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Sunday
April 11

Be Astonished

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to hear the sermon only.

John 20: 19-31

It’s no wonder our gospel reading today begins with the disciples locked in a room together hiding for fear of the outside world. Their friend was dead, an execution they themselves witnessed, and they were suddenly left very alone. Everything they had put their trust and hope in had vanished, and they were petrified. Were they next? Guilty by association? Surely they weren’t expecting their friend and leader to be tried and convicted, sentenced to death when all along they followed him and believed he was there to fix the bad, heal the broken, and inspire change. What now were they supposed to do? Jesus didn’t give leave them a guide book for ministry 101. Instead, the disciples were left very afraid and very confused, locked away, fearful for their lives, wondering how to go on.

We are blessed with the knowledge of an empty tomb and the risen Christ. But the beginning of our gospel reading today does not reflect hallelujahs or shouts of joy – not just yet. Instead, we sense fear and concern, anxiety and numbness as the disciples wonder how it is that Jesus is dead and missing from the tomb. When we look at our reading from Acts, we sense a very different kind of emotions. The disciples here are bold and confident, sure of their faith and eager to proclaim the message of the resurrection, even when danger surrounds them. It almost seems as if they are different people than those we witness hidden in the locked room in John’s gospel. If we keep reading John’s account of Jesus’ appearing before the disciples, we know that the disciples don’t just move from being terrified to being confident without something happening in between. They stood in the presence of the divine and were witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection. Astonishment! Hope was renewed.

And now – we are in the second week of Easter, the psalmist praising God – Let everything that has breath praise the Lord! The tomb is empty, and death could not defeat the greatest good ever known. It’s the time of year for rebirth, new life, and warmth. Spring surrounds us, and we have a bounce in our step. The world is in bloom. Thankfully we don’t have to live in the darkness and harsh weather of winter all year. And thankfully the disciples didn’t remain in the locked room forever. When face to face with the living dead, they rejoiced. How fortunate for them to be in that room when the miracle of their risen friend appeared before them. How unfortunate for Thomas, who was not with them at the time of the appearing. No, he was away. And when he returned, he refused to believe. He was so defeated and swathed in sadness and grief that he could not believe such a tall tale, even though, I’m sure, somewhere deep inside of him, he wanted nothing more than to have faith in such a wonderful story.

A Saturday morning a few weeks ago, I sat in my reading chair with a cup of coffee next to me and I pulled a book of poetry off the shelf. It had been a long time since I read poetry, but a stirring inside moved me to find something by Mary Oliver, the Provincetown poet. I read slowly and breathed deeply. I should have known inspiration and imagination would strike me, and I was amazed and grateful for her honest words on the pages. What was interesting about the book I chose, out of all the others, was that this one in particular evoked very strong emotions for Oliver. This collection of poems were written and collaborated after the death of her longtime partner of over forty years. The loss of someone so dear, someone so close and cherished – how to go on living in the midst of such sorrow. How to keep on creating beauty in the midst of such heartbreak. How to have hope in the midst of despair. She does these things!

I keep coming back over and over to the first poem in this book, called Messenger. She begins by saying her work is loving the world. She then continues, “let me keep my mind on what matters…which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished… which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here, which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart, and these body clothes, a mouth with which to give shouts of joy to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug up clam, telling them all, over and over, how it is that we live forever” (Thirst, pg. 1: 2006). This poems says it so beautifully – how we are to be in the world, messengers of the good news, bringing light to the darkness, even in the midst of our own personal struggles and sorrow. What matters? Letting ourselves be astonished. Everything we need, we already have – gratitude, minds, hearts, and a mouth.

Letting ourselves be astonished. This sounds familiar, doesn’t it? We just read about the disciples’ amazement over the figure of the risen Christ in their midst. They’re reaction could have been one of skepticism, eye brows cocked, taking a step back from Jesus, arms folded across their chests, demanding an answer for the mysterious intrusion into the locked room. They could have asked for details – how is it possible that you, O Lord, are alive? Where did you go? How did you come back? How is it that you can walk through doors? What was it like being dead? Luke didn’t mention any such reactions from the disciples, but instead they let the mystery surround them. They combined that mystery with what Jesus had already taught them during his ministry, and they firmly believed that his resurrection meant he was indeed the Messiah. No, in that moment, they let themselves be astonished. Now, Thomas found himself in a similar situation a week later, when Jesus appeared before him as well. In that moment, he didn’t demand anything from Christ. Instead, he too allowed himself to be astonished.

Growing up, the only thing I really knew about Thomas was his supposed failure. His doubting. The words of a simple children’s song run through my head, don’t be a doubting Thomas, trust fully on God’s promise, why worry, when you can pray. But, Thomas was so much more than the disciple who doubted Jesus’ resurrection. Earlier in John, it’s evident that Thomas was willing to follow Jesus even to death when he said to the other disciples, rallying them to move along, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” Thomas did not hesitate. He had hope when Jesus was alive. He watched him perform miracles, transform peoples’ lives, cause excitement, find followers, and speak of future promises, even things that were beyond his understanding at that time. Thomas gave his life to following this message bearer of good news, peace, and love. When that person died, a part of Thomas died as well. He was losing hope, unsure of anything while darkness covered the world. Just when his pain was going to be too much for him to bear, his hope was renewed, face to face with the living Christ, his beloved friend and trusted leader. He knew in that moment that his life was worth something, he meant something. He held onto hope, and he believed he could make a difference, as long as the message of the good news always was being lived out.

In his book, Hope on a Tightrope, Cornell West describes hope as a “messy struggle” through which the “real work” needs to be done (pg. 6: 2008). Often hope is seen as simply something better in the future, but that’s not where hope ends, that’s where it begins. It starts with being astonished – wonder and amazement. We need to let ourselves be moved and take the time to sit and listen. From astonishment comes imagination – for something better, for love, for justice, for equality, for Christ. A
ction follows. But how does this become real unless there are those willing to do the hard work, to dig deep and trudge knee high in the mud? We learn from the disciples in Acts that living out hope isn’t easy. How often were they persecuted. Disbelief surrounded them, yet they never stopped being the messengers of the miracle they had witnessed. They never stopped living out the hope they saw in Jesus’ life on earth. They recognized that hope meant living out the truth, in very real and very difficult ways.

West’s metaphor of hope being on a tightrope is interesting, isn’t it? A balancing act, slowly stepping across, one foot in front of the other, afraid to fall, to have to start all over again. When will we ever reach the other side? But hope is on a tightrope. It must go slowly, cautiously, anxiously, and eagerly. We fall into despair when we slip, but we get back up, like Thomas. We start over again. Again and again and again. Because it’s not always easy, and living out the truth is rarely effortless. We do not always live in the Easter moment, trumpets blaring, drums pounding, the scent of lilies surrounding us, the joyful song and speech of love eternal and redemption. No, we too often find ourselves caught in between, like the disciples and like Thomas, where it’s difficult to see beyond the dismal and dreary days towards the evidence of hope, of life anew, of the living Christ. Sometimes it’s not enough to simply hear a story. If we know the good news, we must be living it out, in order for others to not simply hear the story of Jesus’ resurrection, but also to see, to witness what hope actually looks like in the flesh.

But, the hope filled aren’t always joy filled. Just as the psalmist often wrote mournful and sorrowful lines about his despair, we too sink into the turmoil of the world around us. We aren’t always clanging the cymbal, dancing with praise, or letting out shouts of delight. We are human. Just as the human Jesus wept for his dear friend Lazarus, we too often find ourselves weeping. Just as the human Jesus felt anger at the people’s corruption of the temple, we too rise up out of anger because of the things beyond our control. Just as the human Jesus cried out to God in humble prayer in the garden, we too go alone to the quiet, dark places seeking out answers and crying out to God, overwhelmed and out of breath. Just as Thomas doubted the possibility of a miracle, we too doubt the possibility of change in the world around us.

Once a year I invite the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students I work with to join me in a night of storytelling in order to share our personal journeys, our joys, and our hardships. It’s a time for truth telling and sharing, based on trust and acceptance. I always preface the event by stating anyone can share as much or as little as wanted, and, for confidentiality’s sake, nothing leaves that room after we all go our separate ways. Most students are nervous and awkward at first, unsure of what to say or how to start. I step in and begin with a story from my undergraduate years, one to which they can relate and connect. There isn’t a better start to a new academic year than in this way, in my opinion. Honesty, community, laughter, tears – knowing that you aren’t alone on campus. Knowing that somebody is there for you, and all you have to do is ask. Knowing that others have gone through some of the same life experiences as you, and there are safe places to turn towards.

I often leave these meetings full of awe. I am astonished – over and over again by the struggles some of these students have gone through and continue to wrestle with. And, I am amazed at the joy often expressed in the midst of these struggles. It’s inspiring. The creativity and passion expressed through simple words reminds me of Mary Oliver, who also has been able to continually create and inspire in the midst of struggle. When I reflect on my time with these students in this setting, I see the hope dwelling up inside of them as they continue to listen and share. If they’re not alone and others share the same vision, inspiration strikes. Hope is renewed. Like Thomas, they realize they can make a difference, and that their lives have meaning.

Thomas just needed something a little more. He needed more than a story from his friends. He needed an encounter with the living Christ. He needed hope. If we truly are made in God’s image, and if we truly are called to be bearers of the good news, we must imitate Christ. We must. The disciples in Acts were filled with renewed hope, upon seeing the risen Christ and feeling the spirit move during Pentecost. They were no longer locked in the room full of despair and frozen with fear. They experienced the resurrection first hand. They had work to do, even to their deaths. Christ’s message of hope and love would not fade. They were called to be messengers. To breathe shouts of joy, and to continue the struggle of hope.

Be astonished, friends. Move from the fear and frustration, the numbness and sorrow towards amazement of what is and what more could be. Only when we allow ourselves to be astonished may we begin to envision something more for ourselves and our world, only then will we begin to be hopeful people, and only then will our imaginations push us to show that same hope to others. Take the time to see and hear, watch and listen. Let the simple things amaze you – the spider delicately hanging from a single strand, swaying in the breeze – the beauty of the pink blossoms along Commonwealth Avenue – the kindness expressed by students from Hugs Don’t Hate offering free hugs outside of Marsh Plaza. And also, be amazed at the things you never expected, that often seem preposterous, and let yourselves be astonished. Take the time to be moved. Only then will we invite imagination to be at work inside of us, our hope being renewed and worked out together. The biblical hope requires imagination to be at work, envisioning what could be – between human beings, nations, churches, and it requires us to live that out – the truth we know of these future promises. We are called to live out the good news – to live out the truth and inspire others along the way. Work your way across the tightrope wholeheartedly and zealously, and pick one another back up, after a fall. Help one another move from fear, like the disciples, to confidence, joy, and hope. With minds, hearts, and mouths tell the simple message of what you know to be true and alive. Be messengers, full of truth, full of mercy, full of hope, full of astonishment. Amen.

~ Liz Douglass,
Chapel Associate for LGBTQ Ministry

posted in Uncategorized on 04.11.2010 at 11:00 am

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Sunday
April 4

Resurrection Light

By Marsh Chapel

Enchantment

The Lord is Risen! Indeed.

