Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

Life and Truth

We long to know the meaning of the gospel in life. Our hearts yearn for such a sense of meaning, as our minds reach for the same.

Last week, a devoted radio congregant, a weekly listener, wrote to respond to the service and sermon, doing so with an evocation of his years, the early 1960’s, as a student here. In a PS addition to the letter, he quoted Miguel de Unamuno: My religion is to seek for truth in life and for life in truth, even knowing that I shall not find them while I live. The next day, another listener, and friend, said, The Marsh services and sermons are about life and truth. Said John Wesley; If thine heart be as mine, then give me thine hand.

Matthew

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.

Some of that perspective involves a developing and developed Christology, an understanding of Christ. For Matthew, the birth narrative conveys the proper ordering of the meaning of the history of the Gospel. Birth narratives still matter, as if the politics of the last several years in this country were not enough alone to remind us. Who is he? Where did he come from? Who are his parents? Who are his people? Who formed him, He who now forms us?

You have missed having read the generations from Adam to Christ. These are found before our reading. Fourteen by fourteen by fourteen, are the generations. From Abraham to David. From David to Babylon. From Babylon to Christ. They run from Abraham to Joseph, who was betrothed to Mary. To Joseph. To and through Joseph.

Abraham. Isaac. Jacob. Judah. Tamar. Amminadab. Boaz. Ruth. Jesse. David. Solomon. Uriah. Rehoboam. Jehoshaphat. Amos. Josiah. Jechoniah. Zerubbabel. Zadok. Eleazar. Matthan. Jacob. Joseph.

Every one of these names, earlier in Chapter 1, is worth a sermon! We could start next week…

Matthew 1 tells of the birth of Christ. Jesus Christ (though a later scribe dropped ‘Jesus’, though most texts hold to it), to move Matthew a little more away from Luke, pushing religion away from history, you could say. The freedom we have to interpret the Gospel for ourselves begins with the Gospels, themselves. Each is different from the others. John is magnificently the most different of them all, the most sublime, the most mysterious, the most divine. Matthew tells of the birth of Christ. Then he will tell of the teaching of Christ. Then he will tell of the healing of Christ. Then he will tell of the cross of the Christ. Then cometh resurrection. In five moves, he is teaching us, Matthew, the teacher. He orders the meaning of history, as Luke orders the history of meaning.

In the birth, it is the cradle we most need to notice. The wood of the cradle, by which Christ is born, is of a type with the wood of the cross, by which Christ is crucified. Born to give us second birth, the birth of spirit, soul, mind, heart, will, love, faith. Born to give us second birth. Is one birth not enough? No.

You are meant to live in faith, to lead a life of loving friendship, to wake up every morning to the sunshine, the light of God. You are meant to walk in the light. Walk in the light. For this, you need to hear a word spoken from faith to faith.

Christmas, as a cultural break, provides a seam, an opening, for grace, both apart from religion, and as a part of religion. You are given the light of God, to rest in your hearts, to illumine your hearts and minds, to give you peace and hope, all through the coming year. We will need that in 2017. We will need that courage this year.

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. The people who raised us, in the snows of the towns along the train tracks of the Lake Shore Limited, Albany to Buffalo, and on to Chicago, knew this well. 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 to conscience and compassion.

Conscience and Compassion: Swimming Merit Badge

At one time, the little towns and smaller cities of Upstate New York were populated with Scout Troops and Methodist Churches, one to foment decency and one to honor difference. The Scouts, at least, had a list of twelve points in the law of the Scouts that kept a measure of and on decency, whether or not every Scout so lived. It is important to tell the truth: so, a Scout is trustworthy. The Methodists, at least, had a pot luck dinner every Wednesday formed out of wide ranging culinary differences, all brought together, with the inevitable digestive turbulence, e pluribus unum, on a long table with a table cloth not quite long enough for the table. The world is full of difference: so, we get together and enjoy one another’s odd casseroles, as a foretaste of the globe. When asked to bring an artifact of his church, the Methodist brings not a Bible, like the Baptist, or a Rosary, like the Catholic, or a Yarmulke, like the Jew, but—a casserole dish!) Now many of these towns are depopulated, and many lack any longer a strong Scout Troop and many lack any longer a vibrant Methodist Church. This changes the culture, the civil society, in the rural lake country of New York. There is less traction for decency and for difference. I suppose the same—a denigration of decency and difference—might be found too today in Wisconsin, in Michigan, in Ohio, in Iowa, in Western Pennsylvania. When, at an earlier age, you are not challenged to see and say, ‘That is not decent, that kind of speech’, or you are not challenged to see and say, ‘That disrespects difference, that kind of talk’, then, you are more inclined to accept indecency and indifference, and you may be more vulnerable to demagoguery. We need more seminarians who will forego the joys of coastal, urban life, and go home to the towns and cities of Wisconsin, of Michigan, of Ohio, of Iowa, of Western Pennsylvania—and of Upstate New York. It is something to think about, in this era, this season of burgeoning American indecency and indifference, our openness to the normalization of what is not decent and what denigrates difference.

We had moved into Oneida—named for one of the Iroquois tribes—the year before. By that December friendships had formed. Our Scout Troop, in the cold week after Christmas, assembled to drive the long, long distance (all of 20 miles!) to Rome (New York, not that to which all roads lead by any means), to swim in a relatively new (YMCA?) pool. In the ice cold, to be transported to steaming warm water, the gym windows beclouded with moisture, that was a treat. (The cold this week brought the memory). But to get there we needed four drivers and only three arrived. It was a Saturday, and my dad was in the church office, upstairs from our Scout Hall, probably trying to write a sermon for the next day, just 14 years after his graduation from BU. ‘Dad, could you drive for us? ‘. With no spoken reluctance, he tapped his pipe, closed the notebook, and put on his coat. We had a blast! I suppose we worked on swimming merit badge along the way, but all that remains in memory is the laughter, going and swimming, warmth in the deeps of cold, and friendship in the deeps of anonymity. A Scout is friendly: he is friend to all, and a brother to every other Scout.

Our family, four children, lived on the minister’s salary, then $6,000 a year, and in the minster’s parsonage. It was a living. They, parents, never complained to my remembrance: they were joyful, proud people. You live on what you have, so not to burden others. In those years, because you were eligible to move, to itnerate every spring or so, you planted a garden, taking pride in its planting, not fully knowing if you or another would harvest. There was a pride in the way these vegetable gardens were planted and hoed and weeded. ‘They really make a good garden!’—that was high praise in the itinerant ministerial community, which like all such, had its share of gossip. You take in pride in what you do. ‘Any profession is great, if greatly pursued’ (O W Holmes).

After the swim, that evening, in the Rome (NY) YMCA, because it was 5 or 6pm, the idea circulated among the swimmers that we should propose to the drivers to stop for a hamburger, at a new hamburger chain, Carroll’s, it was called. The swimmers had the imagination, but the drivers had the money. This seemed like a top idea. Warmed in the swim, and in the fellowship of friendship, I went to my father. He was filling his pipe, and smiling. ‘Dad—the other guys are going to stop for a hamburger on the way back home. Can we go along?’ My father was a genuinely and naturally happy, optimistic man. He did not let hurt easily confound him. ‘Who ever said life was fair?’, that was his response to unfairness, hurt. So I remember that night, because his face fell, a little, at the question: can we stop for a hamburger, too? ( I mentioned that my dad was a proud person, I think.)

He said something like ‘maybe’, or ‘we’ll see’. Then, after a while, with the troop running around and shouting things, I saw him slowly walk over to one of the other drivers, who was a factory owner, a lay speaker, and a friend. I saw a conversation in process. I saw my father looking at my friend’s father. I saw my friend’s father fish out his wallet. I saw my dad–I just wonder now how much it might have hurt him–accept a few bills, and put them into his own, empty, wallet. It was the end of the month, the end of year, the week after Christmas, a time of quiet, but a time of lack, I guess. Having now lived a while, raised some children, seen and felt some hurt, maybe I should better appreciate, a little, what that moment, that willingness to sacrifice pride to give love, may have cost. In the icy winter, in the atrium of a small YMCA, on a Saturday afternoon, with a sermon back on the desk, still unwritten. If I had known then what I know now, about what can hurt, I would not have asked. But if I had not asked, I would not have known, now, what I saw then. Life asks things of us, when we are least prepared, and when we least expect, but ask it does. How we respond becomes the alphabet of faith.

For a time, now, across our culture, and thanks in part to the weakening of Scouts troops and Methodist churches in the northern Midwest, indecency and indifference seem to have won the day. We do not need to recount, in this country. We need to recant. Not to recount, but to recant. We have learned what Jeremiah warned us in September: you usually cannot know humility without first enduring the bitter suffering of humiliation. As a people, now, we are learning the one through the other. Yet. Nonetheless. Nevertheless. Hear the Gospel. It is a first step toward humility. The further steps come, in middling fashion, upon a long road, in the civil forms of civil society that slowly teach what we seem in part to have forgotten—decency and difference–not indecency nor indifference–but conscience and compassion.

So we live into Advent in a difficult time, and there is little that can be said to minimize that dark difficulty. No. No false hope. We must face it and live it through, whether or not we can live it down. We simply will have to live it through: we can attend to affairs of state, to due process under the law, to respect for forms of government. It will take a decade.

But remember: Who hopes for what he sees? We hope for what we do not see, and wait for it with patience. Zadie Smith knows about birth and a warm swim on a cold winter night: Things have changed, but history is not erased by change, and the examples of the past still hold out new possibilities for all of us, opportunities to remake, for a new generation, the conditions from which we ourselves have benefitted…Progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated, and reimagined if it is to survive. (NYRB, 12/22/16, p 37). As did Vaclav Havel: “Hope is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world beyond our horizons. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, no matter how it turns out.”

We long to know the meaning of the gospel in life. Our hearts yearn for such a sense of meaning, as our minds reach for the same. May such meaning fill your longing and feed your yearning, this Christmas, 2016.

– The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 12.18.2016 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
December 4

Sacrament and Discourse

By Marsh Chapel

Matthew 3: 1-12

Cold River

To get to Bethlehem, each year, we have to walk at least once down by the river Jordan. It is cold outside, down here along the banks of the roiling river of life. It is uncomfortable outside, down here along the banks of the rushing river of truth. It is dark outside, down here along the existential river of soul, of salvation, of all that is sacred. And there is more.

A river, especially the Jordan, is a symbol of the edge, the end, the last things, the purpose of life, the end of time. Says Ecclesiastes, ‘All rivers run to the sea, but the sea is not full’. Our beloved Antonio Machado, whose verse strangely comes back to me after years of my own wandering, says the same: “Nuestras vidas son los rios que van a dar a la mar” (Campos de Castilla).

For down by the river, we hear John the Baptist. To get to Bethlehem, each year, we have to walk down by the river Jordan. Here, lurking and skulking and sliding about in the dark recesses of the heart, here is a voice, crying in the wilderness. It is the voice of conscience. The voice of him who crieth in the wilderness, ‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord. Make straight in the desert a highway for our God.’ Down, down, down by the river.

John rankles and offends, because he challenges us to start over. He is dressed in camel’s hair, the rudest of clothes. He eats locusts, and wild honey. Here is a voice. Not pretty image, not contrived appearance, not considered attire—but voice. Not face, but voice. John in the dark, cowering along the caves of the riverbed, crying. His is the voice of conscience, by which we are brought outside of ourselves and made to hear what we may not want to hear. And there is more. His voice reverberates today, down by the river. Let’s go outside, let’s go down and listen to him, on our way to Bethlehem.

