Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

By Marsh Chapel

Revelation 1: 4b-8, Psalm 93, John 18: 33-37

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May we pray.

We praise thee, O God:
we acknowledge thee to be the Lord.
All the earth doth worship thee,
the Father everlasting.
To thee all Angels cry aloud;
the Heavens, and all the Powers therein.
To thee Cherubim and Seraphim
continually do cry,
Holy, Holy, Holy :
Lord God of Sabaoth,
Heaven and earth are full of the Majesty
of thy glory.
The glorious company of the Apostles praise thee.
The goodly fellowship of the Prophets praise thee.
The noble army of Martyrs praise thee.
The holy Church throughout all the world
doth acknowledge thee;
The Father of an infinite Majesty;
Thine honorable, true, and only Son;
Also the Holy Ghost, the Comforter.
Thou art the King of Glory, O Christ.
Thou art the everlasting Son of the Father.
When thou tookest upon thee to deliver man
thou didst not abhor the Virgin’s womb.
When thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death,
thou didst open the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers.
Thou sittest at the right hand of God, in the glory of the Father.
We believe that thou shalt come to be our Judge.
We therefore pray thee, help thy servants,
whom thou hast redeemed with thy precious blood.
Make them to be numbered with thy Saints in glory everlasting.

O Lord, save thy people
and bless thine heritage.
Govern them, and lift them up for ever.
Day by day we magnify thee;
And we worship thy Name ever, world without end.
Vouchsafe, O Lord, to keep us this day without sin.
O Lord, have mercy upon us, have mercy upon us.
O Lord, let thy mercy lighten upon us
as our trust is in thee.
O Lord, in thee have I trusted;
let me never be confounded. (“Te Deum,” Book of Common Prayer)

Amen.

The great hymn of the church known as the “Te Deum” is perhaps the greatest Christian hymn of praise ever penned.  It is certainly the oldest still in regular usage, attributed variously to Saints Ambrose, Augustine, and Hilary, and to Nicetas, bishop of Remesiana, in any case dating to the fourth century.  The text, in any of myriad musical settings, is frequently programmed in worship services that extol the greatness of God as reflected in the greatness of some human personage.  The election of a pope, the consecration of a bishop, or the canonization of a saint are all highly appropriate occasions for a “Te Deum,” and it has been known to be used on secular occasions as well, such as the announcement of a peace treaty or the coronation of a king or queen.  You may be interested to know, particularly if you are Catholic, that a plenary indulgence is available if you are present in a recitation or solemn chant of the “Te Deum” on New Year’s Eve.

Given the many images of the kingship of Christ in the “Te Deum,” with attendant symbols of judge, governor, and lord, it is also highly appropriate to sing this great hymn today, on Christ the King Sunday.  Thanks be to God for liturgically sensitive church musicians!  Indeed, for the offertory today, the Marsh Chapel Choir, under the direction of Dr. Scott Alan Jarrett, and with Mr. Justin Thomas Blackwell at the organ, will offer a setting of the “Te Deum” hymn by Franz Joseph Haydn.  Commissioned by Empress Marie Therese, wife of Franz I of Austria, this particular setting is notable for being an entirely choral work, lacking in the virtuosic solo lines characteristic of Haydn, and for its setting in the key of C major, often associated with music for great feasts of the church.  Furthermore, this setting is in the hallmark form of the classical era, namely the concerto, with two sprightly passages surrounding a central slow movement.

Okay, end of music history lesson.  What does any of this have to do with anything?  The “Te Deum” is textually a hymn of praise, and this has deep resonances on this day when we extol Christ as king.  The feast of Christ the King is celebrated interdenominationally among Catholics and Protestants on the last Sunday of the Christian year, which is to say the Sunday before the first Sunday of Advent.  Furthermore, Christ as king has deep resonances with the Eastern Orthodox symbol of Christos Pantokrator, which may be translated as Christ almighty or Christ in judgment, and is depicted here at Marsh Chapel in our rose window at the front of the sanctuary.

Praise is, ultimately, the most appropriate response of subjects for their rulers.  This is both because rulers provide so many benefits to their subjects and because rulers are in their very nature majestic and glorious, and thus deserving of praise.  It is little wonder that in the pre-Christian Roman Empire the emperors were understood to be gods.  When Christianity came along, the Judaic emphasis on the sovereignty of God over against all earthly temporal powers meant that emperors, kings, and other rulers could no longer be gods in their own right, but could nevertheless rule by “divine right.”  Of course this also meant that God could, in theory, and according to the historical record apparently in practice, withdraw the divine favor of a particular ruler and bestow it upon another.  This is how you get changes of dynasties in medieval European feudalism.  Kingship in Christendom, as it turns out, has its ups and downs.

Jesus certainly knew about the ups and downs of kingship, as evidenced by the texts read today from the gospel according to St. John and from the Revelation to St. John.  On behalf of Dean Hill, allow me to remind us that these are not the same John!  In the passage from Revelation, we get the upside of the story.  Jesus is king of the kingdom of Christians, and in fact ruler of the kings of the earth, i.e. king of kings.  Here is not the historical Jesus but rather the cosmic figure of Christos Pantokrator, Christ who rides in out of eternity on the clouds in judgment of the tribes of the earth.  In the Gospel of John we get the downside.  It turns out that being a king is a significant part of what got Jesus killed at the hands of the rulers of his day.  The problem, it turns out, is that Jesus finds himself out of his kingdom, and he is not the king of the world in which he finds himself, but this has not stopped people from attributing kingship to him, making the rulers of the world highly anxious.  Let this be a lesson to you kings out there: if you are a king, stay put in your kingdom!

I would hazard to guess that many of you are feeling quite ambivalent about all of this talk of kingship only a few short weeks after we in the United States of America have participated in that hallmark of our democratic republic, namely electing our leaders to office.  Indeed, what could the notion of kingship possibly mean for us in the land that rebelled against King George III?  We noted earlier that kings are to be praised both for the benefits they bestow on their subjects and for their innate majesty and glory.  These notions are nonsensical amidst the logic of our democratic republic.  Surely, here in the USA we believe that people are personally responsible and should pull themselves up by their bootstraps so that they are not dependent on the beneficence of government.  And recently disclosed improprieties of a certain general turned spy-master only serve to remind us that our leaders all too frequently fail to achieve even the standards of basic morality, let alone ever being considerable in terms of glory and majesty.

Or do we?  Do we really believe in rugged individualism and the fallibility of our leaders, or in our heart of hearts do we aspire to something more like the kingship model?

Hanging out in stained glass toward the rear of Marsh Chapel on the pulpit side is the stentorian statesman Abraham Lincoln.  He made it into stained glass here because he fulfilled the abolitionist vision of the founders of Boston University through his work to abolish slavery.  The recently released feature-length film Lincoln chronicles his political machinations and negotiations eventually leading to the passage of the 13^th amendment to the United States Constitution outlawing slavery and involuntary servitude.  The Lincoln memorial in Washington, DC, dedicated in 1922, was designed by Henry Bacon in the form of a Greek Doric temple containing a large, seated sculpture of Lincoln by Daniel Chester French and inscriptions from Lincoln’s Gettysburg and Second Inaugural addresses.  In some states, Lincoln’s birthday is celebrated as a holiday.  Or should I say holy day?

So, is Abraham Lincoln a king?  Applying a strict definition from political theory, certainly not.  The new film is based in part on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s biography of Lincoln, entitled Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.  The title of the book makes it clear that Lincoln was not a king in the political sense, as it is his ability to get things done amidst competing interests, and despite the limits of presidential power, that makes Lincoln exceptional.  But in other respects Lincoln may best be interpreted as a king.  His rhetorical skill inspired hearts across divisions of race, gender, class, and religion.  His assassination made him a martyr and bestowed upon him mythical status in the United States and abroad.  Looking back across time, Lincoln may be understood as a king in the two senses outlined above.  He achieved great benefit for his people by virtue of his political skill, particularly for slaves, but for the United States as a whole also through his projects of reconstruction and vision for reintegration of the divided union.  And his soaring rhetoric and towering stature have been imprinted on the American imagination as signs of majesty and glory, as evidenced in stained glass, film, and monument.

There are other figures in U.S. history who might be considered under this rubric of kingship: George Washington, Franklin Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Jr.  It is not the case that any of these men was perfect or otherwise unambiguous.  However, the particular focus afforded by the lenses of history has left us with visions of them that are truly praiseworthy.

I wonder if, political predilections for democratic order aside, there might not be something far deeper in the human condition and psyche that desires a king to rule over us.  I have a sneaking suspicion that there is, and that the “Te Deum” text points to this something deeper in the symbols of judgment, governing, and lordship.  Judgment is the measurement of the difference between the ideal of grace and the reality of sin.  Governance is the ordering of relations such that grace might be maximized and sin minimized.  Lordship is the power to make changes based on judgments and to bring about rightly ordered relationships.  Judicial, legislative, executive.  Far from the supposed American ideal that we do not need government because we are self-reliant and because governments are made up of other humans just as fallen as we ourselves, the “Te Deum” gives voice to that part of us that desires just what we proclaim to deny.

Peter Berger, University Professor Emeritus here at Boston University, wrote forty-some-odd years ago about religion as masochistic.  By this he means that in religious life we give ourselves over to something else, something greater, that can in some way effect an overarching meaning amidst a sea of seeming meaninglessness otherwise.  Indeed, that is at least one of the things that we do when we gather together on Sunday mornings.  We give ourselves over to God, who benefits us by providing us with a sense of meaning, order, and purpose, and who is majestic and glorious, and therefore praiseworthy.  This probably seems at least somewhat okay in relation to God.  Much more troubling for most of us is the fact that we essentially do the same thing with government.  We give ourselves over to a state that we believe can guarantee us some benefit and that seems to us in some way to be glorious and majestic.  This is the social contract.  In the case of monarchies, that glory and majesty is connected to the divine right of royalty.  In the democratic model, the glory and majesty of government derives from the glory and majesty of the human person, perhaps instilled by God.

The problem with a truly democratic government is that in order to fulfill our desire for kingship in terms of justice, governance, and lordship, 100% of the people must be 100% responsible 100% of the time.  In a monarchy, only one person must be 100% responsible 100% of the time, but if he or she screws it up, or at least if people find out that he or she screwed it up, it’s all over.  The problem is that there has never been a single human being, let alone a whole population of them, who has been able to be 100% responsible 100% of the time.  As the apostle to the gentiles tells us in the epistle to the Romans, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”  Modern democratic republics have tried to mediate this problem by allowing for minimal levels of irresponsibility that can be counterbalanced by the checks and balances built into the governance model.  Sadly, as evidenced by the general turned spy-master mentioned earlier, we seem not to actually be able to tolerate the minimal levels of irresponsibility our system of government seeks to afford.  We aspire to more.  We aspire to perfection.  We seek a guarantee of order and meaning over against our uncertainty of each other and ourselves.

This past summer we heard a series of sermons on apocalyptic.  The apocalyptic worldview, that says that the guarantee of order and meaning is not possible in this world but is readily available in the next, is one Christian response to the problem of irresponsible government.  Another is the shift from the divinity of emperors themselves to their ruling rather by divine right, which could be taken away.  A third is the perspective that the image of God in human nature is obscured by sin, thus negating the possibility of fully effective human institutions.  In all cases, the Christian witness is that it is God who is our guarantee.  Ultimately, it is God who is our king, who judges us with perfect justice, governs us with perfect wisdom, and rules over us with perfect power, and so who is glorious and majestic.  No worldly power could possibly aspire to God’s perfection.  And so today, Christ the King Sunday, we give our sinful and broken selves over to God who alone can help us, can save us, can redeem us, can lift us up forever, and open the kingdom of heaven to us.

