By Marsh Chapel

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Mark 11: 1-11

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Said St. Patrick, “I arise today through a mighty strength”.

Letter

It is not so long ago that we greeting Jesus at his nativity, humming carols at home and lighting candles of hope in winter windows.  It is not so long ago that we witnessed his growth in wisdom and stature, in the knowledge and love of God, while as a teenager he taught in the temple.  It is not so long ago that this mighty young man Jesus stooped, fully human, for baptism in the surging river Jordan, the river of death and life.  It is not so long ago that we saw him take up his ministry among us, preaching and teaching and healing.  It is not so long ago that with Peter and James and John we saw him ascend the Mountain of the Transfiguration.  With him, up through the mountains have we climbed this Lent, step by step.

We are delivered from captivity, from the power of fear, in the announcement of the Gospel. It is the word of faith that delivers from enslavement to fear. From separation anxiety, survival anxiety, performance anxiety, anxiety about anxiety. The good news carries us home, to the far side of fear.

Say, to profiles in courage.  One day you may be coming home to Boston.  You may fly into Logan Airport.  You may deplane and walk toward the exit. And there you will find a greeting from the past.  A visitor today to the cradle of liberty, the home of the bean and the cod, coming by air will walk underneath a bright portico at the Airport, adorned with the countenance of a familiar President, whose term of office was tragically foreshortened.   He is pictured pointing out a rocket on the launch pad.

You cannot help but pause. John F Kennedy.  Boston Airport.  A new frontier.  A profile in courage.   An entrance into a new place.  A homecoming lit up in green.  A New England place.  Like the Gospel itself, a new space, a newness of life. The familiar Presidential Boston voice simply says: ‘We do not choose to go to the moon because it is easy to do so.  We choose to go to the moon because it is hard.’ (He recalls O.W. Holmes: Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing. While we are permitted to scorn nothing but indifference…). Not because it is easy, but because it is hard.  For the same reason some choose the ministry, not because it is easy.   He evokes St. Patrick:  I arise today through a mighty strength.

Paul needed this strength.  Today Paul writes, alone in prison. His own missionary work, as we can overhear from chapter 1 of Philippians, is under revision and redirection by others who claim he has failed in certain key areas. His own personal future is more than cloudy, including the possibility of death, and again, his ruminations in the first chapter of Philippians bear this out. He acclaims deliverance for the captives, you and me, a saving drumbeat along the river of life. He has a sight line to the far side of fear.

Ane, he is unafraid, this Apostle to the Gentiles, to quote his opponents. His Gnostic opponents sang hymns, like that in the Poimandres. In these hymns they celebrated a great mind in the universe. They acclaimed the forms of God. They spoke of emptying and filling. They especially and repeatedly compared human life to enslavement in these writings and hymns. To be human is to be ensnared by the elemental spirits of the universe, to be at the mercy of the cosmic, that is historical and natural, forces all around us. To be human is to be humbled by death, even ignominious death. They sang the praise of a Redeemer, who was once preexistent in the form of God, who came to earth in human guise, and who returned to the father’s house, preparing rooms for his followers, and being the most highly exalted. The name beyond all names, the light beyond all lights, before Whom all bow…

Sound familiar? It sounds like Philippians 2.

Philippians 2 sounds like a Gnostic hymn. Paul may have lifted and used it, because his hearers know it and because it suits his message. It is a plundering of the Egyptians, a use of the cultural language of the day to convey great tidings of good news. You need not fear. You need not fear. God has broken in upon our fear, and invaded this life with liberation to live fully and lastingly! God’s beachhead is the cross. The cross is the presence of God in suffering. The cross is the love of God in suffering. The cross is the power of God in suffering, to free the captives—to free every human being—from fear.

I wonder if we can recapture, by the imagination, Paul’s decision to recite for himself and for his correspondents, a hymn to the faithful love of God that carries us over, to the far side of fear. Here is Paul.  Here is the outspoken leader of a religious movement charged with atheism, with rejecting the gods of the empire. Here he is alone in prison. Here he affirms what can only be affirmed by faith, the victory of the visible over the invisible, of God beyond the many gods, of Christ the failed messiah over the cross of his failure. He does so in measured, nearly serene tones.

His attention is captured by the servant Christ, here so like the figure in Isaiah. To be a human being, for Paul, is to be captive under the control of malignant powers, to live in a world in which the human being has too often fallen prey to powers that are aligned and arranged against what is truly human.  In days, like today, following the racist slayings in Atlanta, and following the senseless slayings in Boulder, and clouded by our abject unwillingness as a people to confront gun violence, and guns, and violence, we can readily, fully, even without sermonic amplification, hear Paul in Philippians.

Yet, as one himself immersed in fear, Paul, seized by Christ, is set to singing in his prison cell. Maybe today, given our fears, we may hear something of his happy news.  I arise today through a mighty strength. Meditate this Palm Sunday on what in the past has brought you strength, what brings you home.

The west side of Syracuse New York includes Tipperary Hill, the only neighborhood in America where the green light is on top of the red light in the stoplight.  The green light is on top, just so you know.  Especially coming home that light guides and illumines.  The streets on Tipperary Hill are named for poets.  Tennyson, Bryant, Milton, Coleridge, and Whittier, Whittier the street where my dad grew up.  He said he was the only Protestant on Tipperary Hill.  That was an exaggeration. He said he had to fight his way to and from school every day. That was an exaggeration.  He said all his classmates grew up to be priests or policemen.  That was an exaggeration.  He said the streets of Tipperary Hill were the birthplace of great leaders.  That was not an exaggeration.  I give you Theodore Hesburg, born on Tipperary Hill, for 35 years the President of Notre Dame. I look forward to coming home again, someday, say this summer, to a place of poetic memory, a poetic topography.  Speaking of Whittier:

I know not what the future hath of marvel or surprise

Assured alone that life and death God’s mercy underlies

And so, beside the silent sea

I wait the muffled oar

No harm from Him can come to me

On ocean or on shore

I know not where His islands lift

Their fronded palms in air

I only know I cannot drift

Beyond His love and care

Gospel

And now the passion.  And now it is time to come down from the mountain, to take the full measure of this Man, the Son of Man, and to have the courage to let Him take our full measure, too.  The crisp air and vistas of the mountain pass have fed our souls.  But now it is time to head home, and turn our face to Jerusalem.  It is not so long ago that with Peter and James and John we saw him ascend the Mount of the Transfiguration.  With him, up through the mountains have we climbed this Lent, step by step.  And now the passion.

The road down the Mount of Olives, or down any mountain, can tax the traveler.  It reminds us all of earlier homecomings.

Odysseus walking the last few miles to Thebes.  Socrates walking to the center of Athens and the cup of hemlock.  Richard the Lionhearted sailing the English Channel, heading home.  A prodigal son, scuffling up the last mile of country road toward a dreaded homecoming.  You, returning at last to whatever you have long avoided, wandering as you have in the Galilee of the rest of life.  At last, there is an Emerald City, and the road home.

Today, we raise a question.  What was Jesus’ state of mind, what was on his mind and heart, as he entered the Holy City?

It is perilous, even arrogant, at this late date and from this great distance, to try to imagine Jesus’ state of mind as he descends the Mountain and enters the City.

Albert Schweitzer, before he went of to heal the jungle sick, showed convincingly how inevitably errant are all such attempts.  More recent attempts, like those of NT Wright and Marcus Borg, only confirm Schweitzer’s thesis.  We paint our own inner lives into the life of Jesus, when so we try to see what cannot be seen in Scripture.  That is, against some more popular work of recent years, I still fully agree with Schweitzer.  And yet, particularly at this point in his journey, on Palm Sunday, at the entrance into the Holy City, and on the threshold of his own death,  we are haunted—are we not?—by the desire to see what Jesus saw and feel what he felt and sense what he did sense, coming home.

Now Jesus is walking down into the city, down off the mountain, and down into the heart of his destiny.  He is going to his grave.

Some of the Gospel today, as Jesus heads home, is too true to be good.  For He is not at home, not at home, in a world of injustice, abuse, violence, and death.  For him, in such a benighted world, there is really no place like home.

Jesus is heading home. As are we all, though, it seems sometimes to be a conspiratorially well-kept secret.  We all are walking down the Lenten mountain and into our lasting, our last future.  Every one of us is going to die.  We are going home.

Here are two possible sentiments in Jesus’ heart and mind as he descends the Mount of Olives.

First.  He looks back upon his ministry and feels that he is homeless. He has found no lasting nest on earth, no lasting crib, no lasting domicile.   He has found opposition and rejection.  He has encountered misunderstanding and criticism.  To a harsh world he has brought a gentle manner.  To a wolfish world he has brought the labor of love.  To a selfish community he has brought the summons to service.  To an inconsistent dozen disciples, he has brought the steady presence of peace.   He has not found a home, no home for Jesus, descending the Mount of Olives.   He has even said of himself, “foxes have their holes, and birds of the air their nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”

Some of greatest sentences ever written in English are devoted, in Hamlet’s soliloquy to a similar ennui, a similar existential vagrancy.

And those of us who have been shot out of the saddle, riding for a righteous cause, as we dust ourselves off and bind our wounds, we do so in the best of company, in the company of the crucified, for whom, on this green earth, as yet, there is no place like home.   Today you may feel shot out of the saddle.  But let me ask you something.  What other saddle would have rather ridden?  Some losing causes are worth support even in defeat.  I would rather be shot out of the right saddle than to canter comfortably all the live long day in the wrong one.  So, dust off, bind the wound, and get ready to ride again.  It is a warning.  This last 52 weeks has been one long warning.  Just because we were alive last year is no guarantee that we will be next year.  We have not a person, dollar, idea, day or dream to spare.  Not one.  And it is, let us confess it, an uphill pull.

Second.  There is something else alive in this homeless homecoming.  Frederick Buechner compares the feeling of faith to the feeling homesickness, that longing for the feeling of home.  Faith is a heartfelt longing for the comforts of home.

Jesus looks forward to his passion and feels that he is going home.  He is not yet home, but going home. He has come and now he must go.  He tarries for a while, but he is going home.  Only the greatest of the Gospels, that of John, fully and resoundingly displays this sentiment.  But it is present, muted, in Mark as well.  Jesus must endure the cross, just as we inevitably must endure tragedy, accident, betrayal, injustice, failure and death.    We have the finest of company, the Lord Jesus Christ himself, when we endure life’s damaging darkness.  Some have lost loved ones to death, this past year.  Some of lost beloved institutions to death, this past year.  Some have lost beloved dreams to death, this past year.  Jesus walks beside you.  Jesus walks beside you. In fact, this is his peculiarly chosen path, his way, his way of the cross.  All of the passion, all of the passion music of Lent, all of it, all the way to the cross itself, acclaims, in passion, the compassion of God in Christ our Lord.  God has a passion for compassion.  God has a passion for compassion.   So Jesus looks forward—does he not?—to the completion of his mission, to the last word in the soliloquy, to the transition to glory.  Again, only John has fully held this diamond.  Only he sees the cross as glory, without remainder.  Only he has Jesus say, on the cross, as we remembered last week, “it is completed”.  But Mark too senses Jesus homesickness at his homeless homecoming.  His longing for God.  And we sense it too, because we feel it, too.

Some of the Gospel today, as Jesus heads home, seems too good to be true.  This greatest of passionate tragedies, the cross of Christ our Lord, is the passageway, strangely, wonderfully, to our heavenly home.  He dies as we die.  And we die with Him.  We all die.  We are not even temporarily immortal.  Yet, attendant upon this road down the mountain and into the city, there resounds, softly at first, a carol of grace, a carol of love, a carol for all, like we, who are going home.   And we are.  Going home.

This homesickness, this spirited sense that home is over the next street, up the winding trail to the cross, this hunger for home, this is what Paul meant elsewhere:  this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison…this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison. 

You know, we came far closer on January 6 to a final moment in the American experiment of democracy than, on the whole, we have yet fully to internalize, than, thus far, we are willing to admit.  We just do not want to face it.  We will, over time.  Yet coming home, as a country, in the weeks following, perhaps it helped to awaken us to hear, coming home, reminders of a green light on top, reminders of a mighty strength:  not the example of our power but the power of example…history, faith and reason will show us the way…we are defined by our common loves (Augustine)…there is a cry for racial justice 400 years in the making…and…especially…and hope and history rhyme (Heaney).

One way or another, are you coming home today?  If so take with you the breastplate of St. Patrick.  Said he:  I arise today through a mighty strength. Said St. Patrick, “I arise today through a mighty strength”. Said St. Patrick, “I arise today through a mighty strength”.

Sursum Corda:  Lift up your hearts!

-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel

posted in Lenten Series 2021: St. Patrick, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.28.2021 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

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John 12: 20-33

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John

Now Jesus stands before us at the feast, talking with Greeks as a reminder in John that Jesus came for us, the non-Jews, so that the boundaries of Israel might be expanded, and a branch might be grafted onto the tree of life. Today Jesus stands before us in all his youth. He stands before us as a young man facing certain death. He is a grain of wheat that is cast into the earth and that then brings forth much fruit. His is a life of servant love, given over against so many others who clutch at life, and tragically lose it. Selfishness kills. Generosity saves. Selfishness kills. Generosity saves.

