Marsh Chapel Sermon Archive

Philippians 3:4b-14

John 12:1-8

One

Our two readings, Philippians 3 and John 12, confront us with the ranges of reality in loyalty and mortality. Philippians is about loyalty. John is about mortality. In the blurr of activities, come Sunday, in Christ, one is accosted by loyalty and mortality, through whom, in Christ, ‘we become like him’.

That is, two very different readings from Scripture greet us this Sunday morning. One describes loyalty. The other evokes mortality. Both are good news, and each story amplifies and explicates the other. For you this morning, the lesson and the gospel raise a mortal question about your forms of loyalty, and a loyal question about your sense of mortality. A hymn of love and a reminder of death are somewhere, somehow buried in every sermon and every service of worship. In decisions about loyalty and in the encroachment of mortality, we become like Him: Jesus Christ, the loyalty of God; Jesus Christ, the mortality of the human being.

There is today a tendency to minimize Paul’s change of allegiance, as expressed in Philippians 3, and elsewhere. So this scholarly trend would argue: Paul did not really distance himself from his earlier religious expression. Paul did not really reject his mother tongue, mother land, mother religion. Paul did not expressly depart from the eighth day, the tribe, the law. Paul did not really intend to step aside from his inheritance. Paul was born loyal and died loyal, and his loyalty at birth and death were of a piece. I suppose that scholarly trends, like fashion, move in and out of vogue, for and with some regularity. Certainly, the work of these mentioned scholars, and that of many others, reminding us of the depth and breadth of background to the letters of the APOSTLE TO THE GENTILES (emphasis added for emphasis), carry much of importance. Still, there is the little matter of…rubbish.

Paul calls his inheritance rubbish. SKUBALA. It is a remarkable Greek word, whose force you can hear in its simple repetition. SKUBALA. Rubbish. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and I regard them as rubbish. It will not do to muffle Paul’s apocalyptic sense of loyalty. In fact, much of the work of late that tries to do so ends up representing a view of Paul that is much more akin to the views of his opponents than to those of Paul himself. But what of the particular inheritance, yours and mine and Paul’s? What of our particular, idiosyncratic, experiences and cultures and hues? In Paul’s case, what of circumcision, of covenant, of history, of torah, of valiant duty past? I regard them as…SKUBALA. We may wish Paul had been more temperate. He was not. The gospel of Jesus Christ brings an apocalyptic, cataclysmic, sea change in the fount of loyalty. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

Across town, across the Scripture that is, and in the heart of the Fourth Gospel, meanwhile, we are engaged by another story. Now mortality, not loyalty, addresses us. If there is a richer set of eight verses in the entire New Testament than John 12: 1-8, honestly, where would you find it? Here is the Passover, the third in the fourth Gospel. Here too is Bethany, site of earlier astonishment. Here is Lazarus, who emerged from a tomb, covered with bandages, odorous and squinting. Martha, of serving fame, and Mary, of praying memory, are here, too. A year’s wages are here poured out on feet, feet of course being of sacramental power in this Gospel, as we saw two weeks ago. There is fragrance, the fragrant scent of perfume poured on holy feet, perfume dried in loving hands, perfume gathered on the hairs of the head. An astounding scene, already, but there is more. In comes Judas Iscariot. There arises an argument about money, surely not the last religious argument about money. The poor and the present are set against each other, surely not the last religious argument about the good and beautiful. And then a dominical pronouncement: keep it for the day of my burial. After so many visual, audible, tactile, olfactory and savory images, we are sensorially exhausted and ready for a nap. These images share a common trait. They evoke mortality.

The Passover is the scene of death. Lazarus was raised from death. Mary has a premonition of death. Martha and Mary pleaded with Jesus about death. Judas Iscariot is the agent of death. The plight of the poor is mentioned to avoid a confrontation with death. The perfume is a symbol of anointing at death. If there is one thing more significant in all of Scripture than justice—and it is not clear that there is anything more significant in Scripture than justice—but if there is one thing more significant in all of Scripture than justice—it is mortality. Our gospel lesson this morning pulls out every stop to evoke mortality.

