Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

By Marsh Chapel

We greet you this morning from the banks of the River Charles. We send a Christmas greeting across the country and beyond, a word of hope.

In this season of travel and transformation, travel with me for a few minutes toward a religious transformation, a second birth. Others, across the land, are traveling in this season of transformation. We greet send them our greetings as well.

To David and Sara Beth and their families in Connecticut.

To Jay and his family who are traveling to Galveston.

To John and his family who are busy with the struggles and rhythms of mourning.

To Ray fixing the bulbs on a Christmas tree out in the big sky country.

To James and Mary who are lonely in the hour of change.

To John and his extended family in Newton.

To Roy listening with care in Rhode Island.

To Patrick and Barbara, Darell and MaryAnna, Paula and Rick, preparing for Christmas.

To Ellie and all children on the shores of Lake Michigan.

To Sam clearing the snow from his driveway.

To Mark visiting relatives in Central Texas.

To children who have come home for Christmas.

A Merry Christmas to you all. Although we cannot see you, we can see you. I see you.

Listening for the Gospel

It is our privilege week by week in music and liturgy and word to reach out across the country and beyond, bringing a word of hope. Ours is a light voice, in a way, a veritable whisper from the east coast, a reminder of, an evocation of a particular kind of life and love. Ours is a light national voice. For many decades, by grace and gift, our voice has entered your home and others. Thanks for the invitation.

Perhaps this morning you are preparing a Sunday meal. You are rustling the pantry for potatoes to peel and to cook. Here you are with the radio adjusted. You have remembered to adjust the dial, and just in time. A familiar introit has called us to prayer. There are hymns, hymns sung, and you hear them particularly well when, as sometimes he does, the choir master has us sing a-capella. The kitchen preparation and peeling continue. You recognize again a Kyrie, a sung sorrow, crucial to being human today. Mercy, have mercy. Some courageous soul has lead a psalm. Anthem, hymn, reading, prayer. And a story so well known that it is unknown. A story of birth. Let us move along side you as you work at the counter. Let us listen as you listen, word by word and note by note. Let there be no separation between what is said and what is heard. Let the snow filter fully down this morning, snow upon snow. Let the message of the day be yours and ours. Together.

Now the birth of Jesus Christ, the birth of the Christ took place in this way…

Ordinary Extraordinary

Since, for you and me, this morning is an ordinary Sunday morning, in pulpit or potato peelings, which remembers a most extraordinary occurrence, perhaps we could begin to follow the story, if there is any way to follow the story, by narrating the connection of these two, the ordinary and the extraordinary.

Jesus’ birth is like all births, in that physical sense utterly predictable. Yet ask yourself where in life you have felt closer to miracle than at the moment of birth. An ordinary extraordinary. Today the birth is narrated inside the story of an engagement. Women and men find one another, generation to generation. Yet this connection comes, to Joseph’s astonishment, with a carried blessing. Mary is found to be with child. Extraordinary though ordinary. A problem identified is a problem solved. So Joseph plans to erase the engagement, when the time is right, and in a gentle way, a prudent way. But his prudence is confounded in a dream. Ordinary prudence, extraordinary dream. He remembers his dream. Do you remember yours? Sit quietly a moment when you wake up. See if there is a panoply of wonder that you have brought from the arms of Morpheus. Whether or not the mind is an idol factory, as unhappy Calvin thought, the mind certainly is a story factory, able without provocation and without consciousness to spin a tale, all night long. In the dream, no odd thing a dream, there is a name given, an extraordinary name, a saving name. Jesus. He saves his people from their sin. In any case, here is an account of a husband and wife and child. So it goes. But no! The simple tale confirms a plan set from the beginning of the beginnings of beginning. Up Joseph, up! He wakes. He does. He takes. Yet…he knows her not. Behold an ancient narrative, swinging our way again this season on the hinges of ordinary experience and extraordinary expectation.

Second Birth

It is a weekly thing to write and preach a sermon, or to prepare and serve a meal, and you and I, in pulpit and among potatoes, we have more than something in common. Yet the telling of Christmas, from the very first, was about more than one birth, more than one kind of birth. The gospel writer is trying to say what cannot readily be said, to connect the sense of the extraordinary with the experience of the ordinary. There were many births in first century Palestine. To this one birth there came attached a second birth. His birth, somehow, is our own.

Charles Wesley caught the marrow of the message in a phrase: “born to raise the sons of earth, born to give them second birth”. For the Wesleys both, it was the incarnation of Christ, his birth and life and word made flesh, which rooted and grounded their reverence. The English carols we most love, both those Charles wrote, and those that influenced him and were influenced by him, bring their disciplined obedience to a fever pitch.

Our lessons today bring harmonic support to the intersection of the ordinary with the extraordinary. Isaiah offers a warning, a prophetic utterance in the midst of political chaos. The Psalmist expresses a desire to see the face of God shining on God’s people. Paul enters his conversation with the Romans, declaring his service to the Christ whose birth we now celebrate. Whether in prophecy or in song or in address, the voices of today’s Scriptures also lift up the antinomies of earthly heaven and heavenly earth.

What does the Scripture mean by the birth of the Christ, and what especially does this mean for us, for our second birth, as the hymn has it?

Are we able to enter again into our mother’s womb, either in figure or in truth? But this is the question Nicodemus raised, to no avail. We cannot return to an earlier condition, nor to an earlier conception of an earlier condition. The second birth clearly is not a physical or conceptual return, or recapitulation.

Are we to assume a second naivete, at the heart of the Wesleyan second birth. Paul Ricouer, and others using other terms, have recalled to us the mature, midlife importance of such a second birth. But this individual experience and expression finds no foothold in today’s lesson. Our lesson, Matthew’s individual account of nativity, is told to honor the importance of a root in religious tradition. In the case of Matthew, this tradition is prophetic Judaism, as interpreted in late first century Koine Greek, perhaps by a Jewish Christian, but possibly also by a Gentile who knew and appreciated Judaism.

The Scripture clearly connects the meaning of the birth with the meaning of the name of the newborn, ‘one who will save his people from their sins’. Paul may speak of the Christ as the Lord of a new creation. Mark may affirm the Christ as hidden and crucified. John may herald the Christ at his coming as one with God, revealing God. But Matthew early and late acclaims the atonement wrought in Christ, the healing from past error, the steady saving removal to higher ground. He will save his people from their sins. This is a great hope, the hope of freedom, deliverance from what has hurt in the past. When such saving liberation occurs, there is a kind of second birth, a new lease on life, a new life. More particularly, in Matthew the second birth is a new lease on life for an older religion.

A Second Look at Religion

Something somehow has brought you to the kitchen on a Sunday morning. Here you are. Increasingly, given the pulpit from which I now preach, I am curious about the faithful lives of those who once came to church. I think about the many ways in which women and men are hurt in or by the life of the church. Given my vocation and my commitments, it can be somewhat difficult and painful so to meditate. I think of people who have had their children mistreated, or worse, by religious leaders. This would make one lastingly distrustful of the grammar of faith. Or, in another light, I think of those who themselves have been crushed, or worse, in the inevitable clashes of mind and heart in any real community, including the church. Looking from yet another angle, I think of those who have found their very humanity challenged, or worse, in the glacially slow growth to change in religious community. I think of those who have born the hurt of pastoral malfeasance. Many more there are, to look yet again at those who once went to church, who simply waited and waited for a true word, a courageous word, an honest word, and heard none. They grew old waiting for a real sermon, or at least a sermon they thought was a real sermon. I think of those who were given a small, tidy, false image of God, which lasted until the first large, messy, real experience of life. I think of those whose prayers were not answered, not even in the negative. And I think of those who simply could not any longer endure the ugliness, the willful lack of attention to glory and wonder and beauty. There are as many stories as there are empty pews in New England churches. Some of the stories I know. Others of the stories I can imagine. Still others of the stories I expect to hear.

Yet, here is a Christmas word. You are still listening, if you are listening. I am still preaching, for a few more minutes. And we are together, amid ordinary peelings and regular pulpit, to one side, and a sense of the Extraordinary on the other. Week by week, from the Marsh pulpit, I am reaching out to those who were born, once. People listen. Sometimes they respond. For all the sorrow, there is still, on your part, and on mine, and on others’, a listening ear, a willingness to tune in, a hard to articulate longing, a reaching toward…Another. What is that listening? What is that willingness? What is that longing?

One form of the second birth is here. One form. I could speak another day about a second naivete, a second birth of wonder, love and praise. But today, given this passage and given this congregation, virtual and actual, I muse with you about a second nativity, a second birth. The birth of a second sort of life, following after all the carnage of the first religious experience. A second religious birth, a second connection, a second opening. You would not listen if there were not some meager eagerness to wake up to…Another. Generosity, compassion, forgiveness—these are the hallmarks and doorways into that second birth. You have the heart to give something to others, generously to give something without expecting any personal
return. You have the spirit to be present with someone whose own spirit is sore, spiritually to walk with a fellow human being. You have the soul to forgive a past fault, whether it was thirty days or thirty years ago, mercifully to move on, and say so, and mean it. Your generosity, your compassion, your forgiveness—at least your longing for and leaning toward and listening to them—these are the natal cries of a second birth. You may be ready to practice religion, your real religion, again. Draw your lines before you set out. Determine, by list, what you will most desire. Determine, by list, what you will not accept. I desire rich music, strong preaching, evident kindness. I will not accept personal abuse, pedophilia, gay bashing. Draw your lines. Then set out.

Of course we invite you here. You know us. Our work protects the possibility of healthy non-fundamentalist ministry, in the next two generations. Non-fundamentalist ministry refers to that perspective on life and those habits of work enjoyed by those who love the Scripture, who honor the tradition, who admire the reason, and who respect actual experience. Rudolph Bultmann, John Wesley, Charles Darwin, and Howard Thurman come to mind: Bultmann on demythologization, Wesley on ordination, or Darwin on evolution, or Thurman on presence.

Coda

The sermon is almost done. How are you doing in the kitchen with the potatoes? It is a big world. Life is long. There is more to life than meets the eye. About this time of year, every year, we sing a carol about the birth of Christ, born to raise the sons of earth, born to give them second birth. Perhaps this year, the carol will be yours, sung from the heart.

