Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

John 10:1-10

‘I am the door. He who enters by me will be saved and will come and in and go out and find pasture.’

On the journey: we covet prayer, we remember names, we commune in hope.

Prayer (Prelude)

The Covenant Prayer is perhaps one of John Wesley’s most known prayers. Do you feel that it is an important prayer for believers to pray in modern day? It is often a prayer recited at church in special worship services. Do you feel that it is a prayer believers should pray on their own to affirm their commitment to God?

Mr. Wesley in prayer sought a combination of enthusiasm and enlightenment, as he did in general in the practice of faith. He could feel the presence of the Spirit, as on May 24, 1738 on Aldersgate Street. He also could sing with his brother, Charles, at the opening of an elementary school in Kingswood, England, 1762, ‘unite the pair so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety, learning and holiness combine, truth and love (for all to see)’. The Covenant Prayer is one such sought combination of enthusiasm and enlightenment.

How important do you feel it is for believers to examine themselves with John Wesley’s self-examination questions (https://www.hopefaithprayer.com/john-wesley-holy-club-questions/) and which of the questions do you feel are most important for people to focus on?

All the questions are good ones, though they would benefit from an admixture of first person singular (‘I’), with first person plural (‘we’). The questions help us to stay alert to what is new in every morning. What a wonder there is in what is new! I have been re-reading David Hempton’s book, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit, this year, in which he explores the mysterious birth and growth of the Methodist church, especially in circumstances of harsh confinement—sailors on shipboard, prisoners in cells, soldiers in confined barracks, poor settlers in small prairie dwellings. There is a mystery at the start of something new.

One of John Wesley’s self-examination asks, “Am I enjoying prayer?” Do you have any advice to give on how one can enjoy prayer?

Prayer is the joy of sitting silent before God. Enjoy the quiet. There will be plenty of rumble, din, cacophony, dissonance and just plain noise in the rest of the day.

If John Wesley were here today, what do you think he would recommend for people who feel that they need to revive their prayer life?

Remove yourself from email on a regular basis. When you have to use email, remember that it is irretrievable, international, eternal, and immutable.

We know that John Wesley was very disciplined about prayer. He would wake up at 4:00 AM for his daily prayer time. In order to wake up so early, he made sure to go to bed early. What are some ways you suggest that Christians can become more disciplined about prayer?

One practice suggested by the Rev. Vernon Lee, some years ago, was to use the quiet time of dressing, in the morning, to pray, in particular and in person, for others. The Rev. Susan Shafer gave us a collection of Bonhoeffer’s prayers and writings, 100 words each, one for each day, to be used in the morning. Howard Thurman, though, preferred prayer at night, as he remembered his walk on Daytona Beach: “the ocean and the night surrounded my little life with a reassurance that could not be affronted by any human behavior; the ocean at night gave me a sense of timelessness, of existing beyond the ebb and flow of circumstance; death would be a small thing, I felt, in the sweep of that natural embrace”.

John Wesley would often write out prayers. Do you feel that writing, drawing or other creative modalities help some to better connect with God through prayer?

Yes.

John Wesley advocated for fasting as a way to make prayer more powerful and he himself fasted every Friday; at one point in his life, he fasted every Wednesday and Friday. Do you advocate for fasting? If so, how often?

Regular—daily—physical exercise is as prayerful, meditative, healthy, spiritual and meaningful a practice as one can find. At Marsh Chapel, we host a spiritual yoga group at 5pm.

John Wesley was deeply connected to God. In what ways do you feel he developed this strong connection? How can Christians today strengthen their connection to God?

Mr. Wesley, in his Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament, at several places offers hints, glimpses, and premonitions of his sense of divine presence. Commenting on Matthew 6:9ff, the Lord’s prayer, he writes, ‘He who best knew what we ought to pray for, and how we ought to pray, what matter of desire, what manner of address would most please himself, would best become us, has here dictated to us a most perfect and universal form of prayer, comprehending our real wants, expressing all our lawful desires; a complete directory and full exercise of all our devotions’. Notice the word ‘universal’. For Wesley, as for his tradition at its best, Jesus is our beacon, not our boundary, and in Him, God is loving us into love and freeing us into freedom. Love for all, freedom for all. And all means all.

My mother taught me my first verse of Scripture: A wise man built his house…

Identity (Sermon)

Class of 2017! Are you happy, glad, joyful?

Then, if so, you have entered the deep mystery of a most ancient invocation, that of the Psalmist, from more than 2000 years ago: Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the lands, serve the Lord with gladness!

There is a remarkable sentiment, that gladness itself, happiness itself, joy itself are ultimate service. Gladness serves. Come into his presence with singing! Know that the Lord is God. It is He that has made us, and not we ourselves. We are his people, the sheep of his pasture. Enter his gates with Thanksgiving, and his courts with Praise, give Thanks to Him and bless his name. For the Lord is good. His steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.

Calvin Trilling: “For thirty years my mother served us nothing but leftovers. The original meal was never found.”

The land of Emma Lazarus and the Statue of Liberty is now led to applaud, and celebrate the loss of health care for 24 million. This is an early wave in a tide of humiliation coming our way this decade. The church of Charles Wesley, he of gladness of heart, who helps us to sing, ‘finish then thy new creation’, is now led to affirm the rejection of the consecration of a fine, well prepared, regularly ordained elder, simply because she is gay. This is another wave in a tide of humiliation coming our way in these years.

That gladness of heart is lasting, meaningful service, in faithfulness to ALL generations.

No surprise, that. For you are Boston University graduates, with a name, and from a tradition, of glad hearts. Not some but all. Not home town but universe. Not nation but world.

With gladness of heart, Howard Thurman said, people all people belong to one another. Not some, but all.

With gladness of heart, Martin Luther King said, the moral arc of the universe is long, but bends toward justice. Not country, but universe.

With gladness of heart, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, which gave birth to BU, said, The world is my parish. Not nation, but world.

Not some but all; not home town but universe; not nation but world.

Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the lands, serve the Lord with gladness.

May 14, the day on which you can hear your classmates speak of faithfulness and life, that same day is….Mother’s day. Make a plan. Buy a flower. Choose a gift. Send a note. And do so—with gladness!

My mother was a Latin teacher, for whom reminders were instruction (we tend to need more reminder than instruction)

Hope (Communion)

Come now up the sawdust trail. Receive the Lord. ‘Ye that do truly and earnestly repent of your sin…

We await a common hope, a hope that our warming globe, caught in climate change, will be cooled by cooler heads and calmer hearts and careful minds.

We await a common hope, a hope that our dangerous world, armed to the teeth with nuclear proliferation, will find peace through deft leadership toward nuclear détente.

We await a common hope, a hope that our culture, awash in part in hooliganism, will find again the language and the song and the spirit of the better angels of our nature.

We await a common hope, a hope that our country, fractured by massive inequality between rich children and poor children, will rise up and make education, free education, available to all children, poor and rich.

We await a common hope, a hope that our nation, fractured by flagrant unjust inequality between rich and poor children, will stand up and make health care, free health care, available to all children, poor and rich.

We await a common hope, a hope that our schools, colleges and universities, will balance a love of learning with a sense of meaning, a pride in knowledge with a respect for goodness, a drive for discovery with a regard for recovery.

We await a common hope, a hope that our families, torn apart by abuse and distrust and anger and jealousy and unkindness, will sit at a long Thanksgiving table, this autumn, and share the turkey and pass the potatoes, and slice the pie, and, if grudgingly, show kindness and pity to one another.

We await a common hope, a hope that our decisions in life about our callings, how we are to use our time and spend our money, how we make a life not just a living, will be illumined by grace and generosity.

We await a common hope, a hope that our grandfathers and mothers, in their age and infirmity, will receive care and kindness that accords with the warning to honor father and mother that you own days be long upon the earth.

We await a common hope, finally a hope not of this world, but of this world as a field of formation for another, not just creation but new creation, not just life but eternal life, not just health but salvation, not just heart but soul, not just earth, but heaven.

My mother understood the difference between cultural and financial wealth. And taught us how to change, leave, journey, and itinerate. England, Spain, Geneva WCC, Montreal McGill, Boston.

‘I am the door. He who enters by me will be saved and will come and in and go out and find pasture.’

Calvin Trillin: “For thirty years my mother served us nothing but leftovers. The original meal was never found.” On the journey: we covet prayer, we remember names, we commune in hope.

– The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 05.7.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
April 30

The Bach Experience

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 24: 13-35

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill

‘They told what had happened on the road, and how he had been make known to them in the breaking of the bread’.

There come episodes in the course of a battered lifetime that place us deep in the shadows. If the shadow is dark enough, we may not feel able to move forward, for our foresight and insight and eyesight are so limited. We may become bound, chained, held. Those enmeshed in the strife of warfare today come quickly to mind. Those concerned about the condition and direction of their land and country come also to mind. Those whose church or denomination seems to have slipped into a spiritual amnesia, forgetfulness about the heart of the good news, abiding love, forgetfulness of the God who come Easter is addressed by God’s first name, Resurrection, come personally to mind.

You may have known this condition—of confusion or disorientation or ennui or acedia. You may know it still. The death of a loved one can bring such a feeling. The loss of a position or job can bring such a feeling. The recognition of a major life mistake can bring such a feeling. The recollection of a past loss can bring such a feeling. The disappearance of a once radiant affection, or love, for a person or a cause or an institution can bring such a feeling. The senselessness of violence inflicted on the innocent can bring such a feeling.

And how to speak and think of these things? Over the years you may have grown frustrated by your own mother tongue in various ways. English places such a fence between thought and feeling, when real thought is almost always deeply felt, and real feeling is almost always keenly thought. We need another word like thoughtfeeling or feltthought. When C Wesley sang ‘unite the pair so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety, learning and holiness combined, and truth and love let us all see’ he described something bone marrow close to life, happiness, hope, ministry, faith. And he also was wrestling with the limits of our beautiful language. Anyway, you, well beloved, by nature and discipline live the thoughtfeeling gospel, and for that we are lastingly thankful.

Be it then thought or feeling or thoughtfeeling, there do come episodes, all in a lifetime, that place us, if not in the dark, at least well into the shadows. You may have known all about this at one time. You may know it still.

Come Sunday, some snippet of song, or verse, or preachment, or prayer, or, especially today a line from the Cantata, it may be, will touch you as you meander about in the dim shadow twilight. Hold onto that snippet. Follow its contours along the cave of darkness in which you now move. Let the snippet—song, verse, sermon, prayer, line—let it guide you along. So you may be able to murmur: ‘I can do this…We can make our way…I can find a handhold or foothold…We can hope and even trust that the Lord heals the brokenhearted…I can make it for now, at least for now, for the time being.’ It is the power and role of beauty, verbal or musical or liturgical or communal, to restore us to our rightful mind, our right thoughtfeeling.

Today the epistle, the Gospel and the psalm lift a hymn of faith, a song of courage in the face of adversity. It is this lift for living which beauty, especially the beauty of holiness, and particularly, this morning, the beauty of holy music is meant to provide. Here, at Marsh Chapel we want to accentuate Truth, for sure, and Goodness, for sure. But we don’t want to leave behind beauty. Beauty can heal. In our work with demons. In our quiet and contemplation. Beauty, in the case of this morning, the beauty of Bach, often has the power to shake us loose, to set us free. To make us, as in Luke 24, not just followers but also witnesses.

Dr. Jarrett, how shall we listen, both on the radio and in person, most fully to be immersed in today’s Bach experience?

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett

Thank you, Dean Hill. I’d be delighted. But first, knowing your love of the Gospel of John, would mind reminding us of the highlight’s of the Fourteenth Chapter:

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill

Well, as you know Dr. Jarrett, John Chapter 14 finds Jesus in elevated conversation with his disciples where he predicts and explain the events to come, namely his Passion and Resurrection. Let’s hear the words again:

Vs. 1 “Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me.”

Vs. 2 “In my father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you.”

Vs. 6 “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me.”

Vs. 15 “If ye love me, keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and shall give you another Comforter; even the spirit of truth.”

Vs. 27 “Peace I leave with you . . . “

And two verses featured in this morning’s cantatas:

Vs. 23 “Whoever loves me, and keeps my Word, my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him.”

And finally, Vs. 28 “I am going away, and I am coming back to you. If you loved me, then you would rejoice.”

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett

It is a rich chapter, indeed, and full of verses that form the tenets of our faith and understanding of Christ in our lives then and now.

Bach’s cantatas take their names from the first line of text, and today’s cantata, No. 74 sets verse 23 of John 14: ‘Wer mich liebet, der wird mein Wort halten’ or Whoever loves me, and keeps my Word. Bach originally conceived of the cantata for use on Pentecost Sunday in 1725, where we find the Holy Spirit come down to ignite the movement among the Disciples that would become the Church. The Disciples and followers of Jesus had remained stunned, suspended in disbelief that their movement and leader had been cut down so devastatingly. Today’s lesson of Jesus’s appearance on the road to Emmaus finds the Disciples in the initial stages of their grief, no doubt deep in their own ‘thought-feeling’.

