Sunday
June 20
The Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand
By Marsh Chapel
Sunday
June 13
Go in Peace
By Marsh Chapel
Click here to hear the sermon only.
“ … we know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ. And we have come to believe in Christ Jesus, so that we may be justified by faith in Christ, and not by doing the works of the law, because no one will be justified by the works of the law.” This is quite a statement from a well-brought-up Pharisee. And Paul, like Simon in our Gospel story this morning, was a very good Pharisee.
Now Pharisees have a rather mixed reputation in the Gospels, but they were actually good people – devoted to God, and in that devotion very observant of the Law certain kinds and standards of behavior. And, even before Paul writes to the Galatians, like so many good people, some of the Pharisees had begun to isolate themselves in their own goodness, in their own goodness as defined by how well they kept the Law. They had begun to isolate themselves in what they did, rather than in who they were, God’s loved and forgiven and restored people, whose actions came from their love of God and neighbor in response to God’s compassionate love and forgiveness toward them. They began to isolate themselves from others in their community, and to judge them for not coming up to their own particular standards. This same kind of isolation thinking had begun to surface in the Galatian church, and Paul wants to make it very clear that for Christians, it is faith in God through Jesus Christ, the one who loved us enough to share our life and death, the one who lives within us, it is faith in Jesus Christ that brings us to right relationship with God.
Luke’s account of Simon’s dinner party illustrates what that faith might look like in practice. Simon the Pharisee invites Jesus to dinner. We are not sure what his motives are; Luke portrays Jesus and the Pharisees as already having had numerous discussions, not all of them friendly. Certainly when the uninvited woman intrudes into his home Simon does not evict or stop her, and instead seems to think that Jesus has failed some kind of test that involves her: “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what kind of woman this is who is touching him--that she is a sinner." Simon completely ignores what the woman does and has no interest in why she does it. For him, her sin is what defines her in the past and in the present, and her sin is what should define her in her relationship to Jesus and in Jesus’ relationship to her.
The woman, as happens so often with women in the Bible, is not recorded by name, and she is recorded as not saying anything. But what she is when she is with Jesus speaks more clearly than words. She has found him – after she has taken the time and effort to find out where Jesus is staying. She has found him -- so she then intrudes on a private party and proceeds to display towards Jesus an extravagance of devotion. Her extravagance is one of money: she brings ointment, not just any ointment but the kind of ointment that comes in a fancy jar made of highly-prized alabaster. Her extravagance is one of luxury: the ointment is used to anoint Jesus’ feet. Her extravagance is one of emotion: she weeps in Jesus’ presence, to the extent that she can bathe his feet with her tears. Her extravagance is one of physicality: she bends to his feet as he reclines at dinner as was the custom for men, her tears wet his feet, she dries his feet with her hair; she kisses his feet and rubs the ointment into them in an act of respect and comfort. Her whole self is this extravagance of love and devotion, and manifests as extravagant acts of recognition and hospitality as she welcomes Jesus and the possibilities he brings into her life.
Jesus in turn recognizes her: not as the sinner she may have been, but as the woman of faith she now is, a woman who responds to the compassion and forgiveness of God that she sees in Jesus with a change of life that brings a new relationship with God and with other people. In her love and devotion it is she who becomes Jesus’ true hostess, and what Simon, or anyone else, thinks of her no longer matters. Her faith that God’s compassion and forgiveness are for her has saved her from the power of the past, so that she can go in the present and into the future in peace.
Simon is a good man. And, like so many good people, he cannot get beyond his own goodness. He calls Jesus “Teacher”, but he does not take the lesson. He does realize that the more one is forgiven, the more one will love the forgiver, but he does not see that this might apply to himself. He feels no need for compassion or forgiveness for himself or for the woman. He does not realize his own transgression against the law as he neglects Jesus, his invited guest. He cannot recognize the great change taking place in the woman and in her new reality, but persists in trying to keep her in her place as a sinner. He denies not just his own need for change, but denies himself the compassion and forgiveness of God and the possibilities that might open up for him. In a poignant irony, in his refusal of forgiveness he denies himself and others the best of what he can both be and do: “But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little."
The story of Simon and the woman who crashes his party is our story as well. We live in a culture that pays much more attention to what we do than to what we are, a culture that demands retribution, not restoration, if we transgress. We can never be too rich or too thin, and our exposure to an average of 30,000 advertisements a day tells us that whatever we do or have, it is not enough. Our schedules look like train wrecks and there is no place on the planet where people cannot reach us through some kind of technology. Already we are a nation that works more than any other, and in this economic climate many of us come into work even earlier and stay even later now all seven days a week, and we no longer take the time to eat even at our desks. And if we do not have a job, maybe we should just try a little harder. We overmedicate our children to keep them socially acceptable, and over self-medicate ourselves either to bear the pain or to keep all the balls in the air, or to do both. We have more people in prison than any other nation on earth. Anyone who really tries to change their life will tell you that it’s not the realization of their own mistakes or sin, or the need to change, or the acceptance of forgiveness, or the taking of responsibility for the choice of the good that is the hardest thing: the hardest thing to overcome it is the refusal of other people to acknowledge that any change is possible for him or her or has actually occurred. And as we all know, the hardest person of all to forgive is ourself.
It does not matter how well we keep the law, whatever law we choose to observe. Last October Frank Warren visited Boston to talk about the latest book and news on his PostSecret project. He began the project five years ago when he invited people to mail in anonymously a secret printed on one side of a postcard decorated with art meaningful to them. The secret could be anything, as long as it was true and the sender had never shared it with anyone before. Half a million postcards later and counting from all over the world, and with the postcard secrets posted on a website and on Facebook and Twitter, the project has become a phenomenon, and is still going strong. The secrets are funny, or they sadden, shock, move, or disturb, and they reveal our common humanity and our common desire and need to keep some things hidden, some things we feel we cannot let anyone else know. We are not, and cannot be, perfect: especially to ourselves. And yet our need to reveal, the need for someone
to know, is also there, relieved if only by a stranger’s invitation to let ourselves be fully known without judgment. Frank Warren’s project has grown, and he has become known as “the most trusted stranger in America”, because he does not judge, but accepts each secret confession with respect and compassion. This invites the sharer of the secret also to have respect and compassion for the secret they have shared: many who have posted a secret report that they have gone on to share the secret with those who have needed to know it or with people who can help them with any next steps they may want to take. This also invites the reader to have respect and compassion for the secret, for the sharer of the secret, and for the reader’s own secrets so that the reader feels less alone. When the secret is shared, and compassion is shared, it becomes less a question of what we do than a question of who we are in our common humanity.
The challenge for us as followers of Christ is to claim who we are in the midst of and in spite of the demands made of us to do. In the great religious and philosophical treasury of bumper sticker wisdom, it is revealed that we are not perfect, just forgiven. What we do or how acceptably we behave does not save us in this world; the demands continue to escalate, all we do is never enough. Instead we are saved by our faith in the promises of God through Jesus Christ, that in that faith we are forgiven, we are forgiven, that the whole process of repentance, compassion, forgiveness, and restoration is at work in us and for us, even us, with our mistakes and our secrets and our sin. And our faith does not save us just once for all, for some place where we will have pie in the sky when we die by and by. Our faith saves us also for our whole life long, for this life here in this world, in this place and time, so that we are freed from the power of the past and can live in peace with God, with ourselves, and with our neighbors right now. For when we know that the compassion and forgiveness of God is at work in our lives, we can begin to invite others to experience these gifts as well, and can begin to recognize them at work in others and to support their peace and wholeness as we do our own.
