Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

Romans 4: 17b

Preface

“God, who gives life to the dead, and who calls into existence the things that do not exist”

The gift of resurrection is faith. The rightness of God, is given, from faith to faith, from the faith of Christ, the faithfulness of Christ, to you. In the darkness, light. A quickened life by faith, of faith, in faith.

St. Paul, in his magnum opus, Romans, beckons by faith to faith your faith and my faith. Some of us have been auditing the course in life and faith long enough. This is Easter. It may be time for you to quit auditing the course, and sign up and register and pay the tuition go to class and do the homework and sit for the final and receive a grade. I’ll settle this morning for attendance and tuition, Sunday worship and tithing, to start. However will you hear faith without worship? However will you find faith without community? However will you know faith without study? However will you receive faith without giving in faith? Let this be your first Sunday of worship over the next year, not the last.

A Quickened Life by Faith

Some years ago, well before winter dawn, I had crossed the border into Canada, driving north and east, 90 minutes, in the driving snow, in pursuit of a McGill PhD, and headed for the Mercier Bridge—such a nice name for such a rickety bridge—‘prier pour mois, je conduit sur le pont Mercier’. At the border there were pronounced the usual four questions. Your life, your faith, bring answers to them, every day, one way or another. Life is short. We will leave to Dr. Hobbes the question whether life is also and more so ‘solitary, nasty, poor, and brutish’. Short, no doubt. And another day, and the border questions, including Easter Morn: ‘What is your name? Where are you from? Where are you going? Do you have anything to declare?’ One day, in full, we shall answer. Today, Easter day, we answer in part, affirming our faith.

That 30 below zero snow cascading morning, those foolish enough to drive did so with care, inching along beside the St. Lawrence river. Ahead loomed the headlights of a tractor trailer. The lights flashed, and the truck slowed to stop, and the driver opened his window. ‘Pardone moi: Ou est le frontier?’ Glad to see some other lights in the tundra, glad to have tracks in the snow road to follow, glad to hear a human voice, I picked through my meager basket of French words to cobble up a response. ‘Bon, Le Frontier est prochaine, ouest…’ But before I could finish my soliloquy, worthy I expected of Marcel Proust at his dour best, the driver smiled and laughed and said, ‘Oh, buddy, thank goodness, you’re an American! I can tell by the way you don’t speak French! Excellent. How do I get out of this wilderness?’

The gift of resurrection is faith. The rightness of God, is given, from faith to faith, from the faith of Christ, the faithfulness of Christ, to you. In the darkness—surprise!–light. Romans announces the Gospel. The Gospel reveals itself only through faith, and it leads to nothing other than faith. Think slowly through the Gospel, in the full letter to the Romans:

To bring about the obedience of faith among all the nations

I am not ashamed of the Gospel. It is the power of God for 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’

God gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.

Therefore, since we are justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ…Suffering produces endurance, and endurance character, and character hope, and hope does not disappoint us because of the love of God shed abroad in our hearts by faith through the Holy Spirit.

Hope that is seen is not hope. Who hopes for what he sees? We hope for what we do not see, and wait for it with patience.

‘What then shall we say to this? If God is for us, who is against us? Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?

Shall tribulation or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.

For I am sure that neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities nor things present nor things to come nor powers nor height nor depth nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed, by the renewal of your mind.

Let love be genuine. Hate what is evil. Hold fast to what is good. Love one another with mutual affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. Never lag in zeal. Be ardent in spirit. Serve the Lord. Rejoice in your hope. Be patient in tribulation. Be constant in prayer. Contribute to the saints. Practice hospitality.

A quickened life, by faith.

A Quickened Life of Faith (Romans 4: 17b)

And of faith—a quickened life of faith.

This month, among other pursuits, the icy back roads of an utterly foreign dominion, The Epistle to the Romans, have beckoned, coming to Easter. Paul has something to say to us at Easter. Something about faith. The resurrection frees up the church’s gospel preaching, the offer of the gift of faith. Have you faith? Do you know God to be a pardoning God? Are you moving on to wholeness? Do you expect wholeness in this lifetime?

Tucked away in the winding, ice laden back roads of Romans, you come upon a sharp, almost a U-Turn, at Romans 4: 17b. The next stretch of highway is no picnic, either. You tell me what it means to believe ‘in hope against hope’, for example. But here, in an astonishing curve, Paul lets slip a side angle view of God. Tell the truth, said Dickinson, but tell it slant. Slant Paul says it here. The verse, one must honestly admit, as does your preacher this Easter, finally resists at depth a final rendering. That is why it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace…in the presence of the God…(get ready for it)…who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Pause for just an Easter second right here. Paul spells God by resurrection first, and creation second. Paul names God in resurrection first, and creation second. Greek, like German can abide varieties of sentence word orders (In German all is fair as long you remember the verb at the end of the sentence to put!) Here, Romans 4: 17b to be exact, Paul at the pinnacle of his powers, cedes the first word about God to the resurrection, and makes creation a sub-set of resurrection. Who raises the dead, and creates out of nothing.

Your resurrection is too small, to paraphrase JB Phillips. A quickened life is a faith life of height and breadth and depth—resurrection above all, resurrection in all, resurrection under all! Here you are given a fatter Easter, a more robust raising, an ampler hope, a wider mercy. I love the word ‘stout’. Here is resurrection, stout. Bigger than…all outdoors. I wonder if our resurrection faith could stand a little expansion, a bigger suit size, 42 not 40 long, say, another notch out in the belt, say, an un-hemming of the hem, say?

On closer inspection, Romans 4: 17b that is, there is more. For an unexplained reason, Paul does not use his usual go-to verb for raising here, eigeiro, which everywhere else in letter he does. He uses another, zoapoiountos. This means enlivens, quickens, gives life. And there is more! The rest of the verse, ‘non-being into being’, is a reckoning, beckoning, harkening to the creation ex nihilo, the creation from nothing. Under every frosty evergreen, along every pre-dawn snow belted path, in and through all creation is the power of something from nothing which is best known in resurrection. The Easter is not an add on to whatever other remarkable things one can hear in life, learn in college, and remember in dotage. Resurrection is everywhere, everything, all the time, without measure, itself subsuming the creation, as does the creation of the creation. Alkier: ‘Faith…without any validation. Barth (ETTR): ‘faith brings the known condition and status of human life into relation with the unknown God.’…

Paul speaks sparingly but stoutly of resurrection in Romans (e.g.1:4, 4:24, 6:5, 7:4, 8:11).

Resurrection stands up faith. Be upstanding, faithful ones, be upstanding. As we stand for the Gospel every Sunday here at Marsh Chapel, you be upstanding in life, abstaining evil, practicing good, worshipping God. Go to church on Sunday and tithe, for starters. And great ready to cross the existential border!

A quickened life, of faith.

A Quickened Life in Faith

And in faith—a quickened life in faith.

What is your name?

Our name is given in baptism.

In baptism. One part cross, one part resurrection.

In baptism. Recall the trials of the week past. Betrayal (Judas). Denial (Peter). Judgment (Pilate). Struggle (bearing the cross). Pain (Crucifixion). Trauma (Crucifixion). Humiliation (Crucifixion). Suffering (Crucifixion). Injustice (Crucifixion). Defeat (Crucifixion). Torture (Crucifixion). Despair (Why?). Rejection (burial). Scorn (burial). Death (burial).

In baptism. Today is Easter, the day of resurrection. We celebrate with gladness Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, in concert with the church universal, the church militant, and the church triumphant. Our hymns evoke gladness, our prayers hope, our gatherings promise. Today in faith we affirm the triumph of the invisible over the visible. We hear the voice that is no voice, the words that have no hearing, the range of declaration that stretches out through ‘all the earth’, as our psalm says. The resurrection of Jesus makes possible the preaching of the church.

We all have ways down the road we can learn and teach, teach and learn, the care of the earth. Someone gave you a name, in baptism and in birth.

Where are you from?

We are from, out of, a cloud of witnesses, the church, the church militant and the church triumphant, the church of the majestic brass—militant, and the church of the lilies in honor and remembrance—triumphant.

The church. Hunsinger: Indicative not imperative; gift not possession; conformation not imitatio Christ; resemblance not equivalence; suggestive not technical; ecumenist not ‘modernist’

The church. (Theater) gets us in a room, breathing the same air, thinking about how to be human together (NYT Laura Collins-Hughes 4/10/17).’ Worship does the same, along with other things.

The ‘church’. Abraham Heschel: “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ….get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.” …“When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.”

The church. My father-in-law Pennock, Malone NY, 1965, preached on the theme The Need of Intensity. And he is here today?

Where are you headed?

We are on a journey, headed for a promised land, earthly and heavenly. We are walking on a journey together.

A journey. Our baccalaureate speaker last year, heard the resurrection music in the hallway downstairs, and went on to run the peace corps. The Baccalaureate talk last spring by Peace Corps director Carrie Hessler-Radelet (CAS’79, Hon.’16), who called on BU graduates to “embrace the cause of humanity with optimism and enthusiasm.” (BU Today, June 2016).

A journey. Arts of Democracy: Active listening; Creative conflict; Mediation; Negotiation; Dialogue; Evaluation.

A journey. Think of Eugene Lang, PS 121 NYC, who paid for college for any of the 6^th graders he spoke to at their graduation, 1981. Half of the 69 6^th grade graduates went to college.

Do you have anything to declare?

Out of the marathon bombing horror in 2013 came acquaintance, friendship, love and marriage. Hope springs eternal in the human breast. Roseann Sdoia (lost leg 4/16/13) met Michael Materia (took her to hospital). ‘He was kneeling on the ground, trying to hold me from sliding, trying to hold himself, and trying to hold the tourniquet. And then here I am, telling him to hold my hand. So the poor guy had a lot going on’. After a couple of months, a friendship between the two bloomed into romance. ‘There was an interest growing in each other, kind of quietly, until we talked about it’ (Roseann). Nantucket, 12/4/16 engagement. Then, in full gear he, and slow and steady leading with the left leg she, climbed 1576 steps to the observation deck of the Empire State Building, 86^th floor. We’ve spent a lot of time together and from that we got to see each other’s characters and really just bond. (NYT, 12/16).

Coda

The gift of resurrection is faith. The rightness of God, is given, from faith to faith, from the faith of Christ, the faithfulness of Christ, to you. In the darkness, light. Faith is a quickened life. A quickened life, by and of and in faith.

“God, who gives life to the dead, and who calls into existence the things that do not exist”

– The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 04.16.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
April 2

In Conversation with Nouwen: Here and Now

By Marsh Chapel

Ezekiel 37: 1-14

John 11: 1-4, 28-45

Preface

Throughout the year 2017, at Marsh Chapel, we are engaged in ministry with attention to conversation. Our regular weekly gathering and preaching affirm conversation. Our Summer National Preacher Series will engage in conversation about new directions in discipleship. Our Lenten Series, concluding today, has engaged in conversation with Henri Nouwen. Over the past decade, 2007-2016, Lent by Lent,we identified a theological conversation partner for the Lenten sermons, broadly speaking, out of the Calvinist tradition. For this next decade, we turn to the Catholic tradition. Over the next decade, beginning this Lent 2017, the Marsh pulpit, a traditionally Methodist one, will turn left, not right, toward Rome not Geneva, and we will preach with, and learn from the Roman Catholic tradition, so important in the last 200 years in New England, and some of its great divines including Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Ignatius of Loyola, Erasmus, Hans Kung, Karl Rahner, and others, one per year. Perhaps you will suggest a name or two, as a few have done this past week, not from Geneva, but from Rome? For those who recall, even if dimly, the vigor and excitement of Vatican II, there may well be other names to add to the list.

So, our sermons, largely in teaching format this Lent, have engaged Father Nouwen. We conclude today, attentive to conversation, and looking toward holy communion. Over these five weeks we have relied on Nouwen’s books, Compassion, Reaching Out, The Life of the Beloved, The Wounded Healer, and, today, Here and Now. Continue to read with us, as you have time, energy, interest and capacity.

With the ancient Hebrew prophets, like Ezekiel, and in harmony with the Gospel of John, the Spiritual Gospel, Nouwen invites, nay implores us, to practice the presence of God. Here and Now. Hic et Nunc. Here and Now. In worship. In prayer. In sacrament. In means of grace. In study. In fasting. In conversation. And perhaps in some forms of spiritual discipline new to and particular to our time? Ours is a particular, challenging time, now, and here.

Ezekiel

Ours in not a normal time. The events of this year are not within the norm, are not habituated to the contours of normal American history. From the current leadership of this country now come steadily the beginning features of civil humiliation inaugurated on November 8 and January 20. Ours is not a normal time, but a time of lasting, painful humiliation. More than a decade will be required to undo the damage done already. Ours is become a valley of dry bones.

In the 6^th century bce the prophet Ezekiel announced a vision, a communal resurrection, for his people. As did the other prophets, he directly addressed the waywardness of Israel. Whereas Hosea, Jeremiah, and Isaiah contrasted the wickedness of contemporary Jerusalem with a better past, Ezekiel portrays the entire history of Jerusalem and of Israel as one of continuous rebellion and sin against Yahweh (IBD, Supplement, 316, W Zimmerl). Intones Ezekiel, offering a vision out of exile: There were very many upon the valley, and lo they were very dry. What would he say today?

