Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

By Marsh Chapel

A long time ago, our family was driving home at night following a dinner and grandma’s house. Our three elementary school age children were asleep in the back of the minivan. Jan and I were talking and enjoying the rolling drive over country roads south of Utica, NY. We were traveling down a road that itself followed the banks of the Chenango canal, a canal dug out to connect Binghamton with Utica, and thus with the Erie Canal, in about 1850. Most of the farms for which the canal was dug had since grown up to brush, in the ensuing 150 years. Not much has replaced them. Like much of the forgotten, rural Northeast the darkened farmhouses and little towns along our path were, and are, inhabited by people living on the margins of life: some milking 50 cows and hoping the bank will forgiving; some on one form or another of government support; some traveling good distances to work hard at hard, menial jobs; some crafting a simple existence out of limited incomes and limited needs.

Suddenly a large orange hit the side of the van. The kids awoke, the car lurched, the driver shouted in anger. We were driving through the little village of Deansboro. Once there was a musical museum there, now closed. Once there was a Methodist church there, now closed. Once there was a Boy Scout troop there, now disbanded. There is a bar, still open, as it was that night.

I do not like being hit with oranges. Or other missiles, or projectiles. There is something about that kind of unprovoked, preemptive attack that just seems wrong. Doesn’t it? When someone hits you and you haven’t hit them first, well, something about that just seems wrong. It makes you kind of angry.

I was still at an age of reactive temper and excitable temperament, the night the orange hit. I had redder hair. Well, I mean I had more hair. I had hair. So I pulled the van over

At Your Service (When the People Say No): Philippians 1:18

Have no anxiety about anything but in all things in prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your needs be known to God, for our commonwealth is in heaven.

In the advent of Christ Jesus, anxiety is eclipsed by joy, fear is overcome in thanksgiving.

Thirty years ago James Dittes explored the ranges of redemptive reality in church conflict. A then veteran, now deceased, ever kindly minister had, I cleanly recall, recommended Dittes. But I only caught up to him this summer when my Dad flipped me his book, saying, ‘read the last page’. I read them all, including the last.

Dittes re-reads conflict. He reads conflict in churches with an historical critical eye, and with a sense of the grace that lies under and around honest disappointment. How can I be a minister if you will not be church? Dittes picks up the disappointment ministers know too well. Yet he does so with reverence for the meaning underlying rejection. He encourages you and me not to slay opposition but to join it, not to defeat it but to be submerged by it, and so to discover the potential, in no, of yes, in resistance, of ministry.

What are they saying? What are the people saying when they say no? What are they saying when they miss meetings, skip church, forget to give, refuse to tithe, oppose improvements, resist new liturgies, resist new ministries, resist new thoughts, resist new ideas, resist new moves? What are they truly saying?

They are saying something more than no. They are not saying yes. They are saying something about their experience and their hope.

It takes a big dose of courage to swallow rejection and to hunt around in resistance for what may happen when people meet in a real, shared partnership based on real, shared struggle.

It may be that this attitude lies behind Paul’s first salvo in Philippians. Paul notes the resistance that some have to his trip into the slammer. Not everyone finds his stay in calaboose uplifting. Some do. Some see the gospel advanced through imprisonment. Some do not. Some see Paul being Paul, always spoiling for a fight, always on the edge of conflict, always polemical Paul. They preach Christ, but denigrate Paul, or denigrate Paul in the way they preach Christ. What then?

To be a minister is to know the most searing grief and abandonment, daily and profoundly. 1. If the minister can let go and open up, then perhaps the people can too. 86. There is nurture and direction to be found in the wilderness, a message in the mess, manna in the mania. 40. You cannot make full commitment unless you risk the certain grief that lies within it. 150.

Paul hears the people say no. Elsewhere he indulges the highly satisfactory response, one we may admit we too would readily and lustily employ, of attack and battle. Beware the dogs, the evilworkers, the mutilators. But here, no, here Paul hears the no and subverts it by being subject to it. He finds the common interest—Christ. He sticks to the common interest—the advance of the gospel.

Let us imagine what may also have been in the air, though we cannot prove it. Let us imagine that Paul decides not, at this point, to parry. Imagine that rather, he listens, hard to this no. He listens to the shame people feel when their leader is in stir, up the river, in the joint, in the tank, doing time. People are people. Paul allows himself to feel this. Imagine that he further intuits some fear. Philippians is largely about joy that eclipses fear. He can readily see that some may expect that they too will end up in the calaboose, in the big house, in the grey bar hotel. They have children. They have spouses. They have responsibilities and vulnerabilities. They too are ‘in prison’. They have their own kinds of captors and leg irons. Maybe Paul, still testy, can appreciate this, and so grudgingly admits that they have a point, that they too are part of the struggle for lasting good.

I think most of us do not get this far down the ministry trail. I know I have my limits to affirming people who call me names, put false nametags on me, or resolutely resist what I know, I KNOW, is the right way forward. Maybe you do too. Hence, log jam. Hence, conflict. Hence, the opportunity, missed, to enter another’s real life, real pain, real soul.

No is hardly more articulate than ouch and often means much the same thing. No, like ouch, usually signals pain and fear. It is a genuine groan. It is so inarticulate, so lacking in clues as to what is painful and feared, that the only way to minister to it is through it. The minister enters into the experience of the groaning no, sharing it as a partner, rather than fighting it as the adversary into which it is tempting to be cast. The minister tries to feel what it is like to be this person. 28.

Ministers are appointed by Bishops or located by committees. But the real assignments and locations come daily in the places others put or want to put the minister. (I call this the name-tag syndrome). Visit me. Find me a job. Pray over the cannon on Memorial Day. Join Rotary. Come to my recital. Address our class. Give the grace at the father and son dinner, and please wear a clerical collar, and please keep it brief, and, oh, we will cover your dinner.

The noble traditions of the church, my own struggling to discern meaningful vocation, my long and anguished and continuing to fit myself to fulfill that vocation, the daily discipline I impose on myself to try to be responsive to the deepest rumblings and highest aspirations of life, the careful way I budget my time to try to be a faithful steward of the little time I have available in the light of the immense needs I see—in the face of this earnestness
about my ministry, you want me to give an evening so I can perform, like a trained dog, a short sacerdotal trick, after which you will throw me my supper and ask me to be still. I can’ t think of any more abrupt way of being shouldered off course.

But the ministry lies, neither in compliance or defiance. It lies in accepting the place offered at the table, and then engaging in conversation, perhaps, about why the invitation was the way it was and why it was so important, or so needed, or so meaningful, if it was.

It is from the locations that the people give you that you will give the people something healing. If they place you in a high pulpit, far off and up there, and 15 feet above contradiction, the ministry will have to begin there. It need not end there. If they place you in a rough parsonage with a leaky roof and long, sad history, the ministry will have to begin there, but should not end there. If they place you at the family table, as guest and as host and as minister, you can start where they are, there.

In 1982, one bitter cold Saturday night, we were invited to dinner. Saturday night always carries the proleptic anxiety over Sunday morning, especially, as in the case of this clear winter night, on the Canadian border, when the morning’s sermon was still in gestation, seven months at least from birth. The family dinner, it turned out, was an extended family dinner. Three generations, hosted by grandma and grandpa. After dinner, the dozen of us retired to the family room of the big farm house, when, over dessert, the purpose of the evening arrived. Grandpa wanted grandson to be Christian, to belief, to be confirmed, and to attend church, and wanted the new preacher, or his wife, to effect this, to explain faith, to defend belief, to convert the heathen, then and there. It needs emphasis that these, all were the ruddiest and handsomest and best of good people. They had a location into which they had appointed a minister, their minister. If ministry was to start, it would have to start there, which it did, over a couple of hours. The minister answered what questions he could. He did not complain about the ambush, but he did identify it. Then he also asked his questions, of the family and for the family, questions of histories and systems and silences and patients. By 11pm, the work was done, but not the sermon. It was a sneak attack, to be sure. But it was also an invitation to partnership. Leaving in huff, defiance, would have communicated boundaries but would not have been ministry. Answering questions but asking none, compliance, would have communicated sincerity but not authenticity, and would not have been ministry.

Exhausted and enervated, the minister and young family drove home through the crisp snow and well below at 20 below zero. You cannot leave the nametags on your shirt or back, as inevitable as their placement is. They need removal. But you also cannot predict where real, responsive ministry will emerge. People only hear you when they are moving toward you and they are moving toward you when you are located near them. I am believer in clergy housing allowances, and a fervent supporter of them. But one spiritual feature of parsonages deserves affirmation, too. The people locate their minister, and for some that location, that overture to partnership, finds expression in an historic mode of housing, for all its miseries. Removing the parsonage—I applaud its removal—does not remove, and cannot and should not, the ‘location’ the ‘placement’ the ‘appointment’ of the minister within the social and cultural geography available to the people.

When you are invited to become chaplain of the fire department, accept. When you are asked to pray at the blue and gold banquet, accept. When you are invited to Saturday dinner, accept. When you are called to come to the barn for a talk, accept. When you are asked to visit the family burial ground, accept. When you are invited to speak at Christmas for the service club, go. When you are encouraged, not so subtly, to visit Aunt Tillie, make the visit. These are overtures, questions and hopes, addressed to you and to who knows who.

To be a minister is to know the theological (and maybe even the sociological and psychological) significance of baptism—and to be right about that and able to communicate it meaningfully—yet still be willing, for the time being, to give all that up and to accept the misplacement of being called in merely and casually to baptize the new baby. Such misplacement is accepted in order to have A place in the life of the parents, the only place they have available for the minister now. Maybe it’s like having to be born in a stable because there is no room in the inn, or even like riding a donkey and fitting into people’s hosannahed expectations of messiah even when you know better. Once in place though misplaced, then ministry proceeds in the new place, which feels like no place, which is located, and momentarily bounded by, the parents’ urgent need to have the baby baptized…Ministry is to accept the misplacement so as to open it up, address it, and come to find it replaced. 147.

I thank my God…for your partnership in the Gospel.

Our commonwealth is in heaven.

Rejoice in the Lord always.

The Lord is at hand.

If there is any excellence…think about these things.

He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.

For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.

Stand firm in spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel.

Complete my joy by being of the same mind.

Work out your own salvation in fear and trembling.

God is at work in you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

Whatever gain I had I count as loss for the sake of Christ.

I count everything as loss for the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.

One thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

Have no anxiety about anything but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.

Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think on these things.

I know how to be abased and I know how to abound.

I can do all things through him who strengthens me.

Again I say rejoice.

Let all men know your forbearance.

posted in Uncategorized on 09.21.2008 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Image

George Washington looks out toward us from the far eastern end of Commonwealth Avenue. He surveys the mall. He rides unfettered now by time and unbounded by space. Ride on, ride on, thou lasting image of patient restraint.

Much of religion today, including Christianity, emphasizes moments of breakthrough. Their view, this view, emphasizes the gloominess of existence, apart from an occasional sunburst, an occasional feeling, an occasional point of purpose, an occasional touch of eternity. Once in awhile, so goes this version of life, the sun momentarily shines. Breakthrough religion.

Yet, that is not what is found in the Bible. Not breakthrough, but shot through religion is found in Scripture. A rising radiance of resurrection is shot through all experience, shot through all culture, shot through all life, according to the Bible. The earth shall be full of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea. Your true commonwealth, citizenship, homeland, and mother tongue—heaven—is shot through earth, just as the faith of gospel is shot through the common ways and Commonwealth avenues of life. The kingdom of heaven is in your midst.

We are tracing Paul’s announcement of resurrection radiance shot through life, found in his finest epistle, Philippians. If Commonwealth Avenue is the loveliest street in the land, Philippians is the loveliest letter in the land of Pauline epistles. Everywhere, everywhere, SURSUM CORDA!, cries Paul from prison, everywhere there is a resurrection radiance. Learn its verses by heart:

Let all men know your forbearance.

