By Marsh Chapel

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Luke 24:36-48

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When I was young, my family moved from upstate New York to Northeastern Pennsylvania. We settled outside of Harford Township. A town with just over 1000 people at the time and still is not much larger today. I have grown accustomed, especially in New England to emphasizing the Harf. in Harford. There is no t in the name, but there is a yearly fair. The Harford Fair was always held in late August just before the start of school. The Fair held the promise of fireworks, friends, food, animals, and many other wonders to children and adults alike. Kids below 12 were always free, so my sister and I frequently roamed the fairgrounds.

Over time, my sister closest in age and I learned how to glean at the fair. There was loose change to be found below the bleachers after sheep showings and tractor pulls. We generally found enough for pizza or ice cream. A booth offered apples if you made a hole in one at mini-golf. It was free and the attendants were gracious if you missed. You just went back in the line until you made the shot. You could get free water from the Baptist booth, candy from Democrats and Republicans, popcorn from a local bank, and you could watch a 30-minute Christian cartoon in the shade to break the August heat. There were even a few years when family artwork won some ribbons at the school-house exhibits. To us, the fair teemed with possibility. We never quite knew what we would find, whom we would see, and the fun we would have but every August, the fair came and went.

Usually, we would watch the yearly fireworks as a family, and that meant a trip to the midway. The midway was the location of the rides and carnival games. We spent more time watching than playing there, but the lights and action were fun to see. You could feel the wind whipping from rushing rides, hear balloons popping from darts, and smell French fries. At our family trip to the Midway, Mom and Dad, or my older siblings, would slip us a few dollars and we would play some skee-ball for 10 cents a game back in the day. We would also play a ping pong ball toss game. For a dollar or two, you would get a basket full of ping pong balls, enough for all of us to take many turns. The objective of the game was to throw the ping pong balls into a narrow-rimmed cup. Most did not make it and fell to the wayside. Like many carnival games, the odds weren’t really in our favor to win the big prizes. The balls would hit the rims of the cup and bounce off but most years, one or two of us would manage to get a ball in a small prize cup. The small prize was always a goldfish in a plastic bag.

Whoever won the fish got to name it and it was theirs but we were all excited no matter who won. Throughout the evening, the fish would be thoroughly examined before being brought home. The fishbowl full of water would already be prepared and fishfood ready to be sprinkled. No matter what we did though, no matter what we tried, no fish ever lasted more than a few days. Most had gone belly up overnight. This meant that the fishbowl sat empty for most of the year. It sat empty until the fair rolled back into town. The empty fishbowl resided on a shelf across from my seat at the dinner table. I’d look at it longingly. It was a sign of death and failure. A source of discomfort. A wound for a child who mourned the loss of fish barely known and hardly attached. The empty fishbowl was a sign of death; yet, by grace it was also something else. It was also something more.

By grace, the childish wound of the empty fishbowl was also a sign of hope. For every year, with hopeful expectations I imagined what it would look like to have the fishbowl be a place of life. Every year, I looked forward to filling it with water with the hope that that year, things would be different. Filling the bowl with water each year and hoping took faith. Imaging the empty bowl full was an act of faith. This involved looking past what was to what could be seen through the childhood imagination. It was dreaming and wondering what could be if things were different.

There is a difference between childish imagination and the wonder of children’s imagination. Too often, the wonder of the imagination is set aside as childish but imagination is central to the recognition of what is real and what really matters. Science, language, arts, theology all rest upon some form of imaginative thinking and imaginative expressing. The imagination provides us meaningful paradigms to interpret life and hope in faith for goodness. The imagination does not have to be an escape from the world it can be a way of hoping for the world to come. Sometimes we have to imagine to recognize what cannot be seen otherwise. Sometimes we have to imagine to wonder at what could be. This type of imagination does not have to be childish or lead to passive reception of wounds. This type of imagination is not an opiate of the people it can be the very work that propels us to action. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream stemmed from a holy imagination that refused to allow white racism to dictate the terms of reality. He dared to dream from a different imagination. His imagination sparked hope when many thought hope was lost. The imagination can be a spark that rises from ashes to kindle new possibilities. It can propel us toward recognition of the ever-elusive presence of divine love in loose in the world today. This is desperately needed in this time of great woundedness.

Luke writes about wounds in this post-resurrection narrative following a post-resurrection narrative. Prior to this reading, Luke records that Jesus encountered disciples on the road to Emmaus. Jesus and the disciples spoke but the disciples did not recognize Jesus. On the road to Emmaus, Jesus taught but recognition did not come through quoting texts and convincing speeches. The disciples came to recognize Jesus when bread was broken. Broken bread. The bread of the Eucharist gives life but to do so has to be broken. Perhaps, another way of saying broken bread is wounded bread. After recognizing Christ in the wounded bread, Christ disappeared from the disciples. Then, the disciples turned around and went back to Jerusalem.

After returning to the eleven, it was while they were still speaking that Jesus appeared to them and said peace. Despite having just heard the testimony of those on the road to Emmaus, the disciples were startled and terrified when Jesus appeared to them. The text says that the disciples thought Jesus to be a ghost. A phantom spirit present but not physically there. He addressed the doubts verbally but then did something odd. To alleviate the concerns, Jesus invited the disciples to touch and feel his flesh but before doing that, he showed them his hands and feet. That is odd. Jesus did not ask them to look him in the eyes or tell them something that only he would know. He draws attention to his hands and feet. He showed them feet that journeyed with them and hands that had served them. He showed them hands and feet that they would recognize. But these hands and feet were not unchanged by the cross. Recall the Johannine passage read last week which makes explicit what Luke points toward. The hands and feet of Jesus bear the marks of the nails from the cross. Jesus drew their attention to the wounds of the cross.