Now we are presented, by our ostensible, putative national leadership, with a denial of climate change, and a coarse willingness to dismiss reasoned scientific consensus. Now we are presented daily with a steady drumbeat of hateful rhetoric and action regarding immigrants, refugees, Muslims, Mexicans, and others. Wait and watch the list grow. Now we are presented with the shameful need for further judicial review, and perhaps a doubled rejection, of misguided executive action. Now we are presented with a low level disdain for the highest, most proven forms and institutions in journalism across the nation. Now we are presented with a willingness, only temporarily stymied by legislative mayhem, to steal away health insurance, and thus health care, from 24 millions of our own citizens. And he said to me, Son of Man, can these bones live? Now we are presented with multiple varieties of gratuitous cruelty, including the insidious, callous, baseless slander of the former by the current president. Now we are presented with a national budget that increases military spending 10% and by the same percent decreases human funding. Now we are presented with apparent prevarications regarding remarkable, until this year what would have been unbelievable, machinations in support of collusion with Russian oligarchs. Now we are presented with falsehood morning, and falsehood evening, and a happy willingness to let the consequences of such falsehood abound. Now we are presented with a period in our own national history in which Shakespeare’s 66th sonnet lives, and groans, sauntering like a wild beast, across a humiliated land: strength by limping sway dislodged, art made tongue-tied by authority, folly doctor like controlling skill, simple truth miscalled simplicity, captive good attending captain ill. Things are worse than we begin to imagine. The creaky quasi resistance (let us give some credit where some is due) by courts, by journalists, by congress, by civil society (including a very few churches, one in twenty) that in limited measure we have seen thus far, comes from within the country. Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. Behold they say ‘our bones are dried up and our hope is lost and we are clean cut off’.

But we are mistaken naively to consider that with which we have been presented thus far as the great danger of our time. It is not. No, the great dangers are in foreign policy, where there are such few checks and balances, such few filters, such few even enfeebled civic capacities for resistance and rejection. The great danger is in choices made and then executed, bye executive action, with regard to war and peace, military activity, diplomatic silence, and, thus global harm. No. The motto of our leadership now is not America First, as horrid as that is in its own right, and given its own etymology. The real motto, rightly pronounced, is America First and America Last and America Only. Remember this, and well, when the next terror tragedy occurs. And one there will be.

A far better route is not only possible but proximate. We need only look north to Canada, with few exceptions, to compare and contrast our acute, abject fulsome humiliation here, with what a sane national policy and life can actually be like. Right next door. I shall put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land. Then you shall know that I the Lord have spoken, and I have done it, says the Lord.

Nouwen

To endure, over a decade to come, we shall need, profoundly need, the daily practice of the presence of God, here and now, as Scripture and Tradition steadily teach. Nouwen, now, is our guide.

We remembered last week the theological contours of Henri Nouwen’s teaching: compassion, redemption, presence, hospitality, and the figure of the ‘wounded healer’. His compassionate voice, and his capacity for community, make him a reliable and restorative conversation partner, in our time. So, now, Nouwen may help to ground us in our life of faith, work of love, and commitment to Christ crucified. Toward the end of his life, Nouwen took up residence in a community dedicated to shared, common care for disabled persons, located in Toronto, a L’Arche community named Daybreak, including a patient named Adam. In a moment one our Chapel leaders will say something about L’Arche, a movement developed by the blessed Canadian Christian leader, Jean Vanier, who for many of us, has stood out as an inspiration for ongoing life in Christ.

In a way it is not surprising to think of Nouwen leaving behind both academic gown and monk’s cowl to take up a wash basin, a towel, a cloth, and to practice the presence of God, as did Brother Lawrence, in the simplicity of service.

Most of us today, one judges, given the condition our condition is in, could benefit from a straight forward reminder, in Nouwen’s terms, of living in the present, in the ‘here and now’. My friend, a strong lay leader in our church, once said, ‘Wherever you are: be there. Wherever you are: be there.

Here are Nouwen’s seven guidelines, for such a manner of life, practice, discipline and presence. 1. Remember that every day is a new beginning. Imagine that we could live each day as a day full of promises (HJN, Here and Now, 16). 2. Dispense with unnecessary ‘oughts’ and ‘ifs’. The past and the future keep harassing us, the past with guilt, the future with worries. (18) 3. Celebrate birthdays. On birthdays we celebrate the present…we lift someone up and let everyone say, ‘we love you’. (20) 4. Live in the present. Prayer is the discipline of the moment (22). 5. Use repetition in prayer, repetition of a word, a phrase, a line, a prayer. Such a word reminds us of God’s love. We can put it in the center of our inner room, like a candle in a dark place (24). 6. Pray for others, pray specifically for particular people in unique ways. To pray for one another is, first of all, to acknowledge, in the presence of God, that we belong to each other as children of the same God. (26) 7. Stay close to the hub of life, that is to the center from which all else emerges. When I pray, I enter into the depth of my own heart, and find there the heart of God, who speaks to me of love (28).

Nouwen goes on, emphasizing the here and now, to name some of the substance of prayer. Joy. Suffering. Conversion. Discipline. Spirit. Compassion. Family. Relationships. Identity. In a way, his whole life work, might well have been an addendum to the Fourth Gospel.

John

For the Gospel of John, allowed a meager three-week interjection into our lectionary this month, by interruption of Matthew, is centrally, even solely, an announcement of presence, divine presence, the presence of God. Really only this theological, interpretative insight will make sense for you and me of John 11. Some in the Johannine community spoke in the voice of Jesus. Especially this is so in the ‘I Am’ sayings. If Jesus on earth did not say these things who did? Answer: the Johannine prophet (s). The preacher in John 11 announces presence. I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live. You are a person of faith? Practice that presence. You are a Christian? Practice that presence. You are a Methodist yearning for a faith amendable to culture and culture amenable to faith? Are you? Yes? Practice that presence. The ancient, troubled, community of the beloved disciple, that of John, has your back.

John Ashton: Conscious as they were of the continuing presence in their midst of the Glorified One, no wonder the community, or rather the evangelist who was its chief spokesman, smoothed out the rough edges of the traditions of the historical Jesus…(His portrait of Jesus) arose from his constant awareness, which he shared with members of his community, that they were living in the presence of the Glorified One. So dazzling was this glory that any memory of a less-than-glorious Christ was altogether eclipsed…(They) realized that the truth that they prized as the source of their new life was to be identified not with the Jesus of history but with the risen and glorious Christ, and that this was a Christ free from all human weakness. The claims they made for him were at the heart of the new religion that soon came to be called Christianity. (199) The difference between John’s portrait of Christ and that o the Synoptists is best accounted for by the experience of the glorious Christ constantly present to him and his community (204) (The Gospel of John and Christian Origins).

Nouwen invites, nay implores us, implores you, to practice the presence of God. Here and Now. Hic et Nunc. Here and Now. In worship. In prayer. In sacrament. In means of grace. In study. In fasting. In conversation. And perhaps in some forms of spiritual discipline new to and particular to our time? Say, in spiritual yoga?

Yoga

R: Welcome! It’s nice to see you here at our lectern this morning.

A: Thank you.

R\A: What is your name? Amy Aubrecht. Where are you from? Buffalo Where did you go to college? Cornell. Did you study theology? Yes, right next door.

R: Am I right that you served in a L’Arche community in Syracuse some years ago, and if so, what was that like?

A: Yes. In good Nouwen fashion, it combined compassion and community.

R: Thank you for being here. And thank you for living out and so reminding us of L’Arche, Vanier, and Nouwen. One more question. Do you lead spiritual yoga, as a prayerful discipline, every Thursday here at Marsh at 5pm? And if so, can others join?

A: Yes, and yes.

R: Open to all?

A: Yes.2017

R: Even an aging white guy with a comb-over?

A: Probably.

R: Five O’Clock Thursdays?

A: Yes.

R: We believe in God who has created and is creating….

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in Lenten Series 2017: In Conversation with Nouwen, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 04.2.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
March 26

In Conversation with Nouwen: The Wounded Healer

By Marsh Chapel

John 9:1-11

‘The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash’. Then I went and washed and received my sight.’

Let us draw wisdom from Scripture, insight from theology, and encouragement from experience this Lord’s day.

Scripture

(The Two Level Drama of the Fourth Gospel)

Let us draw wisdom from Scripture.

John 9 describes the healing of a man born blind, and the communal controversy surrounding that healing. Like the rest of the Gospel, this passage reports two layers of healing, of blindness, of community, and of controversy. On one hand, the passage remembers, perhaps by the aid of a source or as part of a source, a moment in the ministry of Jesus (30ad), in which a man is given sight. On the other hand, the passage announces the spiritual unshackling of a hero in thecommunity (90ad), who bears witness to what Jesus has done for him, no matter the repercussions from others, from parents, from family, from community.

The preacher in the Johannine community of the late first century is telling the story of the Son of Man. To do so, he celebrates the courageous witness to healing, and the courageous endurance of expulsion, of a man born blind. Here, he says, is what I mean by faith. The story he uses comes, through un-trackable oral and written traditions, from 30ad. The story he tells comes from 90ad. Every character in the story has two roles. Jesus is both earthly rabbi and heavenly redeemer. The blind man is both historic patient and current hero. The family is from both Palestinian memory and diaspora synagogue. The Jews are both the contemporaries of Jesus and the nearby inhabitants of the synagogue, the Johannine community’s former home. When Jesus gives sight, Christ gives freedom. When the blind one is cured, the congregation sees truth. When the man is cast out of his synagogue, the community of the beloved disciple recognizes their own most recent expulsion. When the Jews criticize Jesus, the synagogue is criticizing the church. When the healing story ends, the life of faith begins. His voice both addresses you and emanates from you. Not your voice, his is nonetheless your voice.

John 9 illumines the central struggle of the community, their bitter spiritual itinerancy from the familiar confines of Christian Judaism, out into the unknown wilderness of Jewish Christianity. History and the history of religions bear manifold witness to this kind of crisis in communal identity, and the long hard trail of travel from primary to secondary identity. In retrospect, as the community gathers itself in its new setting (the pilgrims in Boston, the Mormons in Utah) the story of the tearful trail itself becomes the heart of communal memory and imagination.

What is here unearthed in John 9 can also and readily be applied to the rest of the Gospel of John as well: to the wedding at Cana, to Nicodemus, to the woman at the well, to the healing on the water, to the feeding of the thousands, to the controversies with the Jews, to the raising of Lazarus, to the farewell discourse, to the trial and passion. All of these reflect the experience in dramatic interaction between the synagogue and John’s church. This includes, later, the mysterious figure of the Paraclete, the Spirit, who functions as Jesus’ eternal presence in the world, Jesus, God ‘striding on earth’ (Kasemann). In this way, the Paraclete himself creates the two level drama. Where the world is mono focal, and can see only the historical level of Jesus in history or only the theological level of Jesus in the witness of the Christian community, the Paraclete binds the two together. The Word dwelling among us, and our beholding his glory, are not past events only. They transpire in a two level drama. They transpire both on the historical and contemporary levels, OR NOT AT ALL. Their transpiration on both levels is itself the good news, an overture to the rapturous discoveries of freedom in disappointment, grace in dislocation, and love in departure.

Wisdom from Scripture.

Theology

(The Voice of Henri Nouwen on the Wounded Healer)

Let us draw insight from theology.

In a season of general, national interest in wounds and healing, it is timely, serendipitous even, for us to hear about the healing of the man born blind in John 9, and more so to hear from our celebrated, honored Roman Catholic theological conversation partner for Lent 2017, Henri Nouwen, of blessed memory, on his most revered theme, that of the ‘wounded healer’. His book of that title reminded another generation, and can teach us all still, about the interconnection between our own wounds and the healing of others. Nouwen explored in that monograph, The Wounded Healer, four different doors of entry into ministry: the suffering world, a suffering generation, human suffering in general, and the condition of the suffering minister. While Nouwen’s work is sometimes criticized as ‘theology lite’, its accessibility has provided many with a profound sense of the relational dimensions of gospel, of philosophy, of preaching, of ministry and of therapy.

His chief concern he identifies clearly (p 47): ‘The task of Christian leaders is to bring out the best in everyone and to lead them forward to a more human community; the danger is that their skillful diagnostic eye will become more an eye for the distant and detailed analysis than the eye of a compassionate partner. And if priests and ministers think that more skill training is the solution for the problem of Christian leadership, they may end up being more frustrated and disappointed than the leaders of the past. More training and structure are just as necessary as more bread for the journey. But just as bread given without love can bring war instead of peace, professionalism without compassion will turn forgiveness into a gimmick, and the kingdom to come into a blindfold’.

Compassion, not analysis, comes first. Compassion, suffering with: It is not the task of Christian leaders to go around nervously trying to redeem people, to save them at the last minute, to put them on the right track. For we are redeemed, once and for all. Christian leaders are called to help others affirm this great news, and to make visible in daily events the fact that behind the curtain of our painful symptoms, there is something to be seen: the face of God in whose image we are shaped (48).

