Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

By Marsh Chapel

Robert Allan Hill: As you were saying…

Scott Jarrett: Yes, as I was saying, two months ago, when last our broadcast and local worship service featured a Bach cantata, there is a rare beauty in Bach.

RAH: This year we determined in dialogue, you and I, on Bach Sundays, to affirm the good of Christ by entering more deeply the beauty of Bach.

SJ: Yes, word and music together, music and word, the gospel sung.

RAH: I guess we are a sort of religious ‘Click and Clack’.

SJ: Maybe more like ‘Clink and Clunk’?

RAH: Maybe so. Not every nineteen year old, nor even every ninety one year old hears clearly, at the first hearing, the beauty in Bach. Like all things lasting and good, there is some learning, effort, extension, growth, change, challenge involved.

SJ: True, enough. Pilate asks ‘What is truth?’ Well, the poet answered, ‘truth is beauty, and beauty is truth’. True enough. Though not all of the Scriptures are immediately transparent to us, or at least to me, they are nonetheless very beautiful.

RAH: Today’s Christ the King readings are just so, opaque and lovely. ‘Behold he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him’ (Rev. 1:7). Even uprooted out of its ancient apocalyptic ground, uprooted from the primitive hope of the earliest church, there is a soaring beauty to such a triumphant hope. Beauty brings hope.

SJ: Ah, at last, dear friend, you have brought us to Bach.

RAH: Did I? I was merely interpreting a verse from the Revelation?

SJ: Some of our best accomplishments come quite by accident…even in preaching…

RAH: This is ruefully so… Dr. Jarrett, can you guide us for a moment into the beauty of this Bach Cantata? For what shall listen in the thirty minutes to follow?

SJ: Let me mention three things. First, today’s cantata was originally written for Advent, and then later transposed for Christ the King. So, there is a fair amount of ‘eschatological beauty’ here. That is, the ultimate things, the last things, the lasting things, ‘a thing of beauty is a joy forever’, are pronounced here. Second, there are a couple of words for which we should particularly listen…Third, the most beautiful moment in the cantata, for me, comes at a certain point. Let me name it for you…

RAH: When you teach your students about music, is there a moral sense that arises, within the beauty?

SJ: Well, that depends on what you mean. The music, the choral beauty, just is. It has and needs no defense. Like truth. Truth needs no defense, falsehood has none.

RAH: In the long run.

SJ: In the very long run, but you were the one who brought up eschatology.

RAH: True. And beautiful!

SJ: When you see our students, especially our undergraduates, what do you wish for them, come Sunday?

RAH: Many things. But today, come this Sunday, I covet for them beauty. Beauty reminds us of grace. Beauty recalls our high humanity. Beauty lifts us up from the curb and places us in the clouds. Beauty dresses us up in the finery for which we were meant, for which our grandparents prayed and our parents paid. Beauty takes the world and makes it clean again, holy not innocent to be sure, but clean again. Beauty—today Bach, tomorrow Monet, next week Chekov—beauty saves us from our own worst selves and returns us to the road of our own best selves.

SJ: You know, when I come into Marsh Chapel, I feel that. I see beauty in the architecture. I hear beauty in the silence. I admire beauty in the windows. I revere beauty in the words chiseled in stone. Boston University, here, reaches for beauty.

RAH: The history of our school includes many who sought beauty in truth, and truth in beauty.

SJ: Do any particular people come to mind?

RAH: Why thank you for asking! Erazim Kohak, a philosopher from the last generation said, ‘Humans can become wholly absorbed in the preoccupations of time…There can humans who become blind to goodness, to truth, to beauty, who drink wine without pausing to cherish it, who pluck flowers without pausing to give thanks, who accept joy and grief as all in a day’s work, to be enjoyed or managed, without ever seeing the presence of eternity in them. But that is not the point. What is crucial is that humans, whether they do so or not, are capable of encountering a moment…as the miracle of eternity ingressing into time. That, rather than the ability to fashion tools, stands out as the distinctive human calling’. (Embers, 85). Bach and beauty, Bach and beauty…

SJ: Who do not sing a Bach cantata every Sunday, but you know there is a kind of cantata sung with every hymn. Every time our congregation stands to sing, in four part harmony, we approach beauty. Further, that harmony, that experienced harmony out of difference, unity out of diversity, one hymn out of soprano, alto, tenor and bass, that harmony is itself a saving reminder, a remembered salvation. Difference blends, often blends well. When we forget, when our voices and bones forget the experience of beauty in four part, in choral harmony, we miss something crucial, saving, essential, for our common life.

RAH: In other words, the future depends on good, four voice, hymn singing?

SJ: Maybe it isn’t quite that simple. But there is a beauty, there is a beauty, and a truth within it.

RAH: Friends give our own true selves back to us, as you have done today. Here is what I mean. You have helped me understand something, something deep and good. Last summer I went around preaching in various places, as you know. One day I went to speak at a big conference. There were about 1,000 people, gathered in a large hotel room, for worship and communion. There was music, of a sort. Some instruments, a praise group, a music leader with words thrown up on a screen behind. All sang, pretty well, together, following the screen and one melody line. Something though was radically missing. The sermon came and went. We began the ritual for eucharist. The one line singing continued, just words on the screen, no notes. Then, maybe by accident, the music leader played the melody for a familiar hymn, ‘Let us break bread together’. All of sudden, the room lit up. The color blind saw red and blue. The deaf heard. I mean, the conference members knew, by memory, the four part harmony of the hymn. They knew the soprano, alto, tenor, and bass lines, by heart. And they sang them, together. It was an apocalyptic moment. A joyful moment. An inbreaking of eternity into time moment.

SJ: That may happen again today. You never know. Bach and beauty, truth and beauty, harmony and beauty. ‘Behold He is coming with the clouds, and every eye shall see him’.

RAH: Let us rise and harmonically sing together.

posted in Uncategorized on 11.22.2009 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

The passage today from St Mark is sometimes called the ‘Little Apocalypse’. The reading is a place in the Gospel where and when we overhear the troubles of Mark’s community. They face persecution. In facing trouble, they wonder whether the end of time has come.