Practical Theologian Mary Mcclintock Fulkerson tells us that “like a wound, theological thinking is generated by a sometimes inchoate sense that something must be addressed.”[1] Wounds, true wounds, cannot be ignored. They seek to be addressed. Theology, belief and faith about God often stem from wounds or relate to wounds. Wounds that could lead to questions and fear. Wounds that need to be addressed. Luke and John affirm that wounds can also be a place of recognition. A place where God has gone before us, not to justify, redeem, or cause wounds unilaterally, but to be recognized. Wounds can be a sources of imagination. Faith in Christ does not take away wounds, but faith in Christ is faith in a wounded God. Christ knew wounds and Christ knows wounds. This is the Christ that Black Liberation Theologian James Cone imagines as present among the lynched and suffering. Christ present and wounded at the site of suffering. Cone also tells us that it doesn’t take rope and a tree for a lynching to take place. They just as easily take place at the barrel of a gun. But whether it be at the barrel of a gun, the lynching tree, or the Roman cross, the God who suffers is the God of the oppressed. The risen Christ is the wounded Christ. Christ showed his wounds to the disciples so that they could imagine and recognize different possibilities.

In order to address their doubts and fears, Christ showed the disciples his hands and feet. Recognition did not come through a whirlwind of cosmic power or a glorious triumphal miracle. Recognition stemmed from wounds. The cross is foolishness but honestly, radical love involves foolishness. Imagining God’s radical love cannot speak past wounds or over wounds. It cannot spiritually bypass materiality. Jesus invited the disciples to see the very places where the nails were driven into his body. The resurrection did not take the scars away. Recognition of the scars led to recognition of Jesus as the Christ. “39 Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself.” See that it is I myself, or in Greek, egō eimi autos. egō eimi, I am. Jesus convinced the disciples of his personhood and presence by drawing attention to his scars. Look at my hands and feet; see that it is I myself… We see wounds all around us today. Wounds of the economic divide, racial divide, and political divides. We see wounds but do we see Christ? Do we imagine the wounded Christ present and propelling us toward change? The risen Christ is the crucified God. There is a great temptation to forget that. There is a great temptation to join Peter in his avoidance of Christ as Isaiah’s suffering servant. We cope with the wounded Christ on Good Friday. We sit unsettled with the death of Christ on Holy Saturday, but what about the wounded Christ as the risen Christ in Eastertide? This Christ is unsettling. Wounds are unsettling even as they call to be addressed.

In this Lukan scene, Jesus calls the disciples to witnesses to these things. Part of the resurrection, part of the witness is to wounds. Witnesses are those who have seen and testify through belief about that which they have seen and know. Christian memory is a witness to this Christ or it misses a core part of how to recognize Christ and imagine Christ. Christian witness is partly kindled from the imaginative spark called forth from wounds. To always miss wounds is to risk missing Christ. Wounds should not be unilaterally glorified or celebrated but they also cannot be ignored.

The disciples were looking right at Christ, but until bread was broken, until the wounds were shown, recognition of the risen Christ did not take place. This Christ is present in the work of love and liberation today. This Christ is present in places of suffering and oppression seeking to bring about wholeness and restoration. This Christ is recognized by wounds and in wounds. This work often takes form as resistance and counter-narration. The temptation to see Jesus only when the fishbowl is full precludes the work of imagining Christ when the fishbowl is empty. It is not just a good times and in bad time’s reminder, it is a question of faith, presence, and Christology. Christ is wounded even in glory. This Christ does not call us to ignore pain and circumstances or seek out suffering. This Christ is a reminder that the power of God is not in chariots and horses, nuclear weapons and guns but in everyday resistance to suffering with the wounded God.

The wounds of Christ are meant to imagine a world without wounds.  In The Cross and Lynching Tree, James Cone put it this way, “The gospel of Jesus is not a rational concept to be explained in a theory of salvation, but a story about God’s presence in Jesus’ solidarity with the oppressed, which led to his death on the cross. What is redemptive is the faith that God snatches victory out of defeat, life out of death, and hope out of despair.”[2] These are ongoing activities seeking present day actuality. Wounds can help us identifying the liberating presence of incarnate resurrected love today. The risen love is loose in the world today but if we cannot recognize it, we will not see it.

Luke-Acts should certainly be read and interpreted together but it is significant that this wounded resurrection account frames the conclusion of Luke’s Gospel account. The final image of Luke is of the ascension but before the ascension, Jesus opens up the imaginative interpretive possibilities latent in the experiences and memories of the disciples. He shows the disciples how to interpret Scripture Christologically but also how to believe in the presence of wounds. The risen Christ continues to be present in the work of justice, liberation, and love today. The end is a new beginning. One unforeseen and unimaginable without the grace of God. But by the grace of God, we can imagine this world.