Though a cantata for Pentecost, there is surprisingly little reference to the Holy Spirit, but rather a focus on Jesus’s promise to return, and that faith will create a dwelling for Him in our hearts. The cantata is rich with arias – four total. The first two arias are the more personal – almost a dialogue between the ardent believer and the reminder of the words of Jesus. These mutual assurances exchanged, the final two arias turn outward t the Church and beckon us to follow suit in making room for Jesus within our hearts. Both of these arias find their vigor with representations of the earthly trials each of us face in a life of faith, but also a reminder of the sufferings Jesus himself endured. You can’t have a Bach cantata without a reminder of the Passion and the snares of Sin, afterall.

Musically speaking, Cantata 74 is many things. The opening movement is unified by the motive of the first words, rather than a Chorale tune defining a structure. And for a movement with festival trumpets and timpani, the bluster is replaced with elegance and confidence of stride. At the outset there seems an error in order or at least an imbalance of arias and recitatives, but there is a clear internal structure that features a single recitative between each of the two aria groupings. Those two recitatives serve as musical and theological connectors to the arias on either side.

Within these eight movements, we hear extraordinary variety from Bach, from the winsome Soprano solo, and anxious Bass continuo aria that hints at our own doubt of Jesus’ promise, to the Tenor aria that nearly takes flight, and the blazing bravura of the final Alto aria. Here we have musical and theological reminders of both Penance and Atonement, but also the assurance of Love and Grace.

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill

Given the snares, cold night terrors, noonday destruction, evil, scourge, wild beasts of this very day, it could be that a sober reading and interpretation of our lessons, including our psalm, one of the great trusting hymns of a faithful heart, will sustain us this morning.

Likewise, our Gospel lesson from Luke, brought as an interlude into our yearly reading of Matthew, reminds us of the healing power in ordered worship. First, in a recitation of the gospel. Second, in an interpretation of that Gospel. Third, in a communal engagement of the gospel, in the common bread of the church, in the common cup of the church, in the common life of the church. ‘They knew him in the breaking of the bread.’ For some, the emphasis in Protestant fashion, will fall on the knowing; for others, the emphasis in Catholic fashion, will fall on the thanksgiving, the Eucharistic bread broken. For some, the what. For others, the how. For all, come Sunday, come this Lord’s day, the possibility of new life, even if dimly perceived, even if shadowed.

For those, that is, who have walked past a graveyard or two, for those who have walked the valley of the shadow of death, for a world searching to match its ideals of peace with its realities of hatred, for a nation struggling to rebalance cultural poverty and financial wealth in cultural wealth and financial poverty for you today if you are in trouble, and who are worried today about others and other graves and other yards, and who have seen the hidden traps, unforeseeable dangers, and steel jawed snares of life, there is something encouraging about this Easter song: “They knew him in the breaking of the bread”

For those today, for example, who mourn the current condition of the United Methodist Church, gospel and word and companionship give some help. Remember that what is not the Gospel will not over the long term make very good administrative procedure or church law. Remember that Methodism has long struggled to honor both its preaching voice and its administrative face. Think of Peter Cartwright confronting his presiding elder, Ernest Tittle denouncing the central conference, and Georgia Harkness rebuking the wrongheadedness of the 1972 Discipline. Read, of course, the administrative reports. But first remember to listen to the pulpit voices: in San Diego, in Chicago, in New York, in San Francisco, and Rochester, and Boston. Remember that it is the Gospel that comes first, and matters most. Superintending presumes something, someone to superintend. Preaching precedes, guides, and leads administration (in a healthy church). (The experience of Emmaus Road was not forged in a committee meeting.) Remember that the Gospel of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, affirms the full humanity of gay people as in Galatians 3, John 14, and Matthew 5. So stay on the road, walking in the journey, hearing the good news, heeding its interpretation, and being nourishing in the consanguinity of love.

For those today, for instance, in the thick of transition, the Word has this support for you: the gift of getting by, getting through, getting out, and getting home, not pausing to worry about the small stuff. This song is one for that point on the road when you just have to go ahead and risk and jump. You have made your assessment, you have made your plan, you have made your study, then you have prayed. You are not sure. But you sense a presence, and receive the courage to take one more step.

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

Step forward. Go about your discipleship: pray, study, learn, make peace, love your neighbor, agree to disagree agreeably, let every one be convinced in his own mind. The random remains random. We shall face our challenges in our time. Just this: we need not face them alone, but in the company of the Gospel, and its interpretation, and its community engaged together, one day in Eucharist, say, one day in music, say, one day in service, say, but every day with an uncanny sense of the presence of One Risen.

In the name of the Resurrected Son, and of the Creating Father, and of the Abiding Spirit: Now with the mind of Christ set us on fire, that unity may be our great desire. Give joy and peace, give faith to hear your call, and readiness in each to work for all.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean. & Dr. Scott 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 04.30.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Bach Experience, Robert Hill, Scott Jarrett

Sunday
April 23

Fear and doubt; Hope and faith.

By Marsh Chapel

John 20:19-31

Good Morning! Christ is Risen! Alleluia!

It is an honor and a privilege to step into the pulpit at Marsh Chapel again this morning. My thanks to Dean Hill for his gracious offer to have me deliver the sermon today as well as to the rest of the staff and the congregation for their continued support of my ministry here at Marsh. It is Earth Day weekend, and as has become somewhat of a tradition here at Marsh, I am glad to have the opportunity to share the good news with you today.

Fear and doubt; hope and faith. We are just coming out of our Lenten journey of repentance and solemnity into the joyful celebration of Easter; life over death, the possible over the seemingly impossible. From darkness to light, the hopeless to the hopeful. For many, the day of Easter is over – it’s reserved for celebration one day out of the year. But for us, in the church, we continue to celebrate Eastertide for weeks afterward, 50 days in total, recalling Jesus’ resurrection and the joy and hope that it brings. But it is also a time when we can explore what our faith means – what our faith is grounded in and how we can come to claim our heritage within Christianity.

We’ve entered into the second week of our Easter journey this Sunday with the story of Jesus appearing to the disciples on the evening of what we’ve come to celebrate as Easter Sunday. We commonly refer to this passage as the story of “Doubting Thomas.” Thomas, who was not with the other disciples when Jesus appeared, insists that he must see and touch the wounds of Jesus in order to believe that Jesus is risen. He has earned the moniker of “doubting” over the course of Christian history because he does not rely on the other disciples’ testimony to the risen Christ. He insists on seeing and touching in order to believe.

I think Thomas, the twin, gets a bad rap from this story. Let’s go back and look at the text again. It’s not just Thomas that’s doubtful, or even better, without faith that Christ will do what he said he would. Mary Magdelene had already encountered Jesus at the tomb, after she and Simon Peter and the other disciples discovered that his body was missing. Jesus instructed her to go to the disciples to tell them that he was ascending to God, and she did so. “I have seen the Lord” she reported to them.

But what do the disciples do in response? Do they go to the tomb to see if Jesus will also appear to them there? Do they take Mary at her word? No. What do they do? They return to the house they have been staying at in Jerusalem and lock themselves inside. They are afraid – afraid that others will come after them because of their association with Jesus. Afraid that like Jesus, they too will suffer. It seems they have forgotten everything Jesus did and demonstrated in his time with them and instead are seeking self-preservation above all else. Where is their reliance on what Jesus instructed now?

And then the unexpected happens. Jesus appears to them. Somehow he enters into the locked house and shows himself to them, offering them peace and sending them forth with their assignment– to go out and forgive sins of others. As God sent Jesus to Earth, so Jesus sends the disciples out with the message of salvation. The disciples are overwhelmed with Jesus’ appearance and are eager to tell Thomas about their encounter.

So Thomas is not initially the only one in disbelief here or lacking in faith. The disciples too, are not convinced by others’ testimony of the resurrected Jesus. They have to see to believe. They have to be reminded of what it means to be a follower of Christ. Unlike the other disciples, however, Thomas asserts what will convince him that Jesus is risen. He wants to see and touch the wounds of Christ, to verify that it is him and strengthen his belief. He wants to understand what happened to Jesus – he does not fully grasp what the resurrection is about.

This story provides a practical form of guidance for the Church after its first generation. Without Thomas’ insistence on seeing the wounds of Jesus, Jesus would not have to explain that those who would never see the risen Christ are also blessed in their belief. The author of the fourth gospel knows that the words and actions of the disciples and of Jesus will have to be enough to sustain believers long after those who had first hand knowledge of Jesus, including us. Here we have Jesus saying it outright, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

Thomas is an exemplar of what discipleship should look like, as depicted by the fourth gospel writer. Thomas demonstrates a questioning faith. A faith that looks critically at the situation and says, “This isn’t what I expected; I need more proof.” And he’s been unfairly cast in a negative light because of this questioning nature. But I want you to do some self-reflection in light of Thomas’ questions. Many of us, I think, have gone through or continue to go through periods of questioning faith. And that’s good. That’s healthy. Ours is a faith that still insists on critical thinking, not just rote memorization. It asks us to critically engage with the world around us and interact with others. It begs us to be active participants in our own faith. And Thomas, through his questioning comes to a theological statement that has not, to this point in the text been uttered by anyone else, “My Lord and My God.” Thomas not only recognizes that it is Jesus standing before him, but also sees Jesus’ divine nature – Jesus is God.

A questioning faith, then, can lead to a deeper and richer faith. But what good is this faith if we fail to use it properly? Brian Stoffregen, a Lutheran pastor and purveyor of the online exegetical resource Crossmarks, in reflecting on Thomas’ faith states that “faith is not really about what we believe, but what difference it makes in our lives that we believe.”[1] Let me say that again “Faith is not really about what we believe, but what difference it makes in our lives that we believe.” What I take this to mean, as an ethicist (my theologian friends may argue a different perspective on this) is that if we do not live our lives in a way that reflects our beliefs, then we waver in our faith. If we are overcome with fear and doubt in the face of challenges, we also waver in our faith. If we assert doctrinal beliefs, but don’t follow them with action, we waver in our faith. If, however, like Thomas, we are able to learn from our fear and doubt, able to push through the questioning to something more, then our faith can deepen.

My academic interest is in ecological ethics. I study how faith can inform people’s understanding of the world around them and inspire them to lessen their impact on the world. I have to be honest with you, a lot of what I study is, well, for lack of a better word, depressing. I see all of the ways we continue to harm the earth in the name of economic profit and corporate greed, as well as, in some cases, sheer willful ignorance in the face of science that tells us how we are continuing to harm the planet. It has recently been particularly painful as the health of the environment continues to be less of a concern for those who are in charge of our nation’s priorities. For example, we cannot say that clean air and water are priorities and at the same time insist that regulations on coal mining are too stringent and allow for pollutants to be dumped into nearby streams. This is just one example of how our consumption and misplaced desires for economic gain have taken a toll on the environment. We allow corporations to do what they want because they have money. We continue to only measure success by economic gain rather than by sustainability.

In many cases, we do not immediately observe the impacts our lifestyles have on the world, and so therefore we don’t see anything wrong with the way we are acting. It is only we reach a critical point of pollution or impact on human health that we feel moved to do something. And in some cases, even that is not enough. Or, we have a sense of what the problems are but we are so overwhelmed by their size and complexity that we feel like we cannot do anything – that the solution is hopeless.

This is where we can learn from today’s gospel lesson. Fear and doubt exist in all of us, but we, with the help of God, have the ability to transition from that fear and doubt into hope and faith that is defined by the difference that our beliefs make in our lives. Hope is the biggest contribution that our faith in God can provide in turbulent times. This hope is not idealistic or naïve, but recognizes the realities of the situations at hand and encourages us to find opportunities for justice and reconciliation.

Since my introduction to his work in college, I have been enamored with the poetry and essays of Wendell Berry. Some of you may be familiar with his work. A farmer, writer, and environmental activist, Berry has written over 50 books describing the life and struggle of the small family farmer in the face of materialism, capitalism, and the ever growing idea that technology will save us all. Berry lives with his wife on a farm in Kentucky, getting his electricity from solar panels, but still using horse-pulled plows to till his soil.

Berry advocates for a life of patience and hope – living in tune with the world around us and letting it guide us into the best way possible to interact with it. Bill McKibben, the noted environmental activist and author, calls Berry “a prophet of responsibility.”[2] His writing speaks to so many because it comes from a place of authenticity and experience. While some of Berry’s work has become more radical as he has aged, it never falls into a trap of pessimistic fatalism in the face of global climate change, pollution, and every growing agribusiness that is creating so much harm to our planetary home. He still remains hopeful and confident in humanity’s ability to recognize the changes that must be made.

In an interview with Bill Moyers a few years ago, Berry, in a rare television appearance, explained how he interweaves concepts of hope, grace, and faith into his writing while also, at the same time, describing aspects the world around him in a way that uplifts them as what he calls “precious things.”[3] Berry is a Christian, self identifying as “a person who takes the gospels very seriously.”[4] He admits that there are parts of the Bible that he understands, parts that shame him, and parts that baffle him. He does not claim to have it all figured out, but asserts that his belief “is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts” from God. What he means by this is that we must know the world, take care of the world, and love it – things that we have ultimately failed to do. Berry brings together the fear and angst of a planet in crisis with the sense of responsibility and hope that can be found by listening to reflecting with the Earth.

Listen now, to the words of Wendell Berry in his poem “The Peace of Wild Things,”[5] read by Marsh Associate, Kasey Shultz.

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Berry provides for us a voice that is vulnerable to fear and doubt, but that is still able to convey hope and faith that is found in the world around us. He has a very real sense that God and God’s grace is communicated through nature. God’s grace is both seen and unseen in the natural world. Berry advocates that we can experience the divine through paying attention to and loving the earth, and in turn our connection with the earth can deepen our faith.