Reminders of mortality, like attendance in worship itself, which is one such reminder on a weekly basis, may make us squirm. We have a way of thinking that death happens always to somebody else. We find ways to change the channel. In the last few years we have become experts at changing the channel. Think for a minute about deaths in this country, over the last decade, due to gun violence. Diminishment to a part of the gentle hope, for a real spiritual culture and community, across this land, in our time. Harm to some of the soaring ideals of a young republic, now seen from abroad as a pre-emptive behemoth. Defeat to a part of the great dream of those who built the United Nations. Yes, reminders of death make us squirm.

Dr. Jarrett, how does the music of Bach, aid us in our meditation this morning?

Two

Bach’s point of departure tells another story of mortality and promise of awakening – of Resurrection. Luke Chapter 7 finds Jesus traveling to the town of Nain where he encounters a funeral procession. Moved by the mother’s grief, he calls for the dead man to rise from his funeral bier.

Cantata 8 was written a little more than a year after Bach began to work in Leipzig, placing our cantata in the second cycle of cantatas, the year of the Chorale cantatas. The chorale on the which the cantats is based is Caspar Neumann’s familiar “Liebster Gott, wenn werd ich sterben?” The 1710 melody is feature in the first and last movement, though treated slightly differently in each instance.

The cantata in concerned with mortality, and specifically, the hour of our final moment. We await the ticking clock toward the chime of our own funeral bells. In 18th century Leipzig, parishioners were notified of the death of a member of their community by 24 tolls from the tower bell.

In the opening movement, Bach creates an extraordinary Leichenglocken – funeral bells – using string pizzicatos, the wheels and sprockets of the interior mechanism of the clock, the two oboes d’amore chasing each other as the hands of the clock, and finally the flute tolling exactly 24 repeated pitches, punctuating and “chiming” throughout the movement. All of this extraordinary music accompanies the eight phrases of Bach’s setting of the Neumann chorale.

The clock continues to tick as the cantata turns inward for the first aria. The tenor takes up the strain with oboe obliggato. Typically when Bach wishes to call attention to a particular word or concept, he employs extended melisma. In this aria, note the treatment of the verb “schlägt” describing the striking of the final hour. Similarly, the place of rest – Ruhstatt – finds repose on a long, sustained pitch.

Fear, anxiety, worry are all dashed when the baritone steps forward to sing a gigue, reminding us that it is through Christ Jesus that we are called to new life and transformation. The flute’s somber tolling from the opening movement is transformed to the dance rhythms and melody’s of the baritone’s gigue. When the chorale returns in the final movement, it comes with confidence in full stride: Help me earn an honest grave next to godly Christian folk, and finally covered by earth never more be confounded!

Three

Loyalty and mortality…

Let us return to loyalty for a moment.

In Philippians, our APOSTLE TO THE GENTILES (emphasis added for emphasis), has now stated for us the force and source of loyalty in Jesus Christ, as he does with equal power in Galatians 2 and Romans 5 and 2 Corinthians 5 and 1 Thessalonians 4. That I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through the faithfulness of Christ, the righteousness of God based on faith. (The loyalty of Christ, the righteousness of God based on Christ’s loyalty.) Paul has been found in a new life. His earlier code and covenant have come to an end. They are set aside. They are good and true and beautiful, but not by comparison with the truly good and the beautifully true and the divinely beautiful. It is the loyalty of Christ to which Paul sings his hymn of praise as read this morning. The rendering of these verses depends upon a reading of the phrase, ‘faith..Christ’ as first in reference to Christ’s own faith, by which in faith Paul and we are ‘owned’. It may be that Paul has written these words in prison, and it may be that these words from prison were written at the end of his life. He will have had, as we do on some days, and Sundays, a clear sense of the fragility of life and its brevity.

So let us return to mortality for a moment.