Forbearance.

If you were to be known by just one virtue, one trait, what would it be?
In fact, we do tend to think of groups, and even individuals, in terms of one quintessential grace.
Monday’s child is full of woe. Tuesday’s child has far to go…
If you were to aspire to live your live so as to define one form of goodness, what would it be?

For Tillich, it was courage. For Niehbuhr, responsibility. For Barth, resistance. For Lincoln, humility. For Churchill, resolve. For Teresa, trust. For Luther, faith. For Franklin, industry-- and frugality. For you?

Paul’s intimate letter to the Philippians ends in the fourth chapter with a crashing crescendo of rejoicing, of joy, of thanksgiving, of expectation and of hope. Yet Paul here also inserts his answer to our question.

What one virtue, ‘at the end of the day’ (as the wise of this world now say though I truly do not know the meaning of this phrase), what one would he wish for his loved ones?

Before you look down at the bulletin, cast your imagination upon Paul as you know him, and try to guess.
Obedience? Paul stresses obedience with the Romans.
Preparedness? Paul admonishes the Thessalonians to be on guard, on the qui vive.
Magnanimity? Paul gives Philemon a thought or two about giving.
Love? Who could argue against love? Paul sings a hymn of love to the sometimes lovely Corinthians.
Freedom? Stand fast, you Galatians, Paul urges.
Yet to none of these earlier (assuming for the moment that Philippians is Paul’s latest letter) foci does Paul return here at the rhetorical summit of his work.

Rejoice, rejoice, rejoice, he acclaims, and then he selects his cardinal virtue.
You will be surprised at the choice he makes.
For Paul is himself irascible, polemical, argumentative, tempermental, anger prone, blunt to a fault. Yet, in his cardinal virtue, selected for the Philippians, he turns in another direction.
They are to be known, he hopes, by their…

Forbearance, epiekes, means what is fitting, right, equitable. It refers to a person of balance, of equable temperament. It refers to you, as you are moderate, gentle, kind, and gracious, and it refers to Christ Jesus, in whom we are saved. Radiance, resurrection radiance is shot through life. Forbearance tells us so. Your faith produces in you a saving gentleness, an earthly counterpart of heavenly glory, glorious sunshine from your heavenly commonwealth, gilding and guiding your steps from Arlington to Mass. Ave.

Look hard, next time, at a piece of work you admire. A building, perhaps a beautiful sanctuary like this one. An institution or company, perhaps a great university. A marriage, perhaps that one marriage you have secretly admired over time. A program, perhaps a school or chorus or ball team. A finely crafted painting, poem, song, sermon, or story. Maybe the radiant, glorious opera, La Cenerentola, magnificently performed, by our choral scholars and others, right here at Marsh Chapel last night. (Shot through, shot through, not breakthrough…) Look very hard, deeply inspect some fine work you admire, I say, and I guarantee you a discovery. Even a mildly surprising discovery. What you so admire was brought out of the mud of nothingness, was created, with forbearance. Forbearance. Take a deep, broad high look at something good and I tell you, you are going to find that this Good, whatever it is, is made out of forbearance. This is a great power for doing Good.

Obededom

Which brings us, straightway, to Obededom. God love him. Love his name! I do not need to tell you that for millennia Christian preaching has scoured the Hebrew Scripture for illustrations. Obededom personifies forbearance. Long I have loved his story, his encounter with David.

David was a builder. He made music with lute and lyre. He made war upon the Philistines. He made a nation out of warring tribes. More than all that, in the Psalms he made a language of religious longing and discovery that is without parallel. David was a builder. And the Lord loved him for it. And we do too.

To crown his other achievements, David decided upon a risky project. In order to weld together the northern and southern kingdoms into one unmistakable union, David planned to move the “ark of God” out of the north country, and down into Jerusalem. It was a brilliant symbolic decision, daring and deadly, like most of David’s moves. David gathered 30,000 soldiers and went up to where the ark was hidden, in the house of Abinadab.

For all his accomplishments and talent, David was a profoundly fearful man, as the Psalms show us. So, when the ark, a holy and sacred object, was finally on the road, David was relieved, and casting off all restraint, had one wild party. 30,000 men singing, dancing, shouting, along the old Jerusalem road! Suddenly, one of the oxen drawing the ark slipped, and a poor bloke named Uzzah reached out to steady the wagon, and somehow fell down dead. The party ended abruptly. David’s great-hearted fears returned and he found himself quaking in the road, dying the thousand deaths of a confirmed coward.

Did God reach out and touch Uzzah and kill him? I do not believe it. I do not believe for a moment that such breakthrough capricious destruction fits the Bible picture of God, the one to whom Jesus prayed. Such a God is not the one of Scripture, and is not the object of our worship. Who would worship such a beastly God? Would you? No. Yet, it appears, in the depths of his fear, David did believe that God had killed Uzzah.

David, that is, let his fear get the best of him and his thought about God became, what yours also can become, a mirror of our worst fears: a projection of our anxieties, our worries, our hatreds, our worst selves. Talk about God has long carried this danger. David, we know, was a guilty ridden person, and someti
mes, because of his sense of guilt, his thought about God became fearful. God became David’s worst nightmare.

In this fear David stood frozen. Mark my words, this same fear is freezing people today, too. David could not go forward, and could not go backward, and so he entered the lists of leaders, secular and religious, who, in a pinch, solve a problem by making the problem someone else’s problem. That is, he passed the buck. He went up the road a little bit and knocked at the door of an unsuspecting fellow, a poor guy named Obededom. I can hear David, kingly and cowardly, addressing the humble Gittite.

“Yes, Obededom, my friend, do you mind if I call you Obed, or Obie? How about Obs? Listen, we have out here, what you might call a situation, a situation for which your own many talents, Obs, are sorely needed. Now, you see that little box over there. I want to leave that box over in your back yard for a while, and if, well, if nothing extraordinary happens for a while (That is, if you, Obededom the Gittite, do not get lit up fried and scorched), then I will come back and get it.”

Perhaps you have never had the Obededic experience of having someone in authority over you dump a problem in your backyard. Somehow, though, I think most of us know the experience. And I even wager that right now, out in the back lawns of the lives represented here today, and across our listening congregation, there are some little David gifts, some holy arks, bucks passed and dumped and left out of fear. David passed the buck and went home. Night fell on the village of Gath, and the ark lay there, ominous, dangerous, foreboding like all unknown things, especially like your future and mine.

Now the Bible gives us a remarkable, beautiful gift. It says nothing more about Obededom. The story of Obededom ends here. Obededom does…nothing. In the face of David’s bureaucratic haughtiness, all too human fearfulness, treacherous carelessness, in the face of these unpleasantries and dangers Obededom does…nothing. Obededom forbears, practices a little forbearance. He lives somehow with a sense of radiance shot through life. Without his forbearance, the great city of Jerusalem would never finally have been built. Without his forbearance David would never have regained his courage, the ark would have stayed north, the kingdom would have been divided still, the great project of the Old Testament would lay in ruins. Obededom, the Gittite. Endured, tolerated, kept himself in check, controlled himself under provocation. Obededom taught David and teaches us forbearance, the power of patient restraint.

Oh, I admire Obededom, the poor guy. My natural reaction, in such perverse situation, call it life as we know it, is the contrary, not to forbear but to yell, to scream, to reject, to retaliate, to point out the injustice, to militate against the Powers that Be. All of which would have done no good, for David was not, shall we say, in the mood, to change his mind. No, Obededom could see what we so often miss, that something good, something good for God needs forbearance in its making. This is nearly without exception.

Coda

Look hard, next time, at something well done. It was made out of Obededic forbearance. That sanctuary you find so lovely got approved mainly because someone bit his tongue so hard it bled. That university you admire was started with the aid of someone’s heartfelt forbearance. That president you so admire who with a keen mind and cool hand practiced forbearance in October of 1962, and so averted a nuclear disaster. That marriage you think so much of is based on a decision, down in the deep reaches of human communication, a decision to forbear a weakness, forgive a fault. That choir you love to hear came out of the ground on the shoulders of someone’s patient restraint. That work of art you admire was produced by a modern Obededom, willing to tolerate and endure the sacrifices required of any true artist. That school you support was created with lots of people forbearing one another. That opera last night that was world class magnificence would not have been presented without some serious forbearance in rearranging rehearsal spots at the last minute, at the drop of a hat. Hardly a decent thing ever gets done without the power of forbearance, patient restraint, the willingness to keep oneself in check, to refrain from retaliation. Look hard, look deep. If it is good, it was made with forbearance. Forbearance is prevenient forgiveness, the presupposition shot through today’s gospel, and the radiance of the resurrection gospel shot through life.

I overhear your question. No, forbearance is not appeasement. Appeasement in personal or in global relations is pure illness. There does come a time when restraint no longer works, but let us admit that usually the time comes far later than our impatient, impetuous, imperious selves would think. David, and we so much like him, are not naturally forbearing. With David we love to prance, to twirl wildly in the loin cloth. With David we are all spit and fury, all energy, all readiness to build--until our fears overtake us.

When you think about it, this is also the message of the cross and the hope of the church. We can admire Obededom because we know that his forbearance, more than David’s fear, fairly reflects God. We worship a God who has shown God’s own forbearance toward us, and shows it still, shot through every day, not breaking through at whim and will. God’s patient restraint, God’s power made manifest in weakness, is the power of the cross. Shakespeare had it near to right, “Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all.” God forbears to become the God of David’s fears. God forbears to treat us the way we treat each other. Here too is a strange word: God even forbears to protect God’s self, God’s Christ, God’s Love from us. God’s forbearance is the foundation of the world and of the church. It is the forbearance of God, at the heart of the universe, which gives life, makes life worth living, and saves us from our ravenous selves.

Perhaps this week, recalling the cross, and remembering the example of Obededom the Gittite, we can practice a little forbearance. Sisters and Brothers in Christ, let us promise to forbear one another in love!

posted in Uncategorized on 09.14.2008 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Matriculation Sunday

Scaling the Wall

The pull of gravity keeps our feet on the ground as we move out into an unknown future. Our commonwealth is from heaven, of heaven, heavenly. But we know the pull of gravity whose spiritual dimension is fear. The Commonwealth Avenue Mall honors many women and also men who looked fear in the eye. Today, the eye falls on Leif Erickson. Think about sailing across the Atlantic in wood and sail, hundreds of years ago. Even John Wesley found his faith, his sea legs, finally, watching the Moravians fearless in the Hurricane, and listening to their singing. Peace, perfect peace. Peace, perfect peace. Even Rev. Tindley, could reach out and down at Tindley Temple in Philadelphia, to pen great spiritual hymns: when the storms of life are raging stand by me…

At Boston University I see women and men facing down fear. I see professors looking out into forty eyes in twenty chairs. I see students thumbing through books in foreign languages. I see administrators making good, tough choices. I see parents going up a set stairs with hands full of furniture and coming down the same set of stairs with eyes full of tears.

One local and particularly favorite fear focus is on Commonwealth Avenue, our earthly not our heavenly commonwealth. You will have to go up a few blocks though. You will have to enter the new Fitness and Recreation Center—a beautiful space. Go in with a friend. Go downstairs. Stop at the desk. Tim will greet you. You will see behind him some shoes that look like bowling shoes, except they are so slight, so light, so small. There is probably a pair that will fit you. Then turn around. These are shoes worn by those who face down the fear of heights, scaling a man-made rock wall. Here is an image of a climbing wall, of little shoes, of spotter and rope…of a willingness to move closely over the face of the rock, to know its bumps, its rises, its gullies, its angles of repose.

