Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 24: 44-53

Ascension Sunday

In a moment we shall again stand together to proclaim the mystery of faith. We shall offer a great thanksgiving. Responsively, we shall offer the Lord’s presence to one another. Responsively, we shall encourage one another to lift our hearts to the Lord. Responsively, we shall recall the right goodness, the good rightness of great thanksgiving. Friends, we are rooted and grounded in a history of joyful blessing, of great and loving thanksgiving. Eucharist means thanksgiving.

Our gospel is rooted and grounded in a history of thanksgiving, even as it is read and spoken in order to root us and ground us in love. Luke, the author of both readings for today, has every intention of bonding us to the long parade of women and men who lived with happy hearts, in joyful blessing and great thanksgiving. Our Sunday service of ordered worship has its own roots deep in the past, carrying us in memory all the way back into the first century. You come from people who were thankful people, joyfully praising God. They give us a clear example, these earlier witnesses, of a balanced faith, a faith honest to God about sin, death and meaninglessness, but a faith yet confident, joyful and thankful in life. Luke ends his first book, the gospel, and starts his second, the Acts, with thanksgiving.

Now we may pause a moment to be grateful for the form of Luke’s message. He does believe in doing things decently and in order. Luke provides, by his own assessment, dear Theophilus, an orderly account. It is his view that the words of the Old Testament in law and prophets and psalms, when written of the Christ, are fulfilled in an orderly account of the life of Christ. It is Luke’s further view that Christ opens minds to understand Scripture. Luke makes plain the prediction, embedded in a right reading of inherited Scripture, of cross and resurrection and repentance and forgiveness and the preaching of all the above. It is his understanding that disciples are thus witnesses of all these things. They will be blessed as they bear witness. We will be blessed as we bear witness. You will be blessed as you bear witness. His gospel ends with our reading today, an orderly ending to a well ordered gospel. Jesus blesses and leaves. The disciples give thanks and stay.

Some of the ancient manuscripts which we have of this passage say simply, ‘he blessed them and parted from them’. Others read, ‘he blessed them and parted from them and was carried up into heaven’. It is not clear, at least to this interpreter, which reading is stronger, which more probably original. Yet it is significant, at least to this interpreter, to see and know that more than one version of this passage exists. The addition, if it was a later addition, of ‘was carried up into heaven’, makes this passage a suitable and qualified Ascension passage, unmistakably congruent to the account in Acts 1. Luke’s penchant for the orderly may have inspired a follower of his to do likewise, and clean up one aspect of the conclusion to the gospel. To Luke it mattered to put things in order, to get things right. His spiritual descendents may have had the same passion. The true desire to get things right reveals, makes naked, a joyful thanksgiving. A passion for true goodness, good beauty, beautiful truth, in life, work, politics, music, art, architecture, religion, hospitality and friendship reveals, unclothes, a spirit of thanksgiving.

We are thankful for Luke’s orderly account. We may be a bit mystified by the mythic account of Ascension. We may be less than certain of the meaning of such symbolic imagery in our own time. But we can be utterly confident about the effect of Ascension, on our forebears, and so on us. The religious consequence of the Luke’s conclusion to the Gospel is thanksgiving. The religious consequence of Luke’s introduction to Acts is thanksgiving. Our Sunday praise of God is thanksgiving.

For all the dimness of creation, of the created order and the history within it, for all the trouble in life, in the gift of life and the history that comes with it, for all the fracture in body, in the body of Christ and the history that comes with it, still, at Ascension, there is thanksgiving. Sometimes the gospel and its very human interpreters need to shore up our sense of the way things have gone wrong. I suppose Lent and perhaps Advent too are markedly important seasons for emphasis upon the Fall—the way creation has somehow been loosened from the divine grasp. Sometimes the gospel and its very human interpreters need to short up our sense of creation as God’s creative act, in thanksgiving for what is right. Eastertide and Ascension may be such times. Today, in gospel and Eucharist, is such a day.

With you, I try to read the news and listen to the events of the day. As you do, I try to overhear behind the immediate din of sounds and bites, something of the heart of people and of our people. This spring, sometimes, I overhear a pained and painful sense of doubt about the possibilities in life. A doubt that things can change very much. A doubt that anything new could ever emerge. A doubt that people can repent and turn around. A doubt that systems, so entrenched and contentious, can ever be made orderly. A doubt that any of the older differences among us can ever be bridged. A doubt that any common expression of faith can be trusted. A doubt that any common faith or common ground or common hope can ever, with authenticity, emerge and survive. A doubt that minimizing one’s own visibility or audibility, for the sake of something bigger and someone else, could ever be faithful or reasonable. A doubt that the general public could be trusted to shoulder significant sacrifice. A doubt that anything I do or you do would ever make a difference.

When this cloud of doubt gets so thick that it eclipses both the sun and the moon, it is time to hear again the Ascension gospel. Such a thick cloud comes from a theological weather system

in which the cold front of wrong has chased out the warm front of right,

in which the low pressure of the fall has displaced
the high pressure of creation,

in which the radical postmodern apotheosis of difference has silenced the liberal late modern openness to shared experience, to promise and future, to common faith, common ground, common hope,

in which the cream of liberalism has curdled into the sour milk of radicalism,

in which the creation is seen from the cavern of the fall, not the fall from the prairie of creation.

This is not a “pastor problem”, but a pastoral problem. It is not a political conflict, it is a theological contrast. It is not a matter of church coloration or religious style, it is a matter of creation, of God’s creation and the truth about creative goodness. Just how balanced is your balance between creation and fall?

There are for sure a lot of things wrong. But there are also, and more surely still, a lot of things right. Hear the good news. The gospel ends in joy. You are witnesses of the goodness of God, witnesses who come from a long line of people who joyfully bless, and routinely give great thanks. “Faith is an event expressing the conviction that the things not yet seen are more real than those that can be seen” (L Keck). As you, as I, as we together walk toward our last adventure, our own look over Jordan, it is this thanksgiving, a great thanksgiving, which carries us.

Marilyn Robinson’s novel, Gilead, is about a man who rightly balances creation and fall. We end this sermon, a call to thanksgiving, as she ended her novel, another call to great thanksgiving:

“I love the prairie! So often I have seen the dawn come and the light flood over the land and everything turn radiant at once, that word ‘good’ so profoundly affirmed in my soul that I am amazed I should be allowed to witness such a thing. There may have been a more wonderful first moment ‘when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy’, but for all I know to the contrary, they still do sing and shout, and they certainly might well. Here on the prairie there is nothing to distract attention from the evening and the morning, nothing on the horizon to abbreviate or to delay. Mountains would seem an impertinence from that point of view.”

posted in Uncategorized on 05.4.2008 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

John 14: 1-14

Preface

“He that believes in me will also do the works that I do, and greater works than these will he do” (Jn 14: 12).

Which works? Which works are your works? Which works are the shared works of the Mysterious Christ?

How shall we sense whether, and how, we are called? How do you know what you are called to be and do?

Between the basin and towel of the washing of feet, in chapter 13, and the cross and pain of the crucifixion, in chapter 19, the strange voice of Christ is raised again, here, in a well worn passage.

This morning we shall leave to one side the better known, though often misinterpreted, lyrics in this song in John 14, and hold fast to the conclusion of the reading, about works.

In faith one will do the works I do…

In the face of all our troubles, a radiant memory remains of the power in service to, service with, service for others.

This week, that is, we face squarely the overwarming of the planet, the hunger of the earth’s children, the steady drumbeat of warfare, and the manifold hurts and ailments which beset every family to some degree and every person at some moment.

Yet, this week, we also hear and overhear a high note above all our troubles. We hear this high note, even when we cannot see out to its origin. We hear and overhear a long, sonorous melody that will not cease, will not let go, and will not let us go. To hear it more clearly may be why we come to church.

You heard a bit of it as you listened to your student friends and neighbors sorting out, now that graduation is near, the various claims upon their lives. What a privilege to listen in on the hardest of hard works, the decisions about vocation. Every community harbors such conversation, as does every University worth its salt. Career placement is good, but vocational discernment sings in a higher key. Marsh Chapel is focused on vocation choices. A mysterious allure there is to service…

You heard a bit of it as you listened to your Jewish friends and neighbors celebrating the Passover. So lovely and choice are the rhythms of a holy meal around a family table! Questions and answers. Songs and psalms. A memory of hardship in times of ease, and a memory of redemption in times of trial. The service includes, at its outset, this high note for which we listen. ‘To know one’s service before the Lord is the task of the wise’. A mysterious allure there is to service…

You heard a bit of it as you listened to your Roman Catholic friends and neighbors, watching the Bishop of Rome, making his choices and visits. You may have wondered, psalm in mind, how he ever would sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land. You saw the throngs, parades, and visits. And where was the high note? Was it heard when a moment of pastoral attention, a moment of watching over one another in love, stood out? Flickeringly, the memory have served up Pope Gregory’s self description, ‘the servant of the servants of God’. Servant of the servants. A mysterious allure there is to service…

‘He that believes will do the works that I do…’

What are these works? How shall we hear of them in this strange passage?

These words, however finally sifted, for historical information and insight, as we have done here with regularity, also deserve and require application to life as we know it. The passage and its message, and indeed its Messenger, bear to us an indirect invitation, an evocation of the allure of service in relationship to the divine. It is an odd reading. But the whole of the gospel is of this type.

It is odd that John has no record of the Last Supper, in his account of the passion. It is odd that John demotes Peter from his regular central role. It is odd that this gospel carries no remembrance of parables. It is odd that hardly anything of the standard ministry of Jesus, usual gospel fare, appears here. It is odd that the humanity of Jesus has virtually disappeared into the bright eternal light of his form in John, “God striding upon the earth”. It is odd that the New Testament would include a Gospel so fully at odds with its three synoptic cousins. Cousins, not siblings. It is odd that John, by the main, has no use for the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist. Where would the church be without birth to cleanse and guilt to absolve? It is odd that the Gospel we read today is shaped around seven stunning miracles, and four impenetrable chapters of teaching. It is odd that a Gospel so wildly different from the rest of those in the Bible should have made the cut, and been included. If you think having Ecclesiastes—which rejects, contradicts and humiliates much of the rest of the Hebrew Scripture—included there is a strange thing, then multiply that odd presence by 20 or 50 and you have a sense of how different is John. Nor in church nor in academia have we yet begun to account for the radical freedom and difference of this nonconforming gospel. It is odd.

What remains, as we consider our calling, our vocation?

A testimony to the power of relationship remains. John 14 sets aside predictions, instructions, and demonstrations, found here in the other gospels. Here relationship, relationship alone, remains. The relationship of Father and Son. The relationship of departed and devoted. The relationship of doubter and disciple. The relationship of community and pastor. The relationship of faith and works. The relationship of Jesus and his own.

Things that really matter are ultimately relational, whether that relationship is with others, with self, or with God. Our friends give
us ourselves. Our instincts give us ourselves. Our sense of presence gives us ourselves. So this morning let me directly ask you to think about your close relationships, your work relationships, and your relationship to God. In these relationships you may overhear the humming, mysterious allure of service.