A few years ago, I was stuck in traffic on my way home from downtown Los Angeles to the San Fernando Valley. Zip-tied to a bridge over the freeway was a sign with one word written on it. The homemade sign said, “Imagine.” I’ve always wondered, “Imagine what” but even in imagining what, the sign has generated imaginative thought. The resurrected Christ is a Christ who asks us to recognize wounds and to imagine other possibilities. The imagination is not always an escape from the world it can be a way of hoping for the world to come. We stand at the intersections of wounds and woundedness. We recognize the risen Christ as the wounded Christ. We see the scars, and let us dare to imagine something different. Let us dare to imagine a world where people can get home safe regardless of skin color. Let us imagine a world where people can get home safe regardless of sex or gender. Let the imagination come to be, by the grace of the risen wounded Christ. Let us incarnate the love of God loose in the world today. Imagine that.

[1] Places of Redemption, 14.

[2] 150.

-The Rev. Scott Donahue-Martens

Ph.D. Student in Practical Theology: Homiletics

Boston University School of Theology

posted in Guest Preachers on 04.18.2021 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

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John 20:19–31

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Memory

In our spiritual Easter basket this morning we find gracious gifts of memory and mind, of story and song.

Just before Easter some years ago, a dear mentor died, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin who had been our pastor at Riverside Church in New York.  He comes to memory at Easter, as did this Easter.  His example and service were a beacon and guide for us, as was his preaching, at Yale and then in New York.  At Easter his memory arises, partly because he had gift for epigrams.  In the joy of Easter there is in the seasonal basket the particular joy of his capacity to put things simply and say things briefly.  He was a stellar epigrammatist, as in his own way, was the author of our fourth Gospel, read a moment ago.  Here are a few from Coffin:

There is more mercy in God than sin in us.

To age is grow from passion to compassion.

When my son died God’s heart broke first.

The separation of church and state is not the separation of a Christian from her politics.

Lent is the time to get rid of your guilt.

I’m not OK, and you’re not OK. But that’s OK.

Courage is the most important virtue because it makes all the others possible.

Rules are signposts not hitching posts.

The woman most in need of liberation is the woman in every man.

Hell is truth seen too late.

The trick in life is to die young as late as possible.

The longest, most arduous trip in the world is the journey from the head to the heart.

It is often said that religion is a crutch. What makes you think you don’t limp?

Good preaching is never at people, it’s for people.

To me it is hard to believe a loving God would create loving creatures that aspire to be yet more loving, and then finish them off before their aspirations are complete. There must be something more….

Mind

In our spiritual Easter basket this morning we find gracious gifts of memory and mind, of story and song.

In a class on pastoral leadership this past week, we read Parker Palmer’s classic The Courage to Teach.  In it he explores the relationship of the teacher’s inner life to the craft of teaching.  Those truest to and closest to their own best selves invariably become the most mindful teachers, of whose insights we are most often reminded.  Take Dr. Christopher Morse, who taught us to think about things.  Like heaven for instance.

How are we to think about heaven?

One way to think about something is to think about its opposite.

Our Bible uses the word heaven in opposition to the word earth. Heaven is up there. Earth is down here. ‘Heaven and earth are full of thy glory’. ‘As the heavens are high above the earth’. ‘Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.’ Heaven represents the ultimate or penultimate reality of the physical world in the Bible, as it does in the ancient philosophers.

But we are today reluctant to think that heaven is up there. For we know that ‘Up There’ is the moon, the Milky Way, and the expanding, even infinite, universe.

Our Bible also speaks of heaven in contrast to hell. Now the comparison is not between up and down, as much as it is between lasting good and lasting bad. Heaven is good. Hell is bad. But we also have some question about these inherited, mythological accounts of hell, as well as similar accounts of this Heaven. Harps, wings, clouds…fire, forks, tails…Good we acknowledge. Evil we acknowledge. Hell as the absence of God, or of good, we acknowledge. But hell as eternal torment, administered in punitive ways by a divinity of somewhat unpleasant temperament, this hell we question.

Here is a third contrast. Not heaven and earth, nor heaven and hell, but heaven and hurt. It is at the heart John and the marrow of the Easter gospel that ‘something happened’. Not up and down, nor good and bad, but now and then. This contrast is built on time, rather than on space or on morals. Heaven is then, earth is now. A belief in heaven, then, is a trust in what is ‘taking place’ over against a knowledge of what is ‘in place’. What is taking place, contrasted with what is in place. What is at hand as contrasted to what is in hand. (I am indebted here to the work of my teacher, Dr. Christopher Morse). Now we see in a mirror dimly, then face to face. Now we see in mirror dimly.  Then face to face.

Easter reminds, brings to mind. Heaven is both near and different, utterly close at hand, yet completely different from anything in hand. ‘The kingdom of God is at hand.’ ‘The reign of God has come near to you.’ ‘You are not far from the kingdom of God’. ‘The Lord is at hand…’And yet…there is nothing in our hands like what God hands us. The resurrection is Christ’s victory over death, when no other victory avails.

Story

In our spiritual Easter basket this morning we find gracious gifts of memory and mind, of story and song.

The Holy Scripture brings the story of Easter, nestled into our Easter basket this Eastertide.

Last week we heard from 1 Corinthians 15, wherein Paul writes to address an argument in the church about resurrection. (This is utterly fascinating in itself, since it shows that not 30 years after Jesus’ crucifixion there was already church disagreement about resurrection!  Imagine that.)

