Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 24: 1-12

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Preface

Wonderfully created, more wonderfully restored…

Often our experience falls short of our expectation, even very short.  We hope for love and find companionship.  We desire friendship and find alliance.  We expect vocation and land a job.   We have high expectations, but low experience.   So, over time, our expectations can diminish, and we find ways both to accept that outcome and to militate against it.  Experience ever trumps, and often disappoints, expectation.  We want an A and get B.  We want a Porsche and get a Ford.  We want a full church, and get half of that.

How different Easter!  The Easter gospel is so strangely, hauntingly different.  It is not just a matter of a church being full (though that is very nice).  It is the experience of the women, who come to the tomb, in the face of their expectation.  Luke begins and ends this gospel of restoration power with the women.  A gathering of women engaged in a traditional task of preparing a body with spices and ointment.  Luke revises, not to say restores, Mark’s earlier account.  Christ has triumphed over the cross and that triumph is based on appearances—experiences—of the risen Lord, experiences of restorative power.

For St. Luke, the resurrection of Jesus brings the restoration of life, the redemption of the world, the re-creation of the church.  Hence his location of all these stories in Jerusalem, where the spirit will come upon the church come Pentecost.

The Women

We might ponder especially this Easter the women in Luke 24, the prototypes of faithful people in the church, your own progenitors:  sent on a thankless mission…heading for the stench of death…facing a corrupted corpse and a corrupted hope…dreading the visual and spiritual encounter…worried too about the practicalities (spices, cloths, stone)…together, at least, in their dread and sorrow, together…leave the messy things to the women…carrying with them, at daybreak, the memory of Passover loss…perhaps hoping for one last earthly moment of connection with One who brought meaning, belonging, and empowerment… Jewish women of the first century, not exactly the Lords of creation…three for whom the ministry of Jesus was in ruins, consigned to failure…it is a tomb after all to which they march, conscripted into the army of the least, last, and lost…

‘I dread the sight of him, torn and bloody.  I dread the lifting of him, and the stench.  I dread the cold of the stone, the darkness of the crypt—it makes me shiver shake.  I dread to touch him.  I dread facing him and the future, and facing the future without him.  I dread how awful the world is, and now that light love glimmer doused.  I dread the walk home, full of emptiness.’

Come Easter we recall:  something happened, with power, to restore the life of a desolated community, and to restore the lives of particular women and men, who have given us the record of the Easter restoration.  Easter is about restoration, resurrection, rebuilding, re-creation.

They expected a corpse and found an angel.  They expected a stone and found an opening.  They expected and ending and found a beginning.  They expected death, real pungent death, and found life.  No wonder they were perplexed.

The women breathed apocalyptic air.  The church breathed messianic air.  The evangelist breathed dualistic air.  We are recovering naturalists.  Some assembly required here, that is, some translation, from worldview to worldview.  These are symbols to be interpreted more than doctrines to be propounded.

Easter: Wherein our worst fears are not realized in dread, in bread, and in spread. Wherein, for once, our experience if far better than our expectation. For the Easter news of Jesus Christ is not about creation, but about redemption, about restoration. The good news of Jesus Christ is not about building, but about rebuilding.  The good news of Jesus Christ not about the beginning, but the next beginning.  The good news of Jesus Christ is not about creation but about a new creation.

It raises a personal question for those in their later sixties:  with time remaining, what do you hope to restore? Endow? Rebuild?

As said EE Cummings “I thank you Lord for this most amazing day…”

As Tug McGraw so well said, “You gotta believe.”

As Butch Cassidy told the Sundance Kid, “Kid, I’ve got vision and the rest of the world wears bifocals.”

‘I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, most of which never happened.’  M Twain.

As Judy Collins sang,  “I’ve looked at life from both sides now, from win and lose and still, somehow, it’s life’s illusions I recall.  I really don’t know life at all!”

Exemplum Docet

You can hear restorative words every week:

“Hello, my name is John, I am an alcoholic…”  Restoration.

“I enrolled to start my education again…”  Restoration.

“I just called, Dad, it’s Easter.  I know we haven’t gotten along very                                   well. But I wanted to be in touch…”  Restoration.

“She joined the Y last month.  She had to start again toward health.”

Restoration.

“This meeting is about changing our company to save it.”  Restoration.

“We are here to try to prepare our church for the next century.”

“I took communion because I wanted my life to change.”  Restoration.

“In the time I have I will share my heart with those I love.”

“Hi Mom.  I went to church today.  It felt good to be there.: Restoration.

“I’m 45 years old, and I’ve never been able to commit to anything or

anyone.  With you, I am going to try.”  Restoration.

“For 30 years there has been a woman inside me waiting to come                          alive, to be.  I have crying other people’s tears.  No more.” Restoration.

“I made a mistake when I was 19.  I have been beating myself up for it

ever since.  I guess I’ll move on.”  Restoration.

“Today you made me happy.  I haven’t laughed like that since school.

Where have I been all these years?” Restoration.

New Creation Augustine

‘Twas not the creation which settled Augustine’s heart. Here is restoration from our neighborhood.  It was the grace of restoration.  No, he saw too well who we are by nature, and the restoration turn the redemptive God of Easter gives our souls:

Sloth poses as the love of peace: yet what certain peace is there besides the Lord?

Extravagance masquerades as abundance: but God is never ending store of sweetness.

The spendthrift makes a pretence of liberality; but God is the most generous dispenser of good.

The covetous want many possessions for themselves: but God possesses all.

The envious struggle for preferment: but what is to be preferred before God?

Anger demands revenge: but what vengeance is as just as God’s?

Fear shrinks from any sudden unwanted danger, for its only care is safety: but to God nothing is strange, nothing unforeseen. (Confessions,50).

It was grace, redeeming power: “not in reveling and in drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy.   But put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires. (Rather arm yourself with the Lord Jesus Christ; spend no more thought on nature and nature’s appetites. )(Rom13:13)’”.  For in an instant, as I came to the end of the sentence, it was as though the light of confidence flooded into my heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled.” (Confessions, 178). “ That’s restoration.

Anderson Deliverance

Here is restoration from my neighborhood:  Several years ago, a young man from my neighborhood, upstate New York, one Batavia boy, set out for the Marines.  He did a couple of tours.  Then a job opened up in journalism. He was young!  First he went to South Africa.  And then to Israel.  Later, he chose to transfer to Lebanon.  Free, healthy, successful, gaining influence—what a life.  Then one Saturday he went early to play tennis in Beirut.  Along the way, a black sedan pulled him to the curb.  He was blindfolded, stuffed in the truck and whisked away, carted from basement to tenement to apartment.  He spent all day and all night hooded and chained.  For six years.

It’s one thing to build a life—free, healthy, successful, influential.  Another to redeem a life.

I remembered Terry Anderson’s story again this week.  In the darkness, in the bondage, through the terror, out of the misery he found … a new life, a new creation.  He found faith.  Or faith found him.  He read the Bible, cover to cover, more than 50 times.  It was his only story.  As it is ours.

50 times, he watched Moses slay the Egyptian.

50 times, he saw Israel run from Pharaoh.

50 times, he heard the chariots chasing God’s folk.

50 times, he wondered at the Red Sea parting.

50 times, he gasped as the returning water drowned Pharaoh.

50 times, he fidgeted as Israel just wandered and wandered in

wilderness.

50 times, he heard the promise of milk and honey.

50 times, he sat with Moses on Mt. Nebo.

Then, as Moses lay dying for the 50th time, a knock came at Anderson’s door.  And again he was whisked away, but this time, by grace, to freedom.  Do you remember his landing in New York?  Do you recall his walk across the tarmak?  Do you recollect his drive—they closed the highway to all traffic—to Midtown?  Do you remember his words?   “I have faith in God”.

It’s one thing to grow up in Batavia and build a life.

It’s another thing, hooded and chained and trapped in later life to see life redeemed.  And some bondage comes to us all. That’s power.  That’s restoration.  That’s power.

I Expect Great Things

45 years ago, Martin King was killed.  But he transformed our land.  His words transformed our rhetoric.  His marches changed our culture. His leadership fashioned a new middle class.  His hope kindled our hope.  His courage inspired our own.  45 years ago.   I love a story he told many times about power, redeeming power.  So hidden we miss it, in borrowed upper room, in a tragic crucifixion, in a temporary tomb, in a woman’s report of resurrection, in little hands, scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing to finish the new creation…

The gnarled hands—the cross, Good Friday.  The expectation—the resurrection, Easter. (No matter who you are today, somebody helped you to get there.  It may have been an ordinary person, doing an ordinary job in an extraordinary way. )  Here is restoration from your neighborhood:

There is a magnificent lady, with all the beauty of blackness and black culture, by the name of Marion Anderson that you’ve heard about and read about and some of you have seen.  She started out as a little girl singing in the choir of the Union Baptist Church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  And then came that glad day when she made it.  And she stood in Carnegie Hall with the Philharmonic Orchestra in the background in New York, singing with the beauty that is matchless.  Then she came to the end of the concert, singing Ave Maria as nobody else can sing it.  And they called her back and back and back, and she finally ended by singing, ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen’.   And her mother was sitting out in the audience, and she started crying; tears were flowing down her cheeks.  And the person next to her said, “Mrs Anderson, Why are you crying? Your daughter is scoring tonight.  The critics tomorrow will be lavishing their praise on her.  Why are you crying?

And Mrs. Anderson looked over with tears still flowing and said, “I’m not crying because I’m sad, I’m crying for joy.” She went on to say, “You may not remember, you wouldn’t know.  But I remember when Marian was growing up, and I was working in a kitchen till my hands were all  but parched, my eyebrows all but scalded.  I was working there to make it possible for my daughter to get an education.  And I remember Marian came to see me and said, “Mother,  I don’t want to see you having to work like this.” And I looked down and said, “Honey, I don’t mind it.  I’m doing it for you and I expect great things of you.”

And finally one day somebody asked Marian Anderson in later years, “Miss Anderson, what has the been the happiest moment of your life?  Was it that moment in Carnegie Hall in New York?”  She said, “No, that wasn’t it/”  “Was it that moment you stood before the Kings and Queens of Europe?” “No that wasn’t it”.  “ Well, Miss Anderson, was it the moment Sibelius of Finland declared that his roof was too low for such a voice?” “No, that wasn’t it.”  “Miss Anderson, was it the moment that Toscanini said that a voice like your comes only once in a century?” “No, that wasn’t it.” “What was it then, Miss Anderson.”  And she looked up and said quietly,  “The happiest moment in my life was the moment I could say, “Mother, you can stop working now.”

Marian Anderson realized that she was where she was because somebody helped her to get there.  (MLKing, “A Knock at Midnight”). That’s restoration.  In the mother’s gnarled hands—the cross.  In the mother’s voiced and great expecations—the resurrection.

Endnote

You are a people soaked in a sense of restoration!  The church:  women at the tomb!  The church:  loving rebuilding not just building! The church:  you present today, voicing redemption!  The church:  waiting six years with Terry Anderson in prison!  The church:  giving Augustine grace!  The church:  singing with the voice of Marian Anderson!

Wonderfully created, more wonderfully restored…

Come ye faithful raise the strain

Of triumphant gladness

God has brought his Israel

Into joy from sadness.

Loosed from Pharaoh’s bitter yoke

Jacob’s Sons and Daughters

Traveled with unmoistened foot

Through the Red Sea waters.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.31.2013 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

Luke 24:1-12

The real text for my sermon this evening is the two verses preceding the official text from Luke, namely, Luke 23: 55-56.  “The women who had come with him from Galilee followed, and they saw the tomb and how his body was laid.  Then they returned, and prepared spices and ointments.  On the Sabbath they rested according to the commandment.” Matthew and Mark agree that after Jesus was dead, the women gathered spices but had to wait out the Sabbath before they could embalm Jesus.  John differs by saying that Nicodemus already had embalmed Jesus with spices before he was placed in the tomb.  But they all agree that the Sabbath was a time through which the disciples just had to wait.  Our Easter Vigil symbolizes that waiting.  But unlike the disciples whose wait looked back toward the Good Friday death and desolation, ours points toward the joy of Easter.

