Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

Posts Tagged ‘Robert Hill’

Sunday
September 9

Begin With The Hope In Mind

By Marsh Chapel

Begin with the hope in mind. For there is a healing that hope brings. Begin with hope in mind. For there is a healing that hope brings.

Since her cousins and sister had already jumped into the cold lake, right off the end of the dock, Jane too headed that way. It was her turn to jump. The air was warm but the water was cold, she knew, from wading earlier. She wanted to jump but she feared the cold. She had some hope, but it had a cousin called fear. She longed to proceed as others had but she feared the pain, the jolt, the cold of the water. So, she paused, she pondered, she hesitated, she equivocated, she moved left and right. Then she asked to take a moment to go down into the water, wading, to get her feet wet, and to get herself wet before the jump. Up she came, but still, she stood still. ‘Jump, Jane’ called her cousins. So since that light moistening didn’t work she asked to go down into the water to submerge in full, and be all wet before the jump. Surely that would do the trick. But that didn’t work either. Finally, she negotiated an end to the hostilities by deciding to wait until the next day. She went up the hill dry and warm, but unsuccessful and downcast, her fear mollified but her hope deferred. She had it right, though, both ways, didn’t she? Yes, it would feel good to jump and yes, it would not feel good to jump. Both. At the same time. The sheer, public full honesty of the dilemma, the horns of the dilemma, is something we adults somehow learn or manage to disguise. One is always better than the other, when it comes to choices, we suppose. Right? Is that right? Well, not really. Yes, it feels good to jump, but yes it feels bad to jump. Both. At the same time. And there was evening, and there was morning, another day. And the next day, a whole day older and wiser, she took her usual place, fourth among six, and sauntered to the end of the dock, counted to the ritual three, uno dos tres, and, without a moment’s hesitation, she jumped. She came up smiling. Now less fear, now more hope. Choices in real time, choices in our experience, choices in freedom, for young and old, are strange things, dialectical and multi-dimensional. We want what we fear and we fear what we want. We hope for what we do not see, and we do not see the way toward that for which we hope. And, sometimes, the air feels better, and sometimes the water. The meaning in life and the meaning of life is in the living of life. Choose. Choose! And then choose again. But as you begin, begin with the hope in mind. There is fear, but there is hope.

For the Gospel of Mark, it is ever a question, put to us again today, whether we can learn to see through Jesus’ eyes, to begin with the hope in mind. To be honest about our fears, for sure, and, in due course, to give them their due. But when your child is ill, as was the child of the Syro-Phoenician woman, to begin with hope in mind. But when your body needs healing, as did that of the Gentile without hearing, to begin with hope in mind. Hope is the spiritual air we need to breathe. It is not so much that where there is life there is hope, but more that where there is hope there is life.

We are savingly accosted today by the healing that hope brings. Jesus in his earthly ministry preached, and taught, and healed. Our Gospel of Mark, read this morning and throughout this year, spares no expense or effort to make sure we recognize the power for healing in His hopeful Presence. In fact, today, we have two healing stories conflated and combined, to double the punch. The first story, if ever there was to be one story truly accurate about Jesus’ earthly life, carries us to Jesus’ worn tunic side, to Jesus’ young man’s body, to Jesus’ somehow power to heal, to Jesus’ willingness to be corrected, to stand corrected. Mark and the early church had every reason to forget such embarrassment, the Lord of life brought to terms by a poor woman, a fearful and fretful mother who would do anything for her daughter, a GENTILE woman, an outsider, not truly religious, who challenges him. Yes, Lord. Yet even…There is no mistaking the intention here to evoke and invoke the preaching of the church, on its own mistaken about the universality, the breadth, the magnanimity of the mighty God and his God begotten Son. But with the Risen Christ, radiant in these apocalyptic passages, these errors become real possible pathways to full healing, to a child brought back from the brink, to the chance for the hearing of a word fitly spoken, and the chance for utterance of a word fitly spoken. An old story this, it carries a woman’s harsh rebuke of Him the church and Mark’s Roman community proclaim Risen Savior, Son of God, Lord and Christ.

Both stories are shot through with magical, exorcistic language, so much so that Matthew in retelling the Gospel on the basis of Mark, two decades or so later, eliminated them. The language can cause us to miss the meaning of the stories: they are meant to be understood symbolically, metaphorically. The hope that Jesus brings, announces our Gospel, can be spoken and heard by those not originally religious, those not within the accustomed heritage of faith—the Gentiles. Why Jesus even loses the one argument he loses in his whole ministry, here, to a Gentile, a Syro-Phoenician woman, a wily, crafty, Gentile woman. The hope that Jesus brings can be spoken and heard by those not naturally inclined to such speech and hearing, those not gifted say with a religious gene or a spiritual gene. For some music comes easily, for others not so. For some faith comes easy, for others not so. It is in the nature of things, this difference. Yet the hope in the healing that Jesus brings, here, overcomes both cultural and the natural barriers. Jesus is still working miracles of speaking and hearing, of ‘loosening tied up tongues’ (J. Marcus, Anchor Bible, I, 480).

Salvation is a Latin rooted word, stemming from salvus, which means health. The hope of salvation is the hope of healing. Where there is healing, there is the Risen Christ, as if He were to say, I am the hospital, I am the diagnosis, I am the medicine, no comes to healing but by me, and wherever healing happens there I am also.

Every day this fall, begin with hope in mind. Every week this fall, on the Lord’s day, come to church, and begin with hope in mind. At every turn, with every challenge, in every season, begin with hope in mind.

You heard the hope of healing again in Senator McCain’s memorial last weekend. Yes in the trumpets and traditional American music of the Navy Hymn, and in Boston’s My Country ‘Tis of Thee, and the Battle Hymn of the Republic, and the nature hymn, How Great Thou Art. Yes in the wise voices of Presidents and Senators and family and friends. Yes in the Gospel of John, with attendant, lesser Scriptures. Yes in the organ, the gothic nave, the robed choirs, the solemn liturgy. Yes, yes. But primordially you heard the hope of healing in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s two verse poem, with which the sermon that morning began:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves — goes itself; myselfit speaks and spells,

Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is —

Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

…for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his…

Many of us had left campus last spring before the full ‘beginning’, the full celebration of ‘commencement’. Those days offered great hope in beginnings. Our Commencement at Boston University in 2018 was a new beginning that began with hope.

We heard hope in the voice of the Deans in conference who spoke about ‘What constitutes ideal student life?’ Here are some of the words used. See if they sound to you like they sound to me: meaning, belonging, joy, happiness, in the world for the world, being known, friendship, community, care, pastoral care, health, tradition, gatherings, shared big experience, lessened anxiety, mental health, candle lighting. That all sounds to me like religion. All require a leap of faith. Jump, Jane! You cannot get within earshot of meaning, belonging, joy, happiness, in the world for the world, being known, friendship, community, care, pastoral care, health, tradition, gatherings, shared big experience, lessened anxiety, mental health, candle lighting,apart from religion.

We heard hope in the voice of those honored by induction into the Scarlet Key. This has been donefor 105 years.

We heard hope in the honored faculty member in the School of Dentistry. He remembered his own graduation and having six family members stay with him in his one bedroom apartment. Then he said to the graduates: work for the cause not the applause work for the cause not the applause.

We heard hope in the voice of Professor Nancy Ammerman preaching from this pulpit during the STH hooding ceremony. She fully acknowledged the difficulties in ministry and in life which bedevil our time, indeed which shadow and make anxious every day. Then she quietly and strongly spoke the gospel and spoke about the gospel. The Gospel is leaven, light and salt. The Gospel is leaven, light and salt. And her sermon was leaven, light and salt.

We heard hope in the voice of the the tenor soloist at the Boston Pops singing from Leonard Bernstein’s magnificent West Side Story: Maria…Do what you love and love what you do!

We heard hope in the voice of Carmen Yulinda Cruz Soto, mayor of San Juan, who simply asked what you will do when you are faced, as she and her people were last year, with choices of life and death. How will face that? Then she broke down briefly and beautifully in emotional remembrance of what her parents had sacrificed to send her to Boston University, including mortgaging their house twice.

We heard hope in the voice of John Lewis at the biggest of our gatherings, 20,000 of us at Nickerson Field, after Lewis had worshipped here at Marsh Chapel. He told about his first correspondence with and first conversation with Martin Luther King more than fifty years ago. Then he challenged the 20,000 present at Nickerson Field. So, good for you, you have a degree. And then what? You will get a good job. And then what? You buy a new car. And then what? You will build a new house. And then what? You will advance in your career. And then what? You will make money. And then what? What lasting meaning will your life and work have had? What lasting meaning will your life and work have had?

We heard hope from Colonel Thomas M. Stewart at one of our smallest but most meaningful gatherings, the ROTC Commissioning, annually at Fanueil Hall, but this year at City Hall: Speaking of Ego, Royalty left the Army when the British left Boston. You put your mission first. You focus on your people always. You be adaptable. You practice life-long learning. Then their parents stood beside them, placing upon their shoulders the apullets, the shoulder boards, marking them for service and sacrifice as they promised to Support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign or domestic. Did you hear the wording? The Constitution…all enemies… foreign or domestic.

We heard hope in the voice of Cardinal Sean O’Malley, in the reception of our Madeiros Scholars, telling these 20 full scholarship recipients that because you have been given a great gift, you have a responsibility in the future, in some significant way, to give back.

Today we begin with the hope in mind, a sermon offered as a word of faith in a pastoral voice toward a common hope. May our global listenership, including this year Kasey Shultz in Madagascar, continue to expand. May our undergraduate student members, like those present and participating today, continue to increase. May our worship service be distributed broadly to NPR stations coast to coast, so that those in Idaho and Texas can hear the service live on his home NPR station. May the interpretation of the Scriptures here, and elsewhere, continue to try to bring a biblical, prophetic critique, to bear upon national and cultural leadership under such manifold cloud cover today. May we try to strengthen the vital habits of assembly and representative democracy, these crucial though underattended, time and labor intensive communal gatherings, in Faculty Assembly, in Annual Conference, in Congress, and in Life. May our pastoral care ministry, embodied in chaplains and in many Lay Leaders, be matched by similarly vigorous ministries of outreach and of evangelism.

This may not be the morning for you to take a leap of faith. The timing may not be right. The air may be warmer than the water, and the water may still be cold. The right balance of hope and fear may not yet have arrived. No worries. There is tomorrow, and there is next week, and there is another day. Yesterday was ‘Splash’, the celebration of student life and groups, inviting a leap of faith. Friday night, said John Kerry, in reference to his recent writing about faith: ‘you know, it takes a leap; faith, it always takes a leap’.

Or, on the other hand, the time may be right and the air and water temperature fit, for just that leap of faith.

Begin with the hope in mind. For there is a healing that hope brings. Begin with hope in mind. For there is a healing that hope brings.

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

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 09.9.2018 at 11:00 am
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Sunday
September 2

Communion Meditation

By Marsh Chapel

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James 1:22-27

Mark 7:1-8

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As you enter this year of study, every day you will have a chance and a need for some pause, some moments of quiet. Use your familiar devotional reminders to bring peace of mind and encouragement of heart. Recite the decalogue. Recall the creed. Repeat the beatitudes. Rely on the Lord’s Prayer. Remember Paul’s admonitions. One of our student choristers brings you our sincere, communal and heartfelt word of welcome. Maggie?