It is a pastoral letter, a pastoral word.  Paul sits at the bedside, as it were.  He takes your hand and remembers your experience in receiving an inherited tradition: dead, buried, and raised on the third day. He mentions to you, hand on shoulder, the centrality of resurrection to the whole of Christian preaching. He pauses to place this account of resurrection into an apocalyptic frame, which he brought with him from Judaism, but notices your flagging interest in the history of religions. So, as he did with circumcision in Galatians, and as we are perhaps inclined to think he often did in polemic, Paul lets the whole Gospel ride on this one point, at this point. He recites names of people you also have heard of—Peter, James, others. With you, perhaps asking in Hemingway fashion for your experience too (what is your actual experience of life, death, love, the numinous?), he recounts experiences of others, who have known an appearance, apostles, individuals, and groups, even himself. (This is our one and only primary source reference to a personal experience of the Risen Christ, by the way). He points to popular religious practices (the experience, apparently known in the Corinthian church, of baptizing in the name of the dead). There is a lengthy pause. Then he dramatically asserts his own experience of suffering, and risks of death, as sure evidence of the power of resurrection. He pointedly equates denial of resurrection with license to do as we please. Paul even takes up, less intelligibly, and more mystically, the further question of how resurrection happens. He then more philosophically, and lengthily, assesses our experiences of the glories of nature, the created order, the firmament, the physical body. The passage is based on experience. While he starts with his own experience, he leans heavily on yours.

Then his conclusion. Listen for what is not said, too. Paul also, for all the experiential assurance of the chapter, clearly announces that he tells of a…mystery. Not a fact. A mystery. Not a miracle. A mystery. Not a wonder. A mystery. Not evidence or verdict. A mystery. Behold, I tell you a mystery…

To announce this mystery, the New Testament in general, and Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, convey three different accounts of resurrection. Peter (representing the first three gospels) emphasizes a physical resurrection, an empty tomb, more than resuscitation, to be sure, but physical nonetheless. Paul emphasizes a spiritual resurrection, known in revelation. John announces an existential resurrection, one that fills all of life and creation, that was presaged by the raising of Lazarus, one that makes the cross itself a glorification, a completion. Peter shows us an empty tomb. Paul blows the trumpet of heaven. John acclaims a full heart. All three emphases, perhaps providentially provided to reach the varied hearts and minds of various women and men, all the spots on the personality map, affirm that something happened. Something for dreamers, doubters and doers. Something for engineers, philosophers, and politicians. You may ask if they are all on the same page.

We reply, “They are singing out of the same hymnal: Sings Peter, ‘ours the cross, the grave, the skies’; sings Paul, ‘my chains fell off, my heart was free’; sings John, ‘he walks with me and he talks with me’.”

What the church has tried to name, over the centuries, in the weeks of Easter, is that something happened. Something physical, something spiritual, something experiential. There is room for your particular temperament here. To some measure, they must all be true. For the physical resurrection, the resurrection of the body, at the least is attested in the ongoing life of the church. And the spiritual resurrection is at least attested in the preaching of the faith. And the existential resurrection is at least attested in unexpected, undeserved, real love. Something happened. The church is alive. The future is open. Love is real.  The Lord is risen indeed!

Song

In our spiritual Easter basket this morning we find gracious gifts of memory and mind, of story and song.

It has been just over a year since our last wedding at Marsh Chapel.  So, to converse last week with a couple to be married up the coast this fall, the first since March of 2020, brought an unexpected wave of emotion.  Joy! A song of joy of its own.  After the conversation, the words and rhythms and gladness of weddings flooded in, in full.  Especially the song of St. Paul, not always used in weddings, and when used not always rightly used, but still used often, an Easter song of love:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful;

It is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;

It does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.

For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect;

But when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away.

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways.

For now* we see in a mirror dimly, but then* face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.

So, faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Memory and mind, story and song:  Made like him, like him we rise
Ours the cross, the grave, the skies…Alleluia!

The Lord is risen!  He is risen indeed!

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 04.11.2021 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

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John 20: 1-18

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Preface

Truth and Love are resurrection words.  Synonyms of resurrection.

Charles Wesley sang them:  Unite the pair so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety, learning and holiness combine, truth and love let all men see.

Notice how our Boston University seal is here embedded:  learning, virtue, piety.  Truth and love, for all to see.

The Lord is risen!  He is risen indeed.

This year, on the heels of twelve months of hibernation, loneliness, worry, and death, may we hear the Easter good news, at is clearest, at its fullest, at its…simplest.

Truth and Love are resurrection words.  Synonyms of resurrection.

More so:  may we, may you, decide, from this day forward, to walk in resurrection light, to look for truth and to lean toward love.   The Easter sermon comes with a stark, personal call to you, a challenge for you, to walk in the light as He is in the light, to walk in truth and love.

Truth

I share with you a sentence of my own.  The wording is my own, though of course as with all and all, it draws on centuries and Scripture and others.

Here it is:  There is a self-correcting spirit of truth loose in the universe.  There is a self-correcting spirit of truth loose in the universe.

This truth, this spirit of truth, is the power of resurrection in daily life.  Truth is what Easter means.

In 1995 we were sent to serve a wonderful church, in a new city, one more corporate and less academic, more formal and less familiar, richer but less communal than our own home city.  What a privilege.  What a privilege it is to be in ministry, in any case, to be present as the baby is born, to be present as the vows are taken, to be present as the losses and gains and defeats and victories of life cascade, to be present in the final hours and at the grave, reciting, Jesus said I am the resurrection and the life.