Hope, a legitimate, authentic hope, as Berry puts it, can be spurred by one good example. We only need a kernel of experience to be able to change ourselves, to make a difference in our lives, to see the world in a different way and to act in a way that will promote its sustainability. Nature, for so many, is a place where individuals feel a deeper connection with God, overcome with the complexity and beauty of the earth. When we separate ourselves from nature, both physically and mentally, failing to see the ways in which we are connected to it, we in turn can lose a sense of ourselves and our hopes for the future.

In John’s gospel, we are invited to understand that it is in the hearing of the Word – the truth of Jesus’ ministry and death and resurrection – that we are to come to our faith, and through that faith hope. The disciples and Thomas had not completely lost their faith, but they had doubt and waivered in their assurance of Jesus’ resurrection. We must remember that they are human beings, just like us. The example of Thomas’ questioning faith assures us that it is okay to doubt and have fear, so long as we engage that doubt and fear in a productively critical way. In doing so, we may come out with a deepened understanding of that which is holy. Yes, blessed are those who come to believe without seeing, but that does not mean that we should come to our faith without question. In fact, in questioning God or seeking answers from God, we admit faith that God at least exists and that our faith can be potentially deepened by the process of self-examination that such questioning requires. Once we have a sense of what our faith means to us, that faith must be translated into action. Let it work on us to create a change within us to do what is right in the world.

I leave us not with a statement as to what we should do in the face of fear and doubt, wherever that fear and doubt may spring from, but rather encourage us to question ways in which we can seek out hope and faith. Are we willing to name our fears and doubts and not just hide behind them, but actively seek ways of addressing them? Where can we find examples for an authentic hope? How do we observe God at work? Is it in ourselves? Is it in other people? In community, all of us together? Is it, like for Berry, in the natural world? What difference do our beliefs make in how we live our lives? Do we get involved when times are difficult? Do we march? Do we exercise our right to vote? Do we try to create change in our local community? Do we enact our faith as Christians when we see injustice in the world? Do we value the planetary systems around us and try to protect and preserve them, and in turn, protect and preserve our futures as human beings?

What difference do your beliefs make in how you live your life?

Amen.

-Jessica Ann Hittinger Chicka, University Chaplain for International Students

[1] Brian Stoffregen, “2nd Sunday of Easter - Years ABC,” Crossmarks Christian Resources Exegetical Notes on texts of the Revised Common Lectionary. Accessed 4.20.2017. http://www.crossmarks.com/brian/john20x19e2.htm

[2] Moyers & Company, “Wendell Berry on His Hopes for Humanity,” Filmed: October 4, 2013. Vimeo Video, duration: 39:39. Posted [November, 2013], Accessed 4.20.2017. http://billmoyers.com/segment/wendell-berry-on-his-hopes-for-humanity/

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Jessica Chicka, University Chaplain for International Students on 04.23.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Jessica Chicka

Sunday
April 16

A Quickened Life

By Marsh Chapel

Romans 4: 17b

Preface

“God, who gives life to the dead, and who calls into existence the things that do not exist”

The gift of resurrection is faith. The rightness of God, is given, from faith to faith, from the faith of Christ, the faithfulness of Christ, to you. In the darkness, light. A quickened life by faith, of faith, in faith.

St. Paul, in his magnum opus, Romans, beckons by faith to faith your faith and my faith. Some of us have been auditing the course in life and faith long enough. This is Easter. It may be time for you to quit auditing the course, and sign up and register and pay the tuition go to class and do the homework and sit for the final and receive a grade. I’ll settle this morning for attendance and tuition, Sunday worship and tithing, to start. However will you hear faith without worship? However will you find faith without community? However will you know faith without study? However will you receive faith without giving in faith? Let this be your first Sunday of worship over the next year, not the last.

A Quickened Life by Faith

Some years ago, well before winter dawn, I had crossed the border into Canada, driving north and east, 90 minutes, in the driving snow, in pursuit of a McGill PhD, and headed for the Mercier Bridge—such a nice name for such a rickety bridge—‘prier pour mois, je conduit sur le pont Mercier’. At the border there were pronounced the usual four questions. Your life, your faith, bring answers to them, every day, one way or another. Life is short. We will leave to Dr. Hobbes the question whether life is also and more so ‘solitary, nasty, poor, and brutish’. Short, no doubt. And another day, and the border questions, including Easter Morn: ‘What is your name? Where are you from? Where are you going? Do you have anything to declare?’ One day, in full, we shall answer. Today, Easter day, we answer in part, affirming our faith.

That 30 below zero snow cascading morning, those foolish enough to drive did so with care, inching along beside the St. Lawrence river. Ahead loomed the headlights of a tractor trailer. The lights flashed, and the truck slowed to stop, and the driver opened his window. ‘Pardone moi: Ou est le frontier?’ Glad to see some other lights in the tundra, glad to have tracks in the snow road to follow, glad to hear a human voice, I picked through my meager basket of French words to cobble up a response. ‘Bon, Le Frontier est prochaine, ouest…’ But before I could finish my soliloquy, worthy I expected of Marcel Proust at his dour best, the driver smiled and laughed and said, ‘Oh, buddy, thank goodness, you’re an American! I can tell by the way you don’t speak French! Excellent. How do I get out of this wilderness?’

The gift of resurrection is faith. The rightness of God, is given, from faith to faith, from the faith of Christ, the faithfulness of Christ, to you. In the darkness—surprise!--light. Romans announces the Gospel. The Gospel reveals itself only through faith, and it leads to nothing other than faith. Think slowly through the Gospel, in the full letter to the Romans:

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.

A quickened life, by faith.

A Quickened Life of Faith (Romans 4: 17b)

And of faith—a quickened life of faith.

This month, among other pursuits, the icy back roads of an utterly foreign dominion, The Epistle to the Romans, have beckoned, coming to Easter. Paul has something to say to us at Easter. Something about faith. The resurrection frees up the church’s gospel preaching, the offer of the gift of faith. Have you faith? Do you know God to be a pardoning God? Are you moving on to wholeness? Do you expect wholeness in this lifetime?

Tucked away in the winding, ice laden back roads of Romans, you come upon a sharp, almost a U-Turn, at Romans 4: 17b. The next stretch of highway is no picnic, either. You tell me what it means to believe ‘in hope against hope’, for example. But here, in an astonishing curve, Paul lets slip a side angle view of God. Tell the truth, said Dickinson, but tell it slant. Slant Paul says it here. The verse, one must honestly admit, as does your preacher this Easter, finally resists at depth a final rendering. That is why it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace…in the presence of the God…(get ready for it)…who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Pause for just an Easter second right here. Paul spells God by resurrection first, and creation second. Paul names God in resurrection first, and creation second. Greek, like German can abide varieties of sentence word orders (In German all is fair as long you remember the verb at the end of the sentence to put!) Here, Romans 4: 17b to be exact, Paul at the pinnacle of his powers, cedes the first word about God to the resurrection, and makes creation a sub-set of resurrection. Who raises the dead, and creates out of nothing.

Your resurrection is too small, to paraphrase JB Phillips. A quickened life is a faith life of height and breadth and depth—resurrection above all, resurrection in all, resurrection under all! Here you are given a fatter Easter, a more robust raising, an ampler hope, a wider mercy. I love the word ‘stout’. Here is resurrection, stout. Bigger than…all outdoors. I wonder if our resurrection faith could stand a little expansion, a bigger suit size, 42 not 40 long, say, another notch out in the belt, say, an un-hemming of the hem, say?

On closer inspection, Romans 4: 17b that is, there is more. For an unexplained reason, Paul does not use his usual go-to verb for raising here, eigeiro, which everywhere else in letter he does. He uses another, zoapoiountos. This means enlivens, quickens, gives life. And there is more! The rest of the verse, ‘non-being into being’, is a reckoning, beckoning, harkening to the creation ex nihilo, the creation from nothing. Under every frosty evergreen, along every pre-dawn snow belted path, in and through all creation is the power of something from nothing which is best known in resurrection. The Easter is not an add on to whatever other remarkable things one can hear in life, learn in college, and remember in dotage. Resurrection is everywhere, everything, all the time, without measure, itself subsuming the creation, as does the creation of the creation. Alkier: ‘Faith…without any validation. Barth (ETTR): ‘faith brings the known condition and status of human life into relation with the unknown God.’…

Paul speaks sparingly but stoutly of resurrection in Romans (e.g.1:4, 4:24, 6:5, 7:4, 8:11).

Resurrection stands up faith. Be upstanding, faithful ones, be upstanding. As we stand for the Gospel every Sunday here at Marsh Chapel, you be upstanding in life, abstaining evil, practicing good, worshipping God. Go to church on Sunday and tithe, for starters. And great ready to cross the existential border!

A quickened life, of faith.

A Quickened Life in Faith

And in faith—a quickened life in faith.

What is your name?

Our name is given in baptism.

In baptism. One part cross, one part resurrection.

In baptism. Recall the trials of the week past. Betrayal (Judas). Denial (Peter). Judgment (Pilate). Struggle (bearing the cross). Pain (Crucifixion). Trauma (Crucifixion). Humiliation (Crucifixion). Suffering (Crucifixion). Injustice (Crucifixion). Defeat (Crucifixion). Torture (Crucifixion). Despair (Why?). Rejection (burial). Scorn (burial). Death (burial).

In baptism. Today is Easter, the day of resurrection. We celebrate with gladness Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, in concert with the church universal, the church militant, and the church triumphant. Our hymns evoke gladness, our prayers hope, our gatherings promise. Today in faith we affirm the triumph of the invisible over the visible. We hear the voice that is no voice, the words that have no hearing, the range of declaration that stretches out through ‘all the earth’, as our psalm says. The resurrection of Jesus makes possible the preaching of the church.

We all have ways down the road we can learn and teach, teach and learn, the care of the earth. Someone gave you a name, in baptism and in birth.

Where are you from?

We are from, out of, a cloud of witnesses, the church, the church militant and the church triumphant, the church of the majestic brass—militant, and the church of the lilies in honor and remembrance—triumphant.

The church. Hunsinger: Indicative not imperative; gift not possession; conformation not imitatio Christ; resemblance not equivalence; suggestive not technical; ecumenist not ‘modernist’

The church. (Theater) gets us in a room, breathing the same air, thinking about how to be human together (NYT Laura Collins-Hughes 4/10/17).’ Worship does the same, along with other things.

The ‘church’. Abraham Heschel: “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ....get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.” …“When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.”

The church. My father-in-law Pennock, Malone NY, 1965, preached on the theme The Need of Intensity. And he is here today?

Where are you headed?

We are on a journey, headed for a promised land, earthly and heavenly. We are walking on a journey together.

A journey. Our baccalaureate speaker last year, heard the resurrection music in the hallway downstairs, and went on to run the peace corps. The Baccalaureate talk last spring by Peace Corps director Carrie Hessler-Radelet (CAS’79, Hon.’16), who called on BU graduates to “embrace the cause of humanity with optimism and enthusiasm.” (BU Today, June 2016).

A journey. Arts of Democracy: Active listening; Creative conflict; Mediation; Negotiation; Dialogue; Evaluation.

A journey. Think of Eugene Lang, PS 121 NYC, who paid for college for any of the 6^th graders he spoke to at their graduation, 1981. Half of the 69 6^th grade graduates went to college.

Do you have anything to declare?

Out of the marathon bombing horror in 2013 came acquaintance, friendship, love and marriage. Hope springs eternal in the human breast. Roseann Sdoia (lost leg 4/16/13) met Michael Materia (took her to hospital). ‘He was kneeling on the ground, trying to hold me from sliding, trying to hold himself, and trying to hold the tourniquet. And then here I am, telling him to hold my hand. So the poor guy had a lot going on’. After a couple of months, a friendship between the two bloomed into romance. ‘There was an interest growing in each other, kind of quietly, until we talked about it’ (Roseann). Nantucket, 12/4/16 engagement. Then, in full gear he, and slow and steady leading with the left leg she, climbed 1576 steps to the observation deck of the Empire State Building, 86^th floor. We’ve spent a lot of time together and from that we got to see each other’s characters and really just bond. (NYT, 12/16).

Coda

The gift of resurrection is faith. The rightness of God, is given, from faith to faith, from the faith of Christ, the faithfulness of Christ, to you. In the darkness, light. Faith is a quickened life. A quickened life, by and of and in faith.

“God, who gives life to the dead, and who calls into existence the things that do not exist”

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 04.16.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Saturday
April 15

Backstories of Easter: Creation, Sin, Death, and Resurrection

By Marsh Chapel

Matthew 28:1-10

Romans 6:3-11

The resurrection discovery accounts are flashy made-for Hollywood events: thunder and lightning, an angel or two (depending on the Gospel), frightened women who hold up better than the guards, the nearly fatuous admonitions to be not afraid, Jesus accepting worship of his person for the first time (or, in the case of John’s Gospel, ducking away from worship), instructions for the women to tell Jesus’s “brothers” (no mention of sisters) to go wait for him in Galilee or, again in the case of John’s Gospel, in Jerusalem. This Vigil time between Good Friday and Easter Sunday morning is a good venue to cool those stories and think about the backstories that make them more than flashy episodes. Holy Saturday, which this Vigil concludes, symbolizes being lost, with the Vigil a search for finding ourselves.

The most important backstory is that of creation, of God the creator relating to the world of creatures. Matthew’s Gospel, with its special attention to the Jewish background of Christianity, would suppose creation as described in the two creation stories at the beginning of Genesis. Paul would have those in mind too, but insisted that the Gentiles also knew about creation and should be held accountable for failing to live up to what this entails morally and religiously. The force of the backstory of creation is to understand the difference between God as creator and human beings as creatures. God as creator is due our pure worship and gratitude.

The second most important backstory for the events of Jesus’s death and resurrection is human sin. Sin is one of the most popular topics of Christian thinking, preaching, and practice. Since the beginning of the Christian movement, the content of sin has been a matter of contention. By the time of the Desert Fathers in the fourth and fifth centuries, sins of all sorts were classified as deriving from seven primary and deadly ones: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. This theological preoccupation with the seven deadly sins runs from John Cassian, born in 360, to Robert Allen Hill, who last Sunday gave us a litany of them complete with instructions for how to commit them. In our own time, the question whether homosexual and transgender lives are sinful has preoccupied Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Put aside issues of the content of sin for the moment, however, and look to the root of sin.

According to the Bible, the root of sin is idolatry in the particular sense of human beings wanting to be like God, confusing the difference between the Creator and the creatures. Satan tempted Eve and Adam to eat the apple by telling her that it would make her like God in knowing the difference between good and evil. Now we might think that the knowledge of good and evil is itself a good thing. Indeed, should we not try as much as possible to be like God? Christianity has a long tradition including John Wesley of treating sanctification as theosis, becoming as like to God as we can. Not so in the view of Genesis. In the primal innocence of Eden we could just do what comes naturally so long as we are proper creatures, obedient to God in our creaturely roles. To our late-modern ears, obedience to God’s command not to eat the apple sounds arbitrary. But I take God’s command to be a metaphor in a rule-bound culture for accepting the human place as creatures in relation to the creator God. We find ourselves in situations where our alternative choices have different values. What we choose actualizes those values. Moreover, our choices determine our moral characters as the ones who choose the values we chose. Because we can know a lot about the different relevant kinds of goods and evils, if we just choose naturally so as to bring about what seems the best, we do not have to know anything special about good and evil, only about responding well to the world in which we are created. The Daodejing says something like this in proclaiming the innocence of following the Dao and warning that when concerns for righteousness arise, you know you have already departed from the Dao. Adam’s and Eve’s choice to disobey God’s command was the first level of rejecting their creaturely status, and their desire to have God’s knowledge of good and evil was their second level of rejection. It lost them the innocence of living in Eden doing fine by doing what comes naturally. Significant idolatry is not worshipping statues. It is putting ourselves in the place of God, or trying to do so. Once you do that, everything goes wrong.

St. Paul began his epistle to the Romans by condemning idolatry as the root of sin. You remember that God punished idolaters by giving them same-sex passions. Paul had no conception of homosexuality as a gender orientation. For him homosexual passions were neither a condition of birth nor a matter of choice, as we frame the debate today: they are God-given. The reason he thought it was a punishment was that he and his culture believed that all sex acts require one party to be dominant and the other submissive. Men were supposed to be dominant and women submissive. Like many cultural habits, this one had come to seem natural. Therefore, for Paul, same sex passions and acts caused suffering as unnatural because one of the men had to submissive like a woman and one of the women had to be dominant like a man. So he thought.These acts were not sinful: they were caused by God and they constituted punitive suffering for the idolaters God afflicted. What is important for Paul is the idolatry that brings down God’s wrath in the form of imposed same-sex passion. You see how complicated the discernment of the content of sin is.

Nevertheless, let’s return to the backstories. What about death, the precondition for resurrection? In the Genesis story, Adam and Eve were created to be mortal in the Garden of Eden. God wanted to keep them that way. So after their eyes were open to good and evil, God and his fellow gods banished them from Eden in order to keep them away from the tree of life that would have given them immortality. The gods wanted to keep immortality for themselves and mortality as the natural state of humans. Here was another instance of Adam and Eve wanting to be like God, a matter of idolatry, or so the gods feared. The Genesis story is delightfully fanciful in its anthropomorphic mythic depiction of God and his divine friends. Expelled from Eden, our situation is like trying to make do with some flawed knowledge of good and evil, with responsibilities for running things as best we can, sort of like minimally competent kings trying to run a country under difficult circumstances. You see why, as such klutzy kings, we are prone to pride, greed, lust, envy, wrath, sloth and all the other sins that follow from these.

Between the time of the composition of Genesis and the first century, significant cultural changes had taken place. Whereas polytheism lurked around the edges of the former, Judaism (including Christianity) in the first century was solidly monotheistic. Whereas covenantal fidelity to Yahweh oriented Judaism in the former, apocalyptic thinking from Persia colored the latter. Whereas human beings were assumed to be rightly mortal and created that way by God in the time of Genesis, many people in the first century, especially Pharisees, believed in immortality, a family of notions sponsored by Hellenism. Diverse immortality assumptions included reincarnation of one soul through many lives, the natural immortality of a soul separable from the body that had to go somewhere after death, to hell if not heaven, or purgatory, or limbo, and also the notion that people naturally die and that some of them but not all get resurrected to new life, for instance if they believe in Jesus. Some people believed that, although people naturally die, a just God needs to resurrect everyone so as to punish the wicked in hell along with rewarding the good in heaven. All these backstories about life after death were in the air in the first century; they are not consistent but I doubt many people sorted them out. The reincarnation theory did not go far in Christianity, though all the others did beginning in the first century and remaining through the middle ages up until the Enlightenment.

In the early years of Christianity, the rhetorical center of gravity thus took death as the ultimate evil and new life after death as the greatest good, or salvation. Seeking to be immortal like God was not idolatry for the Christians, as it was for the audience of Genesis, but rather the very center of the desire for salvation. What then was idolatry for the early Christians? It was the twin failure to recognize God as almighty creator and the failure to accept the humility of creatures. As to humility, Jesus preached against hypocrisy, pride of place, and the failure to for the least of people. As to God as creator, Jesus preached the sovereignty of the creator beyond good and evil, sending sun and rain on the unjust as well as the just. Of course, Jesus preached many other things not easily compatible with these points, and Dean Hill has a whole year until the next Easter Vigil to straighten them out.

When it came to understanding Jesus’ death, the early Christians made a mighty theological move. They associated Jesus with God, as the only Son of God, second Person of the Trinity, at God’s right hand in the highest heaven except for a descent to Earth as a slave—a whole host of images that the fourth and fifth centuries tried to sort, unsuccessfully. The early Christians construed Jesus’s death as the death of the real God, except that the creator, having created death as well as life, could not be ended with death. God conquered death by raising the divine Jesus from the dead. Jesus’ resurrection was different from all those other resurrections performed by the prophets and Jesus himself, as well as the early disciples. The resurrection of Jesus was God’s resetting the default on creation. In God’s creation, life triumphs over death. Death as the worst evil was broken. For believers, believing in Jesus as the crucified Son of God triumphantly raised from the dead removes idolatry. To know Jesus as God is to know God as God and not to confuse our own pretensions with God. Paul and many other early writers thought that believers, no longer being idolaters, would themselves be raised from the dead, either soon, as Paul thought, or later, or at some apocalyptic ending of the world. Believing Christians do continue to sin, as we do. But sin does not bind us with any idolatry. Paul said Christians continue to sin more or less out of habit and should just change their ways; get on with sanctification. Sanctification is not salvation, which is the promise of immortality; it is rather how to live our quotidian lives without being idolatrous. Salvation is the faith in Jesus as the true God, faith that destroys idolatry and restores a right relation to God. This faith is not our own work, said Paul, but comes from God’s grace as part of creation. Christians have long disagreed about whether, and if so why, God graciously gives faith to some and not others; let’s skip that problem for now.

Skipping over those problems, with those backstories we can now see how the early Christians, including Paul and Matthew, centered salvation on the death and resurrection of Jesus. Paul pointed out that Jesus’s cosmic restoration of a non-idolatrous way for us to live before God and with neighbors is open to us with our participation in Jesus’s death and resurrection. He said, “Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.” We have new life. Paul also said, “The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Jesus Christ.” Matthew’s Gospel ends with Jesus commissioning the disciples to go live the life of preaching that baptism. Our celebrations of Easter are glorious songs in the lyrics of death and resurrection.

Nevertheless, our times are different from those of the early Christians. We know too much about how all the functions of the human mind, soul, and spirit depend upon the brain. Many today find it difficult to take seriously the immortality assumptions of the first century, except in some symbolic way. We also know too much about other religions with similar avatars and other ways of understanding saved life to be comfortable with the attribution of unique cosmic status to Jesus of Nazareth, except in symbolic ways. We are somewhat suspicious that concentration on salvation as an afterlife distracts our proper attention as creatures to deal with the issues in the world God has created for us. The triumphalism of some literal understandings of Christ’s victory over death looks fishy in light of unhealed trauma and continuing tragedy.

Therefore, we look for the symbolic ways in which the death and resurrection of Jesus can convey the gospel that gives us new life, free from idolatry and properly attentive to our creaturely responsibilities. The resurrection of Jesus to new life, however we might balk at the cosmic metaphors, sharply symbolizes that God creates everything, and for no reason of a worldly sortt. The death of Jesus construed as God symbolizes that within God’s creation God creates death too, and death does not destroy God’s creation. The comfort of the resurrection of Christ and the promise of ours does not consist in more life after death, “more of the same” under the conditions of finitude; that really would not help. The comfort of the resurrection rather symbolizes that even with death, and with unhealed pains, sorrows, tragedies, failures, loss of young innocents, loss of lifetime innocence, and the failure to make a moral world-- even with all that, the creation is good and the creator is to be praised. Celebration of Christ’s death and resurrection points to the peace that passes understanding. This peace accepts the world as we find it and our flawed efforts to live out our place. That peace accepts these flaws as part of our place. To expect perfection of ourselves is idolatry. To expect the creator to be like a just king and treat us better is idolatry. To expect the world to be just rather than a swirl of cosmic gasses clumping briefly to give us our ambiguous lives and morally freighted choices is idolatry. To construe God in our image, inflated to a perfect kingship, is idolatry. To celebrate the creator in the death and resurrection of Jesus is to rejoice in the fact that everything, whatever it is, comes from God’s creation. Our personal comfort is in the eternity of creation from which time derives and in which we dwell most concretely. We sometimes lose track of that eternity and try to reconstruct it as a temporal process of creation, which is idolatry. This leads to sin, despair, and spiritual death. But when we are reminded by Easter that God is the absolutely free creator of whatever is real, and that this includes us with our varied lives to live as well as we can, and that this is what we are created to be, then we have new life. We live with the joy of the salvation that bears all things including death and from which we can never be separated. We live with powerful courage to undertake the tasks of our watch without regard for winning. We live with the comfort and confidence of our eternal identities in the divine life. We can say to the world, Bring it on! Alleluia, Christ is Risen!

-The Reverend Dr. Robert Neville

posted in Guest Preachers on 04.15.2017 at 7:30 am
Tags: guest preacher

Thursday
April 13

The Call to Love

By Marsh Chapel

1 Corinthians 11:23-26

Usually, when you are about to be betrayed by someone, your natural response is not to wash their feet, or buy them food, or care about their well-being in any way.
If someone mocks you behind your back, your first thought is not to buy them froyo.
If someone steals your essay and says it is theirs, the last thing you look to do is offer to help them with another assignment.

If someone is about to sell you out to be executed on a cross, you likely won’t consider washing their feet.
And yet, here you see, in John 13, Jesus does that.

You might be able to brush it off if someone is being rude; there might be serious academic consequences if someone turns in the same assignment as you, but whether results are simply unpleasant or truly dire, we have an example from Jesus in John 13 that teaches us how to react to betrayal.

Both Jesus’s footwashing and the supper after creates the chance for renewal, the possibility for a fresh start. Jesus’s love and service extends even to those who are about to hand him over and deny him, and offers renewal even in the depths of betrayal.

In washing the feet of his disciples, Jesus appears to be in a position of little power even though he is the most powerful individual in the room. Through his service and dedication to others he evokes the power that makes Mary drop to her knees and use her hair to wash the feet of her savior. She sees that he is truly God. Jesus is The Word fulfilled. Jesus fulfills the purpose of the Law, and shows us God in action.

His action reflects the full manifestation of the Love of God, which seems weird and impossible for us to also reflect. Contemporary poet Jermaine Cole writes in his work “love is wanting more for someone than they want for themselves.” Taking this definition from Jermaine Cole, Jesus loves a lot. Jesus’s love wants more from us than we want from ourselves. Jesus wants us to be able to love even those we don’t want to love. Despite his impending death, Jesus wants those who are about to fail him to love more. Jesus wants that of us, too.

The odd thing about the way Jesus is portrayed in John is that his actions seem not only weird to us, but they seem impossible. It’s hard to live like Jesus.

I mean, like, can we do what He does? He’s Jesus. I am not Jesus.

This idea of being Christ-like seems impossible for anyone who is imperfect, and we as human beings are imperfect -- at least I know I am. His actions seem unnatural, impossible, for us.

So I am left with this internal conflict. I am called to live like Jesus, but I am not Jesus. I am just a simple, imperfect human being.

But Jesus is also human. In this passage, he does very human things like spending time with friends, washing, and eating. He is a human being, and his actions tell a brighter, more beautiful tale about what it means to truly be human.

In making our beloved Christ more human in this passage, the author is not making a commentary by playing Jesus down. Rather, he is bringing all of humanity up. Despite all of this messiness and betrayal happening here, this passage is optimistic about humanity. It forces a tension about what is precisely impossible for humans. Is it really impossible? I mean, Jesus does say in John 14 “Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.” In believing in this optimism, we can genuinely attempt to live like Christ, and this is what the disciples are called to do.

Jesus washes the feet of everyone present. The footwashing is an act of love that breaks down the barriers between Jesus and his disciples. Peter is so human; he isn’t able to see the big picture, to see who Jesus is and what he’s doing. But Jesus breaks down this barrier of misunderstanding. Judas is so human, because he succumbs to the pressure and gives in to weakness, pursuing the temporary instead of the eternal. Jesus breaks down this barrier of betrayal, and he performs the same act of love for Judas.

As Jesus cleanses their feet, he recognizes their humanity and loves them despite their failures. In many ways this action seems unimaginable. However, this love that Jesus exemplifies is what he calls us to show to a flawed world.

Though the love Jesus Christ shows to his disciples is a high standard there are moments when ordinary people can exhibit this love. These moments can take many forms, but they typically include the radical choice to love despite the boundaries between them

1.2 miles of Commonwealth Avenue divide the students who live in West and East campus here at BU. In fact, the opposite sides of campus encompass very different lifestyles. East campus enjoys delicacies served by The Late Night Kitchen while West settles for lukewarm pitas served until 2 am. An East Campus student’s workout usually consists of running to the Fitness and Recreation center while West campus students prefer using the treadmills provided inside the facility. West campus residents generally set their alarms 30 minutes early in order to make it to their classes in CAS on time, whereas East Campus students roll out of bed and find themselves just outside of their classroom doors. At times, it seems as though students in East and West campus only share the distinction of being sleep-deprived scholars of Boston University. But it is here at Marsh Chapel, the midpoint of East and West campus, that we share a brief hour together on Sunday mornings. We meet in the middle of our differing residences, perspectives, and beliefs to share in love as a united body, just as Jesus did with his disciples.

But what exactly do we mean by love? It is a powerful word but it is also ambiguous. In English, the word "love" encompasses affection, admiration, appreciation, attraction, infatuation, care, passion, and even friendship. English puts a lot of ideas under that single umbrella term love, but Greek, the language of the New Testament, has four words to describe different types of love. From the tenderness you feel for your sister or brother, who may drive you crazy once in a while, to the way you feel toward the friend who has known you since birth, remembering that one story you’d rather forget. To the physical and romantic attraction we feel for those we put a part of ourselves out there for. But the pinnacle of love is a term called agape. Agape refers to an unconditional love that flows between the Divine and humanity and transcends boundaries among people. When Jesus says, "Just as I have loved you, you should love one another," he uses the word agape twice. The first time he uses it speaks to the unconditional love that Jesus has for his disciples, and by extension the love that the Divine has for all of humanity. The second time he uses agape, however, it takes on additional meaning. Now agape stands for an unconditional love between people as well, not just love from the Divine. When you think about it, Jesus' last commandment to his disciples carries a difficult task with it: to love each other unconditionally, just as Jesus loved them. He is asking them to take something from their relationship with the Divine and apply it to their relationship with other people. This is difficult because human relationships are often messy. Each of us may love one another, but we also disagree with, misunderstand, and hurt each other. How can we love one another unconditionally, when the ones we are supposed to love might be people we don't know, or even people who have hurt us?

This kind of love can be the most difficult to spot on a regular basis, because so often it appears in small acts of kindness. It comes with students who stand out on the plaza on Fridays to give hugs to anyone who would like one. It manifests in a stranger taking time out of their day to help you when you’re injured, lost, or when you’ve dropped all your belongings on the ground. At the same time, agape appears in moments of deeper connection with people. It emerges when you sit down and listen to someone you strongly disagree with to have a conversation, and you both walk away with increased respect and understanding for each other. And perhaps even a changed perspective. Agape is the love that arises if you come to terms with someone you’ve had a falling out with years ago, and you both are able to forgive each other.

Agape is a love that respects, a love that listens, and a love that heals rifts between people.

Loving one another unconditionally can start with small actions, actions that respect the light and humanity that exists within all people. This could be anything from acknowledging the complaints of a coworker who always just seems to get on your nerves to simply smiling at people as you pass by them (something that is difficult to do in New England, I realize). These small actions can build to larger ones, such as starting a conversation with someone you haven’t spoken to in years, because their comments or actions have deeply hurt you in the past. Importantly, showing agape toward each other does not mean you love others unconditionally without loving yourself, nor does it mean that you should ignore or forget the harm that others have done to you in the past. Agape involves recognizing the humanity that exists in all people (yourself included), and caring about that humanity through your actions, however small they may be.

Jesus gave his disciples a commandment, and with that commandment he gave them a challenge: how do you overcome potential conflict and pain that humans experience to show love for them? One tool that we have to overcome this challenge is our ability to understand one another's emotions. Empathy helps us to take on someone else's perspective, and in the process develop an understanding of what their experiences and emotions feel like. The word itself, when broken down, means "feeling in." When you are empathizing with someone else's experience, you are literally "feeling into" their perspective. In that process, you are attempting to acknowledge that they are a also a human being just like you with thoughts, feelings, insecurities, cares, and desires. You are feeling into the common humanity you share and the different experiences you and they have had, and in the process you are validating both. This is the part of agape that can heal divides between different people, while acknowledging those differences.

This healing and transcending of divides was experienced by our colleague Kasey Shultz on her Alternative Spring Break trip this past March. She writes, “Over spring break, I traveled with 8 other BU students and one staff member to Macon, GA to work with an organization that performs housing repairs for elderly and disabled residents. The trip was meaningful in many ways but the thing that stands out to me the most is the way in which this trip bridged divides--divides within BU but also larger divides in society: Personally, as a second-semester senior, I don’t interact with sophomores, like, ever but by the end of the trip, I had spent more time in close proximity to the seven sophomores on the trip than I had in close proximity to some of my BU friends that I’ve known for years. We had students from both west and east campus, from Questrom and the College of Arts and Sciences, from the west and east coast. We also bridged more contentious gaps, as a group of liberal millenials from the Northeast worked with conservative baby boomers from the South. In our evening reflections as a group, we talked about how our stereotypes were being challenged and marveled at the extreme hospitality that we were experiencing. Throughout the week, those boundaries that we had clung to so fastidiously were dismantled one by one This trip reminded me that life is never black and white and that it’s a lot easier to separate ‘us’ from ‘them’ when we never get to know exactly who ‘them’ is.

In this passage from John, Jesus does not call us to tolerate, he does not call us to surround ourselves with people we agree with, he does not call us to stay in our comfort zones, he does not call us to try to improve the people around us--he calls us to love. And he does not call us to love ‘them’—he calls us to love one another. Because when we truly love—deeply and without reservation or judgment—those boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ melt away.”

As made apparent by walking down Commonwealth Avenue and crossing the BU bridge, or even looking around here in the Nave, we are not one homogenous group of people. We have different backgrounds both ethnically and religiously. How does that play into love? Does it matter? Quite frankly, in an interreligious setting: absolutely.

Our limited ability to conceptualize the magnitude of our reach inhibits us from realizing that our Christian neighbors are just one street in a collective of neighborhoods that create a global religious community.

In the soon to be published “Free Text to Life: Religious Resources for Interreligious Engagement” Jennifer Howe Peace writes: “Love is a profound and remarkable resource for interfaith work. It often clusters with a whole host of other dispositions that enable authentic engagement across lines of difference: humility, curiosity, forgiveness and hope to name a few. It allows us to say, as this story illustrates, ‘I may not agree with you, but I love you so I’m listening.’”

Love permeates the divide between groups. Loving someone selflessly does not mean you have to ignore or disregard past differences between you and them. You love them by acknowledging and taking on these differences in an attempt to understand them.

There are two extreme ways to deal with conflict or differences in understanding. There’s reacting with pure feeling -- you know, where we love those for whom we feel love and we hate those for whom we don’t. Conflict and differences provoke strong emotions in us.

The other extreme is to just give up and not care at all. The differences between us and them are just too big and overwhelming, so why bother even acknowledging their existence? The conflict is too much, so it’s better to just avoid it.

These are the very human tendencies we have, and they both lead to stereotyping and stigmatization. But agape love, while extreme in it selflessness, is a happy medium between feeling everything and feeling nothing. This kind of love helps us overcome the pain of conflict and difference by acknowledging and bearing it. This kind of love is something in between, it’s about understanding the differences you have with someone else and loving them anyways.

If you were to engage with someone who has never met a Christian before, what would you want their immediate impression to be of you? Ignorant, indifferent, simply tolerant? No. That person should remember you for your love.

Our Marsh community tries to be a real, loving heart in the heart of the city, an inclusive center for all, including gay, straight, bi, trans, queer, or unsure. You hear this most Sundays and it is predicated on love. As your feet are washed today, or as you wash someone else’s feet today, recognize that these are acts of love for all who wish to follow the example Jesus sets for us. The motivation behind Jesus’ initial act? Agape. Love.

-Tom Batson, Matthew Cron, Devin Harvin, Nick Rodriguez,

Kasey Schultz, Denise-Nicole Stone & Ian Quillen

Boston University Marsh Chapel Associates

posted in Guest Preachers on 04.13.2017 at 6:00 am
Tags: guest preacher, Marsh Associates

Sunday
April 2

In Conversation with Nouwen: Here and Now

By Marsh Chapel

Ezekiel 37: 1-14

John 11: 1-4, 28-45

Preface

Throughout the year 2017, at Marsh Chapel, we are engaged in ministry with attention to conversation. Our regular weekly gathering and preaching affirm conversation. Our Summer National Preacher Series will engage in conversation about new directions in discipleship. Our Lenten Series, concluding today, has engaged in conversation with Henri Nouwen. Over the past decade, 2007-2016, Lent by Lent,we identified a theological conversation partner for the Lenten sermons, broadly speaking, out of the Calvinist tradition. For this next decade, we turn to the Catholic tradition. Over the next decade, beginning this Lent 2017, the Marsh pulpit, a traditionally Methodist one, will turn left, not right, toward Rome not Geneva, and we will preach with, and learn from the Roman Catholic tradition, so important in the last 200 years in New England, and some of its great divines including Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Ignatius of Loyola, Erasmus, Hans Kung, Karl Rahner, and others, one per year. Perhaps you will suggest a name or two, as a few have done this past week, 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.

So, our sermons, largely in teaching format this Lent, have engaged Father Nouwen. We conclude today, attentive to conversation, and looking toward holy communion. Over these five weeks we have relied on Nouwen’s books, Compassion, Reaching Out, The Life of the Beloved, The Wounded Healer, and, today, Here and Now. Continue to read with us, as you have time, energy, interest and capacity.

With the ancient Hebrew prophets, like Ezekiel, and in harmony with the Gospel of John, the Spiritual Gospel, Nouwen invites, nay implores us, to practice the presence of God. Here and Now. Hic et Nunc. Here and Now. In worship. In prayer. In sacrament. In means of grace. In study. In fasting. In conversation. And perhaps in some forms of spiritual discipline new to and particular to our time? Ours is a particular, challenging time, now, and here.

Ezekiel

Ours in not a normal time. The events of this year are not within the norm, are not habituated to the contours of normal American history. From the current leadership of this country now come steadily the beginning features of civil humiliation inaugurated on November 8 and January 20. Ours is not a normal time, but a time of lasting, painful humiliation. More than a decade will be required to undo the damage done already. Ours is become a valley of dry bones.

In the 6^th century bce the prophet Ezekiel announced a vision, a communal resurrection, for his people. As did the other prophets, he directly addressed the waywardness of Israel. Whereas Hosea, Jeremiah, and Isaiah contrasted the wickedness of contemporary Jerusalem with a better past, Ezekiel portrays the entire history of Jerusalem and of Israel as one of continuous rebellion and sin against Yahweh (IBD, Supplement, 316, W Zimmerl). Intones Ezekiel, offering a vision out of exile: There were very many upon the valley, and lo they were very dry. What would he say today?

Now we are presented, by our ostensible, putative national leadership, with a denial of climate change, and a coarse willingness to dismiss reasoned scientific consensus. Now we are presented daily with a steady drumbeat of hateful rhetoric and action regarding immigrants, refugees, Muslims, Mexicans, and others. Wait and watch the list grow. Now we are presented with the shameful need for further judicial review, and perhaps a doubled rejection, of misguided executive action. Now we are presented with a low level disdain for the highest, most proven forms and institutions in journalism across the nation. Now we are presented with a willingness, only temporarily stymied by legislative mayhem, to steal away health insurance, and thus health care, from 24 millions of our own citizens. And he said to me, Son of Man, can these bones live? Now we are presented with multiple varieties of gratuitous cruelty, including the insidious, callous, baseless slander of the former by the current president. Now we are presented with a national budget that increases military spending 10% and by the same percent decreases human funding. Now we are presented with apparent prevarications regarding remarkable, until this year what would have been unbelievable, machinations in support of collusion with Russian oligarchs. Now we are presented with falsehood morning, and falsehood evening, and a happy willingness to let the consequences of such falsehood abound. Now we are presented with a period in our own national history in which Shakespeare’s 66th sonnet lives, and groans, sauntering like a wild beast, across a humiliated land: strength by limping sway dislodged, art made tongue-tied by authority, folly doctor like controlling skill, simple truth miscalled simplicity, captive good attending captain ill. Things are worse than we begin to imagine. The creaky quasi resistance (let us give some credit where some is due) by courts, by journalists, by congress, by civil society (including a very few churches, one in twenty) that in limited measure we have seen thus far, comes from within the country. Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. Behold they say ‘our bones are dried up and our hope is lost and we are clean cut off’.

But we are mistaken naively to consider that with which we have been presented thus far as the great danger of our time. It is not. No, the great dangers are in foreign policy, where there are such few checks and balances, such few filters, such few even enfeebled civic capacities for resistance and rejection. The great danger is in choices made and then executed, bye executive action, with regard to war and peace, military activity, diplomatic silence, and, thus global harm. No. The motto of our leadership now is not America First, as horrid as that is in its own right, and given its own etymology. The real motto, rightly pronounced, is America First and America Last and America Only. Remember this, and well, when the next terror tragedy occurs. And one there will be.

A far better route is not only possible but proximate. We need only look north to Canada, with few exceptions, to compare and contrast our acute, abject fulsome humiliation here, with what a sane national policy and life can actually be like. Right next door. I shall put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land. Then you shall know that I the Lord have spoken, and I have done it, says the Lord.

Nouwen

To endure, over a decade to come, we shall need, profoundly need, the daily practice of the presence of God, here and now, as Scripture and Tradition steadily teach. Nouwen, now, is our guide.

We remembered last week the theological contours of Henri Nouwen’s teaching: compassion, redemption, presence, hospitality, and the figure of the ‘wounded healer’. His compassionate voice, and his capacity for community, make him a reliable and restorative conversation partner, in our time. So, now, Nouwen may help to ground us in our life of faith, work of love, and commitment to Christ crucified. Toward the end of his life, Nouwen took up residence in a community dedicated to shared, common care for disabled persons, located in Toronto, a L’Arche community named Daybreak, including a patient named Adam. In a moment one our Chapel leaders will say something about L’Arche, a movement developed by the blessed Canadian Christian leader, Jean Vanier, who for many of us, has stood out as an inspiration for ongoing life in Christ.

In a way it is not surprising to think of Nouwen leaving behind both academic gown and monk’s cowl to take up a wash basin, a towel, a cloth, and to practice the presence of God, as did Brother Lawrence, in the simplicity of service.

Most of us today, one judges, given the condition our condition is in, could benefit from a straight forward reminder, in Nouwen’s terms, of living in the present, in the ‘here and now’. My friend, a strong lay leader in our church, once said, ‘Wherever you are: be there. Wherever you are: be there.

Here are Nouwen’s seven guidelines, for such a manner of life, practice, discipline and presence. 1. Remember that every day is a new beginning. Imagine that we could live each day as a day full of promises (HJN, Here and Now, 16). 2. Dispense with unnecessary ‘oughts’ and ‘ifs’. The past and the future keep harassing us, the past with guilt, the future with worries. (18) 3. Celebrate birthdays. On birthdays we celebrate the present…we lift someone up and let everyone say, ‘we love you’. (20) 4. Live in the present. Prayer is the discipline of the moment (22). 5. Use repetition in prayer, repetition of a word, a phrase, a line, a prayer. Such a word reminds us of God’s love. We can put it in the center of our inner room, like a candle in a dark place (24). 6. Pray for others, pray specifically for particular people in unique ways. To pray for one another is, first of all, to acknowledge, in the presence of God, that we belong to each other as children of the same God. (26) 7. Stay close to the hub of life, that is to the center from which all else emerges. When I pray, I enter into the depth of my own heart, and find there the heart of God, who speaks to me of love (28).

Nouwen goes on, emphasizing the here and now, to name some of the substance of prayer. Joy. Suffering. Conversion. Discipline. Spirit. Compassion. Family. Relationships. Identity. In a way, his whole life work, might well have been an addendum to the Fourth Gospel.

John

For the Gospel of John, allowed a meager three-week interjection into our lectionary this month, by interruption of Matthew, is centrally, even solely, an announcement of presence, divine presence, the presence of God. Really only this theological, interpretative insight will make sense for you and me of John 11. Some in the Johannine community spoke in the voice of Jesus. Especially this is so in the ‘I Am’ sayings. If Jesus on earth did not say these things who did? Answer: the Johannine prophet (s). The preacher in John 11 announces presence. I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live. You are a person of faith? Practice that presence. You are a Christian? Practice that presence. You are a Methodist yearning for a faith amendable to culture and culture amenable to faith? Are you? Yes? Practice that presence. The ancient, troubled, community of the beloved disciple, that of John, has your back.

John Ashton: Conscious as they were of the continuing presence in their midst of the Glorified One, no wonder the community, or rather the evangelist who was its chief spokesman, smoothed out the rough edges of the traditions of the historical Jesus…(His portrait of Jesus) arose from his constant awareness, which he shared with members of his community, that they were living in the presence of the Glorified One. So dazzling was this glory that any memory of a less-than-glorious Christ was altogether eclipsed…(They) realized that the truth that they prized as the source of their new life was to be identified not with the Jesus of history but with the risen and glorious Christ, and that this was a Christ free from all human weakness. The claims they made for him were at the heart of the new religion that soon came to be called Christianity. (199) The difference between John’s portrait of Christ and that o the Synoptists is best accounted for by the experience of the glorious Christ constantly present to him and his community (204) (The Gospel of John and Christian Origins).

Nouwen invites, nay implores us, implores you, to practice the presence of God. Here and Now. Hic et Nunc. Here and Now. In worship. In prayer. In sacrament. In means of grace. In study. In fasting. In conversation. And perhaps in some forms of spiritual discipline new to and particular to our time? Say, in spiritual yoga?

Yoga

R: Welcome! It’s nice to see you here at our lectern this morning.

A: Thank you.

R\A: What is your name? Amy Aubrecht. Where are you from? Buffalo Where did you go to college? Cornell. Did you study theology? Yes, right next door.

R: Am I right that you served in a L’Arche community in Syracuse some years ago, and if so, what was that like?

A: Yes. In good Nouwen fashion, it combined compassion and community.

R: Thank you for being here. And thank you for living out and so reminding us of L’Arche, Vanier, and Nouwen. One more question. Do you lead spiritual yoga, as a prayerful discipline, every Thursday here at Marsh at 5pm? And if so, can others join?

A: Yes, and yes.

R: Open to all?

A: Yes.2017

R: Even an aging white guy with a comb-over?

A: Probably.

R: Five O’Clock Thursdays?

A: Yes.

R: We believe in God who has created and is creating….

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in Lenten Series 2017: In Conversation with Nouwen, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 04.2.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
March 26

In Conversation with Nouwen: The Wounded Healer

By Marsh Chapel

John 9:1-11

‘The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash’. Then I went and washed and received my sight.’

Let us draw wisdom from Scripture, insight from theology, and encouragement from experience this Lord’s day.

Scripture

(The Two Level Drama of the Fourth Gospel)

Let us draw wisdom from Scripture.

John 9 describes the healing of a man born blind, and the communal controversy surrounding that healing. Like the rest of the Gospel, this passage reports two layers of healing, of blindness, of community, and of controversy. On one hand, the passage remembers, perhaps by the aid of a source or as part of a source, a moment in the ministry of Jesus (30ad), in which a man is given sight. On the other hand, the passage announces the spiritual unshackling of a hero in thecommunity (90ad), who bears witness to what Jesus has done for him, no matter the repercussions from others, from parents, from family, from community.

The preacher in the Johannine community of the late first century is telling the story of the Son of Man. To do so, he celebrates the courageous witness to healing, and the courageous endurance of expulsion, of a man born blind. Here, he says, is what I mean by faith. The story he uses comes, through un-trackable oral and written traditions, from 30ad. The story he tells comes from 90ad. Every character in the story has two roles. Jesus is both earthly rabbi and heavenly redeemer. The blind man is both historic patient and current hero. The family is from both Palestinian memory and diaspora synagogue. The Jews are both the contemporaries of Jesus and the nearby inhabitants of the synagogue, the Johannine community’s former home. When Jesus gives sight, Christ gives freedom. When the blind one is cured, the congregation sees truth. When the man is cast out of his synagogue, the community of the beloved disciple recognizes their own most recent expulsion. When the Jews criticize Jesus, the synagogue is criticizing the church. When the healing story ends, the life of faith begins. His voice both addresses you and emanates from you. Not your voice, his is nonetheless your voice.

John 9 illumines the central struggle of the community, their bitter spiritual itinerancy from the familiar confines of Christian Judaism, out into the unknown wilderness of Jewish Christianity. History and the history of religions bear manifold witness to this kind of crisis in communal identity, and the long hard trail of travel from primary to secondary identity. In retrospect, as the community gathers itself in its new setting (the pilgrims in Boston, the Mormons in Utah) the story of the tearful trail itself becomes the heart of communal memory and imagination.

What is here unearthed in John 9 can also and readily be applied to the rest of the Gospel of John as well: to the wedding at Cana, to Nicodemus, to the woman at the well, to the healing on the water, to the feeding of the thousands, to the controversies with the Jews, to the raising of Lazarus, to the farewell discourse, to the trial and passion. All of these reflect the experience in dramatic interaction between the synagogue and John’s church. This includes, later, the mysterious figure of the Paraclete, the Spirit, who functions as Jesus’ eternal presence in the world, Jesus, God ‘striding on earth’ (Kasemann). In this way, the Paraclete himself creates the two level drama. Where the world is mono focal, and can see only the historical level of Jesus in history or only the theological level of Jesus in the witness of the Christian community, the Paraclete binds the two together. The Word dwelling among us, and our beholding his glory, are not past events only. They transpire in a two level drama. They transpire both on the historical and contemporary levels, OR NOT AT ALL. Their transpiration on both levels is itself the good news, an overture to the rapturous discoveries of freedom in disappointment, grace in dislocation, and love in departure.

Wisdom from Scripture.

Theology

(The Voice of Henri Nouwen on the Wounded Healer)

Let us draw insight from theology.

In a season of general, national interest in wounds and healing, it is timely, serendipitous even, for us to hear about the healing of the man born blind in John 9, and more so to hear from our celebrated, honored Roman Catholic theological conversation partner for Lent 2017, Henri Nouwen, of blessed memory, on his most revered theme, that of the ‘wounded healer’. His book of that title reminded another generation, and can teach us all still, about the interconnection between our own wounds and the healing of others. Nouwen explored in that monograph, The Wounded Healer, four different doors of entry into ministry: the suffering world, a suffering generation, human suffering in general, and the condition of the suffering minister. While Nouwen’s work is sometimes criticized as ‘theology lite’, its accessibility has provided many with a profound sense of the relational dimensions of gospel, of philosophy, of preaching, of ministry and of therapy.

His chief concern he identifies clearly (p 47): ‘The task of Christian leaders is to bring out the best in everyone and to lead them forward to a more human community; the danger is that their skillful diagnostic eye will become more an eye for the distant and detailed analysis than the eye of a compassionate partner. And if priests and ministers think that more skill training is the solution for the problem of Christian leadership, they may end up being more frustrated and disappointed than the leaders of the past. More training and structure are just as necessary as more bread for the journey. But just as bread given without love can bring war instead of peace, professionalism without compassion will turn forgiveness into a gimmick, and the kingdom to come into a blindfold’.

Compassion, not analysis, comes first. Compassion, suffering with: It is not the task of Christian leaders to go around nervously trying to redeem people, to save them at the last minute, to put them on the right track. For we are redeemed, once and for all. Christian leaders are called to help others affirm this great news, and to make visible in daily events the fact that behind the curtain of our painful symptoms, there is something to be seen: the face of God in whose image we are shaped (48).

The manner by which compassion comes into life is, for Nouwen, utterly personal. While he was not a Lutheran—far from it—he would probably have agreed with Luther that the preaching of the Gospel is ‘one beggar telling another where they both may find bread’. In fact, there is hardly a more personal calling than a calling to pastoral ministry. And what a privilege it is to enter and live in such a calling. A privilege to be able to be with people at the dawn of life, in the twilight of life, under the shadows of life. To hold murmuring infants, to confirm squirming teenagers, to bless nervous not to say clueless grooms and brides, to wring hands and pray at the bedside when the outcomes are uncertain at best, to listen in tears to the pain of loss, divorce, failure, emptiness, to stand over the open grave in quiet. You can make a lot more money doing something else, and you can achieve a lot more influence, of a certain sort, doing something else, and you can have a lot more free time doing something else, and there are many worthy callings, many ways to keep faith. But there is nothing quite like the privilege—the joy, the hurt, the rigor, the demand—the privilege of pastoral ministry. And how hungry our people are for it. There is nothing else like it in all of life. ‘The emptiness of the past and future can never be filled with words, but only with the presence of a human being’. (69).

