By Marsh Chapel

John 14: 6-17

Pentecost Sunday

Peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you.

After four years of war and five years of fierce debate about war, these solemn dominical words sound like sentences from a foreign land, in a foreign tongue. Originally Greek, now English, they sound Greek, in American English. For half a decade our pulpits across the remaining outposts of responsible Christian liberalism have struggled to interpret John 14: 26. Peace. Let there be peace.

Today we are grateful for and mindful of those who have offered themselves in the service of others, and the protection of freedom. From our Marsh Chapel fellowship, three are currently serving in Iraq. Last Saturday, one of our graduating seniors, a young man present almost every Sunday this past year here in worship, was commissioned as a second lieutenant in historic Faneuil Hall. He gave the senior address. In the winter Jan and I revisited the desert southwest, and particularly Nellis Air Force Base, where I grew up, nearly fifty years ago. We recognize the courage and the sacrifice of many in our time, and across time.

Peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you.

Today’s sermon is the first of two, the second to be delivered next Sunday, which bear witness to a portion of the church’s attempt, 2001 through 2007, to speak a word of truth about peace in a time of war. Pentecost is a moment of spirit, of truth, of peace. Yet we are a people caught up in the tides and undertows of war. Since 2001 the pulpits of Christendom, including mainline Methodism, here and there, strained to speak a word of truth. One simply cannot convey the extreme difficulty of leading a congregations, growing churches, bringing pastoral care to communities, raising budgets, building buildings, and yet struggling to say what had to be said, across difficult years. To the preachers and laity in the churches of the church, these sermons are offered, in honor of your own, their own, witness, service and sacrifice, year by year.

Peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you.

2001: To Begin

On September 16, 2001, our pulpits recognized the terror and loss of nineleven, and counseled faith. Some were criticized for not using ‘God Bless America’ as the final hymn. One preacher said (Robert Allan Hill, Asbury First UMC, Rochester, NY),

Have faith, people of faith.

Terror may topple the World Trade Center, but no terror can topple the World Truth Center, Jesus the Christ.

The World Trade Center, hub of global economies may fall, the economy of grace still stands in the World Truth Center, Jesus the Christ.

The World Trade Center, communications nexus for many may fall, but the communication of the gospel stands, the World Truth Center, Jesus Christ.

The World Trade Center, legal library for the country may fall, but grace and truth which stand, through the World Truth Center, Jesus the Christ.

The World Trade Center, symbol of national pride may fall, but divine humility stands, through the World Truth Center, Jesus the Christ.

The World Trade Center, material bulwark against loss may fall, but the possibility in your life of developing a spiritual discipline against resentment (Niehbuhr) still stands, through the World Truth Center, Jesus the Christ.

2002

A year later, the drums were beating, and with a steady, recognizable, intent. An argument was advanced, tragic and reckless, to countenance for the first time in American history a project of pre-emptive warfare. Yet, from our pulpits, with some freedom, some grace, and some courage, there came careful, responsive rejoinders. We were reminded of the history of Christian teaching, regarding war. We rehearsed the arguments for pacifism. We remembered, as we do this Memorial Weekend, the long centuries of teaching about just war. From one pulpit, many heard, (though a few walked out midway) (RAHAFUMC, 9/29/02):

People of faith have usually assumed one of two traditional positions in the face of armed conflict, or as is often the case, a kind of wisened situational combination of the two: pacifism or just war. Often, too, the chief job of the pastor in such a time is to help the congregation think theologically, and think clearly, and to maintain space for a variety of views within one body. The pacifist position depends upon Matthew, in verses like chapter 5: 38 “You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”. But I say to you, do not resist one who is evil. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also”. The activist position does too, in verses like Matthew 10: 34, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword…he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me”. How shall we think about this?

I know, given the stature and venerability of this pulpit, that many of you have heard these points rehearsed many times, and engaged wisely and sensitively in the past. Perhaps there is little that I can add. You remember that there have been five basic criteria, from Augustine to Aquinas to us, in the so-called just war theory: just cause in response to serious evil; just intention for restoration of peace with justice, not self-enrichment or devastation of another; last resort; have legitimate authority; have a reasonable hope of success, given the necessary constraints of discrimination and proportion
ality. Shakespeare: “Who the sword of heaven would rear must be as holy as severe”.

Response…Restoration…Last…Authority…What has caught us unprepared this fall, is that it seems that our current course as a country moves in a third way, apart from both the pacifist and activist positions in the history of Christian thought. It seems, at least, that some our moral debate has now taken leave of the history of Christian ethics altogether, leaving behind both the pacifist and the activist, both the non-retaliatory and the just war positions. What congress now debates, and is apparently ready to approve, is not a response but a preemption; not a restoration but a dislocation; not a last but an initial resort; not an act based on a communal authority, but a nearly unilateral act. We are told that this is a new age, that patience must be balanced with realism about the threat at large, that in due time we shall be shown the proof for the need of this new doctrine. But let us be clear: preemption, destruction, initiation, usurpation—these have little basis or foothold in the history of Christian thought, to this point. None, in fact. We are left, as disciples of Jesus Christ, either to redefine the expanse of Christian ethics developed over 2000 years, or to reconsider our current debate.

2003

On the eve of disaster, across the land, here and there, some sentient consideration, some reflection, some attention to response rather than reaction, was uttered. One congregation, on March 2, 2003, heard this, even as one parishioner said the preacher sounded nervous and anxious (RAHAFUMC):

Christ is not at home in a world of collateral damage. I never will take for granted the regard of this congregation for the freedom of the pulpit. Most of you disagree, I know, with what I have said about the impending conflict with Iraq. Yet, you have graciously accepted what you cannot recommend, and you have graciously heard what you would not have said, and you have graciously protected what you would not have preferred. In my own ways, I will strive to measure up to your spiritual maturity in the years to come.

Once more: the opposition here voiced, over many months, to preemptory, unilateral, imperialistic, unpredictable military action continues. I have tried to show that such is outside the bounds of inherited Christian just war ethics. I have tried to argue that such is unreasonable when compared to the alternative of ongoing containment and potential retaliation. I have tried to calculate the consequences of first strike, non-multilateral, imperial invasion by one country of another. I have quoted Robert Kennedy, from another setting, that such would be “Pearl Harbor in reverse”.

What then do I say to the day that one of these terrorists further harms our people? They will. Our president has rightly said, “We shall meet violence with patient justice”. W here we can bring justice, in response to attack, justice, in concert with the united nations, justice that is a republic in defense not an empire in expanse, justice that makes for peace, even when this justice, to be temporarily achieved, may tragically involve the utter horror of war, then, let us say, we may have to act. That is 1991 and that is Afghanistan. But this new war is something else. Terror will continue. Students died in Lockerbie, and that did not end it. The towers came down on 9/11 and that did not end it. Until a global tide of liberty and justice reaches the poorest Moslem hamlet in the most hateful Islamic nation, there will still be terror: to be met with patient justice.

Not all of our voices were silenced, through shock and awe, and the report of a mission accomplished. Even in the brightest, that is the darkest, days of summer, 2003, here and there, for those with ears to hear, there was a homiletically resistance movement afoot. On Independence Sunday, July 6, 2003, the Christian community, at least in some settings, counseled together. Some were beginning to listen. After singing ‘Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory’, preacher addressed a congregation in the following manner (RAHAFUMC):

Now that the dust of the desert has partly settled, though, we may want to consider what we have done. To any fair minded consideration, this war, in direct contrast to virtually ever other American conflict, was unabashedly prosecuted outside of inherited Christian ethical teaching. Of course, pacifism was discounted, but so too were the caveats of the just war theory. Our action was preemptive not responsive, unilateral not commonly authorized, a deliberate but not a last resort, and, for all the technological wizardry available, still brought death to thousands of unarmed civilians. Iraq 2003 is America’s first self-consciously post-Christian war.

Now it may be, and some will argue strongly that it must be, that future Christian thought, in contrast to the past, must make space for unilateral preemption, given the dangers now abroad. Not for one minute do I discount the momentum of this emerging position, even though it is not, just now, one I can support. Let us reason together. Let the discussion evolve. But let us also be clear: just war theory does not currently make space for unilateral preemption.

What is darkly fascinating about the winter’s action is that the dilemma of leadership in which we Americans found ourselves was precisely rendered five hundred years ago. In the Italian Renaissance, the Florentine philosopher Nicollo Machiavelli, quietly composed a frightful, but perhaps unconquerable, understanding of leadership and power, and thus of war and peace. He argued that the leader could be either effective or Christian, but not both at the same time. He would have to choose between effective, powerful and sustainable leadership, on the one hand, and Christian virtue, on the other. He could be successful or right, but not both at the same time. I am indebted to Isaiah Berlin’s rehearsal and summary of Machiavelli’s frightful argument:

“It is in fact impossible to combine Christian virtues, for example meekness or the search for spiritual salvation, with a satisfactory, stable, vigorous, strong society on earth. Consequently a man must choose. To choose to lead a Christian life is to condemn oneself to political impotence: to be used and crushed by powerful, ambitious, clever, unscrupulous men.”

What Machiavelli most clearly stated has been the thorn in the flesh of Christian political ethics for the whole modern era. As Machiavelli predicted, none have been able or willing to f
ully face and finally solve his dilemma: As a leader, and particularly a military leader, you can be victorious or you can be Christian, you can be successful or you can be virtuous, you can survive or you can be good. But not both, argued Machiavelli.

Is this the best we can hope for? Are the horns of Machiavelli’s dilemma unbreakable?

For the country to survive are we forced to give up the application of our faith to matters of war and peace? Is this what our strategic future must now entail, unilateral preemption?

To this question, and to the years 2004 and following, we shall return Come Sunday, come next Sunday.

In the rear of our sanctuary here at Marsh Chapel, there is an unusual stained glass window, of an unusual person, Abraham Lincoln. We await both his insight and his eloquence, applied to our time: With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

posted in Uncategorized on 05.27.2007 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

John 14: 23-39

The Beloved Community of Loss

Our gospel lesson this morning, John 14: 23, is drenched in the sense of loss. These concluding chapters from the fourth gospel record a mystagogical oration, in prayer, as Jesus departs. He departs from his earthly ministry. He departs from his family and history. He departs from his friendships and community. He departs from his role in religious life. He departs from his band of disciples. He departs from his life, this life. He goes.

Much has been rightly written about the strains of division and conflict within the fourth gospel community, as it moved from an identity within Christian Judaism to a new identity within Jewish Christianity and then without Jewish Christianity. Less has been said about loss. Conflict yes, loss less. Yet the strains of relationship and the strains of mystical music with which this gospel concludes evoke a cataclysm of loss. ‘You heard me say, ‘I am going away’’.

Three generations and more after the crucifixion and the mystery of Easter, these earlier Christians were still struggling with loss. I will not leave you orphaned…I have said these things while I am still with you…The Advocate will teach you…Do not let your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid…I am going away…I have told you this before it occurs so that when it does occur you may believe…Rise let us be on our way.

With the last phrase, we think the story will move now to the cross. Yet three more chapters of prayer and speech await us. It is the fact of Jesus’ absence as much as the reality of Jesus’ presence which teaches the beloved community of loss about the meaning of Easter. He is risen means He is not here. The community behind and beneath our Holy Gospel of John struggled with loss.

We do too.

This season of Mother’s Day and Alma Mater and Commencement and Memorial Day regularly connects us with loss. Even without the tragedy of ongoing warfare, and particular losses thereby, we should know, come May, about loss. Even without the tragedy of campus killings in Virginia, and the ongoing sense of grief for all learners and lovers of learners, we should know, again come May, about loss. Even without the personal and particular memories which this kind of day inevitably and woundingly inspires, we should know, when may comes, about loss. It is fragrant in the air, loss is fragrant in the air, like the lilacs of May. You may be present today or absent and listening today, with a vaguely impressive feeling, a heart longing, that for the human being embraces far more than the mind alone can ever capture.

It is remarkable, truly remarkable, to read and listen again to an ancient text, written in all its beauty out of many decades in labor with loss. As a pastor, one often find that the loss of the cross is the best gift the church makes to a grieving world. My dear friend Bill Ritter lost his son some years ago. He will show you pictures. Then he will tell you that his picture of God is like this: God looks at the picture, and embraces Bill, and reaches for his own wallet, and says, ‘Yes, I had a boy too. Let me show Him to you.’ The Gospel of John, as Bultmann rightly argued, ends on the cross with a single Greek word, tetelestai, ‘it is finished’.

At least here, come Sunday, there is honesty about loss. At least here, on the reading of Scripture, there is honesty about loss. At least here, in the celebration of Eucharist, there is honesty about loss. At least here, we can admit to one another that we each have our losses, and we none of us can fully appreciate the other’s loss, but we all each one of us can honor with honesty the loss of the other.

