Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

Exodus 14:19-31

Romans 14:1-12

Matthew 18: 21-35

Bildungsoman

After some significant internal struggle, come Senior year of college, I finally decided to go to seminary.

That spring I visited Harvard, Boston University, Yale and Union. I stood outside the chapel here, and have a picture to prove it. Union in New York was easily the right place, for me. In part I went on the advice of a friend that ‘a year of seminary never hurt any one’. Once in for a penny, I was in for a pound, and really never looked back. Your calling is what you sense is your best response to God. And that can change. In fact, you need to practice the art of ‘editing your dreams’. They need writing, but they editing too.

What a world opened up in New York City at Union! How grateful I am. The urban world, the ecumenical world, the theological world, the biblical world, the world of the gospel and its preachment. It is an embarrassment to admit to you how little I knew about the Bible, for all my parsonage tenure, small Methodist college degree, summer camp leadership, and generational background. I knew nada. And into that mental wasteland vacuum swept Samuel Terrien, George Landes, Raymond Brown and Lou Martyn, four horsemen of the apocalypse, to furnish its empty mental apartment books shelves with, well, books. I fell in love with the Bible, with the Strange World of the Bible. There too were James Forbes, Cornell West, Chrisopher Morse, Linda Clark (who later came here), Horace Allen (who came here later), and many others. William Sloane Coffin came into the Riverside pulpit. Across the street was the Jewish Theological Seminary, whence Abraham Heschel had come in the autumn afteroons to walk around Grant’s Tomb with Reinhold Niebuhr, just a few years earlier. That image of interreligious, interfaith theological discourse inspires still.

It happened that Union was in the throes of a renaissance of sorts, and the President, Donald Shriver had somehow convinced Robert McAfee Brown, a longtime Union alumn, faculty member, and Union family member if you will, to leave his beloved California haunts and come back to New York, with his wife Sydney (a missionary’s daughter). Bob and Sydney met in the summer home of Reinhold Neihbuhr near Heath, MA—they were in that sense god-children of the Neihbuhrs and so of that tradition at Union. Brown stayed at Union only three years, but they were the very three I was there. He had been the Protestant Observer at Vatican II and taught a course we fought to gain entrance too, titled, the Ecumenical Revolution. He knew about Heschel and Neibuhr walking in the autumn light on Riverside Drive very well because—he fell and love and got married under Neibuhr’s roof. Brown encouraged us to go and work in 1978 at the World Council of Churches, in Swizerland, in the Office of Urban Ministry, run by the one and only George Todd, Brown’s fellow Presbyterian. Due to health issues, we left Union and New York suddenly and precipitously in February of 1979. In that early winter of 1979 we retreated to a church in Ithaca, to heal and to begin the work of ministry, among the students at ‘godless Cornell’.

Before we left, perhaps a week or so before, Bob and Sydney Brown held a winter dinner party in their home, which was an apartment in McGiffert Hall, under the wing of Riverside Church along Claremont Avenue. It may have been, if memory serves, that the dinner guests were his seminar students and spouses or friends from the course on the Ecumencial Revolution. Many things for us were unsettled at the time, a time of existential fright and anxiety. The welcome, the warm welcome of that home, the dim awareness we had of who Brown was, who the Browns were, and their very humble circumstance, hospitality and kindness to 2.5 itinerant Methodists stands out after forty years. Robert McAfee Brown had a special reason for the dinner, because he had invited a special guest, colleague and friend of his, whom he had met at Stanford, but who was also now in New York, though he spent a part of each week in Boston. Our dinner guest had been invited to a University Professorship here at Boston University by then President John Silber, and, after some hesitation, as I understand it, he accepted. In a way, Brown’s firm, lasting friendship with Wiesel, at least it seemed to me, reflected the friendship of the earlier generation between Reinhold Niebuhr and Abraham Heschel (who delivered Neibuhr’s funeral eulogy in Stockbridge MA, 1971, just 5 years before we arrived at Union). So it was that we came to know Elie Wiesel.

Robert McAfee Brown’s vision of the oikoumene included Elie Wiesel, his celebrated dinner guest that snowy evening in 1979. By precept and example, then, Brown taught us to consider thinking and living in the same way. The later edition of NIGHT comes with an introduction by RM Brown, after which Brown wrote his full book, Elie Wiesel: Messenger to All Humanity, which includes this passage: I have tried very hard, my friend, not to write this book. At every stage it seemed a tampering with things I had no right to touch. But because each exposure to your work moves me more deeply, I fell compelled to share of portion of what you have given me. To receive and not to share—that would be a denial of all I have learned from you. You have said that to be a Jew means to testify; such must also be the obligation of a Christian. And you have taught us all—Jews, Christians, and all humanity—that before testifying ourselves, we must liest to the testimony of others. I have tried to listen to your testimony. And now I feel obligated…to testify (p. vi.)

There is a gracious power in hospitality, like that which Professor Wiesel showed us in the Browns’ residence, forty years ago. It lasts, the warmth and authenticity of it, they last. Said Unamuno: ‘Warmth, warmth, warmth! We are dying of cold, not of darkness. It is not the night that kills, but the frost’. (Not the night of unknowing, but the frost of unloving—that is what kills). Speaking of night…

Night

Through the eighties I pursued a PhD at McGill. As the dissertation was slowly writing itself—we shall sell no wine before its time!—I began teaching in various schools. Montreal had an excellent film library, free and substantive, which I would raid on occasion for the course taught in community colleges along the border, up north. One perennial was a reel to reel film of Professor Wiesel.

Later still, the dissertation simmering nicely on the back burner for most of a decade—do not take my example—in teaching at Lemoyne College, Syracuse, we read NIGHT, as so many have done over the years. The course prepared the way for it by use of another film—ancient technology—ON RITUAL, whose JTS lead figure was Professor Gillman, whose daughter Abigail is now our colleague her at BU. Gillman: ‘The central Jewish vision is that whole world made holy: all of life raised to its deepest and highest level’. The film follows the annual, weekly, and daily ritual life of woman named Carol, one of the first women to enter the rabbinate in Conservative Judaism, and so teaches about Sabbath, and then about Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, Booths, Hannukah, Purim and Passover. Ritual brings order to life.

Wiesel was the quintessential teacher. His books carried his voice out across the globe. Those who studied with him here regularly remember his remembrance of them. My Norwegian friend vividly remembers Professor Wiesel gradually getting him to come out his shell, by telling funny stories. Our students in the small Catholic School, where most were the first in their families to attend college, connected with him from afar. In particular, the students always read and could always fully engage Wiesel’s book. I taught it by showing the points at which the ten commandments were engaged or broken (pps 50, 59, 71, 73, 90, and others). I never had a chance to ask him whether that was a fair way to teach the book, and whether he had the Decalogue in view for its structure. We learned from Wiesel and his book by raising questions. What is the central theme of the book? What is its weakest point? How do you describe the ‘voice’ of the author? Which scene did you dislike most? What other writing does it recall? What would you ask the author if he were here today?

All of us are far more human than anything else, including and especially those who remind us best of our own best selves, like Professor Wiesel. There is I am sure a full set of observations in loving critique that can and should be raised, and will be in the sessions offered this morning and afternoon in his honor. I wonder, for instance, just how inclusive his perspective was with regard to gay people. I wonder about his relationship with non-Orthodox Judaism. Like every sermon, every life has its points of challenge. But I, for one, have been deeply and lastingly influenced by the life and work of this one who lectured to us here thrice each autumn over 40 years.

Franklin Littell, the first Dean of Marsh Chapel, was not in the habit of mincing words. One ongoing application for those of us who have been seized by the confession of the church, who have been loved by the faithfulness of Christ, is to look again, to look long, to look hard at the Holocaust. We have yet to understand what happened to Christianity in the dark abyss, the hellish, ghoulish fire of Auschwitz. Crucified, Judaism has risen from the dead. But what will become of Christianity? Will there arise a movement from religion to faith? Will there appear on the earth a religionless Christianity? Seventy years later, and the clock is ticking:

Nazism was in no sense a revolt against ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’. Neither was it ‘secularist’. Quite the contrary: in its central creed the party affirmed a devotion to ‘positives Christentum’. The Fuhrer and other party orators made constant reference to ‘divine providence’, ‘spiritual renewal’, ‘moment of decision’, ‘immortal destiny’…and the like. Many of the party hymns were simply new words written to popular gospel songs, with the same brass bands marching and evoking from crowds the same emotional response. The key question, and here the issue of ‘heresy’ arises, is why the millions of baptized and confirmed Christians had no sense that they were now responding to visions and programs antithetical to the biblical faith. (F Little. The Crucifixion of the Jews. 70)

Yet it was not finally the acute academic work of Littell and others that brought a fuller witness to and understanding of the holocaust to the American conscience. That work was largely the influence of Wiesel. Just think back to the most horrific and jarring passage in NIGHT:

“The SS seemed more preoccupied, more disturbed than usual. To hang a young boy in front of thousands of spectators was no light matter. The head of the camp read the verdict. All eyes were on the child. He was lividly pale, almost calm, biting his lips. The gallows threw its shadow over him. This time the camp executioner refused to act as executioner. Three SS replaced him.

The victims mounted together onto the chairs. The three necks were placed at the same moment within the nooses. “Long live Liberty!” cried the two adults. But the child was silent.

“Where is God? Where is He?” someone behind me asked.

At a sign from the head of the camp, the three chairs tipped over.

Total silence throughout the camp. On the horizon, the sun was setting. “Bare your heads!” yelled the head of the camp. His voice was raucous. We were weeping. “Cover your heads!”

Then the march past began. The two adults were no longer alive. But the third rope was still moving; being so light, the child was still alive…

For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. Behind me I heard the same man asking: “Where is God now?”

And I hear a voice within me answer him: “Where is he? Here He is – He is hanging here on this gallows. . . ” (Night, 78)

There is a fierce power in memory. Marcel Proust with his madeleine moment teaches us best: a single minute released from the chronological order of time has re-created in us the human being similarly released…situated outside the scope of time, what could one fear from the future…(these are) resurrections of the past (Proust, RTP, II, 992, 996).

Vespers

From your own losses, your own experience of loss, you will know perhaps the power of kindness in the hour of grief. Our manner of grief, the way we grieve, is about the most personal thing about us—more individual than our eye color, height, skin pigmentation, gait, or fingerprint. Our friends and loves ones give us ourselves, and when we lose them we lose whole body parts, full and veritable pieces of our own most selves. For some grief is light, for others heavy, for some tearfilled for others ‘not something we cry about’, for some long and for others short, for some traumatic and for others timely then gone. At least, we could be aware for others of others manner of grief, and respect what we can see and know and understand.

Our Gospel lesson today, neither taken from St. Mark nor from ‘Q’, but from the particular reservoir of Matthew’s own sources (it is not found elsewhere), stands out, up and alone, and hardly needs interpretation. Is there not a poignancy in this pericope, not unlike that known in grief, the recollection of a beloved teacher? The parable itself is as clear as a bell, and as plain as the nose on your face (or, plainer still, as the nose on mine). You have been loved, now love. Greatly have you been forgiven, so greatly now forgive. IBD, Matthew 18: 21-35: ‘Man can have no more important privilege that to mediate to others the forgiveness which he himself experiences.’