Welcome

Maggie: Welcome to the varied ministry of Marsh Chapel at Boston University, fall 2018! We look forward to getting to know you, as you sign up to sing in a choir, as you volunteer to usher or greet, as you attend a fellowship or study group, and especially as you worship with us on Sunday at 11am!

The envisioned mission of Marsh Chapel is to be ‘a heart in the heart of the city, and a service in the service of the city’. To that end Dr. Jarrett will invite you to vocal expressions of faith in the life of our music program. To that end Ms. Chicka will invite you to global outreach in our work with International students. To that end Br. Whitney will invite you to take part and take leadership in campus student ministry. To that end Mr. Bouchard will solicit your support for work and works in hospitality.

This year, with our emphasis on ‘voice, vocation, and volume’ in our shared life, we are using as a focus for our work the word ‘hope’. Our summer, fall and spring term worship and community life are laden with expressions of hope. We trust and hope that each and every Sunday Morning will become an occasion for the speaking and hearing of ‘a word of faith in a pastoral voice toward a common hope’.

Where we can be personally helpful to you, and where our staff, chaplains, and campus ministers can be a benefit and blessing to you, do not hesitate to call up on us.

John Wesley famously called for a means of grace to ‘spread scriptural holiness and reform the nation’. Now that was a big dream! May grace expand and extend in meaning for us in the fall term, 2018!

To begin, as you enter, as you ‘matriculate’, today and this week, we offer you, in communion meditation, three thoughts on adventure, regret, and faith.

Adventure

We will keep ourselves in good balance by a daily quiet, a regular silence. In this time we may recall and recite the ten commandments, the apostles’ creed, the Lord’s prayer, and the beatitudes.

In so doing, we may be able to remember, to recollect, to regather ourselves by reference to our best selves, to our own-most selves. We have, for instance, had three years of shouting about a wall to be built along the Rio Grande. But even once, or at all, have you heard a reference in all this hollering to the Monroe Doctrine? The Monroe Doctrine expressed a singular, particular interest, on the part of the United States, in the whole of the Western Hemisphere. It privileged, rather than denigrated, our relationship with the peoples and lands from Canada to Mexico to Chile. Have you heard it quoted, or referenced in the last two years?

We happily have a rising senior, who is a student leader at Marsh Chapel, and an international studies major, who can help us remember the Monroe Doctrine. Denise, what can you tell us?

Denise: The Monroe Doctrine, authored by James Monroe in 1823, is in the main a statement of American commitment to the welfare and well-being of our northern and southern neighbors, Canada to Chile. It has waned and waxed in actual influence, and at times has been tragically abused. Theodore Roosevelt added his own corollary about 100 years after the original. The Monroe Doctrine expresses American commitment to protection and defense of our neighbors in this hemisphere.

Who knows? Perhaps some part of our matriculating class of 2022 will engage in the adventure of rebuilding culture, society, economy and politics in our international neighborhood. Listen again to the love poetry in the Song of Songs. The voice of my beloved! Behold he comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills. Voice…Beloved…Leaping…Bounding! Life is just full of potential, of possibility!! Life is an unending set of adventures!! Why we could as a country, for instance, rebuild the Central American societies and economies that are sending parents and children fleeing for their lives north to America. We have the means. We have the motivation. Bridges are better than walls. In safety and with jobs, people could stay in their own countries. What an adventure that would be, to see the Monroe Doctrine refit for the 21^st century! You might want to venture in adventure to study abroad, even perhaps south of the border.

Regret

We will keep ourselves in good balance by a daily quiet, a regular silence. In this time we may recall and recite the ten commandments, the apostles’ creed, the Lord’s prayer, and the beatitudes. In so doing, we may be able to sharpen our capacity to the tell the difference between the true and the false, between the decent and the scurrilous.

You probably remember the phrase, ‘Methinks the lady protesteth too much’. In hindsight we gain insight though often the insight is painful. Where is this remembered phrase found? In Shakespeare. It expresses doubt in another’s sincerity (for those older than I), or authenticity (for those of my own generation), or capacity for irony (for those coming into the student ranks today).

We happily have a rising junior, who is a student leader at Marsh Chapel, and an English major, who can help us remember Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, from near the year 1600. Tom, what can you tell us?

Tom: Well, actually, Dean Hill, the quotation, though often put as you did, is more accurately, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks". The line so spoken is a little subtler and has an irony to it. Here Queen Gertrude remarks on the insincerity, the overstatement within the ‘play within the play’ that Prince Hamlet writes. The play itself shows guilt and insincerity, as does the famous line about ‘protesting too much’. We use it in everyday speech to say that someone is lying.

By the way, if you have to choose, along the way, what in college to read, read some Shakespeare and read some Scripture. The Bible and the Bard are the best, in the long run. Both know about regret, a short or one word definition of hell. Hell is regret, and regret is hell. Hardly anyone escapes this life with no regrets. They befall us all. But we can at least be aware of them. We can least strive to minimize them, both in quantity and in quality, both in number and size. These years, if it be possible, we pray, let your regrets be few, so that your fulsome sense of irony and authenticity and sincerity will shine through. The thing about social media, the newer technological forms, is that it is possible to represent yourself as someone a bit other than yourself. For a time. But over time, the truth, the hard truth, comes out. When you look others in the eye and speak. And they look in you in the eye and listen. That is when you don’t want to have to ‘protest too much’. As the Bard also wrote, trite but still true, ‘to thine own self be true’. At least as much as possible! When I lie, I hurt most myself. Regret, the recognition of a lived moment of lying, hurts not others, but me. Eschew regret. Limit regret. May your regrets be few and far between.

My esteemed friend Professor Andrew Bacevich, speaking to the graduating class of our own BU Academy some years ago, said: ‘Now you are going off to college. You will sometimes find yourself in a situation where a little soulful radar sounds inside you. You know that something is afoot that just might not be right. Listen to the beeping, the conscience, the sound of that soulful radar’. The hardened and stern lessons of the Letter of James stand in this tradition: ‘be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves’. It is not just what you learn or hear, it is what you do or don’t do that makes a life, a college career, and a person.

Faith

We will keep ourselves in good balance by a daily quiet, a regular silence. In this time we may recall and recite the ten commandments, the apostles’ creed, the Lord’s prayer, and the beatitudes.

We are living through a national debate about whether honor is necessary to leadership, or not. Here in Mark 7 honor comes in two varieties, the one of the lips and the other of the heart. Said one this week, speaking of his work place, ‘What is missing there is heart’.

May your adventures be many, and may your regrets be few. The power to see things through, both when you need the accelerator and when you need the brakes, the capacity to balance the two, goes by the name of faith. As the Gospel today emphasizes, it is the inside of the cup, the heart, the sense of honor, over time, that matters most. Faith is the courage to continue to lean forward, when adventure is in the balance, and the courage to continue to lean backward, when regret is in the outcome. Whatever, says Paul, is not of faith, that is sin. So we gather for prayer every Sunday, and are led by lay leaders like Sandra, who often prays with and for us, as she does this morning. Sandra?

Sandra: Gracious God Holy and Just

Thou from whom we come and unto whom our spirits return

Thou our dwelling place in all generations

Rest upon us in the silence of this moment we pray

Dry the tears of those moved to emotion in an hour of separation

Illumine the skyline of opportunity that lies behind the rain clouds of worry

Carry young hearts open to friendship into seas of friendship

Help us hear for our time the voice of the Prophet

‘What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly’?

Help us we earnestly pray to prefer justice to judgment

Help us we earnestly pray to love the merciful more than the material

Help us we earnestly pray to walk humbly not haughtily

May the degrees we earn turn by degrees the wheel of life from judgment to justice

May the courses we choose inspire in choices later a keenness of mind matched by a fullness of heart

May the learning we gain afford us the gain of humility, the honest desire to give credit where credit is due, and not to tip the scale

May the friendships we make in their turn make us less inclined to judgment and more enamored of justice

May the regrets we acquire then incline us to mercy, as we have felt mercy, and not to material measurements alone

May the adventures we bravely pursue give us the wisdom to know our condition, mortal, frail, prone to harm others, frail, mortal

May all our acquisition of knowledge chase us toward justice, toward mercy, and toward humility

And the wisdom to welcome, later, perhaps much later, the recognition that

The larger the body of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of mystery that surrounds it

Amen

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 09.2.2018 at 11:00 am
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Sunday
August 19

The Color Purple

By Marsh Chapel

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1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14

Ephesians 5:15-20

John 6:51-58

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(The form of today’s sermon is borrowed from the work of CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, although today’s preacher does not share Lewis’s fuller theology, nor does he believe in a literal devil or devils.)

My Dear Wormwood,

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

In particular, your work in the United States of America, Wormwood, has been nothing short of masterful. I take my horns off to you, one devil to another, and salute your destructivity. You have kept them fighting among themselves, morning to night, like children in a marketplace, solely sighting their own interests, assured that the one truth they each hold is the only truth, the only crayon in the box. Excellent, Wormwood, excellent. I could not have done better myself, even when I wore a younger devil’s tail. Keep at it, nephew, keep at it, set them one against the other, a man against his own house, a house divided, rich against poor, red against blue, radical against fundamentalist, communist against tea partier, personal ethics against social justice, doing against being. Oh the thrill we have to observe such needless hurt! Good boy. With this letter I enclose your official promotion, commendation, and ribbon as demon of the year, with special commendation for inciting divisive discord, in particular in the ‘lower forty eight’. Wormwood—you devil you!

Now, Wormwood, it would not do for me, your affectionate Uncle, Screwtape, Superintendent of demons in the near Milky Way, to let you go without a little avuncular advice. Call it a little devilish Dutch uncle advice, to keep you on your way. Down below they are considering this year, this fall in major proportion, the great hope of a land of the free, and a home of the brave, a community with liberty and justice for all, a place where those who have much might not have too much, and those who have little might not have too little. Ouch! It cools the fires of hell to hear such loving rhetoric. Here are some bits of wisdom, Wormwood my dear nephew, from your affectionate uncle, Screwtape.

Be most careful, Wormwood, not to let any of these groups you have so carefully set upon each other, with daggers drawn, get Solomon’s idea that wisdom comes from the humility of service, that wisdom is justified by deeds, that wisdom is justified by all her children, that wisdom comes in more than one color. Make sure the blue stay blue, and the red stay red. Flee the color purple, Wormwood, with its recognition of dialectical thought, its movement toward full truth, its bow before the sin all share, its willingness to learn the painful lesson of humility within a time of humiliation. Keep them fighting. Keep the Presbyterians denouncing pride, and forgetting about sloth and falsehood. Keep the Methodists denouncing sloth, and forgetting about pride and falsehood. Keep the Lutherans denouncing falsehood, and forgetting about pride and sloth. Yes. Excellent. Purple is dangerous to us, Wormwood. If the blue start seeing that the red have a point, here and there, or at least that real change is real hard and takes real work in real time including actually showing up at the polls on voting day—your cause is lost. Keep them shouting at each other, like children in a marketplace, one group wanting to play weddings and another wanting to play funerals, pipes vs. wails, dances vs. weepings. Take the purple out of their crayon boxes. You want gated communities, the demise of public schools, lines of suburban\urban separation, racial disease and distrust, class separations, ideological fences, and a verbal war of all against all. Tweet by tweet by tweet. Children in the marketplace, as their Savior, said, yes, Wormwood, well done.

