasting worth, the ultimate value of persons and personality.

He lived and taught that love means taking responsibility.

He placed the highest premiums on marriage, family, children, and friends.

He had a rare, great capacity for friendship.

He could be restless with and critical of those perspectives which narrow the wideness of God’s mercy.  And he could be restless with and critical of those practices in personal and institutional life which did not become the gospel, were not becoming to the gospel.

He trusted that wherever there is a way, there is Christ, wherever there is truth, there is Christ, wherever there is life, there is Christ.

He honored his own conscience and heart, and expected others to do the same, for  the conscience of the believer is inviolable.

Many could testify to the toughness of his love and to the love in his toughness.

And as I heard him say, circa 1990, during a meeting in the Oneida Methodist church sanctuary, ‘because I am loved, I can love’.

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

 And he said, “Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord.” And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; ¹² and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice.

 Sursum Corda.  Hear the Gospel: Jesus sent him away, saying, "Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you."

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.19.2022 at 11:00 am

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John 14:8–17, 25–27

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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 06.5.2022 at 11:00 am

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John 13:31-35

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posted in The Rev. Dr. Jessica Chicka, University Chaplain for International Students, The Rev. Dr. Karen Coleman, Chaplain for Episcopal Ministry, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel, This I Believe on 05.15.2022 at 11:00 am

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John 21:1-19

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The Church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ our Lord;
we are his new creation by water and the Word;
from heaven he came and sought us that we might ever be
his living servant people, by his own death set free.

Jesus speaks to us today from the edge of the shoreline.  His voice, although we often mistake or mishear or misunderstand it, carries over from shore to sea, from heaven to earth.  For the souls gathered here today, that voice—His voice—makes life worth living.  Within earshot of His voice there are no merely ordinary nights or days or catches of fish or meals or questions or answers or friendships or loves or losses.  Within earshot of His voice there are no merely ordinary moments.  When the Master calls from the shoreline, “children…have you…cast the net…bring some fish…have breakfast”, no one who hears will dare ask, “And who are you?”.  We dare not.  For we know.  Jesus speaks to us today from the edge of the shoreline.

His disciples stumble through all the magic and grit of a fishing expedition.  Many of us still find some magic in fishing, though few of us have had to depend on this sport for sustenance.  Still—we know the thrill of it!  And the disappointment.  The roll of the boat with each passing wave.  The smell of the water and the wind.  The feel of the fish, the sounds of cleaning, the sky, a scent of rain:  this is our life, too.  All night long, dropping the nets, trawling, lifting the nets with a heave.  And catching nothing.  The magic comes with the connection of time and space—being at the right place at the right time.  How every fisherman would like to know the right place and the right time.  It’s magic!  The tug on the line!  The jolt to the pole!  The humming of the reel!  A catch.  And woe to the sandy-haired, freckle faced girl or boy (age 12 or 90) who cannot feel the thrill of being at the right place at the right time!

John Stewart Mill once wrote that understanding the chemistry of a pink sunset did not diminish at all his profound sense of wonder at sunset beauty.  In fact, we might add, real understanding heightens true apprehension.

Easter is a season of new beginnings. The promise of resurrection is upon us.  Resurrection disarms fear.  Resurrection ignores defeat.  Resurrection displaces and replaces loneliness.  Resurrection will not abide the voice that whispers, “There’s nothing extraordinary here.  There’s no reason for gaiety, excitement, sobriety or wonder.”  Resurrection will not abide the easy and the cheap.  Resurrection takes a day-break catch, a charcoal fire, a dawn mist, fish, bread, and hungry, weary travelers, and reveals the Lord present, and Peter at the table.

The failing of this world, whether we see it more clearly in the superstition of religion, the idolatry of politics, or the hypocrisy of social life, has its root in blindness to the extraordinary.  Because we are unholy, we think God must be, too.  But hear—and today taste—the good news!  The King of love his table spreads.  And the humblest meal becomes—Breakfast with Jesus.

Called forth from every nation, yet one o’er all the earth;
Our charter of salvation: one Lord, one faith, one birth.
One holy name professing and at one table fed,
to one hope always pressing, by Christ’s own Spirit Led.