Learning the Labor of Loss

What is less clear is our ability to work through grief. The Christian community has a better claim to honesty about loss than to wisdom in loss. Learning the rhythms in the labor of loss is a serious course in life. This morning we will ask you to do more than audit that course, but to sign up and buy the books and enroll in the class and find your seat. We have work to do. When it comes to grief, we have work to do. Our work is cut out for us.

As John Cobb taught us long ago, we are in the midst of creative activity all the time, particularly in ministry. Together, watching over one another in love, we are midwives of grace. There is a kind of directivity alive in our experience, to which, daily, we want to attend. Pay attention! You are here in part to facilitate the growth and listening ability of others. You are children of those ancient poets who crafted the laments in the Book of Psalms. I wonder if you can hear, again, or as if for the first time, this morning, five of the interlacing cries of grief.

One such cry comes up out of the bones, when we are bowed in grief. This is the cry of pain. My God My God why hast thou forsaken me? The cry of pain is an enveloping mist of sadness. Presence is a balm for the cry of pain.

Another, a second cry is one of longing. I expect to see her, to see him…There is a loneliness embedded in the longing. Patience is a balm for the cry of longing.

A third utterance in grief often calls out as a cry for supportive love. People are a balm for the cry for love.

Another, a fourth cry is for understand
ing. Your left brain in grief calls out for understanding. ‘Why?’ Perseverance is a balm for the cry for understanding.

A fifth cry is for significance. Here is the drive to see something good come from loss.

Work by Kubler-Ross, Strohman, Shafer and others has helped us to understand the varieties of religious experience in lament. We understand that these cries do not emerge on schedule or in order. There is no chronological checklist with which to arrange the work of loss. It comes as it comes. We recognize that often women and men grieve in different ways, with different needs and varying measures of silence and speech, intimacy and distance, emotion and protection. We are aware that grief is dynamic, with no linear sequence of starting and ending points. Yet we have come to accept and even to affirm that grief is a minor chord that throughout our whole life will interpenetrate the jubilant major chords o life, giving greater depth to our love of others, and our appreciation for family and friends.

We have work to do.

Naming the Experience of Loss

Here in Boston this year we have experienced loss. The personal dimensions of care offered to those in grief through Boston University are truly angelic labors in loss. At every point, in our eight losses this year, a personal dimension of head and heart has encompassed your care in grief. From the President down to the most part time chaplain, and with everyone in between, your labor has not been in vain. The families of Julienne Miller, Jacob McCecknie, Beatrice Ponce, Mujar Madek, Michael Robertson, Stephan Adelipour, Rhiannon McGuish, Derek Crowl, and those connected with the losses at Virginia Tech, have felt your embrace. In a moment I want to name and honor many of the professionals who have been angels of mercy in times of loss.

Yet, as full as our personal response has been, in each individual case, as a community, we have still more work to do. We cannot conclude the labor in this hour, but we may frame the work for the future. As a community, here at Boston University, we feel pain. Still. This is the labor of loss. As a community, we have longing for reconnection. Still. This is the labor of loss. As a community, we hunger for supportive love. Still. As a community, we wrestle with ‘Why?’, even as we manage to withstand what we cannot understand. Still. This is a labor of love. As a community, we want to give lasting significance in memory of those whom we love. Still. This is a labor of love. We have our work to do. Still.

You have fellow laborers, here, along the Charles. They are angels. Their work, and ours, will go on. Chaplains Schwarzer, Enquist, Polak, Heller, Young-Skaggs, Olson, Whitney, and Gaskell are some of these angels. We honor them and thank them for their pastoral work.

John Battaglino, Susan Cleaver, Daryl DeLuca, Laura DeVeau, Ken Elmore, Katherine Hasenauer, Shiney James, Annemarie Kougias, Katherine Kennedy, Maureen Mahoney, Robert Molloy, Katherine McGinn, Thomas Robbins, Peter Schneider, Daniel Solworth, Jack Weldon, and David Zamojski are some of these angels. We honor them and thank them for their work. It is hard work, good work, important work, true work. We learn as we go, and learn as we do. And it may be, at twilight, that in these hours, we shall find, we have learned the most. As Emily Dickinson wrote,

By a departing light

We see acuter quite,

Than by a wick that stays.

There’s something in the flight

That clarifies the sight

And decks the rays.

posted in Uncategorized on 05.13.2007 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

John 20: 1-14

Easter Sunday

Whose?

It is not so long ago that Jesus came to us wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. We murmured with the Shepherds and knelt with the Kings. We sang: “Christ the Savior is born.” We were innocent and young and happy at birth.

True: some noticed the straw in his hair and the stench of the manger.

True: a few wondered at the humble birth of God.

True: some worried about Rachel weeping for her children.

Mostly, though, we happily received and reported glad tidings of great joy to all people. It is not so long ago that the trees and the greens, beautiful they were, came down.

It is not so long ago that Jesus stripped himself before us and knelt in the Jordan to be baptized. Granted, we have been busy carving our hearts and arrows into the trees of life. Granted, we have been finding jobs and homes and churches and relaxation. We prayed and watched TV.

True: some of us noticed the mud on Jesus’ face after his baptism.

True: a few wondered at the humility of such an act, God stooping to be covered in the icy, rolling, filthy waters of this world.

Mostly, though, we were happy to greet Jesus at his baptism, and day by day like us he grew. We went on to another month of paychecks and forechecks and last respects. It is not so long ago that Jesus and John bathed together.

It is not so long ago that Satan tempted our Lord. Jesus stood tempted and we with Him: tempted to make of life a scramble to the top, no matter who gets hurt; tempted to make of religion a closed shop, no matter who is closed out; tempted to take up a government without a government of the heart. You saw him last month, just up the hill from Jericho, stalking in the wilderness.

True: some blanched at the forty days.

True: some pondered the choice of God to lavish love on a twilight world.

Mostly, though, we thanked Jesus for his troubles and succumbed to the temptations he defeated. It was not so long ago.

It was not so long ago that Jesus healed and taught. Among us there was healing of the sick, though not all of the sick, and teaching of the sinful, though not all were docile, and announcement to all of the Mystery of Love.

True: some noticed the somber tone in the verses about hardship to come.

True: some wondered at divine life lived on the periphery.

True: some rued the unexplained tragedy and individual loss of the time, and the teaching frightened us at times.

Mostly, though, we tilled our gardens. And not so long ago.

Is it only a few days ago that Jesus washed our feet in holy hands? Is it only a few days more that Jesus completed a life of servant love? Is it more than hours ago that Patience and Humility and Wide Mercy were nailed up to make way for the ‘god of this world’, whose violence has not yet been vanquished in fact as we trust it is in principle (Geoffrey Wainwright). Is it only a few hours since the cross covered our past like a baby put to sleep and opened our future like a window flung wide?

True: some noticed the back ache, and the calloused knees and the worn hands of the worker Messiah. A few—was it you?—spotted the hidden glory in such care.

Mostly though we went to the market and to the bank, preparing for an earthly future we thought might be without end. We lived, not just the young, but all, as if ‘temporarily immortal’. No, it is not so long ago that the Lamb of God met us in poverty, humility, temptation, healing and sacrifice.

We have been prepared to answer the question. Whose Resurrection? Whom did God raise? On Whom did God set God’s seal? Whom did God choose as first fruit? On what kind of life, what kind of future, did God rain glory?

Cruciform life. Easter the resurrection of Jesus, the worker Messiah, Servant Love. Love crucified is love raised. It is the same worn Jesus whom God calls ‘the future’. No wonder the disciples did not at first believe, and no wonder we have our doubts as wel
l. The preacher leans against the cross on Friday, and leans against the resurrection on Sunday. For the cross is still with us, followed by but not replaced by the resurrection.

Christ the Lord is risen today: ours the cross, the grave, the skies. If Jesus is God’s future, then his resurrection is our future, and we are well advised to seize the day. Easter is in the first place the resurrection of Servant Love.

Exegetical Interlude

Yet listen again, for just a moment, to John 20. One of the delights of preaching over many years is how startling yet another reading of a familiar passage can nonetheless be. You too have spent some time with John, and with this chapter. It holds no fewer than four, complementary, even competing resurrection accounts. Two of these we heard this morning, the tomb and the garden. Two others, the Spirit and Thomas, come later. Together they present a pastiche of resurrection as presence, on the one hand, and absence, on the other, fearless of the contradiction in that combination. On this reading, for your current preacher, one startling discovery emerged. In scene one, the tomb, Mary refers to Jesus as ‘the Lord’, a formal, accurate, and courteous nametag. In scene two, the garden, Mary refers to Jesus as ‘my Lord’. You can hear the difference in the original. (If the choir can sing in German I can preach in Greek!) John 20:2, heran ton kurion . John 20: 13: heran ton kurion mou. Here in the heart of violence is a move, slight but clear, a move toward intimacy. Violence usually crushes intimacy, but not so here.

Resurrection?

So here is a second response to the question of Easter’s possessor. It is this preached question which makes of Easter a change of heart—a saving change of heart—rather than just a remarkable weekend in first century Palestine. On the cross walk, resurrection is yours. On the way of the cross, you walk in newness of life. You receive resurrection eyes, resurrection ears, and a resurrection smile.

For this change of heart John Donne longs:

I have a bed of sin; delight is a bed:

I have a grave of sin; senselessness of sin is a grave:

And where Lazarus had been four days

I have been for fifty years in this putrefaction;

Why doest thou not call me,

As thou didst him, with a loud voice,

Since my soul is as dead as his body was?

I need thy thunder, o my God;

Thy music will not serve me. (Devotions xxi)

I need thy THUNDER o my God…We might speak of a new epistemology at the turn of the ages, a new eschatology at the turn of the ages, and a new psychology at the turn of the ages. But let’s stick with eyes, ears and smile.

The resurrection of Servant Love helps us see that the resurrection is meant for us, to open us to a new way of engaging in the world, being at home in the world, being confident in the world. Your struggle you can see in a new way, with resurrection eyes--if you will. What is most fragile in the world, which is grace, when seen aright, is the toughest of entities.

If you were to ask at what point I truly felt at home in Boston, the response would be last Tuesday at 11:30am. I saw the world differently. After morning ‘administrivia’, I walked to the dentist. Theology helps us choose, dentistry helps us chew. Predictably, my gaze was footward on route to the chair of judgment. My mind brooded about the fierce cultural wind about us, as fierce for common life as is the winter wind off the Charles River for the lone pedestrian. There is an authoritarianism, even sometimes a pseudo-sacramental authoritarianism, blowing from above, I feared, and a determinism, even sometimes a pseudo-biblical determinism, blowing from behind. Shall freedom and grace die of pneumonia? Such were the pre-paschal ruminations of the forenoon on Tuesday of Holy Week.

So when I crossed University Road, in front of the BU Academy, and heard a car honk, I forged ahead. After all, one hears nothing but horns at that corner. There is not an unhonked moment there. I asserted my pedestrian rights. But the car honked again, and then again. In a fit of pique I turned, ready to exchange icy glares, snarls, perhaps a word of invective, possibly a gesture or two. Not a very clerical pose. Behold: there, driving by, with a knowing gleam in the eye, chuckling, and giving a salutation, friend to friend, was a Boston University leader I have come to enjoy. See: the car was not honking AT me, but honking at ME. Not AT me. But at ME! One sees now a greeting my name, in person, eye to eye, I and Thou.

Resurrection eyes see connections, possibilities, welcomes, openings, and spiritual friendships in the offing. We tend to see the world not as it is but as we are, and the resurrection gives us new eyes. All looks yellow to the jaundiced eye. Much appears gracious to the Easter eye. Life is not honking AT you, but at YOU. Across the crowded traffic of a congested world, we shall need every possible resurrection vision, to have hope for the future.

The resurrection of Servant Love grants res
urrection ears, too. On the cross walk, one hears rumblings of justice. It takes resurrection ears to hear it, but the trumpet sound, though far off, is ringing. Wrote Luther, “here in this life our heart is in too great straits to lay hold of it, but after death, when the heart becomes larger and broader, we experience what we have heard through the Word”. He is sounding forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat. One defeated leader said recently, “For all the grandness that is so apparent in our time, something is missing. There is a hunger for something to believe in and to hold onto, something grander that can lift our aspirations instead of lowering them. Something that appeals to the highest in us: our generosity, our optimism, our courage”.

Easter demands a sturdier hope:

Hope is a dimension of the soul, and it is not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation…It’s deepest roots are transcendental, just as are the roots of human responsibility…It is an inner experience…The most convinced materialist and atheist may have more of this genuine transcendentally rooted inner hope than 10 metaphysicians altogether…Hope in this deep and powerful sense is not the same as the joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather the ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it has a chance to succeed. Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. In short, I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from ‘elsewhere’. (V. Havel, DPT, 23).

Take out the ‘as it were’ and you have Easter, in the words of Vaclev Havel.

