Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

By Marsh Chapel

For those of us who love the Bible, Darwin has not made reading it any easier, has he? He has wrecked havoc with the opening chapters of the book, sure, but more than this, he has raised the question of where we are to discover the God of the Bible in a world of evolution and natural selection where there seems little place left for God to be, little left for God to do. Darwin has compelled us to read the Bible anew asking new questions. He hasn’t made reading the Bible easier.

I think the Christian Century writer Amy Frykholm is right when she says that most mainline Christians have made our peace with Darwin.

“We may not have grasped all the nuances of the scientific debate,” she says, “but we have concluded that evolutionary science is good science and therefore must be compatible with good theology. … We believe that [evolution and] natural selection [are] evidently part of God’s method of shaping the natural world.”

We have accepted the thrust of Darwin’s ideas but most of us have not really explored very carefully the implications of this for our understanding of the God of the Bible and the biblical story.

“I, for one,” Frykholm says, “do most of my thinking about science out of one mental box and my thinking about religion out of another. … While I think the contents of the two boxes are compatible, I rarely try to work out the terms of their relationship.” [italics mine]

“Perhaps that’s because the content of the two boxes are, when mixed, still combustible,” she concludes. There are implications here for the way we read the Bible that we are still trying to figure out.

I want to suggest that Darwin and the evolutionary sciences which he helped birth have actually done those of us who love the Bible a favor. Darwin has not made it easier for us to read the Bible but he has compelled us to read it more profoundly.

Of course, it wasn’t only Darwin. The same century that produced Darwin produced David Strauss, Julius Wellhausen and other pioneers of higher biblical critical thought who have taught us that the Bible is intricately layered and richly contextual. It is the same century that gave us Feuerbach, Marx and Freud. Lots was happening in the era that produced Darwin, and all these have all done us a favor because they have compelled us to look more deeply into scripture to find God. But certainly Darwin too.

Darwin, with his radical commitment to discernable truth, forced us to realize that we will not find God in the cosmology, biology, epistomolgy, or superficial politics of the Bible. No, we’ve got to look more deeply than this within the Bible to find God.

An image that works here, I think, is the one the apostle Paul uses in II Corinthians. “We have this treasure in clay jars,” Paul says. (II Cor. 4:7) And the clay jar he is talking about most of all is himself. Paul is a clay jar. His ideas are clay jars. His writings are clay jars even when they later become part of scripture.

A clay jar is disposable. It is temporary. It passes away. It is important only because it contains the treasure. Someday the treasure will be poured into some other clay jar. The clay jar has only passing value. Our goal is to discern the treasure both held and hidden within the clay jar.

Darwin compels us to read the Bible this way … to look into and beyond the clay jars to find the treasure … to look more deeply within scripture to find God.

God is not found within the details of the seven days of creation in Genesis 1, mostly borrowed from Babylonian mythologies. The details of the seven days are disposable. God is found, if we are to find God, deeper down within the story — within the form that pulls itself up out of the void, within the impulse to life, within the drive toward intelligence.

God is not found among the trees and the snakes of the Garden of Eden of Genesis 2. The details of the Eden story are disposable. God is found, if we are to find God, deeper down within the story, in the human capacity for good and evil, in the struggle within us between self-indulgence and responsibility.

God is not found within the laws of the Pentateuch. We will not find God in the “shalts” and “shalt nots” of various and sundry commandments. We will not find God in the condemnations and abominations of Leviticus. Those laws are temporary and disposable. We’ve got to look deeper to find God. We’ve got to look at the pull within humanity to make laws, the impulse within us to discern how we are meant to live morally. The specific laws themselves are clay pots but they hold and hide the treasure of the awareness of moral responsibility and culpability within the human spirit. This is where we will find God.

God will not to be found in the various social and political structures of the Bible. The social and political orders of the Bible are all temporary and disposable. The imperfect biblical governments riddled with such institutions as slavery, the divine right of kings, and patriarchy are clay jars. If we want to find God we must look beneath the superficial social and political institutions of the Bible to the human impulse to live together orderly and justly and in harmony. The flawed biblical attempts at this are just temporary and passing pointers toward the longing for the realm of God. This is where we will find God in the Bible.

God will not to be found in the biblical theories of atonement and propitiation and substitution. These are clay jars. They hold and hide treasure. God will be found deeper, within the cross, within the human capacity for true altruism, self-giving, and agape love.

Darwin, not Darwin alone, but Darwin for sure, Darwin compels us to search more deeply in scripture to find God. To look within and past the clay pots that hold and hide the treasure.

It is hard to tell how much of this Darwin himself knew. He went from being a candidate for the Anglican priesthood to becoming an agnostic but, even as an agnostic, some days he affirmed his belief in God. He was not a very good agnostic. For some, you know, agnosticism doesn’t mean that they can’t believe in God. It just means they can’t believe in the god being imposed on them. I suspect it was this way with Darwin.

A new book just published this year by Adrian Desmond and James Moore Darwin’s Sacred Cause studies Darwin’s personal papers and notes and even the scribblings in the margins of the books he read and comes to the conclusion that Darwin’s compulsion to discover the ancestry of humanity was motivated by his hatred of slavery. Slavery was one of the clay jars defended by many of its proponents as “biblical” and “natural,” and Darwin believed natural selection undermined the legitimacy of slavery that natural and biblical theologies were sometimes used to justify.

A fascinating book by Keith Thomson Before Darwin: Reconciling God and Nature explores the debate about evolution for the 150 years before Darwin wrote The Origin of the Species. Thomson discovered that many of Darwin’s predecessors and adversaries in the debate about evolution, especially William Paley, feared the idea of evolution because they feared social change. Paley and others preferred to think that poverty and misery were the give
ns of nature.

It may well be that Darwin knew at some level of his being and intellect that the God of clay jars is an idol and that Darwin’s passion for observable truth was an effort to liberate God as well as humanity.

There is inspiration here for the struggles of our time … obviously the struggle to protect the integrity of science and the academy from those who would corrupt them for ideological purposes, but also the continuing struggle against patriarchy, the struggle against racism, the struggle against poverty and economic injustice, the struggle for gay and lesbian inclusion and equality.

Part of the reason finding God in the depth rather than the shallows of the Bible is important is because it returns the Bible to us as an agent of transformation in our lives and world. We’ve wanted the Bible to give us information or theories or explanations or rationales or justifications, and what the Bible has wanted to give us instead is life.

If we can find God in the depths of the Bible, perhaps we can find God again in the depths of the world we live in today and in the depths of our own lives.

One of my heroes when I was a student here 40 years ago and then a young minister was a South Baptist preacher named Carlyle Marney. He died 30 years ago this year.

Carlyle Marney was once spending a couple of days at a seminary in the South. He wandered into a room where some of the seminary students were having a discussion. They were arguing about where the Garden of Eden had been located. Some thought it had been in the Middle East; others thought it had been located in Egypt.

One of the students asked Carlyle Marney where he thought the Garden of Eden had been. He said: “I know exactly where it was. It was at 1611 Locust Street, Knoxville, Tennessee.”
The students looked at him in wonderment, so he continued.

“It was at 1611 Locust Street in Knoxville,” he said, “that my mother gave me some money when I was a small boy to go to the corner store to get milk. When I got there, instead of buying milk, I bought candy. I had eaten the candy by the time I got home. When I got there I hid in the hallway closet behind the coats. After awhile, my mother came and opened the closet door and pushed aside the coats and looked at me and said, ‘Carl, what have you done?’

So you see,” he told the students, “the Garden of Eden was located at 1611 Locust Street, Knoxville, Tennessee.”

Each of us has in our life a Garden of Eden.

Each of us has in our life a Tower of Babel, an Egypt, a Red Sea, a Sinai, a wilderness and a Promised Land. Each of us has in our life a Jerusalem and a Temple, a Babylon, an exile, a Diaspora, and a homecoming. Each of us has in our life a Bethlehem of Judea, a Capernaum, a Samaria, a Jerusalem, a Gethsemane, an Upper Room, a Golgotha, a betrayal, a denial, and an empty tomb. Each of us has in our life a Pentecost, a road to Damascus, an Isle of Patmos, a New Jerusalem, and a heavenly city.

If we can learn to find God in the deep places of the Bible, then perhaps we can rediscover God in the deep places of our lives and of our world again.

Darwin has not made it easier for those of us who love the Bible to read it. But he has helped us read it more profoundly, to look into the Bible more deeply to find God.

posted in Uncategorized on 07.12.2009 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

We spend a part of each summer on a small lake. Ours is a real ‘Once More to the Lake’, lake, with much of the beauty, memory, quiet, seclusion and sense of mortality in E B White’s fine story of that name. The tight belt and wet shorts follow the swim--and forecast death.
We do a good job at the bad job of deceiving ourselves about how short, how fragile life can be. And therefore, to the same end, about how wondrous, splendid, magnificent is every hour and every day.

One night we puttered about in a boat with a 9 horse motor. No one else was around, no one else was in sight. We let the motor idle, then die. And all around there was endless silence. That quiet that tingles and tickles. We sat in the boat. We sat a good long time. We had talked enough, so we just sat. There were 6 or 8 different bird calls, repeated, moving against the background of the nothing, the quiet. There was then, after a while, the long low frog call, and again, and again. There was a little quiet wind, just enough to move the trees. Two dogs barked, but only a little. A bass jumped, then another. Then the long stretch of stillness, again. A deep, long quiet. At last a car moved along the shore road, slowly and softly but with enough steam and sound to break the mood.

Here is our experience. Mystery. Silence.

In faith we face our experience. At its depth, our experience is about mystery, and about the exploration, step by step, of that mystery, along the trail of the mystery of discipleship. In fact, that is a lot of what faith is meant to do, to help us truly to face up to our experience. Today, before we receive the Eucharist, we shall depend on our faith to help us face our experience as creatures, surrounded in a vast creation, older and larger than we have imagined, and shrouded in a mysterious silence. We shall look for help in the writings of one of the great Boston teachers, the father of a philosophy called ‘Personalism’, Borden Parker Bowne. We shall see whether he, and others like him, can help us in our discipleship, our experience, in mystery, in silence.

Our lectionary gospel today, Mark 6, acclaims the mystery of discipleship, and reminds us of the requirement to let things go, to leave unnecessary, weighty baggage behind. Jesus’ representatives, you and you all, are not to take anything unnecessary along for the journey: no bread, no bag, no cash, no change of clothes. You take only a staff, a defensive weapon of self-protection from the wild dogs of pride, sloth, and falsehood. (Falsehood and sloth can hurt you. So can pride.) Tie your running shoes double tight so that when you need to vamoose, to amscray, to make like a tree and leave, you do so dragging along no dust.

This summer we listen for a good word about Darwin and faith. Our preachers represent the best of Protestant preaching both regionally and nationally, and together they well blend ‘the two so long disjoined, learning and vital piety’. Some are teachers with pastoral experience. Some are pastors with scholarly accomplishment. All are themselves disciples—knowers and lovers both. Their presence this summer is in the service of the ministry of the word. We thank them for their gifts to us: Drs. Wildman, Neville, Snyder, Yoost, Wegter-McNelly, Peterson, and Br. Whitney. Our series, “Darwin and Faith”, is unabashedly evangelical in purpose. We are reaching out to those whose mother tongue is the scientific method, who with us affirm the truth in Darwinian theory, and who seldom, if ever hear the preaching of the Gospel of truth to include evolutionary truth. We are reaching out to those in lab coats, holding stethescopes, using microscopes, who remember the trial of Scopes. The Gospel of Jesus Christ, the miracle of discipleship, are yours, too, we affirm. We are also reaching out to those who have long been seized by the confession of the church, but who discern a falsehood, whether spoken or silent, in the church’s own preaching of the Gospel of truth, who seldom if every hear that preaching to include evolutionary truth. The Gospel of Jesus Christ, the mystery of discipleship, can continue to be yours as well, 200 years after Darwin’s birth and 2,000 years after Jesus’ resurrection.