Raymond Brown taught us that 21 is an added account of a post-resurrectional appearance of Jesus in Galilee, which is used to show how Jesus provided for the needs of the church. The gospel never circulated without 21, which is an Appendix, supplement, or epilogue, including many stylistic differences, though the material drawn is from the same ‘general reservoir of Johannine tradition’, and is part completion and part correction? (RAH). Ecclesiastical and Eucharistic and Eschatology form the symbolism of the chapter.  C H Dodd taught us: ‘The naïve conception of Christ’s second advent in 21: 22 is unlike anything else in the Fourth Gospel’.  CK Barrett suggests that chapter 21 be read as if it were a metaphorical account of the birth of the early Christian church for the purpose of explicating the different, yet equally important, roles of Peter and the beloved disciple, penned by a second author (577). Read this way, we are to see the disciples as “catching men”, in “pastoral ministry and historical-theological testimony” (587).

That is, the Gospel of John ended originally with Chapter 20: These things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and believing you may have life in his name (John 20:31).   And in all the twenty chapters, we have a glorious celebration of Jesus, Spirit, Cross, Resurrection, Life, Word, Love, Truth.  But not a word about church. Not a single word about institutional life, nor about leadership, nor about organization, nor about just how one is supposed to live, with others, by faith, in community.  For John, a new commandment is sufficient:  love one another.  For John, a new reality abides:  Spirit.  Live in the spirit and love in the spirit and all will be well and all will be well and all manner of thing will be well, as Hildegard wrote centuries later.

But sometime in the years and decades following the conclusion of John in chapter 20, a later writer added our reading today.  Why?  Well, because it turns out that only love and spirit alone are not enough.  You need leadership.  So, Peter is rehabilitated and jumps into the lake fully clothed.  You need evangelism.  So, we have the quintessential symbol of evangelism included, fish and fishing and catch of 153.  You need stewardship.  So, we have the quintessential symbol of stewardship, the tending of sheep, with the unwritten subtext being the joy of tithing.  Do you love?  Then feed, then tend, then feed, then tend.  Along comes John 21, most probably a later addition, to amend by insertion: in a word, institutions matter.

The gospel today for us today is a ringing challenge, asking in the season of resurrection, just how faithful we have been to the care and feeding of the institutions in life that make life worth living.  We have had a frightful reminder of this word in faith over the last two years.  Read our Dean of Public Health, Sandro Galea, and his ringing challenge this week that we get religion, get religion, about investment in public health AND ITS INSTITUTIONS, including the Center for Disease Control.  We have had a frightful reminder and ringing challenge through this last year, following January 6, that we get religion, that we get religion about attention to democracy AND ITS INSTITUTIONS, including the Congress of the United States.  But you, friends, have had the benefit of such reminders and ringing challenges before.  Do you remember Baccalaureate Sunday, May 2018, here in Marsh Chapel?  After nine days and evenings of remembrance of the Martin Luther King Jr., the month before, including sermons by Governor Deval Patrick and Dr. Cornell William Brooks, come late May, we had two special guests, one sitting three pews from the pulpit, and sitting two pews from the narthex.  One a harbinger of health and its institutional needs, and one a greeting from government and its institutional needs, both honored in a prescient way by BU that year.  In front of the pulpit, John Lewis. Back by the narthex, Anthony Fauci.  Beloved, hear the Gospel of John 21:  institutions matter, they really matter

Though with a scornful wonder the world sees us oppressed,
by schisms rent asunder, by heresies distressed,
yet saints their watch are keeping, their cry goes up, “How long?”
But soon the night of weeping shall be the morn of song.

The church as an institution matters.  Ask John Wesley.

The government as an institution matters. Ask John Lewis.

The post office as an institution matters.  Ask Ben Franklin.

Public Health organizations as institutions matter.  Ask Sandro Galea.

The CDC as an institution matters. Anthony Fauci.

The European Union and NATO as institutions matter.  Ask Vladimir Zelensky.

And one more.  Jesus came to save us from our sins, not from the need to use our minds.

Marsh Chapel as an institution matters.  The public ordered worship of Almighty God is not a matter of indifference, to you, nor to the current dean of the Chapel.  Come Sunday, in worship, one may hear and heed an intervening word, and be saved from lasting loneliness, abject anxiety, deep depression, or worse.  Community, meaning, belonging, empowerment, all are here, and you, beloved, you are offering these things, week by week.  Otherwise a college campus becomes a place with contact but not connection, a place with contact but nof fellowship, a place of contact without communion. You have something to offer, nothing to defend, and everything to share.

Institutions matter.