In thy light, we see light, confesses the church of Christ. In thy light we see. Enchantment revealed. Humility found. Abandon unbound. “In lumine tuo videbimus lumen.”

Joanna, otherwise a stranger to us, has been included in the group of women who religiously approach the tomb. Our festival today affirms that religious practice, the detailed discipline of attention to the sacred, can be showered with light. They are keeping the Sabbath by waiting until the first day of the week. They are keeping tradition by anointing the body, with materials earlier prepared. They are keeping faith by facing death. By visiting the tomb, the flesh, the corpse. At early dawn…

In reverie I look back thirty two Easters and the days preceding them, and the dead rise up. Laurie, Edson, Stan, Mildred, Lucille. You will have your own names and faces and loved ones in mind. It is one thing to attend to religious practice, and another to do so, to visit the body, when you have loved the person. At early dawn…

At early dawn…Morning light is new light. Spring light is new light. Easter light is new light.

And along they come, toward us, along the practice road. Joanna, and others. You. You are here on Easter. Something, some lingering memory of a lingering memory, has brought you along. Religious practice—ask Joanna—can sometimes, suddenly, surprisingly, bring illumination. The great joy of Marsh Chapel is that our preaching is largely to those who are in between. Not religious enough to come to church, but religious enough to listen. Still within earshot. A paper, a bagel, a willingness in whimsy to enter a bit of religious practice from afar, by radio, by ipod, by internet, by computer. Come Easter, more than other Sundays, many have come here. The beauty of the Marsh pulpit: not preaching to the choir, but to the driver, the bagel muncher, the ipod user on a bicycle, the ecclesiastical expatriate, the atheist, the one harmed by the church, the musician attuned—seemingly—only to the music, the academic, the lonely at home.

Why?

Your bit of religious practice has brought you out into the light. How so? Just what are we doing here?

Joanna and the women, moving at dawn, through the mist, toward the tomb might say something to us. The seder meal affirms the covenant people’s mission to preserve and affirm a commitment to hope.

They might affirm what we find all around us, when we pause. (Pause, say, from—too much work, too much worry, too much talk, too much e-talk, too much food/sex/drink, too much fear). At dawn, through the mist, toward the tomb, they find joy, order, humor, hope, virtue, beauty, music. There is the sweet scent of a newborn child, silent in the arm. There is the orderly happiness of that rarest of arts, a well run meeting. There is touch of humor, the truth of mirth of courth. There is the native hue of resolution behind hope. There is the patterned simplicity of a well lived life. There is the beauty of dawn or sunset or both. There is music, beautiful music, invisible beauty, the ringing beauty of music. There are hints and allegations and forms of presence. You cannot be alive, humanly speaking, and miss them.

So thinking, with Joanna, you would rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach 10,000 stars how not to dance (eecummings).

We are not really in a position to say what God can and cannot do, are we? The resurrection questions us.

Welcome to enchantment. After all the winter of disenchantment, welcome. See, what do you see? In a resurrection light, you see wonder, you see amazement, you see awe, you see enchantment.

In Spain, in the evening, during the paseo—Adios, Hola—an introduction is made and then, ‘encantado, encantado en conocerle’. Enchanted.

You listen to a child singing alone just before falling to sleep, and tell me you sense no enchantment? You watch a 9 year old, ball glove on, striding toward Fenway park, other hand in his Dad’s other hand, and tell me you sense no enchantment? You see Lake Lucille. You look down from the Matterhorn. You walk in mid December through a jewelry store. You come into a barn at dawn, with the milking in gear, and Louis Armstrong on the radio. You watch a daughter caring for her mother in the last month of life. You hear the hymns of Easter. And tell me you sense no enchantment? No wonder? No “thaumadzon”?

And yet…

Oh, we hear the other tune, too. The natural horror of earthquake. The historical tragedy of warfare. The social failure of poverty. The resurrection follows but does not replace the cross. Enchantment comes with its measure of perplexity. As Ivan Karamazov tellingly put it, even one, just one suffering innocent defies explanation or defense. Ours will be a muted, a humble, enchantment, won by living through more than by thinking through.

Strange. The strongest people, the most radiant and generous, are often those who are living after and over against and nonetheless in spite of. I knew ‘Donald’ for several years, admiring and enjoying his radiant generosity, before over lunch I learned his early loss of his first wife. Emile Fackenheim said of his faith practice, post holocaust, that he lived so in order to deny Hitler posthumous victory.

Granted this is Easter. Still, you are here, listening. In the course of some religion, you may stumble upon something brighter still. Christ is calling you to faith. Christ is offering the gift of faith. Christ is the Living One, beckoning not directing but beckoning you to faith. His word has the power to convince, to generate new community, to establish authorized leadership, and to commit to mission

Luther: ‘When the heart clings to the word, feelings and reason must fail. Then in the course of time the will also clings to the Word, and with the will everything else, our desire and love, till we surrender ourselves entirely to the Gospel, are renewed and leave the old sin behind. Then there comes a different light, different feelings, different seeing, different hearing, acting, and speaking, and also a different outflow of good works…when the heart is holy, all the members become holy, and good works follow naturally.’ (Sermons, Easter, loc. cit.)

Resurrection light reveals enchantment.

The Lord is Risen! Indeed.

Humility

Inside the tomb, you see, in the shadow, as you see, there is much bowing and perplexity. In humility they find no body. (This is the only gospel to make sure that the word ‘body’ is used, and to our accepted reading, some manuscripts add ‘of Jesus’, to clarify both that the body is gone and whose body is gone.) In humility, as a matter of fact, we may as well admit to what we can see, as our eyes adjust to Luke’s tomb and text: the spices had been prepared, there are two men (not one angel) in dazzling apparel, A Great Question Rises: Why do you seek the living (singular—at title?) among the dead (plural)? Mary Magdalene, Mary mother of James (and so of Jesus?) and Joanna and the other women (more women) are along, but the words seem to be an idle tale (‘nonsense’, ‘empty talk’), not believable (actually, the disciples ‘disbelieve’). Most notably, we may humbly mention, the last sentence was not included in the RSV text, and would not have been read just a few years ago. It (vs 12) is attached here, but only with cautions, for in truth it is probably a later addition. Added? Yes, added. Added to include Peter. A
dded? Yes, added. Added to fit with what will come later near Emmaus. Added? Yes, added. Added to record Peter’s ‘amazement’, which a few years ago was better translated ‘wondering’, which word has a tinge of perplexity, bewilderment, and uncertainty. (It has some eerily Johannine overtones: linens?).

Peter reappears, not quite believing, but willing to doubt his disbelief, wondering and amazed at…The Living One.

There is a humility about Peter in the Gospels that does not always appear in the life of the church. Peter, come lately, at least scurries, at least sees, at least wonders, at least shows some humility before what in any case is beyond us.

All the witnesses are convinced that they have encountered him in such a way that they were convinced that he was the living Lord, commissioning them to continued service.

‘If there is one thing the world needs now’, the Methodist preacher bellowed, ‘it is humility’. This in the course of a sermon titled, ‘World’s Greatest Sermon on Humility’. Which title was revised from the original, ‘Humility and How I Achieved It’. Religion particularly has difficulty with humility, as our age again has had to learn. And as for clergy, we remember Coffin’s coffinesque quip: ‘egotists with a theological alibi’.

Come Easter, we may meditate on the importance, the propriety, of humility before what in any case is beyond us.

And yet…

In our world, stones do not move themselves, bodies do not disappear overnight. Even in the ancient world, and even among the fiercest of followers, the story of the tomb, about which Paul knows nothing, is deemed ‘an idle tale’.

Friends, we must speak plainly about what we know, even as we speak passionately about what we believe. Resurrection comes from the religion Joanna and others carry with them to the tomb. Resurrection comes from Judaism, and from a particular hope in Judaism, an apocalyptic hope. In the range of religious reality available, to Jesus and Paul and Luke and all, the cosmic apocalyptic hope of resurrection, when the dead would be redeemed from graves, was the nearest best idiom available to say this: Why do you seek the Living One among the dead?

Resurrection from the dead comes from Jewish apocalyptic. It explains, interprets and experience, namely the appearance of Jesus to his disciples. He showed himself. “Resurrection is a reflective interpretation of encounters with the Living One which had the power to convince, to generate new community, to establish authorized leadership, and to commit to mission.” (IBD, supplement, loc. cit.).

Paul records his ‘appearance’: to Peter, to the twelve, to 500, to James, to the apostles, and last to Paul (1 Cor 15).

For this sermon, resurrection is the preaching of the Easter Gospel, the sacrament of hearing and speaking, by which faith comes: had the power to convince, to generate new community, to establish authorized leadership, and to commit to mission

Resurrection Light uncovers humility.

The Lord is Risen! Indeed.

Abandon

As George Buttrick, across the river years ago, said, ‘resurrection is the lifting of personal life into a new dimension of light and power…not.. retrogression from the vivid personal into the vague and abstract impersonal…the inner evidence is the structure of our personal life; the outer evidence, meeting the inner evidence as light meets the eye, is in Jesus Christ… faith…beckoning, always with freedom for our choosing and response…by hint and gleam, lest we be coerced’ (Sermons From A University Pulpit, 176).

He makes a telling point: ‘he showed himself to those who loved him’. Those who hear and receive the abandon, the self-abandon of faith ‘see’ Him. Not by historical inquiry, but by participation is the gospel known (Tillich).

A man driving across Ireland had car trouble. He emerged from behind the wheel and could see no one, only a horse. Suddenly the horse leaned over the fence and said, ‘Open the hood, and let me have a look’. ‘You are a talking horse?’. ‘Yes. Clean the gaskets and retry the ignition.’ The car purred, and off the man drove, terrified. He stopped in a bar to calm his nerves with a drink. ‘You look terrible said the barkeep. What happened to you?’ ‘You won’t believe it. My car broke down. Then a horse came to me and spoke, and fixed my car’. ‘Really? What color was the horse?’ ‘Black. Why?’ ‘Well, you were lucky. There is white horse over there, too. But he doesn’t know anything about car mechanics.’

Whimsy. God is loving us into love and freeing us into freedom. Freedom means this: Reality is the arena of God’s cosmic process of redemption.(What is going on around us is infused with the divine)

Wonderment, perplexity, amazement.

Humility, service, ministry.

Whimsy.

Freedom is the Easter gospel laid bare. It is the freedom to live each day on tip toe, to live each day as if it were the last, to live each day with abandon, to live each day with self-forgetful freedom. Lost in wonder, love and praise! Lost in enchanment, humility, and Abandon….

And yet…

Don’t we get lost in the woods with too much abandon?

We do get lost. It is our nature, east of Eden. We get lost in sex without love: lust. We get lost in consumption without nourishment: gluttony. We get lost in accumulation without investment: avarice. We get lost in rest without weariness, in happiness without struggle: sloth. We get lost in righteousness without restraint: anger. We get lost in desire without ration or respect: envy. And most regularly, we get lost in integrity without humility: pride. If you have never known lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, anger, envy or pride you are not a sinner, you are outside the cloud of sin, and you need no repentance. (You may not be quite human either!)