Close Relationships

First, think about your closest relationships, and the ways you were raised to them. Last week I asked you to draw to active awareness the name and memory of an influential teacher. Likewise, for a moment this morning, I ask you to draw up into active awareness, the close relationships that have given you yourself, along the way life, deep in the truth of life. An influential complex of relationships…

For example, here is one account, one testimony, no worse or better than any other. Through our upbringing, we were given a hint of the allure, mysterious but real, of service. I offer my own memory of close relationship, only to encourage your active awareness of your own.

We learned to love Jesus in the simple rhythms of the ordinary. We learned to love Jesus in the pause before meals, with grace in his name. We learned to love Jesus singing hymns to Him, in church, at camp, in the car. We learned to love Jesus as we read about his life in the Bible. We learned to love Jesus by celebrating his birth in snowy December, and his destiny in snow melting April. We learned to love Jesus by seeing older people love him, really love him, with their hands, and their money and their time and most especially with their choices, and within that, with their choices about things not to say, not to be, not to do. We learned to love Jesus like we learned to speak English, one lisp at a time, one dangling preposition at a time, one new word at a time. The music of Jesus played the accompaniment to all of the growth and decay of life around us. There was no wall of separation, neither artificial, nor sacramental, nor communal, between our life and his. His was our life, and our life was his.

This sounds romantic, but it is not meant to be. Conflict, envy, hurt, gossip, anger, misjudgment, unfairness, tragedy, hatred, fear, abuse, neglect, betrayal, addiction, and loneliness sat around the table too—around the kitchen table, around the picnic table, around the coffee table, around the communion table.

Still there was a closeness in the Christ who raised us—a pine needle Christ, with the dawn scent of the forest primeval, a sunlit lakeside Christ, a blue collar chapped finger Christ, a blizzard Christ, an autumn peak Christ, a high summer Christ, a Christ with mud on Easter shoes. You could say that we were more Gospel people than Letter people, more Peter than Paul, more Good Samaritan than justification by faith, more Methodist than Calvinist, more song than verse. There was no forced or feigned distance between Jesus and us, between his life and our own.

He was with us in school, at home, in the summer, as we grew, as we studied, and married and worked. In relationship, in relationships.

Look, for a moment. Look at the good relationships that have sustained you thus far.

Trust your experience. Honor your instincts. Listen to your heart.

Your relationships are crucial, crucial in the dawning of a sense of vocation.

Work Relationships

Second, think about your work relationships in light of relationships that actually work. Let us for a moment be bluntly practical.

So now you are beginning to work, to hold a job. Day by day you may think about your work. Why does the television show ‘The Office’ appeal to so many?

What counts in your work relationships? Can you honestly list what is meaningful and what is not about what you do? There are clues here, deeply important ones. Do not, do not ensnare yourself with something that diseases your soul.

A while ago I picked up a book about work. Richard Florida in The Rise of the Creative Class that gives me hope about the future of the culture, the church, and the ministry. He surveyed people about what they want in work—a kind of white collar Studs Turkel. Regarding work, he found, the question ‘what?’ is often secondary to the question, ‘with whom?’ People prefer the hair salon to the machine shop, for relational reasons. Hear his five part report on surveys of what people most want in work:

I. Responsibility: Being able to contribute and have impact. . .Knowing that one’s work makes a difference. . .Being seriously challenged.

II. Flexibility: A flexible schedule and a flexible work environment. . .The ability to shape one’s own work to some degree.

III. Stability: A stable work environment and a relatively secure job. . .Not lifetime security with mind-numbing sameness, but not a daily diet of chaos and uncertainty either.

IV. Compensation: Especially base pay and core benefits. . .Money you can count on.

V. Growth: Personal and professional development. . .The chance to learn and grow. . .To expand one’s horizons.

Now hear some good news! Many forms of service, including by the way, the Christian ministry, get A+ in four of these five, in responsibility, flexibility, stability and growth. There is no greater challenge or responsibility than shepherding souls, or otherwise attending to human need. Those invested in service often have some flexibility in determining use of time. A pastor has a pulpit—somewhere. Reading a book a day, or the equivalent, is a guarantee of personal growth. Responsibility! Flexibility! Stability! Growth! (And compensation? I will leave compensation for another day).

Says Robert Fogel:

Growing segmen
ts of the population work for challenge, enjoyment, to do good, to make a contribution, and to learn. Such motivations will eventually eclipse compensation as the most important motives for work … People on their death beds never wish they had spent more time in the office.

The mysterious allure of service challenges us to measure our relationship with work by our relationships that work. The mysterious allure of service challenges us to measure our relationship with work by our relationships that work.

A Relationship with God

Third, think about your relationship with God.

For the strange, even odd, mystery of this passage, its acclamation of the mysterious allure of service, takes us farther still. ‘He who believes in me will also do the works that I do.’

A longing deeper than the relationships of belonging, in family, and the relationships of meaning, in work, lies within our passage this morning. Here is a deeper longing, a longing for a relationship with God.

St. Augustine of Hippo at long last found himself, his soul, and his true vocation, by finding a personal relationship to God. Yes, Augustine entered the ministry. He became priest and bishop in North Africa about 400ad. He wrote 500 letters, 200 sermons, 2 great books. In an age, like yours, of intercultural conflict, Augustine made sense of faith’s highest vision…the city of God. In a culture, like yours, that wore the nametag of Christianity without fully understanding its meaning, Augustine celebrated…the grace of God. In a political climate, like ours, that honored highly individualized freedom and the power to choose, Augustine praised God’s freedom to choose, and acclaimed…the freedom of God. In a highly sexualized age, like ours, Augustine colorfully confessed his own wandering, his own mistakes, which, he attested, did test but did not exhaust the …patience of God. In a religious climate, like ours, which buffeted a truly biblical belief, Augustine praised his maker, and so reminded the church of the proper…praise of God. His Confessions—perhaps part of your summer reading—his great autobiography, is a prayer—for the city of God, by the grace of God, in the freedom of God, to the patience of God, as the praise of God. Augustine found a relationship with God and was ordained. And vice versa.

That is…

It may be that the only way God has to relate to some of us, to get our attention, to mute our pride, to kindle our affection, is to get us into the ministry. Baptism and confirmation suffice for most. But for the real hard cases—the guy who wrote the book on pride, the gal whose picture is alongside the dictionary definition of sloth, the one who embodies real falsehood—like us, like Augustine….like you?...God keeps ordination in reserve.

Coda

Friends.

There are many, many ways of keeping faith. There are many paths into the future. In light of today’s gospel, we affirm the mysterious allure of service. Close relationships, work relationships, relationships in faith give us clues.

There is a mysterious allure to a life of service. Frederick Beuchner well named its location: Where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger. There is a mysterious allure to a life of service.

posted in Uncategorized on 04.20.2008 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

April 13 2008

John 10:1-10

Who told you who you are?

Who taught you who you are?

Jesus meets us today, in the Gospel, speaking through the many echoes of many other voices. Take…Eat…As often as you shall drink…In remembrance of me…

Mixed in some of those voices, painstakingly remembered, may come the voice of the shepherd.

Our community of discipleship is centered today upon the Marsh Chapel altar. In a moment we shall celebrate Holy Communion. Presence beckons to us. Memory beckons to us. Thanksgiving Beckons to us. Again we are called and called out.

Do we hear, here?

Other echoes add acoustic bounce.

The sudden recognition of end of term calls too. Papers to edit, projects to complete, exams to prepare, irregular verbs to parse.

Concerns for safety of troops afar, refugees overlooked, a future to engage, with courage and humility. These greater issues call out as well.

The daily routines of hospitality and generosity, they too beckon. We have lunch downstairs today. Somebody is thinking about the oven temperature. Among our radio congregation a brunch or several thousand are in preparation. Somebody is thinking about the meal, as the service of worship, of word and table progresses.

Our Gospel is spoken, lisped, ‘gospeled’, amid other, many other echoes.

We have our monthly offering from our Inner Strength Gospel Choir. Their words and music encourage us.

We have our weekly gifts from the Chancel choir. Introit. Hymn. Kyrie. Gloria. Benediction.

Together, since Easter, we have heard loving voices of caring teachers. A young man from Chicago. A wise man from New Jersey. A word for the wise and foolish. A word of graceful rememberance.

We have also had our losses. Which remind us of other losses. The newer give again voice to the older losses.

Jesus meets us in a particular place and time, his voice like none other, so equable, so magnanimous, so serene, so true, so real. We cannot fully separate the voice of Shepherd from the many other sounds of the sheepfold.

While the table is open to all, it will not do to suppose that the table this morning has no place or time or context.

Hic et nunc. Here and now.

Listen…

He calls his own sheep by name

They know his voice

I am the door

If any one enters by me he will come in and go out and find pasture

If any one enters by me he will come in and go out and find pasture

If any one enters by me he will come in and go out and find pasture

I came that they may have life and have it abundantly

Listen….

There is an immediacy to his voice.

Its own echoes pierce through the many others, the many other sounds, the many other voices.

A month ago, I was not with you for communion. Our able team provided excellence in preaching and sacrament. For this we are deeply grateful. We had traveled to the mid-west for a wedding. We found ourselves in a community, located near the heart of Michigan State, an ecumenical congregation devoted for some 75 years now to ministry among teachers and students, People’s Church of Lansing. In the course of the regular wedding rituals and rhythms, we came to know a whole of host of new friends. At dinner, following rehearsal, we found people who had known one of my dearest teachers, Richard Baurle. One memory evoked another. In preparing the homily for the next day, the teacher’s own influence came again to mind. One memory of Scripture evoked another. In the delivery of the sermon, his name emerged, spoken and heard. One memory evoked another. In the congregation, so it happens, others had known him, for, as it happens, he was raised and educated in that region. One name memory evoked another. The community of the wedding dispersed, but the recognition of this fine teacher carried and was e-discussed, including a note from his son, and a request for further, other memories. One story evoked another…

Days later this message was sent.

Dear Jim (if I may),

It was not however the craft of writing which was his main gift to me, as important as that was. It was his human spirit, or his humanistic spirit, or his brooding, careful, loving, serious yet playful attention to the texts we read. Everything from Socrates to Fahrenheit 451. I do not know his personal history, so I do not know, really, what depths he drew from to convey both the pathos and the poignant power of the human spirit. You knew you were in the room with a real person, which drew me to take 3 or 4 courses with him in the course of earning a Humanities degree. It is strange, but I can see him right in front of me as if we were together yesterday, though I graduated in 1976.

Beloved, as you come to the table this morning, I invite you to a sharper memory, and a better life. As the rhythms of hospitality proceed—liturgy, music, cup and bread---I invite your active awareness of one, someone, who taught you who you are, one someone whose influence shaped you. For those invisible in our communion, listening across in time across space, I invite you to a sharper memory and better life. I invite your activated awareness of one, someone, who taught you who you are, one someone, who shaped you.

The enchantment of Easter comes in the Resurrection voice of Jesus who meets us today in word and table. In very humble elements, table elements, of bread and wine, he meets us.