Now this may sound simple. But it may not be easy. Our faith in our own forgiveness may shock others, and may surprise us as well. There are plenty of people like Simon who will want to keep us in the past or in the opinions they have of us. There are people like the other guests at the dinner party, who may question whether our forgiveness is legitimate. People like the other guests at the dinner party who took exception to Jesus’ support of the woman may take exception to our support of others as they move toward a new way of being. Forgiveness comes from change as repentance, and forgiveness results in change as peace and wholeness of life, and, that change may not look like what we expect. It may look extravagant, or messy, or shocking, or outside our familiar categories. We might expect, as it might be assumed it was for the woman whose sins were forgiven, that those who are not respectable will become respectable. What may also happen, that we might not expect, is that those who are respectable may become not respectable. This happened for Mary Magdalene (even though she had already been relieved of seven demons). It happened for Joanna (the wife of Herod’s steward, no less). It happened for Susanna, and for the many other women, who out of their love for and devotion to Jesus found themselves called to leave home and to travel around the country, to keep the Son of God and twelve other men out of their own resources, and to shatter every stereotype of both respectable women and respectable community, just by their very being.
So the key in all this, as the woman at the dinner party demonstrated, is to keep our focus on Jesus, to keep our focus on our love for and devotion to him, and to keep our focust on the possibilities he offers for our own peace and wholeness through the compassion and forgiveness of God he proclaims and embodies. Then, like the woman at the dinner party, and the women on the road with Jesus proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kin-dom of God, we can have faith in our own forgiveness in spite of what others may think, and in spite of what others may think can offer that forgiveness, peace, and wholeness to others.
There’s no time like the present. If we ourselves have not repented or changed our direction and claimed God’s compassion and forgiveness, we can do that now or whenever we choose. If we already have faith that forgiveness continues to work in our lives, we can begin or continue to move out on that faith to build relationships of forgiveness, health and wholeness with God, with ourselves, and with our neighbors. If we already have faith that forgiveness continues to work in our lives, we can also begin or continue to recognize where forgiveness is or has been at work in the lives of those around us, and can begin to support them as they become a new creation in spite of the obstacles thrown up by those who have a vested interest in the status quo. No matter what we have done in the past, or if now we make mistakes, or backslide, or just choose the not good out of ignorance or orneriness; it is our faith in God through Jesus Christ, our faith in the compassion and forgiveness of God at work for us and in us, it is our faith that has and will save us, so that we can go in peace into our lives and into the world. Thanks be to God. Amen.
~The Reverend Victoria Hart Gaskell, OSL
Chapel Associate for Methodist Students
Chapel Associate for Methodist Students
Sunday
June 6
Healing Remembered
By Marsh Chapel
One wishes that the outset of our gospel were not so utterly contemporary. There are Sundays when it might be a comfort to listen to a lesson that seems utterly innocuous—something about the Jebusites, or the seventh heaven, or camels and loincloths. But here we have an utterly familiar scene, familiar anyway to the remaining readers of remaining front pages of remaining newspapers. A city street. A crowd gathered. A mother who is a widow. The mother’s only son. And he, dead. In all the cities of our residence, over thirty years, New York, Syracuse, Montreal, Rochester, Boston, this story has been, and still is, once the weather gets warmer, regular front page news.
One wonders how those to whom healing has not come receive a gospel lesson like today’s gospel lesson. For healing of the sort provided here, sudden and miraculous, a raising from the very dead, is not routinely a part of our experience. In fact, you and I have not ever seen a man really dead suddenly and really sit up and speak. When healing comes, it comes not like this. And often it does not come. One thinks of those women and men, who have prayed and hoped for healing for their loved ones, and it did not come. A reading like ours might feel like salt in the wound, a needless rhetorical cruelty.
One ponders, even more pointedly, how those whose religion celebrates healing, for whom salvus (health) is the heart of salvation, might receive this kind of story, if in their own experience, the experience has been otherwise. Healing sought that does not come. One imagines a woman in Westfield, whose son is permanently buried, or a man in Marlboro whose wife is permanently disabled, or a daughter in Worcester whose parents are gone and not coming back. And if these three and others had also grown up with a sacramentalism that was revealed as untrustworthy by brute experience? And if these three and others had also grown up with a literalism that was revealed as untrustworthy by brute experience? What then? What would these religious words repeated today sound like?
What is the point of a healing remembered, when so often healing does not come? How are you going to hear gospel, assuming your experience, which is our shared common experience, of loss, grief, sickness to death, dream deferred, and healing that does not always come? What is the point of such a story, such a memory, such a history? How shall we preach about a healing remembered in the midst of so much experience of healing rescinded? The pain, the bruising reminder, of a healing that did not come can last a lifetime. The increased pain in that pain, the wound salt, of misguided religion—literal Biblicism, magical sacramentalism--- can take more than a generation to remove from a family system.
Let us together give our Gospel a moment to respond, in a way that fits the reading’s own intention. We are right to analyze and criticize and demythologize our Holy Scriptures—they can take it. But we also want to give space for the Holy Scripture to analyze us and criticize us and demythologize us. To listen, in other words, to the Word. In our lesson today, healing remembered becomes memory healed. Healing remembered is in the service of memory healed. The account is recalled as a way of remembering again who we are meant to be, who you really are.
Our lesson from Luke is modeled after the longer reading made earlier from 1 Kings. There too, a widow. There too, a son. There too, a healing. There too, a proof of prophetic power. There too, at the climax, ‘he gave him to his mother’. There too, a word about a Word, a word of truth. In the Old Testament lesson, as in the New Testament Gospel, the healing is remembered as a part of the spreading of the word, a word of truth, that sets things right again, and that sets us on our right path again. Like Elijah, Jesus heals, and the healing is remembered. Here we have a clue to the point of a healing remembered.
For the community of faith, this one healing does not eclipse all of the others that did not come, that do not come, that have not come in the desired mode. How could it? After all, even all of the wonderfully typical compassion of the Lukan Jesus, who saw, had compassion, touched, spoke and made right, happens, let the reader understand, at sunset, in the twilight, under the shadow of the coming Cross. The healer is the crucified, from whom no pain and no hurt and no failure, and no loss are kept. On his way to the cross, Jesus has compassion. On his way to powerless failure, Jesus shows a healing power. His resurrection power is remembered even in the shadow of the cross.