Every moment of interpretation is such a perilous project. Will the feet stay settled on a ledge of translation? Will the body lean right or left as needed to find the right paraphrase? Will the hands, particularly the hands, hold tight to the meaning, old and new, of the words interpreted? Will there be somebody to catch you if you fall? Who is holding that safety rope, in the hour of interpretation? What did Paul mean when he sent the following greeting and salutation to Philippi?

Greeting and Salutation

Here, the Revised Standard Version translation of Philippians 1: 1-12 is recited from the chancel ,in front of the altar, before the Marsh congregation and between the choir stalls and choristers…

Hold Fast: Knowledge, Discernment, Approval, Excellence

This year we are learning to do some spiritual rock climbing. We reach toward our heavenly commonwealth, grounded in the reality of our earthly commonwealth, our existential hope grounded in the gravity of our fears. We are moving slowly, ledge by ledge, over the face of this great promontory, Paul’s loveliest letter. We see up close its joints, its crevices, its moss, its façade. We climb to interpret, interpret to climb, climb to interpret, interpret to climb. Hold on! Reach up to the next hand hold.

It is my prayer that your love will abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, that you may approve what is excellent.

Now these are slippery and surprising words to grasp, to hold onto. Be careful will you! We hear ‘love’ and then words to interpret love that we would least expect. Yet here they are. On the climbing wall. I mean in the Bible. Knowledge. Discernment. Approve. Excellent. (*The renditions that follow are the preacher’s, in conversation with articles in TDNT, loc. Cit.)

Love, but knowingly, with knowledge.

Here is a mighty term: Epignosei… Knowledge.

What does the N on the Nebraska footfall helmet stand for? Nowledge!

And what does knowledge here mean? Gnosis? The Acute Hellenization of Christianity? Pessimistic Enthusiasm? Plato in the later years? Epi—super, moreso? Just like knowledge only moreso?

Knowledge signifies grasp, comprehension, and understanding. It is the knowledge needed to learn something, like a swimming stroke, like the butterfly (not perception, though they are connected). In Greek thought, knowledge has the character of
seeing. “For Plato, knowledge is the presupposition for right political action.” Knowledge was the goal of Hellenistic piety. Knowledge involves a concern for what really is. Is God—beyond or separate, Greek or Gnostic? For Paul gnosis (as here) is always set under agape, without which it is worthless.

‘It is the God who said ‘let light shine out of darkness… Knowledge puffs up, love builds up…

Love, but discerningly, with discernment.

Here is a mighty term. Aisthesai. All insight. All discernment. Judgment (!), KJV. Temperment. Some things the Philippians do need from Paul. They need understanding and insight. Love must fasten itself on things which are worth loving.

Here is the power of moral discrimination and ethical judgment. The howling of the TV in our time makes people fearful that our discourse has left all connection in quality and kind with the kind and quality of discourse we need in our fateful moment in history. This is ethical judgment as distinct from religious judgment. A: sensual perception; B: perception or spiritual discernment; C: intellectual understanding. It is primarily A, a capacity of the soul, as distinct from a capacity of the mind. Today we would say transformation not just information.

Love, but by approving what is excellent.

Here is a mighty phrase. Dokimazein… Diapheronta…

Approve. Support. Test. Literally, “That you may test the things that differ.” Look for Essential qualities. So live that there is nothing to condemn. Test! Try! This is a peculiar use in the NT. ‘Human existence stands under the divine testing in which it must prove itself’. Testing, in a fuller and deeper sense, is the result of the experience of the Christian community.

Approve what is …Excellent. I will show you a more excellent way. 1Cor 13. Rom 2:18. ‘approve what is excellent’ (same phrase)….’that which is fitting in a given situation’. We need not apologize for a commitment to excellent. We cannot avoid a calling to excellence.

What is worth more, what is superior to, what is best, what is right, the things that “carry through”. What lasts, matters, counts, works. Behold! At the heart of the Bible, a commitment to excellence, and an attention to detail.

Intelligence is knowing the right story for the right moment, or the right illustration for the right sermon (otherwise, the sideshow that ate up the circus). That last also has political ramifications.

The Saints Who Are at Marsh

We honor examples of identified lay ministry here at Marsh Chapel. For the second year, this first September Sunday is identified as our own, Marsh Chapel Matriculation Service. At the beginning of term, we offer praise to God, we listen for God’s word, we receive the Lord’s Supper, we distribute a new term book, a new brochure, a new information card. And we name, to honor their example, some of our lay leadership here at Marsh. We do so, though, in the spirit and following the letter of Philippians 1, addressing ALL the saints who are at Boston. If your name is not here, it is here still:

Ministry Staff and Chapel Associates

Br. Lawrence A. Whitney, LC+, University Chaplain for Community Life

August Delbert, Ministry Associate for First-Year Students

Liz Douglass, Chapel Associate for LGBTQ Ministry

Susan Forshey, Chapel Associate for Ministry Formation

The Rev. Victoria Hart Gaskell, OSL, Chapel Associate for Methodist Students

Ross Ponder, Ministry Associate for Undergraduate Students

Tom Reis, Ministry Assistant

Tyler Sit, Marsh Associate for LGBTQ Ministry; Ministry Assistant

Elizabeth Siwo-Okundi, M Div, Chapel Associate for Students of African Descent

Jeri-Katherine Warden, Ministry Associate for Student Athletes

Music and Worship Staff

Scott Allen Jarrett, DMA, CFA ’07, Director of Music

David Ames, Chapel Sacristan

Justin Thomas Blackwell, Associate Director of Music

Rachel Cape, Music Program Administrator

Kara Harris, Choral Scholar

Herbert S. Jones, Director, Inner Strength Gospel Choir

Emily Marvosh, Choral Scholar

Stefan Reed, Choral Scholar

Melissa Riesgo, Music Program Administrator

Joshua Taylor, Choral Scholar

Teresa Wakim, Choral Scholar

Brenna Wells, Choral Scholar

Timothy Westerhaus, Assistant Conductor, Marsh Chapel Choir

Graham T. Wright, Choral Scholar

Office and Support Team

Ray Bouchard, MTS, STH ’95, Director of Marsh Chapel

Elizabeth Fomby, Director of Hospitality

Justin Blackwell, Director of Communications

Lea Christoforou, Student Staff

Kaitlin Daly, Student Staff

Heidi Freimanis, Wedding Coordinator

Hae Won Lee, Student Staff

Karen Smith, Student Staff

Lay Leaders, Coordinators and Representatives of Special Ministries

Sandra Cole, Service Ministry, Liturgy, Membership Role

George Coulter, Laura Elliott, Mark Gray, Ushers

Jay Reeg, Kim Schreiber, Jennifer Williams, Ushers

Susan Forshey, Adult Study

Patrick Fulford, Br. Larry Whitney, LC+, Affiliate Churches

Mark Gray, Dean’s Study

Ondine Brent, Dr. Beverly Brown, Advisory Board

Nancy Marsh Hartman, Graham T. Wright, Advisory Board

Rachel Harvester, Co-Chair, Servant Team

Jan Hill, Children’s Choir and Chapel Women’s Forum

Sean McQuarrie, Co-Chair, Servant Team

Glenn Messer, History and Records

The Rev. Dr. Robert Cummings Neville, Eucharistic Ministry

John Pedican, Lay Reading

Cecilia Robinson, Hospitality

Roy Sassi, Radio Congregation

Rhoda Serafim, Ministry through RIM with Iraqi refugees

Nellie Staley, Encouragement Letters

Sherman Wissinger, Photography

TBD, Habitat for Humanity

You Are Philippians Recited

Friends.

We have listened with love, with joy, with wonder, to the words of holy writ. Hands chapped, arms sore, body tired, we have at last settled our feet upon the good earth, down from the great climb of the great wall of holy writ. We are ready for rest, for cleansing, for showering, for refreshment. Holy Communion awaits us. (Those listening may call to request communion in the home).

In conclusion, though we are still staring at Philippians Recited. We realize something. In the week to come, ready or not, prepared or not, feeling so or not, YOU are Philippians. For your neighbor, the only explanation of this word received will be the one you live, on your front porch, in your dorm hall. For your office staff, the only definition of approval that will matter is the one they hear from you, both in what you say and in the way you say it, both in what you do not say, and in the way you do not say it. For your students, I mean your teachers, I mean your colleagues in study, the only preaching of excellence that will have meaning will be the one they hear, or overhear, in your daily discourse. For your family, discernment will be Greek to the, unless they experience your discerning care. YOU are Philippians Recited, come Monday.

Hey, my work is done!  I did what I could for you!  You know where I am!  You had your chance!  Now, ministry is up to you.

-Dean Robert Allan Hill

posted in Uncategorized on 09.7.2008 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

A Commonwealth Partnership

Listen in love for the cadence of mystery that befalls us in gospel partnership…

I thank my God…for your partnership in the Gospel.

Our commonwealth is in heaven.

Rejoice in the Lord always.

He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.

For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.

Work out your own salvation in fear and trembling.

Have no anxiety about anything but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.

I can do all things through him who strengthens me.

Again I say rejoice.

All these inspired sentences come to us from Philippians, including today’s text, the first, which names the partnership of the Gospel.

You are surrounded by intimations of partnership. Take a walk today down Commonwealth Avenue. Abigail Adams will greet you. Yes, she will reach out to you from the women’s memorial. Look hard into her eyes and listen for the echoes of a not too distant past. It is all around you. Not far from where you stands near Fairfield, George Washington mustered his troops, as the Revolution began. Here you are! Bunker Hill, Old Ironsides, the Boston Harbor with its aroma of tea leaves! Enjoy it, don’t miss it. Your time will go by fast.

We lived an hour from Buffalo for many years. You would be surprised how many people in western New York have never seen Niagara Falls. ‘Oh, yes, I meant to go last summer. I will get there some day’. We lived about an hour from Montreal for some years. You would be surprised how many people in the far north country have never been up Mount Royal. ‘We were going to take the kids, but then something came up. We will get over there some day.’ We lived in New York, on the upper west side, right on the Hudson River. You would be surprised how many Yankees fans have never taken the road up to West Point. ‘I just don’t like to drive that much. One day I will get there’.

Abigail, Commonwealth, Boston, New England, the whole earth await you. Don’t disappoint them. Make a pastoral call on life. Be good to life and life will be good to you.

Abigail and John Adams lived out a remarkable partnership. Theirs was a bond, a friendship, a fellowship of rare, real love. You may access some of their shared life through their letters

Listen, for just a moment, Abigail to John:

That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing on of Friend (MDF, 110).

Listen for just a moment, John to Abigail:

It is a fortnight to day Since I had Letter from you but it Seems to me a month. I cannot blame you for one of yours is worth four of mine. (MDF, 370)

Abigail and John lived in partnership. Their historical koinonia is a harbinger, a foretaste, of what gospel partnership can be.

What Paul Means by Partnership

Paul writes not of an earthly Commonwealth Avenue, but of a commonwealth in heaven, a commonwealth of heaven (Phil 3:20). Partnership is the crossroad we take to get to the heavenly commonwealth. Koinonia, partnership, is a way of being in life, a way of living in the world. It is the rigorous character of fellowship that finally turned the Roman Empire upside down, lasted through twenty centuries, and to this day beckons young people and others to another side of the street. With this one word, Paul identifies his running mates.

We are awash this week in running mates. It is a good term, running mates. Those with whom we choose to run the race do say a great deal about who we are. So the Spanish simply say in their refrain, ‘dime con quien andas, y dire quien eres’.

While Paul will later name individual partners, he begins with a broad embrace of all his readers, and now hearers: I am thankful for your partnership.

For Paul the church is an eschatological community. The church is a living body, wherein the whole is far more than the sum of the parts. It is an organic expression of mutuality wherein persons are understood to be made for community, and persons become human persons in a trans-subjective, transpersonal, setting for re-socialization.