Jesus’ original disciples spent the Sabbath in traumatized disorientation.  They did not know who or where they were after the shock of Jesus’ arrest, the hurried denials and evasions by the leading disciples, and the crucifixion.  The text says they rested, but that was because of the commandment regarding the Sabbath.  I can’t imagine it was a peaceful rest.

Consider this theological point.  There is a profound sense in which Good Friday and Easter are always simultaneously with us, not the latter succeeding the former.  Every day we orient ourselves to follow Christ by picking up our cross. Some days are worse than others but life is a continual minefield of crosses.  Likewise every day we enjoy the new life of fulfilled orientation to God as in Easter.  Every day grace abounds if we but have the eyes to see. Part of the maturation of spiritual life is keeping our feet on the ground as we traverse the minefield of crosses while keeping our eyes on heaven where we already live in God’s light and joy. But I want to say that the experience of Holy Saturday, the day of waiting after desolation and before joy, is also a dimension of every day.  Every day we live in a condition of profound disorientation, just like the first disciples, and we require a spirituality to embrace that too.

We orient our lives by a great many things, but I believe they fall into five ultimate categories.

First, we orient ourselves by how we deal with the choices in our lives.  Each of us every day faces value-laden possibilities, and how we choose determines our moral character. We all make bad choices sometimes and it is common for us to think of ourselves as sinners who need forgiveness and mercy.  We are disoriented with regard to our obligations when we do not know how to live with ourselves and our bad choices.

Second, we orient ourselves by how we deal with the need for wholeness and integrity in our personal lives.  Sometimes we are quite literally broken with illness, disability, or other crippling conditions that inhibit our integration.  In deeper senses, becoming whole means coming to terms with the important components of our lives, our talents and career dreams, our families of origin, God bless them, our social conditions such as race, class, wealth, and intelligence, the major historical issues of our watch, and a host of other things.  Each of us has a wrangle of internal conditions that are integrated one way or another but often in ways that are contradictory, fragmented, and deadening.  The quest for wholeness is deep and unending.     Third, we orient ourselves by how we relate to other people and to the institutions and natural ecologies of our environment.  In some respects, these others are internal to our own experience and we treat them according to how they lie in our orientation to personal wholeness.  But that is also to miss the very point of their otherness.  Those other things are not just part of us but exist in their own right.  Every religion says that we should love those other things.  Loving other people is not the same thing as loving institutions or loving various things in our natural environment.  But love involves some kind of appropriate respect for those others precisely as other than ourselves but equally creatures of God.  Jesus was particularly strong on the commandment of love.

Fourth, we orient ourselves by how we find worth and meaning in life.  Some of our value consists in how we integrate our lives’ components.  But we also have effects on others for better or worse, effects that they have to integrate into their lives in ways beyond our control.  We have impacts on the institutions in which we live.  Our very metabolism impacts the environment.  Our value-identity in ultimate perspective is not only what we have integrated into our lives but the effects for better and worse we have on others who have to integrate our effects into their own integral reality.

Fifth, perhaps the most important domain of orientation is how we relate to the very existence of our world, especially of ourselves and place.  Do we affirm the creation in gratitude and joy?  Or is there a low-voiced bagpipe drone of resentment at having to navigate that minefield of crosses, at having to live life so full of failure and suffering, of struggling alongside Job to respond to his wife’s advice to curse God and die?  Sometimes our orientation to life is to give up, and that temptation is nearly always with us.

The problems of righteousness, quests for wholeness, relations with others, what our lives add up to, and how we relate to our Creator are ultimate conditions of human existence. They define us existentially in ultimate ways.  To the extent we have symbols and practices to engage these ultimates, we are religious.  In one sense, everyone is oriented in all these ways.  But often we are oriented badly.  Sometimes the loss of those symbols and practices disorients us. I wager each person here has suffered ultimate disorientation at least momentarily when the religious path gets lost.

Consider the first disciples on the Sabbath.  They had been galvanized to transform their lives and follow Jesus by coming to adopt something like the following story.  Jesus brought them into a radical reordering of their religion’s moral life by saying it was a matter of the heart, not just behavior, as in the Sermon on the Mount.  Joining with him in this movement healed them in various ways and made them more whole.  The journey for which he was the new Moses required them to love one another, more, to love those outside their ingroup, indeed to love their enemies, and they were slowly learning such love.  Their lives were given transformative meaning because of their participation in this story of the incoming of the kingdom of God where Jesus would rule and the Twelve Disciples would be his viceroys over the tribes of Israel.  God in this story was not only the creator but the triumphant king who would bring about justice, destroy evil, and reward his followers with love and mercy.  Something like this is what they believed, and many Christians believe this today, indeed think it is the meaning of Easter.

But by the first Holy Saturday this story was in shambles.  The moral purification of his Judaism was ground to pieces in the underhanded collusion between its leaders and the feckless Pilate.  The sense of personal healing was destroyed by the failure of the renewal project and manifested in the betrayal and abandonment of Jesus by the disciples.  The relation to the world that was supposed to be loving was slammed back in the dirty politics leading to crucifixion, snapping Jesus alleged kingship like a twig.  Jesus was not going to be king and rule in justice in the divine kingdom.  And the Creator sent no angels, did not take away the cup, and was just absent: “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?!!”  Nothing that previously had oriented the disciples in ultimate ways was left.  That story was false.

Sometimes we suffer from a similar disorientation.  For instance, think about the Church.  One of the ancient images of the Church is that it is the Ark, like Noah’s Ark, that can carry us to salvation. The Ark is an orienting metaphor.  But then, when we realize that our Church in the 21^st century denies the full humanity of large groups of people, for example homosexuals, or in the 20^th century denied the legitimate findings of science in the name of a culture-bound misappropriation of the Bible, or in the 19^th century defended the enslavement of large numbers of people, or in the Middle Ages whipped up crusades to kick ass for Jesus, the leaky Ark can no longer provide ultimate orientation.  Now, I could have referred to the crusades as “passionate devotion to hastening the Kingdom of God,” as they spoke of it then.  But they were so mistaken as to be vulgar, and my vulgar phrase is more appropriate.  When the aura of our customary communal orientations to salvation turns from holy to vulgar, we feel something of the disorientation of Holy Saturday.

Or consider your more personal senses of ultimate orientation.  Have you ever thought that some choice you made was so evil in its consequences, wicked in its motivation, and culpable regarding your moral character that you wouldn’t accept forgiveness if it were offered?  Have you ever felt so broken and contradictory to the core that you abandon hope for personal integrity of any sort?  Have you ever felt that your failure to love, not the heroic love of enemies that Jesus commanded but the simple love of friends he said was easy, is so egregious that you hate yourself?  Have you ever thought that all the things you believed make life meaningful are delusions fit for children?  Have you ever raged against the God, or the accident, that gave you life because it’s just not worth it?  I suspect all of us have even if we usually hide those feelings under an apple-butter layer of piety.  I suspect we have these feelings thrumming away in our psyches all the time.

In themselves, these feelings are part of life and are not disorienting.  What is disorienting is not to have religious symbols, beliefs, and practices that acknowledge them and give them proper orientation.  The problem with these feelings is that they undermine and show up as shams so many of the domestic orienting structures of our religion.  Holy Saturday symbolizes the pervasive and profound sense that our religion is in shambles.

I said at the beginning that we, unlike the first disciples, abide Holy Saturday with an orientation to Easter morning.  Now let me tell you what Easter is not.  Easter is not an affirmation of some old story that postulates victory so as to erase the desolation of Good Friday and the disorientation of Holy Saturday.  That triumphalist theology has been common in Christian history but it is just whistling in the dark.  Easter is not the happy ending of a story that had some dark moments.  In fact, Easter is the demonstration that, despite our many stories that give life proximate meanings, ultimate orientation cannot be in a story at all.  The problem is the belief that any story can give ultimate orientation.  One of the meanings of Good Friday is that the actual story of each of us is that we inevitably lose and die.  One of the meanings of Holy Saturday is that no story ultimately can justify our moral lives, or our brokenness, or our estrangements, or our despair, or our hatred of existence. The Easter gospel requires us to give up on stories for ultimate orientation and come to ourselves in God irrespective of our stories.

The resurrection means that God is never absent after all, despite how it seemed to Jesus on the cross.  The astonishing thing about the symbolic power of the resurrection is that it says that ultimate orientation for us all comes from finding our center in God the Creator, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.  What happened in Jesus’ story and in ours, is not ultimately important, and this is ultimately important to recognize.  As sources of orientation, our stories are to be relativized in light of our fundamental orientation to God our Creator.

The problem with our stories, true as they might be, is that they make it seem as if we are the centers of our lives.  But to the contrary God is the center of our lives.  God’s creation is the ultimate cosmic reality, and our own parts in it are only proximately important and then only to us.  Easter is not about Jesus beating Pilate, or the Devil.  It is not about God rescuing his Son from a sticky situation.  It is about the glorious reality of God everywhere and always grounding and holding all our stories, a truth so easy to forget when we live under the illusion that our stories are ultimately rather than proximately important.

Our Easter joy is to accept our moral lives for what they are, including our failures, and to tunnel beyond morality to God the creator of an immensely value-filled universe.  Easter joy is to accept the brokenness of our lives and meditate into to the wholeness of God who gives us our complexities. Easter joy is to accept our estrangements and enter into God’s glorious fecundity in the Other anyway.  Easter joy is to accept the fragmentations of life’s so-called meanings and receive the depths of God who creates all things, even those that do not add up.  Easter joy is to accept the world as it is and consent to being in general because this is God’s act.

So you see that, with the truly ultimate orientation to God, our Easter joy brings a sense of humor to the proximate stories of our moral adventures, quests for wholeness, fumbling attempts to love, concerns about what we are worth, and essays to say whether life is worth living.  Because of God, whatever we do and are ultimately is just fine.  Life is a comedy after all.  Easter is a riot of laughter, from God’s perspective.

With such an ultimate orientation, decentering ourselves and centering our orientation on God, of course we should go back to ordinary life and try to do better morally, to become more whole, to love better, to enrich the world as best we can, and to love the God who gives us life.  Let’s hear it for sanctification! These proximate stories are the actual content of the life we must engage, the stories of our watch. Because of the Easter orientation to God we can start afresh in each of these ways.  But the Easter theme of “new life” is consequent upon coming to ourselves in God rather than hunting for ourselves in our stories.  Our ultimate identity is manifest when we take ourselves ultimately seriously with a sense of humor.

Have you ever wondered why our religion emphasizes Jesus as so meek and humble?  Why does it emphasize Passion-week which is the story of the failure of his regal story?  Why do we preach Christ crucified?  It is because we believe our true orientation is in God and not the historical victory of some regal divinity. What did Jesus do?  Beat the Romans?  Purify Second Temple Judaism?  Heal everybody?  Make proper theologians of the disciples?  Bring righteousness to Zion?  Behave like a proper Messiah?  No, he accepted the cross and commended his soul to God.

The Easter joy in which we come to ourselves in God allows us also to inhabit the particular stories of our lives with their Good Friday minefields of crosses, but with a sense of humor.  It also allows us to acknowledge our disorientations that come with the ambiguities of morality, integrity, engagement, meaning, and life-affirmation; we can abide Holy Saturday with a laugh—who needs all that story-orientation to be ultimate anyway?  With Easter joy we consent to God in our small ways as God consents to us in the great creation of which we are humble parts.  Amen.

~ The Rev. Dr. Robert Cummings Neville

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Neville, Dean Emeritus of Marsh Chapel on 03.30.2013 at 7:30 pm

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By Marsh Chapel

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Introduction (Nico Romeijn-Stout):

Three days before Life triumphed over sin and death, Jesus, knowing what was about to happen, took the time to gather with his closest community to celebrate a ritual meal.  His disciples thought that they were present to celebrate the Passover, but the evening did not unfold as any of them had imagined.  Instead their time together in the Upper Room was full of new experiences, of new rituals.

Here tonight we will embody three ancient Christian traditions associated with Maundy Thursday: foot washing, communion, and the stripping of the sanctuary.  This worship service can become a bit overwhelming with so many rituals back to back.  We challenge you, as we navigate this service together, to be mindful of the reasons for the rituals.

