Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

By Marsh Chapel

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Mark 1:14-20

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In April of 1521, Reformer Martin Luther stood trial for his beliefs and convictions. With full knowledge that heretics of this magnitude were generally put to the death, at the conclusion of his defense he famously uttered, “Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise.” Luther’s theology and convictions led him to stand firm when it would have been far easier to stand down. He is generally viewed favorably for standing strong for what he believed to be true, especially as it challenged existing paradigms and structures. In the United States, we face a situation where many have strong convictions rooted in their beliefs. We know all too well though, that convictions cannot be equated with truth and that convictions can have serious repercussions.

As a nation, we are coming through the postmodern breakdown of all truth to a place of competing truths. There is my truth and your truth but very little of our truth. There is little work across the aisle, across the pews, and sometimes even across the dinner table. In many ways, truth has been reduced to individual experience. There are benefits to recognizing the perspectival, contextual, and experiential qualities of truth; however, truth also exists, or perhaps “insists” to borrow language from Caputo, intersubjectivily. It is never the sole property of one person, one view, or one party. So we come to a point of crisis or at least confusion, there are different “Here I stand” situations across the nation and world, which raises the question, how do we interpret these convictions amid competing truths.

Like many of you, I am still processing the January 6^th insurrectionist attack that took place. My soul is weary and my mind is full as I try to keep a grip on reality. It is not always easy to separate fact from fiction in the best of times but given the breakdown of civility and a lack of candor, it is unfortunately not too difficult to understand how conspiracy theories are being legitimatized and how radicalization is being actualized. We live in uncertain times. We are in difficult times but we do not mourn as those without hope. We are those with faith because of the promises of God poured out through grace. We are those who can imagine a world of equality and freedom because we have seen and tasted a Gospel that lays claim on our being in the world. This works to ground truth, not as some absolute that can be offered in pietistic pithy phrases, but grounded in a Creator who continues to create, a liberator who continues to liberate, and a healer who continues to heal.

We heard last week the words of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. through his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail. There is a great sense of urgency in the words of King, especially read back through his death and through current events. We find also a sense of urgency in our lectionary passages for the day.

From Jonah, we hear the most effective 8-word sermon that still left the preacher disappointed, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” From Paul in 1 Corinthians we hear the hope of the imminent return of Christ and the passing of the present age, “I mean, brothers and sisters, the appointed time has grown short” and a little later, “For the present form of this world is passing away.” From Mark, we hear recognition that the nearness of the Kingdom is at hand and the imperative to believe in the Gospel. “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” These texts placed together by the lectionary on this third Sunday after the Epiphany communicate a sense of urgency. They communicate a sense that something has happened, is happening, and that something is about to happen. These passages teem with expectations of the eventfulness of God’s presence and work in the world. These passages dream with expectations.

The writers of each of these passages wrote of a God of power and strength capable of acting in and upon the world. A God whose words and actions can rupture into time to re-orient particular places and even time itself. They drew direction and purpose from the meanings derived from these understandings and symbols of God. They also understood the importance of responding to the call. While God spoke through messengers and while God is envisioned as the one bringing about aspects of newness and change, the urgency in the passages is not just what the divine is doing or will do, but how humans will respond. The promise of Divine activity is at the same time a call for human responsibility. The call and response provide ground and grounding as God works in, with, and through people for justice, liberation, and love.

This can be a painful process because of misplaced affection and direction. Jonah did not want to go to Nineveh. He did not want his enemies to repent and he actively ran from the call. Jonah knew God to be a God of forgiveness when repentance was genuine. When Jesus called, the disciples put down their nets and they followed. As fishermen, their nets were their livelihood. It was one of their most important tools but a new call requires new tools. Following Jesus did not take away who they were but it did change how they understood the world and their vocation in the world. They could not bring everything from their old life into their new life. Growth rarely comes without growing pains. Often, the Gospel is bad news before it is good news but it is bad news that brings about good news. The Gospel is bad news to parts of the old that should no longer be. It is bad news to powers and principalities. It is bad news to idolizing understandings of God and lies that deceive.  The call of the Gospel leads to restoration and transformation. While the Gospel is for me, it is also for you, and for us. Whenever the Gospel stops being for everyone, it is no longer the grounding Gospel.

It is in the hopes of proclaiming a Gospel for everyone that I share the following about myself with you. I grew up in white America. A town that still is 98.9 percent white that played the country music which described it so well. I lived on a dirt road listening to the crickets and cows in my back yard. I was raised to love God, my family, and the United States of America. I was taught that we were always the good guys. A city on a hill blessed by God and built upon religious freedom. I learned early in life that the United States was formed as a nation set apart for the peace of the world. I pledged allegiance to the flag every day, in fact, I led the pledge of allegiance in my high school over the intercom for years. My mother, who taught me AP government in high school, instilled the hope that if injustice was occurring, that we the people could always form a more perfect union through democratic practices.

While much of what I learned had good and truth in it, there were also many falsities and untruths. In elementary school, I was taught that indigenous people were uncivilized aggressors and that the “holy” pilgrims just wanted to worship God in peace. In high school, I learned that the Civil War was fought to preserve the union and that it was fundamentally a conflict of state rights. My teacher would not accept slavery as a cause of the Civil War. There are myriads of other white myths that formed and informed me. There was a lack of truth about the histories of non-white people and a great fear of “the other.” The other, who takes away jobs and who is a threat to democracy and family values. There came a time when I had to separate fact from fiction and truth from lies. There came a time where the call was a choice. Do I love “the other” or do I run to Joppa? Do I follow a Gospel unbounded by nations and nationalism or do I hold onto my nets which tangle truth with lies?

Some might say I became disillusioned. When what I held to be true but learned was only partly true and mostly false fell apart, I felt wounded. I struggled. I wonder if some of you are there today. In despair and disillusioned. Wondering how to move forward in faith or move forward at all. Maybe you are there for the first time, maybe you are there for the 10^th time. While it is a hard place to be, there are times when we need to be disillusioned to myths in order to see the truth.

Like you, I watched in horror on January 6^th, 2021. I watched a crowd of overwhelmingly white Americans attempt a coup upon not only the particular people in power of this country but the entire American democratic process. I watched people declare that they would rather kill those who they disagreed with then live in tension. I watched people break windows, scale walls, and propel chemical agents. I saw pictures of blood, zip ties, gallows outside the Capitol building, and guns were drawn. I saw democratically elected officials wearing gas masks, laying on the floor, with fear for their lives in their eyes. I saw flags of racism, hate, and sedition in the hallowed halls of government. As an ordained Christian minister, I confess the most offensive images were those with crosses. To authorize a political insurrection with the cross is not only to misunderstand the cross, it makes an idol out of the sacred symbol. Those were really nets. Good for trapping and killing. The cross is not for trapping and killing but freeing and living.

I wept as I held my 8-month-old son who bears the same name as the officer murdered by an insurrectionist mob. I wept that the day Georgia elected its first black senator, Confederate flags representing a system where not all were free and equal were proudly displayed in his future place of work. I wept and I am still angry.

I am angry at calls for unity that come with no accountability. There can only be unity when there is accountability. There can only be unity when there is trust. When trust is broken, it takes time to be restored. I am angry at the excuses and lies that created this moment in history and that attempt to say what happened didn’t really happen.

Beloved while it is necessary, disillusionment can be dangerous. It can just as easily lead to apathy as it can lead to change. We’ve seen a part of this danger in a concrete form on January 6^th but it is also the case that many people have experienced disillusionment their whole lives. Disillusionment itself can become a net or ground for those who repeatedly choose it or are forced into it.  Through time, I have come to see that “my America,” the America that provided me with opportunities and liberties, was not everyone’s America. Through time, I learned that “my America” was not only not everyone’s America but also that “my America” depended on America not being America to others. My upward mobility, my success, my financial independence, my gadgets and gizmos galore depended, yes on my hard work but also on the backs of others. My load was lighter just like my skin … because of my light skin.

Like you, I am still wondering where we go from here to heal from the traumas of history and recent events. Like you, I still wonder how to partner with others and God in redemptive work in the world. This week I heard echoes of the call at the inauguration of President Biden, especially in Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb.” Listen now to a part of this powerful poem. “When day comes, we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never ending shade? … If only we dare, it’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit. It’s the past we step into and how we repair it. We’ve seen a force that would shatter or nation, rather than share it. Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy. And this effort very nearly succeeded, but while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated in this truth. In this faith, we trust for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us. This is the era of just redemption. We feared it in its inception. We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour, but within it, we found the power to author a new chapter. To offer hope and laughter to ourselves. So while once we asked, how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe? Now we assert how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us? We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be a country that is bruised. But whole benevolence, but bold, fierce, and free … When day comes, we step out of the shade of flame and unafraid, the new dawn balloons, as we free it. For there was always light. If only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it.”

Beloved, bravery is necessary to keep searching for light. Bravery is necessary to hear the call of the Gospel and respond with love and liberation for all. The Gospel and democracy are not the same, neither are faith politics. They should not be confused but they can mutually inform and critically engage when done responsibly.

President Biden reminded us this week that democracy is fragile; perhaps, it is time that Christians recognize that the Gospel is fragile as well. Perhaps it is time to see that the Gospel is not a weapon but an invitation, it is not a trump card but a call to live for the sake of God and “the other.” It is not some transcendent universal past panacea but hope of what is to come that alters the present. Caputo put it this way, “The name of God is possessed, not of ontological foundations, institutional support, a large bank account, Swiss guards, a television network or ecclesiastical authority.” He goes on the say that God is found and experienced in the call and response of the everyday lives of people. He calls this urgent eventful aspect of God the “poetics of the impossible.” The “poetics of the impossible” led Jonah to Nineveh when he wanted to go to Joppa, Paul to Corinth where he was rejected, and led the disciples to drop their nets.

The “here I stand ground,” the grounding of the call and response of a liberating God, is the call of the Gospel. The “here I stand ground” is not the moral high ground, the military high ground, or the political high ground. The Gospel ground is sustained by faith and driven by truthful conviction. The “here I stand ground” is the ground of love and service. The call can still be heard today but listening must precede speaking, learning must precede teaching, and accountability must precede unity. There are times when the Gospel has to dislocate us before it can locate us. Stand in the work of the Gospel.

-The Rev. Scott Donahue-Martens

Ph.D. Student in Practical Theology: Homiletics

Boston University School of Theology

posted in Guest Preachers on 01.24.2021 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

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John 1: 43-51

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It is not only an ethical imperative that directs us to love our neighbor.  To feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome the stranger, heal the sick and visit the prisoner.  Should we do these things?  Yes, we should.  Is it our Christian duty to do them?  Yes, it is.  Is this a moral imperative for us, to follow the teachings of Jesus?  It is so.  Then is this the gospel, the good news for today, for the Lord’s day?  Well, we might say it is not the whole of the Gospel.  In the Gospel, not only an ethical imperative, but also, and more so, a divine gift awaits us in Jesus the Christ.  You will see the heavens opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man. You will see the heavens opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.

Let us receive the divine gifts of this day, in the midst of all manner of personal, communal, national and cultural challenges.

Over the last 15 years, in concert with a tradition dating back several years before, we have honored the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. upon this Sunday.  Often, though not this year, this is also the Sunday at the opening of Spring term, a kind of winter Matriculation.  Year by year, we have tried to probe the depths of our legacy, our inheritance, here at Boston University and here at Marsh Chapel, of the voice, mind and heart of Dr. King, whose beautiful, unique and aspirational monument greets us upon Marsh Plaza.  Over the years, voices in concert with his have been lifted here, on the third Sunday of January, prophetic, true, and loving voices: those of the Rev. Dr. Walter Fluker (four times), Mr. Christopher Edwards, Esq., the Rev. Dr. Jennifer Quigley, the Rev. Dr. Peter Paris, Ms. Liz Douglass, the Rev. Dr. Elizabeth Siwo-Okundi, the Rev. Dr. Karen Coleman,  and also the Dean (three times), including last year, January 2020,  in our service celebrating the opening of the Howard Thurman Center (along with Dean Kenn Elmore and Director Katherine Kennedy).  (April 2018 also included 10 days of events and services, fifty years after King’s assassination, culminating in sermons here at Marsh Chapel by Cornell William Brooks and especially of Governor Deval Patrick.)  For Martin Luther King Jr. Sunday this year, this fifteenth year, we listen solely to the voice of King himself, in words all, including every undergraduate, should want to read and know and hear, out of Martin Luther King’s 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail.