On Wednesday, I walked late to the University Christmas party here at Boston University. I entered the packed hall to various greetings and smiles. Greetings a tad to various and more than the usual smiles. Had I seen the ten sleds decorated for competition? No I had not. More greetings, more smiles, a few little moments of happy laughter. I began to feel followed. In fact, I was. My friend drew me through the crowd. Then, with a woosh of surprise, the throng parted and there before me was Marsh Chapel. I mean a four foot sled decorated with Marsh Chapel made of marshmallows and ginger bread and licorice and chocolate. Those present today may see the decorated sled in the narthex. A group of administrators from the Metropolitan college had built it. They gathered in kitchens. Singing Christmas tunes they baked and cooked. They sampled the chapel as it came out of the oven. You could tell they loved doing so together. It was an emotional moment for me to see the true affection they have for their chapel, their chapel, and its architectural, symbolic, historical, physical and spiritual centrality in this college community of 40,000. They gathered. They sang. They worked. They ate. They found meaning. In baking the church, they came home to church, in their own way. You could call it a second birth, a new rebirth of basic religious rhythms. For all the sorrow, there is still, on your part, and on mine, and on others’, a listening ear, a willingness to tune in, a hard to articulate longing, a reaching toward…Another.

In the new year, you may be given a second birth, a new start on a real religious life. Howard Thurman would not be surprised:

When the song of the angel is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost

To heal the broken

To feed the hungry
To release the prisoner

To rebuild the nations
To bring peace among brothers and sisters
To make music in the heart.

posted in Uncategorized on 12.23.2007 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

By grace we pilgrim people are marching on toward a common hope.

The symbolic breadth of Isaiah and Mark’s sharp challenge to service tell us so.

One

In the first place, come Sunday and come to think of it, we are inextricably tangled up with each other. We are walking together. You are yourself and your circumstance, your identity is your situated identity. Ortega perseveres. Nearby to this place of worship are bruised brothers and sisters.

Nearby to this place of worship there is a lone woman raising two daughters and working two jobs. Nearby to this place of worship there is an older man dancing to his death around a bottle. Nearby to this place of worship there is a 19 year old, coming of age, large of body and empty in soul. Nearby to this place of worship there lives a brilliant, bitter bigot. Nearby to this place of worship there are athletes whose greatness longs and yearns for a commensurate grace. Nearby to this place are people who bite and devour one another, careless that they might be consumed by one another.

These folks are your situation. They are you. It barely needs saying, but a sermon is about saying, so: if you find meaning here, bring someone with you; if you find fellowship here, bring someone with you; if you find power here, bring someone with you. And if you find these not, you should another place where you do. We pilgrims are marching toward a common hope—shared in simplicity, simple in its sharing.

Two

In the second place, day by day and week by week, in our own experience, we together are ‘crossing the river’. You only cross a river once. Every day this globe gets noticeable smaller. You do not get to Bethlehem, in any of its forms, without a dose of the river Jordan. Stonewall Jackson died saying ‘let us cross over the river and rest in the shade of the trees’. It fits. On toward a common hope we walk, but to get there we cross over the river. The river Jordan, deep and cold…The river whose streams make glad the City of God…The riverside, down along which we lay down sword and shield, we put on long white robe…The deep river, home, milk, honey, on the other side.

Speaking of the river, as I walked along the banks of Charles last month, trudging over for to Harvard toward a word of common hope, the first 2007 Noble Lecture, the river, a hope shimmering and light, both electric and cosmic, spoke up from the dark reflective river. I had to be careful to listen to the night, while remembering to be careful about the relationships between pedestrians and motorists, the stronger and weaker, and the function of symbols, both de jure and de facto. (Red means stop? Suggests stop? Implies stop?) Symbol and service hovered Tuesday evening, but the river still spoke. To paraphrase an earlier Dean of Marsh Chapel, Howard Thurman: ‘The river and the night together surrounded my little life with a reassurance that could not be affronted by the behavior of human beings. The river at night gave me a sense of timelessness, of existing beyond the reach of the ebb and flow of circumstances. Death would be a minor thing, I felt, in the sweep of that natural embrace.’

The lectures that week illumined, lightened our darkness. How could we not be thankful? I am grateful to Rev. Professor Gomes for hosting each year these important lectures, and inviting three of us to respond. He chose a timely teacher. Is it not remarkable that such a voice as our speaker’s has come along, in full measure, at just the time in world history when her insight and imagination have been needed and appreciated? She has brought light to the vast night dimness in this land about religions, religion, world religions, other religions. We have needed, we need more of this light.

Our speaker was Karen Armstrong.

Perhaps we could briefly express also the gratitude of many lay people and clergy in recent years who have benefited from her work. Many have read her comprehensive religious history, A HISTORY OF GOD which traces the development of monotheism, from its inception to the present. Study groups have used her A BATTLE FOR GOD which traces the history of religious fundamentalism. Fundamentalism she shows is a modern movement in that it is reacting to aspects of modernism. Ministers and priests have read with profit her histories of BUDDHISM, and ISLAM, her ONE CITY THREE FAITHS, a history of Jerusalem. I am right now enjoying her memoir THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE. In writing that is clear, concise, readable and understandable, she has become a trusted public voice for those who are outside of organized religion, as well as for those within it. She has done her part to address the problem of American religious illiteracy, a problem analyzed and addressed with frequency on both sides of this river. After 9/11 she gave many people a balanced, clear conception of religious history, showing some of the historical, cultural, theological and other reasons for the way things occur, and so giving this emerging generation a move through the world instead of being stuck. Indeed, “no ideology is adequate to the desperate needs of this frightening and transitional period in history”.

We in academia have no need or reason to disparage those doing the hard work of synthesizing and communicating the rudiments of religious traditions in ways that lead to a common hope. Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Huston Smith and others need those in the following ranks to continue to convey a common hope.

Her work comes readily to mind as we here again the seasonal citation of Isaiah and the seasonal condemnation of John the Baptist.

Three

For in the third place, our scriptural inheritance helps us on toward a common hope.

Symbol, hope filled symbol, is Isaiah’s hymn. So unlikely, this grand hope, yet here it is. So unearthly, this great hope, yet here it is on earth. So untamed, this giant hope, and yet here it is.

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb

And the leopard shall lie down with the kid

And the calf and the lion and the fatling together

And a little child shall lead them

The cow and the bear shall feed

Their young shall lie down together

And the lion shall eat straw like the ox

The sucking child shall put his hand on the adder’s dean.

They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain;

For the earth shall be full of the glory of God

As the waters cover the sea.

Service, fruit befitting repentance, is John’s interest. There he is again, out along the river. You can’t miss him. Dressed in camel’s hair. Feasting on locusts and wild honey. Growling, shrieking in the cold wild outback. Strong hard words. Prepare. Make. Straight. All Jerusalem went. All Judea went. All the region went.

Our three evenings of conversation last month, across the river, about mystery and mercy inspired, or provoked, several responses. In fact, the invitational and dialogical spirit of the lectures directly encouraged such responses. Think of some of the more memorable comments along the way: ‘humans need the search for meaning to be human’; ‘scripture teaches nothing but charity’; ‘we need to embrace our own a-theism’. And think of the memorable phrases as well: ‘unskillful atheism’; ‘proselytizing theism’; ‘cellphone captivity’; ‘endless invention’. I made such a response. It was an Advent response, one part Isaiah and one part Mark, one part sprawling symbol and one part jarring service.

Four

In the fourth place, our march toward a common hope, shared and simple, asks something of us in our time. Life so lived, leaning toward hope, especially asks of us a reselection of symbols and a recommitment to service.

The dual emphasis upon mystery and charity, within these lectures, recalls the corrective and interpretative lines of 1 John 4, written 1900 years ago as a re-reading of the Gospel of John itself. While affirming the piercingly high Christology of the Fourth Gospel, the author of 1 John unites two sharp contrasts, in the fourth chapter of that epistle. “No one has ever seen God”. Symbol—open, apophatic, symbol. “Let us love one another”. Service—the challenge for personal service. In fact as Amos Wilder (the 1956 Noble lecturer) renders the passage: ‘one who does not love has not even begun to know God’.

We have been steadily and warmly invited into relationship. In that spirit I here identify two openings for further conversation, two footnotes to all that has been said, one about symbol and one about service.

With symbol, we are reminded of Chesterton’s remark that ‘the world does not lack for wonders, but only for a sense of wonder’. With service, we are reminded of Ghandi’s remark that ‘to the hungry God must appear if at all as food’. The first captures the message of religion as symbol, the second the message of religion as service.

First, symbol.

We are encouraged selectively to consider our selection of symbols, ‘to selectively choose those elements that will inspire a counter narrative of compassion.’ This may mean some shifting of emphasis for us in our choice of primary symbols. For instance, one primary contemporary religious symbol is the rainbow. Given the emphasis presented in these evenings, as people of faith, perhaps we should be shifting our symbolic focus from the rainbow to the firmament, from promise to mystery, from covenant to creation, from Noah (and Abraham, Moses, David, and Jeremiah) to Adam, from Genesis 9 to Genesis 1, from religious symbols, symbols of community and covenant, ironically, to life symbols, unreligious symbols, post-confessional symbols, and, in WC Smith’s phrase, “a world theology”, though not, of course, a ‘world religion’. At Boston University, you will find dear, close colleagues, partners in this project, both with regard to mystery and with regard to charity. Some espouse an apophatic theology, some strongly affirm the centrality of the imagination, some publicly affirm the therapeutic value of religious literacy. In our interpretation and preaching we have tried to recall the elements of our shared experience which inspire a common faith, a common ground, and a common hope. In our experience we share many things, as we have sung before:

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

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

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

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

We all age, and after forty, and as my friend says, after forty its maintenance, maintenance, maintenance. All six billion.

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

Our selection of central symbols may shift in this ‘frightening transitional period’.

For instance, think about the biblical language of heaven. Heavenly language and imagery draw us on toward a common hope. Look by cybermagic this afternoon at Jonathan Edwards sermon on heaven. We think of hell when we think of Edwards. But his sermon on heaven is surprisingly heavenly. We could use in our time his cadence of common hope.