If any one enters by me they will come in and go out and find pasture…

As the 23^rd Psalm recalls…

posted in Uncategorized on 04.13.2008 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

John 20:1-11

Easter Sunday

The Lord is Risen! He is Risen indeed!

The joy of Easter comes in three shades. The resurrection is “a transformation, a revelation, and a transition into newness.” So said Valentinus (Treatise on Resurrection), who had his own troubles with semi-organized religion, near the year 150ad. We begin in 2008 where the Easter 2007 sermon ended. Valentinus may have been trying to summarize the earliest teaching on Easter, found in the then scattered books of the yet to be collected New Testament. He may have read what Peter, Paul, and, today, Mary had to say about the matter. Peter, Paul, and Mary. It has a nice ring to it. Hear the good news: The joy of Easter comes in three shades, and means three different things to three different kinds of people, or to you in three different hours of need. But count it all joy.

On this hallelujah day, we keep for ourselves the advice of one Missouri chicken to another about how to lay an egg on the highway: Do it fast and lay it on the line. So here it is.

1. Peter

First, Easter is the resurrection of body. Of belonging in life. Today is the resurrection of the body, of community.

You are not alone. Ortega was right: ‘Yo soy yo y mis circunstancias’. John Donne was right: No man is an Island. The African proverb is right: It takes a village. Dr Johnson was right: Keep your friendships in good repair.

Church is the worst sort of organization there is—except for all the others. The body needs the body to be the body.

Something happened. At dawn. Early. Out in the country. ‘He is risen. He is not here.’ Here is the religious resurrection of Christ. The resurrection of the body. Now in the creed, this phrase, ‘the resurrection of the body’, can refer to the daily rebirth of the church, the ongoing life of the Body of Christ—the church. The church. The astounding remarkable, historical, actual fact of the church. The daily Easter miracle that the church survives. We have lived in 13 parsonages in 50 years, served 7 churches, and attended 35 annual conference sessions. I guarantee you this: it is a miracle, and not a minor, that the church survives at all, this human ‘representation and distortion of the divine’ (Tillich). But it does! Against all odds. Beyond all comprehension. Well beyond any reasonable calculus of what ought to have happened. The church is of God. And will be preserved to the end of time. Through the daily resurrection of the body. Of Christ. Easter is about genuine belonging that crosses the line of death.

Religious resurrection. Beyond: A religion of shared experience and the common faith of John Dewey. Beyond: A religion of shared existence and the common ground of Howard Thurman. Beyond: A religion of shared expectation and the common hope of Marsh Chapel’s preaching during our decade. A poem calling us into the beyond.

Last week on Commonwealth one of our students wore a shirt reading: ‘A Chorus Line’. In a twinkling I was back almost thirty years.

We took our youth group to New York City 25 years ago. The drive was difficult, our lodging was imperfect, we were late arriving, the show we saw was “A Chorus Line”, full of words and gestures that I thought would have me defrocked before I was frocked. So at midnight we sat in a circle uptown to review the day. I expressed my concerns. No one said anything. Then Kathy Likens said: “I am just so glad to be here. I mean, I have never been here. I have never been in New York. And I have never been on Broadway. We were on Broadway! And here I am. And it is so great! I wouldn’t trade this for anything, to be here with you all. I will never forget it as long as I live.” It is a beautiful thing. To be. Here. Together. Hers was the joy of belonging, and the eclipse of loneliness. There is a real, bitter loneliness that can visit young people. Some of the loneliest folks anywhere are freshman and sophomores in college.

Being human requires community. You need genuine love. You need real compassion. You need honest companionship. All of these you will find right here. In the church. He is risen! In his basin, towel, tears, stripes, agony, death and cross, an entirely divine seal has now been set. The empty tomb, the resurrection of the body, the religious resurrection of Christ, Peter’s shade of joy, is our joy too.

2. Paul

Second, Easter is the resurrection of truth and meaning in life.

Words matter. Dollars matter. Decisions matter. You matter. You count. Here is the spiritual meaning of Easter. Over time, truth emerges. There is a self-correcting spirit of Truth loose in the universe. You can count on it. And it matters. We might linger, briefly, at 1 Corinthians 15.

So, Paul. If Christ be not raised from the dead, we are of all people most to be pitied. Because then nothing really, lastingly matters. There is no real failure. There is no real loss. There is no real consequence to anything. Yet, in fact, acclaims our earliest witness, things do matter. As our own experience, honestly construed, does too. You do count.

Christ is risen Resurrection is about life. Meaning. Truth. What matters. What counts. Your choices this year about sex, money, religion, vocation, work, family, politics—they matter. Or as the Apostle trenchantly puts it: “if the dead are not raised, why am I in peril every hour?. If the dead are not raised, ‘let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die’.

Paul was not a disciple. He was an outlaw not an in-law. Paul misses all the family stories: shepherds, kings, Mary, healings, sermons, temple, parables, all. He never heard Jesus say, ‘I by the finger of God cast out demons’. In fact, he never heard Jesus say anything, as far as we know. No wonder he never got the word, or accepted the word, about the empty tomb. Which he did not.

Paul does not mean, by resurrection, an empty tomb. No. Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, says Paul. For those this morning who hear the tradition of Peter, and his shade of joy, and the account of the empty tomb, and say, ‘Why can’t some people just let a story be a story?’ there is a further joy. What a friend you have in Paul. Who knows and says nothing about an empty tomb. He’s your man. He says ‘resurrection’. And what does that mean? The incursion of grace, the invasion of heaven, the apocalypse of love, the end of the old world, the opening the new, a new heaven and earth. “To live by such faith, it is clear from the biblical depictions, is to be on trial as part of a mission in the earth that remains countercultural insofar as the culture embodies the powers of domination opposed to love and freedom that the power of Resurrection brings”. (C Morse)

But Paul, how are dead raised? You yourself have said no to flesh and blood inheriting the kingdom. Just what do you mean?

We may argue with Paul…

It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body.

OK, Paul. I understand physical body. I mean, I know losing sight, hearing, memory, daily deterioration—that I got. I am with you. But what do you mean by spiritual body? And don’t say it’s a mystery.

Lo I tell you a mystery.

I knew you would say that. I mean I just knew you would use the word mystery. It is so like you to do that. What does it mean? And don’t use that metaphor of sleep, how we emerge from sleep, as from a dream.

We shall not all sleep but we shall all be changed.

See, I knew you would do that. I mean honestly, when I think about the difference, the daily transition from sleeping to waking, I am amazed. I think about the dreams I can remember. How colorful they are. How creative. How real. How strange. And how totally unlike the waking world. And yet they are real. In some ways fiercely so. So you talk about change. Good. I guess. And what may I say is that? But please don’t use another metaphor, and no philosophy please.

The perishable must put on the imperishable.

See, there you go again. Perishableimperishable, weaknesspower, dustheaven, mortalimmortal. And how is that to be?

The trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised and we shall be raised imperishable and we shall be changed!

Paul, Paul, Paul…I guess I see what you mean…. Who are we, really, to question the resurrection. Easter is the solemn assurance that it is not we who question who question resurrection, but resurrection that questions us.

Some of our younger adults this morning are truly wrestling with this matter of meaning, wrestling with doubt. Is it true? Is the faith of Christ true? Is it to be trusted, held, affirmed? If it is not, if not resurrection, then what? Adolph von Harnack viewed our Scriptures as sources not norms. Sources of historical information, not norms of spiritual faith. He also carried this warning, that the greatest danger may not be doubt, but entrapment. If you become trapped in a truth too small, you are in greater danger than that which some doubt about a truth much larger may inflict. Better what he called a measure of ‘persistent uncertainity’ than a full measure of unqualified belief. Better the freedom of honest doubt than the prison of false certainty.

The truth of the Gospel, and the spiritual resurrection of Christ, Paul’s shade of joy at Easter, is our joy too.

3. Mary

Third, Easter is the resurrection of possibility. This is resurrection in its most personal mode. It is John who knows Easter best because he needs it least. He leaves Easter to Mary and the garden. For John, the cross alone has accomplished the mission of Christ. It is finished. And the great waves of grief that the community then knew are overwhelmed by the joy of faith.

John gives us four resurrection accounts in chapter 20: Absence, Presence, Recognition, Mission. Today our Easter Gospel is the gospel of absence. Here is Mary weeping…they have taken away my lord …grief…in the ordinary, in the voice, in the name, in the garden, in the gardener, when your name is truly called MARY. The spell of her grief is broken by the spoken. Her grief is broken by the spoken power of an intervening word. She hears. Heart to heart.

A few days ago I had the pleasure of making three visits in the back bay—a home, an office, a school. There is freedom and joy in pastoral visitation. Along Marlborough street I saw a banner, ‘cor ad cor loquitur’. It means heart speaks to heart, and I could ferret that out, but the verb looked wrong. Its ending, I mean. So I phoned up my Latin teacher, who doubles as my mother, a multitasking person still. She explained that the verb is deponent, passive in form, active in meaning. Personal resurrection comes slant, comes latent, comes deponent. Grief is a life work, but it allows of some resolution. It does. Though that resolution may be passive in form, it is powerful, active in meaning. It comes in a word spoken and heard. Today is a day of personal resurrection from ongoing grief.

Here we are together. And listening along the North Shore by radio. And on the internet down in Sarasota. And in Australia by the same stream. Now it is just a further, short leap, symbolized by our memorial insert, to say that by resurrection faith I see you, too, just outside the wall of sight, the doorway of hearing, the threshold of touch. You can silently provide their names…

The whole of the second half of John is shot through with grief. The good news of Easter is that grief is succeeded by joy, a joy as mysterious and full as our grief has been real and shared. And this is the whole record of Scripture as well…

Wise men from the east at last find a star and a child and they rejoice with great joy.

Common shepherds hear tidings of great joy, meant for all people, and are shaken to their boots.

Some seed falls on good ground and…you and you and you…receive the word with great joy.

A servant is faithful over a little, and is set over much, and enters…the joy of the master.

There is more joy in heaven over one who repents than over 99 who lack nothing.

Even the evening of his death, Jesus sings with joy his affection for his disciples.

And early women go to the tomb, and finding it empty are turned upside down and leave with fear and great, great joy.

For Mary it is not the belonging, nor the believing of resurrection that are paramount. It is the joy of becoming! Easter, by Mary’s report—and who would know better?—is the unkillable possibility of the Christian life, the power and empowerment of authentic human life, the unmaskable potential in every space for love.

But some of it is “up to you”. As Augustine said, “the God who made you without you will not justify you without you.” The resurrection is personal possibility, for you.

The possibility in the gospel, and the personal resurrection of Christ, Mary’s shade of joy, is our joy too.

Coda

The joy of Easter comes in three shades, and means three things to three different kinds of people, or three people in different settings, or three moments in the lives of various people, or three sets of ears on three different days.

Resurrection is the transformation of community, the revelation meaning and the transition into newness that is possibility. Communion, Meaning, and empowerment.

Easter is community for those seeking belonging. Easter is truth for those hungry for meaning. Easter is possibility for those seeking faith.

The Lord is risen! He is risen indeed. Amen.