Amen.

posted in Br. Lawrence A. Whitney, LC† on 11.25.2012 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

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We are not always as thoughtful as we could be, not as mindful as we should be…

I can bear witness to this in my own experience…

Then let us be thoughtful this Thanksgiving.

Let us be mindful of the goodness of God, as sung in the 100^th Psalm…

Let us be thoughtful this Thanksgiving.

Let us be mindful of the blessings of God, as sung in the beatitudes…

Let us be thoughtful this Thanksgiving.

Let us be mindful of friendship, as was our friend Max Coots…
"Let us give thanks for a bounty of people:

For children who are our second planting, and though they grow like weeds and the wind too soon blows them away, may they forgive us our cultivation and fondly remember where their roots are....

For generous friends with hearts and smiles as bright as their blossoms;

For feisty friends as tart as apples;

For continuous friends, who, like scallions and cucumbers, keep reminding us that we've had them;

For crotchety friends, as sour as rhubarb and as indestructible;

For handsome friends, who are as gorgeous as eggplants and as elegant as a row of corn, and the other, plain as potatoes and as good for you;

For funny friends, who are as silly as Brussels Sprouts and as amusing as Jerusalem Artichokes, and serious friends, as complex as cauliflowers and as intricate as onions;

For friends as unpretentious as cabbages, as subtle as summer squash, as persistent as parsley, as delightful as dill, as endless as zucchini, and who, like parsnips, can be counted on to see you through the winter;

For old friends, nodding like sunflowers in the evening-time, and young friends coming on as fast as radishes;

For loving friends, who wind around us like tendrils and hold us, despite our blights, wilts and witherings;

And finally, for those friends now gone, like gardens past that have been harvested, and who fed us in their times that we might have life thereafter;

For all these we give thanks."

by Reverend Max Coots

Let us be thoughtful this Thanksgiving.

Let us be mindful of the good earth, of the fruits of harvest, of the fruits of years of labor and love, as one remembered in the figure of her grandmother…

Sitting by my window—looking out at the field

This chair has been such a comfort for so many years

Rocking—rocking

All the children were comforted in this chair

All grown and gone now

Babies—growing year after year

‘Til they could go to the field to help

The fields—so green in the spring

Then the plough broke it up into beautiful brown earth

Worked over and over

Until the seeds had a wonderful bed in which to grow

Week after week growing

And then harvest.

We all went to the field for the harvest.

Sunrise to sunset

Day after day

Finished at last

Ready for winter

Now looking across the field at beautiful virgin snow

Like watching a baby sleep.  So peaceful.

Happy for the quiet.

Anxious for the awakening

Start again

Sitting by my window

Rocking Rocking

By Carol Zahm

Let us be mindful of the faithfulness of God, as we affirm at eventide…

If we believe that life has meaning and purpose

And we do

If we believe that the Giver of Life loves us

And we do

If we believe that divine love lasts

And we do

If we believe that justice, mercy, and humility endure

And we do

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

And we do

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

And we do

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

And we do

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

And we do

If we believe that God has loved us personally

And we do

If we believe in God

And we do

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

And we do

Then we shall trust that love is stronger than death

And we do

Then we shall trust the mysterious promise of resurrection

And we do

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

And we do

Then we shall trust the enduring worth of personality

And we do

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

And we do

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

And we do

Then we shall trust the source of love to love eternally

And we do

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

And we do

Then we shall trust in God

And we do.

Let us be thoughtful this Thanksgiving, mindful of the daily gifts.

Let us be mindful this Thanksgiving, as was Howard Thurman, who was a hundred years head of his time fifty years ago.  His poem:

Today, I make my Sacrament of Thanksgiving.

I begin with the simple things of my days:

Fresh air to breathe,

Cool water to drink,

The taste of food,

The protection of houses and clothes,

The comforts of home.

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

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

My mother’s arms,

The strength of my father

The playmates of my childhood,

The wonderful stories brought to me from the lives

Of many who talked of days gone by when fairies

And giants and all kinds of magic held sway;

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

The excitement of laughter and the twinkle in the

Eye with its reminder that life is good.

For all these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day

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

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

The tightening of the grip in a simple handshake when I

Feared the step before me in darkness;

The whisper in my heart when the temptation was fiercest

And the claims of appetite were not to be denied;

The crucial word said, the simple sentence from an open

Page when my decision hung in the balance.

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

I pass before me the main springs of my heritage:

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

Without whom my own life would have no meaning;

The seers who saw visions and dreamed dreams;

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

And whose words would only find fulfillment

In the years which they would never see;

The workers whose sweat has watered the trees,

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

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

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

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

Could inspire and God could command.

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

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

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

The little purposes in which I have shared my loves,

My desires, my gifts;

The restlessness which bottoms all I do with its stark insistence

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

To reach for the highest;

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

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

inner graces of Almighty affection will cover the life of the

children of God as the waters cover the sea.

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

I make as my sacrament of Thanksgiving to Thee,

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

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 11.18.2012 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

Mark 12: 34-48

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Two weeks after Halloween, 2012

My Dear Wormwood,

Again it is my pleasure to write your annual review, you devil you.  No uncle was ever prouder of a nephew than I am of you, Wormwood. Look at the excellent, successful year you have had making devilry among the good people of planet earth.  As chief representative of the fallen angels in this part of the universe, I have a close relationship with the Prince of Darkness Himself, our Father below.  You may rest assured that news of your various nefarious victories will sink to his hellish level.  You have a dark future ahead of you, Wormwood.  Congratulations.

In particular, your work in the United States of America, over the last decade or more, Wormwood, has been nothing short of masterful.  I take my horns off to you, one devil to another, and salute your negativity.  You have kept them fighting among themselves, morning to night, like children in a marketplace, solely sighting their own interests, assured that the one truth they each hold is the only truth in the box.  Excellent, Wormwood, excellent.  I could not have done better myself, even when I wore a younger devil’s tail.  Keep at it, nephew, keep at it, set them one against the other, a man against his own house, rich against poor, red against blue, radical against fundamentalist, personal ethics against social justice, doing against being.  Oh the thrill we have to observe such mayhem!  Good boy.

With this letter, this annual post Halloween performance review, I enclose your official promotion, commendation, and ribbon as sub-demon of the year, with special commendation for inciting needless division.  I bow my horns to you!

Now, Wormwood, it would not do for me, your affection Uncle, Screwtape, Superintendent of demons in the near Milky Way, to let you go without a little avuncular advice.  Call it a little devilish Dutch uncle advice, to keep you on your way.

Down below they celebrate this weekend, remembering those who protected the great hope of a land of the free, and a home of the brave, a community with liberty and justice for all, a place where those who have much might not have too much, and those who have little might not have too little.  They remember their veterans, their self-sacrificing forebears and relatives.  They reflect on those who road the waves of military service, and they do so with grace and affection.  Ouch!  Wormwood, my little devil.  We cannot have this continue.  It cools the fires of hell to hear such loving rhetoric.  So, here are some bits of wisdom, for your future devilry, sent from your affectionate uncle, Screwtape.

Be most careful, Wormwood, not to let any of these groups you have so carefully set upon each other, with daggers drawn, get the idea that wisdom is justified by all her deeds, that wisdom is justified by all her children, that wisdom comes in more than one color.  Make sure the blue stay blue, and the red stay red. Make sure people from Nebraska never talk to people from Rhode Island. Flee the color purple, Wormwood, with its recognition of dialectical thought, its movement toward full truth, its bow before the sin they all share.  Keep them fighting.  Keep the Presbyterians denouncing pride, and forgetting about sloth and falsehood.  Keep the Methodists denouncing sloth, and forgetting about pride and falsehood.  Keep the Lutherans denouncing falsehood, and forgetting about pride and sloth.  Yes.  Excellent.  Purple is dangerous to us.  If the blue start seeing that the red have a point, here and there—your cause is lost.  If the red start seeing that the blue have a point, here and there—your cause is lost.  Keep them shouting at each other, like children in a marketplace, one group wanting to play weddings and another wanting to play funerals, pipes vs. wails, dances vs. weepings. Their Lord really had your number, there, my nephew.  Take the purple out of their crayon boxes.  You want gated communities, the demise of public schools, lines of suburban\urban separation, racial disease and distrust, class separations, ideological fences, and a verbal war of all against all.  Children in the marketplace, as their Savior, said, yes, Wormwood, well done.

Here is an example.  I hear the good hearts of their leaders saying many and caring things about children and the poor, those left out.  Like that poor woman in the Bible, who gave all she had.  Wormwood, this is peril for us!  Be on the qui vive!  If that country ever got behind that idea, and every one had medical care, education, and respect—oh, it worries me.  Keep them pinned down, keep their leaders pinned down, Wormwood, in tragic conflict, in financial red ink, in culture wars.  And be vigilant!  Sometimes they get the idea! I read in one of their papers about an 11 year old Boy Scout lost in the mountains.  (Did you have something to do with that, Wormwood?  Creative move there,  my boy).  But after all astute creative devilry, 3000 searchers looked for four days until they found him!  The lost was found.  That really frosts me.  Oh, the joy they had in it, too.  It frosts my preserves, Wormwood.  It is like the joy a Christian has at bringing a friend, relative, or neighbor to church to experience love.  There is no greater joy!  It makes my blood freeze.  The rescuer said, “I feel relieved and happy.”  Oh Lordy.  That really takes the cake.  See, if they really start watching over one another in love, like that old Englishman John Wesley said, we would be out of business in your part of the hemisphere.

Another example, Wormwood.  We head devils hate to hear about people moving from poverty to well-being.  All this generosity talk—perish the thought!  All this liberty, equality, fraternity palaver—I thought we rid ourselves of that in the 19^th century.  My boy, we want a permanent underclass, so that we can then use it to foment revolution.  But this country and its churches, especially those pesky Methodists, have always championed social mobility, like that in the churches of Paul, way back when.  His urban Christians were status inconsistent, and so are the living churches today.  That Paul was a thorn in my flesh, that Apostle to the Gentiles, but we got him at last.  We need to keep people in their place.  I tell you, nephew, it bothers me when I read about a young woman, Della Mae Justice, who was a 15 year old foster child living in a hut with a dirt floor, until her uncle came and found her and took her into his own home.  He was an attorney in Kentucky.  She said it was like little Orphan Annie going to live with the Rockefellers. Listen to this Wormwood, and see if doesn’t freeze your blood:

“It was not easy.  I was shy and socially inept.  For the first time, I could have had the right clothes, but I didn’t have any idea what the right clothes were.  I didn’t know much about the world, and I was always afraid of making the wrong move.  When we had a school trip for chorus we went to a restaurant.  I ordered a club sandwich, but when it came with those toothpicks on either end, I didn’t know how to eat it, so I just sat there, well, staring at it and starving and saying I didn’t feel well.”

Her uncle educated her at Berea College, a school set up especially for hard working, children of the poor who want a fine education.  Now she is an attorney in his firm.  Wormwood!  Be on the lookout!  This kind of story will find its way into a pulpit if it is not snuffed out.  See who have on our side in the newspapers.

A story like that brings a tear to the eye, a warmth to the heart, a willingness to give, even if you only have a widow’s might.  Such gospel is our undoing.  A story like that is your undoing, Wormwood.  Come on my boy, have you begun with flesh to end with the spirit?  You can do better, I mean worse, I mean, well you know what I mean

What would happen down there if this kind of idea, took hold?  You would have middle-aged parents whose own children have grown up adopting others!  Starting new families!  Taking the poor into their homes!  Giving like that poor widow did! You would have adoption outpacing abortion, so that abortion was not only safe, legal and rare, but rare, rare and rare!  You would have liberty and justice!  There would be understanding and space for gay children! Our lost cause would be lost.