But now the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.

For John and his church, this meant that the hour has come for faith. The hour has come to see past and see through the physical reality of death to its true significance.

The hour has come to see past and see through the shameful and painful reality of crucifixion to its true significance. The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. This fourth gospel trims out of the story of Jesus’ death almost all the harsher detail, all the spitting, all the degradation, all the abject humiliation, all the brutality-they are gone. Peter’s denial and the crown of thorns alone remain. And this is because for John the cross of Jesus Christ is not crucifixion alone, nor departure alone, nor exaltation alone. This hour is first of all the hour of glory.  So, Matthew may end his gospel with a cry: Eli Eli lamasabacthani. Luke may conclude his gospel with a prayer: Father forgive them for they know not what they do. But John ends with a single word-tetelestai-it is finished. What the world sees as defeat is really a triumph and what the world sees as the end of Jesus’ hopes and aspirations is really the beginning of his ascent to glory. (Blessed Ashton). The heart of life is found in love and death, and today we are right at the heart of life. Love and death, these are our existential space and our daily time.  We are told today to find our life by losing it, to drop our grain that fruit we may gain, we are taught again to love our neighbor as if she were our very self.

In these verses, John 12:20-33, there lingers an essence, a fragrance that eludes description. Why did Dostoevsky choose these verses as frontispiece to his greatest novel, Crime and Punishment? John seems to have distilled a potent nectar, more potent than that found elsewhere, from his knowledge of loss. Why are these verses so haunting?

I believe they astound us so, because they reflect a double death. I believe the sense of glory found in the cross here comes from the hard lesson of loss, in a little church, somewhere in Turkey, turned out of the synagogue, and losing or about to lose, long after the death of Jesus, their last link with the primitive church. In the cross, in their loss, they saw both the death of Jesus, and the death of their beloved disciple, their beloved preacher, their pastor, John. The fourth Gospel is so strange and so startling because it operates at two levels, first that of Jesus and second that of John. After decades of pastoral care, guiding them through change, leading them out of the synagogue, protecting them from their own worst selves, reminding them of Christ the Lord, and showing them how to walk in the light, the towering figure of their beloved preacher was overtaken by death.

First, they lost Jesus, then they lost John. Both losses hurt with unspeakable pain. But here is what they learned: love carries us through loss. Love carries us through loss. Love outlasts loss. In fact, only self-opening love can bring any meaning through loss!

Patrick

Our Lenten conversation partner St. Patrick deeply and fully shared this Johannine sense of loss and love, of loss in love.  The brooding, the longing, the poetry he and his followers, over many centuries, gave to life is located, met, at the intersection of loss and love, a spot we have known keenly in the last 12 months, as we recalled last week.

Near the year 400, a boy named Patrick was kidnapped in Britain and taken as a slave to Ireland.  For six long years he lived poor and alone, a shepherd slave, out in the cold green meadows and mountains.  He lived poor and alone, and as we mostly do, found his faith in trouble.  He turned to the Creator God of his parents, and found a magnificent source of strength.  Out of poverty, out of silence, out of fear, out of hunger grew the life changing faith of St. Patrick, who spent thirty years among the people of Ireland, bringing faith outside the Roman Empire. I wonder where we might find Patrick today.   For out beyond the bounds of what remains of Christian culture today there live many for whom the Gospel is pure news, not just good news, but news.  Our mission is blocks away as well as time zones away.  A friend who normally sits in the balcony when there is seating and seating in the balcony reminded me this winter of Thomas Cahill’s short book, his essay from some years ago, one with a jaunty title and a graceful lyrical composition, How the Irish Saved Civilization.  He tells about St. Patrick, and about his successors the Green Martyrs, and a country of green meadows.  Since our fifteenth Lenten conversation partner, here at Marsh Chapel 2021, is St. Patrick, it seemed time to blow the dust off the volume.

Patrick inspired a host of others to follow him and to follow his Christ.  He embodied a love of nature, a sense of confidence, and a capacity for vision which were wrought in the dark days of his poverty.  Out in the shepherd fields he found his love of nature.  His natural world was forever teaching him, forever succoring him, forever saving him.  Most of us are too far from nature.  We take too few walks, and attend too few funerals.  From this first love, he then found a confidence in God.  A confidence that gave him ease, real peace, in the face of difference, in the need for confession, and, centuries early on, as a champion of the place of women.  Faith is contagious, when it is confident, as Patrick was confident.   Somehow, this poor shepherd, this lover of nature, this confident happy fellow, found a capacity to envision, the power to envision, daily, a better world.  Nature, confidence, vision—these gifts are ours today as well.

For in Patrick’s wake there arose, in the fifth and sixth centuries, an Irish movement called the Green Martyrs.  They took to heart his love of nature, his sense of confidence, and his capacity for vision.  Their country, almost alone had received Christian faith without bloodshed—they had no “red martyrs”.  They knew though that the blood of the martyr is the seed of the faith.  So, they endeavored to offer themselves as Green Martyrs.  And off they went to live as hermits and monks, each in his little cell, copying books, providing hospitality to strangers, living out of doors, keeping a memory of past beauty and glory alive through the dark ages. *

They knew the bright side of Christ.   So, they went off into the green woods or the green mountains or the green islands of their native land—there to be faithful, to pray, to read, to love, to commune.  They went to draw nearer to God.

Nature

One follower of St Patrick in the sixth century wrote:

Grant me sweet Christ the grace to find—

Son of the living God

A small hut in a lonesome spot

To make it my abode

A little pool but very clear

To stand beside the place

Where all men’s sins are washed away

By sanctifying grace

A pleasant woodland all about

To shield it from the wind

And make a home for singing birds

Before it and behind. *

There is a holiness to the creation itself that we do not always well articulate.  One of our leading feminist theologians and teachers, Elizabeth Johnson, has in her work and teaching clearly reminded us of this.  Nature sings, teaches, helps, saves.  Bless those past and present Green Martyrs who by their example help us to live in easy communion with Nature, to walk lightly upon the earth.  Bless those past and present Green Martyrs who by their example notice the sacred groves in which we dwell.

An early Irish poet sang:

I am an estuary into the sea

I am a wave of the ocean

I am the sound of the sea

I am a powerful ox

I am a hawk on a cliff

I am a dewdrop in the sun

I am a plant of beauty

I am a boar for valor

I am a salmon in a pool

I am a lake in a plain

I am the strength of art*

Confidence

From this easy communion with nature, there arose in Patrick and in his Green Martyrs a kind of confidence.  What an inspiring quality is confidence!  Confidence before potential conflict.  Confidence in the face of uncertainty.  Confidence, which the poor must have as the Scripture continually reminds us, in front of random hurt.  Confidence to offer hospitality (will they like my home? will they receive my friendship? will they accept my meal? will they reciprocate?).  Confidence to accept difference.  Confidence of women among men and men among women.  As Thomas Cahill says, it is confidence that builds a nation, a civilization, a culture, a people.  And it is confidence that is lost when a civilization grows weary and small.  Think of your own heroes, your own role models.  Were they not inspiringly confident?  Not arrogant, or pushy, or aggressive, or domineering.  Confident.

There is a connection between being at home in nature and being confident in life. There is confidence that comes from reading, from learning something every day. In 1843, just a visitor to the Irish city of Kerry noticed a poor farmer, alone at midday, and reading an old manuscript.  The visitor was startled to find, in the gnarled hands of this poor man, an old manuscript.  Written in the Irish language, in Celtic character.  Containing poems, stories, histories, philosophy.  Handed down from grandfather to father.   A poor man holding a priceless book. *

Sometimes gifts come from unexpected sources. Here is one.  Confidence.  Confidence that God is a God of love—no small affirmation.  Joseph Plunkett wrote:

I see his blood upon the rose

And in the stars the glory of his eyes

His body gleams amid eternal snows

His tears fall from the skies

I see his face in every flower

The thunder and the singing of the birds

Are but his voice—and carven by his power

Rocks are his written words

All pathways by his feet are worn

His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea

His crown of thorns is twined with every thorn

His cross is every tree. *

Vision

Over a lifetime, one lived in communion with nature, and one filled with a sense of confidence, it may be that a capacity for vision emerges.  It was true for Patrick.  It was true for the Green Martyrs.  In their little huts, through the Dark Ages, fully at peace, furiously copying, making books, making books.  Living beyond heartache, into God’s future.  Learning to love words.  Recognizing that the one sacrifice needed, Christ crucified, has been made, by God.  Ritual sacrifices are no longer needed.  We may seek together God’s purpose.  This is good news for leaders, today.  I love the Bishop Cyprian, himself a lover of the city, whose motto still is central to leadership: “From the beginning, I made up my mind to do nothing on my own private opinion, without your advice and without the consent of the people”. *  That is, what will last is what we have the courage to share.  It may be that in our time, this very year, say, we are learning again to savor a biblical vision.

You know, the cities across upstate New York, my home, came to life 170 years ago, along the path of the Erie Canal.  In their, in our, spiritual constitution, lie buried, though not long dead, memories of what poverty can mean.  Today, we are fast becoming two nations, separate and unequal.  Our public institutions, protectors of the non-rich, are today imperiled.  Our public health.  Our public schools.  Our public parks and places.  Our public churches—I mean churches that have not yet succumbed to the temptation to return to sectarian life, those who will yet dare to be both residents and aliens, not merely resident aliens, willing to see in Christ the vision of a culture transformed, a culture and country to be shared. We need to remember the poor, this Lent.

For it is the poor, the outcast, who at depth know the endless contention of time, and of our time, caught as they are in its undertow.  We in our churches have forgotten our own poverty, our days not long past, of want.  Once, we were poor.  Your family, too, if you go back far enough or long enough.  Not that long ago.  Because we have forgotten, or hidden, our own hurt, not long past, we miss Jesus among the poor, Jesus who meets us amid the endless contention of life.

Here is a vision, a green country vision. We are a church universal, a church catholic.  We are not to leave the poor behind.

Will you acquire an easy communion with nature and nature’s God?

Will you seek a sense of confidence?

Will you develop a capacity for vision?

By the side of the road, from your little garden, will you share a love of nature, a sense of confidence, a capacity for vision?

Will the riches of the poor—nature, confidence, vision—be yours and ours to share?  Today?  As our spiritual worship?

Coda

Here is a challenge written this winter by Leigh Stein (the author most recently of the novel ‘Self Care’, a satire of the wellness industry and influencer culture) (NYT 2/21):  There is a chasm between the vast scope of our needs and what influencers can provide.  We’re looking for guidance in the wrong places.  Instead of helping us to engage with our most important questions, our screens might be distracting us from them.  Maybe we actually need to go to something like church? Contrary to what you might have seen on Instagram, our purpose is not to optimize our one wild and precious life. It’s time to search for meaning beyond the electric church that keeps us addicted to our phones and alienated from our closest kin. 

So, dear ones, walk the meadows and open landscapes of a spirited green country.  Watch this week for worship in life, the green country of lasting life, the places where Sunday and weekday join hands and dance.  If what you are saying and doing has some place in the liturgy on Sunday, then you may have found fruitful life:

Does it glorify God?

Does it meet and greet the neighbor?

Does it provoke honest confession?

Does it provide for children, for the poor?

Does it include silence?

Does it allow a listening for truth?

Does it further learning and teaching?

Does it involve a commitment, a decision?

Does it build, broadly understood, the Body of Christ?

May our daily grace be the blessing of Brigid’s hospitable monastery, St. Brigid of Kildare:

I should like a great lake of finest ale

For the King of kings

I should like a table of the choicest food

For the family of heaven

Let the ale be made from the fruits of faith

And the food be forgiving love

I should welcome the poor to my feast

For they are God’s children

I should welcome the sick to my feast

For they are God’s joy

Let the poor sit with Jesus at the highest place

And the sick dance with the angels

God bless the poor

God bless the sick

And bless your human race

God bless our food

God bless our drink

All homes, O God, embrace. *

*Drawn from Thomas Cahill’s excellent essay:  How the Irish Saved Civilization (NY: Doubleday, 1995).

-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel

posted in Lenten Series 2021: St. Patrick, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.21.2021 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

Service in Commemoration of Lives Lost in COVID

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John 3: 14-21

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Frontispiece

For a full year, we have been worshipping in diaspora, our sanctuary empty.  We have by grace and the work of WBUR and many others continued to broadcast our service around the globe, come 11am on Sunday.  For the sustained efforts of those at every turn who make this service possible and available, we are endlessly grateful.  Today we turn our minds and hearts to those who have died in this last year, near and far, and, especially, to their loved ones, perhaps including you, who bear the losses to this day.  If you have lost someone this COVID year, our sermon and liturgy today here are meant especially for you.

One of the great challenges and difficulties of the last year is found here.  Across the country and indeed around the world, we have not been able fully to gather, to assemble, to worship in person, at the hour of death.  We have lost loved ones without the ability or capacity to face the losses in full in the full company of the church, the church militant, even as we give over our loved ones to God and to the church triumphant.  Later on, later this year, some of this we will again be able to do, even as, in the breach, to some small measure, at gravesides and in small circles, we have done so a bit in the last year.  But we should be frank, candid with one another, and with ourselves, that this particular labor of love is an unfinished labor, just now.