Oh, I almost forgot… One other thing…. Just a thought. Take it for what it is worth.. …If love can prevail in a culture of selfishness…If truth can survive in a world of mendacity…If faith can persist in a time of fear…

It makes you wonder, doesn’t it? It makes you wonder, it makes the joy wonder heavenly and the hope of heaven wonderful…

Just a thought.

posted in Uncategorized on 03.23.2008 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

Jesus meets us today on the road to the future, His and ours. Our decisions about calling, about vocation, open our future.

On Thursday last week, Brett Favre lost it. I recognize the peril of mentioning a non-Bostonian athlete in these hallowed precincts of the home of the bean the cod. As ever I depend upon your forebearance. Favre lost it on Thursday, and, on Thursday, he found it. He found his voice to name his vocation, his next step on the road into the future. He chose. And in choosing he entered life.

Your life counts. Remember, though, that you are not alone in making the decisions that open your life. Your freedom emerges from a particular history, even a particular destiny. Your freedom is found in a particular common family. Your freedom is nurtured in a particular community. Your life counts, but you can count on others, walking into the future.

With the palm waving children, we remember today the teaching of Jesus. You are the light of the world, he taught. Light. Let your light so shine, he taught. Light. This side of Jordan there is hardly a happier verse in the Bible. It radiates a positive joy, a positive peace. The verse resounds with memories. One recalls singing this verse in a children’s day program. Another remembers hearing it in a rock opera, Godspell or Jesus Christ Superstar. You remember hearing the upbeat rendition given by the Kingston trio. I remember William Sloane Coffin singing it at the end of his first sermon at Riverside Church, thirty years ago. This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine…let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

Yet this happy verse is also the cruelest of verses, like coming April, to Eliot, is the cruelest of months. In a verse it captures the light and shadow of Palm Sunday. A verse about light, it is in some ways the most haunting and the most harrowing of verses, because it asks the ongoing existential question. “Just how, now, do I, do you, let your light shine, truly shine? What is my life meant to illumine? What corner of the earth is it meant to brighten? Seniors in college, seniors in retirement both face some version of this hard question of light. At 18 we ask, how do I invest? At 81 we ask, how do I divest?

I have in mind a young man who is now returning from Spring break. He may have slept in this Sunday. He may listen to the sermon later by i-pod. He may not. He has received plenty of career advice, from family and friends and university. His parents have a particularly acute interest. Yet it is the deeper, murkier matter of vocation that intrigues him as he looks forward to commencement. I also have in mind a strong woman who is now in the winter of life, just a hop, skip and jump from that earlier Spring brother. Careers she has had. And now: to what is she called in the deeper murkier matter of vocation. How does he truly let his light shine? How does she truly let her light shine? And how do you?

These questions about light are not light questions. These questions about light, about walking in light, about walking into the future and letting light shine—not light at all. They are dark, murky matters of vocation.

At Marsh Chapel our envisioned mission is to be a heart for the heart of the city, and a (worship) service in the service of the city. Living so, we embrace three hopes. First, we hope to become a national voice for responsible Christian liberalism. Second, we hope to turn up the volume of life and work at Marsh Chapel. Our third hope is at the heart of our concern today, neither voice nor volume, but vocation. We embrace the hope of expanding the human sense of human calling to ‘walk in the light’, to let light shine, to live as a city on a hill, to harbor a hopeful form of service. Today, that is, we lean hard into our very mission, here alongside this venerable pulpit. You have exactly, precisely, one life. How will you let your light shine? You have 4,000 Sundays in your one life. How will they profit you? Both our seniors, our college senior with 3,000 Sundays to go, and our existential senior with 300 Sundays to go, are looking for the light. The thrust of this sermon is simple: Vocation is a part of a common hope. Your vocation is yours and ours. Hear the gospel: in the original greek the youyours in Matthew 5 are plural, ‘you all’.

Both the freshman looking forward to being a senior, and the senior remembering her freshman year are part of the people walking in the light and walking into the future. Our Scripture and our tradition affirm both, both your hope and your heritage, both your reaction and your recantation, both your heresy and your history, both your insight and your inheritance. Both count. Both matter. Walking into the future, you are both yourself and your situation. Your light is precisely yours as it goes away from you, into the world around. Your own intimate experience is precisely your shared experience, experience shared. In fact, what makes your freedom your freedom is precisely its expression and location in your own history and destiny. Light is light in the world. Both our imaginary freshman and our imaginary senior are a part of what is real. Those persons who make up your community have a shared interest in a shared experience of discernment.

We have lived in college towns nestled along river banks. Ohio Wesleyan sits on the banks of the Olentangy. Columbia rises above the powerful Hudson. Cornell straddles Fall Creek in Ithaca. Montreal swims in the middle of the mighty St. Lawrence. Syracuse University you find where the vale of Onondaga meets the eastern sky. George Eastman removed the University of Rochester to the very edge of the Genesee. And here we are in Boston, where the head of the Charles meets the heart of the country, in learning and virtue and piety, at Boston University.

In Syracuse, our children grew up with a Chemistry Professor next door to the north, a Mathematician next door to the south, a Physicist next door o the east, and cemetery west across the road. Carl Rosensweig, the physicist, was the most religious and the most spiritu
al. His family practiced a rigorous orthodox Judaism, and their children best friended our own. In childhood the gifts of society and nature which charm out faith radiate. The Rosensweig kids came and borrowed our picnic table every fall for Sukkoth. They taught us the mirth of Purim. They helped us see how long a Saturday could be, before at last dusk would come, and out they could tumble into the summer twilight to engage again the radiant gifts of life. Swing sets. Sprinklers. Ball gloves. Forts and fortresses. Hot wheels and hillsides. Popsicles which somehow were kosher enough, or if not, hidden well enough. Imaginary friends, imaginary journeys, imaginary battles, imaginary adventures. Tricycles rocketing down ‘Rock Spook Road’. Until at the last the streetlights came on and the day was ended. I can hear Carl calling his daughter, right now, as if he were here in the chancel: “Simone…It’s time for dinner…Simone…It’s time for dinner…Simone…Bring your brother…Simone…It’s time for dinner”.

Carl advised his students with care. Once he told me the pattern of advisement.

“In the freshman year, every one of my students pronounces some version of the following decision: ‘Whatever I do I know one thing. I AM NOT, REPEAT NOT, GOING INTO MY FATHER’S BUSINESS.’ I nod and affirm and agree. In the senior year, every one of my students pronounces some version of the following decision: ‘I have finally discerned that the best choice for me following graduation this spring to is to go into my father’s business.’ I nod and affirm and agree.

That is, both Carl’s imaginary freshman and his imaginary senior are part of what is real about you, your calling, your freedom and your destiny. You are yourself, in your setting. Both are right, and neither is completely right. Both are wrong, and neither is completely wrong. As Tillich put it,

‘Man experiences the structure of the individual as the bearer of freedom within the larger structures to which the individual belongs. Destiny points to this situation in which man finds himself, facing the world to which, at the same time, he belongs…Freedom is experienced as deliberation, decision, and responsibility. Our destiny is that out of which our decisions arise…it is the concreteness of our being which makes all our decisions OUR decisions…Destiny is not a strange power which determines what shall happen to me. It is myself as given, formed by nature, history and myself. My destiny is the basis of my freedom; my freedom participates in shaping my destiny.’

In his book, Let Your Life Speak, Parker Palmer recalls the experience he had deciding whether to take a position that was almost right for him. There is difference between right and almost right. His Quaker community sat and listened to him. We listen to you. His Quaker friends prayed with him. We pray with you. His Quaker community leveled with him. We level with you. So, when asked what he would most enjoy about the position, a college Presidency, Palmer responded: ‘Seeing my photo in the paper announcing the selection’. And then he knew, then and there, that he was on the wrong track. It took a community. It took a community though to help him let his light shine. You need a community that will honor your light. Marsh Chapel is one. We shall return soon to this theme of vocation. But for those who will be choosing in the interim, we may offer a ten digit collection of practical aids as we conclude this morning:

1. Remember that you are yourself and your circumstances together.

2. Be careful not to cut against the grain of your own wood.

3. Learn to compromise and not to compromise, to settle and not to settle. Remember Wesley’s motto: ‘in essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity’.

4. Talk to six confidants when you face a life decision, at least five of whom are sure to level with you.

5. Know the scent of responsible risk.

6. Do not let money eclipse love, do not let money drive the car, do not let money run the show, do not let money become a first level concern.

7. Do not fear failure. Learn from it.

8. Consider where you can have the most influence, the greatest impact on the greatest number.

9. Be able and willing to change your mind, to entertain good second thoughts.

10. To paraphrase Beuchner, discover where your deepest

passion meets the world’s greatest need.

posted in Uncategorized on 03.16.2008 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

Song of Solomon 2, 8, in passim

John 3: 1-17

Frontispiece

There are two Songs of Solomon. One of the heart and one of the soul.

There are two Songs of Solomon. One of the flesh and one of the spirit.

There are two Songs of Solomon. One of earth and one of heaven.

There are two Songs of Solomon. One of human love and one of love divine.

There are two Songs of Solomon. Hear the Gospel: Both are blessed!

Three things are too wonderful for me. Four I cannot understand. The way of a ship on the high sea. The way of the eagle in the sky. The way of the serpent on the rock. The way of a man and a woman.

Faneuil Hall

In December our granddaughter, our daughter, Jan and I rode the T to Haymarket Square. Our beloved’s beloved baby gurgled past Boylston and Park. The Christmas lights glistened out from a soft Nevada. You could see your breath. Jan had seen advertised a free reading of love letters, from Abigail Adams to John Adams, and from John Adams to Abigail Adams, and offered in historic Faneuil Hall, and read by three couples named Patrick, Dukakis, and Kennedy.

There are kairos moments. Whether or not your earnest study of Oscar Cullman and Luke and Galatians convinces you, life will teach you. When Mrs. Duval read Abigail’s letter following Bunker Hill, to a distant John in Washington, full of terror and wonder at whether she would live the week, the air went out of the room. When Governor Dukakis read later John’s angry criticism of the laziness of the congress, and paused midsentence to look meaningfully at Senator Kennedy, no words were needed to bring the house to robust laughter. When Kitty Dukakis read slowly the long, love sentences, ripe and revealing, from wife to husband, from dearest friend to dearest friend, you wondered truly whether you could breathe again. When we heard the horrific sorrow of Abigail’s mother’s death, read out by Mrs. Kennedy, only a stone would not have cried. And I wonder about the stone. Every seat was full. As every heart. See how they loved each other!

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)

I say to our theology students: live in Boston. When your three years have passed, may you have spent 2 days in Boston for every 1 at Boston University, 2 hours in the Copley Square library for every 1 at the School of Theology, 2 mornings in the Public Garden for every 1 at the GSU, 2 nights with the Celtics and Red Sox for every 1 watching TV in the apartment, 2 meals in the North End for every 1 in the Back Bay, 2 winter afternoons walking on Commonwealth for every 1in the FitRec, 2 desserts on Newbury street for every 1 at home.