As we hear in today’s Gospel lesson, during the meal Jesus got up, took off his outer robe, and washed his disciples’ feet.  The Teacher and Lord humbled himself in service to his disciples.  Jesus set for them and for us an example, a pattern of service which we should emulate.

In that same meal, Jesus also set for us an example of how we should eat as a community.  In the breaking of the bread and the sharing of the cup, Jesus gave us a pattern by which to remember him.  When we eat the bread and drink the cup, we are reminded of the Life and Covenant through Jesus Christ.

Tonight we also follow in ancient Christian tradition by stripping our sanctuary of all decorative and liturgical objects as a reminder of both the barrenness of a world without Christ, and also to make room for the new Life we find in the resurrection of Easter.

Jesus, who is the path to Life Eternal, recognized that we would need nourishment in order to thrive.  And so he gave us Life-giving rituals to sustain us.  Tonight we remember those rituals.

Stripping (Caitlin White):

Stripping of the altar is an ancient tradition that Christian communities celebrate in many different ways. Some, like Marsh Chapel, believe that this is a time of reflection on the weighty emotions and issues of the passion and resurrection. Here at Marsh Chapel, we strip our sanctuary of liturgical decorations to reflect the barrenness of a world without Christ. We make the space to reflect on the worst of human deeds on Good Friday and Holy Saturday. Ours is a theological position that allows people to embrace whatever truths they might find in their own reflection- whatever personal narratives relate for them, whatever view of sin and redemption they understand, whatever beauty or disgust they behold in the crucifixion- it makes room for the truths of many people.

Many communities with a similar understanding of the ritual also strip the sanctuary of everything but leave a single cross shrouded in dark cloth, a symbol of the spiritual weight and mourning of the season.

Many Christian communities are much more fixed upon the notion of atonement- the idea that Jesus had to suffer and die for us to be forgiven. Many strip the altar to remember how Jesus was stripped of dignity, clothes, and finally his life, but that may not be a theology that all of us embrace. At least, that might only be one aspect of all that the cross can be for you.

As Dean Hill reminded us in his meditation on the Passion this past Sunday, “Easter defines Holy Week, and not the other way around. The resurrection follows but does not replace the cross. The cross precedes but does not overshadow the resurrection. It is Life that has the last word.”

My challenge therefore to those who hold an atoning, sacrificial way of thinking about this ritual is not that I necessary disagree, but that Christians in our culture (myself included) have a poor understanding of sacrifice, of waiting and of loss. How can we? In a world of fast food, fad diets, and disposable everything, we have forgotten patience and the seasons of life.

Perhaps the question for us today should be: What are you being stripped of? Why did we just do Lenten reflections?  Why give up chocolate – is it just a way to not gain weight in time for spring break and the beginning of summer, or is there something more there? I often think we get caught up in the altar mentality- we give up things because it is hard, not because they are wiser left behind.

Any good gardener knows that the first thing you must do in the spring is pull up all the weeds that have taken over your soil. If anything good and intentional is to take root, it can’t be bumping into other forces, other agendas that rob it of the resources to survive.

The purpose of our ritual should be to root out what distracts us, those noisy things that rob us of positivity, purpose, and connectedness to God, ourselves, and one another. We need to give our time, resources, and communal creativity to something that feeds our spiritual growth and brings more light into the world.

Communion (Nico)

An incredibly intelligent 9 year-old named Becca, in order to be allowed to recieve communion, explained it like this:   Jesus knew that his friends would miss him. He also knew they had to eat every day. So, he told them to remember him when they ate and that they should eat together. That way they'd be able to be friends and get through anything.”

The communion liturgy I am most familiar draws upon 1 Corinthians 10:17 in which Paul writes “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.”  Elsewhere in 1 Corinthians, Paul chastises members of the community for the way in which they are eating their communal meals – a practice probably tied closely to practices of communion.  What was happening was that some members of the community were beginning to eat before others had even arrived, causing a rift in the body.

You see, from Paul’s first-century pen to Becca’s twenty-first century lips, Christian understandings of communion have always been founded upon community.  When we gather at the table, we are united in this meal.  When we break bread, we are one body.  This is a meal to cast off divisions, to cast off hierarchies and inequalities and simply to come, in unity as one body.

In the tradition of Marsh Chapel the communion table is open.  All are welcome to come forward and receive communion.  But the question we must ask is not so much who is welcome, but who is invited? And that question must begin to be asked not in the middle of a service of worship, but rather after  the service, when we leave the sanctuary, go into the streets of Boston, into our neighborhoods.  It is a question we must carry with us as we prepare to gather again every Sunday for ordered worship.  It is a question which must dwell as much with pew-dwellers as with pulpit-dwellers.

The ritual of Holy Communion is a life-giving ritual.  It is a meal in which we may be physically and spiritually fed.  Jesus gave us this ritual of community, a ritual to sustain the lives of his followers.    Given its life-sustaining nature, perhaps we should interpret communion in light of the example-giving life Jesus led.  In his life, Jesus gave us the example by which we should be in community, by which we should feed ourselves and others.  In his life, Jesus gave us the example by which we should live, and by which we should serve.

Foot washing – service (Caitlin):

The service of foot washing- that moment you have all been waiting for, grooming for, wondering how many days your neighbor has recycled those heavy wool socks for. It isn’t a very common spiritual practice for many people and I will be the first to admit that it can be awkward. I will also tell you that it can be thought provoking and spiritually enriching as well- precisely because it is uncomfortable. So why of all the ways to display service did Jesus chose this strange ritual? Why did Jesus choose a ritual at all?

Psychologist, speaker, and activist, Staci Haines might have some insights for my questions. In 2011, I attended a Calling Congregations conference offered by the Fund for Theological Education where she spoke to a crowd of both clergy and laity who seek to renew the church particularly by involving and equipping its young people. She challenged them with the findings of psychology that in recent years has begun to understand that our memories are really in our muscles. The body, in time of panic and adversity, will bypass logic and emotionalism and shortcut to whatever patterns we have trained our muscles for. Aristotle was right- we are what we habitually do. Our problem in the church, she observed, is that our vision- our ideals- our mission statements do not sync up with our practices. We want to put an end to suffering and hunger but we treat service like an event, not a life style. We want to throw our doors open to everyone with love but we haven’t gotten to know anyone who doesn’t look, act, and live like us in so long we’ve forgotten how. We have to retrain our practices to look more like our hopes.

Perhaps, Jesus also understood that rituals can retrain our bodies and our practices. So he took this last chance to serve his disciples.

In tonight’s service, we sing hymns, read lessons, and receive communion, all before foot washing. Honestly, that is because we think it is gross to touch feet and then food. However, in the Jewish custom of Jesus’ time, foot washing would have been the first event of the evening. Ritual cleaning is how you prepared for a meal, for Jesus’ breaking of the bread, to hear his message… Jesus started the evening with service. In times of danger and doubt, serving others was his first reflex, his instinctive response. And he asked them to imitate their Lord- to learn to serve one another in the same humbling way.

Of all the things Jesus could have saved to say for that moment- that last meal- he said, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another… Just as I have loved you.” At least that is how the writer of John reports it to us. But was it really a new commandment? Didn’t that whole love other people concept show up a few times by then? I’m not convinced that it was all that groundbreaking for Jesus. I suspect that this has a lot more to do with our human tendency to need reminding.  And given how absentminded the disciples are portrayed throughout the gospels, I’d guess that they were no exception to the rule. Jesus knew that we need practices that Remind us that love was the way of Christ- Remove us from old habits to try-try again until service is our first instinct- AND Reform our vision for the future so that we might live into it more fully.

Conclusion:

(Nico) In removing us from our old habits of living in isolation from our neighbors, isolation even from those who sit at the table with us; in reforming our vision so that we may see a future in which we are all more fully alive, Jesus has shown us the way.

(Caitlin) In showing us the way, Jesus last teaching to his community was love – and so it should be ours as well.

(Nico) We walk in the footsteps of Jesus when we… Love others.

(Caitlin) We walk in the footsteps of Jesus when we… Serve others.

(Nico) We walk in the footsteps of Jesus when we…Break bread with community.

(Caitlin) As we are stripping the sanctuary, we are stripping it of things, not of people.  As we prepare to remember the death of Christ, let’s not strip Jesus’ message of Life.  It is Life that has the last word – and that word is Love.

~Nico Romeijn-Stout and Caitlin White, Ministry Associates

posted in Guest Preachers on 03.28.2013 at 6:00 pm

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By Marsh Chapel

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Luke 22:14-23:56

A Meditation on the Palms

Seeing With the Heart: Meditations from Marsh Chapel, 2010

The Dean:   If we believe that life has meaning and purpose

People:   And we do

The Dean: If we believe that the Giver of Life loves us

People:   And we do

The Dean: If we believe that divine love lasts

People:   And we doThe Dean: If we believe that justice, mercy, and humility endure

People:   And we do

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

People:   And we do

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

People:   And we do

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

People:   And we do

The Dean: If we believe grace and forgiveness are the heart of the universe

People:   And we do

The Dean: If we believe that God has loved us personally

People:   And we do

The Dean: If we believe in God

People:   And we do

The Dean: Then we shall trust God over the valley of the shadow of death

People:   And we shall

The Dean: Then we shall trust that love is stronger than death

People:   And we shall

The Dean: Then we shall trust the mysterious promise of resurrection

People:   And we shall

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

People:   And we shall

The Dean: Then we shall trust the enduring worth of personality

People:   And we shall

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

People:   And we shall

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

People:   And we shall

The Dean: Then we shall trust the source of love to love eternally

People:   And we shall

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

People:   And we shall

The Dean: Then we shall trust in God

People:   And we shall.

A Meditation on the Passion Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill

Deliver Us From Evil, 2005

The Dean:   To the question of evil let us live our answer by choosing the cruciform path of faith.

People:   Let us meet evil with honesty, grief with grace, failure with faith, and death with dignity.The Dean: Let us carry ourselves in belief.

People:   Let us affirm the faith of Christ which empowers to withstand what we cannot understand.

The Dean:   Let us remember that it is not the passion of Christ that defines the Person of Christ, but the Person that defines the passion.

People: Let us remember that it is not suffering that bears meaning, but a sense of meaning that bears up under suffering.

The Dean: Let us remember that it is not the cross that carries the love but the love that carries the cross.

People:   Let us remember that it is not crucifixion that encompasses salvation, but salvation that encompasses even the tragedy of crucifixion.

The Dean: Let us remember and that it is not the long sentence of Holy week, with all its phrases, dependent clauses and semi‐colons that completes the gospel, but it is the punctuation to come in seven days, the last mark of the week to come in 168 hours, whether it be the exclamation point of Peter, the full stop period of Paul or the question mark of Mary—Easter defines Holy Week, and not the other way around. The resurrection follows but does not replace the cross. The cross precedes but does not overshadow the resurrection. It is Life that has the last word and there is a God to whom we may pray, in the assurance of being heard: “Deliver us from evil”

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.24.2013 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

John 12: 1-8

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Frontispiece

Our mentor and friend Rev. Russell Clark, a Colgate and Boston University graduate, served a small church in Oriskany Falls , NY for many years.  He dodged and weaved as appointments elsewhere were offered, to bigger churches and salaries.  He stayed.  He fell in love with a quieter life, natural beauty, the intrigue of pastoral ministry, the mystery of the cotidian. The Clark home sported a large twirling book shelf in the living room, filled with novels and histories and poetry.

His lay leader died after some years, to the regret and lasting hurt of the community.  People are not replaceable.  The widow, usually of regular perfect attendance in worship, stayed home, for some time.  At last in Lent she appeared.  Russell asked her how she found her way through the morass, the mess, the maze of grief, and got back home to church.  “Well, it was not the scripture, though I love all the scripture.  It was not the hymns, though I sing them to myself day by day.  It was not your visits, though they were most gracious.  It was not the family care and feeding or that of the neighbors.  It was not my personal faith in the resurrection, though I do have faith.   It was not even prayer, though I practice formal prayer, evening and morning, at meals and at bedtime.

“It was just this:  the chickens had to be fed every morning.  So I had to get up every morning.  Once I was up, the rest of the day—and at last, over longer time, the week and month, including Sunday morning—seemed to fall in line.  It was the chickens.  The clucking of those hens.  The clucking of those hens meant more to me, in healing, than all the hymns of Easter.  The regularity of feeding them, early in the morning, restored me, over time.  The clucking of those chickens meant more to me than all the hymns of Easter.”