We have not yet been able to grieve, in church, the loss of our loved ones.  We have not yet been able to remember in public, in full, in sermon, in eulogy, the manifold gifts and graces of their lives.  We have not been able to share the acceptance together of their deaths, by singing them home, singing them on to that greater light and farther shore.  We have not been able, as the body of Christ, the fellowship of love, the assembly of believers, to join our voices in real time, in affirmation, in affirmation that love outlasts death.  Today, we make a start, or a further step, in grieving, remembering, accepting and affirming.  There will be more, many more, times and occasions, with which to continue the work, in the months ahead.  And it is work, good and honest work.  Mourning is work.  It takes time, energy, attention, focus, investment, prayer and love.  Conclusively, to mourn means for you to need to do something in mourning.

As a son, you may have buried my mother.  As a brother, you may have remembered and eulogized your siblings’ mother.  As a pastor, you may have given over parishioners, sisters and brothers in Christ, one by one.  In a University community, you may have faced and mourned the losses of students, faculty, staff, alumni, relatives and others of the University community.  As an itinerant Methodist preacher, you may have had to sing alone ‘Blessed be the Tie that binds’, rather than, by custom, gathering around the casket of a fellow preacher, to sing the hymn with others in ministry.  As an American, you may have wept at the stories of those taken, young and old, rich and poor, black and white, conservative and liberal.  And, as a child of God, you may have lamented without ever fully grasping the depth or breadth of such lament, the deaths of others, other children of the living God.  And I may have, too.

Wherever you are, whoever you are, in your time of loss, in your year of mourning, this morning as we face our mourning, we feel for you, we are sorry for your bereavement, we reach out with invisible hands to hold you in an invisible embrace, and listen with invisible ears as you utter your prayers of lament.  Whatever else may be, at least hear this, you are not alone, you are not alone, you are not alone.

Ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. (L Cohen)

So, this morning, in this liturgical sermon, in this homiletical liturgy, we call you forward to join together:  To grieve. To remember. To accept.  To affirm.

To Grieve

We call you forward to grieve.

Jesus meets us today in love and with love.  His appearance, in word and music, utterance and hymn, takes the form of honest grief, honesty about grief, good grief.

Out of all manner and mixture of feelings, grief, usually unnamed and unspoken, can bring us to worship.  We do not come usually or specifically to church to grieve, unless, perhaps in attendance at funeral or memorial services.  We do not say, slipping into the pew, today I am here to grieve, in grief, grieving.  Grief is bigger, miles higher and longer than that, beyond depiction, beyond description.  Yet alongside us, walking alongside us, come Sunday, it may be, paces grief, our grief.

Grief is a kind of sacrament.  It has a mysterious cast and quality to it, something well afar from our own control, like the grace given us in the Gospel, in that way.  Nor is it enough for the preacher to utter the word ‘grief’ for us to greet grief ourselves, of a Sunday morning, on personal terms.  Here is where memory may come in.  The memory of a partially remembered verse, or homily, weeks later, may trigger something that then allows you to say to yourself, Well my goodness, that is what this is, this mid-winter something alongside me:  it is my grief.  You don’t have to count Citizen Kane your favorite or only favorite film to recognize the cavernous, celestial, capacious range of grief.  Grief takes years.

Robert Hass says:  the movement of grief has something in it of the desert’s bareness and of its distances. the movement of grief has something in it of the desert’s bareness and of its distances.

Here is our affirmation, in grief, our affirmation in mourning:

It is enough that faith knows

That Jesus stands by me

Who patiently draws near His passion

And leads me too along the arduous path

And prepares for me my resting place

It is enough that faith knows

That Jesus stands by me

Who patiently draws near His passion

And leads me too along the arduous path

And prepares for me my resting place

Let Us Ring the Bells of Grief

To Remember

We call you forward to remember.

“It is no small matter whether one habit or the other is inculcated in us from early childhood; on the contrary, it makes a considerable difference, or, rather, all the difference.” (repeat). (Jonathan Edwards).

Remember, real religion involves religious affections. Give some consideration this morning to your own religious affections.  Your experience.  Your dispositions, inclinations, predilections, and affections.  Remember.

Just before our gospel reading today, Nicodemus, thrice mentioned in John, has departed.   You remember his interview with Jesus.  He asks about being born from above.  He asks about resurrection life.  He asks about spirit.  In the nighttime interview, Jesus answers him:  You must be born anew.  Your religion, your religious affection, counts on this.  Our gospel today takes the same theme further.

God is love.  Or Love is God.  Eternal life is trust in God who is love.  The doorway to eternal life is trust.  The doorway to eternal life is trust. We learn this in our experience.  This trust is a gift, God’s gift.  With open hands we receive the gift of God.   We do not achieve or earn or create this trust.  It is given to us.  The gift comes wrapped, belief and trust and faith and knowledge come gift wrapped in meaning, belonging, empowerment—in the beloved community.

To make sure the hearer and reader of his gospel get the full measure of his point, the author of John uses a great old word, judgment.  KRISIS in Greek.  You hear our own word, CRISIS, there.  Until John, more or less, judgment was reserved for the end of time, the eschaton, the apocalypse.  John, as is resonantly clear here, says something different.  Judgment is not at the end of time.  Judgment is now.  Judgment does not await the arrival of the Son of Man on the clouds of heaven, or the millennial reign, or wars and rumors of wars, or signs of the times.  No.  The critical moment is now.  John has replaced speculation with spirit.  John has replaced eschaton with eternal life.  John has replaced Armageddon with the artistry of every day.  John has courageously left behind that to which most of the rest of the New Testament still clings.  John has replaced then with now.  What courage!  The upshot of this change, as recorded in our Scripture today, is the near apotheosis of experience.  And as an ineffable mystery, (you) shall learn in (your) own experience, Who He is (Schweitzer).

In other words, the ancient near eastern apocalyptic, of heaven and end of time judgment, still present in various religious traditions, as we have tragic and sorrowful occasion to see in our own time and struggles with violence, is replaced.  In your experience.  This is the judgment.  The light has come into the world.

As my grandmother used to ask, ‘Are you walking in the light?’

Likewise, we notice that the letter to the Ephesians, written by a student of Paul, makes a complementary affirmation.  By grace you are saved through faith (he writes this twice, or an editor has added a second rendering).  The phrase, both in its repetition and in its cadence, seems clearly to be a prized inheritance for the Ephesians.  God is loving you into love and freeing you into freedom.  God first loved us.  You are not made whole by your doing.  You are God’s beloved, and so, by being loved, by divine love,  you are made whole, made healthy, made well, ‘perfected’.   Both in our successes and in our failures, we truly depend upon a daily, weekly hearing of this promise and warning.  In our experience, we are given to trust God.  Our response in actions will then forever be overshadowed by real love, by God’s love.

Let us ring the bells of remembrance

To Accept

We call you forward to acceptance.  We pray for a measure of acceptance.  We pray for a measure of acceptance.

Gracious God in whom we are all interrelated, interdependent and one in humanity

Thou whose grace embraces all, and in whom violence to our brothers and sisters is violence unto each of us

We grieve for, remember and honor those whose lives were lost in this last year

Give us grace to accept the reality of these losses

Give us grace to accept

Especially we pray for the communities of faith across the country, and around the globe

In these troubling and tumultuous times when bigotry and prejudice breed inhumanity to one another

In this time of challenge and struggle, of tumult and destruction

May we find our way, Your Way, amid conflict, unrest and violence

Teach us your ways, God of refuge and strength, the ways of love and peace

Make us tender hearted and loving toward one another as your mercy rests upon those whose lives have been deeply altered by death or injury

Though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea, You are our God of refuge and strength, a present help in time of trouble

Let us ring the bells of acceptance.

To Affirm

We call you forward to a moment of affirmation.

We rely in affirmation on the voice of the Apostle, Paul:

To bring about the obedience of faith among all the nations

I am not ashamed of the Gospel.  It is the power of God for salvation to all who believe, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.  For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith.  As it is written, ‘the righteous shall live by faith’

God gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.

Therefore, since we are justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ…Suffering produces endurance, and endurance character, and character hope, and hope does not disappoint us because of the love of God shed abroad in our hearts by faith through the Holy Spirit.

Hope that is seen is not hope.  Who hopes for what he sees?  We hope for what we do not see, and wait for it with patience.

‘What then shall we say to this?  If God is for us, who is against us?  Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?

Shall tribulation or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword?  No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.

For I am sure that neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities nor things present nor things to come nor powers nor height nor depth nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed, by the renewal of your mind.

Let love be genuine.  Hate what is evil.  Hold fast to what is good.  Love one another with mutual affection.  Outdo one another in showing honor.  Never lag in zeal.  Be ardent in spirit.  Serve the Lord.  Rejoice in your hope. Be patient in tribulation.  Be constant in prayer.  Contribute to the saints.  Practice hospitality.

And, we rely in affirmation upon our own personal creed, whispering or quietly saying, wherever we are today, our shared affirmation, responding, ‘and we do’:

If we believe that life has meaning and purpose

And we do

If we believe that the Giver of Life loves us

And we do

If we believe that divine love lasts

And we do

If we believe that justice, mercy, and humility endure

And we do

If we believe that God so loved the world to give God’s only Son

And we do

If we believe that Jesus is the transcript in time of God in eternity

And we do

If we believe that all God’s children are precious in God’s sight

And we do

If we believe grace and forgiveness are the heart of the universe

And we do

If we believe that God has loved us personally

And we do

If we believe in God

And we do

Then we shall trust God over the valley of the shadow of death

And we do

Then we shall trust that love is stronger than death

And we do

Then we shall trust the mysterious promise of resurrection

And we do

Then we shall trust the faith of Christ, relying on faith alone

And we do

Then we shall trust the enduring worth of personality

And we do

Then we shall trust that just deeds, merciful words are never vain

And we do

Then we shall trust the Giver of Life to give eternal life 

And we do

Then we shall trust the source of love to love eternally

And we do

Then we shall trust that we shall rest protected in God’s embrace

And we do

Then we shall trust in God

And we do.

Let us ring the bells of affirmation.

Coda

And let us act as well.  In grieving let us reach out by visit or voice to another who knows grief.  In remembering let us write out for another generation some central memories of our lost loved ones. In accepting, let us take the silent time of silence we need, in prayer.  In affirmation, let us invite another to the faith of Christ through fellowship with His people, attendance in worship at his church, and the commitments of tithing and service that are His salt and light.

And let us act as well.  In grieving let us reach out by visit or voice to another who knows grief.  In remembering let us write out for another generation some central memories of our lost loved ones. In accepting, let us take the silent time of silence we need, in prayer.  In affirmation, let us invite another to the faith of Christ through fellowship with His people, attendance in worship at his church, and the commitments of tithing and service that are His salt and light.

-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.14.2021 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

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John 2: 13-22

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Queen Elizabeth

On Christmas Day, two months ago, Queen Elizabeth spoke from Buckingham Palace to her country, and, indeed the whole world.  Carried along on clear, crisp, elegant prosed, and given voice in the Queen’s own ‘King’s English’, her homily evoked a profound, powerful hope.  May there be still many years in which we all shall hear her voice from Buckingham Palace.  As my friend says, in late pandemic, late COVID, we hunger for ‘indicia of normalcy’.  Well, Queen Elizabeth and her long life, Queen Elizabeth and her steady presence, Queen Elizabeth and her regal voice, Queen Elizabeth and her gracious aging, gives us such, such ‘indicia of normalcy’.  Think of her as young girl in war torn England, in bombarded London.  Think of her as a Queen in youth, supervising the elderly Winston Churchill, brilliant--and un-supervisable.  Think of her steady presence, her non-anxious presence, for most of us through our whole lives to date.  She was coronated before I was born.  May there be many more of her addresses at Christmas.

People more need reminder than instruction.  Looking toward 2021, she reminded her country, and, indeed the whole world, of the calling to kindness.  The Queen’s primary image, the heart of her reminder, the crux of her peroration, was drawn from Holy Scripture, from the Bible, a brief mention of the Good Samaritan.  Her application to interpret the parable was neither unusual nor novel:  love your neighbor.  Neither unusual nor novel, but so powerful, so true, so good, so right and so beautiful.  Notice:  the message relied on a liberal biblical theology.  Her short speech was founded on a shared, common language of life, known across the globe by adherents of many and no particular religious traditions, known uniquely in the Bible, a source of shared personal and social ethics, and of the very shared common tongue that, more than nearly anything else, we shall need, to get by.  The Bible is a great, global code.  We shall need a common tongue, a common language, a common personal and social ethic, as a globe, around the globe, to survive the 21^st century, and to deal savingly with nuclear weaponry, climate pollution, and pandemic, this one…and the next.  And here stands Scripture—not as confessional requirement, but as reliable grammar, syntax and spelling, for a shared future.  Marsh Chapel, every Sunday you give the globe four lessons and fifty-nine minutes in sermon and song, of this common tongue, interpreted in a global, a liberal biblical theology.

My friend, deciding about his life, says, ‘it is a road to Damascus moment’.