The Gospel writer records the Lord’s response that ‘the end is not yet’. The rest of this long chapter, which will include some apocalyptic language and imagery from the first century, continues to make the same point. The end is not here. There may be trouble, trauma, and persecution, but the end is not here. In end, at the end of Mark 13, we will be counseled that no one can see the future, and that we should therefore be watchful.

In this way, the Gospel lesson is not that different from the reading from Hebrews, where we are similarly encouraged to be gentle, thankful, loving, and watchful. “Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works”. A remarkable, beautiful admonition.

Taken as whole, the New Testament books, while shot through with apocalyptic language and imagery, like that found in Mark 13, expectations of the end of time current at the time the books were written, these books move away from apocalyptic thought. Some temper that thought. Some discard it. The Gospel of Mark tempers it. The Gospel of John discards it.

In its place, in the main, the New Testament books proclaim a way of living in thanksgiving, a way of living in love. In our day, and in our particular part of history, including these past several days with their own troubles and their own trauma, we may want to take a clear reminder with us of thanksgiving, of love. ‘Consider how to stir up one another to love and good works’.

Howard Thurman helps us to ‘consider how to stir up one another to love and good works.’ Every year, about this time, I re-read his seasonal prayer. Listen to it again…

A former neighbor and fellow pastor, Max Coots, had a way of helping us to ‘consider how to stir up one another to love and good works’. Every year, about this time, I remember his poem to that effect.

May this be the way our community is know, our church is seen, and our lives are measured. May this be the way we are named, by others.

posted in Uncategorized on 11.15.2009 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Before you work high you build a scaffold to get yourself up there.

Steeple Jacks do not use a scaffold. They use rope and pulleys, and they rightly earn many hundreds of dollars an hour. As one said to me, quoting Scripture, and speaking of the dangers of height, “Jesus said, ‘Lo(w) I am with you”. Meaning, he continued, ‘up high you are on your own’.

Our first and smaller churches, some five of them, hired Steeple Jacks for the minor tiling, shingling, painting and other repairs required of small church steeples on small steeple churches. One was squat enough (the church I mean not the Jack) that he could go up by ladder. Our sixth church (and the seventh, too) was a ‘tall steeple church’. The trustees tried to get by with a Steeple Jack, every time repairs were needed, but most times, no, they needed to spend more. Once a two hundred pound section of copper plate fell off that steeple onto a University neighborhood street. Exposure, liability, act of God, randomness—these words appeared in sermons later that month. No one was hurt. Scaffolding went up the next week, and stayed up for several expensive days.

The interior space of churches also requires endless attention. As with care of the human body after the age of forty, the motto for sanctuary care must be ‘maintenance, maintenance, maintenance’. Interior scaffolding also comes at a price. Sure you prefer to change light bulbs and paint ceilings with a huge step ladder and a fearless Trustee or hired painter. Sure. But the higher the nave, the, well, I refer you to adage above. “Lo(w) I am with you”. Not high.
Even before any paint is spilled, and even before any long lasting bulbs are replaced, there is work, there is cost, there is meaningful preparation.

So it is, as you know, in preaching. The interpreter either swings in the breeze like a Steeple Jack, if the matters of historical interpretation are low fences (Paul’s letters come to mind), or, if the height is greater, scaffolding is needed (the Hebrew Scripture, all the Gospels, and especially the Gospel of John come to mind). What you see when the work is done, is the steeple repaired, the roof replaced, the paint (both coats) applied, the bulbs changed. But before that there has been scaffolding up, so that the work could be done.

We come this morning to the interpretation of a passage from Mark. Mark requires scaffolding. We cannot begin to paint until we have someplace to stand. No light bulbs will be changed until we can reach the fixtures. Help me with the scaffolding this morning.

We know not who wrote Mark, only his name. He wrote for a particular community, whose location and name are also unknown. He even mentions by name members of his church, Alexander and Rufus (15:21). The book is meant to help a community of Christians. It is written to support and encourage people who already have been embraced by faith. While it purports to report on events long ago, in the ministry of Jesus, its main thrust is toward its own hearers and readers forty years later. So it is not an evangelistic tract and it is not a diary and it is emphatically not a history.

You will want to know what we can say, then, about Mark’s community. If the community gave birth to the gospel, and if the community is the primary focus of the gospel, and if the community is the gospel’s intended audience, you would like to know something about them. For one thing, the community is persecuted, or is dreading persecution, or both. Jesus suffered and so do, or so will, you. This is what Mark says. This gospel prepares its hearers for persecution. For another thing, the church may have been in or around Rome, or more probably somewhere in Syria. It is likely that Mark was written between 69 and 73 ce. For yet another thing, Mark’s fellow congregants, fellow Christians, are Gentiles, in the main, not Jews. He is writing to this largely Gentile group. He writes for them neither a timeless philosophical tract nor an ethereal piece of poetry. His is rather a ‘message on target’. Further, Mark’s composition, editing, comparisons, saying combinations, style and Christology all point to Mark as the earliest gospel (J Marcus).

I have used the word gospel. You have heard the word many times, and know that it means ‘good news’. It is an old term. You could compare it to ‘ghost’. Gospel is to good news and ghost is to spirit, you might say. Yet Mark calls his writing a ‘gospel’. He creates something new. Mark is a writing unlike any other to precede it. It is not popular today any longer, no longer fashionable, to say this. It is however true. Mark is not a history, not a biography, not a novel, not an apocalypse, not an essay, not a treatise, not an epistle. Examples of all these were to hand for him. Mark might have written one of any one of them. He did not. He wrote something else and so in form, in genre, gave us something new. A gospel. His is the first, but not the last.

Mark is not great literature. It is not Plato, not Cicero, not Homer. Nor is the Greek of the gospel a finely tuned instrument. It is harsh, coarse and common. The gospel was formed, formed in the life of a community, as described earlier. Its passages and messages were announced as memories meant to offer hope. Its account of Jesus, in healing and preaching and teaching, all the way to the cross and beyond, is offered to a very human group of humans who are trying to make their way along His way. The Gospel is a record of the preaching of the gospel. To miss this, or to mistake this, is to miss the main point of the Gospel, and of the gospel. It is in preaching that the gospel arrives, enters, feasts, embraces, loves, and leaves. It is in preaching that you hear something that makes life meaningful, makes life loving, makes life real. It is in preaching that the Gospel of Mark came to be, as a community, over time, heard and reheard, remembered and rehearsed the story of Jesus crucified (his past) and risen (his presence). We should not expect narrative linearity, historical accuracy, or re-collective precision here. And in fact, we find none. Let me put it another way around. Most of the NT documents are, in one way or another, attempts to remember, accurately, the nature and meaning of baptism. Well, Mark fits that description. What does it mean, here and now, to be a Christian?