In the weeks following my Father’s death seven years ago, there came many expressions of condolence, all of which were deeply appreciated, personally meaningful, and part of the healing, or the healing in grieving, or the health in grieving. It is a sacrament of sorts, grief is, as one friend said. At that time, June 2010, one of our leading choristers and dear friends worked here at the University. She was and is at the heart of Marsh Chapel to this date, even though she and her husband and children live in France. Her French is impeccable. Here, at the University, she worked as an assistant to Professor Elie Wiesel. At the time of my dad’s death I received from her a note I cherish today, still:

Dean Hill –

Professor Wiesel asked me to send you the following message.

Ondine

Dear friend,

My deepest condolences. In our tradition we say: may you be spared further sorrow.

Elie Wiesel

There is a poignant power in kindness. Abraham Heschel: “Different are the languages of prayer, but the tears are all the same.”

Coda

Remember the words of Psalm 139…

– The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 09.17.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Saturday
September 16

Peter Berger: A Rumor of Angels

By Marsh Chapel

Alumni Memorial Service

After my dad died seven years ago we began to go through his things, as families do. Desk, tools, books, guns, clothes. (Order, play, hope, justice, humor). We did not make much progress at first. After three years I noted: ‘We still have not made that much. His desk, somewhat more ordered, is laden drawer after drawer. The many tools, both inherited from earlier generations and purchased as needed over a life time, still lie here and there in the basement. A doll house, made for a granddaughter and then taken in for repairs years ago, and then left unattended, did migrate to the home of the great grand daughter. The guns—a relic of another time in the woods and deer hunting of northern New York—were carefully removed by two lawyer siblings. The papers and records now are in boxes with little titles—an improvement of sorts. His clothes still hang in the old closet’.

I was either assigned or self assigned or asked (or not) to begin to take care of the books, forty years worth of books in the lifetime library of a Methodist preacher whose preaching teacher at Boston University, Allan Knight Chalmers, for whom I was named, had admonished his pupils to read one book every day. That is to say, there were more than a few books to look through.

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

There is range of life through which there radiates, like morning sunlight, high and deep and piercingly real experience. Most of this range of experience is not, or not only, in worship or liturgy or ecclesiastical involvement or patterned devotion—these are of course crucial and important, but more as signposts than as the actual meadows and still waters of religious, that is to say non-religious, religious experience.

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

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

There is transcendence—he speaks of the ‘supernatural’—all about us. Maybe that is why you have come, together, to worship on this Alumni weekend. What are the signposts, the clues to transcendence we should look for—in our lived experience? Berger’s summary still works. You may be surprised by the clues he names, the rumors of angels he overhears…

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

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

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

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

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

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

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 09.16.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: memorial, Robert Hill

Sunday
September 10

A Season of Remembrance

By Marsh Chapel

Matthew 18: 15-20

Remembrance

It felt so good last week to come back, after a summer of travel and preaching, to be at home in our church home, to lean forward from our home pulpit, that of which we are the current, temporary stewards. It is like when you go away for a week, and you come home. You turn the key in the latch. You pick up the mail. You turn on the light. You open the refrigerator to see if anything has arrived or departed (why do we do that?). And we take in, you savor, that sense, scent, sensibility of being home. It connects you again to who you are, reminds you of who you are.

Last Sunday a couple who had been married at Marsh Chapel fifty years to the day earlier attended worship here. Our attentive usher team made sure, amid Matriculation madness, that the dean had a chance to greet the happy couple. We asked them their secret of success. He replied, ‘She is the secret’. He did not miss a beat. They came to remember who they were, who they are, who they want to be. Fifty years goes by more quickly than you might think. They had connections with Kingston Ontario, and Queens College there—a beautiful college town, a fine school, along the lakeshore.

Our summer travels took us, as it happens, to Kingston, Ontario in the last days of June—near Queens college, in that beautiful college town, along the lakeshore. We went in something of reminiscence, since decades earlier it had been a regular family vacation destination. Then only 2 hours away; only a couple of hundred US dollars for a few days; only a ride across the Thousand Islands Bridge, and, wa-la, another land, another country, a different currency, a slight difference in inflection. In those years we had gone, summer and winter, to a hotel with a big pool, an indoor gym, hot tub and sauna: a place where the kids could play and the parents could enjoy seeing them do so. What one would or would not give to return, for an hour or a day, to that young adult happiness, in a Canadian hostel! In the hot tub, we found ourselves with two couples, one French and one English speaking. We watched as they watched as their kids did exactly what our kids used to do, in the same spot, the same splash, the same laugh, the same joy. We talked as travelers do. They four were headed the next day to Ottawa to celebrate the sesquicentennial of the birth of the Dominion of Canada. All six of us could remember the World’s Fair, MAN AND HIS WORLD, from the Montreal of 1967. All of us had been there. They spoke of their new leader, son of a former Premier, Justin Trudeau. They spoke plainly, eloquently, proudly, lovingly, and personally. The English wife said, ‘You know, it’s just that, I mean, it’s just that…He reminds us of who we are, at our best’. As in that moment we did refrain, so here in the sermon we will refrain from making any comparative remarks, regarding current Canadian and US leadership, as to what each has reminded us about. ‘He reminds us of who we are’.

Who reminds you of your own most self, your own best selves? You could ponder that this week, and let us know next Sunday. Whose memory, whose books, whose voice, whose example, whose life and the living of it re-clothes you in your rightful mind?

Invitation

With that question, we offer a word of invitation to you, an invitation to discipleship and through Marsh Chapel. Welcome to the varied ministry of Marsh Chapel at Boston University! 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. To that end I will invite you to formal membership, to joining Marsh Chapel, on October 22: mark the date!

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 remembrance. Our fall and spring term worship and community life are laden with moments of remembrance. 2017-2018 is a full season of remembrance. On September 17, we remember Elie Wiesel. On October 29 (and again in November) we remember Martin Luther. In Lent 2018 we remember Thomas Merton. Then in April 2018, in the week following Easter, we remember the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Come and join us throughout this year in a special season of remembrance!

Where I 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’. May grace expand and extend in meaning for us in the fall term, 2017!

A Season of Remembrance

Elie Wiesel reminded and reminds us, at Boston University, of who we are. From the very first day of the life of this University, the school has welcomed with open arms all people, regardless of gender, race, or religion. Women, Blacks, Jews—all—matriculated with day one. Today we would quickly add—all religions, all nationalities, all sexual identities, all varieties of physical abilities. Wiesel’s lectures, attended by more than a thousand a night, thrice each fall, in a stroke set a moral compass for the year’s study. Every era, though few quite as despicably as our own, tempts us, particularly public leadership, to sacrifice moral judgment for the sake of political opportunity. To sacrifice moral judgment for the sake of political opportunity. It is not only a leader taking us, say, toward authoritarianism who is to be resisted and rejected, but it is also and more so those who, without recantation, abet and abide with that leadership, those who are collaborators, who use the same language, who take the same partisan identity, who quietly allow the drip by drip accretion of unfettered power that leads to the great hurricane of later trouble. It starts with a few drops. Wiesel reminds us at BU of who we are.

Martin Luther reminded and reminds us, in Religious Life, of who we are. Many are the difficulties to arranging a proper, nuanced recollection of Luther, Protestant Reformer, Biblical Genius, Person of Courage--and Virulent Anti-Semite. Down and up, though, for ill and good, he reminds us that religion is indeed like the weather. Sometimes sunshine, sometimes rain, never perfect, and in need of steady meteorological, that is to say, theological prediction and predilection. To be a protestant is to apply the protestant principle, as did Luther, and to subject religion to utterly, fully religious critique. (It was Paul Tillich who best did articulate the protestant principle, that all authority, including and especially religious authority, is subject to critique when it makes what is relative, absolute). The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. You see how sharply our moments of remembrance do diverge this year, from Wiesel to Luther and beyond. SEMPER REFORMANDUM. Sola gratia, sola fide, sola Scriptura, but SEMPER REFORMANDUM. The Gospel in St. Matthew today, a rehearsal of an inherited Jewish tradition, with a remarkable and telling late use of the word ‘church’, ECCLESIA, certainly many decades after Jesus, itself places us in this ongoing reformation, from the first century on. Luther reminds us in Religious Life of who we are.

We will trust to Thomas Merton to remind us, as he did in life, of the better angels of Christian nature. His artistic spirit, his international range, his mysticism, his Catholicism, his brilliant writing along the climb up life’s SEVEN STOREY MOUNTAIN, have much to commend them, for us just now. This is an age in this country when a group of nine or so religious leaders in Nashville, who having studied the Bible surely know better, can stand together and dehumanize 10% of the world’s population, straight forwardly dehumanizing anyone not straight. This is a season in which 81% of Evangelical Christians have supported the recent cultural affirmation of white nationalism, without so much as a fare thee well, and, to date, without recantation. Here is the bottom line: You shall love the God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength; and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. The reason your dean ended up preaching\ speaking 18 times not 8 this summer is in part that there is a wide-open field out there for Christian preaching that is biblical, traditional, theological and practical—that is, in a word, liberal. Who is to speak for the full, deep, wide, global body of Christianity—the Nashville 9 and the Evangelical 81? Or the deeper wisdom of scripture, tradition, reason and experience? The deeper wisdom of the church has not yet found full voice or hearing, over against the conservative cacophony. It will. But it will take a decade, and the capacity to endure humiliation for a decade. A light touch, a little whimsy, and deep wisdom: Merton reminds us as global Christians of who we are.

Come April, we will turn toward Martin Luther King, Jr. We will need to do so, to recognize and honor his sacrifice, the loss of his life in and for the cause of Right. While most are not yet across the land, or even our community, focused on the season, this will make 50 years since King was murdered, April 4, 2018. Whatever others may not or may do, Marsh Chapel, we have a song to sing, a bell to ring, a word to say, and a responsibility to meet. The statue out front, the doves, the remembrance of King, does not give us the endless troubles that schools near and far are having with their own statues. My brother is proud graduate of the law school at Washington and Lee, for instance. But it does ask something of us, and specifically of you, Marsh Chapel. With every gift, there comes a task, in the economy of grace. It asks of us a season of remembrance. Our cultural amnesia leading toward fascism, our Christological amnesia leading toward exclusion, our collegiate amnesia leading toward silence finally stand under the shadow of the King statue. King reminds us as the Marsh Chapel congregation, virtual and actual, past and future, tithing and non-tithing, you and me and all, of who we are.

A Word of Faith in a Pastoral Voice toward a Common Hope

We await a common hope, a hope that our warming globe, caught in climate change, will be cooled by cooler heads and calmer hearts and careful minds.

We await a common hope, a hope that our dangerous world, armed to the teeth with nuclear proliferation, will find peace through deft leadership toward nuclear détente.

We await a common hope, a hope that our culture, awash in part in hooliganism, will find again the language and the song and the spirit of the better angels of our nature.

We await a common hope, a hope that our country, fractured by massive inequality between rich children and poor children, will rise up and make education, free education, available to all children, poor and rich.