One of my mentors, R Scroggs, used to say that, for Paul, the church’s characteristic marks are joyful liberation, reciprocal mutuality, gracious equality, communal discernment. The church is both separate from and participatory in the world around, and so must ever think twice, both of its own joyous existence and of its role as God’s arm in the world.

The way of good living, gospel partnership, is revealed, apocalypsed, to Paul. All our readings today bear similar witness. The burning bush is revelation. The song of the psalmist heart is revelation. The marks of fellowship are revelation. The recognition of the Christ comes by revelation. All our readings prepare the way for partnership.

So, Scroggs: “because of grace, persons are able, insofar as at any particular moment they live by faith, to use their faculties without distortion which self-anxiety inevitably creates, without the repression of energy and function which is caused by the exhausting and exhaustive project of securing the self. It is the freedom from fear, life now secure as a gift, which gives one confidence to try, even in the face of obstacle and danger.” (PND, 187)

Here are some guidelines, according to Paul, that mark out where the crossroad of partnership comes upon the commonwealth of heaven: freedom, peace, love, mutual upbuilding.

Koinonia is a new way of being in the world. The world finds a new way of being in Koinonia.

Partnership is one place where the great religious traditions of the world find common ground. It is an opening to a different way of being in the world. I give you Martin Buber:

The life of human beings is not passed in the sphere of transitive verbs alone. It does not exist in virtue of activities alone which have some thing for The realm of Thou has a different basis…

When Thou is spoken, the speaker has no thing for his object. For where there is a thing there is another thing. Every It is bounded by others; It exists only through being bounded by others. But when Thou is spoken, there is no thing. Thou has no bounds...

When Thou is spoken, the speaker has no thing; he has indeed nothing. But he takes his stand in relation. (I and Thou, in passim)

A verse from Paul, readings from our tradition, a voice from the another religious tradition—all of these open up an avenue for you, an avenue of meaning, belonging, empowerment, enjoyment.

What Partnership Means for You

Now you will need to ponder, a bit what this means for you on August 31, 2008. Coming to church, and hearing about koinonia, suddenly changes the news reports about running mates.

Running mates are not only the province and problem of televised campaigns and presidential candidates. You will be nominating your own running mates over the next few years.

A strong partnership has such a powerful influence. Think of the athletic teams you have known that have shown such powerful partnership that they became virtual unstoppable. Think of the couples in leadership, the wives and husbands you have known, who have influence because of their shared commitment. Think of the pastors and lay leaders in congregations, who, when the yoke can be set and shared well, move heaven and earth. Think of the faculties who bring out the best in each other, and so are far more than the sum of their parts.

For our newly arriving students, freshmen and others, the forging of partnerships, the chance at koinonia, will be at the very heart of what happens, for good, in the very quickly passing span of four years. Here is their prayer, and ours too:

Bless our friendships these four years, we ask

Help us to grow in kindness

Help us to listen in silence

Help us to acquire the gentle arts of comraderie

Teach us to speak heart to heart, soul to soul, I to Thou

That when we leave we may have befriended and been befriended

And so have found our own identity, our second identity, our selves.

Bless our decisions these four years, we ask

Help us to grow in confidence

Help us to perceive consequences

Help us to learn to choose and to choose to learn in choosing

Teach us to decide with grace, with passion, with humility

And so by choosing found our own identity, our second identity, our selves.

Bless our intuitions these four years, we ask

Help us to acquire a vocational tongue

Help us to honor what lasts, matters, counts

Help us to have courage to become who we are

Teach us not to cut against the grain of our own wood

And so by hearing our calling to find our own identity, our second identity, our selves.

Yet, the matter of matriculation, of entry upon a new path, is one that greets most people in the autumn of the year, particularly in the gathering of religious communities, like our own.

A real partnership of the Gospel will depend upon a common hope. It is not enough for us to recall the common faith of John Dewey. It is not enough for us to recall the common ground of Howard Thurman. On a reliable, common hope hang our future. What are the features of the common hope, this partnership, this partnership of the Gospel? We have preached some of them this year. T. Something temporal. A heart for the heart of the city—a longing to heal the spiritual culture of the land. U. Something universal. An interreligious setting. L. Something of love. A developed expression of contrition. I. Something imaginative. A keen sense of imagination. P. Some real power. An openness to power and presence. A capacity for partnership, heart to heart, that rests on a faith in the partnership of God in the Gospel.

The human being for all his and her faults, has a capacity for wonder, for love, for courage, for the mutuality of work in partnership, on which this fragile globe depends. The best speech I have heard was by Mario Cuomo, who at the close said he would like to be remembered by one word, ‘participant’. As Charles Darwin’s exhibit reminds us, for all the changes that reason and experience have brought us, which we need not fear: “there is a grandeur about this view of life…” Nearby we have leading thinkers who write about imagination with creativity and about creation with imagination.

Are We Open to Partnership?

Hear the Good News. The God to whom Jesus prayed, and of Whom Paul spoke, and in Whom we live has opened up a heavenly prospect, an eternal meadow of fellowship. We are left today with a lasting question. Are we open to partnership? Are we open to a kind of life formed in the Gospel of Partnership? Are we ready, willing and able to live as the gospel teaches?

We need one another. We need healthy partnerships: of learning and piety, of church and school, of school and university, of pulpit and lectern, of words and music, of lay and clergy, of women and men. To the partnership of the Gospel we turn, for labor, in love, in the next decade. Will you respond? You are gathered here today for a reason, the partnership of the Gospel. Will you act?

Are we ready to live as those who remember Romans 12: 1-9 (recited)?

Howard Thurman wrote:

For this is why we were born: People, all people, belong to each other, and he who shuts himself away diminishes himself, and he who shuts another away from him destroys himself.

Will you embrace the partnership of the Gospel?

-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean

posted in Uncategorized on 08.31.2008 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Opening

Who would not smile to return home to this pulpit?

I ought to pay you for the privilege of standing here, let alone speaking here.

I am told that Winston Churchill called Commonwealth Avenue the loveliest street in America. From the vantage point of this Chapel Nave, on a glorious summer Sunday, in the embrace of a loving congregation, within earshot of all New England, it does certainly seem so. Commonwealth. Our commonwealth. The street where you live, at least, the street where your spiritual life quickens. Commonwealth, lovely Commonwealth.

And I am not even pausing to honor, to celebrate the physical beautification of our avenue, our promenade, spacious street, our Commonwealth.

Walk up to Marsh Chapel from Arlington some Sunday afternoon. Like today. Say hello to those you meet in the park:

Arlington St.: Alexander Hamilton

Berkeley St: Gen. John Glover

Clarendon: Patrick Andrew Collins, Fireman's Memorial

Dartmouth: William Lloyd Garrison

Exeter St: Samuel Eliot Morrison

Fairfield: Women's Memorial (Abigail Adams, Lucy Stone, Phylis Wheatley)

Gloucester: Domingo Sarmiento

Charlesgate: Lief Ericson

All these stories, these biographies, carry us along Commonwealth. They tell us a little bit about who we are. They remind us. They point out shadow and they point to light. They point out shadow and they point to light.

Soon, this fall, we shall give ear to the announcement of a fuller commonwealth. We will allow the guidance of the lectionary to point us toward Philippians, Paul’s loveliest letter, the loveliest street, if you will, in the far off land of Pauline literature. I am told that Philippians is the loveliest street in Paul. There we will meet statues in memory of exemplary people, as the first verse of the letter reminds us. Paul. Timothy. The saints in Philippi. The overseers. The deacons. Turn the corner a few streets, I mean chapters, later. Epaphroditus. Euodia. Syntche. Syzygus. Wonderful! We shall scour, scour the syllables of this epistle, awaiting announcement of a fuller commonwealth.

You can recall, I know you can, the epigrammatic fullness of this new land, this fuller commonwealth, announced in the letter to the Philippians, which, in a few weeks, our lovely lectionary will deign to show us.

There is a resonance to beauty. That is why Winston Churchill recalled our Commonwealth. And that is why we remember Paul singing from prison to Philippi:

I thank my God…for your partnership in the Gospel.

Rejoice in the Lord always.

The Lord is at hand.

If there is any excellence…think about these things.

He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.

For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.

Stand firm in spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel.

Complete my joy by being of the same mind.

Work out your own salvation in fear and trembling.

God is at work in you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

Whatever gain I had I count as loss for the sake of Christ.

I count everything as loss for the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.

One thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

Have no anxiety about anything but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.

Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think on these things.

I know how to be abased and I know how to abound.

I can do all things through him who strengthens me.

Again I say rejoice.

Let all men know your forbearance.

For all the joy and sparkle of these verses, they cannot finally overshadow Philippians 3:20. I bring it as your focus for the preaching of the gospel in this season. And why would I not? How could I not? How could I keep it from you? How could I keep from singing?

Philippians 3:20 (RSV): Our commonwealth is in heaven.

Ours is a heavenly commonwealth, a divine commonwealth. Our true home, our homeland, our real citizenship, our land, our mother tongue, our real selves, in short, our commonwealth is heaven. Along our own Commonwealth Avenue, to this spiritual commonwealth we shall train our ears, and tune our hearts, and attach our wills in this season.

For Paul and Timothy found a rebirth of wonder, and so can you. Paul and Timothy found a rebirth of wonder, and so can we. Wonder seized them. They called it ‘apocalypse’. Wonder is a close, not exact, not precise, not final, not exhaustive, not conclusive, but a close rendering. It is good news for a world that lacks not for wonders, but only for a sense of wonder. (Chesterton).

Two experiences brought them home to wonder. One was an awareness of shadow. The other was a delight in light.

Shadow

Ah, shadow. I remember standing with JAT Robinson, a year before he died, standing in the lovely autumn shadows of University Street in Montreal. He said: ‘as I get older, I am more attentive to the shadow that hovers over our life’.

You might think of sin by way of shadow.

There is an insidious shadow, barely visible, but present. You can barely see it, if at all. You can barely hear it, if at all. Its approach is poetry in motion, fog on cat feet, coming quietly to the back door, dressed to kill.

Most marriages are in far less danger from the occasional direct assault of envy or lust than they are in danger from the quiet dying away of the bond itself. No time spent in talk, and holding, no play, no rest. A year, three, ten. Little cat feet, and suddenly, insidiously, the roof falls in. Most souls are in far less danger from the occasional direct assault of a temptation, to gamble wages or to steal by lying or to take advantage of the weak or to murder a partner, than they are in danger from the nearly silent approach of lifelong addictions. To alcohol. To drugs. To work. To food. To…just what is it that you cannot live without this week? Most churches are in far less danger from the occasional direct assault of a fire, or an unmanageable political conflict, or the machinations of a single verbal arsonist, than they are in danger from the slow, secret advance of unloving habits of inhospitality. God knows, as does the shadow, that it takes time, time, to ruin a home, a soul, or a church.

Or a country.

A direct attack usually incurs a direct response, wise or foolish or both. As Niebuhr showed, groups know how to defend themselves, from labor unions to nations. While you and the neighbor barbecue into the end of another summer, or generation, look around and see if the shadow Paul and Timothy noticed, with which they wrestled to death, lurks around you. The indirect advance of shadow stalks the heart, the dream, the soul. The imagination. And then, slowly, inexorably, one forgets. Have you forgotten the love you had at first? That is a question found in the Bible. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul? That is a question found in the Bible. Slowly, delicately, shadow overtakes the love we had at first. Slowly, delicately, shadow bargains the soul for the worl
d.

What profit is progress if its price is the loss of community? What profit is the desire for unlimited goods if its price is the loss of what matters? What profit is the spiritual commitment to ‘MORE’ if such a gain means a loss of real life? What does it profit a main to gain the whole world, if he loses the love he had at first?