The several marks of mortality set before us in the Gospel of John, chapter 12, are also reminders of divine love. Lazarus evokes such love from Jesus that, in that shortest of verses, we are reminded, ‘Jesus wept’. Mary and Martha are the figures of serving and praying that we know so well in the teachings about disciplined love. Judas is never portrayed as doing ill for the sake of doing harm, but is found to mistake some love for all love. Most strongly, the pouring of perfume in lavish expense is understood as the full fragrance of affection and love.

Our readings today give us grace to live by faith. We may want to consider, on a bright spring Sunday afternoon walk, the examples of abiding loyalty and loving mortality which we have known. We are meant to ‘become like him’, and so we shall want to notice the forms of loyalty and limitation that are ever before us.

We may want to remember something of Josiah Royce, and his evocation of loyalty. You may recall from your own life and family experience, the example of a truly loyal friend. You may recognize that sometimes lesser loyalties must be laid aside in the face of greater loyalties. No one wants the lower lights to occlude the one great loyalty of life. You may recognize the difference, say, between asking forgiveness for a promise broken, and asking forgiveness for a promise that should never have been made in the first place, whether kept or broken. We may deeply recognize the need we have to reclaim the language of remorse out of our religious traditions, so that we might walk again in newness of life, following Lenten confession.

We shall want to find and practice the forms of loyalty by which, and through which, we may dimly acknowledge our mortality. Any pastor will tell you that young people live as if they were immortal, and not only young people. There is a youthful courage in this, but also a tragic risk. We may want to recall the verses of Scripture that warn us about limits. Store ye not up treasure on earth where moth and rust consume…All flesh is grass, it withers and fades…Prize your time now you have it, for God is a consuming fire…The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong…This night is your soul required of you…

Here is a potentially saving word. It is the intimation of mortality that puts steel in the spine of our loyalty. It is the practiced sacrifice of loyalty that gives us courage for the facing of the last things. Where there is a sense of mortality there is a sense of loyalty. Where there is a preparation of loyalty there is a preparation for mortality. The one inspires the other. (Where there is no inkling of mortality there is no spur to loyalty). Perhaps that is why, in the mystery of all things, and in the planning for Sunday readings, Philippians 3 and John 12 were yoked. Think this lent about your lasting commitments. Think this lent about your limitations. And recall the hymn written next door, in the school of theology, by then Dean Earl Marlatt, singing of Jesus, a beacon to God, to love and loyalty…

—The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean & Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music

posted in Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music, The Bach Experience on 04.7.2019 at 11:00 am
Tags: Bach Experience, Robert Hill, Scott Jarrett

Sunday
September 30

The Bach Experience

By Marsh Chapel

James 5:13-20

Mark 9:38-50

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill

Those who have paused, here, or now, to worship with us at Marsh Chapel in the last decade, are aware that we lift the Gospel, come Cantata Sundays, in word and music, together, juntos, in harmony.

Bach brings us the reach of beauty around the globe, a global sphere of orientation. Bach brings us a stretch toward the universal, the reach up and out to what fully lasts, truly matters, and really counts. Bach brings us an artistic angle of vision, rooted in Scripture and in an earlier Lutheran garden, nonetheless known by heart and in the heart, far and near, with those, today you and me, who will pause for the offering of the gift of faith. Bach brings us beauty, a paean for sure to the true and the good, but no avoidance of the beautiful. In our time, this hour, especially this week, we can truly appreciate, benefit from such a global orientation, a high universal reach, a feeling in faith, and the bathing of such beauty.

Given the maelstrom of this moment in our current culture, the wind blasts of charge and counter charge, the examples of courage and also the instances of failures in courage, near and far, we, come Sunday, maybe especially this Sunday, look for the God who is a rock in a weary land. Said Dr. Emilie Townes, last Tuesday, ‘we want to cultivate a vibrant community of hope… we hope to beget an ever more piercing faithfulness’. An ever more piercing faithfulness.

Today we receive the gift in memory of the faith of the church, and we give ear to the beauty of our first Bach Cantata of the year. We are truly ‘blessed’ as our Gospel affirms. All the senses—sight, sound, scent, touch, taste—are enlivened today.

