Sunday
May 30
A Third Way
By Marsh Chapel
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The text for this sermon is currently unavailable.
-Mr. William Edward Cordts
Sunday
May 23
Spirit Days
By Marsh Chapel
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When the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you into all the Truth.
Spirit Days at Commencement
Pentecost, today, is the day of the Spirit. Yet they are all spirit days are they not? All our days, all, are spirit days. Especially, listening caringly to the Gospel of John, we are empowered and emboldened to proclaim that all days, each day, every day, they are all spirit days. The Bible tells us so, as does Shakespeare, Scripture and the Bard being the two best sources for learning in college, and out of college:
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.
On arrival in Boston, some years ago, we had no grandchildren. Then they came, one by beautiful, blessed one, beginning at the end of our first year. As she grew, she spoke, one of her first words, beneath the great CITGO logo, was, ‘sign’. Then she walked, and walked up and down every outside staircase on Bay State Road, one by one, counting the steps. Looking for her grandfather, off at work, she later asked, ‘Where is…somebody? Is…somebody…coming home?’ For once, her granddad was really ‘somebody’. Now she is 13. You will hear from her in a spirited moment, as so fully we did hear the spirit through Commencement at Boston University this last week.
One Club launched a free laundry demonstration, on a recent Friday noon, on Marsh Plaza. Our staff made playful comments about…a rising tide lifts all boats…whisk them away…what do they have to gain by it …Yes, it was Ajax…a whole laundry list…Reap the bounty…We were going a little stir crazy, fifty four weeks later…but at the table next to them the Sojourners Campus Ministry was writing thank you notes to social workers, and encouraging others to do the same.
Spirit Days.
Maria Erb now leads a new department at Boston University, named the Newbury Center, which is devoted to supporting first generation students, those who are first in their families to attend college. It is a center so in keeping with the heart, spirit, tradition, history and soul of BU. She said a few days ago: This is my vocation, my work with first generation students. This is my calling. This is my ministry. I view it as a form and type of ministry, whereby I live out my faith. Could someone say ‘amen’ to that?
Spirit Days.
After a stirring peroration offered to Seniors, of the best ways to live and thrive into the future, a fine faculty member added, as a post script, with humor: And also…get a cat. At that same Senior Breakfast, our friend and colleague Dean Elmore said, ‘My mentor, George Houston Bass, in “Breer Rabbit Whole” had this closing thought that has stayed with me:
May joy, beauty and kindness be with you,
Day after day. Night after night.
May joy walk beside you,
Let kindness guide you,
May beauty surround you,
May you always want to say,
To friends, kinfolk and strangers you meet along life’s way,
May God bless and keep you each and every day.
Spirit Days.
Graduate Soren Hessler, in his fine remarks for THIS I BELIEVE, said… I believe that the modern American research university, so often built upon the educational foundation of training Christian clergy, does well to remember its roots in cultivating personal character and equipping graduates to care for the needs of the world. I believe a quality professional education, regardless of discipline must “Unite the pair so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety: learning and holiness combined.” Graduate Afsha Kasham, said, … Being a woman has taught me a lot. But it’s mostly taught me to speak up, even if my voice shakes. Maybe they won’t believe you, but at least you’ll know that you tried.
Spirit Days.
And for Sunday’s Commencement itself: our pioneering neighbor, the creator of the Moderna vaccine, urging us to be comfortable being uncomfortable; to learn to weather rejection; and to stay curious, always thinking ‘what if?; the head of the Boston Food Bank bluntly asking us, ‘what are you willing to really work for?’; a congresswoman bringing back to this University the voice, the voice both in content and in calling, of Coretta Scott King.
Then Monday, to hear first with the Army near Faneuil Hall, then with Navy on The USS Constitution—to be so located for commissioning!...it is like being ordained a priest at the Vatican or a preacher on John Wesley’s porch—the repeated solemn vow, taken by such young courageous women and men—to support and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. Can you hear that America, in May of 2021? To support and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic.
Spirit Days in John
These are spirited voices, Johannine voices. And John is so different, so radically inspired, so different and new and spirited. Spirit abounds especially, even perhaps in full measure, only in John. Only John places Jesus in Jerusalem thrice. Only in John does Jesus raise the dead at mid Gospel—“Lazarus, come out!” Only in John does Jesus preach for five chapters on the last evening, washing feet rather than celebrating mass. Only in John does Jesus make the Jerusalem road fully and only a road of glory, from Palm Sunday to Easter. Only in John does Jesus say, “In my Father’s House there are many rooms…” He is going home, home. And somehow, again strangely, we know the way where he is going. For it is our way, too. Only in John does Jesus walk serenely to Golgotha. Only in John does Jesus walk to death like God striding upon the earth. Only in John does Jesus pronounce GLORY from the jaws of death. Remember his dying word. Not “eli, eli” as in Matthew and Mark. Not “Father forgive them” as in Luke. Simply, serenely, powerful, triumphantly, yes, gloriously, he says, in John, “It is finished.” It is done, completed, perfected—finished. He dies to rise, and go home, making a place a space for the whole human race. Spirit fully flourishes only in John
‘(Those who composed John) had a burning conviction that they had been given the truth (led into all truth) and that through this truth they would come to enjoy a freedom that would release them from the constraints to which they were subjected: ‘the truth will set you free’’(John Ashton, 95)
Conscious as they were of the continuing presence in their midst of the Glorified One, no wonder the community, or rather the evangelist who was its chief spokesman, smoothed out the rough edges of the traditions of the historical Jesus…(They) realized that the truth that they prized as the source of their new life was to be identified not with the Jesus of history but with the risen and glorious Christ, and that this was a Christ free from all human weakness. The claims they made for him were at the heart of the new religion that soon came to be called Christianity. (199) The difference between John’s portrait of Christ and that of (the other gospels) is best accounted for by the experience of the glorious Christ constantly present to him and his community (204)
The stark strangeness, the utter difference of John from the rest of the Bible we have yet fully to admit. But when we get to the summit, John 14 and following, we see chiseled there in ice and covered fully with wind snow, an enigmatic, mysterious riddle: Spirit, sweet Spirit, Paraclete. The endless enemy of conformity. The lasting foe of the nearly lived life. The champion of the quixotic. The standard bearer of liberty. The one true spirit of spirited truth. Yet we cannot even give the history of the term, nor fully define its meaning, nor aptly place it in context, nor finally determine its translation. Paraclete eludes us. Paraclete evades us. Paraclete outpaces us. Paraclete escapes us.
Notice that the Spirit is given to all, not just to a few or to the twelve, definitely not. Notice that it is Spirit not structure on which John relies. Notice it is Spirit not memory which we shall trust (good news for those whose memory may slip a little). Notice that Spirit stands over against what John calls ‘world’ here—another dark mystery in meaning. Notice that the community around John’s Jesus is amply conveyed a powerful trust in Spirit.
Spirit Days in Life
Now the granddaughter, with whom we began at the first of life’s stages is 13 and crossing into another, and mid-Covid her local news media picked up her spirit, as she honored a retiring crossing guard:
I am writing to you because my friend…and I learned that the Crossing Guard on Monroe, Vicky, by CVS is retiring soon and this Tuesday… is her last day. Vicky has been the crossing guard for 40 years here at Brighton. She was there on our first day of sixth grade and she has always been so kind to us.
Every morning, she greets by name on our walk to school and asks us if we have anything exciting happening. She wishes us good luck on any tests that we have, and gives us advice about school and life. When we come home, she asks us about our tests, or wishes us a happy weekend. She is almost a grandmother to all of the kids she keeps safe each and every day. Vicky has been the most amazing crossing guard to us, and we will be very sad to see her go.
You will take your nourishment as you find it, day by day. As that quintessential romantic Alexander Herzen wrote, “Art and the summer lightning of individual happiness—these are the real goods”.
Spirit Days. Spirit Days. Spirit Days!
Speaking of art and of the summer lightening of individual happiness, we close with a little song. Our own daughter, a generation ago, afforded us on stage the tune, the lyrics, and the inspiration. Our children teach us, as she has taught us, on stage. She has taught us the power of the spoken, live spoken word, to intervene, and alter, and make new. It takes a while to raise parents right, but over time, we sometimes learn, learning that all days of life in every one of the seven stages are spirit days. No one says such lightly, after the last fourteen months. After more than a year of loss, we may be able to hear something of spirit from those who have known loss too. After this last year, those who have suffered loss, those of us who have suffered the loss of loved ones, may yet await spirit days to come.