We await a common hope, a hope that our nation, fractured by flagrant unjust inequality between rich and poor children, will stand up and make health care, free health care, available to all children, poor and rich.

We await a common hope, a hope that our schools, colleges and universities, will balance a love of learning with a sense of meaning, a pride in knowledge with a respect for goodness, a drive for discovery with a regard for recovery.

We await a common hope, a hope that our families, torn apart by abuse and distrust and anger and jealousy and unkindness, will sit at a long Thanksgiving table, this autumn, and share the turkey and pass the potatoes, and slice the pie, and, if grudgingly, show kindness and pity to one another.

We await a common hope, a hope that our decisions in life about our callings, how we are to use our time and spend our money, how we make a life not just a living, will be illumined by grace and generosity.

We await a common hope, a hope that our grandfathers and mothers, in their age and infirmity, will receive care and kindness that accords with the warning to honor father and mother that you own days be long upon the earth.

We await a common hope, finally a hope not of this world, but of this world as a field of formation for another, not just creation but new creation, not just life but eternal life, not just health but salvation, not just heart but soul, not just earth, but heaven.

Coda

Wiesel said, ‘He who hears a witness becomes a witness’. He reminds us of who we are at Boston University.

Luther said, ‘Here I stand, I can do no other, God help me’. He reminds us of who we are in Religious Life.

Merton said, ‘Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name’. He reminds us who we are as Christian people.

King said, ‘The moral arm of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice’. He reminds us of who we are at Marsh Chapel.

Come and join us! I mean it. Come and join us for this year in worship, fellowship, and discipleship. Come and join us in this season of remembrance!

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 09.10.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
September 3

Spiritual Life in College

By Marsh Chapel

Exodus 3

Romans 12

Matthew 16:21-28

Walk

There is a great rush, a wind of life, energy, and hope with which every school year begins. May we not ever miss the privilege and joy of this Matriculation moment. Here you are, having bid farewell to mother and father, and said hello to Alma Mater. Your own life, your own most life, your second but truly first life now begins, or commences in another way. We should, all, remove our sandals, for this holy ground. ‘I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Spiritual life in college, as in all life, but in a particularly particular way, causes you to walk, to walk pretty, to walk in a certain way. You will walk in a moment down Commonwealth Avenue, whose more Eastern blocks Winston Churchill called ‘the most beautiful street in America’. He was not wrong. Like the heart beating lub-dub, like spirit and flesh engaged together, like ear and eye, mind and heart, sol y sombra, one two, one foot two foot, hay foot straw foot, you are on the trail. I take my hat off to you, and bow before you, as did St Vincent De Paul before his students, with the dim awareness that in your midst is genius, somewhere someone somehow.

Boston is the country’s best walking city, a pedestrian palace of nature and culture. You know from the SAT the French phrase, ‘flaneur dans le rue’, to saunter down the street with no especial task, just the breathing joy of breathing, and so you are a flaneur of the spirit. Walk. Walk at dawn. Walk. Walk in the mid day. Walk. Walk in the evening. Walk in the sunshine and especially the snow. But walk. And for those otherwise abled, guide the walkers with a sense of strength in difference.

Come Sunday, that’s the day, walk to worship, walk to church, walk to the Chapel. It is the one walk most needed, on which all the rest in some balefully unappreciated measure does depend. You are child of God. Walk here and hear so.

Listen

Now the spiritual life takes shape. Here you are. Come and listen. Benedict of Nursia in the sixth century set out his orders for his order, beginning with the first and most important. Listen. It is not what you see but what hear that matters, lasts, counts, gives meaning. Faith comes by hearing not scanning. Hearing comes by the Word of God, not the words of a screen. Tweet, tweet. The eye is the window of the soul. The keyboard is not the window of the soul. What holds, molds, scolds, folds, for youngs and olds, is in the hearing. We have three regular blind parishioners who will remind you, in their faithfulness, of the primacy of the ear. Listen.

Listen for what is not said, for the dog that does not bark. Listen for what engages, and for what enrages, both. Listen to the sounds of silence. Listen for a word of faith offered in a pastoral voice toward the prospect of a common hope. Listen for a word of faith offered in a pastoral voice toward the prospect of a common hope. “Dad, I heard something fantastic the other day. It went like this…’ We have two ears, and one tongue.

What Jesus said in 30ad is written down at last by Matthew in 85ad. There was a long line of listening, hearing, sharing, speaking, long before the writing. In part we know this because the two saying here are at odds, one offering to hearing and faith the paradox of saving and losing life: you only have, only possess, only truly hold what you have the power, grace, freedom and courage to give away. If you do not have it, you cannot give it. If you give it, truly, you then show you have owned it. The sayings were written down together in Matthew 16 because they shared a tag word—life. What can you give in exchange for your life? (Here the message is conservative: hold on, flee false forfeit, prize life now you have it). Whoever saves his life will lose it, and whoever loses is life will find it. (Here the message is liberal: splash around with generosity, give with no thought of return, take up the cross, follow). The two teachings are at daggers drawn. Which one for which day on which way will you say? It’s up to you. Over time, you will need them both. Listen. Tune your ear to God. Life is short.

Read

As today, so every Lord’s day, much is read, come Sunday. A love of reading conjured in college—for this we pray for one and all. Not scanning. Reading. Reading will take you out beyond and behind the twin towers of your birth. You have come of age in the shadow of the toppled towers, class of 2021. You were born in the shadow of two falling, flaming towers. You came to breath under the ash cloud of nineleven. Its soot and its debris and its loss. In 2011, ten years on, as University Chaplain I telephoned the BU families, some 50, who had suffered loss that day. Some I could not reach. Some hung up. Some listened, offered thanks, and bade farewell. Some paused and spoke, in remembrance. In the shadow of the World Trade Center.

Yet there is, by analogy, another set of towers that came down as you came up. At your birth two great towers fell. The tower of peace. The tower of voice. Terror toppled the tower of peace. Technology toppled the tower of voice. In that era, 15 or twenty years ago, extremism emerged to quash peace. In that era, 15 or 20 years ago, the internet emerged to quash voice. The latter, the loss of voice to the omnivorous screen, is by far the more pernicious. Tweet, tweet. Though, with a nod to Stockholm, and its syndrome, a whole generation, global, has come to love it. We kiss our captor. We snuggle up to our tormentor. See where we have come. T plus T equals T. Terror plus Technology equals Trump. F plus F equals F. Fear plus Falsehood equals Fascism. Tweet, tweet.

Read. Thereby you escape the confines of the early 21^st century. Are there no other escape routes? No. You read. While other party, you read. While others drink, you read. While others play, you read. You will come to a great land that has been awaiting your arrival. It is the land of memory. See the meadow, bright in the morning! Memory. Hear the chorus of birdsong at dawn! Memory. Now you are ready to move into memory in reading. Pick a favorite verse. Read it well enough to commit it to memory. Dr. Jones at Trinity College said last week, When you start to memorize you start to notice the things you notice, your own habits of attention, your habits of reading. As the congregation knows by frequent infliction, today’s epistle is one of mine. (Let love genuine…). Reading will take you to a land of memory, the location of a deeper story.

Think

Heather Heyer’s mother spoke clearly about the spiritual life, as she gave grieving lament for her daughter’s death. You come of age in a dark time in the history of our land, a decade of humiliation under the aegis of leadership devoted to ethnic nationalism. We are one year in, or almost so. It will take nine more, or more, before we are on the brighter path again. You will want and need to think how we got here. Start with Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. You dwell in the tenth floor of a building whose first three stories were constructed with stolen land and enslaved labor, free land and free labor, for the benefit of anyone who had or used money, then or now.

You have the subsidized freedom, for four years or more or less, to think. Think things through. Think from the top down and the bottom up. Go where others are trying to think, and think with them. Challenge them. Question them. Press them. See what lasts. I am not afraid of the Gospel. It is the power of salvation to all who believe, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith. As it is written, ‘the righteous shall live by faith’.

You remember what the bereft mother of a college age daughter killed in Charlottesville by a marauding white racist driver, and a marauding white racist crowd, and marauding white racist leadership said, quietly, said, gently, said truly, said directly to a feckless, heedless national leadership, ostensibly the soggenante leadership of the free world: Think before you speak. Think before you speak.

Spiritual life—walk, listen, read, think—spiritual life true to your own-most self, is the only primary nourishment you will need for the next four years. Or the next forty. For what will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life?

“WE ARE NOT TO SIMPLY BANDAGE THE WOUNDS OF VICTIMS BENEATH THE WHEELS OF INJUSTICE, WE ARE TO DRIVE A SPOKE INTO THE WHEEL ITSELF.” Bonhoeffer

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in Matriculation, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 09.3.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
July 30

A Little Beauty

By Marsh Chapel

Genesis 29:15-28

Romans 8:26-39

Matthew 13:31-34, 44-52

Ant

The beauty of summer, sub specie aeternitatis, and particularly in a climate, like yours, long in darkness and deep in cold, the beauty that is of the four score summers God gives you, at the largest extent of God’s favor, is itself a matter for parabolic teaching, in the spirit of the Gospel for the day. Let us meditate together today for a few minutes by taking a homiletical walk, down a dusty summer road, watching for a little beauty. In the mind’s eye, and with the sun upon our backs, let us meander a moment, and see what we can see. After all, Jesus taught in parables, ‘teaching not one thing without a parable.’

Start small. There in front of your left moccasin moves a lonely red ant, the lowliest of creatures, yet, like a Connecticut Yankee, bursting with the two revolutionary virtues, industry and frugality. Benjamin Franklin wrote, admiring such frugality and industry, and dubious of much dogmatic preaching, “none preaches better than the ant, and he says nothing.” A good reminder.

While we step around the ant, the little insect recalls others: grasshoppers, flies, locusts. Simple creatures. Some of our friends prefer the heat of the west, and its insects, to the rain of the east, and ours. The locusts, burning dry heat, flat arid landscape, and lack of water, out west, would seem to offer no competition. Yet, some love the virtue of the good people known there. Some like the simple rhythm of town life, and enjoy the simple summer gatherings—reunions, little league, band concerts, parades. “The people there—they are folks with good hearts.” And as Jesus taught his students, “if people have some measure of goodness themselves, think how good their maker must be.

Maybe that is the beauty of summer, to pause and appreciate simple, good people, folks with good hearts.

Berry

We can stop up the path just a bit. Raspberries, blackberries, all kinds of wild fruit are plentiful now. Jesus taught us to ask, simply, for bread and a name. We daily need food and forgiveness. Give us each day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins, for we forgive all who are indebted to us. What bread does for the body, pardon does for the soul. One of the gifts of summer is the time and leisure to remember this. A church should be fullest in the summer, for this reason, this recognition of our ultimate needs.

Our neighbor has baked some of these wild berries into morning muffins. We stop to savor them, with butter and coffee. We listen to one another along the path. So we are nourished, by one another, and made ready for the next steps in the journey.

Maybe this is the beauty of summer, to pause and make space for real worship, for that which can feed our hungers, and set us free for the next adventure.