Our seven sacramental moments in life are each and all meant to release us to self-abandon, self-giving, self-mockery. In Tillich’s phrase, to move from self-centered life to life of the centered self.

Our grandson was baptized at Christmas. He shrieked and squirmed. I was holding him. He always cries when I appear. “He does know people” was all Charlie’s Dad would say. Afterward, as he stumbled around the church, guided by non-relatives, I saw him in a baptized light, a new light, a resurrection light.

We had a Bishop who loved golf, and would include college students to fill a foursome. One day we finished and went to drink ice tea. A man from the foursome ahead of us shouted: “I left my putter on the eighth green. You were right behind us. Why didn’t you pick it up?” I wanted to say, you know, he is a Bishop, but I kept quiet. After a while the Bishop excused himself. He was gone a while, then came in the shop door with a putter and silently laid it on the man’s table. Afterward, thinking about cheeks and cloaks, I saw him in a new light, a confirmed light, a resurrection light.

Richard Neibuhr taught at Yale. I still assign, to my colleagues disgruntlement, his Christ and Culture. It is still unsurpassed. I am told that he was like Wesley a punctuality freak. One day a graduate student came late, and Neibuhr clicked his watch closed and glared at him. The silence was thunderous. But later that night, a knock came at the lowly students door. Professor Neibuhr simply said, “I apologize for treating you so harshly”. I remember that story and wish I were more generous. After hearing it, I saw teaching in a new light, a forgiven and pardoned and penitent light, a resurrection light.

Speaking of the classroom, in preaching class I have each of the students select and read or recite a poem. They can tell about their choice if they choose, choosing and choices being after all at the
heart of the preaching of the gospel. One woman gave hers, a Christopher Marlowe gem, and said she picked it because her fiancé had read it in asking for her hand in marriage. “And if these pleasures may thee move, come live with me and be my love”. Afterward, I saw that poem in a new light, a heteronomous and matrimonial light, a Resurrection Light.

Gary Bergh came through our School of Theology in the 1960’s. At various Episcopal whims and wishes he dutifully moved around from church to church, with his wife Linda, also a BUSTH grad. He preached the gospel and loved the people. He is one of the reasons I am here—here in ministry, here in Boston, here in the pulpit. About three months into a happy retirement he died. Just one of those middle of the night things. Except that for those who named him as a friend, his going was like the going of breath. You know, those of you who have and have lost friends. After his passing, I saw his service in a new light, an ordination light, a resurrection light.

Catherine Corrigan taught all our children fourth grade. She was a Boston native, and a nun for a long time, until Vatican II. She then traded her habit for a public school classroom. How she loved those kids. I think about her and I think is more radiantly alive dead than many people are alive. Cancer came upon her and took her, far too early. But after her funeral, I saw her in a new light, a last rite light, a resurrection light.

In a minute we will receive the Eucharist. What is Resurrection? For Peter Berger: “Faith in the resurrection if faith in a pivotal shift in the cosmic drama, not in a televisable occurrence in a Judean graveyard. “Christ is present, ‘in with and under’ the physical elements but without the empirical nature of these elements being miraculously changed”. (Questions of Faith, 188). What is Resurrection? For Paul Tillich: ‘participation not historical argument guarantees the reality of the event on which Christianity is based’. What is Resurrection? For Martin Luther (2:215): “If we preach only its history, it is an unprofitable sermon…when we preach to what end it serves it becomes profitable, wholesome and comforting”. (Sermons, Easter, loc. cit.) What is Resurrection? For Edmund Steimle: “A sermon that begins in the Bible, stays in the Bible, and ends in the Bible is UNBIBLICAL.” (Rice, Imagination and Interpretation, preface)

The Lord is Risen! Indeed.

Resurrection Light illumines abandon.

Let us pray.

In light of Resurrection, we pray, Lord grant us the revelation of enchantment, the uncovering of humility and the illumination of abandon.

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

posted in Uncategorized on 04.4.2010 at 11:00 am

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Sunday
March 28

The Liturgy of the Passion

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 22:14-23:56
Click here to hear sermon only

Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,

As to behold desert a beggar born,

And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplac'd,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgrac'd
And strength by limping sway disable
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tir'd with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die I leave my love alone.

Sonnet 66
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

posted in Uncategorized on 03.28.2010 at 11:00 am

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Sunday
March 21

Atonement Lenten Series V

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to hear the sermon only.

John 12:1-8

As we approach the end of this Lenten series on Atonement, I can’t help but wonder whether our centuries of elaborate theories, on which the whole church has never agreed, don’t point to a more basic hesitation to believe the fundamental claim that we have indeed been reconciled with God. That somehow, through the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, whatever barrier may have existed between us and the Holy One has been definitively torn down.

We puzzle at this possibility and ask with Charles Wesley’s hymn:
And can it be that I should gain 
an interest in the Savior's blood! 

Died he for me? who caused his pain! 
For me? who him to death pursued?
Amazing love! How can it be ?

How indeed can it be, we wonder – probing the mechanisms by which Jesus might bring humankind into union with God. But we miss the point altogether if we forget to marvel at that union itself, at the reconciliation which exists and the connection which endures. It is this kind of wondering that Wesley invites in the next verse of that same hymn:
'Tis mystery all: th' Immortal dies! 
Who can explore his strange design?
‘Tis mercy all; let earth adore. Let angel minds inquire no more.

A strange mystery indeed … stranger still if we can imagine how un-like us God is sometimes, most of all in the amazing extravagance of unconditional love. Can it be, atonement theories aside, that God might simply love us, for no reason, and with no reservations, through a strange mystery that boggles our minds as much as the Psalmist’s proclamation of rivers in the desert. Can it be that we are saved by love? Full stop.

We know that we go to great lengths to separate ourselves from God. Wandering down alluring paths, chasing after elusive riches, settling for other, not-so-amazing loves, and fearing that we might not be worth anything more.

Can it be that we set the caveats on salvation, conditions for communion, prerequisites for admission into God’s family? “God will save us, if we accept Jesus; if the Father’s wrath is assuaged; if his honor is preserved; if his justice is maintained; if the God-man dies; if the perfect sacrifice is offered; if the invitation is received.” If, if, if.

Can it be, though, that God is not an amplification of ourselves, not a mirror of our “if”-modified loves, our “if”-restrained loyalties?

Can it be that for no reason but love itself the very God of the universe is alive in each and every human soul and is pulsing through Creation? Can it be that the One who “who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters” Isaiah says; is perfectly capable of finding a way into the hearts of you and me.

Can it be that the Psalmist was right in wondering
Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?

Can it be that he was right, too, in answering this way
If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, 

even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast. 


Can it be that Paul was also right, when he said that
neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present,
nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus

Can it be that the image of God within us and the Spirit of God beyond us conspire in a saving unity that draws us more and more into the life of the Holy One?

Can it be that the union with God, which our souls seek, is found when explanation ceases and contemplation begins?

This is where we find ourselves in today’s Gospel, with a mind-boggling act by Mary of Bethany. Jesus visits his friends: Martha, Mary and the recently-raised-from-the-dead Lazarus for a dinner party at their home, a couple of miles outside Jerusalem.

Martha is of course busy getting the food ready, and Lazarus is at table, perhaps talking with some of the disciples, when Mary makes her way to the feet of Jesus and anoints them with a pound of an expensive, fragrant ointment of pure nard. She lingers there, wiping these well-walked feet with her very own hair.

This provocatively intimate moment between two friends caught the eye of Judas, who objected to the wastefulness of her behavior. ʺWhy was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?ʺ A noble question, perhaps, since this sum might be as much as a whole year’s pay. But the jousting of explanations that comes next reveals something more is afoot, with the Gospel writer questioning the motives of the soon-to-be-betrayer, and with Jesus snapping back “Leave her alone” and reminding everyone about the death he saw coming. “The poor you will always have with you,” he says, “but you will not always have me.”

Mary has discerned what the others did not. The tides were turning. Christ’s body was breaking. This was no moment for ordinary reasoning, but for irrationally-extravagant love. Perhaps she could hear the crack in Jesus’ voice, see a weariness of step, a furrowed brow, or an empty stare that betrayed an inner ferment, as he gathered up the power to face what would lie ahead.

Perhaps she knew that something was wrong, that he now needed a blessing. She comes near to him with the same perceptively healing gentleness that he showed to so many others – to the woman at the well, the blind ones in Jericho, the paralytic at Bethsaida, the lepers on the road, and even wee little Zacchaeus up in his tree, even the perpetually not-too-bright disciples, even maybe you and me…

But now his feet are the object of mercy; others take on his healing work. “See from his head, his hands, his feet, sorrow and love flow mingled down,” words we will sing in a few minutes time, marking this new moment in the life of Jesus, a moment of mingled emotion and shifting roles. Yes, Jesus still will kneel and wash the feet of his friends, but as he does, as we are transformed more and more into that Body of Christ.

Judas misses this meaning, misses the connection between friends partaking in each other’s love, and falls into the familiar temptation to make everything about money – a commodification of both the poor and the nard, reducing the fruits of the earth, the loving work of human hands, and the dignity of God’s people into charity and cash, exchangeable, transferable, without the intimate investment Mary shows.

Judas misses the fact that when we really love someone, we do all kinds of crazy things whose economics may be questionable – a pound of nard, an only-begotten Son, perhaps. And even if his desire is pure, Judas misses the one thing that is right before his eyes.

Like him we love big ideas, sensible plans, well-ordered syllabi, and practical strategies with quantifiable benchmarks of success. And these, like caring for the poor, are good, good things. But we can become lost
in them, and wander far from the God who is staring us in the face, far enough that it takes an irrationally prophetic acting out, an undeniably extravagant expression of love to catch our attention again.

We can be tempted to believe the lie that we’re somehow missing out on life if we’re not stressed-out, sleep-deprived, overworked, hypercaffeinated, perpetually entertained and well on our way to making a fortune and/or changing the world – preferably with a hefty dose of community activities, a better than average partner, and a house and cute dog for an added bonus. Mary tells us “STOP, stop, stop” and see what is in front of you. See – like she saw Jesus.

Yes the healing of the world is urgent, but to do that God’s way we need to learn to focus on the one thing. If we are to avoid making even the work of Christ into a project with a price tag, we need to practice an intense, attentive, extravagant love for one who is already before us – the roommate, the partner, the colleague, the familiar stranger on the street, the lonely neighbor down the hall. When we do this, then we might be ready to approach, with dignity, a wider suffering.

Maybe like me you’re juggling jobs to make ends meet, trying hard to just get by, and all this is sounding a little too mystical. But in these last days of Lent, I pray we will give ourselves the gift of some small place to focus bottle of nard’s worth of time:

Maybe call your mom. Speak a word of truth, however painful. Have a cup of tea with a potential new friend. Ask for something you desperately need. Forgive a festering hurt. Walk in this new-found spring weather for no reason other than to spend time with the One who calls you by name. Imagine what an act of extravagant love, for the one who is before your eyes, might be.

Whether your Lenten observance has been a paragon of perfection, or a wilderness disaster, we have time, still, to practice Mary’s style of love. And Holy Week will bring even more ritual moments of irrational intimacy – to praise the one we hoped would change the world, to have our feet washed by our Teacher, to weep at the foot of the cross, to run away in shame, and to marvel, speechless, at the one who is alive again.