You may preach, you may interpret the Gospel flat, in a synchronic not a diachronic way. You may simply read it, and make comments on it, as you please. In the same way, you may fix a roof by hurling shingles to the heavens, hoping some, with appropriate missile guided nails, will land on the roof. You may paint the walls of your church by opening the can, stirring the paint, and letting fly. It is a primitive procedure, but you are free to use it. You may aim your arm at various fixtures, and pitch light bulbs upward in the hope that some may land in place and, perhaps with a little breeze, turn themselves in. Across the l
and we have examples of this kind of preaching without scaffolding. I do not recommend it, neither for hearer nor for speaker. You know anyway when somebody doses you with a bucket of paint. You know what it feels like and how to judge it.

So far, there is, with a few exceptions, broad consensus on the needed Markan scaffolding, in its general shape, heft and contours, as just described. But we have one more tier to place before we have reached our necessary height. Here the height and the weight of the matter make the scaffold lean and swing a little. Just which planks need to go where, here, is uncertain. In our reading and hearing of the Gospel of Mark we need to step carefully here, just at the very top.

I put it this way. Ours is a tale of two Marks. Is Mark a moderate critic or is Mark a critical moderate? How you answer will both depend on and indicate where you stand on the scaffold. Moderate critic, critical moderate? That is, across the length of his Gospel, is Mark actively criticizing others or is he carefully moderating, coaching if you will, the approach of others? Is the tone of the gospel polemic or irenic?

Mark is clearly an apocalyptic writing, although clarity about this has only fully emerged in the last generation or so. Mark expects the end of all things in his own time, and so the Markan Jesus so instructs his followers. In fact, Mark expects the culmination of all things, soon and very soon. In this regard, and in regard to his understanding of the cross, Mark has some congruence with the letters of Paul. Given this apocalyptic perspective, is Mark a critic or a coach?
Critic

The first option, Mark the moderate critic, was most piercingly presented almost forty years ago. First let me give you the outline of the planking in this part of the scaffold, and then let me tell you about the carpenter.

On this view, Mark combats a view of Jesus that will not accept his suffering, his crucifixion. Long after the events of Calvary and Golgotha, spirited and strong people, singing a happy song, have caused the earliest church to forget their baptism, or its meaning. They expect ease, spirit, joy, and, soon, a conquering victory over all that plagues and persecutes them. Mark says no. To say no Mark remembers in delicate detail the story of Jesus’ passion, relying on a source, a document he has inherited. To say no, Mark pointedly shows the ignorance and cowardice of Peter, at Caesarea Philippi and in Jerusalem. To say no, Mark criticizes, diminishes the miracles of Jesus, letting them wind away to nothing as the Gospel progresses. To say no, Mark describes the disciples as diabolical dunces. They didn’t understand it and neither do you, he says. Mark stays within the fold of the inherited story of Jesus, the gospel of teaching and passion, of Galilee and Jerusalem. But he does so as a moderate critic of those who are unrealistic of the suffering that continues, from which the gospel does not deliver, any more than Jesus had been delivered from the cross. Saved, yes, delivered, no. On this view, at the heart of Mark there is a bitter dispute in earliest Christianity about what constitutes discipleship, baptism, and Mark is out to prove his opponents wrong. As with the alternative, there is plenty of evidence to support this sort of scaffold.

I am pleased, and honored, to tell you that the person who most powerfully presented this view is a dear friend of mine. In fact, he was my immediate predecessor in our Rochester church. My eleven years in that pulpit immediately followed his seventeen. He is a Methodist minister who did his doctoral work at Claremont. It has taken some decades for the force and power of his argument to stand up and stand out in comparison to the work of others. Ted Weeden is his name: ‘Jesus serves as a surrogate for Mark, and the disciples serve as surrogates for Mark’s opponents…The disciples are reprobates’. (op cit, 163).
Coach

The second option, Mark the critical moderate, has in a way been present for a longer time, and, one could say, is still the more dominant, the majoritarian position. I read through the summer the culminating presentation of this position in a two volume Anchor Bible Commentary. Imagine my surprise, opening the books, to read that the author was (once) on the faculty of Boston University School of Theology. His name is Joel Marcus, now at Duke. On this view, things in Mark’s community are not so much at daggers drawn. There are differences to be sure, but the disagreements are differences among friends. The Markan coaching does not face strong spirit people, committed to an idea of the ‘divine man’. Mark is not so negative about miracles. The disciples are mistaken but not malevolent. The titles for Jesus are not so telling or convincing. The real trouble is not so much in the community itself (perish the thought), but outside, among the potential deceivers of the church. Hence, on this scaffold, Mark has the job of more gently reminding his hearers of the cross, of suffering, of discipline, of the cruciform character of Christianity, as a moderate, a critical moderate, but a moderate more than a critic.

We have a hard time imaging that our faith tradition was born out of serious conflict. It is like family stories. We really don’t like to imagine that our family tree is littered with broken branches, dead limbs, crooked roots, and Dutch elm disease. We like the picture of the Palm Tree, majestic and free. The second option appeals to our sense of pride in our Christian heritage. It is a more pleasing view. But the former, Weeden’s Mark, is over time the stronger scaffold, and what we need from a scaffold is not presentation but reliability, not beauty but strength.

Here is where my feet come down. Marcus appeals to my heart, what I wish were true or truer. But my mind trusts Weeden. Our passage today, Mark 12: 38-44, is a case in point.