This week I remembered our daughter’s stage voice and presence, from some years ago, in a play about love and marriage and death and spirit. After a lifetime of loss and disappointment, and the recent deaths of their spouses, two very elderly folks fall in love at the end of musical (I Love You. You’re Perfect. Now Change.) Where is life there is hope, and where there is hope there is life and where there is spirit there is life and hope together. In the song, SHE SPEAKS first, and he answers second:
I’VE GOT SOME PROBLEMS, MY HEALTH’S NOT GOOD.
Well at our age that’s understood
I’VE GOT ARTHRITS
Flairs up in June
I’VE GOT BRONCHITIS
I’ll get that soon. No matter. I can live with that.
I’VE HAD A BYPASS
Well I’ve had two
I DIE MY HAIR
It looks nice blue
MY WAYS ARE SET
Well, people change. I find you sexy
I FIND YOU STRANGE
No matter. I can live with that.
I OFTEN THINK OF THOSE I MISS
Sometimes I have to reminisce
FRIENDS KEEP DYING BUT I’M STILL STRONG
It still does hurt, but not as long
MY KIDS DON’T VISIT
Mine never leave
I MAKE A MEATLOAF YOU WON’T BELIEVE
I tell tall tales
I TELL THE TRUTH
I drink skim milk
I DRINK VERMOUTH
No matter. I can live with that.
I LIKE THINGS CLEAN. I SCRUB AND WASH
I’ve got a garden, I grow some squash
I KEEP IN SHAPE I MOW THE LAWN
I wake up late
I’M UP AT DAWN
No matter. I can live with that.
I WILL BE BURIED AT MY JIM’S RIGHT.
Next to my Sue is my gravesite
BUT I’M STILL HERE WITH MUCH TO GIVE
Someday I’ll die
FOR NOW I’LL LIVE
I’ll ALWAYS LOVE JIM
And I my Sue
I JUST DON’T KNOW
You think I do?
(Together): No matter. I can live with you. No matter. I can live with you.
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.
Pentecost, today, is the day of the Spirit. Yet they are all spirit days are they not? All our days, all, are spirit days. Hear good news: When the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you into all the Truth.
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
Sunday
May 16
Boston University Baccalaureate
By Marsh Chapel
Click here to view the Boston University Baccalaureate Service
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This year’s Baccalaureate speaker is Catherine D’Amato (Hon.’21), president and CEO of the Greater Boston Food Bank (GBFB).
For more information about Marsh Chapel at Boston University, click here.
For information about donating to the Chapel, click here.
Sunday
May 9
‘This I Believe’ Meditations
Sunday
May 2
Responding to Easter
By Marsh Chapel
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May we respond to Easter in worship, in history and in life
Responding in Worship
Let us respond to Easter in worship.
For here we are, just for a moment, in worship. Hearing the hymns of Easter. Hearing the Easter word. We yearn for the day, may it be soon, when we can sing with each other, greet each other face to face, offer each other a Methodist handshake. For now, we rely on daily prayer; we gather outside for morning prayer; we especially listen together, drawn in from around the globe, come Sunday at 11am. Right now.
Others too have known the yearning of and for worship. The beloved community which gave birth to our Gospel today did so. For a moment, move by the imagination to a borrowed upper room, say in Ephesus, maybe in the year 90ad. Candles burn. A meal has been offered and received. There is among the fifty, say, there present, a gradual settling, a quiet. It may be a long quiet, starting from that late first century numinous circle and ending—hic et nunc, here, now. Acute pain abides in this circle, the pain of the loss of a beloved leader, the pain of the loss of a venerable religious lineage, the pain of the loss of a prized eschatological hope—love, faith, and hope, lost. Our global radio circle today bears too a shared pain, the global trauma of global pandemic.
Yet as the circle settles, a prayer and reading and a further silence and a long hymn sung, THE ONE who has held them…SPEAKS. Imagine the early church, small and struggling, in worship, in a borrowed upper room. In the silence and in the singing and in then the antiphonal, mournful and joyful, worship antiphon. Were these Gospel words first sung?
I am…light, life, resurrection, way, truth, Good Shepherd, door, bread, water.
I am…the true vine. You shall know…’the truth’. That they may know Thee the only ‘true’ God.
Every heart has secret sorrows, especially now, by Covid time. Every land has cavernous grief, especially now, by Covid time. Back then, for the antiphonal, ancient singers of our scripture, the hurts were dislocation, disappointment and departure. And they named them. Can you name yours? Have you named your hurt?
Hear the Easter antiphon: ‘Abide in me…As I abide in you’. Stay. Remain. Settle. Dig in. Locate. Vines take a long time to grow. But so?
John’s portrait of Jesus arose from his constant awareness, which he shared with members of his community, that they were living in the presence of the Glorified One. So dazzling was this glory, (repeat) that any memory of a less-than-glorious Christ was altogether eclipsed. (J. Ashton) (The Gospel of John and Christian Origins).
With the ancient beloved community, can you lift a muted alleluia? Every hymn, for all its joy, carries a guttural memory of acute hurt. In worship, today, can you pray with joy without forgetting the brokenness out of which that alleluia comes? Let Charles Wesley, let Charles Tindley, let the poor of your own ancestral family’s older past guide you.
Let us respond to Easter in worship.
Responding in History
Let us respond to Easter in history.
What about our place in history, our communal responsibility in real time? A surface glide across Holy Scripture will not allow, cannot provide gospel insight. You want to sift the Scriptures. You want to know them inside and out, upside and down, through and through and through, and then, it may be, by happenstance or grace or the clumsy luck of a very human preacher, you may hear a steadying, saving word. Look back an Easter month. Not activism alone, but engagement matters most in history.
Through this Easter season, Easter tide, you have perhaps noticed, noted, or winced to hear the letter of John, 1 John, amending, redacting, muting and amplifying the gospel of John. You are keen listeners, practiced and adroit, so you will have wondered a bit about this. Why does 1 John nip at the heels of John?
The two ‘books’, John and 1 John, were written by different authors, in different decades, in different circumstances, with different motives. The Gospel acclaims Spirit. The Letter adds in work, ethics, morals, community, tradition, leadership and judgment from on high, rather than judgment by belief and by believer. We may just have, it is important to say, the Gospel as part of the New Testament, with all its radicality, due to its brother named letter, vouching as it were for the sanity of the Gospel. The letter, like James Morrison Witherby George Dupree, takes good care of its Gospel mother, the very cat’s mother, you see.
On April 11, the Gospel in chapter 20 revealed the Spirit, elsewhere called Paraclete or Advocate, come upon us, received and with it received the forgiveness of sins. But at the heels, nipping, comes along 1 John in chapter 2, which names the Paraclete or Advocate not as Spirit but as Jesus Christ—the righteous—whose commandments all are to keep, on pain of disobedience become lying, and truth taken flight. Both read on the same Sunday, within minutes of each other, even as they face each other, in loving disagreement.
On April 18, the Gospel Alleluia still lingering with the Lord and God risen, the letter in Chapter 3, on the qui vive and on the attack, spells out again in no uncertain terms that the righteous do the right, handsome is as handsome does. Both read on the same Sunday, within minutes of each other, even as they face each other in loving disagreement.
On April 25, the Gospel in chapter 10 acclaimed the pastoral image of the Good Shepherd, whose one glorification on the cross is meant to obliterate the need of any other such, even as the Letter, worried, worried out in chapter 3, a long and sorry recollection of Cain—Abel’s one-time brother—and the demands of love from one who laid down his life, and with whom and for whom we are then meant to do something of the same. ‘Let us not love in word and speech but in deed and in truth’, says 1 John 3, when the whole of the Gospel says simply ‘love’, says that words outlast deeds, and that speech, that of the glorious Risen, ever routs works. Both read on the same Sunday, within minutes of each other, even as they face each other in loving disagreement.
And now today, May 2, when and where our one Great Gospel, the Spiritual Gospel, counsels ‘abide’ and ‘remain’ in chapter 15, just here the letter of 1 John in chapter 4, fearing antinomial abandon, appends to his own most beautiful love poem, the charge again of lying, of lack of love of brother, of schism that surely created this letter, 1 John, as the spiritualists and the traditionalists, the Gnostics and the ethicists, parted company, one toward the free land of Montanus and Marcion, the other toward Rome and the emerging church, victorious, against which the Gospel was born, bred, written and preached. Both read on the same Sunday, within minutes of each other, even as they face each other in loving disagreement.