All this is coming (not to mention a mission to heal the world and a Spirit to comfort and guide us) – but for now we have in Mary a precious moment with the vulnerable Jesus, one who longs for us, a moment to come near and manifest the unity we have in God by our care for another.

Can it be that this love is in us too? That same amazing love, which sought us out when we were far off, pulsing now through our veins? Can it be that Jesus has released a power in us? Can it be? Yes, of course … though extravagant love looks to others like foolishness, like a waste; a naïve, unrealistic choice. It makes “sense,” if you can call it that, only in the economy of God, only with the mind of Christ.

And here is where my favorite atonement image might actually help a little – itself more a contemplation than an explanation. It’s what the second century theologian Irenaeus called “recapitulation” – that in Christ, God returns humanity to its true purpose, not simply taking away sin but infusing Creation with a renewal of its original holiness. It’s a kind of cosmic do-over, with a little extra help this time. At every moment of his life, Jesus shows us another way, offers us another choice, demonstrates that rejection of God and each other are not inevitable.

It is, as Russian theologian Vladimir Lossky says, “the deification of created beings by uncreated grace.” A true union with God, not an eradication of our selfhood, nor a feeble acquaintance, but a sharing in the same energies of Life, so that the love which was in Christ Jesus could also erupt in Mary’s love for him, and in our love for those God sends to us. Anglican theologian Lancelot Andrews put it this way: “Whereby, as before He of ours, so now we of His are made partakers.” Can it be? Can it be?

How bold we might become if we really believed, if we trusted that Jesus has already pioneered this way of foolishly boundless love, that we don’t have to be the first to risk awkwardness at a dinner party. Jesus and now Mary of Bethany go before us, along with the saints and sages of the generations, the cloud of witnesses whose lives were filled with God enough to overflow. Can it be that extravagant love is in us, too, ready to be released when we but focus on the One before our eyes, and so more and more become partakers in the very God of the Universe and this being-redeemed world.

Can we take our part in this strange mystery, an atonement in which God chooses us for no reason at all? And so we ask, with John Donne –
Wilt thou love God, as he thee? Then digest,
My soul, this wholesome meditation,
How God the Spirit, by angels waited on
In heaven, doth make his Temple in thy breast.
The Father having begot a Son most blest,
And still begetting, (for he ne'er be gone)
Hath deigned to choose thee by adoption,
Co-heir t' his glory, and Sabbath' endless rest.
…..
'Twas much that man was made like God before,
But, that God should be made like man, much more

Amazing love, how can it be.

~The Reverend Joshua Thomas,
Episcopal University Chaplain

 

posted in Guest Preachers, Lenten Series 2010: Atonement on 03.21.2010 at 11:00 am

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Sunday
March 14

Atonement Lenten Series IV

By Marsh Chapel

“Be reconciled to God.”

We can take Paul’s exhortation in two ways this morning. In Lent we are most often asked to consider how we can be reconciled to God from God’s point of view, in light of our sin which separates us from God. That is indeed an important and necessary part of our reconciliation. And, this morning our scriptures invite us to consider also how we can be reconciled to God from our point of view, in light of the resentment and distrust we often hold toward God.

At first glance, the story that has come down to us as “The Prodigal Son” is a straightforward redemption story that focuses on the younger son. He asks for his share of the inheritance, squanders it “in dissolute living”, comes to rock bottom, and then “comes to himself”. He realizes that while he cannot have the life he had, he can still have a good life. So he goes back to reconcile with his father, to serve him as a servant if he cannot serve him as a child and heir. The father on his part greets him with joy and is quick to reconcile, restores him as a child if not an heir, and throws a luxurious party to celebrate his return. All well and good. But Jesus does not end the story with this happy ending. Instead, he continues the story with the arrival of the elder son, who bitterly resents the father’s joyful reception of the younger son with no retribution. He resents also the father’s lack of appreciation for his, the elder son’s, hard work. The elder son refuses to join the party even when his father pleads with him to come in. He refuses his relationship with his brother (“this son of yours”, he calls him). He questions his father’s love for him himself. We never do find out if he joins the party or not.

If we are honest, as we are called to be in Lent, it is often a challenge for us – the good people, the Christians, the members of the Church – to be reconciled to God in the face of what God and others choose to do. Even if others repent or undergo the consequences of bad or even evil choices, we still find it hard to believe that God can or should love them as much as we should be loved in our goodness and hard work. Some of you may remember the denial and outrage when it was reported that Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer, had repented and become a Christian in prison, and that when Dahmer was killed in prison the chaplain stated that he himself did believe that Jeffrey was saved and would be in heaven with God. Likewise the denial and outrage when Charles Colson, Richard Nixon’s hatchet man, repented in prison and went on to found his Prison Fellowship. Some folks found it very hard to pray for George W. Bush and Richard Cheney as they professed to be brothers in Christ, and some folks find it very hard to pray for Barack Obama as he professes the same. And in any given church deliberation more and more progressives and conservatives draw lines in the sand, with no allowances that God might even conceivably be present with the other “side”. These are just some of the challenges within Christianity. How much more are we encouraged by our culture and our own privilege to demonize the poor, the uneducated, the different, the refugee, the “uncivilized”, even as our delicate sensibilities call us to resent or distrust God on their behalf. Like the elder brother with his father, we often feel that we have worked very hard as good people, and have very little to show for it, or that what we have may be taken away. We feel more and more uncertain of our place in an entangled and globalized world. Climate changes and the decisions of others who we may not even know affects us and those around us in frightening ways. The complexities of our lives make us complicit in wrongdoing without our knowledge or consent. How can we be reconciled to God, who insists on love toward that which so deserves punishment?

In any relationship, there are times when one party has a grievance against the other, a big one or a small one. That is not the problem; the problem arises when the aggrieved party does not talk about the grievance with the other party. This then becomes a problem for both; as the Psalmist says, “when I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all the day long”. As with sins we have committed, so with sins we feel are committed against us. If we do not express our grievances, they fester, and turn to distrust and resentment. The problem is then compounded when the other party may not realize there is a problem. The elder brother at least expressed his resentment and distrust toward his father. The father then had an opportunity to respond. And he clearly stated his affection and plans: “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.” The reason the father celebrates, and pleads for the elder brother’s celebration, is that the younger brother has come back, come back not just from dissolute choices, but from his own death and being lost to his family, the true evil of his choices. In his response toward the elder brother’s grievance, the father invites the elder brother also to “come to himself”: to realize and claim for himself his own place as his father’s son and only heir, and to rest in that true identity. Maybe to claim it to the extent that he could just take a goat and celebrate with his friends, and not work all the time. Maybe to claim it to the extent that he could join the party for his brother, back from the dead to be a son and brother again in a different way, but a son and a brother nonetheless.

Be reconciled to God. The same principle of openness applies to our relationship with God. Part of the invitation of Lent is to examine our grievances toward God, to examine the sins we feel have been committed against us through the choices of God as well as the choices of others. This is for our benefit, so that we know the grievances that we carry and so that the grievances do not fester. It is also for God’s benefit, so to speak: we may feel that God already knows, indeed must know, what our grievances are, but to express them is to give God a chance to respond and to work with us to make things right.

So what does all this have to do with atonement? One of the preachers in my home
church used to say that the meaning of “atonement” was “at-one-ment”; the same word but hyphenated – at-one-ment; that in that great mystery of atonement/at-one-ment God became truly one with us, and we are invited to be truly one with God, in all the complexities and complicities of our lives. Indeed, Paul exhorts us to be reconciled to God “on behalf of Christ”, for Christ’s sake, for the sake of the one who was both God and Human, for the sake of the one who “was made to be sin who knew no sin.” for our sake, for the sake of the one who from the very incarnation in our humanity and human life is “God With Us.” While the mystery of at-one-ment finds its expression in all of Jesus’ birth, life and ministry, it finds its fullest expression in Jesus’ crucifixion. Crucifixion is a nice word for what it really was: Jesus’ execution -- by the state through injustice and torture and by the collusion of religion with political expediency and evil. The experience of crucifixion is the answer of God With Us. It is God’s answer in love and solidarity in suffering. It is God’s answer to our resentment, dist
rust, and fear of uncertainty. This is how much God loves us. This is how much God wants to be at one with us, even to our death in suffering and injustice. In the crucifixion together through Jesus Christ we may experience the worst that sin as evil has to offer, but we do not have to give in to it, we do not have to become it or retaliate in kind; we can keep the faith that evil does not have the last word, that same faith in which Jesus himself, even on the cross, knew himself reconciled to God.

Be reconciled to God. We do not know the end of the story of the Prodigal Son and the Elder Brother. But we do know the end of the story of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion. He did indeed die. But evil did not have the last word. There was instead Resurrection and Pentecost and the birth of the Church (which while often oblivious and coopted and aggravating by its own choice is for all its faults still on a good day the Body of Christ) and there is our ongoing sanctification in the work of the Holy Spirit. But these are sermons for other days. For today, we have the possibility and promise of our identity precisely as we are Christians, those who have accepted the love of God With Us and love God in return, as we do indeed work to serve the good: “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new."

One of my mentors in the ministry of reconciliation says that “you have to give people a way back in.” Jesus told the story of the Prodigal Son and the Elder Brother in response to people who grumbled about the tax collectors and sinners who came to listen to Jesus, and grumbled about Jesus when he welcomed them and ate with them. The grumblers too were good people, religious people, who worked very hard for God, who also were challenged by the choices of God and by the choices of others. Jesus offered the story to give them a way back in, to recognize themselves in both the Prodigal Son and in the elder brother. If we are honest, as we are called to be in Lent, we too will recognize ourselves in both. As good as we may be, we are in no way perfect, in our own choices and in our judgments of the choices of others. Part of the recognition of the grievances we have with others is the recognition of the ways we may also be implicated in those grievances. To deny others a way back in is to deny it to ourselves as well.

In the mystery and paradox of atonement, God offers us a way back in to relationship, through our sin that separates us from God. God also asks us to give God a way back in through our resentment and distrust and fear of uncertainty. If we take the way back in, if we give the way back in, there is a new creation. We are no longer caught up in resentment, distrust, and the fear of uncertainty. We are reconciled to God, at one with God, able to claim our true identity as beloved and at home wherever we are, whatever happens. We also are entrusted, entrusted, God trusts us with the ministry of reconciliation for others, even those whose choices we may find challenging. We are trusted to offer others a way back in to reconciliation with God, with others, and with themselves. When we accept and offer reconciliation for ourselves with God, and accept and offer reconciliation to others, we go a long way toward the elimination of resentment, distrust, and fear of uncertainty for everyone. We go a long way toward helping to continue to create that new creation for ourselves and for the world.
Be reconciled to God. From both God’s point of view and from our own, it is love that makes reconciliation possible. May we accept our own at-one-ment, and offer at-one-ment to others, with joy and thanksgiving.

Amen.

~Rev. Victoria Hart Gaskell, OSL

posted in Lenten Series 2010: Atonement, The Rev. Dr. Victoria Hart Gaskell, Minister for Visitation on 03.14.2010 at 11:00 am

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Sunday
March 7

Approaching Atonement

By Marsh Chapel

Regarding Atonement, tone matters.