Fence

Up ahead there is an old fence. For a river to be a river, it needs riverbanks high enough to contain the flowing water. For a lake to hold its integrity it needs a shoreline that stands and lasts. For a field to retain any semblance of usefulness, it needs fences to mark its beginnings and endings. For an individual to have any identity one needs the limits of positive improvement, as Jesus taught about perseverance, and of protective caution, as Jesus taught about times of trial. For a life to have meaning and coherence, it needs those riverbanks, shorelines, fences, and limits that give life shape and substance.

We can spend some summer time mending fences. Especially at a time and across a country so keenly divided, a house divided against itself. It is hard work, but utterly crucial. Keep your friendships in good repair, and mend the fences where they need it. Think, heal, write, love.

Some years ago, I came by this same old fence. I was walking with my dad, as it happened. We had some coffee and a muffin. Then we started off together, down the old road, he to walk with a gnarled walking stick, and I to jog after my own eccentric fashion. But for a mile up to the same fence, to the place where the road parts, we walked together. We shuffled and talked a little, remembering the name of a former neighbor, spotting a new garden planted, making a plan or two for later on. We remembered an old friend, a old style doctor, long dead. He remembered that Dr Thro came to visit him the day his mother died. “It’s hard when your mother dies,” he said, “it gets you right in the chest!” I remembered Dr. Thro swimming the length of the lake and, while he did so, barking various orders at the universe and some of this patients along the shoreline, riverbank, fence—along the virtuous limits that make a life. We came to fork, one taking the high road and one the low, and with that an embrace and a word and a glance and we were alone again. Now, along that fence, summer by summer, I walk with my dad again, feeling him beside me.

Maybe this is the beauty of summer, to set limits and keep them, to mend our fences and protect them, to honor one another in faith and love.

Cloud

This is a clear day, in our reverie, but even so there are a few dancing clouds, white and bright. We try to make sense of the summer, and to make space for the summer, and to honor this season, one that brings together meteorological splendor and theological insight. In our chapel, we put together different summer experiences—a wedding and luncheon one day, a talk on Summer reading another, a brunch to honor parents, dads and all, a singing Vacation Bible School for the Young and Young at Heart, a Holiday Brunch, an annual summer national preacher series, and fellowship each week on the plaza--to allow meteorology and theology to dance well together.

There is a dimension of possibility alive in the summer that is hard to approximate in the rest of the year. We alter our summer habits, not at all to suggest that devotion is less central now, for in some ways summer ought to be the most spiritual of the seasons, but rather to accommodate our life to the necessary rhythms of life around us.

It is astounding to hear again in the Gospel that the kingdom of heaven is hidden, small, lovely, precious, immaterial, consequential, and secret. But so Jesus teaches us, parable by parable. Summer is the season and devotion is the focus of all such wonder and possibility.

Maybe this is the beauty of summer, to pause and allow a fuller consideration of all the possibilities around us.

Breeze

A summer wind accompanies us as we walk farther down the dirt road. A fawn—or was it a fox?—darts into the brush. The smell apples, already ripening, greets us at the turn. More sun, bigger and higher and hotter, makes us sweat.

I guess every family has a family secret or two, that one subject that dominates every present moment by it the sheer weight of its hidden silence, that one taboo topic that somehow screams through its apparent muteness. Daddy’s drinking. Junior’s juvenile record. Grampa’s prison term. The so-called elephant in the room. True of nations, too, and businesses, and projects and even churches. You find it, finally, by asking gently about what is feared.

The human family has this same kind of family secret. Something we avoid discussing, if at all possible, something that makes us fearful, something that dominates us through our code of silence. It is our mortality. Our coming death is the one thing that most makes us who we are, mortal, mortals, creatures, sheep in Another’s pasture, not perfect because not perfectible, the image of God but not God, “fear in a handful of dust”. Yet we are so busy with so many other things that this elemental feature of existence we avoid.

In the face of death, we turn heavily upon our faith. It is the steady and warming wind, the breeze of the Holy Spirit, that keeps us and strengthens us all along the road. Here is the argument. If your children ask you for something, do you not provide it? And you are evil! (Not to put too fine a point on it!) Imagine, then, how much more God will provide for the children beloved of the all powerful, holy God. You are loved, beloved, graced, embraced—a child of the living God.

Maybe this is the beauty of summer, to number our days that we get hearts of wisdom, to measure the mystery about us and give over our imaginations to a consideration of our limits.

Neighbor

Walking along, you may conjure or contract a traveling bug. Shall we drive north? A popular refrain in Montreal runs like this: “Canada could have had the best of three worlds: British government, American industry, and French culture; instead, Canada collected the worst of all three: French bureaucracy, British economics, and American culture!”

But don’t you believe it. As that proverb’s tangled contents and tone of wry self-criticism tell, Canada has a great deal to offer you and me. We can learn from our northern neighbors. This is part testimony and part admonition: Take a look at the Dominion of Canada. In particular, let me suggest three things that we can bring across the border.

First, there is the Anglican Church of Canada. Its influence far exceeds that of its sister Protestant Episcopal church in the United States. Though still statistically small, Canadian Anglicanism in one sense is the ecclesiastical leader of its land. We United Methodists-especially those out of the Methodist Episcopal tradition-need to hear the voice of the Church of England. After all, we are called to honor our father and mother; where would Methodism be without its Anglican mother? In this age when theological judgment is so frightfully difficult, the history and tradition and liturgy of this parent church have much to offer us. To take just one example: We here south of the border make much of religious experience. But there are some things that should not have to be learned from experience. The richness of our Anglican heritage can remind us of this.

Second, there is Dr. Douglas John Hall, professor at McGill University in Montreal, former student of Paul Tillich, and author. His book Lighten Our Darkness sounds like a voice of realistic truth crying in pious wilderness. For example:

The test of theological authenticity is whether we can present Jesus as the crucified. To be concrete: Can one perceive in the Jesus of this theology a man who knows the meaning of meaninglessness, the experience of negation, the anguish of hopelessness? Does he encounter the absurd, and with trembling? Would a man dare to confess to this Jesus his deepest anxieties, his most ultimate questions? Would such a Jesus comprehend the gnawing care of a generation of parents who live every day with the questions: Will my children be able to survive as human beings? …Will there be enough to eat? Will they be permitted to have children? Would he, the God-Man of this theology, be able to weep over the dead bodies of little children in Southeast Asia and Brazil, as he wept over his friend Lazarus? … Would he be able to agonize over the millions of other beings-not quite little-children, fetuses-for whom there was no place; and over the mothers…Could he share our doubt: doubt about God, about man, about life, about every absolute? Could he understand why we cling to expectations that are no longer affirmed or confirmed by experience, why we repress the most essential questions? Would such a Christ understand failure? Could he participate in our failure? Or is he eternally above all that?

Douglas J. Hall, Lighten Our Darkness: Toward an Indigenous Theology of the Cross. (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1976), 211-212.

Third, there is the United Church. It was formed in 1925 as a union among Methodists, some Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and other Protestant groups. Today it is a church of some 2 million members (in a country of only 30 million), built out of a combination of Methodist and Presbyterian policy. It is not a church without problems. But for those of us who are still interested in walking a little further down the road toward ecumenism, the experience of the United Church in both its victories and defeats offers a glimpse of what our future might be like. Its predecessor denominations, including Methodism, gave up their inheritance for a new future, gave up their name and habits and protections, for the joy of a better future, a church not only with a yesterday, but with a tomorrow.

Canadian tourism commercials entice us to the natural, scenic, and cultural wonders of Canada, our neighbor to the north, le Europe prochain “the world next door.” On a dusty, dreamy summer walk, I believe, we have at least three other reasons for interest: Anglicanism, Doug Hall, the United Church. Take a look.

Maybe this is the beauty of summer, to nourish our souls in the heart and heat of a looming decade of humiliation, with still nine years to go, and to learn from our smaller, little neighbor due north. Sometimes it can good to fall in love with the soteriology next door, come summer.

You

May the Good and Gracious God, in the beauty of holiness, make of all of us attentive people, simple and true in our virtues of the heart, nourishing and nourished in pardon, disciplined by hard even bitter fences of peace, inspired by gracious clouds billowing and high, and supported all the day long by a summer wind, a spirited faith in the face of death, and a bright willingness to continue to journey, travel, learn and grow. May we find a little summer beauty in the ant, the berry, the fence, the cloud, the breeze, and the neighbor. The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 07.30.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
July 9

Imagination and Discipleship

By Marsh Chapel

Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67

Romans 7:15-25a

Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

Upon this summer Sunday, let us meditate together on imagination, and its influence in discipleship. Our gospel turns to the playful imagination of children in the marketplace. St. Paul wrote in a similar way to his Corinthian congregation:

One

19 For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.

20 Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?

21 For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.

22 For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom:

23 But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness;

24 But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.

25 Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

26 For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called:

27 But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty;

Discipleship requires more than wisdom alone. The walk of faith evokes and involves imagination, the free play of insight, the province of children and saints.

Two

What a gift are the parables of Jesus! He taught them in parables, says the Scripture, and without a parable he taught not one thing. Here, in a story form, is the same sentiment just remembered from Paul, God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise.

Jesus stands in the marketplace. He sees two warring groups of children. All community is endless contention and intractable difference. One group wants to play a game called ‘weddings’: we have our pipes, we are ready to dance, come and join us, and let us play the game of weddings. Another group wants to play a game called ‘funerals’: we have our tears, our wailing, our gathered mourning clothes and forms, come and join us and let us play the game of funerals. One game for the enjoyment of life preferred by Jesus himself, one game for the dour, self-discipline for life, preferred by John the Baptist. Come and join!

Yet neither group will give way. Groups, as Reinhold Niebuhr taught us in Moral Man and Immoral Society, have a hard time changing direction, or giving way, or forgiving, or summoning an imagination ready for discipleship. That requires a childlike heart. It requires an imagination soaked discipleship. It requires the person whom you are meant to become.

Did you ever know and love somebody who was always a bit on edge? I mean a beautiful person with a heart of gold, who was run raw by the gone-wrongness of life? This can be a rough world for a sensitive soul. Someone who has an unquenchable passion for getting things right and for knowing when things are wrong. A little of that can go a long way. If your very hunger is for what establishes the soul, you can sometimes go hungry.

Imagine with her eyes: Every child in the community was attending a safe, well-lit, quiet school, where virtually all could read at the sixth grade level by the time they finished the sixth grade level. Every sick person in the community had ample medical care, most of it preventive, and all of it shot through with a heavenly infusion of time, talent and money. Every person of color in the community felt confident entering the public spaces—theaters, churches, stadiums, stores—in every corner of the community. Every man was free to be a man. And every woman was free to be a woman. Every person is seen and heard as a real human being.

Three

Here at University, we are blessed with intelligence, youth, freedom, and reason.