The Resurrection of Servant Love brings happiness, too, a resurrection smile. So Isaiah can sing out: ‘everlasting joy shall be upon their heads.’ As part of the alliance of servant love, one really has cause to smile. A resurrection smile—I have no interest at all in how much you actually smile—is a sign that you can risk. You can risk change, transition, a cross road.

When the circus came to our little town, growing up, we watched the trapeze artists enthralled. These aerial acrobats touch something deep in life.

You can swing from one bar to another on the existential trapeze. Back and forth the bars swing, and at least half a dozen times in life you will be changing bars. It’s scary. Waiting for the bar to come, you know you will have to jump. That is the thing about faith. There is always a bit of a leap in it. From home to college. Jump! From college to…whatever. Jump! From single to married or married to single. Jump! From calling to second calling. Jump! From work to retirement. Jump! From chief household executive to the nursing home. Jump! Easter gives a radiance to life that loosens us, smiling, for the changes in life. You are a part of the alliance of suffering love. Go ahead and jump. Some of us will spot you, and be there to catch if you slip a little. Smile. The risks of change make sense in the service of Servant Love. And every one of these jumps, courageously made, gives you further confidence in the Everlasting Arms of the last jump, the final horizon. Easter is the promise of eternal life!

From this pulpit, at Easter, we may remember, as we did with C T Vivian on Tuesday, the voice of Martin Luther King:

No matter who you are today, somebody helped you to get there. It may have been an ordinary person, doing an ordinary job in an extraordinary way.

There is a magnificent lady, with all the beauty of blackness and black culture, by the name of Marion Anderson that you’ve heard about and read about and some of you have seen. She started out as a little girl singing in the choir of the Union Baptist Church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And then came that glad day when she made it. And she stood in Carnegie Hall with the Philharmonic Orchestra in the background in New York, singing with the beauty that is matchless. Then she came to the end of the concert, singing Ave Maria as nobody else can sing it. And they called her back and back and back, and she finally ended by singing, ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen’. And her mother was sitting out in the audience, and she started crying; tears were flowing down her cheeks. And the person next to her said, “Mrs Anderson, Why are you crying? Your daughter is scoring tonight. The critics tomorrow will be lavishing their praise on her. Why are you crying?

And Mrs. Anderson looked over with tears still flowing and said, “I’m not crying because I’m sad, I’m crying for joy.” She went on to say, “You may not remember, you wouldn’t know. But I remember when Marian was growing up, and I was working in a kitchen till my hands were all but parched, my eyebrows all but scalded. I was working there to make it possible for my daughter to get an education. And I remember Marian came to see me and said, “Mother, I don’t want to see you having to work like this.” And I looked down and said, “Honey, I don’t mind it. I’m doing it for you and I expect great things of you.”

And finally one day somebody asked Marian Anderson in later years, “Miss Anderson, what has the been the happiest moment of your life? Was it that moment in Carnegie Hall in New York?” She said, “No, that wasn’t it/” “Was it that moment you stood before the Kings and Queens of Europe?” “No that wasn’t it”. “ Well, Miss Anderson, was it the moment Sibelius of Finland declared that his roof was too low for such a voice?” “No, that wasn’t it.” “Miss Anderson, was it the moment that Toscanini said that a voice like your comes only once in a century?” “No, that wasn’t it.” “What was it then, Miss Anderson.” And she looked up and said (smiling) quietly, “The happiest moment in my life was the moment I could say, “Mother, you can stop working now.”

Marian Anderson realized that she was where she was because somebody helped her to get there. (MLKing, “A Knock at Midnight”). That’s power.

Whose resurrection? Jesus’ resurrection giving you new eyes, ears and smile. The resurrection of Servant Love, granting new sight, new sound, new soul.

One ancient writer, not an earthly success, not an ecclesiastical victor, nonetheless wrote in the year 160ad: “the resurrection is the revelation of what is, the transformation of things, and a transition into newness (Treatise on the Resurrection).

Eyes, Ears, Smile.

Today we are set free to wonder at life, to work for justice, to weather change. And to do so with grace.

posted in Uncategorized on 04.8.2007 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

Joan Humphrey grew up on a farm in Kansas. She was born, the third of four children, to Donna and Jake Humphrey. The Humphrey farm of 480 acres, near Woodlawn Kansas, raised cattle and crops. Joan attended a one room school there until the eighth grade. She was a cheerleader at Sabetha High School. She also was an officer in her school’s chapter of ‘Future Homemakers of America’. She graduated second in her class. A class of 48. Here is the caption under her yearbook picture: “keen sense, common sense, no room for nonsense”. *

Joan then attended Wheaton College, because her pastor was a graduate. Later on, she entered law school at Northwestern University. Her classmates there teased her about her slow prairie speech. They also envied her lack of stress over exams. In law school she met a boy named Michael. They worked summer jobs on behalf of the poor: disability benefits, evictions, food stamps.

Joan and Michael were married in 1975. He wore a white suit. She wore daisies in her hair, and a white Moroccan caftan.

Joan and Michael then began to raise their own family of four daughters. Every morning, he brewed coffee. He pre-heated her cup with boiling water, filled it with coffee, and carried it to the bed where together they could talk about the day to come.

Joan’s life had two paradigms, professional woman and devoted mother. She cooked dinner every night. She established a daycare center in the courthouse where she worked. She packed lunches for four daughters, making sure to use Tropicana orange juice to limit the girls’ sugar intake. The newspaper quoted Joan as saying, “I wanted my family to be a family that shared their food and the mom could cook like my mom could cook.”

Joan’s temperament and industry brought her, in the year 2000, to the federal bench. She became a judge in the US District Court in Chicago. It was the culmination of a fine career, a position that had eluded her on other occasions. But… In 2002, one of her rulings angered white supremacists. One of these was convicted of plotting to have her killed. They did not succeed. Yet on February 28, 2005, two years ago, Joan’s husband Michael and her mother, both on crutches, were murdered. They were both shot in the head and chest with .22 caliber bullets.

Holy Week, every year, brings us to the precipice of a most disturbing question. At some point, we grow up or wake up enough to ask the question that Joan’s daughter Meg asked her that week. “Mom, why is the world so evil?” Holy Week—with its fleeting laud and honor, its temple conflict, its night of betrayal, its day of trial, its hour of tragedy, and its subsequent, lasting silence—brings us right to this matter of evil. Why? Why Mom? Why is the world so shot through with evil—sin, death, the threat of meaninglessness?

After 300 of his students died in a plane crash near Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, Chancellor Melvin Eggers of Syracuse University brought the question, via a newspaper interview, to his religious leadership at Hendrick’s Chapel. I will never forget his interview, the pain of it, the grief in it, the troubled angst of it, which never left him over the few remaining years of his life.

After 3000 died on 9/11, 2001, that next Friday, hundreds of people filled our sanctuaries, without invitation or liturgical preparation. Here they were, truly hunting for the language and heart with which to assess the same question. What in the world is wrong with this world?

After 300,000 were lost in December on the day after Christmas, 2004, out of a numbed and fogged stupor, there has gradually emerged a serious question, a question about bearing, perspective, and, ultimately, about faith. What kind of world is this? Who is the God who has breathed life into such a place? “Mom, why is the world so evil?”

The same reckoning can arrive in a far more quotidian fashion. One middle aged morning in the winter you may wake up to list the smaller showers of estrangement that meet us every day, long before we ever are drenched in the great thunderstorm of evil:

Premature resignation

Partial self-awareness

Indirect criticism

Cold honesty

Inflated responsibility

Excessive enjoyment

Needless worry

Wasted time

Careless haste

Misguided loyalty

Postponed grief

Avoided maturation

Partial planning

Unconscious entitlement

Pointless earning

Self-serving posture

Thankless reception

You meet them every day…

A contentious person is like a continual dripping of water…

In our time, people of conscience are truly alive, suddenly and earnestly alive, to this question, which is, again, the whole content of Holy Week. It is a question that, in the main, is a matter of grief, trouble, and loss. Which is, of course, the whole content of the church’s experience and memory of Holy Week. It is a matter of deep, abiding grief to face the gone-wrongness in life. And, while we have tried, in our churches, to feed the hunger in this question, to slake the thirst in this question, to provide compelling responses to this question, to a great degree, across the land, we have failed. And failure is the whole content of Holy Week. It is a grief to this preacher that our pulpits, nation wide, have thus far failed to meet the grief and loss and especially fear that pervade our time like a mist in London along Aldersgate Street, like an invisible unholy ghost, just on the edge of our awareness. Like a dawn that just will not come.

We have not been able robustly and preparedly and piercingly to remember, to call to mind our biblical, Christian, tragic sense of life, when most we have needed it. To hear Job on the ash heap: “What is my crime?”; and Second Isaiah: “A man of sorrow, acquainted with grief”; and Jeremiah’s lamentations; “all the rivers run to the sea”; and the tears of the David, “all flesh is grass”; to evoke Ecclesiastes, speaking of 9:11, “the race is not always….but time and chance happen to them all”; and the affliction of Paul, “persecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed”; and best of all Jesus himself, “if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me”. You cannot read all of Barbara Brown Taylor on Job the night of 9/11. It has to be read ahead. You cannot do all of a seminary course on Jeremiah the night after Tsunami. It has to be read ahead. You cannot absorb all that Paul says in Galatians, the afternoon of Lockerbie. It has to be read earlier. In wrestling we used to make weight, trying to lose 5 pounds in two hours by jogging in sweat suits through the school showers. Bodily life, Christian life, does not easily allow such last minute maneuvers.

This morning, we try again, as we enter Holy Week:

Jesus meets us today along this very road of tragedy in life: of evil, grief, loss, estrangement, and failure. His church lives still as a community that knows in its bones how to face evil with honesty, grief with grace, failure with faith, and death with dignity. H R Niebuhr warned his generation to suspect the false sense that somehow a “God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross”. Oddly, it is the starkness of the cross, the coarseness of Jesus’ death, the tremendous sense of loss and failure and grief of Holy Week that is your best gift to a frightened world. His cross truly names the tragedy of evil. His cross permanently enfolds that tragedy in the larger goodness of life and the lasting goodness of God. His cross radiates a thin measure of hope, that there is life beyond brokenness.

Remember your baptism and confirmation.

The world is good, the good handiwork of a divine goodness that passes all understanding and endures forever.

Yet, the world is just not right, but somehow off track, wrongheaded, with something ‘loose’ rattling around in side it—the shadow of sin, the specter of evil, the sorrow of death.

We have to face both and to pray for deliverance from the latter to the former. So we teach our children to say: Deliver us from evil.

Robert McAfee Brown said so memorably (how I miss his voice): “Friends, this is God’s world, but it is a crummy world, and we have to live with both realities”.

To Meg’s question “Why?” I have no answer for you. But the good news is that you have an answer for me. And if you think I do not see it you are mistaken. And if you think I do not appreciate or admire it you are mistaken. And if you think I do not respect it you are mistaken. You live your answer by choosing the cruciform path of faith. You meet evil with honesty, grief with grace, failure with faith, and death with dignity. You carry yourselves in belief.

You remember that it is not the passion of Christ that defines the Person of Christ, but the Person that defines the passion. You remember that it is not the suffering that bears the meaning, but the meaning that bears the suffering…that it is not the cross that carries the love but the love that carries the cross…that it is not crucifixion that encompasses salvation, but salvation that encompasses even the tragedy of crucifixion… and that it is not the long sentence of Holy week, with all its phrases, dependent clauses and semi-colons that completes the gospel, but it is the punctuation to come in seven days, the last mark of the week to come in 168 hours, whether it be the exclamation point of Peter, the full stop period of Paul or the question mark of Mary—Easter defines Holy Week, and not the other way around. Oh, we want to be clear, now: the resurrection follows but not replace the cross, for sure. Still, it is also true that the
cross precedes but does not overshadow the resurrection. It is Life that has the last word.

When we pray, deliver us from evil, there is a God to whom we may pray, in the assurance of being heard: Deliver us from evil…

Maybe that is why Joan Howard—her married name is Joan Howard Lefkow—she like Dorothy Gale of the Kansas farm, she like Billy Graham of Wheaton College, she like Ernest Fremont Tittle of Northwestern University, she like your own mother in kitchen and coffee and packed lunch, answered her daughter’s question (sursum corda!) in faithful witness (hear the Gospel!) to tragedy and goodness and hope.

I confess that I read her statement some months ago, weeping, in the middle of an utterly boring Board meeting, and was for several moments unsure of where I was, or whether these few sentences were read from the printed page as human comments, or were resounding in the mind and heart as divine utterance. Which is this voice? Human or Divine? You be the judge.