Speaking through our conscience the Baptist illumines our minds, strengthens our hands and warms our hearts. His discourse, his teaching, guides us toward today’s Sacrament, and the very Sacrament of every one day.

Head

That is, before we lay our gifts at the manger altar, we will want the chill challenge of a thoughtful, thinking faith. In the long run what is not true cannot be good though it may be news. John the Baptist comes around at least once a year to remind us so.

We can be thankful for those laboring at night in the lonely libraries and cubicles and offices nearby, to stretch our understanding that it might embrace our faith which is seeking that same understanding. Theology matters.

Not long ago, many of us had the joy and the privilege to listen at a faculty retreat to some of the newest, youngest adventures in thoughtful reflection on faith. Words from the wise, words to the wise.

One young biblical scholar reminded us: The Christian Bible…has never been stable; each book and collection has undergone a long process of transmission and reception that continues to this day…The Bible remains a living document preserving not only a diverse body of texts but also the priorities of those who have transmitted it.

One young psychologist of religion reminded us: We are disposed to misunderstand. We live in a pluri-verse, a conversation across the boundaries of different lands. We witness the inevitable but not necessary collapse of ambiguity into certainty. Sometimes, especially when we are trying truly distinguish cruelty from care, we need a sense of ambiguity. We may need to return again and again to Nicholas of Cusa and the ‘doctrine of learned ignorance’.

One young historian reminded us of the central role women have played in global missions: empathy is like oxygen. When you feel somebody experience you deeply, it is like air, like oxygen.

One young philosophical theologian reminded us: as we look at religious experience we have to hold ourselves accountable to empirical research.

An older, wiser teacher, reminded this academic circle of an academic peril: We sometimes mistakenly think that if you can get it down on paper you don’t have to live it.

Some of you will have had the benefit of those who showed by example how to think about faith, how faithfully to think. We want to live in our own version of the memory Tony Judt had of Manhattan decades ago: “Manhattan in those decades was the crossroads where original minds lingered”. (NYT 11/8/10) We could hear his sentence as ecclesiology. So too the church: a crossroads where original minds linger.

This autumn, it may be, our learning has been on the street not in the library, in the culture, not in the school, in the meaning of what things mean—our Advent 2016 fordable river.

‘When I use a word’, said Humpty Dumpty, in a rather scournful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less’. ‘The question is’, said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things’ (Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass).

What you say you meant, in all sincerity, by a word, a choice, a sermon, or a vote, is not in any significant measure what your word, choice, sermon, or vote means. Its meaning is in its impact, not its intention. Its meaning is in its effect, not in its sentiment. It means what it does—to others.

My sister cried when I said something to her. ‘But Mom, I didn’t mean to hurt her. I didn’t mean it that way’. ‘I’m sure you didn’t, Bobby’. Now go to your room. No supper.’ You may not have meant it to hurt (let’s be generous here), but hurt it did.

Words—acts, deeds, votes—have their meaning in the future they create, not in some sentiment of the heart. We are responsible—especially the preacher—not for what we say but for what we are heard to say. What you meant by that vote is not what it means. What it means is what it does.

There is no way, that is, in living the Christian gospel, to ‘normalize’ demagoguery. Not in racist dimension, not in its mistreatment of women, not in its denigration of color, difference, globe, disability or otherness. Demagoguery, from any position, deserves and must receive nothing but condemnation, contempt and resistance. There is no way, in announcing the gospel of grace, to ‘normalize’ such. Or at least saith John the Baptist.

Hand

Then too, your hands are touching and helping others.

Our students for many years engaged a citywide CROP walk to combat world hunger, as the visit this week of a 2011 graduate, Tyler Sit, recalled. Our Methodist fellowship has worked at the Cooper Mission in Roxbury. Our partnership with the University and with Habitat for Humanity built a house. Many have continued to prayerfully support Refugee Immigration Ministries. Some of you will be heading off for a week of Alternative Spring Break service next year. As a congregation you continue to support the BMC food pantry. In short, ‘hands on’ forms of service continue to thrive here at Marsh Chapel, thanks to the lay leadership offered in these many areas.

What we love, we should love ardently. Service helps us ground our faith in action, and thereby protects us from betraying the life into which we have been called. Tragedy is to betray the life into which you have been called, or the profession into which you have been called, or the calling into which you have been called.

Our current generation of students excels at participatory service ministry, and teaches its value by example.

This Advent, for example, our students say:

We invite you to consider collecting items for donation to populations in need - specifically for local food banks, homeless shelters, children's charities, and disaster relief. For those of you in the Boston area, we encourage you to bring your donations to Marsh Chapel at the end of each week and we will deliver them at each of the following nonprofit organizations - Greater Boston Food Bank, Pine Street Inn, Cradles to Crayons, and the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR). For those outside the Boston area, we encourage you to gather a group - maybe in your home congregation, at your workplace, or in your neighborhood - to participate in this activity together and to find locations for donation near you! Here are some websites that can help you locate nonprofit organizations that accept the kinds of donations we will be suggesting: Food Banks; Homeless Shelters; Children's Charities; UMCOR; and, Lutheran World Relief, UCC Disaster Ministries, Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, Episcopal Relief and Development, Red Cross

Heart

Head and hands finally rely on the heart. In the winter we learn to stay warm. Warmth, warmth, warmth. We are dying of cold, not of darkness. It is not the night that kills, but the frost (Unamuno). At night our eyes are sharpened to see shapes in the shadows. When we experience diminishment we also hold more closely those things which mean most to us. With age comes wisdom.

Most of ministry, these years, has been in snow. In smaller assignments, the snow fell often on afternoons given over to sharing the gospel, one by one. What a privilege! Would that more, and better, and sooner, would heed the invitation to ministry. At the kitchen table. Over coffee. In a parking lot. Within a small office. At the hospital. At school. With lunch. In a nursing home. In the barn, at dusk, milking time. In the sugar house. On a tractor.

Or in a pastoral visit, of the following sort.

Snow swirled that day, as the Nursing Home hove into view. Gladys deserved a call, on the line between life and death, and the preacher came prepared, or so he thought.

Would you like me to pray with you, Gladys? Oh, it is not necessary. Of course I love all the prayers of the great church, particularly, now that I see little, those I carry in memory from our old liturgy. But I am fine.

Perhaps you would like to hear the Psalms? My grandmother appreciated them read as she, uh… You mean as she lay dying?...Yes. Oh, it is not necessary. I mean I do love the Psalms, and was lucky to have them taught rote to me at church camp so that they rest on my memory, like goodness and mercy, all the days of my life. But I am fine.

I know that you sang in our choir. Would you like some of the hymns recited for you? Oh that is not necessary. I do so love music! I can sing the hymns from memory to myself at night! I found my faith singing, you know. It just seemed so real when we would sing, when we were younger, around the piano, around the campfire, around the church. I knew in my heart, I knew Whom I could trust. But I am fine.

I brought communion for you in this old traveling kit. Oh, that is not necessary. We can have communion if you like. It is so meaningful to me. I can feel my husband right at my side, knee to knee. After he died, I could not hear anything that was said in your fine sermons for so long, my heart hurt so loudly. But I still could get grace in communion. But I am fine.

So the snow was falling, as it does in ministry in our region, the north, that blanket of snow, blanket of proximate mortality, blanket of grace. Snow on snow…flake on flake…Just like a preacher, he thought, nothing to offer, but to stand and wait and wring the hands…

Gladys, is there anything that I could bring you today? As a matter of fact, there is…Tell me about our church…I have been out of worship for so long… How is the church doing this Christmas?...Are the children coming and being taught to give their money to others? And what of the youth? Are they in church and skating and sledding and hayriding and falling in love? Tell me about the UMW and their mission goal. Did they make it? A dollar means so little to us and so much in Honduras and China. And tell me about the building… Are the Trustees preparing for another generation? It is so easy to defer maintenance…What about the choir—are they singing from faith to faith?...Tell me about your preaching, and the DS, and our Bishop…What is going to happen with our little church …Tell me, please, tell me about our church…It is where I find meaning and depth and love…That is what you can bring me today.

As Howard Thurman wrote,

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and the princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flocks,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among brothers,
To make music in the heart.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 12.4.2016 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
November 27

Approaching Advent

By Marsh Chapel

Matthew 24:36-44

The gist of today’s gospel is clear enough. We cannot see or know the future. We ought to live on the qui vive. Health there is, to be sure, and succor in a full acceptance and recognition of such a humble epistemology and such a rigorous ethic. Let us admit to the bone our cloud of unknowing about the days and hours to come. Let us live every day and every hour of every day as if it were our last. Song and sacrament, sermon and prayer, they will guide us along this very path come Sunday morning, come this very morning.

What is less clear is the meaning of the coming of the Son of Man. What is the nature of this coming? Who is the person so named? What difference, existential difference, everlasting difference does any of this make? What did Jesus actually say here? On what score did the primitive Christian community remember and rehearse his teaching? Did Matthew have a dog in this fight? How has the church, age to age, interpreted the passage? We shall pose these four questions to verses 36 to 44 in the 24^th chapter of the Gospel bearing the name of Matthew, and then apply the verses to ourselves.

Jesus. Jesus may have used this phrase, though over late night refreshment in 1997 Marcus Borg once pushed hard that it is a later church appellation. It may have been both. This phrase, coming out Daniel chapter 7 (did Jesus hear this read and hold it in memory?) and the stock Jewish apocalyptic of Jesus’ day, was as much a part of his environment as the sandals on his feet, the donkey which he rode, the Aramaic which he spoke, the Palestinian countryside which he loved, and the end of time which he expected, in the contemporary generation. Did he understand himself to be that figure? We cannot see and we cannot say, though I think it unlikely. That is, Jesus used the phrase, most probably, but not of himself, most probably. It is Mark and the author Enoch who have given us the ‘Son of Man’ in its full sense, and it is Matthew alone among the Gospel writers who uses the ‘coming’ in a technical sense (so Dr. Perrin, IBDS 834, and others). The soprano voice of Jesus is far lighter in the gospel choruses than we would think or like.

Church. Mark, Luke and Matthew carry forward these standard end of the world predictions. Our lectionary clips out the mistaken acclamation of 24: 34, just two verses ahead of our reading, but we should hear it: Truly I tell you this generation will not pass away until all these things take place. Like the waiting figures in the Glass Menagerie, the earlier church has hung onto these blown glass elements while awaiting a never returning person, like that telephone operator, ‘who had fallen in love with long distances’. They preserve the menagerie in fine glass of hopes deferred that maketh the heart sick. That generation and seventy others have passed away before any of this has taken place. We do not expect, literally expect, these portents any longer. Nor should we. They are part of the apocalyptic language and imagery which was the mother of the New Testament and all Christian theology since, a beloved mother long dead. The Son of Man was the favorite hope child of that mother. A long low alto aria this. Yet we should, and do, hear these apocalyptic passages. They are a part of our shared, family history.

Matthew. To his credit and to our benefit Matthew makes his editorial, redactorial moves, to accommodate what he has taken from Mark 13. The point of apocalyptic eschatology is ethical persuasion, here and in the sibling synoptic passages. Watch. Be ready. Live with your teeth set. Let the servants, the leaders of Matthew’s day, be found faithful. After 37 excoriating verses directed against the Pharisees in chapter 23, white washed tombs which outwardly appear beautiful but within full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness—the hard truth about religion at our worst, and after 43 further verses in chapter 24 of standard end time language, Matthew pulls up. He locks and loads and delivers his sermon. You must be ready. The figure of the future is coming at an hour you do not expect. Hail the Matthew tenor.

