Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 10: 35-45

Who taught you about power?

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

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

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

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

Shaker Simplicity?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who taught you what you know about power?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who taught you about authority?

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

Ambrosian Authority?

Is another model the heartfelt affirmation of the common good?

Mark 10:35 is one of the few spots in the earliest gospel at which the emerging institutional needs of the church are visible. Christianity wrestled with formational questions in the first century: For whom is the gospel? What are the definitive texts? And especially, who shall hold authority? What, How, Where. And Who?

As this passage shows, from the outset it has been terribly difficult for the Christian church to maintain its own authentic form of authority, over against the lesser models abroad in every age. I emphasize the little phrase, slave of all, or servant of the whole. “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up,” said Paul.

Aristotle taught us to attend to the true, the good, the beautiful. In the late fourth century there emerged a good, great leader of the church, Ambrose of Milan. In just eight days he went from unbaptized layman to Bishop. His rhetorical skill, musicianship, diplomatic agility and attention to the preparations for Baptism provided the power behind his lasting influence in Northern Italy. Above all, Ambrose used his authority for the common good. Notice in the Scripture there is no avoidance of the need for leadership. Authority may be shared but responsibility is not to be shirked. What lasts, what counts, what is true and good and beautiful, finally, is what “builds up”.

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

I find some striking parallels to the story of Ambrose in a now popular book by Jim Collins, “Good to Great.” Here are the qualities of those in authority in companies that became great when they had before been good: quiet, humble, modest, reserved, shy, gracious, mild-mannered, self-effacing, understated, did not believe his own clippings—a plow horse not a show horse. A plow horse not a show horse. A lot of progress can be made when we do not linger too long over who gets the credit.

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

Who taught you about power?

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

Who taught you about leadership?

Steady Service?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who taught you about power?

Coda

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

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

A simple passion for the common good of the servants of God is at the heart of leadership.

Here is leadership: simple, authentic service.

Here is leadership: simple, authentic service.

Here is leadership: simple, authentic service.

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

“

posted in Frostiana: Poetry & Preaching, Uncategorized on 10.22.2006 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

Matthew 9: 9-13

1. Matthew on Mercy and Sacrifice (Exegesis)

Caught between our own identities, and the fires of Hell, we have arrived in worship. Like Matthew, who paints himself as Velazquez did into his own portrait, we are invited. Follow me. “He comes to us as one unknown as he did long ago…”, wrote Schweitzer. The real moment of real invitation and real response is real apocalypse. Paul said he met Jesus ‘by apocalypse’. I am here by apocalypse. Another story for another day. You may be too. What are we doing here?

This is a rare and holy moment. Holy, and rare.

Matthew, the author of a dark Gospel, reflecting perhaps the persecutions of the late first century, has stitched his own matriculation to faith together with an apothegem (that is a word that you never use in a sermon) about reading. His entry involved reading. “Go and learn….” Why should anyone have needed to learn the meaning of such a fine and famous line from Hosea, about mercy and sacrifice? Evidently, the meaning was far from evident, by the time of Matthew’s suffering. More study was needed. Why? The experience of the fragile church under Domitian required new readings of the inherited traditions of the church. An inheritance without interpretation breeds a failure in communication. And, as the Amish of Pennsylvania have magnificently reminded us this week, it is costly yet true to desire mercy. The first word, forgiveness.

Each Synoptic passage is like a choral piece, including four voices. There is the Soprano voice of Jesus of Nazareth, embedded somewhere in the full harmonic mix. In Matthew 9, Jesus conflicts with the Pharisaic aversion to pagan inscriptions and iconography. There is the alto voice of the primitive church, arguably always the most important of the four voices, that which carries the forming of the passage in the needs of the community. From Mark to Matthew an insertion has arisen, the citation of Hosea 6:6. Evidently, the earliest church needed the fuller support of the prophetic tradition—mercy not sacrifice, compassion not holiness—as it moved farther out and away from the memory of Jesus. The tenor line is that of the evangelist. Matthew here, marking his own appearance in the record. His work seems to reflect a connection to school, to scribes, perhaps as Stendahl said from across the river, years ago, to Qumran. The baritone is borne by later interpretation, beginning soon with Irenaeus, Against Heresies: “What doctor, when wishing to cure a sick man, would act in accordance with the desires of the patient, and not in accordance with the requirements of medicine?” ( in Richardson, ECF, 377) If our church music carries only one line, we may be tempted to interpret our Scripture with only one voice, and miss the SATB harmonies therein, to our detriment.

2. Failures to Communicate (Explication)

Communication is such a delicate art. Frost’s telephone poem, set to SATB harmony by R Thompson and our choir, reminds us. A little means a lot. Otherwise, a failure to communicate.

Like the preacher who stood before the congregation at Yale chapel some years ago, where did hang a banner, ‘God is other people’, and for the word of that day simply said he wanted to replace the comma, ‘God is Other, people’. I am not God and you are not God and we are not God, together, as Camus might have reminded us. Otherwise, a failure to communicate.

Registering our cars in Massachusetts, I chuckled with the receptionist, who could not understand whether her interlocutor was speaking of Don a man or Dawn a woman. Two people separated by common language and inflection. By the glories of England and New England both. Nearly, a failure to communicate.

Communication can have dire consequences.

One day, following the morning service, we visited a dear saint in her home. She had been in hospital that week, and sat recuperating in her parlor. Her family was with her. And she had a story to tell.

That Tuesday, she prepared to be taken, by ambulance, from one hospital to another, for a particular procedure. She is a fine, older Methodist lady, so she prepared herself with what dignity one can muster in a hospital bed, robed in a hospital gown, and alone in the corridor of life. A little makeup, a comb and brush, some careful adjustments of remaining raiment, glasses perched, smile shining.

She could see the elevator door open, and her stretcher moving out. Then the attendants clearly mentioned her name as they signed the paper work at the desk. The nurse motioned across the hall in the general direction of her room. She poised herself, prepared to be a good, courteous patient. Down the hall the men came, and she waved. They returned the gesture. To her door they rolled—and then, remarkably, rolled on by! They passed to the next room, one inhabited alone by a frail, kindly woman who is deaf as a post. “Mrs. Smith?” “YES” she replied, her volume in inverse proportion to her accuracy. Into the stretcher went the wrong woman, and down the hall they moved. My dear parishioner called out, used her buzzer, flailed her arms like a gypsy at the campfire. But in a New York minute they were gone, carrying away the wrong person. On the way home, following the procedure, someone apparently had the presence of mind to look at the stretchered woman’s wrist band, name tag. I wonder how the reader felt not to see the name Smith. A rare moment of revelation. In this case, little lasting harm occurred. Our hospitals, in fact, to my eye, given their hourly commitment to excellence and attention to detail, put other institutions to shame. We all know the fear of the wrong arm amputated, the wrong knee replaced, the wrong woman put in the stretcher. Physician’s malpractice. But the news, good news, of medical malpractice is that you know soon—an hour, a day, a decade—what has happened, and you can endure it or correct it. So it goes with the physician’s malpractice.

Not so with the m
etaphysician’s.

Biological error lasts, at most, a lifetime. Theological error resides for three generations, or more. If, as ML King Sr. said, ‘it takes three generations to make a preacher’, then it also takes three generations, or more, to recognize and correct the effects of metaphysical malpractice. You cannot fully see its effect for 20 or 40 or 60 or 80 years. And it is a short way from birdie to bogie, from clean cuts to nicks and scratches in innocent organs, mistaken severations and amputations, blood spilled and shed in the wrong bed. Choose the physical mistakes, for the metaphysical are so much more insidious, more damaging, more real.

3. Go and Learn What this Means (Exemplification)…

Sacrifice may be good, but mercy is great. Without mercy, we have a failure to communicate. Without mercy, we have a failure to communicate. Hear the gospel in the movement from sacrifice to mercy…and…

From Incantation to Incarnation…

We risk harm when we replace incarnation with incantation. The gospel of John affirms the incarnation of the Christ, in the flesh. That is—children’s flesh, adolescent’s flesh, young couples’ flesh, people, people, people. The image of God. We have forsaken our passionate interest in people, young or old, fat or thin. Half our membership in the Northeast has been erased, since my ordination. Cataclysm. Apocalypse. A moment, maybe this one, when you look down at the stretcher and you see that the nametag is not what you expected. And you face failure. Face it. It won’t kill you. Denying it will kill more than facing it. We have decided to enjoy incantation, instead, the pseudo worship that has eviscerated many of our churches across the region. We, for the most part, have not wanted to do the hard work of preaching and liturgical preparation. We prefer easy incantation to the rich announcement of incarnation. People notice. We need to cross the river from incantation to incarnation!

From Innocence to Integrity…

We risk harm when we replace integrity with innocence. Innocence is not holiness, nor holiness innocence. While there are many facets to this single haphazard metamedical blunder, the matter of sex alone should make it clear. In our region we no longer talk about sex—a tragic silence given the unfiltered filth of the internet that has invaded most homes far beyond our poor power to add or detract. After the flames of the 60’s Jack Tuell and a couple of other Bishops sat over coffee and came up with the phrase, “in singleness celibacy, in marriage fidelity”. Given the chaos of the time, the phrase made some ordering sense. But today it has served to muzzle and muffle fully honest talk about sex. Tuell’s own confessional, repositioning sermon on homosexuality specifically mentions, and laments, the phrase. But the gays are the least of our problems. Our malpractice has caused fairly good people to mask their struggle for integrity, in failure as well as success, with a false innocence, assuming there can be no integrity without innocence. Our own church has had past denominational leadership that was struggling with personal identity and sexual expression. Is there any wonder that we have no significant conference or area work on human sexuality? We need to find our voice again, to honor God’s good gift of sexuality, and its best expression within the sacramental rite of marriage. We need to pull the scalpel out of the wrong intestine, and wash up and start again. We need a fuller conversation. You can have integrity and holiness without innocence. I might redact Tuell this way: in singleness integrity; in partnership fidelity. We are crossing a river from the east bank of innocence to the great capital region of integrity!

From Independence to Interdependence…

We risk harm when we replace just war with just war, interdependence with independence. The 2003 invasion of Iraq jettisoned our inherited experience codified in just war theory. It was preemptive, unilateral, imperial, unforeseeable, post-Christian, immoral, and wrong. Anybody with half a Bible could see that. But what did our pulpits say in 2002 and 2003? With a baker’s dozen exceptions, across the country, we said: not sure, don’t know, support the troops, what a world, hope it all works out, give it up to God… We had the wrong woman in the stretcher all along, but we just were too busy tuning our electric guitars to see so. Now 2700 are dead in Iraq. It took 25 years, but the chickens did come home to roost. Let us cross over from the quiet shore of independence to the bright light of interdependence!

Now we have, for many of our own close friends right here in this community who hale from other lands, jettisoned habeus corpus. My mother is a Latin teacher and my son a lawyer, so I did my research by phone. The gospel is for the wise: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. From the Magna Charta to John Wesley to the Bill of Rights to this hour, we have understood, rightly, the high priority and cost of individual rights. The right to trial when imprisoned, the right to petition. The right to see evidence against you. The importance of due process. Have we begun with the spirit to end with the flesh?

In the large minutes of early Methodist conversations between Mr. Wesley and his preachers, a remarkable sentence abides. Wesley has given his usual ‘the beatings will continue until morale improves’ speech: Be diligent. Never be unemployed. Never be triflingly employed. Be serious. Let your motto be holiness. Avoid all lightness, jesting, foolish talking. Converse sparingly with women, especially young women. Be punctual. Be ashamed of nothing but sin. You have nothing to do but save souls, spend and be spent in the work. Take no step toward marriage without consulting your brethren…

And then: Believe evil of no one; unless you see it done…You know the Judge is always to be on the prisoner’s side…

Garrison Keillor recently wrote:

I would not send my college kid off for a semester abroad if I were you. This week, we have suspended human rights in America, and what goes around comes around. Ixnay habeas corpus.

The U.S. Senate, in all its splendor and majesty, has decided that an "enemy combatant" is any non-citizen whom the president says is an enemy combatant, including your Korean greengrocer or your Swedish grandmother or your Czech au pair, an d can be arrested and held for as long as authorities
wish without any right of appeal to a court of law to examine the matter. If your college kid were to be arrested in Bangkok or Cairo, suspected of "crimes against the state," and held in prison, you'd assume that an American foreign service officer would be able to speak to your kid and arrange for a lawyer, but this may not be true anymore. Be forewarned.

From Theological Theology to Christological Theology….

We risk harm when we replace God with Jesus. I love Barth, too, but Jesus is not all the God there is. We are still wallowing, as Doug Hall warned a generation ago (you see it does take a long time), in a Unitarianism of the Second Person of the Trinity. Just when the gentle wisdom of Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Huston Smith and so many others might have broadened our creaky Christomonism, we let in the Calvinists. Yes, we want to name the name. The name that is above every name. But that name does not drown the others, like a Gulf hurricane, or bomb the others, like a Desert Storm, or burn the others like a terrorist hijacking. When John wrote “I am the way…”, he meant that wherever there is a way-- there is the Christ, wherever there is truth-- there is Christ, wherever there is life-- there Christ is, too. The day I met the Clergy Session of Conference, at Syracuse University, to be passed on for orders, Huston Smith walked over to the session from his office on the other side of the quad. He stood by me, outside as I waited. I was nervous. He assured me I had no reason to be. We need that voice today! The mystery of God is greater than the measure of Calvin’s mind, and greater than the Christology of the Reformation, and greater than the purpose driven life. We are crossing over the raging river from exclusivity to particularity, from Christology to Theology!

From Giving to Tithing…

We risk harm when we replace tithing with giving. The Christian life involves specific, serious commitments with regard to time, to people, and to money. To be a Christian is to worship weekly, to keep faith in marriage and other close relationships, and to give away 10% of what one earns. Not more than 10% but not less either. Where did we go off the reservation here?

The pervasive materialism of our culture receives its rejection in tithing, not in mere giving. The enduring sense of entitlement in our county receives its contradiction in tithing, not in mere giving. The abject loneliness of exurban life receives its denial in tithing, not in mere giving. We have spent too much time trying to encourage people, bit by bit, to keep faith.

How would your spouse feel if you said, “You know, I was 40% faithful this year, a 5% increase from last year.” That would not fly in my home. Other things would fly (pans, knives, etc), but that would not! Nor can this euphemistic blather about “abundance”, a culture of abundance, last much longer. We need full affirmation of a culture of scarcity, not abundance, and the virtues, once our stock in trade, that come with scarcity: frugality, saving, temperance, industry, and, yes, tithing. Let us cross over and rest in the shade of the tithing trees!

Coda

You live in a country in which 40% of the population can name the Three Stooges, and fewer than 5% the ten commandments. Literacy has a new meaning, referring not to those who can read, but to those who do read. You remember from A River Runs Through It, the line that Methodists are Baptists who can read. The future of the globe relies not on those who can read, but on those who do. Who communicate…

Would you see Christianity reborn? Be careful what you say.

Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice…’

Incarnation

Integrity

Interdependence

Theology

Tithing

posted in Frostiana: Poetry & Preaching, Uncategorized on 10.8.2006 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 9: 30-37

Preface

The shortest distance between two points is the length of the line segment connecting them. Here the distance from heaven to earth is measured in the meaning of ‘welcome’. Power in the power of invitation is good news for the community of faith, for you.