Robinson

Come Lent, here at Marsh Chapel, we converse each year with our sibling Christians out of the Calvinist tradition.   We grow and learn, from and with, the slight differences, in sibling traditions, wherein we do not always agree, but agree to disagree agreeably.  Our interlocutor this year, 2013, is Marilynne Robinson—essayist, novelist, Calvinist.  Her love of Scripture, her sense of the eternal, her rendering of John Calvin, her prophetic defense of wonder in our time, her unwillingness to buy the cheap goods of a culture that languishes in the doldrums of a pervasive malaise, her celebration of quiet life, pastoral ministry, providential grace, and the deeps of love:  all these human gifts we gratefully receive from her this year.  Especially her sense of the extraordinary in the ordinary, health in the clucking of hens, helps us this year.

On Scripture:  One Easter I went with my grandfather to a small Presbyterian church in northern Idaho where I heard a sermon on the discrepancies in the gospel accounts of the resurrection…I was a young child… yet I remember that sermon…I can imagine myself that primal Easter, restive at my grandfather’s elbow, pushing my nickels and dimes of collection money into the tips of my gloves…memorably forbidden to remove my hat…It seems to me I felt God as a presence before I had a name for him…I was aware to the point of alarm of a vast energy of intention all around me…and I thought everyone else must also be aware of it…Only in church did I hear experience like mine acknowledged, in all those strange narratives, read and expounded…(227)…Amen (the preacher) said, having blessed my life with a lovely thing to ponder

On Speech: What should we call the presiding intelligence that orchestrates the decision to speak as a moment requires?  What governs the inflections that make any utterance unmistakably the words of one speaker in this whole language-saturated world? 120

On Sin: It took, for instance, three decades of the most brilliant and persistent campaign of preachment and information to establish, in the land of liberty, the idea that slavery was intolerable. 249

On Salvation: (Calvin’s) theology is compelled and enthralled by an overwhelming awareness of the grandeur of God…his sense of things is so overwhelmingly visual and cerebral, that the other senses do not interest him 221…heaven’s essence for him is that it is inconceivable in the world’s terms, another order of experience

On Service: We should maintain an appropriate humility in the face of what we think we know…encourage an imagination of humankind large enough to acknowledge some small fragment of the mystery we are… The Judeo Christian ethic of charity derives from the assertion that human beings are made in the image of God, that is, that reverence is owed to human beings simply as such….Our civilization believed for a long time in God and the soul and sin and salvation, assuming, whatever else, that meaning had a larger frame and context than this life in this world. 84…I do not think it is nostalgia to suggest that it would be well to reestablish the setting apart of time traditionally devoted to religious observance... 99 Science cannot serve in the place of religion because it cannot generate an ethics or a morality.71…  137

Driver

Speaking of speech, my former teacher Tom Driver recently remembered:

“I was twenty-five years old in 1950, a bachelor newly arrived in New York City to attend graduate school. I bought a single ticket and went alone to see director Harold Clurman’s production of The Member of the Wedding, by the southern author Carson McCullers. With the rest of the audience, I was put under a spell by Ethel Waters singing “His Eye is on the Sparrow.” There came another spell at the final curtain. The play's central focus has been the longing of a pre-adolescent girl to escape from her loneliness. Young Frankie Addams (played by Julie Harris) wants to be part of the forthcoming wedding of her older sister. This privilege is not readily granted, but In the last scene, the way becomes clear, and she exclaims with joy: “The wedding will be the we of me.” Curtain.

“I will never forget what happened next. There was long applause and several curtain calls. And then we just sat there. No one wanted to leave. The strangers sitting next to me were just as slow to move as I was. After a few moments we hitherto strangers began to talk to each other. The theater had become the “we” of us. The performances on stage (and everything that Harold Clurman and the crew did to enable them) had performed something over and above the dramatis personae roles. They had created for that brief moment in time -- less brief than most such occasions -- a community of people whose lives otherwise did not cross. It is called theater magic, which means no one quite understands it and can never predict just when it will occur. But when it does, our joy is immense. It is similar to an experience of religious transcendence.

“In an age in which the term “public” has been denigrated in favor of “privatization,” when housing is increasingly “gated “if it is affordable at all, when public education and health care and transportation and all manner of intrinsically social services are either neglected or attacked as impingements upon “liberty,” when guns are thought to be necessary almost everywhere in the name of freedom and self defense -- in such a time, the liminality engendered by ritual, theater, and religion, carries an important potential.”

Our gospel then raises for us the question of authority.

Authority

Religions wrestle with authority, all the time, everywhere.  The current change in Rome, and the ascendancy of Francis, our brother, whom we honor, encourage, and celebrate, recalls for us centuries of struggle over authority.  To the Calvinist right, all authority is vested in Scripture.  The Bible is the only full authority, ‘sola scriptura’, an historic, in some ways tragic manner of interpretation of life and love.  To the Catholic left, final authority is vested in the Bishop of Rome.  Before we, or more specifically I, become too critical of these vested stations, we, or I, must also recognize that at some point, some one has to break the tie, make the decision, guide the church, be ‘primus inter pares’, whether in the form of a breathing holy person or in the form of a spirited, breathing holy text.  My own tradition attempts to have it all or both ways, not always with shining success.  Methodism combines catholic tradition, reformation message, puritan discipline, Anglican liturgy, and pietist feeling.  Methodism interprets Scripture through Tradition, and Tradition through Experience, and Experience through Reason.  Such a separation of powers, by the way, has great advantages in a university setting, like this one.

Fragrance

But what of our gospel?  What form of authority does the Gospel of John prefer, select, elect, prize?  Ah, glad you asked.  No church in John, just a communal experience of Christ.  No leadership in John, just the deeds and words of the risen, I mean crucified, I mean incarnate, I mean spirited One.  No worries about ethics in John, no catalogue of virtues or vices, just a single command, to love.  No hierarchy, patriarchy, oligarchy, ecclesiology in John.  Just this:  Spirit.  Another Counselor.  With you forever.  A guide into all further truth.  How is that going to work?  Exactly.  That is why we have the letters of John, uno dos y tres, because, clearly, it did not.  The letters add in:  leadership, orthodoxy, ethics, teaching, form, all.  They wake from the Johannine dream.  But what a dream!  A spirited dream of spirit befitting any high Calvinist view of Scripture and any high Catholic view of clergy.  A dream of Spirit, leading to truth, over time.  A fullness of fragrance, spirit in life.  As in Proust, ‘What matters is to transform common occurrence into art (NYRB, 3/13).’

You will recognize the story of the anointing at Bethany.  Sort of…

It is like the familiar parable (sic):  A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and saw a man who had fallen among thieves, so he went and he asked his father for his inheritance.  The father gave him seeds to plant, but most fell on rocky ground.  He appealed to a judge, who would not listen, and then to a dishonest steward, who would listen, but who stole the rest of the seeds, and then planted them and they multiplied thirty, sixty and a hundredfold.  But he left 99 of the fold and went after a lost sheep.  On the way, he stumbled on a lost coin, and put it in his tunic.  This will be like a mustard seed, he thought, which is small but grows a big plant.  He went back to his father and said, I am not worthy to be a son, but make me a worker in a vineyard, and pay me as much as you pay those who started at dawn.  Which of these do you think proved neighbor to the man who fell among thieves?

I know you remember that one.

That is, John has somehow combined a story which was also known to Mark, and used by Matthew, with a story from Luke, unused by Mark or Matthew, and has added his own special ingredients, Johnannine special sauce if you will.  Or maybe a redactor re-edited portions of this passage.  For the record: John has added Judas as the stingy knee jerk liberal; John has added Judas’ motive, not so liberal, of greed;  John has not kept Mark’s ethical admonition, ‘For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you want you can do good to them’. (But Matthew also apparently erased that sentence, for who knows what reason.)  John also has misplaced or erased the fine conclusion, which Mark writes and Matthew copies, wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her. John also neglects to repeat that Jesus said of Mary’s act that she has done a beautiful thing for me.  In other words, what has been told in John was not so much in memory of her, though perhaps in the rest of the whole world it was so.  Most delicately, Mark and John both use a rare adjective, rendered her by the English word ‘pure’, which comes in the original from the same root as the word ‘faith’.  The gospels repeated an admonition from Deuteronomy 15, ‘the poor are ever present’, not at all to discountenance care of the poor (so important to us, and rightly so), but to lift the fragrance, the wonder at the heart of the gospel, to the highest level. (Bultmann, perhaps rightly, hears here a reference to the full fragrance of gnosis spreading throughout the world.)

John, alone, fills the room with fragrance.  That is his point, here.  Incense, the sense of the holy, the mysterium tremendum, the idea of the holy, the presence.  Resurrection precedes crucifixion in this reading.  Crucifixion is merely a coming occasion for incarnation in this reading.  Incarnation is a lasting fragrance in this reading, the fullness of fragrance.

Friends

My friend Rev. John Holt says of his work in ministry:  ‘we are trying to help people discover their spiritual side so that they can make a difference for good in the world’.  That is what I am trying to do in and from this pulpit, trying to help people discover their spiritual side so that they can make a difference for good in the world.

Our poetic friend George Herbert wrote:

Love bade me welcome: yet my sould drew back, Guiltie of dust and sinne.

But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning, If I lack’d any thing.

A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here : Love said, You shall be he.

I the unkinde, ungratefull? Ah my deare, I cannot look on thee.

Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them : let my shame Go where it doth deserve.

And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame? My deare, then I will serve.

You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat. So I did sit and eat.

A friend, of some more years than I, brought her children to worship on Christmas eve.  Afterward, she asked each one—6,8, and11 years old—what they most liked.  Said 6, ‘I especially liked the candle, except the wax dripped on my finger and that hurt.  Said 8, ‘I liked communion and the way the choir music drew us forward, together, into it.  Said 11, ‘I like the way you feel after you have been to church’.  6,8,11—they came to themselves.  And grandma did too.

Our neighbor Ron Dworkin wrote before his death: I shall take these two—life’s instrinsic meaning and nature’s intrinsic beauty—as paradigms of a fully religious attitude to life…These are not convictions that one can isolate from the rest of one’s life.  They engage a whole personality.  They permeate experience:  they generate pride, remorse and thrill.  Mystery is an important part of that thrill. (NYTRB, 68, 3/13).

My friend Frank Halse has written of the presence, recently, a letter and seven poems.  Frank is a double Terrier, CLA\STH, now in his late eighties, a widower, living alone in the great snows of the Tug Hill Plateau.  He was the Protestant Chaplain at Syracuse University from 1965 to 1975.  He drew a short straw and did marvelous ministry.  He is a poet, and now his poetry is all about presence:

Dear Bob,

Joyce’s death left me empty.  Stunned even.  That emptiness stayed for the 1^st year.  Then, two years ago, I began to be bumping into something that I finally put a name down. ‘The Presence”.  My first experience with the mystic corners of our world.

I felt unprepared and awkward, but in time, I began to experience what can only be described as whisperings quietly in my ears.  So I began to struggle with poetry as I think I was hearing:

God is as close as my breath

My heart pulsing my breast

No search reveals the Presence;

Only exhaustion, tragedy, and

Failure will temper my vision to

The point where I can sense the

Presence who responds to my

Needs with gifts of patience

From:  F Halse, Epiphany at Kennebunk Pond, 8/16/01

Coda

On the Sacred, Marilynn Robinson:  So I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes.  I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation.  With all respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us.  The eternal as an idea is much less preposterous than time, and this very fact should seize our attention.  In certain contexts the improbable is called the miraculous.

What is eternal must always be complete, if my understanding is correct.  So it is possible that time was created in order that there might be narrative—event, sequence and causation, ignorance and error, retribution, atonement.  A word, a phrase, a story falls on rich or stony ground and flourishes as it can, possibility in a sleeve of limitation.  Certainly time is the occasion for our strangely mixed nature, in every moment differently compounded, so that often we surprise ourselves, and always scarcely know ourselves, and exist in relation to experience, if we attend to it and if its plainness does not disguised it from us, as if we were visited by revelation.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Not everything measurable is meaningful, and not everything meaningful is measurable.