This is truly good news, especially for those who may be in mortal need of a living reminder, as the Scritpure says, that we are ‘children of God’. For we can sometimes acutely need such a reminder of belonging, meaning and empowerment. We are acquainted with the night. You are acquainted with the night. As our New England poet memorably put it:

I have been one acquainted with the night.

I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.

I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.

I have passed by the watchman on his beat

And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet

When far away an interrupted cry

Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;

And further still at an unearthly height,

O luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.

I have been one acquainted with the night.

To such acquaintance does our worship this morning minister, and our affirmations of faith, and the beauty of Bach. Tell us, if you will Dr. Jarrett, how best we can listen for the gospel today, in and within this marvelous cantata.

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett

Today’s cantata represents a high water mark in the Baroque expression of the anxious tortured soul. Bach surpasses himself in each movement of this musical essay, a sermon-in-song. From the outset, the scope of the opening chorus presents a people in supplication – a people yearning for mercy in the countenance of God’s promised judgment. Presented in two contrasting sections, the opening chorus depicts the many facets of our anxiety. After a pleading alto recitative, the soprano aria gives pitch and rhythm to our angst in the form of trembling sixteenth notes in the upper strings. The foundational voice of the continuo silenced for this movement, the soprano and oboe are left to wander alone. The voice of wisdom and New Covenant in Christ’s Cup consoles and comforts in the baritone recitative which follows. The sixteenth notes here take on a caring and supporting motive. Drawing on the security of promised Redemption heard in the baritone recitative, the voice of the tenor with obligato horn professes a confident assurance. The cantata concludes with the expected chorale setting. The trembling sixteenth notes of the soprano aria reappear, but as the chorale proceeds, phrase by phrase the trembling anxiety is calmed – sixteenths become triplets, triplets yield to duples, until their final concluding quarter notes – Indeed Bach’s musical signature of promised redemption and divine grace.

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill

This moment: in word and worship, in memory and hope, in voice and instrument. We are blessed. We are recalled as children of God: who enter the kingdom of heaven and receive comfort in mourning, and gentle the earth, and crave goodness, and trade in mercy, and see divine grace, and pave with justice the path of peace, and see out to the far side of hardship. Said Howard Thurman, ‘Come Sunday the church says to one and all, the church says to you: you are a child of the living God, you are a child of the living God, you are a child of the living God.

We gather our bits of hard won wisdom: ‘The only way of achieving any degree of self-understanding is by systematically retracing our steps’. ‘One can know fully only what one has oneself made.’ ‘I was once a philosopher, but joy kept breaking in.’ ‘What we borrow, we also bend.’ ‘To surrender the actual experienced good for a possible ideal good is the struggle.’

Somewhere, sometime, it may be, you will find yourself in receipt of the gift of faith. It may be a faith recounted in the Niceaen creed. But it also may be faith as simple, and pure, and true, as the courage to be, the real courage to be. To be and speak. To speak and bear witness. To bear witness, for all the dangers about, and to tell the truth. To tell the truth, and to get up again the next day. Your restoration in faith may be as Lutheran and Scriptural as the substitutionary atonement of tradition, ‘the sacrificial death that wipes out guilt’. Or it may be faith shorn of religious clothing, clean and clear: ‘a courage welling up from a deep and hidden place’ (Senator Blumenthal quoting Senator Graham, from Graham’s book about work with brave witnesses as a lawyer with sex crimes (9/27/18). Either way, you have, say today, a restoration in faith. Faith you can remember, return to be, rely on, when faith, being faith, is, finally all you have left. Receive the gift of faith in music and word this Lord’s Day.

Then go and live!

As one said: ‘I have only just a minute,  Only sixty seconds in it. Forced upon me, can't refuse it. Didn't seek it, didn't choose it. But it's up to me to use it, I must suffer if I lose it, Give account if I abuse it. Just a tiny little minute’. But eternity is in it.’

Our music sings it so:

Now, I know, You shall quiet in me

my conscience which gnaws at me.

Your faithful love will fulfill

what You Yourself have said:

that upon this wide earth

no one shall be lost,

rather shall live forever,

if only he is filled with faith.