Mid toil and tribulation, and tumult of our war,
we wait the consummation of peace forevermore,
till with the vision glorious our longing eyes are blest,
and the great church victorious shall be the church at rest.

Therefore, Christian people, as we work and fight, play and pray this week, let us resist with joy all that cheapens life, all that dishonors God, all that mistakes our ordinary sin for the extraordinary love, power, mercy and grace.   Let the sacrament sustain and nourish us.  In Remembrance.  In Presence.  In Thanksgiving.  Let the sacrament sustain and nourish us.  In bread and cup and life.

Let the institution, the institution, of Holy Communion this day sustain and nourish us. Let the institution, the institution, of Holy Communion this day sustain and nourish us. Let the institution, the institution, of Holy Communion this day sustain and nourish us.

Yet she on earth hath union

With God the Three in One

And mystic sweet communion

With those whose rest is won

O happy ones and holy

Lord give us grace that we

Like them the meek and lowly

On high may dwell with Thee.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 05.1.2022 at 11:00 am

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Luke 24:1-12

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But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.

He went home, amazed… (Gk: thaumazon) …He marveled, he wondered, he was rocked by amazement.  Peter, the rock on which the church, and the faith of the church, are built, here, in this verse added by a later scribe, went home…amazed.  There is no God language here.  No G-O-D.  There is no theological language, no God-talk here.  On Easter.  On Easter!  No.  If such God-talk makes you skittish, uncomfortable, makes you question whether you have a place at the Easter table, hear today’s Gospel: Easter sings Presence. Easter sings presence!

One summer some years ago our family made a three-day trip to Maine.  We stopped in Kennebunkport and swam in the ocean.  That day the newspaper carried a little book review of a short book called On Presence.  The review noted that the book had been written by Ralph Harper, an unknown Episcopal priest in Maryland, who also taught a religion course at the local college.  The book won a prestigious prize.  The author was quoted as saying, among other things, ‘After preaching almost every Sunday for the past 31 years, I know how hard it is to say anything honest’.  I stuffed the review in my shirt pocket.  I finally bought the book (though nine months later).  The book is about presence, sense of presence and practice of the presence of God.  It is about being amazed, amazed as was Peter.

Harper writes, we have too short a time on this earth to pass up any chance to find words and images to live by.  I believe almost everyone is capable of being moved by some person, place, (part of) nature, or individual work of art.  Of course, there is instability and incoherence in and about us all the time.  There is also the inexhaustible store of Being to keep us permanently in awe.

Harper writes, "Not everything can be said easily, except claims of absolute affirmation or denial. In time, most things can be said clearly, at least. And some of these things are so important that we should do everything we can to make them clear. Presence is one of those things. It is not a word that we should allow anyone to rule out of our vocabulary." (120)

This is our first Easter together since 2019.  It is good to see you.  Here is the Easter Gospel after two years in the Covid cave:  Easter Presence.

Howard Thurman, the Dean of Marsh Chapel, Boston University, 1953-1965, found God through poetry, through psalms, and through paintings.  Last week, Samuel Wells, formerly of Duke Chapel, and now in the pulpit of St. Martin the Fields, began his sober sermon, ‘Preaching in Perilous Times’, a meditation on the 23 Psalm, with, yes, Howard Thurman.  Presence, say in a poem.  A sense of presence, say in a psalm.  The practice of presence, say in a painting.

That is, our beloved former dean, Howard Thurman, was a poetic theologian, a theological poet.  Presence, his sense of presence, his practice of presence, intimate to the natural world, made him so.  He was 100 years ahead of his time 50 years ago, so he is still 50 years ahead of me!  Late at night, along his beloved Daytona Beach, he remembered walking alone and with his feet in the sand.

He wrote, ‘the ocean and the night surrounded my little life with a reassurance that could not be affronted by any human behavior.  The ocean at night gave me a sense of timelessness, of existing beyond the ebb and flow of consciousness.  Death would be a small thing I felt in the sweep of that natural embrace.’

Presence.  Presence of mind. (A great phrase).  It happened that a wonderful, beloved professor died in mid-lecture.  Later, the fifteen students from the class were gathered.  After initial awkwardness, there was a full presence in the room as they spoke.  One spoke a soliloquy on trauma and grief.  One gave a soliloquy on connection in hardship. One spoke a soliloquy on pride and love.  One gave a soliloquy on how others, his faculty friends, who had known him so much longer, might be hurting so much more.  ‘Let’s go visit them and offer our condolences’, one said.  And they did.  It was a powerful, poetic moment.  Where did we ever get the idea that 20-year-olds cannot say and do great things?