Tradition. Immediately the church scrambled to reinvent and reinterpret. Basso profundo. One example, found early in the passage, will suffice. Of that day no one knows, not even the Son. Except that some texts take out ‘even the Son’, in deference to Jesus’ later and higher Person. It is, finally, and except for occasional oddball readings, like that of the Montanists in the second century and the fundamentalists in the twenty first, the church’s view that apocalyptic language and imagery convey the future as unknowable and the present as unrepeatable. The future as unknowable and the present as unrepeatable…

To sum up: As soon as we reach out to grasp the future it has slipped past us, already flying down the road to the rear, into the past. The present itself is no better, because its portions of past and future are tangled permanently together. We do have the past, neither dead nor past…or do we? Memory and memoir spill into each other with the greatest of ease. One agnostic admitted that music, performed, was his closest approximation of God, the presence of God, the proof of God. We shall listen in a moment to a beautiful anthem, with rapt attention. One trusted Christian—it may have been you—sensed grace and grace in the grace of worship, unlike any other. Every moment is a veritable mystery. Music is a veritable mystery. So next week, we shall hear: My body and My blood, these are veritable mysteries, so named mystery, sacramentum, to this day. How shall we respond?

Sleepers awake! There is not an infinite amount of unforeseen future in which to come awake and to become alive! There does come a time when it is too late, allowing the valence of ‘it’ to be as broad as the ocean and as wide as life. You do not have forever to invest yourself in deep rivers of Holy Scripture, whatever they may be for you. It takes time to allow the Holy to make you whole. Begin. You do not have forever to seek in the back roads of some tradition, whatever it may be for you, the corresponding hearts and minds which and who will give you back your own-most self. It takes time to uncover others who have had the same quirky interests and fears you do. Begin. You do not have forever to sift and think through what you think about what lasts and matters and counts and works. Honestly, who could complain about young people seeking careers, jobs, employment, work? Do so. But work alone will not make you human, nor allow you to become a real human being. Life is about vocation and avocation, not merely about employment and unemployment. You are being sold a bill of goods, here. Be watchful. It takes time to self interpret that deceptively crushing verse, ‘let your light so shine before others’. Begin. You do not have forever to experience Presence. It is presence, spirit, good for which we long, for which, nay for Whom, we are made. It takes time to find authentic habits of being—what makes the heart sing, the soul pray, the spirit preach. Your heart, not someone else’s, your soul, not someone else’s your spirit, not someone else’s. Begin.

You must be ready. For the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.

For example. How do you deal with hurt that comes from a person you deeply love, a relationship you truly enjoy, an institution you firmly affirm, or a friendship you lastingly cherish? Was yours a contentious Thanksgiving feast? It is one thing to think about pain, permanent or passing, that comes in collision with others whom we do not know well or care for. These traffic accidents are perhaps to be expected in the rush hours of relational experience. When we do not know one another, or not well, we can miss cues and generate miscues that those more familiar would avoid. Not knowing you I did not know and would never have expected that you are an avid Yankees fan, and if I had I would never have said what I did, directly, about Alex Rodriguez. Well, I probably wouldn’t have done. But what about the church you deeply love, when disappointment comes from the pulpit? What about that lifetime friend who says something unpleasant and hurtful? What about that employer, whom you revere and admire, to whom you give both creativity and loyalty? What about that community group whose organizational needs you have selflessly met, that then makes a statement or takes a decision that causes you pain? Or, what about the country you love, when its voice, its choice, deeply disappoint? In short, what happens when those you love hurt you? How do you deal with that?

Perhaps you will irrupt in the moment, lash out in reaction, without any due process of reflection, because the moment needs it, and you have or feel you have no choice. Let your yea be yea and your nay be nay. Be angry, and let not the sun go down on your anger. This may cause more problems than it solves, of course, but you may have had no choice. Sometimes it is better to stand and fight.

Perhaps though flight is better. You may sense that you just want to put some distance between yourself and your source of pain, institutional, relational, or personal. A little time, a little distance, a little pause, a little absence. Thence a cooling off, it may be, not a squaring off. In some measure that may suit you and the challenge. You did not start it. You do not need to take responsibility for it. Shake the dust from your feet. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day. (You see how tough it can be even, especially when you know the Bible, to pick out the right Bible verse!) Flight postpones, but not in healing tones. The trouble is still there, though it may just dissipate on its own. Not all battles have to be fought. Sometimes it is better to take flight.

Perhaps playing dead is the way to go. You know, like animals do, they just curl up and become a log or a part of the scenery. Let life go along, and let the conversation play out. You do not need to oppose. You do not need to repose. You can just pose in silence. You can use the silent treatment—present but quiet. This could work, though there is a quality of falsehood about it. It may depend on just how substantial the fender-bender was, how hurtful the collision, how extreme the traffic accident. Silence alone has limits to its beneficence. Still, as the man said, ‘I would rather remain silent and be thought a fool than to open my mouth and remove all doubt’. Sometimes it is better just to keep your own counsel, and play dead.

You have though at least one other option. Fight, flight, play dead if need be. Yet you might also, well, wait. We are approaching Advent, are we not? Wait upon the Lord. That is, you might think through what happened, both putting the best and worst lights upon it. You might pray about it. Hold it in prayerful thought. You might think out a couple of sentences that you would caringly use, should the institution, relationship, or person provide an opening for that. And then you would have to ‘hurry up and wait’. Be kind to one another, tender hearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ has forgiven you. “You know, I have had that interchange in mind since it happened. Honestly, for whatever reason, it did hurt. But given the love, joy, happiness, meaning and help you give me over so much time, it is just one brief solar eclipse that comes once a decade, when all else is sunshine. Thanks for mentioning it.”

For example. For those still reeling a bit from the last 18 months and the last 18 days in these United States, we may ask: How do you feel? What have you learned? Your protégé, now ten years out from his Marsh Chapel choir experience, and his decision to enter ministry alongside his choir member bride, now in Philadelphia says, I feel like I’ve been kicked in the smug (J). How do you feel? And what have you learned? What are the lessons to be stowed away for future use as birthday gifts, years from now, gifts on the go as it were, for future generations? The lesson that ‘those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities’(Voltaire)? The lesson that we see what we want to see? The lesson that both sexism and racism lurk, endure, live and breathe? The lesson that, in some dark seasons, selfishness trumps charity; anger trumps reason; hatred trumps comity; bigotry trumps friendship? The lesson that voting, the act itself, matters—really matters? The lesson that gathering—in a rally, say, or better in worship, say—empowers, enlivens, motivates, for ill, or good? (Do you worship? Advent is a good time in which to approach worship.) The sad lesson that some, to win, are willing to enter the sphere of demagoguery, ‘sometimes you have to use a certain kind of rhetoric to motivate people’ (DJT, NYT, 11/16)? Can you hear that? It begs to be heard. Or, even, the basic, technological lesson that email, whether well served on its servers, or ill served by it servants, serves to dehumanize, as a sub-human form of communication?

How about this: The lesson that what one means—by an act, a word, a statement, a vote, say—is not all that such an act means? We will experience Advent through this lesson this year. The lesson, that is, that what you in your heart meant by an act, a word, a statement—a vote, is not in fact the limit of what that vote meant: in fact it is a small part, the greater part of the meaning being found in the effect, the impact, the historical influence of the vote. The meaning of a text is found in the future it opens, the future it imagines, the future it creates. (Ray Hart). So too, the meaning of an act, a word, a statement, a vote, say, is found in the future, bright or dark, which it creates. What you meant is not what it means. For that, you have to listen to those harmed, or helped, by it. Meaning is social, not individual, hence our use of words, our developed language, our investment in culture, our life in community. You may have meant it one way, but its meaning is found along another. Such hard, tragic lessons, to have to learn and re-learn.

The gist of today’s gospel is clear enough. We cannot see or know the future. We ought to live on the qui vive. Health there is, to be sure, and succor in a full acceptance and recognition of such a humble epistemology and such a rigorous ethic. Let us admit to the bone our cloud of unknowing about the days and hours to come. Let us live every day and every hour of every day as if it were our last. Song and sacrament, sermon and prayer, they will guide us along this very path come Sunday morning, come this very morning, as together, in faith and hope and love, we approach Advent.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 11.27.2016 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
November 13

A Thanksgiving Conversation

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 21:5-9

Let us be thoughtful in conversation this coming Thanksgiving.

Let us be mindful of the goodness of God, as sung in the Psalm this morning. Let us be mindful of the blessings of God.

The goodness of God knows no limit, no single season, no particular admixture of victory and defeat. Our friends (1), the seasons themselves (2), and the prayerful practice of remembrance (3) tell us this again.

Let us be mindful of friendship. The friendship of Marsh Chapel is offered each Lord’s day, and each day in the Lord, first and foremost to those most in need. The physical safety of our students, in all times and in all seasons, stands as our highest priority in friendship. If you are a sophomore, say, and sense you are in some need or peril, our Hospitality Staff welcomes you in friendship. Mr. Bouchard, our Chapel Director, who will read in a moment a playful poem about friendship, guides a team, including one staff person related to Title IX issues, devoted to your security, in use of space, in programmatic support, and in personal protection. Now in a season when, given the events of this past week and its election, some sense possible peril, we stand with you, on a daily basis, on the ground level, in a protective posture.

Let us be mindful of friendship, as was our friend, of blessed memory, Max Coots:

"Let us give thanks for a bounty of people:

For children who are our second planting, and though they grow like weeds and the wind too soon blows them away, may they forgive us our cultivation and fondly remember where their roots are....

For generous friends with hearts and smiles as bright as their blossoms;

For feisty friends as tart as apples;

For continuous friends, who, like scallions and cucumbers, keep reminding us that we've had them;

For crotchety friends, as sour as rhubarb and as indestructible;

For handsome friends, who are as gorgeous as eggplants and as elegant as a row of corn, and the other, plain as potatoes and as good for you;

For funny friends, who are as silly as Brussels Sprouts and as amusing as Jerusalem Artichokes, and serious friends, as complex as cauliflowers and as intricate as onions;

For friends as unpretentious as cabbages, as subtle as summer squash, as persistent as parsley, as delightful as dill, as endless as zucchini, and who, like parsnips, can be counted on to see you through the winter;

For old friends, nodding like sunflowers in the evening-time, and young friends coming on as fast as radishes;

For loving friends, who wind around us like tendrils and hold us, despite our blights, wilts and witherings;

And finally, for those friends now gone, like gardens past that have been harvested, and who fed us in their times that we might have life thereafter;

For all these we give thanks."

Let us be mindful of friendship. And let us be mindful of the seasons.

Next week, most will sit before a carved turkey. For many years, Marsh Chapel provided such a meal right here. Now the University itself has taken up that meal, and provides it for students who are here over break, along now with open housing. (Your ministry, Marsh Chapel, has been such an incubator over time, for service that then becomes University wide. A Marsh Chapel Martin Luther King observance, becomes a University wide observance. A Marsh Chapel community service program, becomes a University wide service. A gospel group becomes a University-wide Inner Strength Gospel choir, Marsh Chapel hosted. A Marsh Chapel Howard Thurman room and listening center becomes a University Howard Thurman Center. A Marsh Chapel commitment to pastoral care over six decades becomes further embodied in behavioral health, and SARP, and the office of the Ombuds, and others. Your work in incubation continues.) You plant seeds, and they grow, and grow up and on and out. Season by season. So next week, you will be at your table, somewhere.