If I never have another such kairotic moment in Boston, this one evening will have been enough. To whomever arranged such a rhetorical explosion, I offer belated thanksgiving. There is such power, such a searing power, in public reading, in public reading of hallowed words, of public reading of hallowed words fitly spoken. You pick up and read, and read aloud, My Dearest Friend, and judge for yourself. It brings to mind a little remembered verse from a maverick book in the Bible, which itself is a testament of freedom.

Love is as strong as death.

That sentence appears in the Song of Solomon. But there are really two songs of Solomon, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. Both are blessed.

Heart

One Solomon song sings of human love. And how it sings! So loud it sings and so dearly and strong that the sages in Jamnia nearly excluded it from the canon!

You will have your choicest choices. Here are two:

Arise my love, my fair one,

And come away;

For lo the winter is past,

The rain is over and gone.

The flowers appear on the earth,

The time of singing has come,

And the voice of the turtledove

Is heard in our land.

(Song of Songs 2: 10-12)

Behold you are beautiful, my love

Behold you are beautiful!

Your eyes are doves

Behind your veil

Your hair is like a flock of goats,

Moving down the slopes of Gilead.

Your teeth are like a flock of shorn ewes.

Your lips are like a scarlet thread

Your cheeks are like halves of a pomegranate…

…(YOU CAN READ THE REST YOURSELF!!)..

You are all fair my love;

There is no flaw in you.

(Song of Songs 4: 1-8)

Collected in the Canticles are love poems, erotic poems, poems of praise for human love. One of our members asked a year ago whether any sermons are ever preached on the Song. The implication was there that the verses are simply too hot to handle! Last week another member related that in childhood, advised to read the Bible, she had stumbled into these verses. I believe she said, Wow!

Saddled with other challenges for a few decades, the historic church may have lost of some of our voice about love, human love, sexuality, human sexuality, and the ardent themes of the Song of Songs, the meta-song of the Hebrew Scripture. While our own straitened conditions in the church, and our inwardly turned attention to the details of liturgy may constrain us, all about us the culture calls out for the good news of these chapters. It is still the same old story.

The stories of Alistair Macleod, Canadian celebrant of life, are ever reaching for the misty and mystic heights of the Song of Solomon. Macleod, with the exception of one passing humorous reference to an inept clergyman, in none of his published material makes any reference to God, Christ, Spirit, Religion, Church, Faith, Belief or Bible. Like the Song of Solomon, he never mentions God. Yet his work to my ear proffers some of the strongest theological reflection of our time. Island, his stories, and No Great Mischief, his novel, teem with love. He compares one Cape Breton couple to eagles, who mate for life, and soar to the heights.

The verses of this book may have arisen as wedding songs. They celebrate love leading toward marriage and love established in marriage, without a great deal of distinction between the two. They acknowledge the power of love. They drape their music in the imagery of the natural world. They shout for joy for the joyful shout of love, human love. As a pastor, father, friend, now minister to a University community, I might have wished a little more didactic material had found its way into the Canticle. A little admonition about commitment. A little recognition of selfishness. A little sober admission of imperfection. A little paternal warning about regret and regrets. Well, we shall have to find these in other pages of the Scripture, for these songs are flying to other places. They reflect the human experience of the ages. They delight in delight. They delight in delight!

Yes, I could interpret and amend these passages to make sure that we include partnership and friendship as well as covenant and marriage. Yes, we could dwell for a moment on the difference between the literature here and that in the rest of the Bible: ’there is no overt religious content corresponding to the other books of the Bible’ (IBD op cit). Yes, I could remember the sectarian Jewish warning that the book should only be opened and read after age thirty. Yes, I could reflect on what emptiness of the soul does, on this weekend following the further campus tragedy at Northern Illinois. Yes, I could present to the contrary, T Wolfe’s sad narrative, I Am Charlotte Simmons. For those teaching and learning in a large historically Methodist University it bears reading. We use when we should love and vice versa. Thus, though, I would miss the point. The Song of Solomon sings of blessing!

Human love is blessed.

Soul

But there are two Songs of Solomon, one of heart and one of soul, one of flesh and one of spirit, one of earth and one of heaven, one of human love and one of love divine.

Another Solomon song sings of love divine.

The allegorical, cultic, dramatic and other non-literal readings of the Song of Solomon have less influence today. In any case, they fall fairly quickly in the face of the ardent, strong sensuality of
the collection. The rabbis early allegorized the Song to refer to Yahweh and Israel. The church early followed suit, and allegorized the Song to refer to Christ and the Church, or to God and the soul. Hosea had already used the allegory, in his beautiful chapters, the 11^th being perhaps the loveliest in Scripture. But he done so forthrightly, intending and intoning the allegory directly. ‘When Israel was a child I loved him.’ As a reading of the text, it must be said today, that the allegory superimposes something not apparent or present.

What is dethroned from Scripture, however, experience re-crowns. It is not without wisdom that this bit of wisdom literature has been taken to refer, in a Lenten fashion, to the love of the soul for God, to the love of God for the soul, to the love the church for Christ, to the love of Christ for the church. After all, how are we ever going to picture, to propose the relationship of the human being to God?

Here is today’s gospel message:

What can prepare us for intimacy with the divine, if not human intimacy?

What can prepare us for covenant with the divine, if not human covenant?

What can prepare us for fellowship with the divine, if not human fellowship?

What can prepare us for love of the divine, if not human love?

Where else are we going to learn the rhythms of relationship that prepare a community and its individuals, an individual and his communities, for ultimate relationship?

No wonder Plato wrote so tenderly and toughly about friendship. No wonder John the Evangelist epitomized discipleship in the portrait of one ‘beloved’. No wonder Bernard of Clairvaux wrote 86 sermons on the Song of Songs and never got past the second chapter! No wonder that John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila took Italian love poetry and formed their religious poetry on their models. No wonder that even today there is a returning interest in ‘nuptial mysticism’, a recognition that love, friendship, partnership, marriage shape a soulful habit of living. It is in the relationship of lover and beloved that we plumb the depths of experience.

In relationship, we are addressed, truly, from beyond ourselves. We are forced, in real relationship, daily, to face our limitations. We are, in relationship, known, personally, underneath the public masks. We are tested, interpersonally, regarding our patience, stamina, endurance, perseverance, longsuffering and grace under pressure. We are surprised by joy. Joy in love. Joy in creation. Joy in communion. Joy in devotion. Morning and evening, we are surprised by joy. Even C. S. Lewis, no non-traditionalist he, could find the epitome of his orthodoxy in an astounding marriage and friendship and love with Joy.

My friend and student Joshua Duncan, relying on our colleague Phil Wogaman, helped me research this sermon:

Bernard preached dozens of sermons and wrote volumes on the song.

There is an entire sermon just on "He kissed me with the kisses of his mouth", so it is hard to synthesize. I hope this will suffice.

Bernard used the Song to form an ethic based on love. Love, he felt, allowed people to transform from our natural, fallen and selfish state, to more holy state. This happens in stages. First, love is for self, and love of God in the first stage is for the sake of one's self. But, this is not an improper love, because it allows for movement to stage two. This happens when we realize our own limitations, and desire to transcend them. Stage two is love of God for what he gives us (namely, grace). Once we move beyond our limitations (Bernard is a mystic), we are able to enter stage three, love of God for God's own sake, even to the extent of forgetting ourselves. In stage four, we love ourselves once again, but it is an emptied out version of ourselves (did someone say mysticism?). The love of ourselves in stage four is entirely unselfish, because it is a love of ourselves purely for the sake of God.

In the mountains northwest of Madrid, you will find nestled the little old Castilian village of Segovia. I spent only a year there. I walked its cobbled streets during the evening paseo. I was befriended by its teenagers. Adios Roberto. Adios Marie Carmen. Adios Celia. Adios Eduardo. I gazed out at the mountain range that had inspired Hemingway. I ate the baked lamb and drank the red wine of that region. I admired its aqueduct. I photographed its castle. I learned the language, the humor, the humors, the history, the heart, the soul of a noble people. I walked in the dark late night rain and greeted the town crier and constable: ‘Adios’. Someday I hope to return. I find that Segovia appears with more regularity in my dreams now than it has for thirty years past.

I visited there the resting place of St. John of the Cross. I read and remembered his poetry: en una noche oscura, con ansias en amores inflamadas, o dichosa ventura!, sali sin ser notada, estando ya mi casa sosegada.

Lent may not seem like the right time to read the Song of Songs. Yet it is the perfect time! Our hearts are restless, restless, until they find their rest in the divine, the second song of Solomon. Such a word of longing! Is there anything, any theme more Lenten than that of longing!?!

Set me as a seal upon your heart

As a seal upon your arm;

For love is strong as death,

Jealousy is cruel as the grave.

Its flashes are flashes of fire,

A most vehement flame.

Many waters cannot quench love,

Neither can floods drown it.

If a man offered for love

All the wealth of his house

It would be utterly scorned.

Human love is blessed—by God.

Invitation

There are two Songs of Solomon…

In earshot of the two Songs of Solomon, love divine and human both, let me invite you to a better life.

Let me invite you to cherish friendship, and to bathe friendship, like a lover, in the warm baths of time and attention. Let me invite you to honor partnership, and to bathe partnership, like a lover, in the warm baths of time and attention. Let me invite you to enjoy affection, and to bathe affection, like a lover, in warm baths of time and attention. Let me invite you to revere marriage, and to bathe marriage, like a lover, in the warm baths of time and attention.

For such friendship may frame your soul in communion with the divine. Such partnership may prepare your soul for commerce with the divine. Such affection may prepare your psyche for intimacy with the divine. Such marriage may open you…to God.

“Love is strong as death and hard as hell.” (SOS 8:6)

posted in Uncategorized on 02.17.2008 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Matthew 17: 1-9

Whence Saving Insight?

When and how does a moment of insight come? What are the steps up along the mountain trail of life which give a moment of clarity that can save us?

Peter has just heard our Lord’s ageless command: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow.” (Mt 16:24). Then Peter is led, step by step, up a high mountain, where something…unearthly…occurs. He sees what cannot be seen. And, from this mountain view, for a moment, there is insight and there is clarity.

When and how does such a moment arrive, a moment of clarity that can save us from an anger that leads to murder, or a heartache that leads to suicide, or a despair over a gun-totting nation drenched in violence, or a chagrin about a country that ever more closely approximates Fosdick’s verse, “rich in things and poor in soul”?

Today’s Gospel offers us a mountain view, clarity and insight, found step by step along the rocky trail of life, that can lift us up above sin and death and the threat of meaninglessness. Its five step program was inspired by Josiah Royce’s little book of 1912, The Sources of Religious Insight.

In earshot of insight on the mountain of transfiguration…Walk along with me, if you will, for just a few minutes…up the mountain path we go…and take, Come Sunday, a divergent road.

1. Insight Through the Thicket of Personal Need

One step toward insight lies through the thicket of personal need. Careful, step carefully here. Here you recognize your mortality. “It is a great life, but few of us get out alive.” We truly do not know the hurts and needs others face. Every heart has secret sorrows. Here you admit that the acts of desperation in news reports come from conditions you also know. Fear, anger, jealousy, hatred, dread. Here—step lightly—you see the shadow, and your shadow in the greater shadow. One called this “the feeling of absolute dependence”. Here we are confessional. We say, “Hello. My name is John Smith and I am an alcoholic.” We say, “We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.” We say, “There but for the grace of God, go I.