Synoptic Gospel passages, like this one, have usually a quadraphonic complexion. Like a fine hymn, lifted to the praise of God, Mark 9: 30 welcomes us in four part harmony. There is a soprano voice, that of Jesus of Nazareth. The alto, arguably the most important voice, wells up from the diaphragm of the earliest church, which formed and fashioned these passages for its own needs. Mark himself is the tenor voice, the author, the evangelist, weaving past memory into the fabric of present need. You and I complete the baritone line, stretching across two thousand years of clefs and scales and chords.

We want to be sure to honor each voice, as we listen for the divine word. Admittedly, though the musicology of the gospels is well known, few pulpits regularly enjoy the full range of the music in the Gospel. The one dimensional culture around, the drive to black and white distinctions, the need for certainty in a fear driven society, the unwillingness to admit that there is much gray, and that ‘now we see in a mirror dimly’—in short, our flat screen view of life mitigates against a textured hearing. What a loss! The Bible has as story too!

Soprano

Although the Gospels were not written as histories, they surely rest upon an historical base. The Gospel of Mark proclaims Jesus as the Christ, crucified. Yet, underneath, or behind this proclamation, there looms some shadowy recollection of Jesus, and his words and his deeds. Now, I must confess that, as your current preacher and pastor, I bring a minimalist perspective to the question of what we can know, for sure, about Jesus, and his words and his deeds. Let me take you around this once more, to be clear. Some history of Jesus is contained here in Mark 9. It comes, though, in a certain package, namely the memory of Jesus which the early church needed, and needed to use. The higher pitched duet of soprano and alto, Jesus and early church, lovely it is, is also very difficult to distinguish, voice by voice.

A few years ago, we had a nationwide flattening of the Scripture in the phrase ‘what would Jesus do?’ The gospels are written around another question, raised by the early church, a much more nuanced and careful question; ‘what would Jesus have us do?’

Still, the soprano voice of the historical Jesus sounds forth. Here, one might posit, Jesus is remembered, as elsewhere, to have acclaimed service and to have loved children. We sing together of both. The greatness of those who would serve, and the divine preference for the least and the littlest have ample visibility in the gospel records. Jesus taught the value of service, as many teachers, ancient and modern, have also done. Jesus celebrated the life of children, as many teachers, ancient and modern, have also done.

Though primary, this voice is regularly the weakest in the gospel harmony. Our own tradition of interpretation, the ringing voice of the gospel author, and especially the formative influence of the fixing of memory by the earliest church, all conspire to muffle, mute and almost quiet the originary voice of the Nazarene.

When in our worship this is forgotten, danger and even disaster follow. Go and buy an exemplary book by one of our Boston University colleagues, Stephen Prothero, American Jesus, which provides a devastating review, highly readable, of American religious conjectures and fictional portraits of Jesus. Jesus the pioneer. Jesus the businessman. Jesus the androgyne. Jesus the muscleman. Jesus the Mormon. Jesus the revolutionary. Jesus, as in Salman’s head of Christ, the long haired European. More than a careful, minimal assessment of what Jesus said, and did, opens a religious Pandora’s box. We do not know what Jesus would do, in part because we do not know what he did.

One hundred years ago, Albert Schweitzer did show this in his Quest of the Historical Jesus. He looked back at 19^th century historical study of the life of Jesus and found that scholars found what they wanted to find. So the churchman found Jesus to be an ecclesiastical leader. The bohemian saw in Jesus a free spirit. The Marxist painted him as proletarian. The conservative, as a conservative. The liberal as a liberal. Beware an overly carefully drawn portrait of the Man who stilled the waters. Schweitzer left the New Testament for Africa. He left the reading of theology for the living of theology. He went to heal children and to serve. ‘He comes to us as one unknown…’

Alto

The passage that begins at 9:33 was probably a list of instructions that Mark had inherited from the early church. This in itself, for those of us listening for good news in century 21, carries thrill. We are listening in upon a conversation from the middle of the first century! The language of the passage, a regular reminder here helps, is common Greek, the language of bills of lading, of general commerce, of death certificates, of letters, of news and announcements. Jesus spoke no Greek. Another generation, another society, communicating in a different setting and especially in a different language, has shaped the passages that came into Mark’s hands.

The needs of the church, not unlike our needs today, pressed upon the community of those who had committed themselves to the Crucifi
ed. Now it is not very hard to identify what these issues were. Power and weakness, authority and authenticity, internal leadership and external care. Anyone who has been around religious life, or life, will testify to the endless contention and intractable difference lurking in every budding congregation committed to love. In the struggles of the early church—over leadership and welcome—this collection of sayings and instructions found its birth. There are clues that set off these passages as later constructions, significantly later than the walks along the roads of Galilee that Jesus and his disciples surely took. Capernaum, in Galilee, was a reminder to the many Greeks that Jesus took interest in the land of the non-Jews, Galilee of the Gentiles. Also, when Jesus is portrayed as advancing toward the disciples (as he is here, questioning rather than responding), the interests of the early church are being carried forward with his question.

The two issues here, practically speaking, future preachers of America take note, are the hallmarks of pain in pastoral ministry. Who has authority? Who is in and who is out? Leadership and welcome. Every church issue since King David slew Uriah the Hittite can be traced roughly to authority and inauguration, power and welcome. In trying, probably with limited success, to address these issues, unknown memories and unseen voices recalled and applied memories to needs.

Who is to lead? Did not Jesus acclaim service? Did Jesus not live a life of servant suffering? This will be our way, too.

Who is welcome? Did not Jesus embrace children? Did not children, the weakest and least and least powerful become for him the sign of the divine? This will be our way, too. The church opens to all, particularly the least, last and lost. ‘As you have done it to the littlest (gk) of these, you have done it to me…’ (MT25).

This morning you see the stoles worn here, signs of yokes, of humble service. I asked my mentor what was the single hardest thing about ministry? He said, ‘remembering that ministry is service’.

This morning you see the windows and doors of an open church, open especially and pointedly to those who differ, those who are fewer, those who are weaker and littler in every regard. I asked my dad once what hope our church had. He said, ‘well, we have tried to remember the poor.’ Anyone who has ever had issues with authority has good company here. Anyone who has ever struggled with inclusion has good company here. Hail Alto, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…

Tenor

Mark has taken the tradition before him into a new fight. Yes, he with us will affirm the bedrock yes to service and love of children, with our Lord Jesus. Yes, Mark with us will slake our communal thirst on the record that others too struggle over leadership and inclusion. But Mark has other fish to fry, too. He composes a short introduction to this passage, that places all that came before in a new light. He makes these stories to serve his larger war against the disciples.

In Mark, the disciples are ‘reprobates’ (Weeden). They just do not ever get it. They misunderstand. They misinterpret. They willfully disagree and disregard Jesus and his teaching. Jesus must regularly condemn them, often in terms harsher than those used against the Pharisees. The disciples are McHale’s Navy, the crew of the Titanic, the captain of the Minnow headed for Gilligan’s island. You miss the Mark in Mark if you miss this. He hates the disciples, and attacks them at every point. Why?

The disciples represent for Mark those in his own church who are interested in glory. Jesus here is Mark’s voice, reminding his own people of the way of the cross. The disciples are those miracle loving, glory seeking, happy and easy living, strong and handsome and beautiful emerging ‘leaders’ in the church at Rome. After all, Rome was the center, and used to the best. Why not in the church as well?

Mark’s opponents want ease. Jesus speaks of suffering. Mark’s ‘disciples’ garner power. Jesus speaks of weakness. Mark’s foils and foiled disciples expect that faith will ever and always empower, heal, help, enrich, enhance, embolden. Jesus says again: ‘here comes betrayal, here comes struggle, here comes suffering, here comes the cross.’ “The evangelist, here and elsewhere, is intentionally attacking the disciples (they want power, they refuse humility, they do not suffer children, they do not welcome)” (Weeden, Traditions in Conflict).

How you lead your life is directly dependent upon how you view the Christ of God. Christology forms discipleship. A Christ of great fame, fortune, future—this Christ will create a certain kind of discipleship, a discipleship of glory. To this, elsewhere and similarly, Paul, Apostle said, ‘suffering produces endurance, endurance character, character hope, and hope does not disappoint’. Just remember Ecclesiastes 9:11.

Bass

Bring us home bass section.

The echo of Jesus’ faint voice in acclaim of service and children gives us courage to acclaim service and children. The early church’s ready attention to power and weakness, insiders and outsiders, leadership and welcome gives us courage this week to give ready attention to the ways we use power and include others. Most especially, Mark’s savage attack upon the characters he constructs as the Twelve for their theology of glory gives us courage this week to sacrifice authority for authenticity, to measure our worth as individuals, churches, societies by how we treat the littlest and weakest among us.

In other words, we have responsibility imaginatively to interpret and apply the gospel to our very lives. Here is a fine definition of pastoral imagination: “In a pastoral, priestly, or rabbinic imagination, this is the capacity to see a biblical text the form of a sermon, or in the depths of a fractured relationship clues to reconciliation; to hear in an ancient prayer the voices of those who have prayed it through the centuries; in the act of a child’s generosity a vision for the stewardship of the earth”. (Foster, Educating Clergy, 323.

The measure of university success, on this model, is measured in the freshman dorm first, and at the alumni weekend last. The measure of church success, on this model, is measured by just how much welcome we extend to those who can do nothing for us, at least until they grow up.

The line segment of life is from God’s heaven to a child’s earth, from cloud to cheek, passing through Christ. This means change, toward service and toward hospitality. 150 years after Mark, an ancient document called the Acts of Philip said it this way: ‘unless you change your down to up and up to down and left to right and right to left you shall not enter my kingdom of heaven’.

We may some encouragement here. Those who are wrestling with just how to use the measures of power afforded them may contemplate 35, “whoever wants to be first must be last and servant of all”. Those pondering just how wide to cast the net for that next invitation may contemplate 37, “whoever welcomes a child welcomes God”.

Welcome, Mark 9

Soprano

What did Jesus say and when did he say it? Bultmann….

Alto

Two sayings, authority and welcome coupled. Why? Why was this good news for the community? Power and weakness…polemic against a conservative Jewish Christian group…

Tenor

How does this fit into the role envisioned by Mark for the disciples? Weeden

Core: the first shall be last, and the last first…”In Mark, Galilee is a theological-geographical sphere…” Disciples monopolize Mark’s attention…Disciples gray, with mass white and establishment black…

Bass

How did the rest of the NT, and the Fathers, handle this? How about the other texts?

AND SO WHAT FOR US?

How shall we think about the ruins of the church, and about Marsh as not the biggest but the best (music, liturgy, preaching).

What about children, then and now? What does the symbol mean?

posted in Frostiana: Poetry & Preaching, Uncategorized on 09.24.2006 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 8: 27-38

1. Preface

(The sermon was preceded by R Thompson’s ‘Two Roads’, the first Frostiana piece, and the first of seven uses of the seven pieces at Marsh this fall, corresponding to the Markan lectionary, and the sermons of the day. The service concluded with #426 UMH, to the tune ‘Marsh Chapel’.)

As Jesus taught, and Mark wrote, and Frost sang, we become who we are by the decisions we make.

We survivors, surviving survival, and moving from the guilt of survival to the gift of survival, when last we gathered did affirm…

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

The World Trade Center, hub of global economies, may fall, but 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’ (Niebuhr) still stands, through the World Truth Center, Jesus the Christ.

2. A Defining Moment

Sometimes, Fosdick said, a sermon is a twenty five minute public session in pastoral counsel. We mean a place where two or more souls, in Rilke’s words, “protect, border and salute each other”. In God’s presence we may stand by one another, at the border of the soul. Not to avoid. Not to interfere. To honor.

On September 11, 2001 four airplanes were commandeered and employed as weapons in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, DC. More than 2500 people died in hellish ways in the World Trade Centers, the Pentagon, and in an open field, as a consequence of this infamous assault. Parents lost children. Children lost mothers and fathers. Husbands lost wives, and wives husbands. This senseless slaughter of innocent civilians, a cruel and hate filled act inflicted upon defenseless citizens, was further exacerbated by the expressed celebration of American deaths by terrorists across the globe. Wives of New Jersey firefighters were forced to bury their loved ones against the background music of such choruses of joy. Parents of young, single women were caused to weep for their dead within earshot of the terrorist network’s bright eyed happiness. A generation of younger Americans was caused to carry into life lasting pictures of horror: a body, floating like a leaf, falling 100 stories…two young women, clasping hands in the fire of the 90th floor, and jumping hand in hand to their deaths…the greatest of human constructs in two giant towers rendered dust…a city paralyzed…a nation frightened…a culture permanently altered. Nineleven made us a people drenched in fear, anger, sorrow, and hatred. We have scarcely begun to absorb, to digest, or to reflect upon the experience.

3. The Only Thing We Have to Fear is Fear Itself

Robert Pinsky has given us poetry. Rowan Williams has written a short book. The television produced a docudrama. Of late, the movie industry is stirring to life with a film or two. Newspaper articles, now and then, appear and are gone. A collection of sermons from that week has been printed. There are the remaining struggles over the memorial.

But what about you? ‘Who do you say that I am?’

From the perspective of the pastoral theologian, we have hardly begun to work through the psychic, spiritual ground of this tragedy. The time honored cadences of avoidance, denial, and repression are readily apparent to the pastoral eye and theological ear. This is a tragedy, too. In some ways this is the greater tragedy.

Each of us has a slice of this pie. On August 27^th, I had determined to preach a bluntly simple sermon, two live parables, about going the wrong direction and making mistakes. Jesus told paradoxically simple parables. I followed, or tried to. But I must tell you that in the hours before that service, I did not know whether I would find the courage to say what needed saying. No, we do not underestimate the spiritual struggle for health in which we are all, intimately, involved. Each of us has as slice of this pie.

For since nineleven our theological hibernation—theological hibernation-- has allowed a series of actions that multiply the tragedy of the day into the tragedy of a lifetime. We have not sifted and settled our hearts about the horror of that day. In consequence, our national life has been subliminally formed and shaped by undigested angers, unreflective fears, impatient hatreds, and untamed sorrows.

How else, in retrospect, shall we explain the race to war without final evidence for its need? How else, in retrospect, shall we account for the abuses of power in military prisons? How else, in retrospect, do we understand a sudden celebration of victory when all the evidence pointed to its opposite? How else, in retrospect, do we think about a general election decided by votes garnered through the fear of, the specter of, gay marriage, of all things? How else, in retrospect, can we possibly explain the relative silence about casualties and collateral deaths, about maiming and civilian losses? It was our own suffering and survival of these very things that got us into the war in the first place. How else, in retrospect, can we fathom our neglect of our original motto, “meet violence with patient justice”? How else, in retrospect, shall we try to understand the fracture of freedoms hard won over two hundred and more years of American history?

On a more personal, local level, how else, in retrospect, do we analyze the conservative cast of our culture that affects every opportunity to change, every opportunity to grow, every responsible risk to take, every single investment in the future? What has become of us? Tell me: are you looser or tighter with your money since nineleven?

We have survived, when others did not. Can we say that out loud? We survived, when others died. Are we able to name that simple reality? Are we able to articulate and so escape the pervasive survivor’s guilt of this age?