Wormwood!  Perish the thought, Wormwood, perish the thought.

And this matter of war.  Good bit of work, there, Wormwood.  Now, if you can just keep the purple crayon out of the box.  My own fear is that there will emerge a consensus across the land on how to fix this problem.  Here is my thought:  keep the blue critics stuck in their anger over things, they judge, should never have happened—that will keep them from facing clearly new situations with resolve, humility, and imagination; and keep the red supporters stuck in defense of past confusions, misinformation and misjudgment—that will keep them from finding the resolve, humility and imagination needed to change course to attend to new duties.  Especially-- keep them from talking with each other to find the purple ground—divide and conquer, Wormwood, divide and conquer.  Otherwise they may find a way to gather the will of the nations to bring peace to their world and time.  That would be our purple defeat, the defeat of all our devilry.  Confusion, and miscommunication, and mistrust—these are your best allies, my shrewd nephew.  They must not be allowed to remember history and its lessons.   When Elie Wiesel said two weeks ago, ‘we face the enemy with memory’—Wormwood, he is talking about. Get at that work on weakening memory! You help them forget the lessons of the past.  The last thing on earth the Prince of Darkness (who writes my performance review, as you know) is just, participatory, and stable world community.  Peace abroad would let America would be free, purple crayon in hand, to draw a picture of a nation where all, meaning all, have a place.

Or look at their stumbling around about their country’s budget.  I have to hand it to you, you young devil you, you have even made them forget that to balance a budget you have to raise more and spend less money!  How did you accomplish that?  But now, I hear rumblings, Wormwood.  I have a sad feeling that they will find a way to work together, to compromise, to see the larger picture, to work for the good of the whole—oh, you know how I despise all this sappy, caring, loving, pragmatic, effective public leadership!  How much more savory, and sour, a fiscal cliff!

Let me be blunt, Wormwood.  When you see red and blue talking to each other, get moving!  When you see a red woman and a blue man determined to think together, learn from each other, and work side by side, and they have lunch at a table adorned in purple, burn the restaurant.  We just cannot have that kind of synthesis going on! Thesis, yes.  Antithesis, yes.  But no Synthesis. Red we can stand, blue we can handle.  It is the color purple that is our downfall.  We cannot afford that kind of creativity, new creation, new thinking.  I read that Cornel West and Billy Graham were going to have lunch to talk theology.  That’s what I mean, Wormwood.  Burn that restaurant.

Let me be blunter, Wormwood.  When you see a church, the last place people actually gather if they gather at all, that is both red and blue, and putting on a robe with a purple hue, weaken that church.  A denomination that stands for children, for the poor, for social mobility, for justice, but also for personal morality, financial responsibility, moral strength, individual piety--for Biblical, dialectical thought, not just the thunderbolts from far left and right--drain that saving swamp, Wormwood.  What you have done to the Methodists in the Northeast, eliminating half their membership in a generation, you need to do across the country.

Let me be the bluntest I have been, Wormwood.  I have one specific request, dear nephew.  Keep your eye on that chapel in Boston, Marsh Chapel.  They look purple to me.  They are growing.  They are building.  They are blue and red together.  They love students.  They are learning to tithe.  They are starting to invite.  Work on them, Wormwood.  Make them fear the unknown. Make them tentative.  Make them forget the student programs.  Make them accentuate gender, race, ethnic, class divisions. Make them disagree wherever they can.  Set them on each other, red on blue, blue on red.  I will check your work at our next annual early November, post-Halloween review.

Remember our theme song from William Blake:  When Satan first the black bow bent, and the moral law from the gospel rent, he turned the law into a sword and spilt the blood of mercy’s Lord.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 11.11.2012 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

Mark 12: 28-34

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You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength.  And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

In three days one half of these United States of America will be profoundly disappointed and personally despondent.

We just don't yet know which half.

Half of all advertisement is wasted.  We just do not know which half.  $1 B of the $2 B spent on this Presidential election was, if not wasted, at least offered in a losing cause.  Again, we today do not know which half.

A herd of elephants, a pride of donkeys, a country of these United States, more States and less United, these days.

You will, faithful listeners to Marsh Chapel, on WBUR, and otherwise, you will vote.  I have no doubt about it.  Good.  And you have endured the preaching of the gospel this fall, from a venerable pulpit, and from a fallible preacher.  Those especially who responded to the sermons on Biblical Justice, 9/16/12, and on Generosity, 10/14/12, both in harmony and dissonance, have, like love, 'suffered long and been kind'.  Thank you for your forbearance.

Given though the division, not to say war, between the states, or better said, within the states, or more precisely put, in the heart of Franklin County, just north of Columbus, Ohio, the home of Ohio Wesleyan University, a small Methodist college for small Methodists and others, incorporated in 1842, we may wonder, come this Sunday, whether the Gospel--love of God and love of neighbor--speaks to our incipient disappointment.

By the way, in case you had not heard, the whole election comes down to the single vote of one persona, of a young mother, a 2001 OWU graduate, with two children, who themselves will soon attend OWU, living in anti bellum home, four bedroom, shared driveway, on North Sandusky street, in Delaware, Ohio, across from the old ATO house, who attends Asbury Methodist Church, and is vice president of the Junior League.  I believe her name is Mary.  Or Martha.  Or both.

Let me suggest that the Gospel speaks, to us, right now, in love.  That is one thing about love, divine and human.  It never ends.  Campaigns will cease.  Candidates will emerge or retire.  Slogans will be put away, to be unearthed again.  War chests will empty.  Celebrations will come and go.  Discouragement will be reborn into denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and, then, it may be, acceptance.  Some who are elected may learn that the position for which they graciously offered themselves is not exactly heaven on earth.  Some who are defeated may discover that in losing they were not so much denied as spared.  Not so much denied something as spared the actuality of it.  We can be proud of those who will offer themselves for leadership and service, knowing the odds against them.  Especially those who come up short, 49% not 51%.  We owe them far more than we usually admit.

What would love of God and love of neighbor look like, Wednesday, November 7, 2012, the day after a national slugfest?

Well, who knows?

But, in part, I believe that the Markan Jesus' summary of the decalogue, evokes something particular in us, this Sunday.  Love.  Love God.  Love.  Love your neighbor.  Love.  Now, there is also a neighboring verse that affirms love of enemies, of contestants and opponents, the consequence of love of God and love of neighbor.

Those who have listened to Marsh Chapel sermons these years, my own and those of my esteemed predecessors, know full well that this pulpit does not take lightly the consequences of political learning or lack thereof, social virtue or lack thereof, and spiritual piety or lack thereof.  I refer you to the sermons just mentioned and preached some weeks ago.  Real, dire, real, dreamlike, real decisive matters are at hand Tuesday.  So, go and vote.  The freedom of the pulpit encourages you, your own true identity in faith exhorts you, today’s Gospel itself leads you.

And what a Gospel reading!  As was beautifully rehearsed from this pulpit last Sunday, Mark is a Gospel of Conflicts.  In particular, Mark is a gospel wherein Jesus argues, with vehemence, with disciples and with opponents (scribes, Pharisees, and others).  Since the river Jordan in Mark 1, Jesus has been at daggers drawn with the scribes, in particular. In 1:22, in 2:6, in 3:22, in 7:1, in 11:18, in 11:27.  And we haven’t even gotten to the Pharisees yet.  All of sudden, today, SURSUM CORDA, HEAR THE GOSPEL, Jesus meets a peacemaking scribe, an irenic soul, a kind opponent.  Matthew and Luke will twenty years later erase, as if using an ‘etch a sketch’, this memory of kindness.  Their scribe is a testing, testy type.  But not here in Mark.  In the heat of the battle, there is a quiet, kind conversation.  Like those stories of Union and Confederate soldiers, across the line of battle, pausing to sing Christmas carols together, on Christmas eve. Like a Republican governor and a Democratic President finding something shared, something in common, in the teeth of a great storm.  Something deeper, even than conflict, than power, than hatred, than self, is here.  In the presence of a scribe!  Of whom Jesus says, of this good scribe Jesus says, ‘you are not far from the kingdom of heaven’!  I don’t know about you, but most days, if I could go home with that report card, I would rest my feet and rest my case.  ‘The scribe sees with insight and hears with understanding’ (Marcus, 842).  In love—and the scribe sees this—God is grabbing ahold of the world, and of us, again.  A little Deuteronomy, and a little Leviticus, and a little love of God and neighbor.  ‘Neither tragedy nor triumph, but trust’, we heard last week.  And again today.  ‘Fall in love with the world again’ we heard last week.  And again today.  ‘The healing of our faith is still possible’ we heard last week.  And again today.
Hold onto free speech.  Hold on to your own-most identity.  Hold on to peace, like a river.  And go and vote your conscience.

But after the voting, there remains the living, and, by our gospel, the loving in the living. What can this truly mean, come Wednesday? How shall we love God?  By loving our neighbor.  How shall we love our neighbor?  By loving our opponent.

Let me propose an exercise.  Its details may lack something, one point or another, from your point of view.  Fear not.  Add and delete your own spices and ingredients later.  Remember this:  Jesus and the good scribe talk.  They talk.  They listen, and speak.  The summary of the law they affirm, as we know, was also affirmed by Rabbi Hillel, and as a way to condense to the two tablets of ten, five each, is not unique, or even remarkable, though quite portable, and useful.  What is striking, here, is the relationship between the good teacher and the good scribe.  They relate.  The listen, and speak.  In that manner, vein, and spirit, come Wednesday, consider an experimental exercise:  consider why the other half votes the way they do.

So.  You are a liberal.  Good for you.  I commend your liberality.  But let me ask you something.  Have you given much effort of thought to why half of the humans in the lower forty-eight, plus Alaska and Hawaii, disagree with you enough to vote for the other guy?  For you liberals let me suggest three 'l's to consider.  I mean, if we are to love God, love our neighbor, and love our contestant, then we might want to consider why the other side votes the way it does.  Love is for the wise.

Life.  Those more to the right of you in the choir loft tend to have a strong and particular view of the sanctity of life.  Have you, Mrs. Liberal, really heard, I mean really deeply heard, this conviction?  Now, we know there are manifold ways to be pro life, as a columnist well wrote the other day.  But I wonder if, at some gut level, you have yet to appreciate, to approximate, what those to your right in the pew of life, think and say and believe, here?  It will help us, all, down the road, if you can, at least, acknowledge, in detail, that with which you do not agree, in full.

Liberty.  Those more to the right tend to have a fierce and protective sense of freedom, of liberty.  O, I know that liberals love liberty and life too.  My relative asked me once, though, why I thought conservatives did not want taxes taking their money. 'Because they believe it is THEIR money', I said. Individual responsibility matters.  Personal holiness matters. Have you, Mr. Progressive, truly heard this?  What you do, justly or not, deserves just response and reward.  He who does not work, let him not eat, 2 Thessalonians.  For freedom Christ has set us free, Galatians 5.  Give me liberty, said Nathan Hale.  Or give me...It will help us all, down the road, if we can, at least, respectfully and sincerely say that liberty is precious.

Limit.  Those more to the right of you in the balcony are suspicious of large bureaucracies and big government.  They see waste, where there should be frugality.  They see ineffectiveness, where there should be fruitfulness.  They see laziness supported, here, free ice cream given, here, a lack of rigor, discipline, and effort rewarded, here.  Who governs least, he governs best, they think.  Most of all, they see debt, endless and dangerous.  They prefer to support private non profit groups, like the Salvation Army, or churches, or private missions.  They have not even usually resorted to quoting John Wesley--get all, save all, give all you can--though they might have done so.  Have you, Messr. Dreyfusard, adequately, honestly sized up the need for limits?