And keep them discouraged in defeat. When they lose make sure they lose hope too. I am worried about far sighted, eloquent, hopeful leaders, like that Mario Cuomo a generation ago. Remember when he got defeated? But on the night of his defeat, remember what he said: “I come from a religion where the whole symbol of the religion ended in condemnation and crucifixion. But that wasn’t the measure of the experience…That’s just the way it ended…This is a metaphor for everybody’s life, that it is in the living…that you make your mark. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose”. The meaning of life is in the living of life (E Fromm).

Here is an example. I hear the good heart, the Solomonic heart and mind, of some of their leaders saying something about children, about the need for education and health care for all children and young adults, across the land, through age 21. Wormwood, this is peril for us! Be on the qui vive! If that country ever got behind that idea, and every child had medical care, education, respect—oh, it worries me. Why, the natural aristocracy as Ortega called it, would come to the surface. Keep them pinned down, keep their leaders pinned down, Wormwood, in tragic conflict, in financial red ink, in culture wars. And be vigilant! Sometimes they get the idea! You remember, many years ago, how that 11 year old Boy Scout, Brennan Hawkins, was lost for a month in the Utah mountains, and 3000 searchers looked for four days until they found him! The lost was found. Oh, the joy they had in it, too. It is like the joy a Christian has at bringing a friend, relative, neighbor to church to experience love and faith. There is no greater joy! It makes my devil’s blood freeze. The rescuer said, “I feel relieved and happy.” Oh Lordy. See, if they really meant it, if they really chose to live with hope against hope, hoping for what they do not see, and waiting for it with patience, we would be out of business in your part of the hemisphere. And business has been so good, of late!

Another example, Wormwood. We head devils hate to hear about people moving from poverty to well-being. We want a permanent underclass, so that we can then use it to foment division. We want a few of the people to have almost all the money. Excellent. But this country and its churches, especially the Methodists, have always championed social mobility, like that in the churches of Paul, way back when. His urban Christians were ‘status inconsistent’, and so are the living churches today. They are vibrant, they are diverse. Take that Chapel down in Boston there, not far from you, Wormwood, you devil you. Marsh Chapel. They are of many colors and hues and shapes and backgrounds. They resemble the globe on a Sunday. They know—AND THEY LIVE—the universal gospel of the living bread, come down from heaven, with whom to be in communion is eternal life. Oooh, that bothers me Wormwood, to hear such preaching, that ongoing incessant acclamation of a word of faith in pastoral voice toward a common hope. It is irritating! It really frosts my preserves. See what you can do to keep people from listening on the radio, or, worse, horror of horrors, showing up in worship. Those Marsh Chapel people are like that Paul of Tarsus, a thorn in MY flesh, that Apostle to the Gentiles, but we got him at last, remember? We need to keep people in their place. I tell you, nephew, it bothers me when I read about a young woman, Della Mae Justice, who was a 15 year old foster child living in a hut with a dirt floor, until her uncle came and found her and took her into his own home. He was an attorney in Kentucky. She said it was like little Orphan Annie going to live with the Rockefellers. Listen to this Wormwood, listen to what she said, and see if doesn’t freeze your blood:

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

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

Or, look at this matter of the ‘Queen of Soul’. When one young woman grows up in the church, her dad a preacher, and then she starts singing, and she has a voice from, you know, up there--heaven…pretty soon all those divisions we worked so hard to set up start melting: gospel against rock, jazz against R and B, spirituality against sensuality, and pretty soon have the ‘Queen of Soul’ whose music is universally loved. I mean it Wormwood, purple can be a sound as well as a color as well as a voice as well as a word. Keep them all divided up if you can, and get that purple crayon out of their national, their existential crayon box. Purple means good hope for a good future. Get rid of it nephew, Wormwood, you devil you.

Confusion, miscommunication, mistrust—these are your best allies, my shrewd nephew. And there, I must compliment you: you have done so much to them through technology and they have hardly caught up 10%; they have hardly any idea! But be careful. Over time they could catch on. They must not be allowed to remember the lessons of the past. Like that Solomon and his wise, measured understanding. Or that author of Ephesians talking about personal, communal balance and discipline, that ‘keep calm carry on’ malarky. Or, especially, that Fourth Gospel, ever announcing the hope of the presence of the divine. The last thing on earth our Fearless Leader, the Prince of Darkness, wants is a hope of planetary peace. Then people would be free, purple crayon in hand, to draw a picture of a nation and a world that can work, measured by the condition of the least, the last, and the lost.

Let me be blunt, Wormwood. When you see a red woman and a blue man determined to think together, learn from each other, and work side by side, and they have lunch at a table adorned in purple, close that restaurant. We just cannot have that kind of synthesis going on. Thesis, yes. Antithesis, yes. But no Synthesis. Red we can stand, blue we can handle. It is the color purple that is our downfall. We cannot afford that kind of creativity, new creation, new thinking. We can’t have Bob Gates defending John Brennan, on the basis of what is true, right, hopeful and just. That Gates, that Texas Methodist, always out there doing good for others, now in business, here at a college, there in the defense department--with the red and then the blue, then fixing the Boy Scouts mistake about gays, then, here he is again, supporting John Brennan over against emerging authoritarianism. Purple, Gates is purple to the core. Beware that kind of person, Wormwood. That is purple and that is our peril, Wormwood, you devil you.

Let me be blunter, Wormwood. When you see a church, one of the last places people actually gather if they gather at all, that is both red and blue, and putting on a robe with a purple hue, weaken that church. A denomination that stands for children, for the poor, for social mobility, for justice, for Biblical, dialectical thought, not just the thunderbolts from far left and right--drain that swamp. What you have done to the Methodists in the Northeast, eliminating half their membership in a generation, you need to do across the country. Get them so worked up with each other that they just can’t work together. Have them so entirely invested in resistance that they have no energy, or imagination, or voice, for restoration. Restoration, that is the purple hope, the purple trouble, the purple hue. Make them angry, not hopeful. Keep them angry, not hopeful.

I have one specific request, dear nephew. Keep your eye on that chapel in Boston. You know, the one on Commonwealth Avenue. They are growing. They are building. They are liberal and yet they are blue and red together. They love children. They are learning to tithe. They are starting to invite. Work on them, Wormwood. Make them fear the unknown. Make them tentative. Make them forget their outreach to students, their welcome to faculty, their mission work and children’s programs. Make them accentuate divisions, all divisions, gender, race, ethnicity, orientation, class –sweet divisions, sweet divisions. Make them disagree wherever they can. I will check your work at our Halloween review. Halloween—what a fitting, a good time for us to be together, Wormwood.

I send you best wishes for all that is predatory and mendacious, nephew. Remember my theme song, your Uncle Screwtape’s favorite, stolen from Blake, our shared theme song: When Satan first the black bow bent, and the moral law from the gospel rent, he turned the law into a sword and spilt the blood of mercy’s Lord.

And put your horns, pitch fork and tail into it, Wormwood, you devil you. Hold back that Solmonic wisdom: I am only a little child, and I do not know how to come out or go in. Give your servant therefore an understanding mind to discern between good and evil. Hold back that teaching from Ephesians: Be careful how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil…sing songs and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves. Hold back that Gospel promise in John: I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever… Whoever eats of this bread will live forever… Whoever eats of this bread will live forever…

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 08.19.2018 at 11:00 am
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Sunday
July 29

The Least of These

By Marsh Chapel

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Ephesians 3:14-21

John 6:1-21

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Our Gospel this morning, sung in hymns, including children’s hymns, read in Holy Scripture, including the Fourth Gospel, approached in thought and speech, including in a twenty minute sermon, and, in full, lived out in the exuberance of a summer Sunday, accents the glory and revelation in the least among us, the littlest among us. The Gospel of John exalts the glory of God revealed in the divine presence, throughout and through all of life. Our passage from John 6 is one of seven great miraculous accounts recalled in the preaching of the earlier church, and collected in the first half of the Gospel of John, as a way to ring the bell, and sing the song, and tell the tale of the divine presence. It is miraculous that 5,000 have gathered. It is miraculous that all are fed in one setting. It is miraculous, more miraculous still, that not only are they fed, but they are satisfied. That is a glorious morning, when all are satisfied. It is miraculous that in this revelation, there arises, for the author of John in reflection, a sense of what this must mean, that one from beyond has entered within, that one from above has descended below, that ‘a prophet’—such a strange appellation—has come into the world. To be sure, John has received this story from tradition (as in Mark 6), but he has changed it to celebrate a glorious revelation, which takes him well beyond any simply sacramental concern. And of all John’s changes, perhaps, the greatest is the agency he gives to one of the least of those present. In John, unlike in Mark and the other gospels, there is a new figure in the story, a boy, a lad, a little fellow, who is the only one who remembered to bring a lunch along. There was, John avers, a lad with 5 barley loaves and two fish. John smuggles into the morning’s Gospel a new character in the ongoing story of Gospel, of divine presence. In radiant exuberance, the revelatory joy of Jesus’ presence, then and now, on the hills of Palestine and in the hills of New England, John alerts us to this one little lad, the boy with the lunch to share. This is good news packaged in the lunch pail of the least of these among us.

On the streets of Boston in the summer, we too are alert to the least of these among us. Summer takes our city and makes it young, younger still, young again. This is a time when people from all over the globe come and pay us a call, come and visit us here. Just look at the license plates of the cars driving past you some time on the highways north, south and west. Just listen to the languages spoken as you saunter down a summer day in this magical city, as you ‘flaneur dans le rue’. It is an unutterable happiness to be graced with those who want to visit, who come from afar, who save and plan and travel to get here to see something, to learn something, to touch the hem of something.

For this is dear old Boston, the home of the bean and the cod, where the Lowells will speak only to the Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God. Boston, in so many ways the city of origin, the point of departure. Boston, birthplace of the republic: Haymarket Square, Old North Church, Bunker Hill, Old Ironsides.

Boston, home to heroes: Paul Revere, Abigail Adams, John Hancock. Boston, where in 1832 the city heard a children's choir sing, "My Country tis of thee", written a year earlier, and sung first at Park Street Church, just a few blocks from here. This afternoon, on the Freedom Trail you can talk with "Ben Franklin" attired in the garb of 1780. On the subway you can stop at the Scollay Square station and remember the man who never returned. Take the train to Fenway park and peer at the green monster. Try not to make the mistake of wearing a Yankees hat. Walk through downtown and the flower gardens in the glorious Public Garden. Spend a minute along the old streets, and feel the freshness of a country being born, being formed, being built. Visit the children's science museum. Boston your home town takes the world and makes it young again!