-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean. & Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music.

posted in Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music, The Bach Experience, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 09.30.2018 at 11:00 am
Tags: Bach Experience, Robert Hill, Scott Jarrett

Sunday
April 15

The Bach Experience

By Marsh Chapel

1 John 3: 1-7

Luke 24:36-48

Personal Faith

The Christian life is a daily combination of personal faith and social involvement (repeat).

While personal faith is not merely individual faith, nonetheless, it is in persons, like you, that faith is received, and known, and nourished. There is no hiding here, no hiding behind an unconsidered ignorance, nor behind a well-tempered philosophy, nor behind a mountainous and real hurt, nor behind sloth. Your faith is yours, especially when it is about all you have left to go on.

So, you will continue, brightened by Easter, to develop and practice your faith. We are not meant to live in Lent. We are meant to live in Easter. The difference Easter makes comes in part by way of a full body embrace of your own personal faith.

Do you know God to be a pardoning God? Do you hope to be made whole in this lifetime?

Knowing pardon, can you creatively and even at some risk, work with another whom you think needs your pardon, I beg your pardon, but who may himself think you need his? Just how sharp is your faith in its faithful practice of what we pray, Come Sunday, ‘forgive…as we forgive’?

Longing for wholeness, can you creatively and even at some risk, take up work that you have long left behind, but you know is part of personal faith development—reading, prayer, giving, serving, listening? Pardon? Wholeness? It is up to you.

Here the faithful Lutheran, JS Bach, can indeed help us, by means of his own example in faith. His own Bible, we have recently been further taught, was laden with notes in the margin, questions, renderings, and ruminations.

One may choose to play the piano again. Another may take a language study. One may find a daily devotional reader, like the one my friend gave me by CS Lewis, which sits on my bureau so I can read it while tying my tie. Another may sit in the quiet of the sanctuary for a while before worship, as did Emerson, I love the silent church before there is any speaking. One may wander, saunter, flaneur dans le rue, walking for a bit every day (we even have a health group on the staff here doing so right now). Another may start to journal, to record dreams, and to record insights, and to record angers and to record escapes. Teaching and learning are spiritual adventures in pursuit of invisibles and intangibles (W. Arrowsmith, as remembered by V. Kestenbaum). Or, if nothing else, you can hardly do better than a conversation, in loving care, with another person of faith, over lunch, over coffee, over a beer, over the phone. One may look hard at his sexual life, sexual activity, to see whether it becomes the gospel, and whether it approximates the very general guidance in the wisdom saying, In singleness integrity, in partnership fidelity. At least one, probably, will choose to listen to the Marsh Chapel service, Come Sunday. Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to them, "Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things."

Dr. Jarrett: in terms of today’s music, and text, what witness do you sense Bach brings us, of personal faith, within the setting of this lovely cantata?

Bach

Today’s cantata, is, indeed, a lesson in faith, assurance, and the promise of God’s goodness in our lives. Cantata 69a – “Praise the Lord, o My Soul” was first performed on August 15, 1723, like all the cantatas in this year’s series, during Bach’s first three months as Cantor in Leipzig. We have seen in these cantatas not just a remarkable display of compositional craftsmanship, but also an authoritative theological understanding through both the compilation of the libretto and the setting of those texts. Cantata 69a features from beginning to end an exuberant and joyful hymn of praise of God and the good works that enable a life of faith. Opening with full festival forces with trumpets and timpani, Bach sets the words of Psalm 103, vs 2 in a marvelous double fugue. The music is absolutely radiant, brilliant, and brimming with the praise of all God’s faithful. With this rich texture, we can well imagine the sound of Wesley’s thousand tongues to sing the great Redeemer’s praise.

For Bach, the Gospel lesson of the day was from Mark 7, the account of Jesus healing the deaf man at the Sea of Galilee. As the cantata turns from corporate to personal praise, the soprano and tenor soloists join the voices that witnessed Jesus’s miracle proclaiming the goodness of his deeds, and the glory of God. The cheerful tenor aria is delightfully score for recorder and Oboe da caccia. Listen for the extended line that Bach writes for the word erzähle or “declare”, and like the man whose tongue Jesus loosed, the tenor promises a “Gott gefällig Singen durch die frohe Lippen” or a “God pleasing singing though joyful lips.”