Joan says to her daughter, as the Gospel says to us:

I am so sad…It is a human tragedy…Honey, most people are good, most people would not think of doing this…Remember the sermon years ago at the Episcopal Church in Evanston, where the girls sang in the choir and I made sandwiches for the homeless once a month…The priest said, ‘Some things are just broken…they’re broken…just broken…They’re broken and you go on from there…Don’t think you can repair them but get up and go on from there…But whoever did this, I want to look them in the eye and say…How could you?...How could you do that to me and my family?”

*New York Times, 3/10/05

posted in Uncategorized on 04.1.2007 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

Philippians 3 and John 12

George Marlowe lived in a trailer on the Canadian border. His son Kirk lived there with George, and cared for his father. George had lost his legs—to diabetes or in Vietnam or by a farm accident (the cause itself is lost to memory). The son delivered mail in and around Trout River and was the sole care giver for his dad.

Kirk was a jolly soul—big, brawny, full of life and humor. He claimed the border country mosquitoes could stretch up to open the mailboxes into which he delivered the daily post, they were so large. This was hyperbole, but also contained a grain of truth, as hyperbole does. George and Kirk lived together for several years, and largely in peace. They did sometimes argue loudly when by nightfall they had drunk too well. Their neighbors, Lyle and Pat Wilson, in the next trailer down, a double wide, checked on George during the day, when they could. Or they would send one of their daughters to look in on him. Or, if no other remedy was available, they would call the preacher to ask him to stop by on his way down into Canada, to visit with George.

The midday summer heat on a single wide trailer by the 4^th of July is just a simmering oven heat. You would not want a breeze, even if there was one, which there was not. George’s self-medication and relaxed housekeeping, and chain smoking made of the trailer a singular environment. In the summer of 1982, the last of his life, George offered his neighbors a reminder of mortality. In the summer of 1982, emerging into adult life, Kirk offered his neighbors the example of loyalty. Kirk was a simple person. He simply offered and lavished the loyalty of love on his dad, by day and by night. He poured his life like perfume onto the body of George Marlowe, his father.

Our two readings, Philippians 3 and John 12, recall Kirk and George--these readings, that is, along with the hymn we have sung about ‘love and loyalty’. Philippians is about loyalty. John is about mortality. Kirk taught us something about loyalty. George taught us something about mortality. ‘Thy guiding radiance, above us shall be, a beacon to God, to love and loyalty’. George was buried near the border and near where he was born, on July 26, 1982, at 2:00pm. In the blur of activities, come Sunday, in Christ, one is accosted by loyalty and mortality, through whom, in Christ, ‘we become like him’.

Two very different readings from Scripture greet us this Sunday morning. One describes loyalty. The other evokes mortality. Both are good news, and each story amplifies and explicates the other. For you this morning, the lesson and the gospel raise a mortal question about your forms of loyalty, and a loyal question about your sense of mortality. A hymn of love and a reminder of death are somewhere, somehow buried in every sermon and every service of worship. In decisions about loyalty and in the encroachment of mortality, we become like Him: Jesus Christ, the loyalty of God; Jesus Christ, the mortality of man.

There is today a tendency to minimize Paul’s change of allegiance, as expressed in Philippians 3, and elsewhere. So this scholarly trend would argue: Paul did not really distance himself from his earlier religious expression. Paul did not really reject his mother tongue, mother land, mother religion. Paul did not expressly depart from the eighth day, the tribe, the law. Paul did not really intend to step aside from his inheritance. Paul was born loyal and died loyal, and his loyalty at birth and death were of a piece. So, your teacher here at the Head of the Charles, Krister Stendahl, and so my teacher in Montreal, Bishop NT Wright, and so EP Sanders and so many others. I suppose that scholarly trends, like fashion, move in and out of vogue, for and with some regularity. Certainly, the work of these mentioned scholars, and that of many others, reminding us of the depth and breadth of Jewish background to the letters of the APOSTLE TO THE GENTILES (emphasis added for emphasis), carry much of importance. Still, there is the little matter of rubbish.

Paul calls his inheritance rubbish. SKUBALA. It is a remarkable Greek word, whose force you can hear in its simple repetition. SKUBALA. Rubbish. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and I regard them as rubbish. It will not do to muffle Paul’s apocalyptic sense of loyalty. In fact, much of the work of late that tries to do so ends up representing a view of Paul that is much more akin to the views of his opponents than to those of Paul himself. But what of the particular inheritance, yours and mine and Paul’s? What of our particular, idiosyncratic, experiences and cultures and hues? What of circumcision, of covenant, of history, of torah, of valiant duty past? I regard them as…SKUBALA. We may wish Paul had been more temperate. He was not. The gospel of Jesus Christ brings an apocalyptic, cataclysmic, sea change in the fount of loyalty. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

Across town, across the Scripture that is, and in the heart of the Fourth Gospel, meanwhile, we are engaged by another story. Now mortality, not loyalty, addresses us. If there is a richer set of eight verses in the entire New Testament than John 12: 1-8, honestly, I do not know where you would find it. Here is the Passover, the third in the fourth Gospel. Here too is Bethany, site of earlier astonishment. Here is Lazarus, who emerged from a tomb, covered with bandages, odorous and squinting. Martha, of serving fame, and Mary, of praying memory, are here, too. A year’s wages are here poured out on feet, feet of course being of sacramental power in this Gospel, as we saw two weeks ago. There is fragrance, the fragrant scent of perfume poured on holy feet, perfume dried in loving hands, perfume gathered on the hairs of the head. An astounding scene, already, but there is more. In comes Judas Iscariot. There arises an argument about money, surely not the last religious argument about money. The poor and the present are set against each other, surely not the last religious argument about the good and beautiful. And then a dominical pronouncement: keep it for the day of my burial. After so many visual, audible, tactile, olfactory and savory images, we are sensorially exhausted and ready for a nap. These images share a common trait. They evoke mortality.

The Passover is the scene of death. Lazarus was raised from death. Mary has a premonition of death. Martha and Mary pleaded with Jesus about death. Judas Iscariot is the agent of death. The plight of the poor is mentioned to avoid a confrontation with death. The perfume is a symbol of anointing at death. If there is one thing more significant in all of Scripture than justice—and it is not clear that there is anything more significant in Scripture than justice—but if there is one thing more significant in all of Scripture than justice—it is mortality. Our gospel lesson this morning pulls out every stop to evoke mortality.

Reminders of mortality, like attendance in worship itself, which is one such reminder on a weekly basis, may make us squirm. We have a way of thinking that death happens always to somebody else. We find ways to change the channel. In the last four years we have become experts at changing the channel. Our misdeed in the Middle East, preemptive, unilateral, imperial, reckless, immoral, post-Christian, and wrong, has brought death. Interruption of to the regular routines, rhythms, lives and dreams of 200,000 loyal, heroic soldiers of ours. Physical death to 3,200 of those. Serious injury to 25,000. As yet uncountable losses—50,000 to 500,000—to Iraqi civilians: children, women, older adults, young people, daughters with child, young men not twenty, recent grandparents, eight year old boys, three year old girls. Diminishment to a part of the gentle hope, for a real spiritual culture and community, across this land, in our time. Harm to some of the soaring ideals of a young republic, now seen from abroad as a pre-emptive behemoth. Defeat to a part of the great dream of those who built the United Nations. Yes, reminders of death make us squirm.

So let us return to loyalty for a moment.

Meanwhile, back in Philippians, our APOSTLE TO THE GENTILES (emphasis added for emphasis), has now stated for us the force and source of loyalty in Jesus Christ, as he does with equal power in Galatians 2 and Romans 5 and 2 Corinthians 5 and 1 Thessalonians 4. That I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through the faithfulness of Christ, the righteousness of God based on faith. (The loyalty of Christ, the righteousness of God based on Christ’s loyalty.) Paul has been found in a new life. His earlier code and covenant have come to an end. They are set aside. They are good and true and beautiful, but not by comparison with the truly good and the beautifully true and the divinely beautiful. It is the loyalty of Christ to which Paul sings his hymn of praise as read this morning. The rendering of these verses depends upon a reading of the phrase, ‘faith..Christ’ as first in reference to Christ’s own faith, by which in faith Paul and we are ‘owned’. It may be that Paul has written these words in prison, and it may be that these words from prison were written at the end of his life. He will have had, as we do on some days, and Sundays, a clear sense of the fragility of life and its brevity.

So let us return to mortality for a moment.

The several marks of mortality set before us in the Gospel of John, chapter 12, are also reminders of divine love. Lazarus evokes such love from Jesus that, in that shortest of verses, we are reminded, ‘Jesus wept’. Mary and Martha are the figures of serving and praying that we know so well in the teachings about disciplined love. Judas is never portrayed as doing ill for the sake of doing harm, but is found to mistake some love for all love. Most strongly, the pouring of perfume in lavish expense is understood as the full fragrance of affection and love.

Our readings today give us grace to live by faith. We may want to consider, on a bright spring Sunday afternoon walk, the examples of abiding loyalty and loving mortality which we have known. We are meant to ‘become like him’, and so we shall want to notice the forms of loyalty and limitation that are ever before us.

We may want to remember something of Josiah Royce, and his evocation of loyalty. You may recall from your own life and family experience, the example of a truly loyal friend. You may recognize that sometimes lesser loyalties must be laid aside in the face of greater loyalties. No one wants the lower lights to occlude the one great loyalty of life. You may recognize the difference, say, between asking forgiveness for a promise broken, and asking forgiveness for a promise that should never have been made in the first place, whether kept or broken. We may deeply recognize the need we have to reclaim the language of remorse out of our religious traditions, so that we might walk again in newness of life, following Lenten confession.

We shall want to find and practice the forms of loyalty by which, and through which we may dimly acknowledge our mortality. Any pastor will tell you that young people live as if they were immortal, and not only young people. There is a youthful courage in this, but also a tragic risk. We may want to recall the verses of Scripture that warn us about limits. Store ye not up treasure on earth where moth and rust consume…All flesh is grass, it withers and fades…Prize your time now you have it, for God is a consuming fire…The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong…This night is your soul required of you…

Here is a potentially saving word. It is the intimation of mortality that puts steel in the spine of our loyalty. It is the practiced sacrifice of loyalty that gives us courage for the facing of the last things. Where there is a sense of mortality there is a sense of loyalty. Where there is a preparation of loyalty there is a preparation for mortality. The one inspires the other. (Where there is no inkling of mortality there is no spur to loyalty). Perhaps that is why, in the mystery of all things, and in the planning for Sunday readings, Philippians 3 and John 12 were yoked. Think this lent about your lasting commitments. Think this lent about your limitations.

On July 26^th 1982, the little church, Constable UMC, where Kirk Marlowe had been recruited a few years earlier for youth fellowship, was sparsely populated. Two dozen sweaty souls spread out across a hot church to celebrate the life and faith of George Marlowe. The funeral service was read. Good English sentences, scrip
tural and traditional and not too lengthy. A prayer. A psalm. A Gloria. A gospel lesson. A homily. A prayer. Kirk had also asked to offer a word at the end. So, with the prayer executed, the preacher sat. George’s son stood with a wordless dignity. He surveyed the congregation with a silent dignity. He opened a guitar case and unpacked his acoustic guitar. He would not have used the word ‘solemnize’, but he could have. With a languid ease, and all the time in the world, Kirk tuned the instrument. Then he strummed. In a country beat. Country. Things are slow in the country. Then he began to sing, when the choking was subsided.

His was a hymn of love, sung by loyalty, into the teeth of mortality. Earl Marlatt wrote ‘Are Ye Able’, one of the Deans of Boston University School of Theology. Marlatt wrote, in his last annual report, ‘we have developed a sermon-centered curriculum’. Marlatt’s hymn, and these two texts, Philippians and John, through this sermon, ask you to develop a mortality conscious and loyalty laden life. A mortality conscious and loyalty laden life…

Son to father, loyalty to mortality, Kirk to George:

Are ye able…

Said the Master, to be crucified with me

When the shadows close around you with sod

Still the Master whispers down eternity

Lord we are able…

posted in Uncategorized on 03.25.2007 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

John 13: 1-9

Jesus meets us today in the communion of service, and in the service of communion. Together let us listen for the gospel this Lent.

The strange world of the Bible includes no more mysterious, different country than these later chapters in John. If Antarctica is our most different continent in all the world, and the desert southwest the most geographically distinct region in our country, then, in like fashion, these chapters full of speech at the end of John are such a tract.

Our passage today makes two affirmations. One is about Jesus. The other is about his disciples.