One of the best spots in this young city, this birthing room for freedom, is the Aquarium. Right on the port shoreline your city has built a magnificent structure, a several tiered tank. Coral has been transported from the Caribbean, and then also reproduced. Fish of dozens of colors, shapes, sizes swim in the blue green cylinder. Divers in fins, wetsuits and air tanks maintain the giant manmade ocean tank. Stingrays swimming in a separate pool--you could touch them! And around and around the outside of the cylinder walk mesmerized children and adults, looking on the splendor of the Neptune's kingdom. There are six kinds of sharks in the Aquarium. The sand shark and others. At the top level you can watch them jump and swim. Boston returns one to the great ocean deep from which life at last emerged across the millennia. Boston takes the world and makes it young again!

A generation ago, with three children in tow, in the summer heat and on a limited budget, it is a happy glory to recall, our then young family visited the Aquarium. The place was mobbed, packed with kids and parents, classes and groups. The colors and shapes and sizes of the humans walking clockwise around the tank mimicked nicely the variety of fish swimming counterclockwise inside. We saw a little girl pressing her nose against the glass up toward the tank top, just as the sand shark swam by. Two women photographed the coral. A boy screamed as he patted the stingray. There were maybe 3000 people inside the Aquarium. All of a sudden, the loudspeaker crackled. "Please be quiet, all of you." Soon the tall structure, full of children and parents, was nearly silent. The announcer continued, "I must regrettably report that a little boy is lost. He is three years old. He is wearing jeans and a white sweatshirt that says Boston College on the front. He has red hair. Please take a minute wherever you are and look toward the tank and then along the walkway." In a moment, you could feel the atmosphere in the building shift from lark to worry. Every parent's worst nightmare had hit. The tension around the tank was palpable. The thought that one child, even one, out for a day of learning and play would disappear, or worse, held the gathered company on a tight leash.

In a single moment, the joy of the many had been overshadowed, darkly overshadowed by the need of just one. All knew instinctively that there are no extra children, none to spare, not one to give up, to throw to the sharks. In that kind of dramatic moment, it so very clear: every child is precious, every one dear.

We have wondered a little this summer, remembering our long ago visit, about the way the announcement so disturbed those of us who could see our own children. Of course you can think of many reasons. But one central reason the announcement "child lost…white sweat shirt.." pierced the group that day is that we are dimly aware that there is a kind of revelation in the least of these, like the lunch for the road of life brought along by the lad with the 5 barley loaves and 2 fish. Children have not had a chance in full at life yet. They have not had their time yet in the batter’s box. They give a sharp measure of how what we say stands up to what we do, of what our walk is like in earshot of all our talk. Children suffer the effects of poverty most strongly. Children endure the effects of family demise most squarely. Children miss the care of physicians and dentists most keenly. Children feel the impact of bad diet most sharply. Children are too little, too weak, too powerless, too small in every way to watch out for themselves. Children measure the depth of morality around us by measuring the amount of time, energy, commitment, and money within us, ready to be devoted to children.

As a country, just a few weeks ago, we had a shared, convulsive, similar moment, did we not? We know the need for laws, for borders, for the institutions that make up a civil society, including proper, legal, fair immigration practices. Across different perspectives, we can largely agree that law is central to safety and peace, that law is meant to make us more human and humane rather than less. And we also, by vast majority, know and affirm the centrality of immigration in the birth and life and health of our land. But law, like scripture, requires interpretation, and application, and therein lies challenge. So when as country, we faced the shame and humiliation, within this decade of humiliation, of seeing children taken from their parents, seeing parents deprived of their children, seeing what can befall the least among us, and especially those 2,000 directly affected, in our own time, at the borders of life, there was a common revulsion, a common reaction, a common response. Nota bene. There is in that one moment a sign, a sign of a common hope. Like the presence of the little lad who shared his lunch, across the lake from Capernaum, and so both took and gave the measure of that Gospel moment, so the least of these measure us.

As a church, let us readily confess as well, we have yet to achieve the kind of caring for children which we profess. The pious words of a recent Methodist Church statement (“Durham Declaration") are ones we all share: "We believe that caring and providing for one another includes welcoming children into the family of the Church. As members of the Body of Christ, we know that children are gifts from God. In this we follow the example of our Lord, who, during his earthly ministry and in the face of opposition, welcomed children to his side. And we conform to the example of the early church, which, though living in the midst of a pagan empire that casually practiced abortion and abandoned children (usually to slavery, prostitution or death), helped to provide refuge for unwanted ones and their needy parents." There was even a footnote to the Didache. Well, good. Good words. But anyone who has been around the church for very long knows that we do not endlessly, fully practice what we preach, in this as in so many areas. We sometimes devote more language to love of children in church than we do actual time spent with children. Vacation Bible School (we have run one every year since 1979, including a small one here June 24) is one bellwether for our commitment. Sunday School is a close second. We are still more than rightly judged by the sort of people we produce, the sort of children we raise, in the communities of faith.

One day this summer, after a round of golf, two friends stopped at the home of a third to have supper. The host is a retired physician, a family doctor from the bygone days of "fee for service". Redolent with exercise and at ease in the company of friends, the doctor reflected on his life and work. A summer evening, a twilight supper, a moment before the light begins to fade and the cool air returns--this became an hour for thoughts before the autumn twilight of life, a moment before a great change of season.

He spoke about service and care. He ruminated regarding "the young doctors coming up". He unabashedly celebrated great-grandchildren, grandchildren, and children (both adopted and biological). A large family portrait hung on the living room wall. Mostly, though, this veteran of decades of stewardship campaigns talked about his church. He reckoned: "I try to tithe because in the church children get what they cannot get anywhere else. They catch a sense of wonder--wonder at the world, wonder at love, wonder before holiness. They see real kindness--kind people, kind ideas, kind words, kind works. Most of all, they learn about generosity--generosity in church that makes a world of difference. In the church seeds are planted: seeds of wonder, kindness, and generosity. I am happy to hope that my tithing has made a difference."

It made me happy to hear him say so. It makes me happy, on this summer Sunday, to think of all the good women and men, near and far, who are offering themselves, offering yourselves, to, and with, and through the least of these. A student teaching church school. A woman running a child care center. A man hiking with scouts. A musician volunteering with a children’s choir. A graduate student preparing to work with, to counsel children. A couple who lead confirmation classes. The blessed ones who will volunteer to lead youth groups. Summer camp counselors, overworked and underpaid. And more broadly, the citizenry of this land, which still dimly perceives that the lad with the fish and loaves, the least of these among us, measures us.

Someone helped you grow up. Someone helped you discover discipline, hard work and a passion for education. Discipline to reflect the ordering power of God. Work to reflect the creative energy of God. Education to reflect the life-giving newness of God's spirit. Children, the least of these, are made "in the image and likeness of God."

People know that there are no extra children, none to spare, not even one to throw to the sharks. When the need is clearly presented, the problem is almost solved. So it was on a July day in dear old Boston, a generation ago, that after twenty minutes of looking and waiting, the tourists at the Boston Aquarium again heard the crackling loudspeaker, and again heard the announcer’s voice, and at last heard the report, the child is found, the lost is found. Several thousand people stared at one another and many fish and cheered instinctively, just as we will stand and cheer when every child across this great land and around the world over has what she needs to make a life.

One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, said to him, "There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?" Jesus said, "Make the people sit down." Now there was a great deal of grass in the place; so they sat down, about five thousand in all. Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted. When they were satisfied, he told his disciples, "Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost." …When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, "This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world."

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 07.29.2018 at 11:00 am
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Sunday
July 8

The Drinking Gourd

By Marsh Chapel

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Mark 6:1-13

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There is a dark temptation in the assumption that the common hope of freedom is really in the hands of somebody else, someone other than you and me. It is falsely reassuring to judge that the real big advances in liberty have been, are, or will be the work of somebody else.

Today, in this week of Independence Day, we want to remember that the history of our nation tells another story. Our land was populated by people who saw the expanding circle of hope as their own responsibility. With Reinhold Niebuhr, they defined love as taking responsibility.

For the week past, we have been as a family at home, in the farmlands of the Empire State, due west. On the Fourth of July we sat in a boat, three generations watching, as fireworks adorned the sky, north, south, east and west. And then, the quiet, and the dark. And then the firmament, the black sky dotted with bits of white. And there, the ‘drinking gourd’, the Big Dipper, the constellation whose outer stars point to the North Star. The way home, the way north, the way out, the way of hope. Our forebears have left us some travel tips on the journey of hope. Walk with me for a few minutes, due west. Here is a Sunday morning summer vacation trip, free of charge, and lasting only twenty minutes, a remembrance of hope, perhaps hopeful for us, just now, in our own time of trial. I am taking you back home with me this morning. I want you to ‘meet the folks’.

Once a southern Methodist preacher paid this complement. “I mean this, about your area. The south is a different place than it was seventy years ago. Totally different, and the difference comes from Rochester and Syracuse. Two things have completed changed the southern jurisdiction: civil rights and air conditioning! Civil Rights from Rochester and Air Conditioning from Syracuse!” The story of air conditioning we leave for another day.

Our land has given rise to many women and men who did not leave freedom to somebody else. Its price of eternal vigilance they provided in very daily, very personal, very local, very immediate ways. In the same manner by which we might take for granted Niagara Falls, so close and so grand, we take these mighty stories for granted, saving stories of hope and freedom.

Due west is the land of Hiawatha (“who causes rivers to run”). Such musical names adorn this geography: Canandaigua, Tioghnioga, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Susquehanna. The great native leader of the Iroquois showed in the 15^thcentury the critical need for union, for space and time in which to live together. His leadership was focused on common hope, on collegial relations, on counsel together, and so he is harbinger of all the examples of faith and freedom to come up along the Mohawk River and the Erie Canal, as Longfellow rhymed:

All your strength is in your union

All your weakness in discord

Therefore be at peace henceforward

And as brothers live together

This also is the land of Harriet Tubman. You may want to visit her home in Auburn. Her neighbor William Seward, Lincoln’s opponent and ally, also from Auburn, bought Alaska, considered at the time a folly, an “ice-box”. Tubman’s grand niece, Janet Lauerson, was on our church staff for a time in Syracuse, after we both migrated down from the far north country, not far from the burial place of John Brown. Brown’s body lies moldering under a ski lift near Lake Placid. He and Gerrit Smith, founder of Peterboro, a village for freed slaves, a short 15 minutes north of our July 4 fireworks, were not ‘compatibalists’ regarding slavery. As Lincoln would later say, they felt those who most affirmed slavery should start by trying it for themselves. Peterboro, a small village of people of color, in our childhood, stood out, under its civil war statue, one hundred years later, as a beachhead of freedom. Brown, Smith, Seward and others were the chorus before which Tubman could sing out the life of freedom, following the underground railroad. Following the Drinking Gourd.Remember her wisdom: “When I found I had crossed that line (on her first escape from slavery, 1845), I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything...I started with this idea in my head, ‘There’s two things I’ve got a right to…death or liberty’…’Twant me, ‘twas the Lord. I always told him, “I trust you. I don’t know where to go or what to do, but I expect you to lead me, and he always did.”