Perhaps Nouwen is best remembered for this phrase, ‘the wounded healer’. ‘Since it is their task to make visible the first vestiges of liberation for others, (ministers) must bind their own wounds carefully, in anticipation of the moment when they will be needed. They are each called to be the wounded healer, the ones who must not only look after their own wounds but at the same time be prepared to heal the wounds of others. They are both wounded ministers and healing ministers.’ (88) Now, when the balance between the two goes off-kilter, and wounds eclipse health, we have a problem. But the appellation is true enough, when truly pursued. It is perhaps most apparent in loneliness. The ministry is lonely, but only lonely in a way representative of all faithful life. In the last few years, the utter uniqueness of grief, for each person, the individuality of the way we grieve—the very opposite of one size fits all—has stood out, for me. Your grief, though shared and made common in the community of faith, is nonetheless idiosyncratic—your own most self in tears, your spiritual fingerprint, your religious voice, your manner of walking in walking the faith. All the cautions of Nouwen’s book are worthy. But the capacity for hospitality, the power in hospitality, that comes here into ministry is unmistakable. Hospitality makes anxious disciples into powerful witnesses, makes suspicious owners into generous givers, and makes close-minded sectarians into recipients of new ideas and insights (95)….Ministers are not doctors whose primary task is to take away pain. Rather, they deepen the pain to a level where it can be shared. When people come with their loneliness to ministers, they can only expect that their loneliness will be understood and felt, so that they no longer have to run away from it, but can accept it as an expression of the basic human condition.

Insight from theology.

Experience

(A Thought on Entering Ministry, 1953, Rev. Mr. Irving G. Hill)

From experience we may draw encouragement.

Here is a memory, written in 2006, drawn from 1953. That is, sixty-five years past, it is about the same distance from us in time as was the Gospel of John from the events in the life, death and destiny of Jesus of Nazareth. The writer, my father, was soon to graduate from the School of Theology.

“One balmy spring evening, in the early fifties, I was returning to our apartment at 17 Yarmouth Street in Boston…

As I walked across Huntington Avenue, I looked to my left and saw the lighted dome of the Christian Science Mother Church. I had seen it many times before. I had taken our youth fellowship there to visit and walk through the giant globe that is there. But this evening as I made that familiar crossing I was struck, not by an auto, but by the reality that in just a few days I would receive my theological degree and become the pastor of the Brewerton Methodist Church.

How could this be? What was I to do? I was only 24 years old. I had never dealt with death except in theory. I had never sat with a couple after the death of a child. I had never counseled a couple preparing for marriage except in a classroom setting. To my recollection I had never spoken with a person who had no belief in God or saw any reason for one. I had never thought how a church budget was raised or more significantly how my salary would be paid. In a few days, I would be facing all of these things and more.

I recalled a conversation that occurred at the just past annual conference with a committee from the Brewerton church. One of the saints said to me, “Young man, if you get a better offer, you had better take it, I don’t know how we will be able to pay your salary.” How about that?

Now, I had grown up in the church, attended church school, taught church school. I had been active in the youth fellowship at the local level and the conference level. Marcia and I had spent one summer as life guards at Camp Casowasco. But now I was to be the pastor of a church in a community that I had only driven through.

Of course, I had graduated from a Methodist related university and had the privilege of studying at one of the better theological schools for three years, but on that June evening in the middle of that empty thoroughfare, I was totally lost.

Then I heard, “You don’t think you are going to do this all by yourself do you? Surely I will be with you.”

I heard that voice as clearly as I have ever heard anything and it has remained with me for these past 53 years.

It has taken the form of a loving, supportive wife, a devoted family, dedicated and caring lay people, inspired bishops, superintendents, and brother and sister clergy, group commanders, wing chaplains and people of God, just like you.”

Encouragement from experience.

Scripture. Theology. Experience. Wisdom. Insight. Encouragement.

‘The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash’. Then I went and washed and received my sight.’
Amen.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in Lenten Series 2017: In Conversation with Nouwen, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.26.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
March 19

In Conversation with Nouwen: The Life of the Beloved

By Marsh Chapel

John 4:5-42

Life for All

‘A spring of water gushing up to eternal life’.

The gospel is our spoken gift of faith.

Some will have seen the recent film ‘La La Land’, and recall the haunting soulful tune that knits the story together. That phrase of music is the refrain from which the story takes wing and to which it returns, moment by moment, as your life and soul life return, again and again, to the gospel, a spoken gift of faith, the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved us and gave himself for us. Spoken, sung.

Sung. Every bird sings faith, over the globe, through all time. Thurman loved penguins, odd and remote, and their dress, and their song. Listen. Along the Charles, in the spring, we make way for goslings and ducklings. Early in the summer mornings, out in the farmland where we live in the summer, the northeastern tip of Appalachia, and where we will be buried, where we are at home, at dawn a rooster. Two eagles—they too mate for life, as in Christian marriage—soaring--imagine their music. The owl at night. A swan song, a silver swan, who living had no note. The gospel is a bird in song, and all nature sings. Even if or when the preaching of the gospel by human imperfection abates, as it does threaten to do, birdsong will carry the tune. God can preach God’s gospel through birdsong.

Spoken. Derek Walcott, of Boston University, a Methodist: I seek, as climate seeks its style, to write verse crisp as sand, clear as sunlight, cold as the curled wave, ordinary as a tumbler of island water.

John

Father Raymond Brown judged our passage today, John 4, to be the loveliest, finest narrative in the Fourth Gospel. The woman at the well, the Samaritan woman, meets Jesus and meets us in conversation. She is the quintessential conversationalist.

And what a wonder is there in the faintest conversation, let alone this dominical discussion! Ours today, from John 4, is holy, telling conversation, full of the unexpected, full of surprise, full of the utterly personal, full of revelation, full of boundary breaking courage, full of what is saving, healthy, lasting, meaningful, real, and good. Conversation thrives when you know your content, your work, and your audience. There is a mystery lurking under the disarming surface of the simplest conversation. My friend says her favorite two words are ‘awe’ and ‘conversation’. We could add that the two are not very far removed, or apart from each other.

It may have been that the community which gave birth to the Gospel of John included some Samaritans. This would explain the prominence of this long, intricate passage, devoted to the conversation of Jesus with a Samaritan woman. The Samaritans were outsiders. Here, one of their own takes center stage. In our time when those outside—immigrants, refugees, the poor, the different, the other—are steadily subjected to heightened measures of exclusion, we benefit from reminders, like this from John 4, that we are called as people of faith, called as Christian people, to care, succor, attention and protection of the ‘least’ among us. The larger question, and it is very much an open question, is whether the humiliation spreading out right now through civil society and culture--wherein inherited, precious forms of civil society are daily shredded with a gratuitous cruelty--coming now to us over the next decade, will chasten us, will humble us, will in that way strengthen us by the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. He it is, today, who announces His own presence, and Lordship, in the course of a meandering conversation: I am He, the One who is speaking to you…A spring of water gushing up to eternal life

Lenten Conversation

Throughout the year 2017, at Marsh Chapel, we are engaged in ministry with attention to conversation. Our Summer National Preacher Series will engage in conversation about new directions in discipleship. Our Lenten Series, beginning today, will engage in conversation with Henri Nouwen. Over the past decade, Lent by Lent, we have identified a theological conversation partner for the Lenten sermons, broadly speaking, out of the Calvinist tradition. For the next decade, we turn to the Catholic tradition. Over the next decade, beginning this Lent 2017, the Marsh pulpit, a traditionally Methodist one, will turn left, not right, toward Rome not Geneva, and we will preach with, and learn from the Roman Catholic tradition. We began March 5 with Henri Nouwen, and Sacrament, continuing last week with Nouwen and Reaching Out. Today, Nouwen and the Life of the Beloved.

Nouwen (from the ‘Nouwen Society’)

“The internationally renowned priest and author, respected professor and beloved pastor Henri Nouwen wrote over 40 books on the spiritual life. He corresponded regularly in English, Dutch, German, French and Spanish with hundreds of friends and reached out to thousands through his Eucharistic celebrations, lectures and retreats. Since his death in 1996, ever-increasing numbers of readers, writers, teachers and seekers have been guided by his literary legacy. Nouwen’s books have sold over 8 million copies and been published in over 28 languages.

Born in Holland, 1932, Nouwen felt called to the priesthood at a very young age. He was ordained in 1957 as a diocesan priest and studied psychology at the Catholic University of Nijmegen. In 1964 he moved to the United States to study at the Menninger Clinic. He went on to teach at the University of Notre Dame, and the Divinity Schools of Yale and Harvard. For several months during the 1970s, Nouwen lived and worked with the Trappist monks in the Abbey of the Genesee, and in the early 1980s he lived with the poor in Peru. In 1985 he was called to join L’Arche in Trosly, France, the first of over 100 communities founded by Jean Vanier where people with developmental disabilities live with assistants. A year later Nouwen came to make his home at L’Arche Daybreak near Toronto, Canada. He died suddenly on September 21^st, 1996, in Holland and is buried in Richmond Hill, Ontario.”

Nouwen believed that what is most personal is most universal; he wrote, “By giving words to these intimate experiences I can make my life available to others.”

Servants of God

Nouwen dedicated his life to the practice of genuine conversation, genuine faithfulness. He eschewed the false formal and prized the personal in piety. A story, from the same period, from Charles Rice at Drew, Nouwen would hae loved. A few years ago Rice spoke about the servant of the servants of God. He told about an Easter when he was in Greece. He sat in the Orthodox church and watched the faithful in devotions. There was a great glassed icon of Christ, to which, following prayers, women and men would move, then kneel, then as they rose they kissed the glassed icon. Every so often a woman dressed in black would emerge from the shadows with some cleanser, or windex, and a cloth and –psh, psh—would clean the image, making it clear again. Washing clean the image again, and freeing it from so much encrusted piety. And he had a revelation about service and power and authority and leadership. As he watched the woman in black cleaning the icon, he realized that this was what his ministry was meant to be. A daily washing away from the face of Christ all that obscured, all that distorted, all that blocked others from seeing his truth, goodness and beauty. Including a lot of piety.

Life of the Beloved

Years ago, by accident, Nouwen met a man named Fred, a journalist who wanted to write a novel. (We had a saying in our family, when intrusive questions arose; ‘Are you a journalist or writing a book?’) Well, Fred was the former and hoping to do the latter. But he feared a shift in vocation, for all the usual suspect reasons. Henri though persisted in encouraging the man to leave his job and write his book. He went out of his way. Nouwen procured him a grant to do so! So the man entered a new season of vocational discernment, and though he never finished the novel, he did find a deeper level of living, a sense of meaning, and, in the bargain, a great friend in Nouwen.

We might pause to wonder a bit about our callings. Is this your final resting place in vocation—where you are now I mean? You have heard some sort of call, and heeded, or you would not be where you are. But what about the second call? Is there a knocking at your spiritual door, asking you to consider a second call, another call? Fred was a good journalist, but he heard a second call, to write, and in hearing, and in heeding, though not in his case in succeeding, he found himself closer to his own most self. Life is a series of invitations, and a process of discernment. We might pause right now, in front of God and everybody, to wonder about our callings.

Last year at commencement we had a speaker who told about a second call. Not all commencement addresses need or even deserve remembrance. But it had a diamond embedded in it, a treasure buried in a field. The speaker graduated from BU as an actress and went to La La Land. She did what aspiring actors do. She waited tables. For a year. And another. And a third. Then she got a job, part time, on the business side of show business. You know what? She liked it. And it liked her. Then she said: “I looked at my acting career lived out in waiting tables, and I made a decision. I decided my calling was to something else. I decided to (here is the gem) EDIT MY DREAMS.” She decided to edit her dreams. So Nina Tassler, waitress, became the head of CBS entertainment. Yes. Sometimes a second call comes along and invites you to edit your dreams.

Henri Nouwen invited Fred to edit his dreams. And he did. Then Fred invited Henri to edit his dreams, in this way. He asked Nouwen to write a simple book about the spiritual life in a secular world, a book for ordinary people, not academics, ordinary people, not clergy, ordinary people, not even religious people. This took Nouwen out of his comfort zone, but out of that zone he went. He wrote a book, The Life of the Beloved.

Our Gospel today, John 4, has a radiance of love within it, as does Nouwen’s book. Here, in brief, is what Nouwen wrote, this esteemed Roman Catholic theologian, this Yale academic, this profoundly erudite priest. It is portable, what he wrote. You can carry it home after the sermon. You are beloved! You are loved. God loves, and loves you. And you need not do anything to prove it, to earn it, to achieve it, to deserve it. You: beloved. That is, in a single word, the life of the spirit. Beloved.