Love your contestant by knowing her view, and affirming the parts of if that you can.

Or.

You are conservative.  Good for you.  I commend your conservation.  But let me ask you something.  Have you given much effort of thought to why half of the humans in the lower forty-eight, plus Alaska and Hawaii, are voting for the other guy?  For you conservatives let me suggest three 'c's to consider.  If we are to love our contestant we might want at least to practice saying out loud why they vote the way they do.  Love is for the wise.

Choice.  When the chips are down and hard decisions need to be made, where is the liberty to be placed, where is the confidence to be invested?  Those to your immediate left in the choir loft privilege liberty, in the sense of personal choice.  The same affirmations under liberty, made a moment ago, might simply be inserted here.  We recognize varieties of pro-choice positions.  We know not everyone buys every party line.  But, Mr. Conservative, have you truly, deeply considered what it would mean--I am speaking right now mostly to the men--to have your own health choices, of the most personal and most powerful kinds, made by others?   Just how long, Mr. Mr., would you really put up with that?  At least, can you see, why, from another perspective, choice is a deal maker or breaker?

Community.  Those to your left in the pew tend to have a high view of what the common good should be.  Maybe, way down left, they are reciting lines from ML King about the beloved community.  They believe in building community, in doing things together, in sharing time and space and energy and resources.  Or maybe they just have a memory of when their own family needed housing, needed food, needed health care, needed employment, or suffered through a Hurricane, and they think that the whole is more than the sum of the parts.  They underscore that one's own health finally requires a healthy population, that one's own love of country requires a love of all the people, that one's own security and freedom finally require a modicum of the same, provided for the whole.  These lefties may have had a searing experience, up close and personal, with pain and poverty and peril.  Let those who have much not have too much, and those who have little not have too little, they whisper.  Liberty, yes.  But justice, too.  For all, in these United States.

Compassion.  Those to your left in the balcony emphasize compassion.  Their sense of pride, sloth and falsehood is heightened.  There but for the grace of God, go I, they think.  Their sense of hypocrisy, idolatry, and superstition, is heightened.  They carry an acute memory of where and when things have gone badly wrong, in dispassionate ways.  Children.  Children in poverty.  Children without primary health care, who sometimes become obese.  Children in distress.   Those just to your left, they are willing to forego a bit of frugality for the expansion of compassion.  It matters deeply to them, this fall, whether or not another 40 million people, many of them children, will have access to health care, after Tuesday.  Yes, they would rather spare the rod and spoil the child, if that means all children are fed, clothed, housed, taught, and healed.

Love your contestant by knowing his view, and affirming those parts you can.

Now let me close by moving from preaching to meddling.  Maybe you think I have already been meddling!

Preaching since 1976, and my May 1976 departure from North Sandusky street, Franklin County, Ohio Wesleyan, Ohio, and a year living across the street, in the old ATO house, from the one person, Mary Martha, or Martha Mary, whose single vote will decide this election, my impression is that in practice we liberals are not always all that liberal and we conservatives are not always all that conservative.  Here is what I mean.  So, as a conservative, you believe in limited government, and think the private sector, including churches, should care for the poor.  Fine.  So, do you tithe?  The average pledge in churches is 1% not 10%  If you are so keen on limited government, a worthy goal, and think the civil society can carry the work, then why are you so limited in your giving to the churches and other eleemosynary institutions? (See what I mean about meddling?) So, as a liberal, you believe in community, in communal benefits, in the common good, the good of all.  Fine.  Do you build community? Do you take the time to participate in all those fallible, time consuming groups?  Do you worship?  Do you take the time and energy to build up the community, starting with the community of faith?  Or do you lie in bed, or play golf, or something else, come Sunday.  (See what I mean about meddling?)  Here is what I mean.  Let each be convinced, in his own mind.  But practice what you preach.  That is:  I’ll expect a tithe from the conservatives and 100% worship attendance from the liberals, or, better yet, both from both!  Devotion and service, love of God and love of neighbor, worship and generosity.  Friends, these are things, right and left, over time that will last.  Do these, and you will hear a divine whisper, ‘you are not far from the kingdom of heaven’.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength.  And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

By the way, my name is Bob Hill, and I approve of this message!

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 11.4.2012 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

Mark 10:46-52

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Many of us, after we’ve been kicking around in the Christian faith for a while, have got a little list, of sayings we just wish Jesus had not said.  Or, if he were going to say them, we wish he’d included an indestructible set of footnotes, a bibliography, and a youtube video for the body language, so that there would be no confusion at all as to what he actually meant.  “Your faith has made you well.” is one of those sayings for me.

I served as a chaplain in both an “acute, chronic, and tertiary care” hospital and a mental health facility here in Boston.  One of the hardest parts of the work was when faithful Christians, of many years standing, would recount their own struggles as they quoted Bartimaeus’ story to themselves, and as they had his story quoted to them.  They recounted their frustration as they told themselves, and as their friends told them, to just pray more, or just pray different, or just have more faith.  They would wonder why their faith wasn’t enough, why God did not heal their cancer or their blindness or their bipolar condition.  They felt that they were at fault, that they were to blame, that their condition continued.   Their spiritual distress was as difficult for them as their physical or mental challenge.  And so the particular story of Bartimaeus’ particular healing, taken out of context and universalized, became a stick with which to beat those who already suffered.

I do not think it is the purpose of this story to cause more suffering.  So, what is the context and the specificity that might give another interpretation of this faith healing?

The Gospel of Mark has been called a Gospel of conflict.  The conflicts escalate, from Jesus’ preaching and manifestation of the kingdom of God in the local settings of Galilee, to his increasing conflicts with the religious authorities and the imperial overlords that end in Jerusalem.  Jesus’ teaching and acts of power are presented in the Gospel as a renewal of the people of Israel.  They address the social, political, economic, and even physiological aspects of life, for a people and land subjugated by the collusion of religious authority with empire.  Along the way there is also increasing conflict between Jesus and his disciples.  As our readings in Mark over the last few weeks have shown, the disciples continually fail to understand what Jesus teaches and what he does.  Their discomfort and quarrels with both Jesus and each other increases as Jesus leads them to Jerusalem.  They refuse to accept his teaching that he must be rejected, suffer, and die before he is raised again.  The story of Bartimaeus comes at the end of the part of the Gospel in which the disciples’ conflicts with Jesus are made plain.  It brackets this section, along with the earlier healing of another blind man in chapter 8, vss. 22-26.  Most Markan scholars agree that here the author of the Gospel contrasts the restoration of the two men’s sight with the continued “blindness” of the disciples to who Jesus is and what he does.

Bartimaeus himself is not just blind; he is a beggar.  In the culture of the time, both physical impairment and poverty were often considered to be signs of God’s disfavor.  But Bartimaeus, though physically blind, has insight:  he cries out to Jesus as “Son of David”, the one who was widely expected to restore the fortunes of Israel as a king.  Bartimaeus is also not cowed by his

marginal status:  He shouts out to Jesus;  the people around him “sternly” tell him to be quiet; he shouts even louder.  Jesus, for his part, stops in his tracks, and calls for Bartimaeus to come to him.  Now the people around him are all encouragement.  So Bartimaeus, blind as he is, throws off what impediments he can, springs up, and comes to Jesus.  Jesus then does not make things up – he asks Bartimaeus what he wants from him.  Bartimaeus, again showing insight, names Jesus as his teacher and asks that Jesus let him see again.  Jesus then tells Bartimaeus that his faith has made him well.  Immediately Bartimaeus regains his physical sight and follows Jesus along the way.  Bartimaeus,  the physically blind beggar, sees with spiritual insight; whereas the physically sighted disciples remain spiritually blind.  Bartimaeus, again in contrast to the disciples,  allows himself to be taught by Jesus, so that he exchanges his old suppression for the new kingdom of God present in the midst of the people.  He also is taught by Jesus so that he follows Jesus along the way; not just the way of faith but also immediately on the way to Jerusalem, where Jesus will end, not as an earthly king, but as a physically broken and executed political criminal.  If Bartimaeus’ faith has healed his physical sight, the healing of his physical sight heals his faith also, as he is given a new way of understanding his life, and recognizes Jesus for who he truly is and what his mercy truly means.

Sharon V. Betcher is a theologian and a disability activist.  At the age of thirty-seven, ordained, married with a child, teaching in university, she tripped, she fell, and she injured her leg.  Her leg became infected, and, to save her life, it was amputated.  In her book Spirit and the Politics of Disablement, she points out that with the removal of her leg, she will never be “whole” in the sense of “normal”, ever again in this life.  She describes the challenges brought by her literal “fall” from cultural and religious ideals of “normalcy” and physical perfection , the challenges that are harder to bear than her physical disability itself.     And she describes the challenges that stories like the Bartimaeus story posed and still pose for her and for many other people of faith, those who like St. Paul, receive “no” as the answer to prayers for the thorn in the flesh to be removed.

Betcher notes that the healing stories were told as witness to the visitation of the kingdom of God, over against the occupation of the Roman Empire, with its elitist rule, foreign occupation, heavy taxation for war and empire building, and the dislocations it brought to people and to the land.  Reading or hearing these stories, early believers were challenged to believe in wonder; they could fall in love with the world again, as she writes they “could again take joy in a life from which pain cannot be cut away.”  “Miracles”, Betcher writes, “get below or outside our infrastructure of tacit knowledge and may invigorate ways of thinking … may serve to break persons out of old patterns of thought.”  Jesus’ compassion – as it is free from pity, disgust, avoidance, or the assumption that he already knows what Bartimaeus would want from him  -- Jesus’ compassion encourages Bartimaeus to chart a different course, encourages him to increase his faith, that faith healed and justified in Jesus’ acceptance of him, as he was, and now as he is Jesus’ follower.  Jesus’ compassion upends the normal order of things, in which the blind to not see, and are so often not seen.

Paul Farmer, the founder of Partners in Health, writes in his book Pathologies of Power:  “To

explain suffering, one must embed individual biography in the larger matrix of culture, history, and political economy … as social forces … structure … risk for most forms of extreme suffering. … Social forces ranging from poverty to racism become embodied as individual experience … translated into personal distress and disease.”  In our culture the quest for physical perfection is also one of those social forces.  In our fascination with extreme makeovers of all kinds, we forget the economic, political, and cultural forces at work behind the scenes.

Dominique Moceanu, at fourteen, was the youngest member of the 1996 United States Women’s Olympics Gymnastics Team, the only American women’s team to take gold at the Olympics.  In her riveting memoir Off Balance, she describes the behind-the-scenes cost of her physical perfection and agility:  years of emotional and physical abuse from her trainers, family discord and deceit, and physical injury and pain.  Behind the Olympic gold and the national glory was a young girl in great personal distress.  Even though her faith in her dream granted her physical perfection, for a long time Dominique was not well.  Ironically, or perhaps miraculously, it is the discovery of a sister, born without legs, given away at birth, who also became a competitive athlete and performer, it is this sister who is of great support to Dominique in her own healing.

So, where does all this leave us, here this morning, many of us bearing thorns in our flesh, none of us getting any younger, and all of us living in a world increasingly toxic to healthy living?

At the very least, we may join with Philo of Alexandria, who wrote, “Be kind; for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”  We may also affirm that whatever we carry, it is not the whole of who we are.  As a woman who had become blind as a result of diabetes complications once told me:  “I’m just blind.  I still love to hike, to sing, to play the piano, to get together with friends and family.  I still have my faith, even more since God has brought me through so much.  I feel very well.”