So Leslie Dunbar: “we must live together as a people bound together by ties of mutual respect, not as a people armored against each other”.

So Vaclev Havel: “Hope is not prognosis, but a willingness to work for what is good”.

In words like these, we see behind the shadow, past the shadow, a glimmer of light.

Light

Ah light. Light shines in the memory of your true commonwealth. Direct your feet to the sunny side of the street. Paul and Timothy and others, drenched in shadow, saw light. They had a rebirth of wonder.

I put it to you in formula: “when conviction is quickened by imagination there is action that makes a difference”.

Our commonwealth is in the sunlight. In wonder. We may need a little illumination of imagination today! We may even need an Imagination Proclamation about life together, about community in the age of progress, about health for the soul, about the dance between soul circumstance! Shadows covering the imagination can imprison every bit as much as the Roman cell did so to Paul. Our commonwealth is in the sunlight.

Imagine…

If the prisons in this country were half-empty and the streets free of vagrants.

If every generation received a better education than the one that preceded it.

If every man or woman who wanted a job could get one, and not one person was thought ‘redundant’.

If schools and hospitals and churches and charities were overfunded.

If men and women were getting along so well that abortion and abuse were virtually unheard of.

If budgets, public and private, were set with a clear eye, a frugal eye to the future, without being based on borrowing from the next generation.

If the measure of success in this great country were formed not against the question of individual progress, but against the desire for the common good.

If democracy, not only of voice and vote, but also of education and endowment and employment and environment were our song.

If we could go to bed at night, not as those who all the day have been rivals for position and power and privilege, but as those who have worn an easier yoke and a lighter burden, that of real community, as those who have helped one another.

If the criterion for medical care were simply, ‘how sick are you’.

If the communal virtues, the signposts of health—responsibility, frugality, a sense of limits, respect for authority replaced those of mere success, ‘progress’.

If every kid around the world had enough to eat.

If the love of Jesus Christ, and the fear of disappointing Him, and the hope of meeting him in glory, and joy of working in his fellowship were all that we deeply wanted, all that we deeply needed?

Imagine that.

Too idealistic? Really?

What does it profit…

Have you forgotten…

Our commonwealth is…

Closing

Friends. We shall need to choose our course, our homeland, our citizenship, our commonwealth, our home, our horizon. This fall, and this year, the Apostle Paul will remind us. Our commonwealth is heaven. May it be so, and may we live it as so.

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

-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean

posted in Uncategorized on 08.24.2008 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

The Least and the Greatest

Mark 10: 35-45

Robert Allan Hill

October 22, 2006

Marsh Chapel, Boston University

Who taught you about power?

Who taught you by precept or example about the use of authority?

Think for a minute, or for a good stretch of a lifetime, about those who modeled for you the spiritual dimensions of leadership. Unreflectively we follow their lead if reflectively we do not assess their example. And every one of us has power, exercises some authority, and leads, especially in our example. None of us deconstructs our own identity in culture as fully as we might. And we need to. Let there be no secrets where the issue is power. (Wouldn’t that be heavenly?) We are only as sick as our secrets.

Carlyle Marney used to ask us: “Friend, who told you who you was?”

The Gospel today asks of us a narrower question: who taught you about power? The Gospel today tells us that authentic authority, real responsibility are a matter of the heart. What are your models of power? Do they include at least a little Shaker simplicity, a little Ambrosian authority, a little steady service?

Shaker Simplicity?

Is one the heartfelt happiness of simplicity? Heartfelt leadership is ultimately simple.

It is intriguing that the Gospel lessons about living, in Mark, are set in the humble reaches of the lake country of Galilee. Writing in Rome in trouble in 70AD, there must have been some comfort, some folkloric encouragement for the persecuted urban Christians in these polished memories of Jesus teaching along the shores of Galilee. There is beauty along the lake. There is calm along the lake. There is peace along the lake. There is serenity along the lake. Along the lake there is space and time to sift, reminisce, remember, sort. The still waters still restore the soul to stillness. Today’s regatta, outside our Chapel, at the head of the Charles, in its pristine beauty and vigorous discipline, bring a kind of peace, too.

Yet, though our lesson is ostensibly set in the country, up in the North Country lake region, make no mistake: these few phrases are crafted in urban Christianity. We have, exegetically, an ‘alto aria’ in Mark 10. Very little of what we hear today, and through this season of readings, comes out of the history of Jesus of Nazareth. It is the church, like we, that is struggling in these pages for a sense of power’s use. That is the second level or line in a Gospel reading. Surely #4 the baritone of tradition will follow. Surely #3 Mark, in his tenor editing, will intervene. Surely #1, the ethereal Soprano of the Nazarene echoes still. But the earliest struggles of the early church are visible here, in the dominical sayings about power. In #2, the alto voice…

Mark 10: 35ff is a place where the priority, of Mark is clear. Mark is the earliest gospel. Notice how his successors cringe at his composition. Most tellingly, Matthew removes the selfish request from the lips of the disciples, and has their mother ask! But then Matthew still has Jesus respond to the disciples! Matthew, ever the scribe, pins the responsibility on their ‘Momma’, like many today telling ‘yo momma’ jokes.

Luke simply erases the passage, and so ‘spares the twelve’. They too knew the embarrassment of inherited Scripture: what is your sense of the most offensive? John, the Jews…Psalms, dash their children on rocks…Genesis, rape and violence…David (not a children’s story)…household codes in Colossians, and assumption of slavery and of patriarchy…I

These readings come around and we mutter, ‘Is this really necessary?’

THE SCRIPTURE IS A LIVING TRADITION—the earliest writers were utterly clear about that (Luke is so embarrassed he eliminates the whole passage. Matthew has their mother ask!—and John Wesley assumes he is right!).

Mark wants to show that the disciples, as do many in his own church, intentionally miss the point. The point? There is no real greatness, there is no real leadership, without humility, none without suffering, none without pain, none without public rebuke, none without the patience of Job, none without a pastoral heart for those who experience the consequences of decisions which others make. If, in your work, you have shown humility, known suffering, felt pain, had rebuke, summoned patience, found empathy—for all the cost, take heart. You are not far from the leadership kingdom of heaven…

The intonation of glory is a clue that we are reading from years after Golgotha. The stark reference to the cup of sorrow bears a memory of Golgotha. The knowing, counter knowing of the question about baptism, and its portents reveals the hurt of Golgotha. The shadow of grief that darkens this discourse is the shadow of the Cross of Christ. And the final phrase is unmistakable in its reference: to give his life as a ransom for many.the Christian community, we ourselves included, may not ever be unclear about the potential abuse of power. That particular portal to blindness has been nailed, nailed shut.

Who taught you what you know about power?

Said John Wesley, repeatedly, “if thine heart be as mine, give me thine hand”.

And Calvin: What is the chief purpose of human life? To glorify God and enjoy God forever.

There will come a day when you wake up to the purity of the heart that, as Kierkegaard said, is to “will one thing”. That is conversion, often wrought in power struggle.

You may come to a morning hour, even this one, in which you sense a new opening, a desire to live a life that makes God smile. You will become kinder, happier, more generous, more forgiving. This is the purpose of being alive, to speak and act and be in a way that brings a smile to the divine countenance.

Again I remind you of the Shaker community. In their work, their dress, their furniture, their devotion, their relations, the Shakers lived simply. The heart of their simplicity, and ours at our best, is the desire to “live a life worthy of the calling to which we have been called”. Every renewal in Christian history has had this feature: Paul mending tents, Augustine chaste again, Luther and Erasmus cleansing Rome, Wesley a
nd his coal miners, Latin American base communities, and every spiritual nudging in our own very human church.

Who are you trying to please? And how? And why?

Think of someone you have known who lived with a heartfelt, powerful simplicity.

Who taught you about authority?

There is an authority that is visible in every person who has found the freedom of vocation, the freedom to live with abandon. Look around at the windows in this charming Chapel, following worship, and you will see the faces of women and men who found a simplicity, a way to live with abandon.

Ambrosian Authority?

Is another model the heartfelt affirmation of the common good?

Mark 10:35 is one of the few spots in the earliest gospel at which the emerging institutional needs of the church are visible. Christianity 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?

As this passage shows, from the outset it has been terribly difficult for the Christian church to maintain its own authentic form of authority, over against the lesser models abroad in every age. I emphasize the little phrase, slave of all, or servant of the whole. “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. Above all, Ambrose used his authority for the common good. Notice in the Scripture there is no avoidance of the need for leadership. Authority may be shared but responsibility is not to be shirked. What lasts, what counts, what is true and good and beautiful, finally, is what “builds up”.

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.

I find some striking parallels to the story of Ambrose in a now popular book by Jim Collins, "Good to Great." Here are the qualities of those in authority in companies that became great when they had before been good: quiet, humble, modest, reserved, shy, gracious, mild-mannered, self-effacing, understated, did not believe his own clippings—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 I 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.

Who taught you about power?

Think of someone you have known who lived with heartfelt passion for the common good.

Who taught you about leadership?

Steady Service?

Is another the example of deliberate and deliberative service, of steady service, of sincere service, of suffering service?

Bultmann places our passage in his category of ‘legal sayings and church rules’. These later sayings have used a word like ransom and: ‘ taken from the redemption theories of Hellenistic Christianity’ (Bultmann, HST, 87).

The earlier warnings of suffering and death had fallen upon deaf ears…

“The basic inability of the disciples to grasp or accept Jesus’ concept of messiahship or its corollary, suffering discipleship, becomes reflected more and more in their total relationship to Jesus. The conflict over the correct interpretation of messiahship widens into a general conflict and misunderstanding in almost every area of their relationship

A few years ago Charles Rice of Drew spoke about the servant of the servants of God. He told about an Easter when he was in Greece. He sat in the Orthodox Church and watched the faithful in devotions. There was a great glassed icon of Christ, to which, following prayers, women and men would move, then kneel. Then as they rose they kissed the glassed icon.

Every so often a woman dressed in black would emerge from the shadows with some cleanser, or windex, and a cloth and –psh, psh—would clean the image, making it clear again. A servant of the servants of God, washing away the accumulated piety before her…

Rice had a revelation about service and power and authority and leadership. And through him I did too. Maybe it will work for you. As he watched the woman in black cleaning the icon, he realized that this was what his ministry was meant to be. A daily washing away from the face of Christ all that obscured, all that distorted, all that blocked others from seeing his truth, goodness and beauty. Including a lot of piety. Including pretense and presumption and position. Service that lasts is deliberate and also deliberative, it is steady service.

Think of someone you have known who provided heartfelt service to the servants of God. Steady, sincere, suffering service.

Who taught you about power?

Coda

Every one of us has some power. If you have a pen, a telephone, a computer, email, a tongue, a household, a family, a job, a community, a church—then you have some authority.

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 leadership.

Here is leadership: simple, authentic service.

Here is leadership: simple, authentic service.

Here is leadership: simple, authentic service.

For the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many.

"

posted in Uncategorized on 08.6.2008 at 5:36 pm

By Marsh Chapel

Matthew 9:35—10:23

The authority of Jesus’ ministry is today transferred to disciples, ancient and modern.

We meet Jesus on the hinges of the first Gospel, as the flow of the Gospel swings from Lord to apostles. In the announcement of this good news is included a measure of empowerment for each one of us. This is the kind of day on which, for once, for the first time, or for once in a long time, we may be seized by a sense of divine nearness. The kingdom of heaven is at hand. The kingdom of heaven has come near to you. When that sentence makes a home in a heart, or in the heart of a community, a different kind of life ensues.