Of course, both are right. Or we would not still need or read them, let alone together. But you are right, too, to feel some neck pain, some whiplash, as Gospel soars and Letter deflates. It is as if the Song of Solomon were being sung by Obadiah.
The blessed Scripture bears incontrovertible, conflicted witness. Easter is a conflicted, and so a muted, Alleluia, and was so already 20 centuries ago, as the resurrection cross of Jesus was raised up, in mournful joy, in a real joy made real by its honesty about sorrow. Real joy becomes real by its honesty about sorrow. For us to move out of Covid time and on into joy, we shall need honesty about what we have lost. And whom. (repeat). The Scripture, read hard and deep, can help us. For history is endless contention and intractable difference, including religious history, perhaps especially including religious history. To respond to Easter in history, for you, will mean bearing the cross of endless contention and intractable difference, the daily labor of history and community, where ‘the best of intentions run afoul of circumstance or chance’.
And more: there may well come a discreet time, for you, as a person of faith, to say something or do something, a time when some somewhat risky and uncomfortable mode of social involvement, or existential engagement, will beckon you.
Let us respond to Easter in history.
Responding in Life
Let us respond to Easter in life.
The Gospel prepares us for the lifelong work of responding to Easter. The Gospel tells about resurrection largely on the basis of experience. Experience and troubles, troubles that provoked lasting question.
The Gospels and Letters respond in life to Easter, in a muted alleluia, in a sober acclamation.
An Empty Tomb
The church is alive they acclaim.
Especially when we come to celebrate the life of a dear sister or brother in faith, we have a powerful experience of the church alive across the river of death. The church is the body of Christ. We affirm a bodily, physical resurrection, tasted for a time in church. I give you Emily Dickinson:
This World is not Conclusion.
A Species stands beyond---
Invisible as music—
But positive, as Sound---
It beckons and it baffles—
Philosophy—don’t know—
And through a Riddle, at the last—
Sagacity must go (E Dickinson)
Or, as one of our wise beyond years undergraduates said this spring, ‘I will be careful with any kind of hope that I have’.
A Trumpet Blast
The future is open they acclaim.
There is, that is, a spiritual resurrection in your future.
Once, we met a psychiatrist who said his work was to offer the possibility that stories might have a different ending. You know that story of your life at its worst, the one that seems to have the same ending no matter how you live and how you tell it? That story can have a different ending, another conclusion. It can.
Your repeated narrative of inherited addiction can be overcome in sobriety.
Your national adolescence in forgetting the limits of power can be overcome in a more collegial, humbler, more mature foreign policy.
Your usurpation can give way to response. Your isolation can give way to community. Your imperialism can give way to justice. We can learn lessons from our experience.
Your religious amnesia about what is fun in faith—giving and inviting—can be lifted like a fog at dawn, and you can sing out your soul.
Things can, and will in Christ, be better for you and for us. That repeated tale of employment and unemployment, love and loss, relationship and rejection can change. The cycle can be broken, when what is in place is invaded by what is taking place.
An Existential Awakening
Love is real they acclaim. In this way, at least for once, the letter surpasses the Gospel, the child outdoes the parent:
7 Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. 9 God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.
Who would or could or should say more?
Let us respond to Easter in life.
Coda
The church is alive. The future is open. Love fills the heart. Foretastes of heaven. If the heavenly banquet has this menu, perhaps we need over these few earthly years to acquire a certain taste for certain things, faith and hope and love.
May we respond to Easter in worship, in history, and in life? It is an Easter call to the altar. It is your Easter altar call.
So, dear friends, then travel with a little imagination…Imagine Eucharist at Marsh Chapel. Stand to sing… Pause to reflect… Step out into the aisle… Look at and look past Abraham Lincoln and Francis Willard…Receive cup and bread, bread and cup… Kneel at the altar to pray… Stand in communion with the communion of saints…Here is the bread and cup of friendship…Imagine, a congregation reciting together a creed, a psalm, a hymn, a poem. Imagine, if you are willing, a congregation currently in diaspora, but just now, by the word spoken and heard, a gathered and thus addressable community, you and I and all together, able to respond to Easter.
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
Sunday
April 25
The Bach Experience
By Marsh Chapel
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The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel:
Personal Faith
The Christian life is a daily combination of personal faith and social involvement (repeat). Deep personal faith and active social involvement.
While personal faith is not merely individual faith, nonetheless, it is in persons, like you, that faith is received, and known, and nourished. There is no hiding here, no hiding behind an unconsidered ignorance, nor behind a well-tempered philosophy, nor behind a mountainous and real hurt, nor behind sloth. Your faith is yours, especially when it is about all you have left to go on.
So, you will continue, brightened by Easter, to develop and practice your faith. We are not meant to live in Lent. We are meant to live in Easter. The difference Easter makes comes in part by way of a full body embrace of your own personal faith. Let us in Easter spirit embrace the faith we have been given.
We know God to be a pardoning God. We hope to be made whole in this lifetime.
Knowing pardon, seeking wholeness, holiness, can you creatively and even at some risk, work with another whom you think needs your pardon, I beg your pardon, but who may himself think you need his? Just how sharp is your faith in its faithful practice of what we pray, Come Sunday, ‘forgive…as we forgive’?
Longing for wholeness, can you creatively and even at some risk, take up work that you have long left behind, but you know is part of personal faith development—reading, prayer, giving, serving, listening? Pardon? Wholeness? It is up to you.
Here the faithful Lutheran, JS Bach, can indeed help us, by means of his own example in faith. His own Bible, we have recently been further taught, was laden with notes in the margin, questions, renderings, and ruminations.
Personal faith may quicken with personal practices, of a new post-Covid sort. In this past year, we may have discovered some new measures of resilience, grace, creativity and love.
One may choose to play the piano again. Another may take a language study. One may find a daily devotional reader, which sits on a bureau so one can read it while tying a tie. Another may sit in the quiet of the sanctuary for a while before worship, as did Emerson, who said, I love the silent church before there is any speaking. One may wander, saunter, flaner dans le rue, walking for a bit every day. Exercise is so spiritually central and important. Another may start to journal, to record dreams, and to record insights, and to record angers and to record escapes. Teaching and learning are spiritual adventures in pursuit of invisibles and intangibles (W. Arrowsmith). Or, if nothing else, you can hardly do better than a conversation, in loving care, with another person of faith, say, over the phone. One may look hard at her life, her actual activity, to see whether it becomes the gospel, and whether it approximates the very general guidance in the wisdom saying, in singleness integrity, in partnership fidelity. At least one, it may be, will choose to listen with weekly discipline to the Marsh Chapel recorded and broadcast service, Come Sunday. At least one, it may be, will choose to receive as a spiritual practice, the beauty of choral music, Come This and Other Bach Sundays.
Personal faith may quicken with disciplined personal practices, perhaps of a new post-Covid sort, inspired and empowered by the presence of the Good Shepherd, who knows his own and his own know him.
Dr. Jarrett: in terms of today’s music, and text, what witness do you sense Bach brings us, of personal faith, within the setting of this lovely cantata?
Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music:
Bach
Today’s cantata, is, indeed, a lesson in faith, assurance, and the promise of God’s goodness in our lives. Cantata 69a – “Praise the Lord, o My Soul” was first performed on August 15, 1723, during Bach’s first three months as Cantor in Leipzig. We have seen in these cantatas not just a remarkable display of compositional craftsmanship, but also an authoritative theological understanding through both the compilation of the libretto and the setting of those texts. Cantata 69a features from beginning to end an exuberant and joyful hymn of praise of God and the good works that enable a life of faith. Opening with full festival forces with trumpets and timpani, Bach sets the words of Psalm 103, vs 2 in a marvelous double fugue. The music is absolutely radiant, brilliant, and brimming with the praise of all God’s faithful. With this rich texture, we can well imagine the sound of Wesley’s thousand tongues to sing the great Redeemer’s praise.
For Bach, the Gospel lesson of the day was from Mark 7, the account of Jesus healing the deaf man at the Sea of Galilee. As the cantata turns from corporate to personal praise, the soprano and tenor soloists join the voices that witnessed Jesus’s miracle proclaiming the goodness of his deeds, and the glory of God. The cheerful tenor aria is delightfully score for recorder and Oboe da caccia. Listen for the extended line that Bach writes for the word erzähle or “declare”, and like the man whose tongue Jesus loosed, the tenor promises a “Gott gefällig Singen durch die frohe Lippen” or a “God pleasing singing though joyful lips.”