So, Faith.  Healing.  Sometimes our faith does heal us.  Sometimes our faith is not the issue, in our human condition.  And sometimes it’s just that the answer is no.  But always, Faith. Healing. the healing of our faith, is possible.  It may not come easy; it is a great challenge for us, especially in our culture of denial and suppression, to learn to live with pain and loss, of any kind.  We do experience the diseases of empire, and of the corporate empire building of globalization:  war, pollution, economic disparity, consumerism, perfectionism; seemingly impersonal forces that become very personal, often to our great distress.

Yet God wills to meet us where we are on the road, God wills to meet us exactly as we are on the road, to help us chart a different course, to find a new community of love and inclusion, and to increase our faith as we follow along the way.  As Sharon Betcher invites us to consider, we are offered a life of neither tragedy nor triumph, but of trust:  trust that expects wonder, and the expected and unexpected presence of God, even, as Mother Teresa of Calcutta notes, in “distressing diguises;  a life of trust that allows us to fall in love with the world again; a life of trust in which, even in a world in which pain cannot be cut away, we can still take joy.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

The Rev. Victoria Hart Gaskell

posted in The Rev. Dr. Victoria Hart Gaskell, Minister for Visitation on 10.28.2012 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

Mark 10: 35-45

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After my dad died two years ago we began to go through his things, as families do.  Desk, tools, books, guns, clothes.  (Order, play, hope, justice, humor). We did not make much progress at first.  We still have not made that much. His desk, somewhat more ordered, is laden drawer after drawer.  The many tools, both inherited from earlier generations and purchased as needed over a life time, still lie here and there in the basement.  A doll house, made for a granddaughter and then taken in for repairs years ago, and then left unattended, did migrate to the home of the great grand daughter.  The guns—a relic of another time in the woods and deer hunting of northern New York—were carefully removed by two lawyer siblings.  The papers and records now are in boxes with little titles—an improvement of sorts. His clothes still hang in the old closet.  I was either assigned or self assigned or asked (or not) to begin to take care of the books, forty years worth of books in the lifetime library of a Methodist preacher whose preaching teacher at Boston University, Allan Knight Chalmers, for whom I was named, had admonished his pupils to read one book every day.   That is to say, there were more than a few books to look through.

I dawdled, lollygagged, procrastinated, avoided, and otherwise shirked my solemn duty.  I asked all those I could to go through the library and take at least two books.  The books are mostly signed and dated, and of course they have the personal underlining and notes which are typical for most of us.  I appropriated a few:  a set of Jacques Ellul, for a Lenten series two years ago; a few books from BU—Booth, Chalmers, Bowne; sermon collections from Weatherhead, Gomes, Tittle, Fosdick;  others.   But I found my progress slow and slower.  With each book, my willingness to skim and skip diminished.  I found my intrigue at his notes increasing, and my attention to his underlining expanding.  I dream on and off of a large oak door, heavy with metal locks and frame, unopened, chained shut:  my dad on one side and I on the other. In the lasting grief I feel at the earthly loss of my dad, it has happened that his preacher’s library has become a kind of spiritual bridge, a mode of ongoing conversation between us.

I wonder, this Parents’ Weekend, given the more limited but still mammoth separation of the move to college and the emptying of the home, what healthy conversation, and modes of conversation, may emerge among and between the parents and young adult children here this morning?  How will a new mode of conversation emerge, across a new divide, for you?  New occasions teach new duties, and also sometimes require new forms of conversation, and also, happily, new or different topics and themes in conversation.   Let me suggest something.   In a natural, organic way, I wonder whether in these four or three or two years, at least now and then, you, parents and offspring, may find ways to think together about religious experience.  Let me immediately identify though that I mean religious experience that is not so much religious as it is real experience.    There is range of life through which there radiates, like morning sunlight, high and deep and piercingly real experience.  Most of this range of experience is not, or not only, in worship or liturgy or ecclesiastical involvement or patterned devotion—these are of course crucial and important, but more as signposts than as the actual meadows and still waters of religious, that is to say non-religious, religious experience.

One day this summer, on one of my less than fruitful forays into the library, I came upon a book, the title of which is borrowed for this morning’s sermon (A Rumor of Angels: NY, Doubleday, 1969—portions quoted below found therein). Published in 1969, hardly more than 100 pages, accessible to clergy and lay alike, brisk and direct in style, sprinkled with salt and light in humor and aphorism, the book, it happens, was written by a Boston University colleague and friend of mine, the premier sociologist of religion of our time, Peter Berger.  Professor Berger has graciously endured lunches and conversation, including some semi-successful jokes, with me over these last few years.  I knew of this book, both its title and its general argument, which is that God is not dead, religion is not dead and religious experience is not entirely absent from this earthly vale of tears.  But I had never read it.  I stuffed the book in my bag.

It is hard to try to recreate the context, 1968, in which Berger was writing and thinking what hardly anyone else was thinking and writing.  I will not try to do so.  1. But try to imagine, or remember, a time when Time magazine’s cover read, ‘Is God Dead?’, or 2. when the most potent religious word was ‘secular’, or 3. when administrative malfeasance led to a drug experiment on Good Friday in the basement of Marsh Chapel, or 4. when the most successful camp meeting was a mud soaked musical weekend in the Upstate New York village of Woodstock.  Just when all hell was breaking loose, Berger wrote about heaven.   Like debate participants try to do, he caused people to take a second look at something, or someone.

There is a scene in a Woody Allen movie where, standing in line at a movie theater, Allen’s character lengthily philosophizes about the work of Marshal Mcluhan.  After several minutes of blather, the person in line ahead of Woody Allen turns around.  It is Mcluhan himself!  He proceeds to say, in some fashion, ‘everything you have just said is totally bogus’.   In two weeks, over lunch, I will check with author himself about my renderings.  His book is so lastingly potent because he is writing about all of us, and he is especially writing about you.  There is transcendence—he speaks of the ‘supernatural’—all about us.  Maybe that is why you have come, together, to worship on this Parents’ weekend.  What are the signposts, the clues to transcendence we should look for—in our lived experience?  Berger’s summary still works.  You may be surprised by the clues he names, the rumors of angels he overhears…

First, give a little credit to your own blessed rage for order. Some of you are hoarders, of sorts, and bring order by refusing to get rid of anything.  Others are the very opposite, ‘when in doubt throw it out’.   You have a desire to see things set right, one way or another.  What were those kids doing at Woodstock, in the mud, listening to Janis Joplin, fifty years ago?  They were shouting to the heavens that things were not right, that something was out of order.  Berger: A.  This is the human faith in order as such, a faith closely related to man’s fundamental trust in reality. This faith is experienced not only in the history of societies and civilizations, but in the life of each individual—indeed, child psychologists tell us there can be no maturation without the presence of this faith at the outset of the socialization process. B. Man’s propensity for order is grounded in a faith or trust that, ultimately, reality is ‘in order’, ‘all right’, ‘as it should be’. Do you have a longing for order? Underneath, just there, is a mode of religious experience.  Talk a bit about it, parents and children.

Second, and swinging to a different spot, pause and meditate a little on your own enjoyment of play. 1. I see grown men enthralled on a green field following a wee little white ball, which seems to have a mind of its own, for three or four hours in the hot sun.  2. I see grown women shopping together without any particular need, but immersed, self forgetful, in the process of purchasing, God knows what.  3.I see emerging adults fixed and fixated, days on end, in the World of Warcraft.  4. Families were mesmerized this past summer, glued to gymnastics in England. 5.  Can you remember playing bridge in college all night long, to the detriment of your zoology grade?  Berger: A.In playing, one steps out of one time into another…When adults play with genuine joy, they momentarily regain the deathlessness of childhood…(Viewers of the recent film Moonrise Kingdom readily understand this). The experience of joyful play is not something that must be sought on some mystical margin of existence.  It can readily be found in the reality of ordinary life…The religious justification of the experience can be achieved only in an act of faith…B.This faith is inductive—it does not rest on a mysterious revelation, but rather on what we experience in our common, ordinary lives…Religion is the final vindication of childhood and of joy, and of all gestures that replicate these. One said: “I played basketball today, on the intramural team—it was awesome.”  Talk about it a bit, parents and children.

Third, we sense the (my word) supranatural, the transcendent, in the experience of hope. Hope does spring eternal in the human breast.  Hope keeps us going when otherwise we would not.  1. You may have seen Meryl  Streep and Tommy Lee Jones dramatize this in the midst of their struggling marriage.  The movie title:  ‘Hope Springs’.   2. Parents hope their children will thrive in college.  Students hope so too.  So do professors and administrators and Deans of Chapels.  We hope.  Actually, every autumn, when the suitcases and duffle bags spread out on Bay State Road, I see a tide of hope.  It is overwhelmingly beautiful, and tearful given the giving up required by such hope in all directions. ( I have not yet spoken, speaking of giving up, of the tuition check payment. (J) ) There is something lasting, real, meaningful, costly and true about hope.  3. Where there is life there is hope.  Better:  where there is hope there is life.  People with no regular religion at all know about hope, and its absence.  Berger: A. Human existence is always oriented toward the future. Man exists by constantly extending his being into the future, both in his consciousness and in his activity. B.  Put differently, man realizes himself in projects…It is through hope that men overcome the difficulties of the here and now. And it is through hope that men find meaning in the face of extreme suffering…There seems to be a death-refusing hope at the very core of our humanitas.  While empirical reason indicates that this hope is an illusion, there is something in us that, however shamefacedly in an age of triumphant rationality goes on saying ‘no!’ and even says ‘no’ to the ever so plausible explanation of empirical reason…Faith takes into account the intentions within our natural experience of hope that point toward a supernatural fulfillment. I wonder if the generations sitting together in the pews this morning might, come Christmas, talk a bit about that most unreligious religious experience, a thing called hope, a place called hope, a time called hope, a feeling called hope?  Talk about it a bit, parents and children.

Fourth, we have burning desire to see real justice done, and also to see massive injustice called to account.  Berger uses, well, the word damnation.  I am using slightly different language because I cannot make his argument as well with this word this morning.  It is too loaded.  But the heart of the intention is true and strong.  We want people who get away with murder not ultimately to get away with murder.  E Brunner, after WWII, was asked why he spoke about the devil:  Said he:  Two reasons.  Jesus did.  And I have seen him. When we think of mass murder, of horrific injustice, intentionally and painstakingly executed, we demand justice.  There is something down deep in the human heart that just will not let things go.  This is not about forgiveness.  It is about retributive justice.  Sometimes young people have a keener sense of this than their elders.  Berger: This refers to experiences in which our sense of what is humanly permissible is so fundamentally outraged that the only adequate response to the offense as well as to the offender seems to be a curse of supernatural dimensions…A. There are certain deeds that cry out to heaven…Not only are we constrained to condemn, and to condemn absolutely, but ,if we should be in a position to do so, we would feel constrained to take action on the basis of that certainty…B.Deeds that cry out to heaven also cry out for hell…No human punishment is enough in the case of deeds as monstrous as these…(this is) a moral order that transcends the human community and thus invokes a retribution that is more than human. When adults talk as adults, younger with older, there arise memories and understandings, dark in hue and deep in sentiment, that call out for an extraordinary, unearthly, transcendent justice.  How shall we talk about these?  Talk a bit, bit by bit, in the years to come, parents and children.