Capture in the mind’s eye for a moment the sweep of the gospel read earlier. First. Jesus has been about, teaching and preaching and healing. His compassion abounds. The endless range of needs about him he unblinkingly faces. Second. Jesus calls and sends the disciples, and empowers them, and by extension he empowers us. The gospel will have been read thus, as it is thus read by us. He instructs and directs them in their work, where to go, what to do, how to be. Learning, virtue, and piety together. Start at home, heal the sick, travel light. Third. Jesus expects and forecasts for them a less than utter victory in their work. They are to know how to shake dust from their feet. Fourth. Jesus warns that there will be a price to pay. The discipline that is the hallmark of the disciple here is named. Shall we not remember Jesus ministry? Shall we ignore the call and power offered here? Shall we forget the directions given? Shall we expect turn a deaf ear to the caution about consequences? We pray not. The main sweep of the gospel today is clear as a bell. Jesus gives power to his disciples. Hold that thought for a moment.

The devil is in the details. The material in our reading sends us into foreign territory. We have other words, whether only modern or both modern and more accurate, to describe unclean spirits. We recognize that the list of apostles or disciples differs from other lists. We are uncomfortably aware that Jesus himself, in other Bible pages, goes both to the Gentiles and to the Samaritans, and infamously so. We do not regularly meet leprosy. We carry no gold in our belts, nor silver, nor even copper. We are not pilgrim peregrinators who arrive in town and camp on a doorstep. We sense that the hard distinctions we make between disciples and apostles were not made by Matthew. We do not readily conjure up the vision of Sodom and Gomorrah. We sense that the time of Matthew and its persecutions under Domitian, 90ce, may have colored all or a part of this passage. Most glaringly, we know that the Son of Man did not arrive on a schedule coordinated with visits across the 50 by 150 mile area of Israel. The devil is in the details.

Nor are we to think that we should by tunics or money belts or sandals or travel through towns in Israel or prefer judgment fall on Gomorrah. This is impossible. Moreover, a confusion here will allow us to avoid the clear call of Christ upon our consciences in the main flow of the gospel. For the main point is crystal clear. To follow Jesus means to take up where he and his earliest companions left off.

Do you love Jesus? Then you must do something for him.

Jesus has taught, preached and healed. This ministry he has bequeathed to his disciples, his apostles. We have been seized by the confession of the Church; we are Christians. Now his ministry, this ministry, is ours. Which part of this ministry draws you?

We have come back from Buffalo this week, where flags are at half-mast to honor Tim Russert. Because his city, family, story and background are not unlike our own, I have listened with keen ear to the eulogies offered. Maybe you have too. ‘Mine is a face made for radio’, he quipped. Mine too. The details of life and illness will take some time to understand, but as with our reading today, the main point is very clear. Tim was a man for others. Tim Russert lived the life of a man for others. He brought baseball hats to kids on chemo. He came to weddings and partied, as, you know, ‘that guy’, the one guy everyone remembers from a party. He found ways to make a difference in the lives of poorer kids. He taught his son. He wrote a book about his dad. We do not know what a day will bring, but only that the hour for doing something with our life is always present.

Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons. I could argue with you that healing the sick has a medical degree of meaning, that raising the dead is about pastoral ministry in the Northeast where the church awaits resurrection, that cleansing lepers is about including those on the outside of the social fence, that casting out demons is reminding people not to fear, not to fear, after 9/11, not to fear. You could, rightly, challenge the interpretation.

Where does your passion meet the world’s need?

What are you ready to risk doing, to plan for the worst, hope for the best, then do your most, and leave all the rest?

What are you going to give yourself to, to offer your ability, affability, and availability?

Who calls you, who called you, to your own real life, your vocation? We began this spring to gather people here at the University to ask them this. Who gave you your sense of direction, vocation in life? Robert Pinsky revitalized poetry by asking communities to gather and read their favorites. We are trying to revitalize vocation by asking communities to gather and remember their mentors. Tim Russert had Big Russ. What about you? The world opens a bit when a teacher and disciple connect. Here are three examples.

Schweitzer

Maybe we need to remember Albert Schweitzer.

A child organ prodigy, a youthful New Testament scholar, a young principal in his Alsatian theological seminary, a man whose books and articles I used with profit in my own dissertation a few years ago, Schweitzer’s life changed on the reading of a Paris Mission Society Magazine.

As a scholar, he wrote: He comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word, ‘Follow me!’ and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.’ (QHJ, 389).

What he wrote of Jesus became his life. He left organ and desk, studied medicine, and practiced in Africa for 35 years, calling his philosophy, ‘a reverence for life’.

Vocation leads to God. A decision about vocation leads to nearness to the divine.

Addams

Maybe we need to remember the young woman from Rockford Illinois, Jane Addams. She grew up 130 years ago, in a time and place unfriendly, even hostile, to the leadership that women might provide. But somehow she discovered her mission in life. And with determination she traveled to the windy city and set up Hull House, the most far reaching experiment in social reform that American cities had ever seen. Hull House was born out of a social vision, and nurtured through the generosity of one determined woman. Addams believed fervently that we are responsible for what happens in the world. So Hull House, a place of feminine community and exciting spiritual energy, was born. Addams organized female labor unions. She lobbied for a state office to inspect factories for safety. She built public playgrounds and staged concerts and cared for immigrants. She became politically active and gained a national following on the lecture circuit. She is perhaps the most passionate and most effective advocate for the poor that our country has ever seen.

Addams wrote: “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.”

Yet it was a Rochesterian who, for me, explained once the puzzle of Jane Addams’ fruitful generosity. This was the historian Christopher Lasch. Several times in the 1980’s I thought of driving over here to visit him. But I never took the time, and as you know, he died seven years ago. Lasch said of Addams, “Like so many reformers before her, she had discovered some part of herself which, released, freed the rest.”

Is there a part of your soul ready today to be released, that then will free the rest of you?

Vocation leads to God.

Thurman

Maybe we need to remember Howard Thurman. The first page of his autobiography announces today’s gospel, that Jesus empowers his disciples, whose vocations lead to God:

At the end of my first year at the Rochester Theological Seminary, I became assistant to the minister of the First Baptist Church of Roanoke, Virginia. I was to assume the duties as pastor during the month that the minister and his family were away on vacation. I would be on my own. On my first night alone in the parsonage I was awakened by the telephone. The head nurse of the local Negro hospital asked, ‘May I speak with Dr. James?’. I told her he was away. ‘Dr. James is the hospital chaplain’, she explained. ‘There is a patient here who is dying. He is asking for a minister. Are you a minister?’

In one kaleidoscopic moment I was back again at an old crossroad. A decision of vocation was to be made here, and I felt again the ambivalence of my life and my calling. Finally, I answered. ‘Yes, I am a minister’.

‘Please hurry’, she said, ‘or you’ll be too late’.

In a few minutes I was on my way, but in my excitement and confusion I forgot to take my Bible. At the hospital, the nurse took me immediately into a large ward. The dread curtain was around the bed. She pulled it aside and directed me to stand opposite her. The sick man’s eyes were half closed, his mouth open, his breathing labored. The nurse leaned over and, calling him by name, said, ‘The minister is here’.

Slowly he sought to focus his eyes first on her, and then on me. In a barely audible voice he said, ‘Do you have something to say to a man who is dying? If you have, please say it, and say it in a hurry.’

I bowed my head, closed my eyes. There were no words. I poured out the anguish of my desperation in one vast effort. I felt physically I was straining to reach God. At last, I whispered my Amen.

We opened our eyes simultaneously as he breathed, ‘Thank you. I understand.’ He died with his hand in mine.

Vocation leads to God.

The kingdom of heaven is at hand when your passion meets another’s need. Jesus empowers his disciples. Vocation leads to God.

posted in Uncategorized on 06.15.2008 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

Lectionary Readings

Preface: Light and Growth

And what is so rare as a day in June?

You are children of the light, children of the day. In the daytime of our active living, the daylight of our active yearning, we are present this morning. This is the season of growth. The liturgical seasons, laden with substantial significance they are, need not eclipse the real presence of the natural seasons. It is the natural seasons which provoke some of the questions to and toward which the liturgical seasons provide responses. June is the season of promise, of planting, of budding, of growth, including growth in faith.

And what is so rare, asked J R Lowell, as a day in June?

On this Day in June we trace four daytime stories and find three lessons for spiritual growth. Four stories and three lessons…

Four Stories: Abram, David, Paul, Jesus

One

Abram is given the courage to leave. Under the genus and genius of the courage to be one may find, or be found by, the species and specific courage to leave. When you most need the courage to leave, you will most appreciate its gift to you, by grace. People do not always find the timely courage to leave. For all the right and all the good reasons you can think of, sad to say, people do not shake the dust from their feet as frequently as you think…because to do so is difficult. Yet there come times when you ought to leave. Fortunately, Abram had Sarah along with him to put steel in his spine.

One of our public figures has recently taken a very public leave of his church. Separation has its time, a time there is for everything. Oh, I do not dispute the thundercloud of the gathering retort that it does no good to pull up the carrot every ten minutes to see if it is growing. But, you know, life is short, and when things are really wrong, harmfully wrong, dangerously wrong, it is time to pack. That is a form of the principle of reform, as messy as it makes life, and religious life. Messy is preferable to hellish.

Go. Go! From country…From kindred…From parent’s house…Go. Do so with grace, with tenderness, with humility, with suffering, but do what you need to do to breathe. Your suffocation profits no one.

Our passage from Genesis is the true genesis of Genesis. Genesis 12 opens the Bible. Brueggemann catches a part of the truth: “This cluster of promises becomes the originary principle for all that follows” (OTCCI, 41). He misses the heteronomy lurking behind both theonomy and autonomy. The word, that is, is a word both spoken and heard, and without the hearing the speaking does not carry. The first divine word heard in the human community of faith is…Go! New England struggles with the history of immigration which is our heritage. On the one hand we honor pilgrims, puritans, and various waves of arrivals here in the newer world. On the other hand, their own sense of journey, courage to leave, capacity to change, willingness to risk with responsibility is sometimes lost on us.

A settled minister, a settled Christian, a settled person of faith is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron--like ‘jumbo shrimp’ or ‘United Methodist’.

Go. Shoo! Go. In these verses which originate the story of Israel, all the rest is based on a decision to pull up stakes, sell the farm, list the house, put the furniture on e-bay, buy a storage unit, and say goodbye. A wandering, wondering Aramean was our father. Trace backwards the account of today’s Holy Scripture: The cumulative blessing of all the families of the earth depends on itinerancy. The blessing and protection of the faith family and community depends on itinerancy. The growth of faith in community depends on itinerancy. The honor of one’s name depends on itinerancy. The making of a great nation depends on itinerancy. The inheritance of land, space, promise, future—all these too depend on itinerancy. So, Abram went. Incidentally, the rest of the Biblical narrative becomes possible only on the heels of Abram’s departure, his courage to leave.

Do you need to summon a form of the courage to leave this week?

Two

David did not write all of the Psalms, but he wrote some of them, and his name is legendarily connected to them all. I love the place David holds in our Bible, David the hymn writer. David may have started singing with Bathsheba, but he concluded his songs with songs of praise to the Living God. In New England we have amnesia about hymns. Jonathan Winthrop may have sung in the rolling surf of the Massachusetts Bay. The Puritans may have chanted their quiet hymns of faith. The tunes of Irish folk songs and Italian love poems may have made their way into our worship. But friends, across these six states united by a common love of the Red Sox, otherwise known as New England, we have forgotten a bit what it sounds like and feels like to sing hymns with six or seven hundred people in the same room. We have not taught our children to sing the four lines of harmony. We have not practiced the presence of God in the power of singing. I grant exceptions. But when people come out of Easter worship saying, ‘Wow. That was great. So many people. Such hymns.’, it is a measure of what we have forgotten. We could have that experience every week, if we all got out of bed on Sunday. We live in earshot, by the way, of Fenway park, and I do hear the festive tones of ‘Sweet Caroline’, win or lose, rain or shine
, at the seventh inning. It sounds good. So I know you can sing. If you know the words. If you like the music. If you have others around you to guide and support. If you feel the moment.