The manner by which compassion comes into life is, for Nouwen, utterly personal. While he was not a Lutheran—far from it—he would probably have agreed with Luther that the preaching of the Gospel is ‘one beggar telling another where they both may find bread’. In fact, there is hardly a more personal calling than a calling to pastoral ministry. And what a privilege it is to enter and live in such a calling. A privilege to be able to be with people at the dawn of life, in the twilight of life, under the shadows of life. To hold murmuring infants, to confirm squirming teenagers, to bless nervous not to say clueless grooms and brides, to wring hands and pray at the bedside when the outcomes are uncertain at best, to listen in tears to the pain of loss, divorce, failure, emptiness, to stand over the open grave in quiet. You can make a lot more money doing something else, and you can achieve a lot more influence, of a certain sort, doing something else, and you can have a lot more free time doing something else, and there are many worthy callings, many ways to keep faith. But there is nothing quite like the privilege—the joy, the hurt, the rigor, the demand—the privilege of pastoral ministry. And how hungry our people are for it. There is nothing else like it in all of life. ‘The emptiness of the past and future can never be filled with words, but only with the presence of a human being’. (69).

Perhaps Nouwen is best remembered for this phrase, ‘the wounded healer’. ‘Since it is their task to make visible the first vestiges of liberation for others, (ministers) must bind their own wounds carefully, in anticipation of the moment when they will be needed. They are each called to be the wounded healer, the ones who must not only look after their own wounds but at the same time be prepared to heal the wounds of others. They are both wounded ministers and healing ministers.’ (88) Now, when the balance between the two goes off-kilter, and wounds eclipse health, we have a problem. But the appellation is true enough, when truly pursued. It is perhaps most apparent in loneliness. The ministry is lonely, but only lonely in a way representative of all faithful life. In the last few years, the utter uniqueness of grief, for each person, the individuality of the way we grieve—the very opposite of one size fits all—has stood out, for me. Your grief, though shared and made common in the community of faith, is nonetheless idiosyncratic—your own most self in tears, your spiritual fingerprint, your religious voice, your manner of walking in walking the faith. All the cautions of Nouwen’s book are worthy. But the capacity for hospitality, the power in hospitality, that comes here into ministry is unmistakable. Hospitality makes anxious disciples into powerful witnesses, makes suspicious owners into generous givers, and makes close-minded sectarians into recipients of new ideas and insights (95)….Ministers are not doctors whose primary task is to take away pain. Rather, they deepen the pain to a level where it can be shared. When people come with their loneliness to ministers, they can only expect that their loneliness will be understood and felt, so that they no longer have to run away from it, but can accept it as an expression of the basic human condition.

Insight from theology.

Experience

(A Thought on Entering Ministry, 1953, Rev. Mr. Irving G. Hill)

From experience we may draw encouragement.

Here is a memory, written in 2006, drawn from 1953. That is, sixty-five years past, it is about the same distance from us in time as was the Gospel of John from the events in the life, death and destiny of Jesus of Nazareth. The writer, my father, was soon to graduate from the School of Theology.

“One balmy spring evening, in the early fifties, I was returning to our apartment at 17 Yarmouth Street in Boston…

As I walked across Huntington Avenue, I looked to my left and saw the lighted dome of the Christian Science Mother Church. I had seen it many times before. I had taken our youth fellowship there to visit and walk through the giant globe that is there. But this evening as I made that familiar crossing I was struck, not by an auto, but by the reality that in just a few days I would receive my theological degree and become the pastor of the Brewerton Methodist Church.

How could this be? What was I to do? I was only 24 years old. I had never dealt with death except in theory. I had never sat with a couple after the death of a child. I had never counseled a couple preparing for marriage except in a classroom setting. To my recollection I had never spoken with a person who had no belief in God or saw any reason for one. I had never thought how a church budget was raised or more significantly how my salary would be paid. In a few days, I would be facing all of these things and more.

I recalled a conversation that occurred at the just past annual conference with a committee from the Brewerton church. One of the saints said to me, “Young man, if you get a better offer, you had better take it, I don’t know how we will be able to pay your salary.” How about that?

Now, I had grown up in the church, attended church school, taught church school. I had been active in the youth fellowship at the local level and the conference level. Marcia and I had spent one summer as life guards at Camp Casowasco. But now I was to be the pastor of a church in a community that I had only driven through.

Of course, I had graduated from a Methodist related university and had the privilege of studying at one of the better theological schools for three years, but on that June evening in the middle of that empty thoroughfare, I was totally lost.

Then I heard, “You don’t think you are going to do this all by yourself do you? Surely I will be with you.”

I heard that voice as clearly as I have ever heard anything and it has remained with me for these past 53 years.

It has taken the form of a loving, supportive wife, a devoted family, dedicated and caring lay people, inspired bishops, superintendents, and brother and sister clergy, group commanders, wing chaplains and people of God, just like you.”

Encouragement from experience.

Scripture. Theology. Experience. Wisdom. Insight. Encouragement.

‘The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash’. Then I went and washed and received my sight.’
Amen.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in Lenten Series 2017: In Conversation with Nouwen, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.26.2017 at 11:00 am
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Sunday
March 19

In Conversation with Nouwen: The Life of the Beloved

By Marsh Chapel

John 4:5-42

Life for All

‘A spring of water gushing up to eternal life’.

The gospel is our spoken gift of faith.

Some will have seen the recent film ‘La La Land’, and recall the haunting soulful tune that knits the story together. That phrase of music is the refrain from which the story takes wing and to which it returns, moment by moment, as your life and soul life return, again and again, to the gospel, a spoken gift of faith, the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved us and gave himself for us. Spoken, sung.

Sung. Every bird sings faith, over the globe, through all time. Thurman loved penguins, odd and remote, and their dress, and their song. Listen. Along the Charles, in the spring, we make way for goslings and ducklings. Early in the summer mornings, out in the farmland where we live in the summer, the northeastern tip of Appalachia, and where we will be buried, where we are at home, at dawn a rooster. Two eagles—they too mate for life, as in Christian marriage—soaring--imagine their music. The owl at night. A swan song, a silver swan, who living had no note. The gospel is a bird in song, and all nature sings. Even if or when the preaching of the gospel by human imperfection abates, as it does threaten to do, birdsong will carry the tune. God can preach God’s gospel through birdsong.

Spoken. Derek Walcott, of Boston University, a Methodist: I seek, as climate seeks its style, to write verse crisp as sand, clear as sunlight, cold as the curled wave, ordinary as a tumbler of island water.

John

Father Raymond Brown judged our passage today, John 4, to be the loveliest, finest narrative in the Fourth Gospel. The woman at the well, the Samaritan woman, meets Jesus and meets us in conversation. She is the quintessential conversationalist.

And what a wonder is there in the faintest conversation, let alone this dominical discussion! Ours today, from John 4, is holy, telling conversation, full of the unexpected, full of surprise, full of the utterly personal, full of revelation, full of boundary breaking courage, full of what is saving, healthy, lasting, meaningful, real, and good. Conversation thrives when you know your content, your work, and your audience. There is a mystery lurking under the disarming surface of the simplest conversation. My friend says her favorite two words are ‘awe’ and ‘conversation’. We could add that the two are not very far removed, or apart from each other.

It may have been that the community which gave birth to the Gospel of John included some Samaritans. This would explain the prominence of this long, intricate passage, devoted to the conversation of Jesus with a Samaritan woman. The Samaritans were outsiders. Here, one of their own takes center stage. In our time when those outside—immigrants, refugees, the poor, the different, the other—are steadily subjected to heightened measures of exclusion, we benefit from reminders, like this from John 4, that we are called as people of faith, called as Christian people, to care, succor, attention and protection of the ‘least’ among us. The larger question, and it is very much an open question, is whether the humiliation spreading out right now through civil society and culture--wherein inherited, precious forms of civil society are daily shredded with a gratuitous cruelty--coming now to us over the next decade, will chasten us, will humble us, will in that way strengthen us by the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. He it is, today, who announces His own presence, and Lordship, in the course of a meandering conversation: I am He, the One who is speaking to you…A spring of water gushing up to eternal life

Lenten Conversation

Nouwen (from the ‘Nouwen Society’)

“The internationally renowned priest and author, respected professor and beloved pastor Henri Nouwen wrote over 40 books on the spiritual life. He corresponded regularly in English, Dutch, German, French and Spanish with hundreds of friends and reached out to thousands through his Eucharistic celebrations, lectures and retreats. Since his death in 1996, ever-increasing numbers of readers, writers, teachers and seekers have been guided by his literary legacy. Nouwen’s books have sold over 8 million copies and been published in over 28 languages.

Born in Holland, 1932, Nouwen felt called to the priesthood at a very young age. He was ordained in 1957 as a diocesan priest and studied psychology at the Catholic University of Nijmegen. In 1964 he moved to the United States to study at the Menninger Clinic. He went on to teach at the University of Notre Dame, and the Divinity Schools of Yale and Harvard. For several months during the 1970s, Nouwen lived and worked with the Trappist monks in the Abbey of the Genesee, and in the early 1980s he lived with the poor in Peru. In 1985 he was called to join L’Arche in Trosly, France, the first of over 100 communities founded by Jean Vanier where people with developmental disabilities live with assistants. A year later Nouwen came to make his home at L’Arche Daybreak near Toronto, Canada. He died suddenly on September 21^st, 1996, in Holland and is buried in Richmond Hill, Ontario.”

Nouwen believed that what is most personal is most universal; he wrote, “By giving words to these intimate experiences I can make my life available to others.”

Servants of God

Nouwen dedicated his life to the practice of genuine conversation, genuine faithfulness. He eschewed the false formal and prized the personal in piety. A story, from the same period, from Charles Rice at Drew, Nouwen would hae loved. A few years ago Rice spoke about the servant of the servants of God. He told about an Easter when he was in Greece. He sat in the Orthodox church and watched the faithful in devotions. There was a great glassed icon of Christ, to which, following prayers, women and men would move, then kneel, then as they rose they kissed the glassed icon. Every so often a woman dressed in black would emerge from the shadows with some cleanser, or windex, and a cloth and –psh, psh—would clean the image, making it clear again. Washing clean the image again, and freeing it from so much encrusted piety. And he had a revelation about service and power and authority and leadership. As he watched the woman in black cleaning the icon, he realized that this was what his ministry was meant to be. A daily washing away from the face of Christ all that obscured, all that distorted, all that blocked others from seeing his truth, goodness and beauty. Including a lot of piety.

Life of the Beloved

Years ago, by accident, Nouwen met a man named Fred, a journalist who wanted to write a novel. (We had a saying in our family, when intrusive questions arose; ‘Are you a journalist or writing a book?’) Well, Fred was the former and hoping to do the latter. But he feared a shift in vocation, for all the usual suspect reasons. Henri though persisted in encouraging the man to leave his job and write his book. He went out of his way. Nouwen procured him a grant to do so! So the man entered a new season of vocational discernment, and though he never finished the novel, he did find a deeper level of living, a sense of meaning, and, in the bargain, a great friend in Nouwen.

We might pause to wonder a bit about our callings. Is this your final resting place in vocation—where you are now I mean? You have heard some sort of call, and heeded, or you would not be where you are. But what about the second call? Is there a knocking at your spiritual door, asking you to consider a second call, another call? Fred was a good journalist, but he heard a second call, to write, and in hearing, and in heeding, though not in his case in succeeding, he found himself closer to his own most self. Life is a series of invitations, and a process of discernment. We might pause right now, in front of God and everybody, to wonder about our callings.

Last year at commencement we had a speaker who told about a second call. Not all commencement addresses need or even deserve remembrance. But it had a diamond embedded in it, a treasure buried in a field. The speaker graduated from BU as an actress and went to La La Land. She did what aspiring actors do. She waited tables. For a year. And another. And a third. Then she got a job, part time, on the business side of show business. You know what? She liked it. And it liked her. Then she said: “I looked at my acting career lived out in waiting tables, and I made a decision. I decided my calling was to something else. I decided to (here is the gem) EDIT MY DREAMS.” She decided to edit her dreams. So Nina Tassler, waitress, became the head of CBS entertainment. Yes. Sometimes a second call comes along and invites you to edit your dreams.

Henri Nouwen invited Fred to edit his dreams. And he did. Then Fred invited Henri to edit his dreams, in this way. He asked Nouwen to write a simple book about the spiritual life in a secular world, a book for ordinary people, not academics, ordinary people, not clergy, ordinary people, not even religious people. This took Nouwen out of his comfort zone, but out of that zone he went. He wrote a book, The Life of the Beloved.

Our Gospel today, John 4, has a radiance of love within it, as does Nouwen’s book. Here, in brief, is what Nouwen wrote, this esteemed Roman Catholic theologian, this Yale academic, this profoundly erudite priest. It is portable, what he wrote. You can carry it home after the sermon. You are beloved! You are loved. God loves, and loves you. And you need not do anything to prove it, to earn it, to achieve it, to deserve it. You: beloved. That is, in a single word, the life of the spirit. Beloved.