My friend, hearing the broken Hallelujah of Leonard Cohen, can better bear his own grief.

Now I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

My friend, quoting Lincoln, he says, remembers ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand’.  But Lincoln did not write that, did he.  He learned it in a great code, a tome perhaps more meaningful to him than any other, though he hardly ever went to church. The Bible is still—unsurpassed--a great code.  We shall need a common tongue, a common language, a common personal and social ethic, as a globe, around the globe, to survive the 21st century, and to deal savingly with nuclear weaponry, climate pollution, and pandemic, this one and the next.  Just as old Elijah said to Jezebel, you better start to learn your lessons well.  To the shared great code, Queen Elizabeth repaired, to start the year, as 2021 opened.  You remember, a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho when he fell among thieves…

St Patrick

You remember. In Lent, we remember.  “(Lent) is for people who know what it means for their soul to be logged with these icy waters: all of us are such people, if only we can realize it.  There is confidence everywhere in (Lent), yet that does not mean unmixed and untroubled security.  The confidence of the Christian is always a confidence despite darkness and risk, in the presence of peril, with every evidence of possible disaster…  Once again, Lent is not just a time for squaring conscious accounts: but for realizing what we had perhaps not seen before.  The light of Lent is given us to help us with this realization.  Nevertheless, the liturgy of (Lent) is not focused on the sinfulness of the penitent but on the mercy of God.  The question of sinfulness is raised precisely because this is a day of mercy.”(Thomas Merton)

Our Lenten Sermon Series, beginning today, will engage in conversation with St. Patrick.  From 2007-2016, Lent by Lent, we identified a theological conversation partner for the Lenten sermons, broadly speaking, out of the Calvinist tradition.  In the next decade, we have turned to the Catholic tradition.  With Calvin we encountered the chief resource for others we engaged over ten years—voices like those of Jonathan Edwards (2015),  John Calvin (2014), Marilyn Robinson (2013), Jacques Ellul (2012), Dietrich Bonhoeffer (a Lutheran cousin, (2011), Karl Barth (2010), and Gabriel Vahanian (2007), and themes like Atonement (2009) and Decision (2008), summarized with the help of Paul of Tarsus (2016).  Then in this decade, beginning with Lent 2017, the Marsh pulpit, a traditionally Methodist one, turns left, not right, toward Rome not Geneva, and we have preached with, and learned from the Roman Catholic tradition, so important in the last 200 years in New England, and some of its great divines including Henri Nouwen (2017) Thomas Merton (2018) John of the Cross (2019), Teresa of Avila (2020).  Other years, it may Ignatius of Loyola, Erasmus, Hans Kung, Karl Rahner, and others, one per year.  Perhaps you will suggest a name or two, not from Geneva, but from Rome?  For those who recall, even if dimly, the vigor and excitement of Vatican II, there may well be other names to add to the list.  We began with Henri Nouwen in 2017, and by Lent 2020, we were listening in prayer for grace in the life, voice, heart, poetry and spirit of Santa Teresa of Avila.  I had prepared to preach with Dorothy Day this year, 2021, and spent some of the summer reading her biography.  Another year, maybe next, 2022.  But something about this past year, something about life in Boston it may be, something about the events and outcomes of late autumn, something about immersion in the home of the bean and the cod for several years, something, a touch of green, something brought the patron saint of Ireland forward.  St. Patrick will help guide is for Lent 2021.  A touch of memory, shaded in green.

John 2

Speaking of memory.  Our lesson from the fourth gospel gives us memory, in and through which we prepare.

The long weeks of patience, wandering, and wilderness which form our yearly Lenten pilgrimage prepare us.

Notice that John has rearranged the furniture of the gospel. He has placed the temple cleansing at the outset of the story.

We become who we are by daring to decide. We discover the power of imagination by daring to find the courage to decide.  Choose.  Choose!

Some years ago, in the aisle of a darkened sanctuary, and following a dark re-enactment of the events of Holy Thursday and Good Friday, a ten-year old, guided by his mother, came forward and asked, of the Jesus so depicted, ‘What did he do that was so wrong?’ What was the linchpin for the move to the cross?

Well, I said, or perhaps mumbled something about blasphemy and something about treason.

But Matthew, Mark and Luke, the gospels other than John, mark Jesus’ downfall at the temple. As he attacks inherited religion, as he cleanses the temple, his doom is sealed. In John, it is the resurrection of Lazarus, long chapters later, which seals his fate. But John too sees the power of decision in Jesus’ appearance in the temple. In fact, in the second chapter, John opens with Cana, and the promise of incarnation enshrined in that wedding, and closes with the temple, and the forecast of the cross, the hour, the word, which is his abiding interest. Jesus is himself the temple which others will destroy. Here, he gives his new view of the future, not to be awaited somewhere in the clouds. It is taking place now in the life and destiny of Jesus. All throughout, throughout his life, and throughout your own, there is the struggle, this struggle, his struggle, for truth and grace. This is Jesus’ struggle. He becomes himself, his own most self not his almost self, in dealing with decision, in this today’s decision to affront and confront inherited religion.

Faith is finding the courage to choose. Faith is dealing with decision.
Memory is our aid here. Remember Proust comparing ‘the low and shameful gate of experience, and the other… the golden gate of imagination’ (RTP, 401). Memory feeds imagination. Faith is finding the power, receiving the power to choose, to reflect on choosing, to take responsibility for the choice, to learn with choosing, and to address the consequences of choice. Dealing with decision means dealing too with regret and failure. This too is faith in action. Listen again to the regret in Yeats’ poem…

No single story would they find
Of an unbroken happy mind,
A finish worthy of the start.
Young men know nothing of this sort…
Observant old men know it well

This year, intermittently when not reading Mark, we will scale a far greater promontory, the highest peak in the Bible, which is the Gospel of John. With every cut-back trail, at every rest point, atop every lookout, with every majestic view, this spiritual gospel will address you with the choice of freedom, with the ongoing need to choose, and in choosing to find the life of belonging and meaning, personal identity and global imagination. Yes, choosing diversity and inclusion. Yes, and also, choosing unity and mutuality. More personally, this Gospel helps those who struggle with dislocation and disappointment. The Bride in Cana experienced dislocation, and so have you. The Bride of Christ experiences disappointment, and so have you.

John features Jesus in mortal combat over all of these. Jesus demarcates the limits of individualism during a wedding in Cana. Jesus pillories pride by night with Nicodemus. Jesus unwraps the touching self-presentations of hypocrisy in conversation at the well. Jesus heals a broken spirit. Jesus feeds the throng with two fish and five barley loaves. Jesus gives sight and insight, bifocal and stereoptic, to a man born blind. Jesus comes upon dead Lazarus and bring resurrection and life. He brings the introvert out of the closet of loneliness. He brings the literalist out of the closet of materialism. He brings the passionate out of the closet of guilt. He brings the dim-witted out of the closet of myopia. He brings the church out of the closet of hunger. That is: in all, He brings the dead to life.  Jesus brings the dead to life

In poetry, St. Patrick greets us, with just this strength, strength for decisions, strength for the journey.

Breast Plate

St Patrick was British by birth, you will remember.  He lived and worked in the fifth century c.e., the dating beyond that obscure.  By legend and tradition, he brought Christianity to Ireland, of which he became the patron though uncanonized saint.  He survived capture and slavery, and guided by his own visions, his own touches of green, he evangelized: ‘never before did they know of God...but they became the people of the Lord’.  Of many, there is one chief, telling clue to the truth and depth in the wilderness journey of Patrick.  That is, he was unafraid to incorporate pre-existing Irish beliefs and symbols into his teaching about Christianity and his offering of faith, as was the author of the Gospel of John, who himself was unafraid to incorporate pre-existing Gnostic beliefs and symbols into his teaching about Christianity and his offering of faith.  St. Patrick is best known for his glorious poem, his ‘breastplate’ to which we return in later Lent.  Hear a few verses:

I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
of the Creator of creation.
I arise today
Through the strength of Christ's birth with His baptism,
Through the strength of His crucifixion with His burial,
Through the strength of His resurrection with His ascension…

I arise today, through
The strength of heaven,
The light of the sun,
The radiance of the moon,
The splendor of fire,
The speed of lightning,
The swiftness of wind,
The depth of the sea,
The stability of the earth,
The firmness of rock.
I arise today, through
God's strength to pilot me,
God's might to uphold me,
God's wisdom to guide me,
God's eye to look before me,
God's ear to hear me,
God's word to speak for me,
God's hand to guard me,
God's shield to protect me,
God's host to save me..

I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
of the Creator of creation.

Invitation

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

posted in Lenten Series 2021: St. Patrick, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.7.2021 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

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Romans 4:13–25

Mark 8:31–38

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The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel:

Life

Dateline, Wheeling West Virginia, February 2021.  Sarah Mervosh, The New York Times.

The day had finally arrived.

After nearly a year in lock-down for the residents of Good Shepherd Nursing Home—eating meals in their rooms, playing bingo over their television sets and isolating themselves almost entirely from the outside world—their coronavirus vaccinations were finished the hallways were slowly beginning to reawaken.

In a first, tentavive glimpse at what the other side of the pandemic might look like, Betty Lou Leech, 97, arrived to the dining room early, a mask on her face, her hair freshly curled.

‘I’m too exicted to eat’ she said, sitting at her favorite table once again…

West Virginia has emerged as one of the first states to finish giving two doses of vaccines to the thousands of people inside its nursing homes, so Good Shepherd…was among the first in the country to begin tip-toeing back to normalcy…

The first day back was full of ordinary moments: small talk over coffee, bidding wars at an afternoon auction, a game of dice.  But after a year of loss, loneliness, and disruption, the very ordinariness of it all brought joy and relief.

Ordinary moments.  Back to normalcy.  I’m too excited to eat.

After recovering in the nursing home’s COVID 19 ward, (Ms. Leech) was feeling better, she said, and eager to return to some version of normal life, however simple.  ‘Just seeing the people here’ she said ‘is enough’.  On the menu for this first day back were cheeseburgers and potato soup, unveiled with a flourish of silver serving dishes…

In the bustle of the day, there were moments of stillness.  In the lobby of a stained glass chapel, Frank and Phyllis Ellis savored a quiet reunion…During 69 years of marriage, the Ellises said, they have never spent so much time apart as during the last year.

‘We saw each other on Facebook’ Ms. Ellis said.

‘Facetime’ her husband gently corrected her.  The Ellises visits are short and sterile:  she in a surgical mask, he in a gown…mask and face guard.  He does not even think about kissing her, he said, for fear of putting her at risk…She longs for the comforts of home, for her children and grandchildren.  He long for her and even their marital spats.

‘We were always fighting’ he said ‘I miss that’.

Facetime.  Time apart.  Just seeing the people is enough.  A finely written newspaper article, sparing, graceful, humorous, real.

As demonically and fiercely accosted as has been our very humanity, month by month this year, yet the rhythms of the ordinary, as my friend says, ‘the indicia of normalcy’, are coming around, encircling us in our very need, and offering us a lift for living, offering us a lift for living.

Jesus meets us today out of the pages in St. Mark, our earliest gospel, and clothed in the radiant beauty of a Bach Cantata.  Music and Scripture, indicia of normalcy.

Dr. Jarrett, as you have lovingly and compassionately done for us now over many years, can you help us approach the audition of today’s cantata, with appreciation of both history and theology, a passion for compassion, and a regard for the church, through the ages?

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music:

Bach

Having just recovered from a very busy Christmas season in his second year in Leipzig, Bach once again turned his attentions and planning to the major work to be offered for Holy Week— the second version of his Passion According to St John. Fortunately for Bach and his stalwart players and singers, the Lenten season offered something of a break in that no concerted music was performed throughout the penitential season, allowing for all preparations to focus on the Holy Week Passion performance.  Never one to give anything but his most remarkable best, Bach composed an absolute masterpiece for the final cantata heard before Lent, ensuring a most memorable musical moment good enough to last the forty days of of wilderness journey and musical austerity. Cantata 127: Herr Jesu Christ, wahr’ Mensch und Gott (“Lord Jesus Christ, true man and God”) seems designed with a grandeur and scope appropriate for the conclusion of the liturgical season, but also an elegant fortaste and reminder of the annual observance of Christ’s Passion a few short weeks away.  All five movements of Cantata 127 are based on Paul Eber’s 1582 hymn of the same name, “Herr Jesu Christ, wahr’ Mensch und Gott.” Though a funeral hymn, the Passion themes of Eber’s chorale connect to the Luke Gospel of the day in which Jesus predicts his death to his disciples. The petition for mercy also calls to mind the blind man’s plea for sight, as also heard in the Gospel lesson. Otherwise, Eber’s verses and the subsequent movements of Cantata 127 present Jesus alone as mediator in both our final hour and on judgement day.