But of course Nouwen went on to develop this theme, the trails and traces of the spirit in the single word. He put together a quadrilateral, what we can call the love quartet today. First, wrote Nouwen, to become beloved, we need to acknowledge that we are ‘taken’. Chosen. Wanted. And grateful for it! Second, to become beloved, we want to acknowledge that we are ‘blessed’. You are precious in God’s sight, blessed, beloved. As you are, not as you might be later on. Right now, as you are right now. You claim your blessing through the practice of prayer and through attention to presence. My friend says her two favorite words are conversation and awe. Well. There. Memorize a prayer or three (The Lord’s Prayer, Wesley’s Table Graces, the Prayer of Assisi). Third, to live as beloved we want to acknowledge our brokenness. “Each human being suffers in a way no other human being suffers.” (87) It will not do to repress our sadness, our resentment, our fear, our anger. No. We are human, beloved human beings, and so are honest about our fractures. Nouwen then wrote about AIDS, a crucial subject in that time (1992). To heal we have to step toward our pain. Here we can all learn from the 12 step programs, as long as we realize that there are many ways to be addicted that can have nothing to do with substances. You might be surprised to know that Nouwen’s most personal example was his grief at the death of Leonard Bernstein. Fourth, we are given, as beloved ones. We are loved, but not just for our own sakes. As Huston Smith—similarly an academic, similarly a theologian though a Methodist, similarly a cleric—put it, thinking perhaps of his parents who were missionaries in China: ‘we are in good hands, and so it behooves us to bear one another’s burdens’. When we enjoy others, and with joy give ourselves to others, and engage in enjoyment among others, then, in reality, we are given, because we are giving. You only truly have what you give away. Starting—and ending—with your time. Here Nouwen concludes, and rightly, by drawing us toward our own death, and the way we give of ourselves not just living but dying. (You remember my OOPS advice, as we prepare for the end of life: obituary, order of worship, photograph, special papers.) But Nouwen means something more: ‘the spirit of love once freed from our mortal bodies will blow where it wills’. (125). Chosen, Blessed, Broken, Given. “Eternal Life is the full revelation of what we have been and have lived all along” (137).

By grace we too, you and I, have been chosen and set in time and space, to live in faith. By grace we too, you and I have been blessed, sometimes with happiness and sometimes with loss, sometimes with fulfillment and sometimes with unrequited love. By grace, we too, you and I, in honesty, in confession, must add, we have been broken, our brokenness best sung maybe by Leonard Cohen—ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in…forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in…there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in…that’s how the light gets in. By grace we too, you and I have been given, to be gifts and become givers, to choose, tomorrow, one pure act of kindness, to imagine it, plan it, pray over it, do it, and watch it recede in the rear view window.

In the student union, Thursday, a young pianist, of limited ability, but of great heart, played a tune, the haunting soulful tune you may have heard, remembered, from a current film. That phrase of music is the refrain from which the story takes wing and to which it returns, moment by moment, as your life and soul life return, again and again, to the gospel, a spoken gift of faith, the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved us and gave himself for us.

A spring of water gushing up to eternal life.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in Lenten Series 2017: In Conversation with Nouwen, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.19.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
March 12

Reaching Out ad interim

By Marsh Chapel

Genesis 12: 1-4a

Psalm 121

John 3: 1-17

Sunday’s Palms are Wednesday’s ashes as another Lent begins;

thus we kneel before our Maker in contrition for our sins.

We have marred baptismal pledges, in rebellion, gone astray;

now, returning, seek forgiveness; grant us pardon, Lord, this day!

We have failed to love our neighbors, their offences to forgive,

have not listened to their troubles, nor have cared just how they live;

we are jealous, proud, impatient, loving overmuch our things;

may the yielding of our failings be our Lenten offerings.

We are hasty to judge others, blind to proof of human need;

and our lack of understanding demonstrates our inner greed;

we have wasted earth’s resources; want and suffering we’ve ignored;

come and cleanse us, then restore us; make new hearts within us, Lord!

-Rae E. Whitney, 1982

This Lent, as every Lent, and truly all our days, we undertake the work of turning and returning to God. We strive to live our lives reflecting the righteousness God graciously bestows upon us through the sacrifice of Godself in Jesus. For us, unlike for God, righteous action is never pure or absolute. Rather, our actions are situated, contextual, relational, and so reflected as if through a glass, dimly.

In this year’s cycle of the lectionary, our Gospel readings come primarily from Matthew. As we have been exploring over the past couple of months, in conversation with Albert Schweitzer and Amos Wilder, the ethic offered particularly in the synoptic gospels, that is, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, is an interim ethic, an ethic for a time between times, an ethic for an already but not yet eschatology that eagerly anticipates the immanent return of Jesus next week, tomorrow, or perhaps even this very afternoon. Today, however, we interrupt your regularly scheduled Matthean programming for a Johannine advertisement. As Dean Hill has so carefully taught us over the past decade of his ministry here at Marsh Chapel, the Gospel of John is situated and contextualized in a community struggling to cope with their disappointment that Jesus had not, and for us, indeed, has not, returned with anything like the immanent expectations of his earliest followers.

And so, here in the third chapter, we find Jesus teaching Nicodemus, who is struggling to understand how to live a spiritual life in the way of Jesus. He desires the kingdom of God, but is desperately confused as to how to get there, or even what experiencing the kingdom of God might really mean. Jesus’ answers are not terribly clarifying to him, as Nicodemus in a sense represents the synoptic expectation of Jesus’ immanent return and John’s community’s disappointment and struggle to adapt to a new reality.

Here, then, in John, is not the abolishment of the interim but rather a shift of understanding to a different sort of interim, an interim demarcated not so much temporally as socially. The Johannine community is living in the interim between the synagogue and the church. This is not an interim of time but an interim of values, of ideas, of policies, of programs. What is needed, then, is not an ethic for preparing for the end times but rather an ethic, or better yet a spirituality, of resistance to values, ideas, policies, and programs that undermine the kingdom of God we are being born into and that is being born in us. “You must be born from above,” and “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

We too are experiencing life ad interim. We too are being afflicted by values, ideas, policies, and programs that undermine the kingdom of God. We too, urgently, need to seek out resources for constructing an ethic and a spirituality of resistance to these demonic afflictions. “I lift up my eyes to the hills; from where is my help to come? My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.”

In this Lenten season we are invited to consider the wisdom of Henri Nouwen, Roman Catholic priest, pastoral theologian, teacher, pastor, spiritual guide. Saint Henri, I have found, provides timely and salient resources for resistance, an ethic and spirituality of resisting by reaching out, in a small book by that title. Deeply informed by the pastoral psychology of his day, Nouwen invites us to make three spiritual conversions that we might resist in a manner that is effective, sustainable, and lives out the values of the kingdom that we seek to replace with the demonic values of the interim moment.

First, Saint Henri invites us to convert our loneliness to solitude. Loneliness characterizes much of life in the interim, characterized as loneliness is by a sense of anxiety at having been excluded, shut out, cut off, denied, rejected, and abandoned. Anxiety leads to frustration leads to agitation. Loneliness is a state of desperate and yet seemingly unattainable desire for connection.

How on earth could we possibly be lonely, surrounded as we are, especially in the city, by so many people? Apparently, the real question is actually how can we not be lonely? Surgeon General Vivek Murthy regularly points out that the most serious health issue in the United States is neither cancer nor heart disease nor obesity but isolation. The Boston Globe Magazine, on Friday, ran the headline, and pushed it to its subscribers by email, “The biggest threat facing middle-age men isn’t smoking or obesity. It’s loneliness.” Dear friends, loneliness is real and it is decidedly not all in our heads but in our hearts and our bodies, our physiology.

Converting loneliness to solitude is thus an urgent public health issue. It entails first a turn inward to recognize that our overwhelming and anxious desire for outward connection is likely rooted in a lack of inward connection among the various parts of ourselves. We, you and I, each and every one of us, are not singular selves but a community of selves with various needs, desires, longings, aspirations, loves, fears, apprehensions, insights, and confusions. Solitude, then, is the cultivation of inner relationships among these parts of ourselves, it is a becoming present to our selves. Solitude generates a calm, centered, quiet, restful way of being in the world by arranging the voices of ourselves into a consonant harmony.

Cultivating solitude is not only good for our own health. After all how could we possibly expect to harmonize our marriages, our families, our friendships, our workplaces, or our communities if we are shouting dissonant juxtapositions of lonely anxiety? Indeed, solitude is the groundwork of resistance, as Nouwen points out, by in turn converting “fearful reactions into a loving response.” Demonic values, demonic ideas, demonic policies, and demonic programs will never be defeated by fear and anger. They can only be overcome by love. “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love” (1 John 4: 18). The love that emerges from solitude is the groundwork of a creative response to the demons of our interim moment, and as Howard Thurman reminds us, “meaningful and creative experiences between peoples can be more compelling than all the ideas, concepts, faiths, fears, ideologies and prejudices that divide them.”

Second, Saint Henri invites us to convert our hostility to hospitality. In a very real sense, the movement from loneliness to solitude is a movement from inner hostility to inner hospitality, and so this second conversion is simply its outward expression. Of course, moving from loneliness to solitude is merely being hospitable to ourselves; oh, how the shift from inner to outward becomes exponentially more fraught! Even in 1975 Nouwen noted that, “Our society seems to be increasingly full of fearful, defensive, aggressive people anxiously clinging to their property and inclined to look at their surrounding world with suspicion, always expecting an enemy to suddenly appear, intrude, and do harm.” Not only saint, but prophet, was Henri.

Boston College philosopher Richard Kearney is wont to point out that the distance between hostility and hospitality is really quite small, rooted, as both words are, in the Latin word hostis. Alas, over time, the demonic has driven a wedge between them, our growing fearfulness increasingly cutting off any inclination toward “the creation of a free and friendly space where we can reach out to strangers and invite them to become our friends.” Hostility is rooted not only in fear but in the need and desire to own and to control, whereas hospitality finds its grounding in freedom and so in service to the stranger.

Like solitude, hospitality is part of the groundwork of resistance. Hospitality, dear friends, is not merely a posture of receptivity toward strangers. Hospitality also involves confrontation. It is not hospitable to welcome a stranger into your house and then to leave. Hospitality means welcoming the stranger to freely be themselves in the presence of an other, of difference, of strangeness. “Confrontation results from the articulate presence, the presence within boundaries, of the host to the guest by which the host offers her- or himself as a point of orientation and a frame of reference” (239).

Now, dear friends, it would be easy to think, especially this week, in the wake of a second attempt at an executive order restricting immigration from certain Muslim-majority countries, that all of this talk of hospitality toward strangers should be a guidebook for welcoming refugees and immigrants. Indeed, we have much yet to learn about welcoming those who have been driven from their homes by violence in fear and anguish. We must learn to bless Abram that he may bless us, else we must surely be accursed by God.

But do not be fooled! Our need to convert hostility to hospitality is not primarily to the immigrant or to the refugee. It is to each other! To one another, to you and to I, to us, here, in this place, on this campus, in this city, and across this great nation. Resistance is not hospitality to demonic values, demonic ideas, demonic policies, and demonic programs. Resistance is hospitably receiving those whose choices, whose decisions, whose actions, whose votes enabled the demonic to take hold, and of confronting them in articulate presence by saying, “This is not who we are.”

Finally, Saint Henri invites us to convert our illusion to prayer. Perhaps particularly when suffering from frantic loneliness and fearful hostility, but even regardless, it is easy to become convinced that our value, our worth, is manifest in “the things we own, the people we know, the plans we have, and the successes we ‘collect’” (251). Nouwen refers to this misplaced conviction as the “illusion of immortality,” but we might better think of it as the illusion of materiality, the illusion that the things of this life are somehow directly transferable to eternity.

To convert such illusion to prayer is to recognize, to remember, to re-encounter the transcendent source, goal, and ground of our value, of our worth, of our dignity. In Lent we remember that we are dust, yes, but our dustiness is still in the image and likeness of God. Prayer, then, is the practice of recognition, the practice of remembrance, the practice of encounter with the true source, the true goal, the true ground of our value, and thus, our very being.

Prayer is the third element of our emerging ethic and spirituality of resistance because prayer is the language of community. Community is what is built when strangers encounter one another hospitably, honoring the harmonious solitude of each constituent member. In order for community to communicate, however, the medium of their communication must transcend any particular communicant. Communication must arise from what a community has in common, namely the source, the goal, and the ground of the value of the communicants individually and together.

Resistance is not possible alone. No one person, by themselves, lonely, hostile, and suffering under illusion, can make one bit of difference in the face of demonic values, demonic ideas, demonic policies, and demonic programs. Resistance requires community, it requires creativity and partnership, it requires fellowship to sustain it for the long haul. Resistance requires community, community requires communication, communication happens in language, and prayer is the language of community. Resistance, then, is impossible without prayer.

Dear friends, will you resist with me? This Lent, will you cultivate an ethic, a spirituality of resistance to the demonic values, the demonic ideas, the demonic policies, and the demonic programs of our interim moment? Will you resist by reaching out? Will you reach out to your selves to nurture and cultivate their disparate voices into a harmonious solitude? Will you reach out to the strangers you encounter and offer them a receptive and confrontational hospitality? Will you reach out to God, in whose image and likeness you are, that in community you may find partnership and strength for the journey?

In the conclusion to Reaching Out, Saint Henri prophetically notes that, “We are living in this short time, a time, indeed, full of sadness and sorrow. To live this short time in the spirit of Jesus Christ means to reach out from the midst of our pains and to let them be turned into joy by the love of the One who came within our reach. We do not have to deny or avoid our loneliness, our hostilities and illusions. To the contrary: When we have the courage to let these realities come to our full attention, understand them, and confess them, then they can slowly be converted into solitude, hospitality, and prayer” (282).

We are indeed living in this short time, an interim moment full of sadness and sorrow when values of love, freedom, courage, compassion, and justice have given way to hate, fear, cowardice, anger, and control. Resist! Reach out! Reach out to yourself. Reach out to one another. Reach out to God. Resist! Resist! Resist the demonic spirit of this interim moment by reaching out, and so be born from above that you may see the kingdom of God. Amen.

- Brother Lawrence A. Whitney, LC†, University Chaplain for Community Life

posted in Br. Lawrence A. Whitney, LC†, Lenten Series 2017: In Conversation with Nouwen on 03.12.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Lawrence Whitney