4. Undercurrents of Healing

There are undercurrents of healing. Over dinner Wednesday we heard the recorded voice of Johnny Cash. It is remarkable, for instance, that the new film about Johnny Cash, well attended, is built squarely on a plot about survivor’s guilt. Cash’s father said, when Cash’s brother died, “the wrong boy died”. And the singer spent a lifetime healing from his own survivor’s guilt. He survived. His brother did not. He did. He poured his talent and art into lament and atonement.

Remember from last Sunday the contours of existential survivor’s guilt…

Here is a description of the effects of survivor’s guilt: “general anxiety, depression, inability to sleep, poor memory, difficulty concentrating, difficulty completing tasks, an inexplicable sense of guilt.” (Borgess). That sounds like life as we know it.

With birth survival, deliverance and survival down the birth canal, must come a kind of congenital survivor’s guilt, way down deeper than words, that we all, every human one of us, we all share. Not something we have done, but the air we breathe. All, all have been traumatized and stopped short of the Glory of God. Nineleven rekindles it.

This is our condition. “Like the beating of the heart, it is always present.” (Tillich). It? Tragedy, estrangement, sin, unbelief, hubris, concupiscence, separation, guilt, meaninglessness, despair, anxiety. For Peter, Luke, and Acts: especially existential survivor’s guilt. For you, your generation, your race, and your culture—the same. “It is experienced as something for which one is responsible, in spite of its universal, tragic actuality.” (Tillich)

Fair or not, we lived. Survival--strangely--brings a kind of guilt, irrational and unjust and useless, that nonetheless needs healing and pardon. Today we announce absolution for your survivor’s guilt. Kyrie Eleison. In Jesus Christ we are forgiven the fact that we survived. And we are ready to choose life, to choose the way of the future, that includes by the cross the recognition that such life will not be pain free. Good living is not cost free or cross free. We have the tenor voice of the evangelist, here at the crux of the Gospel. Mark has had to construct (so Haenchen, loc. Cit. and Weeden, loc.cit.) this passage to remind the later church of Jesus’ suffering servant role, and so, by extension, their own. (Weeden, Traditions in Conflict, 65ff).

Peter survived and thrived. Your generation survived and thrived. Your mother’s child—YOU—survived and thrived. Our country can too. But we will need to do the things that make for peace, for healing. Here they are. Once forgiven, we are thawed, freed. Now we can move, and we had better move fast. THE ONLY THING WE HAVE TO FEAR IS FEAR ITSELF.

5. Steps Toward Surviving Nineleven

The Boston Globe carried a discussion this week of survival. Don Murray, on 9/12/06, wrote about memory and surviving war. He wrote about ‘the guilt of the survivor’. Yesterday, a fellow veteran responded, insightfully, placing the phrase ‘the gift of survival’, alongside Murray’s ‘guilt of survival’. In a phrase, that is the gospel, the movement from guilt to gift. May it be ours, in the heart and in the mind, and in the soul, this day. Here are some steps along the path from guilt to gift. As one theologian has suggested, we are as a community to experience “the church as ritual sustenance”, for the journey of faith and life (RCNeville, The Symbols of Jesus, chpt 2).

1. Lament

First, we need to lament. Wail. Curse. Shout. Lament. Some of us will need to take time away from religion, until we can make sure our religion is real. Julie Nicholson, an English priest, lost her daughter to terrorists on July 7, 2005, in the London bombings. She had been ordained two years earlier. She resigned her pastorate. She could not reconcile her priestly duties with her refusal to forgive her daughter’s murderers. “I think forgiveness is a cheap grace. We have to be careful that we are not putting layer after layer on a deep and festering wound. I felt it after 9/11 and I feel it now. For a number of months, faith was more a hindrance than a help.” (New York Times, 5/6/06). The conscience of the believer is inviolable.

2. Protect

Second, it is bloodily clear that we have in this world people who will kill without qualm, and on a grand scale. There will be the possibility of further terror. We need to do all that is patient and just militarily to resist such terror. In a responsive way. Together with other nations. Without interest in gain. With exit strategies as a first priority in every case. We face a mortal threat, and with integrity we must face it down.

3. Assess

Third, we need to be realistic about the scope of this threat, by comparison with other past threats. Joseph Ellis has given one example. His view may not be yours, but may provoke you to compose yours: My first question: where does Sept. 11 rank in the grand sweep of American history as a threat to national security? By my calculations it does not make the top tier of the list, which requires the threat to pose a serious challenge to the survival of the American republic. Here is my version of the top tier: the War for Independence, where defeat meant no United States of America; the War of 1812, when the national capital was burned to the ground; the Civil War, which threatened the survival of the Union; World War II, which represented a totalitarian threat to democracy and capitalism; the cold war, most specifically the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which made nuclear annihilation a distinct possibility. Sept. 11 does not rise to that level of threat because, while it places lives and lifestyles at risk, it does not threaten the survival of the American republic (N
YTIMES, 3/06)

4. Divine

Fourth, we need honestly to assess what this does to our understanding of God. We need to think theologically about nineleven. God did not intervene on that day, nor is that the pattern of God’s participation in life. God must love freedom, says Bishop Tutu, because God leaves us free to go straight to hell if we so choose. Our understanding of God can not make space for a small, tribal divinity, even including some of our most cherished Christological affirmations. World religions are as close as the window on your cubical, as a plane approaches. It really matters—to you and your children---how 6 billion people think about God. It is a matter of life and death, of heaven and hell, right here on earth. We will need to become steadily and quickly adept at framing our faith posture in ways that accept, accommodate, and admire others. We shall need theologically, more than ever we have done in history, theologically to love our neighbor as our self. We shall need to be particular in our honest celebration of the faith of Jesus Christ without becoming exclusive to other genuine expressions of faith. Otherwise the kind of theological hatred of which we have our own personal and very local experiences will become the lingua franca of a death-prone world culture.

We want to build five theological bridges for every theological fence, five theological doors for every theological wall, five theological handshakes for every theological fist. We do not have to ‘win’. We do have to love. We shall need to love others as ourselves, by treating different theology as a new friend, not a certain opponent. When we feel the shackles of guilt falling away, we shall be able to summon the courage and energy to get on with the task at hand.

You can read one serious, hard book on world religions this year. You can find a way to offer gracious, unsolicited help to the poor, non-Christian world. You can develop a sensitivity to others, the other. You can see this post-modern world, with its fragmented face, not as a threat to be fought, but as an opportunity to be embraced. You can fund all this by tithing, and you can gain the power to tithe by selling your house and buying a smaller one, selling your car and buying a smaller one, limiting your purchases and leisure investments to a third of their current levels. It is only the unabsolved survivor’s guilt that keeps us from an heroic life. HERE THE GOOD NEWS: YOU ARE FORGIVEN FOR SURVIVING NINELEVEN. TE ABSOLVO. TE ABSOLVO. TE ABSOLVO. Now go and make your peace.

5. Appreciate

Fifth, we see in this shadow, dimly, the living and lively shades of others who have taken the narrow path. We are encouraged to remember them.

Look around , and you will see what I mean. In Toronto there lives the great Jewish teacher, and Holocaust survivor, Emil Fackenheim. Once he was asked, “How can you practice faith in God after the horror of the Holocaust?” (That may be the single most important theological question of our time.) His reply: “I practice faith, in the face of Holocaust, “in order not to permit Hitler any posthumous victories.” He survived, and survived his survival.

Look around. In Montreal there lives a great French Canadian teacher, Jean Vanier. He left the pastoral life to create a movement of caring ministries with developmentally challenged people. Working with survivors to help them survive survival. His organization, L’Arche, has attracted great acclaim, including the service at the end of life of Henri Nouwen.

Look around. When our first two little survivors arrived, we lived in a little cottage in Ithaca, around 1980. In the 1930’s, Pearl Buck and her husband had lived there as he served that church and studied at Cornell. I think of her celebration of Chinese survival, and her effort to save the survivors there, here evocation of birth in the rice paddies of Canton. With her contemporary William Faulkner, she trusted that the human race would not merely survive, but would prevail.

And whence the energy for these steps? Whence the power to continue, when weary feet refuse to climb? Whence the motive? This is our watch. ‘Who do you say that I am?’ We look for a rebirth of hope, real hope, global hope, a living common hope…

6. A Common Hope

This week we pause in prayer and quiet to honor those who lost their lives 5 years ago, and those who lost loved ones the same day. We meet this moment, in quiet, to honor and remember. In doing so we do not neglect, we do not forget, we do not side-step, those who have lost life and loved ones since. In service of God and neighbor, in service of God and country, in Tsunami and hurricane and disease, we remember those who have been hurt, in a world of hurt.

Rightly to honor those lost and those loved, and fitly to meet this moment, we shall need briefly to look out toward the far side of trouble. There is, we hope, a far side to trouble. We may watch from the near side, but there is a far side to trouble as well. That is our ancient and future hope. Dewey spoke of a common faith. Thurman preached about a common ground. Today we identify a common hope.

This is the hope of peace. We long for the far side of trouble, for a global community of steady interaction, an international fellowship of accommodation, a world together dedicated to softening the inevitable collisions of life. This is the hope of peace.

Without putting too fine a point upon it, this hope, the vision of the far side of trouble, is the hallmark of the space in which we stand, and the place before which we stand. If nowhere else, here on this plaza, and here before this nave, we may lift our prayer of hope. There is a story here, of peace.

Methodists are like everyone else, only more so, the saying goes—a wide and diffuse denomination, committed to a handshake and a song, and that shared ‘creed’ of ‘that which has been believed, always, everywhere, and by everyone (so, John Wesley).

Mahatmas Ghandi, walking and singing ‘Lead Kindly Light’, embodied this common hope. Ghandi
wrote: “I am part and parcel of the whole, and cannot find God apart from the rest of humanity”. A common hope of peace. Ghandi inspired and taught the earlier Dean of Marsh Chapel, Howard Thurman.

Howard Thurman, hands raised in silence, later wrote: “The events of my days strike a full balance of what seems both good and bad. Whatever may be the tensions and the stresses of a particular day, there is always lurking close at had the trailing beauty of forgotten joy or unremembered peace.” A common hope of peace.

Thurman taught King, whose stentorian voice fills our memory and whose sculpture adorns our village green. King wrote: “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality”. A common hope of peace. Martin Luther King inspired a whole generation of ministers, including the current Dean of this Chapel.

He (Robert Allan Hill) wrote: “We are all more human and more alike than we regularly affirm, all of us on this great globe. We all survive the birth canal, and so have a native survivors’ guilt. All six billion. We all need daily two things, bread and a name. (One does not live by bread alone). All six billion. We all grow to a point of separation, a leaving home, a second identity. All six billion. We all love our families, love our children, love our homes, love our grandchildren. All six billion. We all age, and after forty, its maintenance, maintenance, maintenance. All six billion. We all shuffle off this mortal coil en route to that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns. All six billion.”

This week, in memory and honor, we lift our hope for a day to live on the far side of trouble. We remember our ancient and future hope, a hope of peace.

7. Coda

He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave
He is wisdom to the mighty, He is honor to the brave
So the world shall be his footstool and the soul of wrong his slave
Our God is marching on.

posted in Frostiana: Poetry & Preaching, Uncategorized on 09.17.2006 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

Matriculation 2006

Boston University School of Theology

Preface

Many of us are quite new here. We hardly know each others’ names, let alone seeing each others hearts. We learn one name at a time, I and Thou.

At Chautauqua in 1999 I introduced myself to a frail saint, who asked my name, heard it, and chuckled. Hill is not a colorful enough name to become much of source of hilarity, but she chuckled still. She explained. “You know, I had such a fear of asking people their names again, once they had told me once, that I came up with a system that invariably worked. Rather than saying, ‘I have forgotten your name, please remind me’, or something equally honest, I would say, ‘now, tell me again, do you spell your last name with an ‘i’ or an ‘e’. My technique succeeded. Chuckle. Until I used it with a man who shares your surname. ‘Do you spell your last name with an ‘i’ or an ‘e’? He blustered. My name is Hill not Hell, you spell it H I L L!

Caught between our own identities, and visions for the future, both heavenly and hellish, we have arrived in Boston. Like Matthew, who in chapter 9 paints himself, as Velazquez did, into his own portrait, we are invited. Follow me. “He comes to us as one unknown as he did long ago, saying ‘Follow me,…”, wrote Schweitzer. The real moment of real invitation and real response is real apocalypse. Paul said he met Jesus ‘by apocalypse’. I am here by apocalypse. Another story for another day. You may be too. What are we doing here?

We are here for matriculation, to begin, to exchange on maternity for another. Here is a matriculation account. Vernon Jordan went to Depauw ( a small Methodist school for small Methodists) in Indiana, lead by various BU graduates. His dad, mom, and younger siblings drove him up and dropped him off their in Greencastle, “up south”, Martin King might have said, from their home in Lousiana. Weeping, his father said, “Vernon, we are not coming back until four years from now. You are here where your future opens. At graduation we will be here, sitting in the front row. This is your time. I have one word of advice. Read. When others are playing, you read. When others are sleeping, you read. When others are drinking, you read. When others are partying, you read.” Take, Vernon, take and read.

In mid September of 1976, perhaps 30 years ago to the very day, many of us stood in the common room at the Union Theological Seminary. I stood near Linda Clarke and Horace Allen, and among the ghosts of theologians past that haunted those halls as others of equal tremor do these. George Landes spoke for the Biblical Field. Sanders, Terrien, Brown, and Martyn sat behind him. “There has been some question about whether the Bible is relevant”, he said quietly, this exacting teacher of Hebrew, and noted Jonah scholar. “We in the Biblical field”—here he gestured meaningfully to his esteemed colleagues—“ask that before you settle that question, whether or not the Bible is relevant, that you…read it.” That is what I remember, in sum, from the days of entry into theological study. I cannot tell you, in retrospect, and though those days themselves were not easy, just how majestically meaningful the voices, many now dead, in that room have been to me. They are in my ears. They are here beside me. As the theological voices of this uniquely exciting, young, potent, new faculty of the Boston University School of Theology will be for many, for many years to come. May your retrospective in 2036 be similar. I hope you will remember, three decades hence, something similar. Whatever others do, in these precious days of somehow subsidized freedom, you read. Read. The savings habits of careful reading can become the difference between life and death.

Matthew on Taking and Reading

Matthew says go and learn, follow and discern, take and read. Matthew, the author of a dark Gospel, reflecting perhaps the persecutions of the late first century, has stitched his own matriculation to faith together with an apothegm (that is a word that you never use in a sermon) about reading. His entry involved reading. “Go and learn….” Why should anyone have needed to learn the meaning of such a fine and famous line from Hosea, about mercy and sacrifice? Evidently, the meaning was far from evident, by the time of Matthew’s suffering. More study was needed. Why? The experience of the fragile church of the late first century required new readings of the inherited traditions of the church. Here is the preacher’s task, to translate tradition into insights for effective living.