Presence.  Presence of mind. Last week Gerda Weissmann Klein, died at age 97, a survivor of the holocaust.  Before he was taken from her in 1942, her father implored her, if she was taken, to wear her ski boots, which she protested because it was summer.  But she did so.  By 1945 she was being marched 350 miles.  She survived, ‘in part she said because while many others wore sandals, she had her ski boots…and her imagination’ (NYT 4/9/22).

Today, Easter, 2022, may you discover or be discovered by such poetry, such presence of mind.

Dean Thurman was a lover of the Psalms.  Presence, his sense of presence, his practice of presence, intimate to the natural world, led him so. You cannot find, or know, Thurman without worship, sacrament, prayer, singing, spirituals, preaching—without religion.  And particularly the Psalms.  He had a favorite, or two.  Perhaps you do as well.  Pick two and learn them by heart this year.

⁷ Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
⁸ If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
⁹ If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
¹⁰ even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast.
¹¹ If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around me become night,”
¹² even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day,
for darkness is as light to you.

A sense of presence.  Samuel Terrien taught us:  Presence….does not alter nature, but changes history…through the character and lives of women and men….The elusive presence of…a walking not a sitting God, a God nomadic, hidden, elusive and free…a God of tent not temple, of ear not eye, of name not glory…a God who creates and calls out a spiritual interiority, a commission by command…a God of time not space, of grace not place…whose faith allows one to translate love for God into actual behavior in society…(393)

 Yet for some, perhaps for you, come Easter, the three letters, G-O-D, may be more fence than doorway.  Not only the agnostics and apophatics, but also, and more-so, the average person, the ‘reasonable man’ of insurance law, often stumbles on those three letters.  And here in part is why:  if God is God, he is not good, and if God is good he is not God.  That is, it is a hard to square the concentric circles of love and power, power and love.  20,000 innocent civilians have been slaughtered this month in Mariupol alone, according to recent estimates. We are tuned in because they lived in homes like those in Boston.  They shopped in stores resembling our own.  They used social media and the internet as do you.  They rode transit, owned cars, vacationed in Barcelona, spoke multiple languages and were part of the new or renewed Russian appetite for slaughter.  If God could stop that and didn’t, he is not good.  If God would stop it and couldn’t, he is not God.  For some, hence, the three letters, G-O-D, are more fence than doorway.  Nor does it help that our halting, partial overtures to a sound, liberal, biblical theology have left us shorn of vocabulary. Sin. We hardly name it.  Death.  We rarely face it.  The daily threat of meaningless.  We barely conceive it.  And then along comes a five-year political crisis for American democracy.  And then along comes a two- year hibernation in the COVID cave.  And then along comes Ukraine, with a whiff of nuclear bombast, nuclear bomblast, in the air.  January 6. 1 million dead. A corpse with hands tied behind the back. Creation, we see.  Salvation, we assume.  But fall?  The fallenness of creation?  The abject, dire, need, one beggar telling another where both can find bread, the impossible possibility in fallenness of salvation?  We were absent that day, or took another course, not that there is any.  Or we thought we had bigger fish to fry.  We in five years, in two years, in five weeks and two days, have had a refresher course in the need for liberal biblical theology.  Sin is the absence of God.  Death is the absence of God.  Meaninglessness is the absence of God.  But you, it may well be, are not at ease with those three letters.  They seem a fancy, a fiction, an antique mistake.

Sometimes they seem so to me, too—though in fact and full I hold fast to the ancient traditions and language—yet sometimes they seem so to me, too, at least given our current cultural, linguistic incapacity, our cultural, linguistic exclusion of the three letters, GOD. So, the Gospel offers an Easter gift, a saving one, another word, that means GOD, but may say so better, at least for some, for a time, in our time.  The word is PRESENCE.   A back porch entry, not a front porch one.   With Thurman, and with Peter today, you may find wonder, marvel, and amazement, in presence.  Peter was amazed…

Today, Easter, 2022, may you discover or be discovered by such a sense of presence, perhaps this season a doorway for you to faith, rather than a fence.

 Thurman was a painter.  He did paint with brush and canvass, and loved to depict penguins, among other figures.  Presence, his sense of presence, his practice of presence, intimate to the natural world, led him so.  But they were the verbal paintings, the metaphors in speech, that were his greatest gifts.  One favorite was ‘a crown to grow into’.  A crown is placed over our heads the for the rest of our lives we are trying to grow tall enough to wear.