The opening movement surely ranks as one of the finest of all the Chorale based works Bach ever conceived. Eber’s tune is motivically present in nearly every measure of the movement, passed around through the intruments and voices — a motto of triumph and affirmation: true man and true God. But from the very first note the strings outline the German Agnus Dei, Christe du Lamm Gottes in long tones before passing to other sections. Though not sung, the presence of the Agnus Dei calls the listener both to the Blind man’s plea for mercy as well as that ultimate image of the Lamb of God lifted high on Calvary’s Cross. Intermittently, one can even hear O Sacred Head Now Wounded in the continuo line. Almost as a foil, the dotted rhythms in the foreground of the texture seem to dance over the immense theological connections achieved by the layering of so many choral motivs at one time. Far from ponderous or weighty or didactic, this thrilling opening movement brims with all the confidence of grace so freely given.

For the interior of the Cantata, Bach calls on a tenor to set the predicament in a recitative describing how in our own failings, our depths of grief, our final hour, it is our faith that draws us to Christ’s Passion and the assurance of his redeeming grace. The soprano and bass take up the cause at this point in two of the most astounding arias in all the cantatas. In echo with a heart-rending oboe obbligato, the soprano brings us without fear to our final hour: The souls of the righteous are in Jesus’ hand. In the background, the plaintive oboe and soprano lines weave together supported by two recorders and continuo marking an unrelenting and unwavering pulse, the inevitable tick of time. In the middle of the aria, the soprano seems to engage with the tick of clock: Call me soon, O funeral bells, I am unafraid of dying, For my Jesus shall wake me again! As the soprano sings the word for funeral bells — Sterbeglocken — the sprockets and gears of the clock come to life in a nimble-fingered upper-string pizzicato.

The bass draws us one level closer to life in eternity, with invocation of the last trumpet and the harrowing day of judgment. As the earth’s foundation are shattered and sunk in ruin, Jesus will be our advocate and redeemer: Believers shall survive forever; they shall not be judged, and shall not taste eternal Death; Cling to Jesus for your salvation. This is astonishing and breathtaking music. The trumpet’s presence signals the Day of Judgment amidst an apocalypse of fiery passage work for the strings. But the words of Jesus tenderly and reassuringly quell the storm affirming the believer’s redemption.

Bach surpasses himself with this cantata, and I’m so grateful for this opportunity to revisit our performance from February of 2019 for today’s broadcast. As with every interaction with Johann Sebastian Bach, our sights and souls are lifted, our standards reset and renewed, and a sometimes distant vision of what could be finds clarity of purpose, and sincerity of intention.

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel:

Word

Jesus meets us today out of the pages of Holy Writ, and clothed in the radiant beauty of a Bach Cantata.  It may be, for you, this Lord’s Day, that his appearance, in word and music, just now, brings a lift for living, a lift for living.

One spring, I met my teacher Lou Martyn in the Union Seminary Quadrangle.  He handed me a book as gift, one of John Knox’s books on the early church (Knox of 20century not of the sixteenth).  I cherish the gift now forty years old, which became a kind of sign for the future, then altogether unforeseen.

I returned this week to Knox on Romans.  To hear what he did hear, here. Like my later teacher NT Wright, Knox took on the hard passages, including this one from Romans.

I marvel at the beauty and mystery of this section of Romans 4,  ‘who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist’.

I marvel at the phrase, ‘hope against hope’.  I marvel at its assertion of a hopeless hope, of hope with no prospect, no rationale, no ready support.  Yet…alive.

I marvel that faith is faith, your faith is your faith, when it is what you are left with, all you are left with.

I marvel that faith is reckoned as righteousness, that what stands up in hope against hope is the faith of Abraham.  Abraham before circumcision, Abraham the father of multitudes not just the religious, Abraham the father then of believers everywhere.  No one can keep the whole law.  Every life includes failure, error, mistake, and misjudgment.  All of us stand in need of grace, pardon, forgiveness.

I marvel at the ordering here of resurrection first and creation second, in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Do you notice?  For Paul here resurrection comes first, then creation, not in a temporal but in an existential sense. Resurrection is the grounding of creation, the grounding of the ground of being, the horizon of the horizon.  When Paul thinks of God, he writes first of the God who raises the dead, and only second of the God who creates.  I marvel at this.  Faith relies on humble trust in God’s mercy and power, as distinguished from reliance on good works. Hope against hope.  To continue to have hope though it seems baseless.

And with this welcoming word, Paul can sing and soar in Romans 5:

Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.

Mark 8 sounds so similar:

If any man would come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow.  For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake and the for sake of the gospel, will save it.

You recognize that this is the voice of an early preacher, whose words Mark has placed in retrospect upon the lips of Jesus.   We see Jesus looking back through the cross, as did Mark.  We hear Jesus through the din of the passion, as did Mark.  We know Jesus through the rigor of trying to follow after him, even if we are a long way behind, as did Mark.  And, as Schweitzer deftly reminded, all, all is shot through with mystery:

He comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, He came to those men who knew Him not.  He speaks to us the same word, ‘Follow me!’  and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time.  He commands.  And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.’ (QHJ, 389).

-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel

-Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music

posted in Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music, The Bach Experience, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 02.28.2021 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

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Genesis 9:8-17

Psalm 25:1-10

I Peter 3:18-22

Mark 1:9-15

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“And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.”  Now there’s a thought for the first Sunday in Lent!  “And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.”  In the Greek, the verb for “drove him out” is the same verb that Mark uses near the end of the Gospel to describe Jesus driving out those who were selling and buying in the Jerusalem temple.  This is not the only juxtaposition of unexpected contrasts and disquieting imagery in Mark’s description of the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry.

The first line of Mark describes his Gospel as “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God”.  The text goes on to describe John the Baptizer’s ministry, a ministry of baptism for the forgiveness of sins and of predictions of one who will come after him who is more powerful and worthy, one who will baptize the people with the Holy Spirit.  Jesus makes his first appearance in the Gospel as himself just emerging from John’s water baptism. But unlike the description of this scene in Matthew and Luke, where the heavens merely open, in Mark the heavens are torn apart.   The Holy Spirit descends on Jesus like a dove, and a voice from heaven validates him as Son, as Beloved, with whom God is well pleased.  Then, immediately after this awe-inspiring scene, the Spirit is not a gentle dove, a Spirit who leads Jesus into the wilderness as in Matthew and Luke.  It becomes the Spirit who drives Jesus out into the wilderness.  And this is not the wilderness of the hiker’s guides.  It is not a place of beauty and peace, where one can re-connect and rejuvenate with nature.  In Jesus’ time the wilderness was a place of desolation, isolation, and danger. It was full of wild animals and predators who were human.  Jesus spends 40 days in such a place, with only the wild animals and Satan for company.  Although, there were angels too who waited on him.  Finally, the next thing we know is that Jesus is somehow out of the wilderness and beginning his public ministry in Galilee.  He proclaims the good news of God, saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”  And yet, this proclamation of good news comes with the background of the arrest of John the Baptizer, that would lead to John’s beheading by Rome’s puppet king Herod.  Mark has been called “The Gospel of Conflict”, conflicts between Jesus and political and religious authorities, and with his hometown, his family, and his disciples.  The mixed energies that surround Jesus throughout his ministry begin with him as he is driven out into the wilderness, driven out into confrontation with that which opposes God, driven out to decide who he will be as a beloved child in a place of hardship and peril for both body and soul.

We can relate.  We too have been driven out of our normal lives into a wilderness for the last year, a place of danger and isolation, even desolation.  We too have faced deadly peril to both body and soul, caught up in a pandemic which for a terrifying while we did not understand and could not control, and which even now challenges our best science and public health structures at every turn.  The indications of climate change in the wildfires burning and the storms battering throughout the country have been mirrored in the fires of anger and frustration about our lack of leadership and preparation and in the battering of seemingly endless revelations of violent injustice against marginalized populations and against our national life.  Our rising rates of clinical depression and anxiety reflect the loss of loved ones, from the greater loss of actual death, to the lesser but still deeply painful loss of physical presence and touch which we can observe but not feel.  These rates of distress also reflect the loss of beloved and nourishing activities, rituals, and routines:  eating together, baptisms, funerals, singing in harmony, hugs.  Predators – who wild animals put to shame – have been our company, as has that which opposes God.  We have all in our own ways faced many temptations toward despair, cynicism, numbing out, and giving up.  And yet angels have waited on us also, certainly for us to see them and recognize them for who they are, and who have kept us fed and connected, have worked to find protection and vaccines, have cared for us in birth, sickness, and death, and have created beauty, humor, and new ways to be together and to encourage one another.  Now we have come through almost a full year, after last year’s Lent in which we began our sojourn in our wilderness.  Now we have come to Lent 2021, not sure that we are out of the wilderness yet, or what time has been fulfilled, or how we are to repent/turn around/change, or what the good news of God is for us now.

Traditionally, Lent has been a time of preparation for new followers of Jesus to receive baptism. Baptism is a sign of right relationship with God and of membership in God’s kingdom through the Church.  For all followers of Jesus, it is a season in the church year of particular reflection.  After the joy of the Incarnation through the birth of Jesus at Christmas, after the revelations of who God is and who God is not in the revelations of Epiphany, Lent focuses on the life, ministry, and teaching of Jesus in preparation for the holy week of his passion and death, and his resurrection at Easter.  In Lent, we join with our companions in Christ to reflect on Jesus as our example for the life of faith, in all its aspects of ministry, challenges, and suffering.  In this 2021 season of Lent, we have a particular opportunity, as individuals and as a community, to reflect on our experiences as people of faith over the last year; we have an opportunity to reflect on our experience through the lens of Jesus’ life and ministry as they led to the Church’s first and most radical proclamation and preaching:  that resurrection is possible with God through Jesus Christ, resurrection even after extremities of conflict, betrayal, suffering, death, and burial.

After the complexities and complicities of the last year, we ought not to expect our reflection to be quick or to yield quick solutions in the aftermath of such upheaval.  Lent in its forty days does give us a good amount of time to get started, and in this year it may be particularly fitting that we begin, as Mark does, with Jesus as he begins his public ministry.

There are four points to consider in the swirl of energies and images that surround Jesus in our scripture this morning.

The first is the depiction of the Holy Spirit.  The heavens are torn apart to make way for it.  It lands on Jesus in acknowledgement, in the form of a dove, a symbol of freedom,  And it is the Spirit who drives him out into the wilderness to encounter its physical and spiritual perils.  In other words, to get Jesus started on his ministry, the Spirit encourages him in his identity and his worthiness for his ministry.  And, the Spirit also gives Jesus unmistakable impetus to face the temptations inherent in his identity as beloved child and in his mission, unmistakable impetus to decide who he will be and how he will act.  The Holy Spirit is actively engaged with Jesus from the beginning, as both empowering witness to who he is, and intentional and even fierce coach who challenges him to decide who he will be and what he will do in the face of adversity and temptation.

A second point is that in Mark’s account, there is no description of the temptations presented to Jesus by Satan.  Matthew and Luke are very specific, and oddly large and general, as to Satan’s blandishments:  personal power to be used for personal convenience or relief at the expense of the dignity of the rest of creation; the trading on one’s power and identity for self-promotion; the choosing allegiance to that which opposes God in exchange for earthly power and wealth.  In Mark’s gospel, Jesus’ temptations, physical and spiritual, inner and outer, remain private:  they are unique to him.

The third point is that, whatever the temptations and perils were, Jesus comes out of the wilderness with the call and confidence to begin a public ministry of proclamation, and with a clear articulation of that proclamation.  God’s good news is this: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent/turn around/change and believe in the good news.”  His confidence and call are such that he persists in his proclamation even in the face of John’s arrest, the arrest of the person who baptized him into a gospel of change and forgiveness.

The fourth and final point is that in all this “in and out of the wilderness”, Jesus is never truly isolated, never really alone.  Whether it is the Spirit with its encouragements and challenges, through the angels who wait on him in the wilderness, or his vision of the good news of the Kindom as near, God is always present with him.  God’s presence and power continue to work in and through Jesus, through the wilderness and through all his life, ministry, death, and resurrection.

As we begin this season of Lent 2021, these points can help us begin our reflections on our experiences of last year, and as we consider where God may be leading us in terms of what comes next.  As we reflect and consider, it is important to be honest with ourselves, and, also to be gentle with ourselves.  Lent is not a time for self-flagellation or suffering for suffering’s sake or the manufacture of guilt over the trivial.  Lent is a time of grace, for our reflections and considerations with God and each other to become information, that both God and we can use to consider and then act:  toward our further growth in the life of faith, toward an increase in our love for God, self, and neighbor, toward change to support the kingdom of God and God’s work of love and justice in the world.

So how has and how does the Holy Spirit confirm and challenge us in who we are, what we do, and who we are becoming?  Who or what else has encouraged us, confirmed our identity as beloved and worthy, even as we were driven out into entirely new circumstances and the need for new priorities?  Who or what has sustained us in the many losses and outrages of this time?  What have been our particular challenges to who we are and what we will do in the face of the many adversities and frustrations of the last year?  Who or what have we encouraged, confirmed and sustained?  Who are we now, what have we done in the face of adversity and frustration, and what might we be and do in the future?

What have been our personal temptations during the last year?  Inner and outer, unique to us?  Not just the big ones, whatever those have been. The little everyday ones too, that are so easy to yield to, especially when we are tired, discouraged, grieving, or frightened, that so often are the ones that can wear away our bodies and spirits down to the nub without our realizing it.  In what circumstances do we feel most tempted to go against what we know to be true or right for us?  How might we or our behavior have enabled yielding to inner or outer temptation for others?  When have we helped to make temptation easier to withstand for ourselves and others?