Today, we ask, we wonder, did those here in Boston 100 years ago, midway between Darwin’s birth and our morning Eucharist, leave us something to guide us along the trail of the mystery of discipleship?

In earshot of Mark 6 and 1 John 4, our response is in the affirmative. They teach us something about confidence, something about experience, and something about development.

First, confidence. The Personalists lived and taught a robust confidence about faith facing knowledge, religion meeting science. In particular they had no fear of learning from evolutionary theory.

For most of its history, Boston University has been the home of Personalism, a distinctive North American philosophical perspective, whose best known disciple was M L King. In addition to offering certain theological perspectives, Personalism celebrated the freedom and potential of the human person.. For Borden Parker Bowne and Edgar Brightman, their late Kantian idealism made man the measure of all things, and saw in personality a clue to the nature of the divine. Listen briefly to Bowne, in his major work, titled, simply, ‘Personalism’, cited throughout the sermon, and published in 1908, halfway between Darwin’s birth and our service today:

“A wise naturalism has displaced the false supernaturalism of earlier time…We may admit the evolutionary formula as a description of the order in which things come along, such that the earlier forms were simple and homogenous, and the later forms more complex and differentiated.” (18)

Science and religion, long star crossed lovers, need each others’ embrace now, in 2009, perhaps more than at any other time in human history. Science flounders without the wonder, legacy, discipline, morality, and purposeful compassion in religion at its best. Religion flounders without the factual honesty, native humility, reverence for experience, and practical compassion in science at its best. Truth is truth, in learning and in piety. Of course, among others, Paul Tillich wisely taught us this 50 years ago. Of course, among others, Howard Thurman, that lover of penguins, wisely preached this, ‘in the sweep of the natural embrace’, 50 years
ago.

Our Boston University forebears, the Personalists of all five generations, give us the gift of confidence. In person, in fact, they were confident people. I studied under a fifth generation Personalist at Ohio Wesleyan, Dr. Lloyd Easton. My father studied with Edgar Brightman, here at BU, who filled the Bowne chair in those years. The Personalists still have some things to teach us, about Darwin and faith.

Philosophy, theology and preaching begin in wonder. The experience of lasting good is a mystery to be explored, a depth to divine. So Bowne asked, ‘What is the power at work which produces the phenomenal order?’ (96)

Second, experience. For all of their idealism (another subject for another day), the Personalists focused on experience, and, more narrowly, on the mystery of experience.

Bowne: ‘Philosophy is simply an attempt to give an account of experience (4)…Experience itself must be accepted as unconditionally trustworthy (32)…Experience itself is the primary fact (89)…All thought about reality must be rooted in experience (104)…For us, the real can never be anything but the contents of experience, and whatever we may infer from them (108)… Our problem is to explain the world of experience (149).

Their understanding of experience continuously pronounced an apprehension of mystery.

Mystery in experience. Perhaps an epigrammatic chorus will help: Philosophy begins in wonder. The world does not lack for wonders, but only for a sense of wonder. Experience is a mystery to be explored. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. ‘No one has ever seen God’. God is seer, not seen. God is not in time, time is in God.

Mystery in experience. They argued that the strength of our necessary negation needs to be further strengthened still, to include ourselves, and to include our own limitations: a personal, even humble admission of our ultimate ignorance. For all our knowledge of the connections between water, rock, plant, fish, bird, and animal life, we are still sitting in silence, on a boat, the 9 horse motor now stilled.

The whole boatload of wisdom literature in the Bible could be cited here (Job, Ecclesiastes, the Psalms, all):

Mystery in experience. The wisdom chorus: My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways your ways. Where were you when I forged the foundations of the universe? I perceived that under the sun the race is not to the swift…time and chance happen to all. There is no speech, nor are there words…

Mystery in experience. Bowne: “there is nothing to excite alarm in any permissible doctrine of the transformation of species”(250)

We who embrace a strict negativity, a theological via negativa, the marrow Protestant aversion to idolatry, need to make sure that we are negative enough, that our negation extends far enough, far enough to include us, too.

Once you admit the reality of the invisible, in your own experience, you make space for the exploration of mystery.

Mystery in experience. Is memory real? Are dreams things of substance? Are thoughts things? What about dread, longing, fear, anxiety, hatred, despair—are they actual existential realities? Is friendship something real? What about trust, or affection, or confidence or agreement? And love? Is love more than affective byproduct? When you say, ‘I love you’, does the verb refer to anything real? Let me ask you about hope. When you say, ‘I sure hope so’, does the verb refer to anything? What of faith? When you say, “I have faith in him”, does this mean anything?

Memory is invisible. So, too, are dreams, thoughts, dread, friendship, trust, affection, confidence, love, hope, and faith. All these are things invisible, heaven not earth. Do you admit to their reality? Or not? Once you admit, in personal experience, to the reality of the invisible, you admit, in general, to the possibility of invisible reality. As Bultmann once wrote, the Gospel is the triumph of the invisible over the visible, of what is not visible over what is.

A central, particular case of this mystery of the invisible is what Bowne terms the ‘mystery of self-determination’: “This is something which cannot be mechanically analyzed or deduced as a necessary resultant—it can only be experienced…It can only be recognized as the central factor of personality, the condition of responsibility, and the basis of the moral life. (210).

Our need is to understand, to face, our experience--which includes experience of the invisible, the non-material. Our experience includes more than the very real dimensions, equally present in cosmic and personal life, of the impersonal, the ambivalent, the inattentive, the passive, the wild, the violent, the inexplicable, and the wasteful.

Third, development. The Personalists took up the Darwinian insight into development with all its random, wasteful, violent, unforeseen effects.

Development, change, progression are at the heart of things. The Personalists saw and emphasized this many decades ago. A Darwinian perspective causes us to value development, to see continuities between our own created being and the rest of the known world, to acknowledge continua and continuity, all of which will help us in our time. Bowne: “the universe is no fixed and completed static fact, but rather a process” (213). Again: “No developing thing can ever be understood or defined by what it momentarily is, but only by all that which it is to become” (247)

In addition, they argued that social Darwinism needs strongly to be avoided. Bowne passionately opposed Spencer and others, and gave us an example for avoiding the social misapplications of Darwinian theory that threaten to emerge in any age.

Bowne’s idealism we may dispute, or not. But regard, for a moment, his conclusion, which we may be inclined to admit:

“The more we dwell upon this view, the more mysterious our life becomes for the imagination…In its relation to man the space world is largely a potentiality, waiting for realization by man himself. There are harvests waiting to grow, and flowers waiting to bloom, but it cannot be until man sets his hand to work. The flora and fauna of the earth are increasingly taking their character from our will and purpose. Even climate itself is not independent of our doings and misdoings. The space world is nothing complete and finished in itself, but is forever becoming what we will it to be.” (276).

In the mystery of discipleship, here is a witness, a Personalist witness from 100 years ago, to affirm confidence, experience, and development. In faith, with an affirmation of confidence, experience, and development, we may continue to face our experience. You may take confidence. You may trust experience. You may engage development.

The author of 1 John knew theological difficulty better than we do, and, in concert with the author of the Gospel of John displayed more spiritual courage than we normally do. He said: “No one has ever seen God”; the d
ivine, the invisible, that beyond our poor power to add or detract, the unimaginable. But this author then moves ahead. He invites you to explore mystery. He even gives you the necessary clue about how to do so. “If” (a big if) “we love one another, God’s love abides in us and is made whole in us”. Dwells and develops, lives and lasts. How? How so? It is a mystery, the mystery of discipleship. You are invited to travel light. You are invited to come along.

posted in Uncategorized on 07.5.2009 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

To return to this pulpit in a series devoted to the impact of Charles Darwin on religion is an honor and a privilege. (You see, I have grown a Darwin beard just for the occasion.) I am especially privileged to follow the Reverend Dr. Wesley Wildman who last Sunday reminded us that our conservative evangelical Christian friends who oppose Darwin’s theory of evolution know whereof they speak. If Darwin’s theory is approximately right, then God cannot be that benevolent supernatural agent of evangelical piety who does good things for you when you believe in Him (I use the male pronoun advisedly). The evolutionary world is random, wasteful, and bloody, as well as glorious and awesome: no benevolent divine person would create that way.

Our conservative evangelical sisters and brothers have an additional symbol for God, different from the benevolent supernatural agent. Some evangelicals identify with the God of wrath and violence who dealt death to the firstborn of Egypt after Himself hardening Pharaoh’s heart against the Israelites, and who will come again in the person of Christ the Avenger to destroy the Earth and save only the remnant of people who persevere in servile obedience. Like the God of love and benevolence, the God of strict justice and wrath is conceived to be a hands-on administrator of a world which is understood to be like a kingdom. Darwin’s world is not like a kingdom with a benevolent or demanding tyrant. It’s more like a jungle. If Darwin is more or less right, and all the evidence points that way, God cannot be conceived literally to be an intentional personal being without also being conceived to be wasteful, cruel, and pleased to toy with us.

Our text from the book of Job is a profound recognition of this. The author deliberately uses figurative language that is not intended literally. The opening scene in Heaven, where God lets Satan torture Job and kill his children solely in order to justify God’s bragging, is heavy with irony. If God is conceived literally to be a personal being, like the God of Job’s prologue, then the pervasive suffering of innocent people signifies that God is just toying with us. The main portion of the book is a series of philosophical arguments by Job’s friends to the effect that, if Job suffers, it must be because he deserves it, for God is just and would not let Job suffer unjustly. For Job’s friends, God simply cannot be conceived to be someone who deals out pain and death to win a bet with a Heavenly colleague. Their arguments all fail, however: Job has done nothing to deserve what he is getting. (Think of the people in Darfur.) Therefore God cannot be conceived to be just. The passage toward the end of the book on which Rev. Wildman preached last Sunday, where God speaks out of the whirlwind to Job directly, is usually taken to mean that there is no place for us to stand in order to apply moral categories of justice or injustice to God. The Creator is beyond good and evil, unlike persons. The very end of the book of Job returns to the Heavenly courtroom where God wins his bet with Satan. God then restores Job’s health, gives him new children and makes him even wealthier than before. Of course this is ironic. New children, however welcome, cannot replace the earlier loved ones who were killed frivolously. Restored health does not justify Job’s needless agony. What does Job need with even more wealth than he had before? If God is conceived as a person, as in the literary imagination of the prologue and epilogue of the book of Job, then that divine person delights in gratuitous suffering and is not benevolent or just. The Book of Job is against that. So there is profound biblical warrant for rejecting the idea that God is a benevolent or wrathful person of the sort that plays such a prominent role in conservative evangelical Christian, Jewish, and Muslim worldviews. We need a better conception of God than that, however much that anthropomorphic vision is a mainstay of popular piety. Of course there may be occasions in which it is legitimate to symbolize God in personal terms, but never with literal meaning.

Nevertheless, the issue is not merely one of finding a conception of God that accords with what we know about the world in cosmic and biological evolution. The larger issue is about the worldviews involved, of which conceptions of God are only elements. A worldview links conceptions or symbols of ultimate matters such as God to other, more profane but important affairs of life, such as how to treat family, community, strangers; when to have babies, go to war, to pray; how to accept new life, how to relate to the Earth, how to be at home, or to be alienated; what to do with guilt, with economic hardship, with the fragmentation of life; how to face death; how to imagine the world without you. The worldviews of the great religions exhibit a continuum of life issues from the most sacred, defining the ultimate, to the most profane, with many combinations of symbols in between. And the symbols of the ultimate get linked to all the places mixing the sacred and the profane.