But of course Nouwen went on to develop this theme, the trails and traces of the spirit in the single word. He put together a quadrilateral, what we can call the love quartet today. First, wrote Nouwen, to become beloved, we need to acknowledge that we are ‘taken’. Chosen. Wanted. And grateful for it! Second, to become beloved, we want to acknowledge that we are ‘blessed’. You are precious in God’s sight, blessed, beloved. As you are, not as you might be later on. Right now, as you are right now. You claim your blessing through the practice of prayer and through attention to presence. My friend says her two favorite words are conversation and awe. Well. There. Memorize a prayer or three (The Lord’s Prayer, Wesley’s Table Graces, the Prayer of Assisi). Third, to live as beloved we want to acknowledge our brokenness. “Each human being suffers in a way no other human being suffers.” (87) It will not do to repress our sadness, our resentment, our fear, our anger. No. We are human, beloved human beings, and so are honest about our fractures. Nouwen then wrote about AIDS, a crucial subject in that time (1992). To heal we have to step toward our pain. Here we can all learn from the 12 step programs, as long as we realize that there are many ways to be addicted that can have nothing to do with substances. You might be surprised to know that Nouwen’s most personal example was his grief at the death of Leonard Bernstein. Fourth, we are given, as beloved ones. We are loved, but not just for our own sakes. As Huston Smith—similarly an academic, similarly a theologian though a Methodist, similarly a cleric—put it, thinking perhaps of his parents who were missionaries in China: ‘we are in good hands, and so it behooves us to bear one another’s burdens’. When we enjoy others, and with joy give ourselves to others, and engage in enjoyment among others, then, in reality, we are given, because we are giving. You only truly have what you give away. Starting—and ending—with your time. Here Nouwen concludes, and rightly, by drawing us toward our own death, and the way we give of ourselves not just living but dying. (You remember my OOPS advice, as we prepare for the end of life: obituary, order of worship, photograph, special papers.) But Nouwen means something more: ‘the spirit of love once freed from our mortal bodies will blow where it wills’. (125). Chosen, Blessed, Broken, Given. “Eternal Life is the full revelation of what we have been and have lived all along” (137).

By grace we too, you and I, have been chosen and set in time and space, to live in faith. By grace we too, you and I have been blessed, sometimes with happiness and sometimes with loss, sometimes with fulfillment and sometimes with unrequited love. By grace, we too, you and I, in honesty, in confession, must add, we have been broken, our brokenness best sung maybe by Leonard Cohen—ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in…forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in…there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in…that’s how the light gets in. By grace we too, you and I have been given, to be gifts and become givers, to choose, tomorrow, one pure act of kindness, to imagine it, plan it, pray over it, do it, and watch it recede in the rear view window.

In the student union, Thursday, a young pianist, of limited ability, but of great heart, played a tune, the haunting soulful tune you may have heard, remembered, from a current film. That phrase of music is the refrain from which the story takes wing and to which it returns, moment by moment, as your life and soul life return, again and again, to the gospel, a spoken gift of faith, the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved us and gave himself for us.

A spring of water gushing up to eternal life.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in Lenten Series 2017: In Conversation with Nouwen, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.19.2017 at 11:00 am
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Sunday
March 5

A Communion Meditation: In Conversation with Nouwen

By Marsh Chapel

Romans 5:12-19

Matthew 4:1-11

A Journey Through Scripture

We journey together this Lent through conversation.

We enter each Lord’s Day into close conversation with Holy Scripture. We enter each Lord’s Day into conversation with our Lenten theological conversation partner, this year, 2017, the Rev. Dr. Henri Nouwen, of blessed memory. We enter each Lord’s Day into conversation with life about us, and the living souls around us, and this day, as is our custom, around the Lord’s Table, bread and cup, thanksgiving, presence and remembrance.

We have come to love the Holy Scripture, a source of abiding inspiration, a canon or rule or measure of the matters of faith more real than the very real life around us, a rhythmic accompaniment in holiness to the daily walk of faith in life. We do love the Holy Scripture, and account its authority in our midst, primarily in pragmatic terms. Come Sunday, that is, it is simply our custom to read and interpret the Holy Scripture, on the journey of holy living.

Our lessons today introduce conversation, and so are more than apt for the first Sunday this Lent. In widely different ways, Romans 5 and Matthew 4 are the open volleys in substantive conversation.

You recall that Paul introduces himself to the church in Rome, prior to his expected visit, by the writing of the Letter to the Romans, his magnum opus, his formal appearance clothed almost entirely in theological language. ‘Here I am’, says Paul, to the church he has yet to meet. Now he may also have wanted to sum up here in 55ad what he already had already written earlier to the Thessalonians, Corinthians, and Galatians. He may also, let us be candid, have desired to moderate, qualify, and temper what he wrote to the Galatians in a white heat, in total honest transparency, and in anger. Paul’s Letter to the Romans gives two or three chapters each, beginning in Romans 1, to five themes, Sin, Salvation (where we are today Romans 5), Spirit, Israel, and Church. 5 ways of meeting the Romans, somewhat on their terms, and somewhat on his.

So these words you have heard, somewhat strange, even odd, to our ears, open a conversation. How? With heartfelt honesty and technical precision regarding pain and struggle in life. Life is struggle, and the Apostle here captures your struggle with a recognition of sin, the gone wrongness in life, by a recognition of the death, the end of every life, and by a recognition of law—one might say religion—as cause, lens and entry into understanding of sin and death. . Pau’s dense, complex argument about sin, and death, and their origin, and their interrelation, may strain us a bit, in a limited moment of interpretation, but, at a minimum, are, in their form, and content, quite true to what we experience. Though we do not deign to acknowledge it so, most hours, the fragility and brevity of our lives is ever present to us. Though we do not prefer to face it, most days, the leaning tendency toward what can and does go wrong in life, is regularly present to us. Paul, using his received tradition, traces the latter (sin) back through the former (death) all the way to the beginning (Adam). An awareness of the proximity of death and the tendency toward sin can become, as surely it was for Paul, for us a grounding in the ground of life. All sin, all fall short of the glory of God. All flesh, all flesh, all flesh is grass.

Not Paul only, but Matthew also, today, assays to explain for us, and to us, and to us, a part of our condition, the struggle in life. Matthew begins the conversation about the adult life and ministry of Jesus, with the story of the Temptation. Life is hard, life is struggle, life is struggle with all manner of temptation. In a narrative, three-point sermon, a stylized and fabulous remembrance of an early Christian preacher, taken up by Matthew and Luke, Jesus wrestles with the devil, over greed and pride and power. Every day is a struggle, says this preacher, and every day in the struggle we are held in the memory of Jesus our Lord who knew struggle, knew our struggle, knew this very struggle, high on a mountain, contesting o diabalos.

You will ask whether your preacher believes in the devil (note the shift from Satan to Devil here). No, he does not. But he does remember this Lent of 2017 the voice of Hans Frei in the Lent of 1977, in the common room of Union Theological Seminary, as Frei remembered the words of Emil Brunner circa Lent 1947, just after the great horror of World War II. Asked the same, ‘Do you believe in the Devil?’, Brunner replied in 1947, as remembered by Frei in 1977 and quoted here today in 2017: Yes. For two reasons. First, Jesus mentions him the Bible. Second, I have seen him. Conversation begins well with utter candid, frank, honesty about our condition: mortal, prone to harm others, children of Adam, acquainted with, and on familial terms with sin and death.

The temptations presented in this early Christian sermon, a fabled imagination of Jesus struggling with the Devil, are ‘to work miracles for the sake of immediate need, to give a convincing sign, and to exercise political power’ (IBD loc.cit.). In a word, the temptation is to confuse the penultimate with the ultimate. The work of faith, as upheld in our Sacrament today, labors to keep us free from this kind of idolatry. Him only shall you serve.

Many among us, and all of us many times in a lifetime, know well the struggle with temptation that one way or another promotes lesser loyalties to supplant, or obscure, or eclipse one great loyalty. The cruciform path, the way of love, an arduous journey as Lent reminds us, asks of us an upward climb. There is a thrill in the ascent of the next high hill, but there is an ache in the knees, too.

A Journey With Nouwen

We also journey this Lent in conversation, and in the fair company, the loving presence of Henri Nouwen.

Where are we?

Physics, Chemistry, Biology—they are all wonderful pursuits. Earth Science stands out, though, as the mode of inquiry which helps us locate ourselves. The manner of the meandering of rivers, the tidal pull, the history of the glaciers, the height of mountains and depths of deserts, the solar system, galaxy, and cosmos, the longitude and latitude—it is no platitude—help us to stand, and walk, and move.

Where are we?

We are entering Lent, a time and journey of preparation and discipline. On the whole, come Lent, we turn for a moment inward, more toward the individual than the communal, more toward personal than social holiness, more toward deep personal faith than toward active social involvement, though, of course, they are both and lastingly and daily ours. You might find one new, daily, habit to cultivate this Lent.

We are walking with our lectionary readings from Holy Scripture. This year it is the Gospel of Matthew, and his emphasis on discipleship, which guides us week by week. We read the lessons of Holy Scripture each week, all through the year, and endeavor to interpret them for our own time, even as they were themselves traditional interpretations of tradition in their own time. A muscular liturgy, a rigorous ordered worship, a challenging sermonic address, a musical echo both familiar and foreign—deep roots that is—will sustain us over the next decade and its various humiliations which have no predetermined outcomes. Matthew is our Gospel, and today his own introduction to our Lenten season, in the familiar account of the Lord’s temptation.

Throughout the year 2017, at Marsh Chapel, we are engaged in ministry with attention to conversation. Our Summer National Preacher Series will engage in conversation about new directions in discipleship. Our Lenten Series, beginning today, will engage in conversation with Henri Nouwen. Over the past decade, Lent by Lent, we have identified a theological conversation partner for the Lenten sermons, broadly speaking, out of the Calvinist tradition. For the next decade, we turn to the Catholic tradition. With Calvin we encountered the chief resource for others we engaged over the last ten years—voices like those of Jonathan Edwards (2015), Paul of Tarsus (2014), Marilyn Robinson (2013), Jacques Ellul (2012), Dietrich Bonhoeffer (a Lutheran cousin, (2011), Karl Barth (2010), and Gabriel Vahanian (2007), and themes like Atonement (2009) and Decision (2008). Over the next decade, beginning this Lent 2017, the Marsh pulpit, a traditionally Methodist one, will turn left, not right, toward Rome not Geneva, and we will preach with, and learn from the Roman Catholic tradition, so important in the last 200 years in New England, and some of its great divines including Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Ignatius of Loyola, Erasmus, Hans Kung, Karl Rahner, and others, one per year. Perhaps you will suggest a name or two, not from Geneva, but from Rome? For those who recall, even if dimly, the vigor and excitement of Vatican II, there may well be other names to add to the list. We begin with Henri Nouwen.

Given our interest through the year in conversation, Nouwen seemed like a natural choice. So in these weeks, as we preach the Gospel grounded in the interpretation of Matthew, we will make some space for dialogue with the Rev. Dr. Henri Nouwen. Nouwen spoke to the last generation as part of a chorus of talented women and men working at the intersection of psychology and religion. Think of Seward Hiltner at Princeton. Recall the voice of Ann Belford Ulanov (a Tillich protégé) at Columbia and Union in New York. Give some thought to the many voices and faces of our own Danielsen Center here at Boston University. Nouwen in New Haven at Yale, but also for time here at Harvard, was part of this chorus, during a time, now past, of avid interest in religion and psychology. In pastoral ministry, with the exception of preparation for preaching, there is hardly a more substantial, fruitful area of preparation than this now somewhat forgotten, even superannuated, preparation for pastoral conversation. The minister wants to overhear, at a deeper level, what the parishioner, at depth, experiences. Probably it is not coincidence that the demise of pastoral psychology has occurred alongside the rising tide of mechanical communication in the newer technologies. Capacities for listening and speaking ebb and flow, wax and wane, in church and culture. Conversation has no grandchildren.

So, our sermons, somewhat in teaching format this Lent, will engage Henri Nouwen. We begin today, attentive to conversation, and looking toward communion. Over the next four weeks (Br Whitney taking March 12) we rely on Nouwen’s books, Reaching Out, The Life of the Beloved, The Wounded Healer, and Daybreak. Read with us, as you have time, energy, interest and capacity.

A Journey Through Life

We journey together this Lent in conversation, with one another, our this morning, toward communion. A word on each.

How are we to practice conversation, itself a means of grace? Especially when that conversation involves difference, division, diversity? How do we trace the hidden harmonies (J Wiggins) therein? We have here no word of the Lord on this. Here though are some suggestions for you as you practice authentic conversation. Pray. Listen. Pause. Reflect. Respond (speak, pause, shun). First, as you anticipate a meaningful conversation, pray about it. Place person or people, topic or interest, setting or timing, desired outcome and response, in the light of God, in the light of God’s love. God is loving us into love and freeing us into freedom. Second, when in conversation, listen with care, listen to everything, listen with heart as well as mind, listen. What is heard and what is overheard? Be able to recite, repeat, rehearse what you have heard. Third, Pause. Take a breath. Fourth, reflect on what you have heard—think about it, in real time. Fear not a reflective silence. Fear not the fallow, the winter, the quiet, Lent. “Let me reflect for a minute on what you have said”, you might say. Fifth, fashion some response out of or out of a mixture of ingredients on your cooking shelf. You might respond by speaking: “well, here’s then what I think”. You might respond by being quiet: “I need some more time to ponder this”. You might respond by shunning: “I think we need to part company for a time”. Or there may be some combination of these. Yes, the arts of conversation—prayer, listening, reflection, response—are neglected in our culture, in our age, but we have the time of struggle, the time of journey, the time of Lent to reclaim them.

And today communion.

Hear Nouwen on communion, as we come to the Lord’s table:The word that seems best to summarize the desire of the human heart is ‘communion.’ Wherever we look it is communion that we seek. Once you are in communion with God, you have the eyes to see and the ears to hear other people in whom God has also found a dwelling place.