Our passage reminds us of what we only with great difficulty continue to see: the Christ is incarnate in humility. For some reason, according to my gospel and yours, God has chosen the scandalous way of the cross, the path of humility in which to make God’s self known to us: a stumbling block to the religious spirit and sheer folly to the reason. Yet this is the witness of Scripture, tradition, and our own considered experience. It may have been that John, our latest Gospel (and much later in time, it may be, than has regularly been assumed) could already see the inevitable triumphalism that the sacraments would carry. The pride of place, the less than blessed assurance that can come with a signed, sealed, delivered grace, controllable grace, cheap grace. So John, throughout his Gospel, eliminates the sacraments. In the fourth gospel we find hardly any reference to sacrament: not to baptism by John the Baptist; not to the baptism of Jesus; not to the Lord’s Supper at the last supper; not to the words of institution; not to the memory of the upper room; not to the revision of the paschal meal. Just here, in John 13, as closer readers of the Gospel sense, just here where on the night of betrayal, and in Jerusalem, and in the quiet secrecy of the familiar gathering, just here where we are about to settle into another recollection of the sacrament of the last supper-- John turns a corner. Where the holy meal has been, we have the stark, searing, unforgettable humiliation of the footwashing. Jesus Christ is known to us in the scandal of real incarnation, not in the magic of a mystery cult. His presence is found in absence, his power in weakness, his authority in service. The great tradition of growth and strength, found more in the other gospels and notoriously celebrated in Acts, is here rejected. Here, nakedness. Here a towel. Here a basin. Here the humility of a servant’s work. Here the grime of feet. Here, ministry. This is the word of faith, and for John anything, anything that stands in the way of the Word of faith, including the sacraments themselves, are to be set aside. There is no Last Supper in the Gospel of John. There is only Jesus the Christ, incarnate in humility. For some, the greatest dimension of sin is falsehood. For some it is sloth. For John, here, the demon is the sin of pride. Christ, the real Host, is the Servant.

It will take some further chapters for the second aspect of this teaching in John 13 fully to emerge. Here in John 13, there is a service of communion that is the communion of service, not Holy Communion. Then in 14, the spirit of truth is known in conversation. In 15, the same spirit in commandment. In 16, the same spirit of truth in catechesis. In 17, the same truth in consecration. But here, in John 13, there is the divine hand on the human foot. Not only Judas the sword bearer, but also Peter, especially Peter, Peter whom the writer of the fourth Gospel deprecates, Peter, first among the misinformed, expects something else and is horrified. He expects—what? A place? A name? Authority? And he is presented an emblem of humble service. There is to be forever in the community of love, which is the church, a serving humility, a humble service: So the cross. So the bowl and towel on the altar. So the stole, an ox yoke, to mock religious garb, so the collection plate, so the call to prayer, so the serving of meals, so the wiping of children, so the profound service of listening, so the quiet willingness to forgive, so the acknowledgement of ignorance, so the capacity to empathize, so the tithe, so the disciplines of discipleship, so the modest art of politics, so the artless labors of administration, so the season of Lent, so the pathetic simplicity of bread and cup, so the actual, earthly, incarnate, humble replication and resurrection of One, who on the night he was betrayed, took a towel, and when he had blessed it, he took it to his disciples, saying, take, wash, this is my labor given for you, do this as oft as ye shall gather, in remembrance of me. Communion, real communion, is service in truth.

A new commandment I give you, that you love one another. Even as I have loved you, so you also ought to love one another. This is my commandment, that you love one another.

This is your ministry, to love one another. Ministry is worshipping. Love one another in worship. Ministry is proclaiming. Love one another is speech. Ministry is teaching. Love one another in learning. Ministry is healing. Love one another in healing. Ministry is serving. Love one another in service. Ministry is liberating. Love one another in setting others free. Ministry is reconciling. Love one another in reconciliation.

One example. Parker Palmer writes movingly of his salvation from depression in Let Your Life Speak. Those who know depression up close and personal will appreciate his diligent honesty. Palmer painfully records those many attempts to help that were not helpful. Well meaning but ineffective. Sympathy that only led to greater sadness. Positive advice that made him more depressed. Reminders of his many talents, which left him in greater malaise. Those who said they knew what he was going through, which, of course, no one ever does. He concludes: Having not only been ‘comforted’ by friends, but having tried to comfort others in the same way, I think I understand what the syndrome is about: avoidance and denial. One of the hardest things we must do sometimes is to be present to another person’s pain without trying to ‘fix’ it, to simply stand respectfully at the edge of that person’s mystery and misery… Blessedly there were several people, family and friends, who had the courage to stand with me in a simple and healing way. One of them was a friend named Bill who, having asked my permission to do so, stopped by my home every afternoon, sat me down in a chair, knelt in front of me, removed my shoes and socks, and for half an hour simply massaged my feet. He found the one place in my body where I could still experience feeling—and feel somewhat reconnected with the human race. Bill rarely spok
e a word. When he did, he never gave advice but simply mirrored my condition. He would say, ‘I can sense your struggle today’, or, ‘It feels like you are getting stronger’. I could not always respond, but his words were deeply helpful: they reassured me that I could still be seen by someone—life giving knowledge in the midst of an experience that makes one feel annihilated and invisible. It is impossible to put into words what my friend’s ministry meant to me. Perhaps it is enough to say that I now have deep appreciation for the biblical story of Jesus and the washing of the feet. (64)

This is my prayer: that you in hearing or in receiving, today, may have ‘life giving knowledge’ in the face of whatever in life is making you feel annihilated and invisible. This is the spirit of truth in communion.

A new commandment I give you, that you love one another. Even as I have loved you, so you also ought to love one another. This is my commandment, that you love one another.

posted in Uncategorized on 03.11.2007 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 13: 31-35

Welcome

We have been gathered here, from Texas and Chicago, from Rochester and Providence, from Bay State Road and Brookline, gathered by grace. From a University President to a babe in the womb, from the least to the greatest, we are, for a moment, gathered. As Thornton Wilder wrote, ‘just for a minute we are all together: let’s look at each other’. Let us meet the moment, not miss it. As Abraham Heschel said, ‘let us learn to meet the moment’. Like a mother hen gathers her brood, the Spirit of Christ has gathered us, and welcomed us again into real life, which is the partnership of the Gospel. Welcome, and please know how meaningful your own presence truly is for this gathering.

A sermon like this one, a salutation, ought to begin with some recognition of the difficulty involved in interpretation, and perhaps with a bit of humor. To those twin ends, we recall the account of the man who was stopped for driving 90 miles an hour on the turnpike. He explained his velocity to the officer by saying he had seen a sign that said ‘90’ so he drove ‘90’. Then the officer noticed three petrified and terrified backseat riders, and asked if they were frightened by their turnpike ride. One said, “Oh no, route 90 was fine, we just hope and pray he is not going back onto route 220—that was really scary!” Interpretation is a delicate art. A gospel text needs and deserves some exegetical examination and some theological explanation and some practical application.

A. Exegetical Examination

In fact, our lesson today, Luke 13:31ff., exudes as poignant, as heartfelt, as realistic, and as personal an outlook as one can find anywhere in the Gospels, in its soprano voice of the lingering teaching of Jesus, or in its alto voice of the earliest church’s memory, or in its tenor voice of the gospel author, or in its baritone rendering in tradition.

The highest note is Jesus’ own. The first line, the melody, is a kind of dominical soprano voice, laden with maternal imagery today. ‘Like a hen gathers, would I have gathered you?’ All these lines (31-33) are found only in Luke, and clearly go back to Jesus himself. The nature imagery, the kindliness of the Pharisees, the use of the term ‘fox’( from a country preacher’s lexicon), the gritty undercurrent of fear, the poetry of three days: mirable dictum!, we hear today what Jesus said. His voice, vss. 31-33, carries across two millennia. Go tell that fox…As a hen gathers her chicks…today, tomorrow, the third day… Here is Jesus of Nazareth, in 33ad, facing the tragic sense of life.

(There also is his frightened, hopeful church, in 70 ad, facing the tragic sense of life. There is Luke, in 90ad, facing the tragic sense of life. And here we are, gathered as partners in the Gospel. Thoreau wrote: “If it is not a tragical life we live, then I know not what to call it. Such a story as that of Jesus Christ--the history of Jerusalem, say, being a part of the Universal History. The naked, the embalmed, unburied death of Jerusalem amid its desolate hills—think of it…”)

Listen particularly, just for moment, to the voice of the writer, Luke, the third or tenor line, if you will, in this harmonic composition. Luke makes two novel moves, which differ from the interpretation offered by Matthew, with whom Luke shares a use of a portion of this text. Both moves impress us today.

First, Luke uses two powerful, forceful verbs to show the sweep of Jesus’ divine embrace, the gathering motion of the mother hen, the announcement of partnership, divine and human (thelo and sunago). I would have done…I would have done…I longed, desired, deeply wished…to gather, to embrace, to join together, to partner…There is a deeply moving aspect to this emphasis, as Luke has Jesus open the next several chapters of the Gospel of Luke, which include all the favorite and solely Lukan materials. We have the Good Samaritan, thanks to Luke. And the lost sheep and coin, thanks to him. We have the prodigal son, that most Gnostic of parables, thanks to Luke. And the dishonest steward, thanks to him. Luke is probing the partnership of the Gospel, and he begins his own emphasis right here. What we think about God determines how we live. Luke illumines that partnership.

Second, Luke stands Matthew’s interpretation of expectation on its head. For Matthew, the prediction of the coming of the Son of Man was an end of the world prediction. Not for Luke. Matthew looks up, Luke looks out. Luke sees the world a little more as we do, with miles to go before we sleep, with generations to go before we sleep. We have work to do. Here. Now. In partnership. Together. In real unity, not just in passing togetherness. Where Matthew heralds parousia, Luke heralds incarnation, and the coming entry, triumphal entry, into Jerusalem. Here Luke foreshadows what is to come. For him, as George Buttrick wrote, “Jesus was killed by the insurrectionists in the mob and by the reactionaries in the temple” (a good warning about the far left as well as the right). We can learn in our time from this text, and offer a form for its theological explanation.

B. Theological Explanation

Gathered here are we, in Boston the cradle of liberty, and at Boston University, the cradle of Methodist ministry. It is hard to walk much farther east, without some swimming trunks. It is hard to walk much farther back, without some memories. John Adams and John Dempster would like a word or two with us. The church whose educational project Dempster, a Mohawk valley native, began, here, and the country whose cultural project Adams, a Braintree native, began, here, both depend on human freedom, human grace.

I longed…to gather…Go
d in Christ invites a partnership of the Gospel, as Paul names it in Philippians 1: a partnership, a koinonia, a partnership. (Tragically, the NRSV has rendered the word, there, a sharing. How pale, how ‘us’ today.) Sursum corda: Jesus gathers us, to live out a muscular partnership of the Gospel: to learn not only to chew, but also to choose.

Our lesson shows Jesus, fully human as well as a body of divinity, ‘the transcript in time of who God is in eternity’.

T. Here Jesus loves his own people like a momma, like a mother hen. These people, and we too, we could discern then, must not have been totally depraved.

U. Here Jesus recognizes the choices that inevitably make us who we are. Choice is relational and conditional, and makes us inspect what condition our condition is in. These people, and we too, must have not been unconditionally elected.

L. Here Jesus gathers everybody, all, all, like a hen with a brood. These people, and we too, we could discern then, must not have been limited to the very narrow, tiny minority of the pre-destined elect.

I. Here Jesus faces, heartsick, the brutal truth, that these people, and we ourselves, can and do resist the invitations of love, even the momma like, mother love of a hen gathering chicks. They must not have been powerless. Jesus’ grace was resisted, steadily and effectively, to the path of the cross.

P. Here Jesus himself does not persevere, not at least in Jerusalem, or in the spiritual culture of our time, nor does his cause, at least not in this passage. Persecution not perseverance awaits this holy one.

Jesus, here, means freedom. The one requirement of your picture of God is that God must be ‘worshippable’, worthy of worship (neither cruel, nor evil, nor blind, nor capricious, nor us on our worst day). Today Jesus sets us on a path of freedom—a good Boston theme. Human freedom that is temporal, universal, loving, imaginative, and powerful. We will think of it in a moment as another kind of TULIP formula. We hunger for the partnership of the Gospel, the partnership of grace, divine and human, and the partnership of freedom divine and human.

A sermon like this one, a salutation, ought to continue with some analysis and examination, careful examination, and perhaps a touch of humor. To those twin ends, Mark Trotter reminded me once of the physician who provided a thorough medical exam to one patient, declaring him as ‘healthy as a horse’. As the man took up his coat to go, he fell down dead as a doornail. The secretary overheard the thud, entered, and asked, ‘what are we to do?’ To which the doctor, in view of misdiagnosis, said, ‘Well, I don’t know. But at least could we turn him around so that it looks like his coming in, not going out?’ Be wary of overly optimistic charts, graphs, reports, diagnoses. Keep the verses of Yeats at hand, “the center does not hold…”

For all our warlike failings, there is still a grandeur to the human being, a grandeur personally known in love, and that love modeled after its partner in the divine love, love divine, all loves excelling! (But not erasing!)

The personalist liberals of Boston knew about partnership--Brightman and his dark God-given, Ferre and his hymn to love, and our own colleagues on imagination and creation. Yet they underestimated the power of human freedom, for evil. Their editors and mid course correctors of the neo-orthodox school knew about partnership. Yet they underestimated the power of human freedom, for good. Their successors, the liberationists, knew about human freedom. Yet they underestimated the power of human freedom, to reach across inherited boundaries.