We want to be careful, and caring, so we pause here. We educators sometimes tend to leave civil society to the rest of society. We have much freedom, but how we choose to use it, in relation to the rest of community and society, is another matter. We after all have that next paper to write, 50 pages of small print not including footnotes, titled with some version of the title, ‘Obscurity Squared’. To do that, one needs a capacity to spend 12 hours a day alone in a library or in front of a computer screen. To do that, to write that series of scholarly papers become books become resume become tenure become professor, can risk leaving aside, if we are not careful, or leaving to others, if we are not careful, the imaginative stewardship of forms of civil society. Girl Scout cookies. Umpire work for the Little League. Pinewood derby leadership. A seat on the PTA. Sunday worship. Neighborhood watch. Refugee resettlement work. These we have to leave in the hands of others, or at least we think we do, those basic cultural building blocks that rest on a willingness to sit quietly in dull meetings, hoping against hope for the blessed refrain, ‘I guess we’re done for tonight’. In civil society we have the chance to influence others, and to be influenced among others, in lasting, personal ways. You want to speak to others, to convince others, to educate—good. But. You cannot speak to others until or unless you speak for others. To be speak to requires first to speak for. Others will not hear or heed you, and should not, in your speech to them, if they do not, with utter confidence, feel, feel, that you speak for them as well. To speak for, you have to be with. At breakfast. Playing golf. In book club. In church. At the YMCA. Then, only then, will you enough funds in the relational bank when you need to withdraw some to say something that may then be audible. If you want people in Wisconsin to hear you, candidate, you have to go and be with people in Wisconsin. If you want people to hear you, preacher, you have to go and be with people, in visitation, on their turf. If you want to speak to others, educators, you will have to find a way to speak for others, not just to others. This is the whole genius of American civil society, from the time of De Tocqueville. Whether we will find, in the humiliations of an era whose leadership is shredding inherited forms of civil society on an hourly basis, the humility to go out and suffer with and for others, over the better part of the next decade, in order then to speak, is an unanswered question. To get to an answer we may just need some imagination in our discipleship.

Four

Wisdom is vindicated by her deeds. Our Gospel lures us and lures our imagination forward, for discipleship. Have we yet learned the lesson that what one means—by an act, a word, a statement, a vote, say—is not all that such an act means? We have experienced this lesson this year. The lesson, that is, that what you in your heart meant by an act, a word, a statement—a vote, is not in fact the limit of what that act, word, statement or vote meant: in fact it is a small part, the greater part of the meaning being found in the effect, the impact, the historical influence of the deed. Wisdom is vindicated, known, in her deeds. The meaning of a text is found in the future it opens, the future it imagines, the future it creates. (Ray Hart). So too, the meaning of an act, a word, a statement, a vote, say, is found in the future, bright or dark, which it creates. What you meant is not what it means. For that, you have to listen to those harmed, or helped, by it. Meaning is social, not individual, hence our use of words, our developed language, our investment in culture, our life in community. You may have meant it one way, but its meaning is found along another. Such hard, tragic lessons, to have to learn and re-learn.

Jesus is our beacon not our boundary. Imagination is a dimension of discipleship that is waxing not waning, needed not superfluous, crucial not peripheral. Our passages today, Genesis, Psalms, and Romans, draw our imaginations to forms of authority, and our engagement with them. In Genesis, the authority in ancestry. In Psalms, the authority in government. In Romans, the authority in conscience. In all these, the writers struggle to imagine a way forward, following the light of the beacon across the challenge of the boundary.

Five

Pause and meditate a little this summer on your own enjoyment of play. Our esteemed colleague and beloved mentor, now of blessed memory, Peter Berger did so, with imagination for discipleship, years ago in his little book, A Rumor of Angels. 1. I see grown men enthralled on a green field following a wee little white ball, which seems to have a mind of its own, for three or four hours in the hot sun. 2. I see grown women shopping together without any particular need, but immersed, self-forgetful, in the process of purchasing, God knows what. 3.I see emerging adults fixed and fixated, days on end, in the World of Warcraft. 4.Can you remember playing bridge in college all night long, to the detriment of your zoology grade? Peter Berger: A. In playing, one steps out of one time into another…When adults play with genuine joy, they momentarily regain the deathlessness of childhood. The experience of joyful play is not something that must be sought on some mystical margin of existence. It can readily be found in the reality of ordinary life…The religious justification of the experience can be achieved only in an act of faith…B. This faith is inductive—it does not rest on a mysterious revelation, but rather on what we experience in our common, ordinary lives…Religion is the final vindication of childhood and of joy, and of all gestures that replicate these. One said: “I played basketball today, on the intramural team—it was awesome.” Talk about it a bit, parents and children.

Six

Imagination in discipleship forms a wisdom vindicated, justified by her deeds. (Luke has changed the ending to ‘justified by all her children’—maybe an even closer memory to the marrow of imagination.)

Hear again the imaginative wisdom of Boston University’s own late personalist philosopher, Erazim Kohak, The Embers and The Stars, with ten of whose epigrams we conclude, this summer morning, to kindle the imagination:

‘We shall dig again the wells of our Fathers.’

‘Humans grow angry so easily, so heedlessly venting their anger at those nearest and most vulnerable, needlessly, wantonly injuring what is most precious and most fragile’.

‘Humans are not only humans, moral subjects and vital organisms. They are also Persons, capable of fusing eternity and time in the precious, anguished reality of a love that would be eternal amid the concreteness of time. A person is a being through whom eternity enters time.’

‘There is self-discovery in remembrance.’

‘We have a sense of history. But we have lost a sense of eternity.’

‘The authentic relation between beings is the personal encounter of mutual’ respect. 208

‘Most of the time we possess and covet far more than we can care for and cherish.’ 212

‘Generosity personalizes as greed depersonalizes.’

‘We need to rediscover ourselves as persons, not as need gratifying organisms.’ 215

‘The chief task of philosophy is to write footnotes to the text of experience’ 219

But to what shall I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn’…Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 07.9.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
June 25

Word to the Wise

By Marsh Chapel

People of faith, hear the Gospel, a Word to the wise: God’s grace shines through and over all human weakness; human failing cannot eclipse divine grace; the moonlight of the Grace of God still illumines, even if dimly at points and darkly at times, the very shadowlands of life. True in Scripture, true in life. Let us lift up our hearts and hear the Gospel: God’s grace, light, and love, shine upon us this Lord’s day.

Scripture

Pause for a moment, as summer begins, to ponder and to wonder at the strange world of the Bible. Our own reckoning with law, prophecy, and wisdom, with gospel, epistle, and revelation, in our brief lived experience, occurs, and stands out before, the strange world of Scripture, whence we turn—where else shall we go?—come Sunday. And the works of our time and times we most prize, at some times we name ‘biblical’ in portion and proportion. And the challenges, the momentous lived responsibilities of our time and times (love means taking responsibility after all) we most anxiously apprehend, at some times we name ‘biblical’ in portion and proportion. Think of an age wrestling with health, like ours, for instance. Our wise women and men over time have begun to prepare us.

Consider WIT, a play by Margaret Edson who teaches elementary school near Atlanta. Some years ago she wrote this one play. It was a success. She was asked to write more, but she demurred. ‘We are busy people here in 3^rd grade. We are busy people here in Georgia, in the third grade. What with the periodic table, and the solar system, and the multiplication tables, and the dissection of frogs, and the poetry of America, and a bit of recess every now and then—we are busy people here. I won’t have time to do another stage play anytime soon, thank you very much. I have all I want to do with these young minds here. One play is enough’. We gladly remember her on the day of our own annual Vacation Bible School.

Her work is biblical in proportion, about death and life, a sort of commentary if you will on Matthew and on Matthew 10. And apt for Marsh Chapel, here at the intersection of academic wisdom and human mortality. The protagonist is Vivian Bearing, a world class John Donne scholar, and the product of a world class doctoral program. At age 50, a single strong determined poetry professor, she discovers 4^th stage metastatic cancer is killing her. Her young physician is a former student, who failed to get an A in her course. Her savior is a nurse, who loves her, loves her physically with hand lotion and hugs, loves her verbally with honesty and grace, loves her personally with kindness and care. ‘This treatment will be very hard’ she hears the doctor say. ‘I love hard things’ she retorts. In 90 minutes she is dead, the curtain falling on the reading of Margaret Wise Brown’s Runaway Bunny. Is Donne’s line ‘Death be not proud” to be followed by an exclamation point or a comma? It comes down to that. For the physician, it may be, the exclamation point. For the nurse, it may be, the comma.

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee 

Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so; 

For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow 

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me. 

*******

One short sleep past, we wake eternally, 

And death shall be no more;

Death, thou shalt die.

Her performance is the kind of saving collision that can befall earnest faithful men and women, a choice encounter of human striving with physical pain and proximate death. It is a play worth reading or seeing again, just now, in the cross currents of debate about health, healing, salvus, salvation: God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty;

Biblical, in proportion, yes ‘biblical’.

The rugged biblical texts read this morning convey to us this existential dilemma. With Hagar we can sometimes find ourselves at the point of no return. With Paul we do face our endless and inevitable sin, yet are not free to wallow in it. With Matthew we are confronted by a stark twist to the fifth commandment, to Honor Father and Mother, to admit that there are times, when to do so is to do the opposite--in order to do so. One best honors an abusive parent with dishonor. Whatever comes not from faith is sin. The height of human longing, the starkness of proximate death.

Pause for a moment with Hagar, Paul, and Matthew. Our dear friend, colleague, now suddenly deceased and of blessed memory, with us in a greater light and from a farther shore, Professor Dale Andrews, regularly taught us, taught all, to consider, among other things, the social, the cultural contexts of the texts we read. We honor him in memory, but so let us honor him in spirit, word, and deed. Set these rugged texts in context, if you please.

The project of Genesis (beginning), is the beginning of creation, covenant, and providence. Our passage lies squarely in the most central of the beginnings, that of the people of faith, the story of Israel, the covenant people. To make way for Isaac, what will become of his half brother? What of the other peoples alongside the ‘chosen’? The earthy cry of a mother for a child braces and embraces us, like Rachel weeping for her children. There is no avoidance of the real costs of decision, choice, preference. God visits Hagar. Theology is learned over time in the school of visitation, of confession, of prayer, of conversation, of pastoral presence in the presence of Presence. God has mercy and shows mercy, an extra mercy, if you will, hearing and heeding. ‘God was with the boy’. At least here, at least for a moment in this passage, there is in the context of Scripture a divine expanse, an universal embrace, an extra mercy. And there is no substitute for visitation, no substitute for hearing the voice of pain, no substitute for seeing in the flesh the need of the other.

Paul’s work in Romans, as well, and whether or not for the moment you agree with Luther that this is the one, main text of the New Testament or not, likewise emerges in context. ‘Paul among Jews and Gentiles’ is the way our neighbor Krister Stendahl regularly phrased it. How are we to live by grace as people who are utterly mortal, regularly prone to harm others, in the deepest sense finally unable to rehabilitate ourselves? His vocabulary may differ a bit from ours, but Paul’s probing of the depths of life is very much our own as well. How are we to live both as healed and as sinful, both as saved and as broken? Well, here the context in full makes every difference. Paul is writing to answer this and other questions, but the writing is not his final answer. Is this your final answer Paul? No. What is? His final answer is coming. He is coming to make a visit, pay a call, stop by and see, pause in Rome and talk with his confreres. For the moment let us give Luther a nod, and, for the sake of argument, agree that Romans is THE book in the New Testament. (Or is it Galatians?). No, let us say Romans for today. But look: the whole of the letter is MERELY an introductory note to the main event, his coming visit to Rome, which he does make, and which leads then to his martyrdom. How important visitation.