That Christmas one of the nine Sunday school classes in that church, each with up to 150 members, hosted a downtown black-tie Christmas party, in the lights and splendor of that then muscular urban setting, to hale the season, but also formally to welcome the new minister and his wife.  What an honor.  An older couple, a retired guidance counselor and lovely wife, came, as you would, to provide the newcomers a ride.  It was a little grace inside in their case of a lifetime of grace.  Some years later, as we saw our own children through high school, and drawing on forty years of experience, he said, speaking of teenagers, Yes, they will take you for a ride.  It would be good to have another lifetime to try to become as true and loving a couple as were David and Joan Closson.   After the dinner and dancing and festivities, we were again driven back, deposited at home, by grace.

This winter, January 20, 2021, I had a note from their daughter.  The apple and the tree, as so often, not being very far apart.  Here is what she wrote:

Hi Dr. Hill. My name is Judy Cama. My parents were Dave and Joan Closson, faithful members of Asbury for so many years.  I even knew your wife when she was the music director at Onondaga Valley Presbyterian Church, as I lived in Syracuse for 8 years and we were members there.

I remember attending church services with my parents at Asbury during your Village Green series, I believe you called it. One sermon really resonated with me when you talked about the “self-correcting power of truth loose in the universe.” I really believe that and I remember taking copious notes in church that day.  Since then I have related those words to many instances in my life and life in general and have shared the quote with many others.  I have always wanted to let you know how impactful your words were.

Today as I watched Joe Biden become our new president your words resonated the loudest and prompted this email.  I just wanted you to know that that particular sermon had tremendous staying power and I thank you for it.  I hope you and your family members are doing well."

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.  Before we get too far down the road into Eastertide and summer, and too tripped up in detail and complexity and variety and vagary, let us announce and trust the Easter gospel. Before we get too wrapped up in the petty narcissism of small religious differences, and the petty narcissisms of acute philosophical details, let us announce and trust the Easter gospel.  Truth is stronger than death.   Now most of the people and family who modeled us the gospel are dead, including Dave and Joan and ten thousand others.  But their truth, the truth in which they lived, and more so still the truth in which and for which they died lives on.  Soon you and I will also be dead, resting in God’s presence.  That is the point, the existential reminder of Holy Week, as if we needed it in April of 2021.  But truth lives on.

I am a perennialist.  That means that I see and hear truth across many differences including and especially religious ones.  That means I am more inclined to unity than sometimes seems popular today, more inclined to mutuality than sometimes seems politic today, more inclined to liberality than sometimes seems prevalent today, more inclined to judge that education is about what is old rather than what is new than sometimes makes the grade today, more inclined to that old perennialist creed:  new occasions teach new duties, times makes ancient good uncouth, one must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth.

Here is a hard-edged question for you.  Will you live in truth?  Will you?

On the third day he rose again.  Truth is the resurrection of the dead.

Love

I share with you another sentence of my own.  As with first, you have heard me say it before.  The wording is my own, though of course as with all and all, it draws on centuries and Scripture and others.

Here it is:  There is a self-revealing presence of love loose in the universe.  There is a self-revealing presence of love loose in the universe.

This love, this spirit of love, is the power of resurrection in daily life.  Love is what Easter means.

In 1981 we were sent and posted to two little churches on the Canadian border.  Our daughter Emily at age 3 could see the St. Lawrence river, down north in Canada, from her bedroom window.  We were sent to serve two rural churches, graced by gracious, loving women and men, who had less education and more wisdom, less money and more sense, than all the other churches combined.  This appointment allowed the initiation, and later the completion, of a PhD in Montreal.  What a privilege.  What a privilege it is to be in ministry, in any case, to be present as the baby is born, to be present as the vows are taken, to be present as the losses and gains and defeats and victories of life cascade, to be present in the final hours and at the grave, reciting,  Jesus said I am the resurrection and the life.

A few days earlier, soon to be on the way north to that border town, and now with two little children under two, and a rented moving van soon to be packed, I drove from Ithaca to Syracuse to be interviewed for ordination.  I stood outside a classroom at the University, wherein 300 or so clergy from the area were gathered, awaiting my time of questioning.  Outside was the SU quadrangle where we had relaxed as high school students in the neighborhood some years earlier, and outside too were the steps of Hendricks Chapel where I would be ordained later that spring, if the clergy approved.  In the church, you are who you ordain.  In the faculty, you are who you tenure.  In the University, you are what you endow (more on that at another time).  So, yes, I was nervous, my stipend, housing, education and future depending on the next hour or so.

Many of the clergy I knew, having been the life guard at their summer camp the years before.  They were bright, committed, adventurous, and a bit wild.  On the whole, as a group, they were, their example was, what commended the ministry to me.  They were alive in ways that others were not.  Others of the clergy I knew through family and upbringing.  These were both mixed blessings, as some did not appreciate the life guard’s whistle and some did not appreciate the candidate’s family.  So, I was on edge.  After a while I also was alone, at which point an older fellow, perhaps a professor, shorter, bearded and bespectacled, wearing jeans and sandals, came over to me.  He asked who I was.  He inquired about my presence.  He sensed and asked after my anxiety.  He nodded and smiled.  Then—I realized then he was going into the meeting—he took my shoulder and said, Bob, you are going to do fine.  I just know you will.  And you have my vote for sure.  A clean breeze blew through me.  As he departed, I thought belatedly to ask, What is your name?  He replied, Smith.  Huston Smith.  Oh my.  Oh… my goodness!  HUSTON SMITH! But I read your book, THE RELIGIONS OF MAN, I fumblingly responded.  He smiled, and off he went, to join his fellow clergy.