Each Synoptic passage is like a choral piece, including four voices. There is the Soprano voice of Jesus of Nazareth, embedded somewhere in the full harmonic mix. In Matthew 9, Jesus conflicts with the Pharisaic aversion to pagan inscriptions and iconography. There is the alto voice of the primitive church, arguably always the most important of the four voices, that which carries the forming of the passage in the needs of the community. From Mark to Matthew an insertion has arisen, the citation of Hosea 6:6. Evidently, the earliest church needed the fuller support of the prophetic tradition—mercy not sacrifice, compassion not holiness—as it moved farther out and away from the memory of Jesus. The tenor line is that of the evangelist. Matthew is here, marking his own appearance in the record. His work seems to reflect a connection to school, to scribes, perhaps as Stendahl said from across the river, years ago, to Qumran. The baritone is borne by later interpretation, beginning soon with Irenaeus, Against Heresies: “What doctor, when wishing to cure a sick man, would act in accordance with the desires of the patient, and not in accordance with the requirements of medicine?” ( Adv. Haer., in Richardson, ECF, 377) If our church music carries only one line, we may be tempted to interpret our Scripture with only one voice, and miss the SATB harmonies therein, to our detriment.

There are two steps in today’s Gospel. Take, Read. The first is invitation, offered and received. The second is education, prepared and planned. You have, somehow, washed up on this shore, out of the ranges of materialism all around. You have set aside more lucrative degrees, you have refrained from taking more reliable paths, and you have stepped aside from entering upon more pleasant routines. What were you thinking? You are here. Thanks to somebody, and some potent word of invitation. Then, too, you are here to learn. To learn what the ancient world still thought was obscure, even following Hosea and Plato: God delights in mercy. I (thelo) desire, delight in, enjoy, am happy for, celebrate, am passionate about…mercy.

One wonders just how pointed Matthew’s reference here is in regard to his own community. Is the contrast between the partnership of the gospel and the willingness to suffer in the coliseum? Or the choice between a hearty entrance into some of the culture around, rather than a sacrificial abstemiousness about the world? Or the happy delight in new deliverance, over against the trudging discipline of mature faith? What of mercy, and what of sacrifice? What pastoral visit, and what new learning has formed this passage? Go…and learn. Take…and read.

Point One: Take

Close reading is crucial to health.

One day, following the morning service, we visited a dear saint in her home. She had been in hospital that week, and sat recuperating in her parlor. Her family was with her. And she had a story to tell.

That Tuesday, she prepared to be taken, by ambulance, from one hospital to another, for a particular procedure. She is a fine, older Methodist lady, so she prepared herself with what dignity one can muster in a hospital bed, robed in a hospital gown, and alone in the corridor of life. A little makeup, a comb and brush, some careful adjustments of remaining raiment, glasses perched, smile shining.

She could see the elevator door open, and her stretcher moving out. Then the attendants clearly mentioned her name as they signed the paper work at the desk. The nurse motioned across the hall in the general direction of her room. She poised herself, prepared to be a good, courteous patient. Down the hall the men came, and she waved. They returned the gesture. To her door they rolled—and then, remarkably, rolled on by! They passed to the next room, 129 not 128—such a small difference, a room inhabited alone by a frail, kindly woman who is deaf as a post. “Mrs. Smith?” “YES” she replied, her volume in inverse proportion to her accuracy. Into the stretcher went the wrong woman, and down the hall they moved. My dear parishioner called out, used her buzzer, flailed her arms like a gypsy at the campfire. But in a New York minute they were gone, carrying away the wrong person. On the way home, following the procedure, someone apparently had the presence of mind to look at the stretchered woman’s wrist band, name tag. I wonder how the reader felt not to see the name Smith. A rare moment of revelation. In this case, little lasting harm occurred. Our hospitals, in fact, to my eye, given their hourly commitment to excellence and attention to detail, put other institutions to shame. We all know the fear of the wrong arm amputated, the wrong knee replaced, the wrong woman put in the stretcher. Physician’s malpracti
ce. But the news, good news, of medical malpractice is that you know soon—an hour, a day, a decade—what has happened, and you can endure it or correct it. So it goes with the physician’s malpractice.

Not so with the metaphysician’s.

Biological error lasts, at most, a lifetime. Theological error resides for three generations, or more. If, as ML King Sr. said, ‘it takes three generations to make a preacher’, then it also takes three generations, or more, to recognize and correct the effects of metaphysical malpractice. You cannot fully see its effect for 20 or 40 or 60 or 80 years. And it is a short way from birdie to bogie, from clean cuts to nicks and scratches in innocent organs, mistaken severations and amputations, blood spilled and shed in the wrong bed. Choose the physical mistakes, for the metaphysical are so much more insidious, more damaging, more real. Read carefully the signs of the times, and their distinctive differences…

There is a crucial difference between sacrifice and mercy. There is a crucial difference between holiness and compassion. There is a crucial difference between law and love. There is crucial difference between representation and redemption. There is a crucial difference between incantation and incarnation. There is a crucial difference between innocence and integrity. There is a crucial difference between independence and interdependence. There is a crucial difference between Christology and theology. There is a crucial difference between giving and tithing.

When we let the very worthy interests in representation eclipse the main work of the gospel, in redemption, we are making a surgical mistake…

We risk harm when we replace incarnation with incantation, forgetting that the Sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the Sabbath…

Integrity and holiness survive beyond innocence, so we might say: in singleness integrity; in partnership fidelity…

We risk harm when we replace just war with just war, interdependence with independence. The 2003 invasion of Iraq jettisoned our inherited experience codified in just war theory. It was preemptive, unilateral, imperial, unforeseeable, not responsive, multilateral, restorative, and limited…

We are still wallowing, as Doug Hall warned a generation ago (you see it does take a long time), in a Unitarianism of the Second Person of the Trinity…

There is a world of difference between habit and mercy, contribution and generosity, giving and tithing. The pervasive materialism of our culture receives its rejection in tithing, not in mere giving. The enduring sense of entitlement in our county receives its contradiction in tithing, not in mere giving. The abject loneliness of exurban life receives its denial in tithing, not in mere givin

These are crucial distinctions. How are we ever going to make them, and learn consistently to make them well, to avoid metaphysical misdirection?

Point Two: Read

How are we to take up the stressful work, the hard labor of careful practice?

You go and read.

Find yourself in front of the Sculpture of Arthur Fiedler, on a bench. Sit farther along the river, as the sun sets. Make permanent friends with the quiet pews of Marsh Chapel and the hidden crannies of the library. Locate that 2am diner breakfast that helped Fred Craddock become a preacher. Find the Arthur Fiedler reading room, a beautiful spot. When others are at war with administration, you read. When others are cursing their Bishops, you read. When others are finding fault with faculty hairstyles, you read. You may especially want to read those who have lived through other times of ruin. Reading frees you from the 21^st century. Reading cuts you loose from your own time and place. Others too have taught and preached in the ruins of the church….

I picture a bright autumn day. You are walking the emerald necklace, with lunch and a bag full of books.

*You start out a Charlesgate, thinking about reading today….

You live in a country in which 40% of the population can name the Three Stooges, and fewer than 5% the ten commandments. Literacy has a new meaning, referring not to those who can read, but to those who do read. We are preparing for teaching and ministry among those who do read, or will soon.

You think of a little office in the World Council of Churches, that of Paolo Freire. There he sat, brown bag lunch in hand. Who taught a continent, for their liberation, to read…

You remember from A River Runs Through It, the line that Methodists are Baptists who can read. But today, the literate are not those who can, but those who do read.

Close, careful reading, matters. I believe Colin Powell could testify to the difference between close, exacting reading, and visual learning. But he is only our best mirror upon ourselves. What have we been reading, as a people? Not enough world history. Not enough comparative religion. Not enough detailed daily news. Not enough economics or political science. Certainly not enough of the koine greek of Matthew 9, or the Hebrew verbs of Hosea 6.

*You pause to sit at the Fenway gardens to read in books from BUSTH, past and future…

The future of the globe relies not on those who can read, but on those who do. Allan Knight Chalmers taught his students here in the 1950’s to read a book a day.

Elmer Leslie, in the same decade, wrote, interpreting Psalm 1. He concluded his book on The Psalms with Psalm 1.

The psalmist first describes negatively the man who walks life’s good way, that is, by what he does not do. He refuses to walk as the morally loose, criminal element in society counsel him to do, or to stand where those congregate who have missed life’s true goal, or to sit as a willing crony among those who scoff at goodness. Then the psalmist turns to positive description and depicts a good man in terms of what he does. He delights in religion and meditates upon the Lord’s requirements as enjoined in the law, brooding over them by day and in the wakeful hours of the night. (op. cit. 432)

From Area A, learn with AT Pierson to “sanctify ambition, not crucify it”. A close distinction in a careful reading of life. From Area B, learn with Hildegard of Bingham to “become one’s ownmost”. From Area C, learn the nature of “good Samaritan” Christians. From Area D, learn with 19^th century Methodism the lasting danger of poor financial planning, and learn the merits of disciplined sacramental observance. Or, learn the history of 3 Timothy. All this and more, you can read in the books of your teachers in this fine school. Read what you want, what you need, when you want, as you need.

*You sit beside the lawn at Emmanuel College, to pray…

In our own reforming, newly reconstituted community here at BUSTH, we have been further chastened and strongly sobered by death coming as a thief in the night. In one sense, there is little we can say, either to others or to ourselves. We must hold our tongue, and stand, and, just like a preacher, wait and wring our hands. We do not know why these things happen. There is no explaining, finally, the depth of tragic loss. But we can be present to one another, and treat each other with an honest kindness, a kind honesty. And with a little humility about our own limitations. And with a happy grace that embraces every morning with a sense of wonder. G.K.Chesterton caught it right, as he did so often; “the world does not lack for wonders, but only for a sense of wonder.” This harrowing week does not lack for meanings, but only for a sense of meaning. We can trust the unseen God to give confidence, faith, and your lived capacity to withstand what you cannot understand. Sometimes that is all you have, the faith to withstand what you cannot understand. For the loss of a brother does not make this week, this matriculation, any less meaningful, or less meaning filled. In fact, it frames our study in the arch of eternity, and recalls for us the heart of ministry, which is the health of persons, the saving of souls. We are on the edge of eternity in every moment of life. You, teacher, you preacher, you pastor, are living testimony to the Eternal Now.

*You may pause and rest at the beginning of the Riverway to think practically about theological education…

The ministry will be upon you in three years, or less, or more. If you can start, by reading, to think theologically, and model that dimension of spirituality for your parishioners, you will have done them a world of good.

Students, read the bottom line. You need to leave seminary with no debt. Faculty, read for the fine truth that sets free. Teachers, love your subjects and your students, as Augustine advised. You have nothing to do but to know the truth. Administration, read the need for conviviality, with joy. Minimize debt, students. Marginalize delusion, faculty. Maximize community, administration.

Oh, I know, there is more to life than books. I remember the 1904 Discipline and its terse rebuke, “we would rather throw over all the libraries in the world, rather than let one soul perish”. The difference 100 years later is that for the world soul not to perish, you must become living libraries. Bradbury’s campfire at the end of Fahrenheit 451 comes to mind.

*You find a quiet corner along the river think about the impact of careful reading, and its absence…

This fall we shall witness a titanic struggle for the minds and hearts of America. We do not cast a single ballot in any direction. But the difference between a fear soaked visual bombardment, and a careful literate philosophy of peace, is close to the marrow of what will or will not save us. What some discern as the shift from a gender to a religious divide, should perhaps be seen as a literacy divide. It matters what hymns, prayers, liturgy, and certainly sermons people know.

One does not live by bread alone. Better read than dead. Better well hung than ill wed, better well read than spiritually dead.

Read now. Robert Kennedy did not have the freedom to do a research paper on Aeschylus the night Martin King was killed. He either had read or he hadn’t. He had. His 3 minutes in the Indianapolis rain were his greatest words, because he had read. There is very little left of the historic Protestant church in the Northeast. What there is clings for life to the words, and to the Word.

*In the glade you wonder about the nature of reading itself…

And what relationship shall the reader have to the read? Who among us does anywhere near enough to deconstruct our own various contexts? Is the text to have the sole divining voice, or is the reader king? What of the relationship between the unsaid and the uttered? In reading, how do ranges of power dance with colors of truth? Is the truth of Scripture the sole truth? Or one truth among many? Or primus inter pares? Or an anachronism altogether? How then do you read?

Misreading intelligence can land a nation in the soup of a civil war. Misreading tests can land a patient in the wrong surgical suite. Misreading accounts payable can land a business in bankruptcy. Misreading a traffic signal can land you in the ditch. Most of these have healing solutions available within one generation. Theological misreading lasts for several generations. It takes three of four generations to bring correction to a sincere or not so authentic theological misreading. Be careful how you read, for how read is how you think, and how you think is how you act.

*You may circle the pond at Jamaica Plains, eat lunch, and read especially from those who have read and preached in various conditions of the ruins of the church…

Here is an October Saturday in the sun. Read in the ruins. Take, Read. Read along with those who also rose to preaching amid the ruins of the church. You walk. You read BBTaylor. Leaving Church. You walk. You read K Phillips, American Theocracy. You walk. At Jamaica Pond you read P Beinhart, The Good Fight. Then you read Vaclev Havel, on almost anything. You read H Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited. Boston is your campus.

McCourt in Angela’s Ashes is really giving you a hymn to language. He sits by the hospital bed of his eleven year old girlfriend. She teaches him a poem, “The Highwayman”, and she dies. He is so hungry that he finds a soiled newspaper, with the remains of fish and chips, and licks the grease…and the words…off the paper. That is, McCourt’s lovely bildungsroman, Angela’s Ashes, ends with the young boy escaping his past, escaping his family of origin, escaping the biology that threatens always to become full destiny, and feeding himself. He is so hungry that he finds trashed newspapers in which the daily fish and chips have been wrapped, and he licks the papers clean of scraps and bits and crumbs and oil, until the words on the paper fill his mouth. His whole book is about his deliverance, how he learned to live by reading, how he learned to love through words.

*At last, as night is falling, you pause for a minute on the way home to read this last passage from Augustine’s Confessions…

I was saying these things and weeping in the most bitter contrition of my heart, when suddenly I heard the voice of a boy or a girl I know not which–coming from the neighboring house, chanting over and over again, “Pick it up, read it; pick it up, read it.” [”tolle lege, tolle lege”] Immediately I ceased weeping and began most earnestly to think whether it was usual for children in some kind of game to sing such a song, but I could not remember ever having heard the like. So, damming the torrent of my tears, I got to my feet, for I could not but think that this was a divine command to open the Bible and read the first passage I should light upon. For I had heard how Anthony, accidentally coming into church while the gospel was being read, received the admonition as if what was read had been addressed to him: “Go and sell what you have and give it to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven; and come and follow me.” By such an oracle he was forthwith converted to thee.

So I quickly returned to the bench where Alypius was sitting, for there I had put down the apostle’s book when I had left there. I snatched it up, opened it, and in silence read the paragraph on which my eyes first fell: “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof.” I wanted to read no further, nor did I need to. For instantly, as the sentence ended, there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty and all the gloom of doubt vanished away. (Outler translation, Book V111)

At dinner someone may ask what the matriculation sermon on Wednesday was about. You would say, well, I think he was singing a song of love for reading; I think he was raising a hymn of praise for reading; I think he was lining out a psalm of affirmation for reading…

Tole, lege…

posted in Frostiana: Poetry & Preaching, Uncategorized on 09.13.2006 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

Acts 10: 34-43

Marsh Chapel, Boston University

Preface

On Thursday the newspaper (NY Times 9/7/06) carried a narrative, a retrospective interview of NYC, five years after nineleven. Births, migrations, deaths have changed the city’s population, so that today New York City is a city of “newcomers and survivors”. The writer, Michael Brick, attended to themes of a biblical nature. Loss, empathy, anxiety, sadness. Especially, survival.