Our passage today teems with criticism. There is venom here. There is hurt, too. There is an outsider looking in. There is a widow, righteous, but overshadowed. You too were outsiders, the passage recalls. You follow one who sat outside, who had his eye on the sparrow, who resented the robes, the prayers, the stoles, the seats, the feasts, the forgetful unsympathy which occludes human vision and corrupts human life. Be careful. In God’s time, the first become last. When it comes to giving, the question is not how much but from how much…

“The fact that it follows Jesus’ summons of the disciples, moreover, could hint that the lesson is particularly important for the members of the Markan community. Are there perhaps rich people there as well as poor ones, and are the ostentatiousness of the former and their callousness toward the latter among the spiritual dangers besetting Mark’s church home” (Marcus, II, 861).? For Mark, the disciples are the church, his church. Just how hard on them is he?

Mark: moderate or critic? This passage begins with an attack upon the scribes of old, and so upon the leaders of Mark’s church. This passage concludes with a wry portrait of a poor widow, a picaresque portrait of unjust distance between rich and poor in the Temple, and so in the community of Mark’s church. Today’s passage, concluding the gospel’s narrative before the passion, shows us Mark the critic, Mark the prophet. He might have Jesus add: ‘I saw many in the temple that day….and it seems like I saw some of you there, too.’

Two tones are po
ssible for this sentence: she has given all she has, her whole life. One moderate, a good stewardship lesson. One critical, a call to change. The latter is the truer, the latter is the gospel.

Three suggestions follow, regarding awareness, regarding assessment, and regarding allegiance, when it comes to scaffolds, to the frames from which we see and hear, build and repair.

We see what we expect, or want, to see. We hear what we are accustomed to hear. We have our scaffolds. “All looks yellow to the jaundiced eye” (Pope)._

Are they the right ones?

Granted that the scaffolds on which you stand to build or repair the steeples of your lives are fundamental, necessary, and crucial, are these, yours, the right ones for your life today? Are you aware of your presentiments, your prejudices, your perspectives? Are you? Can you give an account, for example, of your religious perspective? We are more regularly challenged to account for our political perspective, conservative or liberal, or our economic perspective, libertarian or egalitarian, or our cultural perspective, bohemian or bourgois. Today the Markan Jesus sits, sits, outside the temple, and turns a moderate or critical eye upon the horizon, upon the whole, upon what purports to represent the good, true, beautiful, and holy. What is your scaffold made of, when you lean toward the realities of dawn and twilight?

Are you aware of the scaffolds you have ascended?

Then let me ask you, since this Sunday, and now we have awareness, to assess your religious scaffolding. Does it hold? Here are a couple of tests, ways to jump a bit up and down on the board, without yet falling. What about death and taxes?

Does your religious scaffold hold, when you are reaching out to fix up the steeple in the hour of death? Last Sunday, Tom Long, our colleague in Atlanta, preached an op-ed sermon about our cultural, spiritual inability gracefully to approach and accept death. He recommends some better scaffolding: ‘show me the manner in which a nation cares for its dead, and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender mercies of its people (Gladstone’…People who have learned how to care tenderly for the bodies of the dead are almost surely people who also know how to show mercy to the bodies of the living’. (NYT, 11/1/09)

Does your scaffold hold, when you are facing financial extremity? Has the scaffold the strength to hold you up, while you look out for that next job, while you look down at the prospect of debt, while you look up at your hope for measured frugality, while you look in toward the same potential greed Jesus saw in the temple of old? If the scaffold wobbles here, you have some work to do.

Have you assessed your scaffold?

Then, to conclude, let me ask you something. Where is your lasting allegiance? Given awareness. Granted assessment. Whose are you? Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Where is your allegiance? Is it time to change? Is it time to find a better scaffold, I mean perspective, I mean scaffold, I mean worldview, I mean scaffold, I mean faith? One of our friends sent in this comment on a sermon last month: ‘I'd further suggest it is time to unleash a more aggressive message: that only stupid people think they are so smart that they can figure out everything for themselves and that if they (and everyone else) just maximize their self-interest we will end up with the best of all possible worlds. Rather, really smart people know that they are both limited but responsible and that their best hope is to join in the company of other faithful people in a life of prayer and study and worship to help illumine the path.’

Have you come to a moment of change?

A long time ago, a preacher and Greek scholar summed up his own way of thinking: ‘If thine heart be as mine, give me thine hand’. Can you hear the trust held, affirmed, offered there? ‘If thine heart be as mine, give me thine hand’. Can you hear the openness, there, the maturely naïve confidence there, the fresh breeze there? ‘If thine heart be as mine, give me thine hand’. Can you hear the freedom and grace there? It begs to be heard. In its hearing is your health, safety, healing, salvation.

posted in Uncategorized on 11.8.2009 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

Preface

Purity of the heart is to will one thing.

To will one thing.

Simplicity.

Have no anxiety about anything but in all things in prayer and supplication with thanksgiving lift your needs to God.

No anxiety.

Simplicity.

What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love kindkness, and walk humbly with your God?

Simplicity.

So Kierkegaard. So Paul. So Micah.

My friend says it this way…

Wherever you are, be there.

Jesus says, ‘I am the resurrection and the life’.

Simplicity?

Our text, our tradition, our time in life today evoke within us an awareness of a simplicity that is not so simple longing.

So of course we must preface all that comes with a Dutch uncle paragraph to warn against simplicity that is false, shallow, untrue. The airwaves abound with such.

Our text, our tradition, our time itself will guide us.

One: Text

First, John 11.

Is this not the end of the seven signs? It is.

Is this not an account peculiar to John’s memory? It is.

Is this not the crowning announcement of the gospel which ends—you remember how the book ends?—‘these things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ and that believing you may have life in his name’.

To hear John today we must, must, hear his story, the story of the community that formed the gospel out of disappointment, dislocation and departure. There, there, they found freedom, grace and love.

Lazarus is unknown to the rest of the New Testament. It is sondersprache.

My children had their own such speech. Yours did too.

John whose community found freedom in the aftermath of disappointment. John whose community grasped grace in the aftermath of dislocation.

The greatest hope of the primitive church had been disappointed. Christ had not returned, one, two, three generations later. John, alone, had the courage to look about and find the freedom to change his thought. Heaven is here and now. Hell and judgment, too. Every day is the last day. As Rauschenbusch said, “which is more daunting, the thought of meeting Christ on the last day, or the thought that every day is lived in his presence? Today is the last day, until the next last day, which is tomorrow.