Here there is something unexpected which unexpectedly occurs. Life can be like that, and that is good. Here there is something which stitches together family sundered and life ended. Here there is a mission, a desire, a thrust into the future. We come to church, listen for the word, and receive the sacrament, for just such a moment of memory, right remembrance, reclaimed. This one healing—a great joy and wondrous gift, however it may have happened—is meant to teach us, to remind us, that we are a part of the healing work in the world. We have something to learn from this, something to recall. The recollection is offered for all—healed and hurt, well and ill, recovered and removed. In some ways it is meant especially for those whose first dreams have been deferred, and for those whose initial hopes have been disappointed. Today, that may be you. In healing rightly remembered, our memory is rightly healed, and we have the chance again to be who we are meant to be, healers. Healers who remember that sometimes surprising, unexpected, good things happen. Healers who are not willing to give up on hope for what is not yet seen. Healers who relish the chance to heal, and be healed. Healers who recall the long parade of healing, with Jesus in the midst --the Great Physician. Healers who see in moments of health a sign of God’s loving presence in the world, ready and willing to heal and make new.
One wonders if there has ever been a time that more needed such a word, such a healing remembered bringing memory healed. Police battling city street crime need that memory. Diplomats battling the urge and surge to war need that memory. Discouraged engineers battling the deep cut into the earth gushing oil into the future need that memory. Spouses of those with tough diagnoses need that memory. In remembering past healing, we learn something -–something saving and true--about ourselves.
Lee Woodruff spoke for an hour in April, just down the street, about a healing remembered. Those who heard her left in tears because our memory was healed. Lee is a journalist, married to Bob Woodruff, who is a journalist, too, a national television anchor man. Bob nearly died in Iraq, coming home in a deep coma, with near fatal head trauma. Lee spoke at the Sargent School, our college for physical therapy. She told the future healers her story…in order to remind them of who they are meant to become. She related her terror and fear a a young mother with a husband whose wounds seemed incurable. She described the day by day routine of visiting a comatose spouse, 35 days with no response. She critically witnessed about those, mainly doctors, who spoke only of the worst possible outcomes: ‘the nurses were truer, saying that no one knew, but they had seen cases of healing’.
She was reminding by remembering. Her healing remembered became memory healed: Illness affects a whole family not just a patient. Do not be afraid to offer hope. Give information slowly. Touch him like
a person. Rub his feet. Keep the whole family in view. Tell it like it is.
And. Have faith. Faith is not some icky, scary, non-PC thing. It is one of the tools in recovery. Recognize that things happen randomly, that there is not a set plan whereby all things occur. Yet believe that God’s desire is for healing, healing in every setting, in every trauma, in every illness.
Lee read him letters that came from all over the country. Day after day. No response. One letter came from Bruce Springsteen. She added a few sentences of her own to what was written, saying that Bob was invited when better to go on stage and play with E-street band. No response.
Then on the 36th morning of his coma, following her usual swim and Starbucks stop, Lee Woodruff walked in to find her husband sitting up and saying, ‘Hi Lee, where have you been?’
For months later they battled aphasia. One day he gestured with his arms, not remembering the word for guitar, but making the motions. ‘Why do you want a guitar?’ ‘To get ready to play with Springsteen’, he replied. And today he has almost fully recovered. But the burden of her sermon, and it was such, a powerful sermon which might have had as its text Luke 7:11, was to remind us that we all and we each have some role in healing. You are meant to be healers. You were baptized into the community of healing. You have grown up to faith in a tradition of healing. You are those who are hopeful for healing. You gather regularly around a simple table, to share the bread and the cup, to taste the new wine of memory healed, which is today announced in the account of a healing remembered.
~The Reverend Dr. Robert Allan Hill,
Dean of Marsh Chapel
Dean of Marsh Chapel
Sunday
May 30
What Shall We Say?
By Marsh Chapel
Click here to hear the sermon only.
Well, this is just fantastic. The dean decides to take Memorial Day weekend off and leaves me stuck attempting to explain the doctrine of the Trinity. Oh sure! No problem! It’s only the most complicated and contested doctrine in the history of Christian thought. Piece of cake! Nothing we can’t get sorted out in the next twenty minutes.
May we pray? Holy God; Holy and mighty; Holy and eternal. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our rock and our redeemer.
Oh dear. What exactly are we supposed to do here? Or more precisely, what shall we say? After all, to declare with the ancient creeds of the Christian church that divine life is one God in three persons is precisely that, a declaration, a form of speech.
To speak of God is always difficult, if not outright terrifying. What if we get it wrong? If we say something out of line, will God smite us where we stand? More importantly, what if someone believes us? If we are wrong, might we have sent them down a dangerous path? That there is so much at stake in our speech about God is hardly made easier by the fact that the object of speech, God, often seems so inaccessible. It is not like describing a stone that we pick up at the beach, washed ashore by the crashing waves. We can describe the stone to a friend and the friend can look and see whether or not our description meets up with their experience of the stone. But God does not fit in our hands. Saint Anslem said that God is “that than which nothing greater can be thought.” One of the implications is that God is so great that the power of human speech to be meaningful in describing God is compromised.
So, why bother to say anything at all? Why not just remain silent in the face of God, who we can barely comprehend? Is it not sheer hubris to attempt to speak of God at all? As a matter of fact, yes, it is sheer hubris to speak of God. Not that pride has ever been a particular deterrent to people going ahead and doing whatever it is they are determined to be about anyway. But there is more to it than pride. It seems that there is a human compulsion to speak. The very first lines of the Tao Te Ching say that “A way that can be walked is not The Way; a name that can be named is not The Name,” but it then immediately goes on to say that “Tao is both Named and Nameless. As Nameless, it is the origin of all things; as Named, it is the mother of all things.” Similarly, with regard to the Trinity, Augustine notes: “Yet, when the question is asked, What three? human language labors altogether under great poverty of speech. The answer, however, is given, three "persons," not that it might be [completely] spoken, but that it might not be left [wholly] unspoken.” To fail to speak, it seems, is as great a sin as the pride of speaking.
This should not be entirely surprising to us. We gathered here in the nave of Marsh Chapel and listening over radio waves and internet signals are a community, and communities are formed out of shared experiences that are then shared again and again in common patterns of speech, in the telling and retelling of stories. Without speech, we would not be. This is the truth of the beginning of the Gospel according to John: “In the beginning was the word.”
All right, so we can’t speak well, and yet we must speak. But what exactly are we doing when we speak? To speak is not simply to state a fact. Yes, there are what philosophers of language and linguists call locutionary aspects of speech. When we speak we make sounds that are strung together in patterns that comprise words, which are in turn strung together in sentences with grammar and syntax and thus have meaning. However, this is not all that is happening when humans speak. In addition to locutionary aspects, human speech also has illocutionary aspects, in which meaningful words and sentences are spoken in a context so as to bring about some outcome. Human beings speak with intent. Sometimes that intent is merely to describe. “It’s really hot outside.” More often, however, the intent is to more than merely descriptive. After service, if you find yourself standing on the plaza chatting with a fellow congregant, and that person says “it’s really hot outside,” it is more than likely that they are suggesting that the two of you should continue your conversation in some nearby shade. You can tell this because if your response is simply to agree, “yes, it is really hot outside,” your conversation partner will likely roll their eyes and make the request more explicit, “why don’t we go sit in the shade and chat?” Under the illocutionary aspect, we do not merely make intelligible sounds, we ask, request, promise, greet, warn, advise, challenge, encourage, deny and otherwise initiate actions. In speaking, we expect a response.