I am perennialist.  And I am personalist, too.  That means that I see and hear the divine in the human person, in accord with a fine, long tradition at Boston University.  While the philosophical underpinnings of that tradition have long been withered, the heart of the matter, the heart of personal experience of love remains, as in that perennialist professor’s kindness, overlooking a college campus, the friendly help of Huston Smith.  We are a generation of women and men who have not yet fully heard the difference between knowing about someone and knowing someone.  You can know about somebody by zoom.  But to know somebody takes presence, takes voice, takes body, takes talk, takes personhood, take…love.  Love is stronger than death. We are long way down the trail of I and It, and only at the trailhead of I and Thou.  So, in one sense, I am still a personalist, a bit more inclined to conversation than is currently fashionable, to visitation than is currently ministerial, to presence than is currently possible.

Here is a hard-edged question for you.  Will you live in love, lean toward love?  Will you?

On the third day he rose again.  Love is the resurrection of the dead.

Coda

Truth and Love are resurrection words.  Synonyms of resurrection.

Charles Wesley sang them:  Unite the pair so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety, learning and holiness combine, truth and love let all men see.

Notice how our Boston University seal is here embedded:  learning, virtue, piety.

Truth and love, for all to see.

The Lord is risen!  He is risen indeed.

This year, on the heels of twelve months of death, hibernation, loneliness and worry, may we hear the Easter good news, at is clearest, at its fullest, at its…simplest.

Truth and Love are resurrection words.  Synonyms of resurrection.

More so:  may we, may you, decide, from this day forward, to walk in resurrection light, to look for truth and to lean toward love.   The Easter sermon comes with a stark, personal call to you, a challenge for you, to walk in the light as He is in the light, to walk in truth and love.

In a moment we will hear again the ancient liturgy for eucharist.  We are not together to receive together the bread and cup.  But we are together in relationship, by memory, in hope, through prayer.  And with a little imagination, with eyes closed and hearts open, we might allow the familiar, ancient prayers of communion, to bring us into communion.

So, travel with a little imagination…Imagine Eucharist at Marsh Chapel.  Stand to sing… Pause to reflect… Step out into the aisle… Look at and look past Abraham Lincoln and Francis Willard…Receive cup and bread, bread and cup… Kneel at the altar to pray… Stand in communion with the communion of saints…Here is the bread and cup of friendship…Imagine, if you are willing, a baptism, a wedding, a funeral, say right here, and a congregation reciting together a creed, a psalm, a hymn, a poem.  Imagine, if you are willing, a congregation currently in diaspora, but just now, by the word spoken, a gathered and thus addressable community, you and I and all together.

Sursum Corda!  Lift up your hearts…

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 04.4.2021 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

An audio recording of this service is not available.

Mark 16:1-8

Christ is Risen! Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!

How good it is to be here, in person, worshipping together with all of you for the first time in over a year! Easter has arrived! We gather together in community, new and familiar faces, early this Easter morning to share in the joy of the Holy Spirit at the news of the impossible becoming possible and the glory of our salvation through Jesus Christ, our Lord. We’ve donned our Sunday best, are surrounded by the beauty of the creation, have the sounds of beautiful music from the Marsh Chapel Choir, and feel the exuberant energy of this festival day. We are glad to be together, although distanced and outdoors, to share in worship together. For some of us, including me, it has been a very long time since we have been able to worship in person! We joyfully hear the words of “Christ the Lord is Risen Today!” and shout our “Alleluias,” listening for the good news of grace freely given through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

However, our Gospel reading for today does not seem to match the positive feelings we might have about our service this morning. In fact, I’d go as far to say that it’s somewhat off-putting given the celebratory nature we expect from our Easter service. In Mark’s telling of the resurrection, the oldest of the gospel accounts, we are greeted only with an empty tomb, a man dressed in white, and women who deeply loved Jesus left in stunned silence, too scared to go and share what they have witnessed. Most scholars agree that the original ending of Mark is verse 8, where our gospel reading ends today. There is no triumphant celebration of victory over death in this ending, just stunned silence.

Imagine yourself following along with these three women – Mary Magdelene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome – as they approach the tomb where Jesus had been laid days earlier. These three women had seen the traumatic death of Jesus from afar, having been Jesus’ followers with other women from Jerusalem during Jesus’ ministry (Mk. 15:40-41). They saw him crucified, give up his final cry, and die. They now approach his tomb with trepidation – they could not anoint his body before this point because it was the Sabbath. The violent death Jesus faced at the hands of the authorities does not dissuade them from their task to make sure his body is properly prepared for burial. Instead of fear of being discovered, their biggest concern is that they will not be able to access his tomb because of the large, heavy rock that had been used to seal it. The task seems almost impossible, but they are moved forward by their love, care, and devotion to Jesus in these last moments with his body.

It is no surprise then that the women are shocked when the rock had already been moved away! No one else would have any reason to visit Jesus’ tomb. Who else could have possibly moved away this stone? Not only that, but where is Jesus’ body?! This is not at all what the women expected when they set out to the tomb that early morning. Their worry shifts to alarm as they encounter the young man in white. This young man in white, perhaps an angelic figure, is not identifiable by any of these women, but he knows exactly whom they seek (Jesus of Nazareth), where he has gone (He is not here…he is going to Galilee), and what the women and the disciples (who are not there) are to do now (Go, Tell!). He tries to calm the women: “Do not be alarmed,” he states. But it’s too late. The women, those same women who had been devoted followers of Jesus throughout his ministry are alarmed. Even more than that, their alarm turns to fear and doubt.