I remember the first time I was left alone with our first child, to give her mother a night out. She had been the most pleasant of children, happy and bright, sleeping through the night. She hardly cried. But that hot August night, at the very moment the door closed and the car drove off, she began to wail. Not to whimper or weep, but to wail and shriek and scream. Five, twenty five, fifty minutes. I was really shaken, terrified, angry and frustrated, at my wit’s end, and probably at the edge of some irrational behavior. Over the din of the howling daughter, I heard the doorbell. In came our church’s lay leader, Bernice Danks, a veteran nurse and teacher of nurses at Cornell who wordlessly took the child and somehow the howling ceased. “Oh, I like to make a few house visits a week. It’s a little routine of mine…You know I tell my nursing students that we call the things that are most important, ‘routine’…and I came by the parsonage and for some reason I decided to stop. I hope you don’t mind the intrusion…What a pleasant baby she is!”

When we are helpless, insight can come.

Wesley is still with us to ask, “Will you visit from house to house?” Insight sees inside the closed door of personal need, and measures the distance between public appearance and private reality. We recognize personal need with every Sunday, at Marsh Chapel with gusto, in confession and kyrie, cry for forgiveness.

2. Insight Over the River of Others’ Hurts

A second step toward insight lies over the river of another’s hurt. Here, we’ll jump the river at the portage path, where we bear each other’s burdens like canoes carried in tandem. A moment of clarity can come when you truly see another’s plight, and feel it in your heart. Some insight comes from serving others, some from sensing others’ hurt. It is really a matter of understanding power, this insight about others. Think of the Prince and the Pauper, or of Lazarus and Dives. Insight happens in the chorus of the common life, when we sing out, “so that’s what it is like to be you…”

The social gospel tradition, theological and political, (Rauschenbusch, Douglass, Anthony, Gladden, and others) may be criticized as a “Johnny one note” presentation. But if you have to choose just one note to play, this is one to pick. Jesus means freedom. To learn about the nature of power, and the effects of power, we listen to the powerless.

Men, listen to the women about whom you care, as they describe being pulled over on the thruway in a winter night. With red lights flashing…sirens wailing…car door thudding…a tall male figure in uniform and wide brimmed hat…a revolver in the belt… “May I see your license please?”…Men, listen to women.

Majority, listen to the minority describe the feeling of being stopped on the front porch step, at night, after a long day of menial work. Do you remember this New York tragedy of some years ago? With the lights flashing and the uniforms and hats and, when you reach for your wallet some one yells.”Gun!” 41 bullets later a tragedy—unintended to be sure—has occurred. Not a gun but a wallet. Such a tragedy for all. But maybe it can help us to gain insight, to feel what others feel. Majority, listen to the minority.

Insight comes through the common song that recognizes another’s hurt.

You know, we recognize this chance for insight every Sunday as we sing hymns together, to recognize that we are all in this together.

3. Insight Scaling the Cliffs of Reason

A third step toward insight lies over the cliff of reason. “Come let us reason together” says the Psalmist. God has entrusted us with freedom, and with minds to think through our use of freedom. While reason has its limits, it is reason, finally, that will help us learn the arts of disagreement—at home, at work, in church, in the community. We say, “Try to be reasonable”. And reason often prevails. If you ever doubt the power of reason to bring insight, remember the words of the Psalmist, and the voices of great minds through the ages. Josiah Royce’s Sources of Religious Insight, is itself a gem of such reasoned discourse. Come let us reason together…

Now I submit to you that this meaning of the word reason is perfectly familiar to all of you. Reason, from this point of view, is the power to see widely and steadily and connectedly. Its true opponent is not intuition, but whatever makes us narrow in outlook, and consequently prey to our own caprices. The unreasonable person is the person who can see but one thing at a time, when he ought to see two or many things together; who can grasp but one idea, when a synthesis of ideas is required. The reasonable man is capable of synopsis, of viewing both or many sides of a question, of comparing various motives, of taking interest in a totality rather than in a scattered multiplicity. (87).

You know, we recognize this chance for insight, this moment of clarity, every Sunday through a sermon, a word (we hope) fitly spoken.

4. Insight Across the Gorge of the Will

A fourth step toward insight lies across the great gorge of the will. Look before you leap. We are here ever closer to the mountaintop. Real insight comes in a moment of decision. Some say we learn to choose. But our experience is that we learn by choosing. Viktor Frankl spent his whole life developing the “logotherapy” around this one conviction: we grow by deciding. Choose. You cannot lose, in the fullest sense, and in the long run. Choose. Either way, you have learned, you will grow, you have changed, you will improve, you have developed. Choose.

Faith is not a matter of emotion or feeling or soul or heart or intellect only. First, faith is a decision. “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow.”

As Kierkegaard put it, “eitheror”… Either God or not. Decide. Either you see God in Christ or not. Decide. Either Jesus Christ has a claim on your life or not. Decide. Either every day is a chance for love or not. Decide. Either the way of love means particular consequent acts regarding your time, your money, your body, your community…or not. Decide.

Faith is not as much thrill as it is will.

You know, we recognize this chance for insight every Sunday, in a moment of invitation—to devotion, to discipline, to dedication.

5. Insight Upon the Summit of Loyalty

A fifth step toward insight brings us to the summit. There. Take a breath. Up here, the air is rarified. Up here, you may have a moment of clarity. For the fifth step toward insight brings us to the altar of loyalty. We are in the thin air that requires a use of archaic words—loyalty, duty, chivalry. Beware though the sense that loyalty is a matter of sullen obedience. On the contrary! Loyalty is the red flame lit in the heart’s chancel, lit with the admixture of personal need and social concern, illumined by the reason and ignited by the will. Loyalty combines the conservative concern for morality with the liberal hunger for justice. Loyalty is life, but life with a purpose. Insight, real clarity, can come with a brush up with loyalty. Tell me what you give to, and I will tell you who you are. Tell me what you sacrifice for, and I will tell you who you are. Tell me what altar you face, and I will tell you who you are. Dime con quien andas, y te dire quien eres

And real loyalty is magnanimous. Real loyalty is bighearted enough to honor an opponent’s loyalty. At the summit, there can be a reverent respect for another’s loyalty, truly lived, even when it clashes with our own. Maybe especially then. US Grant felt this at Appomatox as he took the sword from RE Lee. It is chivalry, this honoring of loyal opposition. We were once known for this kind of chivalry, a reverent respect for divergent loyalties, as long as they did not eclipse the one great loyalty. I overheard this kind of chivalry from a local football player this week, a burly formerly bearded lineman, who said, “They played better than we did.”

Such a memory could help our political conversations, reminding us that at depth loyalties converge out of difference. Surface difference can occlude deeper agreements. Loyalty has a magnanimous depth that honors others’ divergent loyalties.

One of the strangest turns in the New Testament is found in 1 Corinthians 15. After Paul has reached the very summit of our faith, and sings of the resurrection in such heavenly tones, then, immediately, he turns to—do you remember?—the collection! A matter of loyalty.

Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

You know, we recognize this chance for insight every Sunday, through the presentation of gifts, an expression of loyalty, at the altar of grace and freedom and love.

Royce on the Mountain

Several years ago, we worshipped in the tiniest church in our area. A little Adirondack chapel, at the end of the trail, high up in the northern mountains. Beyond Owl’s Head, and Chasm Falls and Wolf Pond, there is the
summit of Mountainview, with its chapel and pump organ and wooden pews and simple pulpit, and humble service, still though a service like this one or any --- a chance for saving insight as we recognize personal need, others’ hurts, the power of reason, the importance of will, the force of loyalty—in the prayer of confession, the music of community, the preaching of the Word, the invitation to decision, and the loyal offering of gifts.

Let insight abound on the curvaceous slopes of personal need! Let insight abound on the majestic mountains of social holiness! Let insight abound on the prodigious cliffs of reason and will! Let insight abound on the purple mountain summit of loyalty—from every mountainview, let insight abound! So that, to paraphrase the spiritual, we might sing, insight at last, insight at last, thank God Almighty, we have saving insight at last!

Somehow we were deluded to think that worship is optional. Many things are optional. For those, however, who desire to see life as human and keep life human, worship is essential, essential, essential to insight, essential to the insight that keeps life human. How can we be human without seeing our own frailty, without knowing another’s pain, without learning to reason together, without the courage to decide, without the love of loyalty? So let us improve in Lent.

Let us worship God together. As you are doing, do so more and more.

Let us make it our earnest desire to worship God each Lord’s Day.

Let us make preparation for our ordered worship in daily prayer and reading.

Let us sing lustily, as Wesley taught, and pray with energy, and listen with care.

Let us do as OW Holmes regularly did with every sermon, ill or well though the sermon was: “I applied it to myself”.

Let us shake off our timidity and seize every opportunity to include others, friend and neighbor and relative in worship.

Let us savor the memory of Sunday all week long—humming familiar verses, reciting familiar phrases, chewing on various themes.

Let us expect and experience of love, of presence, of God.

Let us enter silence with grace and song with freedom.

Let us prepare to worship…

To Quicken the Conscience by the Holiness of God

To Illumine the Imagination by the Beauty of God

To Open the Heart to the Love of God

To Devote the Will to the Purposes of God

posted in Uncategorized on 02.10.2008 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Lectionary Texts

Preface

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

1. Errancy

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

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

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

The Marsh pulpit, and others like it, are not within traditions which affirm the Scripture as the sole source of religious authority. We do not live within a Sola Scriptura tradition. The Bible is primary, foundational, fundamental, basic, prototypical—but not exclusively authoritative. Do you hear that? It begs to be heard. Today’s passage from Matthew 4 is an idealized memory of something that may or may not have happened in the way accounted, somewhere along the Tiberian shore. It looks back sixty years. Sixty years! What do you remember from January of 1948? Nor was it written for that kind of certainty. Matthew 4 is formed in the faith of the church to form the faith of the church.

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

We grasp for certainty, but confidence grasps us.

2. Equality

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

Baptism is as traditional and central a variously understood practice as Christianity possesses. It is in some ways the very doorway to our traditions. Yet listen to Paul today. In his context, he rejects baptism. For him gospel trumps tradition.

Our linkage of the gifts of heterosexuality and ministry, however traditional, falls before the gospel of grace and freedom. Further, on a purely practical level, another generation will not be impressed by church growth strategies rooted in the exclusion of 10% of the population. There is a serious upside limit to the use of gay ba
shing to grow churches. My three children in their twenties are not going to stay around for it.

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

If I were convening a Lenten study in suburban Washington DC I would have the group read G. Wills’ Head and Heart: American Christianities, for some perspective on the way traditions change.

3. Evolution

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

Of course reason unfettered can produce hatred and holocaust. Learning for its own sake needs virtue and piety. More than anything else, learning, to last, must finally be rooted in loving. Did you hear the one thing requested in our vibrant Psalm? To inquire in the temple. Inquiry!