What kind of action are we undertaking when saying that God is Trinity? And to whom are we speaking? There are two primary contexts in which we speak of God. The first is in the context of worship. It is traditional in the history of Christian worship that following the sermon and leading into the celebration of Holy Communion the congregation would recite together a creed, often the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. The creed usually begins, “I believe.” This identifies the creed as what philosopher John Searle identifies as a declarative speech act, one that commits the speaker to the truth of what is said. Entering into a common action of committing to a common truth is a powerful way of drawing people together under what all affirm as the same experience of the same God. This is one way of overcoming the difficulty of the inaccessibility of God to easy perception and thus description.
The other context in which God is spoken of as Trinity is in the context of theological explication. In this context the theologian is enacting what Searle calls a directive speech act that seeks to cause the hearer or reader to do something, usually in this case to believe in God as Trinity as the theologian has laid out the case. Trinitarian theologians seek to make the case that believing in God as Trinity allows for a coherent, consistent, adequate and applicable understanding of God, the world, and our place in the world. Because the account provides coherence, consistency, adequacy and applicability, categories I am borrowing from Alfred North Whitehead, then the hearer or reader is justified in assenting to the theologian’s claims.
These then are the two contexts in which we speak of God: worship and theological explication. In the first our speech is declarative, and is addressed to God and to each other, binding us together in a common community. In the second the speech of the theologian is directive, and is addressed to us, calling us to believe in God as Trinity because such belief is justified. At least, these are the ways that talk of God is classically understood. I would like to suggest that limiting ourselves to these two understandings of God-talk is missing an important active dimension in what we are doing when we speak of God.
Speaking of God is not merely declarative, committing ourselves to the truth of what we say, nor merely directive, asking others to believe as we do. To speak of God is to enact a type of speech act that Searle distin
guished as declaration. A declaration does not merely commit the speaker to the truth of what is said, but changes reality to accord with what is said. In a criminal case, when the judge hands down the sentence, the reality of the defendant is no longer ‘defendant’ but either the one who committed the crime, ‘guilty,’ or the one who did not commit the crime, ‘innocent.’ At a wedding, such as the one at which I will officiate this afternoon, the words “I now pronounce you…” are what make the marriage legal, and so are a significant part of what makes the marriage real.
While I identified the declarative and directive classes of speech acts as the classical interpretations of the nature of God-talk, they are so only in terms of a modern western conception. The idea of speaking of God as a declaration that changes reality is actually quite old when we turn to south Asian religious traditions, and also to some very early Christian sacramental theology, some of which survives to this day. In both cases, the understanding that speech has the power to make reality as it is arises in the context of ritual. In south Asia, it was believed that enacting rituals, and particularly speaking the right words in the rituals, maintained the very existence of the world. This belief was crucial to the religious heritage of the region and speech remains central to Hindu theologies. For Christians, the idea of anamnesis is that in reciting salvation history in the Eucharistic prayers, time collapses together to make the ritual expression of the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus one with its first occurrence in first century Palestine and with every other anamnetic retelling past, present and future. Thus, the Eucharistic prayer is not simply a retelling of what happened, but the actual happening of salvation history, the enactment of the reality of salvation history. The declaration of the story makes it so.
Of course, it is one thing to say that declaration makes socially constructed realities so, but it would seem to be nonsensical to believe that simply saying that “the sky is chartreuse” could make it so. Indeed, there is a significant difference between social reality and brute reality. And we run into trouble if we say that the declaration of God as Trinity makes God Trinity because most of us would like to believe that God is a part of brute reality, something given to be experienced, not a projection arising out of common affirmation. But this is indeed what South Asian and early Christian theologies claimed, that the very being of the brute world is dependent upon ritual. Today we may wish to dissent from this strong claim about the capacity of declaration. But perhaps we need not protest too much.
Recent work on ritual by Boston University professors Adam Seligman and Robert Weller make the case that ritual, broadly understood, creates subjunctive, as-if spaces that allow us to cope with the broken, disjunct, fractured experience of life. Ritual gives us the ability to draw together the strewn about pieces of our lives and our experience of the world into something resembling a unified whole. The fact of the matter is that our experience is not normally coherent, consistent, adequate or applicable across the many arenas of life in the world, and we ourselves are not coherent, consistent, adequate or applicable. This is why in religious life we acknowledge the deep chasms and fissures of the human condition. As Stephen Prothero, another BU professor, so carefully points out in his most recent book, God Is Not One, different religious traditions make different claims about the contours of those chasms and fissures, and therefore prescribe different ways of unifying them. Nevertheless, it is fundamental to religious life that there is something wrong with the world, that we ourselves are not well suited to overcoming those wrongs, and that it is only by acknowledging and giving ourselves over to the ultimacy of ultimate reality that we can get by. As Paul says, “We also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts.”
To speak of God is to create a ritual, subjunctive, as-if space in which all of the chasms and fissures of our broken lives and experience fit together coherently, consistently, adequately and applicably. But our speech about God must in some way acknowledge the subjunctive character of the space. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity does this, as do other conceptions of ultimate reality. The doctrine of the Trinity insists that God is one, thus creating the subjunctive space of wholeness. But the doctrine of the Trinity can only understand God to be one in terms of three persons, three expressions, thereby acknowledging that the reality of God can only be coherent, consistent, adequate and applicable to us in our brokenness and our disjunct lives in a fractured world insofar as God is not one. This is to say that God participates in our desire for unity and God participates in the reality of fractured existence. How God can do this, how God can be both transcendent and immanent, is not something that we can speak as a fact but is something that God speaks as a declaration. The unity of God, how it is that these three are one, is not something that we can bear; it is a mystery. “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” The declaration of God is that ultimate unity - ultimate coherence, consistency, adequacy and applicability – is not for us now, except in the glimpses of grace we experience when we make our own declaration of God the Trinity. Amen.
~Br. Larry Whitney, LC+
University Chaplain for Community Life
University Chaplain for Community Life
Sunday
May 23
A Dog’s Life
By Marsh Chapel
The twin powers of gathering and hearing are at the heart of Pentecost. In a combination of community and audibility Spirit arrives.
Our understanding of the Acts of the Apostles has deepened and sharpened over the last two hundred years. How we interpret the church’s first history is a matter of some debate. Is the book, written by Luke, a sourced, reliable, historical document, rendered for the benefit of the church as an actual account of its earliest life—a kind of stylized ecclesiastical baby-book? This would be the traditional, often the British view. Or is the book, written by Luke, a selective memory, presented to make a point and to offer a perspective—a kind of ecclesiastical court brief? This would be the critical, often German view. Long after WWII ended, this particular biblical studies conflict between London and Berlin (really Cambridge and Tubingen) continues. How much of Luke’s history is Luke and how much is history? How much of Acts 2—wind, tongues of fire, drama, miracle—is what Luke thought, and how much is what Luke thought happened? Both bear truth and meaning, both are holy and good, both have precedent in religion and Scripture. How much of this is history and how much of this is theology, granted that both history and theology are good things?
It may be that there is some merit to both views, but that the needle points toward theology. That is, our Holy Scripture in Acts 2, we might decide, was not written chiefly to record or fend off a charge of drunkenness against Peter from early one morning, nor to catalogue the nationalities of that day’s immigrants, legal or illegal, who appeared at the birthday party of the church. The passage is written to communicate, lastingly, good news about Spirit, good news about how the power of gathering inspires the power of hearing.