Today’s Gospel is a word about survival.

Peter, we are expected to remember, denied Jesus three times. His sermon is ostensibly remembered here today. But there was another day in Peter’s life, too. Cowering in the corner, he watched Jesus die. Peter survived. Maybe this is why his sermon here begins with testimony: “I truly understand…”

The early church, we are able to recall, watched the destruction of Jerusalem from afar. They saw the temple destroyed in 70ad. Luke and the church survived. Is this what fuels the memory here of Galilee and Judea and even Jerusalem? “Beginning in Galilee…”

This text, Acts 10, we are stunned to see, displays a potential, universal salvation. Any and all who have lived well, and lived to tell the story--are accepted. The race survives. Fear God and do what is right: “anyone who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to him”.

Yet there is more. What Jesus the Risen Christ brings is survival grace, survival forgiveness, the capacity for you to survive your survival. For those who survive often do so with a shadowy sense of –well, read the paper--guilt—irrational, unutterable, survivor’s guilt. Peter—forgiven in survival. Luke—forgiven in survival. All—forgiven in survival. We—forgiven our survival.

Remember the newspaper’s careful report about thought and emotion in the city of New York, five years after nineleven. NYC today is a community of newcomers and survivors. The former discover a capacity for empathy, the latter a way forward.

Peter survives, but he will carry with him always, as the Gospels testify, a memory, and a sense of guilt, about his darkest hour. The story of his life, and perhaps of ours, comes in leaves from the notebook of a survivor. Survivors’ guilt is a condition, that sense that ‘it could have, might have, should have been me’.

Peter raises a question for you about the greatest trauma you have personally have survived. You did survive. Good for you, you survivor, you. Now: have you had absolved the lingering sense of guilt that attends almost every survival?

Luke raises a question for you about the greatest trauma your generation has survived. Your generation did survive. Good for you, you survivor you. Now: have you all received absolution for the lingering sense of guilt that attends almost any survival?

Acts raises a question for you about the greatest trauma the human being has survived. Now: have you heard the word of absolution for the lingering sense of guilt that attends any survival?

You survived a car accident. You survived a war. You survived birth. Personal, generational, congenital survival. It is the Gospel that will empower you to survive your survival, too.

1. Peter and You: Personal Salvation

Have you named your greatest trauma? Death of a brother. Loss of a son in law. Expiration of a mother. Pink slip. Bone cancer. Hospital closing. A phone call from the Bishop announcing your displacement. Moving after 25 years. Abuse at an earlier age. A child’s suicide. An unexpected pregnancy. A plane crash. Divorce. A car accident. A run across an open field, with live ammunition coming at you. The sudden death of a classmate at the opening of term.

In the first three Gospels, it is centrally Peter who faces trauma like this. He has left all. He has followed. He has stayed. He has loved. He has waited in the dark courtyard. But then—his singular existential trauma—he has denied his Lord thrice. And Jesus has died and Peter has survived, watching the death of his Beloved.

The Gospel accounts of Peter’s denial, or betrayal, form the rich heart of the passion narrative. The pathos, the hurt with which the accounts are given reach to the depths of our hearts, even 2000 years later. Yet, through it all, Peter has survived. What remains for Peter, and for us, is to learn how to live as survivors, to survive our own survival.

I am not a psychologist, nor the son of a psychologist. But I know that “survivor’s guilt” is real. Do you remember the film “
Ordinary People” (based on Judith Guest’s novel), about two brothers who capsize in a boat? One dies and one survives. Mary Tyler Moore oversees a spotless home where “everything is in its proper place—except the past.” Berger, the counselor says at one point: “a little advice about feelings kiddo, don’t expect it always to tickle.” Conrad, the survivor, very nearly takes his own life, saved at the last by wise, loving, intervening words of his counselor, and friend, who asks repeatedly, “what is it that makes you feel so bad?” The answer, at last: “I survived.”

Never doubt the saving power of personal presence and a word fitly spoken.

You too have survived. Something. Some years ago we were grieving the Columbine tragedy. The kids there testified, truly, that a strange guilt followed their grief. This is the tragic guilt of the innocent, survivor guilt. “Megan hid her tears behind sunglasses: ‘I just feel so lucky to still be here.” Greg Martinez said, “You almost feel guilty, about, you know, having your kid get out.” Their counselor said those who feel guilty for making it out alive “need to be reassured that they can celebrate their survival.” (AP, A Levinson, 4/99).

Here is a description of the effects of survivor’s guilt: “general anxiety, depression, inability to sleep, poor memory, difficulty concentrating, difficulty completing tasks, an inexplicable sense of guilt.” (Borgess).

That sounds a lot like human life in general!

In the light of Resurrection, Peter finds the power not only to survive but to prevail. He finds the power to enter a new life, to change, to risk. He finds courage that will take him beyond mere survival and will help him travel throughout the known world, and, if legend serves us, to die a martyr in the far off city of Rome. He survives his own survival.

Here is a promise for all of us. Whatever lingering survivor’s guilt attends our survival through trauma, here is a power that frees us for a new life, beyond that great past tomb.

Are you ready to survive your own survival?

Even more. Something from that trauma you may fashion into a great gift for others, this side of Resurrection. Your loss will sensitize you to others. Your illness, to that of others. Your demotion, your failure, your dislocation—these now are gifts in your love for others.

For something happened, to Peter, that took a suffering survivor, bitterly weeping at the foot of the cross, and made him a fisherman for God, on whom the whole church has been built. What happened? Something happened. Something that saved Peter from his own survival.

2. Luke and Vietnam: Generational Salvation

What is true of individuals like you and Peter, is also promised today to generations, like yours and Luke’s. Again, I ask. What is single greatest trauma your generation has survived?

For the people to whom Luke speaks, now toward the end of the first century, one great generational trauma overshadows their life. Thirty years earlier, in the year 66ad, the Jews began a tragic, and losing, conflict with Rome. The war ended with the burning of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple.

Did you ever wonder why Rome, not Jerusalem, is so central to Christianity? Jesus, Peter, John, James, Paul—all Jews, all focused on Jerusalem. The earliest church—that in Jerusalem. But by Luke’s time, all that has been destroyed. And Luke’s church is adrift. They have survived the destruction of Jerusalem. Others have died, including perhaps the brother of Jesus, James. But they have survived this central generational trauma. Now the question is whether they can survive their own survival.

Have you named your generation’s greatest trauma?

For one generation today, located halfway between my father and me, that trauma was Vietnam. This conflict, in the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta, on the grassy lawns of Kent State, in the classrooms of Columbia University and the board rooms of America, traumatized a whole generation. The trauma is not limited to one political perspective. All, all have been traumatized, to retranslate Romans 5: 12. All, the whole generation, all have been traumatized and stopped short of the glory of God.

Still, as a generation, you have survived. You survivor, you. The Chevy 409 is gone. But here is the Chrysler Sebring. Arnold Palmer is retired. But here is Tiger Woods. You got through. Not all did. But you did. Do you come through with some generational survivor’s guilt? Does it continues to carry the potential to hobble, maim and kill. For another generation, the trauma was that of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. (Still a great film). For you, it is Coming Home, The Killing Fields, Apocalypse Now, Platoon. Public trust, the place of authority, community commitments, and your relationships to other generations are overshadowed by trauma past. Yes, you survive. But the Easter gospel brings power to survive your own survival.

Here is historical fact. Something happened to Luke that 60 year later still had the power to take a generation like Luke’s, a church that had lost its Jewish moorings and was adrift in a punishing and forbidding culture, and make a movement that became an Empire wide community, full of men and women ready to die in public rather than call Caesar God.

Even more. Something from that generational trauma you will be able to carry forward, from many perspectives, to make a new way, for a new day. God had a purpose for Luke and his generation.

Resurrection is cutting you free from generational survivor’s guilt. This is unspeakably good news, like fine wine, 30 years in the making. And one day, a generation we have hardly seen in church since they were teenagers will come home, surviving their own survival. Coming home, this generation situated half-way between my father and me. Coming home out of survival guilt, to explore the use of a great wave of treasure, a huge transfer of wealth (and I would like to speak to some of you personally!). Coming home to a new rebirth of wonder, and a new global community, with one shepherding Lord.

How will this occur? In church. But the church is so…. Yes, the church is always both a representation and a distortion of the divine. But how can you love God and hate the things of God? How can you come near to God at a distance from the grace of God? How can you experience God without praying, singing, communing, hearing, giving, serving? No, you will have to find a church. Maybe not this church, but a church.

3. Christ and Humanity: Congenital Salvation

Could it be that the salvation promised to you and Peter, the power given to your generation and Luke’s, is also conferred upon the human race?

For a third time I ask a question. What is the single greatest trauma shared by the human race? All of us together?

Peter runs to the tomb, sees the linen clothes, marvels and wonders. It is Paul who puts the unspeakable into words. He reminds us that all have been traumatized and fallen short of God’s glory. Individuals, generations, races—all for some unknowable reason—are tinged with survivor’s guilt. It is an irrational, inaccurate, unfair, untrue sense of ennui, gonewrongness, fallenness, exile. It is what the Bible means by sin—not something we do, but the air we breathe. Paul understands that God has subjected the whole creation to futility, for the final purpose of saving the whole creation.

Just here, St. Luke in Acts has much to give us. Luke emphasizes the will and plan of God. Luke explores the nature of the Kingdom of God, on earth as it is in heaven. Luke proclaims as far back as Christmas Eve: “all flesh shall see it together.” Luke repeatedly uses a lit
tle greek verb, found also in verse 7 of today’s reading, dei—it is necessary, it is purposefully required, it is providentially needed, it is necessary. Luke holds all life in three parts: the time of Israel, the time of Jesus, and the time of the Church. For Luke, this time—our time—is the greatest of times, the time of the Kingdom of God, on earth as it is in heaven. For Luke, there abides a twin craving, held at the heart of the universe: a craving for a faith that appeals to culture and a culture that is attractive to faith. When church and city, faith and culture dance together on the bandstand of brotherhood—that is the Kingdom of God! And Luke, with scholarly Paul (Gal 3) and wondering Peter (Acts 10), means this for all people. All.

What great trauma do all people share?

Birth.

You by virtue of your lonesome journey through birth are an heroic survivor. You by virtue of your gestation for nine long months, are an heroic survivor. You by virtue of your sudden, violent and cataclysmic deliverance, through natal Red Sea waters, are an heroic survivor. You made it. You got through. Others may not have. But you did. You survivor, you. And there you are, crying and all messy, pink and little fisted and wrinkled and wailing to beat the band. You survived.

Not unscathed, but undefeated. Bloodied but unbowed. I have not read it anywhere, and have not time to write my own book, but I think that with birth survival must come a kind of congenital survivor’s guilt, way down deeper than words, that we all, every human one of us, we all share. Not something we have done, but the air we breath. All, all have been traumatized and stopped short of the Glory of God.

This is our condition. “Like the beating of the heart, it is always present.” (Tillich, STIII, 188). It? Tragedy, estrangement, sin, unbelief, hubris, concupiscence, separation, guilt, meaninglessness, despair, anxiety. Existential survivor’s guilt. “It is experienced as something for which one is responsible, in spite of its universal, tragic actuality.” (Tillich).

As Jim Croce might have written, had he survived: I’ve got those steadily depressing, low down, mind messing, existential post-partem blues.

Hear the promise of salvation from survivor’s guilt. You just may survive your own survival. The resurrection saves us from the lingering effects of birth by giving us—second birth. “Born to raise the sons of earth, born to give them second birth.” Friends, on Easter we are set free to live in the Kingdom of God, a kingdom of love and light!

God is cutting us free from congenital survivor’s guilt. We are set loose to risk, to try, to change, to laugh, to weep, to become who we were meant to be. Irenaeus: “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”

For Peter, for Luke, for the church….For you, for your generation, for you race…

Something happened. Something that even 2000 years later has men and women saying prayers, giving money, offering time, swinging hammers, sorting clothes, attending meetings, singing hymns, loving neighbors and on every day in every way building the kingdom of God. Luke would love it. What happened? Something happened, something that opens life up wide and frees us from our original survival and saves us for a new life, a new way, a new creation, a new heaven and a new earth!

You survived trauma, Vietnam, and birth. You will survive surviving 9/11 too. (Come next week.)

Next week, once we have survived nineleven again, we shall consider the gospel as it speaks to the single greatest trauma our nation, recently, has faced….Then we shall sing…

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

The World Trade Center, hub
of global economies, may fall, but 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 (as Reinhold Niebuhr, author of Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic) still stands, through the World Truth Center, Jesus the Christ.

posted in Frostiana: Poetry & Preaching, Uncategorized on 09.10.2006 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

Matthew 9: 9-13

Matriculation 2006

Preface

Many of us are quite new here. We hardly know each others’ names, let alone seeing each others hearts. We learn one name at a time, I and Thou.

At Chautauqua in 1999 I introduced myself to a frail saint, who asked my name, heard it, and chuckled. Hill is not a colorful enough name to become much of source of hilarity, but she chuckled still. She explained. “You know, I had such a fear of asking people their names again, once they had told me once, that I came up with a system that invariably worked. Rather than saying, ‘I have forgotten your name, please remind me’, or something equally honest, I would say, ‘now, tell me again, do you spell your last name with an ‘i’ or an ‘e’. My technique succeeded. Chuckle. Until I used it with a man who shares your surname. ‘Do you spell your last name with an ‘i’ or an ‘e’? He blustered. My name is Hill not Hell, you spell it H I L L!

Caught between our own identities, and visions for the future, both heavenly and hellish, we have arrived in Boston. Like Matthew, who in chapter 9 paints himself, as Velazquez did, into his own portrait, we are invited. Follow me. “He comes to us as one unknown as he did long ago, saying ‘Follow me,…”, wrote Schweitzer. The real moment of real invitation and real response is real apocalypse. Paul said he met Jesus ‘by apocalypse’. I am here by apocalypse. Another story for another day. You may be too. What are we doing here?

We are here for matriculation, to begin, to exchange on maternity for another. Here is a matriculation account. Vernon Jordan went to Depauw ( a small Methodist school for small Methodists) in Indiana, lead by various BU graduates. His dad, mom, and younger siblings drove him up and dropped him off their in Greencastle, “up south”, Martin King might have said, from their home in Lousiana. Weeping, his father said, “Vernon, we are not coming back until four years from now. You are here where your future opens. At graduation we will be here, sitting in the front row. This is your time. I have one word of advice. Read. When others are playing, you read. When others are sleeping, you read. When others are drinking, you read. When others are partying, you read.” Take, Vernon, take and read.