Baptism opens the door to the Eucharist. The Eucharist is the sacrament through which Jesus enters into an intimate, permanent communion with us. It is the sacrament of the table. It is the sacrament of food and drink. It is the sacrament of daily nurture. While baptism is a once-in-a-lifetime event, the Eucharist can be a monthly, weekly, or even daily occurrence. Jesus gave us the Eucharist as a constant memory of his life and death. Not a memory that simply makes us think of him but a memory that makes us members of his body. That is why Jesus on the evening before he died took bread saying, “This is my Body,” and took the cup saying, “This is my Blood.” By eating the Body and drinking the Blood of Christ, we become one with him.

We journey together this Lent through conversation. God grant us grace for the struggle!

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in Lenten Series 2017: In Conversation with Nouwen, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 03.5.2017 at 11:00 am
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Sunday
February 19

Resistance

By Marsh Chapel

Matthew 5: 38-48

Preface

We pause for a moment this morning to listen to the Gospel of Matthew 5:39, and this morning’s three-point sermon upon it. (Either a three-point sermon, or three points in search of a sermon!) While there are easier sentences which might tempt us here in this reading, we shall listen to the hardest for interpreters, ‘Do not resist one who is evil’.

As today’s reading reminds us, we are from a deep, though intricately varied, ethical tradition that enshrines selfless love, Christo-centric love, cruciform love as the cherished ideal of human behavior. “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, Love your enemies’.

We reflect this morning first on the personal dimension, second on the social dimension, and third on the contemporary dimension of our verse.

One: Personal Ethics

Do not resist one who is evil. If anyone smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. Coat, cloak. One mile, two. If you love those who love you, what reward have you?

At the outset with these verses we shall stay with the heavy emphasis they clearly have on personal relationships, where the ice is thicker and we are safer. For an individual, alone and with no responsibilities to others, there are often options for self-less self-sacrifice. Our own striking remembrances of times when we have seen this verse practiced restore us. Some examples:

A new Bishop came to us just after our first year in college. He loved golf, and would happily take a summer afternoon to play with some of his preachers, and sometimes their sons. This was a different era, before the entrance, in numbers, of women into the ministry, and before the more pronounced current separation of those superintending from those superintended. The general and district superintendents, it was more steadily them remembered, were simply ministers, fellow elders, assigned to different sorts of work. The color purple was not often in evidence. As one of the chief influences of our entrance into pastoral work, it is a supreme happiness to remember his kindness, his humility, and his example. I see him carefully washing hands, and then offering a prayer with 12 year olds at summer camp. There in memory he is carrying hymnals downstairs after he spoken on the district. We served him spaghetti in a modest New York apartment, and he was easy and at home.

One August he and three others were playing golf on a public course, in the heat. After the round all stopped for a soda in the club house—another era, well before Methodist clergy could drink a beer. At least in front of each other (and with the Bishop). Another group asked if they had seen a putter one had left behind. My friend Gordon Knapp remembers: we enjoyed a cold drink after a round, a foursome at a nearby table muttered and groused about Joe and me not picking up one of their clubs that lay near a green. I was getting hot. Not Joe. He got up and walked to the far side of the course to see if the club was still there. Not finding it, he returned without saying a word to our mouthy detractors. I have always looked upon this incident as a marvelous lesson in practical Christianity.

Perhaps you too had a grandmother who baked cherry pies on February 22. The cherry tree myth is the most well-known and longest enduring legend about our first president, George Washington, whose birthday we honor this week. We have remembered James Baldwin and Frederik Douglass, and have sung with Charles Tindlay this month. We also have recalled Lincoln and Washington. “In the original story, when Washington was six years old he received a hatchet as a gift and damaged his father’s cherry tree. When his father discovered what he had done, he became angry and confronted him. Young George bravely said, “I cannot tell a lie…I did cut it with my hatchet.” Washington’s father embraced him and rejoiced that his son’s honesty was worth more than a thousand trees.”

In one suburban neighborhood a young family worked hard and were disappointed by the results of the autumn elections. Their windows and lawn were adorned with campaign material. You knew where they stood. When the snow came, an older neighbor one block away, who had a new snow blower, and some extra time, plowed out his neighbors’ sidewalks and driveways. By accident, at a holiday party, the young family learned that their kind plowman had voted for and staunchly supported the opposing party. The snow removal is still going on.

But we need to be careful here, even here where the ice is pretty thick. The words here are plural in command (you plural must not resist) and singular in object (one who is or does evil). The teaching applies to individual behavior, though it is given to all. What you may be free to do or not to do, on your own, is not a freedom available to groups, institutions and societies. Niebuhr teaches us: An individual may sacrifice his own interests, either without hope of reward or in the hope of an ultimate compensation. But how is an individual, who is responsible for the interests of a group, to justify the sacrifice of interests other than his own…No one has a right to be unselfish with other people’s interests…Fewer risks can be taken with community interests than with individual interests…To some degree the conflict between the purest individual morality and an adequate political policy must therefore remain (Moral Man and Immoral Society, 269-273).

Two: Social Ethics

The harder question, and the spot on the pond where the ice gets thin, or at least thinner, is ‘how far the principle can be applied to groups, and especially political life’ (IB loc cit). Our recognition that the dominant alto\tenor voices of the early church and evangelist, expecting the very soon return of Christ, and hence shading this ethic as an interim ethic (we this winter rely on Albert Schweitzer and Amos Wilder here), may help us. Here is a ringing question placed against the ethic of retaliation that dates to Hammurabi, to Roman Law, to Aeschylus, and is epitomized in the lex talionis, eye and tooth. Resist not., says 5: 39.

Especially, how shall we hear this verse in relation to the brief span of human history given to our keeping? While there are easier applications, we shall today head straight into the hardest, the Christian ethical teaching on the place of military might. It needs no particular emphasis, today, to recognize that behind the furry and flurry of daily news—cable news that should have less viewership, major newspapers that need more calm and balance, millennials and baby boomers both who need fewer protests and more projects--there looms the prospect, ever present across the globe, of armed conflict. Matthew 5:39 says ‘resist not’. So how shall hear this verse?

Over 20 centuries, and speaking with unforgivable conciseness as one must in a twenty-minute sermon, two basic understandings of war and peace have emerged in Christian thought. As you know, these roughly can be called the so-called pacifist and just war understandings.

Pacifism preceded its sibling, and infinitely extends to all times the interim ethic of the Sermon on the Mount (which even here in Matthew, a late writing, expects that the coming of Christ will soon make moot our ethical dilemmas, and so tends to err on the side of quietism, or, in the case of arms, pacifism): “to him who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also”. Many utterly saintly Christian women and men have and do honor this understanding with their selfless commitment, including many in this congregation today. My own pulpit hero, Ernest Fremont Tittle, the best Methodist preacher of the 20^th century, did so from his Chicago pulpit through the whole Second World War. My namesake Allan Knight Chalmers did so in pulpit and classroom near the same time, here in Boston. Think about that for a minute. While personally I have not been able, to this date anyway, to agree with them, I never compose a sermon on this topic without wondering, and to some degree fearing, what their judgment might be.

The multiple theories of just war, or war as the least of all evil alternatives, have developed since the Fourth Century and the writing of St. Augustine. Here the command to “be merciful, even as God is merciful” is understood tragically to include times when mercy for the lamb means armed opposition to the wolf. The New Testament apocalyptic frame and its interim ethic are honored, to be sure, but supplemented with the historic experience of the church through the ages. Many utterly saintly Christian men and women have honored this understanding with their selfless commitment, including some present here today, and some who are not present because they gave their lives that others might live. Just war thought includes several serious caveats. We together need to know and recall these, in five forms: a just cause in response to serious evil, a just intention for restoration of peace with justice, an absence of self-enrichment or desire for devastation, a use as an utterly last resort, a claim of legitimate authority, and a reasonable hope of success, given the constraints of “discrimination” and “proportionality” (usually understood as protection of non-combatants). Response. Restoration. Restraint. Last resort. Common authority.

Prayerfully, we each and we all will want to consider our own understanding, our own ethic, our own choice and choices between these two basic alternatives. But the careful listener this February of 2017 will want a thought or two about how, together, as those who influence culture together, we might positively and proactively live out Matthew 5:39. Our age and world are embedded with nuclear weaponry, which with luck thus far, since 1945, has not been used. But, as one wrote last week, ‘luck is not a plan and luck tends to run out’. We are keenly aware, as well, that in a nuclear age, the temperament, judgment, and character of those in positions of dispositive power, are crucial. We are aware, as well, of the influence for good and ill that leadership carries, including the power to shred inherited, longstanding forms of etiquette, diplomacy, and culture, on a daily basis. We are well to remember that the wise primary impetus for globalization is not economics but security.

Three: Resisting Resentment

So far, in this sermon, we have offered, first, a qualified application of our verse to personal ethics and, second, a qualified separation of the verse from literal use in social ethics. Third, what does the verse call for, through us, today?

We will pause now to welcome a visitor to our service. Welcome. You will find him to my right, and down the west aisle of the chapel. He is standing alone, and has been with us before. Actually, his worship attendance at Marsh Chapel has been perfect for 60 years, a far better record than he had in life. For he is enshrined in one of our Connick stained glass windows, one of the many novel choices the fourth President of Boston University, Daniel Marsh, made in designing our chapel. Abraham Lincoln may be able to offer us some assistance today, on President’s weekend.

In the fall of 1858, two men as different as life and death stood beside each other on debate platforms in Illinois. To the right was the carefully groomed, smooth speaking, dapperly dressed Senator Stephen Douglas. To his left, looking like a bumpkin, stood a gangly, homely man, overly tall and saddled with a high pitched, irritating voice. They debated for the heart of the country, and Lincoln lost. In his career he lost and lost and lost. In 1858 he lost, even though virtually every point he made in his speeches proved true. A house divided against itself cannot stand. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others you have lost the genius of your own independence. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves. True, true, true. He won in 1860, but in 1862 his party was thrashed (he said, ‘I am too big to cry and too badly hurt to laugh’), in 1863 the horror of Gettysburg quickened his finest address, in 1864, challenged by his own subordinate, he barely won, and in 1865, on Good Friday, he too was dead. Lincoln spoke of his country in the soaring phrase, ‘the last, best hope’. Lincoln exemplified a life-long resistance to resentment. He got up and tried again, time after time. He did not let the inevitable resentments of life stymie him.

Lincoln resisted resentment. Sometimes it is better to have patience than brains. If we can restrain ourselves, in the future, from making scapegoats of some in order furiously to retaliate against other hidden foes, that is, we shall find that the community of peoples will see in us a last best hope. We may model, as a people, a path forward into a time of freedom, pluralism, toleration, compromise, and peace. Here Lincoln holds a key for us, a dream and hope of ‘malice toward none’.

We may be entering an Epoch of Spiritual Discipline Against Resentment. Here I simply refer to a great American and a greater historian, Christopher Lasch, and his rumination on the work of Reinhold Niebuhr:

The only way to break the ‘endless cycle’ of injustice, Niebuhr argued, was nonviolent coercion, with its spiritual discipline against resentment. In order to undermine an oppressor’s claims to moral superiority, (one) has to avoid such claims on their own behalf.

Again, in the confines of a sermon, I can only sketch. Lasch’s essay distilled this theme, a spiritual discipline against resentment, from the lives and writings of Niebuhr, but also from Martin Luther King, the Boston Personalists, and many others. He saw, as we too may see in the Matthean passage earlier read, the necessity of holding at bay those deeply human sentiments that easily, and tragically, attach themselves to us when we are fearful, attacked, and violated. For a future to emerge that is more than simply a repetition of the patterns of the past, a people must develop a ‘spiritual discipline against resentment’.

What is this discipline? What does it look like? How is one to find its power? Truly I see no other source than a confessional reliance on the Christ of Calvary, and no better reading than the one we heard a moment ago. Frederik Douglass: “If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.”

A Spiritual Discipline against Resentment. It is quotidian, tedious work, and will take up the next decade. It was the genius of Isaiah Berlin, with whom we conclude, which best bespoke this wise admonition to a discipline against resentment:

Collisions, even if they cannot be avoided, can be softened. Claims can be balanced, compromises can be reached: in concrete situations not every claim is of equal force—so much liberty, so much equality; so much for sharp moral condemnation, so much for understanding a given human situation; so much for the full force of law, and so much for the prerogative of mercy; for feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, healing the sick, sheltering the homeless. Priorities, never final and absolute, must be established.

Of course social or political collisions will take place; the mere conflict of positive values alone makes this unavoidable. Yet they can be minimized by promoting and preserving an uneasy equilibrium, which is constantly threatened and in constant need of repair—that alone is the precondition for decent societies and morally acceptable behavior, otherwise we are bound to lose our way. A little dull as a solution you will say? Yet there is some truth in this view.