A delight for this day is found here. Our epistle lesson from Romans 8 squarely interprets spirit as that which gathers, which includes, which gives lineage, which names heirs—the religious dimension of belonging. Our gospel lesson from John 14 squarely interprets spirit as truth heard, as speaking which was understood, as the gift of ‘a self-correcting spirit of truth loose in the universe. Acts announces the power of gathering inspires the power of hearing. Romans reminds us about gathering. John reminds us about hearing.
Today’s lessons do not exclusively assign Spirit a religious wardrobe or zipcode. Although these readings are later to become building blocks for religious building blocks, they are not in their birth swaddled only in the birth cloths of religion. John least so, as he speaks fiercely of truth. Paul hardly so, as he writes of children lisping at the urging of an inner voice. Luke in Acts, barely so, as he gathers Medes and Persians, and heralds the hearing of Parthians and Edomites. Spirit on Pentecost has yet to don its religious robes. Spirit is loose in the universe. Our readings hold up for us the possibility that we may meet Spirit on the street where we live. Our readings hold up for us the possibility that we may hear Spirit in our own tongues, our own hearts. We may have had a foretaste last week. For example, to take one example, to take one common example of gathering and hearing, last week’s Commencement, The Boston University terrier, the dog of this sermon’s title, is fully alive. There is a common Pentecost, a part of our everyday experience, that arises wherever the power of gathering inspires the power of hearing.
Your life is nourished by the pentecosts of your life. The nourishment may come through the regular gathering and hearing in worship that focuses on a sermon. Or it may come through a regular family gathering, that focuses on a meal and stories of encouragement. Or perhaps through a regular reunion, relational or professional, that focuses on fun and reflection. Gatherings which inspire hearing are crucial to your personal, spiritual life. The same is true for a university like ours.
We gathered Friday at the Tennis and Track Center for the Dental School Commencement. Some of us help others choose, and some help others chew, and both are vitally important. At the dental school commencement ceremony, the fine speaker, Dr Shadi Daher, warmly introduced by Dean Hutter, had a profoundly insightful bit of wisdom and encouragement to offer. “Try to find something new in every case, and learn from it. Find the new learning in even the most repeated and routine procedures. Learn something new every day. For the biggest challenges are not outside us, they are within us, in our attention, our attitude, our emotions, our thoughts and feelings.” The radiant life, and the rich range of diverse human presence—in age, gender, race, nationality, ethnicity—at the dental school was a joy to behold!
Then on Saturday afternoon, the ROTC commissioning ceremony was held in historic Faneuil Hall. It is very moving to see the parents of these young soldiers pin signs of rank upon their children’s shoulders. This year, a young couple going off to ministry in the military chaplaincy joined us, which made the ceremony even more meaningful. Senator Scott Brown spoke an encouraging word to the commissionees, and connected his own experience in years past with their coming years of service.
Dr Douglas Sears speaks each year for the University. He is the administrative head of the program at BU. He reminds us that academic freedom is a subset of political freedom, and that the broader political freedoms we enjoy are not free: they come with costs in service, sacrifice, and devotion. Freedom is not free. He also reminds us that with our religious history rooted in the Methodist tradition, he can say to the young people not only good luck, but also Godspeed.
We went from Scott Brown in Faneuil Hall to James Carroll in Marsh Chapel. (☺) We have looked at life from both sides now (☺)!
For last Saturday night this Marsh chapel was full with 250 members of the BU class of 1970. That class did not have a formal graduation, having been sent home in the danger and chaos that followed Kent State. So they were invited back, this year, to ‘walk’ (to receive their diplomas at Commencement, in robes, on the field). In preparation for their arrival, I talked by phone with some members of the class. One told me that he received his diploma by mail one summer afternoon in 1970. He was alone in the house, except for his two dogs. He opened the diploma and showed it to his dear pets. Then he put it in a drawer. “I had a canine commencement of my own”, he said. He was with us Saturday. The power of the gathering here in the nave was palpable. It was thick like a fog on the ocean at dawn. A soloist sang ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’. A pianist played the sound track of 1970. There was a litany and a time of silent remembrance. Then the catholic chaplain of the time, James Carroll, now a columnist for our city’s paper, piercingly addressed the gathering. He briefly called up the memory of that spring forty years ago, focusing on a perilous confrontation between students and those trying to keep the peace. But then he turned with emotion and asked the congregation (for by now this was an addressable community, a congregation that is) ‘So what are we doing here?’ Are we here to find
healing? Are we here to hunt for some completion? Are we hear to seek some inner peace? In preaching terms, he moved deftly from the prophetic to the pastoral. The soloist began then to sing ‘Let it Be’, but the solo quickly became a hymn, as all joined in. And yes, as foreshadowed a moment ago, the pianist, Jan Hill, played us out with ‘Both Sides Now’. Gathering and hearing. You can read about in the New York Times. Gathering and hearing. You can read about it in Acts 2.
There is something about the intersection of gathering and hearing, the twin powers of Pentecost, which ushers in a new wind. Boston University’s metaphorical mascot, the terrier, the dog of this sermon’s title, showed Spirit Life last weekend. I do not find references to the Book of Discipline, to the Book of Order, to the Book of Common Prayer, or even to the hymnal, in the Scripture lessons for Pentecost. I do read about a spirit of truth. I do read about a spirit of sonship. I do read about a mighty wind. The church may have to think more broadly about the nature of the church than we inside the church have been accustomed to do.
Here in church last Sunday our Baccalaureate speaker, Dr Wafaa El-Sadr, spoke about her work with AIDS patients. She urged us not to oppose a ‘culture of no’. Then she told of a patient, who said of her illness: ‘AIDS is the best thing that has happened to me. Once I got it, I left the street, I left the hustle, I left the drugs, and I cleaned up my life’.
How long has it been since you were immersed in the gathering and speaking of a graduation? The atmosphere teems with aspiration, promise, foretaste, and hope. When 25,000 people stand to applaud a civil rights legal champion like William Coleman, awarded an honorary degree last Sunday, you feel the earth shake a little bit. All together know the power of that gathering and that hearing. All the ‘laudes’ From summa to ‘thank ya’, all the graduates know, and so does everyone else. It is not only in Methodism that gathering and speaking have announced spirit (we would say conference and preaching of course). Life itself does. Wherever the Spirit of the Lord is, there is that kind of freedom.
Then came the gathering of 25,000 under the sun at Nickerson field, and with it, speaking and hearing. Graciously introduced by President Brown, Commencement speaker Attorney General Eric Holder addressed the gathering: “I am reminded of Dr. King, not only because he blazed the trail that allows me to stand on this stage as our nation’s first African-American Attorney General; and not only because his dream of a more just and inclusive world remains one of our most important guideposts. Today, I am reminded of Dr. King because he, too, took leave of this campus at a difficult, and defining, moment in America’s history. “I know,” he said, “that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.”