In mid September of 1976, perhaps 30 years ago to the very day, many of us stood in the common room at the Union Theological Seminary. I stood near Linda Clarke and Horace Allen, and among the ghosts of theologians past that haunted those halls as others of equal tremor do these. George Landes spoke for the Biblical Field. Sanders, Terrien, Brown, and Martyn sat behind him. “There has been some question about whether the Bible is relevant”, he said quietly, this exacting teacher of Hebrew, and noted Jonah scholar. “We in the Biblical field”—here he gestured meaningfully to his esteemed colleagues—“ask that before you settle that question, whether or not the Bible is relevant, that you…read it.” That is what I remember, in sum, from the days of entry into theological study. I cannot tell you, in retrospect, and though those days themselves were not easy, just how majestically meaningful the voices, many now dead, in that room have been to me. They are in my ears. They are here beside me. As the theological voices of this uniquely exciting, young, potent, new faculty of the Boston University School of Theology will be for many, for many years to come. May your retrospective in 2036 be similar. I hope you will remember, three decades hence, something similar. Whatever others do, in these precious days of somehow subsidized freedom, you read. Read. The savings habits of careful reading can become the difference between life and death.

Matthew on Taking and Reading

Matthew says go and learn, follow and discern, take and read. Matthew, the author of a dark Gospel, reflecting perhaps the persecutions of the late first century, has stitched his own matriculation to faith together with an apothegm (that is a word that you never use in a sermon) about reading. His entry involved reading. “Go and learn….” Why should anyone have needed to learn the meaning of such a fine and famous line from Hosea, about mercy and sacrifice? Evidently, the meaning was far from evident, by the time of Matthew’s suffering. More study was needed. Why? The experience of the fragile church of the late first century required new readings of the inherited traditions of the church. Here is the preacher’s task, to translate tradition into insights for effective living.

Each Synoptic passage is like a choral piece, including four voices. There is the Soprano voice of Jesus of Nazareth, embedded somewhere in the full harmonic mix. In Matthew 9, Jesus conflicts with the Pharisaic aversion to pagan inscriptions and iconography. There is the alto voice of the primitive church, arguably always the most important of the four voices, that which carries the forming of the passage in the needs of the community. From Mark to Matthew an insertion has arisen, the citation of Hosea 6:6. Evidently, the earliest church needed the fuller support of the prophetic tradition—mercy not sacrifice, compassion not holiness—as it moved farther out and away from the memory of Jesus. The tenor line is that of the evangelist. Matthew is here, marking his own appearance in the record. His work seems to reflect a connection to school, to scribes, perhaps as Stendahl said from across the river, years ago, to Qumran. The baritone is borne by later interpretation, beginning soon with Irenaeus, Against Heresies: “What doctor, when wishing to cure a sick man, would act in accordance with the desires of the patient, and not in accordance with the requirements of medicine?” ( Adv. Haer., in Richardson, ECF, 377) If our church music carries only one line, we may be tempted to interpret our Scripture with only one voice, and miss the SATB harmonies therein, to our detriment.

There are two steps in today’s Gospel. Take, Read. The first is invitation, offered and received. The second is education, prepared and planned. You have, somehow, washed up on this shore, out of the ranges of materialism
all around. You have set aside more lucrative degrees, you have refrained from taking more reliable paths, and you have stepped aside from entering upon more pleasant routines. What were you thinking? You are here. Thanks to somebody, and some potent word of invitation. Then, too, you are here to learn. To learn what the ancient world still thought was obscure, even following Hosea and Plato: God delights in mercy. I (thelo) desire, delight in, enjoy, am happy for, celebrate, am passionate about…mercy.

One wonders just how pointed Matthew’s reference here is in regard to his own community. Is the contrast between the partnership of the gospel and the willingness to suffer in the coliseum? Or the choice between a hearty entrance into some of the culture around, rather than a sacrificial abstemiousness about the world? Or the happy delight in new deliverance, over against the trudging discipline of mature faith? What of mercy, and what of sacrifice? What pastoral visit, and what new learning has formed this passage? Go…and learn. Take…and read.

Point One: Take

Close reading is crucial to health.

One day, following the morning service, we visited a dear saint in her home. She had been in hospital that week, and sat recuperating in her parlor. Her family was with her. And she had a story to tell.

That Tuesday, she prepared to be taken, by ambulance, from one hospital to another, for a particular procedure. She is a fine, older Methodist lady, so she prepared herself with what dignity one can muster in a hospital bed, robed in a hospital gown, and alone in the corridor of life. A little makeup, a comb and brush, some careful adjustments of remaining raiment, glasses perched, smile shining.

She could see the elevator door open, and her stretcher moving out. Then the attendants clearly mentioned her name as they signed the paper work at the desk. The nurse motioned across the hall in the general direction of her room. She poised herself, prepared to be a good, courteous patient. Down the hall the men came, and she waved. They returned the gesture. To her door they rolled—and then, remarkably, rolled on by! They passed to the next room, 129 not 128—such a small difference, a room inhabited alone by a frail, kindly woman who is deaf as a post. “Mrs. Smith?” “YES” she replied, her volume in inverse proportion to her accuracy. Into the stretcher went the wrong woman, and down the hall they moved. My dear parishioner called out, used her buzzer, flailed her arms like a gypsy at the campfire. But in a New York minute they were gone, carrying away the wrong person. On the way home, following the procedure, someone apparently had the presence of mind to look at the stretchered woman’s wrist band, name tag. I wonder how the reader felt not to see the name Smith. A rare moment of revelation. In this case, little lasting harm occurred. Our hospitals, in fact, to my eye, given their hourly commitment to excellence and attention to detail, put other institutions to shame. We all know the fear of the wrong arm amputated, the wrong knee replaced, the wrong woman put in the stretcher. Physician’s malpractice. But the news, good news, of medical malpractice is that you know soon—an hour, a day, a decade—what has happened, and you can endure it or correct it. So it goes with the physician’s malpractice.

Not so with the metaphysician’s.

Biological error lasts, at most, a lifetime. Theological error resides for three generations, or more. If, as ML King Sr. said, ‘it takes three generations to make a preacher’, then it also takes three generations, or more, to recognize and correct the effects of metaphysical malpractice. You cannot fully see its effect for 20 or 40 or 60 or 80 years. And it is a short way from birdie to bogie, from clean cuts to nicks and scratches in innocent organs, mistaken severations and amputations, blood spilled and shed in the wrong bed. Choose the physical mistakes, for the metaphysical are so much more insidious, more damaging, more real. Read carefully the signs of the times, and their distinctive differences…

There is a crucial difference between sacrifice and mercy. There is a crucial difference between holiness and compassion. There is a crucial difference between law and love. There is crucial difference between representation and redemption. There is a crucial difference between incantation and incarnation. There is a crucial difference between innocence and integrity. There is a crucial difference between independence and interdependence. There is a crucial difference between Christology and theology. There is a crucial difference between giving and tithing.

When we let the very worthy interests in representation eclipse the main work of the gospel, in redemption, we are making a surgical mistake…

We risk harm when we replace incarnation with incantation, forgetting that the Sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the Sabbath…

Integrity and holiness survive beyond innocence, so we might say: in singleness integrity; in partnership fidelity…

We risk harm when we replace just war with just war, interdependence with independence. The 2003 invasion of Iraq jettisoned our inherited experience codified in just war theory. It was preemptive, unilateral, imperial, unforeseeable, not responsive, multilateral, restorative, and limited…

We are still wallowing, as Doug Hall warned a generation ago (you see it does take a long time), in a Unitarianism of the Second Person of the Trinity…

There is a world of difference between habit and mercy, contribution and generosity, giving and tithing. The pervasive materialism of our culture receives its rejection in tithing, not in mere giving. The enduring sense of entitlement in our county receives its contradiction in tithing, not in mere giving. The abject loneliness of exurban life receives its denial in tithing, not in mere givin

These are crucial distinctions. How are we ever going to make them, and learn consistently to make them well, to avoid metaphysical misdirection?

Point Two: Read

How are we to take up the stressful work, the hard labor of careful practice?

You go and read.

Find yourself in front of the Sculpture of Arthur Fiedler, on a bench. Sit farther along the river, as the sun sets. Make permanent friends with the quiet pews of Marsh Chapel and the hidden crannies of the library. Locate that 2am diner breakfast that helped Fred Craddock become a preacher. Find the Arthur Fiedler reading room, a beautiful spot. When others are at war with administration, you read. When others are cursing their Bishops, you read. When others are finding fault with faculty hairstyles, you read. You may especially want to read those who have lived through other times of ruin. Reading frees you from the 21^st century. Reading cuts you loose from your own time and place. Others too have taught and preached in the ruins of the church….

I picture a bright autumn day. You are walking the emerald necklace, with lunch and a bag full of books.

*You start out a Charlesgate, thinking about reading today….

You live in a country in which 40% of the population can name the Three Stooges, and fewer than 5% the ten commandments. Literacy has a new meaning, referring not to those who can read, but to those who do read. We are preparing for teaching and ministry among those who do read, or will soon.

You think of a little office in the World Council of Churches, that of Paolo Freire. There he sat, brown bag lunch in hand. Who taught a continent, for their liberation, to read…

You remember from A River Runs Through It, the line that Methodists are Baptists who can read. But today, the literate are not those who can, but those who do read.

Close, careful reading, matters. I believe Colin Powell could testify to the difference between close, exacting reading, and visual learning. But he is only our best mirror upon ourselves. What have we been reading, as a people? Not enough world history. Not enough comparative religion. Not enough detailed daily news. Not enough economics or political science. Certainly not enough of the koine greek of Matthew 9, or the Hebrew verbs of Hosea 6.

*You pause to sit at the Fenway gardens to read in books from BUSTH, past and future…

The future of the globe relies not on those who can read, but on those who do. Allan Knight Chalmers taught his students here in the 1950’s to read a book a day.

Elmer Leslie, in the same decade, wrote, interpreting Psalm 1. He concluded his book on The Psalms with Psalm 1.

The psalmist first describes negatively the man who walks life’s good way, that is, by what he does not do. He refuses to walk as the morally loose, criminal element in society counsel him to do, or to stand where those congregate who have missed life’s true goal, or to sit as a willing crony among those who scoff at goodness. Then the psalmist turns to positive description and depicts a good man in terms of what he does. He delights in religion and meditates upon the Lord’s requirements as enjoined in the law, brooding over them by day and in the wakeful hours of the night. (op. cit. 432)

From Area A, learn with AT Pierson to “sanctify ambition, not crucify it”. A close distinction in a careful reading of life. From Area B, learn with Hildegard of Bingham to “become one’s ownmost”. From Area C, learn the nature of “good Samaritan” Christians. From Area D, learn with 19^th century Methodism the lasting danger of poor financial planning, and learn the merits of disciplined sacramental observance. Or, learn the history of 3 Timothy. All this and more, you can read in the books of your teachers in this fine school. Read what you want, what you need, when you want, as you need.

*You sit beside the lawn at Emmanuel College, to pray…

In our own reforming, newly reconstituted community here at BUSTH, we have been further chastened and strongly sobered by death coming as a thief in the night. In one sense, there is little we can say, either to others or to ourselves. We must hold our tongue, and stand, and, just like a preacher, wait and wring our hands. We do not know why these things happen. There is no explaining, finally, the depth of tragic loss. But we can be present to one another, and treat each other with an honest kindness, a kind honesty. And with a little humility about our own limitations. And with a happy grace that embraces every morning with a sense of wonder. G.K.Chesterton caught it right, as he did so often; “the world does not lack for wonders, but only for a sense of wonder.” This harrowing week does not lack for meanings, but only for a sense of meaning. We can trust the unseen God to give confidence, faith, and your lived capacity to withstand what you cannot understand. Sometimes that is all you have, the faith to withstand what you cannot understand. For the loss of a brother does not make this week, this matriculation, any less meaningful, or less meaning filled. In fact, it frames our study in the arch of eternity, and recalls for us the heart of ministry, which is the health of persons, the saving of souls. We are on the edge of eternity in every moment of life. You, teacher, you preacher, you pastor, are living testimony to the Eternal Now.

*You may pause and rest at the beginning of the Riverway to think practically about theological education…

The ministry will be upon you in three years, or less, or more. If you can start, by reading, to think theologically, and model that dimension of spirituality for your parishioners, you will have done them a world of good.

Students, read the bottom line. You need to leave seminary with no debt. Faculty, read for the fine truth that sets free. Teachers, love your subjects and your students, as Augustine advised. You have nothing to do but to know the truth. Administration, read the need for conviviality, with joy. Minimize debt, students. Marginalize delusion, faculty. Maximize community, administration.

Oh, I know, there is more to life than books. I remember the 1904 Discipline and its terse rebuke, “we would rather throw over all the libraries in the world, rather than let one soul perish”. The difference 100 years later is that for the world soul not to perish, you must become living libraries. Bradbury’s campfire at the end of Fahrenheit 451 comes to mind.

*You find a quiet corner along the river think about the impact of careful reading, and its absence…

This fall we shall witness a titanic struggle for the minds and hearts of America. We do not cast a single ballot in any direction. But the difference between a fear soaked visual bombardment, and a careful literate philosophy of peace, is close to the marrow of what will or will not save us. What some discern as the shift from a gender to a religious divide, should perhaps be seen as a literacy divide. It matters what hymns, prayers, liturgy, and certainly sermons people know.

One does not live by bread alone. Better read than dead. Better well hung than ill wed, better well read than spiritually dead.

Read now. Robert Kennedy did not have the freedom to do a research paper on Aeschylus the night Martin King was killed. He either had read or he hadn’t. He had. His 3 minutes in the Indianapolis rain were his greatest words, because he had read. There is very little left of the historic Protestant church in the Northeast. What there is clings for life to the words, and to the Word.

*In the glade you wonder about the nature of reading itself…

And what relationship shall the reader have to the read? Who among us does anywhere near enough to deconstruct our own various contexts? Is the text to have the sole divining voice, or is the reader king? What of the relationship between the unsaid and the uttered? In reading, how do ranges of power dance with colors of truth? Is the truth of Scripture the sole truth? Or one truth among many? Or primus inter pares? Or an anachronism altogether? How then do you read?

Misreading intelligence can land a nation in the soup of a civil war. Misreading tests can land a patient in the wrong surgical suite. Misreading accounts payable can land a business in bankruptcy. Misreading a traffic signal can land you in the ditch. Most of these have healing solutions available within one generation. Theological misreading lasts for several generations. It takes three of four generations to bring correction to a sincere or not so authentic theological misreading. Be careful how you read, for how read is how you think, and how you think is how you act.

*You may circle the pond at Jamaica Plains, eat lunch, and read especially from those who have read and preached in various conditions of the ruins of the church…

Here is an October Saturday in the sun. Read in the ruins. Take, Read. Read along with those who also rose to preaching amid the ruins of the church. You walk. You read BBTaylor. Leaving Church. You walk. You read K Phillips, American Theocracy. You walk. At Jamaica Pond you read P Beinhart, The Good Fight. Then you read Vaclev Havel, on almost anything. You read H Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited. Boston is your campus.

McCourt in Angela’s Ashes is really giving you a hymn to language. He sits by the hospital bed of his eleven year old girlfriend. She teaches him a poem, “The Highwayman”, and she dies. He is so hungry that he finds a soiled newspaper, with the remains of fish and chips, and licks the grease…and the words…off the paper. That is, McCourt’s lovely bildungsroman, Angela’s Ashes, ends with the young boy escaping his past, escaping his family of origin, escaping the biology that threatens always to become full destiny, and feeding himself. He is so hungry that he finds trashed newspapers in which the daily fish and chips have been wrapped, and he licks the papers clean of scraps and bits and crumbs and oil, until the words on the paper fill his mouth. His whole book is about his deliverance, how he learned to live by reading, how he learned to love through words.