The universe is 14 billion years old. The earth is 4.5 billion years old. 500 million years ago multi-celled organisms appeared in the Cambrian explosion. 400 million years ago plants sprouted. 370 million years ago land animals emerged. 230 million years ago dinosaurs appeared (and disappeared 65 million years ago). 200,000 years ago hominids arose. Every human being carries 60 new mutations out of 6 billion cells. Yes, evolution through natural selection by random mutation is a reasonable hypothesis, says F Collins, father of the human genome project, and, strikingly, a person of faith.

If I were the chaplain of a small private school in New England I might have my fellowship group read this winter F Collins, the Language of God. He can teach us to reason together.

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

4. Existence

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

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

But beloved, a simple or general appeal to the love of experience, in our time, in 2008, is not appealing or loving. It is not experience, but our very existence which lies under the shadow of global violence. To have any future worthy of the name we shall need to foreswear preemptive violence. How the stealthy entry of such a manner of behavior could shape our civil discourse without voluminous debate and vehement challenge is a measure of our longing for false certainties. Preemption is our besetting theological temptation. Our existence itself is on the line in discussions or lack of discussions about violent action that is preemptive, unilateral, imperial, and reckless. One thinks of Lincoln saying of slavery, ‘those who support it might want to try it for themselves’. Not one of us wants to be the victim of preemptive violence. We may argue about the need for response, and even for the need of some kinds of anticipatory defense. But preemption? It will occlude existence itself.

If I were gathering a book club in downtown Boston to read this winter I would select the articles and books of Reinhold Niebuhr. Our future lies on the narrower path of responsive, communal, sacrificial, prudent behavior and requires of us, in Neibuhr’s phrase, ‘a spiritual discipline against resentment’.

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

posted in Uncategorized on 01.27.2008 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Matthew 3: 13-17

1. Preface

Here it is after Christmas.

Our week began with one Hillary crying, and ended with one Hillary dying.

Here it is after Christmas.

And what do we have to show for it?

An empty manger. A family taken to flight. Herod on the rise. Kings come and Kings gone. And now, in just a few days time, Jesus meets us grown full. What did all that Christmas singing and speaking mean? It does not seem like we have very much to go on. Not much to go on.

The manger of Christmastide. The star of epiphany. And today the river of baptism. Hay and Star and Water. Not much to go on.

We are left with choices and the journey, choices which shape the journey, choices which are the journey. Choices that bring tears, and the journey that ends in death. Crying and dying. Our Hillary week, beginning with one and ending with the other, could not be more liturgical appropriate. Joseph chose and traveled. The Magi followed and worshipped. Jesus chose and dipped.

Take the Magi. They chose—to worship. They traveled—to follow. And so, we too. Left with little to go on. Daily choices and a long day’s journey. Choice and journey. It is a spare existential Gospel for Epiphany, and a true one.

Dark nights. Lonely trails. Unforeseen delays. Risky decisions. Vague premonitions. Misleading intuitions. Distorted powers. For all of the Eastern religion and miraculous birth embodied in the Christmas and Epiphany stories, what stands out is the empty frontier of living, in choice and journey. It is enough to make a grown man, or woman, shed a tear.

We do not think enough about tears, until or unless we are jolted by them. Tears are the river of life. Think of the verses that cry out from memory…Jesus wept… Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning… There is a time to weep and a time to laugh… Blessed are those who weep now, for they shall be blessed…Rachel wept for her children…My tears have been my food, day and night…The Lord God will wipe away every tear from their eyes… She washed his feet with her tears…

We do not think about tears until they overtake us. So it is with the journey and its end. Shakespeare sharply describes our condition:

Tir’d with all these, for restful death I cry:
As, to behold Desert a beggar born,
And needy Nothing trimm’d in jollity,
And purest Faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded Honour shamefully misplac’d,
And maiden Virtue rudely strumpeted;
And right Perfection wrongfully disgrac’d,
And Strength by limping Sway disabled,
And Art made tongue-tied by Authority,
And Folly, Doctor-like, controlling Skill,
And simple Truth miscall’d Simplicity,
And captive Good attending captain Ill -
Tir’d with all these, fro, these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

2. Choice and Journey

Choice and journey. What guidance are we given? Very little. Starlight and hay and water.

We are invited to make choices in response to a mute manger. We are welcomed to make our choices in front of weakness incarnate. We are encouraged to make our choices under the innocent gaze of a newborn. We are called, addressed, summoned to make the choices that themselves make us, make our lives, standing on hay. The revelation, if it is one, is a haymow revelation. Poor. We are to make our choices in front of human weakness, ‘asleep on the hay’. It is not much to go on.

We are invited to make our journey in starlight. We are invited to make our journey forward in the near darkness of starlight. We are invited to make our journey under the flickering littleness of a lonely star. We are called, addressed, summoned to ‘wonder as we wander out under the sky’. It is not much to go on.

3. Epiphany Gifts of Choice and Journey

The choices and journey of the wise ones lead into the choices and journey of the Lord at his baptism. All these stories, from hay to star to water, proclaim choice and journey.

After all, those wise folks who carry the burden of the gospel story as it begins in Matthew, and who bear such expensive gifts to the scene of Jesus' birth, also bring you gifts. We certainly can be glad for the gold and incense and medicine with which they have again showered the Prince of Peace. What gifts, other than our whole selves and our every resource, are worthy of a Messiah? But, in their journey, remembered again today, the wise professors from Iraq also present you with holiday presents, gifts of the spirit. It is good to receive as well as to give.

The kings are seekers and searchers. They embody the dominical saying, "seek and ye shall find." They do search, diligently, and they do find their hearts' desire. One card given me this year ended with the phrase, "may you find your heart's desire." These magi would applaud such a note. Not for them, the one storey life. Not for them, the one horse life. Not for them, the overly easy, overly simple. To search diligently for your heart's desire means work and loss and failure. To seek means to question, to reject, to give up. It may even mean changing your mind or your plan. Today at least some have come to church searching, or have come to church to represent to themselves that they still wonder, they still care, they still are yearning for the heart's desire. Here is a kingly gift for every one who is searching diligently. Our wise men bless you. They may represent God's benevolence toward you, the benevolent watching and guiding of a shepherd, or of a parent, or of a teacher. If no church will encourage your search, if no popular movement will animate your soul, if no family member or friend finally will validate your seeking--fear not: the kings of the East know the precious value of your search, for it has been theirs as well.

The wise ones offer you a gift which may not seem very religious, nor very fit for epiphany. Yet it is a princely possession for those who will receive it. I refer to their capacity to sift and measure, to sift and separate wheat from chaff, true from evil. These kings remind you of your own high calling, to discern, to test everything, to consider and ponder and think. Life is more than activity and work. Life is more than running and stopping. Life is more than selling and buying. Actually, none of these outward acts means much, without the heart's desire. Here the magi have shared a remarkable, choice possession, yours for the asking. Herod's information is accurate but his motives are unclean and his purpose is malevolent. Herod is a wolf, in sheep's clothing. Wisdom knows the howl of the wolf. The kings could overhear the deception in Herod's claim to worship. Herod lives still, and the wise of this world learn to distinguish true from evil.

The kings give you another look at the star. They encourage you to trust the inner sense you have of guiding, of light, of direction. You were not born without a moral compass. You have a conscience. It lives as long as you live. Through all of the valleys and hills of life, this inner sense will orient you, if you will receive it as the royal gift it is. All too often we forsake our own best insight, out of false humility, out of laziness, out of fear, out of self-doubt. Just here, the three kings have a post-Christmas gift to offer you. Train your ear to hear your own conscience. Strain your mind and heart to know the pure tones of the heart's desire.

Strange gifts, for a strange story, and a strange season. Wise men from the east bring gold and frankincense and myrrh. Also, they bring you some gifts this morning. They are yours for the unwrapping. A blessing upon searchers. A blessing upon thinkers. A blessing upon believers. Go and search. Go and measure. Go and trust. Choose and travel.

Choice and journey.

4. Jesus’ Choice and Journey at Baptism

For the legend repeated and refurbished in Matthew, bearing the account of Jesus’ baptism, forcefully continues the same spare, existential gospel of Christmas and Epiphany. Choice. Journey. This is what we have day by day, our choices and the journey made from them. Look at how much has been left open, left free, left undone, left to you and me. What confidence, divine confidence, is so expressed in beings, human beings.

Jesus chooses to enter the roiling river Jordan, and to go on from there, beloved and beckoned. Jesus’ choice—to enter. Jesus journey—to die. And ours. And ours.

Matthew has added to Mark’s earlier account a rejoinder to those of his later congregation who worried about Jesus needing forgiveness, and who worried about Jesus needing John. He chose, judges Matthew, he chose. Matthew has further added to Mark’s earlier account a redirection of divine voice. In Mark the voice from heaven speaks to Jesus, ‘thou art’. But in Matthew, the voice speaks out to all, ‘this is’. He steps out, judges Matthew, he steps out. So the voice of heaven prepares the earthly journey.

Here we are. After Christmas. In life, in choice, in journey. A spare existential gospel for epiphany. In a week that began with one Hillary crying, and another Hillary dying, we might meditate on choice and journey.

5. Application

One gathers over time wisdom sayings about choice. Here are a few.

Plan for the worst, hope for the best, then do your most, and leave all the rest. Under Palm Trees in San Diego Ken McMillan, a dear friend, once gave us this proverb. It has been a help to me. Particularly in church, in denominational life, wherein not every relationship has been as dear and friendly as that with Ken, the saying has helped. It preaches.

Show up, pay attention, tell the truth, do not get overly invested in the results. This proverb’s origin I know not. It does help one survive committee meetings, though, setting the bar low, as it does. I have had occasion in academic life, which admits of some committee work, to remember it.

Here is my own Methodist handshake on choice, five fingers for you. As you decide ask yourself: Have I truly prayed about this? Have I learned as much as I can about the choice? Have I talked with four close friends? Have I lived with it, letting the soul breathe? The last is hardest to say: Have I felt for grace along the way? Prayer, Study, Conversation, Fasting, and Mystery—another way to consider the means of grace.

We prepare for choice.

Furthermore, for our journey we might remember, as from a more distant past, fellow travelers, with us, on hay and under star and in water.

Paul Tillich is one.

“During the larger part of my life I have tried to penetrate the meaning of the Christian symbols, which have become increasingly problematic within the cultural context of our time. Since the split between a faith unacceptable to culture and a culture unacceptable to faith was not possible for me, the only alternative was to attempt to interpret the symbols of faith through expressions of our own culture”.

Wendy Wasserstein is one.

The gospel of choice and journey, a spare existential epiphany gospel, can be heard at the Huntingdon Theater, in Wendy Wasserstein’s fine play Third. At the drama’s climax, we are placed before the meaning of the journey we share, and asked, in a young man’s voice, “do you really want to sacrifice hope for the sake of irony”?

Sir Edmund Hillary is one.