With the following alto recit, we turn inward to remember our human frailty and shortcomings. With further reminder of the Gospel lesson, the alto calls on God to utter his mighty ‘Ephphata’ just as Jesus did in Mark 7:34. From the singing of that Aramaic word meaning “Be opened”, the otherwise syllabic recitative opens to a lovely melody on the words, “so wird mein Mund voll Dankens sein!” “ Then my mouth will be full of thanks!”
The bass aria which follows affirms God as Redeemer and Protector. The believer, here the voice of the bass, pens himself to Christ’s Cross and Passion, pledging to praise at all times. In the same way that Christ gladly took up the cross, thereby exalting his Passion, we, too, will rejoice and sing praise in our own Cross-bearing and suffering. Note the stark contrast of the lines for Kreuz und Leiden (Cross and Suffering) with “singt mein Mund mit Freuden” (My mouth sings with joy).
The final Chorale echoes the close of Mark 7 proclaiming “He hath done all things well!” “Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan, darbei will ich verbleiben.” Because God holds me in a fatherly embrace in his arms, I will let him alone govern me. Confidence, assurance, affirmation, and ultimately, faith to live in freedom, and freedom to live by faith.
The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel:
Social Involvement
The Christian life is a daily combination of personal faith and social involvement (repeat). Of deep personal faith, and active social involvement.
The community of the Gospel of John knew the necessity of nimble engagement of current experience, and the saving capacity to change, in the face of new circumstances. The community of this Gospel could do so because they had experienced the Shepherd, present, ‘here’, hic et nunc. In distress, we hold onto divine presence, on word, the Shepherd– here.
On the front porch of our beloved Marsh Chapel stands John Wesley, posed in preaching, who reminds us that there is no holiness save social holiness (repeat). In the tradition which gave birth to Boston University and to Marsh Chapel and so to our worship on this and every Sunday, personal faith and social involvement go together, and, in truth, are not found, except hand in hand.
As all of our 55 weeks and Sundays of worship, teaching, fellowship and remembrance, throughout these 385 days of contagion, masking and vaccine, have evinced among us, pistis and polis, faith and culture go together. Here Bach may help us, if especially in the surge of beauty his music showers on us a sense of grace, and in so doing gathers us as one. The older Lutheran preference for the two kingdoms, Christ and Culture in paradox, is at some lesser closeness to the transformational aspiration in Wesley’s social holiness. Yet Bach’s very vocational choice to embed himself in congregational musical life is itself a harbinger of transformation. More, the universal regard for the beauty of Bach itself places on the edge of a way forward, as a global village.
As women and men of faith, we are not free to celebrate faith apart from life, to affirm faith in ignorance of the polis, the city, the culture, the political. The Bible itself is a 66-book declamation of social justice, at every turn, by every writer, with every chapter, at every point. Moses, Amos, Micah, Matthew, Luke, Paul, All. Try and read the Bible without being confronted, accosted, seized and shaken by its fierce acclamation of the hope of justice. Real religion is never very far from justice, even though justice alone, a crucial part of the Gospel, alone is not the heart of the Gospel. The Gospel is love, which is more than justice—though not less.
You then, in real time, read the newspaper as well as the Bible. You have reason and obligation to be concerned about what you read. You have reason and obligation to be concerned about the persons and personalities driving cultural and political formation. You also have reason and obligation to be concerned about the policies, speaking of polis, which emanate from those personalities and persons, those forms of rhetoric and language and behavior. You have full reason and obligation to be concerned about public good, about the polis, about the forms of culture and civil society across our land, painstakingly built up over 250 years, that are not government and not politics, but are more fundamental and more fragile than both. You have reason and obligation to be concerned about the use of force of any kind, as we have been this past week. For example, our own BU President, Dr. Robert A. Brown faithfully wrote this week:
It’s my hope that this trial, and the activism and awareness which resulted from Mr. Floyd’s death, will bring us closer to that elusive equality, certainly as it relates to policing and the threat posed by law enforcement practices in communities of color. I also hope his legacy—and the legacy of the many other Black people who have lost their lives to police violence—helps to illuminate and redress the many other racial injustices which continue to afflict our society. These tragic deaths cast a bright and honest light on every form of racial antipathy, and I hope this energy carries into the fight we are having today to secure voting rights for people of color, and to stand up against every other manifestation of racism around the world.
Let us run the race set before us. So, as a runner, say, you have reason and obligation to be concerned about the route itself. Run with joy the race set, but neglect not to engage by precept and example the social support, the cultural forms required for the race. Like our beloved Marathon, which we have not celebrated now for two years, but we may honor in imagination today: The route. The roads cleared. The police. The first responders. The supporting cheerers. The rules and traditions. The many, thousands, standing by you, and standing with you, and standing for you. Personal holiness is the run. Social holiness is the route (repeat). They go together.
The Christian life is a daily combination of personal faith and social involvement (repeat). So, our song this Lord’s day, is just this:
Ah, would that I had a thousand tongues!
Ah, would that my mouth were
Empty of idle words! Ah, would that I said nothing other
Than what was geared to God’s praise!
Then I would proclaim the Highest’s goodness,
For all my life he has done so much for me
That I cannot thank Him in all eternity.
-Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music
Sunday
April 18
Imagine That
By Marsh Chapel
Click here to hear the full service
Click here to hear just the sermon
When I was young, my family moved from upstate New York to Northeastern Pennsylvania. We settled outside of Harford Township. A town with just over 1000 people at the time and still is not much larger today. I have grown accustomed, especially in New England to emphasizing the Harf. in Harford. There is no t in the name, but there is a yearly fair. The Harford Fair was always held in late August just before the start of school. The Fair held the promise of fireworks, friends, food, animals, and many other wonders to children and adults alike. Kids below 12 were always free, so my sister and I frequently roamed the fairgrounds.
Over time, my sister closest in age and I learned how to glean at the fair. There was loose change to be found below the bleachers after sheep showings and tractor pulls. We generally found enough for pizza or ice cream. A booth offered apples if you made a hole in one at mini-golf. It was free and the attendants were gracious if you missed. You just went back in the line until you made the shot. You could get free water from the Baptist booth, candy from Democrats and Republicans, popcorn from a local bank, and you could watch a 30-minute Christian cartoon in the shade to break the August heat. There were even a few years when family artwork won some ribbons at the school-house exhibits. To us, the fair teemed with possibility. We never quite knew what we would find, whom we would see, and the fun we would have but every August, the fair came and went.
Usually, we would watch the yearly fireworks as a family, and that meant a trip to the midway. The midway was the location of the rides and carnival games. We spent more time watching than playing there, but the lights and action were fun to see. You could feel the wind whipping from rushing rides, hear balloons popping from darts, and smell French fries. At our family trip to the Midway, Mom and Dad, or my older siblings, would slip us a few dollars and we would play some skee-ball for 10 cents a game back in the day. We would also play a ping pong ball toss game. For a dollar or two, you would get a basket full of ping pong balls, enough for all of us to take many turns. The objective of the game was to throw the ping pong balls into a narrow-rimmed cup. Most did not make it and fell to the wayside. Like many carnival games, the odds weren’t really in our favor to win the big prizes. The balls would hit the rims of the cup and bounce off but most years, one or two of us would manage to get a ball in a small prize cup. The small prize was always a goldfish in a plastic bag.
Whoever won the fish got to name it and it was theirs but we were all excited no matter who won. Throughout the evening, the fish would be thoroughly examined before being brought home. The fishbowl full of water would already be prepared and fishfood ready to be sprinkled. No matter what we did though, no matter what we tried, no fish ever lasted more than a few days. Most had gone belly up overnight. This meant that the fishbowl sat empty for most of the year. It sat empty until the fair rolled back into town. The empty fishbowl resided on a shelf across from my seat at the dinner table. I’d look at it longingly. It was a sign of death and failure. A source of discomfort. A wound for a child who mourned the loss of fish barely known and hardly attached. The empty fishbowl was a sign of death; yet, by grace it was also something else. It was also something more.
By grace, the childish wound of the empty fishbowl was also a sign of hope. For every year, with hopeful expectations I imagined what it would look like to have the fishbowl be a place of life. Every year, I looked forward to filling it with water with the hope that that year, things would be different. Filling the bowl with water each year and hoping took faith. Imaging the empty bowl full was an act of faith. This involved looking past what was to what could be seen through the childhood imagination. It was dreaming and wondering what could be if things were different.