You will expect to hear something of Frederick Douglass, on this trek, who is buried in Rochester. His cemetery plot is across the street from Strong Memorial Hospital. As one patient said one day, looking through the window, “it gives you something to think about”. Douglass printed a journal, the “North Star” in Rochester, and so developed a voice for a new people in a new era. 80 years or so later, at Syracuse University, it was Professor Roland Wolseley who developed the first national program in Black Journalism, across the mid to late 20^thcentury. Wolseley was formed in the faith under the great preaching of the best Methodist preacher in the 20^thcentury, Ernest Freemont Tittle, when Wolseley’s young wife was Tittle’s secretary. Wolseley was our pastor parish chair, and measured sermons according to their likeness or otherwise to those of Tittle. Wolseley lived around the corner from the Carrier Dome and therein a moving tribute to Ernie Davis, a kid from Elmira, who, a century after Douglass, and in the lifespan of Wolseley, gave tragic, courageous, and lasting embodiment to the hope of racial justice, harmony and integration. He also played some football. The voice of Douglass rings out against the harmonic background of Tittle, Wolseley, Davis and others. In the North Star, Douglass wrote: “The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle…If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its mighty waters.” Or maybe we should give the honor to his ally Sojourner Truth: “That…man…says women can’t have as many rights as man, cause Christ wasn’t a woman. Well, where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman. Man had nothing to do with it!”

Susan B. Anthony did not leave the project of freedom to others. I wonder what sort of dinner companion she might have been. Her constant consort with governors and senators across the Empire state made her an early Eleanor Roosevelt. Think a bit about where we have traveled in hope under the Drinking Gourd. Pause and slake some thirst by remembering real progress in history. Our grandmother grew up in Cooperstown and graduated from Smith College four years before she had the right to vote. Our mother was born only eight years after full suffrage. Yet today, my wife is a musician and teacher, my sister is a corporate attorney, my other sister a teacher in medical care, and across a life in ministry my top colleagues have been female. I scratch my head to imagine a world without their voices. For instance, Syracuse produced Betty Bone Schiess, one of the first women ordained to ministry in the Protestant Episcopal church. One of the Philadelphia 11. We study her in Introduction to Religion. One rainy day when my daughter Emily was 13 and had the flu, we met Schiess, at the druggist. The pharmacist called her name. I clamored over to investigate whether it were she, the famous Schiess. “Who wants to know?” she replied. As she left, after good banter, she turned in her slicker and totting an umbrella, and looking at us, pronounced this blessing: “One day you will be a Methodist bishop”. At first I thought she was speaking to me. But no. “Thank you very much”, my daughter replied. Think of Schiess when you visit the birthplace of suffrage and feminism in Seneca Falls. Susan B. Anthony’s witness stands out among the witness of so many others: your grandmother, your mother, your sister, your wife, your daughter, your pastor, Betty Bone Schiess, and so many others. Who can forget her motto: “Failure is impossible” (on her 86^thbirthday, 1906). And her challenge: “Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation.”

Sometimes the freedom train derailed. Exuberance can produce minor collisions. When we get so focused on the speedometer that we forget to drive the car safely, then trouble arises. Woodstock pales by comparison with the communal experiments in this region during the nineteenth century. The Shaker Community and the Oneida Community perhaps can bracket our recollection. Under Mother Ann Lee, and starting in farm country near New Lebanon, in the Albany area, just across the Massachusetts line, the shaking Quakers firmly addressed the matter of sex. They forbade it. Like the desert fathers and Qumran communities of old, they took Paul at his word and meditated fully on 1 Corinthians 7. Women and men came together only once a week, on Sunday morning, for ecstatic singing and dancing, hence their name. This made church attendance somewhat more than casual liturgical observance. However, the practice did not amplify the community itself: infant baptisms lacked the requisite infant, and so were infrequent. Consequently the Shakers moved to Cleveland where they blended into Sherwood Anderson’s new Ohio, returning to the old ways of hard work, monogamy, and frugality. In short, they became Methodists. Hear, again, the Shaker tune:

Tis a gift to be loving

Tis the best gift of all

Like a gentle rain love falls to cover all

When we find ourselves in the place just right

‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight

When true, simplicity is gain

To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed

To turn, turn, will be our delight

‘Till by turning, turning, we come round right

Now, the Oneida’s. You may want to read again Without Sin, the history of their somewhat different experiment. Just a few miles west of New Lebanon, the Oneida community set out to find heaven on earth, the end of all oppressions, and even the hope that, as John H Noyes read from Revelation, “death itself will be no more”. Although I went to High School in Oneida I do not recall a full lesson on the matter of stirpiculture, the heart of the Oneida experiment. The Oneidas practiced “complex” marriage, in which every man was married to every woman and vice-versa. Procreation was planned, through a deliberated, committee process. (For those of you for whom this is more information than you require, I apologize) Three hundred in number at their greatest growth, the community produced bear traps and then silver, continuing, in some fashion, until just a few years ago. Of all the utopian experiments, the Oneida project is one of the most fascinating. However, after word got out about the doings and practices in Oneida, clergy in Syracuse banded together and ran them out of town, first to Canada and then to the Midwest. Noyes died on the trip, and the community disappeared, except on your dinner table, in wedding gifts, and in quality restaurants. Let us be charitable and remember their hope, their love of freedom, as Noyes expressed it, even if we cannot affirm his methods: “I am free of sin and in a state of Perfection”

God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. The faith of Jesus Christ and the freedom of Jesus Christ we celebrate today. Our forebears were disinclined to leave the pursuit of freedom to others. They seized freedom in their own hands and by their own lives. They did not wait on others. They did not pause to seek a secret blessing. They did not wait until some ethereal sign emerged. They did not expect some magic insight. And it is their hope of freedom that is our greatest remembrance of them.

They followed today’s dominical teaching of Mark 6. (Notice, today, that here Jesus fails in preaching but succeeds in pastoral leadership.) When you journey toward hope, keep your friendships in good repair (6:7), travel light (6: 8), keep faith close which is the confidence that better things can come out of worse, waste no time (6:10), when rejected shake the dust from your feet and move on (6:11). And keep the main thing the main thing: Jesus Christ is come to guide us true north, guide us by the Drinking Gourd, guide us on the journey of hope, and we are not there yet. Of course not. It is hope that we seek. And hope that is seen is not hope. Who hopes for what he sees? We hope for what we do not see, and wait for it with patience. Real love is taking historical responsibility on the journey of hope.

In earshot of our Lord’s teaching, in remembrance of the freedom and hope of our forebears, there is no avoiding a very personal question: as a Christian man or woman, what are you going to do to continue to expand the circle of freedom in our time? Where is your Polaris, your North Star, your Drinking Gourd? Where is your tribal council to create? Where is your slavery to escape? Where is your North Star to publish? Where is your franchise to find? Where is your libertinism to avoid? Where is your hope to share? Are you to celebrate independence by singing and smiling only? Or will you lift a hand?

From the rear of Marsh Chapel, if the windows could speak, you would hear our 16^thPresident, himself a beacon of hope:

(Gettysburg Address, recited)

May it be so:

Follow the drinking gourd,

For the old man is a-waiting for to carry you to freedom,

Follow the drinking gourd.

Left foot, peg foot, traveling on,

Follow the drinking gourd.

The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 07.8.2018 at 11:00 am
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Sunday
June 24

Grace and Peace

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to listen to the full service

2 Corinthians 6:1-13

Mark 4:35-41

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Grace opens our hearts. Peace stills our hearts. May this summer 2018, for you, be a summer of Grace and Peace.

First, Grace

Grace opens our hearts.

A friend recalled Marilynn Robinson: “Theologians talk about prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave—that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. And therefore, this courage allows us, as the old men said, to make ourselves useful. It allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying exactly the same thing.” (p. 246, Gilead, paperback, 2006).

Let us make ourselves useful to the cause of grace. Christ molds us, using our faults, even, He molds us in the cruciform of love. We are not perfect, for we are not perfectible. So, Shakespeare: ‘They say best men are molded out of faults, and, for the most, become much more the better, for being a little bad’.

In her study of religious congregations, the subject of several of her award-winning books, Boston University Professor Nancy Ammerman says she’s witnessed two big changes. One is the diversifying of the American religious landscape, as immigrants have seeded the country with Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, and other religions. The second is the growth of the “nones”(the religiously unaffiliated). Their mushrooming is a response to dismay with both the growing politicization of religion (especially evangelical Christians linking up with the right), she says, and scandals such as Catholic clergy sex abuse. These developments prompted the rise of self-described spiritual-but-not-religious Americans. But “the bottom line of my research is that they’re probably neither,” she says. (April 25 2018, BU TODAY)

What does it mean, here and now, to be a Christian, to grow in grace and learn the arts, the habits of the spiritual and the religious?

In this week when we have watched as the welfare of 2300 immigrant children has been hanging in the balance, the question has a direct and sudden personal immediacy, even if in retrospect the moment has been amply foreshadowed in the last two years. We hear the force of the Apostle’s warning, existential warning, not to accept the grace of God in vain.

Yes, you have reason and obligation to be concerned about the persons and personalities driving cultural and political formation, concerned about rhetoric and language and behavior, concerned about voice, and what voice and voices do speak for the land you love, the country you cherish.

Yes, you have reason and obligation to be concerned about the policies, which emanate from those personalities and persons, those forms of rhetoric and language and behavior. Government is just what we decide to do together.(D Patrick, 4/8/18) Policies affecting now these 2300 children, and others that cause 5-year old children in Mississippi to lose their teeth due to lack of medical care, or policies that may ignite and incite the wreckage of warfare, or policies that enrich the few and impoverish the many by forging a hierarchy of zip-codes, or policies that forget the stranger in our midst, or policies that diminish some by means of race or gender or nationality, in particular: about this you have reason and obligation, as Christian people, to be concerned. You have no option about the concern, however you finally judge the policies. You are free to run your marathon, in personal faith, but just make sure you see the social engagement all along the route, from Heartbreak Hill to Kenmore Square, that makes your run possible. Grace begets a combination of deep personal faith and active social involvement.

Yes, you have full reason and obligation to be concerned about public good, about the forms of culture and civil society across our land, painstakingly built up over 250 years, that are not government and not politics, but are more fundamental and more fragile than both. You have reason and obligation to be concerned about flagrant falsehoods and the celebration of untruth (contrary to regular assertion, there are by percentage fewer incidents of crime among immigrants, legal or undocumented, than in the rest of the population, for instance) about the denigration of women by callous mistreatment, about the mockery of the one hundred years of devotion to moral development by the Boy Scouts, about the disdain for courts of justice and the rule of law, about discourtesies to transgender people, about accommodation of white supremacists, about the rejection of diplomacy amid long standing global partnerships as a matter of course, about verbal and visual insults of Puerto Ricans, about forms of spurious half-baked nationalism, about the hourly shredding of the inherited role and influence of national leadership, about racist disdain, in scatological expression, for countries of color, about unapologetic, flagrant, unbiblical and public misuses of sexuality, about the dismemberment of public discourse centered on objective truth, about the un-enforcement of fair housing laws, and so on—in short, about all manner of the lowering of standards and forms of civil society.

Grace, the struggle to live by grace and not in vain, grace is the antidote to what is graceless. Grace opens the heart, as Paul teaches the early Christians in Corinth. Grace for persons, policies and public good. Beloved: You have not accepted the grace of God in vain. You have accepted the grace of God in faith. This very past week, in particular, have you accepted grace to lead you on and lead you home. If grace can change the heart of John Newton, a slaver, who gave us our hymn, Amazing Grace, then grace can continue to open hearts, open minds, and open doors. Our radio congregation, this week, has led the way. A message from Vermont hails the determination of the United Methodist Church to bring charges against a member, the current US Attorney General, who may have fallen under the graceless shadows of child abuse and racism (as the charge alleges). (In forty years of ministry, this disciplinary paragraph has been used, in my experience, only once, prior to this week. Charges are brought against clergy with regularity, but almost never against laity. Rare, but there.) A message from Boston calls us to faith, to protest, and to compassion, by the grace of God. A message from regular weekly congregant listeners in Georgetown Texas, calls on the Methodist Church to remember its own disciplinary teaching: The official United Methodist policy is stated clearly in the Book of Discipline: “We oppose immigration policies that separate family members or that include detention of families with children.” (Para. 162.H, emphasis added). A message from New Haven Connecticut, and the campus of Yale University, admonishes us all to civility, recalling Hannah Arendt, to meet the graceless with grace: After a while, people come to “believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true,” wrote Arendt, the German-born philosopher, in describing how truth lost its way in her native land.

Grace opens the heart. Here is what the Holy Scripture helps us see, regarding grace. From Vermont, to Boston, to Texas, to New Haven…you are not alone. You see and know the ongoing struggles, in grace for grace, by grace to undo the graceless, as did St. Paul in his frank accounting of his own struggles, in admonishment to the Corinthians. In fact, we too will perhaps develop a catalogue of hurts, which then can be used to say, ‘You see. I have been for you, into injury. I am for you, even to hurt. So now, maybe, I can speak to you’. You see two years of past humiliation, and probably most of decade into the future, before the shadows fully lift, before the tide fully turns. You have endurance (UPOMONE) which may be allowed to stand for all the rest in Paul’s catalogue of hurt. You have endurance, in part, because you know that you are not alone. We have still in our mind, our memory, our heart, and our soul, as a people, a capacity for grace.

Grace opens the heart to a little worldly wisdom, let us say: I was once told the whimsical story of an Ethiopian tribe, Dorze by name, who, knowing that the leopard is a Christian animal, believe that like all good Christians in their region the leopard fasts on Wednesdays and Fridays; despite this belief, they are just as anxious to protect their herds and themselves from the leopard’s marauding on these days as on the other five! Wise as serpents, innocent as doves…

So do one thing. My grandmother had a sign on her kitchen door that read: ‘Do one thing. There. You’ve done one thing.’ Support one campaign, somewhere in the country where it makes a difference: by acquaintance, by prayer, by encouragement, by giving. For example.

Grace opens our hearts.

Second, Peace

Peace stills our hearts.

You have little trouble to understand why this wonderful passage, Mark 4:35, about the wind, and the sea, and the boat, and fear, and the dominical gift of peace, were so loved and cherished and remembered that Mark recalled and recorded the moment fully 30 years after the earthly ministry of Jesus. Peace! Be Still! While this narrative is embedded in the career of Jesus’ preaching, teaching, and healing, its meaning is a moment of resurrection, of lasting peace, a foretaste of heaven, within the vicissitudes of earth.

The Gospel of Mark is heard, written, read and interpreted, after resurrection. While the hearer knows the story, a passion narrative with a long introduction, as Wilhelm Wrede aptly said, the passion of the story is resurrection, in the light of which, after which, as a consequence of which, chapters 1-15, including our passage today, appear. You read Mark 4 in the bright light of Mark 16. You hear the account of the rocking boat in earshot of the account of the risen Lord. Why are you afraid? Have you no faith? Perfect love casts out fear, does it not? Which, that is, takes you back to April 1, to Easter. What do you remember from Easter? Do you recall Easter at all? Hug Easter. Life is meant to be lived in Easter, not Advent, not Lent, not Good Friday.

Remember an angel on the right, clothed in white. Remember the Crucified, going before, continuously before. Remember those great Greek Gospel words, you can hear their English cousins, tromos and ekstasis(trauma and ecstasy). Remember that they were afraid, but that resurrection gave Mary Magdalene the strength to move out of her past, and Peter the strength to admit faithful disappointment. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the preaching of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The chance for. The possibility of. The hearing of.

Now Markis not great literature, but it is Holy, it is Holy Scripture. It is not Plato, not Cicero, not Homer. Nor is the Greek of the gospel a finely tuned instrument. It is harsh, coarse and common. The gospel was formed, formedin the life of a community. Its passages and messages were announced as memories meant to offer hope. Its account of Jesus, in healing and preaching and teaching, all the way to the cross and beyond, is offered to a very human group of humans who are trying to make their way along His way. The Gospel is a record of the preaching of the gospel. To miss this, or to mistake this, is to miss the main point of the Gospel, and to miss the gospel. It is in preaching that the gospel arrives, enters, feasts, embraces, loves, and leaves. It is in preaching that you hear something that makes life meaningful, makes life loving, makes life real. It is in preaching that the Gospel of Mark came to be, as a community, over time, heard and reheard, remembered and rehearsed the story of Jesus crucified (his past) and risen (his presence). We should not expect narrative linearity, historical accuracy, or re-collective precision here. And in fact, we find none. Let me put it another way around. Most of the NT documents are, in one way or another, attempts to remember, accurately, the nature and meaning ofbaptism. Well, Mark fits that description. How are we to live with a measure of peace, one of the fruit of the spirit?

Peace stills the heart. Here is a story about Barbara Bush, of blessed memory. Her pastor at her funeral remembered Barbara Bush’s playful peace. He sat with her on the shore at Kennebunkport as she washed out her shoes in the rocky surf. A family came up and the mother said, ‘You look a lot like Barbara Bush.’ Barbara smiled and replied, ‘I get that a lot’. Peace.

Peace stills the heart. A consolation note, from one woman to another, carried this line: “I know your grief. Yet once my own grandmother died, in a way she was closer, more present, to me than in life, because neither of us was any longer twisted up in all those family conflicts. She became more really herself to me”.

Peace stills the heart. Years ago, here at BU, in an otherwise somewhat routine luncheon following a service for families of women and men in military service—I somehow think Sr. Olga hosted--a guest, the former national head of all Catholic Chaplains was introduced. Unsolicited, he offered a few excellent, brief comments. In sum, he said his work in Washington had largely been about finding ways to tell people ‘no’ without hurting them, to tell them ‘no’ without permanently damaging them. His example: 25 priests all feel called to be stationed in San Diego…but only 5 are needed. I found the reflection deeply true of life, of ministry, of administrative service, and simply but clearly put, peacefully put, in a human, honest, responsible, mature and caring way. His little speech carried truth that had been forged in the white heat of life, shaped and molded then by some semblance of reflection and prayer, and stated cleanly and happily. I think everyone there will remember his words, when all other 22 speakers are forgotten. He spoke from his lived experience. And he spoke with in a spirit of peace.

In peace, then, in conclusion, here are some humble, practical summer suggestions, on the way of peace. To struggle for grace, over the long term, you will need the nourishment of an inner peace. Find that peace in attentive embrace of what is beautiful and true and good. Yes, that means regular Sunday worship, wherever you can find the true and good and beautiful, as much as possible in equal measure. (For the Christian, worship is not optional, any more than is faithfulness in partnership or in disciplined giving). It also means morning prayer. Follow in the morning, if you like, Martin Luther and recite each morning the decalogue, the creed, and the Lord’s prayer (or add a psalm or two, or add the beatitudes, or add verse of St Paul, say Romans 12: 9). Or use a book of daily readings. Take a moment, maybe just a week, to start, to journal, to write down something that strikes your fancy, a quotation, a memory, a conversation, a poem. Share meals when possible:Half of all meals now eaten in the USA are eaten alone.Limit your consumption of news, and vary your sources for news. The average American spends 170 minutes a day watching television and 170 minutes a day searching the internet. That may be a little too much immediacy, in an age hungry to death rather for transcendence, don’t you think? That may be a little too much entertainment, in an age hungry to death for enchantment, don’t you think? Think of Kierkegaard and the divine incognito. Think of Ricouer and the second naivete. Think of Wesley and the reservoir of human goodness all around.

Make your song something like this: My life flows on in endless song, above earth’s lamentations; I hear the clear though far off hymn that hails a new creation; no storm can break my inmost calm, when to that rock I’m clinging; if Love is Lord of heaven and earth, how can I keep from singing?

Grace opens our hearts. Peace stills our hearts. May this summer 2018, for you, be a summer of Grace and Peace.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.24.2018 at 11:00 am
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Sunday
June 17

I Looked Over Jordan

By Marsh Chapel

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2 Kings 2:1-12

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The text for this Sunday's sermon is unavailable. Please enjoy this service's Community Announcements and Prayers of the People by the wonderful Reverend Doctor Jennifer Quigley and Reverend Soren Hessler.

Community Announcements

Good morning, and welcome to Marsh Chapel at Boston University. On this Father’s Day, we are glad that you are joining us for a moment of pause, rest, and worship, either here in the nave at 735 Commonwealth Avenue, listening via radio or internet waves at 90.9 WBUR or wbur.org, or later via the podcast. As we strive to be a service in the service of the city – Boston – and a heart in the heart of the city, know that you are welcome here – immigrant, refugee, or 8^thgeneration New Englander, black, brown, white, gay, straight, bi, trans, something else, or simply not sure. You are welcome here. Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Green Party, Independent, you are welcome here. If you are new to Marsh Chapel, we hope you may identify yourself to one of the chapel’s staff after the service so that we can introduce you better to this vibrant and diverse Christian community or add your name and contact info to the red pads at the end of each pew. If listening from afar, check out our website: www.bu.edu/chapel or send us an email at chapel@bu.edu. We are delighted to get you better connected.

While academic year chapel activities remain suspended for the summer, the chapel offices remain open on weekdays and Sunday mornings. We continue to be here for worship at 11am every Sunday and coffee hour following the service. We hope you might join us downstairs following the service today.

Next Sunday, June 24, following the morning worship service, join the Dean and Jan Hill for a Vacation Bible School experience beginning at noon complete with pizza, bible verses, music, and fellowship. For more information, contact chapel@bu.eduor speak with the Dean.

The following Sunday, July 1, the chapel’s annual Independence Day cookout will happen following the morning service. You are welcome to bring a dish to share.

Finally, on a more personal note, I am pleased to share that the Rev. Dr. Jennifer Quigley has accepted a two-year post-doctoral fellowship with the Louisville Institute and will be placed at Drew University Theological School as Assistant Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Studies. Jen and I will be moving to Madison, New Jersey, August 1. I will continue as Associate Director of the Miller Center for Interreligious Learning & Leadership at Hebrew College, working primarily remotely from Madison. We are both grateful for a decade of shared ministry with the community at Marsh Chapel, the last nine of which have been as members of the chapel staff. We are deeply indebted to the Marsh Chapel community, our colleagues on the staff, and especially the Dean and Jan. This community has formed us and transformed us and will continue to shape who we are and how we serve as we shift into new venues for ministry. Thank you for the warm wishes and glad tidings that were extended before the service today. We anticipate continuing to worship at the chapel through the end of July and hope to greet many of you individually before we move.

A complete list of chapel activities and worship opportunities is available on the chapel website www.bu.edu/chapel where there is also the opportunity for online giving to support the mission and ministry of Marsh Chapel. As the choir continues to lead us in worship and prayerful meditation, please remember it is a gift and a discipline to be a giver.

Prayers of the People

As we come to a time in our service where lift our hearts, our minds, and our spirits to God in prayer, I invite you to find a posture that will help you be in a spirit of prayer, by remaining seated, coming to the communion rail to kneel, or standing as the choir leads us in the call to prayer: lead me Lord.

Loving God, we come before you this morning as your children. Our brother Jesus taught that unless we change and become like little children, we will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Loving God, we ask that we may be transformed by your grace to become more childlike so that we might enter the kingdom of heaven.

Transform our hearts this morning. When our cynicism has gotten the best of us, when we are weighed down by the burdens of this world, when we are too numb to feel, give us the hearts of children who weep when others are weeping, but who find ways to laugh infectiously when no one else can crack a smile. Open us to unbridled joy and delight in simple things and the gratitude of one for whom all of creation can still be new.

Transform our minds this morning. Give us a constant hunger for learning, so that we might commit ourselves to studying scripture. Give us the eagerness for the story, to read the next verse, the next chapter, and the next book, so that we might not prooftext to justify whatever position we might already hold, but so that we might be open to the whole story of your persistent grace and your redeeming love. Give us the humility to learn from our mistakes, to acknowledge when we and our sisters and brothers who have gone before have read poorly and have harmed others with our interpretations of scripture. Give us the persistent curiosity to ask why. Give us a childlike sensitivity to inequality and injustice and let us ask why? Give us the energy to ask why over and over again when we see children harmed and families separated.

And transform our spirits this morning. When we feel deadened to the world around us, enliven us with a childlike sense of wonder. Inspire in us awe at the beauty of creation, from the vast blues of the ocean, to the green of tiny blades of grass, to the shimmer of bird’s wings. Give us a childlike tireless energy for life, and the peace to sleep soundly at the end of each day. And give us the childlike ability to be assured in hope and confident even in unseen things; give us faith.

And on this Father’s day, we pray for all those who are fathers, who serve as father-figures, for those who are single parents. We also pray for those for whom this day is difficult, for those who have lost their fathers, for those who have lost children, for those who are estranged from, have been harmed by, or do not know a father. No matter how we relate to one another as human families, we are grateful for the parental love that you unconditionally offer us, God, and that you allow us to call you by many names so that we might have better relationship with you. And we conclude our prayer this morning by calling on you in one of the names that our brother Jesus taught us.

Our Father…

-The Reverend Doctor Robert Allan Hill, The Reverend Soren Hessler, and The Reverend Doctor Jennifer Quigley

posted in The Rev. Dr. Jennifer Quigley, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel, The Rev. Dr. Soren Hessler on 06.17.2018 at 11:00 am
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Sunday
June 10

A House Divided

By Marsh Chapel

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Preface

Driving west on Route 90 you may have seen the new billboard which honors Abraham Lincoln, and extols civility, and quotes today’s lesson, ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand’. The billboard makes it seem that President Lincoln coined the phrase, but, as you know, he did not. This is Jesus’ word, entering the world of conflict and tragedy, denying any part in Satan’s divided household, and claiming to have, like a wily thief, entered that house, and trussed up the strong man Satan, and conquered him in apocalyptic fury. Jesus’ family calls him crazy. Jesus’ disciples discard his teaching. Jesus opponents set religious rhetoric on fire to condemn him. All within syllables of the disciples themselves being named. His ministry begins in a whole heap of trouble, in this third chapter of St. Mark.

Mark

We know not who wrote Mark, only his name. He wrote for a particular community, whose location and name are also unknown. He even mentions by name members of his church, Alexander and Rufus(15:21). The book is meant to help a community of Christians. It is written to support and encourage people who already have been embraced by faith. While it purports to report on events long ago, in the ministry of Jesus in 30AD, its main thrust is toward its own hearers and readers forty years later in 70AD. So it is not an evangelistic tract and it is not a diary and it is not a biography and it is emphatically not a history.

You will want to know what we can say, then, about Mark’s community. If the community gave birth to the gospel, and if the community is the primary focus of the gospel, and if the community is the gospel’s intended audience, you would like to know something about them. For one thing, the community is persecuted, or is dreading persecution, or both. Jesus suffered and so do, or so will, you. This is what Mark says. This gospel prepares its hearers for persecution. For another thing, the church may have been in or around Rome, or more probably somewhere in Syria. It is likely that Mark was written between 69 and 73 ce. For yet another thing, Mark’s fellow congregants, fellow Christians, are Gentiles, in the main, not Jews. He is writing to this largelyGentilegroup. He writes for them neither a timeless philosophical tract nor an ethereal piece of poetry. His is rather a ‘message on target’. It is the preaching of the gospel. Further, Mark’s composition, editing, comparisons, saying combinations, style and Christology all point to Mark as the earliest gospel (J Marcus).

We have used the word gospel. You have heard the word many times, and know that it means ‘good news’. It is an old term. You could compare it to ‘ghost’. Gospel is to good news as ghost is to spirit, you might say. Yet Mark calls his writing a ‘gospel’. He creates something new. Mark is a writing unlike any other to precede it. It is not popular today any longer, no longer fashionable, to say this. It is however true. Mark is not a history, not a biography, not a novel, not an apocalypse, not an essay, not a treatise, not an epistle. Examples of all these were to hand for him. Mark might have written one of any one of them. He did not. He wrote something else and so in form, in genre, gave us something new. A gospel. His is the first, but not the last.

Mark 3: 20

In particular, we have entered a very strange gospel land this morning, in the reading of our gospel, Mark 3: 20. Call it the landscape of apocalyptic. Jesus is beside himself. There is mention of a certain Beelzebub. The teaching has recourse to a parlor debate about demons, and the prince of demons. Jesus refers to their, the demons’, casting out. One wonders—don’t you?—about the binding up of a strong man. We have frightening words about the end, about blasphemy, about forgivenessof all sins (hurray!), except for one, the sin against the Holy Spirit (not helpfully defined, and, by the way, (boo hoo!). Here is an unclean spirit. There are family members disdained. Jesus enters ministry in blistering conflict with his own followers, with his religious debating partners, and with his own family. Friends, Scribes, and Family have this in common: conflict with Jesus Himself. That is, Jesus is an apocalyptic preacher, announcing the coming of the end, the turn of the ages. We can be sure of very little about the historical Jesus, but we can be sure of this.

In fact, the point of the oddly arranged set of sayings, is that Jesus has arrived to shift the world from the old age to the new age. He has brought the end of the old and the start of the new. He has set his standard on the field of battle, and having done so, as Divine Power, he has in effect already won the war. Hence, disciples are to be disciplined. Hence, family, when in revolt, is to be discredited and rejected. Hence, and especially, the old religion is to be transformed. All, that is every and all, sin is finally forgivable, with various modes of atonement. But full on, flat out opposition to what is good in favor of what is not, to what is life in favor of what is death, to what is holy in favor of what is hellish, to what is spirit in favor of what is emptiness—this is by definition not forgivable, the sin against the Holy Spirit. Forgiveness is yours as long as you do not deny the reality of forgiveness. If you do, by definition, you go unforgiven. If there is no forgiveness, for anyone anywhere at any time, then, again, by definition, there is none for you. There are none so thin as those who will not eat.

We are not the first age to hear and to see lived out the extremities of familial, religious, and cultural enmity. Our house and our houses, across the lower 48 and beyond, may well be divided. But division we did not invent.

A House Divided

Across these years of division, a time of humiliation, and a time taste testing a sort of fascism, and so fully in need of Samuel’s warning about having a king (‘you want a king’, says Samuel, ‘then you shall have one, and with him much misery’) we too, like Jesus with his followers and Jesus with his sagacious opponents, and Jesus with his family, will enter conversation, discussion, discourse. To do so with grace, with both honesty and kindness, is a grave but unavoidable challenge. At least, so engaged, we might do well to be true to our own, actual experience. If we can honor our own lived experience, with some authentic recollection, then we may have a better chance to engage that of others. Here is one example.

A few weeks ago a mildly conservative columnist, whose work otherwise one often appreciates, wrote broadly of ‘tens of millions of Americans’. He was referring to middle America—red, smaller town, rural, fresh water, America, and trying to explain why we have the divisions we do. He wrote, ‘tens of millions of Americans rightly feel that their local economies are under attack, their communities are dissolving, and their religious liberties are under threat’, and went on to encourage attention to social problems. (David Brooks, NYT, 4/18).

Our experience, across ten pulpits, and four decades in ministry, years of upbringing and happy experience in the areas he is trying to describe, is the opposite. Most of our upbringing and of our ministry was invested in red, smaller town, rural, fresh water, America. Here is an afternoon spent planning a stewardship campaign riding on the back of a tractor. Memory carries the happiness of calling in the barns at milking time. There is an evening spent listening to vocation and job choices at the kitchen table. One morning visit offered the chance to learn the family history of a middle sized tool and die company, in a small city. After the committee meeting there was time to hear the history of a once prosperous manufacturing and imaging company. This was a life in ministry spent seeing the seasonal rhythms of seed time and harvest, of the first day of trout fishing season and the last day of deer hunting season. Bluntly put, I hardly met a Democrat, before I went to college, and in the succeeding years our churches were largely colored red.

Our friend was right to encourage robust attention to social problems. In the rest of this paragraph he is mistaken. “Tens of millions” of Americans in red, smaller town, rural, fresh water America are not living as if under economic attack. In our own lived multi-decade experience they are, rather, sturdily and steadily enduring the unstoppable shift to a fully global economy, with courage and creativity and long-suffering. With some little exception, our current national divisions are not welling up out of the angers of licensed nurses, truck drivers, farmers, school teachers, plumbers and firefighters. Here is our experience, to the contrary. Here is a north country farmer putting livestock and machinery to auction and becoming an electrician, with courage and grace. Here is the grandson of a family company, suddenly globalized, becoming a photographer. Here is a middle-manager in a down-sizing corporation taking retirement and doing what he always loved, being with children, and driving a school bus. One hopes that their religious formation in the Methodist tradition that celebrates itineracy, moving about on the planet, gave some support, some wind beneath the wings. Further, “tens of millions” of Americans are not whimpering about the loss of community. With some little exception, our house is not divided because den mothers and choir directors across the near mid-west think their communities are dissolving. They do not and they are not. They are busy and faithful in their service to neighbor and divine, as much as ever, and not dawdling around whining about ‘dissolving communities’. Nor are “tens of millions’ of Americans hand wringing about religious liberty. With some little exception, the people in our lived experience, in our five rural churches, our two college town churches, our two smaller city churches are not wailing and bemoaning that their religious liberties are under threat: the Johnson Amendment has been used exactly ONCE since its 1954 inception (in a Binghamton NY case involving Operation Rescue of all places and groups). No. There is more religious liberty and religion in rural, small town, agricultural, America than there is pretty much anywhere else, and people know it, and people are glad for it. There is not a lot of rural whooping about selling cakes or not for gay weddings. No. ReadHillbilly Elegy as often as you like: it is still inaccurate as a broad brush description, as beautifully written and as true as it may be in the singular narrative, if our own lived experience in ministry is any guide. Not economic attack, not communal demise, not religion falling away. These sorts of mis-descriptions caricature good people in false ways. They wrongly and unnecessarily denigrate the faithfulness and courage of many of our siblings, cousins, compatriots, and fellow citizens. If we are going to find a way toward common hope, we will need to do so, from red to blue and blue to red, unencumbered by and unshackled from, such falsehoods. Across this summer, and into this autumn, we will need everything we can muster to speak a word of faith in pastoral voice, toward a common hope: a word of faith in a pastoral voice toward a common hope. If we can honor our own lived experience, with some authentic recollection, then we may have a better chance to engage that of others.

Speaking of common hope, and speaking of a pastoral voice, we conclude with a breakfast scene from fifty years ago.

Bobby

June 5 1968 began with the usual commotion in our Methodist parsonage. Two younger sisters and one younger brother, arranging books, breakfast, the day’s plans. Pancakes and argument and some humor. One mother overseeing the relative chaos. I, hoping to be ready, for once, when friends arrived to walk together to school.

That spring I had gained a fervent connection, at age 13, to Robert F Kennedy. For some reason I strongly and emotionally engaged with him, our Senator then in the Empire State, and with his campaign as it unfolded. For one thing, there was a common hope therein (yes, borrowed from G.B. Shaw): some people see things as they are and say, why; I dream things that never were and say why not. My father supported another candidate, but was willing to respect a different, my own, point of view. Earlier in the year I remember sitting with him, watching President Johnson, jowly and bespectacled, telling us through the grainy black and white TV that he would not run. Just before Johnson said it, my Dad said, “he’s going to do it, he’s going to drop out…” (He was after all a graduate of BUSTH, the school of the prophets.) Less fully, I remember the announcement of Martin L King’s death, and only later heard RFK’s words from that night, words in eloquence and care of a heavenly sort. No, I was busy with eighth grade. Eighth grade in a still new school system was all consuming. I still had not finished raking the lawn across the street that I had contracted to do in the fall, the deal being with a member of our church, a kindly, patient pediatrician. There was a decision to make about a dance coming up—I remember feeling odd and uncertain about that. I spent my time on homework, scouting, sports, and friends, to the extent I had located some.

But there was also RFK. It was many years later until I heard the tape of his Indianapolis speech, late at night, bringing tragic tidings to hundreds gathered, black and white, on the night of King’s murder. I use the tape in teaching. Aeschylus, Scripture, his own loss, all rolled into a plea for calm. “To those of you who may be tempted to anger and vengeance tonight, I can say that I had a brother whom I lost… What we need in this country now"What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice towards those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black."

My dad was in Chicago that week, June 5 1968, for some long forgotten denominational meetings. It was 7am our time, so 6am his. The phone rang, and after a brief word with mom, he asked to speak to me, which was a little odd for that hour. He wanted me to know, and to tell me himself, that early that morning in California RFK too had been shot and killed.

He sensed how much that news would grieve me, though we still have yet fully to sense how much his loss cost us. Maybe at an unconsidered, sixth sense level, dad wanted to prevent any unnecessary cynicism, on my part, or hardened bitterness, that might sprout up, and of which there already was plenty abroad. Mostly, he was trying to be a good dad. And he lived and worked without every forgetting the humble grace, the quiet power of a word of faith in a pastoral voice toward a common hope.

Fifty years later. I partly appreciated the call, then. I really appreciate it now. Fifty years later.

The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.10.2018 at 11:00 am
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Sunday
June 3

Heart and Voice

By Marsh Chapel

Click here to listen to the full service

1 Samuel 3:1-20

2 Corinthians 4:5-12

Click here to listen to the meditations only

Heart and Voice

Goodness is close at hand. Goodness is close to you. Goodness is not far, not out of reach, not gone, not gone forever. Goodness, what makes life liveable, and godly, is within reach. Are you ready to reach out and receive?

Goodness is right close at hand, even when we do not see her. Even when the days bristle with ugliness, with mendacity, with the lack of virtuous example in leadership, with a willingness to use ugliness, mendacity and lack of virtue to hurt and maim by what we say and what we do. This is the clue to the long reading from Samuel, wherein all looks bleak for the ancient Israelites: but goodness has not quit the field just yet. Eli will be chastened, but there will be heart and voice, still. In Samuel. This is the clue to the beauty of Psalm 139, wherein should we even travel to heaven, to hell, to uttermost parts of the sea, even there goodness will find us, the right hand will guide us, the light will shine in the darkness. Are you at a point to listen, and then to notice, and then to abide in goodness? This is the clue to the choicest of Pauline passages, 2 Cor. What a shame that we do not always know and hear the Holy Scripture for what it is: Holy. True and loving, honest and kind. We are indeed cast down. But not forsaken. Not driven to despair. Is that not a good reason, goodness knows, to bestir yourself and come Sunday come to church? There are many reasons not to worship, but far more to get up and come your hair and come to church. Goodness is lurking, waiting, watching, reaching out, ready with a helping hand for you. This is the clue to Mark 2, and the debates about Sabbath. Sabbath is good. What heals the human heart and lifts the human voice is goodness. Good that gets in the way of goodness is not good, like religion that gets in the way of God is not godly. Behold the strange, beautiful, saving, powerful, loving world of the Bible, the good book.

Heart and Mind

The paper carried a story last week about a woman who was found out by goodness. (NYT, 5/25/18). Goodness saved her as goodness can do. Maybe at home. Maybe in holy communion. Maybe in prayer. Maybe in the meandering melody of a summer sermon.

Her name is Louise Penny. She is a Canadian crime novelist. For those of us with a little Raymond Chandler roving the back roads of our imaginations, she is a companion, compatriot, confrere, an ‘unfailingly cheery detective writer’, centered on Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, hero of her 13 books. In the writer’s house is a throw cushion with the words ‘goodness exists’.

At age 46, she had written not a single book. In fact, her life was hanging by a thread. She was depressed and lonely, and had turned to alchohol for self-medication. She said: ‘Gnawing loneliness, self-loathing, fear…I know what it is like to hate yourself so much that you have to murder yourself. Coming out on the other side gave me a profound belief that goodness exists’.

How did she get out? All of our churches have been winsomely populated and supported by many who found goodness in the way she did. First, she found community, in her case, Alchoholics Anonymous. Every one of our churches has had a group meeting of this or similar sort. Second, she found a friend, actually a doctor who later became her husband. Friendship is a rare gift in life, sometimes only touched like the hem of a dress passing by.

Encouraged by community, encouraged by friendship, Louise Penny started to do what she loves and to love what she does. Do what you love and love what you do. She writes spell binding crime novels set in a little Quebec village. She said: ‘My books are love letters to Quebec’. One preacher said his sermons are ‘love letters to New England’. Friend: right here, close at hand, in the pew and in the nave, there is community for you and there is friendship for you. Community. Friendship. Don’t take only the preacher’s word for it, or only the church’s witness to it, or only the religious longing for it. People like Ms. Penny have found it, along the struggling path of life, in community and in friendship. We pause to ask you a question, speaking of heart: have you made space enough in life, your life, your one and only life, for community and friendship?

Heart and Service

Goodness is close at hand. So close, so close that if it were a snake it would bite you. Plain as nose on your face, and plainer still, plain as the nose on my face. Why it is right here, all around us. Yes, right here, for a moment, we pause to give thanks, right here, right now for some of the goodness here at Boston University. You know, healthy good institutions really matter, and where by heart and voice, in heart and service, we see goodness, we want to name it, to claim it, to celebrate it.

President Brown said this spring: Boston University is an institution with a long history of outreach and engagement. (President Robert A. Brown, 3/12/18.)

President Merlin said in 1923: Boston University lives in the heart of the city, in the service of the city. (President Lemuel Merlin, 1923.)

One deeply embedded value and strength of Boston University, today, and found in every school and college is this long (1839) history (Methodism) of outreach (heart) and service (in the world, for the world). Goodness.

The three medical campus schools lead the way with care for the urban poor (MED), with daily recognition that public health means social justice (SPH), and with the most global student body of any school or college at every commencement (GSDM).

All fourteen schools on the Charles River campus show the shadows and lingering long-term influence of heart and service.

Reflect on the current emphasis in Questrom upon ethical business and business ethics.

Remember the School of Education’s 25-year commitment to the Chelsea city schools, but also ongoing delightful efforts like their work in literacy through the 20 years of gift to urban school children through BUILD (Boston University Initiative on Literacy Development), and the outreach to Boston Public Schools so strongly enhanced by the Wheelock merger.

Rejoice at the concept of ‘citizen artist’, the ‘social artist’, affirmed at the College of Fine Arts, the best of theater and music and visual art, brought to the street level (along with the Arts Initiative).

Reflect on the curricular and co-curricular engagement in the School of Theology, with current issues like race, gun violence, immigration, and poverty, the ongoing voice of ‘The School of the Prophets’.

Remember the School of Social Work engagements with neighboring hospitals and schools, in internships and partnerships.

Rejoice at the ongoing vitality within Metropolitan College of a now veteran program in prison education.

Reflect on the Engineering School support for Women in Science, Math and Technology, and the Inovation Lab for a better world.

Remember the School of Hospitality emphasis on servant leadership.

Rejoice at the communal nature of education at the College of General Studies, modeling dimensions of shared learning and living with great effect.

Reflect on College of Arts and Sciences and its birth of the PARDEE School, committed to world peace.

Remember the Law School, and its honored graduates, like Barbara Jordan, who have defended the legal system of this country, ‘a country of laws and not of men’; and Cornell William Brooks, former head of the NAACP.

Rejoice at the varied commitments through School of Communication to the development of an educated populace, on which the rest of democracy depends.

Reflect on the Sargent School lectureships on physical and occupational therapy, open to the public, and applicable to the work of many other schools and colleges as well, with focus on the care of the whole person.

To these vital forms of outreach and engagement in schools and colleges, add co-curricular projects (brought into more prominence by the new ‘HUB’ initiative). That is, add the influence of the Howard Thurman Center in race and conversation across difference; the special scholarships for city students (Menino), for Catholic students (Medeiros), and for Methodist Students (Clergy offspring); add the voice of Marsh Chapel, across the region and around the globe, every Sunday morning; add the 6 University Chaplaincies and 25 campus ministries, all with some portion of service; add the ROTC program for women and men preparing to ‘preserve and protect the Constitution of the United States’ (including with their very lives); add the Hubert Humphrey Scholars international students and families program (one of the original programs in the country); add occasional work like the space given to 1,000 Tulane students for the year 2005-6following Katrina; add the Community Service Center and its multiple programs and FYSOP; add the Pardee Center and its ecumenical and hopeful labor; add the Elie Wiesel Center; add PILOT; add the BU Initiative on Cities; add the Sustainability Center: all of these to some measure reach out beyond the University to serve and help the larger community, across the region and around the globe. Boston University exemplifies a culture of ‘outreach and engagement’.

Friends, as Peter Marshall used to say, ‘There are a lot of things wrong. But there are a lot of things right.’ Clasp goodness today, in word and song and sacrament, as nourishment for the week to come.

The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.3.2018 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

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Sunday
May 6