We might think of the summit of Everest and its first visitor. His famous journey took him high. But his life journey took him wide. He found in the Sherpa people, in their need as well as their strength, a cause to serve, a way to give, a folk to love. Sir Edmund found himself by losing himself in faithful renovation of culture and cultural expression of faith. In our time we may not need a theological reformation as much as we need a cultural revolution, one whose summit again enlists the heart and mind in a common hope, a common hope.

We prepare for the journey.

Are you ready for choice? Are you ready for the journey?

posted in Uncategorized on 01.13.2008 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Sounds of Nativity

If we listen with the ears of the heart, the sounds of Christmas may just envelop us. And heal us.

A cough, Joseph turning.

A shuffle, Shepherds moving.

A murmur, a shudder, a shake.

Cattle, lowing.

The crisp crackle of hard soil, snow and ice, under foot.

Distant laughter, ribald and rough, out from the inn.

And Mary. Mary. Her yawn, her sigh, her song, her cry.

If we listen with the ears of the heart, the whole creation sings in ecumenical chorus, and the sounds of Christmas heal us by enveloping us in a circle of peace, whose circumference is without measure. Without measure…

You know, our time, and world and culture are fixed on limits. We lean more on what we can count, than on what we can count on. Christmas inquires about our sense of limits.

Limited Atonement

For instance, one great old Christian teacher was John Calvin. He produced no carols, by the way. For the Songs of Christmas we depend on others, like John and Charles Wesley. Yet while Calvin may not have capaciously explored the nativity, and while we may object to his narrowed and straitened theological perspective (total depravity, unmerited salvation, limited atonement, irresistible grace, perseverance of the saints), he may have provided us with a distant mirror in which to see ourselves. Especially his thought about limited peace, limited salvation, health, mercy, atonement.

Oh, we talk a good game about God’s limitless love…Yet…

Our lips may not acclaim limited atonement, but our habits of being do. Health care, for all or for some? Limited medical atonement. Good education (with books, safety, discipline, respect), for all or for some? Limited educational atonement. Employment (most people just need a job and a home), for all or for some? Limited vocational atonement. Heavenly hope, for all or for some? Limited spiritual atonement. We do tend to live and move and have our being as if the very temporary distinctions we so prize had, somehow, a lasting life.

A Broad Peace

Here is a Christmas pronouncement of a broad peace, on earth. On earth. With Ghandi along the Ganges. Beside Tutu on the southern cape. Along the path of the Dalai Lama in farthest Tibet. In Tegucigalpa with Lynn Baker. This is no Calvinist quietism, which so suddenly has taken over non-Catholic American Christianity, from its seedbeds in the Orthodox Presbyterian and Anabaptist communions: cold, careful, efficient, first mile, changeless, fearsome, depressed. No, this is Christmas: warm, open, effective, second mile, free, growing, angry, and hopeful! I remember Augustine’s proverb. Hope has two beautiful daughters: anger and courage.

A Tale of Two Tales

The early church told two stories about Jesus. The first about his death. The second about his life. The first, about the cross, is the older and more fundamental. The second, about the manger, is the key to the meaning of the first, the eyeglasses which open full sight of the first, the code with which to decipher the first.

Jesus died on a cross for our sin according to the Scripture. That is the first story. How we handle this story, later in the year, come Lent and Easter, is a perilous and serious responsibility, given the myth of redemptive violence in which so much of our national and global thinking is now enmeshed. This morning, wee do light a candle, light a candle, for our Pakistani siblings, in the hour of Ms. Bhutto’s tragic, unnecessary death. We wail with them, even as Rachel and others wailed long ago. Peace and preemption have no common ground. Violence that is preemptive, unilateral, reckless and unforeseeable, in any direction, by any hand, has no lasting future. You cannot make a world on such a premise. Global warming is indeed a threat. But so, and more so, is global arming. Especially this week we have every reason to recall that we will have no world, no world worthy of the name, if I legitimately may attack you merely on the basis of what I imagine or fear you might do.

The first story, the death story, the story of Jesus’ death, another season’s work, needs careful, careful handling. Today I might briefly say again what I have said to you recently: Remember that it is not the passion of Christ that defines the Person of Christ, but the Person who defines the passion. Remember that it is not the suffering that bears the meaning, but the meaning that bears the suffering…that it is not the cross that carries the love but the love that carries the cross…that it is not crucifixion that encompasses salvation, but salvation that encompasses even the tragedy of crucifixion… and that it is not the long sentence of Holy week, with all its phrases, dependent clauses and semi-colons that completes the gospel, but it is the punctuation after seven days, the last mark of the week to come in 168 hours, whether it be the exclamation point of Peter, the full stop period of Paul or the question mark of Mary—Easter defines Holy Week, and not the other way around. The resurrection follows but not replace the cross, for sure. Still, it is also true that the cross precedes but does not overshadow the resurrection. It is Life that has the last word.

Later in the year we shall return to story one. At Christmas, we listen for story two, the stor
y of Jesus’ life, the story of Jesus.

Who was Jesus? What life did his death complete? How does his word heal our hurt? And how does all this accord with Scripture? One leads to the other.

This second, second level story begins at Christmas, and is told among us to interpret the first. Christmas is meant to make sure that the divine love is not left only to the cross, or only to heaven. Christmas in a violent world is meant to remind us, all of us, that you do not need to hate the world in order to love God. Here is the single greatest divide between liberalism and fundamentalism. Alf Landon said, “I can be a liberal and not be a spendthrift”. We might say, “I can be a Christian and not hate the world around”. Christmas is meant to open out a whole range of Jesus, as brother, teacher, healer, young man, all. Christmas is meant to provide the mid-course correction that might be needed if all we had was Lent. And the Christmas images are the worker bees in this theological hive. Easter may announce the power of peace, but Christmas names the place of peace. Jesus died the way he did because he lived the way he did. Jesus lived the way he did so that he could die the way he did. That is, it is not only the Passion of Christ, but the Peace of Christ, too, which Christians like you affirm. What good news for us at the end of 2007! Such a passionate year we have had. Theologically, culturally, politically, militarily, ecclesiastically —we have exuded passion this year. Now comes Christmas again to announce that there is more to Jesus than passion. There is the matter of peace as well.

New Creation

With great effort, the ancient writers join the God of Creation with the God of Redemption. The coming of the Savior does not limit the divine care to the story of redemption, but weaves the account of redemption into the fabric of creation. There is more to the Gospel than the cross. The ancient writers sense this and say it with gusto: angels to locate heavenly peace on earth; shepherds to locate peace on ordinary earth; kings to empower the sense of peace on earth; a poor mother to locate physically the Prince of Peace in the womb of earth. The location of peace is earth, and its circumference is without limit. God’s Christ is without limit.

There are many rooms in this mansion. In the OT, as translated into Greek long ago, Christ referred to Cyrus the King of Persia, who at last freed the Jews from their bondage in Babylon. 'The Christ of God' later Isaiah calls King Cyrus.

Then Christ meant the messianic conqueror who would bring apocalyptic cataclysm, the end of things as we know it, the reconstitution of Israel, and the reign of God--the main wellspring of hope for those breathing and sweating in Jesus’ day, including Jesus.

Christians then began to use the term to refer to Jesus, as sometimes we do, meaning that man who spoke Aramaic, rode a donkey, recited the Psalms thinking David wrote them all, walked only in Palestine, never married, and was crucified for blasphemy or treason or both.

A while later Christ, in Paul, becomes the instrument of God's incursion into the world, to recreate the world, and is known in the cross and the resurrection.

Still later, when the Gospel writers pick up the story, Christ is the Risen Lord, preached by Paul, and narrated by unknown silent ghost writers who somehow put together the story of his earthly ministry, always spoken as a resurrection account, and always seen, if seen, in light of Easter.

John takes another trail, in the telling of the Christ, because for John none of the above really matters at all, save that Christ reveals God--wherever and whenever there is way, truth or life, there is Christ.

Still later, and drawing on all the above and more, the church fathers--early Christian writers--painstakingly and painfully tried to fit all this into neo-platonic thought, involving natures and persons, the human and the divine, the seen and the unseen, and described Christ in creeds, perhaps best and for sure first in the Apostles' Creed--only Son, Lord. Most of the options then have been laid out by 325ad or so, to be regularly and fitfully retried and rehearsed into our time.

Even John Calvin, God bless his unhappy being, could write that we really can't say, definitively, where Christ, as Lord, begins or ends. Is Christ only in the Methodist Church? Or only in the south? Or only in Christianity? Or only in America? Or only in religion? Or only in this world? Or only in the church of Rome? Or only in Bible believing churches? Or only in worship? Let us allow all the absolutists their absolute Absolution--absolutely!--Christ is the Absolute. Story one. But then, in the end, we also have to ask, Where is Christ? Leo Tolstoy wrote a Christmas Story about this once. "Where Love is, Christ is". Story two.

The lovely decorated Christmas tree in your living room, with its natural grace adorned by symbolic beauty, is meant to connect the God of Creation with the God of Redemption. The story of Jesus the Christ is as wide and large and limitless, limitless, as the story of light throughout all creation.

Once we visited in the home of a friend whose lovely tree sported a particularly wonderful ornamentation. Oh, he had placed upon the boughs the more usual collection of angels, bulbs, lights, tinsel and all. But here and there, slowly illuminating and slowly darkening, there were five lighthouses. I had never seen a lighthouse as an ornament. As we shared life and faith in the living room, the slowly illuminating and slowly darkening lighthouses, all five, caught my imagination. With Wesley we affirm five means of grace, ever available, and savingly so, amid
the branches and brambles of life. Prayer: as close as breath. Sacraments: in the closest church, weekday and Sunday. Scripture: take and read, read and remember, remember and recite. Fasting: we might say walking, exercise, attention to discipline and diet. Christian conversation: a word spoken and heard that just may be healing enough to be true, or true enough to bring healing. Even in a sermon on the Sunday after Christmas.

An Invitation

At Christmas we can remember. We are humans before we are lovers. We are lovers before we are Christians. We are Christians before we are Protestants. We are Protestants before we are lovers. Are we lovers anymore? Where love is, Christ is.

If we listen with the ear of faith, the whole creation sings in ecumenical chorus, and the sounds of Christmas heal us by enveloping us in a circle of peace, whose circumference is without measure.

A circle with an unlimited circumference inevitably includes…you. You may decide today to lead a Christian life. To worship every Sunday. To pray every morning. To tithe every dollar. To take up the way of peace, by loving and giving. You may decide upon this path this morning. Do.

The birth of Christ is for you.

His way of life is for you.

His manner of obedience is for you.

His church is open to you.

His happiness is for you.

His love is for you.

His death is for you.

His life is for you.

His discipline is for you .

You see, you really did get a special gift this Christmas!

If we listen with imaginative ears, the sounds of Christmas envelop us and heal us.

A cough, Joseph turning.

A shuffle, Shepherds moving.

A murmur, a shudder, a shake.

Cattle, lowing.

The crisp crackle of hard soil, snow and ice, under foot.

Distant laughter, ribald and rough, out from the inn.

And Mary. Her yawn, her sigh, her song, her cry.

posted in Uncategorized on 12.30.2007 at 11:00 am