There is a difference between childish imagination and the wonder of children’s imagination. Too often, the wonder of the imagination is set aside as childish but imagination is central to the recognition of what is real and what really matters. Science, language, arts, theology all rest upon some form of imaginative thinking and imaginative expressing. The imagination provides us meaningful paradigms to interpret life and hope in faith for goodness. The imagination does not have to be an escape from the world it can be a way of hoping for the world to come. Sometimes we have to imagine to recognize what cannot be seen otherwise. Sometimes we have to imagine to wonder at what could be. This type of imagination does not have to be childish or lead to passive reception of wounds. This type of imagination is not an opiate of the people it can be the very work that propels us to action. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream stemmed from a holy imagination that refused to allow white racism to dictate the terms of reality. He dared to dream from a different imagination. His imagination sparked hope when many thought hope was lost. The imagination can be a spark that rises from ashes to kindle new possibilities. It can propel us toward recognition of the ever-elusive presence of divine love in loose in the world today. This is desperately needed in this time of great woundedness.
Luke writes about wounds in this post-resurrection narrative following a post-resurrection narrative. Prior to this reading, Luke records that Jesus encountered disciples on the road to Emmaus. Jesus and the disciples spoke but the disciples did not recognize Jesus. On the road to Emmaus, Jesus taught but recognition did not come through quoting texts and convincing speeches. The disciples came to recognize Jesus when bread was broken. Broken bread. The bread of the Eucharist gives life but to do so has to be broken. Perhaps, another way of saying broken bread is wounded bread. After recognizing Christ in the wounded bread, Christ disappeared from the disciples. Then, the disciples turned around and went back to Jerusalem.
After returning to the eleven, it was while they were still speaking that Jesus appeared to them and said peace. Despite having just heard the testimony of those on the road to Emmaus, the disciples were startled and terrified when Jesus appeared to them. The text says that the disciples thought Jesus to be a ghost. A phantom spirit present but not physically there. He addressed the doubts verbally but then did something odd. To alleviate the concerns, Jesus invited the disciples to touch and feel his flesh but before doing that, he showed them his hands and feet. That is odd. Jesus did not ask them to look him in the eyes or tell them something that only he would know. He draws attention to his hands and feet. He showed them feet that journeyed with them and hands that had served them. He showed them hands and feet that they would recognize. But these hands and feet were not unchanged by the cross. Recall the Johannine passage read last week which makes explicit what Luke points toward. The hands and feet of Jesus bear the marks of the nails from the cross. Jesus drew their attention to the wounds of the cross.
Practical Theologian Mary Mcclintock Fulkerson tells us that “like a wound, theological thinking is generated by a sometimes inchoate sense that something must be addressed.”[1] Wounds, true wounds, cannot be ignored. They seek to be addressed. Theology, belief and faith about God often stem from wounds or relate to wounds. Wounds that could lead to questions and fear. Wounds that need to be addressed. Luke and John affirm that wounds can also be a place of recognition. A place where God has gone before us, not to justify, redeem, or cause wounds unilaterally, but to be recognized. Wounds can be a sources of imagination. Faith in Christ does not take away wounds, but faith in Christ is faith in a wounded God. Christ knew wounds and Christ knows wounds. This is the Christ that Black Liberation Theologian James Cone imagines as present among the lynched and suffering. Christ present and wounded at the site of suffering. Cone also tells us that it doesn’t take rope and a tree for a lynching to take place. They just as easily take place at the barrel of a gun. But whether it be at the barrel of a gun, the lynching tree, or the Roman cross, the God who suffers is the God of the oppressed. The risen Christ is the wounded Christ. Christ showed his wounds to the disciples so that they could imagine and recognize different possibilities.
In order to address their doubts and fears, Christ showed the disciples his hands and feet. Recognition did not come through a whirlwind of cosmic power or a glorious triumphal miracle. Recognition stemmed from wounds. The cross is foolishness but honestly, radical love involves foolishness. Imagining God’s radical love cannot speak past wounds or over wounds. It cannot spiritually bypass materiality. Jesus invited the disciples to see the very places where the nails were driven into his body. The resurrection did not take the scars away. Recognition of the scars led to recognition of Jesus as the Christ. “39 Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself.” See that it is I myself, or in Greek, egō eimi autos. egō eimi, I am. Jesus convinced the disciples of his personhood and presence by drawing attention to his scars. Look at my hands and feet; see that it is I myself… We see wounds all around us today. Wounds of the economic divide, racial divide, and political divides. We see wounds but do we see Christ? Do we imagine the wounded Christ present and propelling us toward change? The risen Christ is the crucified God. There is a great temptation to forget that. There is a great temptation to join Peter in his avoidance of Christ as Isaiah’s suffering servant. We cope with the wounded Christ on Good Friday. We sit unsettled with the death of Christ on Holy Saturday, but what about the wounded Christ as the risen Christ in Eastertide? This Christ is unsettling. Wounds are unsettling even as they call to be addressed.
In this Lukan scene, Jesus calls the disciples to witnesses to these things. Part of the resurrection, part of the witness is to wounds. Witnesses are those who have seen and testify through belief about that which they have seen and know. Christian memory is a witness to this Christ or it misses a core part of how to recognize Christ and imagine Christ. Christian witness is partly kindled from the imaginative spark called forth from wounds. To always miss wounds is to risk missing Christ. Wounds should not be unilaterally glorified or celebrated but they also cannot be ignored.
The disciples were looking right at Christ, but until bread was broken, until the wounds were shown, recognition of the risen Christ did not take place. This Christ is present in the work of love and liberation today. This Christ is present in places of suffering and oppression seeking to bring about wholeness and restoration. This Christ is recognized by wounds and in wounds. This work often takes form as resistance and counter-narration. The temptation to see Jesus only when the fishbowl is full precludes the work of imagining Christ when the fishbowl is empty. It is not just a good times and in bad time’s reminder, it is a question of faith, presence, and Christology. Christ is wounded even in glory. This Christ does not call us to ignore pain and circumstances or seek out suffering. This Christ is a reminder that the power of God is not in chariots and horses, nuclear weapons and guns but in everyday resistance to suffering with the wounded God.
The wounds of Christ are meant to imagine a world without wounds. In The Cross and Lynching Tree, James Cone put it this way, “The gospel of Jesus is not a rational concept to be explained in a theory of salvation, but a story about God’s presence in Jesus’ solidarity with the oppressed, which led to his death on the cross. What is redemptive is the faith that God snatches victory out of defeat, life out of death, and hope out of despair.”[2] These are ongoing activities seeking present day actuality. Wounds can help us identifying the liberating presence of incarnate resurrected love today. The risen love is loose in the world today but if we cannot recognize it, we will not see it.
Luke-Acts should certainly be read and interpreted together but it is significant that this wounded resurrection account frames the conclusion of Luke’s Gospel account. The final image of Luke is of the ascension but before the ascension, Jesus opens up the imaginative interpretive possibilities latent in the experiences and memories of the disciples. He shows the disciples how to interpret Scripture Christologically but also how to believe in the presence of wounds. The risen Christ continues to be present in the work of justice, liberation, and love today. The end is a new beginning. One unforeseen and unimaginable without the grace of God. But by the grace of God, we can imagine this world.
A few years ago, I was stuck in traffic on my way home from downtown Los Angeles to the San Fernando Valley. Zip-tied to a bridge over the freeway was a sign with one word written on it. The homemade sign said, “Imagine.” I’ve always wondered, “Imagine what” but even in imagining what, the sign has generated imaginative thought. The resurrected Christ is a Christ who asks us to recognize wounds and to imagine other possibilities. The imagination is not always an escape from the world it can be a way of hoping for the world to come. We stand at the intersections of wounds and woundedness. We recognize the risen Christ as the wounded Christ. We see the scars, and let us dare to imagine something different. Let us dare to imagine a world where people can get home safe regardless of skin color. Let us imagine a world where people can get home safe regardless of sex or gender. Let the imagination come to be, by the grace of the risen wounded Christ. Let us incarnate the love of God loose in the world today. Imagine that.
[1] Places of Redemption, 14.
[2] 150.
-The Rev. Scott Donahue-Martens
Ph.D. Student in Practical Theology: Homiletics
Boston University School of Theology
Sunday
April 11
Easter Basket
By Marsh Chapel
Click here to hear the full service
Click here to hear just the sermon
Memory
In our spiritual Easter basket this morning we find gracious gifts of memory and mind, of story and song.