As we gain information and learn from our reflections as individuals and in community, do we notice patterns of thought or behavior?  Is there anything in what we have learned that calls us. with God’s encouragement, to do, to say, to change, or to begin?  How might we encourage ourselves and each other to answer these callings?

On this first, beginning Sunday of Lent, as we consider the beginnings of Jesus’ public ministry and Mark’s depiction of it, let us also rest in God’s presence and power with us as they were with Jesus, that we may begin to move with what we have learned out of our personal and collective wildernesses, begin to realize how we are to repent/change, begin to see and hear what the good news of God is for us now, and begin to recognize the time that has been fulfilled, toward a turnaround of good news, new hope, and resurrection.

Amen.

-The Rev. Dr. Victoria Hart Gaskell, Minister for Visitation

posted in The Rev. Dr. Victoria Hart Gaskell, Minister for Visitation on 02.21.2021 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

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2 Corinthians 4: 3-6

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For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake.  For it is the God who said ‘Let light shine out of darkness’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.

Preface

In a changed world, a reordered life, a twilit era, sometimes a poem lights the way.  Ted Kooser’s poem sees a church transformed into a barn, heavenly order replaced by earthly disarray, a poem of love and loss, with good works yet all around.

There’s a tractor in the doorway of a church

in Red wing, Nebraska, in a coat of mud

and straw that drags the floor. A broken plow

sprawls beggar-like behind it on some planks

that make a sort of roadway up the steps.

The steeple’s gone.  A black tar-paper scar

that lightening might have made replaces it.

They’ve taken it down to change the house of God

to Homer Johnson’s barn, but it’s still a church,

with clumps of tiger lilies in the grass

and one of those boxlike, glassed-in signs

that give the sermon’s topic (reading now

a birdnest and a little broken glass).

The good works of the Lord are all around;

the steeple top is standing in a garden

just up the alley; it’s a henhouse now;

fat leghorns gossip at its crowded door.

Pews stretch on porches up and down the street,

the stained-glass windows style the mayor’s house,

and the bell’s atop the firehouse in the square.

The cross is only God knows where.

Ted Kooser, Kindest Regards, p. 24

Light

In thy light we see light.  In thy light we see light.  If we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another.  If we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another.

Now the light shines longer at the end of the day.  No longer have we the deep sudden 4:30pm New England dark of December.  The light hangs and hangs on longer.  At 5pm you may pause, if the weather suits, and lean on the balustrade along Marsh Plaza.  With a clear day, the sunlight lingers and warms and heals.  The buildings to the west, as the sun now sits and sets, are a few stories only, so we have a full sunset, or nearly so.  It feels good.  The sunlight lingers and warms and heals.

We have had no shortage of dark days the year past.  Pollution, pandemic, politics, prejudice, pain.  Pollution and a challenged climate.  Yet.  The light still shines.  One reads of a global automobile manufacturer determining now to produce only electric cars by 2035.  Pandemic and endless losses, death near and far.  Yet.  The light still shines.  One reads of the heroism of scientists in laboratories, right across the Charles River, bringing vaccines to life, for life, to use, for use.  Politics unmoored from healthy culture.  Yet.  The light shines.  There is a prayerful, heartfelt resolve, matched by some actions: a confession that character matters, decency matters, empathy matters, experience matters, honesty matters.  Character, decency, empathy, experience, honesty, especially when it comes to leadership, they truly matter.  Prejudice, the abiding corruption of racism near and far.  Yet.  The light shines.  One sees, right here, here at Boston University, right now, now in 2021 a new full emphasis, embodied, in the flesh:  Andrea Taylor, Katherine Kennedy, Kenn Elmore, Crystal Williams, Ibram X. Kendi, Louise Chude-Sokei—the President’s Senior Diversity Office, the Howard Thurman Center, the Dean of Student’s work, the Associate Provost’s office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, The Center for Anti-Racism, the African American Studies Program.  With the late afternoon sun resting on the MLK monument, with the longer afternoon sunset resting on the Marsh door statue of John Wesley, there is an inkling, a dawning, a harbinger, an echo, of faith, and of better days coming, and a relighting of higher hopes past.  Pain though remains.  Pain remains especially in our losses of loved ones in COVID.  In liturgy and worship on Sunday March 14, mark the date, we will engage pain and honor loss.  Yet.  The light still shines.

In thy light we see light.  In thy light we see light.  If we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another.  If we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another.

Darkness

In faith, we can face pain squarely, what Paul ascribed to ‘the god of this world’—shadow, hurt, pain.  The god of this world.  Hm.  Paul is close here, as close as he gets, to the language of Gnosticism, and may have borrowed the phrase from the Gnostics.  Paul is as far here, as far as he gets, from the language of the Hebrew Scripture, and may have used the phrase to set some distance between himself and his religious family of origin.  He is in dark pain, even as he claims and acclaims that the light still shines.  We can too.

Even new life brings pain.  There is joy but there is pain.  Even in moments of luminous new life.  A student finds her way into Marsh Chapel, and asks for prayers…A young woman follows an urge and comes to church, and asks for poems…An older man prays at night, knowing what he needs to do to do his job but knowing others will be hurt and still others will judge harshly, and asks for nothing…A young man determines to face the music, to address his addiction, and does so, outside of church, and asks for prayers…A parent loses his child, and calls in grief, and hunts for consolation…A woman makes a hard choice in real time about something that counts, and finds her spirit lightened, and sings her prayers…A religious man opened an Advent devotional, one part word and one part music, and heard ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, and cried and cried and cried…A University leader does the right things at the right times in the right ways, not always with full appreication…A senator gives us his seat rather than support fascism…A family member survives the hurt of another…

There, here and there, here, the light still shines. A scientist, Anothy Fauci, and a humanist, John Lewis, worship together in Marsh Chapel, Baccalaureate Sunday, May 2018.  All in worship so remember the prophetic call:  Human agency, human agency, human agency:  May 2018 in the nave of Marsh Chapel, John Lewis and Anthony Fauci:  BU past and future.  Incarnation is the honoring of the human being.  You and others, in whom light shines in the heart. God is at work in the world to make and keep human life human—THROUGH HUMAN BEINGS.  It will have to be a shared agency, a common purpose, for it to work in time.

The psalmist says, "The Lord has done great things for us, and we rejoiced." It is easy to rejoice when things are going well.  Nothing is more enjoyable than a season of life that is endlessly exciting, happy, and generally, personally "successful." We readily love life when life feels easy and day to day is filled with laughter.  We struggle though when life is not so joyful. On days when tears come far more readily than smiles, joy is the furthest thing from our mind. We become grouchy and repel joy in favor of self-induced misery.  We even remember happier days through a rose-colored lens and fall into despair instead of taking those past joys as a reminder that joy will come again.   There is light, and light still shines.

This year has been full of tearful, lonely, stressful days when we looked back on life B.C. (Before Corona), and longed for times of rest and community like we had back then. Sometimes we have the feeling as though life will never be so good or so "normal" again, and we feel sorrow. We miss friends and family and ordinary life, even though we know that this isolation is not the final word. Still there is light. The light still shines. There have been good days before and there will be joyful days in the future as well.  The future will restore the wealth of joy, community, and love that we have known before. For now, we are planting seeds of future joys and community, and we know that when this is all over and we are able to be together once again, we will come bearing overflowing hearts full of joy which were fostered through patience and loving-kindness toward our neighbors.

2020-2021 has brought a plague, and pain in plague, 450,000 now dead.  Many have lost their parents, without having the chance to grieve their going in the last weeks, days and even hours of life.  Nurses, physicians, hospital administrators, support personnel, and others in medical care have given the last full measure of devotion. (At least 1,000 nurses have died in the course of providing medical care to others). As have police officers, teachers, morticians, bus drivers, and others.

What might have been a moment of shared national commitment and common patriotic sacrifice, a war against disease, became instead a kind of war against healing, with cavalier understatement of danger, cavalier refusal to mask, distance, clean, test and trace, cavalier underestimate of the enormity and duration of the calamity (‘over by Easter’, ‘one day gone like a miracle’), and cavalier denial and avoidance of colossal grief and loss, from sea to shining sea.  How does one think about this? How does one reckon with this?  The presence of pandemic is a matter of nature.  Wise and careful leadership, or its astounding and costly absence, is a matter of grace, or, lack of grace.

Yet. Yet. Yet. The light still shines.

Remember.  There were voices, speaking truth, early on.  We were warned.  Jeff Flake, 10/24/17:  ‘I will no longer be complicit or silent in the face of…reckless, outrageous, undignified behavior…I deplore the casual undermining of our democratic ideals, the personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedom and institutions, the flagrant disregard for truth and decency…We must stop pretending that the conduct of some is normal.  It is not normal.    It is dangerous to a democracy. (NYT, 10/24/17)

Sometimes things end badly.  That’s why they end.  Sometimes the way a person leaves proves profoundly, beyond a shadow of doubt, why the leave-taking was needed.

You may know this in your own direct experience. When someone you love says or does something you hate, something that is wrong, hurtful, damaging, and lasting, not something mild or minor but something real and permanent, then a door closes on that event or act or  word, and you are left with disappointment and anger, disappointment that does not quickly dissipate and anger that does easily not abate.  It is a permanent wound, a lasting, permanent scar, forgivable and forgiven, by grace it may be, but not forgettable or forgotten.  By grace, it may be forgivable.  In truth, though, not ever forgettable.  It has only one true first cousin in life, and that cousin is death.  Here.  Just here. Here is where you will need a measure of faith.

Light in Darkness

In extremis, we need the voices of faith, like that of Paul, to steady us and remind us:  Yet.  The light still shines.  And other voices, too.  On Transfiguration Sunday, they may just transfigure us.

In the darkness of the 1930’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer glimpsed light: ‘God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him.  The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us…Before God and with God we live without God.  God lets himself be pushed out of the world and onto the cross.  He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us… And the church that calls a people to belief in Christ must itself be, in the midst of that people, the burning fire of love, the nucleus of reconciliation, the source of the fire in which all hate is consumed and the proud and hateful are transformed into the loving.” LETTERS AND PAPERS FROM PRISON 196.

In the darkness of the 1970’s, a decade we seem tragically intent to repeat, Erazim Kohak glimpsed light: “A life wholly absorbed in need and its satisfaction, be it on the level of conspicuous consumption or of marginal survival, falls short of realizing the innermost human possibility of cherishing beauty, knowing truth, doing the good, worshiping the holy”

In the darkness of 2020, David Blight glimpsed light:  Above all we need to revive the idea that truth matters. John Dewey:  ‘for truth instead of being a bourgeois virtue is the mainspring of all human progress’. (NYT 11/9/20, David W. Blight).

In our time and on our very street, Ibram X. Kendi glimpsed light, and says so in the language of possibility, the vocabulary of your own possibilist tradition, the very tongue of historic Methodism:  (Let us) saturate the body politic with the chemotherapy or immuno-therapy of antiracist policies that shrink the tumors of racial inequities, that kill undetectable cancer cells…But before we can treat, we must believe.  Believe all is not lost for you and me and our society.  Believe in the possibility that we can strive to be antiracist from this day forward.  Believe in the possibility that we can transform our societies to be antiracist from this day forward.  . (Ibram X Kendi, How To Be An Antiracist, p.238.)

In thy light we see light.  In thy light we see light.  If we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another.  If we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another. In a changed world, a reordered life, a twilit era, sometimes a poem lights the way.

Coda

There’s a tractor in the doorway of a church

in Red wing, Nebraska, in a coat of mud

and straw that drags the floor. A broken plow

sprawls beggar-like behind it on some planks

that make a sort of roadway up the steps.

The steeple’s gone.  A black tar-paper scar

that lightening might have made replaces it.

They’ve taken it down to change the house of God

to Homer Johnson’s barn, but it’s still a church,

with clumps of tiger lilies in the grass

and one of those boxlike, glassed-in signs

that give the sermon’s topic (reading now

a bird-nest and a little broken glass).

The good works of the Lord are all around;

the steeple top is standing in a garden

just up the alley; it’s a henhouse now;

fat leghorns gossip at its crowded door.

Pews stretch on porches up and down the street,

the stained-glass windows style the mayor’s house,

and the bell’s atop the firehouse in the square.

The cross is only God knows where.

Ted Kooser, Kindest Regards, p. 24

For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus sake.  For it is the God who said ‘Let light shine out of darkness’ who has hone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.

-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 02.14.2021 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

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Psalm 147

Mark 1: 29-39

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Preface

In a few minutes 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.

Coming into communion, together, together, let us listen for good news, this Lord’s Day, in Gospel and Psalm.

Mark 1: 29-39

First.  In our resolute Gospel, Jesus heals and then prays at some length. What did Jesus pray? And how? And for how long? Was his prayer attendant upon his healings? Or caught up only with his pending decision to itinerate? Where was this that he went? What did he wear? Did he kneel? Is this history or theology in Mark 1?