Fifth, one can sense the horizon of heaven, the transcendent radiance of mystery, the supranatural or supernatural, in the simple experience of humor, perhaps the very polar opposite of the cry for retributive justice.  1. Here I will pause to tell an ostensibly humorous story.  I was asked to pray at the start of a billion dollar campaign.  My reply:  ‘It would be my pressure—I mean my pleasure.’  2. People ask about interreligious life on campus and I say:  ‘The Hindus are the most Christian people I deal with’.  3. Phyllis Diller died this year. You remember her husband:  Fang.  You remember her mother in law:  Moby Dick.  You remember her sister in law:  Captain Bligh.  You remember her self deprecation (‘I once wore peek a boo blouse.  One man peeked and then shouted ‘boo!’).  You remember her cackling laughter.  Humor, real humor, stops time still.  ‘He who sits in the heavens shall laugh’, says the psalmist.  Berger:  There is one fundamental discrepancy from which all other comic discrepancies are derived—the discrepancy between man and the universe…A. The comic reflects the imprisonment of the human spirit in the world…B.Humor mocks the ‘serious’ business of the world and the might who carry it out…Power is the final illusion, while laughter reveals the final truth…It is the Quixote’s hope rather than Sancho Panza’s ‘realism’ that is ultimately vindicated, and the gestures of the clown have a sacramental dignity. When you gather at Thanksgiving table, after the prayer and before the turkey, tell one funny story, or one joke, or one humorous memory.  Talk a bit, talk a bit, talk a bit, parents and children.

Here is our theme:  Order, play, hope, justice, humor: religious experiences without recourse to religion. You may not be so religious, or so you think.  But do you create order, and crave play, and desire hope, and long for justice, and enjoy humor?  These are signs, for you, signs of something else, something lasting and true and good and extraordinary.  Talk a bit about it, parents and children.  As Bonnie Raitt put it:  let’s give them something to talk about!

For our gospel today, Mark 10:45, accosts us in this very way.

Can you drink the cup that I drink?  Whoever wants to be great shall be your servant.  Whoever wants to be first shall be the slave of all.  The Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.

Parents, Students, Community, Listeners:  Can you drink that cup?

Sursum Corda:  Things are not quite always as they seem, says the gospel.  There is more than a little difference between appearance and reality, says the gospel.  Real leaders serve others, says the gospel.  Ambition unfettered will not lead to happiness, says the gospel.  A true life is not always an easy one, says the gospel.  The son of man did not come to be served, but to serve, says the gospel.   There is a mystery at the heart of life, says the gospel.  And that mystery is Jesus Christ, and him crucified, one whose life, true life, is poured out like a ransom paid to free others.  Underneath the tiny things lurk the great things.  A mystery, a ransom paid, a life laid up and laid out and laid down, lurking, waiting, present, like a breath, the eternal great things, hidden under the unlikely blankets of the littlest things.  Your calling to faith may be brewing…Under a desire for order.  Under a love of play.  Under a feeling of hope.  Under a longing for justice.  Under a sense of humor.   And all through the cacophony of a noisy world, a hint, a glimmer, an echo, a breath,  a rumor…of angels.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 10.21.2012 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

Mark 10: 17-31

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Introduction

None is good but God.  With God all things are possible.

We savor, today, what another Scripture (Gal. 5:22) names as the Spirit’s fruit—goodness, or, perhaps better rendered, “generosity”, goodness that does some good, generative goodness, AGATHOSUNE, generosity.

This is the day, either literally or figuratively, in which the material world is invaded, assaulted, attacked, by Another Reality.

Into the teeth of congenital selfishness, cultural stinginess, communal exclusiveness, and congregational sanctimoniousness, divine Generosity marches on.

Several Octobers ago I did have a Sunday off—what a luxury.   We were in Pheonix, with sunshine and 100 degrees.  I got up late, skipped breakfast, went to a church service someone else had prepared, ate lunch, and then headed out to see if I could get into a major league football game—Cardinals and Giants. Scalpers had some--$100 dollars.  No thank you.  At last, the ticket booth, with a little crowd gathered.  I stood and waited in line.

Suddenly a Pheonix fan appeared, dressed in Cardinals hat, Cardinals shirt, Cardinals socks, Cardinals buttons.  He was a burly bloke, and not overly tidy in his attire.  He also was quite a large person.  He wore a beverage container on his back that had a tube running to his mouth. His Cardinal hat was shaped like a bird, and had wings that moved up and down “in flight” as he walked.   He wore size 13 Converse sneakers.  He stood in the ticket area and said, “I have two $50 tickets that I want to give away.  I don’t want them sold, I want to give them away.”

No one moved.  No one spoke.

“I have free tickets here.  Two of them.  They’re on the 30 yard line, 18 rows up.  I want to give them away.”

I don’t know why, exactly, but no one moved or spoke.  We couldn’t believe it.  “There must be something wrong—a catch.”

Finally, exasperated, Mr. Cardinal slammed his tickets on the counter,  and said to the taker—you give them away, at which point yours truly, not born yesterday, said, “Well, I appreciate your generosity—thanks for the tickets. May the best team win.”

But we don’t really appreciate generosity.  We don’t expect it so we don’t see it.  It stomps up to us and bites us and we still don’t see it.

I was given a place at the table, a seat at the banquet, a ticket to the game—space, entrance, inclusion.

So armed, I walked to the turnstile and realized I had two tickets but only needed one.  So, I walked over to a group nearby and said, “Listen, I have a free ticket here.  I don’t want it scalped.  Who would like it?”

Guess what?

Dead silence.

“Hey.  This is legitimate.  This was given to me—it’s yours for free.”

Nothing.

I turned to leave, when an older man said “OK, OK,  I don’t know what your angle is, buddy, but—hand it    over.”  Which I did.

So on a 100 degree Sunday off in the southwest I was given a free ticket, and also, as the game progressed, and my mind wandered, an apocalyptic insight into the nature of the fruit of the spirit known as goodness, generosity, in three particulars.

Divine Generosity surprises us.

Divine Generosity makes space for others, especially for the stranger, the outsider, the other.

Divine Generosity seduces us, at last, into offering our own generous gifts.

Our text has been variously interpreted since Clement of Alexandria in the first century.  A figurative teaching?  A word for one man only?  A command for the few not the many?

A. Divine Generosity Surprises Us

An elderly couple who met at Depauw University in 1926, but who never graduated, some years ago decided to leave that school their whole life savings, $128 million dollars.  75 students a year will attend that school with full scholarships.  Surprising generosity.

A person visits my office and late that week mails in a check for $3000, to be used “as you see fit”.  Surprising generosity.

A woman who does not attend our church is inspired by the work of the Chapel and leaves that ministry a quarter of a million dollars.  Surprising generosity.  May her tribe increase.

A family needs a place to stay for a summer trip and, hearing the need, a brother in Christ provides a home for the visit.  Surprising generosity.

Someone is saved from psychic hell through the pastoral care of their church, and chooses to endow the expense of pastoral ministry.  Surprising future generosity.

BU is raising $1B:  as the preacher said, ‘this would be my pressure—I mean my pleasure’.

It is in the nature of the spirit to take us somewhat by surprise, and nourish us generously.  So the Scripture teaches us.

Psalm 33:  The earth is full of the HESED (generous goodness) of the Lord

Romans 15:  You also are full of generosity

Galatians 6:10:  Let us be generous to all, especially to those of the household of faith

2 Cor 9:  “The Lord loves a cheerful giver”

Romans 12:  “Let love be genuine.”

Matthew 6:  “If anyone asks for your coat, give him your cloak as well.  If he asks you to go one mile, go a second too.

Galatians 6:  “Bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ.”

Think of Jesus’ parables—of sowing and reaping, of mustard seeds exploding from tiny to great, of talents used and underused, of dishonest but generous stewards and of that haunting and joyous refrain—may it reach our ears at heaven’s door!---“Well done though generous and faithful servant, you have been faithful over a little, we will set you over much.  Enter into the joy of the master.”  How frightful, daunting, awesome, profound is our charge in this life to minister to one another so that we are ready to hear such a sentence pronounced:  “…well done, thou generous and faithful servant..”

If we have savored generous surprise, then we may also sense that this form of the Spirit’s fruit makes space for others.

B. Divine Generosity Makes Space for Others

Look at Marsh Chapel, flourishing because of the surprising generosity of hundreds of faithful people, who want the world to be a better place, who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, who understand that as the seedbed for wonder, morality, and future generosity, the church has a prior claim on our giving.

Let me push you a little here.  I know it is appealing to give to many particular causes and special projects.   But it is Another Reality, the fruit of God’s own spirit known as goodness, which ultimately feeds all giving, and to which the church alone bears full witness.  I think we run the risk of taking our Chapel for granted.  It will prevail into the new millenium only to the degree that another generation of young adults learns and chooses to reflect divine generosity with some of the human variety.

Five students one week reminded me so: a poet, a community worker, a preacher, an economist and a groom to be.

One day a veteran faithful member of the chapel commented to me about our ministry.  In conclusion she said, and the words carried a depth of meaning perhaps even beyond her intention, “we don’t want anyone left behind.”

But that’s it!  No one is to be left behind, left out, left off the list, left outside.   Not at least for those of us who worship the Jesus Christ of the manger, the wilderness, the borrowed upper room, the cross, and the empty tomb!  Jesus lived and died “outside”, to remind us on the religious inside of those still outside.  So that all might have space, have a seat, have a place at the table.  You and I have had seven courses of faith, when others lack even the appetizer.

“We don’t want anyone left behind.”

Marsh Chapel’s current growth and future health are fed by Generosity, goodness that does good.  Generosity makes space, in this chapel, for those who are not yet inside.  Why? Why more?  Why grow?  Because God is generous, and we believe in God.  Because the need of the world is great, and we care about that need.  Because the future health of this chapel depends on our becoming, over a decade, welcoming, inviting and generous, and we love this church.  Because when our own generosity is quickened, faith is less a dull habit and more an acute fever.

For we learn over time.   Sometimes the best gift you can give somebody is the opportunity for them to give themselves.  That is what this sermon is about.   We are trying today, in this season of spiritual harvest, to feast upon the fruit of the spirit known as Generosity.  And the best gift you can receive is the chance to give of yourself.

A while ago friends were going a trip and needed someone to watch their children.  I heard the request and did what you would have done—I referred the idea to the spiritual leader of our home.  Jan said sure.  I wondered a little about it, but the day came and all of a sudden, we had again multiple teenage voices in our home.   And what a treat they were, what a joyful presence, what a gift!  One is this term now completing a PhD across the river at Harvard.

But if our friends had not had the courage and taken the risk of asking, of giving us the real gift of a chance to give, we would have missed a little bit of

Amid surprise and extra space, the Spirit can seduce you, even on an autumn Sunday.

Across religious lines:  some weeks the Hindus are the most Christian people I deal with!

C. Divine Generosity Seduces Us

So in that vein I am going to ask you to risk some generosity this fall.  This chapel can prosper if you will generously support it.  It’s entirely up to you.   I invite you to give, to pledge, to pledge strongly and to tithe.   I am aware that this is a very personal decision.  You only have what you give away.  You only truly possess what you have the power and freedom to give to someone else.

But the world is not going to be healed by token pledges and convenient giving.

This is a giving community.  It needs to become a generous one.  That is your opportunity this fall.

Remember your forebears.  These are the people of whom Diognetus wrote in the year 130ad:

They dwell in their own countries, but merely as sojourners.

Every foreign land is to them their native country.

And yet their land of birth is a land of strangers.

They marry and beget children, but they do not destroy

Their offspring.

They have a common table, but not a common bed.

They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh.

They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven.

When reviled, they bless.

When insulted, they show honor.

When punished, they rejoice.

What the soul is to the body, they are to the world.

What salt is to earth and light is to world, are you to this country, to this region.

The churches stay open for people on whom almost all other doors have closed.  For the poor.  For the irascible.  For the loony.  For the difficult.  You are sitting in the most open, and generously vulnerable public space in this county.

As Lorraine Hansberry wrote,

“When do think is the time to love somebody most?  When they done good and made things easy for everybody?  Well then, you ain’t through learning, because that ain’t the time at all.  It’s when he’s at his lowest and can’t believe in himself ‘cause the world done whipped him so”.