*At last, as night is falling, you pause for a minute on the way home to read this last passage from Augustine’s Confessions…

I was saying these things and weeping in the most bitter contrition of my heart, when suddenly I heard the voice of a boy or a girl I know not which–coming from the neighboring house, chanting over and over again, “Pick it up, read it; pick it up, read it.” [”tolle lege, tolle lege”] Immediately I ceased weeping and began most earnestly to think whether it was usual for children in some kind of game to sing such a song, but I could not remember ever having heard the like. So, damming the torrent of my tears, I got to my feet, for I could not but think that this was a divine command to open the Bible and read the first passage I should light upon. For I had heard how Anthony, accidentally coming into church while the gospel was being read, received the admonition as if what was read had been addressed to him: “Go and sell what you have and give it to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven; and come and follow me.” By such an oracle he was forthwith converted to thee.

So I quickly returned to the bench where Alyp
ius was sitting, for there I had put down the apostle’s book when I had left there. I snatched it up, opened it, and in silence read the paragraph on which my eyes first fell: “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof.” I wanted to read no further, nor did I need to. For instantly, as the sentence ended, there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty and all the gloom of doubt vanished away. (Outler translation, Book V111)

At dinner someone may ask what the matriculation sermon on Wednesday was about. You would say, well, I think he was singing a song of love for reading; I think he was raising a hymn of praise for reading; I think he was lining out a psalm of affirmation for reading…

Tole, lege…

posted in Uncategorized on 09.6.2006 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 7:1-8, 14-15

Marsh Chapel, Boston University

The challenge of preaching, and of our preaching this autumn, is to translate tradition into insight. To announce the gospel is to translate the tradition into insights for effective living. Our gathering, actual and virtual, come Sunday, moves us along the path from tradition to insight.

Today’s Gospel provides a feast and a tangle of traditions, variously entwined. At depth, Mark 7 rests on the prophetic insight that one does not speak of God by speaking of the human in a loud voice. Jesus’ citation is from Isaiah. One tradition from Hebrew Scripture is set above and before another set of practices, involving cleanliness and holiness. Then we also have a translation, of sorts, explaining Jewish practices, in Greek, for a largely Greek community. We have, too, an assumed distinction between the traditions of the Pharisees and others, carried by Mark for his church into another kind of insight. The relationship, in religious life, of holiness and compassion, and their balances, it could be said, is crucial to our life in the 21^st century. Every global religious tradition, ours included—need this be said in the shadows of Methodism and Wesley?—wrestles mightily with their comparative strengths. Tradition, insight. Come Sunday, we try to translate the tradition into insights for effective living. We try to remember that the Sabbath was made for the human being, not the human being for the Sabbath. Likewise, liturgy. Likewise, hymnody. Likewise, homily. Likewise, community. Here, as we happily celebrate the Lord’s Supper, the very heart of our tradition, we remember, discover and celebrate moments of insight in tradition.

It is insight for effective living that is the gift of tradition rightly rendered. Today the preacher interprets Mark, and Mark Jesus, and Jesus Isaiah, and Isaiah a holiness tradition.

1. Invitation

One insight welling up from a rich tradition, remembered Come Sunday, lies in the power of an invitation. We offer ourselves to God in worship in response to an invitation. We feel the insight of the New England poet regarding seven moments of insight symbolized in the sanctuary, and opening our ordinary time worship for this autumn, beginning at the communion rail of invitation:

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring

I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away

And wait to watch the water clear I may

I shan’t be gone long. You come too.

You come too.

Ye that do truly and earnestly repent of your sin and are in love and charity with your neighbors and intend to lead a new life following the commandments of God, draw near with faith, and take this sacrament to your comfort. Abstain from evil, practice good, worship God. Enter the front of door of Christianity by faithfulness, devotion and tithing. At the rail we move from tradition to the insight of invitation.

2. Embrace

A second insight welling up from rich tradition come in a musical voice, sometimes a choral voice. For the Wesleys, hymnody was about embrace, love, evangelism, even when, for a time, one refrains from embracing. Here is Frost’s voice again:

As I came to the edge of the woods,

Thrush music — hark!

Now if it was dusk outside,

Inside it was dark.

Faith is not only a walk in the dark. Faith is a song in the dark. The chancel harmony, SATB, reminds us of the four voices in every Gospel text: the soprano of Jesus’ teaching; the alto—most important—of its formation in the early church; the tenor of the evangelist; and the bass line of historic church interpretation. Embrace, musical embrace, moves us from tradition to insight, in the chancel of love.

3. Grace

A third insight from tradition, and resting in the baptismal font, lies in the recollection of the gifts we have received, from the One who from our mothers arms has blessed us on our way. In poetic verse we could say:

A neighbor of mine in the village

Likes to tell how one spring

When she was a girl on the farm

She did a childlike thing

One day she asked her father

To give her a garden plot

To plant and tend and reap for herself,

And he said, ‘Why not’?

It is humility we gain at the font, by remembering that we are saved by what we receive, not by what we achieve. Ortega taught: Yo soy yo y mis circunstancias. The Spanish have a saying: dime con quien andas y te dire quien eres. From Marney to Forbes to Hill: to translate the tradition into insights for effective living: grace at the font.

4. Teaching

Insight in teaching arises from the reading and hearing of Scripture. To read, mark, learn and inwardly digest the words of the tradition, is finally to gain insight about how to communicate, and so how to live. And communication is a delicate art:

Don’t you remember what it was you said?

First tell me what you thought you heard?

Grace moves us, prevenient grace, from being self centered to becoming centered selves (Tillich). We remember with our freshman coming today the words of Romans 12: let love be genuine, hate what is evil, hold fast…

In the reading of Scripture an ear culture invades our e-culture. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.

5. Height

There is a fifth, central way, in which we gain insight for living, out of our tradition, represented so wonderfully here at Marsh Chapel in these beautiful stained glass windows. They remind us, story by story, of those women and men who found the courage and strength to gain by losing, to offer themselves in committed service, and to keep their commitments.

In season and out, to choose something like a star:

It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end.
And steadfast as Keats' Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

6. Commitment

Today we have gathered at the Lord’s Table to renew again our way of living. We hear and trust the grace of God carries us forward, as we make and keep our several commitments. To this table we come, as generations before and after have done. We come for pause, for the existential snow that makes things slow. We come for meaning, belonging and empowerment. We come to celebrate presence, remembrance and thanksgiving. We come to live our commitments, and to remember that sin is the neglect of doing specific acts of kindness and love. We want, as Wesley said, to do all the good we can, in all the ways we can, in all…

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse
near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

7. Vocation

From tradition to insight. Rail, chancel, font, lectern, nave, altar, pulpit. Every sermon is a call to decision.

We become who we are by the choices we make. Many of these are relatively small decisions. A turn to the left, a turn to the right. In one sense, every sermon, including this one, is a call to decision. To walk in the light…To discern one’s calling is the work of a whole lifetime, marked along the way by choices, smaller and larger and smaller still. You will make some choices this week, but the question is whether you will be alert and awake. Not to miss the moment. To meet the moment. To master the moment. To be mastered by the moment. Not to miss the Christ in life. To meet the Christ. To master Christ’s teachings. And so to be mastered by him.

The night before we made the decision to come to Boston, at a nearby restaurant, she asked to remember this poem:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

May this be a week, this coming week, of invitation, of embrace, of learning, of grace, of height, of commitment, and of vocation.

posted in Frostiana: Poetry & Preaching, Uncategorized on 09.3.2006 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

John 6: 60-69

1. A Spirit of Truth

It is the Spirit that giveth life.

Spirit. Spirit.

It is the Spirit that giveth life. There is a self-correcting Spirit of truth loose in the universe. There is a self-giving Spirit of compassion loose in the universe. One provides a saving, divine flexibility, crucial to our spiritual sustenance in the next decade. One provides a saving, divine femininity, crucial to our spiritual sustenance in the next decade. In such flexible femininity is the freedom of Christ, of which Paul said, ‘where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom’.

It is the Spirit that giveth life.

Spirit. Spirit.

Earlier this summer I made a wrong turn. I was driving back here, that is back home to Boston, though the route is not yet familiar because we have not yet really lived here, at home. It was dusk, and there was fog, and there was rain. Nor do I think of myself as someone who misses turns in the dark. With no trusted voice near me, no dad or wife to point out, in a trusted voice, the moment of error, I was left to my own pride. Early hints of misdirection went utterly unnoticed.

I make this appeal for sympathy and support, to you. I was reviewing, and rehearsing the next Sunday’s sermon, as the rain fell. I mean I had it more or less in mind—text, theme, outline, flow. I was trying to comb through it, as you do, to trim and tuck. This was in the mind’s eye, now. The paper copy lay next to me on the seat. You see, I have a good excuse for flubbing up, even a religious excuse.

I came toward Albany and turned onto Route 90. The to and fro of the sermon came and went, as the wipers on the car went swish swish swish. At some point, I began to feel funny. The rain fell. I had that down in the stomach funny feeling. Then in the shadows, somehow, without full consciousness, I began to realize that the landscape was not what I expected. Too much open space. Too little traffic. Then I passed an exit for Amsterdam. I did remember not that Amsterdam was east of Albany. Which it is not. After that, I clicked off the mental sermon memory work. The landscape was definitely wrong, even in the dark. I waited to see a Route 90 sign, hoping against hope that it would say 90 east, the way to dear old Boston. The sign came. 90 west. There was no escaping the truth of the matter. I made a wrong turn. So I exited, entered, retraced the twenty miles.

It is fascinating to think about the levels of awareness regarding error. When do we begin to notice that something is rotten in Denmark? A feeling…a dim awareness…a moment of consciousness…proof and recognition. I wonder if groups, as well as individuals, go through various stages of denial and avoidance, on the one hand, and recognition and admission on the other? A period of calm….A feeling in the viscera…A subconscious awareness…. A hair raising full alertness to the possibility of error…. A hope against hope to be wrong about being wrong, and to be right about being right….The moment of truth and proof.

The chagrin and mortification of the long trip back.

Of course we should have seen the signs ‘do not enter’, ‘wrong way, go back’, with lettering about just war theory making no space for preemptive, unilateral, imperial, unforeseeable action. Many did say, ‘this is immoral, post-Christian, and wrong.’ But that was down in the subconscious. The hands on the wheel made the turn. Drive on.

As a country we had a period of calm, of sorts, following the invasion of Iraq. We had statues toppling and mission accomplished moments. The Christian community, mostly mutely, occasionally vocally, criticized the war. In all, though, there was an early calm. Drive on.

But even those who affirmed the original action began to have a feeling in the viscera, shortly thereafter. Life is busy, so there was every reason to lean on the assumption that somebody knew what was going on. Drive on.

Then there was a pre-conscious awareness, that through the fog of war, nonetheless, we could make out the contours of a landscape different from the one we expected. Something about the lingering absence of any connection to 9/11 terrorists weighed on the national psyche. Life is busy, and didn’t we remove a villainous dictator anyway? Drive on.

It takes time to pull yourself away from the various tasks at hand to ask about just where the car is going. It is much easier to assume that we are headed in the right direction. But then you pass by one sign post or another. It clicks. Life is busy, but not so busy that you miss a lack of weapons of mass destruction. Drive on, but let’s check at the next exit.

We have been hoping against hope that we were wrong about being wrong and right about being right. We were not. All hell has broken loose, on our watch. We are headed west, not east. It is time to get off the highway and turn around. Drive back. And in that drive back we have to pass by all our missed signs. The sudden counter insurgency. The inadequacy of troop levels. The steady rejection of our plan by many of our best friends. Canada is our best friend. A good enough friend to tell us flat out how wrong we were. The mounting deaths of soldiers, the soaring severe casualties, which we shall view now for two generations in this land. The murderous levels of native deaths
. The collapse of infrastructure. The flaming civil war in which now our boys and girls are sitting ducks.

How do 300 million people come to terms with such a colossal mistake?

Pastoral counsel begins with the suggestion to return to the point where you last felt right. To the point in history before the doctrine of preemption. Before our decision to act unilaterally. Prior to the living out of the desire to seize oil rich land. Ahead of the moment when we jettisoned the memory of proportionality and restraint. In other words, when we still kept the pillars of Judeo-Christian just war theory in mind: responsive not preemptive, multilateral not unilateral, restorative not imperial, limited not endless. That time earlier. When we could remember RFK saying to his brother about pre-emption: “Jack, that would be Pearl Harbor in reverse”. When we could remember the wise, courageous ideals that went into the creation of the United Nations in the 1940’s. When we could sense the gravitational pull of oil, before we had K. Phillips documentation in American Theocracy. When we and he still remembered the Powell doctrine.

Sursum Corda. Here the good news of John 6. There is a self-correcting Spirit of Truth, loose in the universe. The future is open.

At depth, it is our operating idea of God that is at issue here, and is to become either the source or the barrier to the source of our needed spiritual sustenance. Is there freedom in God? Freedom to make mistakes and learn from them? Freedom to find flexibility to turn around? If your idea, or picture of the divine makes no space for trial and error, or if your operating idea of God is that of ‘John Calvin on a bad day’ (all providence, predestination, and purpose), if, that is, God wills every turn onto Route 90 west, and you were meant to make that mistake, then you have very little courage or capacity to turn around. To turn, turn…To learn and turn.

There is a self-correcting Spirit of Truth loose in the universe.

To be converted to life in this way would be, with Karl Barth long ago, at the end of his life, to be seized by a sense of the Humanity of God, a book he at last wrote in the last stretch of his work. For those of us interested in ameliorating some of the Calvinism abroad today, Barth’s valediction, in some ways a contradiction of his earlier work, is significant.

It was Tillich who celebrated Spirit: In the Spiritual Presence, man’s essential being appears under the conditions of existence, conquering the distortions of existence in the reality of the New Being. This statement is derived from the basic Christological assertion that in the Christ the eternal unity of God and man becomes actual under the conditions of existence without being conquered by them. Those who participate in the New Being are in an analogous way beyond the conflict of essence and existential predicament. The Spiritual Presence actualizes the essential within the existential in an unambiguous way. (ST III, 345)

2. A Spirit of Compassion

Let me ask you to think for a minute about Spirit and Flesh, with regard to Alice and Ralph Kramden. We have long ago left behind the caricatures here. As Gardner Taylor said, “we are all part male and part female, thank God”. We are all part Alice and part Ralph, part daddy party and part mommy party, thank goodness.

Regarding spirit and flesh, and with all loving respect to Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden, there is hardly an actor that brought more corpulence, more flesh to the TV screen. By the same bus token, no actress brought more Spirit to the same screen than did his much wearied spouse, Alice. The set of the Honeymooners is not just a one bedroom walkup in NYC. The set is the heart, ours, yours.

Every ‘Honeymooners’ plot was the same. The husband, the Daddy figure, hatched a plot, part idealism, part desire to please, part love, part arrogance, part lunacy. Ralph would become a millionaire. Ralph would be elected lodge President. Ralph would become bus supervisor. Ralph would buy a business. Daddy knew best. All faith and no insight, all ideology and no community, all theory and no practice. The hermeneutical circle without a circle or a hermeneutic.