The greater the sea of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of mystery surrounding it.

The world does not lack for wonders, but only for a sense of wonder.

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

posted in Lenten Series 2013: Marilynne Robinson, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.17.2013 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

Luke 15: 11

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Frontispiece

Have you ever found yourself on the edge, verge or cusp of a new insight, or maybe even on the edge of a new life?

How much do you need (to acquire, to achieve, to conquer) before you are open to God? Open my eyes that I may see…

Maybe this winter morning, this Lenten hour, you too will have a prodigal thought, and you will come to your self.  Such an interesting phrase.  But when he came to himself…On coming into his true self…

There was a man who had two sons.  Notice all that is not here, before us today.  No incarnation.  No pedagogy.  No transfiguration.  No temptation.  No trial.  No passion. No crucifixion.  No resurrection.  Only a story about a man with two sons.  One who stays home.  And one who goes away.  Most of the listenership and most of the congregation today know this story, or at least have a vague lingering memory of some of it.  With the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son is the most famous of Jesus’ parables, and rightly so.  It is the account of the lavish love, the personal love, the uncritical love, the joyful love, the parental love, the patient love, the courageous love, the magnanimous love, the ecstatic love, the gracious love—the love of God. For you.  God loves you.  You are loved, so you can love.  Because God loves me, I too can risk love.

A Turn of Phrase

Prodigal means extremely—extremely something:  wasteful, generous or abundant.  The verb is (an Aorist participle):  and coming (in) to himself (a moment in time, a process in thought).  “For till then he was beside himself, as all men are, so long as they are without God in the world.’ (J Wesley).

But notice that the gospel, love, is hinged today on a single phrase.  After his travel and squandering, and before his return and reception, the prodigal has a thought, a prodigal thought at that.  All of the gospel this Lord’s Lenten day turns on a thought.  When he came to himself…When he thought to himself…

Three pulpits ago Professor Roland Wolseley endured this minister’s more youthful preaching.  Now deceased, Dr Wolseley was the preeminent scholar in the field of African American journalism.  Through his post at Syracuse University he almost singlehandedly created the discipline, through the publication of many books, the guidance of doctoral students, and a dogged, fierce love of his field, the struggling saintly newspapers and journals of the black community.  Roland went to Medill in Chicago, at Northwestern.  There, in his twenties he fell under the spell of my own greatest pulpit hero, Ernest Freemont Tittle, at Evanston First UMC, then the largest UMC in the country.  Tittle, a pacifist, as was Wolseley, gathered a group of graduate students for fellowship and reconciliation.  Wolseley met his wife, Bernice, there, and she went on to be for many years Tittle’s secretary.  You can read about Tittle in Robert Moats Miller’s older biography, or in Christopher Evans more recent monograph.

In those Syracuse years, Roland, a person of deep faith and quiet humor, would trace the work of Tittle in contrast and connection to what he was hearing.  Occasionally, too occasionally, he would say, leaving church, ‘Tittle would be proud  of that one’.   Another of those early 1940’s graduate student couples, it happened, awaited us when we moved to Rochester, where Ruth and Vernon Lippitt then lived.  These people, young in the forties, were mature the eighties and nineties, but had lost nothing of their early conviction, a combination of deep personal faith and active social involvement, found decades earlier, in the arm of a University congregation.  Marsh Chapel:  the seeds you plant today will flower and blossom and grow for decades, with telling affect.  Faint not, fear not, flag not!

Roland also kept us alive during administrative meetings, using punctuative humor.  Our trustees usually hired the same painter, a fine painter named Bogus, when the decay of the building outran their native parsimony.  When they couldn’t wait any longer to the paint a room, they made a motion to ‘hire Mr. Bogus’.  After the motion and second, with practiced timing, and with all knowing what was coming, yet unable not to laugh when it did—some things are just funny for no real reason—Dr. Wolseley would compliment the recent extravagance of the trustees in hiring Bogus, then add, speaking of Bogus, ‘Is the is guy for real?’  In eleven years I think I heard that question thirty times—‘Is Bogus for real’?—and yet it always made me smile.  After three hours of administrative board meeting, it doesn’t take much, that is true.

Roland was a careful listener.  He wanted the best for preaching and preacher, and, from Tittle, he knew the best, and he knew the rest.  Once the sermon including the phrase “I thought to myself”.  Afterward he asked sharply, ‘Why the redundancy?  Just say, ‘I thought’.’  He was probably thinking of William Strunk, ‘omit needless words’, a fence I have long since jumped, as you have the scars to attest.  But I took his advice.

Except, today, with love and real affection for Roland who is now in heaven, we wonder…When he came to himself.  There is something in that lingering middle voice construct in a language like ours that has no middle voice, only active and passive, but has lingering forms like this one.  The phrase shows the mind circling on itself,when he came to himself.   We do this in memory, come to ourselves.  We do this in discovery, come to ourselves.  We do this in prayer, come to ourselves.  Give some Lenten minutes to memory, discovery and prayer.  We do this in those moments when we realize there is more to life than meets the eye.  When he have a prodigal thought.  A new, wayward, slightly reckless, excessive, extravagant, prodigous thought.

Gnostic Thought

Now I put it to you:  how long has it been since you have had a prodigal thought?  The prodigal son is prodigally reckless in departure.  But he is prodigally excellent and ecstatic in return.  His negative prodigality in descent is eclipsed by his positive prodigality in resurrection.  How long has it been since you have come to yourself?

Though no one says so, and to my knowledge no one has yet so written, Luke 15 may be the most Gnostic of chapters in the New Testament.  It is about gnosis, self knowledge, coming to oneself. As the Gnostics taught, we are trapped in a far country, a long way from our true home, like a man who has squandered his birthright, and moved from light to darkness.  As the Gnostics taught, we are meant to get home, to get back home, to get back out from under this earthly, fleshly, pig slop bodily existence, and back to higher ground, to heaven, to the heaven beyond heaven, to the land of light, to the loving father, like a prodigal son returning to the home that is truly his.  As the Gnostics taught, there is just one way to get back home, one key to the magic door.  That way and that key is knowledge, self knowledge, the knowledge of one’s own self—whence w come, wither we go.  As the Gnostics taught, salvation comes from this sort of esoteric, personal, soulful knowledge.  When he came to himself…

It is jarring, I give you that, to admit that this most traditional and most popular and most orthodox of parables may well have grown up outside the barn, outside the fences of mainstream Christianity.  But there is nothing orthodox about the prodigal and his coming to himself.  His is truly a prodigal thought.  I need to get back home.  Back to the land of light.  Back to the pleroma.  Back to the God beyond God.  No ‘Christ died for our sins’, here.  No ‘lamb of God’, here.  No settled orthodox Christology here.  No cross, no gory glory, no Gethsemane, no passion of the Christ, here.  It all comes down to self awareness, to awakening, to a moment of clarity.  When he came to himself.The parable of the Prodigal Son is the most Gnostic, most heterodox, most Johannine of them all.  Stuck here in the middle of Luke, read here in the middle of Lent, interpreted here in the middle of March.

The Gospel challenges us to come out from hiding.

You cannot hide behind a distrust of organized religion today.  The prodigal thought soars beyond that.  You cannot hide behind a disdain for clergy, for formality, for robes and choirs and altars and candles.  This prodigal thought pierces all that.  You cannot behind the hideous moments in religious and Christian history—many there be—as a way to fend off the gospel, at least not this morning.  The knife cuts deeper, to the deeps, to your very soul.

You cannot hide on the left behind a critique of Catholicism today.  Prodigal thought soars beyond that.  You may reject the celibacy of the priesthood, the sacrifice of the mass, the subordination of women, and the infallibility of the pope.  But many, very many, Catholics do the same.  No, the gospel undercuts your smart but narrow critique, and asks about your soul.  You do have one you know.

I cannot hide on the right behind a critique of Calvinism today.  Prodigal thought soars beyond that.  I may reject Calvinist total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints.  Not all saints persevere, grace is resistible, atonement limitation is not divine, election has a human dimension, and depravity, well, it certainly is present, but not total.  But you know, many Calvinists, very many, would agree.  No, the gospel undercuts my own smart but narrow critique, and asks about my soul. I do have one, you know.

It asks whether you are coming to know yourself?  Are you?  This is the parable, oddly enough, that calls the seekers’ bluff.   Today the Gospel attacks where you have finally no ready defense.  It moves to your mind, your soul, your own most self.

Calvinist Interlocutor Lent 2013 M Robinson

As our Calvinist Lenten preaching partner this Lent, M Robinson, writes in The Death of Adam, and in Absence of Mind, prodigal thought is soul thought, and meant to change your life. She is a powerful voice today honoring the mind. A prodigal thought is a tussle between the mind and the world, the mind and the soul, the mind and itself.  Give her voice some space in your mind:

It all comes down to the mystery of the relationship between the mind and the cosmos. 3…

Consider…The deeply pensive solitudes that bring individuals into congregations and communities to be nurtured by the thought and culture they find there 9…The mind as felt experience…

We suffer today the exclusion of the felt life of the mind 35…A central tenet of the modern world view is that we do not know our own minds, motives or desires 59

The mind is an illusion according to modern theory… The renunciation of religion in the name of reason and progress has been strongly associated with a curtailment of the assumed capacities of the mind… 75

Yet we have… A singular capacity for wonder as well as for comprehension 72…

For the religious, the sense of the soul may have as a final redoubt, not as argument but as experience, that haunting I who wakes us in the night wondering where time has gone, the I we waken to, sharply aware that we have been unfaithful to ourselves, that a life lived otherwise would have acknowledged a yearning more our own than any of the daylit motives whose behests we answer to so diligently

Soul is…a name for an aspect of deep experience  116… The self that stands apart from itself, that questions, reconsiders, appraises. 119…

How does your soul fare?  Are you open to the challenge of a prodigal thought—in memory, in discovery, in prayer?

When He Came to Himself in Memory

In my fifties I have come to myself, at least in one sense.  I realize I now have time for opportunities I no longer have.  Once I had opportunity but no time.  Now I have time but no opportunity. I walked on the Charles River the other wind swept day, along the northern bank, along Memorial Drive.  The wind blew hard and cold.  Now seven years into a delightful deanship, with things rolling, no tenure to earn, ten books out, 1000 sermons written and delivered, and so on, I have the real mental and spiritual freedom easily to converse with my dad.  But he is dead.  Now that I have time I don’t have him.  When I had him I didn’t have time.  Now I have the time.  Stepping along the river bank, in the heart of the city of Boston he so loved, across the river from the University he so loved, thinking of him whom I so loved, I came to myself.  And what would I not give for another conversation with him?  You know this in your own experience.  I am driven to memory, and saved by memory.

When He Came To Himself in Discovery

Our son is a thirty five year old lawyer in Albany, NY.   He wrote a letter to the editor of the paper there, about a man in his church who had died:

“The front page article ‘Religion? More reply ‘none’”, Oct 21, about the decline in our community, particularly in my demographic, forced me to think about why I still go to church, despite its flaws.  As I continued through the paper, I found my answer in the obituaries.

“I met Dr. Wesley Bradley at Trinity UMC about five years ago.  I was immediately drawn to him—to the earnestness of his handshake, to the comforting advice he offered me as a new dad, to the way he proudly strolled down Lark Street with his lovely bride as if it were their first date

“Although I did not know the extent of Dr. Bradley’s professional accomplishments until I read his obituary, I knew the greatness of his grace.  I witnessed the faith that had sustained him and I learned from his humble and caring example.

“The church provides a time and place for God’s grace to touch and connect us.  But for church I would not have known Dr. Bradley.  My soul, which now grieves his passing, would have remained unaffected.

“I go to church to feed my soul.  It’s not the only way to do it, but I think Dr. Bradley’s life of faith is worth my generation’s consideration.”

When He Came To Himself in Prayer

We stood with 500 eighteen year olds gathered Thursday evening past, in the wake of the death of our 18 year old student.  For many, in their teens, a first harsh encounter with death.  In a secular gathering they offered a secular prayer.  Some came to themselves that evening, thinking:

“We mean to be thoughtful, and to be together in our thoughtfulness.