The mission may be the bit and bridle, but the great steed, the real horseflesh of life is found in vision, a vision of a healed and loving world, where there is space, real quality space, for all.  We dare not let the moon of mission eclipse the sun of vision.

Now we sing: Take my life and let it be, Consecrated Lord to thee. We might better sing: Take my life and let it be, Shaped by Generosity.

Our gospel today celebrates divine generosity, the goodness and possibility of God.  None is good but God.  With God all things are possible.

Jane Addams knew this.  Maybe we need to remember the young woman from Rockford Illinois, Jane Addams.  She grew up 140 years ago, in a time and place unfriendly, even hostile, to the leadership that women might provide.    But somehow she discovered her mission in life.  And with determination she traveled to the windy city and set up Hull House, the most far reaching experiment in social reform that American cities had ever seen.  Hull House was born out of a social vision, and nurtured through the generosity of one determined woman.  Addams believed fervently that we are responsible for what happens in the world.  So Hull House, a place of feminine community and exciting spiritual energy, was born.  Addams organized female labor unions.  She lobbied for a state office to inspect factories for safety.  She built public playgrounds and staged concerts and cared for immigrants.  She became politically active and gained a national following on the lecture circuit.  She is perhaps the most passionate and most effective advocate for the poor that our country has ever seen.

Addams wrote:  “The blessings which we associate with a life of refinement and cultivation must be made universal if they are to be permanent…The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain, is floating in midair, until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.”

Can we apply this to our own very space and time?

Yet it was an historian who, for me, explained once the puzzle of Jane Addams’ fruitful generosity.  This was the historian Christopher Lasch.  Several times in the 1980’s I thought of driving over here to visit him.  But I never took the time, and as you know, he died seven years ago.  Lasch said of Addams, “Like so many reformers before her, she had discovered some part of herself which, released, freed the rest.”

Is there a part of your soul ready today to be released, that then will free the rest of you?

I wonder, frankly, whether for some of us that part is our stewardship life, our financial generosity.

Is that part of you, the wallet area part, ready to be released today, and in so doing, to free up the rest?

I think with real happiness over the years of men and women who have, just for example, taken up the practice of tithing, and in so releasing themselves, have found the rest of their lives unleashed for God.

Is there, as there was for Jane Addams, some small part of your soul ready to be released today, which then will free up the rest of you?

Conclusion

Deep, real life change comes from apocalyptic insight and cataclysmic experience.  “All who enter the kingdom of heaven enter it violently”.

Is there a part of your soul which, once released, would free up the rest?  A catalytic experience or moment?  Is it possible, that such an experience is waiting for you, metaphorically speaking, in the lobby outside your bank?  Not in sex, or religion or nation or peril, but in…generosity?

Maybe we can know, in the surprise of Divine Generosity, in the space provided by Divine Generosity, in the seductive attraction of Divine Generosity, what made a man of God out of John Wesley, and helped him to live on a mere 60lbs sterling year by year for his whole adult life, and in the process build a cross continental movement for good, of which we are heirs and debtors.  Go, tithers and future tithers, and live his motto:

Do all the good you can

At all the times you can

In all the ways you can

In all the places you can

To all the people you can

As long as ever you can

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 10.14.2012 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

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Text for today's sermon is unavailable at this time.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 10.7.2012 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

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Matthew 21: 23-32

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Dean Hill:

Beauty opens the world to grace.  Beauty may prepare you for the gospel of faith, the faith of the gospel.  Beauty is a ‘preparatio evangelium’, a preparation of the gospel.  Bach is a prelude to faith.

You will recognize the two sons of today’s parable.  One strong and one weak.  One secular and one religious.  One defiant and one compliant.  One directly negative and one indirectly positive.  One comes to faith.

Nineteen year olds, strong and secular and stepping away from their primary identity, recognize our gospel’s dilemma.  Whether to say a meek ‘yes’ to cradle religion, when the heart is steadfastly in the ‘no’ column, or whether to speak up, to rise up, that is, to stay away, to stay in bed on a Sunday morning, and so be honest to God, if not happy in God.  I walk past snoring dorms full, brother, every Sunday morning.

Forty one year olds, conditioned and religious and doubting in the pew, recognize our gospel’s dilemma.  Whether to say a meek ‘yes’ to Biblicist religion, when the mind stays steadfastly in the ‘no’ column, or whether to rise up, that is, to step away from the fundamentalism that has swamped American religion today like a hurricane turning good cities into mud, or to stay put, to smile, to murmur Sola Scriptura, and so to be dishonest to God, as well as unhappy in God.  For thirty five years I have served in churches among such struggling souls, every Sunday morning.

Sixty five year olds, who have avoided pride and falsehood since 1968, but when it comes to faith have succumbed to sloth, to a kind of personal laziness, a deadly personal ennui, recognize our gospel’s dilemma.  Whether, having said a good, honest, heartfelt ‘no’ some years ago, whether to look real hard at what condition your condition is in, and then whether—HOW HARD THIS IS—to think again.  About what?  About love, about meaning, about eternity, about God, about faith.  It takes a leap. And the leap takes some preparation.  Yes, when it comes to faith, there is always a leap involved.  And that leap requires some preparation.  What preparation, Dr Jarrett, do we receive in today’s glorious cantata?

Dr. Jarrett

Today’s cantata is for those who have chosen to go into the vineyard – maybe they’re our newest students entering the vineyard of Boston University this autumn – maybe they’ve just moved to begin a new job – or maybe they’ve just taken on a new leadership role. For Bach, the vineyard workers are the newly elected mayor and town councilors of Mühlhausen where Bach was organist at St. Blasius’s Church. The text, drawn variously from Psalm 74 and Second Samuel, depicts the old and the new, and the charge for those working in the vineyard.

From the title of the cantata, we can understand that Bach intends to remind the new town council of who’s really in charge – God is my King, and so it has been in ages past. The realm of God’s power knows no boundary. God alone determines the order of all things – the sun and planets take their course from God alone.

Bach reminds those taking up any work in the Vineyard that faith and trust in God alone will bring peace, salvation and prosperity.

Written when Bach was only 23, Cantata 71 is one of his earliest attempts at a larger choral/instrumental form, and it’s his first use of festival forces. Today we hear not an orchestra with chorus, but many choirs of instruments and voices in concert – trumpets and timpani, a choir of strings, oboes with bassoon, and the sweet sound of two recorders with cello. And as Bach’s primary responsibility in Mühlhausen was as organist, there is a prominent part for organ obbligato in the second movement.

Bach includes another special indication or grouping in the score that separates vocal soloists from their section. Today you’ll hear the Choral Scholars of the Marsh Chapel Choir as a small group, joined intermittently by the full Chapel Choir.

As we begin a new semester at Boston University, students, faculty, staff and all within our voice are reminded by Bach to go to the vineyard, accept the charge, but do so only with the full mantle of faith and trust in God.

Dean Hill:

Faith, the leap of faith, requires preparation.  Our colleague Peter Berger has written about this preparation: “I can find in human reality certain intimations of (God’s) speech, signals, unclear though they are, of His presence…joy, expressed in (great music) which seeks eternity…the human propensity to order which appears to correlate with an order in the universe…the immensely suggestive experience of play and humor, the irrepressible human propensity to hope, the certainty of some moral judgments, and last, but not least, the experiences of beauty…”(Questions of Faith, 12).

Beauty prepares us for faith.  Bach is a prelude to the gospel.

When you stand before your grandchild, in the hour of birth, you might think about that.  When you look into your father’s eyes, as he lies critically ill, you might think about that. When you realize that you have a real friend, one real friend, you might think about that. When you look at your beautiful country, in a mess, and wonder whether you should bestir yourself to write a check or make a phone call, you might think about that. When a sunset seizes you, when a poem teases you, when a sermon freezes you, you might think about that.  It takes a leap.  Faith takes a leap.

The beauty of our gospel, in part, is found in its silence about what caused brother one to take his leap, to turn around, to come back, to seize, I mean to be seized by, Love.  We do not know.  Only Matthew tells this story.  His telling is misremembered in five different versions in its textual history.  Its challenge and promise are the same: “the irreligious can often be awakened to a realization of their spiritual need, while those who are actually more righteous are sometimes impervious to the gospel and make no progress beyond the formal morality which they already possess” (IBD, loc. Cit., 510).

Something beautiful may have prepared our brother.  Bach may prepare you today.  Bach may lift your soul beyond youthful grunge.  Bach may raise your soul out of religious hiding.  Bach may sear your soul with beauty, and call you out of forty years of spiritual sloth.  It would not be the first time.  Today we hear a song of thanksgiving, a grateful and beautiful anthem. “Bach’s cantatas, in fact, were conceived and should be regarded not as concert pieces at all, but as musical sermons; and they were incorporated as such in the regular Sunday church services”. (The Cambridge Companion to Bach, 86).  I wonder whether the beautiful holiness of this music will touch you?  I know that you swore an oath one day at the Vietnam Memorial that you had turned your back on all that, all this, all gospel, all God.  In a way, once, I did the same. But I wonder whether there is preparation this morning for your return.  I believe there is.  I know that the flat building, shallow music, one dimensional fundamentalism you hear as faith has soured you.  I know.  It did me too.  But I wonder whether there is a preparation this morning for your return.  I believe there is.  I know that the lonely, awkward wastelands of freshman year can make you question anything lovely and lasting.  I know.  They did me as well.  But I wonder whether there is a preparation this morning for your return.

“Son, Go and work in the vineyard today.”  And he answered, “I will not”.  But afterward, he repented and went.

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

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music

posted in Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music, The Bach Experience, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 09.30.2012 at 11:00 am
Tags: Bach Experience, Robert Hill, Scott Jarrett

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By Marsh Chapel

Mark 8: 24-9:1

Click here to hear the full service.

Click here to hear the sermon only.

A. Today

1.  Jesus is our Common Wealth.  Today and yesterday and everyday, present and past and future.

2.  Last Saturday, along the Charles River, thousands marched in a Heart Walk.  Children zigzagged across the path.  An octogenarian wore his name tag:  Uncle James, a survivor.  Little troops in colored T shirts—yellow, brown, red, silver—marked by hospital names and sponsor names and business names, walked along a common path, not far from commonwealth avenue.  A shorter man and taller woman walked side by side, then, in a moment, clasped hands:  a couple was born!  Older, younger, all colors and shapes, dimly embracing and embodying something unspoken but shared, a common life.   Bought with God’s life, a ransom, one for many.  One group bore this shirt message:  ‘we walk to remember P J’.  (E Hemingway was asked once to write a short story in 6 words.  His reply: ‘Baby shoes for sale. Never worn.’)  One purple group had the right phrase: ‘Take a few steps for a good cause’.  That is about all we do here come Sunday morning.  We parade in.  We process.  We remember our heart, and the dire importance of its health.  We join a world wide parade, come Sunday, here in our modest gothic nave.  We sing, preach and pray, then we recess, and march on.  Underneath the motion and color of the existential parade there abides this deep ground of power, love, grace, freedom and truth:  God has given up God’s life so that we might have life.  Divine absence empowers human presence.  Need I point out that what God has done for us, we in our own measured ways do for those who follow us?  Our life is given, well or poorly, that others might live.