There is a strong argument to be made that we really know very little about Jesus, including about how he prayed in Capernaum. James Sanders once gave us a list of 8 things we could know about Jesus, one of which was that he died on a cross, and the others of which were not much more startling.  Norman Perrin said, “This material had a long history of transmission, use and interpretation in the early Christian communities, and when it reached the hand of Mark any element of historical reminiscence had long been lost…The Gospel of Mark is narrative proclamation.” Yet this scholarly sobriety hardly slakes our curious spiritual thirst.

We want to know about Jesus, as much as we can! When you love someone, you want to know them, root and branch, hook, line and sinker. Every Christian at every time has known this desire. We listen for, and to Him, today.  We listen for his word, to his word, today.

Take his word, forbade. Forbade. He did not permit the demons to speak. We do not believe in demons. Not at least in the ancient apocalyptic sense. Some others around the globe, it may be, are much more at home with the first century worldview of the New Testament than are we.  Still…we do make some admission in the midst of COVID, of reality beyond our understanding or control.  Those struggling this morning with mental illness might teach us all, and rightly, here. Or those battling the corrosive power of addiction. Or those who can bear full witness to racism in systemic exclusion and in generational impoverishment. Or those alive to, keenly aware of, the specters of pandemic, pollution, politics, prejudice and pain. But demons? No.  No demons. Not for us.  Still…

Or take his word, ‘say nothing’. Why is Jesus forever shushing others in Mark? You can find a dozen places where the writer has Jesus muffle, silence any report about who He is. Here is the first, read today. He did not permit the demons to tell people what was really going on, that he was the Messiah. Why? We really do not know. This may though be a clue for us to the message Mark wants to convey. He is an author writing a certain version of the Gospel that differs from others. There is no shushing in John. What is Mark’s point?

As one great scholar and dear friend has carefully argued (T. Weeden, Mark: Traditions in Conflict), Mark—not Jesus now, nor the early church now, but Mark---has an axe to grind. Here it is. Jesus was powerful but crucified. Christian life will involve glory--but also pain. Jesus was not only a wonder worker whom demons could celebrate or denigrate.  He also became a Messiah who disappointed his disciples, to the point of their, to the point of Peter’s, choosing betrayal. Jesus died on a cross, toward which in prayer this morning, a winter prayer if ever there was one, he chooses to itinerate. Christians suffer. Mark may want firmly to teach his generation that hurt is, tragically, a part of the walk of faith. Nero’s persecution may lie in the background. The Jewish war may lie in the foreground. A strongly competitive version of a glory gospel may lie in the background. Regardless, this gospel is about resolute discipleship. To be a Christian means to know how, and why, when you must, to pull up your socks.  To be resolute.

Take his word, ‘Shush’.  This lack of permission giving on Jesus’ part, confronted by demons, is a hard sell in a culture of leisure and narcissism. Christianity is a hard sell too. (Hence the inversions of it at various points.) Not all youth do easily warm to the required biblical reading of this faith. Not all young adults do easily warm to the sexual disciplines of this faith. Not all mature adults do easily warm to the expected tithing generosity of this faith. Not all older adults do easily warm to the necessary perseverance of this faith. It is a hard sell, to transform a culture of almost life to a culture full of life. This is hard, Sunday morning work. Work in pulpit and prayer. Across America we don’t so much need a political revolution as we need a cultural reformation. Today, across America we don’t so much need a political revolution as we need a cultural reformation.  For that, we will need to resolve to take another look at resolution.

For this, this morning, we have some good news. We have ancient, good company in Mark. The writer’s community finds themselves at the beginning of the eighth decade AD faced with a crisis of faith. Forty years have passed since Easter morning. The eschatological age has not dawned…the joys of the kingdom are still only dreams…Mark’s church is beset by suffering…The focus of his spiritual reflection is the on the struggling, even suffering life of Jesus (Weeden, Mark: Traditions in Conflict, 159).

Some by example show us this. There are some heroes and heroines among us, making the case for resolute discipleship, in what they say and how they live. One such is Marian Wright Edelman, now 81 years old.  She must pray. She must. Otherwise, how would she have the discipline to stay on the trail for children for so many years, so many decades? She wrote once to and for her students:

"I want to convey a vision to you today, as you (move) into an ethically polluted nation in a world where instant sex without responsibility, instant gratification without effort, instant solutions without sacrifice, getting rather than giving, and hoarding rather than sharing are the frequent messages and signals of our mass media popular culture and political life.

"Don’t be afraid of failing, it’s the way you learn to do things right. It doesn’t matter how many times you fall down, it just matters how many times you get up. It doesn’t matter how many times you fall down, it just matters how many times you get up."

In other words, this particular walk, in faith, your personal walk of faith, means that you will not always be appreciated. This walk means that you will be required to be kind to those who do not afford you the same courtesy. This walk means that you will daily get nametags thrust upon you that are misspellings. You may die a hero’s death and have your name misspelled in the paper. Jesus’ morning prayer in Mark 1: 29 had one single outcome: a resolve to take a hard path.

Will your morning prayer be resolute?

Psalm 147

Second. Listen to the morning Psalm, 147.  Given the wintery snares, cold air shoveling, icy night terrors, and snow bound ennui of this winter, and this week, the icy noonday destruction, evil, scourge, wild beasts of this very day, it could be that a sober, heart-felt, reading of our psalm, one of the great trusting hymns of a faithful heart, will sustain us a bit this morning.  Truth can heal.  Across this country, perhaps more than anything else, we need to recover a reverence for truth itself, the antithesis of falsehood, the very basis for a shared ethic and a common language.

Our psalmist, our singer is a person of simple faith.  We could make many complaints about this hymn and its singer.  He has a dangerously simple view of evil, especially for the complexity of a post-modern world.  He has a way of implying that trust, or belief, are rewarded with safety, a notion that Jesus many times in the Gospels, scornfully dismisses, and we know to be untrue.  He seems to have an appalling lack of interest in the scores of others, who fall by the wayside.  He seems to celebrate a foreordained, foreknown providence that ill fits our sense of the openness of God to the future, and the open freedom God has given us for the future.  He makes dramatic and outlandish promises not about what might happen, but about what will be.  As a thinking theologian, this psalmist of psalm 147 fails.  He fails us in our need to rely on something sounder and truer than blind faith.  He seems to us to be whistling past the graveyard.

And yet… for those who have walked past a February graveyard or two, for those who have walked the valley of the shadow of death, for us today, for a country mourning 450,000 losses (which in liturgical form we will do here on March 14), for a world searching to match its ideals of peace with its realities of hatred, for you today if you are in trouble, and who are worried today about others and other graves and other yards, and who have seen the hidden traps, unforeseeable dangers, and steel jawed snares of life, there is something encouraging about this simple song:  “the Lord heals the broken hearted and binds up their wounds.” The Lord heals the broken hearted and binds up their wounds.

Our writer, our psalmist, is not a philosopher.  He is a musician, perhaps, but not a systematic thinker.  In his psalm, his winter prayer, he has one interest:  getting by, getting through, getting out, and getting home. Maybe you feel that too this Sunday morning. So, he does not worry about the small stuff.  In fact, you may have a sense that the psalmist is a bit desperate.  His song is one for that point on the road when you just have to go ahead and risk and jump.  That’s the thing about faith:  it takes a leap. You have made your assessment, you have made your plan, you have made your study, then you have prayed.  Yet you see all the pestilence about you in homes and institutions and nations, so you wonder, is it worth the risk?  You are not sure.

This hymn of the heart is one you sing when you are not sure, but you are confident.  Not certain, but confident.  You can be confident without being certain.  In fact, a genuine honest confidence includes the confidence to admit you are not sure.  Faith means risk.  Isn’t that part of what we mean by faith?  Our writer is at that point, the point of decision.  Once you are there, you have to choose between walking forward and slinking away.

Our psalmist is speaking just here to our immediate need.  ‘Fear not’.  The Lord is not interested in ‘the strength of the horse or the speed of the runner’.  Fear not, and go about your discipleship:  pray, study, learn, make peace, love your neighbor, agree to disagree agreeably, everyone convinced in her own mind.

Here is the memory of a Day Care center we opened in one of our churches, where every morning you used to see notes pinned to the coats and sweaters of daycare toddlers.   Dads and moms pinning notes on the winter coats of their precious children. This psalm is a note pinned to the shirt of a loved one heading into danger.  When there is nothing else we can give our daughters and sons we want them to have faith.  Faith to go forward, with heart-felt bravery, without being sure of what they will find along the way.

Will your prayer be heart-felt?

Winter Prayer

So, dear friends, 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, a gathered and thus addressable community, you and I and all together, able to offer our winter prayer, framed in Gospel and Psalm, resolute and heart-felt.

Let us pray.

Gracious God,

We summon the better angels of our nature to sit quietly before you at this noon hour, in gratitude.  About us await the challenges of 2021: climate, covid, race, economy.  Right here, here and now, hic et nunc, on the street where we live.

For the gift of your love to inspire us, to quicken us to try, to join, to sign up, to get out, we are peacefully thankful.

For the gift of your presence to sustain us, to strengthen us to continue, to persevere, to stay up, to move on, we are simply thankful.

For the gift or your power to embolden us, to encourage us to achieve, to give, to change, to travel, to grow, we are spiritually thankful.

For the gift of your peace to illumine us, to steady us to plan, to finish, to complete, to leave, we are personally thankful.

Help us to love what is lovely, to be present to what is real, to find strength in what lasts, and to know peace in what honors, but surpasses, understanding.

Guide us to savor the beauty of holiness and the holiness of beauty, as with gratitude, right now, we remember and honor those who have supported us, our mentors, our parents, our friends.

Inspired by your love, sustained by your presence, encouraged by your power, confirmed by your peace, our life before you flows on in endless song.

For the privilege of these few days, even for this last, fallow, year, we are thankful.  To thee we offer our resolute, heartfelt prayer.

Amen.

-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 02.7.2021 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

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Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music:

As we turn again to our regular musical conversation partner, Johann Sebastian Bach, the tri-partite  rhythm of Tradition, Confrontation, and Response echoes in the works of Bach, a fifth Gospel transforming thought, word, and deed into a sacred song of praise, inspiration and aspiration.

Today, we feature five movements from five cantatas heard over the past two decades here at Marsh Chapel in our Sunday morning liturgy. As with Bach, we begin and end with hymns of praise and adoration, before confronting the challenges of our earthly predicament. Bach seems to acknowledge the difficulty we have in loving our neighbor, but he challenges us to embrace the transformative experience of a daily opportunity to extend God’s grace, Loving into freedom and freeing into greater Love.

We begin in joyful adoration with the opening movement of Cantata 69: Bless the Lord, O My Soul and forget not all His benefits.

BWV 69a.1| Lobe den Herrn, meine Seele          August 15, 1723

Psalm  103:2

Lobe den Herrn, meine Seele, und vergiß nicht, was er dir Gutes getan hat!

Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits!

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel:

And now, a pivot, a challenge, a confrontation, an opportunity for contrition perhaps:

Ecclesiasticus 1:28 — “See to it that thy fear of God be not hypocrisy, and do not serve God with a double heart”

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett:

Ah yes, the Apple of Sodom. Did you ever hear of this mystical fruit?? Bright and shiny on the outside, but so rotten inside, that it instantly dissolves into ash when plucked. For Bach and the librettist of Cantata 179, the Apple of Sodom represented a dire warning for the faithful: see to it that your inner and outer piety are of equal sincerity. The idea of reflection and mirroring the image of the creator is seared into the very counterpoint of the movement we’re about to hear. Written as a fugue, notice how successive entrances are cast in mirror inversion of the main theme — a paradigm for the purity faith requires, inside and out. One can hear the strain and stress of a false or double heart in the descending chromatics sung on the word Falsche or False. See to it, that your fear of God be not hypocrisy. Serve God with a pure heart, reflecting and mirroring God’s infinite grace and mercy.  Jaunty, didactic, even admonishing, Bach readily flexes his contrapuntal muscles with zeal and ardor, inviting the faithful to seek the high ground, survey the common ground, but not before we’ve scoured the background.

BWV 179.1 — Siehe zu, dass deine Gottesfurcht nicht Heuchelei sei          August 8, 1723

Ecclesiasticus 1:28

Siehe zu, daß deine Gottesfurcht nicht Heuchelei sei, und diene Gott nicht mit falschem Herzen!

See to it that thy fear of God be not hypocrisy, and do not serve God with a double heart.

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett:

Hear these words from the prophet Isaiah:

“Deal thy bread to the hungry, and bring the poor  that are cast out to thy house. When thou seest the naked, cover him; and hide not thyself from thine own flesh. Then shall thy light break forth as the morning and thy health shall spring forth speedily; and thy righteousness shall go before thee, the glory of the Lord shall be thy reward.”

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill:

The idea of reflecting the image of the creator is the creative spark at the heart of the golden rule. For to love your neighbor, extending grace, is indeed the image of God’s grace so freely and readily given to each of us. What begins as social justice for Isaiah – feed the hungry, clothe the naked, house the unhoused, becomes the animus for our own transformation.

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett:

Like Jesus in today’s lesson from Mark 1, Bach teaches us with remarkable understanding and authority. What begins as hollow, even disembodied “dry bones” music, more resembling those who most need our help, little by little takes on sinews until fully clothed in the garb of a joyful dance.