Matthew has placed a harrowing set of demands, strictures, commands before us. He too was facing a decade of humiliation, though his in the latter years of the first century ad. He wanted his people steeled, ready, perseverant, of happy heart, of glad spirit, but of disciplined capacity for faithfulness. After all, those who took up the journey would be in regular visitation among others of different perspective. We do well to recall, as we did in February, regarding some of the hyperbole in the dominical teaching, particularly as recorded in Matthew, the wise, word to the wise, interpretation of Amos Wilder:

Jesus meant the requirements very explicitly…but the radical formulation of the requirements is to be explained by the imminence of the kingdom of God. The judgment was immediately at hand and an extraordinary ethic was proper for an extraordinary emergency. We have then in Schweitzer’s term ‘interim-ethics’ immediately relevant only to Jesus’ disciples in the brief period before the end…his insight that the teaching is significantly governed by the drawing near of the new age is today generally accepted. (IBD 161) As did Matthew, we are under obligation to appropriate (Jesus’ words) in a free and responsible way, applying them to our own situation…bearing in mind the disparity between his situation and ours (IBD 164) (Amos Wilder).

We read the text in context, as our beloved Dr. Andrews and so many others would have us to do.

Life

As in Scripture, so in life. Pause for a moment, as summer begins, to ponder and to wonder at the strange world of our lived experience.

The weekly ministry of the gospel, as basically constituted, in most settings and painting with a rough broad brush, requires a sermon, as good as one can do fifty times a year, and two dozen pastoral visits—home, hospital, nursing home, work place, third place. The two are intricately interwoven, the speaking the listening, the visiting and the proclamation. One significant portion of the visitation necessarily includes hospital and nursing home visits. In a week of national debate about health care, these rise to the surface of memory and reflection. Not only Scripture but also our lived experience, this Lord’s Day, in the announcement of the Gospel, strikingly recall us to the power of visitation. Have we not learned so in our own struggle?

On an August Sunday, in 1975, there is a 20-year old recovering from an appendectomy, in a rural hospital. There are four beds in the modest room, 1975. Into the room come four people, a minister in the AME tradition, dark and in dark suit and collar, and his wife and two deacons. They are there to visit the roommate on the left. In the heat the talk quietly and briefly. The fans buzz. Most of the afternoon—hours—they spend in silence. Once a bit of hymn, once a furtive reading out of a prayer book. A prayer at the end. As it happens, this one cameo becomes one of the myriad pushes into ministry for the fellow in the bed beside.

Here in the summer of 1976, oddly in the same rural hospital, is a 21 year old untrained minister making a first pastoral visit on a 22-year old man, who for three years has hoped to be a State Policeman in the Empire State. His life dream. But in the prior weekend he crashed a motorcycle, risking life and limb. His life was spared, but not the future full us of his left leg, his limb. He would heal in time, but not in a way that would allow him to hold his life dream any longer. What does one say?

That same summer, in the overheated house nursing homes of small villages, many soon to be and rightly summarily closed by the state, one saw and heard, and experienced with all the senses, the plight of the sick. In four decades much progress has been made, but we are still a long way from Tipperary. Have you been in a nursing home of late?

In the early 80’s, a call in the evening, pre-surgery. “Are you ready to go?” (meaning intended, ‘are you ready for the procedure’) “I certainly am not. I will survive”. (meaning heard—and what else do you think of when the minister shows up—‘are you ready for the end’.)

In the late 1980’s on Halloween and Thanksgiving and Christmas, accompanied by growing children, there were visits in homes and nursing homes, maybe on those holy days a dozen in the afternoon before dinner.

Then a decade later, and moving quickly, a fuller string of stops to make, some so quick that others referred to them not as visits but as sightings. Even moving quickly though, things happen, one conversation turning into another, and a roommate and a relative and another room and the day can just go. Today, one’s own mother, who would have expected this, resides in one of those places.

This year, one of our dear friends spent some time in such a home, and in recovery had struggle. One shadowy day a boy came and sat with her, a ten year old on the lam from his own family down the hall. “What’s your name?” he asked. “What do you do?” And from there, a long magic mystery in the gift of grace in human conversation, an intervention, a visitation, an appreciation, a recognition of the humanity of one older person through the humanity of one younger person. Healing ensued.

If you were to ask the changes, hospital and nursing home, in all these years, there have been many and very many. If you were to ask the abiding realities, what is the same, what is constant, unchanging, that is very simple to state: then as now, most people have no visitors. Most people in hospital and nursing home have next to no visitors. Even the inbred, trained, generations deep pastoral habits of visitation, in fact, and including those of one’s own denomination, have themselves atrophied, given the ever attractive lures of the computer screen.

So, now, with a decision on the table in our nation’s capital, whether or not to eliminate 25% of Medicaid support, when 60% of nursing home residents depend on Medicaid support, we are at sea a bit, because we have not been regular in our visitation. It is much easier when you no lived experience of what cutting from three nurses a day to two nurses a day will do to those who have no visitors.

One wrote a month ago: ‘Have we really degenerated into a nation so lacking in compassion and mercy that those of us who have more than we need are no longer willing to extend a hand to those who don’t have enough?’ (NYT, letters, 5/25/27).

Real religion is to visit widows and orphans in their affliction and remain unstained from the world, wrote James (1:27). Each one of us this week could make a visit in a nursing home. Call on a neighbor, a parishioner, a family member, or just show up on the second floor with some Oreo cookies and stay a few minutes. This is one of those sermons with an altar call, a call to decision, an invitation to discipleship. You are hereby happily invited sometime within the next seven days, to help set our common conversation about health and care in the context of actual faithful experience, of pastoral visitation (never the sole privilege of the clergy, though their example matters greatly). Visit some or someone in a nursing home this week. Make a personal visit. Erazim Kohak: ‘Humans are not only humans, moral subjects and vital organisms. They are also Persons, capable of fusing eternity and time in the precious, anguished reality of a love that would be eternal amid the concreteness of time. A person is a being through whom eternity enters time.’

People of faith, hear the Gospel, a Word to the wise: God’s grace shines through and over all human weakness; human failing cannot eclipse divine grace; the moonlight of the Grace of God still illumines, even if dimly at points and darkly at times, the very shadowlands of life. True in Scripture, true in life, let us lift up our hearts and hear the Gospel: God’s grace, light, and love, shine upon us this Lord’s day.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.25.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
June 4

Gift on the Altar

By Marsh Chapel

John 17: 1-10

A gift on the altar. Your life is a gift on the altar. What gift in what way on what altar?

The month of June each year provides a space and time for various gifts shared and received:

A Community Luncheon today (Marsh Room):

Featuring a presentation on planned giving by Sharon Wheeler, Associate Director of Planned Giving at Boston University. Then…a wedding of two members of our community, to which all are cordially invited.

June 11 a Summer Reading Discussion Group, convened by Ray Bouchard, at 9:45am.

On June 18 our Annual Father’s Day Brunch, 9:30 to 11:00am, meant for ALL.

Then on June 25, from noon to 1:30pm Vacation Bible School: “Pizza and Psalms” For children, youth, and the young at heart. Led by Bob and Jan Hill. Come and join us. Jan says everyone can sing. And she actually knows something about teaching.

You and you all who have chosen to bear witness to faith, here on a University Campus, live out gifts on altars. You welcome freshmen, as they arrive, eager and sometimes lonely. You bid farewell to them four years later, after they have both warmed and stolen your hearts, and the good bye hurts because it so good. You take up your place in the heart of an academic enterprise, to recall with joy that learning and meaning are both important, that head and heart are both utterly human, that all of us are better when we are loved, even if we don’t get an A. Some graduate Summa, some Magna, some Cum, and some of us just graduate THANK YOU LAUDE (LORDY)! You have to be willing to say hello, and to say good bye, here, and you are, and you do. What a gift on the altar of life!

A gift on the altar. Your life is a gift on the altar. What gift in what way on what altar?

In a few minutes we will bring our ordered hour of worship to a climactic close. Ushers will come forward out of the gathered people of God. A hymn of praise will be sung. Two of our fellows, a man and a woman, maybe a couple, a mother and daughter, two old friends, perhaps two youth, will stand before the altar, collection plates in hand. A gift will be placed upon a beautiful altar. We will offer a prayer. Almost every week, as we conclude our one hour of common prayer, we do this together.

Why do we do this?

Our physical statement, a regular occurrence in most worship services, particularly adorned and beautified in the habits of this congregation, is meant to be a ringing affirmation, in this moment of a gift upon the altar.

Pentecost causes us to consider this, as does today’s Gospel, John 17:1-10

More than we regularly acknowledge, issues of life and action that may not seem theological at first, at depth really are. How shall we offer our time, energy, and money? What is the Christian understanding of warfare? Is personal possession, ownership of property, a proper feature of a good life? What is the status of those at the start, children? What value do we ascribe to frail, mature life? How are women and men to relate? What are faithful uses of money?

At length, or depth, all of these questions, on which our daily lives founder or are founded or both, require a theological horizon, demand a theological response, deserve a theological assessment.

The great strength of our now passing post-modern, or even post-Christian era, has been a sense of limits, a sense of humility, even ignorance before the question of truth. Our time more than any other has honored the biblical and human perception that truth is very difficult to determine, nearly impossible to ascertain, as Solzenhitzyn better than most did remind us. In life there is much gray. The great weakness of our now passing post-modern, or even post-Christian era, has been this same sense of limits, sense of humility and ignorance before questions of ultimate reality. Too readily we have let the sense that truth is difficult to ascertain become a despondent acceptance of the impossibility of affirming truth. Too readily we have let the sense that truth seems nearly impossible to ascertain become a fatalistic denial that any truth at all is preferable to any other. The truth of relativity has given way to the falsehood of relativism.

To this the word of truth responds.

A gift on the altar. Your life is a gift on the altar. What gift in what way on what altar?

Listen again to the strange, stark mystery of today’s Gospel, come Pentecost, come the day of spirit, come the presence of the Comforter, the Advocate, the Paraclete.

‘The hour has come, glorify your Son’. In John, glory means the cross. Jesus’ glorification is the completion of his life in death, ad gloriam dei.

‘Eternal Life’. This is eternal life that they may know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent. Notice how different in five ways this simple verse is from Matthew, Mark and Luke.

‘I glorified you by finishing the work’. The word is the same, the last upon the lips of Jesus in this gospel, ‘finished, it is finished’.

‘Before the world existed’. Eternal life precedes created life. God is not in time, time is in God. Eternal life, love, resurrection are both prelude and postlude. Love is God’s first name. Or, Resurrection is God’s first name, Creation God’s middle name, and…Surname…Inspiration. In this Gospel at any rate.

‘They have kept thy word’. In our time, an emerging time of the famine of the word, words to speak and hear are hard to find. The Risen Jesus whose voice emanates from 2000 years ago, out of the imagination of a dear soul beloved community preacher calls out a word and for a word kept.