It is the tone in atonement that matters most. The hue. The fragrance. The touch. Without tone, love is lost, and atonement is love.

Both our Psalm and our Gospel tell us so.

Psalm 63:

Like the 23rd Psalm, Psalm 63: 1-8 is about faith, confident trust in God. The characteristic forms of lament are also present here. In this psalm, though, the words are spoken to God, not about God. Here we may find a helpful correction for some of our current spiritual life. This Psalm should put a little steady 4/4 rhythm into our willingness to talk to God. God is righteous, just, merciful, faithful…and gracious, we affirm. So, as this Psalm encourages us, we may find courage to lift our heartfelt prayers directly to God, to speak from the heart. It is healthy so to do. One college sophomore, recently considering the early choices about studies and majors that loom with later and larger consequences, said, in full and honest confession: “it’s scary, its scary to think hard about your future”. It is a brave person who will honestly admit and lament some fear, as this Psalm encourages us to do.

This matter of thirst both unites and complicates our poem. Like a fugue appearing and disappearing, the song of Psalm 63 names a “thirst” that will not be slaked by anything other than Ultimate Reality. Now some of this thirsty confusion may be due to a long observed confusion in the order of verses. Following H Gunkel, many commentators to the present day have arranged the verses to the order of 1,2,6,7,8,4,5,3 (e.g. I B, vol.4, 327). Yet the exact ordering of the psalm has little full influence on its interpretation. The verses hold together, whether in the inherited order or in the edited improvement, guided by a desire for lasting meaning. Once during a continuing education session at the local Veterans’ Hospital each staff person was asked to give a single word description of what he or she brought to the work of the hospital. What the nurses, technicians, physicians and administrators said, in a single word, has not been recalled. The chaplain’s word, though, stands out in memory: “meaning”. Her presence brings meaning to those singing in lament.

One formal feature of this set of verses deserves some remark. Like a repetitive staccato interruption, there is a physical praise at work in this song, a praise that employs “lips”(3), “hands”(4), “mouth” (5). The praise of God is a physical act. It is healthy so to do. Praise involves presence. A pastor once went for his physical exam to the office of a backsliding parishioner. Said the doctor: “Why do you worry so much about numbers—worship attendance, giving totals, numbers of members? I don’t need to be a part of the numbers game to be faithful.” Replied the minister: “oh, for the same reason you worry so much about numbers—blood pressure, cholesterol count, even the dreaded weight scale. The body craves health—true of your body and true of the Body of Christ”. In Psalm 63 there is a physical interest at work. There is also an awareness of physical intimacy here that is startling: “upon my bed…in the watches of the night”. Our psalm lifts a physical, even intimate, grace note that surprises and disturbs, and sets us on a course of healing. The poet has found that there is some “help” here. A choral swell lifts the end of the song: “because thy steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise thee” (v.3).

The tone, in atonement, is love. Love so amazing, so divine

Luke 13:

Here whatever events occurred in Jesus’ time are now lost. The soprano voice of Jesus in history is barely audible. Clearly, for the first churches, though, the matter of repentance was crucial. The alto harmony (the inner line voice in the choral harmony of the early church) breathes repentance. Then, in good tenor fashion, Luke connects repentance to experience. The experiences of political terrorism (Pilate and Galilean blood) and natural accidents (gravity and falling towers) we know as well as they did. The experience of fruitless labor we also know. We know too about injustice unaddressed leading to suffering. Through the centuries, the church’s bass voice has carried forward the intersection of experience and repentance. It is this humbling, quieting mode, tone, which the church has to offer to a post-church world.

To the question “Why?” I have no answer for you. But the good news is that you have an answer for me. And if you think I do not see it you are mistaken. And if you think I do not appreciate or admire it you are mistaken. And if you think I do not respect it you are mistaken. You live your answer by choosing the cruciform path of faith. You meet evil with honesty, grief with grace, failure with faith, and death with dignity. You carry yourselves in belief. And in humility. Maybe a story will remind us…

Why did Jesus have to suffer and die? In Christian history, there have been multiple answers. One is that God sent Jesus to die on the cross to atone for the sin or sins of the world. A righteous God holds sinners accountable and sends Jesus to suffer and die to satisfy\appease God’s judgment upon sinners. This atones for human sin and believing sinners go free. For me, such a view seems to suggest that God is behind and wills awful brutality.

Another view is that Jesus died the way he did because he lived the way he did. His uncompromising compassion and the integrity of his
love challenged others. Threatened religious and political authorities then combined to put him to death. Where is God in all of this?

Some people came to see God’s love at work in Jesus’ love, a love willing to go to the cross to show the depth of its integrity. God does not cause Jesus’ terrifying crucifixion, but God can use it to show that nothing in life or death or anything else in all creation can separate us from such love, including crucifixion. God’s raising Jesus from the dead is God’s imprimatur on such love. (Paul Hammer)

It is important to use the right tone when speaking of the atonement…

You remember that it is not the passion of Christ that defines the Person of Christ, but the Person that defines the passion. You remember that it is not the suffering that bears the meaning, but the meaning that bears the suffering…that it is not the cross that carries the love but the love that carries the cross…that it is not crucifixion that encompasses salvation, but salvation that encompasses even the tragedy of crucifixion… and that it is not the long sentence of Lent, with all its phrases, dependent clauses and semi-colons that completes the gospel, but it is the punctuation to come, the last mark of the season, whether it be the exclamation point of Peter, the full stop period of Paul or the question mark of Mary—Easter defines Holy Week, and not the other way around. Love defines death, and not the other way around. Oh, we want to be clear, now: the resurrection follows but not replace the cross, for sure. Still, it is also true that the cross precedes but does not overshadow the resurrection. It is Life, it is Love, it is Good Who has the last word.

 

~The Reverend Dr. Robert Allan Hill,

Dean of Marsh Chapel

posted in Lenten Series 2010: Atonement, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.7.2010 at 11:00 am

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Sunday
February 28

Atonement, Lenten Series II

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to hear Sermon only

Well, dear friends, here we are, once again, plodding through the liturgical season of Lent. The weather has decided, this year, to cooperate with the penitential feel of the Lenten season. Here in Boston, unseasonably warm temperatures have yielded a series of rainy, dreary days instead of the usual snow. Snow, of course, is too beautiful to be penitential, although New York and Washington, DC may wish to point out that they have been experiencing penitential snowfall by sheer quantity.

Now, it must be said, and at the outset, that natural occurrences and calamities, be they rainfall and snowstorms or the earthquakes that rocked Haiti last month and Chile yesterday, are simply not a result of divine malign. In theology, like in statistics, correlation is not causation. The facts that rain and snow fall from the skies and that human beings are sinful do not mean that human sinfulness causes rain and snowstorms. The facts that the earth shifts and shakes and that human beings are sinful do not mean that human sinfulness causes earthquakes, any more than rainfall, snowstorms, or earthquakes are excuses for human sinfulness. While natural events may provide an emotional canvas on which to paint our spiritual journey, it is both a spiritual and a theological mistake to confuse the painting for reality.

Having set aside the temptation to equate natural events with divine intent, it is our task in considering the theme of atonement to investigate the equation of human sinfulness and divine grace. Temptation and addiction are two central figures in the drama of human sinfulness. Here at Marsh Chapel we may be prone to an addiction to excellent preaching. This is why it is important for me to step into the pulpit occasionally, to break the habit and remind everyone not to take for granted the homiletical extravaganza they are blessed to hear every other week.

It is no easy task we have set ourselves, to speak of atonement. Not that we at Marsh Chapel are prone to taking the easy road. Last summer we tackled the theme of Darwin and Faith, one of the greatest sources of tension in contemporary religious life. Now we delve into one of the greatest controversies in the history of Christian doctrine: how is it that the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth almost two thousand years ago effects a transformation from sin by grace in you and in me today and every day?

Rehearsing the myriad theological treatments of this central question in Christian faith and life would consume our time together and almost certainly result in even more snoring than is already emanating from the congregation. Alas, I am afraid that the vast majority of atonement theologies would not touch on the lived experience of so many of us in the second decade of the 21st century. In our question of the atonement we are not looking for the correlation between sin and Jesus, but for a causal relationship. We expect God in the person and work of Jesus Christ to actually do something to or for us on account of our sinfulness. But I wonder if the way we pose the relationship is not the source of our trouble in understanding atonement in light of our lived experience.

You see, in our posing the question, we expect something of God; that our sinfulness causes God to do something. Our Gospel lesson today sets things up differently. Jesus says, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” Paul too understands the discrepancy when in our reading from his letter to the Philippians he says “For many live as enemies of the cross of Christ; I have often told you of them, and now I tell you even with tears. Their end is destruction; their god is the belly; and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.” What Jesus and Paul explain is that we understand very well what God does for us; what we do not understand is ourselves and our sinfulness. We are not willing. Our minds are set on earthly things.

There are four movements of atonement: confession, repentance, mercy, forgiveness. Atonement theologies have historically been arguments about the relationships among these movements. But our lived experience, and the breakdown in the atonement process, that Jesus and Paul knew and that we live daily, is not in the process itself but before and between its movements. In my admittedly brief time in ministry, my own experience is that people are often in one of two places with regard to their lived experience.

The first place many of us find ourselves is stuck in the starting gate; the atonement process never even gets going. As anyone who has ever moved from addiction to recovery can tell you, the first step in overcoming the addiction is admitting that you have a problem. Yes, dear friends, many of us are in denial, and I do not mean a river in Egypt. (Clearly, that for which I most need to atone is a predilection to bad puns).

The most obvious form of denial is the excuse. The most thoroughgoing excuse conceived in human history is the strict determinism of scientific materialism, resulting in the statement, “the universe made me do it!” Indeed, many of us cannot identify the exact cause of our failures of responsibility, but the sense that something beyond our control must have impinged upon our actions is prevalent. And the conclusion is that whatever it was that intervened should be held responsible for our failure.

If you are wondering if you have ever actually had an experience that matches up with this abstract musing, just ask yourself this question. Have you ever found yourself saying, or at least thinking, “Oops! I forgot…”? “Oops! I forgot to turn off the stove!” “Oops! I forgot to make my rent payment!” “Oops! I forgot to fill the car with gas.” Really, it works with just about anything. “Oops! I slept through class.” “Oops! I cheated on my girlfriend.” “Oops! I pressed the wrong button.” The word “oops” serves a dual function in our experience. It signals that we know something is wrong, and that we should not be held entirely responsible. After all, how can I possibly be expected to remember everything? I forgot to turn off the stove, but I remembered to lock the front door. I forgot to pay my rent but I paid the cable and electricity bills. I slept through class but I work so hard and for so many hours that I get exhausted. I cheated on my girlfriend but I was drunk.

Another form of denial takes the form of “it’s not that big a deal.” This is the recognition that something is not quite right, but also the concomitant belief that the not-quite-rightness does not rise to the level of a real problem; certainly not to the level of sin. The “no big deal” form of denial is less verbal than the impingement form, mostly because we tend not to acknowledge such events since they are of supposedly negligible importance. Nevertheless, there is a sense that things could have been better. “I could have said that better.” “The sauce could use more oregano.” “The prelude would
have been better if I’d hit the F# instead of the F-natural.” Of course, Justin never hits a wrong note so he wouldn’t know.