Given the choices others have made in election and selection, and given the tragic tide of white nationalism, as un-Christian as it is un-American, which has surprisingly splashed upon all this week, how shall we engage in conversation with family with whom we disagree, come Thanksgiving? Perhaps it will be too much, this year, and silence or absence will be required. Yet, it may be that the rhythms of nature in harvest will help us. It may be that the season itself, redolent and rich with meaning, may support us. It may be that the hymns of Thanksgiving, hummed or remembered, may help us. You could also sing them, of course, even if you are not Methodists. It may be that prayers, like the three used year by year here at Marsh, and used today, may help us. Feel free to borrow.

Yes, our lessons from ancient Scripture regularly surround us with a thanksgiving conversation: Isaiah in hope, the Psalmist in praise, the Epistle in encouragement, and the Gospel in patience. Even those of us dwelling mostly in an urban setting can from this autumn—warm, mostly; dry, mostly; pleasant, mostly—receive such a sense of blessing and so a sense of gratitude. Seed-time gives way to harvest, as tears give way to shouts and joy. The long months of hidden growth, of change and development under the earth, are a firm reminder that the future will look different from the past, and from the present. Every autumn, every harvest season, we are offered such a reminder.

Let us be mindful of the good earth, of the fruits of harvest, of the fruits of years of labor and love, as one remembered in the figure of her friend. Carol Zahm, now deceased, wrote a poem prayer, about a friend, some years ago. It is set in Wisconsin, on a family farm. Today it will be read by our University Chaplain for International students, Ms. Jessica Chicka. As Mr. Bouchard cares for space and safety, she cares for our International sisters and brothers. As a junior, you might muse, isn’t it wonderful that she is here! In a fortnight when the ugliness of American selfishness, and a shameful ‘Christian’ bigotry, may frighten our beloved neighbors, or worse, she is here to provide pastoral care, and programmatic support and administrative help for all—for those from Pakistan and Korea and China, and for those who are Hindu or Muslim or Buddhist or Confucian—or no religious tradition at all. In a week when students on campuses, now, given the open space set out for this by a particular, now victorious, party and candidate, who have unashamedly ridden a wave of white nationalism, are accosted for wearing religious garb, or who are fearful for their families (one interviewed by the New York times, standing on the steps not twenty feet from the Marsh Chapel on Wednesday), your ministry with and to those who are strangers in an increasingly strange land, has real portent. (We need someone, by the way, to endow the Deanship of Marsh Chapel, a $4 million gift, to make sure this sort of ministry continues in perpetuity. We need others, by the way, to tithe in support of Marsh Chapel for the year to come, to make sure this sort of ministry continues into the future—where will your tithe go?) It may be, at Thanksgiving, that the season, the harvest, nature itself, will support us.

Sitting by my window—looking out at the field

This chair has been such a comfort for so many years

Rocking—rocking

All the children were comforted in this chair

All grown and gone now

Babies—growing year after year

‘Til they could go to the field to help

The fields—so green in the spring

Then the plough broke it up into beautiful brown earth

Worked over and over

Until the seeds had a wonderful bed in which to grow

Week after week growing

And then harvest.

We all went to the field for the harvest.

Sunrise to sunset

Day after day

Finished at last

Ready for winter

Now looking across the field at beautiful virgin snow

Like watching a baby sleep. So peaceful.

Happy for the quiet.

Anxious for the awakening

Start again

Sitting by my window

Rocking Rocking

Her rocking, the rhythm of her remembrance, along the brown earth, seems a world away from our world today, for we have been this past week through a very difficult patch. Nature may aid culture here.

We will want to be somber and sober to remember that God gives the human being a rooted, daily freedom, but does not then suddenly intervene to erase that freedom, however perversely, however violently, however despicably that freedom is used.

We will want to stand up, sit up, and take notice that liberty is only of any value within the constraints of security to enjoy it; and that security is only of any value as a basis for the enjoyment of liberty itself.

As people of faith we cannot in sloth afford to be naïve, refusing the dominical wisdom of serpents to hide underneath a false innocence of doves, when facing hatred, religious terrorism, and nihilistic venom. Protection for the lamb requires resistance to the wolf, before either determines to lie down with the other. Any manner of bigotry deserves to be met by condemnation, contempt and resistance. We have plenty of work to do, and let us not grow weary in doing it.

We do not want to pray, preach, sing or proffer a kind of cheap grace. The utter realism of the Bible, on the one hand, and our brutal experience across many centuries, on the other hand, and now including this past week, forbid it. Read again Victor Klemperer’s two volume diary, I Will Bear Witness, or the exemplary biography of Bonhoeffer, Strange Glory.

In helping one another, and speaking to our children, in Thanksgiving conversation, we can at least remind them that ‘they are safe, and it is OK to feel sad about what has happened to others’, and we can continue to support and protect our neighbors and friends of all manner of different traditions, religious and secular alike.

So let us be mindful of the seasons this Thanksgiving. And let us be mindful of remembrance.

Howard Thurman, who was a hundred years ahead of his time fifty years ago, was so mindful. Our University Chaplain, Br. Whitney will read Thurman’s poem in a moment. What Mr. Bouchard brings to physical safety, and what Ms. Chicka brings to religious safety, Br. Whitney brings in full to psychic safety. With his team, and in partnership with others across the campus, he ministers—perhaps with you in your senior year?—to anxiety, to depression, to all that unbalances the person. See, hear him, and know he is here with and for you. Thurman’s poem:

Today, I make my Sacrament of Thanksgiving.

I begin with the simple things of my days:

Fresh air to breathe,

Cool water to drink,

The taste of food,

The protection of houses and clothes,

The comforts of home.

For all these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day!

I bring to mind all the warmth of humankind that I have known:

My mother’s arms,

The strength of my father

The playmates of my childhood,

The wonderful stories brought to me from the lives

Of many who talked of days gone by when fairies

And giants and all kinds of magic held sway;

The tears I have shed, the tears I have seen;

The excitement of laughter and the twinkle in the

Eye with its reminder that life is good.

For all these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day

To conclude, a story, an analogy—full well knowing that all analogies stumble. The point of the parable is that there is still a future, remarkable, different, and good—we just do not know what the future holds.

In 1978 we had planned maybe to stay in NYC, and there or nearby to study further. In our third year of seminary though we became pregnant. Then after Christmas Jan suffered a severe illness, requiring surgery: the doctor said he did know whether either mother or child would survive the six-month stage operation. By God’s grace, they did. We moved suddenly into a small church in Ithaca, NY, a congregation whose minister had run off with the organist mid-year, hence an opening, and a place where mother and coming child could convalesce, and ministry could begin, with some commuting for the finishing seminarian, back down to NYC.

Now my Korean student in Boston says, ‘Dean Hill there are three kinds of Korean Christians: conservative, very conservative and very, very conservative’. Then, in Ithaca, there were three kinds of people: liberal, very liberal, and very, very liberal. It was 1979, and all weddings were done on horseback, underwater, out in a field, or naked (well, that is hyperbole, but you get the point). That fall, a modest proposal to improve a road up the far hill to the hospital was met with communal outrage, and defense of the squirrel population near Trumansburg. The newspaper reported that three people attended a hearing, in squirrel defense, dressed as squirrels (not hyperbole, and you get the point). The next year, an election was held. Its results produced apocalyptic apoplexy: the president elect—Ronald Reagan. That winter, in a Cornell graduate student home, over dinner, we spoke in fear and trepidation of what would befall the republic. But the host, a veteran Washingtonian back to do a PhD above Cayuga’s waters, listened and quietly, presciently, replied: “No, he will not trim the bureaucracy—it will expand. No, he will not eliminate the debt—it will grow. No he will not cut taxes—they will increase. He doesn’t have the power. He will shove and push that tree and one apple will fall. Watch and wait. (You would have thought he was quoting today’s Lukan little apocalypse).”

You watch and wait. We left Ithaca in 1981 for pastoral visits along the St. Lawrence, in the far north, in the bitter cold, in the barns at milking; for ministry among farmers and truck drivers in the fire department; for an immersion in non-urban poverty, poverty without electricity and without a subway, along a frozen river; and later for counseling with engineers let go by a failing Carrier Corporation; prayer with factory workers dis-employed by Oneida Silver and Smith Corona; tearful farewells to executives leaving Kodak; in short, the disappearance of both farming and manufacturing, as the drums of globalization beat along the Mohawk. That is, our real theological education began, in earnest, in 1981. Martin Luther: “One becomes a theologian by living, by dying, and by being damned, not by understanding, reading, and speculation.” You watch and wait. You have faith, you have hope, and you have each other. And you have plenty of work to do, awaiting the day when ‘the wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; and dust shall be the serpent’s food. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain says the Lord.’

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 11.13.2016 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
November 6

All the Saints

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 6:20-31

There is currently no text available for this sermon. We apologize for the inconvenience.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 11.6.2016 at 11:00 am
Tags: no text, Robert Hill

Sunday
October 30

Come Down Zaccheus!

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 19:1-10

Did we in our own strength confide

Our striving would be losing

Were not the Right Man on our side

The Man of God’s own choosing

Dost as who that may be?

Christ Jesus it is He

Lord Sabaoth His name

From age to age the same

And he must win the battle

It is hard for me to tell, from this angle, which tree you are in. Given the troubles of this autumn, it is hard for me to tell which tree I am in myself, day to day. Has life chased you up the tree of doubt? Or are you treed in the branches of idolatry—idol-a-tree? Or are we shaking or shaking in the money tree? Or stuck without faith in the religion tree? Jesus calls us today, to come down out of the tree forts of our own making, and accept a loving relationship with Him. May we measure all with a measure of love.

Doubting Zaccheus

Perhaps the presence of unexplained wrong provokes you to doubt the benevolence in life or the goodness in God. To doubt that ‘God is at work in the world to make and to keep human life human’ (John Bennett). Randomness may have treed you.

No one can explain why terrible things happen, as they do. But if you will come down a limb or two from your philosophical tree of doubt, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you may hear faith. God can bring good out of evil, and make bad things work to good. This is not a theological declamation, and certainly not a paean to providence. It is just something we can notice together.

We played golf one day. On the last hole, I pulled out a three wood and hit a grounder, that nonetheless rolled right to the green. If I had connected, I would have smashed the clubhouse window, for it was way too much club. Sometimes a bad thing, a worm burner golf shot, interferes with a really bad thing, a $1000 broken window.

One Sunday, years ago, I drove late to church. I used to run early Sunday and finish memorizing the sermon along the way, as I did on that Lord’s Day. I just forgot the time. We raced to church , and in so doing I cut a corner, literally, and so popped a car tire. I was not happy to hear my son say, “haste makes waste”. You know, though, both rear tires were thin. I had replaced the front two months earlier, and forgot about the rear ones. I have to admit, it was good that I had reason to replace them, before I had a blowout, on the highway. Sometimes it happens that a bad thing prevents a really terrible thing from happening.

Joseph was thrown into a pit, and sold into slavery. He had to find his way, as a Jew, in the service of the mighty Pharaoh. He did so with skill, and rose to a position of influence, even with Potiphar’s wife chasing him around in his underwear. Then, a full generation later, a great famine came upon those brothers who had earlier sold Joseph down the river. They went to Pharaoh, looking for food. And who met them, as they came to plead? There was Joseph. He so memorably said, as written in Genesis 50: “You meant this for evil, but God meant it for good, that many might be saved.” Sometimes it happens that a bad thing in one generation prevents starvation in the next.