The best moment of Commencement came with the student address, preached by a young African American man from Mississippi, Jonathan Priester, on behalf of the class of 2010. You will not surprised, once you hear his words, as to the reason for my personal ‘hallelujah’ in response:
“As this day has approached – the end of my stay at Boston University as a student – I found myself walking around campus trying to remember as much as I can about this place. A place that has been my home for the last four years. While attempting to retrace my numerous adventures on this campus, I noticed the inscription on a wall in Marsh Chapel. It reads, “we hope that the procession of immortal youth passing through the halls of Boston University for the next thousand years will be vouchsafed a vision of greatness and that that vision of greatness will become habitual and result in moral progress.” I like that line. At its center is my favorite word: progress.
“Our challenge is to do just what is said on the wall of Marsh Chapel. We must make greatness habitual in order for moral progress to be the result of our lives’ journeys.
“The University itself gives the best example of the truth and direction offered by the inscription in Marsh Chapel. This University has made greatness habitual. Boston University has struggled and survived… and has managed to continually emerge victorious over ignorant, regressive traditions that had long gone unchallenged…Let’s reclaim the energy, optimism and fire that gave the founders of Boston University the courage to establish our great school.
Remember the words of Boston University’s very own Dr. Howard Thurman: “There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have.”
Can somebody say Amen? I can.
The gathering turned to speaking—the dog’s life on display last weekend—concluded with our high school graduates, who are honored every year in a most dignified commencement of their own. Speaking of history and theology, listen to Head of School James Berkman’s charge to the senior class of BU Academy, on Monday morning:
“Continue your educational adventure, knowing it will lead you to a variety of life roles. Be sure your life’s work has three components: To love what you do every day like Odysseus, to bring the poetry of the spirit into it like Chaucer, and to be sure anything you do well and invent serves the good of others like Ben Franklin.”
A closing image. Late on Saturday evening, a full Symphony Hall listened to the music of John Williams, as he conducted the Boston Pops. At the end, as the patriotic fanfare proceeded, a certain familiar dog, full of life, a Boston Terrier, full of life, scampered up one aisle and down another. In that assembly and in that audition, focused on that dog’s life, we were reminded, as we were again this morning that the power of gathering inspires the power of hearing.
May your summer breathe, breathe with little pentecosts of assembly and audition!
~The Reverend Dr. Robert Allan Hill,
Dean of Marsh Chapel
Dean of Marsh Chapel
Sunday
May 16
Baccalaureate Service
By Marsh Chapel
There will be no sermon text for this week.
~ Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr
Sunday
May 9
This I Believe Meditations
By Marsh Chapel
Click here to hear Sermon only
John 14:23-29
John 14:23-29
My name is Andrew Moses, I am a senior graduating with a degree in Biology with a focus in Neuroscience. Over the years these four walls of marsh chapel have seen my faith evolve and change with the lessons I’ve learned and the people I’ve met. With a humble breath, I give you what my faith means to me now.
I believe in God. I may have rejected the anthropomorphic father with a flowing white beard for something that resembles the Force more than father time, but still it is a divinity. I may not be able to understand it but I can surely recognize it, in the songs we sing in the faces of those I love and in the simple caring hug that speaks volumes and calms a wounded heart. I believe in a loving God that loves us enough to let us make mistakes, which brings me to the second point:
I believe in Freedom. I believe that all people are free to be whoever they want to be. As john connors once said, there is no fate but what we make. Only our own actions and choices can dictate which of the infinite possible futures that can come into fruition does in fact come into being. God may have written the beginning of the book for us with a few of the main characters, but we are the editors with an infinite supply of red ink. It is up to us to create a main character we can be proud of and surround ourselves with people whom we love. Which brings me to the third point:
I believe in companions. No, not just friends companions but those that travel through life with you because they are companionem from the latin com “with” and panis “bread”, those that you break bread with, and commune with. After his resurrection Jesus was not recognized save in the breaking of the bread, and I have come to recognize my Lord in unexpected and wonderful ways. Every meal with believers, nonbelievers, and everyone in-between has shown me that spark of divinity that lives in all of us. It is in this peace that comes from sharing a meal that I believe the spirit of communion can truly be found.
Through my companions I have found the loving community of Marsh chapel, where I have learned about music, life, love, and faith. I have sung more Bach than I knew existed and am a better person for it, with thanks to Dr. Jarrett. Because of communion and community I appreciate the harmony that transcends time and illuminates different facets of God, thank you Dean Hill, and better appreciate the religion that I have shared every Sunday morning. It is here that I learned the true meaning of ‘passing the peace’ in every embrace and smile with those I love. And it is here that I learned how to best abide with God as he surely abides in me. So I leave you with a bible verse that has helped me through these many years: Isaiah 40:30-31 “Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.
Andrew A. Moses
***
I will graduate from Boston University on May 16, 2010. This is an honor for me because of the University’s reputation and the culmination of hard work that my degree represents. Most of all it is an honor to graduate from Boston University because my best friend and grandmother, Barbara Farrell McCauley, attended BU seventy years ago. Unfortunately, she will not be here in to share my accomplishment as she passed away on my sixteenth birthday – but she is always in my heart and often life reaches out to remind me that her love endures.
Four years ago as I sat quietly on my coach, heart pounding with anticipation that the envelope in my hands might be an acceptance to Boston University I knew she was with me. And when I pulled out the packet, all shiny, red and white – we are pleased to inform you . . . . . I knew she celebrated with me.
Throughout my childhood my grandmother and I were united by our purpose to help my mother, who worked full time, with her daily tasks. We loved completing a daily “to-do” list. One day we made a special stop to pick up some bulbs at the flower shop. We planted these daffodils – our secret - outside the kitchen window so when they bloomed in spring they would serve as a surprise Mother’s Day gift for my mom. Daffodils hold special meaning for me and remind me of my friendship with my grandmother and her great gift of faith that she shared with me.
Throughout my college experience there have been challenging times when I relied on my faith that my grandmother and God were with me. During a particularly challenging day this spring, answers to what I would do after graduation eluded me. On that day I received an email that reminded me to keep the faith. This was the story sent to me in the e-mail:
The Daffodil Principle written by . . . Anonymous.
Several times my daughter had telephoned to say, “Mother, you must come to see the daffodils before they are over.’ I wanted to go, but it was a two-hour drive."I will come next Tuesday," I promised a little reluctantly on her third call.
Next Tuesday dawned cold and rainy. Still, I had promised, and reluctantly I drove there.
After about twenty minutes, we turned onto a small gravel road and I saw a small church. On the far side of the church, I saw a hand lettered sign with an arrow that read, "Daffodil Garden." We got out of the car, each took a child's hand, and I followed Carolyn down the path. Then, as we turned a corner, I looked up and gasped. Before me lay the most glorious sight.
It looked as though someone had taken a great vat of gold and poured it over the mountain peak and its surrounding slopes. The flowers were planted in majestic, swirling patterns, great ribbons and swaths of deep orange, creamy white, lemon yellow, salmon pink, and saffron and butter yellow. Each different-colored variety was planted in large groups so that it swirled and flowed like its own river with its own unique hue. There were five acres of flowers.
"Who did this?" I asked Carolyn. "Just one woman," Carolyn answered. "She lives on the property. We walked up to the house.
On the patio, we saw a poster. "Answers to the Questions I Know You Are Asking", was the headline. The first answer was a simple one. "50,000 bulbs," it read. The second answer was, "One at a time, by one woman. Two hands, two feet, and one brain." The third answer was, "Began in 1958."