With the following alto recit, we turn inward to remember our human frailty and shortcomings. With further reminder of the Gospel lesson, the alto calls on God to utter his mighty ‘Ephphata’ just as Jesus did in Mark 7:34. From the singing of that Aramaic word meaning “Be opened”, the otherwise syllabic recitative opens to a lovely melody on the words, “so wird mein Mund voll Dankens sein!” “ Then my mouth will be full of thanks!”

The bass aria which follows affirms God as Redeemer and Protector. The believer, here the voice of the bass, pens himself to Christ’s Cross and Passion, pledging to praise at all times. In the same way that Christ gladly took up the cross, thereby exalting his Passion, we, too, will rejoice and sing praise in our own Cross-bearing and suffering. Note the stark contrast of the lines for Kreuz und Leiden (Cross and Suffering) with “singt mein Mund mit Freuden” (My mouth sings with joy).

The final Chorale echoes the close of Mark 7 proclaiming “He hath done all things well!” “Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan, darbei will ich verbleiben.” Because God holds me in a fatherly embrace in his arms, I will let him alone govern me. Confidence, assurance, affirmation, and ultimately, faith to live in freedom, and freedom to live by faith.

Social Involvement

The Christian life is a daily combination of personal faith and social involvement (repeat). Of deep personal faith, and active social involvement.

On the front porch of our beloved Marsh Chapel stands John Wesley, preaching, who reminds us that there is no holiness save social holiness (repeat). In the tradition which gave birth to Boston University and to Marsh Chapel and so to our worship on this and every Sunday, personal faith and social involvement go together, and, in truth, are not found, except hand in hand.

As all of our eight days of worship, teaching, fellowship and remembrance, in honor of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. have evinced among us, pistis and polis, faith and culture go together. Here Bach may help us, if especially in the surge of beauty his music showers on us a sense of grace and in so doing gathers us as one. The older Lutheran preference for the two kingdoms, Christ and Culture in paradox, is at some lesser closeness to the transformational aspiration in Wesley’s social holiness. Yet Bach’s very vocational choice to embed himself in congregational musical life is itself a harbinger of transformation. More, the universal regard for the beauty of Bach itself places on the edge of a way forward, as a global village.

As Christian women and men, we are not free to celebrate faith apart from life, to affirm faith in ignorance of the polis, the city, the culture, the political. The Bible itself is a 66-book declamation of social justice, at every turn, by every writer, with every chapter, at every point. Moses, Amos, Micah, Matthew, Luke, Paul, All. Try and read the Bible without being confronted, accosted, seized and shaken by its fierce acclamation of the hope of justice. Real religion is never very far from justice, even though justice alone, a crucial part of the Gospel, alone is not the heart of the Gospel. The Gospel is love, which is more than justice—though not less.

You then, in real time, read the newspaper as well as the Bible. You have reason and obligation to be concerned about what you read. You have reason and obligation to be concerned about the persons and personalities driving cultural and political formation. You also have reason and obligation to be concerned about the policies, speaking of polis, which emanate from those personalities and persons, those forms of rhetoric and language and behavior. You have full reason and obligation to be concerned about public good, about the polis, about the forms of culture and civil society across our land, painstakingly built up over 250 years, that are not government and not politics, but are more fundamental and more fragile than both. You have reason and obligation to be concerned about the use of military force, either as Christian pacifists, or as Christian activists watching for the just war adjectives: responsive, multilateral, proportional, non-imperial, just, and limited.

As a runner, say, you have reason and obligation to be concerned about the route itself. Run with joy the race set, but neglect not to engage by precept and example the social support, the cultural forms required for the race. The route. The roads cleared. The police. The first responders. The supporting cheerers. The rules and traditions. The many, thousands, standing by you, and standing with you, and standing for you. Personal holiness is the run. Social holiness is the route. They go together.