So in Jericho, as Jesus found the little man up in the tree, his fellows grumbled (vs. 8). Why would he take time with such a greedy, selfish person who makes his living off the sweat of others’ brows? That hurts, to see divine attention given to those who have harmed you. Why would he have a meal with someone who takes no thought for the hurt of God’s people? This is bad! And it is. We miss the power of the parable if we do not see this. This is Jesus taking up with those who have wished the church ill, who have used the church for their own very well intended but nonetheless self-centered reasons. This is Jesus consorting with sinners. But sometimes a bad thing in the little brings a good thing in the large. Zaccheus changes, and in so doing provides great wealth for others’ benefit.

Come down from this one tree, doubting Zaccheus. I know that bad things happen to good people, and as a pastor hardly anything troubles me more. Sometimes, though, sometimes—not always, just sometimes--a bad thing early averts a really bad thing late. I have seen it, and you have too. It is enough to give someone up the doubting tree a reason to come down at least a branch. Think of it as existential vaccination.

It is the labor of faith to trust that where sin abounds, grace over-abounds. Even in this autumn of anxiety and depression. But one of the redeeming possibilities in this season of cultural demise is the chance that as a result, enough of us, now, will become enough committed to the realization of a just, participatory and sustainable world, that these darker days will move us toward a fuller light. Sometimes a bad thing in one part of history protects us from a worse thing in another part.

Let us not lose sight of the horizons of biblical hope, as improbable as they can seem. The lion and the lamb. No crying or thirst. The crooked straight. All flesh.

The divine delight comes still from saving the lost, including the forgotten, seeking the outcast, retrieving the wayward sons and daughters of Abraham. God wants your salvation. Your salvation “has personal, domestic, social, and economic consequences” (Craddock). Jesus Christ saves us from doubt.

So come down Zaccheus, come down from your perch in that comfortable sycamore tree, that comfortable pew, that skeptical reserve, that doubt. Come down Zaccheus! The Lord Jesus Christ has need of your household and your money, and He responds to your doubt.

Idolatrous Zaccheus

Come down Zaccheus, down from your overly zealous leanings, hanging out on the branch of life. Idolatry comes when we make one or more of the lesser, though significant, loyalties in life to become a shadow of the one great loyalty, that which the heart owes alone to God. Zaccheus had governmental responsibility, community status, a welcoming home, a fine family, and we can suspect he was loyal in these regards. Curious as he was, up on his branch, he had no relationship with the divine. Into this relationship, Jesus invites him. More precisely, Jesus invites himself into relationship with a man up a tree. He is invited into a whole new life, a new world of loving and faithful relationships, that stem from the one great loyalty.

We need to be careful about lesser loyalties this fall.

Remember last week, and our prayer for forgiveness of sin? We confessed lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, anger, envy and…’integrity without humility’, pride. Say you were an attorney general in a state with a governor’s election ten days away. You find a folder on your desk, empty, but with a pending potential investigation. You feel that your integrity requires that you tell the whole inhabited earth about a pending possible investigation about which you know nothing. You remember your Boy Scout law (trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent), and decide your integrity requires a statement. But what of your humility? (The scout motto—a good turn daily—not just the law). Humility would require you to consider due process, to consider past practice near elections, to consider the advice of your colleagues in law enforcement, and to consider the nuances of the situation and your conscience. Integrity, alone, bulldozes blazes and blasts past all these. Harm is done. Integrity without humility is the worst of the seven deadly sins—pride. When we grow up, sometimes, we recognize the peril of integrity alone, the great steed of integrity, without the bit and bridle and saddle of humility—pride.

Yet all of this involves a lesser loyalty than the one owed to God. We can forget whose water we were baptized into, if we are not careful. Rather, let us remember the student of Paul who wrote 2 Thessalonians: your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing (2 Thess. 1: 4).

Do you see the danger? Come down Zaccheus, come down, before it is too late. Make sure your lesser loyalties—to government, family, home, all---do not cover over, do not shadow the one great loyalty, that all of your daily tasks do not eclipse a living memory of a common dream:

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

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

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

We harbor a common dream, a dream 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 harbor a common dream, a dream 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 harbor a common dream, a dream 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 harbor a common dream, finally a dream 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.

Wealthy Zaccheus

Come down Zaccheus, come down, at last. Impediments to faith come through doubt and idolatry and resentment and religion, but none of these holds a candle to the harm that wealth can bring. In global terms and in historical terms, every one of us in this room is wealthy. Ours are first world problems. Luke’s entire gospel, especially its central chapters, is aimed at this point. For Luke’s community, the remembered teachings of Jesus about wealth were most important. That tells me that the Lukan church had money, and so do we. This is what makes the account of Zaccheus, “one who lined his own pockets at other people’s expense”, so dramatic for Luke, and so Luke concludes his travel narrative with this clarion call: come down. Be careful as you do not to trip over wealth, power or health. We lose them all, give them all away, over time. They are impermanences. They go. Better that we see so early. Time flies—ah no. Time stays—we go.

Wouldn’t you love to know what Jesus said to Zaccheus that caused him to give away half of what he had? I would.

It is a western, white, male, educated, wealthy, healthy, heterosexual, middle class, two handed world. I need to be reminded of that. Come down Zaccheus, and feel the pain of others. And: Soon we will all be dead. Maybe we could find ways to use whatever power we have now to honor God, love our neighbor, reflect our mortality, and affirm the powerless. Come down Zaccheus, come down!

Before we left seminary, on the day after Thanksgiving in 1978, an odd event befell us. I worked nights as a security guard in those years and would come home to sleep at 7am. Jan had the day off, and left to shop, but left the door to our little apartment ajar, by accident. About noon a street woman found her way into the building and up into our floor, and then into our room. I woke up to see a very poor, deranged woman, fingering rosary beads, and mumbling just over my head. Boy did I shout. She ran into the next room and I stumbled downstairs to call the police. By the time three of New York’s finest and I returned to the apartment, the poor lady was in the bathtub, singing and washing. They took her away. Jan came back at 3 and asked how I had slept. The moment has stayed in the memory, though, as an omen. Our wealth is meant for the cleansing of the poor of the earth. Perhaps tthe Lord wanted me to remember that in ministry, so I have tried to. Come down Zaccheus, and use your wealth for the poor.

Religious Zaccheus

Let’s talk for a moment about religion, shall we? Come down Zaccheus, come down! No amount of religious apparatus can ever substitute for what Jesus is offering today, and that is loving relationship. No amount of theological astuteness can ever substitute for loving relationship. No amount of sturdy churchmanship can ever substitute for loving relationship. No amount of righteous indignation can ever substitute for loving relationship. No amount of church music, instrumental or vocal, can ever substitute for loving relationship. No amount of formal religion can ever substitute for the power of loving relationship. Jesus invites us into loving relationship with him, and so with each other. That is salvation. Are we lovers anymore?

Like Zaccheus in the tree, religion can dwell above Jesus, high and aloof. Is it good to be above Jesus?

It was the German monk Martin Luther who, in 1517, went alone and nailed his 95 theses to the door in Wittenberg, and thereby splintered inherited religion to bits. The words of this same Luther were read, as interpretation of Romans 8, on the rainy night in London, 1738, along Aldersgate Street, as John Wesley’s heart, at long last, was strangely warmed, and he came down from the tree of religion, to sit at table with the Faith of Christ. We remember Luther this Sunday every year. We pointedly remember that we are saved by faith, by faith alone, by grace we are saved by faith, and not by any or all the works of the law.

Here is an old, ostensibly humorous story. A man approaches the pearly gates. “Tell me about the good in your life (says Peter): admission requires 100 points.” “Well, I once gave to the United Way (1 point). And, I remember I shoveled a neighbor’s walk (1 point). I used to go to church (1 point).” (Pause). ‘You, know I’ll never make it to 100 points except by the grace of God’. (GRACE OF GOD—97 POINTS).

Luther recalls us down from the religion tree, to sit at the table of faith:

“Sola Fide”

“Crux Sola Nostra Theologia”

“Sin Boldly, but trust upon the Lord Jesus Christ more boldly still”.

“In the midst of the affliction He counsels, strengthens confirms, nourishes, and favors us…. More over, when we have repented, He instantly remits the sins as well as the punishments. In the same manner parents ought to handle their children

“Thus every matter, if it is to be done well, calls for the attention of the whole person.”

“If there is anything in us, it is not our own; it is a gift of God. But if it is a gift of God, then it is entirely a debt one owes to love, that is, to the law of Christ. And if it is a debt owed to love, then I must serve others with it, not myself. Thus my learning is not my own; it belongs to the unlearned and is the debt I owe them…My wisdom belongs to the foolish, my power to the oppressed. Thus my wealth belongs to the poor, my righteousness to the sinners

“It is with all these qualities that we must stand before God and intervene on behalf of those who do not have them, as though clothed with someone else’s garment…But even before men we must, with the same love, render them service against their detractors and those who are violent toward them; for this is what Christ did for us.”

“Teaching is of more importance than urging.”

“One learns more of Christ in being married and rearing children than in several lifetimes spent in study in a monastery

“One becomes a theologian by living, by dying, and by being damned, not by understanding, reading, and speculation

“What would it profit us to possess and perform everything else and be like pure saints, if we meanwhile neglected our chief purpose in life, namely, the care of the young?”

“Without a doubt we are named after Christ – not absent from us but dwelling within us; in other words: provided that we believe in him and that, in turn and mutuality, we are a second Christ to one another, doing for our neighbors as Christ does for us.” ("The Freedom of a Christian,” The Annotated Luther, Vol. 1: The Roots of Reform, Timothy J. Wengert, Ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 525).

Come down Zaccheus! Come down from the doubting tree, the tree of idolatry, the wealth tree, the tree of religion. Come down and receive the Gospel: Jesus invites us into loving relationship with himself, and thereby into loving relationship with our neighbors.

Did we in our own strength confide

Our striving would be losing

Were not the Right Man on our side

The Man of God’s own choosing

Dost as who that may be?

Christ Jesus it is He

Lord Sabaoth His name

From age to age the same

And he must win the battle

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 10.30.2016 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
October 23

Persistence in Prayer

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 18:9-14

God be merciful to me, a sinner. I tell you, this man went down to his home justified.

Yeats in Poetic Prayer

(for confession)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

(WB Yeats, 1919)

Persistence in prayer is difficult, in our age.

Prayer in Luke

We can readily appreciate the stark rigor of Jesus’ Lukan parables. A Samaritan whose kindness illumines the limits of religion…A rich man who builds bigger barns, but whose soul suddenly is required…A figure of a fig tree, fruitless, but spared for yet another year in hope…A marriage feast wherein humility is tested and the poor are fed…Another banquet to which many are invited but few respond, and out to highways and byways the invitation goes…A lost sheep—found!...A lost coin…found! A lost, prodigal son…found!...A truly dishonest steward whose wiliness shines out…A rich man who turns his back on a poor man, and roasts in hell for it… a persistent widow whose raises her voice to an unjust judge…Talent wasted and invested…A vineyard stolen by tenants…and, today, a publican persistent in prayer.

What drove Luke, alone, to remember or construct these parables? The lengthening years, without ultimate victory, since the cross? The long decades of living without Jesus? The uncertainties of institution and culture and citizenship and multiple responsibilities? The daily stresses of managing a budget? It is the primitive church that can give an example for us today in our time of anxiety. They waited for Jesus to return. And he delayed. And he delays, still. It is enough to make you lose heart.