We too need to find our theological voices, after 50 years of wandering in the wilderness. There is hardly any lasting theological writing from the Protestant churches since Tillich. We have been surviving as nomads in a wasteland, now two generations wide. Voices, free and graces, will emerge, new voices for a new day. Especially that will help us think again about unity and diversity, and move us from a unified diversity to a diversified unity, which we shall need to survive the challenges of century 21, Islamic totalitarianism and the ventures of the new sciences.

Likewise John and crew had been shown the door of inherited religion, and expulsed from the temple. Yet they found a strange and new grace in this difficult dislocation. In our region and time, too, we are dislocated. Since (taking Vahanian’s calendar) the opening of the post-Christian era in 1965, we have been moved from a mode of remembering to one of rebuilding. From Christ in culture to Christ transforming culture. We have 150 year old buildings, 100 year old habits, 50 year old preachers, all of which need rebuilding. Rebuilding is harder than building. And more fun. There is more texture, more history, more complexity, more detail. And more fun, for the right temperaments.

And now, in these rare chapters, John concludes his twilight Gospel, by bearing for us the recollection of departure. These next 5 chapters are drenched in sorrow, the sorrow of loss, of grief, of change, of departure. To hear them, aright, we need to focus on two losses. That of Jesus and that of John. Jesus in 33ad on the cross. John, or the beloved disciple, or whomever, this church’s beloved patriarch, who after many himself at last gave up the ghost. These twin shadows, of Jesus and John, lie upon our passage.

Two: Tradition

Second, tradition.

“Wherever you are, be there”.

We at Marsh Chapel, and we at Boston University may not yet have the largest financial endowment in the country, or along the Charles River. One day, that may change. If you would like to help us to help that to change, please let me know. Be assured that we will do whatever we can for your personal and spiritual welfare, in gratitude. But there is another way in which Marsh Chapel, and Boston University may already have the largest endowment in the country, or along the Charles River. Our riches are vocal. Our largest endowment is not financial but audible, not monetary but epistolary, not in the coin of the realm but in the language of the heart. Boston University, and centrally within the University, Marsh Chapel, is a treasure store of voice. You notice that, probably, every Sunday when you come across the plaza, and pass the sculpture and monument to Martin Luther King, birds in flight. Said Karl Barth, ‘The gospel is the freedom of a bird in flight’. But King’s voice was not only or mainly a solo voice. He sang in a choir, in choro novo. He sang as one bird in the flock. Howard Thurman sang with him, for example. So did Allan Knight Chalmers. Robert Hamill’s voice was known in his regular column in motive magazine. Littell lead the way.

Come Sunday, every Sunday, here at Marsh Chapel:

The Chapel’s gothic nave, built to lift the spirit, welcomes you

The Chapel’s sixty year history, at the heart of Boston University, welcomes you

The Chapel’s regard for persons and personality, both in its Connick stained glass windows and in its current ministry, welcomes you

The Chapel’s familiar love of music, weekday and Sunday, welcomes you

The Chapel’s congregation of caring, loving souls, in this sanctuary, welcomes you in spirit.

Welcome today as we enhance our endowment.
Endowment.

Yes, a word brings a lift to the decanal eyebrow, a stirring to the soul, a tingle to the spirit, a warming to heart.
A welcome word, today. Now, endowments are crucial for chapel, for school, for university. We shall other days on which to build such.

But today is All Saints’ Day.

Today we celebrate the endowment we already have. It is a rich treasure.

It is an endowment vocal not visible, audible not audited, psychic not physical, moral not material.

Listen for its echoes…listen…listen to the voices of Boston University and of Marsh Chapel…

All the good you can…

The two so long disjoined…

Heart of the city, service of the city…

Learning, virtue, piety…

Good friends all…

Hope of the world…

Last Week: Are ye able, still the Master, whispers down eternity…

Common ground…

Content of character…

Wesley. His Brother. Merlin. Warren. Marsh. Harkness. Marlatt. Thurman. King.

A vocal endowment.

These saints, our vocal endowment, offer a kind of simplicity. It is a confidence born of obedience, a readiness to hear and speak, to listen and act.

Three: Times
Third, our time.

Our times demand nothing less.

Let me ask you bl
untly about disappointment. That job, girl, promotion, rank, offer, possibility that never came. No religious water will wash away the rank, raw hurt of it. Forget that. What the gospel, John 11, resurrection and life offers is an ancient testimony that with a different way of thinking and speaking, one can by apocalypse find freedom right in the guts of disappointment. John lost the primitive hope of Jesus’ return. Surprise! Just there, just there in disappointment, not before it in anticipation nor after it in redirection, but right there, he found, they found freedom. To think spirit, not speculation, artistry not Armageddon, paraclete not parousia. Is there something you are not seeing in disappointment? Like a new, radical freedom?

Let me ask you to level with about dislocation. That reassignment, that rejection, that sudden turn in the road, that dismissal, that shift in social location. The hurt…stays. But John and company were heaved out of their mother land, their mother religion, and, dusting themselves off, and looking up, here is what they found. They found a grace to love that they could not have known without leaving the old country. They found, well, diversity. They found a wide open world. Et toi? Is there something we have not yet found, down in the cave of dislocation? Look again. Something else, like a new doorway to grace?

What of our common disappointments and dislocations? Are they bringing us, all wrangling aside to a new day? A healthier day? Are they bringing us, all strategic wrangling aside, to a new day? A more just, participatory, sustainable day?

One note, to close. Should you ever mistake the staggering distance and difference between John and his synoptic siblings, remember this. In Matthew, Mark and Luke, what sends Jesus to the gallows? What event? The temple cleansing is the answer, the chasing of the money changers from the temple. In John, it is Lazarus, the raising of Lazarus, that puts Jesus in peril. ‘They determined to kill him’.

John ever raises the stakes, ups the ante, lifts a call to a kind of revealed, radical, root simplicity. Resurrection. Life.

Not religious ritual, but spiritual power is what Jesus brings. Not religious ritual, but spiritual power is what the Pharisees rightly fear. Not religious ritual, but spiritual power places Jesus in peril. Not the cleansing of the temple, but the raising of the dead.

In table and word, we offer our service. We announce Jesus Christ, who is, just now, right here, for you, in truth, resurrection and life.