3.  Paul teaches us how to live this truth:  “He who gathered much had nothing over, and he who gathered little had no lack” (2 Cor 8:15):  You have found a way, in a balanced and measured manner, to give to others.  As a community you know the truth of Paul’s advice in giving and living,  found in 2 Corinthians 8.  1.  You are excellent in so many other things, so you will want to excel here.  2.  Real giving is always of one’s own free will.  3.  There is a healthy comparative rivalry for growth in giving which we may affirm.  4. We give according to what we have, so that he who has much may not have too much and he who has little may not have too little.  5. Our measure of what is right, “honorable”, is found both in the sight of God and in the sight of others.  6.  One who sows bountifully reaps bountifully.  7.  Happiness, cheer is the mark of real giving. 8. God will provide what is needed.   9. The main blessing of giving is to the giver:  You will be enriched in every way for great generosity, which through us will produce thanksgiving to God, for the rendering of this service not only supplies the wants of the saints but also overflows in many thanksgivings to God.  Under the test of this service, you will glorify God by your obedience in acknowledging the gospel of Christ, and by the generosity of your contribution for them and for all others.

4. Though we do not always, regularly recall it, our life is His life, and His, ours.  The pattern of his life becomes the pattern of our own lives.  Not many of us are placed in the situation of the four chaplains in our back window, each of whom gave a younger sailor his life jacket as the ship went down.  Not many of us are Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pacifist become activist become prisoner become martyr.  Not many of us have all of our giving concentrated into one quick stroke, one life moment.  But be not deceived.  You too are giving away your life, one way or another, day by day.  You too are giving life that others may live.  From the mother’s breast milk to the father’s night labor to the teacher’s extra effort to the soldier’s risky service to the grandmother’s soft advice to the officer’s dangerous duty.  To live, truly to be alive in the heart of the Common Wealth, the Christ of God, is to give and love and serve.  Faith is the way we accept the gift, the manner in which we account the ransom, the human life by which we receive the self emptying of the divine life.  God has died that we might live.

5. Jesus is our Common Wealth.  Jesus is our Common Faith.  Jesus is our Common Ground.  Jesus is our Common Hope.  Jesus is our Common Life.  Jesus is our Common Wealth.

B.  Yesterday

1.  Jesus is our Common Wealth.  Our tradition reminds us so.

2.  We at Marsh Chapel, and we at Boston University may not yet have the largest financial endowment in the country, or along the Charles River. One day, that may change. Our current capital campaign, ‘Choosing to be Great”, will help.  If you would like to help us to help that to change, please let me know. Be assured that we will do whatever we can for your personal and spiritual welfare, in gratitude.

3.  But there is another way in which Marsh Chapel, and Boston University may already have the largest endowment in the country, or along the Charles River. Our riches are vocal. Our largest endowment is not financial but audible, not monetary but epistolary, not in the coin of the realm but in the language of the heart. Boston University, and centrally within the University, Marsh Chapel, is a treasure store of voice. You notice that, probably, every Sunday when you come across the plaza, and pass the sculpture and monument to Martin Luther King, birds in flight. Said Karl Barth, ‘The gospel is the freedom of a bird in flight’. But King’s voice was not only or mainly a solo voice. He sang in a choir, in choro novo. He sang as one bird in the flock. Howard Thurman sang with him, for example. So did Allan Knight Chalmers. Robert Hamill’s voice was known in his regular column in motive magazine. Littell lead the way.  Ten Presidents.  Six Deans of the Chapel.

4.  Come Sunday, every Sunday, here at Marsh Chapel:

The Chapel’s gothic nave, built to lift the spirit, welcomes you

The Chapel’s sixty year history, at the heart of Boston University, welcomes you

The Chapel’s regard for persons and personality, both in its Connick stained glass windows and in its current ministry, welcomes you

The Chapel’s familiar love of music, weekday and Sunday, welcomes you

The Chapel’s congregation of caring, loving souls, in this sanctuary, welcomes you in spirit.

Welcome today as we enhance our endowment.

Endowment.

5.  Yes, a word brings a lift to the decanal eyebrow, a stirring to the Episcopal soul, a tingle to the Provostial spirit, a warming to the Presidential heart.  A welcome word, today, on an Alumni Weekend. Now, endowments are crucial for chapel, for school, for university.  We shall other days on which to build such.  But today we celebrate the endowment we already have.  It is a rich and treasure.  A tradition of ‘common wealth’ on Commonwealth Avenue.  It is an endowment vocal not visible, audible not audited, psychic not physical, moral not material.

Listen for its echoes…listen…listen to the voices of Boston University and of Marsh Chapel…

All the good you can…

The two so long disjoined…

Heart of the city, service of the city…

Learning, virtue, piety…

Good friends all…

Hope of the world…

Are ye able, still the Master, whispers down eternity…

Common ground…

Content of character…

6.  Jesus is our Common Wealth.  Jesus is our Common Faith.  Jesus is our Common Ground.  Jesus is our Common Hope.  Jesus is our Common Life.  Jesus is our Common Wealth.

7.  Lift up your hearts:  Signs of courtesy…to someone who could be of no service…reveal to us suddenly…a whole world of beliefs to which (we) never give any direct expression but which govern (our) conduct…(Proust, RTP, 1016)

8.  We too are summoned to take our place in the march, the great procession of faith, the heart walk of our common wealth.  Does anyone want to follow?  Renounce self, love others.  Have a sense that others are you and that you are the other.  Take up the cross, then.

9.  Friends:  there is something so direct and common about this teaching, something we as buyers and sellers, as savers and spenders, as those with pockets and wallets and accounts can ‘get’.   Our life rests on the gift of our Common Wealth, the gift of God in Jesus Christ.  As we learn, very partially, to do, year by year, to give our days and hours and lives for others—our friends, our family, our community, our country, our church, our world, all—so God has done for us, by laying down the divine life, as a ransom.  In some dark mysterious way, this was the only way to get us loose, set us free, give us life.  Isaiah had foretold it.

10.  Calvin wrote first about sanctification and then about justification, first about holiness and then about salvation, first about ethics and then about theology.  For once, we have followed his lead, last week and this.  For the call to justice raises a question.  Why should anyone care?  Why should anyone care to be just?  What makes that claim a worthy claim?  Last week we listened for the moral of this account, the ethical teaching of Mark 8 about justice.  This week we listen for the spiritual meaning, the reason anyone would care to care about the moral of the story, the portrait of God, the life of God, God’s given life, life giving love.  God has died that we might live.  That makes the ransom of Christ so precious.  That makes the gift of each day so valuable.  A radical Calvinist, author of The Death of God, who died himself last week, Gabriel Vahanian, put it this way: ‘God is not necessary but he is inevitable.  He is wholly other and wholly present.  Faith in him, the conversion of our human reality, both culturally and existentially, is the demand he still makes upon us’ (NYT obit, 9/12)

11.  Dorothy Sayer, a radio listener reminded me, put it this way:

The worker’s first duty is to serve the work. The popular catchphrase of today is that it is everybody’s duty to serve the community, but there is a catch in it. It is the old catch about the two great commandments. “Love God – and your neighbor: on those two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”… The catch in it, which nowadays the world has largely forgotten, is that the second commandment depends upon the first, and that without the first, it is a delusion and a snare. Much of our present trouble and disillusionment have come from putting the second commandment before the first… Whenever man is made the center of things, he becomes the storm center of…

C. Everyday

1.  Jesus is our Common Wealth.  Our Scripture reveals Him so.

2.  There is something beyond our telling, something down deep on which we ground everything else.  T Wilder:  we don’t take it out and look at it very often but still we know:  there is something eternal about every human life.

3.  Behold, I tell you a mystery…Our Gospel lesson cuts to the heart of faith and life.  The mystery and the rigor of following after a crucified Christ have ever been right in the heart of faithful life.   We are invited to join the parade.  If nothing else, our faith and tradition squarely face original sin, inevitable death, communal guilt, and tragic loss.  Today’s lesson is an early formulation of this heart and this faith and this life.  There come moments, regularly, in which the question reverberates, ‘but…you…who do you say that I am?’  The earliest church lived under the shadow of this question, and so do we.  When others see us, and see us taking the name of Christ, whom do they see that we say, in our living, who he is?  Peter’s rebuke is remembered and rehearsed because some, or maybe better said, some part of all of us, find the crucified Christ unacceptable.  Peter is told:  get behind me, that is, follow, learn, and take up.  Peter names Christ in the same way that Mark’s church named him, and in the same way that you do here, too.

4.  Jesus walk is to some measure that of his followers as well.  It is ours, too.  We too labor on without full or final victory.  We too, whether suddenly or slowly, give up the life given us at birth.  We too face and struggle in facing up to injustice, tragic mistake, forces that make human life inhuman.  We, too, live and die seemingly apart from God.  The end, the fulfilling wholeness of the reign of God, has in fact not come.  We cut to the heart of being, of being itself, of being alive, today, Mark 8:27, this last week of summer, 2012.

5.  There is though another side to the same story.  Jesus’ path becomes ours, to some measure.    We too live with a sense of the dawn of a better history at hand.  We too live with the potential, always present, for a new rebirth of wonder, love and praise.  We too struggle forward, in the midst of much ambiguity, and sometimes in a depth and despair of pain, guided on by a north star of hope marked ‘will rise again’.  We too face the future free to shape it.  Free to make our mark, to rise up for a just cause, to rise up for a just peace, to rise up for a just world, to rise up for the hope of a common wealth, a shared future, a siblinghood of society in which every child is cherished and no man maligned and no woman wasted and every person protected.   Wealth, to have worth, will be common, shared, spread out.  For what would it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?  What can one give in exchange for one’s soul?

6. Jesus is our Common Wealth.  Jesus is our Common Faith.  Jesus is our Common Ground.  Jesus is our Common Hope.  Jesus is our Common Life.  Jesus is our Common Wealth.

7.  Our Common Wealth, who gave his life as a ransom for others.  You may not be a lasting fan of atonement theory and theology:  nor am I.  Yet the one partial explanation which St Mark will give, later in the Gospel, for the death of Jesus, marks him forever as our Common Wealth.  In explicitly commercial terms, mercantile language, the language of payment and recompense, of ransom, one for all, Jesus is so named:  Common Wealth.  He, the basis for our common life and living community.  While you may have heard so, you may not have heard, really heard the word:  God has given up God’s life for the life of the world.

8.  Yes, the expectation of the immediate return was disappointed.  Our disappointment continues, to this day.  Our hoped for future lies still in the future.  Yet, along the way there is a presence, there is an alluring mystery, a ground underneath the ground on which we walk.  It is holy ground.   A great gift has been given, a great price paid, a great offering made.  All the twirling magic of life, along the heart walk of faith, all of this life has been bought with a price.  When Mark asks himself, ‘why did Jesus die?’, he gives only one answer:  as a ransom (so, rightly for once, Marcus, II, 605).    The ‘wealth’ that has produced our common life, our common wealth, is Jesus Christ, and him crucified.  There is something very disturbing, and odd, yet true and clear, here.  God has given God’s life for ours.  We are to go and do the same for others.  The figure of a ransom—a bag of treasure given over to open a way to freedom.  The Greek word for ransom means release.  The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for the many (for all).  One life given, life given all.  Jesus is our common wealth which releases all of the rest of life, the life underneath all other life, the ground of life and being and all.  For many?  How many?  Very many!  All!  He purchases a way forward, a ticket, a passage for the voyage, at a very steep price.

9.  The life of God, God’s very life, moves to its nadir.  Our common life, the life of the world, human life, is freed to move to its apex.  God dies. Man lives.  The Son of Man dies.  The sons of men live.  Behold—SURSUM CORDA—the gospel mystery!   The divine generosity is whole, absolute, complete, perfected.

10. As we shall sing together in just a few months:

Jesus is our childhood’s pattern

Day by day like us he grew

He was little, weak and helpless

Tears and smiles, like us he knew

And he feeleth for our sadness

And he shareth in our gladness

And our eyes at last shall see him

Through his own redeeming love

For that child so dear and gentle

Is our Lord in heaven above

And he leads his children on

To the place where he has go

~The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill,

Dean of Marsh Chapel

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 09.23.2012 at 11:00 am

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