For me, that moment was a life-changing experience. I thought of this woman whom I had never met, who, more than forty years before, had begun, one bulb at a time, to bring her vision of beauty and joy to an obscure mountaintop. Planting one bulb at a time, year after year, this unknown woman had forever changed the world in which she lived. One day at a time, she had created something of extraordinary magnificence, beauty, and inspiration. The principle her daffodil garden taught is one of the greatest principles of celebration.
The End.
I wondered, like so many other experiences, was this email a coincidence, or a message of love from my grandmother? It reminded me that the most valuable answers are often also the most straightforward. I believe God is present in the little “to-dos”, the planting of each bulb, a perfectly timed email. For me this means having enough faith to take the first step after BU toward a career I love without worry, having faith that the big picture will unfold.
Taylor Ferry
Growing up, I always struggled with my faith. It wasn’t that I hadn’t any, seeing my mother battle with cancer and my father’s frequent visits to the ICU on account of various heart failures had planted me firmly on the spiritual side. It was that I wasn’t sure how to properly express it. My father was born a catholic though never practiced, and my mother after experimenting with many churches finally decided on Methodist, though to this day she stands firmly in her status as non-denominational. I would go to church with my mother every Sunday, though I never quite felt at home and began dedicating myself to volunteering in the nursery during service. I found that I enjoyed playing with miracles rather than listening about them.
I soon left the church in search of other spiritual paths. I loved Buddhism, though didn’t practice enough to call myself Buddhist. Hinduism I found to be fascinating, though in need of far more research than what I was able to devote. After years of dabbling, I ceased my search. There must have been a religion that fully encompassed my spirituality; I just hadn’t been able to find it.
Then I moved to Boston. My move to the north was a planned adventure. It was a time for me to break away from home and establish who I was. I hadn’t planned for this renaissance of self to be inclusive of my faith, but as is with all great epiphanies, it happened completely by accident and unexpected.
One day, I was on the train coming home from the city. I had just finished a conversation with my brother, and when I hung up my cell phone I began my favorite train riding hobby and listened to the people around me. I kid you not, every single person was engaged in a conversation, but each was speaking a different language. The train was packed, and not one person was speaking English. I was surrounded by voices in different languages that fused together to create a wonderful feeling of unity. Here we were, complete strangers from different walks of life, all speaking in different tongues, yet on a similar path. Some just recently entered the train, some would reach their destinations before others, but we were all taking the journey together.
This is what faith means to me. Whether it be Taoism, Sufism, Christianity, Buddhism, faith is faith no matter what form. I found that day that my faith is comprised of tidbits from conversations of each, for in the end, though we may speak completely different religious languages, we are all speaking to the same power. And though we may end up in different destinations, inevitably we are all travelers on the same spiritual journey. This I believe.
Desa Larkin-Boutte
Sunday
May 2
Bach and Belief
By Marsh Chapel
Sunday
April 25
Remembering Howard Thurman
By Marsh Chapel
Click here to hear the sermon only.
Two Approaches to Christ in John 10
Two startling, conflicting approaches to Christ accost us in our Scripture lesson this morning. One, the Presence. Two, the shepherd. It may be that you, of a sudden, this hour, will find your way forward walking hand in hand, presence to the left, shepherd to the right. You may find you need a hand one day. WS Coffin: ‘They say religion is a crutch. What makes you think you don’t limp?’
Our verses were born—hear the coached breathing, the contractions, the shouts of pain—in distress. We shall suppose the following setting: the year 100ce, the place Ephesus, the audience a small, fierce and fledgling church, the cast a group of people who have been thrown out of their community at just the moment that they have lost their main belief. They have lost belonging and meaning in the same breath of contraction. That is, they once happily affirmed Jesus in the synagogue. But that lasted only as long as they were traditionally monotheistic. Once the Spirit said of Jesus, ‘I and the Father are one’ they had to pack their bags. To grow up, they had to leave home. In the same years—I prize the courageous honesty of these early relatives of yours—they had to face up to the fact that Jesus was not coming back, in the manner of the primitive hope, any time soon. The great, primary apocalyptic hope of the primitive church—‘with a cry of command, the archangels’ call, the sound of the trumpet’—proved false. Parousia gave way to Paraclete, Armageddon to the artistry of every day, and speculation to Spirit. Necessity once again gave birth to newness. They had to open the door and unshutter the window, to broaden their religious circle and open their spiritual perspective. You need to feel your way into a moment in life—yours or another’s—in which your community of friends is wrecked and your sense of purpose is destroyed.
For instance, in these days and weeks, we embrace those about to graduate.
As you participate in various community gatherings, and then are cast out or cast out into the real world, you may have occasion to recall the Scriptural witness today to similar experience.
What we hear in John 10 is a sermon, or part of one. You may wonder why modern sermons are not limited to 8 verses. Well, things do not always get better. (☺). Motion is not progress. In this sermon, delivered 70 years after the crucifixion, an explanation of disappointment and dislocation (remember, no apocalypse and no community of origin) is affirmed, to help people. Preaching is meant to help people. To know Christ is to know his benefits. We are out in the snowbank, de-communitized, for a reason, says the preacher. Jesus in Paraclete said: ‘I and the Father are one’. But for the traditional monotheists among us, this presents a problem. One, we got. Two? Not so much. And we haven’t even raised the Trinity issue, the move to three, yet. So it is time to move, to itinerate, to know again the lostness of being outside, starting over, existential commencement.
But. Jesus in Paraclete also says something else. Your greatest freedom may surprisingly be embedded in your most hurtful disappointment. Your truest grace may surprisingly be embedded in your most wrenching dislocation. That door once opened, that window once unshuttered, offer a clean breeze and warm sunlight.
We move to commencement, a new beginning, honoring our graduates, singing freedom into the maw of disappointment, singing grace into the cavernous maw of dislocation.
At least, that is what John’s little community discovered, and called eternal life, resurrection, salvation, truth. You didn’t need that tight knit community after all. You didn’t need that suprerannuated hope after all. Because: the sheep know the shepherd’s voice. ‘My life flows on in endless song above earth’s lamentation. I hear the clear though far off hymn that hails a new creation. No storm can break my inmost calm, when to that rock I am clinging. If love is Lord of heaven and earth, how can I keep from singing?’ Two Christs: one transcendent, one immanent, one divine, one human, one silent, one shepherd. The Father and I are one. My sheep hear my voice. There is nothing more personal than voice. Not fingerprint, not DNA, not Facebook catchalls. Voice is the personal given life. Hence, preaching, the sacrament of preaching. Romans 10: faith comes by hearing. I wonder whether you are deep enough in disappointment and dislocation to bump into freedom and grace? Every sermon in almost every religious tradition is a call to decision, a dualism of decision: a call to personal loving and giving, a call to communal giving and loving, a call to relational authority and authentic relationship, a call to service and care.