Doubt is the antithesis of faith. Faith requires trust. Fear prevents the women from fully putting their trust in the words of the young man in white. He instructs the women, “But go, tell” the disciples of Jesus’ resurrection and plans to meet them in Galilee. The women don’t “go” or “tell.” In placing trust in their own perception of the events surrounding Jesus’ resurrection they falter in their faith in trusting God and Jesus, even though Jesus has expressed previously that he will return to them. Many of us would have the same reaction if placed in a similar situation. The mixture of emotions with the traumatic events which have taken place may have well left us too afraid to say anything to anyone else. In today’s political and social climate, some may relate with feeling too uneasy with our own religious tradition to be bold proclaimers of our faith to others.            We fear judgment of our beliefs or that our experiences of the Divine will not be understood by others who have not shared in them.

Mark’s gospel does not shout the good news of Jesus’ resurrection, but quietly retreats into stunned silence. What a strange way to end the gospel that is supposed to declare the Good News of Jesus Christ. What are we supposed to take away from such an abrupt ending? It would be easy to assume that Mark was mistaken in writing the ending this way – that perhaps the rest of Mark’s gospel was lost and there was a more satisfying ending in which the resurrected Jesus actually appeared to the women and the disciples and told them what to do next. In fact, early Christians were so certain that the ending of Mark must’ve been a mistake that they added in their own set of verses around the 2^nd century C.E. to make the story feel more “complete.”

However, most New Testament scholars now recognize that the choice to leave the gospel on a cliffhanger may have been intentional by its writer. The silence of the women opens up the possibility for those reading the text to proclaim the good news.[1] Even though the written word of the gospel ends at verse 8, the story does not end here. You see, Jesus is not just a dead historical figure and the resurrection is not a one-time event. We’ve been saying so all morning – Alleluia, Christ is Risen! IS RISEN! Jesus continues to live and act in the resurrection.

We are a part of this Easter story. The man in white at the tomb speaks to us, just as the Holy Spirit continues to guide us in our faith. As New Testament scholar, Ira Brent Diggers, points out, “Christian discipleship is always Easter ministry.”[2] We continue to experience this Easter story throughout the rest of the year. An empty tomb gives us the opportunity to see how Jesus is and can be present to us in our lives. The good news of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins is not just that it happened, but that it continues to happen for you (LC V, BoC 469.21-22). We are justified by faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and receive the free gift of the grace of God through our faith. We might have our own moments of doubt or trepidation in claiming or proclaiming our faith, but the Holy Spirit through the Word and sacraments reminds us that we do not have to be afraid, we need only trust in God and God’s promises (LC V, BoC 473.61-63). We may feel lost in knowing what to do next in the face of adversity, but God continues to remain steadfast with us no matter the circumstances, even if the tomb is empty.

Our faith in the promises set forth by God through Jesus and the Holy Spirit bring us together to form the church and to be God’s witness to the world (Ap VII & VIII, BoC 175.13). Faith is a gift to us from God. We do nothing to manufacture it, but instead receive it through the means of grace. God meets us where we are through hearing the scriptures and participating in the sacraments. We grow in faith each time we hear the Word proclaimed, sharing in that moment with others and allowing its messages to touch us personally (Ap IV, BoC 131.67). We encounter Jesus each time we hear the words of institution – “This is my body, given for you…This is my blood, shed for you…Do this in remembrance of me…” (LC V, BoC 473.65). When we partake in the Lord’s Supper, it physically binds us to the reality of Jesus’ sacrifice through eating the bread and drinking the wine (AP XXIV, BoC 271.73). We witness God’s choice of us and others each time a new member is brought into our community through Holy Baptism. We feel the Holy Spirit move and inspire us as we join together in Word, sacrament, and song as the church, whether we are physically together or sharing in the Word virtually through radio waves and internet streams. In all of these acts we continue to strengthen our faith in God and the relationships we form with one another in the Body of Christ here and beyond the walls of this church. Faith has the power to be transformative in our lives, opening our hearts and enabling us to be in service to others. The voice of the Holy Spirit invites us to “go, tell” others about the amazing things Christ does for us. An empty tomb is a sign of possibility. The story doesn’t end here. It’s only just beginning. Alleluia! Christ is Risen!

[1] Tucker S. Ferda, “The Ending of Mark and the Faithfulness of God: An Apocalyptic Resolution to Mark 16:8,” Journal of Theological Interpretation, Vol. 13, No. 1, 2019.

[2] Ira Brent Diggers, “April 4, 2021: Commentary on Mark 16:1-8,” Working Preacher, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/resurrection-of-our-lord-2/commentary-on-mark-161-8-7 , accessed April 4, 2021.

-Dr. Jessica Chicka, University Chaplain for International Students

posted in The Rev. Dr. Jessica Chicka, University Chaplain for International Students on 04.4.2021 at 7:30 am

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By Marsh Chapel

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Mark 11: 1-11

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

Letter

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sound familiar? It sounds like Philippians 2.