Notice the specific amendments in Psalm 33 (a highly memorizable passage by the way). A new song… Played skillfully…On the strings… with loud shouts …rejoice…praise…make melody… with a ten string harp…

Notice the specific glories in Psalm 33 ( a highly memorizable passage by the way). Our soul waits for the lord. He is our help and shield. Our heart is glad in him. We trust his holy name.

“God looks down upon humanity, searching their inmost being. What is in men’s hearts?’ (E Leslie, 86).

The heart of the Bible is hymnody. It is the Psalter, the hymnbook of the Bible that is its core and heart. Paul, Augustine, Luther, Wesley---all based their calls to faith on the book of Psalms. And David is remembered for many things, but he is revered as the legendary giver of the Psalms.

Three

Abram had Sarah, and David had Bathsheba and who knows who else. But I cannot quite find a woman to set alongside Paul. Yes, I know about Priscilla and Aquila… Still…Perhaps Paul’s evocation, early and late, of the Holy Spirit herself might round out his story for us on this Day in June. It is the Spirit that frees Paul to leave his own religious heritage. It is the Spirit that opens Paul to another way of reading about Abram. It is the Spirit that settles into Paul’s mind the crucial centrality of promise. It is the Spirit that empowers Paul to lay down the law and pick up the Gospel, to lay down Torah and pick up grace, to lay down the experience of others, and to pick up his own. The law—any and all—is finally the experience of others. Faith is your experience not that of others. That is why faith is so utterly and incomparably personal.

Our reading again captures Paul’s sermon in Galatians, though most of the rest of Romans serves to reinterpret Galatians. We see the unvarnished Paul here—law or faith, there is no middle ground. Have you begun with the Spirit to end with the flesh? Paul calls us out. Your faith will not be yours lived in the shadow of another’s observance. To thine own self be true (that is not in the Bible by the way). Faith that is not utterly personal is not faith. Faith is personal and love is responsible.

How do we understand faith working through love? If we are not careful a kind of fatalism can creep over us, whether sacramental or biblical. For to read out only three verses from Romans 4, and leave them hanging in mid-air, out of context, out of grounding, out of place in the larger sweep—and a large sweep it truly is—of the Epistle to the Romans is not to understand but to misunderstand. Paul affirms faith, and justification by faith. But Paul also affirms faith, and the obedience of faith. Romans 3-8 has to be read within earshot Romans 12-16. Faith is faith working through love. Faith is personal, love is responsible. Faith means work.

Bill Muehl spoke once about Romans 4. (His is a name I have heard from mutual friends, but this one sermon is my only personal contact with him.) Muehl brings a tough, Pauline argument to our Pauline passage. He is trying to find his way through law and grace in a way that is real. He remembers a TV show in which a character says, of a woman of ill repute, ‘Prostitute is what she does not who she is’. Over several pages or minutes Muehl tears apart this false dichotomy and this false interpretation of Romans 4. He tears at and tears apart the false separation of being and doing, of who we say we are and what we do says we are, what we say says we are, how we act says we are. You become what you do. His point: personal faith is about what we do and who we are. I love his concluding illustration:

Some years ago a group of parents stood in the lobby of a nursery school waiting to pick up their children after the last class before Christmas recess. As the kids ran from the classrooms, each one held in his or her hands the brightly wrapped package that was the surprise, the gift on which the kids had been working for some weeks leading up to Christmas. One little boy tried to put on his coat, carry the surprise, wave to his parents all at the same time, and the inevitable happened. He slipped and fell, and the surprise broke with an obvious ceramic crash on the tile floor. For a moment, he was too stunned to speak or cry, but then he sat up in inconsolable lament. Well, his father, in an effort to comfort his son, but also to try to mitigate the embarrassment of those present, went over to him and patted him on the head and said, ‘Now son, it really doesn’t matter. It’s not important son. It really doesn’t matter’. But the child’s mother, somewhat wiser in such affairs, went to the child’s side, knelt on the floor, took her son in her arms and said, ‘Oh, but it does matter. It matters a great deal’. And she wept with the child.

Our God is not the careless parent, who casually pats us on the head and says…You are justified by your faith. What happens to you and what you do, these things are not important at all. Our God is the parent who falls to the ground beside us, takes up our torn and bleeding spirits, and says, ‘Oh, but it does matter. It matters eternally.’ (Muehl, “It Matters Greatly”, 262 Sermons from Duke Chapel).

Four

Now we come to Jesus. Across the gospels, Jesus’ attention to women is manifest, and theirs to him. Across the gospels, Jesus’ attention to those needing healing is manifest, and theirs to him. Jesus healed. Those who touch Him are healed. Those whom He touches are healed. Matthew affirms a code of holiness, but even in Matthew, where holiness and compassion collide, it is compassion that survives. ‘I enjoy mercy’, says the Lord. Jesus heals on the way, and at the end of the road. Two healings are wrapped together in our passage, a resounding report of the power in Divine Love to heal earthly hurt. Do all the go
od you can!

You may not be able to say, with such amazing grace, ‘Take heart, daughter, your faith has made you well’, as did Jesus. But then, you are not Jesus. Yet one good, healing good, you can do this week is to let someone else know of a time in your own life when disappointment gave way to grace, when dislocation became the doorway to freedom, when what seemed like bad news turned out to be pretty good news after all.

Proust: So manifold are our interests in life that it is not uncommon that, on a single occasion, the foundations of a happiness which does not yet exist are laid down simultaneously with aggravations of a grief from which we are still suffering (RDTP, 292).

Perhaps our familiarity with this signature passage in the Gospel of Matthew occludes our view of its powerful call to healing. The Risen Christ, who suffered Golgotha and outwitted the tomb of meaningless death, passes by. Your Christ is passing, your Christ is passing, your passing by shouts the Gospel! One earnestly seeking healing reaches up and touches the garment of Pardon Personified. Do we notice—a generation of political theology to the contrary notwithstanding—Jesus’ attention to a ruler, to authority, to power, to leadership? Do we reckon that this leader—a generation of biblical theology to the contrary notwithstanding—may not have been of synagogue, in the redactor’s imagination, but of empire? (The word for ruler is archon, as valent a Greco-Roman term as one could imagine.

Where do ordinary hands reach out, desperate for pardon? I listen on the esplanade, as young mothers swing their toddlers. I listen at the ballpark, for conversations over hotdogs. I listen with guests at the dinner table. I listen at the coffee shop. I listen to talk radio. I ‘listen’ to common letters to the editor.

The paper yesterday brought this paragraph, a hand from the heart of a sickened people and broken land reaching up to touch the passing Christ:

Democracy can commit not just blunders but horrendous wrongful acts with disastrous consequences for another nation…(Our) chosen leaders abused the power of their offices to conquer and devastate another country that was not a threat to us. How can we redeem ourselves? What do we owe the Iraqi people? What can we say to the families of our dead and wounded soldiers? Can we continue to promote the virtues of democracy to the rest of the world? And we still have the daunting problem of extricating ourselves from the scene of the crime…(Benjamin Solomon, NYT, 6/7/08).

How..to redeem ourselves? We cannot.

How to be redeemed?

By reaching to the Person of Pardon, and allowing our prayers to be conformed to prayers of pardon, and presenting our lives to be shaped as examples of pardon. Do you know God to be a pardoning God? No promise without peace, no peace without pardon. Pardon us our sin as we pardon those who sin against us…

Itinerancy. Hymnody. Personal Faith. Compassionate Pardon. A church that could methodically convince its leadership to itinerate, its people to sing lustily, its preaching to emphasize personal faith, and its laity to heal every earthly hurt—imagine such a church! A church that could methodically energize a global network of clergy to move wherever need and talent meet, that could gather on every hill and molehill a thronging chorus of gracious singing, a church that could preach like the wind about the places in the heart, a church that could assign every baptized soul a healing ministry—imagine such a church! A church that could methodically spend itself in sudden moves and dislocations, in hymns of joyous beauty sung with gusto, in words read from the Bible and spoken from the heart, in service to the poor, the maimed, the blind and the lame—imagine such a church! A church methodically built on these four stories of Abram, David, Paul and Jesus—imagine such a church! Itinerant ministers. Thunderous hymns. Personal preaching. Healing compassion. Hm…I wonder what we would call such a denomination? It would certainly be ‘Christianity in earnest’…

Coda: Three Lessons

Earnest souls, for our spiritual journey this week, what lessons do we learn, people of the day, in the season of growth in faith—what lessons do we learn on this Day in June?

1. First, there are many ways to keep faith. All four of these stories are utterly distinct, variegated, different, multifarious. Your manner of faithful living may not approximate any single other. Abram moved. David sang. Paul trusted. Jesus healed. And you? There are many ways of keeping faith.

2. Second, the expression of faith changes with the context of its time and space. There is serious discontinuity, from book to book and age to age, in the private and public practice of faith. J R Lowell’s other poem also is worth remembering. New occasions do teach new duties.

3. Third, over time there are lasting features of faithful living. One is the courage to leave. Another is the desire to sing. Another is the personal acceptance of responsibility. Another is the attention to suffering. Real religion is mobile, choral, real, and caring. With tender courage, in loving responsibility, let us sing:

(Oldest extant church hymn, Oxyrynchus Papyri 1786)

Together all the eminent of God

Let th
em be silent

Let the luminous stars not…

Let them hold back, rushing of winds, founts of all the roaring rivers.

And as we hymn Father, Son and Holy Spirit, let all the powers answer

‘Amen, Amen, strength, praise, and glory forever to God

The Sole giver of all good things

Amen, Amen

posted in Uncategorized on 06.8.2008 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

Matthew 7: 21-29

Today’s Gospel is the Earliest Memory of a verse of Scripture I have. I am four, playing in the desert sand outside a military base housing unit in Las Vegas. It is hot and hotter. The wind blows through the yard and sand, stinging the face and eyes. I am displeased that something built has been blown down. I hear my mother’s voice: ‘A wise man…’

You should Memorize. Memorize: the 10 Commandments, the Books of Bible, the Beatitudes, the Apostles Creed, Psalms (2), Romans 12: 9-13, Hymns (2), Lord’s Prayer.

Both imperatives like this and personal memories like these are verboten for some good reason in preaching text books. The indicative of God’s grace should precede and eclipse any imperative to human behavior, like the command to memorize. The personal illustration threatens to split the consciousness of the hearer, as the Gospel is announced. Mea culpa. It is good that we have the Eucharist today, for the sins of the preacher, in imperative and memory, to be cleansed.

Memories of breakfast are rare in the Holy Scripture. Famously the Gospel of John is concluded by breakfast with Jesus. The Psalmist exclaims that joy will come with the morning, which tarries through the night, but there is no morning meal mentioned in Psalm 33. Jesus shares meals, but they tend to be evening meals, as in a borrowed upper room, or luncheon meals, as with Zaccheus, or midday feasts, as in the 5000 feedings. It would be unfair to declare that the Bible dislikes breakfast, and yet breakfast does not appear to be a major biblical theme.

William Sloane Coffin once described the breakfast this way: ‘the worst hour of the day, the worst time of the day, the worst meal of the day, and everybody at their worst’. (Riverside Sermons, pamphlet) He presumably wrote this sour accolade early in the day. Maybe at the breakfast table.

I happen to like the breakfast hour. Coffee and a real paper newspaper and a time to think about the day. Yet I must admit to and accept the reigning judgment, biblical and experiential, that breakfast is a wholly unholy hour for many.