-The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 02.19.2017 at 5:44 pm
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Sunday
February 12

The Bach Experience

By Marsh Chapel

Matthew 5: 21-37

The Rev. Dr. Robert Hill

A.1. ‘This third cantata of Marsh Chapel’s Bach Experience continues the overarching theme of arrivals that permeate the four cantatas this season: in the fall, we celebrated the birthday of John the Baptist and the Ascension of Mary; in April, we will celebrate the arrival of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. This morning features Bach’s Cantata, composed for the Feast of the Purification and first performed on 2 February 1725. The Purification commemorates Mary’s return to the Temple forty days after giving birth to Jesus in accordance with Mosaic law; the sense of Jesus’ arrival is crystallized, however, by the words of Simeon, whose prophecy of death soon after meeting the Messiah has remained one of the most enduring poetic and musical texts in all of Christianity. Those words, also known by the Latin Nunc dimittis, are set here by Bach in a combination of Martin Luther’s chorale translation and an anonymous libretto’s extrapolation of the corresponding chorale verses’ themes, a technique we have seen in the other chorale cantatas’ (from today’s notes).

A.2. For a moment, let us hear Matthew in concert with all the gospels. They are each very different, but in the acclamation of resurrection and cross, they partly converge. So the grace and power of Bach this morning, are amply justified: ’(The Gospel writer) himself had a vision overwhelming enough to eliminate the painful and humiliating aspects of Jesus’ passion and to replace them with signs of exaltation and glory, so as to compress the events of Good Friday and Easter Sunday into a single momentous happening, the defeat of the prince of this world and the victory of Christ’ 193 (Ashton). Recall Matthew, and his community of faith:

A.3.Conscious as they were of the continuing presence in their midst of the Glorified One, no wonder the community, or rather the evangelist who was its chief spokesman, smoothed out the rough edges of the traditions of the historical Jesus and expanded the ‘points into stars’…(His portrait of Jesus) arose from his constant awareness, which shared with members of his community, that they were living in the presence of the Glorified One. So dazzling was this glory that any memory of a less-than-glorious Christ was altogether eclipsed…(They) realized that the truth that they prized as the source of their new life was to be identified not with the Jesus of history but with the risen and glorious Christ, and that this was a Christ free from all human weakness. The claims they made for him were at the heart of the new religion that soon came to be called Christianity. (199) The… portrait of Christ …is best accounted for by the experience of the glorious Christ constantly present to him and his community (204). (John Ashton, op. cit)

A.4. Beloved, the Sermon on the Mount is an interim ethic, meant first and foremost for those to whom Jesus preached and with whom Matthew taught. These words, Matthew 5: 21 and following, fit a time when intense expectation predicted the culmination of history in apocalypse, the end of time, not sometime, but Thursday after lunch, or Friday morning. Hence the stark hyperbole here. Hence the rigorous ethic here, pending the eschaton, a teaching ad interim, awaiting, soon and very soon, the return of the Lord. We know hyperbole when we hear it, eyes plucked and hands cut off and so on, no matter the witness of Origen. We know also the wrestling with hard choices, here cast in first century white heat, as in the stricture against divorce, though even here with a caveat, for with Scripture and tradition who know and affirm the need on occasion for divorce, for the sake of the institution of marriage itself. These words from 85ad are not meant to be taken out of 2000 years on ice, only to let them thaw and eat them raw. Sickness would ensue. No, they need preparation, cooking, heating, seasoning, and careful presentation. Originalist interpretation is as much a failed project in biblical hermeneutics as it is in constitutional law.

A.5.Glory! As F.C. Baur put it: ‘The essence of Christianity is the revelation of the glory of God in the only Son of the Father, the fullness of his grace and truth disclosed in him who was made flesh—wherein all the imperfections, limits, and negativity of the law…are absolutely transcended’ (204). What has the Bach Cantata, in all its glory, today to say of and too this all?

Dr. Scott Jarrett

B.1. Today’s cantata explores not just Salvation by faith, but the extraordinary Wonder of the Light of Christ come to save. Written for the Feast of the Purification of Mary, Bach’s anonymous librettist focuses on the wonderful story of Simeon’s encounter with the Christ child in the Temple – the lesson from ten days ago in our calendar.

B.2. The opening movement is as solemn as it is elegant. Set in a dance-like 12/8 time, this e minor opening chorus might remind the listener of the famous opening chorus of the Matthew Passion. The movement’s motives are heard first in dialogue between the solo flute and oboe before other instruments and voices have their chance at the melody. The Chorale itself was well-known to Bach’s listeners, and his special treatment of the phrases toward the end dealing with the Calm and Quiet of Death’s eternal sleep surely wouldn’t have gone without notice.

B.3. The central portion of the cantata sets two arias and two recitatives. And as we might expect, the theological journey moves from the most personal to the corporate, indeed global. Perhaps the most astonishing movement in Cantata 125, Bach’s aria for alto soloist is also the longest clocking in at nearly eleven minutes. The aria is scored for solo flute and oboe, with a lightly pulsating continuo line, and Bach indicates that the keyboard player is not to outline any of the harmonies, but simply double the cello part. The flute and oboe begin as a duet, but the inclusion of the alto solo completes a trinity of highly ornamented concertists. With an obvious nod in the libretto to Simeon’s old and failing eyes, the light of Salvation at having seen his Savior shines clear. Here Bach draws us in to his remarkable sound world – delicate and suspended as we ponder the Wonder of our Salvation.

B.4. By intentional contrast, the bass soloist stirs us from this enthralling music in an accompanied recitative that weaves both libretto and Luther texts in a well-hewn sermon. The wonder of the Light of Salvation takes on a new opulence in a fantastic duet for tenor and bass in which the Light of Christ shines as a global radiance, an “unfathomable and uncreated Treasure of Goodness” – not just for Simeon and Bach’s Lutherans - but a universal assurance of grace.

The Rev. Dr. Robert Hill

C.1. On a Cantata day devoted to arrivals, where are we, and at what portal do we arrive? We are looking back, now, on a decade of progress, across this land of the free and home of the brave: cultural freedom, economic progress, recession bailout, gulf cleanup, attempted bipartisanship, gay marriage, expansive health care, immigration prudence, measured peace, renewable energy, supported community colleges, presidential grace, rhetorical excellence, wars ended, a Nobel Prize, some racial progress, opposition to guns, a denuclearized Iran, Paris climate accords, international respect, personal perseverance, presence in trauma (here in Boston too), and exemplary leadership. But now we are looking forward, now, to a decade of laborious redress: With students at BU—Be You—we will need to be: bold, kind, tough, wise, true, lean, strong, good, sharp, smart. But when? And then, how? Matthew is concerned with false prophets and false brethren, in five parts: discipleship, apostleship, hidden revelation, church administration, judgment. We shall need the sense of glory, of joyful transcendence, of abandon, of play—yes even that found in the aftermath, say, of a fifth Superbowl—to empower and nourish us along the hard path of the next decade, a decade of humiliation that may lead to humility, a decade of crucial but tedious committee level leadership development that may lead to progress, a decade of gradual recognition, slowly, on the part of millennials and baby boomers together, that culture matters, civil society matters, organizations matter, institutions matter. And so do votes.

C.2. Late last Sunday night the words of Peter Berger, a generation ago, may have come to mind: ‘Both in practice and in theoretical thought, human life gains the greatest part of its richness from the capacity for ecstasy, by which I do not mean the alleged experiences of the mystic, but any experience stepping outside the taken for granted reality of everyday life, any openness to the mystery that surrounds us on all sides. A philosophical anthropology worthy of the name will have to regain a perception of these experiences, and with this regain a metaphysical dimension. The theological method suggested here as a possibility will contribute to this rediscovery of ecstasy and metaphysics as crucial dimensions of human life, and by the same token to the recovery of lost riches of both experience and thought’ (A Rumor of Angels, 94). Such ecstasy makes space for generosity.

C.3 In fact, and in conclusion, the eye of the Lord today rests for a moment upon a genuine generosity. You are generous people! If we follow his gaze our eyes too may rest for a moment upon genuine generosity. We too by the lenses of the Scripture may for a moment see what Jesus sees, imagine what he imagines, today. His vision may shape our own. Then in his light we may see light. Follow in the mind’s eye for a moment the angle of vision, the dominical angle of vision, now registered for us and all time in St. Matthew’s generous gospel, Chapter 5. Hum the tune, some months after Christmastide: Do you see what he sees? He sees and honors genuine generosity. Can we do otherwise? The next time you are tempted, as you consider a generous act, to think that no one sees, that no one shares, that no fruit falls, remember today’s gospel, be reconciled…then come and offer your gift. Follow the eye of the Lord, resting for a moment today on generosity. He teaches us about visible generosity. He delights us with religious generosity. He persuades us of the power of generosity.

C.4. Such generosity as had our 16^th President, whom, this February 12^th, we may recall, just weeks before his death. As Lincoln put it: (March 4, 1865 (in passim))

At this second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first…On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it…Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came…

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Invitation to Discipleship (the Rev. Dr. Robert Hill and Dr. Scott Jarrett)

Rev. Dr. Hill: Whence cometh our help?

Dr. Jarrett: From the Lord who made heaven and earth. The Creator. The Ground of Being. The God beyond God. The invisible, unknowable, unutterable, unattainable. The first, the last beyond all thought. The Transcendent.

Rev. Dr. Hill: What is the point of our lives?

Dr. Jarrett: To worship God and glorify God forever.

Rev. Dr. Hill: How is this possible, in the face of silence, darkness, mystery, accident, pride, immaturity, tragedy and the threat of meaninglessness?

Dr. Jarrett: By walking in the dark with our Transforming Friend, the Transcript in Time of who God is in eternity, the gift of the Father’s unfailing grace, our beacon not our boundary, the presence of the absence of God, Jesus Christ our Kyrios.

Rev. Dr. Hill: Given our failures, our gone-wrongness, our sin, what daily hope have we, as those who hope for what we do not see?

Dr. Jarrett: Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. Where there is freedom, there is promise. There is a self-correcting Spirit of Truth loose in the universe. There is a self-correcting Spirit of Truth loose in the universe.

Rev. Dr. Hill: How do we follow the trail of the Spirit?

Dr. Jarrett: By tithing, by ordered Sunday worship, by honest faithfulness in our relationships.

-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 02.12.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Bach Experience, Robert Hill, Scott Jarrett

Sunday
February 5

Communion Meditation: Ad Interim

By Marsh Chapel

Matthew 5:13-20

Preface

‘Is this not the fast that I choose, to loose the bonds of injustice?’

‘Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.’

James Baldwin spoke, eloquently, of the death of the heart.

We are both and landing pad and a launching pad here at Marsh Chapel. Rev. Holly Benzenhaver has guided our quiet prayer, faithfully and gently, before Sunday worship. Now she goes to work for a time with the First Baptist Church of Needham. We send her off with blessings and best wishes, and wish her well, grateful for her gifts in ministry with us. Each of us by baptism is given gifts for and invited into forms of ministry. How would you currently describe yours?

There are many ways of keeping faith. In my Father’s house there are many rooms. The world’s varied religious traditions cradle treasures, precious and distinct. At birth, our nation affirmed this. We are a country founded by immigrants. Founded by immigrants fleeing religious persecution. By immigrants fleeing religious persecution and seeking religious freedom. Immigrants fleeing religious persecution, seeking religious freedom, and determined to expand the circle of that freedom to include others, many, all. The sights, symbols, sounds, statues, and landmarks of Boston, of New England, stand in sharp contrast to our current, gratuitously cruel, ban on some immigrants. We know better. This is not who we are. We are invited to be rememberers not forgetters, to receive fresh every morning a newly remembered gospel, a gospel that in a word is love. One such Boston, or New England, reminder is found in the love of Amos Wilder.

Our Town

Our guide ‘ad interim’ today is Amos Wilder.

Following, though, the longstanding advisement, in preaching, to move from the familiar to the different, we perhaps could start with his brother.

Perhaps know him, or his name, through his brother, Thornton, who wrote OUR TOWN, including the letter addressed to the ‘Mind of God’ and delivered all the same, including Emily and George and love and death, and including the graveyard out of which Emily travels to return to the land of the living on her 12th birthday, February 11, 1899.

Recall Wilder's Emily Webb returning from the dead. She asks, just once, to return to Grovers' Corners, to see and hear and taste and touch and feel. "Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough." She picks her 12th birthday, at dawn, early in the morning.

Three days snow, in Grover's Corners. Main Street, the drug store. Mr. Webb coming home on the night train from Hamilton College. Howie Newsome, the policeman. Mrs. Webb ("how young she looks! I didn't know Mama was ever that young"). 10 below zero.

I can't find my blue ribbon

Open your eyes dear. I laid it out for you.

If it were a snake it would bite you.

The milk man arrives. Mr. Webb kisses Mrs. Webb. Don't forget Charles it's Emily's birthday.

I've got something right here. Where is she? Where's my birthday girl?

Breakfast, early in the morning, in New Hampshire: ‘A very happy birthday to you. There are some surprises on the kitchen table. But birthday or no birthday I want you to eat your breakfast good and slow.

I want you to grow up and be a good, strong girl.

That blue paper is from your Aunt Carrie

And I reckon you can guess who brought the post-card album

I found it on the doorstep when I brought in the milk--George Gibbs.

Chew that bacon good and slow. It'll keep you warm on a cold day.’