‘All mine are yours and yours are mind and I have been glorified in them’. He speaks from beyond. The words of glory come before the moment of glory, the cross, in which all is finished. Eternal life. Life, Love, Light.

A gift on the altar. Your life is a gift on the altar. What gift in what way on what altar?

Someone recently proposed that we resist alienation by way and by means of participation. Resist alienation through participation.

We are 6 months into a decade of humiliation. The path ahead requires steady participation, personal discipline, the service of God with gladness, a sure hold on a common hope. For this, we shall need each other, and the regular engagements of worship.

Each of us oversees a mental parking lot, over which we have no control for entry and exit. Worries come and go, parking and leaving. Fretful cares come and go, parking and leaving. Anxieties come and go, parking and leaving. Just when you think the lot has emptied out for a bit, another jalopy, hooptie, pulls in. Though the parking lot is imaginary, and the worries are invisible, these cars are real, real metal, vinyl and rubber. In quiet, come Sunday, we can simply watch, as the traffic pulls in and out. Automobiles of anxieties global, national, cultural, denominational, vocational, personal, all. Some days the lot is filled. Others, closer to empty. You have little to no control over these parking patterns. That may be good news. Just let the traffic flow.

You do have a life, a gift on the altar, in faith, to offer, in the song of the Apostle, Have no anxiety about anything but in all things in prayer and supplication with thanksgiving lift your needs to God.

A gift on the altar. Your life is a gift on the altar. What gift in what way on what altar?

Our community has become a generous, giving one, over many years. The Lord loves a cheerful giver, and the Lord loves you. You Marsh Chapel folks are known as giving, generous, tithing people. You are not alone in this, but you are exemplary in this. This past week many of us spent in our Annual Conferences, doing various Methodist things like singing lustily, and like eating endlessly, and like arguing vociferously, and like finding ways to hug one another and pray for one another, even after our words have stung. There was a woman, now a minister in the Adirondacks, who as a child, with her parents, in a very modest home in the Finger Lakes fed a simple dinner to an untrained and uneducated and unprepared young preacher, 1976. It both bothers and moves me to remember that the ‘table’ was a cardboard box, upended and covered with a white cloth. A gift on the altar. One retiree recalled her first church of 21 people, whom she asked, ‘Do you use the lectionary’? The lay leader said, ‘Sure, you can use either pulpit or the lectionary to speak from’. She was telling others to translate the tradition, not to serve it raw. And there were bitter differences, growing more painful by the years, largely over the fundamental gospel issue of the full humanity of gay people. But as the proceedings wandered along, and now not as 21 year old preacher in name only, but as an aging, rookie, grandfather in training (‘dad, you are just another old white guy with a comb over’), my mind could not help but wander across the landscape of love in the churches in that room. It does not take long to go from being a young turk to becoming an old turkey.

I remember a widow with four teenagers who somehow still found the time to run a Wednesday dinner for all the neighborhood kids.

I remember a recovering alcoholic, living alone in a trailer, who took on the job of raising $4000 for preachers’ retirements, out along the blue highways of the North Country.

I remember a couple who decided to run an old car two more years, so that they could help to build a new church, out along the blue highways of urban upstate New York.

I remember two retired teachers, loving housemates forever, who singlehandedly started an endowment fund, out along the blue highways of the Finger Lakes.

I remember the story of a janitor at the University of Pennsylvania who the left the school $2 million dollars in his will, along the Quaker state blue highways.

I remember reading about a maid in Mississippi who never graduated even from elementary school, who cleaned student rooms for 40 years, and left this world heavily endowing a scholarship fund for minority students at Ole Miss, out along the blue highways of the sweltering south.

I remember a Colgate graduate who put the church’s endowment into his will, and so put his estate into the endowment. Someone here could do that, Colgate graduate or not.

And now, coming home to Marsh Chapel, I remember Daniel Marsh. I tell you, without the tithing of other generations, we would be worshipping in a pup tent. But they gave us something, a beautiful, reverent, charming Chapel. They made it their gift. So much so that Daniel and his wife are buried right here, their ashes right in the shadow of the altar, right before the pulpit.

A gift on the altar. Your life is a gift on the altar. What gift in what way on what altar?

My friend Doug Mullins told me once about another gift on the altar, with which to end:

Belinda was a single parent, trying to take care of herself and raise a five year old Ryan. She was a single parent because when her husband learned that the requisite surgery for her cancer would leave her disfigured, he left. One evening Belinda tucked Ryan into bed and was reading a book to him. He interrupted her to ask if she had bought that book for him.

“Yes”, she said.

He then inquired if she had also bought the bed in which he slept.

Again the answer was “Yes”.

Had she bought the house they called home?

Yes, she said.

And what about the new sweater he liked so much?

“Yes”, she said, she had bought that too.

He thought about how good she had been to him, supplying all his needs, and finally he said, “Mommy, get my piggy bank. There are seven pennies in it. Take them and get something you really want for you.”

You know, everything we have is a gift from God. Life, breath, faith, forgiveness, and hope of eternal life. Cross, altar, gift. Life, light, love.

This summer think, again, about tithing.

A gift on the altar. Your life is a gift on the altar. What gift in what way on what altar?

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.4.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
May 7

Alma Mater

By Marsh Chapel

John 10:1-10

‘I am the door. He who enters by me will be saved and will come and in and go out and find pasture.’

On the journey: we covet prayer, we remember names, we commune in hope.

Prayer (Prelude)

The Covenant Prayer is perhaps one of John Wesley’s most known prayers. Do you feel that it is an important prayer for believers to pray in modern day? It is often a prayer recited at church in special worship services. Do you feel that it is a prayer believers should pray on their own to affirm their commitment to God?

Mr. Wesley in prayer sought a combination of enthusiasm and enlightenment, as he did in general in the practice of faith. He could feel the presence of the Spirit, as on May 24, 1738 on Aldersgate Street. He also could sing with his brother, Charles, at the opening of an elementary school in Kingswood, England, 1762, ‘unite the pair so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety, learning and holiness combine, truth and love (for all to see)’. The Covenant Prayer is one such sought combination of enthusiasm and enlightenment.

How important do you feel it is for believers to examine themselves with John Wesley’s self-examination questions (https://www.hopefaithprayer.com/john-wesley-holy-club-questions/) and which of the questions do you feel are most important for people to focus on?

All the questions are good ones, though they would benefit from an admixture of first person singular (‘I’), with first person plural (‘we’). The questions help us to stay alert to what is new in every morning. What a wonder there is in what is new! I have been re-reading David Hempton’s book, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit, this year, in which he explores the mysterious birth and growth of the Methodist church, especially in circumstances of harsh confinement—sailors on shipboard, prisoners in cells, soldiers in confined barracks, poor settlers in small prairie dwellings. There is a mystery at the start of something new.

One of John Wesley’s self-examination asks, “Am I enjoying prayer?” Do you have any advice to give on how one can enjoy prayer?

Prayer is the joy of sitting silent before God. Enjoy the quiet. There will be plenty of rumble, din, cacophony, dissonance and just plain noise in the rest of the day.

If John Wesley were here today, what do you think he would recommend for people who feel that they need to revive their prayer life?

Remove yourself from email on a regular basis. When you have to use email, remember that it is irretrievable, international, eternal, and immutable.

We know that John Wesley was very disciplined about prayer. He would wake up at 4:00 AM for his daily prayer time. In order to wake up so early, he made sure to go to bed early. What are some ways you suggest that Christians can become more disciplined about prayer?

One practice suggested by the Rev. Vernon Lee, some years ago, was to use the quiet time of dressing, in the morning, to pray, in particular and in person, for others. The Rev. Susan Shafer gave us a collection of Bonhoeffer’s prayers and writings, 100 words each, one for each day, to be used in the morning. Howard Thurman, though, preferred prayer at night, as he remembered his walk on Daytona Beach: “the ocean and the night surrounded my little life with a reassurance that could not be affronted by any human behavior; the ocean at night gave me a sense of timelessness, of existing beyond the ebb and flow of circumstance; death would be a small thing, I felt, in the sweep of that natural embrace”.

John Wesley would often write out prayers. Do you feel that writing, drawing or other creative modalities help some to better connect with God through prayer?

Yes.

John Wesley advocated for fasting as a way to make prayer more powerful and he himself fasted every Friday; at one point in his life, he fasted every Wednesday and Friday. Do you advocate for fasting? If so, how often?

Regular—daily—physical exercise is as prayerful, meditative, healthy, spiritual and meaningful a practice as one can find. At Marsh Chapel, we host a spiritual yoga group at 5pm.

John Wesley was deeply connected to God. In what ways do you feel he developed this strong connection? How can Christians today strengthen their connection to God?

Mr. Wesley, in his Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament, at several places offers hints, glimpses, and premonitions of his sense of divine presence. Commenting on Matthew 6:9ff, the Lord’s prayer, he writes, ‘He who best knew what we ought to pray for, and how we ought to pray, what matter of desire, what manner of address would most please himself, would best become us, has here dictated to us a most perfect and universal form of prayer, comprehending our real wants, expressing all our lawful desires; a complete directory and full exercise of all our devotions’. Notice the word ‘universal’. For Wesley, as for his tradition at its best, Jesus is our beacon, not our boundary, and in Him, God is loving us into love and freeing us into freedom. Love for all, freedom for all. And all means all.

My mother taught me my first verse of Scripture: A wise man built his house…

Identity (Sermon)

Class of 2017! Are you happy, glad, joyful?

Then, if so, you have entered the deep mystery of a most ancient invocation, that of the Psalmist, from more than 2000 years ago: Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the lands, serve the Lord with gladness!

There is a remarkable sentiment, that gladness itself, happiness itself, joy itself are ultimate service. Gladness serves. Come into his presence with singing! Know that the Lord is God. It is He that has made us, and not we ourselves. We are his people, the sheep of his pasture. Enter his gates with Thanksgiving, and his courts with Praise, give Thanks to Him and bless his name. For the Lord is good. His steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.

Calvin Trilling: “For thirty years my mother served us nothing but leftovers. The original meal was never found.”

The land of Emma Lazarus and the Statue of Liberty is now led to applaud, and celebrate the loss of health care for 24 million. This is an early wave in a tide of humiliation coming our way this decade. The church of Charles Wesley, he of gladness of heart, who helps us to sing, ‘finish then thy new creation’, is now led to affirm the rejection of the consecration of a fine, well prepared, regularly ordained elder, simply because she is gay. This is another wave in a tide of humiliation coming our way in these years.

That gladness of heart is lasting, meaningful service, in faithfulness to ALL generations.

No surprise, that. For you are Boston University graduates, with a name, and from a tradition, of glad hearts. Not some but all. Not home town but universe. Not nation but world.

With gladness of heart, Howard Thurman said, people all people belong to one another. Not some, but all.

With gladness of heart, Martin Luther King said, the moral arc of the universe is long, but bends toward justice. Not country, but universe.

With gladness of heart, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, which gave birth to BU, said, The world is my parish. Not nation, but world.

Not some but all; not home town but universe; not nation but world.

Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the lands, serve the Lord with gladness.