Though with a scornful wonder we see her sore oppressed

By schism rent asunder by heresy distressed

Yet saints their watch are keeping their cry goes up ‘howlong’?

And soon the night of weeping will be the morn of song.

Persistence in prayer takes faith, to be in faith.

The publican—the tax collector—looks hard into the mirror. God be merciful to me—a sinner!

He uses a word that we avoid. Sin is utterly personal. This we understand. The covenantal commands of the decalogue have a personal consequence (Exodus 20). As grace touches ground in Jesus Christ, sin touches sand in personal confessions. We get lost. It is our nature, east of eden. We get lost in sex without love: lust. We get lost in consumption without nourishment: gluttony. We get lost in accumulation without investment: avarice. We get lost in rest without weariness, in happiness without struggle: sloth. We get lost in righteousness without restraint: anger. We get lost in desire without ration or respect: envy. And most regularly, we get lost in integrity without humility: pride. If you have never known lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, anger, envy or pride you are not a sinner, you are outside the cloud of sin, and you need no repentance. (You also may not be quite human).

It is a long wait. And that is just the point. Like the bridesmaids who waited with lamps trimmed, we feel the length of the wait. But we can wait, together. We can offer together a common prayer. We can slowly, stumblingly give ourselves over to persistence in prayer, to the forms of religious practice that bear meaning, to the life of the church, for all its foibles, wherein we learn the grammar of grace, and where through we face down the evils of this age.

Persistence in prayer is challenging, in our tradition.

Techne

Virginia Woolf’s serious joke that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’ was a hundred years premature. Human character changed on or about December 2010, when everyone, it seemed, started carrying a smartphone. For the first time, practically anyone could be found intruded upon, not only at some fixed address at home or at work, but everywhere at all times. Before this everyone could expect, in the course of the day, some time at least in which to be left alone, unobserved, unsustained and unburdened by public or familial roles. That era now came to an end.

When the smartphone brings messages, alerts, and notifications that invite instant responses—and induces anxiety if those messages fail to arrive—everyone’s sense of time changes, and attention that used to be focused more or less distantly on, say, tomorrow’s mail is concentrated in the present moment…You cannot reduce your engagement with the past and future without diminishing yourself, without becoming ‘more tenuous’.

(Edward Mendelson, NYRB, 6/23/16, 34)

Persistence in prayer is challenging, in our culture.

Rather than another hour of email, or on our smartphone, perhaps we could walk, alone, quiet, and talk to God. Tell it to God. Pray. Our overcapacity in email is a direct consequence of our under-investment in prayer.

Prayer in Life: Charles Taylor

One advantage of a life of study, the life of the mind, the college years, is the chance to pick out some new theological eye glasses. Prayerfully consider, for example, the thought of Charles Taylor, our Montreal philosopher. Taylor explores background conditions: social imaginaries, moral perspectives, the cultural influences we sometimes take for granted. His central emphasis is the exploration of ‘fullness’: an experience of what counts most in life. Taylor views the spiritual shape of the present age through the lenses of the work of Ivan Illich, Charles Peguy, G M Hopkins, and I Berlin. He has no interest in a return to an untroubled harmony, which is utterly unattainable, and is even a kind of culpable weakness. Taylor seeks a new more nuanced map of the ideological terrain all about us. Fullness…

I prayerfully remember the summer, thinking in prayer of Taylor. When I see my granddaughter Ellie tubing behind a motor boat for the first time, I have the joyful fullness of watching her as a remembrance of her mother, our daughter, Emily skiing on the same lake. When our youngest granddaughter, Hannah, wakes up from a nap; or when her brother Charlie, ‘screwing his courage to the sticking post’ tries tubing himself; or when their cousin Sally cries out wanting her dad, our son, Benjamin; or when Jan comes home as happy as Yogi Bear, her bucket full of blackberries; or when the blue lake and blue sky outside our blue cottage call out the name of the Blue God; then there is fullness, in a summer hue.

Charles Taylor, a great Canadian, has something he rails against: subtraction (of transcendence) theories. That is, he fights against the late modern urge to bracket out such transcendence. Transcendence in ordinary life, in society, in erotic love, in a new poetic language—Taylor works to make sufficient cultural space for transcendence. That is what we are about at Marsh Chapel, too. Taylor affirms not disenchantment but re-enchantment: claims for belief, for God, a sense of the soul and salvation, over against the modern or late modern experience of malaise, ennui, uncertainty, meaninglessness, melancholy, despair. Here is his question: ‘Where in the culture of expressive individualism is the sacred?’ To this end, Taylor examines a kind of ‘diffusive Christianity’, a habit of moving between belief and unbelief, an emphasis on believing not belonging. His work heralds a new age of religious searching, not a decline in religious belief and practice, but a plurality of forms of belief and unbelief, transitory and fragile, existing within a range of cross pressures within the ongoing contest of religiosity and materialism. He criticizes what he calls ‘excarnation’ (a shift from taking the body seriously, head over other). In all, Taylor is the evangelist for the joy of everyday relationships, conduct, and experiences, his ear tuned to the sacred, his eye searching out the range of the sacred canopy, his mind alive to spirit, his heart given over to a hymnic celebration of our aspiration to wholeness. His work is a hymn to and of persistence in prayer.*

*(Charles Taylor, as seen by Philip Amerson, Robert Allan Hill, and Michael Morgan (Indiana University) in conversation

We fear, and try to find our security in larger automobiles or drug supplies or stock collections or homes or layers of disconnection, gated communities of the mind and heart. But security comes not through possession, but through relationship. Do you want to be safe and secure? Invest yourself in a lifetime of building and keeping healthy relationships. There is your security, where neither moth nor rust consumes.

Such persistence in prayer needs new theological eyes, in our era.

Persistence in Prayer

Ernest Fremont Tittle was the greatest Methodist preacher of his mid twentieth century generation. Tougher than Sockman, truer than Peale, Tittle preached in Chicago until he died at his desk, writing about Luke:

There is special need for persistence in prayer when the object sought is the redressing of social wrongs. God will see justice done if the human instruments of his justice to not give way to weariness, impatience, or discouragement, but persevere in prayer and labor for the improvement of world conditions. Here we can learn from the scientist. Medical research is a prayer for the relief of suffering, the abolition of disease, the conservation of life—a prayer in which the scientist perseveres in the face of whatever odds, whatever darkness and delay. More especially we can learn from great religious leader like Luther, Wesley, Wilberforce, Shaftsbury, who year upon year prayed and fought for the causes to which they dedicated their lives. The need for persistence in prayer arises not only from the intransigence of the oppressor, but also from the immaturity and imperfection of the would-be reformer. We have a lot to learn and much in ourselves to overcome before we can be used of God as instruments of his justice. Recognizing this, Gandhi spent hours each day in prayer and meditation, and maintained a weekly day of silence.

Persistence in prayer takes practice, for those who seek to resist injustice.

A Common Prayer

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, will sit at a long Thanksgiving table, this autumn, and share the turkey and pass the potatoes, and slice the pie, and, if grudgingly, show kindness and pity to one another.

We 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, 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.

Application in Prayer

Talk to God walking on the river, in the woods, on the beach, once a day: do not use email and other such modes when a silent prayer will suffice.

Go to church, once a week, for sermon and music and eucharist, but also to see different others, to feel different neighbors, to place yourself in the community of God’s people.

Give away 10% of what you earn, to the church you love, to the mission you admire, to the school that taught you, to the place you where help meets hurt.

Read. Read every sentence, when you read, and think it through. Read your Bible. Read a good newspaper. Read.

What shall we say? How shall we pray?

Pray always

Labor Omnia Vincit

Do not lose heart

Work conquers all

Pray always

All of us are better when we are loved

Do not lose heart

Early to bed and early to bed and early to rise

Pray always

A stitch in time

Do not lose heart

Waste not want not

Pray always

Rome was not built in a day

Do not lose heart

Only the devil has no time

To let things grow

Pray always

Persistence in prayer begins with a decision to pray ‘without ceasing’.

God be merciful to me, a sinner. I tell you, this man went down to his home justified.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 10.23.2016 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
October 16

Persistence

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 18:1-8

‘Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart’

Persistence amid Confusion and Timidity

Tuesday you may have been driving mid-day out over the BU bridge, and into Cambridge. If so, on that bright crisp autumn day, you would have run into a delay.

Along the river, remember, there are swans, many white swans, encamped alongside and under the bridge. But they do not exclusively sojourn riverside. Sometimes, by the by, they saunter out, due north and west, themselves headed for Cambridge, or at least a little part of Cambridge. Ah, the allure of the other side of the river, and all its Cambridge delights—colleges, students, green grass, bicycle lanes and endowments. Sweet.

The River Charles is deep and wide, Alleluia. Thirty-eight billion on the other side, Alleluia. (J)

Tuesday, which was a BU Monday by the way, but still a Tuesday, you perhaps came to rest awaiting the green light. In the head of the car queue there was an elderly couple, somewhat timid, surely nice, perhaps kindly Midwestern folks, and the light turned. But the swans had made their way into the intersection, and the kindly couple was loath to disturb them. The car, and so the subaltern many cars behind, waited for another light change. A dozen or two confused birds crossed, and then, just as the light changed again, they turned and walked back, solemn in waddling procession, one by one, ‘beginning with the eldest’ as in John 8. Again, our dear Midwestern guests made no honking, threatening, aggressive moves, and waited, and again the light changed.

You might want to imagine what sorts of reactions to all of this were then occasioned and vigorously offered by the line-up of cars eager to leave Boston and enter the Shangri La of Cambridge. We Bostonians are such a patient, calm, irenic crew, especially when behind the wheel, don’t you know…

It was not pretty.

After another light change or three, somehow, by grace, the swans elected to return home to their nests and spots and cribs along the River Charles. Driving, say, then, along Memorial Drive, perhaps headed to visit a friend and parishioner in a nursing home in Watertown, you may have mused, bemused, about what you saw, swan and car, light and traffic, intersection and interruption, and mainly, in equal balance, the timidity of the lead drivers and the confusion of the birds in procession. One part timidity, one part confusion, or one part confusion and one part timidity, in largely equal measure. Confusion and timidity.

You may have been reminded of many church meetings, where the two, confusion and timidity are also often found in equal measure.

You may have been reminded, in our season, of the choices made in cable network so-called journalism, where the two, confusion and timidity, have been found in full this year, in equal measure.

You may have been reminded of the cultural demise all around us, to the shame of us all, the acceptance of bullying and demagoguery, the normalization of vulgarity and sexism, the accommodation of buffoonery and megalomania, our willingness to have our children and grandchildren so surrounded in a culture careening into a nihilistic abyss. ‘Yes, I really got him. Low energy. That was a one day kill. Words are beautiful things.’ Can you hear that?

Institutions are far more fragile than we sometimes think, especially the bigger ones. They all require trust, commitment, integrity, self-sacrifice, and humility on the part of their leaders, or over time they disintegrate. It is not just the processes, the systems, the organizations and structures that matter, it is the people. No amount of systemic adjustment can ever replace the fundamental need, across a culture, for good people. No wise process has any chance against unwise people. Do not assume that institutions that have been healthy will always be so. Do not presume that free speech in newspapers, that due process in political parties, that honest regard for electoral results simply exist. They do or they don’t. It depends on the people who inhabit, support, and lead them. Beware a time like ours when the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity (Yeats).