For instance, how does your worldview link your understanding of God to the way you should treat people? If you believe that God is on the side of your in-group, say the Christians, then you will be inclined to treat Christians with justice and love and will be ready to treat non-Christians with hostility, at least until they convert to your side. On the other hand, if you believe that God is equally the enthusiastic creator of everybody, Christians, those in other religions, and the irreligious, then you will be inclined at least to try to treat every person with love and justice, regardless of your in-group. What your worldview believes about nature, about various societies, and about your history, makes a difference to how your symbols of God are ranged along the continuum from the sacred to the profane.

The salient point here is that conceptions of God are not determined only by our best thoughts about God but also by our human interests in relating God to all the elements in our worldview. Suppose, following the book of Job, we say that God is beyond good and evil, wholly transcendent. Fine. We can sit easy with a Darwinian worldview about nature. So then, just how does God bear upon good and evil? How should we think about our suffering in divine terms? How should we deal with wickedness and guilt? You can see why there is such a temptation, almost an irresistible urge, to personify God, to say that God wants us to do good and avoid evil, that God shares our suffering, that wickedness is met by God’s demand for repentance. At some sophisticated level we know it is a mistake to domesticate God literally to a kind of interactive person just in order to relate God in familiar ways to human affairs. At another level, it seems that, if we do not do that, we do not have a coherent worldview that lets the sacred bear upon these profane but important human affairs. Our conservative evangelical friends feel this pull.

Consider another continuum within worldviews, and imagine it like this. Imagine the continuum from sacred to profane to be a horizontal line, and imagine another continuum to be a vertical line that moves to intersect the horizontal line at any point. The vertical line is a continuum from very sophisticated t
hinking at one end to “folk” thinking at the other. Most of us think in between. Regarding the sacred or ultimate, sophisticated thinkers for more than two thousand years have known that God transcends good and evil and in fact every other distinction. The first chapter of Colossians says that Jesus is the first visible image of the invisible, that is, unimaginable, God. Thomas Aquinas, whose theology shaped Christianity for centuries, said that God is the absolutely simple, infinite, non-determinate Act of to-Be, and is incapable of relating to anything else; Thomas’s God is not a being of any sort. Paul Tillich, in the twentieth century, has described God as the Ground of all beings that exhibit any distinctions whatsoever. At the other end of the sophistication spectrum are the folk images of God as the mover of storms, the battle deity fighting competitors, the warrior-king of the Exodus story, the personal God of interactive prayer who hides or reveals parking places. In civilized religious worldviews, the rhetorical center of gravity falls somewhere between the high sophistication of the theologians and the undisciplined projections of folk-religion. Our liturgies are somewhere in the middle, mixing both sophisticated notions such as the Trinity with folk practices such as begging for favors. No worldview is consistent in its symbols because it picks them up from all along the sophistication continuum and we learn to live with that inconsistency.

The sophistication spectrum does not apply only to the sacred parts of a worldview, but also to the more profane parts. There is university physics and folk conceptions of how nature works, university biology and folk biology, university psychology and folk psychology. Although we in this congregation believe we view the world through the sophisticated scientific end of our worldview, in point of fact we live most of the time somewhere in the middle: we drink water, not h2o. You see how enormously complex our worldviews are, linking everything from the most sacred to the most profane, and expressing all these linkages in symbols that jumble from the most sophisticated to pop culture.

But these worldviews make all the difference. Our conservative evangelical friends really object only on the surface to the science per se in Darwin’s theory of evolution. As Rev. Wildman said, their objection is more to the negative effect of that science on their views of God as a personal, interactive being. And yet it is not only to the implication for the conception of God that evangelicals object: it is really to Darwin’s undermining of the whole worldview linking their conception of God to the spectrum of life’s issues reaching into the profane. So much of that worldview has to do with placating a personal God with repentance and obedience so that He will not punish us with everlasting torments, rewarding us instead with a good Heavenly life. The placating of a personal God determines that worldview’s approach to morality, which then is for the sake of reward, to other people, which then focuses on judging who is among God’s elect, to nature, which then has only instrumental significance, and to responsibility, which then has to do with obedience to divine authority. If that evangelical worldview is undermined by Darwin’s science, the whole world seems suddenly meaningless. This can lead to passionate denial of modern science in the name of biblical literalism. Or it can lead to angry rejection of and resentment at the exploded evangelical worldview itself. So many of my students here at the university are ex-evangelicals whose entire world has been undermined and who are desperately searching for something that can be saved in any religion.

This brings me to the positive task for popular religion in the day of Darwin, by which I mean religion for thinking people, not just the sophisticates nor devotees of folk religion. The gospel for this morning is from John where Jesus tells the Samaritan woman that religion will evolve. Remember that he reminded her of the distinction between his Jewish religion and her Samaritan one, and said that his was better. But then he said, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain [as the Samaritans did] nor in Jerusalem [where the Jews worshipped].” . . . But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.” The task of our age is to develop in fear and trembling our old faith with an appropriate new worldview that worships God in spirit and truth.

Part of what we learn from Darwin, and evolutionary theory more generally, is that the universe is vastly older and larger than was understood in biblical times. We are not its center and we have only a tiny sample of what it contains, possibly creatures far more interesting than ourselves. So, worshipping God in spirit and truth means worshipping the Creator of this vast cosmos, and accepting a very humble place within it. Such cosmic humility should be decisive for an authentic Christian worldview. Another part of what we learn from Darwin is that the nature in us is unimaginatively complex. We are creatures of molecular bondings, of intricate metabolic processes, of cells and microbes, of organs that evolved through DNA and that pass on those codes. Our bodies float in a roiling biological ocean and we must worship God as creator of that vast whirlpool of nature.

As Jesus told the Samaritan woman, our religious worldview is still evolving. The Bible is replete with images of God as the creator of the extent and depth of nature, and is deficient only in that its images of nature are far too small, with the result that its attention to human affairs is far too large, distorting the modeling of God. A proper worldview for religion in the day of Darwin will dissociate the historical and personal problems of profane human life from conceptions of God as a person who wills this or that to happen like a divine actor in the human narrative. Instead a proper worldview will associate every part of our profane lives with a profound humility about our place in God’s vast creation. Jesus said the first will be last and the last first.

A proper worldview will associate every part of life with a profound reverence for the astonishing complexity of natural evolution with which God has created us together. Jesus said God shines the sun on both the just and unjust.

It will associate all our human relations with a divinely inspired love based on a grateful appreciation of commonality within the evolving universe. Jesus said we should love one another, even our enemies.

With regard to profane human affairs--how to organize our lives, foster our families, nourish ourselves and others, deal with politics, build communities, make love, make war, make art—these are mainly our own responsibilities. In a proper popular religion in the day of Darwin, we should take up these responsibilities in mature ways, declining to behave like obedient children of a benevolent divine father or, even worse, like abject slaves of a wrathful divine tyrant.

Jesus calls us to the amazing project of learning true humility and reverence in the face of the Father of all creation, and learning to love even the random wild violence of evolving creation, including our enemies the earthquake, wind, and fire, and our personal foes. That project is a long way from completion, and its way is tumultuous. One task for us thinking Christians is to work out that worldview with rigorous inquiry, going on from Darwin. The more important task is to discipline ourselves to the humility, reverence, and love, as well as human responsibility, that make disciplined religion itself a part of evolving human excellence. Jesus calls us o’er that tumult.

Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 06.28.2009 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

I consider myself an evangelical Christian of the liberal sort, but I have many evangelical Christian relatives, friends, and students who are extremely conservative. Despite mutual respect, it appears that I have little in common with them, theologically. My outlook on life and faith leaves me feeling dismayed by what strikes me as their doctrinal and moral rigidity, appalled by their dismissal of the wisdom of other religions, and a little frightened by their willingness to vest absolute authority in an allegedly plain reading of the Bible. But my self-righteous theological appraisal does not go unchallenged. From their point of view, I am disloyal to what they see as the supernaturally established tradition of the Christian faith, dangerously cavalier about the fragile moral fabric of society, and all too willing to besmirch the purity of divine revelation with arrogant reliance on human reason and experience. They wouldn’t hesitate to declare, with relief, that they share little in common, theologically, with me.

At the personal level, this liberal-conservative difference is manageable, so long as we don’t have to resolve disagreements about biblical authority, so long as we care for one another, and so long as we remember to laugh at ourselves from time to time. At the cultural level, however, the liberal-conservative difference has the proportions of an unbridgeable chasm, which makes it seem deadly serious. Often enough it is a hateful and deadly disagreement. You know about the recent murder of late-term abortion provider Dr. George Tiller inside the Reformation Lutheran Church of Wichita, Kansas, as he prepared to welcome worshippers into the sanctuary and talked with a friend about taking his grandchildren to Disneyworld. This shows how deadly the disagreement can become. And there are many other disastrous consequences of religious hatred.

Most fundamentalist and conservative evangelical groups decried Dr. Tiller’s murder but others, such as Rev. Fred Phelp’s Westboro Baptist Church, said Dr. Tiller got what he deserved and even picketed his funeral. Meanwhile, the violent rhetoric that inspires extremists to act out their distorted heroic fantasies continues. Sometimes it seems that the United States is only a small step away from the religious violence that has been so disastrous between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland, or between Sunnis and Shiites in the Middle East.

Such disagreements among religious people are sad and strange, in some ways. After all, we do have a great deal in common, including our love of children, our celebration of our mothers and fathers, our preference for peaceful neighborhoods, our quest for health and happiness, and our conviction that life is best lived in relation to an ultimate reality that suffuses everyday events and transcends everyday concerns. But despite these shared life goals, mutual suspicion and hostility are very real.

As I address this issue today, I will not take up the abortion controversy, despite our painful awareness of Dr. Tiller’s murder. Rather I will focus on another front of the disagreement, namely, the evolution wars. As far as I know, the evolution controversy has not produced fanatical murders. But it continues to be extremely painful and it surfaces the substantive disagreements clearly, as we shall see.

Keep in mind that I am not addressing the wider secular versus religious debate over evolution. Rather, I am speaking to a dispute among religious people, all of whom accept that the world is God’s creation and thereafter have to undertake some serious navel gazing to figure out whether and how to incorporate evolutionary theory into that basic conviction. I hope to demonstrate that each group of Christians has something valuable to learn from the other.

The dispute among Christians over the theological implications of evolution arises on the back of four deeper disagreements.

First, we have conflicting visions of reality. The conservative evangelical imaginative world is defined by a God who knows the world intimately, who cares about each one of us personally, who acts freely according to divine purposes, and who answers our prayers in fatherly love when we ask in confident faith. The liberal evangelical imaginative world is defined by a God who is beyond measure and understanding, speaking from the whirlwind of creativity in ways that are sometimes difficult to comprehend. One God is scaled to human needs and interests and sits awkwardly with evolution, while the other is vastly beyond every worldly agenda, and suits evolution more naturally.

Second, we have conflicting visions of authority. The conservative evangelical vests authority in definitive divine revelation, expressed decisively through the Bible, the Pope, or some other religious touchstone. The liberal evangelical vests authority in traditions of interpretation, accepting diversity, contradictions, and struggles within those traditions as unavoidable and valuable. If evolution contradicts the authoritative revelation of the nature of God then evolution is easily rejected, for one side, whereas the other side naturally seeks for a creative synthesis.

Third, we have conflicting visions of history. The conservative evangelical regards culture and civilization and scientific discovery as the ambiguous stage for the drama of salvation but never salvific in itself, and always subordinate to theological truth. The liberal evangelical sees history as a process of development that can be appreciated as part of what salvation means, and thus as able to challenge traditionally received religious beliefs. One side has little reason to respect scientific theories such as evolution if they contradict revealed truth, whereas the other side receives evolution as a magnificent divine revelation about the world that must be taken seriously no matter what theology says.

Finally, we have conflicting visions of church. The conservative evangelical sees correctness of doctrine as a vital form of religious purity, and will sacrifice church unity to protect it—by expelling those who stubbornly resist the party line, if necessary. Meanwhile, the liberal evangelical tries hard to tolerate doctrinal variations because certainly about such matters is impossible, and because unity of believers matters more than purity of beliefs. One side handles tension between God beliefs and evolution by rejecting evolution to protect doctrinal purity, while the other side minimizes the tension in the name of Christian unity and in hopes that God-beliefs and evolution can somehow be reconciled.

Let me be clear: in my view, conservative evangelicals who reject evolution in favor of creationism, or who embrace the neo-creationism of Intelligent Design theory, make a serious error in judgment. Yet they un
derstand what is theologically at stake in evolution far better than most of their liberal counterparts who casually resolve the issue by declaring that God creates through evolution, without pausing to think through what that must mean.

Charles Darwin, whose two-hundredth birthday we celebrate this year, began his scholarly career as a convinced believer that God intentionally conceived, designed, and created the world in roughly the form Darwin encountered it. As a young man he read and accepted the still-famous design arguments of his countryman William Paley. After all, he couldn’t explain the wondrous structure of the eye any other way; he had to assume a personal, benevolent, attentive, and active designer God. As his studies widened and deepened, however, Darwin’s theological views slowly shifted. Though he never discovered the DNA mechanism by which traits were transmitted across generations, he was confident that trait preservation and transmission occur, and that random variations of traits make organisms more and less fit to survive the rigors of any given environment. He believed that this process of trait inheritance, random variation, and natural selection in competitive environments is powerful enough to explain the origin of species, which is the name he gave to his most famous book, published 150 years ago. And he assembled a formidable array of evidence to support his theory—evidence that is extraordinarily difficult to explain apart from the evolutionary hypothesis.

Unsurprisingly, Darwin’s view of God changed as the secrets of the natural world opened before his uncanny gaze. God was no longer necessary to explain the particulars of the world and its teeming life forms. Rather, God’s domain was the creation of the potentialities of the world-as-a-whole, a world that answered to the description that the theory of evolution provided. Unsurprisingly, to Darwin God gradually seemed less personal, benevolent, attentive, and active. Surely such a loving, personal deity would have created in another way, a way that involved less trial and error, fewer false starts, less mindless chance, fewer tragic species extinctions, less dependence on random symbiotic collaborations, fewer pointless cruelties, and less reliance on predation to sort out the fit from the unfit. Darwin arguably never lost his faith in God. Rather, believing that God created through the evolutionary process, his growing knowledge of that process dramatically transformed his view of God. And this left him ill-at-ease with the anthropomorphic personal theism of his day, and with friends and colleagues who believed in a personal, benevolent, attentive, and active divine being.

Christians and other theists who casually assert that God creates through evolution—as if there is no theological problem with this—should pause and consider Darwin’s faith journey. Darwin was theologically more perceptive than many of his liberal endorsers. He knew that saying God creates through evolution puts enormous stress on belief in a personal, benevolent, attentive, and active deity. Evolution casts a pall over the moral clarity that most people want to see in the God they worship and serve. Darwin felt the difficulty acutely. Many theologians since Darwin have struggled with the problem. Do you feel the challenge? Or do you casually blend evolutionary theory and belief in a personal, benevolent, attentive, and active God as if there is no problem?

Many of my conservative evangelical Christian brothers and sisters who reject evolutionary theory feel the problem Darwin felt. They instinctively grasp that their personal, benevolent, attentive, and active God could not possibly have created the world as Darwin described it. Such a God would be morally unrecognizable to them, a kind of heartless gambler over the lives and wellbeing of Earth’s creatures, and not at all like the loving and wise Parent they trust and serve. This would contradict their morally clear and homey worldview, which is borne up by a God of pure compassion and perfect goodness. Because they take on authority the proposition that God is personal, benevolent, attentive, and active, they know with confidence that Darwin must have been wrong.

To see the power of this argument, consider C.S. Lewis’s creation story. It is in a lesser known volume of his Narnia Chronicles called The Magician’s Nephew. The children in that story are present when the great Lion Aslan creates Narnia and its creatures. The method of creation is beautifully intimate and personal: Aslan sings in a majestic voice, with spectacularly complex undertones and rippling overtones, and the world awakens around him. Each creature struggles up and out of the Narnian soil, awakening to a new world, personally called into being by the fatherly Lion God himself. I find the story enormously moving. You see, C.S. Lewis grasped the point that Darwin also felt so forcefully: the God Lewis believed in could not create in a way much different than Aslan did. Good literature is able to test the coherence of the “God creates through evolution” idea. So long as God is conceived as a personal, benevolent, attentive, and active being, like Aslan, the literary acid test shows that God cannot and would not create through evolution. They just don’t fit.

Conservative evangelical Christians who resist evolutionary theory for theological reasons are shrewdly targeting a problem for their God-infused worldview, perhaps the sharpest problem that worldview has ever faced. They are not tiptoeing around, pretending that the God they trust every day somehow creates through evolution. They feel the contradiction and just say no to evolution. I admire that. I, too, feel the dilemma they feel. Since a personal, benevolent, attentive, and active deity cannot create through evolution, either that God or evolution must go. Unlike them, however, I am not in any doubt about the exceptional robustness of the theory of evolution. It is as stable a scientific theory as the atomic theory of matter.

For me, therefore, the choice leads to a different conclusion: God the creator simply cannot be a personal, benevolent, attentive, and active deity. We can preserve those affirmations symbolically and poetically but they do not refer to a divine being with intentions and awareness, with feelings and intelligence, with plans and powers to act. Rather, they refer to the ground of being itself, to the creative and fecund power source in the depths of nature, to the value structures and potentialities that the world manifests. They refer to the God beyond God, which is to say the truly ultimate reality that hovers behind and beneath and beyond the symbolic Gods we create and deploy to satisfy our personal needs, to make sense of our world, and to legitimate the exercise of social control.

You may be surprised to hear me praising the theological perceptiveness of the conservative evangelical resistance to evolutionary theory while also praising evolutionary theory itself. And you may be taken aback by my affirmation of the God beyond God, with the associated critique of more popular views of God as a personal, benevolent, attentive, and active being. I speak to you this way, however, not to convince you to agree with me about God; I understand this to be a bit of a stretch for most people. Rather, my aim is to convince you that there is a big problem trying to fit popular personal theism together with evolutionary theory—a bigger problem than many Christian believers and even many theologians are ready to admit. Ironically, it is the conservative evangelicals who resist evolutionary theory that really grasp this point. They believe in a God who could only create the world in something like the way Aslan creates Narnia. But Darwin showed us a different world. That revelation demands not atheism—not
for Darwin and not for us today either—but a different conception of the divine. You may not think it is necessary to embrace my solution to this problem. But I am confident that we will never understand the real passion and coherence of the religious anti-evolution position until we grasp the problem that evolutionary theory poses for personal theism.

The luminous Narnian creation story helps to confirm what evolutionary theory shows us, namely, that God did not create that way. It also helps us grasp why a personal, benevolent, attentive, and active divine being could not and would not create through evolution. One of our readings has God interrogate Job, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” Well, we were nowhere to be found, so we have to approach these matters with humility. But that does not mean we should be casual in our theological reasoning. Our readings from Psalm 8 and John’s Gospel set examples for us of careful thinking about the meaning of creation, and we should do the same. Conservative evangelical anti-evolutionists and neo-creationist ID believers detect the inconsistency and are willing to protect their homey worldview at any cost—even if it means rejecting a scientific theory as well supported as evolutionary theory and the attendant migration into an cultural backwater where people who don’t get what is at stake make fun of them.

Are you as careful and consistent as they are? Do you believe in a God who would and could create the world in the way Aslan created Narnia? Such a God could not and would not and did not create the world evolutionary theory shows us. So how do you resolve the theological puzzle? When God speaks to you from the evolutionary whirlwind, do you hear a personal, benevolent, attentive, and active divine being addressing you, soul to soul? Or do you hear the abysmal ground of being rumbling in fecund creativity, morally impenetrable, imponderably beautiful, and defying rational grasp? My spirituality is tuned to the latter conception, to the God beyond all Gods, so I can afford to acknowledge the theological perceptiveness of my conservative evangelical anti-evolutionist brothers and sisters. What about you? What sort of God could, would, and did create the world through evolution?

In this year of Darwin anniversaries, we owe the great man nothing less than careful reflection on this question, which so haunted him. And to the God who speaks to us from the whirlwind, demanding to know where we were when the foundations of the earth were laid, we owe our very best efforts to absorb what is revealed to us about the world we inhabit and to incorporate that into our faith journeys as honestly and consistently as we can.

Amen.

posted in Uncategorized on 06.21.2009 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

The New Yorker cartoon images sometimes return to the mind, in recollection or memory or both, from decades past. I wonder whether another generation, clickified so, will retain the delight, or whether theirs will be other delights? Those etchings, those whimsical, often wise inspections of cotidian strangeness have been over time a friendly companion. Religion and life are not separate from one another. Religion is life, and life is religion. You spell that L.I.F.E. I do not want a religion separated from life, nor a religion which provides an escape or a hiding place, nor do you.

This particular cartoon shows a church, just as the service begins. In the pulpit stands the minister dressed in a black suit and collar. Over his right shoulder hangs a golf bag. One can make out three woods, several irons, a putter, a towel, a ball retriever. Three rows back one man leans to another and says, ‘I could be wrong, but something tells me that today’ s sermon may a short one’.

We are at the edge of summer. This summer we welcome an exciting array of guests, who will preach the gospel of truth and hope as they consider the influence, at his bicentennial, of Charles Darwin. They bring a hopeful and helpful word, and will set to work in the work before them. Let me spill the beans, and let the cat out of the bag. We intend these ten sermons as an evangelistic rally, of sorts. That is, we intend to offer sermons that connect to and with people whose primary language, mother tongue, is scientific, whose work involves microscopes, stethescopes, and lab coats, who on the great divide long ago measured by C P Snow, in the Two Cultures, are most immersed in the ranges of truth known in the physical, natural and biological sciences. Certainly, the broader population—internet, radio, live—we have in mind. But too infrequently in our time, there have been offered examples of preaching the gospel of truth that fully acknowledges scientific truth. Marsh Chapel makes this gift to the country and beyond this summer.

Today, in Mark 4, we focus on the practice, the rigorous practice, of faith. We do not ever focus enough on the actual practice of faith, faith after all known in its practice, particularly on planting and fishing, on tithing and evangelism.

Ben Hogan, perhaps the last century’s best golfer, died some years ago. So often we do not appreciate a person until she\he is absent, or dies. Tragic, this. Hogan rose from poverty, survived an unsurvivable automobile accident, overcame a slight build and reached all of his golfing potential, plus 10%. Most shocking to the average mortal golfer is the bitter fact that Hogan, for years, struggled to tame a fierce slice. (A slice is when you hit the ball 300 yards, 150 forward and 150 due east). At last he conquered this besetting sin, this slice, and went on to glory. Of course, everyone wanted to know how he did it. “It’s a secret” is all he would say. His obituary, however, reported that a couple of years before he died, Hogan revealed what he by revelation, by apocalypse, had learned: “The secret…is in the dirt”, he concluded.

Now there is a gnomic, epigrammatic, mystagogical wisdom saying, if ever there was one. “The secret is in the dirt”. Hogan meant: the secret is in the constant, lifelong swinging of the club into the dirt, morning and evening, in season and out, victory and loss. “The secret is in the dirt”.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice…

In the d.i.r.t.:

Determination
Intensity
Repetition
Thrill

There comes a time in life when one determines one’s determination.

There comes a time to choose, and then to follow through. You do not have forever to choose, though forever you live with how you choose.

We are impressed, this spring, with the sheer anxiety of the workplace. Women and men, particularly men, are anxious and fretful. Capitalism, the grinding will of man in the market, shows little partiality.

“Believe me, John, I’d love to do otherwise but the numbers are just not there”.

I feel for the women and men, particularly the men, of this age who offer soul and body to work—only to find that the goddess of labor is not always faithful. We have long been leaving people behind in this country. It’s just that the numbers and kinds of people so marooned have changed.

Jesus asks you this: “What can it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his life? What can a man give in exchange for his life?”

There is more to life than work. There is more to life than work.

Yet, we have managed to develop an anxiety laden country of 90hr weeks, neglect of home, dismissal of community, abandonment of children. We clergy have some responsibility here. We have modeled the spiritual dimensions of commitment, earnestness, and the work ethic. But have we heeded the grandfather who said, “Looking back I wish I had spent more time in reflection, risked more, and focused on my legacy to another generation”?

Here Jesus stands. “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow.” There comes a time when one determines one’s determination.

Enter in at the narrow gate. Broad is the way and wide is the gate that leads to perdition, and many there are who go therein. But narrow is the gate and straight the way that leads to life and few there are who find it.

When shove supplants push, my friend, whose are you? Can you sing something like the old hymn, “Where he leads me I will follow”? The secret is in determination. In this sense, it is really the work of teachers of so many sorts in discipleship, that counts most. I’m speaking to women and men, particularly men. Bonhoeffer wrote:

“Only the obedient believe. If we are to believe we must obey a concrete command. Without this preliminary step of obedience, our faith will only be pious humbug, and lead us to the grace which is not costly. Everything depends on the first step. It has a unique quality of its own. The first step of obedience makes Peter leave his nets, and later get out of the ship; it calls upon the young man to leave his riches. Only this new existence, created through obedience, can make faith possible”.

The secret is in determination.

Determination hungers for intensity, for the purity of the heart which is to will one thing, a continual bearing down on the very core of your life, your vocation, your calling.

It matters greatly, as Bill Muehl wrote, what happens in life.

We lived for a while in a small town along the Mohawk river. One Sunday our Bishop came to preach. He was one intense cleric. My mother planned a fine Sunday dinner for after church. But the Bishop was not planning to stay for lunch. In the end, though, he stayed. We all hurried through the meal. Especially my sister, who backhanded her milk glass all over the Bishop’s black suit, clerical collar and spec
tacles. He even wore, for part of the meal, a slight dollop, a thin thread, a trace of the aforementioned milk on his nose. When I say him later in life, I could still “see” the milk.

Death is a part of life, and not the other way around.

Suffering is a part of experience, and not the other way around.

Love outlasts loss, and not the other way around.

The secret is in intensity. In this sense, it is really pastoral work, the pastoral care of our fellowship offered both by ministers and lay folks, that counts most. Bonhoeffer wrote:

“To be called to a life of extraordinary quality, to live up to it, and yet to be unconscious of it, is indeed a narrow way. To confess and testify to the truth as it is in Jesus, and at the same time to love the enemies of that truth, his enemies and ours, and to love them with the infinite love of Jesus Christ, is indeed a narrow way. To believe the promise of Jesus that his followers shall possess the earth, and at the same time to face our enemies unarmed and defenseless, preferring to suffer injustice rather than to do wrong ourselves, is indeed a narrow way.”

The secret is in intensity.

Such intensity, to survive, needs repetition in practice. The determined, intense, repetitive practice of faith, as in all things, at last wins out.

Count it all joy, brethren, when various trials beset you…

In community we learn to challenge each other when our strokes are errant. We learn to challenge abusive behavior, intended or unintended. We learn to challenge the use of crude language, which does not become the gospel. We learn to challenge misuses of power, however benevolent. We learn to hold one another accountable to Jesus Christ. We learn…by practicing. We learn…by repeating. In this sense, the work of our small groups are most important. Bonhoeffer wrote:

“If our Christianity has ceased to be serious about discipleship, if we have watered down the gospel into emotional uplift which makes no costly demands and fails to distinguish between natural and Christian existence—then we have (forgotten the cross).

I know that the word religion is suspect, today, and rightly so. So much darkness, so much hurt, so much that maims life is covered by such a word. It takes repetitive resistance to shift, to shove to shift, the balance of influence in that word.

So we resist. We resist the cultural influences that make the tragic slaying at the Holocaust museum a referent for the word religion. We resist the cultural influences that make the tragic killing of Dr Tiller a referent for the word religion. We will resist the Denver leader, quoted in the Globe, who, reflecting on Tiller said, ‘well, you know, when you work for the mafia, you know you are taking risks’ (Our pulpits need to ring out, now. I will give you the phrase. Here it is: women’s bodies are women’s bodies). So we resist, with a swinging repetition.
The secret is in repetition. Backswing, stroke, follow through. Backswing, stroke, follow through…

In the end, there is a thrilling prospect that awaits us.

Determination produces intensity.
Intensity produces repetition.
Repetition produces a thrill.
Thrill does not disappoint.

Whitehead wrote,

“The death of religion is the repression of a spirit of high adventure.”

The human condition is not a spectator sport.

Are you…

Determined?
Intense?
Repetitive?
Thrilled?

This summer, there may be a high moment.

Summer in the northeast carries a precious liturgical and ritual. In a land of cold, snow, ice, dark, wind, rain and storm, these summer months allow a pause. In this pause we may travel. In this pause we may enjoy the gifts of nature. In this pause we may connect or reconnect with our families. In this pause we may read, stroll, wander, wonder. No wonder the minister carried his clubs into the pulpit.

At dawn, along the lake. Sitting under a water fall. Alone along a trail. Fingers and toes deep in sand. Sunset, purple. Howard Thurman on Daytona Beach.

There may be a high moment, an experience of truly being alive.

posted in Uncategorized on 06.14.2009 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

The ministry of Marsh Chapel, in this decade, quickens in connection with voice, vocation and volume. The voice of this pulpit, around the globe, is lifted and shared, in the liberality of the gospel, as it has been from the time of our first Dean, Dr. Franklin H. Littell. Our Psalm today celebrates voice. The vocation to service, in ministry and culture, to which we invite young people every day, is our joy and hope, this day, as it was in exuberance over lunch last Sunday. Our lesson today celebrates vocation. The volume, simply put, the increasing worshipping presence of the people of God, grows in ordered worship, as we lift hymns in four part harmony, enjoy choral music both historic and contemporary, and ponder the word, with head and heart, to ‘unite the two so long disjoined, learning and vital piety’, as the lost are found. The gospel today speaks of the lost and the found. We invite you to step alongside the ministry of Marsh Chapel, our shared common prayer, in voice, vocation and volume.

First, voice.

The hallowed predecessors who occupied this pulpit in the cradle of liberty and the cradle of Methodist theology are names, and voices, you mostly know. Robert Cummings Neville. Robert Watts Thornburg. Richard Nesmith. Robert Hammil. Howard Thurman. And Franklin Littell.

Dr. Franklin Littell was the first Dean to occupy this pulpit. President Daniel Marsh brought him here in the early 1950’s. As recently as May of 2006, Littell was able at age 88 to preach here, as he did that spring at commencement (for the School of Theology). A friend, colleague, contemporary and fly fishing partner of our dear friend Dr. Ray Hart, Littell brought a stirring sermon to that moment just three years ago. You may know that Littell died just recently, in late May.

Or maybe both his life and death are unfamiliar territory for you. In fact, I guess that such is the case for many, and so, come October, I am planning to preach a full sermon titled ‘Remembering Littell’ for Alumni Weekend.

We at Marsh Chapel, and we at Boston University may not yet have the largest financial endowment in the country, or along the Charles River. One day, that may change. If you would like to help us to help that to change, please let me know. Be assured that we will do whatever we can for your personal and spiritual welfare, in gratitude. But there is another way in which Marsh Chapel, and Boston University may already have the largest endowment in the country, or along the Charles River. Our riches are vocal. Our largest endowment is not financial but audible, not monetary but epistolary, not in the coin of the realm but in the language of the heart. Boston University, and centrally within the University, Marsh Chapel, is a treasure store of voice. You notice that, probably, every Sunday when you come across the plaza, and pass the sculpture and monument to Martin Luther King, birds in flight. Said Karl Barth, ‘The gospel is the freedom of a bird in flight’. But King’s voice was not only or mainly a solo voice. He sang in a choir, in choro novo. He sang as one bird in the flock. Howard Thurman sang with him, for example. So did Allan Knight Chalmers. Robert Hamill’s voice was known in his regular column in motive magazine. Littell lead the way. Remember today three features of Littell’s voice.

He was the father of holocaust studies. Littell was the first to offer courses, formal study, in the area of the holocaust. Throughout his life, with passion, and as a Methodist preacher, he continuously challenged the Christian community to take emotional responsibility for the horrors of the holocaust. Yesterday, rightly, we honored those who physically, and in some cases ultimately, took responsibility for stopping the Third Reich. Littell, in his time here and later in his long career, never stopped pushing, preaching, even attacking his own Christian church to look hard, deep, and long at Auschwitz. He did so from this pulpit. He did so later as a college President, and he did so in scores of classrooms from Temple, to Emory, to Chicago. Remember his words: “Most gentiles, even church leaders, have not confronted the Holocaust and its lessons for the present day... It is important, especially for Jewish children, to know that in those terrible years not all the gentiles in Christendom were either perpetrators or passive spectators," (NYT obit)

Likewise, Littell gracefully and steadily combined learning and piety. His ministry embraced both head and heart, and actually could not have been conceived or developed without such a real, even radical integration of the mind and the spirit. His passion about the holocaust, for instance, began out of a revulsion he felt as a student in Germany in 1939, attending a Hitler rally. He never forget the feeling of that early experience, and that feeling fueled his work through the years. Feelings are more than emotions, more than sentiment. They are the great steed, the great horse on which we ride. The mind is the bit and bridle, as Wesley somewhere wrote. He pressed the church, our church, to remember the great Kingswood hymn of Charles Wesley: ‘to unite the two so long disjoined, learning and vital piety’. So he was a preacher who also was President of Iowa Wesleyan. He was a pastor, who also taught and wrote. He was a person of faith, who saw the need to combine mind and heart.

In addition, and to my great benefit, Littell was an early supporter and even translator and commentator on the work of Rudolph Bultmann, still an important voice in the study of the New Testament.

Holocaust, head and heart united, the critical study of the New Testament—these are three gifts of Littell to our time. His voice continues to bless us. Voice, the liberality of the gospel, is our central mission.

Second, vocation.

Our time needs a cultural revolution as much or more than a theological reformation. The peace of God will come to earth as much at the urging and prompting of those committed to cultural transformation as through those engaged in the work of religious or even theological reconstruction. It is striking just how much religious expression is shaped, even determined, by the surrounding culture. Hence, while we hunt every work day for women and men who are called to preach—is that you?—we also here at Marsh Chapel are vigorous in our celebration of those called to service of other saving, healthy forms.

To that end, something powerful happened here last Sunday. And I am not referring to worship, prayer, sermon, or collection, our Sunday service at 11am, though I hope and
trust that we in our way offered our best selves to God in that hour of prayer. No, the wind of grace blew through here last Sunday at lunch as well.

Carefully and covertly, our lay leaders hatched a plan for a surprise lunch, to honor three young women of our congregation. One is a becoming a teacher, one a lawyer, and one is working on the hospitality of the church. Our lay leaders emailed and called and cooked up a smorgasbord for lunch. I doubt that any church luncheon was offered that was more savory and more calorific than that provided last Sunday. I think we lived on its effect for two days. Of course a beautiful cake concluded the repast. Our women and men decorated the room with balloons and crepe paper. They set out the table. The arranged for gifts. These gifts were delicately and carefully wrapped. I emphasize the detail of these gifts because the commitment to excellence in the manner of giving was so pronounced. People notice when things are done well. Excellence, enjoyment of people, and entrepreneurial spirit are three things that grow churches. I mean excellence at anything, from mowing the lawn to preaching to wrapping gifts with style.

After the meal, formal speeches and prayers were made. There was much humor. We sang also some happy birthday greetings. Then a charismatic transfer occurred. I am going to use the term ‘ordination’, only because you get the sense from it of what ‘went down’ last Sunday after lunch. The three women, none preachers, but all heading into ministry, were summoned forward. They were given gifts, practical and beautiful, helpful and playful. Then the community listened as they told the truth about their lives, and their vocations. One is going to work as urban teacher in Missouri. One is going to practice law for the greater good in Boston. One is going to continue to fan the flames of life and hospitable growth in a church not far from here, actually, Marsh Chapel itself. In the speaking, and listening, a transfer of charisma, of gifts, accompanied the transfer of physical gifts. No kneeling occurred, no hands were laid upon heads, no stoles or robes were put on. Yet an ordination of a truly profound sort occurred. Three young women named their callings, and the community cheered.

This is how the world gets better, when young people and once young people connect their deepest passions with the world’s greatest needs. It was a moment that preached out the following question: ‘and how about you?’ Lunch became a charismatic moment last week, a moment of transfer of charismata. Vocation, the liberality of the gospel set to work, is our central calling.

Third, volume.

In a moment we shall celebrate together Holy Communion. If you are listening from afar and would like to have someone bring communion to your home, call the chapel, and we will endeavor to do so. One by one, heart by heart, the good news of love divine changes people for the better. The lost are found. It is a moment of true joy, as our gospel today told us.

Many years ago, Jan and I were serving a little church in Ithaca, New York. We had two little children, and one beagle puppy. The salary was $8,000 a year, the home modest, the work challenging, the learning curve steep. It seemed like it was always Saturday night, and the sermon awaiting its writing.

One Saturday Jan came home in the morning from the grocery store in tears. Somehow she had lost her engagement ring. The ring itself was modest enough, a family heirloom, but nonetheless, a symbol at the heart of things. After a little breakfast, she had been shopping while the children were sleeping, and I was trying to figure out what to say the next day. We spent the later morning and all afternoon hunting for the ring. We went back to the grocery. We walked every aisle. We searched behind cereal boxes, and looked under grapefruit. We enlisted the help of kindly overworked store attendants. Dusk came, no ring. What a sad Saturday night! No ring, no sermon, no joy in Ithaca that night. Finally, the kids went down and Jan went off to bed. Sunday morning loomed, and the wind was just not in the sails.

About ten o’clock I went down into the kitchen. As every writer knows, the only cure for writer’s block is…eating. Even when there is no cure, the eating itself is, like virtue, its own reward. So I poured some juice. Then I waffled between cookies and toast, and settled on a piece of toast, comfort food. There was only one piece of bread left in the loaf, and I struggled to pull it out of the bag. As I did, I felt something. That is something that happens with bread and grape juice, sometimes. You feel something. I felt around in the bottom of that forlorn bread bag. Something small and hard, something round, something smooth, something good—I felt it. And there it was. A simple little ring, with a small diamond, the lost, now found. Is there a more joyful moment than this? Truly I tell you, there is joy in heaven, when the lost are found.

We are coming to the table in a moment. When you eat this bread and drink this cup, there is remembrance, there is presence, and there is thanksgiving, all in one. In feasting on the love of God, you are meant to turn up the volume, here at Marsh Chapel, for that love of God. Heart warmed, you are meant to warm other hearts. You are found, and you have found something, now go and find others for whom such divine discovery has yet to happen. Volume, the liberality of the gospel shared with others, is our central calling.

Our common prayer: voice, vocation, volume.

Voice like that of Franklin Littell, father of holocaust studies, combiner of head and heart, student of the Bible.

Vocation like that of three young women, a teacher, a lawyer, a minister.

Volume like that of bread and cup, word and table, in remembrance, real presence, and thanksgiving.

posted in Uncategorized on 06.7.2009 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

With most of our students now away on summer break, we may hazard a reference to Donna Reed as the sermon begins.

The Marsh pulpit, historic and delightful as a setting for preaching, demands weekly illustrations or combinations of illustrations accessible to four generations, 20, 40, 60 and 80 years of age, or thereabouts. This quadrilateral in illustration is true in other, in many other places, but heavily true here, where our youth group mailing list has 25,000 names on it. On a Sunday during the school year, I would think twice about dear Donna, and whether or not 20 year olds would know her, and whether 40 year olds would connect with her.

‘I has been a long time since any of us boys have seen a woman, so we are writing to you in hopes you’ll help us out off our situation…We would appreciate it very much if you would send us a photo of yourself’ (NYT, 5/25/09). So wrote one solder in 1944 from the Aleutian Islands. From New Guinea, a month later: ‘The boys in our outfit think you are a typical American girl, someone who we would like to come home to’. A year earlier my wife’s uncle had died on the next island over, New Britain, a hockey star and recent graduate of Mount Hermon, age 20. In 1943, someone asked her to dance because ‘I really felt like she was a girl from back home. She was from a smaller community, and we were more or less the same age, so I felt she was the kind of person I could talk to’. ‘We think you’re swell’ wrote six marine sergeants.

Other generations will know her, not by photograph, but by cinema and television. They will remember her as the bright light of George’s ‘Wonderful Life’, the woman whose stairway banister can never permanently hold its top. Or they will remember her as the woman ever standing in televised living room or kitchen, always perfectly dressed, from 7am to 7pm.

Donna Reed, it turns out, kept her WWII letters, 341 letters stored up in an old shoebox. Remembered, by so many, it turns out, she remembered many. The letters sat undiscovered for 65 years, kept in a shoebox kept in a garage. Donna Reed’s daughter, Mary Owen, discovered the letters early this recession. They made her feel ‘really proud’. Many of the letters she saved from GI’s overseas came from fellow Iowans, some from friends near her family farm in Denison, Iowa. Her daughter discovered the shoebox and letters earlier this recession. It happens that the Mary Owen was employed, pre-recession, by Bear Stearns, a company, as we know see, neither bearish enough nor stern enough, its name notwithstanding. In 1942, Reed wrote to a friend, ‘my effort to win the war has not amounted to much…I wish I could find more to do’.

In preparing this sermon, I did not fish out this newspaper story from earlier in the week only to continue my ongoing personal support for the beauty and power of the daily newspaper at its finest. Although, now that the subject has come up, the power of the daily paper to open the world, to expand the horizon, to challenge the mind and to warm the heart, it might be noticed, is a great and gracious good. When Karl Barth said, in days of Donna Reed, that the preacher speaks with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other, he had little sense that one of his two hands might fall empty, or that the endangered document would be the paper. No, the sermon about the press and freedom is for another day. Nor is the point her to recall the power of a hand written letter to form memory and meaning and to call up the very presence and person of the writer to our minds and hearts. Again, another sermon for another day. I mention the story because Donna Reed’s shoebox opens up today’s gospel, a recession theology well fit for Pentecost, in two ways. The 341 letters, saved by the generous mother, and their discovery, made by the newly unemployed daughter, recall for us a recession theology that honors those in need and out of work, and a recession theology that drives us back to the glory hole of spirit, the shoebox of longing, the recessive, recessive depth of saving faith. A recession theology: we are our brothers’ keeper. A recession theology: return to the forgotten love you had at first.

Romans 8, a jewel and a beauty, reminds us on Pentecost that our voice in need is our voice in deed. When we are weak, then we are strong enough to see more clearly. The spirit helps us in our weakness. On my prayer list in these months are nearly two dozen people without work, mostly men. I look forward to their re-employment, and I look forward to a day when as a people we may more effectively mitigate the effects of recession. Then we shall rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. Then we shall see what we avoid, that the person on the corner, wearing the sign, ‘jobless, homeless’, another time may be us, or our relative. Then we shall work for the common good with a shining zeal and ferocity like that you see in the photographs of servicemen in 1942. Then in the common good we shall find the moral equivalent of war.

For Romans 8, as the choice verse on hope reminds us, is yet another point in Paul’s apocalyptic desire for heaven, a heaven of earth and and earth of heaven, that which ‘we wait for with patience’. It is not, this hope, what now we see. We have miles to go before we sleep.

Maybe you do to: I keep a little statistical list in my journal. Here are some of the latest entries. They are only numbers: 47, 58, 50, 87, 10, 266, 28, 40.

40% of babies born in the USA in 2008 were born out of wedlock.

58% of male Harvard graduates who entered the work force in 2007 went into finance.

50% of recent Afghani applicants for police positions tested positive for drug use.

87,000 Iraqis have died violently since 2005.

10,000,000 species live on earth right now.

266 uses of waterboarding, a kind of torture were inflicted on 2, just 2, detainees.

28% of all US adults change their religion.

40% change their denomination.

You see? Every now and then arithmetic can be ever so interesting. Today I mention the number 84. 84% of the jobs lost this recession, thus far, have been lost by men. For all the spirit gusts of Pentecost, or perhaps precisely out of that holy wind, today upon the heart we feel the hurt of the unemployed.

Why Dean Hill do you present us this number, amid these numbers, on Pentecost? Is this not the church’s birthday, Dear Dean. Are we not to adore the birth of the early church, in red cloth and sparkling songs? What has the spirited holy catholic and apostolic church to do with a few redundant men?

Well…

A long time ago, Augustine of Hippo started into Bishop work, in North Africa. He had many troubles. He fought fundamentalism, for instance, as we do in our time, shouting,
‘love understanding wholeheartedly’. He also argued and wrestled with the Donatists, an ancient, spirited and disciplined form of Christianity. One side of the spat was the question of the extent of the church.

How much real estate is church and how much is not? How much humanity is church, or potentially so, and how much is not? Should the church focus on quality or quantity? Are only those baptized by good Bishops baptized well, or at all? What makes the hotentot so hot? What puts the ape in apricot? Is the church, as the Donatists argued, a select remnant, a pure priesthood, a leaven in the lump, a company of resident aliens, a band of holy Methodists fleeing from the wrath to come? If so, then church is always and ever separated from, alienated from the culture in which it exists. Christ against culture.

Or is the church, as Augustine argued, and as I do today, itself a mixture of wheat and tares, saints and sinners, holy and not yet holy, yet all and objectively founded upon and protected within spirit, divine grace, a set of networks and invisible relationships in the world to redeem the whole world, to transform culture, and the society from which culture comes, and the language that is the very root of that society? Christ transforming culture.

Is church us in worship or does it include unemployed men, whether in worship or not? Is the church the circled wagons of resident aliens? Or is the church found in all humanity, ‘nothing human foreign to us’? How you answer, on this Pentecost Sunday, the church’s birthday, will determine whether you think Christ and his church have anything in common with men without work.

Not all of our unemployed are people of faith. But very few are socially located very far from a baptized brow or a consecrated marriage or a social hall covered dish dinner. Not all of our unemployed are of great moral strength. But very few are living in towns and cities without good people doing good things. Not all of our employed are people who give to anything, any cause or institution, on a regular basis. But very few have received no help, support, forgiveness or grace from someone, somewhere, somehow, sometime. The parables of Jesus are almost all about men and work and troubles. I do not find Augustine invariably helpful. Yet his view of the church, in argument against the purists, and his respect for its well nigh universal, invisible expanse—this I preach, this I affirm, this I love. Nothing human is foreign to us. The issue of work, of honorable work, is as shot through with Pentecost spirit and sacramental wine as every curiosity about prayer, parament, liturgy, music or pardon. The word liturgy, in fact, means ‘work’.

I left an exit ramp in New York on Tuesday, and passed that man wearing that sign, ‘jobless, homeless’. For many men, the job is the spiritual home. His job is his home and his home is his castle. So I pull out my statistics list when I read that 84% of the job losses befell men. We can do better by our brothers in Christ, and one day, we shall have built a society that better smoothes the inevitable collisions between growth and value, and better smoothes the inevitable tensions between liberty and justice. The hurt of this recession will prod, goad, teach and inspire us to do so. One of two announcements in recession theology is this, that we are our brothers’ keeper, meant to watch over one another in love. Donna Reed symbolizes this shared effort, this common good, this love of neighbor.

Yet there is a second flame flickering in the fire of Pentecost and its, our, recession theology. For heaven and full employment are not the same thing. Heaven and guaranteed employment are not the same thing. Heaven and employment are not the same thing. Your job may be your home but it is not your soul. A friend, savingly, asked me recently, ‘have you been long enough in your new job to have a sense of humor about it?’

John 16 is striking for how strikingly strange it is. Sin is not what we do. Sin is not believing. Righteousness is not what we do. Righteousness is Jesus’ absence and the longing absence creates. Judgement is not hellfire. Judgement is the victory of things invisible over the god of this visible world. The Counselor, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth—perhaps the least historically understood figure and figure of speech in the New Testament to this day, by the way—guides us, guides us still.

There is more to life than work. Very few people, come dusk, say, ‘I just wish I could have spent another Saturday afternoon in the office’. There is more to work than earning. Very few hearses come equipped with a trailer hitch ball, neither a 2 inch or 1 ¾ inch variety. I know these are trite preacherly truisms. Yet why do we live as if all we needed were work? Yet why do we live as if our hearse will pull a trailer?

A Spanish poet: ‘while others strive vainly for impermanent authority, let me lie down in the shade of a tree, singing’.

Donna Reed’s daughter found meaning, power, memory, love, a depth she did not before know, on an unemployed day, rooting around in the garage. She found glory in the glory hole. She remembered, as she learned about her mother’s own memory lane. Maybe we can remember some things hidden in our spiritual shoeboxes, in our personal garages. Do you remember what you were taught?

See ye first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these will be yours as well.

Store ye not up treasure on earth where moth and rust consume and thieves break in and steal, but store up treasure in heaven where neither moth nor rust consume, nor do thieves break in and steal. Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Prize your time, now you have it, for God is a consuming fire.

When she died in 1986 at age 64, Donna Reed wanted to remember that at least 341 servicemen, many from Iowa, had found comfort in her photo, counsel in her response, truth in her letters, spirit in her correspondence. Did we not just read that in John 16? I believe we did.

We treasure what we love, and love what we treasure.

I want to ask you flat out: where is your treasure? What is it that you want to keep dry, preserved for the benefit of another generation, tucked in a shoebox literal or figurative, stored in a garage actual or virtual, kept as a badge of honor in the spirit of truth? What do you hope someone, a daughter, a great--great nephew, might come upon, about your life, which might make them, as Mary Owen said of her mother, ‘feel so proud’?

For a recession theology—I am sure you guessed the turn we would make here—is a recessive one. It seeks out the recesses of mind, heart, and soul. Faith plumbs the deepest recesses of your inner being. In a recession, we have more opportunity, and more need to climb down into the recesses of our lives. In this way, recession is a necessary prelude to salvation. The Spirit is given to us in our weakness, not in our dominance, but in our recession. When we need love, we know love, and know how to love. The second announcement of good news in a recession theology is just this. Grace meets us not just when we succeed, but also and more so when we recede. And in place of prowess, to replace prowess, grace gives love.

“In thee
is the fountain of life and in thy light we shall see light. Give me a man in love: he knows what I mean. Give me one who yearns. Give me one who is hungry. Give me one far away in this desert, who is thirsty and sighs for the spring of the eternal country. Give me that sort of man: he knows what I mean. But if I speak to a cold man, he just does not know what I am talking about” (S Augustine, sermons).

posted in Uncategorized on 05.31.2009 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

Grace can appear, out of the mist, out of a London fog. Grace can overtake you in the mist, in the midst of an English Spring. Faith is that kind of walk in the dark. You only appreciate your faith when you get to a point that you truly need it. I wonder whether you are at a point, ready to set out on the trail of faith? Faith overtakes us in the mist, in the dark, in the fog like that interminable London fog.

We have last week passed through the ritual of Commencement, here at Boston University. Many thousands cheered at Nickerson Field, in the main gatherings. Many hundreds, school and college by school and college, heard words with which to be hooded and to begin again. Two smaller gatherings impressed me this year.

Another kind of fog, spring in England, greeted us at Faneuil Hall.

Jan and I have gone, every year, to Faneuil Hall for the commissioning ceremony for our new ROTC leaders. It is at 3:30pm in the afternoon. Each young woman or man ascends the historic stage of the Hall. They each take an oath to defend the constitution of the country. Then their parents come forward to pin the amulets for their new rank upon each shoulder. There is a little quiet at the pinning, as mom and dad find the right way to attach the rank badges. The hall is fairly full. Veterans are honored. There is a prayer and a speech. There are awards. This year’s winner was remembered for his playful temperament, his team spirit, and the fact that he still used a Chuck-E-Cheese wallet. These are young people. As mom and dad pin on the rank, it becomes shockingly clear just what sacrifice and just what cost arises when peaceful means, diplomatic strategies, fail. Then we turn to young people, some of whom are carrying wallets from childhood, and depend on their courage. There is a thick fog of unforeseeable future and a mist in the eyes as well. Every year there have been soldiers who have been regulars in worship here at the Chapel. Some of you will remember Morgan Jordan from last year. We prayed that day:

Another fog still greeted us on Monday.

On Monday, the day after commencement, some of us gathered for a very dignified graduation ceremony to honor the senior class of the BU Academy, our resident Preparatory High School. These students were at least four years younger than the soldiers. They came forward in robes not uniforms. A stately quiet piano rendition of Pomp and Circumstance guided their entry. Their senior orations were in Greek and Latin. The speaker of the day playfully quoted a certain mid-20century English philosopher and sociologist, one ‘J Lennon’ and his colleague, Dr ‘P McCartney’ to the effect that money cannot buy love and love is all you need. The students were admonished, with straightforward frankness, to learn to delay gratification. There were awards. And while the list of schools, fine colleges, to which the graduates have been admitted was printed, it was clear that the future was not clear. One honoree gave thanks for finishing, and remembered studying her Latin vocabulary in the shower. Again, the fog and mist of the unforeseeable future did not escape the prep school ceremony, any more than it had the ROTC commissioning. Young people, young people, such young people.

If we could see everything, we would not need trust. If we knew every little thing ahead of time, we would not need faith. If we were certain, already, about how the future would unfold, we would not need the courage to be or the confidence born of obedience. Faith is fond in the fog. Faith is fond in the London Fog. Whatever version of an English Spring you are living through right now may just the weather system and psychic mist that will evoke your faith. It has happened before.

Nicodemus presents himself to Jesus, appearing out of the misty fog and London like shadows at night, to ask the location of real authority, he who is a figure of much authority, and to seek an authoritative word of faith. Where is faith? Almost any religious text is a neighbor to this question, and here in the fourth Gospel, Nicodemus brings the question home. What is the shape of real faith?

Is it found in law, the ten commandments, the fierce fundamentalism on the rise in our time? Surely these commandments are the basis of good life, but are they the heart of life? Is faith found in order or structure, as in that of a church with laity and deacons and priests and bishops, the depositum fidei? Surely the river of life needs some banks, otherwise all would be flood, but is order at the heart of faith? Are we left, for salvation, to choose between fundamentalism and ecclesiasticism? In this monsoon, this rainy English spring, let us listen again for the Word of God.

The freedom and love in today’s Scripture lesson provide an alternative. Authentic faith, finally, is found in freedom and love.

Speaking of London fog…

We once remembered that. It is the experience of freeing love, that ignited the Methodist church.

Every Sunday has four liturgical dimensions, four calendars. One is the lectionary and liturgy of the church—we use this each week, here, so our lesson and Psalm and musical recognition of Ascension. A second is the cultural calendar, Memorial Day this weekend, the traditional beginning of summer and remembrance of service. A third is the calendar of every local community, like ours here, at BU, in our case feeling the effects of the tide going out, faculty, students and staff on summer break. And a fourth is the variety of denominational dates and events, the birthdays of obscure Scottish saints, the feast days of more venerable holy ones, the needs of the larger church for funding of very sorts, and today, 5/24, Aldersgate Sunday, the 271st anniversary of Mr. Wesley’s own English Spring, his discovery of faith in fog (more on this in a moment).

Winston Churchill knew the fog of an English Spring.

At the right moment, one momentous English Spring of 1940, Winston Churchill faced down the more polished, better heeled, more popular and more experienced old Britons of his newly formed war cabinet, and steadily led his country away from their desire to compromise with Adolf Hitler. With Belgium defeated, Churchill clung to a
love of freedom. With France cut in two, Churchill clung to a love of freedom. With 400,000 men stranded at Dunkirk and escape virtually impossible, Churchill clung to a love of freedom. With the whole German airforce poised to incinerate England’s green and pleasant land, Churchill clung to a love of freedom. With Lord Halifax ready to seek terms and Lord Chamberlain ready to let him Churchill clung to a love of freedom. Re-read this summer John Lukacs’ Five Days in London, May 1940. He concludes: “Churchill and Britain could not have won the Second World War. In the end, America and Russian did. But in May 1940 Churchill (alone) was the one who did not lose it.” Faith is about love of freedom.

John Wesley knew something about the fog of an English Spring.

At midlife, one enchanting night in the English Spring of 1738, John Wesley heard something said in church that warmed his heart for good. He had been on Aldersgate street that Sunday evening, going to chapel service more from duty than from passion, when he heard a preacher read Romans 8 and also Martin Luther’s commentary on that passage. There is something so fragrant and so full about damp London in the springtime. As he left church, Wesley felt something new, a freeing love in the heart, which is the creation and work of the Holy Spirit, which blows where it wills and you hear the sound of it. Faith is about freeing love.

The sermon today is an altar call for you. I propose that you come to prayer, ready to accept Jesus in your life. So come, to experience freeing love. So come, to receive a love of freedom. So come, to give thanks for the freedom to love. For the wind blows where it wills and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes. So it is with every one who is born of the spirit.

Last week’s Commencement reminded us of freedom and love. After our main event speaker had filled the imaginations of a very responsive class with a challenge to service of others, I leaned over to Father Paul and said, ‘I am calling an audible’. I put aside the written benediction (I reserve the right to use it next year!), and remembered a New England poet and a New England poem. It seemed to fit the moment, as it does as well today:

posted in Uncategorized on 05.24.2009 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

Thank you, to the mighty, matchless class of 2009 of our beloved Boston University for receiving me so generously. Congratulations. You all can exhale now. You made it!

Thank you to families for the sacrifices of love you have made over the years. Hopefully, after today you can start receiving your own stimulus package.

Thank you to President Brown, faculty, staff and trustees for extending this invitation.

Thank you to my family who form the wind beneath my wings – daughter, Mariama, and her husband, my son-in-love, Rahn, our daughter, Adiya, and granddaughter, Ella Bella Boo.

Thank you to my husband, the Rev. Dr. Ray Hammond, who was privileged to deliver the baccalaureate sermon 10 years ago. After 35 years, 11 months, 23 hours, he still take my breath away.

Over the years, I have been privileged to deliver other commencement speeches. This year is particularly difficult. Your class is facing the worst unemployment rate in a generation. Instead of making your way into the real world, many of you will be returning home to live with your parents.

Yet there is a word from the Lord. As we reflect on the significance of this call to persevere in the 10th chapter of Hebrews, please pray with me on the charge, Just do it!”

Today this theme is most often identified as the popular logo for Nike athletic gear. But I submit that long before Nike was a twinkle in its founder’s eye, this mantra could be found in the timeworn book that has been passed down through generations of mothers.

Where are the mothers in the house? “The Handbook of Motherhood” is comprised of all those tried-and-true statements that we promised we’d never say when we grew up and had kids of our own. My personal favorite is, “I brought you into this world, I can sno’ nuff take you out.”

“Just do it” is one of those statements.

Your mother didn’t want to say it, but every now and then, you made her go there. Can I get a witness from any mothers in the audience today? After repeatedly asking you to do something, you bright, gifted, articulate hopes for the worlds of tomorrow became the deaf, mute, blind and ignorant of our today. Right mothers?

And your uncooperative attitudes would mount up with wings like eagles and soar to a path that led straight to her last nerve. After enduring a litany of excuses, the collective wisdom of Dr. Spock, the Proverbs 31 woman and even Oprah became patently irrelevant, she blared, “No ifs, no ands, no buts – just do it!”

Surely, this logo summarizes this text in the book of Hebrews. This open letter, whose definitive author remains a mystery, was written to a group of early Christians, who faced great persecution. They endured jeers and flogging, chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, sawed in two, for the sake of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

By God’s grace and because of their courage, faith and determination, the early church not only survived, it had thrived. However, as we meet them in this text, they are undergoing a new wave of persecution. Some were starting to give up the faith.

The writer issues this poignant challenge: “Remember where you’ve come from, what God’s brought you through, how He made a way out of no way and do not throw away your confidence. You need to persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what he has promised.”

No ifs, no ands, no buts, just do it!

As you seek to discern your next steps during this season of challenge, allow me to suggest three: Step up with courage; step out with faith; step forward with determination.

You must step with courage, just do it!

For the past eight years I have devoted my time, talent and treasure to advocating on behalf of the great people of Sudan, victims of genocide -- not only in Darfur, which is western Sudan, but also in southern Sudan and the Nuba Mountains in central Sudan – all of which was facilitated by the current president, Omar Al-Bashir, for whom the ICC has issued an arrest warrant for murder and crimes against humanity.

My earliest trips were fear-filled, not because of fear from external dangers associated with traveling into a war zone, but because of the fears of inadequacy that loomed large within me.

One day during my second trip was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. I encountered an 11-year-old cow herder whose face was rendered utterly grotesque by his former master. Angry because the lad lost a cow, the master used an ax to chop off the boy’s nose.

That night I lay in the loneliness of my tent, tossing and turning, and yes, crying and crying out. God, get me out of here. I don’t have what it takes to confront the profound depth of this crisis. I cannot do Sudan. Father, let this cup pass from me.

God began to minister to me in the midst of my inadequacy. God said that I was exactly in the place I needed to be. And it did not feel like a good place, but it was a God place.

The God place is where you hit a wall and you have to choose whether you’ll succumb to fear or step up with courage. The God place is where you come to know that you know the truth of Mother Teresa’s observation that most Christians don’t recognize that Jesus is all they need until Jesus is all they have.

On a dark night in war-torn Sudan, God reminded me that I stand on the shoulders of heroes like Harriet Tubman and Eleanor Roosevelt and Rosa Parks and Mother Teresa. These women confronted hard situations with courage. They refused to shrink back in the midst of dire circumstances and set the stage for great changes in our world.

Indeed, there is a direct line to be traced from the courage of Harriet Tubman and the courage of Eleanor Roosevelt and the courage of Rosa Parks to the election of America’s first African-American president, Barak Hussein Obama.

After that terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, I along with others found the courage to say yes to God. We found the courage to found My Sister’s Keeper and come alongside Sudanese women as they seek justice and rebuild their communities.

We found the courage to build a national and international advocacy movement to stop the genocide in Darfur and promote peace throughout all Sudan.

We found the courage to move from that lonely tent in Sudan to the West Wing of the White House to advocate for this cause with two different presidents of the United States.

In two weeks, by God’s grace, my husband and I will join a delegation returning to South Sudan to dedicate the new campus for our primary school for girls and our literacy project for women. That campus, constructed by MSK, will serve 1,000 girls and 200 women.

Step up with courage and just do it!

Step up with courage and also step out on faith. I’m talking about a special kind of faith, what Jesus called “mustard-seed faith,” and what I so often see in the faith of a little kid. I am convinced that just as there are few atheists in the foxhole, there are also few atheists in the sandbox or on the merry-go-round or the teeter-totter.

In my second year of residency I met 5-year-old Elizabeth, from Maine. Elizabeth developed one of the worst forms of leukemia for which we could buy time but offer no cure. Curing her frequent hospitalizations, we became best buddies. That was a blessing. The problem was that the treatments for Elizabeth’s disease at that time almost 30 years ago was often as traumatic as the disease itself.

One morning, Elizabeth’s mother greeted our resident team during rounds. Through the night, she had wrestled with a sense that she could no longer put Elizabeth through the indignity and pain of this regimen. That same morning, Elizabeth awakened and independently shared that she didn’t want any more needles. The faithful mother and the courageous 5-year-old daughter stood firm and returned to their beloved Maine.

Several months later, while walking the hall of the oncology ward, I heard singing and laughter coming from one room. I peeked in to discover now 6-year-old Elizabeth and her mother, and several friends and nurses, donned in party hats and eating cake and ice cream.

Elizabeth had come for a transfusion to prevent excessive bleeding. She explained why they were having a party. She had been praying – she paused to explain to me that praying is when you talk to God and God talks back to you. God had told her that she was going to go to heaven where she would see her grandmother and she would not be sick any more.

Because Elizabeth believed what God had said to her would be accomplished, the party was on! That’s the kind of faith Christ was talking about when he said that in order to enter the kingdom of heaven we have to change and become like a little child. That’s the kind of faith that allows you to step out and pierce the darkness of challenging times.

Seated in my favorite chair of my study is a black Raggedy Ann doll named Dr. Gloria. Before Elizabeth died, she had willed Dr. Gloria to me. Now Dr. Gloria reminds me that as I face difficult challenges both personally and professionally that make up the package called life, that God will never leave me nor forsake me.

With courage and faith, a child-like faith, I can step up and just do it!

Step forward with determination. To be perfectly honest, the work does get wearying. That’s when God sends an angel – for this pediatrician, usually a child – to propel you to step forward with determination.

A few years ago, I came to the end of a rather frustrating day. I spent the morning unsuccessfully searching for alternate housing for an asthmatic hospitalized in the ICU again, who lived in a rat- and roach-infested third-floor walkup that was a serious hazard to his health.

My afternoon began trying to access social services for the family of a little girl who we discovered had been sexually abused. All my referral sources told me to take a number, the wait would be long. By the time I got to my last client, I seriously wanted to ask Scotty to beam me up.

Maria was a 12-year-old girl, recently emigrated from Guatemala. In order to assess how well kids are adjusting to the new culture, I encourage them to speak English with me. But Maria kept shaking her head no. Her mother explained that Maria was “muy timida” – very shy.

Sympathetically, I invited Maria to pull the curtain and undress for my exam. As she did so, Maria’s mom and I continued to talk. Her mom was a minister; so was I. A doctor and a minister? Yes. Married? Yes. With children? Two. Que bueno! Well, challenging.

Suddenly the curtain flew back to reveal Maria in her blue paper gown. With her hand on her hip, her head bobbing, a smile on her face, and her finger pointing at me, she said in perfect English, “You go girl!” In any language, that sounds like profound wisdom for graduates determined to persevere.

You go, Class of 2009 of Boston University – just do it! Step up with courage – just do it! Step out on faith – just do it! Step forward in determination – just do it! Clip the ifs, can the ands, and kick the buts – Just do it!

posted in Baccalaureate, Uncategorized on 05.17.2009 at 11:00 am

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By Marsh Chapel

Click here for audio of just the sermon

Good morning, my name is Tim Kelly, and I am a senior graduating from the College of Arts and Sciences with a degree in psychology. As I stand before you today, I realize how many things one can fit in to four years. I have taken 33 college courses, spent over 1,200 hours in lectures, run 3 half marathons, sung more than 10 Bach Cantatas, and have given countless campus tours all since September 2005. But as I reflected on what I was to speak about today, none of these things came to mind as I considered what I now believe as a graduating senior. Actually, I’ve pretty much narrowed it down to three things.

First: God is here. What might seem like the most obvious or simple of statements suddenly becomes questioned, doubted, and sometimes forgotten in daily life. I certainly have been through my share of ups and downs, as I am sure many of you have. What it amazing, however, is that I have experienced God in all sorts of ways. Maybe you experience God through the reading of Scripture. Maybe you see God as you watch a beautiful summer sunset. Maybe you hear God in the music of a classical motet. Perhaps you experience God through people, through friends and family, or even through a loving, kind-hearted brunette in the soprano section of your choir. Maybe you give thanks today, like I do, for your mother or for someone who has played a mother-like role in your life. If you’re like me, you probably experience God through many of these lenses, but certainly I believe that God is here.

Second: we cannot do this alone. I have truly come to value the experience of community within church and Christian life. If community was not important, we’d all be listening to church services on the radio and there would be no need for pews or coffee hour or retreats or passing the peace or fellowship. While I have certainly met great people here at Marsh, I have also searched out community by finding my own separate time to worship away from singing here in the choir, and doing that has given me a wonderful, additional opportunity to grow both personally and spiritually. I truly believe that we cannot go through this adventure, this journey called Christian life by ourselves.

Thirdly: God does not always work in the ways we expect Him to. If you have ever had highs and lows, with some expectations met and some surprises encountered in your life, you, like I, have likely experienced this. I’ve learned that we can take away just as much from a seemingly negative situation as we can from a seemingly positive situation. As a freshman I came upon a quote which at the time I found interesting, and which now I find so true to my own experience:

I asked for strength and God gave me difficulties to make me strong.
I asked for wisdom and God gave me problems to solve.
I asked for prosperity and God gave me brawn and brain to work.
I asked for courage and God gave me dangers to overcome.
I asked for patience and God placed me in situations where I was forced to wait.
I asked for love and God gave me troubled people to help.
I asked for favors and God gave me opportunities.
I asked for everything so I could enjoy life.
Instead, He gave me life so I could enjoy everything.
I received nothing I wanted but I was given everything I needed.
My prayer has been answered.

I believe I am a pilgrim on a continuous journey through my faith that doesn’t stop next week at Commencement. I believe God is here to help me through my journey, not always in the ways expected, but through faith and community, I hope and pray that I may live out God’s will in my life.

Thanks be to God.

posted in This I Believe on 05.10.2009 at 11:00 am

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