Just before Easter some years ago, a dear mentor died, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin who had been our pastor at Riverside Church in New York. He comes to memory at Easter, as did this Easter. His example and service were a beacon and guide for us, as was his preaching, at Yale and then in New York. At Easter his memory arises, partly because he had gift for epigrams. In the joy of Easter there is in the seasonal basket the particular joy of his capacity to put things simply and say things briefly. He was a stellar epigrammatist, as in his own way, was the author of our fourth Gospel, read a moment ago. Here are a few from Coffin:
There is more mercy in God than sin in us.
To age is grow from passion to compassion.
When my son died God’s heart broke first.
The separation of church and state is not the separation of a Christian from her politics.
Lent is the time to get rid of your guilt.
I’m not OK, and you’re not OK. But that’s OK.
Courage is the most important virtue because it makes all the others possible.
Rules are signposts not hitching posts.
The woman most in need of liberation is the woman in every man.
Hell is truth seen too late.
The trick in life is to die young as late as possible.
The longest, most arduous trip in the world is the journey from the head to the heart.
It is often said that religion is a crutch. What makes you think you don’t limp?
Good preaching is never at people, it’s for people.
To me it is hard to believe a loving God would create loving creatures that aspire to be yet more loving, and then finish them off before their aspirations are complete. There must be something more….
Mind
In our spiritual Easter basket this morning we find gracious gifts of memory and mind, of story and song.
In a class on pastoral leadership this past week, we read Parker Palmer’s classic The Courage to Teach. In it he explores the relationship of the teacher’s inner life to the craft of teaching. Those truest to and closest to their own best selves invariably become the most mindful teachers, of whose insights we are most often reminded. Take Dr. Christopher Morse, who taught us to think about things. Like heaven for instance.
How are we to think about heaven?
One way to think about something is to think about its opposite.
Our Bible uses the word heaven in opposition to the word earth. Heaven is up there. Earth is down here. ‘Heaven and earth are full of thy glory’. ‘As the heavens are high above the earth’. ‘Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.’ Heaven represents the ultimate or penultimate reality of the physical world in the Bible, as it does in the ancient philosophers.
But we are today reluctant to think that heaven is up there. For we know that ‘Up There’ is the moon, the Milky Way, and the expanding, even infinite, universe.
Our Bible also speaks of heaven in contrast to hell. Now the comparison is not between up and down, as much as it is between lasting good and lasting bad. Heaven is good. Hell is bad. But we also have some question about these inherited, mythological accounts of hell, as well as similar accounts of this Heaven. Harps, wings, clouds…fire, forks, tails…Good we acknowledge. Evil we acknowledge. Hell as the absence of God, or of good, we acknowledge. But hell as eternal torment, administered in punitive ways by a divinity of somewhat unpleasant temperament, this hell we question.
Here is a third contrast. Not heaven and earth, nor heaven and hell, but heaven and hurt. It is at the heart John and the marrow of the Easter gospel that ‘something happened’. Not up and down, nor good and bad, but now and then. This contrast is built on time, rather than on space or on morals. Heaven is then, earth is now. A belief in heaven, then, is a trust in what is ‘taking place’ over against a knowledge of what is ‘in place’. What is taking place, contrasted with what is in place. What is at hand as contrasted to what is in hand. (I am indebted here to the work of my teacher, Dr. Christopher Morse). Now we see in a mirror dimly, then face to face. Now we see in mirror dimly. Then face to face.
Easter reminds, brings to mind. Heaven is both near and different, utterly close at hand, yet completely different from anything in hand. ‘The kingdom of God is at hand.’ ‘The reign of God has come near to you.’ ‘You are not far from the kingdom of God’. ‘The Lord is at hand…’And yet…there is nothing in our hands like what God hands us. The resurrection is Christ’s victory over death, when no other victory avails.
Story
In our spiritual Easter basket this morning we find gracious gifts of memory and mind, of story and song.
The Holy Scripture brings the story of Easter, nestled into our Easter basket this Eastertide.
Last week we heard from 1 Corinthians 15, wherein Paul writes to address an argument in the church about resurrection. (This is utterly fascinating in itself, since it shows that not 30 years after Jesus’ crucifixion there was already church disagreement about resurrection! Imagine that.)
It is a pastoral letter, a pastoral word. Paul sits at the bedside, as it were. He takes your hand and remembers your experience in receiving an inherited tradition: dead, buried, and raised on the third day. He mentions to you, hand on shoulder, the centrality of resurrection to the whole of Christian preaching. He pauses to place this account of resurrection into an apocalyptic frame, which he brought with him from Judaism, but notices your flagging interest in the history of religions. So, as he did with circumcision in Galatians, and as we are perhaps inclined to think he often did in polemic, Paul lets the whole Gospel ride on this one point, at this point. He recites names of people you also have heard of—Peter, James, others. With you, perhaps asking in Hemingway fashion for your experience too (what is your actual experience of life, death, love, the numinous?), he recounts experiences of others, who have known an appearance, apostles, individuals, and groups, even himself. (This is our one and only primary source reference to a personal experience of the Risen Christ, by the way). He points to popular religious practices (the experience, apparently known in the Corinthian church, of baptizing in the name of the dead). There is a lengthy pause. Then he dramatically asserts his own experience of suffering, and risks of death, as sure evidence of the power of resurrection. He pointedly equates denial of resurrection with license to do as we please. Paul even takes up, less intelligibly, and more mystically, the further question of how resurrection happens. He then more philosophically, and lengthily, assesses our experiences of the glories of nature, the created order, the firmament, the physical body. The passage is based on experience. While he starts with his own experience, he leans heavily on yours.
Then his conclusion. Listen for what is not said, too. Paul also, for all the experiential assurance of the chapter, clearly announces that he tells of a…mystery. Not a fact. A mystery. Not a miracle. A mystery. Not a wonder. A mystery. Not evidence or verdict. A mystery. Behold, I tell you a mystery…
To announce this mystery, the New Testament in general, and Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, convey three different accounts of resurrection. Peter (representing the first three gospels) emphasizes a physical resurrection, an empty tomb, more than resuscitation, to be sure, but physical nonetheless. Paul emphasizes a spiritual resurrection, known in revelation. John announces an existential resurrection, one that fills all of life and creation, that was presaged by the raising of Lazarus, one that makes the cross itself a glorification, a completion. Peter shows us an empty tomb. Paul blows the trumpet of heaven. John acclaims a full heart. All three emphases, perhaps providentially provided to reach the varied hearts and minds of various women and men, all the spots on the personality map, affirm that something happened. Something for dreamers, doubters and doers. Something for engineers, philosophers, and politicians. You may ask if they are all on the same page.
We reply, “They are singing out of the same hymnal: Sings Peter, ‘ours the cross, the grave, the skies’; sings Paul, ‘my chains fell off, my heart was free’; sings John, ‘he walks with me and he talks with me’.”
What the church has tried to name, over the centuries, in the weeks of Easter, is that something happened. Something physical, something spiritual, something experiential. There is room for your particular temperament here. To some measure, they must all be true. For the physical resurrection, the resurrection of the body, at the least is attested in the ongoing life of the church. And the spiritual resurrection is at least attested in the preaching of the faith. And the existential resurrection is at least attested in unexpected, undeserved, real love. Something happened. The church is alive. The future is open. Love is real. The Lord is risen indeed!
Song
In our spiritual Easter basket this morning we find gracious gifts of memory and mind, of story and song.
It has been just over a year since our last wedding at Marsh Chapel. So, to converse last week with a couple to be married up the coast this fall, the first since March of 2020, brought an unexpected wave of emotion. Joy! A song of joy of its own. After the conversation, the words and rhythms and gladness of weddings flooded in, in full. Especially the song of St. Paul, not always used in weddings, and when used not always rightly used, but still used often, an Easter song of love:
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful;
It is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;
It does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.
For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect;
But when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away.
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways.
For now* we see in a mirror dimly, but then* face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.
So, faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
Memory and mind, story and song: Made like him, like him we rise
Ours the cross, the grave, the skies…Alleluia!
The Lord is risen! He is risen indeed!
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
Sunday
April 4
Love and Truth
By Marsh Chapel
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Click here to hear just the sermon
Preface
Truth and Love are resurrection words. Synonyms of resurrection.
Charles Wesley sang them: Unite the pair so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety, learning and holiness combine, truth and love let all men see.