Giving ultimate loyalty to penultimate reality is sin at its depth. To support an organization at the cost of honor, of integrity, of honesty is to give ultimate loyalty to penultimate reality. That is, to support a political party at the cost of honor, integrity and honesty is to give ultimate loyalty to penultimate reality. This is sin at its depth. That is, to support a denomination at the cost of honor, integrity and honesty is to give ultimate loyalty to penultimate reality. In the hour of judgment, the organization—party or church or other—depends on the courage and integrity of individuals to resist idolatrous loyalty to penultimate reality and to respond with courage and integrity to ultimate authority. You cannot serve God and Mammon. Giving ultimate loyalty to penultimate reality is sin at its depth.

Persistence in Jeremiah

In 1980 with 12 Cornell students, and for a full year, we studied Jeremiah. Two of those then young graduate students are now teaching at Brown University, and are part of the extended Marsh Chapel family. Last year they reminded me that the group had asked to study Jeremiah, high above Cayuga’s waters, and I had wondered ‘whether they were ready for him’. They said they were, and they were. In all these intervening years, with student and campus groups from Cornell, McGill, North Country Community, Syracuse, Lemoyne, Colgate Rochester, the University of Rochester, United Seminary and, now, Boston University, we have returned in group study to Jeremiah. Never, though, have I been more grateful for Jeremiah’s evocation of the stark suffering divine love of God, for Jeremiah’s unswerving realism, than this fall. In the autumn of demagoguery and its partial acceptance by America, I kneel and kiss the ground, thankful for Jeremiah and his divine human realism.

I am eternally thankful for Jeremiah’s realism about what horrors can befall people and a people when they forget their identity.

I am eternally thankful for Jeremiah’s realism about what happens to a people whose leaders have and live values diametrically opposed to the nation’s own values.

I am eternally thankful, painful as it is to hear the words, for Jeremiah’s realism about how naïve in selfishness a people can become, and how earth shattering that foolishness can be.

I am eternally thankful for Jeremiah’s realism about the crucial importance of diplomacy rather than violence, and about what happens when megalomaniacal leaders mock diplomacy.

I am eternally thankful, if such can be said, for Jeremiah’s own wretched suffering as he watched his beloved country exchange their birthright of justice for a mess of material pottage.

I am eternally thankful for the clarity, not confusion, for the courage, not timidity, of his voice ringing out across 25 centuries to say to you in a way you cannot avoid: if you follow leadership that is immoral, unjust, unloving, unwise, you will get what you deserve, and the desserts will be disastrous. In real time.

I am eternally thankful for Jeremiah’s pitiless reproach for people whose own religion bluntly teaches them to tell truth, honor others, seek justice, protect the poor, who then select leaders who say they have done and will do the opposite, and then are proven to have done. We have been warned.

I am eternally thankful for Jeremiah’s realism which—did you hear?—includes at the end, encompasses at twilight, for all the suffering the divine love endures, including Jeremiah’s own slave death and unmarked grave in Egypt, a grace note, a ringing bell, a song sung, a word spoken, a hope, that one day ‘says the Lord, I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah… No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord…

Persistence in Luke

So we arrive today in the confusion and timidity of our time, at the town court of Nazareth, the honorable UnJ Judge presiding. Hear ye, hear ye. Hizzoner awaits. And Behold the Lord Jesus Christ dressed today in the apparel of a poor woman. For those who, rightly, feel anxiety or despair or depression at the rampant sexism now latent and palpable, revealed by the events of this year and autumn across our decaying culture, take heart: behold the Lord Jesus Christ dressed today in the raiment of an importunate, a persistent poor widow.

Yes, in our autumn of anxiety, we can readily appreciate the Scripture’s utter realism. Luke too needed to remember that Jesus told them about “losing heart”. This phrase communicates, in a time like ours. Greater souls in easier times have felt such ennui. So we are not surprised today to hear reports of increased therapy, medication and consumption of comfort food. We can feel the depression.

Jesus pointed to the Town Court of Nazareth and therein to the simple figure of a persistent woman. See her at the bench. Watch her in the aisle. Listen to her steady voice. Feel her stolid forbearance. Says she: “Grant me justice.”

‘The widow’s untiring pursuit of justice is translated into the ‘faith’ that should mark the church’s welcome of the awaited Son of Man’ (Ringe)

In Nazareth town court, all rise hear ye hear ye the honorable U J Judge presiding, a persistent woman employs time and voice. You have time and you have voice. Like Christ himself, she implores the implacable world to grant justice. Like Christ himself, she comes on a donkey of tongue and patience. Like Christ himself, she continues to plead, to intercede. Like Christ himself, she importunes the enduring injustice of this world. Like Christ himself she prays without ceasing. Like Christ himself she persists. She is an example to us of how we should use whatever time we have and whatever breath remains--to pray. It is prayer that is the most realistic and wisest repose of the anxious of this autumn of exasperation. By prayer we mean formal prayer, yes (more here next week). But by prayer we mean, too, the persistent daily leaning toward justice, the continuous pressure in history from the voice of the voiceless and the time of the time bound.

Notice, waiting with us, this poor widow. She lacks power, authority, status, position, wealth. She has her voice and all the time in the world. Like Jesus Christ, whose faith comes by hearing and hearing by the preaching of the word.

If we are not to lose heart, in the seemingly unending search for justice, we shall need to pray always, to “relax into the truth”, and to give ourselves over to the divine presence in our midst. To give ourselves over to a real, common hope, and to be clear, not confused, courageous not timid about our hope:

Persistence in Hope

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Persistence Today

We hear the call to persist today. It is a daily practice, a daily discipline.

An example of persistence, in the figure of an importunate widow.

By the by, that drive on Tuesday, amid confusion and timidity, you recall, ended in the presence of a poor widow, now 100, one of your dear sisters, residing across the river in a nursing home. 100 years of growth, and travel from the west to the east coast, and faculty spouse leadership in fresh and salt water schools, and administrative guidance and correction of several General Conferences, church meetings, Bishops and the writing of the 1988 Book of Discipline, and motherhood and sisterhood and discipleship…and, through it all, persistence. ‘For what should we pray?’ she was asked. ‘Pray for all those who are hurting’, she replied.

‘Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart’

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 10.16.2016 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
October 2

The Sacrament of Conversation

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 17:5-10

Sacrament: Conversation

Our theme at Marsh this year is Conversation. Sacrament means mystery. 2 Sacraments and 5 sacramental rites shape our life of faith. John Wesley named 5 means of grace including conversation (Scripture, Prayer, Eucharist\Baptism, Fasting, Conversation). Vancouver 1983, WCC, ‘in Christ there is no East or West’.

Conversation: Sacrament

Iva. A Winter Sunday. So angry. (Janitor). My PhD that year. ‘Of course, you know, they have PhD’s. I should be more understanding. They have PhD’s. You really can’t expect much. (J). Learning is no substitute for meaning. Making of living is no substitute for leading a life. Your field work is no substitute for your domestic duties. Learning is good and very good, but it will not alone lead you to meaning. Our business at Marsh Chapel is not talent but grace. We would rather have untalented grace than graceless talent. As Wesley, ‘we would rather throw over all the libraries in the world than lose one soul’.

Lamentations

Jeremiah may or may not have written this. Catharsis of grief and despair is the aim of the poems (we can use this). They are all acrostics (facilitates memorization). ‘The pent up emotion of a people who had lost practically everything that belonged to their former way of life IBD’. Historical faith vs. historical actuality. ‘What is the meaning of the terrible calamities that have overtaken us?’ A new, firmer faith emerges, dominated by strong convictions: responsibility for sin; the disciplinary value of suffering; the absolute justice and abiding love of God; the inscrutability of God’s ways; the unconquerable trust of the believer; the necessity of patience.

Luke

Your field work is no substitute for your domestic duties. Men and parenting. Students and parents. Adults and mature parents. Civil Society including church and worship.

Slavery is here used as a positive analogy. It is Biblical and dominical, ‘Jesus says…’ Should we then affirm slavery? This is the hermeneutic of the evangelical Christians who use 6 verses in all of Scripture to support bigotry against gays. The Bible has a history, too, as do you.

You are not finished once you have recited the conjugations, written out the periodic table, aced introduction to computer science, memorized the ten presidents of BU and the 44 of the USA, and defined the teleological suspension of the ethical.

Faith as a mustard seed. ‘Faith that mountains can move’. Hyperbole (eye, pluck it out, etc). The way of discipleship: worship, prayer, study, tithing, faithfulness, charity, hospitality. ‘Service!’ At your service. At your disposal. Ministry is service. Ministry is to put yourself at another’s disposal.

Condition according to fact (even if you only had faith the size of a seed it would be enough, but you have a whole lot more than that!)

Spirit

Spirit: The church as the bride of Christ: conversation, divine and human.

We are here with you because we are here for you (repeat). We have come from many regions of the world and many ranges of your past experience in order to be present here, to share your presence, and our presence with you. Here with you, we are here for you.

And yet, quite soon, we will not be present, at least most of us. You will go off on your own for another week. We will need to give you over, and to give over to…Another Presence, God’s Presence. God’s presence, spirit, or, as the reading for today names it, God’s Abiding in us. As will you, day by day, so will we need to trust in…Another Presence.

You will sense the warm breeze, the sunlit horizon, the abiding grace of God’s Presence by its fruit (Galatians 5:23). Another Presence, of which you become aware, in your daily life together, by sensing the fruit of this presence. God’s love abides in us and is made whole in us, through these marks, these footprints, these touches of grace.

In Love. Love is the attentive gift of time, as in the course of a lifetime of faithfulness—in family, in friendship, in work, in marriage. In Love.

In Joy. Joy is happy embrace—physical, mental, spiritual, soulful—morning and evening. In Joy.

In Peace. Peace is the gift—all these are pure gifts of God—of real listening, listening with a full smile and a glad heart. In Peace.

In Patience. You need persistence, the accelerator, and patience, the break, to make it over the mountains and through the deserts, and across the great plains of life. Said the Buddha: patience is self-compassion which gives you equanimity. In Patience.

In Kindness. Kindness is the long distance run, the gift of a gracious long distance perspective, known in part in the openness to forgiveness. In Kindness.

In Goodness. Real Goodness bursts forth in generosity. You only have what you give away, and you only truly possess what you have the grace and freedom to offer to someone else. What you give is what you have. In Goodness.

In Faith. Faith is a gift, like all other signs of abiding love. Faith is the capacity to withstand what and when we cannot understand (repeat). When you face struggle, challenge, difficulty, may this gift be yours by divine grace. In Faith.

In Gentleness. Tea, sunset, backrub, quiet, handholding, prayer, worship. In Gentleness.

In Self-Control. Self-Control, a gift of God’s Presence, guides you to work through any and all labors: in care for family and extended family; in stewardship of precious material wealth, never plentiful but always sufficient; in sensitivity in intimacy, sexuality, in preparing for an unforeseen future; in the building of community—yes religious community, but also neighborhood, town, school, city, and a culture gradually amenable to faith. In Self-Control.

Into Another Presence, into Another’s Presence, we send you, for another week. With Ruth may you say: ‘Wither thou goest I will go, wither thou lodgest I will lodge, they people shall be my people, and thy God my God.’

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 10.2.2016 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
September 25

The Bach Experience

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 16:19-31

Dean Hill

In music and word, again this Lord’s Day, we worship Almighty God, and proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ, crucified. For ten years now in this manner, twice a term, we have sought to preach the good news and offer the gift of faith, a gift now offered to you, the hearer, you, the listener, by way of the confluence of music and word, chorus and sermon, Bach and Experience. To our knowledge, this sort of offering is sui generis, unique. A woman, say, listening today in southern New Hampshire, struggling to interpret hard news from North Carolina and Washington State, may hear us and the offering of faith. Faith in a recognition of the wonder of creation, God the Creator. Faith in a beginning step alongside the promise of baptism, God the Redeemer. Faith, to start, in the sudden exclamation by spirit—I exist! Here! Now!--, God the Sustainer.