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

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

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

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

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

I know not what the future hath of marvel or surprise

Assured alone that life and death God’s mercy underlies

And so, beside the silent sea

I wait the muffled oar

No harm from Him can come to me

On ocean or on shore

I know not where His islands lift

Their fronded palms in air

I only know I cannot drift

Beyond His love and care

Gospel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sursum Corda:  Lift up your hearts!

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

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

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By Marsh Chapel

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John 12: 20-33

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John

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patrick

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

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

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

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

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

Nature

One follower of St Patrick in the sixth century wrote:

Grant me sweet Christ the grace to find—

Son of the living God

A small hut in a lonesome spot

To make it my abode

A little pool but very clear

To stand beside the place

Where all men’s sins are washed away

By sanctifying grace

A pleasant woodland all about

To shield it from the wind

And make a home for singing birds

Before it and behind. *

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

An early Irish poet sang:

I am an estuary into the sea

I am a wave of the ocean

I am the sound of the sea

I am a powerful ox

I am a hawk on a cliff

I am a dewdrop in the sun

I am a plant of beauty

I am a boar for valor

I am a salmon in a pool

I am a lake in a plain

I am the strength of art*

Confidence

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

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

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

I see his blood upon the rose

And in the stars the glory of his eyes

His body gleams amid eternal snows

His tears fall from the skies

I see his face in every flower

The thunder and the singing of the birds

Are but his voice—and carven by his power

Rocks are his written words

All pathways by his feet are worn

His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea

His crown of thorns is twined with every thorn

His cross is every tree. *

Vision

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

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

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

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

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

Will you seek a sense of confidence?

Will you develop a capacity for vision?

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

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

Coda

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

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

Does it glorify God?

Does it meet and greet the neighbor?

Does it provoke honest confession?

Does it provide for children, for the poor?

Does it include silence?

Does it allow a listening for truth?

Does it further learning and teaching?

Does it involve a commitment, a decision?

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

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

I should like a great lake of finest ale

For the King of kings

I should like a table of the choicest food

For the family of heaven

Let the ale be made from the fruits of faith

And the food be forgiving love

I should welcome the poor to my feast

For they are God’s children

I should welcome the sick to my feast

For they are God’s joy

Let the poor sit with Jesus at the highest place

And the sick dance with the angels

God bless the poor

God bless the sick

And bless your human race

God bless our food

God bless our drink

All homes, O God, embrace. *

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

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

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

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By Marsh Chapel

Service in Commemoration of Lives Lost in COVID

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John 3: 14-21

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Frontispiece

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Grieve

We call you forward to grieve.

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

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

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

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

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

It is enough that faith knows

That Jesus stands by me

Who patiently draws near His passion

And leads me too along the arduous path

And prepares for me my resting place

It is enough that faith knows

That Jesus stands by me

Who patiently draws near His passion

And leads me too along the arduous path

And prepares for me my resting place

Let Us Ring the Bells of Grief

To Remember

We call you forward to remember.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let us ring the bells of remembrance

To Accept

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

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

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

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

Give us grace to accept the reality of these losses

Give us grace to accept

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let us ring the bells of acceptance.

To Affirm

We call you forward to a moment of affirmation.

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

To bring about the obedience of faith among all the nations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If we believe that life has meaning and purpose

And we do

If we believe that the Giver of Life loves us

And we do

If we believe that divine love lasts

And we do

If we believe that justice, mercy, and humility endure

And we do

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

And we do

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

And we do

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

And we do

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

And we do

If we believe that God has loved us personally

And we do

If we believe in God

And we do

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

And we do

Then we shall trust that love is stronger than death

And we do

Then we shall trust the mysterious promise of resurrection

And we do

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

And we do

Then we shall trust the enduring worth of personality

And we do

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

And we do

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

And we do

Then we shall trust the source of love to love eternally

And we do

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

And we do

Then we shall trust in God

And we do.

Let us ring the bells of affirmation.

Coda

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

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

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

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

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By Marsh Chapel

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John 2: 13-22

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Queen Elizabeth

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

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

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

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

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

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

St Patrick

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

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

John 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breast Plate

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

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

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

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

Invitation

In a moment we will hear again the ancient liturgy for eucharist.  We are not together to receive together the bread and cup.  But we are together in relationship, by memory, in hope, through prayer.  And with a little imagination, with eyes closed and hearts open, we might allow the familiar, ancient prayers of communion, to bring us into communion.

So, travel with a little imagination…Imagine Eucharist at Marsh Chapel.  Stand to sing… Pause to reflect… Step out into the aisle… Look at and look past Abraham Lincoln and Francis Willard…Receive cup and bread, bread and cup… Kneel at the altar to pray… Stand in communion with the communion of saints…Here is the bread and cup of friendship…Imagine, if you are willing, a baptism, a wedding, a funeral, say right here, and a congregation reciting together a creed, a psalm, a hymn, a poem.  Imagine, if you are willing, a congregation currently in diaspora, but just now, by the word spoken, a gathered and thus addressable community, you and I and all together.

Sursum Corda!  Lift up your hearts…

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

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

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By Marsh Chapel

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Romans 4:13–25

Mark 8:31–38

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

Life

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

The day had finally arrived.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music:

Bach

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

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

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

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

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

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

Word

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark 8 sounds so similar:

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

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

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

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

-Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music

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

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By Marsh Chapel

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Genesis 9:8-17

Psalm 25:1-10

I Peter 3:18-22

Mark 1:9-15

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

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

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

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