Coda

Lazarus—come out! Come down! Come forth! Out of the caves of disappointment and dislocation and into the sunlight of freedom and grace. Receive the bread of freedom and the wine of grace, the bread of resurrection and the cup of life.

posted in Uncategorized on 11.1.2009 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

The ministry of Marsh Chapel, in this decade, quickens in connection with voice, vocation and volume.

The voice of this pulpit, around the globe, is lifted and shared, in the liberality of the gospel, as it has been from the time of our first preacher, Dr. Franklin H. Littell. Our Psalm today celebrates voice.

The vocation to service, in ministry and culture, to which we invite young people every day, is our joy and hope, this day. Our lesson today celebrates vocation.

The volume, simply put, the increasing worshipping presence of the people of God, grows in ordered worship, as we lift hymns in four part harmony, enjoy choral music both historic and contemporary, and ponder the word, with head and heart, to ‘unite the two so long disjoined, learning and vital piety’, as the broken are healed. The gospel today speaks of the lost and the found.

We invite you to step alongside the ministry of Marsh Chapel in voice, vocation and volume.

Especially today we ‘Remember Littell’. Franklin Littell, who died this spring at age 91, lived and preached a faith that gives sight. An insightful faith.

The hallowed predecessors who occupied this pulpit in the cradle of liberty and the cradle of Methodist theology are names, and voices, you mostly know. Robert Cummings Neville. Robert Watts Thornburg. Richard Nesmith. Robert Hamill. Howard Thurman. And Franklin Littell.

Dr. Franklin Littell was the first to occupy this pulpit. President Daniel Marsh brought him here in the early 1950’s. As recently as May of 2006, Littell was able at age 88 to preach here, as he did that spring at commencement (for the School of Theology). A friend, colleague, contemporary and fly fishing partner of our dear friend Dr. Ray Hart, Littell brought a stirring sermon to that moment just three years ago.

Perhaps both his life and death are somewhat unfamiliar territory for you. In fact, I guess that such is the case for many, and so, today, I offer a moment of remembrance, in conjunction with our Boston University Alumni Weekend. Last year we were ‘Remembering Chalmers’. This year, Littell.

Remember today three features of Littell’s ministry.

First, he was the father of holocaust studies. Littell was the first to offer courses, formal study, in the area of the holocaust. Throughout his life, with passion, and as a Methodist preacher, he continuously challenged the Christian community, and particularly the Protestant Christian community, to take emotional responsibility for the horrors of the holocaust. Littell, in his time here and later in his long career, never stopped pushing, preaching, even attacking his own Christian church to look hard, deep, and long at Auschwitz. He did so from this pulpit. He did so later as a college President (Iowa Wesleyan), and he did so in scores of classrooms from Temple, to Emory, to Chicago. Remember his words: “Most gentiles, even church leaders, have not confronted the Holocaust and its lessons for the present day... It is important, especially for Jewish children, to know that in those terrible years not all the gentiles in Christendom were either perpetrators or passive spectators," (NYT obit., 6.09).

Second, Littell gracefully and steadily combined learning and piety. His ministry embraced both head and heart, and actually could not have been conceived or developed without such a real, even radical integration of the mind and the spirit. His passion about the holocaust, for instance, began out of a revulsion he felt as a student in Germany in 1939, attending a Hitler rally. He never forgot the feeling of that early experience, and that feeling fueled his work through the years. Feelings are more than emotions, more than sentiment. They are the great steed, the great horse on which we ride. The mind is the bit and bridle, as Wesley somewhere wrote, but the great steed is faith, fed by the wellsprings of emotion in the heart. He pressed the church, our church, to remember the great Kingswood hymn of Charles Wesley: ‘to unite the two so long disjoined, learning and vital piety’. So he was a preacher who also was college president. He was a pastor, who also taught and wrote. He was a person of faith, who saw the need to combine mind and heart.

Third, in addition, Littell was a serious and lifelong scholar of the reformation. His early formation, study and teaching were devoted to this area. Most reformation scholars invest study in the New Testament, too, and Littel was no exception. He was an early supporter and even translator and commentator on the work of Rudolph Bultmann, whose own voice is still so important voice in the study of the New Testament.

First: holocaust studies. Second: head and heart united. Third: reformation studies, including interest in the critical study of the New Testament. These are three gifts of Littell to our time. His voice continues to bless us.

In the lineage of Littell, we have work yet to do, both theological and liturgical.

We have theological work to do.

Judaism and Christianity share a vision of redemption in history. Yet the ongoing work of redemption, in exodus and resurrection both, demands, deserves and requires deeper reflection. (The annual Elie Wiesel lectures, which begin again tomorrow night here at Boston University, provide us an opportunity to labor together in this part of the theological vineyard). Further, the devastating, demonic disaster of the holocaust of the 1940’s stands to challenge both religious and secular affirmations of redemption in the late modern period. In particular, all claims to universality which diminish the particular in every particular stand under the challenge of the holocaust whose study Littell initiated. Our understandings of revelation stand under challenge. Our use of dialectic feels the strain of the same challenge. Our universalization of communication and to some degree of valuation lies under that shadow too. While we have remembered Wiesel and other courageous witnesses to the shoa, we have not yet finished our theological reflection. As Robert McAfee Brown used to say, theology, including Christian theology, that lies out of earshot of the holocaust, is severely diminished.

Some of our further theological work, within the Christian community, includes reading and reflection upon Jewish theological works. The books of Abraham Heschel come to mind. Articles like Irving Greenberg’s ‘Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire’, come to mind. Voices like that of Emil Fackenheim come to mind, who described his practice of faith as a way of resisting Hitler and resisting any ‘posthumous victories’ by him. Our own theological work, tracing Littell’s, may involve reading and hearing our Jewish siblings.

Our own theological work, much yet to be done, begins by tracing the work of our Jewish siblings.

We have liturgical work to do as well.

Irving Greenberg, some years ago, in the article just mentioned, outlined various forms of Jewish post-holocaust theological and liturgical models. He wrote about Job. He wrote about Isai
ah 53. He wrote about Lamentations. He wrote, most personally, about silence. He wrote about religious testimony: in life, in ‘chesed’, in rebirth, in rebirth for the state of Israel, in exploration of the imago dei, in authority and authenticity.