Five years ago, today, we began Marathon Monday with our Marsh Chapel traditions. The Dean’s breakfast. The meal of eggs, bacon, muffins and juice, with invitations to all undergraduates to arise before the race comes through Kenmore Square. Music to sing, written in Boston long ago for a children’s choir, “My Country ‘Tis of Thee, Sweet Land of Liberty”. Longfellow cited, one if by land if two if by sea, and I on the opposite shore will be. The Gettysburg address recited, Fourscore and seven years ago. Then, out to the race and the day and the 26 mile family picnic on Boston’s best morning. But as you know the day ended differently than planned, as our Wednesday April 11 remembrance this past week here at BU recalled. Just recall the social involvement of those who expected to treat blisters and ended up placing tourniquets. Just recall the social involvement in the lives saved, hundreds saved, by prepared, well supported, team oriented hospitals and physicians. Just recall your social involvement in the vigil that Tuesday evening on our plaza, the Wednesday evening worship service in our sanctuary, the Thursday morning service at the Cathedral with the President speaking words of grace, the Friday lock down. Just recall the Monday global service for our own Lu Lingzi, which ended with her family, 18 together, bowing at the waist before the University and the world. Dime con quien corres, yo te dire quien eres. You tell me WITH WHOM you run, and I will tell you who you are.

The Christian life is a daily combination of personal faith and social involvement (repeat). So, our song this Lord’s day, is just this:

Ah, would that I had a thousand tongues!

Ah, would that my mouth were

Empty of idle words!  Ah, would that I said nothing other

Than what was geared to God’s praise! 

Then I would proclaim the Highest’s goodness,

For all my life he has done so much for me

That I cannot thank Him in all eternity.

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

posted in Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music, The Bach Experience, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 04.15.2018 at 11:00 am
Tags: Bach Experience, Robert Hill, Scott Jarrett

Sunday
February 11

The Bach Experience

By Marsh Chapel

Mark 9:2-9

Hill

Last Sunday our worship service of Word and Table conclude with the singing of an old hymn, written by a Massachusetts minister J. Edgar Park, who was President of Wheaton College, Massachusetts. He was born in Belfast, Ireland, March 7, 1879 and had his theological studies at New College, Edinburgh, The Royal University, Dublin, and Princeton Theological Seminary. His principal pastorate was in the Second Church of Newton, Congregational, West Newton, Massachusetts, which he served 1926 to 1944, going from there to the Presidency of Wheaton. He was the author of many books, including one of the Lyman Beecher Lectures at Yale.

You may not in fact remember the hymn we sang, to conclude our service, which is not any detriment to or criticism of you. The hymn title is ‘We Would See Jesus’, number 256 in our venerable Methodist Hymnal, which Hymnal is about to be revised this coming year with all the attendant disagreements, disputes, and ultimately, we trust, a happy and useful outcome for the use of singing Methodists near and far. One of our own faculty here at Boston University is a member of that committee.

The hymn fits our readings from Mark, and fits Epiphany, the season out of which we come, and traces the ministry of Jesus.

We would see Jesus, lo! His star is shining, above the stable while the angels sing

There in a manger on the hay reclining, haste let us lay our gifts before the King

We would see Jesus, Mary’s Son most holy…

We would see Jesus, on the mountain teaching…

We would see Jesus, in his work of healing…

We would see Jesus, still as of old he calleth ‘Follow me’…

In a few simple verses, the hymn traces the earthly ministry of Jesus, birth, growth, teaching, healing, calling. This is the Jesus most of us most of the time are most comfortable with, and the Jesus, one could add, that most seminarians prefer to study, the Jesus of parables, of the lilies of the field, of the various healings, of the preachments in valley and on mountain—in short, the human Jesus. This is the Jesus known and heard in Matthew, Mark and Luke, with some occasional exceptions, like today’s reading. We can fairly readily approach this Jesus, we would see him as the hymn says, in the verses and chapters of the Synoptic Gospels.