I am convicted and astounded by the power of Edward’s symbolic speech about heaven. His more contentious, critical and ornery passages I pass by. But his writing on heaven is heavenly. Heaven is a world of love, he preaches, with four applications. Contention and strife make us less fit for heaven. Possession of such a common hope makes us happy—happy for regeneration, happy to have such a hope, happy to work hard to be worthy of it. Such a real hope alarms everything unheavenly in us. So let us earnestly seek heaven, a common hope: less indulgence, more exercise, some persevereance, keen hope and this conclusion:

If you would be in the way to the world of love, see that you live a life of love — of love to God, and love to men. All of us hope to have part in the world of love hereafter, and therefore we should cherish the spirit of love, and live a life of holy love here on earth. This is the way to be like the inhabitants of heaven, who are now confirmed in love forever. Only in this way can you be like them in excellence and loveliness, and like them, too, in happiness, and rest, and joy. By living in love in this world you may be like them, too, in sweet and holy peace, and thus have, on earth, the foretastes of heavenly pleasures and delights. Thus, also, you may have a sense of the glory of heavenly things, as of God, and Christ, and holiness; and your heart be disposed and opened by holy love to God, and by the spirit of peace and love to men, to a sense of the excellence and sweetness of all that is to be found in heaven. Thus shall the windows of heaven be as it were opened, so that its glorious light shall shine in upon your soul. Thus you may have the evidence of your fitness for that blessed world, and that you are actually on the way to its possession. And being thus made meet, through grace, for the inheritance of the saints in light, when a few more days shall have passed away, you shall be with them in their blessedness forever. Happy, thrice happy those, who shall thus be found faithful to the end, and then shall be welcomed to the joy of their Lord! There “they shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and lead them to living fountains of waters, and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.”

Reselect your symbols with an eye to the common hope.

Second, service.

As Karen Armstrong argued with regard to Genesis 1, religious insight comes often in rebuttal of popular, or current perspectives. Hence, the two creation accounts of Genesis, read with a kind of mirror reading, reject the Babylonian creation myths. Creation is about peace not conflict. We are offered a therapeutic cosmology. God saw everything created, and it was good. Today, it may be that both imagination and sheer creativity together will provide a healing, and fruitful interpretation both of scripture and of life. Thought and word, that is, may have to give way to deed, to service, for the creation myth to be heard as creative. One example involves our predicament in Iraq. Theological perspectives about our catastrophe in Iraq, great thoughts, were offered and ignored, over these five years. Preaching in many pulpits, strong words, were uttered and forgotten, over these five years. Thought. Word. Now it may be the time for deed. In specific, as we are considering across the river in your sister church, it may be the hour for communities of faith to look hard at the 2.5 million Iraqi refugees displaced and worse by our hubris, and do something about them. We may need to do some theology before we write any more theology. Charity may require, well, charity. Another example comes from the work and life of the interfaith youth movement. They are practicing the truth of what has been spoken here. They too affirm that belief which does not imitate God’s benevolence is sterile, that scripture is a parable of compassion leading to an experience of the divine, that we want to transcend resentment (or in Niehbuhr’s phrase, to ‘develop a spiritual discipline against resentment). But their miqra, their summons to action, is service itself. Discussion of symbols and scriptures is done after, and on the basis of, the shared experience of service to the poor.

The central significance of service may expand in this ‘frightening and transitional period of history.’

Today I again challenge this congregation, actual and virtual, to pray with earnest discernment about our place in the hard coming work of refugee resettlement. Several of you know have responded. Next Sunday there is a meeting, across the river, for which Br. Larry is seeking participants. Let your life speak.

Recommit to service as the shared basis for a shared common hope.

Five

In the fifth place, and lastly, symbol and service have no better friend than Marsh chapel and its root and branch, from Little and Thurman, through Roberts one to five, and well on into the future

The symbolic breadth of Isaiah and Matthew’s sharp challenge to service tell us so.

They remind us: Bear fruit worthy of repentance. They remind us: The earth shall be full of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.

posted in Uncategorized on 12.9.2007 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 21: 25-36

“Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and … the worries of this life…be alert at all times”

In the kitchen this morning, it may be, there is a man watching and listening. It is a distracted watching and a listless listening, to be sure. Loss and depression take there toll, and why wouldn’t I be over his death after two years anyway? Come Sunday, another Sunday morning, and here I am and here she is not.

The nibbling joys of Sunday stay. Coffee. A pastry. The radio carrying music and word, popular and religious. Newspapers strewn. Attending church in slippers. The comforting sameness of the radio that has been on, he does not flinch to notice it, all day and all night and all day and all night. A presence, in the dark.

Now the days are short, and with the gray sky and the shorten day, the season seems like an endless Bergman film, gray and clouded.

You may know this good person. You may be he, or he you. Or not. He is struggling with, wrestling against despair, which sometimes feels like—he remembers the recent obituary of William Styron—what Styron called ‘the despair beyond despair’ (NYTimes, 10.18.06). He earned the naming rights.

Now in this smaller, suburban home, there is a view of the field beyond. Today, windswept, stubbled, empty. He turns back to the paper. The radio carries tune and phrase, now a talk show, now a recording, now a worship service.

He wonders a moment about the difference between being lonely and being alone.

Then—it takes an effort—to the newspaper again. But concentration falters. It is an up hill climb. The gaiety of shopping, here, and the carnage of war, there, sitting side by each, column by column, like eggs and bacon on a worn platter. How can this have come to pass? One in seven of our young people has killed, by accident, a civilian. 3000 have died, on our side. 15,000 serious casualties. 50,000 on the other. And no easy way forward or backward or out. He thinks of her neighbor’s son, just finished at West Point.

The blanket of despond settles ever thicker on top of distraction and listlessness.

“Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation …and the worries of this life…be alert at all times”

The hymn sung in the service, just there, reminds him of fifty years ago, when they were young and living in the city of Boston, now a two hour drive away. On Sunday they would make a circuit. One day to hear Howard Thurman at the Marsh Chapel. One day to Trinity Episcopal and Theodore Ferris. One day across the river to Harvard Memorial Church and George Buttrick. It was a time of hope! It was time of a common hope! Where had it gone?

His spouse, a Presbyterian by temperament, preferred Buttrick. Where was that collection of sermons? There. He pulls it down, and finds the underline passage. And the line she loved to quote from Buttrick, “we should not know hope had we not known despair” (Sermons from a University Pulpit, 56).

Now the sermon of the service has commenced, a newer voice, flat vowels, slower cadence, middle Atlantic sound. There is the announcement, at Advent, of an overture to a New Covenant. On a reliable hope hangs our future, says this less familiar voice. He is glad to have had the apocalyptic myth, from the ancient church, explained a week before. This past language and imagery, metaphorically so curiously modern, but theologically now empty. The world did not end in the first century, thank God! And all our sins, tragedies, and errors, will not themselves end it in the 21^st, though we must make haste to make peace.

And the memory of fifty years past, and the hint of honesty and hope in the radio sound, and the flood of recognition, in gratitude, for each day.

As Styron also wrote, the one creditable thing about depression is that, in many cases, it can be conquered (ibid).

“Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation… and the worries of this life…be alert at all times”

The service, its music and word, hum along in background. He is on the bridge, the service in the stern. The wind out on the bay is rough, carrying the salt from the sea, and in its memories carrying the salt of many wounds.

One of the service hymns reminds him of another. Finlandia. They were singing in the great Trinity Cathedral those years ago…

This is my song, O God of all the nations,
A song of peace for lands afar and mine.
This is my home, the country where my heart is;
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine;
But other hearts in other lands are beating
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

My country's skies are bluer than the ocean,
And sunlight beams on clover-leaf and pine.
But other lands have sunlight too and clover,
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
Oh, hear my song, O God of all the nations,
A song of peace for their land and for mine.

There is hope in every prayer. He feels a coursing hope moving through his mind for the moment. He puts a note on the refrigerator: Hope—a daily prayer.

Hope gives way to thought.

He sees again the book of poetry about which he had been thinking. Seamus Heaney:

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.

History says, Don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme

In the distance the preacher’s voice hums along on the radio.

There is that feeling. A feeling of absolute dependence? A feeling of full acceptance? A feeling of freedom? Old names from her studies in religion swirl around like leaves—Schleiermacher, Tillich, ML King. A prayer, a thought, a deed. Ways to live in hope. To pray, each day. To think, each week. To act, each month.

He is free, unlike the pew bound, to bounce up and flick through a well worn collection of family readings. In those years they would make clippings when something heard, or something in the paper stood out.

He puts a second note on the refrigerator: Hope: a daily thought.

Hope gives way to thought. Thought gives way to deed.

He thumbs along, thumbing through the yellowed clippings.

Here is one from South Africa. Now his thought wanders to all that has happened, and peaceably, there…

Didn’t he read just recently about laws to protect a broad freedom to marry like those in his own state? He muses: Canada, Belgium, Netherlands, Spain, South Africa, Massachusetts—all the great, free lands…

Great lands of great minds past:

Pierre Eliot Trudeau (luck is when preparation and opportunity meet…neighboring the USA is like sleeping next to an Elephant*)

Baruch Spinoza (Peace is not the absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice*)

Miguel de Unamuno (Warmth, warmth warmth! We are dying of cold, not of darkness. It is not the night that kills, but the frost*)

Nelson Mandela (I am not truly free, if I am taking away someone else’s freedom*),

And then the words of a Bay State native, Robert F Kennedy, Cape Town, 6/66, forty years old…

We must recognize the full human equality of all of our people before God, before the law, and in the councils of government. We must do this, not because it is economically advantageous, although it is; not because of the laws of God command it, although they do; not because people in other lands wish it so. We must do it for the single and fundamental reason that it is the right thing to do*. (* RAH notes)

A third note he puts on the refrigerator: Hope: A daily deed.

And what shall I do?

Attend a meeting

Write a letter

Sign a check

Listen to an adversary

Visit a victim

Offer a gift

Forgive an assailant

“Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation …and the worries of this life…be alert at all times”

Now the choir has lifted its voice in praise. There is the cascading beauty of the blended voices.

Says he, to no one present, to one in particular.

‘I have known despair and I have known hope. Both. And well. And I shall them both again. Both. And well. But I will set my sail, into the teeth of the off shore wind. And I will live in hope. In daily prayer. In daily thought. In daily deed.’