Our Day Today and Two Christological Perils
Our son Ben said once of his grandfather, ‘I love to hear his voice’. Last year, his grandfather survived a nearly mortal illness. There are not words to convey the joy, the gratitude, that we his family experience in his escape. Those who have been on the brink of death can appreciate 10:28, ‘I give them eternal life and they shall never perish and no one shall snatch them out of my hand’. Not all such deliverance has an earthly horizon. Some freedom and some grace must await us across the river. And I don’t mean Harvard. But some comes to us here. He and my mother lived here in Boston 1950-1953. In 1975, he wrote the following sentences in the back of a book. I quote them with permission.
The temptation for the people of the church in every age is to believe: a) Jesus is only human; b) Jesus only appeared to be human. For those who settle on ‘a’ there is no power, no mystery, no pull to pry them out of much of life. For those who choose ‘b’ there is no hope because mankind cannot ascend the heights of divinity. Both are heresies. The pious wise men of 325ad saw, though they could not explain it, that he was fully human and fully divine.
They departed in 1953 just as Howard Thurman came to town. Rev. Gomes last week recalled, as he and I exchanged pulpits, that George Buttrick and Howard Thurman used to do the same. Thurman’s voice carries us into two dimensions, two realms of reality. He was 100 years ahead of his time, 50 years ago, (my standard way of introducing Thurman), so he is still 50 years ahead of you (and me). He evoked the Christ of Common Ground, transcendent, universal, shared, unconfined, free. He evoked the Christ of the Disinherited, immanent, particular, grasped, embodied, back against the wall. Two Christs. One and Shepherd. Calling out to you to know the grain of your own wood, not to cut against the grain of your own wood…
Our six ministry associates prepared this sermon, in three hours of mortal combat with me, and three hours of cultural and biblical exegesis, confronting John 10 and April 25. They turned for support to Howard Thurman. To his book, THE SEARCH FOR COMMON GROUND. To his book, JESUS AND THE DISINHERITED. You can too. But they as a group vehemently argued against processed religion. It worse for you than processed food, they said. I like Wonder Bread, I objected. So they had to teach me to beware processed food and beware processed relgion. They showed me a video, ‘I am Sorry I am a Christian’. They confessed,‘Even though Easter has come, it does not always feel that way’, they said. Late April means more norma
l liturgy, a coming move out of the dorms (‘talk about dislocation’), new life and growth, but also old and enduring challenges. Hear they are, in voice, our 2010 Marsh Chapel Ministry Associates, lifting again Thurman’s Common Ground and Thurman’s Disinherited.
Thurman and Transcendence: The Search for Common Ground
I am Kelly Drescher, Ministry Associate on the Medical Campus:
Our work across campus this year has involved us in many individual lives and many forms of ministry, both with religious and with unreligious people. We have striven to bring a sense of freedom and grace to all, to recognize the ‘common ground’ upon which we walk. As Thurman wrote in the Search for Common Ground, “The Hopi Indian myth carries still, in its thematic emphasis on “the memory of a lost harmony””. (CG, 40)
I am Jen Quigley, Ministry Associate for Student Affairs:
There is a unity of living structures...that includes rocks, plants, animals, and humans. Antibodies and antigens. And the arrangement of a cell in a human child (CG, 40).
I am Lauren Miramontes, Ministry Associate for the Interfaith Council:
Thurman cites Plato: ‘Until philosophers are kings…and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside…cities will never have rest from their evils’. (CG, 53)
In the voice of Howard Thurman, 100 years ahead of his time 50 years ago, there is a regard for mystery, silence, presence, the transcendent, where Jesus the Paraclete can say, ‘I and the Father are One’. One in kinship with all of creation. One in kinship with every human being, so that nothing human is foreign to us. One in transformative engagement with the soup of our natural world, our home, our condition, our circumstance. One in openness to the great differences and diversities of personal, that is to say religious, expression, including myth from long ago and far away.
The Presence.
Thurman and Immanence: Jesus and the Disinherited
I am Micah Christian, Ministry Associate for First Year Students (our fourth, he follows Augie Delbert in 2009, David Romanik in 2008, and Larry Whitney in 2007):
‘Jesus rejected hatred. It was not because he lacked the vitality or the strength. It was not because he lacked the incentive. Jesus rejected hatred because he saw that hatred meant death to the mind, death to the spirit, death to communion with his Father. He affirmed life, and hatred was the great denial’ (JATD, 88)
I am Soren Hessler, Ministry Associate in Judicial Affairs:
‘There is something more to be said about the inner equipment growing out of the great affirmation of Jesus that a man is a child of God. If a man’s ego has been stabilized, resulting in a sure grounding of his sense of personal worth and dignity, then he is in a position to appraise his own intrinsic powers, gifts, talents and abilities. He no longer views his equipment through the darkened lenses of those who are largely responsible for his social position’ (JATD, 53).
I am John Prust, our other Ministry Associate for Interfaith Work:
The basic fact is that Christianity, as it was born in the mind of this Jewish teacher and thinker, appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed…In him was life, and the life was the light of all people…Wherever this spirit appears, the oppressed gather fresh courage; for he announced good news that fear, hypocrisy, and hatred, the three hounds of hell that track the trail of the disinherited, need have no dominion over them.
The Shepherd, as well.
An Invitation to Faith
Jan and I came over here to Boston four years ago, in order to invest the last quarter of our ministry in the next generation of preachers, teachers, ministers of the gospel. You hear today six voices that will change the world for the better. I asked them, in Thurmanesque fashion, to tell me about their sense of the divine, about presence, about shepherd. Here is what they said:
Jesus
is all the world to me…
loves me…
is perpetually ripe….
means freedom…
shows us that self giving love is the way to life (John)… is my transforming friend…
has got my back…
is the consoler of the poor…the lamp of the poor …
is unconditional love…
is the constant companion on life’s journey…
My greatest gift…
Patient pursuer….
In love with us….
the Hound of Heaven…
Friend on the Journey….
challenges us because he loves us…
brings out our best self…
Now we ask you, as we sing the hymns of Easter: How will you live out the deep river truths, presence and shepherd? How will you live down its opposition, however you understand it? Have you truly intuited the brevity of life? Have you really absorbed the capacity we have as humans to harm others? Have you faced the dualism of decision that is the marrow of every Sunday, every prayer, every sermon, every service? Are you ready to make a break for it? Are you ready to discover freedom in disappointment and grace in dislocation? Are you set to place one hand in that of The Presence, and the other in that of The Shepherd?
As Director Katherine Kennedy once said, "The beauty of Thurman is that he wasn't trying to convert people to Christianity. Rather, he wanted people to see that there is a common ground we can reach by respecting one another's differences, while still holding onto those beliefs that are uniquely ours."
As we reflect on such questions, may we do so in the confidence of freedom and grace
Known in the promise of this season
Reflected in the joys of springtime
Overheard in the words and vows of commitment
Expanded into the lengthening evening daylight
Enjoyed in the gatherings of families and friends
Celebrated in the ceremonies of completion
And carried forward from this hour of worship and day of remembrance
In the words of Emily Dickinson:
I stepped from plank to plank
A slow and cautious way;
the stars above my head I felt,
About my feet the sea.
I knew not but the next
would be my final inch.
This gave me that precarious Gait
Some call experience.
~ The Reverend Dr. Robert Allan Hill,
Dean of Marsh Chapel
Dean of Marsh Chapel
Sunday
April 18
Still with Us
By Marsh Chapel