As one great theologian, who is no stranger to this pulpit, has said, to be human is to be obligated. We are all responsible to fulfill all of our obligations. But, alas, our obligations are so many and various as to mutually exclude each other and overwhelm us. It is this condition that gives rise to the coping mechanism of denial. It is easier to simply say that fulfilling all of my obligations is impossible so I cannot possibly be responsible. Such coping mechanisms are reinforced when they are successful in getting us out of the consequences for our failures. Unfortunately, this coping mechanism is not entirely true, and thus not entirely helpful. The fact of the matter is that we do feel our obligations and resulting responsibility deeply. Even if it is the case that our obligations overlap and conflict, we still must choose which we will fulfill responsibly, and we are still responsible for the ones we choose not to fulfill. We are responsible. We ourselves. Not someone else. Not the situation. We are responsible and we have failed in our responsibility, despite any intervening agents and situational complexity. We have failed. We have sinned. We are responsible and culpable and in need of repentance, mercy and forgiveness.

The other place that many of us find ourselves is stuck in the middle. Of course, the truth is that in some sense we are all stuck in the middle. It is always the case that we have sinned again before the sin we just confessed and repented of can be forgiven. But this is a different kind of being stuck in the middle. This is the kind of stuck in the middle that gets depicted in the 1998 dramatic film, What Dreams May Come. The character Annie, wracked by guilt over the death of her husband Chris, commits suicide and is damned to hell, not by God, but by the psychological pain that brought her to commit the act in the first place. This middle place, which for many is a hell of their own making, is marked by an overwhelming sense of guilt.

The place of guilt is in many respects the opposite end of the pendulum swing from the place of denial. In guilt it is not that our obligations are overwhelming and therefore we cannot be held responsible, but that our obligations are overwhelming and we are so responsible that we can never escape. There is not enough mercy in the world to overcome our failures. To be stuck in the middle is to be stuck constantly repeating Hagrid: “I should not have said that. I should not have said that. I should not have said that.”

The problem here, once again, is not really a lack of confidence in God, but a lack of self-confidence that we are really worthy of forgiveness. God could not possibly forgive me, not because God is not capable, but because I am not worthy. “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” The agony of the place of guilt is only partly our own agony in the face of our own sinfulness; it is also the agony of God who longs for relationship but we are unwilling. It is not God who counts us unworthy; it is we ourselves.

How, then, might we bring the pendulum back to the balance point? And what might life look like once it is there? Let’s take the second question first, shall we?

We, in the spirit of Lent, seek to live in the space between denial and guilt. If we are to avoid denial, we must be honest, first and foremost with ourselves, about our own failures and thus our own sinfulness. And yet, to avoid extreme guilt, we must learn humility. We must humbly acknowledge our faults and enter a place of deep contrition out of which those we have faulted may offer forgiveness. So too, we must humbly recognize that the mercy of God is far greater than any sin we might possibly commit. When I was last on silent retreat with the Community of Taizé, Br. Sebastian led our daily reflections. He pointed out that the only possible way to withstand humiliation is to cultivate humility. Denial and guilt are both defense responses that attempt to fend off humiliation. But at the end of the day, neither are successful coping mechanisms. Br. Sebastian is correct. The only possible way to withstand humiliation is to cultivate humility.

I often find myself saying to faculty and administrators that if students at Boston University learn nothing in the classroom, but during their time here learn to fail and recover gracefully, then we will have succeeded in our mission as an institution of higher education. To fail in our responsibilities is indeed inevitable in life. This inevitability does not absolve us of our responsibility. Only God can do that. But neither does it doom us to live guilt-wracked existences. We can, in fact, recover.

The good news of Jesus Christ for us today is that there is more love in God than sin in us. “But now, irrespective of law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith” (Romans 3: 21-25).

From the perspectives of denial and guilt, it may appear as the saying goes, “you just can’t get there from here.” In the Protestant traditions there is a hesitation here, because justification is by faith, not by works. Indeed, it is God who delivers mercy and offers forgiveness of sins, and yet it is we ourselves who must make the spiritual journey of Lent from denial and guilt to humility. This journey largely consists in ritual.

There are two theories of ritual at Boston University. The first is that of the former Dean of Marsh Chapel, the Rev. Dr. Robert Cummings Neville, who points out that ritual is the cultivation of habits that allow us to live well in the world. The second is that of anthropology and religion professors, respectively, Rob Weller and Adam Seligman. For them, ritual is the creation of subjunctive, “as if” spaces in which our own brokenness and the world’s brokenness can be held together as if they were whole. In neither perspective is ritual identified solely with religious rites such as the one we are in the midst of now. Both understand that ritual consists in such mundane patterns of behavior as walking down the street and driving the car, all the way up to the patterns of ceremony involved in religion and civil society.

So who is right? Is ritual a set of patterned behaviors that allow us to live well, or the creation of “as if” spaces that help us cope with our own and the world’s brokenness? The mistake would be in assuming that the two views are mutually exclusive, and the Lenten spiritual journey is the perfect case for demonstrating that the correct answer is a resounding, “both!”

On the one hand, the rituals of discipline in Lent really are better ways of living in the world. To reject temptations, begin to recover from addictions, and honestly and humbly recognize our own sinfulness makes us better able to see ourselves and our world as they truly are. Furthermore, the ritual movements from confession and repentance through mercy and forgiveness help us keep balance between denial and guilt and to cultivate humility. When we do so we are better able to relate to friends, family, neighbors, the world and, above all, God.

But in order to have that effect on our lives, ritual must first pull us out of our world and then stuff us right back in. The rituals of Lent pull us out of our normal daily existence and confront us with that fact that human sinfulness is world destroying. According to the Christian narr
ative, it was human sinfulness that lead to the death of Jesus on the cross, not the sinfulness of some humans, but the sinfulness of all humanity. Jesus Christ, who in our ritual context was in the beginning with God and through whom God created the world, is destroyed by our sin. But just as surely as our sinfulness is world destroying, so too is the grace of God world founding. Sin is not the final answer, but is overcome by the victory of resurrection life by the grace and mercy of God. And so the ritual places us back in the world in the middle, not stuck but moving more fluidly through the process of confession, repentance, mercy and forgiveness.

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” In the Lenten journey let us participate in the drama of atonement, the movements of confession, repentance, mercy and forgiveness that we might become willing participants in the realm of justice and peace that resurrection ordains. To do so we must in all humility reject the extremes of denial and guilt by allowing the ritual discipline of Lent to do its work. The ability to fail and recover gracefully is the greatest learning we might hope for, and then give thanks that the love and mercy of God indeed triumph over sin and death.

Let us bless the Lord. Thanks be to God. Amen.

-Br. Lawrence A. Whitney, LC+

posted in Br. Lawrence A. Whitney, LC†, Lenten Series 2010: Atonement on 02.28.2010 at 1:50 pm

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Sunday
February 21

Led Into Wild Spaces

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 4:1‐13

Grace to you, and peace, in the name of Jesus our brother who embodies God’s love for us and leads us into life. Amen.

Taken into the wild at the Spirit’s leading, Jesus, the newly baptized, fasts forty days and nights, tempted by the devil even before the threefold test begins. The Spirit descendent like a dove had alighted on him at the Jordan, when John had drawn Jesus into waters and the Voice declared him ‘the Beloved.’ But the next thing we know, “full of the Holy Spirit” Jesus is led out. He’s led out deep into Judean wilderness, to desert landscape—that spare terrain—“location of choice in luring God’s people to a deeper understanding of who they are” (Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, 46).

Like those before him whose sojourns in the wild are part of the ‘family story,’ Jesus’ time of solitude occasions not only struggle but, more basically, a stretching, a breaking-open if you will: exposure to elements and to the Elemental. In the desert, as on Dakota plains about which Kathleen Norris so famously wrote, “A person is forced inward by the sparseness of what is outward and visible in all [the] land and sky... what seems stern and almost empty is merely open, a door into some simple and holy state" (Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, 157).

The territory of Jesus’ testing is no small part of the story as a whole. That fierce landscape quite literally grounds him. It grounds Jesus out in the wilds; grounds him, in effect, beyond culture or class, in time and yet somehow beyond it; far-flung from the usual diversions by which we seek to transcend the distances of 2000 years and some 6000 miles. The evangelist Luke puts him there, on the margins, that we might see this Second Adam in quintessential struggle of identity: teasing out relationship and living into vocation. As with the psalmist whose moisture was “all dried up as by the heat of summer" (Psalm 32:4), so Jesus enters the time of his Testing with Jordan waters but a distant memory, the voice of God’s pleasure likely to be only a slight stirring amid groans of hunger and thirst. (Remember, Jesus is famished.) Trust will be all in all as the Tempter presses Jesus to exploit his equality with God (Philippians 2:6).

Famished. Hollowed out. Empty. That’s what Jesus is when challenged:
“Turn those stones to bread and satisfy your hunger!”
“Let angels bear you up!”
“Claim the kingdoms of this world and all their store!"

It is tempting, indeed! The lures of the world, easy satisfactions… But, remember the wilderness! The wilderness has stripped away more than food and drink, more than comfort and security. Laying waste all illusions, emptying him of all he does not need, Jesus has been drawn to his truest self—his deep hungers fed by God’s word in nurture, companionship, and strength that satisfies more than momentary fixes of food or fortune ever will. And thus, in touch with his truest self Jesus counters devilish words with deep trust. Over and again, the Tempter presses, “If you are the Son of God…” And yet it is because, it is because he is God’s Beloved that Jesus will live by (and even live as) the word that comes from God’s mouth, worshiping and serving only God, not putting the Lord to the test. Indeed, Jesus’ answer, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test”, effectively becomes a cry. “Away with you!” he seems to say. And thus the Test is ended. Luke says “The Devil retreated temporarily, lying in wait for another opportunity" (The Message, Luke 4:13).

Each year the church’s Lenten journey begins with this narrative accompaniment to Jesus’ wilderness testing. And while we have scrubbed them from sight, still it is with ash-smudged foreheads that we link ourselves all Lent long. We link ourselves to Source and End: the dust we are, God’s very own. Turning and returning, we walk a pilgrim way—rarely as contemplative or purgative as with a forty day fast, but carving out such patterns of discipline as will take us deeper into the Word, feeding us with more than bread for bellies’ cravings. Like Jesus out in the wilds, in our forty days we open spaces; we open spaces within our hearts. In what we give up and let go of in Lent, we trim away the excesses as best we can so as to walk a road less burdened. It is a narrow way, a road that leads to awesome mystery: God’s Own for the world, given in love.

All the while, “The brutality of the cross casts a long shadow over Lent…” So says a spiritual companion to my Lenten journey this year. By this, Jan Richardson means to acknowledge the starkness of the season and the difficulty one sometimes has in learning to see the “beauty present in its starkness and the secrets in its terrain.”