We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed

Perplexed, but not driven to despair

Persecuted, but not forsaken

Struck down, but not destroyed (2 Cor. 4: 6)

posted in Uncategorized on 12.3.2007 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Matthew 24: 36-44

Advent 1, Bach Cantata, Eucharist

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

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

Jesus. Jesus may have used this phrase, though over late night refreshment in 1997 Marcus Borg once pushed hard that it is a later church appellation. It may have been both. This phrase, coming out Daniel chapter 7 (did Jesus hear this read and hold it in memory?) and the stock Jewish apocalyptic of Jesus’ day, was as much a part of his environment as the sandals on his feet, the donkey which he rode, the Aramaic which he spoke, the Palestinian countryside which he loved, and the end of time which he expected, in the contemporary generation. Did he understand himself to be that figure? We cannot see and we cannot say, though I think it unlikely. It is Mark and the author Enoch who have given us the ‘Son of Man’ in its full sense, and it is Matthew alone among the Gospel writers who use the ‘coming’ in a technical sense (so Perrin, IBDS 834). The soprano voice of Jesus is far lighter in the gospel choruses than we would think or like.

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

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

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

To conclude. As soon as we reach out to grasp the future it has slipped past us, already flying down the road to the rear, into the past. The present itself is no better, because its portions of past and future are tangled permanently together. We do have the past, neither dead nor past, or do we? Memory and memoir spill into each other with the greatest of ease. One agnostic admitted that music, performed, was his closest approximation of God, the presence of God, the proof of God. We shall listen in a moment with rapt attention. One trusted Christian—it may have been you—sensed grace and grace in the grace of the Eucharist, unlike any other. We shall taste in a moment and see. The moment is a veritable mystery. Music is a veritable mystery. My body and My blood, these are veritable mysteries, so named mystery, sacramentum, to this day. How shall we respond?

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

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

posted in Uncategorized on 12.2.2007 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Park Ridge Community Church

Park Ridge, Illinois

Anne and Ben.

This is a day of new beginnings.

Dressed up ourselves, we are dressing up this day, this very evening hour, in the costumes and customs meant for such a new beginning. You feel it. In the pricey corsages. In the beauty of the ladies. In the shoes, polished. In the haircuts. In the nervous musicians. In those who are cutting a fashion edge, and in those who aren’t. In the mayhem, merriment, mischief, misunderstanding and mystery of marriage. Your marriage is an evening of new beginnings.

For the gathered congregation, who are less visible and so less stressed than the bridal couple and party, it is possible to sense and see in this new beginning a reflection of others. You mirror other first moments. Some will remember your births, like all births, your crinkly pink emergence from water into light. Others will recall a first day at school, a first trip away overnight, a first injury, a first failure or success. They will link this moment to other beginnings. Yours and theirs.

We will let them have a moment to do so. We will let the congregation reminisce for a moment as we up front here together announce the good news, declare the gospel, of a new beginning.

1 John and Matthew 5 bring a startling word. It is a new word. God is not known in power but in love, says John. The blessed are not the strong but the weak, says Matthew. The poor, including the poor in spirit. The mourners, the meek, the hungry and thirsty, including those hungry for the good. The merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted, including those persecuted for a good cause. It has been fifty years since there has been a generation committed to the least, the last, and the lost. You just may change that. It will take work in public policy and in law, a lifetime or two of such labor. Yes, John and Matthew acclaim a new good, a good news. John’s wording, rightly rendered, cuts very close to the bone. He who does not love has not begun to know God (trans. A. Wilder). We are met this evening by a divine presence, good—eternally good, new—eternally new. Good. News.

Some from the congregation, though, reverie lifting for a moment, may wonder…

Is there really anything new? Including right now, is there really anything new? Here and now even? I have been to this service before. I have heard these words before. I have heard this preacher before. Didn’t I see him at some other wedding? I might even have heard this sermon before. Is he using old material? I feel like I’ve been here before. Generations come and go. Rapidly. The sun rises and sets. Repeatedly. Youth gives way to age, the limber and the nubile stepping aside for the lumbering and the nettled. Regularly. “Once in a thousand times, it is interesting” wrote Thornton Wilder. Doubt shadows faith, like Ecclesiastes follows Isaiah: “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun…Is there anything of which it is said, ‘See, this is new’? It has already been, in the ages before”. All that, by the way, is in the Bible. Doubt, a realistic, hard, cross examination of life, is a part of faith. It is bass note and grace note in the song of faith. And when old habits cling, and when old hurts linger, and when old conflicts flare, and when old disappointments appear, we wonder—it is a bone heart cry—we wonder just what exactly is new about anything.

We will let the congregation cogitate on that for a moment, while we listen to the mysterious gospel song again. They can think about doubt for a while. We will let them. After all, they brought it up.

Is there anything new?

I am convinced that you two, at least, believe so. Otherwise, you would not have had the temerity, the courage, to stand here. Where did this courage, con fide, come from? Somewhere. You have been loved. So you can love. You have been trusted. So you can trust. You have been respected. So you may in turn respect, trust and love one another. There is plenty of reason for your courage and your confidence in what is new. You feel it, for one thing. You have known something new in your own experience. A glance across a crowded restaurant, a new face, and you are mesmerized. The new discovery of mutually loved habits and values, and you are enthralled. The experience of newly shared simply joys—exercise, nature, fishing, camping—and you are emboldened. You know what Paul felt, if not fully yet what he meant: “the old has passed away, behold the new has come”.

The ‘new’ of biblical faith lives on the far side of the old, not the near side but the far side of the old. You might call this faith something real new. New that has weathered a good shellacking of the old.

Faith admits, faces, and endures the old. And moves through and moves on. Jacob believed in something new and said, ‘surely the Lord was in this place and we knew it not’. He walked in wonder, but he walked with a limp. Ruth believed in something new and said, ‘entreat me not to leave you or to turn back from following after you. For where you go I will go and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people will be my people, and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried.’ Ruth committed herself. But to enter the new she had to lose the old, even at the cost of homesickness. Paul, idiosyncratic enervating Paul, believed in a new creation, and so delighted in a new life. ‘Let love be genuine…’ He had faith in the new, but it was new born from and bearing up under the old
. With limping Jacob and homesick Ruth and oddball Paul, you have faith in something new. At least I think you do. And you are now saying that you do.

You know, I sense that the non-sleeping part of the congregation grudgingly agrees. They have to admit it. Here is the hint of something new in a vow taken. Here is a glimpse of something new in a ring offered. Here is a glimpse of something new in a handshake, handclasp, prayer and kiss. Your novel hospitality has brought us from Michigan in the north and Dallas in the south, from Boston in the east and San Diego in the west, from the banks of the Erie Canal (Albany, Utica, Oneida, Syracuse, Rochester) to the Wisconsin lake shore, from the country roads of West Virginia to the barbecue pits of Kansas City, and has included a cloud of witnesses from Depauw and Ohio Wesleyan. Someone even came from London. London, England that is. What has brought us all this way?

Something new!

A new creation. A holy estate. A mystical union. Something adorned and beautified …

This is a day, an hour, an evening of new beginnings.

Something new.

posted in Uncategorized on 11.3.2007 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

John 1:1 and Lectionary Passages

Opening

AND God stepped out on space,

And He looked around and said,

“I’m lonely—

I’ll make me a world.”

And far as the eye of God could see

Darkness covered everything,

Blacker than a hundred midnights

Down in a cypress swamp.

Then God smiled,

And the light broke,

And the darkness rolled up on one side,

And the light stood shining on the other,

And God said, “That’s good!”

(James Weldon Johnson 1922)

Start Fresh

Well begun is half done. Gut begonnen, hapt gebonnen. Your first day on the job includes rhythms, histories, personalities and systems that will accompany you until retirement. Your first month of marriage includes stories, histories, encounters, and disagreements that will span the lifespan of the life of the marriage. Your first week on campus will expose you to a place, a time, a community and a history which will change you far more than you will change it. Picture the extended family crowded in the evening around the cradle of a newborn.

A true joy of university life is matriculation. In one sense, the world is reborn every September, reborn in spirit and reborn in flesh. It is thunderous to hear 4000 18 year olds and a few scattered, well outnumbered faculty and staff, create the new year with a roar. It echoes all the way from Monday morning through today.

On Monday we applauded the young men and women. Many wore T-shirts. As a liturgical observance, a place that is where the work of the people is seen under the aspect of eternity, my colleague and I read out the statements. Many simply named a club, a town, a team, or a project. Marsh Chapel, read one shirt. But the great wave of announcements continued well beyond group identities. Save the Sudan…So many books, so little time…Big Love…Red Sox (this is a religious affirmation in our region)…Make cupcakes not war…The Grateful Dead (really!)...A heart strangely warmed and a community warmly strange…Devil says: God is busy, may I help you?...My colleague said he was going to market a shirt reading, ‘Stop marketing silly T-Shirts’. I thought those of you present today, and the many listening from afar, might enjoy feeling the pulsing power of thousands of young lives, ready to start fresh. Fresh men and women.

There is a divine energy, a creative energy, pulsing in the start of something. To this energy, the Psalmist sings as he offers a blessing upon meditation, reading, and the reading of Torah, by one who so becomes ‘like a tree planted by streams of water, in all that she does, she prospers’. Start well. It matters.

Our community was blessed by one who himself has been planted by streams of waters, and has prospered. Sir Hans spoke clearly about beginning. Like Zaccheus, he is a diminutive don. I am a scientist—more precisely a microbiologist. You might think, looking at me, that a micro biologist is a small biologist, but it actually means that I do research, using bacteria as test organisms. By doing research I am not only trying to discover new things, but I am publicly proclaiming that I am ignorant. If I knew the answer, I obviously would not need to do research. In other words, your Professors are still students, just as you are—the only difference is that they have been at it rather longer. Let me remind you that there is a world of difference between ‘I don’t know’ and “I don’t know but I am trying to find out”.

It is this creative energy, a divine donation in our midst, which gives us the courage to start fresh. We do not know every place the journey will take us. But we are trying to find our way. You do not need to know the whole story to get started. In your faith journey, you need not finally have concluded just where you want to land your little boat. But begin. In one sense, for the 21^st century, there is simply no better place to start your spiritual journey than in a university setting.

Nor do we need to have a fully finished picture of God, to begin our journey. God is not one of the aspects or features of our world, not an item or a value or a virtue or a plant or a decoration. We are well warned from history not to start with an image of God that is really an idol. God gives the conditions for life, but may not be identifie
d with any solitary aspect of life.

As John Kennedy put it, “All of this will not be finished in the first hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.”

Start Fresh!

Start Over

Still, every solitary beginning, which we might name in our hearts, is not ever fully solitary nor completely a beginning either. Sometimes to start is more to start over. Immanuel Kant, across the craggy, beautiful and arid expanse of his Critique of Pure Reason, argued that the ultimate role of the reason to understand itself, to apprehend itself, through time and space, and so to guard itself. From what? From misuse, from misunderstanding, from misapplication. He too feared pride, sloth and falsehood, as we do too. So, we might say in parallel fashion, the role of religion is ultimately to watch over itself, to keep itself from harming itself and others. That requires not merely starting, but also starting over. To begin is to begin again.

The greatest of the prophets, Jeremiah, tells us so, in unmistakable terms. His figure is the potter and vessel, his hope is in the capacity in life to start over. More: the potter is the divine design against evil, the pressure in life and history to learn from what is wrong, and so to learn again what is right. Here is a hidden gospel. If you know evil, at least, by inversion, we may learn to know good.

Our student matriculation speaker caught the new beginning spirit, the starting over, the excitement of trying again. I was so moved by his speech that I asked his permission to quote him this morning, as I had done with Sir Hans. Adil Younis, who gave the student address, is with us today. I wanted to stand up and shout! Amen! Not just because Adil mentioned ML King. Not only because he aptly quoted Howard Thurman. Not merely because he mentioned Marsh Chapel. (All very honorable things to have mentioned, mind you.) Friends give you back your real self. Adil gives Marsh Chapel a reminder of who we are supposed to become, in the hands of the divine potter: I challenge you to discover what ideals that have been fostered here at Boston University for generations are most import to you. For me it has always been Boston University’s innovational history and its relationship to the city.

Boston University is in the heart of the city of Boston and in that sense we are in service to the city. When I first came to the Boston University campus what struck me most was Marsh Chapel and how it serves as a non-denominational place of worship. For me, coming from Lebanon where religion is often a cause for conflict that was a really powerful thing and it is something I hope to take back to my community one day. I also like to think that one of the greatest dream in American History may have begun right here on the Charles River Campus, but it certainly did culminate with Martin Luther King Jr. sharing his dream with millions of people on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

I challenge you to discover what your dreams are and to begin pursuing them here at Boston University.

I would like to leave you with a quotation. One that you may have heard before, but nonetheless truly embodies the spirit of Boston University. A quotation by Howard Thurman: Do not ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

Start over!

Jump Start

There are some times and places in life where a start requires a jump start.

We learned to drive in the frozen snow of the northern reaches of New York State. To learn early to ‘jump’ the car, with the help of others and cables and a strong source of energy, was a necessity not a luxury.

Sometimes, in the journey of learning to live, there are points that require a sudden jolt, a burst of spirit and energy, a jump start. John Dempster, who started Boston University as a school for Methodist ministers, and who grew up in upstate New York, adroitly brought such sudden starts to new projects. In the heart of Luke’s gospel, today, we hear a similar word. Here Jesus is depicted as jolting his hearers. To start down the road of discipleship some may need to hear the jolting word of separation from first identity, as a prerequisite to second birth, or the birth of a second identity, or becoming a real human being. Bear the cross. Count the cost. Leave kindred and even life. These are stern and sharp words. They jolt. They jump. They inflame. To start some engines, especially in the cooler climates, a jump start may be required. A word of sober caution, a word of mature warning, a word of challenge.

A couple of years ago, my colleague and friend Robert Neville said as much, at a time of another beginning: ‘Our text from Ecclesiastes however says that “better is the end of a thing than its beginning”. Dramatic openings are fine, filled with large choices. But life is lived in the living, not the starting, and we do not know how to assess it until the end…Success…will be measured in large part by the management of prosperity and adversity as dual gifts of God”. Sober caution and a word of mature warning and a word of challenge.

There are perils in sudden starts. But t
here are perils, too, when sudden starts are avoided. A sudden decision is not necessarily a hasty one, prepared as it may have been by earlier experience, sincere prayer, personal courage, and collegial support. Still, the high voltage and energy burst of sudden starts warrants sobriety and caution.

A day of new beginnings is a day of good news. In the faith of Jesus Christ, you are given courage to start. To start fresh, to start over, to jump start. I will not complain if someone hears this as a Trinity of creation, redemption, and inspiration. For there is a blessing in beginnings, enshrined in the Fourth Gospel at its very outset: “In the beginning, was the Word”. The presence, voice, person, relationship, power, love of God were—from the beginning. So we believe…

Coda

We believe in God who has created and is creating

Who has come in the true person, Jesus, to reconcile and to make new, who works in us and others by the Spirit.

We trust God.

God calls us to be the church, the Body of Christ.

To celebrate Christ’s presence.

To love and serve others.

To seek justice and resist evil.

To proclaim Jesus, crucified and risen, our judge and our hope.

In life, in death, in life beyond death,
God is with us.

We are not alone.
Thanks be to God.

posted in Matriculation, The Courageous Gospel, Uncategorized on 09.9.2007 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

John 21: 12

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

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

John Stewart Mill once wrote that understanding the chemistry of a pink sunset did not diminish at all his profound sense of wonder at sunset beauty. In fact, we might add, real understanding heightens true apprehension. In such a spirit, we might note that chapter 21 in John, the breakfast chronicle, is probably not original to the gospel. A later writer (he leaps out in the first person singular in vs. 22) has added this breakfast scene. (Three such additions were also made to Mark, as you know) So, you veteran John readers have reason to scratch your head in chapter 21. The gospel has no use for sacraments. Chapter 21 is a Eucharistic feast. The gospel has no happy place for Peter. Peter stars in Chapter 21. The gospel champions the beloved disciple. The beloved disciple is less beloved and less disciple in Chapter 21. The gospel abounds in a philosophical vocabulary: light, life, spirit, love, knowledge, truth. Chapter 21 counts fish—153. The gospel makes nary an ethical claim upon its reader. Its voice is indicative. Chapter 21 is a command wrapped in a directive shrouded in an order. Its voice is imperative. The gospel ends in 20:31, “these things are written that you may believe”. Chapter 21 is an ending without an ending.

Our inspired writer stands in a long tradition of concern for relationships and fellowship. Jeremiah thrashes his hearers for drinking polluted water, drawn from what does not feed and does not slake, apart from relationship with the living Lord. The psalmist gives a divine voice to a plea for the basis of relationship, a listening ear, a trained capacity to listen, in love. The gospel of Luke again arranges the concerns of the religious life around a common table. Who is excluded? Invite them. Who is humbled? Exalt them. Who is disgraced? Honor them.

John is a meta-gospel. His is a gospel’s gospel, a gospel in which themes like those in Luke are reprised. John is in a way a gospel about the gospel, a concluding gospel in which the nature of the gospel and of written Gospels is addressed.

Yet this chapter 21 has been roughly—crudely?—added to make a wondrous point, to underscore John 3:14, ‘the word became flesh’. Real religion is about relationships, too. Prize them. You will find a beloved pastor, sometime in your life, someone with whom to share an intimate breakfast. At least one of your siblings may become a friend, or an approximation thereof—a breakfast looms. Hardly a student escapes college without befriending or being befriended by a teacher. This happened even way back when before Facebook. Breakfast fodder. Who is to say whether you may fall in love this autumn? Take the boy to breakfast.

Don’t you ever wonder when the preacher goes on about such a topic—relationships, for example—whether she or he ever had any such? You look at the preacher’s Facebook page and he has only three friends, two of whom are relatives, paid to sign up. It makes you wonder.

Well, thirty years ago, some of us were befriended, if from afar. A former chaplain at Williams, become Yale Chapel Dean had then come to preach near our seminary. It is, I note, he who first in my hearing used the sermon title pronounced today, ‘Breakfast with Jesus’. I have not a single memory of the content of sermon, but the title stuck. And I have only a smattering of memories of actual events and deeds in those years. But the friendship, the sense of having been befriended, from a venerable pulpit, by a good preacher, in a true way, the relationship remains. Even post-mortem. At the end of this Eucharistic homily, I shall quote from his book CREDO. What William Sloane Coffin meant to one generation, we can mean to another. But it does not happen without relationships.

Autumn is the start of the New Year, in Judaism and in Academia, and in University congregations and communities like this one. Welcome home choir! This is a day of new beginnings. The promise of resurrection is upon us. Its harbinger is Holy Communion. Resurrection disarms fear. Resurrection ignores defeat. Resurrection displaces and replaces loneliness. Resurrection will not abide the voice that whispers, “There’s nothing extraordinary here. There’s no reason for gaiety, excitement, sobriety or wonder.” Resurrection will not abide the easy and the cheap. Resurrection takes a daybreak catch, a charcoal fire, a dawn mist, fish, bread, and hungry, weary travelers, and reveals the Lord present. Resurrection takes bread and wine and makes an encounter with God.

The failing of this world, whether we see it more clearly in the superstition of religion, the idolatry of politics, or the hypocrisy of social life, has its root in blindness to the extraordinary. But hear—and today taste—the good news! The King of love his table spreads. And the humblest meal –breakfast—the worst meal of the day the worst hour of the day and everyone at there worst--becomes—Breakfast
with Jesus!

Therefore Christian people, as we take this sacrament, as we enjoy the gift of this day, and as we work and fight, play and pray this week, let us resist with joy all that cheapens life, all that dishonors God, all that mistakes our ordinary sin for the extraordinary love, power, mercy and grace of God.

As an old friend, William Sloane Coffin wrote (CREDO, in passim):

In love...

There are those who prefer certainty to truth, those in church who put the purity of dogma ahead of the integrity of love. And what a distortion of the gospel it is to have limited sympathies and unlimited certainties, when the very reverse—to have limited certainties and unlimited sympathies—is not only more tolerant but far more Christian.

In humor...

Clearly, the trick in life is to die young as late as possible.

In confession…

I am a little clearer now on the issue of hypocrisy. Of course we all pass ourselves off as something we are not, but not anything we are not. Generally we try to pass ourselves off as something special in our hearts and minds, something we yearn for, something beyond us. That’s rather touching.

In spirit…

The longest, most arduous trip in the world is often the journey from the head to the heart. Until that round trip is completed, we remain at war with ourselves. And, of course, those at war with themselves are apt to make casualties of others, including friends and loved ones.

Before breakfast…

Relationships—not facts and reason—are the key to reality. By entering those relationships, knowledge of reality is unlocked (P Palmer).

posted in The Courageous Gospel, Uncategorized on 09.2.2007 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

Jesus meets today us along a summer road, a road to health. He meets us as the Lord and Savior of our humanity. Human beings, real, true, authentic, he calls us to be, as, in the same way, long ago, his voice did call out to one daughter of Abraham. For Luke, as for us, it is not her healing, finally, that lasts. Words seem weaker than deeds. Yet words outlast deeds. Unless they are perpetually repeated, deeds remain, located in their setting. Words carry. Words last. So Jesus offers us the gift of humanity today, his words to her, which now are his words to us: “you are set free from your ailment”.

The gifts of summer make us human. They recall Irenaeus who wrote that ‘the glory of God is a human being fully alive’. They prepare the way of John Wesley who wanted his poor Methodists to be a ‘people happy in God’ Walk with me. They remind us that we worship God who, as Paul Lehmann used to say, is continually at work in the world to make and keep human life human.

The meaning of summer, sub specie aeternitas, and particularly in a climate, like yours, long in darkness and deep in cold, the meaning, that is, of the four score summers God gives you, at the largest extent of God’s favor, is itself a matter for prayer. Let us pray together today for a few minutes by taking a homiletical walk, down a dusty summer road. In the mind’s eye, and with the sun upon our backs, let us meander a moment, and see what we can see.

Picture an Ant…

Start small. There in front of your left moccasin moves a lonely red ant, the lowliest of creatures, yet, like a Connecticut Yankee, bursting with the two revolutionary virtues, industry and frugality. Benjamin Franklin wrote, admiring such frugality and industry, and dubious of much dogmatic preaching, “none preaches better than the ant, and he says nothing.” A good reminder.

Ghandi said that ‘to the starving, God must appear as food’. Today we might add ‘to the threatened, God must appear as security. When our freshman come, and decorate their rooms in Warren Towers, we might murmur, ‘to the lost and lonely God must appear as companion’.

While we step around the ant, the little insect recalls others: grasshoppers, flies, locusts. Small creatures. Our world leaders summer in August, often near their places of growth. They must love the virtue of the simple people they have known there. They must like the simple rhythm of town life. Perhaps they enjoy the simple summer gatherings—reunions, little league, band concerts, parades. Surely they tire of the necessary urban emphasis on urbanity, the inevitable public relations concern for appearance and apparel. They return to place from which they can see life, not from the top down, but instead from the bottom up, from the vantage point of one ‘daughter of Abraham’. We may pray that there is a summer pause in which we all may focus on the little. The ant. A pause in which we may fully consider the human consequences of what we choose and do, the effect on actual individual lives. Consider the human consequences. This is near the marrow of Luke 13. Jesus steps past the relics of a form of religion to seize one human life, to heal one daughter of Abraham.

Maybe that is the meaning of summer, to pause and appreciate simple, good people, one daughter of Abraham at a time, ‘folks with good hearts’.

Imagine a Berry…

We can stop up the path just a bit. Raspberries,

blackberries, all kinds of wild fruit are plentiful. Jesus taught us to ask, simply, for bread and a name. “Bless the Lord O My Soul”. We daily need food and forgiveness. Give us each day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins, for we forgive all who are indebted to us. What bread does for the body, pardon does for the soul. One of the gifts of summer is the time and leisure to remember this. They church finds its prayerful voice in the summer, for this reason, this recognition of our ultimate needs.

Our neighbor has baked some of these wild berries into morning muffins. We stop to savor them, with butter and coffee. We listen to one another along the path. So we are nourished, by one another, and made ready for the next steps in the journey.

Perhaps this is the gift of summer, its meaning, to pause and make space for real worship, for that which can feed our hungers, and set us free for the next adventure.

Envision a Fence…

Up ahead there is an old fence. For a river to be a river, it needs riverbanks high enough to contain the flowing water. For a lake to hold its integrity it needs a shoreline that stands and lasts. For a field to retain any semblance of usefulness, it needs fences to mark its beginnings and endings. For an individual to have any identity one needs the limits of positive improvement, as Jesus taught about perseverance, and of protective caution, as Jesus taught about times of trial. For a life to have meaning and coherence, it needs those riverbanks, shorelines, fences, and limits that give life shape and substance. The book of the prophet Jeremiah begins with the divine voice in shaping mode. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you…” (Jeremiah)

We can spend some summer time mending fences. It is hard work, but utterly crucial. Keep your friendships in good repair, and mend the fences where they need it. Think, heal, write, love.

The other day I came by this same old fence. I was walking with my dad, as it happened. (He now sends an e-note every Sunday morning). We had some coffee and a muffin. Then we started off together, down the old road, he to walk with a gnarled walking stick, and I to jog after my own eccentric fashion. But for a mile up to the same fence, to the place where the road parts, we walked together. We shuffled and talked a little, remembering the name of a former neighbor, spotting a new garden planted, making a plan or two for later on. We remembered an old fri
end, an old style doctor, long dead. He remembered that Dr our friend to visit him the day his mother died. I remembered the gentelman swimming the length of the lake and, while he did so, barking various orders at the universe and some of this patients along the shoreline, riverbank, fence—along the virtuous limits that make a life. We came to fork, one taking the high road and one the low, and with that an embrace and a word and a glance and we were alone again.

You need not have read all of Tao Te Ching to know the truth of Laot Tse’s remark, “the reality of a vessel is the shape of the void within”. Here is a gift for the end of your summer. Set limits and keep them, mend our fences and protect them, honor one another. How? In faith and love.

Behold a Cloud…

This is a clear day, in our reverie. (It is our sermonic hike. We make of the day what we choose. How are we ever to proclaim of grace and freedom unless we live lives that exude grace and freedom?) Even so, there are a few dancing clouds, white and bright. We try to make sense of the summer, and to make space for the summer, and to honor this season, one that brings together meteorological splendor and theological insight.

There is a dimension of possibility alive in the summer that is hard to approximate in the rest of the year. We alter our summer forms of worship, not at all to suggest that worship is less central now, for in some ways summer ought to be the most worshipful of the seasons, but rather to accommodate our life to the necessary rhythms of life around us.

It is astounding to hear again, earlier, just before our reading in the Gospel Luke, that seeking, knocking and asking themselves bring discovery, opening and reception. But they do. Summer is the season and worship is the focus of all such wonder and possibility.

A gift of summer. Maybe this is the meaning of summer, to pause and allow a fuller consideration of all the possibilities around us.

Sense a Breeze…

A summer wind accompanies us as we walk farther down the dirt road. A fawn—or was it a fox?—darts into the brush. The smell apples, already ripening, greets us at the turn. More sun, bigger and higher and hotter, makes us sweat.

Most families have a family secret or two, that one subject that dominates every present moment by it the sheer weight of its hidden silence, that one taboo topic that somehow screams through its apparent muteness. Daddy’s drinking. Junior’s juvenile record. Grampa’s prison term. The so-called elephant in the room. True of nations, too, and businesses, and projects and even churches. You find it, finally, by listening quietly and asking gently about what is feared.

The human family has this same kind of family secret. It is something we avoid discussing, if at all possible, something that makes us fearful, something that dominates us through our code of silence. It is our mortality. I made a summer list of the most utterly personal things about each one of you. Your fingerprint. Your voice. Your gaite. Your manner of aging. What would you add to that foursome? Our coming death is the one thing that most makes us who we are, mortal, mortals, creatures, sheep in Another’s pasture, not perfect because not perfectible, the image of God but not God, “fear in a handful of dust”. Yet we are so busy with so many other things that this elemental feature of existence we avoid.

In the face of death, we turn heavily upon our faith. It is the steady and warming wind, the breeze of the Holy Spirit, which keeps us and strengthens us all along the road. Here is the argument Luke has made just before Jesus gazes upon the daughter of Abraham. If your children ask you for something, do you not provide it? And you are evil! (Not to put too fine a point on it!) Imagine, then, how much more God will provide for the children beloved of the all powerful, holy God.

Does your brow furrow when a reading from Hebrews is announced? Lord, if it be Hebrews, let it be the cascading litany of Hebrews 11: cloud of witnesses, by faith Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses…Lord, if it be Hebrews, let it be the clear ten point ethical sermon of Hebrews 13: love, love strangers, love prisoners, honor marriage, be good stewards, remember your leaders, avoid strange teaching, praise God ceaselessly, obey your leaders, pray for the church. Yet, by grace today we hear Hebrews 12. Fire. Trumpet. Darkness. Trembling with fear. A consuming fire, but all showered with a mystery, and showered with a promise. “We are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken. Let us give thanks”.

Maybe this is the meaning of summer, to number our days that we get hearts of wisdom, to measure the mystery about us and give over our imaginations to a consideration of our limits, to learn to pray.

Utter a prayer…

Think for a moment about prayer.

Prayer is a kind of shadow boxing, the struggle of the soul for one’s own life, over against all the forces outside arranged against us.

As Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote in Gift from the Sea, “Every person, especially every woman, should be alone sometime during the year, some part of each week, and of each day.”

Prayer is the possibility of an inner life, of communion with God—whether in the graveyard, the library, the symphony hall, the art gallery, the study, the beach. Or, in church.

A sanctuary is a place to be quiet, in order to reconstitute our real life: “the very best prayers are but vain repetitions, if they are not the language of the heart.” (J Wesley)

The soul, personal or collective, is boxing with its shadow in prayer….

Before the firelight of a hard decision, as your soul sees its shadow lengthen into something like fear

Before the blue haze of the television glass, as your soul sees its shadow lengthen into something like listlessness—acedia

Before the searching, seering floodlight of clear and painful memory, as your soul sees its shadow lengthen into something like hatred

Prayer is one great battle, your soul locked shadow boxing in combat with what maims and harms life.

Prayer tunes out many of the frequencies of this world. Prayer is deaf as a post, stone deaf to the telephone the radio the world around.

One older, beloved hospital patient, who had only one working ear, found peace and healing at a nearby medical facility by lying with his good ear straight down, planted firmly in bedding, muffled in the starchy pillows. He turned a deaf ear to the orderlies and nurses and heavy constant dehumanizing noise. Prayer is like Beethoven at the end, deaf. So in prayer, if you will steal away, you will hear another music.

The song of the soul

The chance for an inner life

The language of the heart

Ears to hear THE REAL YOU

Remember Job, as sentence which provokes an end to any sermon, “Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth, therefor let your words be few.”

Your Gifts of Summer…

May the Good and Gracious God make of all of us prayerful people. May the Good and Gracious God make of us all simple people. May God make true our virtues of the heart, nourishing and nourished in pardon. May God’s grace discipline us with fences of peace, inspire us with gracious clouds billowing and high, and support us all the day long by a summer wind, a spirited faith in the face of death, and an honest attempt at prayer.

posted in The Courageous Gospel, Uncategorized on 08.26.2007 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

Galatians 3: 23-29

There are a few moments in every season when the broad, deep expanse of life opens up to us and we wonder about the meaning, the purpose of things.

A woman stops for the red light. She has finished her day job, working 9-5. She will swing quickly now into a parking lot to gather up her two children from daycare. On the way toward home she will stop to pick up a pizza, ordered a few minutes earlier by car phone. Her husband is traveling so she will not be going this month to the evening church meeting. As she looks out at the long line of snarled traffic, she wonders: “What am I doing here? Who am I?”

Who are you?

A man leaves home in the gray early morning light. He came in at 10:00 and leaves again at 6:30. His teenage children have grown accustomed to his wandering, finding his presence odder than his absence. His job, like all, never ends. For every inch he gives, it takes a mile. He recalls the story of Hercules and the hydra. The gas gauge is on empty—he forgot yesterday to fill it. He backs out of the driveway, and then has this strange moment when he wonders: “What am I doing here? Who am I?

Who are you?

A couple in retirement spend Wednesday morning visiting the physician and the specialist and the therapist. They stop to fill prescriptions and to go to market and to finish the banking. They have lost good friends to death this year. The radio plays a mix of new music and old news. It is raining again. She looks at the street and he looks at her and then past her. Silently they wonder, without speaking, “What am I doing here? Who am I?”

Who are you?

Love without truth is sentimentality. Truth without love is brutality. Today we are swept up again into the great rainbow goodness of Almighty God, who calls us both to honesty and to kindness.

We find our primal identity in Jesus Christ, baptized as we are into him. In Him, we are all children of God. Our identity is not found in our religious tribe. Our identity is not found in our financial insecurity. Our identity is not found, either, in our sex. None of these distinctions, so fundamental to everyday life, gives us our identity. We are children of God, by the promise of God which overpowers every religious, economic, and gender distinction.

We are promised, in the Christ who is Lord of the New Creation, a whole new life.

One day, a friend and I had breakfast, and talked about Reynolds Price’s book, A Whole New Life. In it, Price traces the grace of healing which comes to him in the midst of critical illness. Price, a gifted southern author, succumbed without warning to a malady that nearly took his life. He records the terror, the pain, and the disease that nearly killed him. He remembers the kindness, the friendship, the prayer, and the skill that finally saved him.

At breakfast, we mentioned the book a couple of times, A Whole New Life. Our waitress overheard and, bringing the coffee said, “… that’s what I want—a whole new life!”

As she returned with juice, I asked, “And what kind of life would you like?”

“Let me think about it”, she replied. How would you have answered?

Carrying over grapefruit and oatmeal, she pronounced: “I’ve decided on my new life…I want to become a baby again…To be held, to be loved, to be rocked, to be protected, to be fed, to be cradled, to be cared for…I’d like to become a child again…and THAT WHOLE NAP THING—WAY UNDERRATED…THAT NAP THING IS TOTALLY UNDERRATED.”

Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians is one of the great high peaks of the New Testament. It is about a whole new life, a new creation. In fact, it may be the highest peak in the whole range, the Mount Everest of the Bible. It is written to address this question: “Must a Gentile become a Jew before he can become a Christian?” Is there a religious condition to be met, prior to the reception of God’s apocalypse in Christ?

After Paul had been converted to Christ, he spent 17 years in unremarkable, quiet ministry. We know nothing of these two decades spent in Arabia. All the letters we have of Paul come from a later decade. Paul was converted to Christ, as he says earlier in this letter, “by apocalypse”. Christ revealed himself to Paul. Thus, for Paul, the authority in Christ is not finally in the Scripture, nor in traditions, nor in reason, nor in experience. Christ captured Paul through none of these, but rather through revelation, the apocalypse of God. In short, Paul was not a Methodist.

There is a singular, awesome freedom in the way Paul understands Christ. We have yet, I believe, in the church that bears His name, to acknowledge in full that freedom.

After these 17 years, Paul went up to Jerusalem to meet with the pillars of the church. Can you picture the moment? All in one room: Paul, Peter, Andrew, James, John, Titus, Barnabas. And in that room there was argument, difference. Paul preached the cross of Christ to unreligious people, and they heard. What would the Jerusalem elders say? Jesus was a Jew, and had been circumcised. So also were all the first Christians, including Paul himself. But God had done something astounding. It was the Gentiles, not the Jews, who fervently believed the Good News. Should these unreligious children of God be brought back into the Covenant of Circumcision? No, they all agreed, no. God had done something new. So, Peter went to the circumcised, and Paul went to the uncircumcised. Peter went to the Jews, and Paul to the Gentiles. They agreed to disagree, agreeably. And the meeting ended and it was settled.

But you know how sometimes it’s not the meeting but the meeting after the meeting that counts? What was settled in Jerusalem was unsettled later. Peter couldn’t be counted on to hold the line, and Paul told him so, to his face. Peter was inconsistent about freedom—sometimes he ate with the unclean Gentiles—that’s all of you by the way. Sometimes, when somebody was watching, he backed away. And Paul caught him at it and as he ways, “opposed him to his face”. I wish all opposition in church was so clean, direct, personal, and honest. “One of us is wrong and I think it’s you!” Paul doesn’t talk about Peter, he talks to Peter. There’s a life lesson.

The lines that are drawn in the name of religion are so marked, so indelible. Look at the Middle East, Ireland, Bosnia, Botswana, India, Quebec. We listened again the other night to the music of West Side Story, and heard the poignant plea in Maria’s song, “There’s a place for us.” For some, caught between various Montagues and Capulets, there is never a place.

Paul envisions the end of religion, Christ “the end of the law”. In its place he pictures the community of faith working through love. Whatever does not come from faith is sin.

Your primal identity does not come from your religion. Christ brings a whole new life, the end of religion and the beginning of the church, understood as the community of faith working through love.

As potent as is the power of religion to determine identity, money is stronger still. This is why in the Gospels Jesus speaks so repeatedly about money, about its dangers…where moth and rust consume. If you are used to solving your problems by writing a check, you are doubly endangered by the real problems, for which no check is large enough.

I remember an old District Superintendent 25 years ago saying to me that Jesus spoke more about money than about anything else, and I was offended. “I thought it was love”, I smugly and arrogantly and full of my Union Seminary theological degree did respond.

But over time I have learned from experience, about how selfishness can hurt the spirit, and how mixed up our priorities can become. And I read the Bible weekly for 25 years, and I hear Jesus: with Zacchaeus in the Sycamore, and Matthew the tax collector, and the widow giving her mite, and the prodigal son squandering, and the man fearful of the talents, and the crafty steward, and rendering to Caesar, and—you see how the list grows?

Paul sees what we still hardly ever do see. Money can’t buy love. Finally, one’s place on the map of economic life is not one’s primal identity. It is interesting to remember at the end of his life that John Wesley worried about the growing wealth of his poor Methodists. They did what he told them. They earned all they could. They saved all they could. They gave all they could. They prospered. And in their prosperity, they were endangered. They forgot the poor, once they were not poor. Their diligence, frugality, and industry, all wondrously good things, also contained the potential to obscure their primal identity. We are not what spend, nor are we what we buy.

We are stewards, not owners. Finally we only truly own what we give away.

I remember an old friend of ours, who is now a City School Superintendent. I have watched him for 25 years, as he struggles to teach the poorest children in our region. I will not sentimentalize his work. The city schools in the northeast are in tough shape. Violence and disrespect are rampant in many places. He and I watched our own children hurt by these schools. No, we need not sentimentalize.

But I also remember another day. It was a bright June day like this one, and I had left the office for the hospital when I drove past the school which my friend led so well. There on the side lawn, moving in a circle, were 400 students, 50 teachers and administrators, and a dozen custodians and cooks. There they were—half black, half white; half rich half poor; half male half female; most straight and a few gay; Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, Jew; some Republicans, and many others; some past puberty, and some a long way from it; some A students and some delinquents. But in that hour, they danced together, with a good leader. In that moment, they swayed back and forth to some new Polynesian beat and rhythm. I pulled to the curb to watch, and pray. It wasn’t quite heaven, but you could see it from there. Neither slave nor free. No, your primal identity does not come from your wallet, either.

What could mark more indelibly than religion and money? What could keep our attention better than religion and money? If you had to devise a televised soap opera to mesmerize 270 million people and much cattle for a whole year, what, other than religion and money, would you use? Any thoughts?

In the resurrection, there will be no gender. At least according to Paul in Galatians. In Christ, there is no ‘male and female’. Gender is swallowed up in victory. The Oneidas and the Shakers could sense this, odd and contrasted as were their ways of living it out.

We have yet, I doubt, to take seriously the Good News of liberation found in these passages. Your identity does not come from your sexuality, your gender, your orientation.

In this passage, in the Bible, Paul points to a clue, as well, to one of our great arguments today. Here, your identity is not to be inferred from creation….but from new creation! This apocalyptic baptismal formula declares the erasure—who says there is nothing radical about Christ?—of the distinction we so heighten, that between male and female.

God is calling into existence a new community of faith working through love. There is your identity. Not what is natural but what is heavenly about us forms our primary identity. That is, the Bible itself, from the vantage point of this great mountain passage, opens the way for an understanding of identity that is not just nature or creation, but new creation. This is the community of faith working through love. Here, there is a place where God may be doing something new, revealing something new. And, most strangely, it may be those who are not so easily confined by the creational categories of male and female, those who are both or neither, who are on the edge of the new creation. I know what Paul writes in Romans, but you still must ask yourself, at this point, which is Mount Everest: Galatians 3 or Romans 1? I think it is Galatians 3. I have come to believe that gender and orientation do not provide our primal identity. No male and female means no gay and straight, no homosexual and heterosexual. God is doing something new, which includes all in the community of faith working through love.

The trajectory of Paul’s preaching in Galatians, and thus in total, makes ample space in our churches for gay people. If you love Jesus, and especially if you love the Bible, then you may just find courage not only to defend a moral life in a post-moral culture, but also to preserve freedom for those who have found a whole new life, like Reynolds Price--a gay man, and so are harbingers of the new creation.

Who are you?

If your identity does not come from religion or money or sex, then who are you?

Are you a part of the new creation?

Are you a child, daughter or son, of the living God?

Are you, baptized into Christ, now wrapped in Him?

Are you an heir of God’s promise that predates all else?

Are you identified by faith, the faith of Jesus Christ?

Are you then walking in newness of life?

Are you found in the community of faith that works in love?

Are you on the edge of heaven?

Are you one in Christ Jesus?

posted in Uncategorized on 06.24.2007 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

Galatians 1: 11-24 and John 13: 31-35

Thought, Word and Deed. Lover, Loved, Love. Memory, Understanding, Will. Sun, Ray, Touch. Breath, Hearing, Laughter. Father, Son, Spirit…

Fear not, the sermon is not going to devolve from an inscrutable title into an unintelligible body toward an unfathomable conclusion. At least, we shall hope not. We will not try, with the fabled preacher, to “define the indefinite, explain the unexplainable, and unscrew the inscrutable”. We shall hope that the sermon, at least to one sense, does not approximate the peace of God, which ‘passes all understanding and endures forever’.

Rather, we shall meditate on a kindlier, clearer text. ‘Jesus said…love one another’. Some Christianity, more Religion, and much Life, strangely, sails adrift from such a word. ‘Jesus said…love’. Salvation depends upon the saying of things. It is not enough not to say. To tell the truth is to shame the devil. There is a crucial saving power embedded in the lowliest of creatures, a clear intervening word. Says the Apostle, ‘The Gospel proclaimed by me is not of human origin’. It is not gospel if it is not said.

I remember when George Gibbs was so saved in conversation, with Emily Webb who has ‘just got to tell the truth and shame the devil’.

On the way home from school, George offers to carry Emily’s books. When she gives them to him, he notices that she is peeved about something. When he asks why she is angry, she tells him that he is so caught up in baseball and other activities–he has just been elected president of his class while Emily was elected secretary-treasurer–that he hardly notices his friends anymore. He is stuck-up. George takes the criticism gracefully, saying he will strive to improve his behavior. When Emily tearfully regrets her criticism, George invites her to have an ice-cream soda with him at Morgan’s Drugstore.
.......In the drugstore, the stage manager–playing Mr. Morgan–fills George's order for strawberry sodas. Then–in a shy, roundabout way–they begin expressing their feelings about each other. George says he no longer desires to go off to college to study agriculture; he’d rather stay home and be with Emily. George says, "I think that once you've found a person you're very fond of . . . I mean a person who's fond of you, too, and likes you enough to be interested in your character . . . Well, I think that's just as important as college is, and even more so."

If Emily had not spoken then George would not have responded and she would not have wept and he would not have bought ice cream and they would not have admitted their love and he would not have taken the farm and they would not have married and she would not have loved and left and he would not have loved and lost and no one would know anything about Grover’s Corners. Sometimes you have to say something to somebody. A word fitly spoken is like an apple in the sun. Words, just the right word at just the right time in just the right way, do matter.

A federal in Chicago told us last month, with keen humor, about the importance of words. A young preacher was sent to a tiny congregation, deeply wise but formally untutored, off in the hills, or so she said. After three months he had visited everyone, written sermons ahead for a month, and edited the cradle roll. So, he decided to do something new and called a meeting. In the little packed church the minister announced, ‘what we need here is a chandelier’. Silence ensued. At last a kindly granddad from the back stood up. ‘Well, brother, we love you, we do. But as to this chandelier, I am against it. And for three reasons. First, there’s not one of us here who can spell it. Second, nobody around here knows how to play one. And third, what we really need in this sanctuary is more light!’. Moral: say what you mean and mean what you say. If you need more light, say you need more light!

Careful now: We are about to take a sharp turn into the past.

Eight letters, printed as today’s sermon title, broke the ancient church in half, east and west. To this day, our Orthodox and Catholic friends, with various Protestants strewn along the path like so much brush, divide over filioque, the Latin for ‘and the son’, or as the Latin teachers and students who recognize the ablative when they see it would add, ‘and from the son’. The Nicene Creed affirmed that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father. As time went by (I particularly like the maverick Spaniards and their role here), the church altered the formula: the Spirit proceeds from the Father—filioque—‘and from the Son’. What difference does it make? In 1054, along with concerns about the Pope, the eight letters split the church—eastwest, RomeConstantinople, popepatriarchs.

It is remarkable that just a few letters can make such a difference, that just a few words rightly or wrongly spoken can make such a difference. We find it hard to understand. Of course, we do understand what eighteen words, misspoken, can mean, in a speech in 2003. Of course, we do understand what a few letters, WMD, incorrectly identified at in 2003, could mean. Yet every single one of us, every last one of us, has at least eighteen words ill spoken to regret, and at least three letters to rue. For the preacher, you may multiply that by many thousands. So, on reflection, we can at least generally understand the power of eight letters.

We have a saying in American English: two is company, three is a crowd. The ancient debates about the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit were about the way three relate to two, two to one, one to three, three to one. God is one and three, said the west. God is three and one, said the east. In our time, we have no doubt that Jesus was human. We wonder about his divinity. But the opposite was the truth for antiquity. They wondered about his humanity, but Jesus was divine, for sure. So they further thought about his
relation to the other aspects of divinity, Father and Spirit. Augustine encouraged the expansion ‘and the Son’: “God the Father alone is He from whom the Word is born, and from whom the Holy Spirit principally proceeds. And therefore I have added the word principally, because we find that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son also”. (Walker, 189)

Why ‘and from the Son’?

Here, libraries are full of full responses. Yet, in earshot of today’s lessons, one particular response resounds.

Why, ‘and from the Son’? Why from the Word? Why from the Logos? Why from the Word of God? Why Spirit proceeding from Word?

Because spirit proceeds from word. Spirit emerges from Word. You have to say it. The deed is the child of the word as the word is the child of the thought. ‘In thought, word and deed…’, we pray. There is a profoundly experiential, spiritually existential dimension to filioque. In other words, the divine dimension of life is really three dimensions: thought, word and deed. In the beginning was the Word, with God and God. It is not enough to think. Thinking alone does not create. It takes utterance, speech, word. Spirit proceeds from God the Father and from God the Son: from God the Creator and from God the Redeemer: from God the Mind and from God the Voice: from God the Ground of Being and from God the Word made Flesh. Filioque is at the heart of hospitality, and of communion, and of service.

Ten years ago two friends were walking on a Saturday along a River. They strolled along the river bank, looking out across the River at the window of a Chapel. They were on the other, not to say lesser bank. They shared a profession, and a friendship. It was a natural thing. They walked and talked and fed the geese. An engaging woman and a personable man strolling along a beautiful river. After a while, inspired, she simply told him about her church, across the river—its minister, its time of worship, its personality, its quirks. She invited him to come. She spoke a word. She said it. Now both have a church home to enjoy and a church family to love. Word—God the Son—filioque—is at the heart of hospitality.

Some years ago, you may have heard on audio tape Frank McCourt’s hymn to words, Angela’s Ashes. It contains one of the most beautiful accounts of being in love, being delivered in Christ from our otherwise one-dimensional time and world. Two ten year old hospital patients, Frank and Patricia Madigan, become friends. She calls him ‘typhoid boy’. She has a poetry book, and reads to him, as he heals. Or is it that he heals as she reads to him? He hates the owl and the pussycat and says so. She says she will not read to typhoid boy. But she relents, and reads another poem, and makes him memorize it.

The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,

The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas

The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor

And the highwayman came riding

Riding, riding

The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door

He’d a French cocked-hat on his forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin

A coat of the claret velvet, and breeches of brown doe-skin,

They fitted with never a wrinkle, his boots were up to his thigh.

And he rode with a jeweled twinkle,

His pistol butts a-twinkle,

His rapier hilt a-twinkle, under the jewelled sky. (Angela’s Ashes, 196)

Of course Frankie, typhoid boy, falls in love with Patricia Madigan, whom he cannot see behind the curtain of the next bed, but whose voice carries him to health. And of course he waits every day for her to come back from therapy and recite another verse of the poem. And of course he memorizes the verse with the feverish attention of first love. And of course he learns, there, then, in sickness, the power of language. And of course he waits so he cannot sleep for the excitement of it, he waits for the voice behind the curtain, and for the ongoing poetry of life, and for the next installment of the Highwayman. And of course Patricia dies. And of course you see, no you hear, no you feel, no—filioque—you know that spirit proceeds from word.

Blood red were his spurs in the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat,

When they shot him down in the highway,

Down like a dog in the highway,

And he lay in his blood on the highway, with a bunch of lace at his throat.

Word—God the Son—filioque—is at the heart of communion. Like Patricia Madigan’s, the body of the historic church in the north is wasting away. Yet, in all our affliction, we may still whisper a saving word to the future world. Yes, a love a God. Yes, a love
of language. Yes, a love of the Word. Yes, a love of words. Yes, in our time and place, particularly, the language we shall most need, going forward, the spiritual language of lament, compunction, contrition, confession, regret, and the longing therein for pardon, and the hunger therein for peace, and the witness therein to a better day, some day.

Howard Thurman as a hundred years ahead of his time, fifty years ago. Fifty years from now we may catch up to him. Thurman’s was not a high Christology. He knew, though, the power of speech, as well as of silence. His well remembered silences, lengthy and deep, were themselves full attestations to the power of love proceeding from speech, spirit from word. Something must be said. You need go no further, no further, than the first page of his autobiography.

Thurman has finished one year in seminary, here in Rochester, NY. He has been offered an internship in Roanoke VA, at the First Baptist Church, to care for the church while the minister is away on vacation. On the first night in the parsonage, the phone rings: May I speak with Dr James? Dr James is the hospital chaplain. There is a patient here who is dying. He is asking for a minister. Are you a minister? Yes, I am a minister. Please hurry, or you will be too late.

Thurman is anxious, ambivalent about life and calling. He rushes out, forgetting to bring his Bible. He approaches the dreaded curtain around the dying man.

The sick man’s eyes were half closed, his mouth open, his breathing labored. The nurse leaned over and, calling him by name, said, ‘the minister is here’. Slowly he sought of focus his eyes, first on her, and then on me. In a barely audible voice he said, ‘Do you have something to say to a man who is dying? If you have, please say it, and say it in a hurry.

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

We opened our eyes simultaneously as he breathed, ‘Thank you. I understand.’ He died with his hand in mine. (With Head and Heart, 3).

Beloved, speak the good words.

posted in Uncategorized on 06.10.2007 at 12:00 pm