Sometimes, as Ralph Harper wrote, we need the height of presence: “When I am moved by a painting or by music, by clouds passing in a clear night sky, by the soughing of pines in the early spring, I feel the distance between me and art and nature dissolve to some degree, and I feel at ease. I feel that what I know makes me more myself than I knew before. This is how the saints felt about God, and I see in my own experience elements that I share with the saints and prophets, the philosophers and priests.” (6)

Our grandmother loved Brother Lawrence, and his book, The Practice of the Presence of God.  (John Wesley also loved the book).  Brother Lawrence was a 17^th century Carmelite lay brother, who was injured in battle, and became a household servant, a valet, a cook, a dishwasher.  My grandmother grew up near Cooperstown, driving a horse and buggy to the milk station, skating on the Hudson, once all the way to Poughkeepsie, later on driving a car like she drove a horse and buggy, side to side, born 25 years before suffrage, posting little notes on her kitchen door like, ‘do one thing:  there, you’ve done one thing’, and, ‘do you know who I like to cook a big meal for? ANYBODY’, teaching the Sunday school class no one else wanted, for 6^th grade boys, wearing out the Jehovah Witnesses when they came to call (‘can’t you stay a little bit longer’?), with her detailed, exacting knowledge of the Old Testament, and in all and with all, living day by day to ask respectful questions, and then listen intently to the responses.  She loved the dishwasher of the 17^th century.

He was all about presence.

Brother Lawrence: ‘the time of business does not differ with me from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were on my knees.

Brother Lawrence: ‘do not be discouraged…often, in the beginning, you will think that you are wasting time, but you must go on, be determined and persevere in it until death, despite all the difficulties.

Today, Easter 2022, may you discover or be discovered by such a rhetorical portrait, a word painting, a new favorite or an old one.

Presence.  A sense of presence.  The practice of presence. The faithfulness of Marsh Chapel, its fine lay leadership past and present, the beauty of its sanctuary, and its gifts of friendship for those near and far, are a lasting grace and help us.  In a world in which there is so much wrong, we need one another to help us hold fast to what is good—a poem, a psalm, a painting. Even today.

But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.

He went home, amazed…(Gk: thaumazon)…He marveled, he wondered, he was rocked by amazement.  In Easter Presence, may we too marvel, wonder and be rocked by amazement.  It is Easter!  Can you allow a bit of presence to touch your heart?

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 04.17.2022 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

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Luke 19:28-40

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Dean Hill:

It is not so long ago that we greeting Jesus at his nativity, singing carols and lighting candles of hope.  It is not so long ago that we witnessed his growth in wisdom and stature, in the knowledge and love of God, while as a teenager he taught in the temple.  It is not so long ago that this mighty young man Jesus stooped, fully human, for baptism in the surging river Jordan, the river of death and life.  It is not so long ago that we saw him take up his ministry among us, preaching and teaching and healing.  It is not so long ago that with Peter and James and John we saw him ascend the Mountain of the Transfiguration.  With him have we walked this Lent, step by step.

And now it is time to take the full measure of this Man, and to have the courage to let Him take our full measure, too.  The crisp air and vistas of the mountain pass have fed our souls.  But now it is time to head home, and turn our face to Jerusalem.

The road down the Mount of Olives, or down any mountain, can tax the traveler.  It reminds us all of earlier homecomings.

Odysseus walking the last few miles to Thebes.  Socrates walking to the center of Athens and the cup of hemlock.  Richard the Lionhearted sailing the English Channel, heading home.  A prodigal son, scuffling up the last mile of country road toward a dreaded homecoming, as we heard two weeks ago.  You, returning at last to whatever you have long avoided, wandering as you have in the Galilee of the rest of life.  At last, there is the Emerald City, and the road home.

Today, I raise just one question.  What was Jesus’ state of mind, what was on his mind and heart, as he entered the Holy City?

It is perilous, even arrogant, at this late date and from this great distance, to try to imagine Jesus’ state of mind as he descends the Mountain and enters the City.

Albert Schweitzer, before he went of to heal the jungle sick, showed convincingly how inevitably errant are most such attempts.  We paint our own inner lives into the life of Jesus, when so we try to see what cannot be seen in Scripture.  And yet, particularly at this point in his journey, at the entrance into the Holy City, and on the threshold of his own death, we are haunted—are we not?—by the desire to see what Jesus saw and feel what he felt and sense what he did sense, coming home.