The tragedy of anti-Semitism predates the New Testament. But the 27 books of our canon, from 1 Thess. 2 to John 10, are shot through with this same tragedy. The church has yet to come to terms with the deadening effect of our lectionary readings and liturgical practices. We have found ways to honor the experience of women, in our liturgical phrasing. We have learned ways to honor those ‘outside’ and those ‘foreign’, in our church language. But we have not budged, when reading the passion narrative in John, with its fisted, hurtful chorus of language, ‘oi oudaioi’, ‘oi oudaioi’.

We have liturgical work yet to do.

Theological and liturgical work lies ahead of us.

I like to think of an autumn day in 1955, along Broadway in NYC. There is Reinhold Niebuhr. With him is Abraham Heschel. Together they walk for an hour around Grant’s tomb. Together they think, probe, reason together. Both are better for it.

Heschel gives our last word this morning:

There are three ways in which a man expresses his deep sorrow: the man on the lowest level cries; the man on the next level is silent; the man on the highest level knows how to turn his sorrow into a song. (Sabbath, 59).

posted in Uncategorized on 10.25.2009 at 11:00 am

By Marsh Chapel

There are many reasons for appearing in church. To some of these we may be able to attach descriptions and meanings. There are historical reasons. Family traditions come to mind. There are sociological reasons. Cultural influence, in some regions at least, comes to mind. There are psychological reasons. The very human needs for meaning, belonging, and empowerment come to mind. There are theological, philosophical reasons. Curiosity about life and fear of death come to mind. There are many reasons for coming to church, come Sunday.

On Parents’ Weekend, on a college campus, there are many reasons for coming to church. As a Parent, you may want to offer a prayer of thanks, a hymn of praise, that things have gone so well so far, for your beloved son or daughter. As a Student, you may want to include your Dad or Mom in part of the weekly rhythm of life, here, to say ‘welcome’ to your spiritual home. As a Professor or Administrator, you may want to stand alongside others in the community of faith, as work progresses across midterm valley, in the community of learning. Or, withal, you all may just want to enjoy a time of singing, a moment of peace, and a good, free lunch. On Parents’ Weekend, on this college campus, there are many reasons for coming to church.

All these reasons are good reasons.

Yet, stirring in the early part of the sermon’s development, and just now in your own thought and heart, there may be another awareness, too. I think there is. For all the goodness of all these reasons for worship, down deep or at least deeper, there is something else at work. I ask you to search for a minute, in your own soul, for this something else. While you are looking around, down in the recesses of the soul, let me call up a familiar story.

Make Way For Ducklings

This story is about intimacy, about closeness, about nearness.

It is a story that many parents and children together have enjoyed. The story is set in Boston. As a matter of fact, it is set right here, along the Charles. It contains the usual suspects. A family on the move. A hunt for suitable housing. Various dangers and perils. Changes in direction, changes in location. Some good people along the way. This story offers connections to Beacon Hill, the Public Garden, the Back Bay, Charles Street, our shared River, and that lastingly typical feature of Boston, MA, traffic. As I view the congregation, I imagine that a few parents and a few children, here today, enjoyed this story together. Isn’t it wonderful to be sitting inside the book of Robert McCloskey’s story? Rather than holding the book, the book holds you. That is one great thing about Boston. Here you see Mrs. Mallard, right on the river. You step alongside the Garden, and its little island. You ride the tour boat, rather than seeing it sketched. You dodge the cyclists, and the autos, yourself. Be careful. You may not be able to fly over the State House, with its copper dome, but you can walk right up to it. By the Longfellow Bridge you can spot the cozy place for molting. You can say hello to Michael the policeman. And when jack, kack, lack, mack, nack, ouack, pack, and quack come toward you, on the esplanade, you yourself can ‘make way for ducklings’. And when you and others take your life in your hands crossing the street, at Arlington and Beacon, you can hope that Michael will be there to help, as he so consistently, unfailingly was, in the book. When Michael calls Clancy from Mt Vernon Street, at a pay phone, or maybe now on a cell phone, you may overhear the call. You are here. On the pond you may see the Mallard clan, heading home to the little island, where Mr. Mallard sits waiting. (He never did do very much in that story did he?) You may say to yourself, on your Sunday afternoon stroll through the Public Garden, “The ducklings liked the new island so much that they decided to live there. (Some of them even decided to go to college down the street.) All day long they follow the swan boat and eat peanuts. (College is a kind of subsidized freedom). And when night falls they swim to their island and fall asleep. (A little past dusk, most nights, by the way).

This is a story about closeness that for many years has given people, maybe you, an experience of closeness. A story about intimacy that has caused an experience of intimacy. A story about nearness that has evoked a real experience of nearness.
Parental Swimming Lessons

I do not mean to idealize family life. ‘It takes a long time to raise parents’. The road is a rocky one. The journey has its own perils, every bit as fierce as the river, the tour boat, the traffic, and the garden. For parents, to become parents of adults, as adult parents to young adult children (you see how complicated this gets?), have to learn new swimming lessons, on the river, in the pond, under the bridges of life. Parents have to take swimming lessons. I know. I had to get wet myself. Once you send your child away, you need some new swimming lessons.

You need the prone float of trust, that kind of faith that trusts in letting go. That makes you a beginner. You need to learn two strokes, and swim with your mouth closed. (Ah, I see you get my meaning). Sometimes the tongue is for biting. That makes you an advanced beginner. You need to master the crawl, front and back. To control your self control, for only self control is real control anyway. It is the only control any of us really has. Enjoy it. That makes you an intermediate. You need to show power for distance swimming, and to avoid triangles, that is, when you need to talk, to talk directly. (Avoiding triangles is the basis of the University’s policy about communication with parents of students, by the way). Then you are a swimmer. After a while your adult child may come to you with a question. People, including children, only listen when they are ‘coming toward you’. There may be a question. ‘Dad, what do you think about…? Ah, sweet moment. You have moved into a coaching role, and have become an advanced swimmer. And when your own children go through their molting stages, and find a mate along the river bank, then you will relate as one parent to another. That may be the most important parenting you do, parent to parent. You have become a lifesaver.