We are not alone in our thoughts.  We have each other to lean on.

We will lean on our friends,  those with whom we can share a hug.

We will lean on our groups, classes, dorm and hallway neighbofrs, those who know our names and call us by name.

We will lean on our own traditions of memory and hope, so significant, now, those words and events and stories that place all experience in ultimate perspective.

We will lean on our religious traditions, wherein we sing and kneel.

We will lean on our faith, that dimension of life that is deepest and truest to our own most self, our soul, the dimension of deep experience.

We will lean on some snippets and memories of words and phrases—goodness and mercy will follow me, let us love one another, love is God, let us watch over one another in love.

We may be moved to wonder again, at life, the meaning of life, the boundaries of life, and our own choices and actions and words therein.

We will be thoughtful and we are not alone in our thoughts.”

Coda

Memory. Discovery. Prayer. What will it take for you?  How much more do you need (to acquire, to achieve, to conquer) before you are open to God?  God is patient.  He waits.  Like a dad who has time when his son does not.  He waits.  He waits at home, hoping for little dust rising on the trail a long way off, sign of a boy coming home.  He waits at home, knowing the pig husks we can mistake for real food.  He waits at home, having already given more than enough in inheritance.  He waits at home, awaiting that moment that may come—today?—in a far country, in a rough circumstance, in an unwelcoming place.  That moment of prodigal thought….But when he came to himself…My life flows on in endless song…

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

posted in Lenten Series 2013: Marilynne Robinson, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.10.2013 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

Luke 13: 1-9

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This Lent in our preaching we converse with Marilynn Robinson.  Each year we have chosen a voice from the Reformed tradition, a tradition different from the Methodism of Marsh Chapel, with whom to learn and grow, from whom to develop a fuller sense of discipleship, in whom to find ways to expand our circles of faithfulness.  So these years we have heard also from Bonhoeffer, Barth, Ellul, Edwards, Calvin and from varieties of interpretation of the Atonement.

Robinson is a contemporary novelist and essayist, and a Calvinist, perhaps the strongest living American exponent of Calvinism.  Her depiction of the Rev. John Ames, in the novels Gilead and Home, has been deeply meaningful to many of us.  Her writing celebrates the privilege, terror and joy of pastoral ministry.  Her writing celebrates the goodness of village life.  Her writing celebrates providential grace.  Her writing celebrates the power of story, of parable.  Her writing celebrates the beauty of the world around us.  Listen to her voice in that of the Rev. John Ames, depicting dawn in Iowa:

“I love the prairie! So often I have seen the dawn come and the light flood over the land and everything turn radiant at once, that word ‘good’ so profoundly affirmed in my soul that I am amazed I should be allowed to witness such a thing. There may have been a more wonderful first moment ‘when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy’, but for all I know to the contrary, they still do sing and shout, and they certainly might well. Here on the prairie there is nothing to distract attention from the evening and the morning, nothing on the horizon to abbreviate or to delay. Mountains would seem an impertinence from that point of view.”

Jesus taught in parables, stories with a point.  Two today, the latter which affirms a second chance to love, the former which acknowledges random hurt. They challenge us to follow their form and tell our own parables, two today. The first challenges us not to take for granted those closest to us.  That is the point of the parable:  care for those closest to you.  The second reminds us of the hurts hidden in each human soul.  That is the point of the parable:  remember that every heart has secret sorrows.

Let us care for those closest to us…

Some time ago, in a small upstate village, there lived a man and a woman. They were of middle age and middle class. In fact, they ran their own business, a “mom and pop” store. Through the village, the man was known for the attention which he showed his partner. He doted on her. He opened doors and bought flowers and made compliments. For her part, she also was devoted to her man. She stood by her man. She baked and sewed and entertained. In church, they sat in the front pew, holding hands for the Sunday observance.

The pastor in the town for years admired them, and during wedding services would quietly pray, Lord make these young people like them, devoted to each other. One night the pastor was invited to visit the home of these two lovebirds. After the usual chitchat, it became clear that something was afoot. Wringing his hands and sweating, the man awkwardly asked, at last, whether the pastor would have any qualms about performing a wedding ceremony. “Not at all,” the parson replied. “For whom?” Silence followed, the man coughed, and the woman blushed. Dimly, the pastor realized that the wedding was to be theirs. Yes, they had come to the village many years ago, had fallen in love and worked together, and then lived to together, first in aid of their business, and then as the townsfolk began to refer to them as MR and MRS, they began to relax and enjoy one another. They were very happy.

The wedding ensued, quietly performed in the parsonage living room.

Exactly one month to the day after the wedding, late at night, the parsonage phone rang. The man, panic stricken began in a rush, “It’s all over.” Our marriage doesn’t work. Please come and help us.” The pastor took the two aside to hear their confessions. “For years, you were so happy, and now, married, you are not? What has happened?” The man began, “Well, it used to be, you know, I just never knew whether she would stay. We weren’t really married. She was free to go. So every day was special. I watched what I said, and I watched what I did, and I watched her. I wanted to please her. But somehow, after that ceremony, I let down. I guess I figured she was there to stay now, so it didn’t matter. I think I took her for granted.” And he cried. The woman also reported, “It used to be that every day was an adventure.  I knew he could leave at any time. Every meal might be our last. Then we actually got married and I let down. I guess I figured it didn’t matter as much now. I think I took him for granted. Pastor, what are we going to do?” After more hours of tears and talking, the pastor finally prepared to leave the home. As he left he commanded the couple to promise each other that from that moment forward, they would live as if they were not married. He said to the husband, “You are to live as if you have no wife.”  So he interpreted Scripture, I Cor. 7:25.

Marilynn Robinson in two fine novels, Gilead and Home, over the past several years, has given you a sympathetic reading of determinism (fundamental or radical), which, ultimately, though cautiously, she rejects.  Here is the climax of Home:

This second book places the apparently damned Jack in earshot of a young woman who has married an old preacher:

“Just stay for a minute”, she said, and Jack sat back in his chair and watched her, as they all did, because she seemed to be mustering herself.  Then she looked up at him and said, ‘A person can change. Everything can change’…Jack said, very gently, ‘Why thank you, Mrs. Ames.  That’s all I wanted to know’. (p 228)

(and)

There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error…You must forgive in order to understand.  Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding…If you forgive…you may indeed still not understand, but you will be ready to understand, and that is the posture of grace (p 45)

Luke 13, a second chance with the fig tree to love.  Luke 13, a remembrance of shared, random hurt.  One lesson:  do not take for granted those closest to you.  A second: every heart has secret sorrows.

Remember that every heart has secret sorrows…

Several decades ago, a poor boy was growing up in a small town along the Finger Lakes. His family worked hard, but had little extra, and so he would work himself on a neighboring farm. There he became friends with the farmer’s son, a boy about his own age. They became fast friends, cleaning the barn, and milking, chasing the cattle in the summer, filling the hay mow. At Christmas the farmer gave both boys trumpets. They sat down together and carved their names into the handles. Then they fell to practicing, and found the joy of music. Every night, after chores, the poor boy would cross the valley and ascend the hillside where his home lay. Then, as night fell, he would turn and face across the valley toward his friend, and slowly play a melody. Then, with the other trumpet, the friend would reply. “Day is dying in the west…” For some years this was their habit, and the farm folk and villagers in this Finger Lake region came to rely on the trumpet duet as a call to evening prayer.

Then, the farmer’s son was drafted and, in short order word came that he had died in the great world war. The poor boy was devastated. He had known little of the comfort of life, and little of friendship, and now, what he had known, was taken away. He became bitter, and his life drifted on, building itself around the heartache at the center of his soul. He grew old. One day the pastor came to call. The pastor dreaded the visit in this home, because there was so much hurt, and so little comfort. On this day he happened to ask if there was any good memory, any happy memory that the man could share. After some silence, the man replied, and told the story of the two trumpets. He told of his friendship, his love of music, his acceptance in the farmer’s home, his bitterness at the tragic loss. The pastor asked to see the trumpets, and then asked if he might borrow them.

Some weeks later, the old and bitter man was seated rocking on the porch, in the summer heat. Suddenly, a familiar tune came his way. From his left afar off he heard, “Day is dying in the west…” and then from the right “Holy Holy Holy…” It came closer… and closer… and with every verse, somehow, a bit of the faded memory came clearer. Two boys, high school age, came playing the trumpets, grateful for their use, prompted by the pastor to offer this tribute. What a precious gift a friendship is, the old one thought. How lucky I am to have known even briefly, its power.   The parable interprets for us the meaning of the psalmist, Psalm 100.

Marilynn Robinson could put it this way:

Come to the table of remembrance, and of presence, and of thanksgiving.

Greet and so be greeted, here, by the Lord Jesus Christ, our Lenten Grace, of whom we sing, ‘Blessed is He whom comes in the name of the Lord.

As those who have known betrayal, in the active and the passive tenses and senses, come for mercy.

Join the angelic chorus, singing hosannas, in the highest, meaning the very height of heaven.

Make of this moment a readiness to join lasting banquet, the heavenly banquet of grace, freedom, and love.

As Christ offers Himself, come to offer yourself, to love, for God and neighbor.

Come, partake.  Receive with grace the Lenten Grace.

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

posted in Lenten Series 2013: Marilynne Robinson, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.3.2013 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

Luke 9:28-43a

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The Gospel from Luke for this second Sunday of Lent might strike you as a little odd, perhaps even disjointed. What does transfiguration have to do with an exorcism? Both the congregation and, I will admit, the preacher might have preferred that this excerpt from the 9^th chapter of Luke stop with verse 36, before we get to the part with that lovely quote from Jesus that more often finds itself redacted and deployed as a slogan in hate speech or internet trolling than engaged with in any meaningful way. But, so it goes; the verses march on after verse 36. And, in a way, it is helpful from time to time to read a slightly messier lectionary reading, because it reminds us that this is how the Gospels are constructed. The authors of our gospels were compiling the stories and traditions of Jesus and His Disciples, and if you sit down to read the middle chapters in the synoptic gospels, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, you will find little phrases to string together various parts of the Jesus tradition to create a sequential strand of parables and miracles, teaching and preaching. The Gospel writers concerned themselves with a message to a 1^st-century audience, not with satisfying a 21^st century continuity check. My favorite example of this is the Gospel of Mark; Jesus crosses the lake so often it looks as though the disciples are running a ferry service.  It is well worth the hour or two it takes to sit down and read one of the Synoptics in a single sitting, to pay attention to the beautiful patchwork-quilting process that is the Gospel.

This week, our gospel reading from Luke frames two small patches of the quilt, a transfiguration and an exorcism. One day, the disciples are witness to the greatest heights of humanity’s encounter with the divine; they see the possibilities of the better angels of our nature. The very next, they bumble their way through the ministerial trenches; in fear of the messiness of sin and illness, they fall away from the grace which first overtook them. There are two stories, two days,  two lessons to our Gospel this morning. The first is familiar, stirring, enchanting: the blossoming of faith, the transcendent beauty of assurance. Faith is the Joy of the Lord and the Church.  We love when individuals are overtaken by faith. The second is strange, discomfiting, bracing: the growth of faith, the hard work of sanctification. Discipleship is the Crown of Faith and the Church. We long for individuals to become disciples, just as we long for the transformation of the church, the one body, to the body of Christ’s glory.

Faith is a deeply personal transformative experience that is often fostered in the midst of community. You hear a word over the radio that touches something deep inside the very fiber of your being. You hear a word which speaks to where you are in your life. You close your eyes and let the forte waves of a choir wash over you. You hear some music that awakens some feeling in you. You have a deeply meaningful conversation, you feel safe enough to ask someone you trust the difficult questions, and you feel a sense of peace deep within your soul.  You find your heart strangely warmed, you come to kneel at the altar rail, you accept Jesus as your personal Lord and savior. Different denominations, local churches, and worship styles have diverse ways of fostering the sort of atmosphere through which God’s grace can flow. But the electricity of God’s grace is able to be conducted through a number of materials, and the result is faith awakened in the soul.