Many decades ahead of his time, one voice stood out, and from this very pulpit. Howard Thurman explicitly championed the partnership of the Gospel. Oh, he celebrated personality with his teachers, but knew the darker dimensions of experience for both Jesus and the disinherited. Oh, he too acclaimed faith, but knew the dangers of Christo-monism, and the neglect of a common ground. Oh, he too faced the terrors of power without truth, but knew the dangers of any ghetto, and could preach a scandalous universality, and acclaim a spiritual presence. Brightman and Niehbuhr and Guttierez all offer something, but not enough, not alone. Not enough for a world hungry for the partnership of the Gospel. Thurman would have gathered them together, like a mother hen gathering her chicks.

How shall we appropriate such an explanation? As my grandmother would admonish, ‘give us something practical to take home’.

C. Practical Application

Jan and I have come to Boston to spend the fourth part of our ministry in gathering chicks, in a generative mode, and in a spirit of partnership—to build a congregation, and recruit preachers, and exemplify spiritual hospitality, in a way that engages the next generation in the partnership of the Gospel. A national voice, a Methodist ethos, an excellent hospitality—these are our signposts. Marsh Chapel can become a heart for the heart of the city and a worship service for the service of the city. We will rightly be measured by the kind of people we produce, and the kind of pastors we produce. Humanly speaking, the death or life of the church depends upon the leadership of the church, and its voice. The voice of responsible Christian liberalism may be dormant but is not dead, not yet. You are here today because you are the natural partners in this expression of the Gospel. Our voice is a responsible Christian liberal voice, one that sails between the Scilla of reaction and the Caribdis of rejection. The voice of Marsh Chapel is a responsibly Christian liberalism.

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

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

Is partnership to have a voice? Or will the Gospel be only ‘the throwing of a stone’? Will the heteronomous freedom of partnership in the Gospel—temporal, universal, loving, imaginative, and powerful--find a hearing? Or shall the determinists (both Biblicist and materialist) win? Will your grandchildren sing the songs of freedom and grace? Or will a lockstep legalism of a purpose driven life prevail? Hear the gospel: as a hen gathers her chicks…

No, it is not too late for partnership. Abraham had a whole lot of nothing. And faith. And that gave him a future. Who knows what may come? Fifty two years ago, I doubt that Marcia and Irving Hill thought that once they named their misbehaving first baby Allan after Allan Knight Chalmers, that he would be one day the Dean of Marsh Chapel. But here he is. It is not too late. The best time to plant an oak tree is one hundred years ago. The second best time is today

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

Voice, ethos, and hospitality cost.

Sermon by sermon this year, we have tried to announce a call to the ministry: our future voice. Sermon by sermon this year, we have tried to remember a charmed chapel story: our historical ethos. Sermon by sermon this year, we have taught disciplined generosity: our chance at real hospitality.

We hope to complete the endowment of the Marsh Chapel deanship. Is there one person who would feel called to such a gift, in the partnership of the Gospel?

We hope to renovate this building. Are there 100 people who would fee called to share the burden of such giving, in the partnership of the Gospel?

We hope to establish a Dempster House, an interreligous living unit for students (Hindu, Moslem, Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, all) committed to a common hope. Are there 1000 people who could share the burden of such a project, in the partnership of the Gospel?

Closing

We have provided personal counsel, and some solace, in this past week. One couple, reflecting on a grim tragedy, a loss of life and of friendship, sought counsel under the shadow of a familiar portrait. As we completed a prayer, the young man asked, ‘Who was Howard Thurman?’ Before I could put into gear my own lengthy response, which, like the peace of God would have passed all understanding and endured forever, his friend spoke. She answered, ‘Oh, I know his story: Dean of Marsh Chapel, religious teacher, guide to Martin Luther King, advocate for a common ground…’ In eight sentences, she had it. I still do not know which was more thrilling, his question or her answer! Thurman wrote:

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

Will you embrace the partnership of the Gospel?

posted in Uncategorized on 03.4.2007 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 4: 1-13

It is the season of Lent, and again, come this first Sunday in Lent; we meet Jesus in the wilderness. There He resists. In the time honored tradition of a three part story, we are given a lesson about making and keeping human life—human. Here, as in our other gospels, the Lord faces and masters the various temptations which we also know. They include a kind of will to power, and a sort of pride, and a type of avarice. We come to church with some experience temptation and resistance and temptation. As the song writer says, ‘good experience comes from seasoned judgment--which comes from bad experience’.

In many communities, including our own, the sun rises this morning, this Lenten morning, on experience of loss and hurt. This morning there are homes and families who have suddenly known unexpected loss. This morning there are friends and groups of friends who have been faced with mortal danger. At one breakfast table, a wife now sits alone, for the first time on a Sunday in 60 years. At another breakfast table, a family gathers for the first time, in a long time, and missing a member. It would help us to remember just how short our words do fall in trying to describe the depth of these moments. Our words arrive only at the shoreline, at the margin of things. Beyond this we practice prayer, a kind of sitting silent before God.

Our immediate community here along the Charles River today mourns unexpected losses in a recent, tragic fire. Along with the scripture and the music, amid the hymns and prayers of our worship, there walks also among us today, by the mind’s farther roads, a recognition of loss. There is some shock to loss. There is a kind of fear that comes with loss. There is, often later, an honest anger. There is some numbness. There is a real, and good, desire to do something helpful. There are questions, numerous and important. And there is the one haunting question, too, why?

We do not know why these things happen. We hurt, and grieve. In the bones. At the deeper levels, we just do not know, and for a community committed to knowing, and knowing more, and more, this means wandering in a serious wilderness. Give us an equation to solve. Show us a biography that needs writing. Provide us with an experiment. Happily we would organize a committee, or develop a proposal, or phone a list of donors. But loss, unexpected and unfair, is tragic. The tragic sense of life takes us out into wilderness, where we learn to resist.

Faith is resistance. Faith is the power to withstand what we cannot understand.

We are in worship this morning to attest to something. Faith is the power to withstand what we cannot understand. Worship is the practice of faith by which we learn to withstand what we cannot understand. God is the presence, force, truth, and love Who alone deserves worship, and worship is the practice of the faith by which we learn to withstand what we cannot understand. Worship prepares us to resist. So we see Jesus again in the wilderness. To resist all that makes human life inhuman. So here you are, come lent, come Sunday, come this Sunday.

This week you may, suddenly, find that a choice is required of you, through no fault, intention, planning or device of your own. Further, the choice you want to make perhaps could involve refusal and resistance: refusal of a request from an archetypal authority, resistance to a popular mood, resistance to an ingrained habit, refusal of the pleas of a friend. Russell Lowell predicts that at least once to every person and group comes such a moment to decide.

With all your heart you may want to refuse, to refuse. An invitation, a suggestion, a promotion, a direction, an order. Your heart may say: This is not me, not right, not good. Resistance always costs. Resistance means sacrifice. Resistance hurts. The slings and arrow of fortune's discontent draw blood. Resistance, refusal. Does such principled denial have a place in Christian living? Dare ask: Does God evoke and use refusal? Does Christ, God's everlasting Yes--in whom Paul says there is no longer Yea and Nay, but only Yes--Does Christ desire resistance and refusal?

For Daniel, refusal to give up his family name, his religion, his faith landed him, with the others, in trouble. You enjoy the story, I know. Daniel resists the order to blaspheme, and accepts punishment, even death. Bound in the heart of fire, the prophet of God is protected, strangely, by God who answers prayer.

For Naboth, refusal came more dear. Old King Ahab had every vineyard he wanted but one. He asked for the land. Naboth refused. He asked again, this time presumably in a more kingly voice. Naboth refused. Ahab asked again, with a hint of threat on his tongue. Naboth refused. And Ahab went whimpering to bed. Not so, Jezebel, who simply took Naboth aside, and cut off his head. Refusal can either cost you a king's friendship, or your head, or both.

John of Patmos did something to put himself out on the rocky prison isle, a first century Papillon, as he wrote his Revelation, our last Bible book. Refusing to worship Caesar? Names jeeringly attached to Rome--beast, satan, whore? Resistance to the more established synagogue?

What if I were to shout to you this morning that this church had received a magnificent bequest, a precious gift left us by an ancestor? Further, were I to announce that this one gift was worth more than all our buildings and all our current endowment and all our church program put together? Would you not dance, sing, soar?

You inherit a tradition of principled refusal, a pearl of great price, a treasure hidden in a field, a precious gift. A tradition of principled refusal.

Several summers ago an older woman was robbed at gunpoint in her own home. The newspaper, perhaps accurately, has quoted her in full as regards her view of this crime: "We are raising a generation of hooligans."

Pummeled still, even in old age, even in closeted retirement, the violent spirit of the age pounds at her, lacing her with blows left and right. Yet she resists! You may recognize her, now.

This was Rosa Parks. A younger Mrs. Parks found herself, seated midway back in a Montgomery bus, on December 1, 1955, pummeled again by the hand of aggression, the Strong Man of this world. For some reason, she refused to move. Bus stopped. Police came. Crowd gathered. Anger, shouting. The Montgomery bus boycott began. A tradition of principled resistance--this is your native land, your mother tongue, your home territory.

The prophets of old knew this. They spoke about God's unbending holiness. They spoke about God's own refusal to set a divine seal on any present moment, any present setup, any present arrangement of power. They spoke about human suffering, about how God sees, hears, knows, remembers, and intervenes for the suffering. They spoke about God's justice, critical of every established power. They refused. Here it is: "Prophetic speech is an act of relentless hope that refuses to despair, that refuses to believe that the world is closed off in patterns of exploitation and oppression." (Brueggeman).

My son had only one request for a gift one year. He showed me a catalogue that pictured a little grill, for cooking meat, “ A lean, mean fat reducing machine, guaranteed to reduce each average hamburger by 3 oz of fat--$59.95” Then I noticed the sponsor of this culinary instrument—George Foreman. And I inflicted a story on my son, as parents do.

In 1974, one of the greatest boxing matches of the century pitted Mohammed Ali against the world champion, George Forman. Kinshasha, Zaire. November 2. Ali predicted: "The most spectacular wonder human eyes have ever witnessed." 60,000 cheering fans, shouting, "Ali Bu Mal Ye", which antiseptically translated means, "Go get him".

Scenes: Forman charging, rounds 1-6. Forman 25, young, strong, powerful. Recently defeated both Frazier and Norton. Ali: 32, guile fitness and will. After 5 rounds, Forman arm weary and bewildered. 3rd Round, Ali leans to crowd: "He don't hurt me much". 5th round, Forman tantalized by the stationary target, angry, frustrated. Angelo Dundee had loosened the ropes! Ali, later: "The bull is stronger but the matador is smarter". Then, 8th round: "Ali is leaning back against the ropes, inviting the champion's hardest blows suddenly in the next instant he springs forward and brought Forman down. Down the strong man went, the first time ever he had been knocked out.

The historic Christian church in this country has been on the ropes for a generation, 30 years of blows to the midsection. God's spirit is not in a mode of lightening triumph, for those who would still maintain a real connection between deep personal faith and active social involvement. But the eighth round is still coming…

Those who may need to resist and refuse today are part of the spiritual rope strategy, the wearying of the Strong Man, the resistance of evil, the binding of evil. It's not pleasant. Hurt, setbacks, delay, confusion. But there is an eighth round coming! There is an eighth round coming!

How hungry the church is today to perceive this truth. God is at work, in part, to encourage and give stamina to those on the ropes, using Ali's rope a dope strategy, binding the Strong Man.

A tradition of principled resistance.

I can imagine an objection or two.

Well taken, is your perhaps silent objection thus far: some refusal is Godly, but some is not. Too often those who resist or refuse are simply petulant, immature, arrogant, slothful, idiotic, selfish. Agreed…But we speak here not of forms of hypocrisy, so many they are. Rather, we speak of principled resistance, which shows its character by enduring body blows, by leaning against the rope and aching.

Or, maybe you doubt that refusal takes a part of small stage play. Perhaps only the civil disobedience of Ghandi or the peaceful resistance of Martin Luther King or the risky French Resistance of Albert Camus stand out, great historic refusals, great moments of common endurance. But you would be wrong, I suggest, to think so. Most resistance is hidden, unheralded, unknown, unrewarded. Most principled refusal is known only to the one sagging against the ropes, the one catching the body blows. Most real principled resistance is very ordinary.