Faith is a gift. In the gift of faith we find the courage to face death. Death makes us mortal. Facing death makes us human. In the gift of faith, we find the courage to face life. Life in all its turmoil, cacophony, and difficulty. To take another step. That may be all our listener in southern New Hampshire needs from the gift of faith today, as Sunday morning slips into Sunday afternoon, and the burdens of the rest of the day and the week to come. A sense of love, at the margins, a sense of possibility, though far off, a sense of promise, hidden but real. Baptism is a sign of the gift of faith, and faith is the courage to face death and life, to take another step, to walk ahead into the dark. Bach sings faith and Jeremiah speaks faith and we attempt to weave the two together.

Dr. Jarrett

Today’s cantata was composed by Bach for the Feast of St John observed in Leipzig on June 24 of 1724. The date makes Cantata 7 the third work composed in Bach’s second full cycle of cantatas for the church year. As we have come to expect from this particular cycle, many of these cantatas are closely connected to their chorale tunes, these tunes often appearing in the soprano part on long tones, directing and connecting the listener to the stories and teachings of the great hymns of the faith. Cantata 7 numbers among the important “chorale-cantatas” of this cycle, and draws compositional inspiration from Martin Luther’s 1541 hymn “Christ our Lord came to the Jordan.” Of the cantata’s seven movements, the first and last movements, sung by the choir, take their text directly from Luther, while the inner solo movements are paraphrased from Luther’s inner verses and attributed to Bach himself.

The story of John the Baptizer and of Jesus’s baptism is found in the third chapter of Matthew and Luke, and right away in the first chapter of Mark and John. These accounts mark the beginning of Christ’s ministry on earth, and lead ultimately to his Passion and Resurrection. Each account bears the familiar imagery of water, the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove, and the voice of the God from the opened Heavens declaring pride and pleasure in his only Son. When viewed together, the fullness of the Trinity is richly depicted in the Baptism story, and Christian teaching through these symbols is a clear public anointing and forecast of the teachings and purposes of Jesus in his earthly ministry.

If we look back just a few verses, and focus on John, we find similarities in these accounts as well. John is depicted as something of a wild, ruffian whose prophesies excite and call his audience to prepare for the one who will come and will purify the world by fire. This is the important connection for Bach as he sets out to write his musical sermon for the day.

Water imagery abounds throughout the cantata, bubbling, rippling, even crashing in what Craig Smith has called Bach’s La Mer. Throughout the cantata, the purity and clarity of the water is tinged and colored by the awareness that Jesus’s blood – that is to say, his Passion – transforms the water with the purifying zeal of the refiner’s fire. Let’s take a closer look.

The Cantata opens with a monumental, even epic, setting of the first verse of Luther’s hymn. You’ll find the chorale tune in long notes, not in the soprano part, but submerged in the tenor part with old-style polyphony in the other four parts all around. The vocal parts considered alone proceed with an austerity that reminds the listener to look up from the Jordan to the Cross. Musically, the remarkable material here is the freely composed instrumental ritornelli that open, close, and punctuate each of the nine phrases of the chorale tune. Our program annotator Brett Kostrzewski reminds us that Jesus’s arrival at the Jordan for baptism marks the onset of his adult ministry, and Baroque conventions provide a stately French overture with dotted and regal rhythms for any auspicious arrival. And so the cantata opens with strong French overture rhythms in the upper strings and oboes in a harmonic sequence that outlines the austere modal colors of the chorale tune. But one immediately hears the Jordan lapping at the hem of Jesus’s garment in the cello and bass figurations that support the upper material. This short and strict two bar phrase freezes harmonically as the violin soloist’s second theme figurations depict more churning of the purifying Jordan waters. The cello’s original motif is transferred to the upper supporting strings, further suspending progress. The overall effect is one of churning, expectation, even foreboding.

The three arias that comprise the corpus of the cantata paraphrase the inner verse of Luther’s hymn. In the first, sung without preparatory recitative, the bass calls every believer to baptism, not with water alone, but with the Word and Spirit of God. One imagines a good Methodist baptism in the sprinkling heard in the cheerful accompaniment. The central tenor recitative and aria connect all of the Gospel images with fiery virtuosity on full display from two solo violins and the bravura of the tenor part. The words of God in the moment of Jesus’s baptism are sung in the second half of the tenor recitative as if to provide full charge for the purification to come. The zeal of the aria’s opening imagery softens at the mention of the Dove. [Be careful - the German word for Dove (Taube) is only one letter away for the word for Baptism (Taufe).] The bass returns for a recitative that reminds us of Jesus’s call for his disciples to teach and baptize throughout the world. The words of Jesus are set in a manner the presages Bach’s musical treatment of the words of Jesus in the Matthew Passion with strings ‘halo-ing’ the text in red letters. The final aria for alto soloist begins notably without any introduction. To me, this underscores both the connection to Jesus’s commandment, but also creates a greater sense of urgency for this text. The message here is a direct exhortation of the purifying power of faith and baptism. The final movement is a standard four-part chorale, but the amount of theology packed into this verse is worth noting – here Luther connects everything: original Sin and our own inheritance of sin, the redemptive grace of Christ’s Passion, all forged by the purifying power of personal devotion, faith and baptism.

Dean Hill

The beauty of the music this morning is itself a sort of baptism. We sometimes long to take a spiritual shower, to bathe ourselves in the living waters of grace, faith, hope, life, and love. Especially, it might be stressed, on any college campus today, the need for spiritual cleansing in the midst of sub cultural murkiness, is continual. We need both judgment and mercy, both honesty and kindness, both prophetic upbraid and parabolic uplift. And we get them, thanks be to God, in Jeremiah and in Luke. But look! They come upside down. In a stunning reversal, kindness and gentle hope are the hallmarks of our passage from Jeremiah, while wrath and hellfire explode out of Luke.

Listen again to the voice of the prophet, one of the great, strange voices in all of history and life, one of the great, strange voices, in all of Holy Writ. Jeremiah. All is lost, in Judah, as Jeremiah addresses Zedekiah the King. You will be a slave in Babylon, King Zedekiah. You will be given into the hand of your sworn, mortal enemy, and so too will be the fate of your city, your temple, your people, and your country, King Zedekiah. BUT. NONETHELESS. AND YET. These are resurrection words. BUT. NONETHELESS. NEVERTHELESS. STILL. EVEN SO. And Jeremiah put his money where his mouth is.

In this season of cultural demise and decay across our country, we benefit from the harsh challenge of Luke, and we benefit from the hopeful promise in Jeremiah. You see, as we said some weeks ago, there is more Luke in Jeremiah than at first you think, and there is more Jeremiah in Luke than at first you think.

Sin is not doing concrete deeds of generous kindness. Of all the Gospels, St. Luke most emphasizes this: in the sermon on the plain; in the wording of the Lord’s prayer; in the parables of Sower, Samaritan, Lost Sheep, Lost Coin, Lost Son, Dishonest Steward, Guests to the Wedding Banquet, the 10 healed Lepers; in the communal interest extended to Samaritans (those of different ethnic and religious background), to women (those whom tradition has marginalized), to the poor (those left forgotten in transaction and acquisition, to the lepers (those ritually and culturally excluded). To read Luke is to be given eyes to see by contrast abroad in America today an emerging culture of denigration--denigration of immigrants, Muslims, and Mexicans--and to weep. It is not enough, though it is true enough, to blame this almost exclusively on one particular candidate and one particular party. (repeat). No, the mirror is held up for us all, for all of us in some measure have contributed to a culture that is uncultured, a rhetoric that is rancorous, a politics that is impolitic, an increasingly uncivil civil society, a rejection of hard-won experience and preparation in favor of careless entertainment and tomfoolery, a preference for cruelty over beauty, and a robust willingness to throw away hundreds of years of painstakingly crafted institutional commitments and social norms. You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but cannot fool all of the people all of the time. Will Lincoln’s proverb hold in our time? You may well hope so, though you may well doubt so. Finally, as Jeremiah looks upon Zedekiah, we confess, we get the leaders we deserve.

More personally, in the Methodist tradition which built Boston University, other than worship and the study of Scripture, the most cherished practice of faith is tithing: annually giving away 10% of what you earn. The reason for the centrality of tithing—today, sadly, honored largely in the breach, even in Methodism, now, to our shame—is set for us in today’s harsh parable of Lazarus and Dives, the harrowing horror of what it means to forget the needs of the poor. Such forgetfulness is a persistent threat in the heart of all human life, but is especially challenging for those who have much, and so are sheltered, routinely, from the anxiety of poverty, the hurt of exclusion, the pain of hunger, and the despair of lack and loss. Sin is the unwillingness on a weekly basis to practice generous kindness, to tithe. Luke reminds us so.

And Jeremiah? Now that his beloved country is in ruins (are we beginning across our own cultural landscape this fall to catch a glimpse of his woe?), Jeremiah does something great. Remember: the city is burned, the temple is wrecked, the population is slaughtered or in chains, and the nation is destroyed, soon to spend two generations in Babylon, by the rivers of Babylon, where to sit down and weep, as tormentors mock, ‘sing to us one of the songs of Zion’. But Jeremiah buys a plot of land. One day, a long time from now, he muses and prays, there will be some manner of restoration: ‘I cannot see it. I cannot hear it. I cannot prove it. Sometimes I cannot believe it. But, hoping against hope, I will buy some land, and someday, somebody, somehow will use it’. This is faith: to plant trees under which you will not sleep, to build churches in which you will not worship, to create schools in which you will not study, to teach students whose futures you will not know—and to buy land which you will not till. But someone will. Or at least, that is your hope. That is why, as darkness is falling across a confused, frightened, and benighted land, you have done some things this fall. You offered a morning prayer. Good for you. You sent a check to support some leader or candidate. Good for you. You went and volunteered to make contacts and calls on his or her behalf. Good for you. You spoke up and spoke out, regardless of the fan mail, family disdain, and other costs. You did something. Will it make a difference? It may not. But it does make a difference, for you, if for no one else. Go and buy your little plot of land.

James Weldon Johnson gave us our marching orders, in words both of challenge and of hope, words that recognize straight-up what real harm can and has befallen people, especially his own people, and words that cling, even desperately, to a future, a future hope, something hoped for but not seen, and ever subject to neglect, amnesia, rejection, and defeat. Marsh Chapel’s own Max Miller gave us our accompaniment, as well, our marching beat, in music both of challenge and of hope, a hymnic cadence mindful of harm and aware of hope. May Johnsons’ words and Miller’s music, their Jeremiah 32, their Luke 16, guide us forward.

Behold a broken world, we pray, where want and war increase,

And grant us Lord, in this our day,

The ancient dream of peace.

God of our weary years

God of our silent tears

Thou who hast brought us thus far along the way

Thou who hast by thy might

Led us into the light

Keep us forever in the path we pray

Lest our feet stray from the places our God where we met thee

Lest our hearts drunk with the wine of the world we forget thee

Shadowed beneath thy hand

May we forever stand

True to our God

True to our native land

Bring Lord your better world to birth, your kingdom love’s domain

Where peace with God

And peace on earth

And peace eternal reign.

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

posted in The Bach Experience, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 09.25.2016 at 11:00 am
Tags: Bach Experience, Robert Hill, Scott Jarrett