In slapstick panache, over the next 23 minutes, all heaven would break loose. Ralph would overestimate the project. He would underestimate the opposition. He would mistake the cost. He would overlook crucial facts. He would slightly, every so slightly, misrepresent the truth, a little supressio veri here, a little suggestio falsi there. He would dig himself into a hole, paint himself into a corner, lock himself into a cage and throw away the key. To speak this paragraph with you is to laugh and delight in a human person caught in the act of being human. You just cannot decide whether to laugh or cry.

Then, with disaster coming up the stairs of their modest, working class, plain, refrigerator centered, one room apartment, Ralph would go to the one person he could go to. Alice. And Alice would listen, honestly criticize, shake her head in disgust, and shake the dust from her feet, and shrug, and find an exit strategy. She would force Ralph to call and apologize. She would gather some friends to fix the plumbing. She would remind Ralph of his generous, not greedy self. She would fix a workable plan.

We laughed and went to bed happy and relieved.

Now. For some years across the US of A we have had an idea that one group of people constituted the Daddy in us and one constituted the Mommy. One set of individuals, to quote the otherwise perspicacious David Brooks, were the ‘peddle to the metal guys’ when it came to new, tough adventures. The other set, were those individuals still wallowing in such flea bitten, moth eaten, down at the heel, run of the mill inter
ests as feeding the household, keeping order in a working class environment, loving with kindness, communicating with honesty, and having a nose for foolishness. ‘Daddy party’ in us all and the ‘Mommy’ party in us all.

I would say, by this Scripture of Spirit and Flesh, that it is time to simply submit to the (false) dichotomy. Let us allow the ‘Daddy’ in us all that role. Sometimes, as in Asian wrestling, you subvert something by becoming subject to it, with a twist. Ralph Kramden has a good heart, and wants to please the mother figure. He truly believes in what he is doing. And he is funny. His ‘strategery’ is a source of hilarity. He wants to boldly go, or boldly to go, depending on whether you are an English teacher or a Trekky, where no man has gone. Preemptively, unilaterally, imperially, unforeseeably. Is it immoral? Post Judeo-Christian? Wrong? Certainly the motives were good and paved the way…

The Ralph in us got it wrong.

It is time for Alice to find her voice.

Alice the wise, the loving, the compassionate, the realistic, the suffering servant. Alice the Christ. It is time for Alice to conclude the episode. Yes, you can have the title Daddy, Ralph. You can be the head of the ideahold. You can swagger and strut. You can initiate—in all good faith, and with good intentions, and with a true heart, and much Flesh.

But it is the Spirit that giveth life. There is a self-giving Spirit of Compassion loose in the universe.

You gotta hit it Alice. Now. You gotta hit it. The Flesh is of no avail. So the housewife with no salary, no progeny, no status, no power—THE CHURCH—needs to help Ralph get off our back without hurting himself.

If this 6 billion person world household is going to have a future, Alice better find her voice. Alice? Where are you? Church? Theologically educated clergy? Where are you? Come out, come out wherever you are…We need to clean up the mess we made in Iraq, in order to get on with the real war on terror. We need to find a responsible exit plan.

Alice says: there will be no world worth living in, Ralph Kramden, until we give up the notion of atttacking people who have not attacked us. There will be no world worth living in if one country, no matter the provocation, goes around shooting others at will and wim. There will be no world worth living in if addiction to oil rules life. There will be no world worth living in, if we cannot restrain our anger, and miss the chance to “meet violence with patient justice”.

There will be a frying pan in the air fight. There will be a huge argument. There will be Ralph shouting, ‘To the moon, Alice, to the moon.’ That is what happens when you not only ruffle, but pluck feathers.

When that happens we will have been seized, as was Barbara Brown Taylor, by the Femininity of God. If your audition of God makes no place for soprano and alto voices, but only tenor and base, you will miss some of the spiritual resources needed for the 21^st century. If your picture of the divine makes no space for the so-called feminine, you will miss the living water, with which to slake our global thirst.

There is a self-giving Spirit of compassion, loose in the universe.

One question is ‘what saves you’. Another is ‘what is saving you right now’, as Taylor asks. Today B Taylor is ‘being saved’ by nature, Sabbath, teaching, and friends (Leaving Church).

Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza reminds us of the patriarchy in Scripture, Scripture that is prototype more than archtype, but its application is in the voice of Alice: I’m warning you Ralph…You listen to me Ralph…I’m going to my mother’s Ralph.

It is the voice of Ma Joad: Well, Pa, a woman can change better'n a man. A man lives sorta - well, in jerks. Baby's born or somebody dies, and that's a jerk. He gets a farm or loses it, and that's a jerk. With a woman, it's all in one flow, like a stream - little eddies and waterfalls - but the river, it goes right on. Woman looks at it thata way….Rich fellas come up an' they die, an' their kids ain't no good an' they die out. But we keep a'comin'. We're the people that live. They can't wipe us out; they can't lick us. We'll go on forever, Pa, 'cause we're the people.

It is, returning by Route 90, the voice of Mother Ann Lee and the early Shakers, in New Lebanon, at the border of Massachusetts and New York: Tis a gift to be loving, tis the best gift of all, like a gentle rain love blesses as it falls, and when we find ourselves in the place just right, twill be in the valley of love and delight. When true, simplicity is gain, to bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed….

TO TURN, TURN WILL BE OUR DELIGHT, TILL BY TURNING, TURNING WE COME ROUND RIGHT!

There will come a day…

A day when Ralph, the Ralph in us all, chastened, Ralph, grateful, Ralph, toughened, Ralph matured, will walk across the little refrigerator centered apartment kitchen of life, and give God’s own sigh, God’s own cry, God’s own hug, God’s own tearful and loving word.

And what will he say? What will Ralph say to Alice? What will influen
ce say to compassion? What will flesh say to Spirit? What will corpulence say to wit? What will power say to truth, well told? What will you say to the living Christ?

Baby, you’re the greatest…

By your manner of living, say so starting today.

posted in Uncategorized on 08.27.2006 at 12:00 pm

By Marsh Chapel

John 6:51-58

1. Odd Experience

We have listened with care to a reading from the second century of the common era. One wonders what resonance, what close connection these words make to those listening for hope in Maine, or on the warm shores of Cape Cod, or out in the lakes and woods of New Hampshire. Living Bread. Live forever. True flesh. True blood. These words seem to be pulsing with life and promise, but they are, to the average ear, odd words too.

Recently a reporter from traveled to Alaska. The reporter followed a trail of news, stemming from the announcement that in several Alaskan cities, there lived an abundance of young single men, and a paucity of young single women. An eager editor, seizing a summer moment, sent off his dutiful scribe, to interview the Northern Lights. As I recall, the reporter did confirm the statistical imbalance, far more women than men. 3 men for every woman. 3 to 1. What made the article memorable, however, was a more insightful quotation, with which the report concluded. The reporter interviewed a young woman at a bar, and asked her perspective on this statistical imbalance. “Well”, the woman replied. “yes, it is true, look around you, yes, the ratio is heavily weighted. The men outnumber the women. There are something like two three men for every woman. You could say that the odds are good, if you are looking for a relationship. The odds, yes, the odds are good….but, on the other hand, again, look around you, the odds are good, but…though the odds are good…the goods are odd!”

Her experience changed her outlook, modified her perspective, qualified her inherited idea.

2. The Difference of the Fourth Gospel

This morning, the odds are good that we have before us great good news. We worship in a historic, beautiful sanctuary, with divided chancel, beautiful windows, wondrous music, plenty of parking. Those present have weathered the rain, the good gift of this week. Some weeks are better than others. Some weeks bring Spahn and Seine and a day of rain. Some weeks you get the day of rain. Still, come Sunday, the odds are good that we shall hear again a saving, good word.

But today, though the odds are good, the goods are odd. These are strange terms. We do better to acknowledge our puzzlement about the words and phrases, and we do better not too easily or quickly to append them to our way of seeing and hearing. They do not do well, these and other words from John, copied and strung along as signboards in baseball stadiums. They do not fare well, these and other words from John, recited and repounded in quick cadence. They do not travel well, these and other words from John, especially in the heat of a summer like this, if they have not been cleaned and cut and frozen. The odds are good. But the goods are odd.

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

3.A Strange Passage within a Strange Gospel

But the plot thickens again, today. Now when we approach the rickety gate of John 6:51, we arrive at oddity squared. Here the Johannine rejection is itself rejected. Where the rest of the gospel has laughed at end time speculation and ignored sacramental theology, our morning reading has replaced them both. In vivid imagery. In chomping sound bites. Pun intended. In bloody, gorey physicality. The greek word for eating, softly rendered here for mild English speaking palates, means “munch, grind, chomp”. Odd, odd. All the rest of the gospel concurs with a verse just out on the back lawn from the house of our reading, “it is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail”. Hence no baptism of the Lord. Hence no Lord’s Supper. Hence the washing of feet instead of eucharist. John has no use for end time speculation. John has no use for sacraments. John has no place for the left behind series. John has no place for hyper sacramentalism.

Except in this passage, and a few others like it. How odd.

It is as if in one paragraph we tumbled from pulpit to altar, from Philadelphia to Rome, from George Fox to John 23.

So odd, in fact, that scholars have sent their own studious reporters into the fray to interview, to gather the facts, and report on their own imbalance. One standing judgment about this passage is that it is a later addition to the original. A later editor added these and a few similar passages, whe
n the community entered new territory.

4. Watching John Learn from Experience

Facts are stubborn things, as one of our earliest Presidents, from Massachusetts, asserted. Facts are stubborn things said John Adams. They are the bedrock of our experience, which itself is a stubborn reminder to us of our limitation, our potential, our error, our success, our shortcomings, our glories.

Whether or not we can finally ferret out all the intricacies of this morning’s text, and whether or not any have stayed fully awake to follow the trail of such an effort, and whether or not the preacher of the day has served poorly or ably as a trail guide, there does stand out a feature of truth that may, in its own way, provide a healthy word.

The writers of the fourth gospel and its traditions changed course when their experience showed them a deeper dimension of their inherited faith. The fourth gospel in particular gives us the fossil evidence, the footprints, the fingerprints of people and communities that could change, when the facts and their experience warranted change.

Yes, there is another sermon for another day, from another text in another context, warning against us being ‘blown about by every wind of doctrine’. Fair enough. But let the day’s own Scripture be sufficient for the day. Sufficient to the day is the Scripture thereof…Today we find a reminder from the shrouded past, that even in the heart of the Bible, down in the depths of what is most firmly traditional about our faith, and buried in that most sublime and spiritual of the gospels, no less, that of John, there dwells a capacity to trust in what our actual experience, the blood and breath of our own lives, the flesh and bone of our own work and death can give us.

In the Johannine tradition there were moments when Spirit and Life were fully sufficient to guide the church: “those who do what is true come to the light” (3:18); “the true light that enlightens everyone was coming into the world (1:9)”; “God so loved the world that God gave the only begotten son, that whoever believes…”; “very truly I tell you, anyone who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life” (5:24): “I am the resurrection and the life…everyone who lives and believes in me will never die” (11:9).

Then there were others, when, for whatever obscure reasons, a regrounding in the earth of relationship, a reconnection with the blood and flesh of sacrifice, required a rewriting of the tradition itself.

Often this passage has been fought over by those extolling word, on the one hand, and those extolling sacrament, on the other. Oddly, the ecumenical movement has both ameliorated and broadened this debate, a good and old and lasting one. Is it hearing and believing that saves? Is it eating and drinking that saves? Is it Word? Is it Table?

Hear some good news. The very lasting existence of this debate honors our experience. There same days when it is the former that is needed. There are some days when it is the latter. And they do not blend together, in some easy synthesis, anymore than Wednesday becomes Thursday, by our wishing it to be so. Both Word and Table come in experience.

Schleiermacher seems to have captured this: Where Christ recommends as essential the eating of his flesh and the drinking of his blood, He had in mind neither the Supper nor any other definite act. He wished rather to indicate in how profound a sense He Himself must become our being and well-being…we must be related to Him as the branch to the vine (TCF, 704).

5. We learn too.

Ours is crucial good news today, for individuals, for churches, for nations. We learn too.

We just knew the earth was flat. Until Copernicus and Galileo. We just knew that India was just a few miles west of London. Until Columbus. We just knew that the world was formed in seven days. Until Darwin. We just knew that the reason was king of the forest. Until Freud. We just knew that Pluto was the last planet. Until this week. We just knew that homosexuality stood apart from our tradition. Until we met George or Mary, or reread Galatians. We just knew that they would welcome us as liberators in the streets of Baghdad. Until they didn’t. She just knew he would stop drinking before he hurt someone. He didn’t. He just knew he would win that money back with one more hand. He didn’t.

There is no lasting harm in surprising, different or difficult experience. Nor lasting shame in failure. With one exception. That is the sin against the Holy Spirit that comes with blind and willful ignorance of our lived experience. Sin is not receiving what is offered, as Ann Ulanov used to say.

Sometimes the Biblical witness is set against our experience, our blood, breath and bone. But here, as in general, what we find in the Bible is our experience, at its depth. And what we find in our experience, is the deep witness of Scripture.

At lunch, some years ago, after the single most hurtful, most depressing, and most bitter experience of my professional life to that point, my friend asked me a simple question about what had happened: “So, Bob, what have you learned from it?”

This week dear friends sent Ellen Goodman’s Paper Trail, autographed by the author, one of my double decade favorite voices. It is her capacity to consider the actual experience of life that makes her so gifted. Of course, she has her traveling
companions, three in number. Skepticism. Humor. And the question, “Wait a minute…”

Timothy Tyson’s memoir of his father’s ministry in the south during the 1960’s, Blood Done Sign My Name, includes the same three traveling companions, and reminds us that really change, really learning, can take generations.

When even an anti-sacramental, non millenarian, Spirit Gospel like John, can suddenly make space, in John 6:51, for some sacrament and some cosmic eschatology, you know that some experience changed some view.

New occasions teach new duties. Time makes ancient good uncouth. One must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth.

My friend’s dad told him, “You do not have time to make all the mistakes yourself, so you will need to listen and learn from the experience of others, too.”

There is a great deal of hurt, a world of hurt, behind the development of the Fourth Gospel, which to this point we only minimally understand. Even as we have yet to appreciate John’s difference, we have yet also to appreciate, feel, his pain.

I wonder, this summer, whether, dangling a foot in the pool, or listening to the wind in the rigging, or awake at dawn, you might like to learn from the experience of the early church, from John, and with him find a way to admit, assess, and accept what we find there.

I wonder, this fall, whether, by televised debate or print exchange, we as a country might like to think about whether, in all our youthful and adolescent and idealistic intent, we may have made some errors, truly costly errors, near and far, in the past few years.

I wonder, this morning, sitting in the pew, or driving on Route 90, whether you might want to ponder your experience in the light of what is at the depth of your experience, living bread…coming down from heaven… To live life, that is, sub specie aeternitatis, under the aspect of eternity. Whoever eats this bread will live forever.

posted in Uncategorized on 08.20.2006 at 12:00 pm