It is important at the outset of Lent to hear a word about faith, about assurance, about presence, about the personal experience of the divine. You heard such a word last week from Dean Hill. It is important to begin Lent with a shoring up of faith, an experience of beauty, learning, comfort, assurance. It nourishes us, it can sustain us for the forty days of reflection and fasting to come. But after worship on Sunday, after the first few days of Lent, after the first few moments of faith, comes the question, “What comes next?”  What about Monday morning? What about the rest of Lent? What about the rest of life?

A preschool put on a production of the Ugly Duckling, the beloved Hans Christian Andersen tale. It combined the best parts of early childhood education: group singing, moving on and off stage in a straight line, a moral lesson, and of course, a crafts project. Each child would make her own set of wings, with help, of course. Cutting with safety scissors, using an Elmer’s glue bottle, carefully attaching feathers, and filling in the gaps with marker. It was the ideal craft for a small child, messy and fascinating. Almost all the children used bright yellow; Big Bird-color feathers and a sunny yellow marker. These were the ducklings. One boy and one girl, though, were selected to be the ugly ducklings in the production. They had the same work to do as the other children: cutting, gluing, attaching, coloring. Their feathers were a dull grey-brown, the name of their Crayola marker was more optimistic than it looked: “golden beige.” But they had to put in twice as much work as their classmates; they had the rare preschool homework assignment. Each had to make a whole second pair of wings, to cut, glue, attach, and color all over again. It took forever, but this time, there was glitter, whole tubes of silver and gold glitter and bright, iridescent feathers. Twice the work, to be sure, but this little boy and little girl got to do a quick costume change during the production, to exchange their wings to become swans.

Don’t we all want to be swans? Don’t we all want a chance to exchange our wings? To put down the burdensome wings of our sin, shame, our old lives? Faith means we get to put down the old wings of our lives, to start over again, to molt the old feathers. And that is beautiful, saving grace, that we get a costume change in life. But something happens after that. To put on new wings, to molt, we need to cut, glue, attach, and glitter that new set of wings. We don’t do it alone. We do it by the grace of God and with the support of a community of faith, but we still have homework to do.  We have help, but we need to make that second set of wings.

In Methodist circles and beyond we often talk about John Wesley’s Aldersgate experience. Wesley’s journal entries record the moment, and his words have been edited to a catchphrase of sorts for the conversion experience. I’m sure you know, that evening May 24, 1738 when John Wesley felt “his heart strangely warmed.” The phrase is a darling of the theological left and the right, it is beloved as his conversion moment. We really focus on it. On May 24, 1738, John Wesley went to a meeting, and on hearing Luther’s Preface to the Epistle on the Romans, he felt his heart strangely warmed.

What happened the next day? What did John Wesley do when he when he went home that evening? What about when he woke up the next morning? Wesley writes that he went home that evening to pray, but soon felt the nagging question in his head, “This cannot be faith; for where is the joy?” He continued to pray late into the night. The next morning, he woke up, went to church, and sang a hymn. Again, another nagging question.  He writes, “If thou dost believe, why is there not a more sensible change? I answered, “That I know not. But, this I know, I have ‘now peace with God.’ And I sin not today, and Jesus my Master has forbidden me to take thought for the morrow.” The next journal entry comes over a week later, June 7, when John writes that he has decided to go to Germany, to spend some time with the Moravians.  He writes the following, “And I hoped the conversing with those holy men who were themselves living witnesses of the full power of faith, and yet able to bear with those that are weak, would be a means, under God, of so establishing my soul that I might go on from faith to faith, and from ‘strength to strength.’”

John Wesley’s Aldersgate moment, his coming to a deeper and truer sense of his own faith, his conversion moment did not mean that he never doubted again. It did not mean that he woke up a saint the next day, and it certainly did not mean that his work as a Christian was done because he had felt assurance. He had to wake up the next day and take the next step. Faith began the hard work, faith empowered him for the hard work, the cutting and gluing and pasting of the wings of his new life. After Aldersgate John Wesley continued to pray, he went to church, he sang hymns, and he went and found others to accompany him on the journey of “establishing his soul.” Wesley had begun the process of sanctification. Soon he would be establishing Sunday school s so poor children could learn to read, soon he would be preaching to crowds in the field, soon he would be riding all over the countryside, establishing meetings, working with the urban poor. These were the next steps in John’s lifelong process of growing in faith and faithfulness. And this is what the Lenten journey is all about. Lent is a time of fasting, remembrance, and hopefully, growth. Lent is about the long life-process of faith, it is about the next day, the next step.

Far too often in the church we act like a bunch of normal looking ducklings. We don’t own up to our status as ugly ducklings, we don’t concern ourselves with the work of cutting, gluing, pasting, and glittering our new wings. On the theological right, we demand that all ducklings must look alike to be real ducklings. Our faith cannot be genuine unless we meet certain the ideological litmus tests about certain social issues, unless we have a very particular conversion experience, unless we offer a convincing testimony of that conversion. We peck at ducklings that don’t look like we do, who don’t fall into perfect line with all the other ducklings. Our feathers get ruffled too easily. We don’t connect our concern for personal piety with a continued dedication to our social holiness. We content ourselves with one set of wings, because we don’t put in the work to make a new pair.

On the theological left, we pretend our own feathers will never molt, that we will maintain the same, idealistic adorable yellow fluff for the duration of our worship, avoiding difficult topics such as sin or evil. We think our faith is enough because we offer a moving experience through our music, our worship, our preaching, because we have the “right” experience. Or, we set out in a cute duckling line to save the world before receiving our police escort, a la Make Way For Ducklings back to our ecclesiastical island in the middle of the Public Garden. We peck at ducklings that don’t look like we do, who don’t fall into perfect line with all the other ducklings. Our feathers get ruffled too easily. We don’t connect our concern for social holiness with a continued dedication to our personal piety. We content ourselves with one set of wings, because we don’t put in the work to make a new pair.

If there was one theological doctrine that John Wesley caught the most flack for, it was Christian perfection. John Wesley believed so much in the continued process of growth, healing, and restoration in our lives of faith.  He believed that God, working in us, could truly “take away our bent to sinning,” as his brother’s hymn phrases it. In critiquing this doctrine, people focus too much on the telos, the goal, on the perfection. Wesley never claimed to get there himself, but he really emphasized the life-long journey of sainthood, of working hard to become just a little more holy every day. That is the discipline of the Christian life.

Discipline. Disciple. Both words come from the Latin discipulus which originally, before it gets caught up in Christian Latin, refers to a student. Someone who follows a teacher, learns from them, imitates them. When we are called to be and to make disciples, we are called to be and make students, life-long students of Christ.  You may come to Marsh Chapel or tune in on the radio because you like the preaching or the fellowship or the music, and those are all good and true things. But I imagine that there is something also drawing you to a community of faith grounded in a place of learning, Boston University. There is something invigorating, enlivening, transforming about working with, worshipping among, and listening to college students. Maybe it reminds you of your own student days, maybe it connects you to a child or grandchild you have in college. Beloved, whether you are a freshman or coming up on your 50^th high school reunion, your student days are not behind you! You are called to be a life-long student of Christ, to continue to learn and grow in faith and wisdom, and to participate in the learning community that is the Church.

It’s a little ironic, to be sure, but the very best description I have ever encountered for our sanctification comes not from John or Charles or any one of the Wesleys, but from a Baptist preacher and teacher, a lifelong student, the Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman. The Rev. Dr. Robin Olson used this quote as the focus of our Marsh Chapel winter reading retreat, and I just could not get it out of my head. In The Inward Journey, Howard Thurman writes,

"There must be always remaining in the individual life some place for the singing of angels-some place for that which in itself is breathlessly beautiful and by an inherent prerogative, throwing all the rest of life into a new and creative relatedness-something that gathers up in itself all the freshets of experience from drab and commonplace areas of living and glows in one bright light of penetrating beauty and meaning-then passes. The commonplace is shot through with new glory-old burdens become lighter, deep and ancient wounds lose much of their old, old hurting. A crown is placed over our heads that for the rest of our lives we are trying to grow tall enough to wear. Despite all the crassness of life, despite all the hardness of life, despite all the harsh discords of life, life is saved by the singing of angels."

A crown is placed over our heads that for the rest of our lives we are trying to grow tall enough to wear. We must always open ourselves for the transcendent – the singing of angels.  But those moments pass, and then we have some growing to do to reach for that crown.

This Lent, stand up a little straighter. Try for a little more discipline in your life, with your money, your choices, your consumption. Grow a little taller. Pray a bit more, imitate someone whose example you admire, find a spiritual accountability buddy, an accountabilabuddy. Reach for that crown. What is that next step in your faith life? Where is your spiritual comfort zone, and how can you get out of it? Try having a chat with someone outside your age bracket after church today. What is their vision for the Church, for Marsh Chapel, for the life of faith? Begin to trace out for yourself a new pair of wings.

I am increasingly convinced that people come to faith, they shadow the walls of our churches, they tune in and sit up, when they see sanctification being modeled. There have been plenty of Christian experiments focusing on justification, on the come to Jesus moment. I am convinced that we are not being honest with people about what it means to be a Christian unless we are telling them about what comes next, unless we are modeling what comes next through our own discipleship, our own process of sanctification. What is the next step for you as a disciple? What is the next step for Marsh Chapel’s discipleship? How are we cutting, gluing, pasting, and glittering our way to greater holiness, to help create the sort of wings that can bear people up so that they are not dashed against the stones of life?

People come to faith when they see a community that models sanctification.  This is not an excuse to be holier than thou, but it is, I believe, a truer invitation to a lasting relationship. Beloved, how are we continuing to learn together as a community of faith, as disciples? How are we, as the body of Christ, being conformed to the body of His glory? This Lent, beloved, may we take those next steps toward discipleship, toward holiness in our lives. When we do, both on the mountaintop and back in the messiness of the city we will be astounded by the greatness of God.

Amen.

~Rev. Jennifer Quigley, Chapel Associate for Vocational Discernment

posted in The Rev. Dr. Jennifer Quigley on 02.24.2013 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

Romans 10

Luke 13

Psalm 31

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Frontispiece

There come wintery episodes in the course of a snow 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 frozen, snowed in.

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.

(Over the years I have grown frustrated by my 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 so bone marrow close to my own life, happiness, hope, ministry, faith.  And he also I think was wrestling with the limits of our beautiful language.  Anyway, you by nature and discipline live the thoughtfeeling gospel, and for that I am 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, 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—let it guide you along.  So you may be able to murmur: ‘I can do this…I can make my way…I can find a handhold or foothold…I can abide in this shadow…For now I can abide here…I can make it for now, at least for now, for the time being.’

This Lent we shall await a word about war and peace, about drones and defense, about our beloved country in this year of our Lord.  We will rightly desire a word of interpretation about a passage in Scripture—Old Testament, Gen. 22, or Epistle, Rom 10. or Gospel, Luke 4.   This Lent we will rightly desire a communication about how to live, in discipline and obedience and faith, during a time of penitence and preparation and we will want a word from our Lenten conversation partner Marilynn Robinson.  All in due time.  Today , first, though, the word, near to us, on our lips and in our heart, is a word of faith, the given courage to abide in the shadow. Health is such a word, and very salvation, for those who are stumbling a bit and stumbling about in the dark today.  On this plea for faith all our other attentions depend.  So says the 91 Psalm.

Today the psalmist lifts a hymn of faith, a song of courage in the face of adversity.  He speaks from his experience.  He teaches, like a grandfather teaching a grandson.  Spinning a fishing fly.  Boiling the sap down in the sugar house.  Watching a basketball game.  Watching the sun set.

Given the wintery snares, cold air illness, icy night terrors, and snow bound disease, noonday destruction, evil, scourge, wild beasts of this very day, it could be that a sober reading of the 91^st psalm, a trusting hymn of a faithful heart, will sustain us this morning.  In this psalm we are promised divine deliverance in five ways…So…

1. Deliverance from snares…

Our singer is a person of simple faith.  He has one, and only one, word for us:  You are covered.  Abide in the shadow.

We could make many complaints about this hymn and its singer.  He has a dangerously simple view of evil, especially for the complexity of a post-modern world.  He has a way of implying that trust, or belief, are rewarded with safety, a notion that Jesus in Luke 13 scornfully dismisses, and we know to be untrue.  He has an appalling lack of interest in the scores of others, other than you, who fall by the wayside.  He seems to celebrate a foreordained, foreknown providence that ill fits our sense of the openness of God to the future, and the open freedom God has given us for the future.  He makes dramatic and outlandish promises not about what might happen, but about what will be.  As a thinking theologian, this psalmist of psalm 91 fails.  He fails us in our need to rely on something sounder and truer than blind faith.  He seems to us to be whistling past the graveyard.