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill:

Love and serve your neighbor, and do so with the understanding that this above all rejoices God’s heart, transforming us with the brightness of the morning sun.

BWV 39.1 — Brich dem Hungrigen dein Brot          June 23, 1726

Isaiah 58: 7–8

Brich dem Hungrigen dein Brot und die, so im Elend sind, führe ins Haus! So du eienen nacket siehest, so kleide ihn und entzeuch dich nicht von deinem Fleisch. Alsdenn wird dein Licht herfürbrechen wie die Morgenröte, und diene Besserung wird schnell wachsen, und deine Gerechtigkeit wird für dir hergehen, und die Herrlichkiet des Herrn wird dich zu sich nehmen.

Deal thy bread to the hungry, and bring the poor  that are cast out to thy house. When thou seest the naked, cover him; and hide not thyself from thine own flesh. Then shall thy light break forth as the morning and thy health shall spring forth speedily; and thy righteousness shall go before thee, the glory of the Lord shall be thy reward.

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill:

The Golden Rule. Seems so easy, so straightforward. The Law – to love the Lord your God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thyself. Jesus offers simply and directly, “Love one another.” No other qualifications or exemptions, but Jesus’s Lucan parable of the Good Samaritan acknowledges our human failings.  In so doing, Jesus reveals a sublime dialectic – Law and Grace, inextricably connected, inviting us daily to acknowledge our sin, claim God’s redeeming grace, and freely share that same Grace.

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett:

In recent years, our survey of Bach’s cantatas has drawn inspiration and focus from those cantatas Bach wrote in his first months in Leipzig: July, August, and September of 1723. These works reveal an astonishing and radiant understanding of the scripture, far beyond mere text setting. The grand and bold opening movement of Cantata 77 unfolds with tender, unassuming lines, that ultimately gather to the most extraordinary musical essay on the great dialectic of the Law and Grace. The highest and lowest instrumental voices play the familiar Ten Commandments chorale tune in grand canonic imitation. But these lines attain new meaning and height when we realize that the inner lines sung by the chorus are that same melody sung backwards and upside down. Grace is inextricably derived from the creative stuff of the Law, in perfect equilibrium, the most noble expression of contrite, sincere love of God — a pure reflection of inner and outer piety. Bach’s musical expression of Imago Dei – the Image of God.

BWV 77.1 — Du sollt Gott, deinen Herren, lieben          August 22, 1723

Luke 10:27

Du sollt Gott, deinen Herren, lieben von ganzem Herzen, von ganzer Seele, von allen Kräften und von ganzem Gemüte und deinen Nächsten als dich selbst.

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as thyself.

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill:

Well beloved, today’s journey with Bach celebrates that perfect state of grace attained when we — each of us — imparts grace, kindness, patience — persistent patience — all without quid pro quo.

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett:

Imago Dei. The mirror of the divine: freeing into love, and loving into freedom. Freide über Israel! Peace upon Israel. Bach’s song to you, God’s abiding peace to you.  Peace upon Israel.

BWV 34.5 — O ewiges Feuer, o Ursprung der Liebe          1740s

John 14: 23 and 27

Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our abode with him. Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you.

Friede über Israel. Dankt den höchsten Wunderhänden, Dankt, Gott hat an euch gedacht. Ja, sein Segen wirkt mit Macht, Friede über Israel, Friede über euch zu senden.

Peace upon Israel! Give thanks to the Almighty’s wondrous hands, Give thanks that God has been mindful of you. Yea, the might of His blessing casts peace upon Israel, and peace upon you.

-Compiled and written by Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music

posted in Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music, The Bach Experience, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 01.31.2021 at 11:01 am

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By Marsh Chapel

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Mark 1: 21-28

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Jesus greets us today through the inner voice, your inner voice, nudging by and through the inklings of faith, in your own experience.  You are listening and so are drawn to faith, through the spiritual nudges of the Gospel, in tradition and in confrontation and in response.

Three inklings of faith are announced today, in the Gospel According to St. Mark.   We shall trace their emergence in our hearing, and attempt to apply them to our spiritual benefit.

Tradition

First, notice the lingering power of tradition.  Not traditionalism, but the forms of inherited tradition.  The dominical voice bespeaking inklings of faith whistles through the willow branches of tradition.

Jesus speaks.

When does he speak?  On the Sabbath. Where does he speak?  In the synagogue.

How does he speak?  As a teacher.

All three of these aspects of his speaking are named for us, though we might have inferred two of the three from just the mention of one, or another.  They go together—holy time, holy space, holy words.  The gospel means to emphasize by repetition.

There is, at the outset, a regard, a lingering respect for what has been, for what one inherits.  For tradition, though not traditionalism.  The Sabbath is the occasion.  The synagogue is the setting.  The role of teacher frames the message.

A time of rest and refreshment, Sabbath, here receives Jesus’ blessing, at least in the manner of his recognition and participation.   Sunday can be a time of Sabbath rest.  A time for sleep, for recovery, for reading, for gathering.   We are a sleep deprived people, somnambulant in a sleep deprived culture.  So a traditional occasion, a time for retreat and renewal can feed us, if we let it.  There are none so weary as those who will not sleep.

Following my sermons, some arise inspired and some awake refreshed.  Both are good outcomes.  Both!

Likewise, synagogue, a coming together, is a traditional form.  It means, a gathering together.  Blessed are the hosts, for they shall be called the cooks of God.   When you have had a hand in gathering together a gathering together, you have brushed close to something good, something godly.  How we feel the force of this, mid-Covid, an inkling known in pain in the breach.

So, too, the role of the teacher.  A familiar role, a familiar social location.  It is not in some exotic form that Jesus greets his hearers today.  The form is familiar, the teacher.  We may sometimes look too far, too wide for what we most want and need, when nearby, familiarly so, our health awaits.

Sabbath, synagogue, rabbi.  Tradition.  Here Jesus is more than willing to don the raiment of inheritance, to be harnessed by the yoke of tradition.  Jeremiah recommended the old paths.  Matthew prized every jot and tittle.  We hunger for those voices that will help us translate the tradition into insights for effective living.

So, a Chapel, and so a Sunday service. Some memories of college years, here, will be connected to the particular sound of our choir.  Some recollections of exams passed or nearly passed, will be held in earshot of a meal or a trip or a talk, here.  Some remembrances of things past, even of hard moments of loss or regret or disappointment, will have about them a shaft of light through stained glass, an echo of truth through scripture read, an admission of prayer needed and offered.

Our gospel today, which offers inklings of faith, notices the lingering power of tradition.

It is in the midst of this house, this lineage, this inheritance that Jesus speaks, not absent it.

His hearers are astonished.  He is not confused in their hearing with their hearing of the scribes, his usual opponents in the flow of this gospel.  They know a different voice when they hear it.  A voice, nudging you today, a hum, a whisper, an inkling of faith.

But we are not told what exactly made the voice authoritative.

Like last week, in the calling of the disciples, the two sets of brothers.  We are told nothing, there, about what made them move, what caused their decision, what set them free.  And this week, in the authorization of teaching, we are told nothing about what made the sermon so good.  Only that it was.

Confrontation

Second, notice, and how can you help it, the centrality of confrontation.  Here there is an unclean spirit loose, loose amid the holy time and place and role.

A voice of authority calls out his nemesis.  We are straightway here in the realm of apocalyptic, cosmic apocalyptic, battle.

I can remember the first burial, now nearly thirty years ago, in which such wailing occurred in my hearing.  It was startling, as, for many, here, it was last week.  But it was true and real.  That is, now and then, people still ‘cry with a loud voice’, sometimes, in church.

Our worldview is not cosmic apocalyptic confrontation.  We do not see a convulsive as one demon, of an unclean sort, challenging another Jesus demon of an authoritative sort.  We are late modern people, women and men who do not cry out in public, unless we are at a sporting event, drinking heavily, or about to call the police into a domestic dispute.  Maybe, in compensation, that is why sports and drinking and all become so central to us.

Authentic authority involves confrontation, not just pleasant courtesies of disagreement, but genuine squaring off.  To your roommate you finally say: ‘One of us is wrong and I think it is you.’  To your boss you finally say:  ‘Look, do you want to do my work or will you let me do it?’  To your political economy (known by the way for good reason as ‘capitalism’ not ‘laborism’, because capital rules labor in capitalism) you finally say:  ‘One way or another my son needs a job.’  To your good friend, gently, you say: ‘I am sorry you feel that way.  Goodbye’.  To your spouse you say:  ‘You can have me or him but not both at the same time’.  To your warring world you finally shout:  ‘My son is not your cannon fodder’.

One thing I truly admired about my dad was how he easy he was around confrontation.  A man would stand up and shout and carry on a church meeting, walk out of worship the next Sunday, or send a blistering hand written hate note to the pastor, and my dad would shrug and smile and say, ‘I like to see him get worked up.  It is worth the price of admission just to see him so angry.’  Less naturally and more slowly, I too have learned to honor and receive anger.  Mark would understand.

Here Mark is starting his gospel, with a confrontation.  The verb here rendered ‘be silent’ (so polite) means ‘to muzzle’.  Be muzzled.  Shut your trap. (so J Marcus, loc. Cit.).  Matthew begins his public gospel with the Sermon on the Mount.  Luke begins his public gospel with the sermon in Nazareth.  John begins his public gospel with the wedding in Cana (again, Marcus).  But Mark?  He begins with demons and confrontation.

When we get angry, we get in touch with something deep inside, something not necessarily at all related to what we think we are angry about.  We are not so very far from the ‘unclean spirit’ of Mark 1.  We are complicated creatures.

You see and hear this again in a play from a few years ago, ‘Freud’s Last Session’, an imagined conversation between Sigmund Freud, the great psychologist, and C. S. Lewis, the great apologist.  Bombs are falling on London.  Freud is suffering with mouth cancer.  Lewis is struggling with his young man’s sexuality. And through it all—the question of God.  Freud and Lewis confront each other. They lock horns for 90 minutes of verbal combat.  Each memorizes and delivers the equivalent of two Sunday sermons.  They square off and argue.  Good.

There is no resolution—how could there be in 90 minutes?  But there is confrontation, in and through which, it may be, there is an inkling of something, and inkling of faith.

It takes sometimes the inkling of exorcising power, finally, of love, to move us.

Response

Third, response.  Notice the response.  The emphasis falls on an acknowledgement of an authenticity in the nudges to faith.  Inklings with authority.  ‘With authority…a new teaching…he commands…even the demons obey…his fame spread throughout the north country’.   It works.  Whatever he said, whatever he taught, it helped somebody.  We wish we knew what it was!

Yet, there is a quieter wisdom in the silence of Scripture here.  If we knew, we would be tempted just to repeat rather than to rehearse.  We need to have the tradition, in the moment of confrontation, translated into insights for effective living which, in response, we can use.  That is authentic authority in the full.  If we knew that he used the 100^th Psalm, we would repeat it every Sunday.  If we knew he preached on Jeremiah, we would invariably do so.  If we knew he taught specific proverbs, we would ignore the rest.  No, there is freedom in the silence of the gospel, here, a freedom to live and love with authentic authority.  To respond.  And you?

I am committed to the life of faith because the best people, leading the best lives, in my experience, have shown inklings of faith.  I respond to the freedom and love I see in other people of faith, now 65 generations after the exorcism in Capernaum, and the response all across Galilee.  In other lives I have seen glimpses of what I could be and do, if I would only straighten up and fly right.  Some of those lives are in this room.  Some are in memory.  Some are out there waiting to be introduced.  Don’t kid yourself.  Especially, especially in a University setting, people are taking your measure.  Good.  Your example counts, matters, lasts, works.

Tradition and confrontation evoke a response.  The unclean spirit leaves.  The congregation murmurs.  The report goes forth.

Let me turn it around.  When you fail somehow, and we all you do, sometime, you know the negative influence of your own response.  Give yourself some credit then, on the up side of the ledger.  Dean Jones gave me a book.  Professor Jones listened with care.  That TA gave me the benefit of the doubt.  I will always be grateful for what Chaplain Jones did for me.  Let me say to those of us thirty years old and more:  eyes are watching, ears are listening, minds are considering what path to take.  Your example makes a difference in their response, right here, right now, right at Marsh Chapel.  We are forever teaching and learning, learning and teaching.

Someone taught you.  A High School band director?  A Latin teacher in college?  A chemistry professor who lingered with you in the lab?  Who?

One responded to her Latin teacher.  Another responded to his science teacher.  One responded to her history teacher.  Another responded to her family matriarch.  One responded to his theology professor.  As Carlyle Marney put it:  “Who told you who you was?”

The music is playing all around us, all through us, in our triumph and in our tragedy.  We just need to respond.  To lean over, and turn the dial, and set the music free.

This is the power of Bach today.  Inklings of faith are found in real response.

The Gospel According to St. Mark starts off with inklings of faith, inklings of faith.  When you are searching for a sense of, then hunt around a healthy bit of lost tradition, and for a courageous and cleansing moment of confrontation and  for a real and personal, public response.

-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 01.31.2021 at 11:00 am

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