Notice how our Boston University seal is here embedded: learning, virtue, piety. Truth and love, for all to see.
The Lord is risen! He is risen indeed.
This year, on the heels of twelve months of hibernation, loneliness, worry, and death, may we hear the Easter good news, at is clearest, at its fullest, at its…simplest.
Truth and Love are resurrection words. Synonyms of resurrection.
More so: may we, may you, decide, from this day forward, to walk in resurrection light, to look for truth and to lean toward love. The Easter sermon comes with a stark, personal call to you, a challenge for you, to walk in the light as He is in the light, to walk in truth and love.
Truth
I share with you a sentence of my own. The wording is my own, though of course as with all and all, it draws on centuries and Scripture and others.
Here it is: There is a self-correcting spirit of truth loose in the universe. There is a self-correcting spirit of truth loose in the universe.
This truth, this spirit of truth, is the power of resurrection in daily life. Truth is what Easter means.
In 1995 we were sent to serve a wonderful church, in a new city, one more corporate and less academic, more formal and less familiar, richer but less communal than our own home city. What a privilege. What a privilege it is to be in ministry, in any case, to be present as the baby is born, to be present as the vows are taken, to be present as the losses and gains and defeats and victories of life cascade, to be present in the final hours and at the grave, reciting, Jesus said I am the resurrection and the life.
That Christmas one of the nine Sunday school classes in that church, each with up to 150 members, hosted a downtown black-tie Christmas party, in the lights and splendor of that then muscular urban setting, to hale the season, but also formally to welcome the new minister and his wife. What an honor. An older couple, a retired guidance counselor and lovely wife, came, as you would, to provide the newcomers a ride. It was a little grace inside in their case of a lifetime of grace. Some years later, as we saw our own children through high school, and drawing on forty years of experience, he said, speaking of teenagers, Yes, they will take you for a ride. It would be good to have another lifetime to try to become as true and loving a couple as were David and Joan Closson. After the dinner and dancing and festivities, we were again driven back, deposited at home, by grace.
This winter, January 20, 2021, I had a note from their daughter. The apple and the tree, as so often, not being very far apart. Here is what she wrote:
Hi Dr. Hill. My name is Judy Cama. My parents were Dave and Joan Closson, faithful members of Asbury for so many years. I even knew your wife when she was the music director at Onondaga Valley Presbyterian Church, as I lived in Syracuse for 8 years and we were members there.
I remember attending church services with my parents at Asbury during your Village Green series, I believe you called it. One sermon really resonated with me when you talked about the “self-correcting power of truth loose in the universe.” I really believe that and I remember taking copious notes in church that day. Since then I have related those words to many instances in my life and life in general and have shared the quote with many others. I have always wanted to let you know how impactful your words were.
Today as I watched Joe Biden become our new president your words resonated the loudest and prompted this email. I just wanted you to know that that particular sermon had tremendous staying power and I thank you for it. I hope you and your family members are doing well."
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. Before we get too far down the road into Eastertide and summer, and too tripped up in detail and complexity and variety and vagary, let us announce and trust the Easter gospel. Before we get too wrapped up in the petty narcissism of small religious differences, and the petty narcissisms of acute philosophical details, let us announce and trust the Easter gospel. Truth is stronger than death. Now most of the people and family who modeled us the gospel are dead, including Dave and Joan and ten thousand others. But their truth, the truth in which they lived, and more so still the truth in which and for which they died lives on. Soon you and I will also be dead, resting in God’s presence. That is the point, the existential reminder of Holy Week, as if we needed it in April of 2021. But truth lives on.
I am a perennialist. That means that I see and hear truth across many differences including and especially religious ones. That means I am more inclined to unity than sometimes seems popular today, more inclined to mutuality than sometimes seems politic today, more inclined to liberality than sometimes seems prevalent today, more inclined to judge that education is about what is old rather than what is new than sometimes makes the grade today, more inclined to that old perennialist creed: new occasions teach new duties, times makes ancient good uncouth, one must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth.
Here is a hard-edged question for you. Will you live in truth? Will you?
On the third day he rose again. Truth is the resurrection of the dead.
Love
I share with you another sentence of my own. As with first, you have heard me say it before. The wording is my own, though of course as with all and all, it draws on centuries and Scripture and others.
Here it is: There is a self-revealing presence of love loose in the universe. There is a self-revealing presence of love loose in the universe.
This love, this spirit of love, is the power of resurrection in daily life. Love is what Easter means.
In 1981 we were sent and posted to two little churches on the Canadian border. Our daughter Emily at age 3 could see the St. Lawrence river, down north in Canada, from her bedroom window. We were sent to serve two rural churches, graced by gracious, loving women and men, who had less education and more wisdom, less money and more sense, than all the other churches combined. This appointment allowed the initiation, and later the completion, of a PhD in Montreal. What a privilege. What a privilege it is to be in ministry, in any case, to be present as the baby is born, to be present as the vows are taken, to be present as the losses and gains and defeats and victories of life cascade, to be present in the final hours and at the grave, reciting, Jesus said I am the resurrection and the life.
A few days earlier, soon to be on the way north to that border town, and now with two little children under two, and a rented moving van soon to be packed, I drove from Ithaca to Syracuse to be interviewed for ordination. I stood outside a classroom at the University, wherein 300 or so clergy from the area were gathered, awaiting my time of questioning. Outside was the SU quadrangle where we had relaxed as high school students in the neighborhood some years earlier, and outside too were the steps of Hendricks Chapel where I would be ordained later that spring, if the clergy approved. In the church, you are who you ordain. In the faculty, you are who you tenure. In the University, you are what you endow (more on that at another time). So, yes, I was nervous, my stipend, housing, education and future depending on the next hour or so.
Many of the clergy I knew, having been the life guard at their summer camp the years before. They were bright, committed, adventurous, and a bit wild. On the whole, as a group, they were, their example was, what commended the ministry to me. They were alive in ways that others were not. Others of the clergy I knew through family and upbringing. These were both mixed blessings, as some did not appreciate the life guard’s whistle and some did not appreciate the candidate’s family. So, I was on edge. After a while I also was alone, at which point an older fellow, perhaps a professor, shorter, bearded and bespectacled, wearing jeans and sandals, came over to me. He asked who I was. He inquired about my presence. He sensed and asked after my anxiety. He nodded and smiled. Then—I realized then he was going into the meeting—he took my shoulder and said, Bob, you are going to do fine. I just know you will. And you have my vote for sure. A clean breeze blew through me. As he departed, I thought belatedly to ask, What is your name? He replied, Smith. Huston Smith. Oh my. Oh… my goodness! HUSTON SMITH! But I read your book, THE RELIGIONS OF MAN, I fumblingly responded. He smiled, and off he went, to join his fellow clergy.
I am perennialist. And I am personalist, too. That means that I see and hear the divine in the human person, in accord with a fine, long tradition at Boston University. While the philosophical underpinnings of that tradition have long been withered, the heart of the matter, the heart of personal experience of love remains, as in that perennialist professor’s kindness, overlooking a college campus, the friendly help of Huston Smith. We are a generation of women and men who have not yet fully heard the difference between knowing about someone and knowing someone. You can know about somebody by zoom. But to know somebody takes presence, takes voice, takes body, takes talk, takes personhood, take…love. Love is stronger than death. We are long way down the trail of I and It, and only at the trailhead of I and Thou. So, in one sense, I am still a personalist, a bit more inclined to conversation than is currently fashionable, to visitation than is currently ministerial, to presence than is currently possible.
Here is a hard-edged question for you. Will you live in love, lean toward love? Will you?
On the third day he rose again. Love is the resurrection of the dead.
Coda
Truth and Love are resurrection words. Synonyms of resurrection.
Charles Wesley sang them: Unite the pair so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety, learning and holiness combine, truth and love let all men see.
Notice how our Boston University seal is here embedded: learning, virtue, piety.
Truth and love, for all to see.
The Lord is risen! He is risen indeed.
This year, on the heels of twelve months of death, hibernation, loneliness and worry, may we hear the Easter good news, at is clearest, at its fullest, at its…simplest.
Truth and Love are resurrection words. Synonyms of resurrection.
More so: may we, may you, decide, from this day forward, to walk in resurrection light, to look for truth and to lean toward love. The Easter sermon comes with a stark, personal call to you, a challenge for you, to walk in the light as He is in the light, to walk in truth and love.