At age 13, on June 5, 1968, I can dimly remember breakfast. Siblings scraping at the elbow sharpen any memory, like iron sharpens iron. June and its examinations sharpen the memory, for of the writing of books and exams there is no end. A swirl of energy, cacophony, juice and cereal settles the memory of that morning. It was Proust, in THE REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST, who best taught us to measure and mingle memory with taste….

And as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set to attach itself to the little pavilion opening on to the garden which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated segment which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I used to be sent before lunch, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And as in the game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, solid and recognizable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea. (RDTP, 113)

So much recollection from a little cookie! So maybe breakfast has something memorable to offer.

That June 5 1968 breakfast, though, carries another valence. The phone rang amid pancakes and juice, sometime close to 7am. My dad was traveling that week, attending a conference in Chicago. He would call sometimes from the road, usually to talk to my mother. It was then a surprise to have the phone passed down to me.

“I know how much Bobby Kennedy has meant to you. So I wanted to make sure you heard, and heard from me so that we could talk, that he was shot last night. This is a terrible tragedy, a tragedy set among others. It will take many years for us to absorb its significance, and more to still to understand it, if we ever do understand it. Life will go on, under the aspect of a changed world. We can talk more when I get home.”

There is remembrance of things past which illumines and magnifies our current experience. We live out of the unforeseen, and we understand out of the unknown.

Thursday we played a recording, for the high school students of the Boston University Academy, RFK’s impromptu speech on the evening of MLKing’s death, a brief speech torn out of Kennedy’s personal reading and experience. You can ‘google’ it so I need not repeat it, except its key lines:

For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.

But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond these rather difficult times.

My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote: "Even in our
sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.

We come to the table of empowerment, belonging and meaning, the table of remembrance of things past. Take and eat. An imperative to be sure. Do this in remembrance. Personal experience to be sure.

posted in Uncategorized on 06.1.2008 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

Matthew 6: 24-34

Memorial Sunday

Dear Rebecca,

You may not remember Al, but he loved you. Even in his eighties he had an unerring capacity to relate to kids. You and your brother grew up while he finished his ministry. Al died one week after he stopped work as the assistant pastor of our church.

Al stood about five feet tall. He was bald, hairless as a billiard ball. He wore thick glasses. One friend, who never says a critical word about anyone, once said that Al was the homeliest person she had ever met, but no one ever noticed because he was so loving.

I met Al when I was myself a teenager. Actually, I had known him during my childhood, as an infrequent clergy visitor to our home, a large and foggy category of preachers, ministers, chaplains, priests, itinerants and other vaguely odd spiritual leaders who were vaguely connected to our parents.

In high school I went to Owasco lake for a week of summer camp. Al I think led the camp, or at least he was around. A few years later I was working there as the lifeguard and every summer, without fail, Al would take his volunteer week to work with high schoolers. I remember drinking beer with Al past midnight around a fire down on the shore. One young cleric was busy criticizing the nascent fundamentalists (a group for which Al also had some disdain). After the hot air faded, Al sipped and leaned forward to say to the young turk: ‘I suppose you are right, but those folks have had a religious experience—something you might want to have yourself sometime.’ He added later that clergy who were hyper active in liturgy or politics usually had never had a real religious experience. Those two categories pretty much included, one way or the other, all the fire lit faces around that midnight hearth.

Al knew you, and your brother, during the years I hired him at our church as my assistant. We paid him hardly anything. He and Ruth bought their first home, on at tree line street, at age 70, after he finally retired. He took out a thirty year mortgage, a daily source mirth for him, a mirth he contrived to share with all comers. In fact, though, he personally lived to pay twenty of those years, if I remember right. It is hard to convey how simply happy Ruth and Al were to have their own home. After five decades of life under the leaky roofs of various parsonages, and after five decades of life under the stingy thumbs of various parsonage committees, their thousand foot house and postage stamp lawn was their prize and paradise, their pride and joy. To think of it makes me ashamed of the times in life I have thought I should have more, or would like more, or deserved more. In the winter he died, Al hornswaggled a friend into redoing the kitchen for Ruth. He saw that the parsonage kitchen was redone and decided Ruth should have something just as nice. It was. She used it for a decade more, to good hospitable avail you can be sure.

Al loved you and your older brother, and your Mom and Dad, who loved him too. Sometimes Al would hold court in his front room, his big black dog between his legs, Al rubbing behind the years. You may remember that the dog’s name. Satan. Al smoked pretty heavily, well into his late eighties. I say that not as recommendation but as recognition, recognition of humanity. He also drank some beer. One neighbor on Scott Ave called the Bishop to complain that he saw the retired pastor drinking beer in the evening. ‘It’s nice to have people so concerned about your well being, isn’t it?’ This was Al’s wry comment.

I noted such Alphorisms. He called one of our great hearted lay leaders, Iva Gorman, ‘stormin’ Gorman’, and is the only person she would have allowed to do so. Sometimes he called Iva, ‘Iva the Terrible’, but not directly to her face. Another person, a female type woman as he would say, who shall remain nameless, Al identified vocationally as, to quote him precisely, ‘a test pilot in a broom factory’. Of those who seemed, to him, wrong spirited, he offered this proverb: ‘I don’t mind people being Christian as long as they are nice about it.’

In his parish, a good village church along one of the deep, great Finger lakes, one of the saintliest women in town, a recently retired single school teacher, was struck by lightning while she trimmed her roses. I am told that at the funeral, Al got up, tried to speak, cried, and cried, and wept, and, at last, said, ‘we have no idea why these things happen, we have no way to explain why these things happen’. Then he sat down.

I knew, during my own college years, that if I ever got into a pickle that I could not get out of alone, and could not discuss with my parents, I could go to Al. I never did, though I almost did once. But I had him in the back of my mind all those stormy years. While I gaze at that in memory I realize that that is just about the best definition of a pastor I could give. Someone you could go to, even if you never do, when the chips are down.

I had a good friend whom he counseled well, a young man who had been away from home, and came home to learn that his girlfriend had been dating other boys. The young man did not come to Al for counsel, but one evening Al found him on the street and told him a joke. ‘A man and woman die and go to heaven. St Peter gives the man a tricycle for transportation and explains that heavenly vehicles are based on the amount of dating activity you had on earth. The next day the man sees his wife driving a Cadillac.’ They laughed, and Al caught the young man’s eye, with a tear filled eye of his own. They laughed so hard they cried, Al crying the harder.
While I gaze at that in memory, I realize that that is just about the best definition of a pastor I could give. Someone who accompanies you, overhears your pain, pierces your pain with wit and skill, drains your hurt, and walks away with you as you walk away well. The tricycle and the Cadillac lived happily ever after by the way.

Rebecca, you know the chapel at that old Campground on Owasco lake. You remember it is a rustic all wood Adirondack style Chapel, with a fifteen food window behind the cross, looking out at five miles of Finger Lake beauty. You grew up in the gaze of that chapel. You learned to swim two miles down from that window and cross. You got your boating license in order to run the motorboat back and forth past that campground, that chapel, that window, and that cross. You know the people who built it, or at least their names. (G Y Benton, Vivian’s uncle. L Schaff, who convinced the Case people to give the land for Methodist youth. C Skeele—he built the building, ‘Skeele-built’ he would say, add 10% to the price. Irving Hill, President of the Conference Youth Council at the time.) People like Al, and Ruth, who gave whatever meager shekels they may have had, with typical, generous, careless, abandon, and who gave their time to kids, sitting on the hard benches of that rustic church. I bet you can hear the bell ring, in your mind’s ear, the big old church bell that sits at the doorstep.

Gong. Gong. Gong. Gong. Gong.

In my last month as a lifeguard there, I came sauntering down the road. My friend asks me to be attentive to the etymology of the word saunter. I am. I came sauntering down the road at age twenty. From there, because of the incline, you can see right into the full chapel, and up to the cross, and on through the window, and on a clear morning, right down the lake, right down to the end of the lake, right there where Charon has his boat. It was a clear morning that morning. Sometimes when I have had too much religion, I travel myself by memory back to age twenty, your age Rebecca, back to that downhill road, back to that campground, back to that chapel, back to that window, and back to that cross. I have not decided what to do in life as I come down that road. I am not married. I have no children. I have no parchment, no degree. I have no military experience, no romantic experience, no financial experience, no tragic sense of life. Not quite yet. I am lollygagging, breakfast served and done, swimming lessons to teach, sunshine on my shoulder. Sunshine on my shoulder.

In the chapel I see, though he cannot see me, a short, bald, bespectacled, homely fellow, swinging a broom in the air. At first I find it a source of hilarity—old Al has finally lost it. But as I approach, as I peer into the darkened church, I see that Al is deadly serious. He is utterly absorbed in his flayling about. A sparrow is trapped in the chapel, and, Al must have seen, is set on flying straight toward false deliverance, straight at the clear glass, straight at the brightly scrubbed religious glass cleaned up with so much Methodist cleanliness is next to godliness piety that the poor thing is deceived into mistaking piety for salvation, glass for air. Kyrie Eleison! Al swings, shouts, jumps, doing as he can everything he can to drive the bird out of the church, to drive the bird out the open door, past the steps, out the path, over the bell, beyond the little steeple, and into the grace and freedom of the open air.

His parishioner however is an orthodox bird, religious and pious, and set on a disciplined course. What bird anyway ever understands until it is too late the difference between air and glass, freedom and religion?

I watch, and I suddenly have the dread feeling that I am an uninvited observer in a personal drama, trauma, amid flora and fauna. Al swings, the bird loops, dives, lifts, flies—thud.

Gong. Gong. Gong. Gong. Gong.

Unseen, I watch Al as Al groans and cries. He moves to the window, and shamelessly I watch from my hiding place. Under the cross he finds the bird, another victim of religion and piety, deader than a doornail. He takes a large white handkerchief from his pocket. Later in life, his and mine, I learn the constant contents of his pocket—handkerchief, cigarettes, billfold, pocket knife. He bows to the bird. He gathers the sparrow in his hands, weeping, covers the bird in his handkerchief, weeping, holds the bird at the glass, weeping.

I saw this with my own eyes.

There he stood, before the beautiful blue expanse, the home and heart loveliness of Owasco Lake, in the heart of the Finger Lakes, the single most beautiful place in the world, heaven for those of us who did swim there. I stood as long as his back was toward me, a good long while. Then, when he began to move, to find a way toward some natural burial, I jogged out down to the waterfront, and to my safety duties, and to the teaching of the prone float. I never mentioned it to Al, and he never spoke of it in my hearing.

In the next several years I became better acquainted with, better related to tragedy, of various sorts. Into each life a little rain must fall. I ended up a preacher, too, not least because of Al. I preached at funerals. I preached at memorials. I preached on Memorial Sundays. I preached at commemorations. Once a year I preached on Good Friday. Thirty and more years later I look back through the open chapel door, past the pews, over the cross, out through the window and over the lake. There still is Al, still before the silence of lake and cross. I felt that day that I had been given a front row seat at something, somewhere, (Mercy? Calvary?), at the origins of loving and giving. We live out of the future and understand out of the past. While I gaze at this in memory, or recollection, I realize that this is just about the best definition I can give of a pastor. One who knows the difference between religion and salvation, between glass and air, between cross and freedom, and chases those hiding from life out of church into life, with all his might, and when he fails, knows and shows cruciform love.

R
ebecca, my Memorial Sunday prayer for you is that you will take a sense of cradling care with you, for every hour, on every day, enough to sustain you and your family, and enough more to share with your neighbor.

Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor about your body, what you shall put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these…The Gentiles seek all these things; and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well.

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father’s will. Even the hairs of your head are numbered. Fear not therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.

Kryie Eleison…

Kyrie Eleison…

Kryie Eleison…

Kryie Eleison…

Kryie Eleison…

posted in Uncategorized on 05.23.2008 at 12:00 pm