And yet… for those who have walked past a February graveyard or two, for those who have walked the valley of the shadow of death, for a country at war for a decade now, for a world searching to match its ideals of peace with its realities of hatred, for you today if you are in trouble, and who are worried today about others and other graves and other yards, and who have seen the hidden traps, unforeseeable dangers, and steel jawed snares of life, there is something encouraging about this simple song:  “he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler”.

2. Deliverance from illness…

Our writer is not a philosopher.  He is a musician, perhaps, but not a systematic thinker.  He has one interest:  getting by, getting through, getting out, and getting home.  So he does not worry about the small stuff.  In fact, I have a sense that the psalmist is desperate.  His 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.  Yet you see all the pestilence about you in homes and institutions and nations, so you wonder, is it worth the risk?  You are not sure.

This hymn of the heart is one you sing when you are not sure, but you are confident.  Not certain, but confident.  You can be confident without being certain.  In fact, a genuine honest confidence includes the confidence to admit you are not sure.  Faith means risk.  Isn’t that part of what we mean by faith?  Our writer is at that point, the point of decision.  Once you are there, you have to choose between walking forward and slinking away.  It becomes very simple.  Either God lives or not.  Either God is in Christ or not.  Either God in Christ touches us by Spirit or not.  Either we move forward in faith, or not.  Choose.  And the Psalmist wants his student or grandson or parishioner to choose in faith.  So he urges:  abide in the shadow of the Almighty ... “He will deliver you from the deadly pestilence.”

3. Deliverance from night terror…

Our psalmist is speaking just here to our immediate need.  Fear not the terror of the night.  Go about your discipleship:  pray, study, learn, make peace, love your neighbor, agree to disagree agreeably, every one be convinced in his own mind.  The night is not as terrifying as you fear…”You will not fear the terror of the night”.

4.  Deliverance from noonday destruction…

It is in the heart of the Psalm that one senses the singer’s desperation.  There is an irrational side to his message.  ‘Thousands will fall but you will be spared.’  It will not help us to ask about the ethics of this promise.  Nor will it help us to question the sense of destiny involved here.  I hear this psalm in another way.  I hear it as a father’s prayer, or a mother’s dearest hope.  I cannot help but think that this psalm perfectly captures the hope, the visceral hope, which this decade has been on the minds of our own parents of soldiers and sailors.  Noonday destruction will not come near you.  I pray that noonday destruction will not come near you.

I remember a Day Care center where I used to see notes pinned to the coats and sweaters of daycare toddlers.   This psalm is a note pinned to the shirt of a loved one heading into danger.  When there is nothing else we can give our daughters and sons we want them to have faith.  Faith to go forward, bravely, without being sure of what they will find at noonday.  And we are passionately desperate for one hope: that they will come home.  And we sing the song without any chords of doubt, because we want to admit none.  We make no uncertain sound because we want our beloved to carry no worry, but to be armed with the confidence of the Lord.  This is a battle hymn.  It is the kind of song you sing to yourself when all about you there is mayhem.  If I were a chaplain it is the kind of psalm I might give to a soldier to memorize by day and recite by night in the face of mayhem.  “You will not fear the destruction that wastes at noonday.”

5.  Deliverance from evil…

The teacher implores his student to make God his place of dwelling, his home.  To rest in God, so that all else is secondary.  Evil will not befall, or at least will not define, such an one.  How can someone escape all evil?  We know better.  We know that evil touches us all.  But this misses the meaning of the poem.  The writer is praying!  In the same way we pray, every Sunday.  Deliver him from evil!  Not from some, or most, almost all evil, but from evil!  Religion is a matter of the heart before it is a matter of the head.  As Wesley said, the mind is the bit and bridle, but the heart is the great horse, the mighty steed of faith.  “He will give his angels charge of you to guard you in all your ways.  On their hands they will bear you up, lest you dash your foot against a stone.”

Coda:  “I will deliver him…”

Deliverance from snares, illness, terror, destruction, and evil.

Our psalm ends, as does this sermon, at the edge of a remarkable announcement.  Like lightening flashing over a darkened sky, or like a burst of sunlight separating clouds, the voice of the poem shifts.  God speaks directly to the human heart.  It is a shift devoutly to be desired.  All of the speaking, from teacher to student and grandfather to grandson, all of the instructional lines are now interrupted, and on a grand scale, and on a profound scale.  Like Yahweh addressing Job, the psalm ends with a divine word.  It is a shift, yes, devoutly to be desired.  It is what we hope will happen with every one of our children.  It is what we hope will happen in every one of our worship services.  Frankly, it is what we hope will happen in every sermon.  All the rest gives way to…God.  Now the fumbling voice of the teacher is replaced by a divine voice. Now the Lord speaks in the first person, and his word is a lasting joy:  “I will deliver him…I will protect him…I will answer him…I will be with him…I will rescue him…I will honor him”

When we have nothing else to go on, there is something irreducibly solid, something strong and good—the divine voice in the faith of Christ---to which we may cleave and cling.  Finally, this is what brings you to the pew and me to the pulpit and us to the church, the hope that something may be said and heard that is divine, saving, satisfying and true.  In the silence that follows all our speaking, like the priestly verses that follow the human voice in this psalm, we may hear something that changes everything.  So Charles Wesley, as ever, in perfect pitch:

Let us plead for faith alone

Faith which by our works is shown

God it is who justifies

Only faith the grace supplies

Active faith that lives within

Conquers hell and death and sin

Hallows whom it first made whole

Forms the Savior in the soul

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

posted in Lenten Series 2013: Marilynne Robinson, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 02.17.2013 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

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For those new to our service of worship, present here or listening from afar, we warmly offer an especial word of grace and welcome, on this blizzard weekend Sunday.  Your own church may have been closed today, and so you are listening.  Your hockey game, or neighborhood gathering, or personal commitment may have been cancelled due to weather, and so you are with us.  In other words, snow, like grace, may have interrupted or intervened or interceded into the otherwise well laid plans of life.  Good! Welcome.

New to all this, you may not have heard our regular dialogue sermons, come Bach Cantata Sunday.  Allow, then, a brief explanation.  Our envisioned mission at Marsh Chapel, to be a ‘heart for the heart of the city and a service in the city’, extends by radio and internet to the whole globe, the heart and service of the city of the whole earth.  We lift the praises of God with the guidance and support of JS Bach.  Why Bach?  Because Bach is the best.  Bach is world regarded as the very best.  In Europe, in Asia, in the Americas, around the globe, Bach is the best, and we want the very best for our service of worship.  Bach brings the globe together.

In order then to make the Holy Scriptures read for the day, and the Cantata for the day, as meaningful and accessible as possible, to as many as possible, from the 19 year old undergraduate in the third pew to the 89 year old widower listening in Scituate, Dr Jarrett and I have over several years now offered a dialogue sermon on these Cantata days, meant to merge music and word in the very Gospel, the word of God.  This form of preaching is, if not unique to our Marsh work, at least unusual and special, and in that we take great joy.  It is one gift we lay upon the altar, in heart and service.

Today we bring you a word of faith, a word about faith, a word in faith for those who may, like the Samaritan of old, feel themselves outside of the formal community of faith.  Faith is God’s gift to you today.

Yet if there are 60,000 people now listening to our radio broadcast service, 40,000, it may be, well identify with a phrase from this past week’s Washington prayer breakfast.  The speaker (President Obama) inclusively addressed those of various faith traditions, and those ‘of no faith that they can name’.  It could be that 2/3 of our listeners faithfully and honestly understand themselves as people ‘of no faith that they can name’.  Of a faith that has no name.  Is that you?

This past Wednesday many of us gathered, undergraduates with the Dean of the Chapel, to discuss ‘God on Campus’.  If there has been a more spirited, honest, and enjoyable conversation among 20 people recently, in this area, that would be news.  One young woman, speaking for thousands, said, ‘I just don’t have that kind of rote faith anymore’.  It could be that 2/3 of our students faithfully and honestly understand themselves as young people ‘of no faith that they can name’.  Of a faith that has no name.  Is that you?

Over the course of ministry in four decades, nine pulpits, one brief superintendency, one briefer presidency, and one delicious deanship (the best job anywhere by the way), various defeats and victories, and Thursday evening meetings of the cradle role committee, the greatest thrill and joy has come from those who are just outside the visible community of faith.  Prospects, constituents, the unchurched (such an uncharitable phrase)…call them neighbors.  To spend time with those just outside the bounds of religion so called is the pure joy of ministry.  It could be that 2/3 of our neighbors, from Brookline to Bar Harbor to Bangladesh, faithfully and honestly understand themselves as people ‘of no faith that they can name’.  Of a faith that has no name.  Is that you?

It could be that 2/3 of our actual and virtual congregation faithfully understand themselves as people ‘of no faith that they can name’.  Of a faith that has no name.  Is that you?

Outside Israel there lies Samaria.  Along the road from religion to life, from Jerusalem to Jericho, there lies a man in pain.  Love lifts him in the person of a person of no faith that he can name.  The hero of our cantata this Transfiguration morning, the Samaritan, later called GOOD, stands, in this passage, as a person of a faith that has no name.  In a moment, the waves of musical beauty will roll over us.  What, we may wonder, shall we hear, shall we listen for, shall we await….?

To the faithful, honest, prayerful agnostic, to the various goods and various Samaritans around about, we offer, in brisk and brilliant revelation, come Transfiguration, a way of thinking and feeling, a thought feeling, a felt thought, a form of faith where there is no faith.

Our experience of the Samaritan, as his gift of love attends us, is the faithfulness of God.  Where others profess too much and too quickly, where others believe blindly and shallowly, where others pronounce themselves holier, humbler, more religious than thou, where others rush in where angels fear to tread, behold the goodness of the northern Samaritan.  His life, in loving and giving, in knowing and loving, in giving and knowing, has become his faith, a faith that has no name. Yesterday he shoveled the widow neighbor’s walk, uncovered a neighbor student’s car, brought milk and eggs to a homebound neighbor’s kitchen, chipped ice from an elderly neighbor’s roof, included in family sledding a busy neighbor’s son.  Come blizzard weekend,  a faith with no name may be the truest faith of all.  Is that faith yours?

A generation ago, our dear teacher Paul Tillich called such faith the state of being ultimately concerned.  Are you deeply concerned?  Do things concern you? When we come upon a man whom bandits have stripped and beaten and left by the side of the road for dead, does your heart quicken?  You see this victim of violence, harmed by others who have since disappeared, as with wily politicians who are ‘eager to dominate but reluctant to offend’ (so, FDR, NYRB, 1/13).   Before gun violence, or unfettered drone flight, or children untutored, or wayward greed, or amoral sexuality, or steady drunkenness, or moral indiscretion—somewhere the road from religion to life, from Jerusalem to Jericho—are you concerned?  Your concern is your faith.  In deep concern you discover grace and freedom and love.  Your concern is your faith.

But now Tillich is long dead, and his concern may not fit twenty year olds.  In our generation, then, we might call such a state of faith the state of being ultimately connected.  Are you deeply connected?  Does life connect you to others?  When you come upon a man whom bandits have stripped and beaten and left by the side of the road for dead, does your heart quicken? When a fog surrounds you brought on the collision of the warm winds of love and frosty glacier of wrong—what?  Do you connect?  Do you text, then, or tweet, then, or post, then, or email, then, or call, then, or write, then, or visit, then?  Does the plight of another move you toward others?  Along the road then from religion to life, from Jerusalem to Jericho—are you connected?  Your connection is your faith. In your deep connection you discover grace and freedom and love.  Your connection is your faith.

Live your faith.  Live your faith.

No other God, no graven image, no name in vain

Remember Sabbath, honor father and mother

Do not kill, commit adultery, steal, witness falsely or covet

Live your faith.  Live your faith.

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

And thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself

As did the Samaritan….

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 02.10.2013 at 11:00 am
Tags: Bach Experience, Robert Hill

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