The work of ethics can open a world us to a world of angels. When you feed the hungry, then you may be christened.  When you clothe the naked, you yourself may be given a confirming gift.  When you welcome the stranger, it may be own joy in eucharist that emerges.  When you heal the sick, you might just find your own anointing and absolution.  And when you visit the prisoner, it is your own soul that is fed.   We are directed ethically to the periphery of life (hunger, nakedness, loneliness, illness, abandonment) so that our ethical zeal can carry us higher.  John knew well, perhaps best in Scripture, that morals and ethics only take us to the foothills.  There is a great high mountain before us.  We find our way toward this height when, by surprise, in the midst of our work and duty…we are accosted by God, by the angels of God.

So, it is, for those who will hear, some nearly sixty years later, words from Martin Luther King, in the finest document remaining from the civil rights era, his Letter from Birmingham Jail.  Those in prison, from Paul of Tarsus to Nelson Mandela, have long had wisdom to share.  They have time to think, and so, something to say.  The finest document from the civil rights era, now nearly sixty years past, is this letter.  Its burden of truth, carried in soaring prose, is largely conveyed in these words:  impatience, justice, time, love, disappointment, and hope.  In the quiet of this winter weekend, with all that swirls about us across this great land of the free and home of the brave, let us carefully meditate together on the gospel as heard through these words from Birmingham.  For we too, now in January 2021, sorely need the nourishment of impatience, justice, time, love, disappointment, and hope.

As we enter the next chapter of American history, the central, lasting, troublous, challenging matter of race, of racism, of anti-racism meets us head on and head long.  This is not only an ethical set of issues.  Rightly seen, rightly heard, this can be a gift of God to us.  Perhaps, at Marsh Chapel, as a University pulpit, we have both the responsibility and the opportunity to place some of this near future work in the context of angelic words, none finer than those of Letter from Birmingham Jail.  On completing the Ph.D. I went to our neighborhood college, a young Jesuit school, and asked to teach.  The Religion Chair, a wonderful woman and Tillich scholar, a former religious, said, ‘You want to teach?’  So, she assigned me the Introduction to Religion Course, which I taught for two decades there, everything you never wanted to know about World Religions, Judaism, Christianity and yours truly.  I asked about the curriculum.  That is up to you, she replied.  Except here (she looked over at a photo of Daniel Berrigan) we always require the Prophet Amos, and Augustine’s Confessions and…Letter from Birmingham Jail.  Wise counsel.

1. Let us meditate on impatience:

For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear… with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant 'Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God- given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jet-like speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark jab of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million  brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six- year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children…then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and (we) are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

2. Let us meditate on justice:

One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all".

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust... Paul Tillich said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression 'of man's tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness?

3. Let us meditate on time:

I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: “but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth."

Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely rational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of (those) willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation…Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

4. Let us meditate on love:

Was not Jesus an extremist for love: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream." Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." Was not Martin Luther an extremist: "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God." And John Bunyan: "I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience." And Abraham Lincoln: "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free." And Thomas Jefferson: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal ..." So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love?

5. Let us meditate on disappointment:

I have looked at (our)beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious-education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: "What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices…

Yes, these questions are still in my mind. In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? l am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson and the great- grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.

6. Let us meditate on hope:

Perhaps I have once again been too optimistic. Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world? Perhaps I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual church, the church within the church, as the true ekklesia and the hope of the world. But again I am thankful to God that some noble souls from the ranks of organized religion have broken loose from the paralyzing chains of conformity and joined us as active partners in the struggle for freedom…They have carved a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment.  

I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are at present misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America's destiny…We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.

Angels of God, ascending and descending…Hear the Gospel in the voice, the voice of Martin Luther King, Jr., meditation on impatience, justice, time, love, disappointment, and hope.  You and I will need some measure of divine impatience with what is wrong, in this next year.  You and I will some measure of divine justice to seize what is right in the next year. You and I will need some measure of time, Kairos time not just Chronos time, to do the right things in the right ways at the right times in the next year.  You and I will need some measure of love to bring meaning to work in the next year.  You and I will need some honesty about disappointment, and its depths, to endure the challenges of the next year.  And most of all, you and I will need some measure of hope, that which we do not see but wait for with patience, in the next year.  May God bless us all.

Let us pray:

In a season of stagnation, dear Lord, make us impatient.

In a season of unfairness, dear Lord, help us yearn for justice.

In a season of delay, dear Lord, cause us to prize our time.

In a season of decay, dear Lord, inspire us by love.

In a season of disappointment, dear Lord, grant us courage to be.

In a season of desire, dear Lord, may we hope for what we do not see.

Amen.

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

posted in Services Honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 01.17.2021 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

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Mark 1: 4-11

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A voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased’.  

There are some weeks when good news seems hard to come by.

Late in November, 1963, with youth hockey around the corner, and at last some new skates that fit, a lingering pallor covered our town, after President Kennedy tragically was shot.   There was an evening prayer service, but good news was hard to come by.  ‘We are a nation drenched in sorrow’ began Jan’s dad’s, my father in law’s rewritten sermon for that Sunday.

A decade later, with some of us studying abroad, preparing to teach college Spanish literature—a dream deferred to another lifetime, the war in Vietnam was reportedly ending, with helicopters carrying out the remaining soldiers and staff from a rooftop in Saigon.  ‘How do you ask a man to be the last to die in a mistaken war?’ aptly asked one then young, now veteran national leader.  A nation chastened, broken, without bearing or mooring, and little good news to be had.

A bit more than a decade later, 1988, a plane down in Lockerbie, but we rehearsed that last week, did we not?

Of a Tuesday morning, a bright one, an autumn bright morning, September 2001, some of us headed out for work, wondering what we had just seen, or what had we seen?, in the skies above the Towers above the city that never sleeps.   Little sleep, and very little good news, there was in that week of 9/11.  The evenings were given over to community worship, and on Friday the churches come 11am were packed.  The dangling chads of Broward County the year before were forgotten.

On this very avenue, in April of 2013, with the blasts of Beacon street still reverberating in mind and memory, every evening that week brought, right in here in Marsh Chapel, some manner of worship service, and gathering, for healing and help.  None of it fully adequate, all of it offered to God and neighbor on behalf of a better future day, days and weeks when there would be more news of a better sort.  A promissory note, within the notes of grief and loss.

Early November of 2016 brought another set of days, a week, weeks let us say, of confusion and despair regarding that fall’s election.   In hindsight, we see a bit better why.  What many meant by choices in 2016 was not the meaning of those choices.  What one meant was not, and is not, what it means.  What you meant is not what it means.  What it means is found not in intention but in consequence.  The road to hell is paved with good intentions.  We all can attest to that from our own experience, and our own behavior.  It was hard to scare up much good news that late autumn.

There are some weeks when good news seems hard to come by, and this week is one such.  Yet these serial reminders of dark days past are meant, as you rightly surmise, to recall that we did make it through them, and we will get through this, too.  We did make it through them, and we will get through this, too. Not unscathed, and hopefully not unchanged, but together, we will make it through.

Coming into this week already we faced challenges aplenty.  A climate reeling out of control.  A pandemic claiming 350,000 lives.  A political culture, a culture cooked politics, for politics is ever downstream from culture, putting people at daggers drawn.  A community of communities seeing, in full, for the first full time it may be, the ravages and damages of racial bias, hatred, and prejudice.  And pain, the pain of every day.

Now this week.  On top of all other this (Thursday) morning’s blaring headline, ‘TRUMP INCITES MOB’.  4 dead, not in Ohio this time, but in the nation’s capital city,  and inside the nation’s capitol building.  Insurrection with presidential incitement. One wonders about the future of the party of Lincoln.

January 6, 2021. For the rest of history, for the rest of our lives, we shall have to live with, and attempt by faith to live down, both to live with and to live down, such utter calumny, such tragic, needless, heedless yet revelatory disaster.  It is an apocalyptic—a revelatory—moment, hundreds wrecking the capitol, with hardly a single arrest to date, encouraged by a wantonly graceless leader, and with 6 Senators, 6 Senators (Cruz, Hawley, Hyde-Smith, Marshall, Kennedy, Tuberville), and much other congressional cattle (Jonah 4:11), continuing to feed its root cause. For while this sermon is being recorded Thursday late afternoon, January 7, 2021, we cannot be at all sure what further difficulty and distress may visit us, in this current week of scarce good news, by Sunday when the sermon is heard, January 10, 2021.  One said, ‘this is like 9/11, except we did this to ourselves’.

But at some preconscious level, somewhere down in the declivities of the country’s psyche, we had a sense that this was coming.  We did not want to admit it.  We hoped against hope to be wrong in that premonition.  We hoped to whistle past the graveyard for another few days.  Yet we remembered, dimly, our upbringing, ‘don’t play with fire if you don’t want to get burned’. We have had four years of warning, advisement, signs along the pathway of this premonition.  So we are not surprised, and have no reason to be.  It has been as plain as the nose on your face, even as plain as the nose on my face, at least since Charlottesville.  It is no wonder, no surprise, that the 25^th Amendment remedy is now rightly, and wisely, under full consideration.  For a lot can happen in two weeks.

So, the community of faith gathers come Sunday, January 10, 2021, to listen, pray, and prepare.  You have come this morning, by radio or internet, to listen, pray, and prepare.  And to wonder.  Just what is the gospel, the good news for this Lord’s Day?

With you, I weep for my country and its people.  More so, I pray for my own people, my own congregation, our University, our listenership, you and your loved ones, near or far or very far away.  It must be admitted, that there are some weeks when good news seems pretty hard to come by.  This is one.

Still.  The preacher’s role is to announce the gospel in interpretation of and accord with the Scriptures. Scripture gives us the chance for the long view.  Scripture gives us a deep grounding, with heaven a little higher and earth a little wider. Thank goodness we have the Holy Scripture to which to turn, from which to  learn, with which to listen, pray and prepare.  Silver and gold have I none, but that which I have I give thee. (Acts 3:6).  Listen. Pray. Prepare.

Listen.  The Gospel of Mark was written for listening.  It emerged over long time, with the earliest Christians reciting and recalling their Lord, his love, and their shared shaping by that love, in faith, beginning in baptism.  They listened, morning and evening, Sunday by Sunday, and over time, in direct response to weeks both empty and full, they began to write down for future generations what they had heard.  Today we have such an account, that of Jesus’ baptized.  Today we have such a lesson, the hearing of a voice.  Today we start again into an unknown future, within earshot of that same divine voice, ‘This is my Beloved’.  For all our failure, for all manner of sin and death and meaninglessness, for all that is wrong, and there is much, especially just now, there is a voice, ringing out and calling to us.  A voice from heaven.  ‘A voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased’.   Yes, this is a scandalous particularity, to name One the Beloved, to call out One with intimacy (‘with you’), to identify One, baptized in the Jordan, ‘with Thee I am well pleased’.   Yet for generations women and men have found this particularity strikingly universal, and lastingly, eternally real.  Especially in weeks when good news is scarce.  And in our time, into dimensions of common ground that may cause us work and make us uncertain, we will want to learn to listen, and listen again.  Listen.  Listen.  Listen.

Pray.  What a tremendous spiritual gift is our Psalter.  Remember Samuel Terrien teaching us: :  Here are 700 years of psalms, 1000-400bce.  For the psalmists, Yahweh’s presence was not only made manifest in Zion.  It reached men and women over the entire earth.  The sense of Yahweh’s presence survived the annihilation of the temple and the fall of the state 587bc.  Elusive but real, it feared no geographical uprooting and no historical disruption.  Having faced the void in history and in their personal lives, they knew the absence of God even within the temple.  The inwardness of their spirituality, bred by the temple, rendered the temple superfluous. (279)  In other words, they knew how to live through and out through godless weeks.  Our psalm today, Psalm 29, ancient and redolent with glory, recalls for us how to pray.  From your youth you have known.  Adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication.  The ACTS forms of prayer.  Adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication.  One is a word of glory, echoing the glory of God that thunders.  Glorify God and enjoy him forever.  A word of glory. One is a word of contrition, by which we begin every service at Marsh Chapel.  Prayer is not only a matter of individual or even personal attention, a certain sitting silent before God.  Prayer is also the voice, the responsive voice, of the people of God, echoing in antiphonal chorus, the call, the bowing before glory.  GLORY!   All have sinned, all have fallen short of that primordial glory.  All.  A prayer of contrition. One is a word of gratitude.  In such a week, it may simply be a prayer of gratitude that things are not yet any worse.  A piercing memory of an 87 year old woman who had hidden, and been hidden, from the Nazis as a child evoked this the other day: “During the war, we didn’t know if we would make a day. I didn’t have any freedom. I couldn’t speak loudly, I couldn’t laugh, I couldn’t cry…But now, I can feel freedom. I stay by the window and look out. The first thing I do in the morning is look out and see the world. I am alive. I have food, I go out, I go for walks, I do some shopping. And I remember: No one wants to kill me. So, still, I read. I cook a little bit. I shop a little bit. I learned the computer. I do puzzles. (1/3/21, Toby Levy, NYT).  A word of gratitude. One is a word of longing, desire, incantation, supplication.  Dear God, guide us through these murky moments, like those we have seen in the past, let us pray, and let our learning now make us stronger later.  A word of supplication. Prayer takes some set aside time, some quiet, some intentional focus.  Pray.  Pray.  Pray.