In a moment we will hear again the ancient liturgy for eucharist. We are not together to receive together the bread and cup. But we are together in relationship, by memory, in hope, through prayer. And with a little imagination, with eyes closed and hearts open, we might allow the familiar, ancient prayers of communion, to bring us into communion.
So, travel with a little imagination…Imagine Eucharist at Marsh Chapel. Stand to sing… Pause to reflect… Step out into the aisle… Look at and look past Abraham Lincoln and Francis Willard…Receive cup and bread, bread and cup… Kneel at the altar to pray… Stand in communion with the communion of saints…Here is the bread and cup of friendship…Imagine, if you are willing, a baptism, a wedding, a funeral, say right here, and a congregation reciting together a creed, a psalm, a hymn, a poem. Imagine, if you are willing, a congregation currently in diaspora, but just now, by the word spoken, a gathered and thus addressable community, you and I and all together.
Sursum Corda! Lift up your hearts…
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
Sunday
April 4
The Story Doesn’t End Here: Easter Sermon on Mark 16:1-8
By Marsh Chapel
An audio recording of this service is not available.
Christ is Risen! Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!
How good it is to be here, in person, worshipping together with all of you for the first time in over a year! Easter has arrived! We gather together in community, new and familiar faces, early this Easter morning to share in the joy of the Holy Spirit at the news of the impossible becoming possible and the glory of our salvation through Jesus Christ, our Lord. We’ve donned our Sunday best, are surrounded by the beauty of the creation, have the sounds of beautiful music from the Marsh Chapel Choir, and feel the exuberant energy of this festival day. We are glad to be together, although distanced and outdoors, to share in worship together. For some of us, including me, it has been a very long time since we have been able to worship in person! We joyfully hear the words of “Christ the Lord is Risen Today!” and shout our “Alleluias,” listening for the good news of grace freely given through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
However, our Gospel reading for today does not seem to match the positive feelings we might have about our service this morning. In fact, I’d go as far to say that it’s somewhat off-putting given the celebratory nature we expect from our Easter service. In Mark’s telling of the resurrection, the oldest of the gospel accounts, we are greeted only with an empty tomb, a man dressed in white, and women who deeply loved Jesus left in stunned silence, too scared to go and share what they have witnessed. Most scholars agree that the original ending of Mark is verse 8, where our gospel reading ends today. There is no triumphant celebration of victory over death in this ending, just stunned silence.
Imagine yourself following along with these three women – Mary Magdelene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome – as they approach the tomb where Jesus had been laid days earlier. These three women had seen the traumatic death of Jesus from afar, having been Jesus’ followers with other women from Jerusalem during Jesus’ ministry (Mk. 15:40-41). They saw him crucified, give up his final cry, and die. They now approach his tomb with trepidation – they could not anoint his body before this point because it was the Sabbath. The violent death Jesus faced at the hands of the authorities does not dissuade them from their task to make sure his body is properly prepared for burial. Instead of fear of being discovered, their biggest concern is that they will not be able to access his tomb because of the large, heavy rock that had been used to seal it. The task seems almost impossible, but they are moved forward by their love, care, and devotion to Jesus in these last moments with his body.
It is no surprise then that the women are shocked when the rock had already been moved away! No one else would have any reason to visit Jesus’ tomb. Who else could have possibly moved away this stone? Not only that, but where is Jesus’ body?! This is not at all what the women expected when they set out to the tomb that early morning. Their worry shifts to alarm as they encounter the young man in white. This young man in white, perhaps an angelic figure, is not identifiable by any of these women, but he knows exactly whom they seek (Jesus of Nazareth), where he has gone (He is not here…he is going to Galilee), and what the women and the disciples (who are not there) are to do now (Go, Tell!). He tries to calm the women: “Do not be alarmed,” he states. But it’s too late. The women, those same women who had been devoted followers of Jesus throughout his ministry are alarmed. Even more than that, their alarm turns to fear and doubt.
Doubt is the antithesis of faith. Faith requires trust. Fear prevents the women from fully putting their trust in the words of the young man in white. He instructs the women, “But go, tell” the disciples of Jesus’ resurrection and plans to meet them in Galilee. The women don’t “go” or “tell.” In placing trust in their own perception of the events surrounding Jesus’ resurrection they falter in their faith in trusting God and Jesus, even though Jesus has expressed previously that he will return to them. Many of us would have the same reaction if placed in a similar situation. The mixture of emotions with the traumatic events which have taken place may have well left us too afraid to say anything to anyone else. In today’s political and social climate, some may relate with feeling too uneasy with our own religious tradition to be bold proclaimers of our faith to others. We fear judgment of our beliefs or that our experiences of the Divine will not be understood by others who have not shared in them.
Mark’s gospel does not shout the good news of Jesus’ resurrection, but quietly retreats into stunned silence. What a strange way to end the gospel that is supposed to declare the Good News of Jesus Christ. What are we supposed to take away from such an abrupt ending? It would be easy to assume that Mark was mistaken in writing the ending this way – that perhaps the rest of Mark’s gospel was lost and there was a more satisfying ending in which the resurrected Jesus actually appeared to the women and the disciples and told them what to do next. In fact, early Christians were so certain that the ending of Mark must’ve been a mistake that they added in their own set of verses around the 2nd century C.E. to make the story feel more “complete.”
However, most New Testament scholars now recognize that the choice to leave the gospel on a cliffhanger may have been intentional by its writer. The silence of the women opens up the possibility for those reading the text to proclaim the good news.[1] Even though the written word of the gospel ends at verse 8, the story does not end here. You see, Jesus is not just a dead historical figure and the resurrection is not a one-time event. We’ve been saying so all morning – Alleluia, Christ is Risen! IS RISEN! Jesus continues to live and act in the resurrection.
We are a part of this Easter story. The man in white at the tomb speaks to us, just as the Holy Spirit continues to guide us in our faith. As New Testament scholar, Ira Brent Diggers, points out, “Christian discipleship is always Easter ministry.”[2] We continue to experience this Easter story throughout the rest of the year. An empty tomb gives us the opportunity to see how Jesus is and can be present to us in our lives. The good news of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins is not just that it happened, but that it continues to happen for you (LC V, BoC 469.21-22). We are justified by faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and receive the free gift of the grace of God through our faith. We might have our own moments of doubt or trepidation in claiming or proclaiming our faith, but the Holy Spirit through the Word and sacraments reminds us that we do not have to be afraid, we need only trust in God and God’s promises (LC V, BoC 473.61-63). We may feel lost in knowing what to do next in the face of adversity, but God continues to remain steadfast with us no matter the circumstances, even if the tomb is empty.
Our faith in the promises set forth by God through Jesus and the Holy Spirit bring us together to form the church and to be God’s witness to the world (Ap VII & VIII, BoC 175.13). Faith is a gift to us from God. We do nothing to manufacture it, but instead receive it through the means of grace. God meets us where we are through hearing the scriptures and participating in the sacraments. We grow in faith each time we hear the Word proclaimed, sharing in that moment with others and allowing its messages to touch us personally (Ap IV, BoC 131.67). We encounter Jesus each time we hear the words of institution – “This is my body, given for you…This is my blood, shed for you…Do this in remembrance of me…” (LC V, BoC 473.65). When we partake in the Lord’s Supper, it physically binds us to the reality of Jesus’ sacrifice through eating the bread and drinking the wine (AP XXIV, BoC 271.73). We witness God’s choice of us and others each time a new member is brought into our community through Holy Baptism. We feel the Holy Spirit move and inspire us as we join together in Word, sacrament, and song as the church, whether we are physically together or sharing in the Word virtually through radio waves and internet streams. In all of these acts we continue to strengthen our faith in God and the relationships we form with one another in the Body of Christ here and beyond the walls of this church. Faith has the power to be transformative in our lives, opening our hearts and enabling us to be in service to others. The voice of the Holy Spirit invites us to “go, tell” others about the amazing things Christ does for us. An empty tomb is a sign of possibility. The story doesn’t end here. It’s only just beginning. Alleluia! Christ is Risen!
[1] Tucker S. Ferda, “The Ending of Mark and the Faithfulness of God: An Apocalyptic Resolution to Mark 16:8,” Journal of Theological Interpretation, Vol. 13, No. 1, 2019.
[2] Ira Brent Diggers, “April 4, 2021: Commentary on Mark 16:1-8,” Working Preacher, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/resurrection-of-our-lord-2/commentary-on-mark-161-8-7 , accessed April 4, 2021.
-Dr. Jessica Chicka, University Chaplain for International Students