Tithing is primarily a form of spiritual refusal, refusal to accept the world's understanding of success and refusal to accept the implication that all that we have is ours alone. Worship is primarily a form of spiritual refusal, refusal to accept the world's time clock, where all time is meant for work or play. Marriage and loyal friendship are primarily forms of spiritual refusal, refusal to accept the world's low estimate of intimacy, refusal to accept the unholy as good. Choosing carefully is primarily a form of spiritual resistance: "We live in a society that primarily starves our soul...we have to really resist the culture to care for the soul...but...if we choose with care our professions and ways we spend our time and our homes in which we live, if we take care of our families and don't see them as problems, and if we nurture our relationships and friendships and marriages then the
soul probably will not show its complaints so badly." (Moore)

You are a part of a tradition of principled resistance.

In 350, Philip of Macedon wanted to unite Greece, which he did except for Sparta. He did everything he could. Finally he sent them a note: If you do not submit at once I will invade your country. If I invade I will pillage and burn everything in sight. If I march into Laconia, I will level your great city to the ground. The Spartans sent back this one word reply; "if". (laconic).

You may not need this word today. You may want to remember it, though, especially if you are young. For one day, one day, you may want to use some of your spiritual bequest, your prophetic endowment. You may need to draw on the tradition of principled refusal.

Good news has it that along the ropes, and upon the cross, Jesus has bound up the Strong Evil, subverting by being subject to, and so empowered us to resist.

A year before he was executed by the Nazis, languishing in a small prison cell, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote this hymn:

"By gracious powers so wonderfully sheltered

and confidently waiting, come what may,

We know that God is with us night and morning

And never fails to greet us each new day.”

posted in Uncategorized on 02.25.2007 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 9: 28-36

Opening

Martin Luther King’s own favorite sermon, “The Dimensions of a Complete Life”, as Gary Dorrien reminds us (157, The Making of American Liberal Theology), was itself based on a sermon from Boston’s own Phillips Brooks. King preached the sermon in 1954, to candidate at Dexter Avenue, and again at Perdue in 1958 before a national UCC convention, and again in 1964 in Westminster Abbey to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. As you learn, preaching on a circuit, what is good the first time, can often be better preached three times or more. The opposite also may be true. King, following Brooks, compared life to a cube, possessing the three dimensions of length, breadth and height. The good life flourishes when all three interact in something like a great triangle. “At one angle stands the individual person, at the other angle stand other persons, and at the top stands the Supreme Infinite Person, God”. Length means achieving personal goals, breadth comprises the concern for the well being of others, and height signifies the desire for an upward moving longing for God.

Today’s text is about the third dimension, about height, and personally asks you whether your life exhibits this, King’s third dimension. Height. Hast Thou Height? Granted your personal achievements. Given your communal engagements. Have you a known, or been known by, ‘a mountain view’? In Boston, during this winter of 2007, in the speaking and hearing of Luke 9: 28, there could hardly be a more personal, pertinent question. On it hang hope and health, yours and mine. A mountain view is one of the gifts which the religious communities may offer to support our common hope across the globe.

The work of a sermon is in the hearing, and the astute hearer regular asks A: what is this about? And B: what difference does it make?

A. What Is It About?

Today we hear Luke’s later version of the Transfiguration. Originally a resurrection appearance account, this legend eventually was placed, by Mark, in the year 70ce, back into the life of Jesus, as a confirmation of his Messiahship, a portent of Easter, and an affirmation of Peter’s earlier confession. Our lectionary places this passage, given symbolical and other similarities, adjacent to Exodus 24. But the truth is that there are as many reasons to disjoin as to conjoin the two texts, and it is generally better to avoid more than the inherited usurpation by the Newer Testament of the Older, if at all possible. Rather, the passage as it washes up from Mark on the shoreline of Luke’s persecuted Roman congregation, near the turn of the century, is an ill fit to our current lectionary assembly.

Mark has brought the trumpets of universals to the occasion. All life longs for height! Hear the resurrection gospel! Light. Shining. Cloud. God. Tradition. Prayer. Silence. Presence. White…white as snow…white as no fuller on earth could bleach…white as light…dazzling white. What arrives to Luke is a Mountain View, an announcement of God. This is my beloved…listen…

Today’s Gospel is about Luke’s editorial and authorial changes to the Transfiguration. There is movement and harmony here, a four part, SATB choral interpretation at work in the Gospel. Notice with me a dozen changes Luke makes, working on what he inherits from Mark. Marsh’s pulpit today interprets Luke yesterday, who interprets Mark the day before, who accounts for the Transfiguration.

First, Luke adds two days to the number of days in the distance from the earlier text, perhaps a more regular 8 day week, than the more resurrectional 6 day account in Mark. Luke’s is a more ordinary account of what a week is. Your week: sleep, work, travel, talk, sleep. Sermon. Sleep, work, travel…

Second, Luke demotes James to the third position, after not before John, perhaps a move to distance himself and his church from the Jewish Christianity which James led. Luke represents more a Roman, regular human, than a Jerusalem, brother of the Lord, religious sentiment.

Third, Luke depicts all present in prayer. We can identify with prayer. It is something, however weakly, we practice. It is a human word to God, not the other way around.

Fourth, Luke makes the white ‘dazzling’, to stand out in our human experience.

Fifth, Luke fills in the detail of the conversation, the tertulia, held among the Law and the Prophets and the Lord. They speak of exodus, of glory, of what is to come. Mark kept them mute, Luke gives them voice, human language.

Sixth, to be clear, Luke has called these figures ‘men’. Mark gives their names, Luke their genus and species. They are to be seen and heard as men, real men, not ghosts

Seventh, Luke puts the disciples to sleep, a magical sleep, so well known in all our folk tales, from the Brothers Grimm to Frank Baum. Sleep, sleep…nary a more human activity than slumber.

Eighth, Luke reveals Peter as even more human than thou, not only not knowing what to say, as in Mark, but not knowing what he had said. My dear friend and colleague was accused of publishing every thought he ever had, to which he deftly replied, “Oh no, I published much more than that”. Our self-criticism can reveal our ownmost selves.

Ninth, Luke dec
lares explicitly, what you know best in your nightmares, that the disciples are afraid. You fear, I fear, we fear. Fear in handful of dust. After 9/11, we are people drenched in and numbed by fear.

Tenth, Luke radically changes God’s statement about Jesus. Mark has “this is my beloved Son”, a repetition of Jesus’ baptism. Luke uses a strange word, a perfect passive participle, for Jesus whose perfection, passive reception and earthly participation, Luke names this way: “This is my Son, my Chosen”. Actually, the word means, “picked out from”. Love is great but vague. We are known in our choices, we choosing humans. Thank you for love. Now, what choices does that imply?

Eleventh, Luke implicates the disciples in the keeping of silence. Mark has Jesus keep the secret, Luke the disciples. Secrets, open or otherwise, are the stuff of human community, and tragedy. A family or institutional system is dysfunctional at the point of its secrets, and its fingerprints are in its secrets. What is not said is what is loudest.

Twelfth, Luke emphasizes the prophetic dimension of this tale, as the Apocalypse of Peter will do later in the century (Apoc. Pet. 6). Prophecy is what keeps biblical narrative human.

What is all this about? Just this. At twelve points, Luke has not so subtly re-written an inherited account of epiphany, of a mountain view, at every point to make it more human. Granted a mountain view, Luke smashes home his sermon: this holy event is human, accessible to human beings, grounded in human experience, open to all the human frailties and weaknesses we so painfully know, human, human, human, human! Homo sum: humani nil a mi alienum puto. I am human, nothing human is foreign to me.

In the main, the Transfiguration ill suits Luke’s general gospel purpose, to present the human face of God in Jesus, or so it would seem. But look! Luke has brought you something profoundly hopeful and healthy. Good life has height, as well as length and breadth. Good life has height that is a part of human experience. For Luke, unlike for Mark, the Transfiguration is not about divine but about human experience, not about a divine voice but about human ears. Luke’s passage is about heightened human experience.

B.What Difference Does it Make?

So, what difference does this make? If any?

On Sunday we may ask this of the text of the day: what is it about and what difference does it make?

In another year, or on another day, we might need to preach the Markan Transfiguration, which Matthew more dutiful repeats, as a simply positive declaration of divine authority. Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans, in 1919 hit the church and the academy like a bombshell landing on a playground. In chaos, one longs for certainty. After ten years of disquietude, 1997—2007, we can understand why appeals to authority work. Monica, Y2K, hanging chads, election by fiat, the rubble falling onto Wall Street at 9/11, run up to war, false information in the run up to war, war engaged four years ago, mission accomplished, mission not so accomplished, another dicey election, the crumbling of the mission, the fraying of parts of the Bill of Rights: a decade past of fear upon fear. Who would not appreciate the clarity of positive authority, in such uncertainty?

Positive authority: Bible, Pope, Me. Ah, the joy of saying, “one of us is wrong and it is you!” Clarity. Certainty. Very satisfactory. Mount Sinai. Mount Olympus. The Transfiguration, in the other gospels. A mountain view, to be sure…but not Luke’s, not one accessible to human experience.

It is striking that Luke, facing similar fright as do we, during the terror of Domitian, wrote otherwise, here. (May his courage, and the courage of the other biblical writers, ever infect us.) As if to say, there is more than one witness, the persecution of Christians under Domitian, he heightens human experience, making even transfiguration fully human. As if to say to us, there is more than one witness, the horror of 9/11, making even our life open to height.

At least ask yourself, as this sermon comes around third base to head on home, whether your life has height? Human height? Has it?

The tradition of responsible Christian liberalism, advocated at Marsh Chapel, understands and honors Luke 9:28. Now those of us who initially studied theology thirty years ago, heard very little of this. We heard Neo-Orthodoxy, on the one hand. We heard Liberation, on the other. Both the liberationists and the Barthians are correctives to the larger liberal tradition, needed at times and good at times, but both espousing not only a responsible authority, but also a kind of authoritarianism, and both imbued with a lasting anger, whether that of Hauerwas or that of Cone, which Luke’s Transfiguration does not justify, as appealing as both are to the 9/11 nighttime all around us. How we have missed the fuller voices of Deotis Roberts and James Forbes, of George Lindbeck and Paul Tillich, now that the cultural night has set in!

Luke 9: 28 offers another message. Your life, in its struggle up the mountain, may open up, at points, to a humanly accessible mountain view!

In fact, if life does not retain a height dimension, life becomes a kind of death. Without the mountain presence, the absence of the valley becomes the valley of death. Luke has smashed home his sermon, already, so in like fashion we may want to ask ourselves, I may ask you, a question. Does your life have height? Is the spiritual ceiling in your weekly house of sufficient stature? How high is heaven, day to day? Is there any place for a cloud, for brilliance, for presence, for the numinous? Is there a room with a view? Is there a place for special experience, even ‘special revelation’?

Sometimes, as Karl Jaspers taught us, the third dimension of life, its height, may be opened to us in liminal moments: change, loss, death, birth, relocation, illness, healing. Let us remember Jaspers this Lent.

Sometimes, as John Wesley taught us, the third dimension of life, its height, may be provided for us by means of grace: a regular mealtime prayer (do you know one?), a memorized set of verses (do you have them?), a favorite hymn or two (do you hum one?), a pattern of worship (do you claim one?), a church family to love and a church home to enjoy (do you attend one?). Personal goals, life’s length, do not come without effort. Communal changes, life’s breadth, to not come from wishes. Why should we think that a mountain view, a certain height, will come our way without attentive effort? Let us remember Wesley this Lent.

Sometimes, as Ralph Harper taught us some years ago, we need the height

of presence: “When I am moved by a painting or by music, by clouds

passing in a clear nigh sky, by the soughing of pines in the early spring, I

feel the distance between me and art and nature dissolve to some degree,

and I feel at ease. I feel that what I know makes me more myself than I

knew before. This is how the saints felt about God, and I see in my own

experience elements that I share with the saints and prophets, the

philosophers and priests.” (On Presence, 6) Let us remember presence this

Lent.

Sometimes, as Tony Campbell taught, we need to remember that you cannot cook on a cold stove. What bakes bread is not only yeast but heat! Let me hear you whistle! Let me feel your body in the pew! Let me notice you humming a hymn! Let me eat at your table and see your photographs! Let me know your name! Then there may come the chance for a certain height. Let us remember Campbell this Lent.

Closing

In my junior year, spent abroad in Segovia, I had the good fortune to meet and friend. We climbed the mountains of Castile together, but I never saw her in church. Then the week before Lent in 1975, the last year of Franco’s reign, we in the plaza. My friend was carrying, in good Castilian fashion, the Ejercicios Espirituales of Ignatius of Loyola. Surprised, I inquired about this reading for Lent, and participation in the visionary exercise of Loyola. “Siempre se saca algo bueno de estas cosas” said the confirmed agnostic: “ah, one always gets something good from these things” said the passionate climber of mountains. Another kind of mountain view…

Hear the gospel: height, a mountain view, awaits you, too.

posted in Uncategorized on 02.18.2007 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

1 Corinthians 7:25-31

Paul--Apostle

What a friend we have in Paul!