‘O Mama, look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Mama 14 years have gone by. I'm dead. You're a grandmother Mama. I married George Gibbs. Wally's dead too. His appendix burst on a camping trip to North Conway. We felt just terrible about it--don't you remember? But, just for a moment now we're all together, Mama. Just for a moment we're happy. LET'S LOOK AT ONE ANOTHER’

‘So all that was going on and we never noticed. Grover's Corners. Mama and Papa. Clock's ticking. Sunflowers. Food and coffee. New ironed dresses and hot baths. Sleeping and waking up. Earth! You are too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

And earlier in the play…

REBECCA:
I never told you about that letter Jane Crofut got from her
minister when she was sick. He wrote Jane a letter and on the envelope the address was like this: It said: Jane Crofut; The Crofut Farm; Grover's Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America.
GEORGE:
What's funny about that?
REBECCA:
But listen, it's not finished: the United States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God--that's what it said on the envelope.
GEORGE:
What do you know!
REBECCA:
And the postman brought it just the same.
GEORGE:
What do you know!

Amos Wilder

“Amos Wilder occupies a unique position in American literary history, combining the vocations of poet and scholar, critic and pastor. He brought together the heritage of the Bible with the visions of the 20th century. His wartime experience recorded in his early poetry opened him up to the catastrophic depths of humanity, while his vision of hope, derived from his biblical story, allowed him to press beyond the negative limits of his time. His poetic eye enabled him to see connections between the Bible and literature, the Kingdom of God and modern ethics, religious experience and contemporary symbols.” (the source of this citation has been lost)

He knew and reminds us that the Gospel, in the freezer for 2000 years, cannot merely be taken out, to let it thaw then eat it raw. It needs cooking, seasoning, preparation, and presentation.

Poet and Scholar. Professor and Pastor. Mind and heart. Reason and Imagination. Amos Wilder, across most of the 20th century lived a unity of that pair so long disjoined, and disjoined to the harm of both: learning and piety.

A child in China. A student at Oberlin, Oxford, Yale. A minister in North Conway. A teacher at Harvard. To begin to embrace the Good about us, in us, around us, sustaining us—the good from all sides which we shall need gently to continue to nurture over the next decade of humility acquired through humiliation, national humility acquired through national humiliation—we shall need both in full. Salt and light. Salt and light. Salt and light.

Here is his poem, about the modest wedding of a poor couple, in the Conway parsonage, during a snowstorm:

Wedding

Brother and sister in this world’s poor family,

Jack and Jill out of this gypsy camp of earth,

Here is where the injustice is greatest

And you feel it obscurely,

And you have a right to storm within yourselves

And seek sanctuary in one another’s shabbiness.

This boy and this girl with all their abandonment and futility,

Folly and dereliction,

Whirled from ignominy to ignominy,

Condemned to all the wretched chores of the community-

O tribute of forlorn humanity! Come for his benediction whom they have

blasphemed,

And somehow sense that they touch- what?

God, the Higher, all that they have missed:

Innocence and mercy and compassion.

Poor lad, scoured from humiliation to humiliation,

Pressed by dirt and danger, squalor and exhaustion,

And bred in blasphemy and the poison of men’s bitter spirit,

And the maudline imaginations of their lust;

Where else could it end but in this makeshift marriage?

And well may you storm within yourself,

at the same time that you feel the awe of it

God and the devil both have a hand in joining you

And you are hardly at fault.

Poor sister in our earth’s poor family,

Stupid and stupified and hallowed all at once,

Poor creature of poor moments,

Disinherited Eve,

How else could it come out but in the tumble of that first assault,

And yet God has put his finger on even this.

No bridesmaids nor flowers for you,

The groom hasn’t given you these.

You came in an old coat.

One of the gang is best man and witness,

The boy minister goes through with it,

And there is no shower as you go out.

The sleigh waits outside in the heavy snowfall.

It is movie night in the village, and no one

is about to spy you at the parsonage,

And so you go off in the blizzard to the lumber camps.

This is all the world gives you.

But the Son of Man of the wedding feast haunts such occasions

and understands you.

He can turn water into wine and such shame and loss into gain

In some world some time;

Lucy Hanks bore Nancy seven years before her marriage feast.

The Son of Man knows too well what the hells are,

and the dumb wonderings and sicknesses of the soul,

And he is the only one who does know.

So endure these gust and whirlwinds of the night until the morning breaks.

I heard the organ roll behind the snowfall

and saw in it the confetti of the heavenly bride chamber,

Glimpsed the sons of the bride chamber rejoicing

In that City which is full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof,

Before the Father whose face the angels of

little children do always behold.

The Healing Waters: Poems 1943.

(I am indebted to my friend the Rev. Joe Bassett for acquaintance with this poem and better acquaintance with Amos Wilder).

“The appreciation of the depths and multi-dimensionality of language led Wilder to reject any reductionist interpretation of biblical material. In order to understand the historical evidence of the first century imagination and heart, Wilder employed a wide-ranging mode of interpretation, using literary criticism, social psychology, the studies of archetypes and folklore, and anthropology.

Wilder's inclusive mode of interpretation differed from other New Testament scholars, particularly in the relation of scripture to social ethics. In contrast to the existentialist position of Rudolf Bultmann, Wilder maintained that an individualistic approach did not do justice to the full dimensions of the New Testament message. For Wilder the revelation of God comes through the New Testament's varied symbols and myths, which need to be interpreted in their socio-historical context. Once interpreted, these mythological expressions can speak to the social dimension of faith.”

Wilder, as New Testament Scholar, Teacher, Pastor, and Preacher, could combine the rational and the imaginative, the scientific and the humanistic, history and mythology. His mind and heart were formed in the furnace of WWI. His voice is yours, New England. He knew personally and well Albert Schweitzer, whose understanding of our passage as an ‘interim ethic’, governed by the expected closeness of the coming kingdom, itself reigns, to this day. ‘Resist not’ is meant for the time being, for the time Jesus lived and stretched out to when Matthew wrote. It is meant for a particular time, but not for all time. For all time, and for our time, we have the staggering responsibility to fit the teaching to a new era, another epoch. Whether or not ethics is situational, it is certainly epochal. Our response and resistance to a megalomaniacal Presidential regime can be guided by but not directed by these precious verses of Holy Scripture. Their application is, to use a marvelous American idiom, ‘up to you’.

Ad Interim

So. Here is what Amos Wilder, our guide, whose brother, Thornton, is the more familiar, will now say to us, about the Sermon on the Mount:

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)The teaching comes out of a small world, a rural and small town society of a comparatively simple kind, in a semitropical climate. Nietzsche, Marx, Others decry it. Give to him who begs from you (Luther: but not what he asks for). 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).

Wilder knew Schweitzer from time shared in England, at Mansfield College. They corresponded for years. Wilder’s little church in Conway, New Hampshire—from which town brother Thornton collected scenes and stories, including Huie Newsome’s death from appendicitis on a Scout hike—holds letters from and plaque honoring Schweitzer, or so I am told.

Later in the month, we shall assay to understand a specific portion of the Sermon the Mount, under the aspect of this perspective on ‘interim ethics’.

Coda

‘Is this not the fast that I choose, to loose the bonds of injustice?’

‘Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.’

We turn now, together, toward the communion table. Those on the launching pad and those on the landing pad do so together. We gather at the table of remembrance. We gather at the table of thanksgiving. We gather at the table of presence. We enjoy together a sense of meaning. We enjoy together a feeling of belonging. We enjoy together an intimation of empowerment. We enjoy together an experience of community.

Together, in communion meditation.

The first task of the church is not to speak but to be the church, a community, where object lessons in Christian life and faith are given unintentionally…The effective way of evangelism is to be the church and to pioneer in the field of social relationship and community service. The gospel is not good advice, but good news (Hoekendeijk).

Let us break bread together on our knees.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 02.5.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
January 29

For The Time Being

By Marsh Chapel

Matthew 5:1-12

Preface

He is the Way

Follow Him through the land of unlikeness

You will see rare beasts and have unique adventures

He is the Truth

Seek Him in the kingdom of anxiety

You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years

He is Life

Love him in the world of the flesh

And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.

For the Time Being

For now. For the time being. Whether or not ethics are situational, they are certainly epochal. Each time, each season brings another climate for decision, for life.

New occasions teach new duties

Time makes ancient good uncouth

One must upward still and onward

Who would keep abreast of truth

A woman in pregnancy knows for sure the arrival of another epoch—for the time being. A student in the struggle winter of freshman year, when novelty has given way to normalcy, and autumn to snow, knows for sure the arrival of another epoch—for the time being. A nation which has swung by political pendulum from liberal left to hard right, on the basis of 77,000 votes along the country roads of three states, knows for sure the arrival of another epoch—for the time being. A man in Shakespeare’s seventh stage, or nearing it, sans sight sans hearing sans agility sans memory sans sleep sans energy, knows for sure the arrival of another epoch—for the time being. Our conditions condition our decisions, epoch by epoch—for the time being.

For the time being, we shall want daily to recall Emma Lazarus and Martin Neimoller, to remember who and whose we are, in promise and in warning.

Lazarus:

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,

Send these, the homeless, the tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door

Neimoller:

First they came for the (Communists, Socialists, Trade Unionists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jews ) and I did not speak out because I was not a (Communist, Socialist, Trade Unionist, Jehovah’s Witness, Jew )

Then at last they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out

We have left St. Luke, now, to follow the trail of Jesus’ life, death and destiny, this year, in the Gospel of Matthew. Matthew relies on Mark, and then also on a teaching document called Q, along with Matthew’s own particular material, of which our reading today is an example. He has divided his Gospel into five sequential parts, a careful pedagogical rendering, befitting his traditional role as teacher, in contrast to Luke ‘the physician’, whose interest was history. We have moved from history to religion, from narrative to doctrine. Matthew is ordering the meaning of the history of the Gospel, while Luke is ordering the history of the meaning of the Gospel. You have moved from the History Department to the Religion Department. Matthew has his own perspective.

Every word is meant for a particular time, but not for all time. For all time, and for our time, we have the staggering responsibility to fit the teaching to a new era, another epoch. Whether or not ethics is situational, it is certainly epochal. Our response and resistance to a megalomaniacal regime can be guided by but not directed by these precious verses of Holy Scripture. Their application is, to use a marvelous American idiom, ‘up to you’. And this will be difficult. Policies we can adjust. Fear mongering we must resist.

‘A literary work or a fragment of tradition is a primary source for the historical situation out of which it arose, and is only a secondary source for the historical details for which it gives information’ (45). (Wellhausen.)

Some of that perspective involves a developing and developed Christology, an understanding of Christ. Matthew is apparently fighting on two fronts, both against the fundamental conservatives to the right, and against the spiritual radicals to the left. In Matthew, Gospel continues to trump tradition, as in Paul, but tradition itself is a bulwark to defend the Gospel, as in Timothy. Matthew is trying to guide his part of the early church, between the Scylla of the tightly tethered and the Charibdis of the tether-less. Our forebears taught us so. That is, with Matthew, they wanted to order the meaning of the history of the gospel. They aspired to do so by opposition to indecency and indifference. They attempted to do so by attention both to conscience and to compassion.

For example: we enter now a reading and rendering of the Sermon on the Mount, perhaps the most beloved and best remembered of Jesus’ teachings. At the outset, we face a raging river to cross. For when were these teachings meant? For all time, for Jesus’ time, for Matthew’s time, for our time—for the time being?

It Means What it Does

In July of 1976, a small congregation gathered just up the hill from New Hope Mills, a pancake flour maker, an old grist mill. That Methodist church had endured the fumblings of an untrained, unordained minister all summer. One Sunday he mistakenly, errantly left his sermon, titled, ‘Forgiveness’, across the road in the parsonage. Mumbling something about forgiving and forgetting, he left the pulpit and hustled across the road to retrieve the homily, as the choir, four in number, soprano in voice, sang several favorite verses of In the Garden, in any case a weekly occurrence. A cow mooed in the field beside the church. Later that week, he stopped to see the young family of the volunteer Fire Chief in New Hope. It happened that short comment, innocuous, had been made about fire protection, in the sermon. To what remarkable end that illustration may have been sent out, we know not, remember not. Said the wife, “John and I heard your sermon very clearly on Sunday, and, taking it to heart, have decided that he will quit his role as chief and resign from the department”. The sermon, sadly, meant nothing of the kind, in the preacher’s intention, in his heart of hearts, in his preacherly imagination. But the sermon means what it does, not what its intention meant. The preacher is responsible, not for what he says, but for what he is heard to say. What it means is not what it meant but it what it does. We clarified in conversation, what was misspoken in homily: a note to the wise about the critical importance of visitation, and the critical homiletical need to avoid misunderstanding if at all possible. The sermon’s meaning is not in the purified intentions of the preacher, but in what it means—what it does—in life. Are children thereby baptized? Do any learn to tithe? Do newcomers receive welcome into worship? Is God glorified? Have you fruit? But Mr. Wesley, I meant well. But did you do well?

‘What it means is what it does’---act, word, speech, deed, all. This year has provided an expensive way for 340 million people to learn a first lesson in biblical hermeneutics and theological interpretation. You voted. You may have meant one thing. The meaning of your word or deed is something else. The road to hell is paved with—good intentions. We don’t need to recount as much as we need to recant. Jeremiah, it appears was right: you only learn humility on the far side of humiliation.

And now, for the time being, we will simply have to live it through. Not all order is godly, especially when purchased with the counterfeit currency of oppression and injustice. But a quiet and peaceable life itself requires order, and when we have such, we are right to give thanks. Especially in the later New Testament writings there is preserved for us a mature recognition of the value in things done ‘decently and in order’. The body. Birds of the air. Lilies of the field. Reminders of what Marilyn Robinson might call ‘the givenness of things’.