Prepare.  The whole of Scripture begins with the divine preparation, in creation, and in speech.  ‘Let there be…’  And what might that be, let there be?  Light.  Watch for the rays of light in the dark.  Watch for the rays of light in the dark.  Wednesday morning, before all, well, chaos, broke loose, a newly elected Senator from Georgia was interviewed.  He was raised in public housing, one of 12 children.  Whatever the day, his dad had them all up before dawn.  Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning, he was reminded.  Yes, but that’s the thing about the morning, he responded, it begins in the full dark, it begins at dawn, before daybreak.  Senator Warnock learned to prepare, shining his shoes every morning, before daylight, to get ready, to be ready.  His parents gave him the gift of faith before daybreak.  So.  Light.  Watch for the coming rays of light.  Nor does light shine only in the heart, but also, even moreso, in the heart of the community.  Individuals need to prepare, but so do communities.  Senator Warnock went to Morehouse College, where his dean, Dean of the Chapel the Rev. Dr. Lawrence Carter, who has preached three times in the last three years from this Marsh pulpit, greeted him.  Now Senator Warnock went on to earn a PhD from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York (I believe I have heard of the school) and has since been in the pulpit of historic Ebenezer Church, Atlanta, for many years.  But Dean Carter reminded me in conversation Wednesday morning, that when his parents dropped him off at Morehouse, Rafael Warnock had not a dime to his name.  His parents could give him only what they had, their powerful, limitless, ceaseless love, pride and belief in him.  Their powerful, limitless, ceaseless love, pride and belief in him.  Not much?  Well.  It seems to have been enough, just enough.  That’s the thing about the morning.  It begins in the dark, in preparation, awaiting the word… LET THERE BE LIGHT.  Prepare.  Prepare.  Prepare.

People of God.  Listen!  Pray!  Prepare!  And hear again the gospel:

A voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased’.  

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 01.10.2021 at 10:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

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John 1: 10-18

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¹⁰ He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. ¹¹ He came to what was his own,^[a] and his own people did not accept him. ¹² But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, ¹³ who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

¹⁴ And the Word became flesh and (dwelt) among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son,^[b] full of grace and truth. ¹⁵ (John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’”) ¹⁶ From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. ¹⁷ The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. ¹⁸ No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son,^[c] who is close to the Father’s heart,^[d] who has made him known.

Preface

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Christmas at a social distance need not be Christmas at a spiritual distance.  Hear the good news.  The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.  There is a physicality at the dawn of faith, through the echoes of faith, welling up in the gift of faith.  There is a physique to faith, your faith, the faith of the church, the faith which has seized us and seizes us still, a faith in flesh and bone.  As Paul Lehmann taught us long ago: God is at work in the world to make and keep human life human. God is at work in the world to make and keep human life human.  God works through people, through human agency. Incarnation, poetically and wondrously pronounced in John 1, reminds us so, and recalls to us the lasting power of human agency, people, like you, God's people at work in the world. God's work must truly be our own. There are many who will scoff at human agency: 'uh oh, oh no, go slow, veto'. Not you. You know you can make a difference for the good, the true, and the beautiful. YES YOU CAN. Your prayer is that of Howard Thurman. Your motto is that of John Wesley. Your carol is that of his brother Charles.

Howard Thurman:

When the Song of the Angels Is Stilled
When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and the princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flocks,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the heart.

John:

Do all the good you can.

By all the means you can.

In all the ways you can.

In all the places you can.

At all the times you can.

To all the people you can.

As long as ever you can.”

Charles:

Hail the heaven-born Prince of Peace!
Hail the Sun of Righteousness!
Light and life to all he brings,
risen with healing in his wings.
Mild he lays his glory by,
born that we no more may die,
born to raise us from the earth,
born to give us second birth.
Hark! the herald angels sing,
"Glory to the new born King!"

All the theological poetics we can muster, all the poetical theology we can risk, all the words set to music and music made for words, all the musical words, all verbal music, all, and more, that we can find and more than all that we can shape, we shall need, this Christmastide Sunday, and every Sunday through 2021, to herald the gospel, the faith of flesh and bone, the physicality of faith.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Light A Candle

We have never been far from academia—Colgate, Syracuse, Ohio Wesleyan, Columbia, Cornell, McGill, Lemoyne, University of Rochester, now BU.

Our friend Bob worked at Syracuse University for four decades.   He and his wife Connie started coming to our church out of an old family connection, on her side, and because his Boy Scout troop met in the building, on his side.   She was an architect, community leader, financial developer, and outgoing spirit.   He was quiet, kind, soulful, and real.   You could swap stories with him about Eagle Scout courts of honor, about trading neckerchiefs at the National Jamboree, about Philmont Scout Ranch and the Tooth of Time.

Bob worked in a small office on campus.  We will need some archaeological tools to describe his life’s labor.  He supported students who needed AV and other equipment.  In the chaos of his little nest, he could find for you all manner of treasures:  carbon paper, white out, typewriter ribbon, film strip projectors, carousel slide projectors, screens, amplifiers, ditto paper, pens and pencils, and virtually anything else you, dear student, might need, some decades ago, for your class presentation due in two hours, due early tomorrow morning, due in 10 minutes.   In the joyful freedom of pastoral ministry, as that church grew, the minister could go and visit Bob, and watch the nearly endless stream of orphaned students stampeding their way to his little room.  He didn’t hector them:  your lack of planning is not my personal crisis…proper planning prevents poor performance…be punctual and do everything at the appointed hour.  No.  He just helped.  He just quietly and joyfully helped.  One winter a middle-aged former minister, working on another master’s degree, came by to speak about Bob: “I watch him.  He is salt and light.  He would give you the shirt off his back.  He is there for students.”

On weekends he took his scout troop to be enveloped in the natural world, usually deep into the Adirondacks.  There he taught a love of the created order, a respect for the history of places, and the rudiments of leadership: ‘affirm in public, criticize in private’, and other lasting truths.  Big eyes covered by big glasses, a big smile, and silent except for laughter.  He never bought a thing on credit.  Not his house, not his car, not his camping gear.  He taught his four children that same frugality.

Connie predeceased him by some years, but until Bob died a few winters ago, one could know and smile to think that at least one Christian walked the earth, in the shadow of the Carrier Dome.

As we were trying to get that urban churching rolling, we one year arranged a December dish to pass dinner.  We sang some carols, maybe 100 of us or so.  We had asked three of our people just to tell a Christmas story, as our fairly humble program that snow-covered evening.  Bob’s was the last.

As a 20-year-old he had gone to England, as part of a bomber crew in or about 1941.   During our own national and international upheaval, pandemic 2021, we may want to recall stories and courage from his generation. He told us, simply, about being away from home for the first time.  About having a photo of his girlfriend, Connie.  About his mom and dad and sister.   He said that his only thought was to hope that he would see them all once more.  Connie.  His Mom.  His Dad.  His sister.  “I would like to get home alive”.  This was his prayer, as it is for some in hospital today.  Christmas came, but the service men were not allowed any decorations.  No candles on land that might be lit and so shine and so guide enemy bombers.  Bob noticed that their rations came in cardboard boxes with a coating of paraffin on them.  So, when he had time, he would sit in front of Connie’s picture, that December, and using his scout knife he would peel off the paraffin, storing it in a number 10 can.  By Christmas Eve Bob had enough for three candles, each with a short wick made of shoestring in the middle.   That night as plane after the plane took off, he set up a little table in the rear fuselage.  Flying home, as they leveled off, he and the crew, except for the pilot, gathered at the little table.  He was afraid maybe the paraffin wouldn’t work.  But after a while, all three candles were lit, burning now in the dark sky over the cliffs of Dover and over the English Channel.  After a long silence, one of the men recited a psalm.  Then they said the Lord’s prayer.  Bob prayed his hope to get home.  Then together, without much singing talent and without any practice, they quietly sang a carol, ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Glory to the Newborn King’.  “I would like to get home alive”, Bob said, as the candles dimmed, flickered and went out.

From that personal Christmas remembrance, we all caught a glimpse of the origins of Bob’s matured humility, kindness, and integrity.  His faith in flesh and bone.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Faith is a Walk in the Dark

Before Jesus there was John, before the Christ there was the Baptist.  Jesus was a contemporary of John.  John prepared the way for Jesus.  As we listen with word and music, perhaps we can ponder the power of faith in flesh and bone.

Before Christmas there is Advent, before the incarnation is the anticipation.  The feast of Christmas, so this Lord’s day, comes after the penitence of Advent.  The joy of birth comes after the anxiety of expectation.  As we listen with word and music, today let us ponder the mystery of faith in flesh and bone.

Before tradition there is event, before understanding there is experience.   The rolling voice of the Baptist is the event through which we each year pass in order to come to our understanding of Christmas, this Christmastide Sunday.

Before Matthew there was Mark, before teaching there was preaching, before catechesis there was kerygma. We will listen this year, 2021, mostly to Mark.  Last year, Matthew, this year, Mark. Matthew is an interpreter of Mark.  Mark is the model for Matthew.  As we listen with word and music, perhaps we can ponder the power of change, especially for those living outside.

Before John the Gospel there was John the prologue to the Gospel, John 1, our reading today, wherein the Baptist gives way to the Christ:

Seasoned Religion said that the end was near. John says the beginning is here.

Earlier Religion saw the end of the world. John preached the light of the world.

Inherited spirituality waited for the future coming of the Lord. John celebrated the Word among us, full of grace and truth.

Earlier Religion feared death, judgment, heaven and hell, in the by and by. John faced them all in every day.

Seasoned Religion clung fiercely to an ancient untruth. John let go, and accepted a glorious new truth, and hugged grace and freedom.

Our inheritance, and Matthew and Mark and Luke and Paul and all looked toward the End, soon to come. But John. John looked up at the beginning, already here. They said with Shakespeare, “All’s well that ends well”. John replied, gut begonnen hap gebonnen, “well begun is half done”.

John alone had the full courage to face spiritual disappointment and move ahead. So, we memorize 8:32: You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free!

We face the need to change from inherited untruth to new insight and imagination.  New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth; one must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of truth.

Truth: faith in flesh and bone.

Truth, at Christmas, outside, in the cold, at night, in a manger. Outside, as communities of color, needing but fearing some of their neighborhood police, both needing and fearing their own police, in the year of Taylor, Arbery, Floyd, Hill and others. Outside, as those along the borders, sometimes, without principle and without apology, stripped of their children.  Outside, hunting for a meal, with children in tow.  Outside, with employment lost, bereft of purpose or place or position or power.  Outside, fearing, fearing pollution and pandemic and politics and prejudice and pain.  Outside, and without, even, the indoor beauty of a church, or the indoor beauty of a choir, or the indoor beauty of a gathered and loving congregation, a truly addressable community. El Greco best painted the incarnation, worn fingers and bowed heads, and wrinkled brows, and outdoor clothing, shepherds abiding, abiding, abiding.   All, and all, at a Christmas social distance.  Incarnation comes, into a world of hurt.  Faith in flesh and bone.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

The Holy Scripture assumes a multi-generational perspective, no more so than in the narratives of Christmas.  Real change takes a long time, generations of time, when it comes at all.  Do you remember what you were confronted with a generation ago?   For some of us, another December in that same Syracuse neighborhood, 32years ago, it was the sudden announcement on a bitter snowy night, to a stunned basketball crowd in the Carrier Dome, that a plane with many of our own neighborhood students, our own Syracuse University students, and students from other regions including Boston, had crashed in Lockerbie Scotland.  The portent of that moment in 1988 eluded us, eluded all, but it was a harbinger of the struggles of the next thirty years, in one limited, horror and tragedy.  182 passengers died; 270 in total died; 35 students from SU died, and some from other Universities, including one from Boston University.  A few days ago, as this sermon was gestating, a newscast recast that moment, noting ongoing legal challenges, and retelling the story of Lockerbie.   It brought back that night, and the silent 30,000 in the Dome, after the game, and the walk home.  Over the hill and through the cemetery where now both my parents have since been buried, side by side.  Through the dark and cold, wind and snow.  The darkness of sin.  The cold of death.  The snowfall of the threat of meaninglessness.  Sin, death, the threat of meaninglessness.  To trod through these, again in 2021, we shall need some faith, faith in flesh and bone.  Faith to face and face up to the mystery of death, the tenacity of sin, the bitter temptation of meaninglessness.  Maybe the challenge of the year past, in manifold dimensions, has been just this.

Coda

All the theological poetics we can muster, all the poetical theology we can risk, all the words set to music and music made for words, all the musical words, all verbal music, all, and more, than we can find and more than all that we can shape, we shall need this Christmastide Sunday, to herald the gospel, the faith of flesh and bone, the physicality of faith.  We shall need the flesh and bone of ordinary grace, to live the daily truth of faith.

And the word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Speaking of such.  A friend, Kerry Loughman, recently wrote:  “Hope you and your family are well in this crazy, COVID time.  I have a small poem for you… We live opposite a Brookline elementary school in Coolidge Corner and every day these children were my daily blessing. I watched from my third-floor window all last spring and into the summer. “

Every afternoon, around four,

a wheeled flock of boys

flies down my city street

on bikes, scooters, skateboards,

more skilled than scared, and

raucous with it. Contrapuntal

eurhythmic beats play concrete

sidewalk sections 'til they dare

to launch off curbs, catching air,

helmet plumage drafting down,

fledging into a new reality.

Masked avengers, they swoop

into games of capture and release;

capture the invisible flag,

release time's arrested breath,

spread mojo on all our viral fears.

Circuitous flights around the school,

capture and release of joy.

They go round and round:

a circumlocution of boys.

‘Capture and Release’, by Kerry Loughman

10.08.2020

A circumlocution of boys.

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, your own 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.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 01.3.2021 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

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Galatians 4: 4-7

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Preface

The birth of Christ places before us a new possibility.

We can live in a new way.

“Christ is alive and goes before us, to show and share what love can do.  This is a day of new beginnings.  Our God is making all things new”.

You can continue to live in the old way.

Or you can live a different life, living the gift of faith.

Paul’s Christmas Gospel

Paul writes to the Galatians:  But when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption, as children.

Paul of Tarsus rarely is mentioned at Christmas.  He never saw Jesus and knew almost nothing of the birth.  Or of birth.   Of Christmas, he says only:  “born of a woman, born under the law”.  (Gal. 4) A human birth, still in the dark shadow of religion.

Paul is our earliest, best witness to the primitive Christian church.  Yet he says nothing about any of the things we take for granted in this season:  Mary, Joseph, manger, Bethlehem, shepherds, Kings, Herod, Rachel weeping.

In fact, you may have ruminated a little about how Paul might have approached our reading from Luke 2: 22-40, composed some thirty years after Paul’s own (legendary) death in the Roman coliseum.  How would the celibate rabbi have thought about Mary and a complicated birth?

More basically, more biologically, how would a man like Paul have connected, if at all, with the multiple nursery scenes found in the first three gospels?

You will admit, if pressed, that there are few things more bemusing than listening to men talk about child birth.  All the gospels and almost 2000 years of Christmas sermons fall beneath this judgment.  What do we know about it?

And Paul?

How can men--how could Paul--possibly fathom the pain, change, and transformation of childbirth?  Especially when this birth is not just birth but--Incarnation?

Which brings us to Christmas 2020 and the stunning news that Paul, more than all, “gets it”!    Better than virtually any other piece of the New Testament Paul names the Christmas Gospel with utter precision in Galatians 4: 4-7.

This verse of Holy Writ, read for this Christmas Sunday, places a claim on you and me.  If Paul can “get it”, if Paul can receive the grace of Christmas, the gift of faith, and faith is ever and only and always a gift, then there is hope for everybody.  Especially for you this morning if you feel at some distance from the Christmas traditions, the old stories, the church’s habits and patterns.  Especially if you feel, that is, a little on the outside.  Come COVID, we are all, by some measure, on the outside. Here is Christmas.  And Christmas is all about God’s love for the outside.  Paul—what a friend we have in Paul!—changed, was changed, became a changed man, in the full morning light of Christmas.

There is a place, a bit earlier in his collection of letters, that gives us the full picture.  In the earliest piece of our New Testament, 1 Thessalonians, as he describes his happy relationship with one of his first churches, Paul offers us a glimpse of the gospel, the Christmas gift of faith.  We will lean on Thessalonians to interpret Galatians.  Paul wrote, For we were gentle among you, like a nurse taking care of her children.  For we were gentle among you, like a nurse taking care of her children.  It is Christmas testimony that we can live in a new way!

The coming of Christ changed Paul. Christmas changed Paul. From Pharisee to freedom fighter.  From lawyer to preacher.  From religion to faith.  From law to gospel.  He has been given the “wings of the morning”.  There is no other way to interpret his self-designation, a Christmas nametag if ever there was one, here in 1 Thessalonians.  Nurse.

Paul refers to himself and his way of living as “gentle as a nurse”.  Gentle?  Paul?  Apparently so, at least now and then.    And then, “nurse”.  In our COVID era, we readily and rightly and with great gratitude and respect think of heroic nurses, first responders.  It is right for a quiet moment, here, just to think of all that nurses and others have given, to us and others, this year, 2020.  And now some receiving vaccines, a modern miracle if ever there was one, even as we converse here this morning. Yet here, in Paul’s letter, the word does not refer to white gowns, medical degrees, stethoscopes, or medications.  It means the other kind of nurse and nursing, the nurse-maid.  We learn this, even without reference to the Greek, from the rest of the verse, a “nurse caring for her children”.  The word, ηπιον, means wet nurse or nursing mother.  The image so jarred one early copier, one early scribe, so much, that he added an extra letter to one text to “clean it up” and change the meaning.  Paul is staggeringly clear, however.  He describes himself as a wet-nurse, like a woman nursing a child!  Paul, that is, is referring to his own new way of living as a kind of nursing, as intimate, physical, personal, vulnerable, self-giving.  As in, well, as in nursing a child.

You may find this astounding, that one who could speak so harshly of his opponents in Galatia (it is Christmas and we will avoid a direct citation) could understand himself by analogy with a mother and child in the moment of nursing.  If the birth of Christ can move Paul that far, how much more can Christmas do for you and me!

A generation ago, I discovered, James Clarke had a similar insight, writing about Paul’s self-designation as a nurse maid:

Here is conversion in great might.  It is easy to think of Paul as the missionary who made Europe and Asia his parish and lifted Christianity out of its Palestinian cradle; as the warrior who fought the good fight of faith and whose sword seldom rested in its scabbard; as the statesman who conceived vastly and executed daringly; as the theologian who handled the huge imponderables and grand peculiarities of the faith with ease and judgment; as the personality, powerful and decisive, who cut his signature deeply into the life of his time; as the mystic who beheld the faraway hills of silence and wonder, and whose great theme was “union with Christ”.  But it strains the imagination to picture him, who was so imperious, in the gentle and tender role of nursemaid.  Truly there is no limit to the converting power of God in Jesus Christ. (IBD loc cit)

Yet Clarke climbs only half the mountain.  Yes, it does astound our imaginations to picture Paul as a mother with a child at the breast.  What is doubly astounding, however, is to realize, fully to intuit, that Paul understood himself this way! Paul understood himself this way!  Paul, at his most converted, could see his life in a new way, a marvelously new way, as different from all he had lived before as a nursemaid is different from an imperious religionist.

Paul may not have known the account narrated in our reading from Luke 2 today.  He may not have had any more idea than we do about the exact nature and detail of these birth narratives.  He probably would have been somewhat surprised by their imaginative peculiarity.

But the meaning of Christmas he fully knows.  Paul ‘gets it’.

Your Christmas Gospel

And, so may we, mais oui, may you and I, ESPECIALLY, if you are not easily or closely enthralled by magic stories, birth miracles, speaking wombs, nursery rhymes, and angel voices.  Paul hears the truth of it all, and his life changes.  Ours can too.

Paul may not have known the Christmas stories we do, but his pastoral life embodied the incarnate love of God in Christ, physical intimate, personal, vulnerable self-giving, gentle as a nurse-maid.

Ours can too. Yours can too.  You can live in a new way.  You can.

It is the way of the turned cheek, the offered cloak, the second mile.  It is the way of love for those who are not lovely.  It is the way of the love of enemies.  It is the way of forbearance.  It is the way of tenderhearted forgiveness.  It is the way of prayer for those who persecute.  It is the way of God, who is kind to God’s ungrateful and selfish children.  Gentle as a nurse…

A famous leader, once, and sadly, scornfully disdained the “turn the other cheek approach”.  You had to wonder whether his Methodist Sunday School had shown him Paul’s letters. Maybe he was absent that day.

Christmas gives birth to the daily, very real possibility, starting again for you at noon, the real potential that you can live in a new way.  Christmas gives birth to the life and death decision for or against Jesus, for the new path or the old.

If Paul can “get it”, all can.  This is the change that God works (GOD works) in the human heart.  The God who said “let light shine out of darkness…” It is the gift of faith.  Faith comes by hearing.  Hearing by the word of God.

We live in age of violence, even global and extreme violence.   Certainly cultural, verbal, rhetorical violence. But this is Christmas!   With Luke we may marvel at the mystery of Christ.  But with Paul we may practice the partnership of the Gospel, living as gentle as a nurse with her children.

We can live in a new way.  The world does not lack for promise, but only for a sense of promise.  But how?

Three Applications

First. We can live as those who look forward to a gentler world community.  In a year, 2020, of manifold and multiple difficulties that included environment, virus, government, race and loss—pollution, pandemic, politics, prejudice and pain, we can afford to listen to the strange language of the Bible, and of Paul.  All of us listening this morning, liberal and conservative, democrat and republican, urban and rural, blue and red, hawk and dove.  We can all share the horizon of hope for peace on earth, good will to all.  We can look out for ways to “soften the collisions” that will come in our time.  As Inman says, in that great old novel Cold Mountain, life is riddled with “endless contention and intractable difference”.  Collisions are virtually inevitable.  But they can be softened.

Our guide here is the great quintessential liberal British philosopher, Isaiah Berlin:

Collisions, even if they cannot be avoided, can be softened.  Claims can be balanced, compromises can be reached:  in concrete situations not every claim is of equal force—so much liberty, so much equality; so much for sharp moral condemnation, so much for understanding a given human situation; so much for the full force of law, and so much for the prerogative of mercy; for feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, healing the sick, sheltering the homeless.  Priorities, never final and absolute, must be established. 

Of course, social or political collisions will take place; the mere conflict of positive values alone makes this unavoidable.  Yet they can be minimized by promoting and preserving an uneasy equilibrium, which is constantly threatened and in constant need of repair—that alone is the precondition for decent societies and morally acceptable behavior, otherwise we are bound to lose our way.  A little dull as a solution you will say?  Yet there is some truth in this view.

Not just some truth, much, much, much truth.

Second.  We can work toward a gentler local community, in the heart of the city, in the service of the city. More than you know, you transform the culture around you with every act, every choice.  Remember…

Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low.

         He shall feed his flock like a shepherd.

         And the glory, the glory of the Lord shall be revealed.

         And all flesh shall see it together.

         Since by one man death came, so by one man shall come the resurrection of the dead. (my favorite)

         Blessing and honor and glory and power be unto him!

So, they received Christ. Here is a door held.  There is a criticism softened.  Here is a preparation made.  There is a courtesy extended.  Here is a listening ear.  There is a gesture of welcome. As we follow our course let us not become coarse.

One Christmas decades ago, when we lived in NYC, Lily Tomlin produced a single actor play.  One night a street person stumbled into the theater and was treated roughly.  She made the paper by stopping her performance, guiding the man to center stage and quietly addressing the audience: “Let me introduce you all to--a fellow human being.”  She gave him a seat.

At our best, Marsh Chapel and this community both set a fine example of liberal gentleness, even gentility.  (That is a compliment to you, by the way.  Just so you know.)  It is not just what you do that counts, it is how you do it.

At our best, we can live together, watching over one another in love, and treating one another “as gently as a nursemaid”.  Men and women both.   I can be even more personal.  The Christmas Gospel in its Pauline cast directs me as a minister.  It gives me the courage to be, to be a pastoral administrator, and to be so with gentle care.  Now I will admit that the phrase, “pastoral administrator” is something of an oxymoron, two words that contradict each other.  Like jumbo shrimp or United Methodist.  Either you are pastoral or you are administrative, tender or tough.  But here is Paul, the Great Tough Apostle to the Gentiles, identifying his way of being with that of a woman, a tender mother, breast feeding her kids.  That means time spent.  That means some tolerance for untidiness.  That means a willingness to admit imperfection, some fruitful slobbery sloppiness.  That means a habit of being that is more rounded than rectangular, more organic that engineered, more maternal than mechanical.  That means not to worry when things aren’t perfect and not to listen when others want them immediately perfect.  Life is messy.  Community life is particular messy.  That means a willingness to go the second and third mile, as you would for your infant.  That means risking getting bitten.  That means burping and wiping and holding.  And especially that means a fierce focus on the future of now young life!  That sounds like hard work!  Manger work.  Nursery work.  New Creation work.

Third.  We can become gentler people, one by one.  Christmas too can become a season as gentle as a nurse.  Someone wrote, mimicking, yes, Paul, in 1 Cor 13:

If I decorate my house perfectly with plaid bows, strands of twinkling lights and shiny balls, but do not show love to my family, I’m just another decorator.

If I slave away in the kitchen, baking dozens of Christmas cookies, preparing gourmet meals and arranging a beautifully adorned table at mealtime, but do not show love to my family, I’m just another cook.

If I work at the soup kitchen, carol in the nursing home, and give all that I have to charity, but do not show love to my family, it profits me nothing.

If I trim the spruce with shimmering angels and crocheted snowflakes, attend myriad holiday parties and sing in the choir’s cantata but do not focus on Christ, I have missed the point.

Love stops cooking to hug the child.

Love sets aside decorating to kiss the spouse.

Love is kind, though harried and tired.

Love doesn’t envy another’s home that has Christmas china and table linens.

Love doesn’t yell at the kids to get out of the way, but is thankful they are there to be in the way.

Love bears, believes, hopes, endures all things, and never fails.

Board games will break, pearl necklaces will be lost, golf clubs will rust.  The gift of love will endure.

A Time to Choose

This is the spiritual change that God (and God alone) works in the human heart.  “Born to raise us from the earth, born to give us second birth”.  Here are the birth pangs of the new creation.

Gentle globe, gentle community, gentle soul.

Are you ready to live in a new way?

For their parts, the ancients were caught off guard.  So the Kings meandered, the shepherds shuddered, the cattle were low and lowing.  There was no ready expectation of Jesus, a poor Messiah.  No, there was no prepared expectation for God touching earth in a manger.  “A smoking cradle”, said Karl Barth, is all we have of Christmas.   How about you?  Are you ready for Christmas?  That is, are you, as did Paul, able and willing and ready to receive the gift of faith? That is, are you, as did Paul, able and willing and ready to receive the gift of faith?

Merry Christmas!

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 12.27.2020 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

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Romans 16:25-27

Luke 1:26-38

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A Preface

If we listen with the ears of the heart, the sounds of Christmas may just envelop us, its echoes of faith may revive us.  And heal us.

A voice, Gabriel, fear not.

A cough, Joseph turning.

A shuffle, Shepherds moving.

A murmur, a shudder, a shake.

Cattle, lowing.

The crisp crackle of hard soil, snow and ice, under foot.

Distant laughter, ribald and rough, out from the inn.

And Mary.  Mary.  Her yawn, her sigh, her song, her cry.

If we listen with the ears of the heart, the whole creation sings in ecumenical chorus, and the sounds of Christmas heal us by enveloping us in a circle of love, whose circumference is without measure.

You know, our time, and world and culture are fixed on limits.  We lean more on what we can count, than on what we can count on.  (repeat). Christmas inquires about our sense of limits, and reverberates with echoes of faith, a robust cosmic faith.

Our lips may echo such faith, even if our habits muffle such faith. Health care, for all or for some?  Good education (with books, safety, discipline, respect), for all or for some?  Employment (most people just need a job and a home), for all or for some?  Civic protection for all or some?  Heavenly hope, for all or for some?  We do tend to live and move and have our being as if the very temporary distinctions we so prize had, somehow, a lasting life.

Here is a Christmas pronouncement of a broad peace, the prospect of love and peace, on earth.  On earth.  With Gandhi along the Ganges.  Beside Tutu on the southern cape.  Along the path of the Dalai Lama in farthest Tibet.  In Tegucigalpa with the church Amor, Fe Y Vida. This is no religious quietism: cold, careful, efficient, first mile, changeless, fearsome, depressed.  No, this is Christmas:  warm, open, effective, second mile, free, growing, creative and hopeful!

A Tale of Two Tales

The early church told two stories about Jesus.  The first about his death.  The second about his life.  The first, about the cross, is the older and more fundamental.  The second, about the manger, is the key to the meaning of the first, the eyeglasses which open full sight of the first, the code with which to decipher the first.

Jesus died on a cross for our sin according to the Scripture.  That is the first story.  How we handle this story, later in the year, come Lent and Easter, is a perilous and serious responsibility, given the myth of redemptive violence in which so much of our national and global thinking is now enmeshed.  This morning, we do light a virtual candle, light a candle, for our siblings across this great land, 300,000, 300,000, taken by COVID, to a farther shore and a greater light. We wail for them, even as Rachel and others wailed long ago.  Yet this week, across the globe, the first vaccines appeared, including right here in the USA. In Canada, first responders were pictured receiving vaccination.  A country of 36 million, and a government that has already purchased 80 million vaccines.  Those receiving, and those watching, wept.  To remember the past year, and now the approaching vaccine, a latter-day miracle for sure, is to weep, with Rachel, at Christmas.

That is, the first story, the death story, the story of Jesus’ death, another season’s work, needs careful, careful handling.  Today I might briefly say again what we have said each year in Lent:  Remember that it is not the passion of Christ that defines the Person of Christ, but the Person who defines the passion. Remember that it is not the suffering that bears the meaning, but the meaning that bears the suffering…that it is not the cross that carries the love but the love that carries the cross…that it is not crucifixion that encompasses salvation, but salvation that encompasses even the tragedy of crucifixion. The resurrection follows but not replace the cross, for sure. Still, it is also true that the cross precedes but does not overshadow the resurrection. It is Life that has the last word.  Later in the year, come March and April, and who knows what life will be like by then?, we shall return to story one.  At Christmas, we listen for story two, the story of Jesus’ life, the story of Jesus birth, and its echoes of faith.  I wonder:  are you ready, Christmas Sunday 2020, ready in a new way and ready for the first time or the first time in a long time, to hear the susurrations of faith?  Have you faith?  Where is your faith?  How is it with your faith?

Last Saturday in the later afternoon it rained heavily.  That meant the best walk home, from Chapel to residence, did lie through the long hallways of the College of Arts Sciences, where my mother worked as a secretary in 1951, putting her husband through seminary, when the building was spanking new.  From the chapel, the portico will keep you dry, and then take you into the building.  The building is regularly teeming with echoes, voices, greetings, laughter, discourse, lecture, music, all.  By that late hour, all was silent.  Not a person, not a peep, not a word, down the long, lovely hallway of the College of Arts and Sciences. Solitude of a COVID sort, CORONA cause, CORONA based.  Solitude.  And echoes and ghosts at every step.  A meeting here, years ago.  Two lectures there, years ago.  An Academy graduation speech, here, many years ago.  A memorial reception for a lost student, there, years ago.  And meetings, meetings, meetings.  Now: silence, los sonidos de la silencia, Solitude.  Here a photo of a colleague whose memorial we celebrated in 2017.  Here a reminder of a past curriculum.  And all about, nothing, nothing but quiet, with the rain falling fast outside.  In the atrium, a pause, amid the ghosts, and amid the silence.

And a quickened, sharp awareness, a COVID moment:  Solitude has its own beauty.  Solitude has beauty.  It is harsh beauty.  It is a dark beauty.  And it is a discomfiting beauty for those of us who thrive on presence, conversation, gathering, and human being, morning to night.  But a beauty still.  I wonder:  does your faith have space for such solitude, such harsh, dark, discomfiting beauty? Does mine?  When it gets quiet enough, there can be a hearing for the echoes of such faith.

So, we recall at Christmas, the birth story.  Who was Jesus?  What life did his death complete?  How does his word heal our hurt?  And how does all this accord with Scripture? One leads to the other.

This second, second level story begins at Christmas, and is told among us to interpret the first.  Christmas is meant to make sure that the divine love is not left only to the cross, or only to heaven.  Christmas in a troubled world, a world of pollution, pandemic, politics, prejudice and pain, is meant to remind us, all of us, that you do not need to leave the world in order to love God.  Alf Landon said, “I can be a liberal and not be a spendthrift”.  We might say, “I can be a Christian and not reject the world around”.  Christmas is meant to open out a whole range of Jesus, as brother, teacher, healer, young man, all.  Christmas is meant to provide the mid-course correction that might be needed if all we had was Lent.  And the Christmas echoes are the worker bees in this theological, spiritual hive.  Easter may announce the power of love, but Christmas names the presence of love.  Jesus died the way he did because he lived the way he did.  Jesus lived the way he did so that he could die the way he did.  That is, it is not only the Passion of Christ, but the Peace of Christ, too, which Christians like you affirm.  What good news for us at the end of 2020!  We together need both passion and peace.  Such a passionate year we have had.  Theologically, globally, culturally, politically, ecclesiastically, we have exuded passion this year.  Now comes Christmas again to announce that there is more to Jesus than passion.  There is the matter of peace as well.

Creation and Redemption

With great effort, the ancient writers join the God of Creation with the God of Redemption.  The coming of the Savior does not limit the divine care to the story of redemption, but weaves the account of redemption into the fabric of creation.  There is more to the Gospel than the cross.  The ancient writers did sense this and say it with gusto:  angels to locate heavenly love on earth; shepherds to locate love on ordinary earth; kings to empower the sense of love on earth; a poor mother to locate physically the Prince of Peace, the Lord of Love, in the womb of earth, and remind us of the physique, the physicality of faith.  The location of love is earth, and its circumference is without limit.  God’s Christ is without limit.

God’s Christ.  The Christ.  Echoes of faith.

Ah, the Christ. There are many rooms in this mansion.  In the Hebrew Scripture, as translated into Greek long ago, Christ referred to Cyrus the King of Persia, who at last freed the Jews from their bondage in Babylon.  'The Christ of God' later Isaiah calls King Cyrus. Echoes of faith.

Then Christ meant the messianic conqueror who would bring apocalyptic cataclysm, the end of things as we know it, the reconstitution of Israel, and the reign of God--the main wellspring of hope for those breathing and sweating in Jesus’ day, including Jesus.  Echoes of faith.

Christians then began to use the term to refer to Jesus, who spoke Aramaic, rode a donkey, recited the Psalms thinking David wrote them all, walked only in Palestine, never married, and was crucified for blasphemy or treason or both.  Echoes of faith.

A while later Christ, in Paul, becomes the instrument of God's incursion into the world, to recreate the world, and is known in the cross and the resurrection. Echoes of faith.

Still later, when the Gospel writers pick up the story, Christ is the Risen Lord, preached by Paul, and narrated by unknown silent ghost writers who somehow put together the story of his earthly ministry, always spoken as a resurrection account, and always seen, if seen, in light of Easter, but interpreted through the faith of Christmas, and its echoes. Echoes of faith.

John takes another trail, in the telling of the Christ, because for John none of the above really matters at all, save that Christ reveals God--wherever and whenever there is way, truth or life, there is Christ.  Echoes of faith.

Still later, and drawing on all the above and more, the early Christian writers painstakingly and painfully tried to fit all this into neo-platonic thought, involving natures and persons, the human and the divine, the seen and the unseen, and described Christ in creeds, perhaps best and for sure first in the Apostles' Creed--only Son, Lord.  Most of the options then have been laid out by 325ad or so, to be regularly and fitfully retried and rehearsed into our time.

John Calvin could write that we really can't say, definitively, where Christ, as Lord, begins or ends.  Alpha, Omega…echoes. Leo Tolstoy wrote a Christmas Story about this once.  "Where Love is, Christ is".   Story two.

The lovely decorated Christmas tree in your living room, with its natural grace adorned by symbolic beauty, is meant to connect the God of Creation with the God of Redemption.  The story of Jesus the Christ, and his love, is as wide and large and limitless as the refraction of light throughout all creation.

We felt it, a bit, last Sunday, in the virtual open house, our congregation gathered by zoom, with voices greeting us from California, Iowa, Indiana, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, New York, Florida, Virginia, and most all the New England States.

Once we visited in the home of a friend whose lovely tree sported a particularly wonderful ornamentation.  Oh, he had placed upon the boughs the more usual collection of angels, bulbs, lights, tinsel and all.  But here and there, slowly illuminating and slowly darkening, there were five lighthouses.  I had never seen a lighthouse as an ornament.  As we shared life and faith in the living room, the slowly illuminating and slowly darkening lighthouses, all five, caught my imagination.   With Wesley we affirm five means of grace, ever available, and savingly so, amid the branches and brambles of life.  These are saving, Christmas echoes of faith. Prayer:  as close as breath.  Sacraments:  in the closest church, weekday and Sunday, or maybe a love feast, at home, in pandemic.  Scripture:  take and read, read and remember, remember and recite.  Fasting:  we might say walking, exercise, attention to discipline and diet.  Christian conversation:  a word spoken and heard that just may be healing enough to be true, or true enough to bring healing.  Even in a sermon on the Sunday before Christmas.

An Invitation

At Christmas we can listen, and remember.  We are most human when we are lovers.  Are we lovers anymore?  Where love is, Christ is.

If we listen with the ears of faith, the whole creation sings in ecumenical chorus, and the sounds of Christmas heal us by enveloping us in a circle of love, whose circumference is without measure.

You may decide today to lead a Christian life.  To worship every Sunday.  To pray every morning.  To tithe every dollar.  To take up the way of peace, by loving and giving.  You may decide upon this path this morning.  Do.  An echo of faith may catch you up, with a susurration, a whisper:

The birth of Christ is for you.

His way of life is for you.

His manner of obedience is for you.

His church is open to you.

His happiness is for you.

His love is for you.

His death is for you.

His life is for you.

His discipline is for you.

If we listen with imaginative ears, the sounds of Christmas, and its echoes of faith, envelop us and heal us.

A voice, Gabriel, fear not.

A cough, Joseph turning.

A shuffle, Shepherds moving.

A murmur, a shudder, a shake.

Cattle, lowing.

The crisp crackle of hard soil, snow and ice, under foot.

Distant laughter, ribald and rough, out from the inn.

And Mary.  Her yawn, her sigh, her song, her cry.

AMEN.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 12.20.2020 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

No sermon was preached today as Marsh Chapel celebrates the annual service of Lessons & Carols.

This Service of Christmas Lessons and Carols is compiled from the rich and extensive archive of broadcast recordings from Marsh Chapel Sundays in recent years. We very much regret that live worship is not possible during this time, most particularly during this Advent and Christmas season.

Please enjoy the beautiful service by following the link below:

Click here to hear the full service

posted in Lessons And Carols on 12.13.2020 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

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Mark 1: 1-18

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Dormant

We rested alone in the dormant, dormant quiet of Thanksgiving 2020, as so many did.  There were walks and talks.  There was time for reflection and reading, as well as distance learning about dearest loved ones, by way of the current, sometimes helpful, technologies.  A red, bright red, maple leaf floated our way.   Leaves were there for the kicking and kicking up.  We both resisted and bowed to the beckoning of disagreeable chores put off, now waiting and awaiting attention, with no earthly excuse for avoidance.  Something to clean, something else to toss, something further to give off, something even to cherish, and, perhaps…something to discover or recover.

In the evenings we nestled in to see some news, not that much is newscast any longer, and then, as moved, to return to stories and novels and films and sequels.  We had left off the Crown after two seasons, a good while ago, and made our way back into the next.  We had stood outside Buckingham Palace, with long hair in 1972, then recently wed in 1978, then with a church tour of Methodism and its ghosts 1995, and then, overjoyed, on holiday in 2017, en route to view John Wesley’s tomb in Westminster Abbey.  We worshiped there, seated that august and August Sunday above the stone marked for William Wilberforce.  Would you go back?  To London?  In a New York minute…Marsh Chapel, Gothic in design, exudes an English spirit—the garden in the poem of Sir George Sitwell, the corner stone atop two further stones from Oxford University (St. John’s College and Jesus College) and the inscription, Boston University’s pedigree is traced directly to Oxford University, England.(Cambridge is both on and meant for the other of the river.)  The University Arms, said Daniel Marsh, ‘connect Boston University both with the town of Boston, England, and also with the University of Oxford.’   And for good reason:  Mr. Wesley, an Oxford don, brought through fierce preaching a vigorous gospel, the reformation faith, to the English poor, in mine and in field and in city and on ship and in prison.  Our heritage is thus, personal, denominational, professional and religious.  So, we are inclined to watch the show.

At one point, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, is accosted by his mother, an eccentric and brilliant nun, recently transposed to Buckingham Palace from a humble nunnery in Greece.  He interrupts her kneeling prayer, after years of disconnection.  She, mentally troubled, in story, cared for by Sigmund Freud, and he, a kind of orphan, left alone in the world.  In the heart of the talk she abruptly asks him a question.  And what about your faith?  And what about your faith?  Have you faith?  A question of which Mr. Wesley would have been, would be, proud.  What about your faith?  He honestly, suddenly answers:  dormant.  My faith is dormant.  She murmurs, she mourns, she gasps, she then says, That is not good.  Find yourself a faith.  Find yourself a faith.  At the end of the episode, you see them walking away, arm and arm, into an English country garden.

And you?  What about your faith?  It is a serious question, even, maybe even especially, in a dormant time.  Perhaps, sensing this, you have for a moment allowed the car radio to linger at religion, in worship, this morning.  Perhaps, sensing this, you have turned on or turned toward a few minutes of music, Scripture, prayer, and preachment.  A dormant Thanksgiving may have given you pause, or a pause, coming now into December.  Pause before illness.  Pause before randomness.  Pause before mortality.  Pause before God.  Faith, dormant faith, wakes up in that kind of pause.  A dormant pause brings, or can, the dawn of faith.  Pause to pray in the morning.  Pause to recite a psalm mid-day.  Pause to listen in care when another speaks.  Pause to write an encouraging word.  Pause to push your mind in study, not for what informs but for what transforms.  Pause to recover a joy in generosity.  Pause to make a plan to worship, come Sunday, just as now, well, you are doing.  Faith is dormant unless it wakes up in these moments of pause.

Of course.  What other realm of life or experience do we know that opens itself with no investment?  No investment in funds leads to no gain in growth.  No investment in exercise leads to no gain in health.  No investment in study leads to no gain in learning.  No investment in equality leads to no gain in justice.  No investment in difference leads to no gain in community.  No investment in friendship leads to no gain in friends.

Your faith, how is it with your faith?  If the answer is ‘dormant’, come this dormant Advent, you may want to invest yourself, say, in Scripture, say, in its serious study, say, or for what is shows in life, vital moments of awakening, life’s woke times.

Advent

That is, you cannot come to Christmas unless you cross the river Jordan…

Between you and the 12 days of grace in the feast of Christmas 2020 there runs an icy river, four weeks of Advent 2020, the journey in preparation…

You cannot get across alone, or without cost, or without preparation, or without getting wet…

You will need some investment here…

This beginning, Advent, is like all others—uncertain, difficult, scary, hard…

In these weeks there is set aside a time of preparation…

The voices of our ancestors, forebears, precursors in faith cry out in our covid 2020 wilderness experience…

In today’s readings, three distinct voices resound.  The voice of the prophet Isaiah. The voice of the John the Baptist.  And the voice of the St. Mark, the author of the earliest gospel and its beginning….

The voices come out of the great, distant past, cloaked in antiquity, hooded in mystery, shrouded in misty history, covered by the winds and dust of time.

Our Scripture is holy, is the word of God, because week by week, we read and listen, here, for the divine word.  Where else would we possibly want to be, come Sunday, than in earshot of that Word? We stand on the shoulders of the ancients, stretching back two and three thousand years, for whom also these words were holy.  They outlast us, these words of holy writ.  They uplift us.  They reshape us.  They return us to our rightful minds.  The authority of Scripture lies in a very pragmatic garden of practice:  we do this every week, all the 4,000 Sundays of our lives.  Scripture acquires authority out of its long-time traditional use.  Scripture exudes authority as the mind, our gift of reason, explores the caverns and caves, the stalactites and stalagmites, the dark recesses of venerable words.  Scripture pierces the heart with authority, in our own hearing, our own recitation, our own living, our own experience.  Tradition, reason, and experience crown Holy Scripture with--authority.

Listen, then, in love, to the voices of our ancestors, forebears, predecessors who also wrestled with the question of faith, the waking of faith at the dawn of faith.

Second Isaiah

The year is 540bce.

In the dark days of exile, the second prophet Isaiah recalled for his people the nature of faith.

How difficult it is to be away from home, to be alone, to be cut off from the people and places that mean most to you. You college junior you. All travelers know this, as do all human pilgrims.  Your life is a journey, a spiritual journey wrought in meaning, fraught with meaning, fought for meaning, taught by meaning.

The preparation for good news may even begin in the dark lost hurt of exile, like a birdsong before dawn. Dormancy…can be the dawn of faith.  The book of Isaiah stops at chapter 39, a hard stop.  The book of Isaiah begins again, heard today, in chapter 40.  Isaiah could hear the early singing of the birdsong of hope long before any of his contemporaries.  The people of Israel, through a series of tragic decisions, guided by a series of misguided leaders, found themselves enslaved to a foreign king. Our gospel of the Prince of Peace is born out of a strife-torn experience.  Our confidence in the God of Hope is born out of a record of nearly hopeless moments in the community of faith.

What makes faith possible in a time of exile?  What makes hope possible in the wasteland of a desert?  What makes faith possible in pandemic?

Faith comes from a mixture of memory and imagination and vision.  Faith, like its first cousin, hope, comes from trouble.  Over 45 years of ministry, when the question has arisen, “Where did your faith come from?’, ‘Whence, Faith?’, the answer invariable runs something like this: “well, a long time ago, I was in a deep kind of trouble, and, here is what happened…’ Faith comes out of trouble.  The dawn of faith is in the dormancy of trouble.  Faith, like cousin hope, is real faith when it is most what you need.  And faith comes in trouble, in times of trouble, in exile, in times of exile.  Ours this year, 2020 is such. An exile.  And some days we feel it to the marrow bone.

This is what a verse remembered does for us.  It frees us to hope for what is not yet seen.  A song like Isaiah 40, well sung, frees us from the tyranny of the present, the oppression of the right now, the slavery of the moment.  We get free to dream of another time or two.  Oddly, the best thing about the study of theology is that it frees us from the 21^st century.

The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ may involve a newfound capacity to hope, to hope against hope, to hope for what yet cannot be seen, to hope and to hope and to hope.  The song and marrow bone of faith comes calling out just before sunlight, at dawn.

Isaiah overheard and foretold another voice, another prospect.  He sensed what was not yet visible.  Who hopes, anyway, for what he sees? So he cried out:

The voice of one crying in the wilderness

Prepare the way of the Lord

Make his paths straight

The Baptist

The year is 27 ce.

It is the year of the courage of the Baptist. It takes a peculiar spiritual strength in faith to find the grace to…step aside.   John the Baptist created a commotion with his call to confession of sin.  He called, and the people came.  They had a common mind, at least to the point of acknowledging their need.  Like Isaiah, he was, he is, one of our venerable ancestors, forebears, precursors.

John came out of tradition—the tradition of the prophets.  His role and work were not alien to the long history before him.   So, when he went out in his rough clothing, into a harsh desert, to speak unpleasant but true words of warning and judgment, he did so out of a common understanding that prophets might just come along every now and then.  They might call the city of Jerusalem to repent every now and then.  They might direct the people of Israel out to the river bank every now and then.  They might point to God every now and then.

John spoke directly to his people.  He challenged his generation to look hard at the way they had lived, and with a spiritual plumb line to measure themselves according to the law of God.  What one has no sin to confess?  What one has no fault to regret?  What one has no desire to be made clean? What one would not, given the chance, wash in the Jordan and start over?  Who has not tossed and turned at night, in the dark, awaiting the dawn?

Friends.  Politics lies downstream from culture, and culture downstream from religion, and religion downstream from…faith.  The dawn of faith is at the headwaters of all the rest, for all the cultural amnesia of such today.

The Baptist reminds us of the distance between our dreams and our deeds.

But the lasting word of the Baptist is not about his own work at all.  Like the church to this day, finally, he exists to point to Another, the thong of whose sandals none is worthy to loosen.

For all his accomplishment, at the pinnacle of human endeavor, right religion, John finds, in faith, at the right time, the grace to make space.

The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ may involve a willingness, at the right time, to  make space for someone else, to step aside.  For you, one day, the gospel may evoke a willingness to step aside.  Or, one day, not so much the willingness, but the reluctant courage to do so.

John felt that nudge,and so he cried out:

After me comes he who is mightier than I

The thong of whose sandals

I am not worthy to stoop down and untie

John Mark

The year is 70ce.

With others, Mark could have found a more pleasant way to begin his gospel.  He might with Matthew have offered a long list of names of great saints and sinners past, and then told a story about wise men from the east.  Or he might with Luke have started with thrilling birth stories, retelling the birth of the Baptist and of Jesus, to Elizabeth and Mary, and then recounted the advent of the Son of God among humble shepherds, in a humble inn, in a humble town, on a humble night.   The Gospel of John even begins with the beginning of time and Jesus rounding the unformed cosmos as the divine word, logos.

As plain as the nose on your face, though, Mark starts simple and bare.  No frills, no varnish, no make-up, no extras.  Like Paul, Mark says nothing about the birth of Jesus, or young man Jesus, or the family of Jesus.  He begins with the river Jordan, and John, a man dressed in camel’s hair.

This gospel begins with a barren, bleak moment in the icy dark, along a cold river, faith dormant in exile.

The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ may well involve just such a cold, and foreboding start, a beginning that in that way is like all beginnings, from the infant cry at birth, to the coughing susurration at death, and every new venture in between:  a little quiet, a little cold, a little wild honey.  And hovering somewhere nearby…the divine possibility of a divine possibility.  So, Mark writes: The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

Let us pause to shrug off our dormancy.  Let us awake.  Together, let us begin the journey.

Coda

With Second Isaiah, in a time of exile, we will face down the loneliness we feel, and will explore a newfound capacity to hope.  In a period of discouragement, we will accept the courage and the capacity to wait, to wait without idols, to wait for the living and true God, whose messengers do come, in the fullness of time.

With John the Baptist, in a period of anxiety, an age of anxiety, when our own service has been rendered, and our own work is done, we will look for that saving willingness, the grace to make space, to make way for Another.

With John Mark, in an age of pestilence and dislocation, when change in work or health arrive, we will face the harsh difficulty of a cold, new beginning.  We will rely on faith, the faith of our ancestors, forebears, precursors, those who came before, who also knew the icy cold of the river Jordan.  We will name our precursors, honor them, remember them.  At a dinner table.  In the comfort of a family conversation.  In the discussion and dialogue of real national debate.  In divine worship, as the Scriptures are read and the Word is proclaimed.  And in the communal silence of eucharist, today a spiritual eucharist.

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, your own 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.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 12.6.2020 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

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Isaiah 64:1–9

1 Corinthians 1:3–9

Mark 13:24–37

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When I was a young adolescent, I thought the following was an outrageously funny joke. A man saw three holes in the ground and said, “well, well, well.” Nowadays, I suppose, nobody thinks of wells as holes in the ground, but it was very funny back then. Today I want to talk about holes in our intellectual ground. I’m going to speak of these holes abstractly, but they are not only abstract. As Christians we recognize them as holes in the Trinity: of the Son, of the Spirit, and even of the Father. Other religions have alternative means of expressing these, but I am going to focus on Christianity.

Isn’t it astonishing, however, to refer to the Trinitarian Persons as “holes”? After all, those Persons name the basic contours of the faith. All the other doctrines, stories, songs, and celebrations are elaborations of the Persons of the Son, the Holy Spirit, and the Father. The usual order to list them is Father, Son, and Spirit. But I am going to change that to start with the Son as the most distinctive doctrine of Christianity, the Spirit as the pervasive presence that animates the religious community, perhaps even many communities, and the Father as the universal Creator acknowledged by many if not all communities. Instead of seeing these Persons as the most positive general doctrines of the faith, I see them as holes. How astonishing! But consider.

Belief in Jesus as the Son of God is the most distinctive of Christian doctrines. Of course, it is extremely varied. The Gospel of Mark treats Jesus as adopted by God for a larger purpose and made special in that way. The Gospel does not even have a proper post-resurrection scene and makes the calling of Jesus by John the Baptist extremely important. The Gospel of Matthew was addressed to the Jews who surrounded Jesus and focuses mainly on how Jesus amended the Jewish teachings. It traces Jesus’ ancestry back to Abraham and calls attention to spreads of fourteen generations to David, fourteen more to the deportation to Babylon, and fourteen more to Jesus. The Gospel of Luke was addressed to gentile followers of Jesus and traces his ancestry back to Seth, Adam, and God, with claims for Jesus universality. The Gospel of John tells a very different story from the first three Gospels, beginning with a metaphysical sermon on the creation that claims that the Word or Logos that God spoke was itself incarnate in the person of Jesus, but then moving to a very personal account of Jesus’s friendships and enemies, ending with a very long sermon, Jesus’s crucifixion, and then his appearances first in Jerusalem and then at the Sea of Tiberias. Paul wrote about Jesus almost exclusively as a metaphysical antidote to the judgment of the Jews, the Second Man Adam responding to the First. He said almost nothing about the biographical details that interested the Gospels. The other New Testament writings depicted Jesus in the large cosmic roles given credence in Jewish thought, often extending beyond Judaism. In Post-Testamental times, Jesus was interpreted in the terms of Greek thought with many variations in how he could be both God and man. Augustine recognized the difficulties of giving a straightforward interpretation of the scriptures and interpreted Jesus according to his own categories. Aquinas adopted many of these strategies of interpretation and embedded the highly interpreted Jesus in his dense fabric of ethics. Schleiermacher treated Jesus as the best example of a God-intoxicated person. Bultmann thought of Jesus as an historical figure who was given a highly sophisticated interpretation by the thinkers of his context. But in all of these, from the Gospellers to the twentieth century, Jesus was interpreted as the Son of God, whatever that might mean. Some of you long-time members of this church have heard my interpretations of Jesus over the years, drawing heavily on Tillich though set in a much wider context.

Without for a moment suggesting that a consistent story is true about Jesus, I want to make clear that I have a consistent story, beginning with John’s Gospel that swings from metaphysics to friendship and that has nearly always two story-lines: one that is for the masses and one for sophisticated Christians. I follow that through history to our own day. But is this not still only speculation? So I have an interpretive point of view, for which I can argue vigorously, is it still not merely an argument? Don’t I recognize the power of many other interpretations, particularly more fundamentalistic ones? Don’t I recognize that the finer my interpretations, the fewer people agree with me? Of course I do.

Moreover, the existential meaning of Jesus is itself speculative. How many people have believed that faith in Jesus will get them into Heaven? I don’t even believe in Heaven as a place for after-life experiences. How many people have believed that Jesus is the judgment of God, rewarding the good and punishing the evil? I don’t believe that evil is something worth punishing. How many people have believed that everyone is saved in the end through faith in Jesus? I’m a little shaky even on salvation. How many people go along with Jesus’s rather apparent pacifism? In the short run I’m dead set against it.

Now I’ll bet a lot of you share my doubts about Jesus. In church, everything is fine because we know that the language of the liturgy, even of the preaching, is mainly metaphorical. But when pressed, how much can we affirm that Jesus is Son of God? Not much. And this is where the doctrine of Jesus as Son of God has holes in it. Your holes might be different from mine. Nevertheless, at some point, when pressed, or at night, or when faced with Covid 19, I bet you just get quiet and say someone else had better figure it out.

The doctrine of the Holy Spirit is equally full of holes. It began with the Gospel of John’s introduction that took the form of a special midrashic sermon based on two texts. The primary text was the first part of Genesis that said that the universe was created by God speaking. Was God whole while silent but also while speaking? That gives rise to a rather simple view of God as a person. Or was God whole prior to speaking so that the creation of speech was the beginning of creation? This gives rise to a very sophisticated view of God prior to speaking and then a determinate situation once speech began; on this view the speech was divine and was that through which all things were made. This was the view held by John and the Christians, and it was acceptable within Judaism up until the Babylonian Talmud in the fourth century; then the Jews defended more strongly the first interpretation according to which God is like a person, first silent and then speaking. John’s second text was the reference to Lady Wisdom in Ecclesiastes and the intertestamental writings as being around and ready for heeding but being neglected. Finally God made his speech or Logos incarnate in the person of Jesus who was himself treated very badly. But then John’s text shifts to the biographical details of Jesus’s life. Nevertheless, Jesus promised to send the Logos, or divine speech, or the Holy Spirit to guide the disciples after he had died.

The Book of Acts records how on Pentecost day the Holy Spirit descended to the disciples in tongues of fire on their heads, giving them wisdom and the power to speak in all the languages represented in their audience. This marks the beginning of an association of the Holy Spirit with the Church that has come down to the present day. All sorts of stories exist in which the Holy Spirit comes to individuals. But mainly it is to the Church that the Spirit comes. Paul Tillich went so far as to say that the Church is not the real Church, but is a phony church, unless the Spirit is present, which leaves him with the problem of identifying the true Church. If you eliminate the separation of the Holy Spirit and the Church, don’t you have only the Holy Spirit?

If you have only the Holy Spirit, what are its marks? How can you tell?

The holes in the Person of the Holy Spirit have lapped around the doctrine since its beginning. It is easy to claim the Spirit for the side that wins the debate, which is what happened. But then the losers of the debate also claimed it. Schleiermacher had perhaps the best version of the doctrine insofar as he gave a theoretically rich interpretation of the experience of the Holy in nearly (or in fact in) every person. But his interpretation rested upon a metaphysical distinction at the root of experiential process between the passive and the active, and not many people agree to that. I think Schleiermacher’s tack is good so far as it goes, but it needs to go much farther, and perhaps will turn around and prove that just the opposite is the true, that the confusion of the passive and active proves there is no Holy Spirit. When we look to the Holy Spirit to give us a divine authority for something we want to say, it is full of holes.

The Person of the Father is the most universal of Christian doctrines. Backing off from the Son and the Holy Spirit, it is extremely general. The adoption of Greek thinking gave the Christians plenty of room to speculate on God as Creator. Aquinas defended the Neo-Platonic view that God is infinite and that the creation is finite and made from the infinite. Calvin too said that God is infinite. Schleiermacher and Tillich were somewhat vague about whether God is full or empty, limiting himself to God’s creation. West Asian religions have tried to carry over the personal characteristics of intentionality and wisdom to God, even when God is beyond real characters. South Asian religions have taken the intentionality line to be unfavorable and have pushed for consciousness in some pure state to be the nature of God, even when God is beyond nature. The East Asians have given up just about all uses of the metaphor of the person for God and have talked about nature giving rise spontaneously to determinate things. The Chinese have been naturalistic rather than theistic in their theology. All have admitted that some line of finite characteristics remains with God, even when substantial form is denied it. At least, this is the way I read the intellectual progress of religions.

I don’t know how far you want to go with me on this adventure of conceiving God. Most Christians want to hold on to some kind of intentionality in God and are reluctant to give up a vague claim that God acts with purpose or has hopes for us.

But remember the intellectual pressures pushed to an extreme, remember the dark night, remember Covid-19. Perhaps you would be willing to give up the view that God is a being, a thing, however infinite, and consider God to be an act of creation. God as act is known only with the creation and could not be considered anything before the act. The act is eternal because all time is created. But any thing to be honored, prayed to, or located as present or absent is part of creation. God is God only because of creation.

To my mind, God is good only because the act creates determinate things, all of which are good, each in its own way. God is the source of evil only because these goods inhibit one another and conflict. The goods and evils of human life are all rather local and we do the best we can, although what we can do and fail surely counts. But we count only proximately, not ultimately. Ultimate we all are good in just the way we are.

So I agree with John that God’s speech is separate from God’s reality, though God’s reality is nothing unless he is speaking. All that is metaphorical.

Mine is a fairly extreme view. If you go with me, welcome. If not, I encourage your belief. But remember this is all just speculation, however sophisticated. It is the best that I can do. I presume on the basis of past experience that it is an hypothesis that will be superseded by a better hypothesis some day. From my standpoint, all previous hypotheses have fallen short and been superseded. Why not mine?

Surely there are holes in my hypothesis of the Father as the ultimate sheer act of creation, inseparable from the creation itself. I do not know what they are, but I fear them. By happy days I work on my hypothesis. But when pressed ultimately, in the ultimate dark, or even ultimately depressed by the virus, I am ultimately afraid. Of course, now it is daytime and light, and so I am only referring to my fears, not exhibiting them.

What did Jesus say about this situation? He said, “Take courage; I have conquered the world.” According to John, he said this toward the end of his long speech at the last supper, a speech so complex and contradictory no one understood him. “Take courage; I have conquered the world.” He said it after warning that his disciples would face persecution, as we all do whether we believe anything or nothing. “Take courage; I have conquered the world.” He said it whether or not we believe in his later resurrection after crucifixion. “Take courage; I have conquered the world.” He said it whether or not he actually said it, which he probably did not. “Take courage; I have conquered the world.” He said it even if the whole story of his life, even if the rumors of the Holy Spirit, even if his belief in the Huge God beyond all reckoning is false. “Take courage; I have conquered the world.” He said it even if there are holes in our best theories, even if there are holes in the roots of our life’s determination, even if there are holes in the God beyond gods. “Take courage; I have conquered the world.”

Even if there are holes in every theory we have thought, in every theory we now think, in every theory anyone shall ever think, Jesus says “Take courage; I have conquered the world.” “I have conquered the world” refers to the past to what Jesus has done and endured. Whatever happens in his future, including crucifixion and resurrection, and looking down from Heaven on his Church, count as nothing because he has already conquered. “Take courage” refers to his disciples, to us, and to everyone from then on: it means that whatever happens comes from God and is good, and that we should anticipate it with joy. Even if the world is ultimately destroyed, we have had enough. Even if my ultimate hypothesis according to which God is the act of creation and the creation is ultimately good is mistaken, we have had enough. We have had enough in our local circumstance, even if we are locally evil, and we have had enough in ultimate perspective. Do not give up when things go bad. Have courage.

Well, well, well. Three holes in the ground. Three holes in our best understanding of what is ultimately real. So we should be modest in our claims as Christians. We should be strenuous in our attempts to do better. We should engage our local projects with determination and our ultimate end with thanksgiving. “Have courage; I have conquered the world.”

Amen.

-The Rev. Dr. Robert Cummings Neville, Dean Emeritus of Marsh Chapel

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Neville, Dean Emeritus of Marsh Chapel on 11.29.2020 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

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Matthew 25:31-46

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May we be blessed with liberal helpings of grace, gratitude and generosity, both to receive and to give, in this singular Thanksgiving season.

Grace

May we be blessed with a liberal helping of grace, in this season of needed grace.

We hear in Matthew 25 today a ringing valediction, a ringing acclamation of grace.  Although it is found in no other gospel, we feel and sense today’s parable as the very word of the Lord, pronounced in full, in an unmediated way.  We are haunted by it:  as you have done it to the least, you have done it to me (repeat).  A last word, a valediction, a last will and testament, sure, unshakable and downright clear.  We are still rightly measured by the way we treat those at the dawn of life, those at the twilight of life, and those in the shadows of life.  As you have done it to the least of these, you have done it to me.

A valediction, a last word, carries an acute power.  In a way, the Bible is a long chain of valedictions.  Jacob, Moses, Elijah, David, Job, Jesus, Peter, Paul. Especially, read again the second half of the Gospel of John, a wondrous, fulsome valediction.

One type of valediction is a concession.  It is a grace to concede--at the end of a contest, or race, or election.  There is a powerful poignancy of a particular kind, a riveting poignancy, in a concession rightly rendered.  It has a power like no other.  For all the joy one finds in acceptance and celebration at victory, there is a deeper reach in the concession.  We think of Abraham Lincoln, after a loss, saying he was like a boy who stumbled and found he was ‘too hurt to laugh and too old to cry’. Adlai Stevenson quoted him a century later.  There is a kind of courageous offering on the part of those who will stand and offer themselves, who then are defeated or rejected, and then have the grace to step forward and offer support to their opponent, for the greater good. We could use such a liberal helping of grace today.  In our Methodist tradition, at the election of general superintendents, the grace of acceptance is often surpassed by the grace in concession.  It takes more courage, more grace, to concede in defeat than to accept in victory.  A liberal helping of grace.

Another type of valediction is a farewell, perhaps at retirement.  What kept me going to our denominational annual meetings, as the years progressed, was the chance to listen to the soon to be retired,superannuated clergy, reflecting in five minutes on fifty years of travel, labor, and discipline.  They were the truest words, many joyful, some somber, of the conference gathering each year.  Or, think of University life, as students graduate, on the one hand, and as faculty and staff step down, on the other.  This University, it should be said, thanks to offices of President and Provost, has lived a proud commitment to these moments.  What you say at the end, in leave taking, has a lasting power.  In ministry, the way you leave is the most important thing you do.  I suspect the same could be said for other professions, other callings.

Another type of valediction comes at a point of change, of separation.  In one setting, as we prepared to itinerate from one pulpit to another, the children of the church were guided to offer their own shared valediction, during a children’s moment.  They were encouraged to say two things:  thank you, and, goodbye.

Yet another mode of valediction comes at the grave.  Here the life, not the voice, speaks, or others give voice to the life now departed, dearly departed.  We shall struggle in covid time, and following covid time, to match these moments aright.  We have not been able, 250,000 deaths later, fully, fully to validate in valediction, the lives our dearest loved ones, and the lives of others in our communities.  We shall need to find other and further ways to do so, into the unforeseen future.  It is a heap of work, necessary and good work, that lies ahead.

With grace, Matthew concludes his gospel in words that ring surely and truly--of Jesus.  Now, as you have come to see, and perhaps dislike or regret, Matthew cloaks his teachings, including the last judgment—hungry, thirsty, stranger, naked, sick, imprisoned—in apocalyptic garb—Son of Man, angels, sheep and goats, glory, eternal punishment, eternal life, though not as harshly here as in some of our parables earlier this fall.  Many, including beloved Rudolf Bultmann, found apocalyptic language and imagery entirely useless, the husk of antiquity shrouding the kernel of truth.  Yet, even the apocalyptic dress has something for us, which today, late autumn 2020, we may be ready, in part, to receive.  Apocalyptic faces squarely the unyielding powers around every individual, the principalities and the powers, the powers that be, and admits the ravenous darkness therein—technology, weaponry, plague, resentment.  Apocalyptic faces squarely the transience of life, the brevity and difficulty embedded in even the best of life—the fragility of inherited norms, the fragility of venerable insitutions, the fragility of acculturated kindnesses taken for granted.  Apocalyptic, ever consolation literature fore and aft, keeps an eye on the far horizon, the freedom beyond fragility, and the promise of a new heaven and a new earth, freedom for lives and communities redolent with gratitude and grace and generosity. (John Collins of Yale, years ago, reminded us of this)

We hear today in St. Matthew 25, the gospel valediction, the gospel in gracious valediction.

May we be blessed with a liberal helping of grace, in this season of needed grace.

Gratitude

May we be blessed with a liberal helping of gratitude, in this season of gratitude.

Let us be mindful this Thanksgiving, off gratitude, as was Howard Thurman, who was a hundred years head of his time fifty years ago, so he is still fifty years ahead of us.  As is our long time custom here at Marsh Chapel, on this Sunday we remember his poem, his paean, his hymn to generosity:

Today, I make my Sacrament of Thanksgiving.

I begin with the simple things of my days:

Fresh air to breathe,

Cool water to drink,

The taste of food,

The protection of houses and clothes,

The comforts of home.

For all these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day!

I bring to mind all the warmth of humankind that I have known:

My mother’s arms,

The strength of my father

The playmates of my childhood,

The wonderful stories brought to me from the lives

Of many who talked of days gone by when fairies

And giants and all kinds of magic held sway;

The tears I have shed, the tears I have seen;

The excitement of laughter and the twinkle in the

Eye with its reminder that life is good.

For all these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day

I finger one by one the messages of hope that awaited me at the crossroads:

The smile of approval from those who held in their hands the reins of my security;

The tightening of the grip in a simple handshake when I

Feared the step before me in darkness;

The whisper in my heart when the temptation was fiercest

And the claims of appetite were not to be denied;

The crucial word said, the simple sentence from an open

Page when my decision hung in the balance.

For all these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day.

I pass before me the main springs of my heritage:

The fruits of labors of countless generations who lived before me,

Without whom my own life would have no meaning;

The seers who saw visions and dreamed dreams;

The prophets who sensed a truth greater than the mind could grasp

And whose words would only find fulfillment

In the years which they would never see;

The workers whose sweat has watered the trees,

The leaves of which are for the healing of the nations;

The pilgrims who set their sails for lands beyond all horizons,

Whose courage made paths into new worlds and far off places;

The saviors whose blood was shed with a recklessness that only a dream

Could inspire and God could command.

For all this I make an act of Thanksgiving this day.

I linger over the meaning of my own life and the commitment

To which I give the loyalty of my heart and mind:

The little purposes in which I have shared my loves,

My desires, my gifts;

The restlessness which bottoms all I do with its stark insistence

That I have never done my best, I have never dared

To reach for the highest;

The big hope that never quite deserts me, that I and my kind

Will study war no more, that love and tenderness and all the

inner graces of Almighty affection will cover the life of the

children of God as the waters cover the sea.

All these and more than mind can think and heart can feel,

I make as my sacrament of Thanksgiving to Thee,

Our Father, in humbleness of mind and simplicity of heart.

May we be blessed with a liberal helping of gratitude, in this season of gratitude.

Generosity

May we be blessed with a liberal helping of generosity, in this season of needed generosity.

As you have done it to the least of these…

Today, as a nation, we yet await a full, national, coordinated, generous response to the pandemic, as in:  here is what we are facing; here is what we have done; here is what we need to do;  here is the probable duration of our efforts;  here are the greatest risks; here is what you can do (cleanliness, distance, testing, tracing, masks).  And one more thing:  this will take a long time, and will be very hard, but together we can and will meet the challenge.  Together we can do this.

To do so, we will need the grace of honesty confronting loss.  We have a checkered history here: there have been 200,000 opioid related deaths since Oxycotin was approved in 1995, for instance.  The number of US children without health insurance rose by more than 400,000 between 2016-2018, for instance.  NYT 3/24/20.  (Think about doctor visits, annual physicals, sick care, dental care, all).  And now 250,000 dead in this covid 190 corona virus time.  Of course, in plague, we think of Albert Camus.  We will need his honesty.

Plague or no plague, there is always, as it were, the plague, if what we mean by that is a susceptibility to sudden death, an event that can render our lives instantaneously meaningless.  This is what Camus meant by the ‘absurdity’ of life.  Recognizing this absurdity should lead us not to despair but to a tragicomic redemption, a softening of the heart, a turning away from judgment and moralizing to joy and gratitude”(Alain de Botton, NYT, 3/22/20.)

A liberal helping of such honesty will turn us toward generosity.

To do so, we will need a liberal helping of balanced liberalism, a recollection that ‘the invisible hand of the market requires the visible hand of the government to regulate its inevitable excesses’ (Ellis on Adams, 91).  Further we shall require ‘an educated citizenry fluent in a wise and universal liberalism…This liberalism will neither play down nor fetishize identity grievances, but look instead for a common and generous language to build on who we are more broadly, and to conceive more boldly what we might be able to accomplish in concert.’  (NYT 8/27/18).  To and for the support of this liberal balance, the maintenance of a liberal balance, have been devoted the Marsh pulpit sermons in series, August to November:  they in one sense have been simply an interpretation of the gospel devoted to the reclamation and rehabilitation of a single word in spoken English, a word as both adjective and noun, the word ‘liberal’.

And when did we see thee…

Hungry, thirsty, stranger, naked, sick, imprisoned…

As you have done it to the least of these…

As Mark Twain put it, ‘it’s not the the parts of the Bible I don’t understand that worry me, it’s the parts I do understand’

I come back again to the voice of James Alan McPherson:  ‘each United States citizen would attempt to approximate the ideals of the nation, be on at least conversant terms with all its diversity, carry the mainstream of the culture inside himself (The Atlantic in 1978).  As an American, by trying to wear these clothes he would be a synthesis of high and low, black and white, city and country, provincial and universal.  If he could live with these contradictions, he would be simply a representative American.  I believe that if one can experience its diversity, touch a variety of its people, laugh at its craziness, distill wisdom from its tragedies, and attempt to synthesize all this inside oneself without going crazy, one will have earned the right to call oneself a ‘citizen of the United States’. (N.Y. Times, 7/28/16, a25).  It will take a liberal helping of generosity, given and received, to ‘live’ the contradictions without going crazy.  We can too.  You can too.

As you have done it to the least of these…

This week our friend Tom Fiedler, former BU School of Communications Dean,  spoke on Boston television, and wrote for the Charlotte Observer, about the new struggle in evangelical  Christianity,  the struggle over power vs. generosity, seen in example through the bitter conflict within the Billy Graham family.

He quotes Graham’s daughter Jerushah: “I have spoken out as much as I have because I feel that some of these evangelical leaders are tarring (Christianity) with shame,” she said, in a pointed reference to her uncle…People who don’t know Jesus are not being introduced by the leadership to the Jesus I know.” And she said she is confident that her positions on such issues as gay rights, the treatment of refugees and respect for “the most marginalized” are those that not only resonate with the future generation, but that align with those of her grandfather.

When did we see thee hungry, thirsty, stranger, naked, sick, imprisoned…

May we be blessed with a liberal helping of generosity, in this season generosity.

Grace, gratitude, generosity.  Grace, gratitude, generosity.  May our Thanksgiving tables be fully laden with liberal helpings of all three.

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

posted in Liberal Gospel: Autumn 2020 Sermons, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 11.22.2020 at 11:00 am

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