Now Jesus is walking down into the city, down off the mountain, and down into the heart of his destiny.  He is going to his grave.

Some of the Gospel today, as Jesus heads home, is too true to be good.  He is not at home, not at home, in a world of injustice, abuse, violence, and death.  For him, in such a benighted world, there is no place like home.  He is not at home under the rubble of Ukraine.  And need to recall and recover our own tragic sense of life, and our own use of biblical terms like sin, like death, like the threat of meaninglessness.

As are we all, though it seems sometimes to be a conspiratorially well-kept secret.  We all are walking down the lenten mountain and into our lasting, our last future.  Every one of us is going to die.  We are going home.

Here is a possible sentiment in Jesus’ heart and mind as he descends the Mount of Olives.

He looks back upon his ministry and feels that there is no place like home.   He has found no lasting nest on earth, no lasting crib, no lasting domicile.   He has found opposition and rejection.  He has encountered misunderstanding and criticism.  To a harsh world he has brought a gentle manner.  To a wolfish world he has brought the labor of love.  To a selfish community he has brought the summons to service.  To an inconsistent dozen disciples, he has brought the steady presence of peace.   He has not found a home, not here.   There is no place like home, for Jesus, descending the Mount of Olives.   He has even said of himself, “foxes have their holes, and birds of the air their nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”

Some of greatest sentences ever written in English are devoted to a similar ennui, a similar existential vagrancy, Hamlet’s soliloquy, ‘to be or not to be’

And those of you who have been shot out of the saddle, riding for a righteous cause, as you dust yourselves off and bind your wounds, do so in the best of company, in the company of the crucified, for whom, on this green earth, as yet, there is no place like home.   But let me ask you something.  What other saddle would have rather ridden?  Some losing causes are worth support even in defeat.  I would rather be shot out of the right saddle than to canter comfortably all the live long day in the wrong saddle.  So dust off, bind the wound, and get ready to ride again.  We have not a person, dollar, idea or dream to spare, locally, nationally, or globally.  Not one.  And it is, let us confess it, an uphill pull.  But there is no other saddle you would ride in, for all the risk.  This is the place to be!

This hunger for home, this is what Paul meant:  this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.

Our beautiful Palm Sunday Bach Cantata may arouse again this hunger for home.  Dr. Jarrett, how best shall we listen this morning?

Dr. Scott Jarrett

This slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison. A slight momentary affliction. One could be forgiven for thinking it a little churlish of Paul to categorize the human condition as a momentary affliction. Especially if our only solace is acceptance of a future heavenly home that can only be verified by faith. That’s a tough one.

With our loud hosannas and palm branches waving, we commemorate Christ’s triumphal entry to the city of Jerusalem, riding on a lowly donkey. In a few days, we’ll recall the events of the upper room, a dear friend’s betrayal, another’s denial and recusal. We’ll observe the manipulation of a populace through lies and falsehoods – alternative facts, perhaps? We’ll observe the original washing of hands – an abdication of responsibility – moral ambivalence, a giving up and giving in when the fight becomes too difficult.

Today we offer Bach’s Palm Sunday cantata Himmelskönig sei Wilkommen. Beyond enjoining ourselves to those who shouted Hosanna in Jerusalem centuries ago, Jerusalem is in our hearts, and the Salem of joy, our eternal rest. Cantata 182 is a triumph of charm, sweetness, humility, mercy, and fortitude, a joyful dance. Listen for Bach’s interpretation of a royal French overture – no trumpets or drums here. Christ’s entry on a humble donkey represented by solo recorder and violin with pizzicato strings. Utterly charming and affecting. A Lutheran theology, a Bachian melody, an invitation to acknowledge our need for salvation, a joyful acceptance and confidence of the redeemer’s grace and mercy, all that we might take up the Banner of Christ’s Cross and Passion to be Christ for and with one another throughout all our momentary afflictions.

Dean Hill:

Whittier’s poem:

I know not what the future hath of marvel or surprise

Assured alone that life and death God’s mercy underlies

 And so beside the silent sea

I wait the muffled oar

No harm from Him can come to me

On ocean or on shore

I know not where His islands lift

Their fronded palms in air

I only know I cannot drift

Beyond His love and care

posted in The Bach Experience, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 04.10.2022 at 11:00 am