A Common Longing

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

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

We offer a common prayer, a prayer 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 offer a common prayer, a prayer 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 offer a common prayer, a prayer 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 offer a common prayer, a prayer 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 offer a common prayer, a prayer that our families, torn apart by abuse and distrust and anger and jealousy and unkindness, show kindness and pity to one another.

We offer a common prayer, a prayer 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 offer a common prayer that, over time, and by hard experience, we may learn that the meaning of a word, a deed, an act is not found in the sentiment or feeling in which it was uttered or offered, but just in what it does for others, not in what we meant by it, but in what it does to others.

We offer a common prayer, a prayer 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 offer a common prayer, a prayer that women—our grandmothers, mothers, sisters, daughters, granddaughters, all—granted suffrage less than 100 years ago, will be spared any and all forms of harassment and abuse, verbal or physical, on college campuses, in homes and families, in offices and bars, in life and work, and long having suffered and now having suffrage, will in our time rise up to be honored, revered, and compensated, without reserve, but with justice and mercy.

We offer a common prayer, finally a prayer 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

For the time being…our Holy Scripture, including our beloved Sermon on the Mount, the most cherished of the Lord’s remembered teachings, may guide us but cannot direct us.

Brueggeman: not just moving people from outsiders to insiders, but also moving people from forgetters into rememberers and from beloved children to belieful adults (Biblical Perspectives…94). You need to read.

Hoekendijk: The first task of the church is not to speak but to be the church, a community, where object lessons in Christian life and faith are given unintentionally…The effective way of evangelism is to be the church and to pioneer in the field of social relationship and community service. The gospel is not good advice, but good news. You need to worship.

One specific: join us tomorrow on Marsh Plaza at 3pm in support of our Boston University Arabic Society, or say a prayer, read a psalm, send a note or check at 3pm

In sum, while our blessed Sermon on the Mount can and does guide us, it does not direct us, in the end. We are charged, challenged and required to make sense of our own epoch, and by faith to live in faith. While this is exhilarating in its freeing of the will, it is staggering in its requirement of the man or woman of faith.

You may feel empty. Note the fullness promised emptiness in the Beatitudes. ‘The reality of the vessel is the shape of the void within it.’ (Lao Tze)

Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down his disciples came to him. 2 And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying:

3 “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

4 “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

5 “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

6 “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

7 “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

8 “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

9 “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

10 “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 01.29.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
January 22

In the Moonlight

By Marsh Chapel

John 1:29-42

Preface

Wise Nicodemus saw such light
As made him know his God by night.

O for that night! Where I in him
Might live invisible and dim.

We are a people who languish in the doldrums of a pervasive, shared disappointment. A cultural disappointment: technological, relational, conversational, rhetorical—spiritual (including donkeys and elephants and others). After a year of disappointment, broadly shared: disappointment of process, outcome, option, influence, rhetoric, values, and virtues. While not universal, and while certainly varied in focus, a common disappointment robes the vast majority across our land. We pause in prayer under a night sky, in the moonlight.

Hear Good News: Faith discovers in disappointment a truth that sets free. A freeing of the will.

Remember that the ancient and holy scriptures afford a space for moonlight, as well as for sunlight.

The heavens are telling the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech and night to night declares knowledge.

At night, there is moonlight. A song in the night. A weeping that tarries for the night. A reflected light. A pale moonlight.

If I say let only the darkness cover me, and the night about me be as night: even the darkness is not dark to thee; the night is as bright as the day; for darkness is as light with thee.

Out in the wilderness, late on a winter night, say it is a clear night, you see by a different light. A refracted illumination. A reflected brightness. A luminosity of a different measure, kind, sort and type. The moon on the breast of the new fallen snow brings the luster of midnight to objects below. The corn stubble in the field gives its shadow out from the dark brightness of the night.

Look around you here in the dark. Train your eyes to see what only shows up in moonlight.

The heavens are telling the glory of God. That is sunlight. And the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork. That is moonlight.

Day to day pours for speech. That is sunlight. And night to night declares knowledge. That is moonlight.

There is a wonder of the heavens. And there is a wonder of the firmament. There is a wonder of the day. And there is a wonder of the night. There is a wonder at life. And there is a wonder at death. There is a wonder at birth, brightness, gaiety, satiety, summer, joy, victory, discovery and all that lives. And there is a wonder at death, darkness, despond, emptiness, acedia, defeat, loss and all that limits life. One wonder is exuberant, and the other is melancholy—one of the day and one of the night. But both are wonder and both are ours and both are witnesses to faith, a faith that uncovers freedom in the heart of disappointment.

The heavens are telling the glory of God. And the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork.

Day to day pours for speech. And night to night declares knowledge.
As Nicodemus knew (H Vaughn):

Wise Nicodemus saw such light
As made him know his God by night.

O for that night! Where I in him
Might live invisible and dim.

John Sees

On Christmas Day, we newly remembered, by John, grace in dislocation. Their Johannine Grace in the heart of dislocated darkness: our Epiphany of grace, by Jesus, in our own experience.

In Baptism, that of John today, who comes and sees, we newly remember, by John, freedom in disappointment. Dislocated out of the synagogue, they also had been disappointed, by Jesus. He did not, had not, would not return. Not Parousia, Armageddon, Speculation: but Paraclete, Artistry, Spirit. Not the end is here, but the Lord is near. And in that trauma of abject disappointment, by Jesus, their Epiphany of freedom! The hour is coming? No. The hour NOW IS. Our Epiphany, by Jesus, of freedom, right in the teeth and belly of supreme disappointment.

When you have known disappointment together. When you have endured disappointment together. When you have suffered disappointment—together. When together you have faced disappointment.

Then, in freedom, you see. Then, in the moonlight, you see. Not the freedom of the will (Pelagius), but the freeing of the will (Augustine).

Come and see. See. It is the freeing of the will that allows moonlit sight, that at last allows a night vision, tenebrous vision.

John knows the twilight. His is the twilight Gospel, with which our lectionary, our liturgy, our day light predilections are least at ease. Hence the others, on a three-year cycle, all have their space, their own room: John sleeps in the stairwell, outside, occasionally, as here in January, granted a comfortable night’s rest, an occasional, limited hearing.

John knows night. All the chapters 13-17 are Jesus speaking at night, a twilight farewell discourse. All the chapters 18-20 are burial, visitation, inspiration, at night. Nicodemus appears in Chapter 3, 12, and 19, only at night. The darkest, bitterest words of the New Testament are found in chapters 7-8, a nighttime of rhetoric. And Chapter 1: the light shines—in the darkness; the true light that enlightens everyone—was coming into the world. John knows night.

John knows the night of disappointment, shrouded by these rhetorical forms. John faces what others avoided: disappointment. The greatest early hope of the primitive Christian church—its rejoinder to doubting contestants, its encouragement in the face of suffering, its expectation of scores settled, its very marrow and meaning and mane, its name—was the expected, imminent, soon and very soon return, Parousia, coming of Christ in power on the clouds of heaven. Read again the Revelation. All for nought. Into the third generation, it became clear, all arithmetical recalculations aside thank you 2 Peter, that Jesus was not coming again, at least not any time soon. John looked dismay in the eye, admitted disappointment, and then—SURSUM CORDA—saw by moonlight the freedom of the gospel. Spirit, not Jesus. Presence, not absence. Artistry, not apocalypse. Soul, not speculation. Here and now, not there and then. Real freedom.

It is the shunted aside lectionary avoided Fourth Gospel, John, you need when the chips are down. We saw this on Christmas Day—dislocation illumined grace. We see it today—disappointment illumines freedom. When it gets dark enough, you can see the stars. But you have to wait and watch as the sun goes down, down, down below the horizon to your left, and then wait and watch as the moon comes up, up, up, over the horizon to your right. And it is harder to see, at night. But, mirable dictu, you see some things better. In the moonlight.

The Gospel is not a prophecy fulfilled, but a mystery revealed. John is very different. Be careful! *Step lightly: this (1:29) is John—the Baptist—yet not named so. *Jesus is not baptized by John in John. *Behold: the Lamb of God who takes away sin: this is the only use of this line in the Bible, yet we use it monthly for eucharist, so think it is common. *In thy light we see light. *He ranks before me because he was before me. *The true light that enlightens everyone was coming into the world. *For this (John the Baptist) came that He might be revealed.

So: Come…and…see. Over a long time, the community of John—say in Ephesus, say in the years following 90ad, gradually and painfully came to see. They came to see…Him. They came to see that He, and those in Him, through Him, were bathed in glory. Bathed not only in beauty, but bathed in glory. His glory. Glory as of the Father’s only Son. Glory. Come…and…see.

Imagine their antiphonal music in worship: “I am the vine”. “I am the door.” “I am the door”. “I am the vine”. (Insight received from John Ashton).

In a small upper room. In the evening. In candle light. In seclusion. Away from their formerly beloved, now feared, perhaps familial, opponents, whom they now held in odium theologicum. In reading. In communion. In silence. In utterance. Knees on hard, cold floors. Hands outstretched. Eyes closed. In a small upper room.

We See

In the moonlight, in the freedom that a twilight disappointment alone can give, we see things we otherwise would miss.

We have a shared national disappointment. To repeat: let it be firmly asserted that this lacrimose loss is not limited to donkeys or elephants, left or right, loser or winner. The disappointment, though not universal, by large measure, is broadly shared, if variously construed, and variously defined. Look around, in the moonlight. Let your eyes adjust over the next many months and years. We will come around again in four years to such a period as we had last year. But now: be ready to receive what the moonlight shows. The greater light to rule the day; the lesser light to rule the night. What do you see, now, at midnight? What did you learn during the day, that now you can see, during the night? In the moonlight.

In the moon light we see…

We see that we see what we want to see, or what we expect to see, both pollsters and others.

We see that we have penchant for entertainment, sometimes to the detriment of information.

We see that big, unexpected, bad things can and do befall people, both individuals and countries (as if any of us in Boston following April 2013 needed a reminder).

We see that social location, your choices in standing and sitting, prayer and worship, volunteering and voting, come Sunday and come weekday, do matter. Particularly in voting.

We see the ongoing corrosive effects of race and sex, still with us long after emancipation and suffrage. The exuberant gathering on the Boston Common yesterday, wherein we greeted so many of you, nourished us and others.

We see that we tend, tragically, to underestimate the power of hatred and evil, having neglected too long our careful reading of Niebuhr.

We see that we learn humility from humiliation, and discipline from pain. ‘Advice we humor. Pain we obey’ (Proust).

We see that our view of history is dim, our grasp of history is weak, our knowledge of history is partial, our respect for history is far too limited. Give us today, in 140 letters. So, the marvelous Monday BU MLK observance nourished us—in song, chorus, instrument, band, dance, speech, reflection, and remembrance

We see that we neglect gathering, including ordered worship, to our peril.

Now we see, in the freedom following through disappointment. Now we see. Come and see. In your own experience. To live it down we will have to live it through.

You See

I am told that a recent film titled ‘Moonlight’ carries the story of a young man’s acquisition of freedom through and throughout the harrowing experiences of disappointment. What about you?

Once you have sat down by the rivers of Babylon and wept, you may just find a wise freedom. That job you knew was meant for you—gone to another. That degree you most wanted to pursue—not going to happen. That labor, unfulfilled, to make a marriage go that would not go. That dream deferred, making the heart sick. Once the disappointment is faced, squarely, admitted, honestly, endured, faithfully, then a freedom of another dimension may enter.

You may have offered yourself, say, as a candidate for a high office. How much we owe, and how little we honor, those who are willing to run and not win. By the way, winning is not always success, and losing is not always failure. They are not the same, losing and failing. They are not the same, winning and succeeding. So Unamuno: we truly do not know when we have succeeded. You lost the race, which is not always to the swift, by the way. So. Now what? You may seize, or, better, be seized by, a full freedom. Now you are free! Go and make climate change, said Al Gore. Go and bring world peace, said Jimmy Carter. You may just find, as a friend said to another, following a bitter defeat: You have not so much been denied, as spared. Not denied, but spared. You did what you could. People know who you are. They had their chance. They had their chance. Now you have yours, another, perhaps richer, maybe truer, possibly freer. Let faith hold you, and mold you, and enfold you in a greater freedom, that of God’s cruciform love. One high proud moment here at Boston University came three years ago when we had dinner around a small table with John Lewis, whose suffering on the Edmund Pettis bridge in 1965, a profound, gruesome disappointment, opened over time into a great life of faith, a faith that found freedom right in disappointment.

Coda

We are a people who languish in the doldrums of a pervasive, shared disappointment.

The heavens are telling the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech and night to night declares knowledge.

At twilight there is moonlight.

If I say let only the darkness cover me, and the night about me be as night: even the darkness is not dark to thee; the night is as bright as the day; for darkness is as light with thee.

Or with Howard Thurman, out on the beach. The sun has set, the moon has risen, the stars are out, the wind is light: 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.

Look around you here in the dark. Train your eyes to see what only shows up in moonlight. Disappointment is the seedbed of freedom. In disappointment there is a discovery, a truth that sets free.

Wise Nicodemus saw such light
As made him know his God by night.

O for that night! Where I in him
Might live invisible and dim.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 01.22.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill