Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

Luke 15:1-10

Preface

Faith walks along a tenebrous edge—a dark, shadowed, cliff walk.

We all survive the birth canal, and so have a native survivors’ guilt. All seven billion.

We all need daily two things, bread and a name. (One does not live by bread alone). All seven billion.

We all grow to a point of separation, a leaving home, a second identity. All seven billion.

We all love our families, love our children, love our homes, love our grandchildren. All seven billion.

We all age, and after forty, its maintenance, maintenance, maintenance. All seven billion.

We all shuffle off this mortal coil en route to that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns. All seven billion.

Today, September 11, 2016, in memory and honor, we remember our ancient and future hope, a hope of peace. Faith walks along a tenebrous edge—a dark, shadowed, cliff walk.

Along our way, this Lord’s day, as we hike in faith along the tenebrous edge of life, we do so in dire need of memories—of Jeremiah, of America, of Luke, of Nine-eleven.

Jeremiah

Remember Jeremiah.

The prophet Jeremiah excoriated his people, hoping against hope to keep them in faith along a tenebrous edge. For four decades he challenged, criticized, and vilified his beloved country, and its leadership, and its people. They heeded him not.

The prophet was the victim of the nationalistic hysteria of those who favored revolt, a rejection of their own best selves. Untrue to themselves and to their history and to their God, and heedless of Jeremiah’s words, his beloved people subsequently suffered the great distress of 587bce, in which the northern Assyrians conquered them, their city was burned, their temple destroyed, their nation buried, and their population deported to Babylon. Judah became a vassal state, a province of Babylon. Yet for four decades before this disaster, Jeremiah spoke truth to his wayward people, four decades of unheeded sermons.

Jeremiah lived from about 650 to 580 bce. King Josiah in 621, heeded his word in part, but himself was killed in 609. And then the defeat in Carcamesh in 605, and then the partial deportation in 598, and then, the end, apocalypse 587bce. Along the way Jeremiah counseled diplomacy and even capitulation, to no avail. He was condemned to death, but survived, thrown in a cistern, yet prevailed, until his own deportation, and probable death, in Egypt. Anatoth, 2 miles from Jerusalem was his home; Hosea was his model; harlotry the main image: ‘Again and again he exhorted his countrymen to obedience and persisted in his call to repentance and change of heart although he came to feel that their moral sense had become so atrophied that repentance was impossible.’ He urged the people not to listen to the optimistic predictions of the prophets. Jeremiah’s opponent, the prophet or pseudo-prophet Hananiah wrongly predicted the defeat of Bablyon, wrongly predicted the return of exiles and wrongly predicted the restoration of the temple treasures. Is there any word from the Lord, plaintively King Zedekiah asked Jeremiah?

Yes, Jeremiah whispered, there is: You shall be delivered into the hand of the king of Babylon. (37:17).

Jeremiah exclaimed: False prophets deceive people with their optimism. The temple has no efficacy in and of itself. The true circumcision is not of body, but of mind and heart. Even the Bible can lead astray: Even the Torah may become a snare and a delusion through the false pen of the scribes.

By the way, notice some of the themes from the sixth century bce: Deportation, false optimism, betrayal of heritage, forgetfulness of history, ineffective leadership, personal failings which damage the nation, turning of a deaf ear toward the voice of God. “For my people are foolish, they do not know me; they are stupid children, they have no understanding. They are skilled in doing evil, but do not know how to do good.”

Jeremiah, whom we have heard in the background of our worship and preaching for some weeks, speaks to us today, and continues into late October. He warns of the tenebrous edge.

May his memory help us.

America

Remember America.

Culture

For us, as part of a national culture now careening toward decay, our memory is failing us. Rhetoric and rancor that befit no civilized people we have somehow accepted, acceded to, accomodated. We forget Emma Lazarus and prefer demagoguery. We forget Lincoln and support nativism. We forget King and accept narcissism. We forget Jesus the crucified and cleave to the cry of triumphalism, out of fear and out of exhaustion and out of amnesia, both a cultural and a Christological amnesia.

Yet on the horizon today we hear and see demagoguery—America First, Birtherist, Misogynist, Racist, Xenophobic, Narcissistic (don’t you love all these Greek rooted words?) bigotry. I sure did that well. ‘Low Energy’. That was a one day kill. Words are beautiful things.

Over time, we get the leadership we deserve.

We desire a faith amenable to culture, and a culture amenable to faith. For what good is a baptized cleansing if we are simply thrown back into the mire? Personal and social holiness are married to one another. Loving faith expects loving culture.

Philosophy

Some express surprise, a sense of mistake, regarding the willingness of a grand old party, a party of Lincoln, to nominate a particular candidate. Yet there is no surprise or mistake about the nomination in question. 80% of voters in that party agree with these three propositions: Muslims should be banned. A wall should be built along the Rio Grande. Undocumented immigrants of all ages and stages should rounded up, arrested, jailed, and deported. (New York Review of Books, p 8-10, June, 2016) If you are in conversation with a member of such a party, chances are 4 out of 5 that you are in conversation with these views. No surprise. No mistake. You see? The shadow falls on us. Shadow. Dark. Twilight. The tenebrous…

Pause, Boston, to remember who and whose you are. How, why and for what purpose did your forebears arrive here in 1630, and in the years thereafter? Why did Jonathan Winthrop drift and write out in the Boston harbor that year? To deport immigrants? To erase religious freedom? To wall off and wall up borders? Hardly. Their original hope, so often expressed only in the breach in years to come, was the very opposite. Not to deport immigrants—they were themselves immigrants, as were your people. You Lutherans in Wisconsin and Iowa. You French Canadians in New Hampshire and Maine. You Irish and Italians in Albany and Buffalo. You Scots and English in North Carolina and Florida. Not to deport immigrants—they were themselves immigrants, as were your people. Not to deny religious liberty, but to find it and live it, in a new land, a New World, where your creed could be yours indeed. Not to fortify borders, but to expand them, and expand them they did, so that the original dream would be city set on a hill, a last best hope, like the moon, a lamp of the poor. We walk along a precipice, a philosophical cliff, a tenebrous edge.

May this memory help us.

Luke

Remember Luke.

Though no one says so, and to my knowledge no one has yet so written, Luke 15 may be the most Gnostic of chapters in the New Testament. As the Gnostics taught, we are trapped in a far country, a long way from our true home, and moved from light to darkness, from found to lost. As the Gnostics taught, we are meant to get home, to get back home, to get back out from under this earthly, existence, and back to higher ground, to heaven, to the heaven beyond heaven, to the land of light, like a sheep or coin being found and returned.

It is jarring, I give you that, to admit that this most traditional and most popular and most orthodox of parables may well have grown up outside the barn, outside the fences of mainstream Christianity: ‘I need to get back home. Back to the land of light. Back to the pleroma. Back to the God beyond God. Find me!’ No ‘Christ died for our sins’, here. No ‘lamb of God’, here. No settled orthodox Christology here. No cross, no gory glory, no Gethsemane, no passion of the Christ, here. It all comes down to the safety of being found, and included again in the great light of Light.

The Gospel challenges us to come out from hiding. Our Sheep parable is also found in Matthew 18: 12-4. Luke moves the story from an if to a when and from strayed to lost, and from a functional rescue to a joyful recovery—communal rejoicing!

Just how far is Luke from Jeremiah? Marcion thought so far that the two preached different divinities, and, listening today, you can sense a bit of why that was—one God of anger, wrath, judgement, justice, and fear, one God of love, mercy, embrace, acceptance, and grace; one God of creation, one of redemption; one of the Old and one of the New Testament. We have Marcion to thank, by the way, for our Bible. He proposed the first one, around 150ad, made up of Luke (like today) and the letters of Paul. But the church, rightly, added the Hebrew Scripture, other Gospels and other Letters and other books. The church spoke of God as both Creator and Redeemer, and so do we. Moreover, if you listen carefully to Luke, you hear of the darkness there too.

We race in hearing to the joy of discovery. But anyone who has lost or been lost knows otherwise. The fright of despair that loss will be permanent. The darkness of dismay that what is hunted is not immediately found. The terror, the tenebrous terror, at what that loss of sheep or coin, of person or value, will ultimately mean. There is more Luke in Jeremiah than you think, and there is more Jeremiah in Luke than you think.

The fall of freshman year can include a sense of loss, and of being lost. There is more loneliness in college than we usually calculate. So the daily processes, now underway right here, Lukan they are in spirit and ethos, are so crucial: to find and help others find and be found; over time to connect and be connected. Our chaplains Friday offered a table of small pots to paint and flowers to plant, small natural green room decorations, and a gathering for conversation and friendship along the way. Luke here and in general reminds us that evangelism ever trumps pastoral care, that outreach ever trumps contemplation, that the minister is present for those who are not yet present.

May his memory help us.

Nine-eleven

Along with Jeremiah, America, and Luke we today remember Nine-eleven, as we did so here in 2006 and 2011. We print again in your bulletin the names of those Boston University alumni who were lost 15 years ago. In a moment we pause in prayer and quiet to honor them, with an abiding sense of hope.

Rightly to honor those lost and those loved, and fitly to meet this moment, we shall need briefly to look out toward the far side of trouble. There is, we hope, a far side to trouble. We may watch from the near side, but there is a far side to trouble as well. That is our ancient and future hope. Dewey spoke of a common faith. Thurman preached about a common ground. Today we recall a common hope.

This is the hope of peace. We long for the far side of trouble, for a global community of steady interaction, an international fellowship of accommodation, a world together dedicated to softening the inevitable collisions of life. This is the hope of peace.

Without putting too fine a point upon it, this hope is the hallmark of the pulpit in which we stand, and the place before which we stand. If nowhere else, here on this plaza, and here before this nave, we may lift our prayer of hope. There is a story here, of peace.

Methodists like Daniel Marsh, a wide and diffuse denomination, committed to a handshake and a song, and that shared ‘creed’ of ‘that which has been believed, always, everywhere, and by everyone (so, John Wesley), have honored a common hope of peace.

Mahatmas Gandhi, walking and singing ‘Lead Kindly Light’, embodied this common hope. Ghandi wrote: “I am part and parcel of the whole, and cannot find God apart from the rest of humanity”. A common hope of peace. Ghandi inspired and taught the earlier Dean of Marsh Chapel, Howard Thurman.

Howard Thurman, hands raised in silence, later wrote: “The events of my days strike a full balance of what seems both good and bad. Whatever may be the tensions and the stresses of a particular day, there is always lurking close at hand the trailing beauty of forgotten joy or unremembered peace.” A common hope of peace.

Thurman taught King, whose stentorian voice fills our memory and whose sculpture adorns our village green. King wrote: “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality”. A common hope of peace. Martin Luther King inspired generations of ministers, including the current Dean of this Chapel.

He (Robert Allan Hill) wrote and said (9/16/01, 9/11/06, 9/11/1, 9/11/16):

Have faith, people of faith.

Terror may topple the World Trade Center, but no terror can topple the World Truth Center, Jesus the Christ.

The World Trade Center, hub of global economies may fall, the economy of grace still stands in the World Truth Center, Jesus the Christ.

The World Trade Center, communications nexus for many may fall, but the communication of the gospel stands, the World Truth Center, Jesus Christ.

The World Trade Center, legal library for the country may fall, but grace and truth which stand, through the World Truth Center, Jesus the Christ.

The World Trade Center, symbol of national pride may fall, but divine humility stands, through the World Truth Center, Jesus the Christ.

The World Trade Center, material bulwark against loss may fall, but the possibility in your life of developing a spiritual discipline against resentment (Niehbuhr) still stands, through the World Truth Center, Jesus the Christ.

– The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 09.11.2016 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
September 4

On Beginning a Conversation

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 14:25-33

*On Beginning a Conversation:

A Psalm, 100

*On Beginning a Conversation:

A Prayer

Gracious God, Holy and Just, Whose Mercy is over all thy works

We invoke thy blessing today as we embark on this new journey

Guide us as we sail out for points unknown, ports unseen, and horizons unexplored

Be our North Star, our compass, sextant

Keep a clean wind blowing through our lives to make us happy and humble

Help us to seek shelter when the gusts of loneliness and failure threaten to capsize

Bless and help us to be a blessing to those commissioned to sail this ship, to the set our course, and to the lead the way

And a special intercession today for all sailors and crew on the good ship 2019

For those on the bridge—wisdom

For those learning the ropes—patience

For those working the in the rigging—a light heart

For those who bid farewell at the gangplank, our parents and sponsors—thanksgiving,

thanksgiving for the birthpangs that brought life, the hands that prepared us to sail, the hearts that forgave and conditioned and seasoned us, for the tear filled eyes and proud hearts that wave to us as the ship leaves the harbor, our mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, and our communities of meaning, belonging and empowerment—thanksgiving, thanksgiving.

O Thou who stills waters and calms seas, grant us fair winds, bright skies and an adventurous voyage

Amen

*On Beginning a Conversation:

Questions at the border (4): What is your name? Where are you from? Where are you headed? Do you have anything to declare?

*On Beginning a Conversation: Read

Here is a matriculation account. Vernon Jordan went to Depauw, a small Methodist school in Indiana, lead by various BU graduates. His dad, mom, and younger siblings drove him up and dropped him off their in Greencastle, “up south”, Martin King might have said, from their home in Lousiana. Weeping, his father said, “Vernon, we are not coming back until four years from now. You are here where your future opens. At graduation we will be here, sitting in the front row. This is your time. I have one word of advice. Read. When others are playing, you read. When others are sleeping, you read. When others are drinking, you read. When others are partying, you read. When others are wasting precious time and encouraging you to do the same, you read.” He did. Read, that is. Last week, on Martha’s Vineyard, Mr. Jordan celebrated his 80th birthday, in the company of Presidents Clinton and Obama.

Speaking of Presidents, Boston University’s third President, Lemuel Merlin, left Boston for Greencastle Indiana, to become the President of Depauw, nearly 100 years ago. All of our Presidents—Warren, Huntington, Merlin, Marsh, Chase, Christ-Janer, Silber, Westling, Chobanian, and Brown—would salute this Augustinian slogan, ‘take and read’.

For like our gospel lesson today, they and this University, have been interested in what makes a person human, in what makes a human be human, in what lies not outside, but inside, not in measurement but in meaning, not in the visible but in the soulful, not in making a living, only, but in making a life, fully.

*On Beginning a Conversation: Gaining Soul

Your challenge in these fours years is not only to earn a BA. Your challenge is to do so without losing your soul. Your challenge is to do so gaining your soul, tending to the inside, walking in the light, becoming your own best self, finding the place where your heart, ‘the inside’ comes alive, uniting the pair so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety, and uniting vocation with avocation, ‘as two eyes make one in sight’. Frost:

Yield who will to their separation

My object in living is to unite

My vocation with my avocation

As my two eyes make one in sight

Only where love and need are one

And the work is play for mortal stakes

Is the deed ever really done

For heaven and the future’s sakes.

Each Synoptic passage is like a choral piece, including four voices. There is the Soprano voice of Jesus of Nazareth, embedded somewhere in the full harmonic mix. In Mark 7, Jesus conflicts with the Pharisaic attention to cleanliness. There is the alto voice of the primitive church, arguably always the most important of the four voices, that which carries the forming of the passage in the needs of the community. Here the community is reminded about the priority of the ‘inside’. The tenor line is that of the evangelist. Mark here, marking his own appearance in the record. The baritone is borne by later interpretation, beginning soon with Irenaeus, Against Heresies: “What doctor, when wishing to cure a sick man, would act in accordance with the desires of the patient, and not in accordance with the requirements of medicine?” (in Richardson, ECF, 377) (If our church music carries only one line, we may be tempted to interpret our Scripture with only one voice, and miss the SATB harmonies therein, to our detriment.)

*On Beginning a Conversation: Mortality

“Is it dead, Papa?” I was six and could not bring myself to look at it.

“Yes”, I heard him say in a sad and distant way.

“Why did it die?”

“Everything that lives must die”.

“Everything?”

“Yes”.

“You, too, Papa? And Mama?”

“Yes”.

“And me?
“Yes.”, he said. But then he added in Yiddish, “But may it be only after you live a long and happy life, my Asher.”

I couldn’t grasp it. I forced myself to look at the bird. Everything alive would one day be as still as that bird?

“Why”, I asked.

“That’s the way the Ribbono Shel Olom mad this world, Asher.”

“Why?”

“So life would be precious, Asher. Something that is yours forever is never precious.”

“Recently I’ve been thinking about the difference between the resume virtues and the eulogy virtues. The resume virtues are the ones you list on your resume, the skills that you bring to the job market and that contribute to external success. The eulogy virtues are deeper. They’re the virtues that get talked about at your funeral, the ones that exist at the core of your being—whether you are kind, brave, honest, or faithful; what kind of relationships you formed (p. xi).”

“People with serious illness have priorities besides simply prolonging their lives…avoiding suffering, strengthening relationships with family and friends, being mentally aware, not being a burden on others, and achieving a sense that their life is complete…our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet those needs” (p. 155)

*On Beginning a Conversation: Scripture

I was saying these things and weeping in the most bitter contrition of my heart, when suddenly I heard the voice of a boy or a girl I know not which–coming from the neighboring house, chanting over and over again, “Pick it up, read it; pick it up, read it.” [”tolle lege, tolle lege”] Immediately I ceased weeping and began most earnestly to think whether it was usual for children in some kind of game to sing such a song, but I could not remember ever having heard the like. So, damming the torrent of my tears, I got to my feet, for I could not but think that this was a divine command to open the Bible and read the first passage I should light upon. For I had heard how Anthony, accidentally coming into church while the gospel was being read, received the admonition as if what was read had been addressed to him: “Go and sell what you have and give it to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven; and come and follow me.” By such an oracle he was forthwith converted to thee.

So I quickly returned to the bench where Alypius was sitting, for there I had put down the apostle’s book when I had left there. I snatched it up, opened it, and in silence read the paragraph on which my eyes first fell: “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof.” I wanted to read no further, nor did I need to. For instantly, as the sentence ended, there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty and all the gloom of doubt vanished away.

*On Beginning A Conversation: Spirit

Class of 2020: 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 some of us. The airplane will taxy down the runway, the gas tank will be filled, and we will be off, absent, or present in thought and care but not in flesh and bone. We will need to give you over, and to give over your commitment to, your delight in, and your wonder at each other, 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 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. A marriage needs 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 (you both have great natural gifts and capacities for friendship, as is evident today)—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, your families, loved ones, and friends, now send you, married, from this day forward. 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.’

*On Beginning a Conversation: 2 Creeds

Coda

Boston University, proud with mission sure

Keeping the light of knowledge high, long to endure

Treasuring the best of all that’s old, searching out the new

Our Alma Mater Evermore, Hail BU!

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in Matriculation, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 09.4.2016 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
August 28

A Special Guest

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 14:1, 7-13

We have a special guest with us today. He has made his way into our midst, through a long and arduous journey. Our guest over a great expanse, has come our way. Because his presence has come at significant expense in time, labor and effort, and because his presence is precious to us, in ways both known and unknown, both speak-able and unspeakable, we pause to honor him.

Many thousands of miles separate us from his homeland. In fact to travel here, he travels over land and sea, over continent and sub-continent, over mountain and valley and hill and molehill. The very fact alone that we have him here is cause for delight, wonder, celebration, reverence, awe and joy. Many hundreds of years separate us from his family of origin, from the time and times of his time. To travel here he has to engage in a sort of time travel, like that involved in every day, in every hour, in every moment, in every memory and in every hope. Here is the future: ah, it has slipped into the present. Here is the present: ah, it has slipped into the past. Here is the past: ah, it has slipped into memory. Here is memory: ah, it has been lost, or reborn in hope.

Peer into his eyes for a moment, eyes aware of a numinous divine humility. Our visitor awaits your recognition.

For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.

Can one acquire humility without enduring humiliation? It is a serious question. Discomfort, we ignore. Pain, we obey.

Our visitor emerges from the strange world of the Bible. In these weeks, in case we might have tried to avoid the mysterium tremendum, in worship, we have had the lava flow of Hebrews to terrify us, the ringing prophetic voice like no other in Jeremiah to rivet us, the heart wringing prayer of David in the Psalms to stop us in our tracks. Our visitor emerges from this kind of strange world—Hebrews, Jeremiah, Psalms—the strange world of the Bible. Strange. The Bible is very different, up to and including its most distinctive different difference, the Gospel of John.

Yes, wee have a special guest with us today. He has made his way into our midst, through a long and arduous journey. Because his presence has come at significant expense in time, labor and effort, and because his presence is precious to us, in ways both known and unknown, both speak-able and unspeakable, we pause to honor him.

Our guest began life as a story told perhaps among shepherds and wanderers. His is the kind of story beloved of the poor, the maimed, the halt, and the lame. His is the kind of story beloved by you, at 3am, with troubles. His is the kind of story audible to the mortal, the sick, those in need, and those beyond help in need. Our guest brings a Sunday story. Six days shalt thou avoid your impending death and your ongoing fragility and your endless fault lines, but the seventh shall be a Sabbath unto the Lord.

Allow me to present him to you, if you will. You may greet him with a Methodist handshake. He already knows you, as the Bible knows us where and when we know ourselves not, as God knows us, though we were to know ourselves not at all—what sweet truth! That is, you need no introduction to you. He knows you. But allow me to present him to you, perhaps for the first time, but more likely for the first time in a long time. Isn’t it happy to have such a guest today?

In his younger days, he was a story told along the highways and byways of life. It may be that he was a Palestinian. The fifty by one hundred and fifty mile rectangle of ancient Judea was probably his home in his growing up days, though as for that, we cannot be entirely sure. As a story goes, he is an old one, from the time of his youth until today. Remember we piped to you but you did not dance, we wailed to you but you did not weep? That account earlier in the gospel of children playing games in the marketplace, one group wanting to play the game called ‘weddings’ the other wanting to play the game called ‘funerals’? Pipes? Wails? Of course life is much more than weddings and funerals, isn’t it? Or is it? Our guest was in the mix of these sorts of stories and games and reposts and conversations and imaginative utterances.

As a Palestinian, spoken in Aramaic, our guest found his way to Jesus, or to someone close to Jesus, or to Luke, or to someone close to Luke (by then translated if that is the case, into simple—koine—Greek). You see he has quite a pedigree (Lk 11:43, 20:46). What an honor for us to have him here. (Note: if I were presenting to you a human guest who is 2000 years old, who has traveled from the ancient Middle East to us in our modern experience of the ongoing middleeastification of American life, who has consorted with Jesus and Luke and all, who has been a compinche, compadre, companion to Teresa of Avila and Julian of Norwich and Georgia Harkness and Mother Teresa and Mother Olga and your Momma and mine, who has been spoken and spoken of since before Polycarp was a pup—would you not be astounded?) We venerate the venerable, in worship: ringing out for us are sturdy words, millennia old.

Greet him please. Our guest is our Gospel reading, an ancient manuscript. We rightly stand, at his reading in the service, to honor him. In worship, he stands among us, VERBUM DEI, the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, St Luke, Chapter 14, vss. 7-11, though before his life in ministry he was simply an ordinary businessman, walking the dusty trails of Bethlehem and Nazareth and Capernaum and Jerusalem. He is the everlasting account of a wedding banquet, which, like all social moments, is one full of both treasure and treachery, a feast to which you—YOU!!!—have been invited.

Peer into his eyes for a moment. Our visitor awaits your recognition.

For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.

Can one acquire humility without enduring humiliation? It is a serious question. Discomfort, we ignore. Pain, we obey. The preaching of the gospel is the utterance of the word of faith in the hope, and in the trust, that such a word may become, by God’s grace, an intervening word, a saving word, a word that enters and changes the course of life. Can humility so conveyed and so acquired protect us from humiliation, learning the hard way, learning from experience?

You may be curious about our guest’s features, temperament, personality, and resume. His extended family includes a hero from Proverbs: Claim not honor in the presence of the King, Nor stand in the place of great men; it is better for you to be told, ‘Come up hither’, than to be humbled before a noble (25:6). The question of whether you are seated ‘below the salt’ or not abides. His face is present also in Luke 18: 14 (everyone who…) and Matthew 23: 12 (everyone who…) and James 4: 6 (God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble). He has a second cousin or two in Luke’ ‘sermon on the plain’ (Lk. 6). His is a familiar face, one you recognize even though you cannot place it immediately: Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled and he who humbles himself will be exalted. Our guest has many colleagues in traditional Jewish wisdom literature, and shares its characteristics of artistic language, hyperbole, paradox, metaphor, and (here) similitude. Our guest is not really a parable, though Luke kindly affirms him so. He is a simple tale, with a proverbially twist. The story he tells warns about humility, in the mode of a wedding feast. The twist, at the end, announces a turning in the world, from high to low and low to high. And here, he shows his true colors. He is an introduction to the Christ of God. Luke 14: 7 intimates, whispers, a reverence for the divine humility, the hiddenness, silence, absence of God.

Luke has included, here, a wisdom saying fit to the voice of Jesus. To honor others, to count others in higher esteem, to give credit where credit is due, to develop a capacity for wonder and vulnerability and self-mockery, to take ourselves lightly that we may fly like the angels, to acquire a capacity for humility—such a process of development in life, here, in this wisdom saying, fit to the voice of Jesus, is offered us as a way of life, of health, of salvation, of peace.

Peer into his eyes for a moment. Our visitor awaits your recognition.

For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.

Can one acquire humility without enduring humiliation? (repeat) It is a serious question. Discomfort, we ignore. Pain, we obey.

For us, as part of a national culture now careening toward and into an apotheosis of hubris, the similitude of Luke 14 hits home. The way of the long future is along the path of humility. But we get tired of humility, because it is a tiring and tiresome talent to hone. We get tired, and if we get scared when we get tired, if a portion of fear is laden into a potion, poisonous potion, of pride, and if that fear potion is potent enough to carry us, we forget who we are. We forget Emma Lazarus and prefer demagoguery. We forget Lincoln and support nativism. We forget King and accept narcissism. We forget Jesus the crucified and cleave to the cry of triumphalism, out of fear and out of exhaustion and out of amnesia. We forget the advice of the author of Hebrews: Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured. We turn aside from the prophetic voice of Jeremiah, Has a nation changed its gods, even though they are no gods? But my people have changed their glory for something that does not profit. Can we acquire a modicum of humility, that measure we will minimally need as a people, without enduring humiliation? Can we learn without learning the hard way? Can we see the pending consequences through the lenses of humility, without needing, in order to learn, a full experience of humiliation? Or, as so often in history, will we need to drink the bitter cup of full cultural and national humiliation, in order for humility to return? I would like to be optimistic… Sometimes people just have to learn the hard way. To learn what? Pride goeth before a fall.

For us as individuals, who have known more than our share, as our guest reminds us, more than our share of elbowing our way to the head of the table, the similitude of Luke 14 hits home. Narrow is the gate and straight is the way that leads to life, and few there be who go therein. We all, one way or another, get born on third base and think we hit a triple. We all see a turtle on top of a fence post and think he got there by climbing. We all preach our version of the sermon, Humility and How I Achieved It. We all have one set of arithmetic for our own deeds and misdeeds and another for others, one abacus for our own intentions and another for those of others. We all can stand a little and more than a little house cleaning when it comes to the rooms marked off by what we think we did when we didn’t and what we think we didn’t when we did. There is, that is, still a place in the pilgrim faithful heart, for the quiet Yankee voice of self-criticism. There is still a value in the teacher who began every class bowing to the students, not knowing what range of genius might already be present. H R Niebuhr in the evening hunted up a student whom he had chastised in the morning, asking forgiveness. Can we learn without learning the hard way? Can we see the pending consequences through the lenses of humility, without needing, in order to learn, a full experience of humiliation? Or, as so often in history, will we need to drink the bitter cup of full personal humiliation, in order for humility to return? I would like to be optimistic… Sometimes people just have to learn the hard way. To learn what? Pride goeth before a fall.

Mahatma Ghandi, whose favorite Christian hymn we have just sung, in sandals and Sari, walked four miles a day, among all his people. He knew the English court, the banks of the Thames, the style and rhythms of British life, but went home. Ghandi reminded us that for the hungry God will present, if at all, in bread. To listen to the hurt in others, to pause before the hidden courage of others, to accept the grace to celebrate the good in others, to spot the one thing needful in the need of others—herein, behold, a humility, a divine humility—today’s special guest. Shakespeare: There's a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will. (He) ‘who came not to be served but to serve’…who today occupies the supreme place in history…to whom has been given the name that is above every name’. (So E F Tittle, Commentary on Luke 155).

Lead kindly light amid the encircling gloom

Lead Thou me on

The night is dark and I am far from home

Lead Thou me on

Keep Thou my feet, I do not ask to see

The distant scene, one step enough for me

So long thy power hath blessed me, sure it still

Will lead me on

O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent till

The night is gone

And with the morn, those angel faces smile

Which I have loved long since, and lost a while

Sursum Corda: Lift up your hearts! Great this Lord’s Day a Special Guest, Luke 14: 7, and shake his hand: For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 08.28.2016 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
August 21

The Lukan Horizon

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 14:1, 7-14

Come summer in the north, we are closer in some ways to nature, than we are otherwise. You may be listening this morning, toes in the surf or sand, or high up a mountain trail, or along a lakeshore, or in the back lawn, coffee in hand. We need the summer to survive the winter. You are wise to embrace it.

In the evening hour, with a tenebrous cool after a long, hot day, you may have, this summer, looked out on a horizon, blue and pink and moving. The day has a beginning at sunrise, and an end at sunset. To know the day you need to know both, as to know a person you need some information regarding whence and more regarding wither. To know people, and to know a people, the far horizon, tenebrous at dusk, is keenly, crucially meaningful. Quo vadis? Where are you headed? Dime a donde andas, y te dire quien eres.

A question for those to be married: where will you be ten years from today? A question for those to matriculate: to what end is your education? A question for those entering retirement: are there now different shores on which to land? A question for those newly diagnosed, suddenly alone, shorn of routine, anxious about the unseen: what is the ‘telos’, the point, the soul forming meaning of your disappointment, dislocation, or departure? Our gospel affirms lasting meaning in life.

In particular, the Gospel of Luke paints a compassionate horizon. The third gospel has a passion for compassion. In a broad compassion Luke locates our ultimate destination.

The National Preacher Series

Today concludes the tenth year of our annual Marsh Chapel Summer National Preacher Series. Our intention has been to bring the best preachers—the best whether or not the best known—to address, either in some indirect or in some more linear fashion, a shared theme. Listen again, on the website to some of our past sermons. Consider ‘the Gifts of Summer’ in 2007, including the missionary witness of Mark and Lynn Baker. Hear again (now) Bishop Mike McKee on the Call to Ministry in 2008. Pick any of the ten sermons on Darwin and Faith from 2009, say that of Wesley Wildman. Receive the Gospel from (now) Bishop Ken Carter, on the theme of Grace in 2010. Hear Rev. Dr. Robin Olson on student ministry in 2011, or enjoy again the venerable voice of our saintly (now)deceased friend and neighbor, Professor Peter Gomes, earlier that year. Learn about New Testament Apocalyptic, say with Dr. David Jacobsen, in 2012. Enjoy the Peter Falk like voice of Dean Snyder, so wise and true, on Hope in the Church, 2013. Reckon with Professor Jonathan Walton, summer 2014, on Emerging Adulthood. Or reflect again on the Beloved Community, from last summer 2015, with the Rev. Dr. Regina Walton. Our is a University Pulpit, and with your aid, support and engagement we shall continue to unite the pair so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety.

The Summer Series 2016

Your 2016 series made some news earlier this summer. Our local reporter, Mr. Richard Barlow of BU Today wrote about the 2016 series:

The series kicks off Sunday, July 3, with the first of seven sermons on Luke’s Gospel and its central theme of compassion. The Lukan Horizon, as the series is named, seeks “to remember the compassion—the passion for compassion—in the person of Jesus the Christ,” says…dean of Marsh Chapel. The Gospel stresses humanitarianism and forgiveness; it’s the only one of the four Gospels with the stories of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, and it is full of sympathetic portrayals of women.

This message… contrasts with the “less than appealing and frankly appalling conditions of some parts of our culture that have been revealed in some ranges of (our recent experience).”

The compassion motif also echoes several recent Commencement addresses, Hill says, including the Baccalaureate talk this spring by Peace Corps director Carrie Hessler-Radelet (CAS’79, Hon.’16), who called on BU graduates to “embrace the cause of humanity with optimism and enthusiasm.” (BU Today, June 2016). (We could quickly add the magnificent speech given this spring at the Boston University Humphrey Scholars graduation program May 9, 2016 by Hubert Humphrey’s niece, Dr. Ann Howard Tristani, who quoted her uncle’s famous 1948 spell binding Philadelphia aspeech: ‘There will be no hedging, no watering down, of the instruments and the principles of the civil rights program. My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say we are 172 years late…To those who say this bill is an infringement on state’s rights, I say the time has arrived in America. The time has arrived for the Democratic party to get out of the shadow states rights and walk forthrightly intot he bright sunshine of human rights.’ It is both stunning and tragic to recognize how much of what he addressed then is still with us this great, but troubled land, in today’s issues of urban violence and its state level address, in affordable health care usage (or not) state by state, in the lasting not just lingering formative power of slavery in the making of American Capitalism, in the willingness or lack thereof of those who have much, to provide for others who have little, in the use of a word like ‘liberty’ to mean its opposite, its very denial to tens of millions of poor children.

Luke 13: Gospel and Tradition

Luke was written nearly a generation later than Mark, by most estimates, Mark in or near 70, Luke in or near 90 of the common era (in fact, possible much later). Traditionally ascribed to Luke the physician, its author and that of its sequel, the Acts of the Apostles, is finally unknown to us. We know him only through the writing itself.

What do we find?

Luke is made up of a mixture of ingredients. First, Luke uses most of Mark. An example is the memory of our passage today, Luke 13. Like Matthew, Luke knew and repeated most of the earlier gospel of Mark. But he made changes along the way, or construed the gospel according to his own desires and emphases. This is hopeful for us, in that it is an encouragement for us to take the gospel in hand, and interpret it according to our time, location, understanding, and need. In fact, we are summoned and ordered to do so, and not free not to do so. Second, Luke uses a collection of teachings, called Q, as does Matthew. An example is our Lord’s Prayer, later in the service. Luke’s version is slightly different from that in Matthew, as is his version of the beatitudes and other teachings, found in the ‘sermon on the plain’, rather than the ‘sermon on the mount’. Third, Luke makes ample use of material that is all his own, not found in Mark or elsewhere. The long chapters from Luke 8 or so through Luke 18 or so, where we find ourselves this morning, are all his. Examples include some of your favorite parables, like the Good Samaritan, and like the lost sheep, and like the Prodigal Son, and like the Dishonest Steward. We have Luke to thank for the remembrance of these great stories. Luke brings us a unique mixture of materials, and makes his own particular use of them.

What does Luke say?

This will take us the rest of the fall and more to more fully unravel. We shall do so, on step at a time, one Sunday at a time, one parable, teaching, exhortation, miracle, or, as today, one traditional episode at a time. Still, there are some outstanding features of the Lukan horizon, which we may simply name as we set forth. First, Luke displays a commitment to and interest in history, and orderly history at that. Both Luke and Acts are cast in a distinctive historical mode. Second, Luke employs and deploys his own theology, or theological perspective, including this emphasis upon history and the divine purpose, or better said, divine meaning, in history—on this more in a moment. Third, Luke highlights the humanity and compassion of Jesus in a remarkable way. The Christ of St. Luke is the Christ of magnificent compassion, embodied in the humility of a birth among shepherds. The poor, women, the stranger, the injured, those in dire need all stand out in Luke, as the recipients and subjects of Jesus’ love, mercy, grace and compassion. Fourth, Luke carries an abiding interest in the church. Ephesians says that ‘through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the principles and powers’. That catches the spirit of the author or the third gospel and of the Acts to follow. It is this feature of Luke, the Lukan Horizon, the Lukan passion for compassion, upon which our preaching has centered this summer. So we are taught: know history, think for yourself, love the church, have compassion.

Compassion in interreligious dialogue framed and formed the sermon by Br. Lawrence Whitney on July 3: ‘ritual restrains our tendency toward indifference and causes us to recognize one another’. Compassion for those at the margins of society, including those who have suffered in this year’s tragic killings of various sorts and in various places, inspired the sermon of Chaplain Jessica Chicka on July 10: ‘the Samaritan does not allow himself to be constricted by rules or fear’. Compassion for those searching for meaning, and a direct challenge to find such in spiritual inwardness, self-discipline, and struggle gave the heart to Dean Lawrence Carter’s July 17 address. Compassion for those of ‘another flock’ gave wings to his July 24 acclamation—the witness of Ghandi, the voice of King, the advice of Thurman, the wisdom of Buddhism, the mothering of Hinduism and the stark reminder: it is not Christian belief but its realization that finally matters. Not belief but realization! Compassion and concern for our shared home, our natural habitat—a worthy and frequent theme in this pulpit—empowered Dr. Davies’ homily on July 31: dominion is not domination, both optimists and pessimists can at least be meliorists, our children’s children will ask questions of or to us, about how we have cared for our environment. Compassion of a substantial, material, physical, even financial kind—‘forgive us our debts’ carried the burden of the Communion Homily on August 7. And last Sunday, beginning and ending with Tutu, probing the power of relational rather than authoritarian power, finding examples in hospitality near and far, the Rev. Susan Shafer, in the heat of the day, interpreted a tough passage from Luke and memorable line from our Vice President: ‘the world needs from us not the example of our power, but the power of our example’. It happens, perhaps providentially, but certainly in a timely way, that our lectionary readings this year hail from Luke. Toward what horizon are we hiking? Onto what shore do we hope to land? By what compass and map, what star, what conscience call, what soulful spirit shall we be guided? ‘Quo vadis?’ Whither? Where are you headed? Is yours, at twilight, a compassionate horizon?

Today’s Gospel, it happens, presents this theme under the cloud of smoke and pillar of fire of a familiar, pan Gospel, episode, Jesus’ compassionate willingness to heal on the Sabbath, to judge the Sabbath by its human or humanizing effect, to forever trump tradition with gospel, and to make religion necessarily subject to judgment in the categories of pride, sloth, falsehood, superstition, idolatry and hypocrisy. Is religion a good thing? It can be. Is the weather a good thing? It can be. It depends.

In our passage from St. Luke chapter 13, the Gospel writer has sharply implanted his own emphasis, on compassion. The similar Sabbath passages are in Mark 2, Matthew 12, and John 5. Luke explicitly heightens Jesus’ authority by placing him in the synagogue, in the synagogue teaching, and in the synagogue teaching on the Sabbath. Luke changes the gender of the afflicted person, from male to female. Luke quantifies the hurt, to 18 years of suffering. Luke accentuates the verbal condemnation, ‘hypocrites’. Luke connects the healed one to Abraham, and amplifies the size of Jesus’ legal victory, shaming adversaries and causing rejoicing by all. Clearly, this is a story that has developed, that has lived a while, that has been marinating in the sauce of the church’s own growth, advance, and expanse. Sadly, there is here the hint, the glimpse, the clear though far-off hymn, that hails---triumphalism. Not Jesus the minority view rabbi, arguing uphill against a majoritarian Torah tribe, but rather Jesus the conqueror, the great debater, the winner of arguments about Torah. We might do well to re-hear and rehearse Elie Wiesel’s lecture on this from 5 years ago.

The Far Horizon

One final note about Luke today. The gospel itself, and its sibling book the Acts of the Apostles, written also by Luke, make heavy use of a short, Greek verb. The three letters, delta-epsilon-iota—not a fraternity or sorority as far as I know—mean simply ‘it is necessary, it is needful, it was necessary, it was needful’. For St. Luke there is a necessity at work in the church’s expanding involvement within the culture around, and hence its need for story as legend, for leadership in unity from Peter to Paul, for organizational forms, bedrock heroes, and ways of thinking about others, and others within others. Yet Luke’s spirit is one of compassion. His theology is determinist to some degree. He sees purpose, necessity, even fate if you will, behind most trees, and behind many bushes. You may not see things that way, as many in late modernity do not. In interpretation, you will then perhaps need to hear Luke’s song of necessity transposed into the key of meaning. Purpose in the sense of meaning, not in the sense of destiny. Not so much ‘God has a purpose for your life’ as ‘God has life for your purposes’.

At Marsh Chapel we have the privilege to solemnize weddings on a regular basis, especially come summer. You need summer to survive winter, here in the north. There is grace in every wedding. There is unspoken, volcanic power in the hearing and speaking of the vows in every wedding. There is real change, which is real hard, heralded in every wedding. A privilege—what a privilege—to be present at the creation, nay the new creation, of such a moment. In a play otherwise precious and beautiful, Thornton Wilder had his dour New England minister say, as he prepared to marry Emily and George, speaking of his wedding experience, ‘Once in a thousand times it is interesting.’ That is the very opposite of my experience. Over 40 years at 20-25 weddings a year on average, I have not reached, but may be closing in on his number. Every one in the thousand was not just interesting but unutterably so. A while ago we married one couple, who were standouts in spirit and soul. Their four parents rose to greet them after the vows. Her parents, the mother from Japan and the father from England. His, the mother from India and the father from Italy. Buddhist, Methodist, Hindu, Catholic. Sometimes it feels like the world is coming apart at the seams. And then you go to a wedding, and, as every other time in a thousand, it is not only interesting, but unutterably so. This world can work. It may take a little compassion. But it can work.

Which brings us back to the very beginning. Your purposes. Your horizon. Your outlook, perspective, your end point and its hope. The offer of the Third Gospel, the horizon in Luke, is the possibility of a life of faith, girded in compassion. Will such a life be ours?

My life flows on in endless song,
above earth's lamentation.
I hear the clear, though far off hymn
that hails a new creation.

No storm can shake my inmost calm
while to that Rock I'm clinging.
Since love is Lord of heaven and earth,
how can I keep from singing?

Through all the tumult and the strife,
I hear that music ringing.
It finds an echo in my soul.
How can I keep from singing?

More: Will you consider—it is offered with love and care—perhaps reconsider, maybe accept an invitation to lead a faithful life? To practice—nay, realize—the Christian faith? To walk steadily toward a horizon of compassion--a Lukan Horizon?

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 08.21.2016 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
August 7

Heart’s Treasure

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 12:32-40

Treasure

Last Sunday we worshipped in a Baptist Church, the Mother Church of Colgate University, in Hamilton, NY. The pews, windows, edifice, organ, and structures have not overly changed in fifty years. The kindness, grace, joy, reverence, humility, and care of the congregation roundly resemble those from decades ago. It is a rare chance, a gift of some significant dimension, to be welcomed into a community of faith, come Sunday, particularly when such opportunities each year, given one’s vocation, are limited. The Baptists welcomed us, mere Methodists, as they have regularly in the summer in the past in the Spirit.

It should be noted that the welcome required the welcome of six children/grandchildren as well, who happily explored the pews, hummed the hymns, joined in the children’s moment and, with some sharp exceptions, impeded not the liturgy of the day. It takes courage to open your doors in a Baptist church, or any, come Sunday, not really knowing what sort of Methodist others might descend upon you, a baker’s dozen with their kids.

The children are immersed in summer, with its changed schedules, alternating child-care systems, and various other forms of mayhem. They are busy with 8 year-old things, and the things of childhood, wonderfully overheard in their jokes. You know these, but maybe you have forgotten. What time is it when an elephant sits on your fence? What is the biggest pencil in the world (or biggest boss or biggest ant)? Why is six afraid of seven? And endless ‘your momma’ jests. See me following worship if you have forgotten these. Those who care for children, such a noble and beautiful career and calling, deserve our salutes, particularly come summer. Thank you. Thank you Aunt Millie. Thank you Uncle Fred. Thank you in the day care. Thank you at home child care. Thank you Mom. Thank you Dad. Thank you Gramma. And thank you for those who agree to work at summer camp, especially church camp.

The bell tolled, as it does on the hour, every hour, in that small town. We sang familiar hymns—Crown Him, Seek Ye First, O Zion Haste. We heard the interpretation of the Scripture from a venerable pulpit known to Harry Emerson Fosdick, Adam Clayton Powell and Colgate students beginning in 1819. (Colgate that began with ’13 dollars, 13 men, and 13 prayers’.)

In the prayers for the day was included the Lord’s Prayer, as you would expect. Also, by tradition, the wording was slightly different therein to the venerable usage employed here at Marsh Chapel, and elsewhere. That is, we prayed forgiveness for debts, not trespasses. Forgive us our debts. And following worship, we returned home, as we say, the Baptists to their debts and the Methodists to their trespasses. (☺) Except that there is something truly good about hearing a familiar prayer in a different mode. These good American Baptists use a version of our shared prayer that emphasizes the substantial, material, physical nature of what is to be forgiven. Yes, it misses the larger, varied multiplicity of the more common translation—trespasses—it is more narrow, more hedgehog than fox, say—but, for all that makes a strong point. There is a treasure, a heart’s treasure, a treasured physicality in the grace of the gospel. When you have to throw yourself on the mercy of the court, it is a great gift to experience that mercy present to you in all its substantial, material, physical nature. Speaking of which: We are coming to the Lord’s Table, to bread and cup, to thanksgiving, presence and memory, after all. Forgive us our debts…

A Lukan Horizon on Treasure

Given the cultural prominence in America this year of the rhetoric of racial hatred, religious animosity, and rhetorical ugliness, the ‘gift’ to our time and culture from one particular candidate and now, sadly, too, his party of record which has disowned what can only be disowned, a grand, even an old party, we may be open to a reminder, a gentle one, about the heart’s treasure, about treasure in and from, from within the heart. Life is brief, rounded by a little sleep. What we say lasts longer than what we do. So, damage already done, it is a travesty and a tragedy to have a beloved culture arrested and assaulted this this year by the rhetoric of demagoguery, birtherism, demagoguery, America Firstism, demagoguery, misogyny, demagoguery, racism, demagoguery, xenophobia, demagoguery, bigotry. You perhaps remember that this candidate, given to vitriol, recalled demolishing his earlier adversary, saying, yes, that was great, I really got him, with one phrase, ‘low energy’, that phrase destroyed him, that was ‘a one day kill’. A one day kill. And then: words are beautiful things. My, oh my. And people seem to like it. One wonders what the children in New Hampshire and Ohio and elsewhere will hear, remember, and make of this, and how they will think of their parents and grandparents, regarding this, in years to come. ‘Grandpa, what did you say, what did you do, in 2016?’

The Gospel of Luke, a multi-layered Gospel of compassion, today takes us to a moment of preparation, and to a holy call, to a holy calling, to a holy experience, to a holy readiness, estando listo, a word for you today, to a quickened courage even in the face of dark death, cultural and existential. Luke has prepared us. You know how to live. Fear not. Sell and give. Hold onto what lasts. Foxes have holes but the Son of Man no place. A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho who fell among thieves. Give us this day our daily bread. Woe to you, if you neglect justice and the love of God. This night your soul is required of you. So we are not entirely surprised by today’s gospel. The way has been prepared.

Treasure is important to life. The heart’s treasure is the importance of life. Treasure has its place in life. The heart’s treasure is the point of life. Treasure makes a way for life. The heart’s treasure is the way of life. Eternity gracing time—here is the heart’s treasure.

Horizon and Shadow

Purses that do not grow old…treasure in the heavens that does not fail…so you also must be ready…

We are cleaning through, now, the papers and photographs in our mother’s home, since she has been moved to assisted care. Many of you have done the same. Which pictures do you save? Which documents? Which furniture?

When I was 13, my mother chastised me for something I had said to our neighbor, a woman of her own age. The infraction itself is blessedly forgotten, but not the cure. ‘You must go and apologize to her’, she said. I did so, reluctantly. But I did so, at her direction. ‘You must tell her that you are sorry’. I did so, not happily, but in person, up the porch, to the door, knocking and speaking. (Later she became quite a good family friend. In meeting the couple, my parents went to dinner in their home with others. The host was carving a turkey, having no success. To make light of the moment my mother said, ‘What we need is a surgeon.’ Silence followed all around followed by my father’s laughter and honest whisper: “He is a surgeon”. (☺) ) All the materials in our mother’s house, letters and books and yearbooks and newspaper clippings and cards and Christmas cards and photos and photo albums, all of it, and all of them, and we are still moving through them, are as nothing compared to that word—go, apologize. Forgive us our debt. There is a word that is substantial, material, physical.

The heart treasures forgiveness, either given or received, because pardon comes by grace alone. Like the gift of life, and like the promise of eternal life, forgiveness is the gift of God’s grace. This gift we receive again this morning in Holy Communion. Whether the forgiven is debt or trespass, the forgiveness is lasting treasure, treasure buried in a field, the imminent and immanent presence of God.

Your Treasure

Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. Sometimes the forgiven is substantial, material, physical. Even financial.

This summer, near and far, people are giving of their time, energy, talent and money to give children a week at summer camp.

And what a gift it is! To see a boy or girl learning to swim, learning the prone float for the first time; to see a girl or boy who has never held a fishing pole before, catch a fish or two or three; to see a boy or girl view the whole firmament at night for the first time; to see a group of young people across many divisions of background, race, gender, orientation, class, temperament and personality come to friendship; to hear prayers and songs and hymns and psalms lifted in young voices morning and evening—what a privilege, what a gift.

Our granddaughter spent her first week at camp, at a campground at which her great grandfather, her grandfather and her mother had worked long before her arrival. A place, you might say, for the discovery of the heart’s treasure. It is not a small thing for a nine year old to go away for a week, to sleep away at camp. It requires levels of trust, confidence, and assurance in multiple directions.

She went with a friend, whose family had only recently become involved in church. Her friends parents themselves had an experience at camp. It happened this way. The parents went to pay their bill. Like many, they had paid half the tuition, but had to complete their payment. So they stood in line in front of a desk, out on a lawn, looking on a beautiful long lake. In front them was a mother, alone. Her turn came. They watched as she went slowly to the desk, and stood, silent. The camp worker waited. The mother said nothing, but finally held out her hands, empty. She had paid the first half, hoping to have enough to pay the second, but, as happens, pay check to pay check, something happened. She couldn’t pay the bill. But she had brought her daughter, hoping. Hoping that her daughter could go to camp like others were going. Making the drive, taking the chance, hoping against hope, that there might be a way. Love has a hidden strength. Or, she might have reasoned, it is a church camp, even a Methodist camp. When you throw yourself on the mercy of the court, you just hope there is some mercy there. She just stood, hands out, and whispered, ‘I’m sorry’.

In a fast motion, the woman at the desk came forward, took her arm, saying, ‘This is no problem. Just come with me. Your daughter is going to camp this week. You come with me. What is your name? Where are your from? Do you have a home church? We will take care of this.”

I have a lover’s quarrel sometimes with my church. But then, sometimes, sometimes in the summer, sometimes in the simple things, sometimes there is a reminder of who we hope we are, who we think we are, who we have promised to become. Do you know God to be a pardoning God? Do you know God to be a pardoning God? Do you know God to be a pardoning God?

I know you can’t run an economy on these terms. I know people have to pay their bills. I know you can’t run a business or a school or a city, or even run a church if people don’t pay their pledge. You can’t keep a campground open very long if that is the way things go. I got it. I know. But you know what? Sometimes people need a little help. Sometimes there needs to be a space made, an opening, a little forgiveness. I am really proud of that church camp, Camp Casowasco, where we grew up, worked, learned, and over three summers lifeguarding chose to go into the ministry, because of the ministers we met there. ‘Somebody let you grow up’ my parents would say. There was room, there. There was a place, there. There was a forgiveness, there, not just of trespasses, whatever they are, but also, sometimes, of debt. Forgive us our debts.

It was the story of the bursar line, by the way, the account of a passionate moment in the lineage of faith, like that in Hebrews, the moment of a mother’s faith when faith is really faith which is when faith is all you have to go on, her faith that somehow her daughter would get a bunk and take the swim test and sing at campfire and be like the rest of the kids, it was that account that her friend’s parents recalled and retold. ‘No problem. We will take care of this. Come with me.’

What is going on with us in this country, anyway? Have we forgotten who we are? A cultural amnesia? A Christological amnesia? Have we forgotten the love we had at first? Have we forgotten how to make a place for someone left out, someone somewhat different, someone ‘other’? Have we mixed up our heart and our treasure? What is our heart’s treasure? What do we stand for, when push comes to shove? There is a reckoning coming for us, as people and as a people.

If you leave that camp ground on Owasco Lake, and drive southeast for a while, either on the road four hours or in the mind’s eye four minutes, you may come down to the Hudson River, and then right out toward the Atlantic Ocean. There is harbor down there. In the harbor there is a statue. On the statue there is a statement. It reads as follows:

Give me your tired, your poor

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free

The restless refuse of your teeming shore

Send these, the lost, the tempest tossed to me

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 08.7.2016 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
June 26

A Summer Pause

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 9:51-62

The text for this sermon is currently unavailable. 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 06.26.2016 at 11:00 am
Tags: no text, Robert Hill

Sunday
June 19

Ahab’s Shadow

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 8:230-29

Introduction

“I will not give you the inheritance of my fathers.”

On this Father’s Day many of us think of our parents who rest now in greater light and on a farther shore. You think today of your inheritance, your real, that is spiritual, that is familial, that is named inheritance. What is yours? What is that quintessential something, that no one else perhaps has to carry forward, that is yours, that you will not, cannot, should not, give away? And what about our shared inheritance, as a globe, as a country, as a church?

“I will not give you the inheritance of my fathers.”

With this terse refusal, Naboth lost his garden, his head, and, in fact, the very inheritance he hoped to protect. For Ahab—though he sulked, and though he fasted, and though he moaned, and though he allowed Jezebel to take charge—King Ahab at last had his wish, his vineyard. Just here, Ahab’s shadow begins to fall.

Israel nine centuries before Jesus went sliding down a slippery slope, pushed and pulled by the influence of increasingly poor leadership. Poor leadership. After David and Solomon, the nation’s fortuned declined steadily, under other, lesser kings. Who remembers Jereboam? Or Nimri? Or Omri? Or, today, Omri’s son, Ahab? BUSTH has a long history of excellent teaching in Hebrew Scripture: Elmer Leslie, Harrell Beck, Kathe Darr. They have remembered, and helped us to do so, too. Old Samuel had told them years before: You want a King? You want a King. Everybody else has one, so you want one, too. All right, you will get your king, and with your king, a whole basket of lasting trouble.

Ahab is remembered in Scripture because, in hindsight, he symbolized the progressive disintegration of Israelite society. The failings of the leader, somehow, uncannily, were seen in retrospect to represent a deeper and far wider malaise, in a society that year by year increasingly placed the poor at the mercy of the rich. Ahab’s shadow, part of the lengthening shadow of predatory, mendacious leadership in ancient Israel, has had a long, long reach--right up to today’s newspaper.

Ahab shadow—what was his capricious craving all about?

He desired, coveted, his poor neighbor’s little plot. And, in a way, why not? After all, he was the King! Hey. Rank has its privileges. To the victor go the spoils. What do you give a 500 pound gorilla? (ANYTHING HE WANTS!) I mean—this was a personal matter. It had nothing to do with public policy. The nation was prosperous and safe, thanks to shrewd management and the alliance with Tyre and Sidon, sealed with Jezebel’s kiss. This was a small matter. Kings have stolen a whole lot more.

What did Ahab want with that little, secret, private pleasure?

What would provoke a King, like Ahab, so to desire a tiny vineyard, like Naboth’s?

Ahab’s Shadow: Looking back at David

Perhaps…the stresses of public life caused Ahab to desire a little personal pleasure. After all, he might have reasoned, even in the Camelot days of David, there was the matter of the beautiful blonde, Bathsheba. Even in the halcyon glory days of an earlier generation, still there was a dark side, and Urriah the Hittite and Psalm 51. If David could have Bathsheba, surely Ahab could desire a little vineyard, the inheritance of Naboth and his faith, and turn a little profit, plowing under the vines and planting a regular garden. Like they do in Egypt, say. Did Ahab desire to be like David?

Ahab’s Shadow: Tired of the Trivia

Perhaps…the trappings of power and leadership changed Ahab. As Roy Smyres used to say about episcopal leaders, “They hear every day what wonderful people they are and what a great job they are doing—and, amazingly, some of them—START TO BELIEVE IT!” Visibility, power, position: they corrupt. Maybe it takes one to know one. You get distant. You don’t visit in the home as much, pace

J Wesley. You become insulated. You rise above. You look down. You forget what it takes. Bishop Herbert Skeete, once a kindly and compassionate pastor in Harlem, came up here to lead in New England and then retired. He referred in his 1996 valediction (July, U Mass, NEJurisdictional conference) to the vast majority of his little New England churches as (I quote him exactly) “eurocentric havens of mediocrity”. A little exhaustion, a little frustration? My, my. I guess you get bitter, hardened. The hurts and gifts of the Lilliputians under you fade. “L’eglise—C’est moi”. Yes, General Superintendent. Yes, King. Those lay folks, clergy don’t need the encouragement of my example. Naboth can get along without a vineyard. The heck with his inheritance, the cultivated vineyard. The heck with their history, of live free or die. It doesn’t matter that much, really, now, does it? Did Ahab get tired of the small stuff?

Ahab’s Shadow: Accomplishment

Perhaps…the endless contention and intractable difference of leadership in a republic—in any institution really—“got to” Ahab. After all, he was King! Couldn’t he even organize and execute, on his own, the purchase of a vineyard? Some years ago thirty UM pastors from large churches gathered in Minneapolis. We worshiped at Hennepin church. Rod Wilmouth, the lead pastor there, preached a great sermon on the theme of faith that moves mountains. His sermon title, though, was accidentally printed not as intended, “Faith that Can Move Mountains”, but, rather, as “Faith that Mountains Can Move”! He said, “And I thought I was in charge here!” As a public leader, sometimes, you can’t win. You don’t succeed. You fight city hall, tooth and nail---and you are the mayor! Did he just want a sense of accomplishment?

Ahab’s Shadow: Marital Dynamics

Perhaps…this all has to do, then and now, with family dysfunction. Jezebel, an early enabler, acts out for her sulking mate his lust for the vineyard. Isn’t that a picture? I can imagine the political cartoons of the day—“Impeach the King--and her husband too!” She orchestrates the media, the courts, the public opinion of the day, the powers that be. So the nation becomes a messy place. A place where it’s hard to tell who is telling the truth. A place where the spoken public word is not always verifiable. A place where innocent are found guilty. A place where the apparatus of state is used for personal gain. ‘Hard to imagine such a nation, isn’t it? Or is it?

Jezebel is not really to blame here. She just executes her husband’s, her King’s desire. The shadow is his, not hers.

Be careful dear friend. We become the servants, unwittingly, of those whom we most want to please. It is important for Jezebel and for you to know whom we are trying to please in life. We are slaves of that one.

Faith in Christ, the faith of Jesus Christ better said, is God’s gift and frees us, radically and truly frees us from all forms of enslavement to pleasing others. Paradoxically, the faith of Jesus Christ does so by re-enslaving us—to Christ alone. In Him. See where you are—in the cosmic apocalypse of Christ. See what time it is—the time when new creation supplants creation. Hear the Gospel: There is no longer Jew nor Greek, there is no longer slave nor free, there is no longer male or female. There is no longer gay nor straight. No one can serve two Masters. The life we now live in the flesh we live by the faith of Christ. You are His.

Who do you want to please? Did Ahab become caught up in unhealthy family systems?

Ahab’s Shadow: Convenience

None of these, finally, is the marrow, or the buried treasure of the Scripture today, nor the truth of our own time either.

In spite, or perhaps because of his military success and material surplus, Ahab desired…at depth…and this is the tragedy of his tale… a more convenient God. Ahab desired a less inconvenient deity. Ahab desired, through all these other lesser cravings, a more compliant Lord. One more in the mold of the nations, more Jezebel and less Elijah. And here the shadow truly lengthens and fully falls.

Ahab shadowy desire, apocalyptically revealed here as truth, in the manner detected and discerned by the wise through the ages, by W James, L Martyn and St Paul, in the odd moment, by apocalypse truth happens, his desire was for a less austere God, one less inclined to invade human space with haunting, troubling questions about life and death and meaning and love and…especially… JUSTICE.

A little Elijah goes a long way. He walks into the King’s court and shouts, “One of us is cursed and I think it’s you!…Look…there…dogs will lick your blood.” A little of that goes a long way.

Is this really-- MORE ABOUT US THAN IT IS ABOUT HIM?

Ahab’s Shadow: Our Own?

Israel remembered Ahab’s shadowy desire for a more convenient God, not out of reverence for Ahab, but because his desire somehow revealed the waxing national desire for a little lower heaven, a little lighter covenant, a little more convenient God. As the distant mirror of the Scripture may teach us, we are so interested because we know this figure and this desire so well.

We, too, want a little more convenient deity. One who will affirm our proclivities and ignore our cruelties

We know this Ahab well. Always a little sideways to the truth…Politically able, morally twisted…at heart faithless…looking for more convenience than the “inheritance of the fathers” allows…at heart hoping for an easy chance, the lottery of life, something for nothing, a quick pleasure, a garden delight.

We get the leadership we deserve.

On the horizon today we hear and see demagoguery—America First, Birtherist, Misogynist, Racist, Xenophobic, Narcissistic (don’t you love all these Greek rooted words?) bigotry. I sure did that well. ‘Low Energy’. That was a one day kill. Words are beautiful things.

Some express surprise, a sense of mistake, regarding the nomination in question. Yet there is no surprise or mistake about the nomination in question. 80% of voters in one party—grand?, old?--agree with these three propositions: Muslims should be banned. A wall should be built along the Rio Grande. Undocumented immigrants of all ages and stages should rounded up, arrested, jailed, and deported. (New York Review of Books, p 8-10, June, 2016) If you are in conversation with a member of such a party, chances are 4 out of 5 that you are in conversation with these views. No surprise. No mistake. You see? The shadow falls on us.

Over time, we get the leadership we deserve.

Today we pray for the Orlando dead. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do so, as in gathering, and vigil, and silence, we have done all week. First, and foremost, we turn our spirits toward their loved ones and families and friends. We return to the very themes preached exactly one year ago here, following Charleston, regarding gun violence. Our BU SPH Dean Sandro Galea has furthered that argument, with strength, this very week.

Yet, as a Chapel in the Methodist tradition, we also have a particular reckoning, now. United Methodism has been part and parcel of a part of our shadowed culture that has fomented and augmented dehumanization of gay people, bigotry against sexual minorities. Only two active northeastern bishops (Johnson, Devadhar) put their name this May to a shared letter rejecting in no uncertain terms this abject denominational failure. Silent, silent were the vast majority of active general superintendents. Now the chickens have come home to roost. It’s time. The time for discussion is over, washed away in the blood of Orlando. Local churches in Charge Conferences need to stop funding that supports bigotry, as, in one possible example, in three general funds: world service, the episcopal fund, and Africa University. Annual Conferences need to go ahead and ordain and deploy gay people, as many are doing, the silence of their bishops not withstanding—seven now across the country, including the actions taken in New England this week. Bigotry (largely of southern US and Africa Methodists) is, from this day forward, globally, generationally, and grittily rejected. Orlando is to Methodism and the Gay issue what Kent State was to America and the war in Vietnam, an apocalyptic moment when those who may still have thought otherwise, people of sound mind and heart, now turn. It’s time. What the sad incompetence of the General Church, the General Conference, and the silent General Superintendents has ignored, look! by apocalypse!, the local churches and annual conferences now address. We at Marsh Chapel adamantly and vigorously marry gay people and employ and deploy gay clergy. Where we can support others to do so, we shall.

One northeastern bishop this week callously sent out a letter about Orlando without even mentioning the targeting of the gay population. A minister in his conference wrote him the following:

I was shocked that no mention was made in your statement about the key issue the country

and our church are wrestling with: the oppression of gays. As long as our denomination and its leaders

not only continue the oppression of gays, but ignore their pain in the midst of being slaughtered….

we will have truly made ourselves irrelevant in the healing of the world in this day and time.

With a heavy heart…

No, we want a little lower heaven, a little lighter covenant, a little less inconvenient God.

Israel saw in hindsight that Ahab’s shadow had become their own—the easier worship of a less inconvenient God.

It isn’t about Ahab, it’s about Israel. It isn’t about others, it’s about us.

Elijah, Are You with Us?

Elijah, in the end, speaks. Elijah never dies. His voice is active, coming in forms we least expect, and sitting in empty chairs left vacant by faithful hearts. Elijah—rumpled and tousled. Elijah—skeptical of concentrated power. Elijah—with a passion for compassion. Elijah—concerned for the left—out. His voice irrupts now and then. So we are right to leave a chair, some space, vacant for him.

I have not heard his voice in a while, but he does not die.

Almost forty years ago this spring, on at least one evening, you heard him full of compassion. This spring has overtones from 1968, all the way to the California primary.

On June 5, 1968, at 8am our phone rang, at breakfast. My dad had gone to Chicago for a denominational meeting. Breakfast with three younger siblings at age 13 is not exactly heaven on earth. ‘It’s for you’ my sister said. Now that is a first, a phone call, for me, at breakfast. My father said: You probably don’t know this yet, but your favorite, your hero, Robert Kennedy was shot last night in California, and probably will die today or tomorrow. I know how much he meant to you, and I am sorry for our loss. It is tragic, but we will get through this. As a pastor he always had a knack for showing up where he was least expected and most needed, least expected and most needed. Wouldn’t every minister want to be so remembered?

Two months earlier, on April 4, Robert Kennedy was on his way to accept victory in the Indiana primary, five painful years after his brother’s death and just weeks before his own assassination, a few hours after the killing of Martin Luther King. Galatians 6:14 speaks of a triple crucifixion. One redeeming feature of our own hurt is that it helps us proffer compassion to others who hurt.

Elijah keeps heaven high and the covenant heavy and God, God. ELIJAH! We wait for your voice today!

Kennedy spoke to an inner city rally of black and Polish voters. They had not heard the news, which he gave. There is a generation deep moan that barks from the crowd. I hear it still. He stands, rumpled shirt and tousled hair before a single microphone, note-less and alone. What courage to stand there that night, and then, Elijiah-like, to speak:

*I have some very sad news for you…

*In this difficult time it is perhaps well to ask what kind of nation we are, and what direction we want to move in…

*Do we want bitterness, hatred, a desire for revenge, greater polarization of black and white?…

*Or, with ML King, do we seek understanding, comprehension, to replace violence and the stain of violence with compassion?…

*For those tonight who feel hatred and mistrust, I can also feel in my own heart that same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed…

*But we have to make an effort in this country to understand, to get beyond this time…

*Aeschylus wrote: “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our despair and against our will comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

*What we need in this country is not division, hatred, violence, and lawlessness, but love and wisdom and compassion and justice…

*We need to “tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.”

Conclusion

We still need to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.

We still need to see thing as the never were and say, “Why not?”

We still need to see wrong and try to right it, see suffering and try to heal it, see war and try to end it.

Perhaps Elijah will take his place, fill his chair, and lift his voice again in our time, and shine some light through Ahab’s shadow?

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.19.2016 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
June 12

Forgiven

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 7:36-8:3

Introduction

Please forgive the intrusive nature of this sermon. For I want to begin by taking a walk with you into the attic of your soul. Though we are friends, it is not my right to initiate such a visit. Though we are pastors and parishioners, it is not our right to force such a trek back up through the mist of time. You would need to make an invitation, yourself. Even to suggest the climb, without any initiative on your part, is rude of me. I apologize.

The Gospel, however, intrudes upon our very souls, whether the preacher has a right or not. As kingfishers catch fire, and dragonflies draw flame, so truth—that light in which we see light—advances upon us. So we go ahead. We walk together upstairs to the landing. You kindly have turned on the hall light. Thank you. I wonder if this is a sign from you that you will welcome this joint venture? We pull down in the chain that loosens the attic portal. You know how that little door in the ceiling falls open, and slowly a flank of wooden stairs comes down, and down, and down, and touches our feet. We are ready to climb up into the darkness.

Watch your step. You have not been up into the cobwebs and the dust of memory, the mothballs and the coverlets of history, the grime and the darkness of the past. It is a little slow going. This is your attic, though. You know it as well as you know your own past. In fact, it is your past, box by box, and crate by crate. I have no right to be here, and if you ask me, I will leave. A man has a right to his own regrets. They are not common property. They are yours, these boxes and labels and shoes and hangers and records and amulets and souveniers from the dusty past. One of you is looking over at an old service uniform from the great war—brown and rumpled. Another sees bobby sox and a political poster—I LIKE IKE. She has stumbled past three old Beatles albums—greatest hits, Abbey Road, the White album. I notice a Jim Croce tape. I wonder if it still plays? He thumbs through a pile of other newer albums. Of course there are lots of photographs. What kind of an attic would it be without boxes and records and photographs?

This is the attic of memory. No, we won’t stop at the wardrobe

Today. The wardrobe is for another day, a day of hope and imagination. Lions and witches come from wardrobes. Today we are looking back, though. We are going to stumble and claw our way over into the back corner. There is not much light here. It is a long time since anyone came back in, all this way. Dust, cobwebs—it makes you sneeze.

Over in the corner there is a small, low box, carefully closed, and tied around with a little bailer’s twine. This is yours. No one else knows it is here, or if they do they have forgotten or never understood or just don’t care. But you know and remember and understand and care. I really do not want to be here, and you probably don’t want to either. I—for it is not my business. You—because in black ink, now dusty, is penned across the top of the box a single, awful, hellish word—regret. Regret is a short synonym for hell. And up here in the attic of memory, off in the corner, sits this stupid box, which means nothing to anyone, except to you. There it is—a single box labeled “regret”.

Open it.

Go ahead. Try it. If you want. I think you have wanted to come up here, but just never had 20 minutes of quiet to do so. Remember last summer when you thought about the box? And remember that early morning dream? That was a strange thing. I want to encourage you to open it. Hold it in both hands. Untie the twine. Loosen the top. Turn it over, and let it all fall out.

That was a gutsy thing to do. Good for you.

The reason the box was marked “regret” is that this is one thing you regret. You have a regret. That is part of being human. Can you live with being human? Can you live with being a little lower than the angels? How do I know all this? As my great aunt would say, “If you’re so smart how come you aren’t rich?” A real good question. I know because I have boxes in my attic too. They too are covered with cobwebs. I too make my visits, my attic climbs, very seldom. And, yes, I know about regret. Not just vicariously, either. There is nothing quite as bitter. If only…

I asked to come up here with you for a reason. Up in the attic here, with that swinging bare light bulb and the Johnny Mathis record and all this dust, we may feel God.

Look at the box again, and all its contents spread across the floor. In the dark I cannot see the floor, but after 22 years and 7 pulpits I truly doubt if any of it would surprise me. After reading the Bible and Shakespeare and a few decades worth of the New York Times, there is not much that surprises. But it is different for you. This is your attic, your memory, your box, your regret. It is YOURS. In a way, this box is more yours than any of the others.

In this box are the articles of impeachment brought by life against us. They are multiple and they are damning and unlike civil and criminal law, the laws of the soul do not give way to lawyerly cunning. And there is no vote, no 2/3 majority needed.

What is that you say? Not you? Never a cutting word? Never a selfish deed? Never an unhealthy habit? Never a compulsive trend? Never a myopic judgment? Never a temptation accepted? Never an ungenerous year? Never a non-giving decade? Not you? Never a misspent dollar or day or dream? You don’t go to enough funerals.

But the box doesn’t lie. Nor does the conscience. Nor does the memory. Nor does life.

It simply spells “regret”. That, I regret.

God Forgives You

There is something that both can and must be said, as we pack up the regret box. It is not a human thing to say, though we are the only saying beings around so we do the best we can. It is a God word. And only God speaks God words.

First, looking down at the dusty cardboard of past regret—something that if not removed can fester and infect and cripple—first there is this. God forgives you. It is, according to the Scripture, the divine promise and intention to forgive and to forgive. Abraham felt it. Joseph practiced it. Hosea proclaimed it. Jesus taught us to pray for it. And for 2000 years the church has tried to exemplify, embody this one word. God forgives. John Wesley asked his preachers one initial question. “Do you know God to be a pardoning God?” Now that, in the face of a box marked “regret”, that is good news. In the face of the worst rejection and the most regrettable misjudgment on earth, God practices a powerful forgiveness.

You know in the midst of all the harshness of the religious right and the flightiness of the New Age, it can be hard to hear the central truth about God and about us. God forgives.

God forgives before we are up in the attic at all. God forgives when we realize what we have to regret. God forgives as we carry the regret around. God forgives when we hear and when we do not and it does not depend on our hearing.

Do you know God to be a pardoning God? If so, you know God, the God of Jesus Christ.

Here are Scriptures worth memorizing about God who forgives….

If you forgive others their trespasses, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you.

Lord how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? As many as seven times? … I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven.

Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ has forgiven you.

Other People Forgive You

But maybe that is not what keeps you awake, not what makes you linger today in the attic. You may well believe and trust that God forgives. But what about those you have regrettably hurt?

This can be particularly hard for those who have grown up around especially hardened parents and other adults. If you have not heard an encouraging word much growing up, it can be hard later in life to believe that those other humans around you can be gracious.

They can be.

As a matter of fact, most of the time they are. More than most of the time. People forgive, more than you know and more than you may think you deserve. It really delights me. People have a profound capacity to forgive and forget. It is God given, and it is real and it is good.

I think of the waiting father and the prodigal son.

I think of Paul forgiving Peter’s two faced behavior.

I think of Augustine’s mother forgiving his selfishness.

I think of Erasmus forgiving the wayward Popes.

I think of Grant and Lee at Appomatox.

I think of Abraham Lincoln walking through Richmond.

I think of the Marshall Plan and rebuilding of Germany in the 1940’s

I think of women and men, night after day, for millenia.

You may have to ask sometime for forgiveness. You probably should. Say, “I’m sorry”. Like the Fonz, who could never utter the word, “I was wrong..” But my experience is that most people most of the time when confronted with a heartfelt, sincere apology from a person of integrity will say, “Don’t worry about it. I forgive you.” It is one of the greatest things about other people. You may have to give it a little time. You may have to pray about it. You may have to trust a little. But—other people will forgive you.

Forgiving Yourself

But that may not be what holds you here in the attic. As a matter of fact, I bet that the box is still up here, wrapped in twine and covered with dirt and marked regret, for another reason. It’s one thing for God to forgive you. It’s one thing to accept another’s kindness. But in the end that still leaves you a few sandwiches short of a picnic, and a few french fries short of a happy meal. God has forgiven you! Your neighbor has forgiven you! Now comes the hard part.

You have to forgive yourself. You have to let yourself off the hook. You have to find a way to admit to yourself that you are not 101% perfect. You have to, well, accept your own acceptance. And that can be a lot easier said than done. Because we have a way of holding onto what poisons us. We have a way of just wrapping ourselves in a miserable kind of self-conceited self-condemnation. Up in the attic.

Lent is a good time to dump your guilt. God doesn’t want it. No neighbor finally has much use for it. So why is it still in the box? What good is it? Get rid of it. When it doubt, throw it out.

God forgives you. So does your neighbor. Forgive yourself.

Matter of fact, while we are here, up in the attic—let’s just take that box out of here. I’ll hold the ladder for you while your coming down. You can carry it, with a little homiletical help. If we hurry we can get out on the curb before noon, and the heavenly garbage truck always comes by this part of your mental world Sunday at noon. There, it’s out on the curb, and soon it will be gone for good. William Blake:

And throughout all eternity

I forgive you, you forgive me.

And throughout all eternity

I forgive you, you forgive me.

And throughout all eternity

I forgive you, you forgive me.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 06.12.2016 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill

Sunday
June 5

In Communion

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 7:11-17

There is 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 06.5.2016 at 11:00 am
Tags: no text, Robert Hill

Sunday
May 22

Blessed Trinity

By Marsh Chapel

John 16:12-15

Triune God

For this Sunday our lessons evoke a Triune God, God in three persons, blessed Trinity. I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers. We have peace through our Lord Jesus Christ. The Spirit of truth will guide you into all truth.

My friend attended another, here unnamed, divinity school, which at the time was blown about by many if not every wind of doctrine, so much so that my friend, with a bit of whimsy and humor, described their theology thus: ‘God in seven persons, blessed heptopoly’.

Here, today, we shall limit ourselves to three, the three persons of the traditional Godhead. Psalm 8 evokes God as Creator. Romans 5 evokes God as Redeemer. John 16 evokes God as Sustainer. Father, Son, Spirit. These are choice, endlessly lovely passages, any one of which, and any verse from any one of which should deserve 22 minutes of preaching attention and acclamation. Memorize them.

The Christian doctrine of Trinity is of course a deeply mysterious matter, out of reach of most of us most of the time. How can God be, both one and three? Faith we must guess involves more than math. Not less than math, but more than math. If nothing else, about the Trinity, we remember this: God is relational, on this teaching. At the heart of the divine there is relationship, of First to Second to Third to Second to First. This is what the early church found in Jesus: the God to whom Jesus prayed, the God who guided and inspired Jesus, and the God in Jesus. This is what the early church found in the Scripture: Psalm 8, Romans 5, John 16. This is what the early church found in Life: the rush of creativity, the joy of love, the breath of spirit. In our Gospel today, the Scripture goes even further, in a way giving privilege, at least here, to Spirit that guides into truth. Once the creation has emerged; once redemption has been offered; then it is a matter of spirit, Spirit, wind, breath, gusting Spirit of God.

We preach and pray at the crossroads of faith and culture. This is true for every congregation, pulpit and place, but especially and keenly so right now at Marsh Chapel. In a new, perhaps conflicted way, across the country, we may be listening this summer for words of grace, out of our holy scripture, out of our traditions, out of our sacred history, and wondering, hoping, perhaps doubting but still hoping, that these as preached may help us make some sense of what is becoming of us, as a people and as a country, in our time.

For all the attention we—rightly—give to politics and economics, it is really the cultural realities that have most impact on individual lives, over time. When an 8 year old bursts through the back door, crying, saying that her school friend, from Mexico, we will be deported, hers is a culturally inflicted wound; when an 87 year old woman, in a nursing home, rues the collapse of her life long party, and surveys its demise and damages with the word ‘dismaying’, hers is a cultural assessment; when a candidate, given to insulting his competitors, and branding them with epithets, reflects on defeating one by calling him ‘low energy’ and, months later, in reflection, saying, ‘that was a one day kill’ and then adding, ‘words are beautiful things’ (as my Dad said, ‘its one thing to be tough, but its another to be mean’), we suffer a cultural decline; when a great Christian denomination lacks spiritual leaders, general superintendents, who could simply say, ‘gay people are people’, and then keep silent (only one active UMC Bishop in the Northeast, Peggy Johnson, did so this week), this is a cultural measurement; when only 24% of 17-24 year olds are eligible to seek admission into armed forces (the other 76% ineligible due to obesity, lack of a high school diploma, drug use, criminal record, failure of physical exam or other), here we trace cultural influence; when forms of worship, meant for enchantment, give way over two generations to a pseudo-worship aimed at entertainment, with direct connections to features of Reality TV, professional wrestling, and beauty contests—the same social expressions now driving some political selection and debate--we face a cultural deficit; in short, when a culture, like ours, has a mirror held up to it, as has happened this calendar year, and the image is more appalling than appealing, then some among us may begin to return to, revert to, a reconsideration of our more ancient repositories of wisdom: scripture, history, thought, and scrutinized experience. In an age of broad cultural malaise, some may seek more steadily the reassurance, peace, insight, and resolve to be found in moments of truth, goodness, beauty—and ordered worship. Those in the pulpits across this country have our work cut out for us in 2016. How shall we invoke and evoke faith fit for culture and culture fit for faith? How will we address incivility in a civil way? How do we oppose demagoguery with democracy? How do we contrast buffoonery with beauty? How does one supplant cultural disorder with liturgical order? How do we combat fear with faith? We have our cultural work cut out for us this year.

Thank goodness we are not alone! Blessed Trinity blesses us, especially as Trinity leans to Spirit.

There is a self-correcting Spirit of Truth loose in the Universe, leading us. Next week we shall begin hearing, along with Luke, from Galatians, chapter by chapter, speaking of spirit and truth, speaking of relationship, speaking of the new creation. The Trinity leans toward Galatians, on this Trinity Sunday. Here is your preparation for the Holy Scripture of the next month, your shake down cruise for the trip to Galatia, your introduction to Paul, Freedom, Spirit and New Creation, and the Magna Charta of Christian freedom. Such beautiful verses: I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me, and the life I now live I live by the faithfulness of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast therefor and do not be enslaved again. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faith, gentleness, self-discipline. Bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. Here is the story behind the Epistle lessons you will hear through June.

New Creation

Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians is one of the great high peaks of the New Testament. It is about a whole new life, a new creation. In fact, it may be the highest peak in the whole range, the Mount Everest of the Bible. It is written to address this question: “Must a Gentile become a Jew before he can become a Christian?”. Is there a religious condition to be met, prior to the reception of God’s apocalypse in Christ?

After Paul had been converted to Christ, he spent 17 years in unremarkable, quiet ministry. We know nothing of these two decades spent in Arabia. All the letters we have of Paul come from a later decade. Paul was converted to Christ, as he says earlier in this letter, “by apocalypse”. Christ revealed himself to Paul. Thus, for Paul, the authority in Christ, is not finally in the Scripture, nor in traditions, nor in reason, nor in experience. Christ captured Paul through none of these, but rather through revelation, the apocalypse of God. In short, Paul was not a Methodist.

There is a singular, awesome freedom in the way Paul understands Christ. We have yet, I believe, in the church that bears His name, to acknowledge in full that freedom.

After these 17 years, Paul went up to Jerusalem to meet with the pillars of the church. Can you picture the moment? All in one room: Paul, Peter, Andrew, James, John, Titus, Barnabas. And in that room there was argument, difference. Paul preached the cross of Christ to unreligious people, and they heard. What would the Jerusalem elders say? Jesus was a Jew, and had been circumcised. So also were all the first Christians, including Paul himself. But God had done something astounding. It was the Gentiles, not the Jews, who fervently believed the Good News. Should these unreligious children of God be brought back into the Covenant of Circumcision? No, they all agreed, no. God had done something new. So, Peter went to the circumcised, and Paul went to the uncircumcised. Peter went to the Jews, and Paul to the Gentiles. They agreed to disagree, agreeably. And the meeting ended and it was settled.

But you know how sometimes it’s not the meeting but the meeting after the meeting that counts? What was settled in Jerusalem was unsettled later. Peter couldn’t be counted on to hold the line, and Paul told him so, to his face. Peter was inconsistent about freedom—sometimes he ate with the unclean Gentiles—that’s all of you by the way. Sometimes, when somebody was watching, he backed away. And Paul caught him at it and as he ways, “opposed him to his face”. I wish all opposition in church was so clean, direct, personal, and honest. “One of us is wrong and I think it’s you!” Paul doesn’t talk about Peter, he talks to Peter. There’s a life lesson. Said Paul: ‘In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither Slave nor Free, there is no Male or Female’. Not religion, not wealth, not gender—no, all these give way before Spirit.

In the resurrection, in Christ, in faith, in the new creation, there is no gender. At least, according to Paul in Galatians. In Christ, there is no ‘male and female’. Gender is swallowed up in victory. The Oneidas and the Shakers could sense this, odd and contrasted as were their ways of living it out.

We have yet, I doubt, to take seriously the Good News of liberation found in these passages. Your identity does not come from your sexuality, your gender, your orientation.

In this passage, in the Bible, Paul points to a clue, as well, to one of our great arguments today. Here, your identity is not to be inferred from creation….but from new creation! This apocalyptic baptismal formula declares the erasure—who says there is nothing radical about Christ?—of the distinction we so heighten, that between male and female.

So, my teacher, J L Martyn: “In Rom 1: 18-32, Paul uses an argument explicitly based on creation, drawing certain conclusions from the “things God has made” in “the creation of the cosmos” (Rom 1:20). In effect, Paul says in this passage that God’s identity and the true sexual identity of human beings as male and female can both be inferred from creation.

“What a different argument lies before us in Gal 3:26-29, 6:14-15! Here the basis is explicitly not creation, but rather the new creation in which the building blocks of the old creation are declared to be non-existent. If one were to recall the affirmation ‘It is not good that man should be alone” (Gen 2:18), one would also remember that the creational response to loneliness is married fidelity between man and woman (Gen 2:24, Mark 10:6-7). But in its announcement of the new creation, the apocalyptic baptismal formula declares the erasure of the distinction between male and female. Now the answer to loneliness is not only marriage, but rather the new-creational community that God is calling into being in Christ, the church marked by mutual love, as it is led by the Spirit of Christ (Gal 3:28). The result of such a radical vision and of its radical argumentation is the new- creational view of the people of God...It is Christ and the community of those incorporated into him who lie beyond religious distinctions...Baptism is a participation both in Christ’s death and in his life; for genuine, eschatological life commences when one is taken into the community of the new creation, in which unity in God’s Christ has replaced religious-ethnic differentiation. In a word, religious and ethnic differentiations and that which underlies them—the Law— are identified in effect as the “old things” that have now “passed away”, giving place to the new creation (2 Cor 5:17).” (Martyn, in passim, Anchor Bible Commentary: Galatians).

God is calling into existence a new community of faith working through love. There is your identity. Not what is natural but what is heavenly about us forms our primary identity. That is, the Bible itself, from the vantage point of this great mountain passage, opens the way for an understanding of identity that is not just nature or creation, but new creation. This is the community of faith working through love. Here, there is a place where God may be doing something new, revealing something new. And, most strangely, it may be those who are not so easily confined by the creational categories of male and female, those who are both or neither, who are on the edge of the new creation. I know what Paul writes in Romans, but you still must ask yourself, at this point, which is Mount Everest: Galatians 3 or Romans 1? I think it is Galatians 3. I have come to believe that gender and orientation do not provide our primal identity. No male and female means no gay and straight, no homosexual and heterosexual. God is doing something new, which includes all in the community of faith working through love.

We worship on Trinity Sunday. The Triune God summons us to relationship and complexity and courage to seek the truth. The Spirit of God leads us into all truth: Come Trinity Sunday we recall that there is, by God’s triune grace, a self-correcting spirit of Truth loose in the universe. The trajectory of Paul’s preaching in Galatians, and thus in total, makes ample space in our churches for gay people. If you love Jesus, and especially if you love the Bible, then you may just find courage not only to defend a moral life in a post-moral culture, but also to preserve freedom for those who have found a whole new life, and so are very harbingers of the new creation.

God in three persons, blessed Trinity. I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers. We have peace through our Lord Jesus Christ. The Spirit of truth will guide you into all truth.

- The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.

posted in The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 05.22.2016 at 11:00 am
Tags: Robert Hill