May 14, the day on which you can hear your classmates speak of faithfulness and life, that same day is….Mother’s day. Make a plan. Buy a flower. Choose a gift. Send a note. And do so—with gladness!

My mother was a Latin teacher, for whom reminders were instruction (we tend to need more reminder than instruction)

Hope (Communion)

Come now up the sawdust trail. Receive the Lord. ‘Ye that do truly and earnestly repent of your sin…

We await a common hope, a hope that our warming globe, caught in climate change, will be cooled by cooler heads and calmer hearts and careful minds.

We await a common hope, a hope that our dangerous world, armed to the teeth with nuclear proliferation, will find peace through deft leadership toward nuclear détente.

We await a common hope, a hope that our culture, awash in part in hooliganism, will find again the language and the song and the spirit of the better angels of our nature.

My mother understood the difference between cultural and financial wealth. And taught us how to change, leave, journey, and itinerate. England, Spain, Geneva WCC, Montreal McGill, Boston.

‘I am the door. He who enters by me will be saved and will come and in and go out and find pasture.’

Calvin Trillin: “For thirty years my mother served us nothing but leftovers. The original meal was never found.” On the journey: we covet prayer, we remember names, we commune in hope.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 05.7.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
April 30

The Bach Experience

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 24: 13-35

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill

‘They told what had happened on the road, and how he had been make known to them in the breaking of the bread’.

There come episodes in the course of a battered lifetime that place us deep in the shadows. If the shadow is dark enough, we may not feel able to move forward, for our foresight and insight and eyesight are so limited. We may become bound, chained, held. Those enmeshed in the strife of warfare today come quickly to mind. Those concerned about the condition and direction of their land and country come also to mind. Those whose church or denomination seems to have slipped into a spiritual amnesia, forgetfulness about the heart of the good news, abiding love, forgetfulness of the God who come Easter is addressed by God’s first name, Resurrection, come personally to mind.

You may have known this condition—of confusion or disorientation or ennui or acedia. You may know it still. The death of a loved one can bring such a feeling. The loss of a position or job can bring such a feeling. The recognition of a major life mistake can bring such a feeling. The recollection of a past loss can bring such a feeling. The disappearance of a once radiant affection, or love, for a person or a cause or an institution can bring such a feeling. The senselessness of violence inflicted on the innocent can bring such a feeling.

And how to speak and think of these things? Over the years you may have grown frustrated by your own mother tongue in various ways. English places such a fence between thought and feeling, when real thought is almost always deeply felt, and real feeling is almost always keenly thought. We need another word like thoughtfeeling or feltthought. When C Wesley sang ‘unite the pair so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety, learning and holiness combined, and truth and love let us all see’ he described something bone marrow close to life, happiness, hope, ministry, faith. And he also was wrestling with the limits of our beautiful language. Anyway, you, well beloved, by nature and discipline live the thoughtfeeling gospel, and for that we are lastingly thankful.

Be it then thought or feeling or thoughtfeeling, there do come episodes, all in a lifetime, that place us, if not in the dark, at least well into the shadows. You may have known all about this at one time. You may know it still.

Come Sunday, some snippet of song, or verse, or preachment, or prayer, or, especially today a line from the Cantata, it may be, will touch you as you meander about in the dim shadow twilight. Hold onto that snippet. Follow its contours along the cave of darkness in which you now move. Let the snippet—song, verse, sermon, prayer, line—let it guide you along. So you may be able to murmur: ‘I can do this…We can make our way…I can find a handhold or foothold…We can hope and even trust that the Lord heals the brokenhearted…I can make it for now, at least for now, for the time being.’ It is the power and role of beauty, verbal or musical or liturgical or communal, to restore us to our rightful mind, our right thoughtfeeling.

Today the epistle, the Gospel and the psalm lift a hymn of faith, a song of courage in the face of adversity. It is this lift for living which beauty, especially the beauty of holiness, and particularly, this morning, the beauty of holy music is meant to provide. Here, at Marsh Chapel we want to accentuate Truth, for sure, and Goodness, for sure. But we don’t want to leave behind beauty. Beauty can heal. In our work with demons. In our quiet and contemplation. Beauty, in the case of this morning, the beauty of Bach, often has the power to shake us loose, to set us free. To make us, as in Luke 24, not just followers but also witnesses.

Dr. Jarrett, how shall we listen, both on the radio and in person, most fully to be immersed in today’s Bach experience?

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett

Thank you, Dean Hill. I’d be delighted. But first, knowing your love of the Gospel of John, would mind reminding us of the highlight’s of the Fourteenth Chapter:

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill

Well, as you know Dr. Jarrett, John Chapter 14 finds Jesus in elevated conversation with his disciples where he predicts and explain the events to come, namely his Passion and Resurrection. Let’s hear the words again:

Vs. 1 “Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me.”

Vs. 2 “In my father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you.”

Vs. 6 “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me.”

Vs. 15 “If ye love me, keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and shall give you another Comforter; even the spirit of truth.”

Vs. 27 “Peace I leave with you . . . “

And two verses featured in this morning’s cantatas:

Vs. 23 “Whoever loves me, and keeps my Word, my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him.”

And finally, Vs. 28 “I am going away, and I am coming back to you. If you loved me, then you would rejoice.”

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett

It is a rich chapter, indeed, and full of verses that form the tenets of our faith and understanding of Christ in our lives then and now.

Bach’s cantatas take their names from the first line of text, and today’s cantata, No. 74 sets verse 23 of John 14: ‘Wer mich liebet, der wird mein Wort halten’ or Whoever loves me, and keeps my Word. Bach originally conceived of the cantata for use on Pentecost Sunday in 1725, where we find the Holy Spirit come down to ignite the movement among the Disciples that would become the Church. The Disciples and followers of Jesus had remained stunned, suspended in disbelief that their movement and leader had been cut down so devastatingly. Today’s lesson of Jesus’s appearance on the road to Emmaus finds the Disciples in the initial stages of their grief, no doubt deep in their own ‘thought-feeling’.

Though a cantata for Pentecost, there is surprisingly little reference to the Holy Spirit, but rather a focus on Jesus’s promise to return, and that faith will create a dwelling for Him in our hearts. The cantata is rich with arias – four total. The first two arias are the more personal – almost a dialogue between the ardent believer and the reminder of the words of Jesus. These mutual assurances exchanged, the final two arias turn outward t the Church and beckon us to follow suit in making room for Jesus within our hearts. Both of these arias find their vigor with representations of the earthly trials each of us face in a life of faith, but also a reminder of the sufferings Jesus himself endured. You can’t have a Bach cantata without a reminder of the Passion and the snares of Sin, afterall.

Musically speaking, Cantata 74 is many things. The opening movement is unified by the motive of the first words, rather than a Chorale tune defining a structure. And for a movement with festival trumpets and timpani, the bluster is replaced with elegance and confidence of stride. At the outset there seems an error in order or at least an imbalance of arias and recitatives, but there is a clear internal structure that features a single recitative between each of the two aria groupings. Those two recitatives serve as musical and theological connectors to the arias on either side.

Within these eight movements, we hear extraordinary variety from Bach, from the winsome Soprano solo, and anxious Bass continuo aria that hints at our own doubt of Jesus’ promise, to the Tenor aria that nearly takes flight, and the blazing bravura of the final Alto aria. Here we have musical and theological reminders of both Penance and Atonement, but also the assurance of Love and Grace.

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill

Given the snares, cold night terrors, noonday destruction, evil, scourge, wild beasts of this very day, it could be that a sober reading and interpretation of our lessons, including our psalm, one of the great trusting hymns of a faithful heart, will sustain us this morning.

Likewise, our Gospel lesson from Luke, brought as an interlude into our yearly reading of Matthew, reminds us of the healing power in ordered worship. First, in a recitation of the gospel. Second, in an interpretation of that Gospel. Third, in a communal engagement of the gospel, in the common bread of the church, in the common cup of the church, in the common life of the church. ‘They knew him in the breaking of the bread.’ For some, the emphasis in Protestant fashion, will fall on the knowing; for others, the emphasis in Catholic fashion, will fall on the thanksgiving, the Eucharistic bread broken. For some, the what. For others, the how. For all, come Sunday, come this Lord’s day, the possibility of new life, even if dimly perceived, even if shadowed.

For those, that is, who have walked past a graveyard or two, for those who have walked the valley of the shadow of death, for a world searching to match its ideals of peace with its realities of hatred, for a nation struggling to rebalance cultural poverty and financial wealth in cultural wealth and financial poverty for you today if you are in trouble, and who are worried today about others and other graves and other yards, and who have seen the hidden traps, unforeseeable dangers, and steel jawed snares of life, there is something encouraging about this Easter song: “They knew him in the breaking of the bread”

For those today, for example, who mourn the current condition of the United Methodist Church, gospel and word and companionship give some help. Remember that what is not the Gospel will not over the long term make very good administrative procedure or church law. Remember that Methodism has long struggled to honor both its preaching voice and its administrative face. Think of Peter Cartwright confronting his presiding elder, Ernest Tittle denouncing the central conference, and Georgia Harkness rebuking the wrongheadedness of the 1972 Discipline. Read, of course, the administrative reports. But first remember to listen to the pulpit voices: in San Diego, in Chicago, in New York, in San Francisco, and Rochester, and Boston. Remember that it is the Gospel that comes first, and matters most. Superintending presumes something, someone to superintend. Preaching precedes, guides, and leads administration (in a healthy church). (The experience of Emmaus Road was not forged in a committee meeting.) Remember that the Gospel of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, affirms the full humanity of gay people as in Galatians 3, John 14, and Matthew 5. So stay on the road, walking in the journey, hearing the good news, heeding its interpretation, and being nourishing in the consanguinity of love.

For those today, for instance, in the thick of transition, the Word has this support for you: the gift of getting by, getting through, getting out, and getting home, not pausing to worry about the small stuff. This song is one for that point on the road when you just have to go ahead and risk and jump. You have made your assessment, you have made your plan, you have made your study, then you have prayed. You are not sure. But you sense a presence, and receive the courage to take one more step.

Emmaus Road brings a hymn of the heart, one you sing when you are not sure, but you are confident. Not certain, but confident. You can be confident without being certain. In fact, a genuine honest confidence includes the confidence to admit you are not sure. Faith means risk. Isn’t that part of what we mean by faith? Once you are on the road, you have to choose between walking forward and slinking away.

Step forward. Go about your discipleship: pray, study, learn, make peace, love your neighbor, agree to disagree agreeably, let every one be convinced in his own mind. The random remains random. We shall face our challenges in our time. Just this: we need not face them alone, but in the company of the Gospel, and its interpretation, and its community engaged together, one day in Eucharist, say, one day in music, say, one day in service, say, but every day with an uncanny sense of the presence of One Risen.

In the name of the Resurrected Son, and of the Creating Father, and of the Abiding Spirit: Now with the mind of Christ set us on fire, that unity may be our great desire. Give joy and peace, give faith to hear your call, and readiness in each to work for all.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean. & Dr. Scott Jarrett, Director of Music

posted in Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music, The Bach Experience, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 04.30.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Bach Experience, Robert Hill, Scott Jarrett