Yet, she says, “Lent is a season that invites us to explore its hollows and, in so doing, to explore our own, to enter the sometimes stark spaces in our souls that we may prefer to avoid. The season challenges us to think of our own lives as vessels, to contemplate the cracks, to rub our fingers over the worn places, to ponder whether we are feeling full or empty, to question what we open ourselves to. [Lent] beckons us to ponder what we have shaped—or bent—our lives around, whether the shape of the container of our life offers freedom or confinement, and whether it opens us to the possibility of new life to which the empty tomb points" (Richardson, Garden of Hollows, 1).

Of course, what constitutes the stark spaces of wilderness will be different for each of us. Still, we should be clear: the landscape of our pilgrimage need not be that of a thirsty land. Topography is not the key.

• No, for us, the wild terrain might just as well be made of our horror in the face of natural disaster such as we witness in Haiti’s rubble, the painful truths of human tragedy blowing hard against us like strong, hot winds.
• The sands – they could be of loneliness or despair. The great gulf of distance separating many of us from families and friends “back home,” or the pain of separation right here in Boston when our relationships break apart and we are set on paths of our future once more alone.
• The night’s bitter cold? It may come through poverty… or plenty, from overwork or lack of work, from fatigue or even failure. Even as the day’s heat might scorch because one feels misunderstood or maligned…or because one has burdened another with the same.

The point here is not so much the how but rather the what. The point is the “what” of an opening: of openings to metaphorical landscapes and their contours, openings to companions on our journeys. The point lies in openings to the emptiness of bellies and hearts and tables…the emptiness of our own solutions and self-satisfactions.
Friends, following the Spirit’s lead into wild places, often amounts to little other than opening ourselves to the sometimes painful places of life. And God knows, there are plenty of those places in a world such as ours.
Tuesday’s New York Times front page story above the fold opened with the question: “Will anyone remember that 17-year-old Angelania Ritchelle, a parentless high school student who wanted to be a fashion model, died of fright two days after the earthquake and ended up in a mass grave on the outskirts of [Port-au-Prince]?” Will anyone remember? Tha
t was the question 23 year old Emmanuella was asking as she grieved her young cousin’s death, noting that Angie “is just one of the nameless, faceless victims.” Wrenchingly, poignantly, she added, “And I hate that.”

To date, the quake is said to have killed 230,000 people. That seems to me to be a number incomprehensible to most of us, eh? To put it in some perspective, though, it is roughly equal to all the students attending every one of the 77 colleges and universities in metropolitan Boston. In other terms, it’s about 37% of the total population of our neighbors to the north in the great state of Vermont. 230,000 lives: and most of them buried unknown, without memorials. This quake has been called “an equal opportunity leveler with such mass deadliness that it erased the individuality of its victims.” Ah yes, there’s plenty of pain in the wild spaces to which we might open ourselves this season.

And still closer to home, we must know as well that aftershocks continue wreaking devastation among our Haitian neighbors. Our city is the third largest Haitian community in the United States. And Boston is trying to respond to the needs of the thousands here whose families back home struggle to stand in the aftermath of the quake. One such remarkable response to those needs is a concert to be held this Friday at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, downtown, adjacent to the Park Street T stop. At 7:30 on Friday evening they will host an effort spearheaded by many of our students called “Singing in the Aftermath.” Singing in the Aftermath: it’s a concert for Haiti with the Greater Boston Haitian Community. Financial contributions gathered there will support the extraordinary relief work of Partners in Health, while canned goods collected will restock empty shelves in local food pantries. A nice discipline to add to Lent’s rounds.

Of course, attending to the suffering of Haiti is only one way to open ourselves to the painful places of life. Surely, right here—even within our very selves—here also are great griefs to bear as each of us fails to live “as intended;” whether those disappointments come in coursework or relationships, in our jobs or by lack of living from our own core values. The reality is, we all fail. We all have broken places. Painful places.

But here is one of Lent’s gifts. It seems to me that this is a season that can bear the stark landscapes. The point is that we should not turn away from failings, from the broken in or around us. Indeed, the reality of our struggles – both outward and inward, both globally and locally – the reality of our struggles is part and parcel of why Lent stands to offer us more than just challenges to our willpower. Going into the wild places on a Lenten pilgrimage asks us, more deeply, to explore the very marrow of our being. As it did with Jesus in his forty days apart, Lent stretches before us pressing us to look at what ultimately satisfies, what gives us strength, what holds us safe.

Just so, however and wherever we find ourselves as we walk the ‘pilgrim way of Lent,’ I pray each of us finds what we need to face the fierce landscapes. In the emptying and refilling, in the turning and returning, may God’s own Holy Spirit among us be Energy for Life. May it lead us to the places we need to go, and strengthen us for all the testing ahead. Throughout, may the Lenten desert landscape be seen less as a place of temptation and more as a kind of proving ground, a place where emptying creates room enough to receive all God offers us. Thus, as with the One who has gone ahead of us—Jesus our brother with whose cross we have been signed—thus we would come through these forty days to ever-deeper understandings of who we are and how graciously God provides all that we need: grace upon grace upon grace.

Dear friends, companions on the way, traveling mercies I bid you. May we all keep a holy Lent out in the wilds! Amen.

~ The Reverend Joanne Engquist,
University Chaplain for Lutheran Students

posted in Guest Preachers, Lenten Series 2010: Atonement on 02.21.2010 at 11:00 am

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Wednesday
February 17

Ash Wednesday

By Marsh Chapel

At St. Patrick’s Elementary School in Huntington, New York, the 3rd-5th grade classrooms and the nurse’s office are on the second floor. The hallway next to the nurse’s office is also home to an interesting piece of artwork. It is in imitation of a stained glass window, about five feet long and four feet high, but instead of brightly colored glass, it is a composite of various stained wood pieces. This makes for a dark, earthy mosaic. The subject matter? Our gospel reading today, the story of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery. The bottom-right corner depicts a woman in a mismatch of disheveled garments, tears streaking her face, hands protecting her head. The top left corner features a huddle of well-dressed frowning men, a pile of untouched rocks before them. In between, kneels Jesus, face hidden, writing with a single finger in the dust. Above his head, a translucent plastic speech bubble contains the second half of John 8:7. “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” The mosaic sits above a stern bench on which students waiting to see the nurse sit. More than one child has been miraculously cured of her fake illness sitting under that looming scene. My third grade class soon learned that this picture came from the story of Jesus and the Woman Caught in Adultery. We didn’t understand what adultery was, we simply thought it was something bad that only adults did. What a strange, out-of-place work of art!

The story of Jesus and the Woman Caught in Adultery is itself a strange, out-of-place work of art within the Gospel of John. Nearly all biblical scholars agree that this text is a later addition to the Gospel. Jesus has just been speaking about rivers of living water, and as soon as our gospel reading ends, Jesus goes right on to his next metaphor, identifying himself as the light of the world. The Johannine Jesus doesn’t normally get his hands dirty, as he does in this text. In comparison with the Synoptic Jesus, who shows a remarkable fondness for spittle and hands-on-healing, the Johannine Jesus works signs with more sterility and symbolism. Thus, for its interruption of the theological flow, its shift in language, and its out-of-character Jesus, the conclusion is drawn that this text as an insert must be an afterthought. Why add this out-of-place work of art at all? Maybe because it is too important a story to leave out.

Even in this spiritual gospel, we find this “lost pearl of ancient tradition,” (W. Heitmuller) which reminds us that Jesus isn’t afraid to get down into the dirt and the sin of life. In this makeshift trial scene, the Pharisees could care less about the violation or the woman; they are there with an agenda, “to test Jesus, that they might have some charge to bring against him.” They have quite literally objectified her, turning her into a topic of debate, no different from the discussion of whether to pay taxes to Caesar in Matthew 22. The Pharisees have become so wrapped up in themselves and in getting what they want that they fail to notice the very human element of this story. Jesus doesn’t consider their inquiries worthy of his attention, and instead crouches down to “doodle in the dust.” Perhaps Jesus is referring the Pharisees to Jeremiah 17:13 (O LORD, the hope of Israel, all who forsake you will be put to shame. Those who turn away from you will be written in the dust because they have forsaken the LORD, the spring of living water.) or perhaps the writing on the wall in Daniel 5, but what is clear is that Jesus is referring the Pharisees “to the judgment of God, before whom all are sinners.” (Schnackenburg 166). The Pharisees don’t get it, though, and Jesus has to get explicit, saying, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” One by one, each walks away. Many times we focus this story on the judgment of the woman, but Jesus’s real judgment is focused on the Pharisees. They are in no place to judge one another, when they stand judged before God.

We all stand judged before God.

We all stand judged before God. This is an essential part of our Christian identity and our Lenten journey. We all have need of remembrance, remorse, repentance. Emily Dickinson, holed up in her quiet solitude, writes “Remorse is memory awake, her parties all astir, a presence of departed acts at window and at door. It’s past set down before the soul and lighted with a match, perusal to facilitate and help belief to stretch.” Ash Wednesday awakens our memory with its multi-sensory liturgical shift: the musical tone becomes more plaintive, we feel the touch of ash on our fore-heads and see everywhere we go the same sign on others. Ash Wednesday is a messy holy-day, a strange, out-of-place interjection into the early part of a new semester, when, in the middle of a fresh snow and a still-blank semester transcript, the burnt-up palms from the Passion Sunday of a year ago are placed on our foreheads with the words “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Remembrance awakened: remorse. Remorse embodied: repentence.

What does it mean to embody remorse, to repent? This requires us to find a way to speak about that from which we repent: sin. The philosopher Paul Riceour argues in The Symbolism of Evil that we cannot grasp ideas such as love and sin without understanding the ways that people talk about these ideas, the metaphors and stories that individuals and communities use to embody these abstracts. The Bible is full of vivid imagery of sin, as we find in Psalm 51, read today. We ask for sin to be blotted out, to be washed away, to be cleansed, we ask for our hearts to be made new, to be restored, to be delivered. There is another image, another phrase, which has too often been twisted and co-opted to signify more and mean less than it should: conversion. Conversion literally means turning. The Greek we find in the New Testament also means a turning about: metanoia. But from where do we turn, and to where do we turn?

In the 31st Canto of Dante’s Inferno, we find the giant Ephialtes, who Dante tells us “rebelled against Jove.” He is chained with one arm behind, one arm in front, so that he is twisted in on himself. Isn’t that what the Pharisees have done, getting wrapped up in their own agenda? Sin is a chain in which we twist in on ourselves. What is repentence? To break those chains…to untwist and face others. Sin is an inward turning act, repentence turns the focus outward. This is why Isaiah criticizes so vehemently the false-fast…the self-interested fast. “Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?” What is the fast that the Lord chooses but “to loose the bonds of injustice, to let the oppressed go free.” Isaiah calls us to “not hide ourselves from our own kin.”