Paul—Apostle

Whose mighty voice has rolled down through the ages bringing us the good news in all its stark simplicity: Christ the Lord is Risen!

Paul—Apostle

Raised in Tarsus, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, of the Tribe of Benjamin, as to the law a Pharisee, a defender of the traditions of the elders—and so a persecutor of the church.

Paul—Apostle

Who rode to Damascus and on the way was blinded and there heard a voice saying: “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?”

Paul—Apostle

Who in that blinding encounter with the Risen Lord, gave himself up, pronounced a sort of death sentence over himself, and so died with Christ and walked henceforth in newness of life.

Paul—Apostle

Who believed that God had raised Jesus from the dead and so lived moment by moment thinking, “Who knows what will happen next?”

Paul—Apostle

Who cared for those first few Christians, and worried about them, and grew angry with them, for they so easily lost this vision: that since God had raised Jesus from the dead, who knew what would happen next?

Paul—Apostle

Paul’s Apocalyptic World View

Who challenged the Thessalonians: “This is the will of God, your sanctification”.

Who challenged the Galatians: “Be not deceived, God is not mocked.”

Who challenged the Philippians: “Let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel”.

Who challenged the Romans: “Be ye not conformed but be ye transformed by the renewal of your minds.

Who challenged the Corinthians: “Be reconciled”

Paul—Apostle

Whose mighty voice speaks to us today, ever answering the question of what we should do by saying something, first, about what God has done. Our faith springs not from ourselves but from God, the Giver of both life and faith. “All religions are attempts to know God; none is the event of being known by God…God’s graceful election of us by his rectifying and non-religious invasion of the cosmos in Christ is the subject of the whole letter.” (Martyn, Galatians, 4:9)

Paul reminds us that “the form of this world is passing away”. What else can we expect from a God who raises crucified Messiahs? Who knows what will happen next?

The future is as open as we, in faith, will allow it to be.

The voice of the Marsh Chapel pulpit, a national voice for a once vibrant, now wounded, nonetheless crucial form of faith, call it a responsible Christian liberalism, has not feared the future. We seek the truth, and so have nothing to defend and everything to share. So we may recognize in this passage from 1 Corinthians 7, a form of thought that
differs utterly from our own. If Paul did retain some of his formative Jewish worldview, the part he closely retained here was his inherited apocalyptic eschatology. The resurrection must be, he reasoned, the beginning of the end. Hence, preaches Paul, the form of this world is passing away.

Paul’s worldview, his apocalyptic eschatology, is not our worldview. Paul’s world, though, is very much ours too. So we shall need to imagine, to dream, and to interpret these verses in a new way, for a new time.

Paul for a New Day

New occasions teach new duties. What a friend we have in the one non-gentile NT author who nonetheless was the ‘apostle to the gentiles’! Paul was a shirt tail cousin of George Bernard Shaw, whose ringing question, ‘why not?’ haunts us. Paul was related, though not by marriage, to Robert Kennedy, who lived, in extremis, Shaw’s question. Dr. James Walters of Boston University is a third cousin, twice removed in this blood lineage, for he did say this week, in good Pauline fashion, “epiphanies are the vehicles through which God creates dreamers”.

No, we may not share Paul’s worldview, but we share his world. So we may benefit from his friendship, and practice his faith.

We may rely not on ourselves alone, but upon God who raises the dead.

We may face the world, free from the world.

We may lean into the future, free of the burden of past worry.

We can live on tip toe.

We can compose every day with brilliance as if it were our last, which, in a way, each one is.

The person of faith, who overhears the distress down deep in this world, so deep that others don’t hear it, does not rely on himself to sooth it. He knows there is one Savior and he isn’t Him.

What a friend we have in Paul, who preaches Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.

The Corinthians want to know about marriage.

Odd, strange, foreign, and alien as the teaching is to our ears, we must Paul aright. Says he, “Don’t worry, marriage isn’t sinful”.

An irrelevant answer to an unasked question, say we.

We never thought it was!

We forget Paul’s apocalyptic worldview. We also forget that for Paul and for many in earliest Christianity, marriage—as the epitome of dealings with “the world”—was decidedly inferior to celibacy. This text recommends a sort of brothersister alliance. The early church so understood it. The desert father Amoun of Nitria (love that name) spent his honeymoon expounding 1 Cor 7 to his (surely puzzled) bride.

Why does Paul teach this way?

Because Paul expects that “the form of this world is passing away”. God has raised Jesus from the dead. Who knows what will happen next?

For Paul, this meant a daily, excited, imminent expectation of the turn of the ages, a new heaven and earth, the end of time and the beginning of a new era. For our sake, it is a blessing that Paul’s own timeline was a little fuzzy. Otherwise we would not be here. But the spiritual truth which lives in this passage, its existential reality, is the same. Every day is our last. Paul so reminds us, and so shakes us out of our stupor. THIS is the day the Lord has made. We shall rejoice and be glad in it!

What if we are free?

What if Christ is Risen?

What if the form of this world is passing away?

What if …

Our interest is so great in the form of this world that we don’t notice the world that is to come. We forget. We rely upon ourselves when really, by faith, we mean to rely on God who raises the dead. God who

Has shown great strength with his arm

Has scattered the proud in the imaginations of their hearts

Has put down the mighty from their thrones

Has exalted those of low degree

In all of life, in the fullness of faith there lies this strange, new potential. Potential. Potential for something new.

We face the world, free from the world.

We meet each day with courage.

We touch and are touched in the presence of Divine Potential, the raw possibility of a new day.

We live on tip toe

We live each day as if it were our last, which it is

We greet the hour and its struggle, from a certain distance, and over every loud booming statement there is a misty question mark.

This year at Marsh we have asserted that on a reliable hope hangs our future. A hope that life has meaning and that this world, not some Gnostic nether world but this world, can work. Weekly you have pressed: what are the features of this hope? We reply: one ingredient in hope is imagination, a willingness to live ‘as if not…’.

As If Not…1

“As if not..”

The form of this world is passing away.

So let those who have wives live as if they had none. Let them be married, not in the form of this world, but in the form of the world to come, “as if not…”

Once there lived a model couple. Pillars of church and community, they arrived at their mid-fifties in joyful wedlock. They were models of self-giving love. He would arise every morning thinking, “What can I do to make her life brighter today?” She would end every evening with some bright thought for the morning. The minister would pass by that house and smile.

Then one night the preacher had a phone call from the couple, and a distressed question: “Can you come right over?” After some awkwardness and foot shuffling they asked, “Would you marry us?” Well it was a long story. They had begun many years earlier working together, running the town store. Times were tough, so, to save money, they moved in, together to share space. Then they fell in love. People in the town assumed they were married, and, well, what could they say? So, year followed year and decade followed decade. They felt, though, that is time to make if official. A simple, elegant ceremony ensued. The minister would pass by that house, again, with a smile.

About a month after the wedding, the minister received another late night call. Down he went again to visit this model couple, who, for the first time were on the verge of separation. They were at wits end. The wife spoke up: “Nothing has been right since the wedding. It used to be, you know, every day was a new happiness. But since the ceremony and the ring and the certificate, I guess we have started to take each other for granted. There was something about being free to leave, that kept both of us on our toes. We used to really watch out for each other, even serve each other. But now that the knot is tied, we are chaffing at one another.”

A long night of conversation followed. Tears and apologies, advice and consolation. There was a return of the old feeling for the old couple. In the wee hours the minister put on his coat to leave. But before he left he forced the couple to make a solemn vow. He made them promise to live together, from that day forward, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, as if they were not married. As if not…

Let those who have wives live as if they had none. Let us be married, not in the form of this world, but in that of the world to come. Not in complacency and disregard and a taking for granted—this world. But in surprise and kindness and joy and love—the world to come.

As If Not…2

Let those who mourn do so as though they were not mourning. May they mourn, not in the form of this world, but in the form of the world to come.

A long time ago, up north, I called on woman in a nursing home, in the autumn of the year, in the autumn of her life. She was alone and that day mourning the loss of her last living relative. Over tea, she made a familiar confession. “At 18 I knew everything there was to know. I had a tall pile of answers and hardly any questions. But somewhere between ages 25 and 75 that pile began to shrink and another started to grow. Question jumped on top of question. Finally about age 85 I came to a point where I could honestly say I did not know anything, really, at all. With my sister gone, I know nothing and no one.” Nothing? No one? She thought, a little longer, and then added, a gleam of contentedness shining through her deep hurt: “I guess I do know something and Someone. I know Whom I can trust.”

There is something in that trust, that kind of proto-faith, which breathes with imagination. May our graduating seniors take heart! All the songs have not been sung yet. All the poems have not been written yet. The storehouse of good deeds yet undone has not closed for the evening.

My friend Jon Clinch, best man in our wedding and I in theirs, has a great new novel coming out this month. Titled, FINN, the book imagines the life of Huckleberry Finn’s father, Pap. Pap’s life is something to be mourned, though his death is not. In the course of writing this dark tale, the author has given us an insight, a novel reading of the greatest American novel, which no one, no one, for 120 years, had earlier seen! You read this book and sense that the author has found the key to pick the lock of Twain’s mind! Do you know what a huckleberry is? What color it is? What hue? Twain hid his secret right in plain view, in the name, Huckleberry, whose mother, according to this newest fiction, was black.

Let us imagine in the form of the world to come.

Let those who mourn do so as if they were not mourning, for the form of this world is passing away. When things go south, let us live not in the form of this world (in despair and doubt and dread), but in the form of the coming world (hope and freedom and a sense of God’s awesome potential).

Paul has been read for 2,000 years, yet only in the last generation was his apocalyptic eschatology fully appreciated. Paul awaited a new creation! How new? Look again, with JL Martyn, at the Greek text of Galatians 3:28, where Martyn finds an expectation of a new creation, so new that all the old categories, including those most debated today, are set aside:

“The variation in the wording of the last clause suggests that the author of the formula drew on Gen 1:27, thereby saying that in baptism, the structure of the original creation had been set aside…it is a radical vision of loving mutuality enacted in the community of that new creation”. (Galatians, Anchor Bible, 3:28 loc cit).

Today we mourn the loss of young life in Iraq. We read of the best and brightest, lost and lamented. Our hearts break. They break. Shall that mourning be our only mourning? Or shall we mourn the loss of the best and brightest in the form of the world to come? That is, with active imagination about what might honor their loss by preventing further loss?

As if not…

As If Not…3

Let those who rejoice do so as if they were not rejoicing. Let them rejoice not in the form of this world but in the form of the world to come.

You know, it is not always clear what is bad news, or good. What can seem cause for the greatest rejoicing also can carry hurt, and vice-versa. God’s time is not our time. God’s purpose is not equivalent to any one of ours. God’s justice is not the same as our own. God’s freedom far surpasses yours and mine. A crushing defeat can, in God’s time, and with patience, become the source, the medium of great victory. I think of Franklin Roosevelt. Where would our country be today, without his life’s strange mixture of rejoicing and suffering and struggle and perseverance? Is it not odd that the one President, who appeared to be the least vigorous, was in fact the most? ‘To lead you have to love, to save you have to serve’

As If Not…4

As if not…

Let those who buy and sell, do so as if they had no goods. Not in the form of this world, but in the form of the world to come. Augustine said it so well: we use what we should love and we love what we should use. We use people and love things, when we are meant to love people and use things.

Let us allow Paul to befriend us. He may help us obse
rve the reversals announced in Jesus’ beatitudes. He may help us leave aside our negativity for the psalmist’s ‘delight’ in the Lord.

So James Finley, ‘Merton once told me to quit trying so hard in prayer. He said, ‘How does an apple ripen? It sits in the sun.’ A small green apple cannot ripen in one night by tightening all its muscles, squinting its eyes and tightening its jaw in order to find itself the next morning miraculously large, red, ripe, and juicy beside its small green counterparts. Like the birth of a baby or the opening of a rose, the birth of the true self takes place in God’s time. We must wait for God, we must be awake; we must trust in his hidden action within us.’

Jesus told of a man who grew more and more crops and built bigger and bigger barns. At last the man could say: “soul, take thine ease, eat and drink and be merry". But that very night his soul was asked of him. “Whose then shall all these things be?”

Yes, use the things of this world and buy and sell. Let us do so, though, not in the form of this world, but in the form of the world to come. Not in grasping selfishness, not in anxious pursuit, not in such strangely intense attention. Rather: with aplomb, with a certain disregard, with an inner freedom.

About your car, your house, your wardrobe, your bank account, your things—ask this: Do you own it or does it own you? Do you own it or does it own you?

Coda

What a friend we have in Paul:

Let those who have wives live as if they had none

Those who mourn as if not mourning

Those who rejoice as if not rejoicing

Those who buy as if not buying

Those who use this world as if not using it

FOR THE FORM OF THIS WORLD IS PASSING AWAY.

posted in Uncategorized on 02.11.2007 at 11:00 am