In our previous pastorate, we saw all three of our children depart for college. All went to Ohio Wesleyan. After we dropped them off, we drove home to Rochester. The tears flowed from Columbus to Cleveland. The tears flowed from Cleveland to Buffalo. The tears flowed from Buffalo to Rochester where, drenched, we stopped. After the first such bath trip, my wife decided that the next year, and every year following, she would host a dinner for mothers whose ducklings had flown the coop. They gathered, ate, drank, laughed, cried, and went home the better for it. They are still doing so, under new leadership. They are helping each other with swimming lessons.

In absence, the absence of children becoming adults, they are learning about a new kind of intimacy, a new kind of closeness, a new kind of nearness.

Spiritual Intimacy Mark 10:35

Some minutes ago I asked you to think about your presence here, and its fountain and origin.

Gain or loss of one kind of intimacy can sometimes kindle a desire for another kind of intimacy. Absence can make the heart grow fonder. In more than one way…

I tell you about Mallard closeness, McCloskey intimacy for a reason. I reflect with you about parental swimming lessons for a reason. Here is the reason. I want to invite you into another kind of intimacy. In fact, lurking somewhere down deep or deeper, I think you are waiting for such an invitation. It may be the very reason you are in church, today, or any Sunday. The intimacy of human love is a foretaste for the intimacy of divine love. How can you love God whom you have not seen if you have not loved your children whom you have seen? Better: having loved your children, or your parents, you are ready for another kind of love.

In our Gospel, Mark 10: 35, something is conveyed that I usually miss, in this familiar reading. Perhaps you caught it. It is the desire for a spiritual intimacy.

James and John are rightly chastised for their spiritual one-up-manship, but not for their longing for intimacy. Usually this passage is read as a warning against pride in authority. So it is. ‘May our pomp not be pompous’, as one said this week. ‘Whosever would be great among you must be your minister ’. True greatness is found in service. And ultimately, Christ offers his life as a ransom for many, for the many, for the nations, for the church, for humanity, for the whole inhabited earth. Place and position, Jesus defers to God. ‘It is not so among you’, says the Markan Jesus, contrasting earthly tyranny with churchly love. Later editors thought this was a bit much, and so recast the sentence: ‘it will not be so among you’. But the word of Christ seems to mean what it says. In reality, that is, where you are truly yourself, at your realest real, at depth, in reality, ‘it is not so among you’. When you come to yourself.

James and John are chastised regarding position and authority. But not for their longing to be near him, to sit by him, to be close to him. This desire is the most striking feature of today’s Gospel. ‘Let us sit next to you, right and left’.

They want to be near Him, in whose service is freedom. They want to know that kind of lasting intimacy. They want the intimacy of faith. For sure, they are less than fully prepared for the cost. But their desire is not scorned. Far from it. Their desire is honored for what it is, the very heart of life, of being human, of being alive. They know what they most want: the intimacy of faith. I think you do too. I think most people do, even though we go a long way around Robin Hood’s barn to find it out. We long for the peace of faith. We long for the joy of faith. We long for the confidence of faith. We long for that intimate, close, nearness, which is the experience of the divine, maybe the only experience of the divine we can ever have, on this earth. ‘Belief transforms’ (Proust, RTP, 644).

Childlike is this longing, childlike this hunger.

Soon we will be at Christmas. We will sing familiar carols. One is a children’s carol. Our daughter sang this in a little country church, on Christmas eve, when she was four: “be near me Lord Jesus I ask thee to stay close by me forever and love me I pray; bless all the dear children in thy tender care; and fit us for heaven, to live with thee there”.

A Path To Intimacy

How does one enter such intimacy?

Our reading directly tells us.

Through service. Closeness comes through service, and intimacy, through service, and nearness, through service.

If you love Him, why not serve Him?

This is the strange gospel paradox, the cruciform paradox of the good news. Those who are last, they shall be first. Those who are poor, they shall be filled. Those who serve, they shall be greatest…. Because they shall be closest, nearest, most intimately joined, to Him.

Last Sunday a friend invited me to go with him to a nearby nursing home. There we with visited with a Christian gentleman, who is struggling with his health. We sat together. We quietly conversed and conferred. Some part memory, some part experience, some part humor. A gentle autumn wind lifted the maple branches outside. We closed with prayer. In that simple moment, there was a true intimacy, a nearness. In the direct discourse. In the need and in the presence. In the careful attention, from all to all. In the very ordinary, very traditional, very regular moment of a Sunday visit in a nursing home.

Do you desire a closeness in life and with life? A nearness? An intimacy? Is this hunger, longing, craving—known to James and John, and known across the ages—yours as well?

Four years ago we were invited to come to Boston, and to enter this pulpit. Among the powers that drew us here, was the chance to labor in the shadow of Howard Thurman and to preach from the pulpit he once filled. Thurman was the first Dean of Marsh Chapel. In the work of grieving and departing from one setting and entering another, I was telephoned by a friend and parishioner. In 1950, in San Francisco, she had heard Thurman speak. On the basis of that experience, she devoted her life, over the next forty years, to service in the YMCA. I asked her what she remembered. She said, ‘I’ll show you.’ Some weeks later she made an appointment, and came to the office, with an envelope in hand. In the envelope, there was a poem about a duck, speaking of ducklings. ‘He read this poem’, was all she said. Later came this note, “I have held sending my thanks to you while I located ‘The Little Duck”. You do not need to live in New England to love it, but it does help. The fact that I heard it through Howard Thurman’s beautiful voice adds to it for me”. The ‘little duck’ is a poem about the freedom of a duck floating on the waves, written in 1947 by Donald Babcock. Here are verses from that poem…

Invitation

About three hymnals ago in our church, there was a short prayer that was used with some regularity. It was a prayer in intimacy, for nearness, with closeness: ‘Our Heavenly Father, we adore Thee, whose name is love, whose nature is compassion, whose presence is joy, whose word is truth, whose spirit is goodness, whose holiness is beauty, whose will is peace, whose service is perfect freedom, and in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life’.

If there is a kindling of heart leaning toward nearness, fan the flame.

If there is a longing of heart for closeness, feed the desire.

If there is a hunger for an intimacy, a vital connection, nourish the need.

Today.

The Reverend Dr. Robert Allan Hill
Dean of Marsh Chapel

posted in Uncategorized on 10.18.2009 at 11:00 am