This is what we are called to do today; we stand before each other and acknowledge our sinfulness, and we ask forgiveness from God as a community. We face each other with the remembrance of sin and the hope of forgiveness upon our foreheads. What if the Pharisees had been able to stand together with this woman? What if they had been able to face her, look her in the eye, and reach out to her with love and forgiveness? God’s action is to always reach out to us, to turn towards us, and to challenge us not to turn in on ourselves again. What if the Pharisees had followed Jesus in this way? What if, instead of ignoring the woman, they had turned to her, faced her directly? So, as we discern our own Lenten practice, I ask, does our Lenten practice break us from the habits that cause me to turn in on myself, to not notice others? Maybe we’re giving up dessert, or meat, or facebook… let us make this choice in order to interrupt our self-focus, to give us clarity and open our eyes to notice others? Do we take on this Lenten practice to challenge us to reach out to others, to notice those who are in need and to help them? Maybe we have resolved to do one good thing for other
s every day, or to smile and say hi in the elevator or on the T. Do we take on this Lenten practice to stretch our belief, to This practice may make us feel strange, out-of-place, even a little too hands-on, but it is the example Jesus sets, bending down even in the tidiest of gospels, to get on his hands the dust of the earth.
As thou didst hunger, bear, and thirst, so teach us gracious Lord, to die to self, and chiefly live by thy most Holy Word. Amen.

~ Jen Quigley,
Ministry Associate for Student Affairs

posted in Uncategorized on 02.17.2010 at 6:00 pm

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Sunday
February 14

I Will Bear Witness

By Marsh Chapel

Bear witness.

Show up. Pay attention. Tell the truth. Do not get too attached to the results.

This is the law and the prophets. It is today’s gospel, too.

Klemperer

The ninth commandment requires us not to bear false
witness.

Ten years ago the English translation of Victor Klemperer’s two volume history, memoir, and diary of Germany in the 1920’s and 1930’s was published. “I Will Bear Witness”, it is titled. I encourage you to read it. A Jewish man who became a liberal Protestant, a cultural and literary historian, an esteemed professor and writer, Klemperer applied himself to a humble daily task. He quietly recorded, in his diary, the clinking sounds of the Nazi shackles slowly, gradually tightening upon the German people, and, horrifically, with tragic weight upon those of Jewish ancestry. Including Klemperer.

Little things. Rationing. Distinctions in the process of rationing. Automobile registrations. Distinctions in the manner of registration. Little things. Slight, ever so subtle shifts in social behaviors. Invitations extended without response. Dinners offered but not reciprocated. Gradual transformations in daily language, in the language of the morning newspaper. Decisions about which words would be or would not be allowed, in the common spaces of life. Little things, really. Variations in the wording of classified ads. Glances, furtive looks across the street where before there was full eye to eye contact. Just little things. But seen, revealed, transfigured in the prescient, humble diary composition of one quiet teacher.

As you know, little things became big things. Family, friends and neighbors who decide to emigrate. Positions limited. Positions trimmed. Positions eliminated. The threat of confinement to town. Then confinement. To house. Then confinement. Marches in brown shirts. Yellow stars. Captivity. War. The unimaginable. The unspeakable…

Klemperer recorded events and words both great and small, in order not to bear false witness.

Awakening

To some degree, in the light of the Transfiguration, in the light of truth, the true light that enlightens everyone, we all have responsibility to bear witness. In fact, our saving possibility lies in the very challenge and calling we have to try to respond to the light, however dim, the true light, however dusky.

Your awakening to faith, your Christian reawakening as my friend put it, may occur, may arrive on the witness stand.

You are a junior in college. What have you seen? What have you heard? What have you experienced of wisdom and love?

You are a man without a job. 85% of jobs lost have been men’s in the great mancession. What have you seen? What have you heard? What have you experienced of wisdom and love?

You are a professional. Necessarily an institution has a claim on you. Adult life is invariable institutional, whether or not you are institutionalized. What have you seen? What have you heard? What have you experienced of wisdom and love?

You are an elder of many moons and many moccasins. If someone spares the time to ask your testimony, what will it be? What have you seen? What have you heard? What have you experienced of wisdom and love?

Worship

On the mountain, the baffled disciples tried to bear true witness—word, tent, accolade, mystery. What did you see? I saw…

The passage is an account developed after Easter, as a way of trying to symbolize Jesus Christ as risen Lord. It has no biographical or earthly valence, nor does it need any, nor does it claim any. It is about seeing, and being transfigured by what one sees. “During his lifetime a few of his followers were permitted a glimpse of what he was to become” (IBD, loc cit, 173).

Our witness arrives after a word and before a deed. Transfiguration precedes healing for the shrieking, convulsing foaming at the mouth demoniac, a case that stumped all disciples. Transfiguration follows the word of the cross, ‘if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow’.

A moment of witness follows a word and forecasts a deed.

You are good and sturdy gospel listeners so you know without elaboration that Moses embodies the law and Elijah the prophets. You know the revelation of wisdom from Moses, the Decalogue. Recite it with me. You know the audition of love from Elijah. Remember the still, small voice. (... the Lord was not in the wind, earthquake, fire… and after the fire a sound of sheer silence (1 Kings 19)…), Sinai and Horeb, the Law and the Prophets.

Here, it is as if the Gospel of John has spilled ink upon the page of Luke. Notice the little things: law and prophets, Moses and Elijah; a prophecy of the cross, called by the term ‘departure’ (did John write this?!?) (the greek word is ‘exodos’); Andrew absent; Peter confused.

But what of his confusion? The confusion itself is confusing. ‘Not knowing what he said..’ What does that mean? Jesus confuses Peter. Peter confuses Luke. Luke confuses the preacher of the day. The preacher confuses you. There is an opacity here, a stymied utterance. To which, oddly but honestly, Peter bears witness.

There is a cloud here, a cloud of unknowing.

There is a mountain here, a mountain of unknowing

There is a voice here, a voice of unknowing.

There is a countenance here, a face of unknowing.

There is a white robe here, a robe of unknowing.

There is a silence here…

Silence…

Silence…

Silence…

This is worship. Enchantment. Not entertainment.

Bear witness.

Bear Witness? How?

1. You may be in college. Good for you. A moment in life of subsidized freedom. Has freedom led to grace? One student said he realized part of his role in school was to combat debauchery. Tartly put, that. And you? We begin Lent on Wednesday. Religious life on campus sings another song, an older song, a truer song than much of the cacophony around. Our little bands of worshippers, here and there, are oases of freedom become grace. So the Song of Solomon graces Valentines Day, and love by covenant challenges love by convenience. Our sermons this Lent involve our University Chaplains in a rendering of the meaning of Atonement. Especially if you have suffered loss, or known grief, or experienced regret, you may want to bear witness by attending worship.

2. You may know a man in search of a job. Or his wife, or daughter. You may be his neighbor. How shall you witness to the loneliness, depression, hurt of this time? Across the land, men long for jobs. Depression breeds depression. Those who have no work, who have talent and energy and will and love and experience and children and loyalty, but not work, are waiting across this land. Like the effects of war, the effects of massive recession are not known for years, for a decade or more. But there are effects. Lasting effects. We are far too complacent about the lasting societal effects of unemployment. Can you record your experience, and bear witness? Better: can you encourage someone who is looking for work? Would you not be happy if twenty years from now someone remembered you, say at a funeral, by saying, ‘Nobody knows this but when I
was out of work, John found a way to make a way for a job for me’?

3. You may be a middle aged professional, whose beloved institution is foundering. You cannot stand it. You cannot change it. You cannot leave it. Ah. You can make a difference, by bearing witness to another time, past, another possibility, future.

I attended my home conference, my spiritual home. As an itinerant preacher, a traveling elder, my church is the gathering of similarly cast about travelers, my conference. My brothers in ministry, my sisters in itinerancy. Hymns to sing. My life goes on in endless song…I drove to Clarence Center, near Buffalo, thinking about the plane crash last winter which put the little town on the map. My sad reverie was shaken as I passed a church sign which read: ‘True peace is found only through Jesus Christ’. I do not believe that. Neither do you.

I drove on, glad to be arriving at a MAGNANIMOUS METHODIST conference wherein ‘there is no east or west, wherein no south or north, but one great fellowship of love throughout the whole wide earth, wherein there is broad peace, peace perfect peace, wherein Wesley is remembered.

Listen to my incipient musing: Not for you, not for us the holier than thou neo-gnostic Unitarianism of the second person of the Trinity, patronizingly triumphalistic, christofascist, exclusivist hatred of such a saying: ‘True peace is found only in Jesus Christ’. No.

But. As you probably already surmise, in the rear view mirror, and beneath the aforequoated warped proverb, I cringed and wept to read the church’s name, Harris Hill United Methodist Church. And. As you may now guess, at the conference itself the opening sermon, an atrocity, gave more than ample cover to such christomonist religious one-up-man ship.

I cannot change it. I cannot stand it. I cannot leave it. But I can bear witness, by remembering another time and another possibility, another past and another future.

I can bear witness.

I can re-read Romans 8 again about the whole creation groaning if you must.

I can read Acts 10 about all in their own way being saved if you must.

I can re-read Galatians 3:26 about the end of religious distinctions if I must.

I can channel John Wesley—“if thine heart be as mine then give me thine hand”—if I must.

I can re-read any of Huston Smiths books… Remember Abraham Heschel….Remember Anwar Sadat…. Remember Abraham Lincoln….Remember Mahatma Ghandi….Recall the Dalai Lama…

I can bear witness. To Wisdom and Love, Law and Prophets, Moses and Elijah.

We know in our bones that there are many ways of keeping faith. We know in our guts that in the Father’s house there are many rooms. We know in our hearts that the true light that enlightens EVERY ONE has come into the world.

4. You may be an elder of the tribe, many moons and many moccasins. Can you bear witness to what you have seen and heard? I know a man in his eighties who takes an hour every Sunday to send a poetic memory, a personal email page to his children and grandchildren. You can too. We children and grandchildren appreciate it.

Diamond Point

In our School of Theology we teach students that a sermon should have a point. It should not be three points in search of a sermon, but a sermon with a point. A diamond point, we say—that sharp, that fine, that beautiful, that valuable.

A sermon could, say, have a two word point to it: bear witness. A sermon should have a point. The point today is: bear witness.

William McGuire King: ‘one’s own salvation rest(s) in the freedom God offers …to enter into his atoning activity in history’(Evans, LWI, 44).

Pray! Journal! Read! Blog! Paint!

Bear witness.

Coda

You will bear witness. As you do, you will come awake, come to worship, come to awareness, find your tongue. Your life will sing. You will live as a song that God is singing. Our Canadian siblings sang this way:

We are not alone,
we live in God's world.

We believe in God:
who has created and is creating,
who has come in Jesus,
the Word made flesh,
to reconcile and make new,
who works in us and others
by the Spirit.

We trust in God.

We are called to be the Church:
to celebrate God's presence,
to live with respect in Creation,
to love and serve others,
to seek justice and resist evil,
to proclaim Jesus, crucified and risen,
our judge and our hope.

In life, in death, in life beyond death,
God is with us.

We are not alone.

Thanks be to God.

Bear witness.

Show up. Especially at 20. Pay attention. Especially at 40. Tell the truth. Especially at 60. Don’t get too attached to the results. Especially at 80.

In the winter, my wife’s children’s choir sang here in Boston’s Back Bay. They lifted a poem which our own Marsh choir has also sung, and beautifully. In dresses and bow ties, dark pants and paten leather shoes, fidgeting and swaying, they did bear witness, to far more than they could know.

My life goes on in endless song…

Above earth’s lamentation…

I hear the clear though far off hymn…

That hails a new creation…

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

posted in Uncategorized on 02.14.2010 at 11:00 am

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