Now pause, for a moment, and hear again the Gospel today, which is none of this. The Mark 9 Transfiguration is like an invasion of the gospel of John into an other-wise happy earliest Gospel of Mark. A high mysterious mountain. Strange choices about booths. The sudden acclamation of Elijah and Moses. A blinding light. MYSTERIUM TREMENDUM. The Holy. Suddenly not just a teacher or preacher or healer or rabbi, but…This is the Jesus of your life and death. Death makes us mortal, facing death makes us human. This is the Jesus of whom it is said, ‘My Lord and My God’. This is the Jesus to whom we turn in the Lenten challenges, whether or not they come in Lent, the Lord of life and death. So, our Charles Wesley hymn, in a few moments, is quite different: Christ whose glory fills the skies, Christ the true the only light, Sun of Righteousness arise, triumph o’er the shades of night, Dayspring from on High be near, Daystar in my heart appear

It is this holy grace, this gracious holiness, to which we turn our ears, not our eyes, on the Sundays, like this one, upon which we hear the Gospel as spoken, but also as sung: A day is coming that will judge the secrets [of humankind], Before which hypocrisy may tremble. For the wrath of His jealousy annihilates What hypocrisy and cunning contrive.

Dr. Jarrett: how shall we listen, this morning, with particular and careful attention, to today’s cantata?

Jarrett

Thank you, Dean Hill. At first read, the texts of today’s cantata surely align more with the MYSTERIUM TREMENDUM depiction you’ve just described. Cantata 136 warns of the day of judgement when our own hypocrisy and cunning-ways threaten to undo us. The bass soloist tells us that the heavens themselves are not clean, and that all are struck by spots of sin, brought upon us by Adam’s Fall. These depictions endure for much of the cantata, until, mercifully, we are reminded that Jesus’s wounds cleanse and redeem. In the final chorale we sing that even a drop of the Blood of Jesus can cleanse the entire world. The image is one of humankind ensnared in the Devil’s jaws, set free and at liberty by the blood of the lamb.

Bach’s anonymous librettist was surely trying to amplify the themes of the lessons heard earlier in the Leipzig service — for Bach these were lessons from Romans and Matthew. They call the Christian to live according to the spirit, not the flesh, along with an admonishment to beware false prophets and hypocrisy. These are the subjects of the internal movements – two recitatives, an alto aria, and a duet for tenor and bass. Bach highlights a few words here with extended melismas for the singers: erzittern or tremble referring to the sinner on judgment day, vernichtet or annihilate describing the wrath of God’s jealousy. In the duet, as if to number our spots of sin, Flecken is set as a melisma. Later in the duet the redeeming Strom or stream of Jesus’s blood is similarly treated, all of which offer aural anchors throughout these two remarkable movements.

A typical cantata libretto draws on several sources for texts. The internal movements were most often newly written poetic texts by someone in close working relationship with Bach. It’s in these texts we find the most theological exegesis worked out. Most often the cantatas concluded with a Chorale by one of the famous Lutheran hymn writers, frequently by Luther himself. The opening movements were typically direct quotes of Scripture, drawing on the Psalms more than any other Biblical source. Bach follows this exact design in Cantata 136, opening his cantata with the 23^rd verse of Psalm 139: Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me and know my thoughts. In the German: “Erforsche mich, Gott, und erfahre mein Herz; Prüfe mich, und erfahre, wie ich’s meine.” Modern German translations of the Luther Bible replace erfahre with erkenne. Regardless, listeners can recognize these four imperative verbs that begin each line, imploring God’s true examination of our inmost thoughts.

Hill

I rely with gratitude on John Ashton, a great NT scholar, to keep the Jesus of Mark and also the Jesus of John, who makes an invasive appearance here in Mark 9, both before us. Both Christmas and Easter. Both Life and Death. Both teaching and crucifixion. Both healing and resurrection. Jesus both human divine, both Mark and John, both Mark 1 and Mark 9. Both ‘We would see Jesus’ and ‘Christ whose glory fills the skies’. Both last Sunday and this Sunday.

No doubt the Synoptic Gospels held their place; but for them Christianity might well have rapidly vaporized into some form of speculative Gnosticism. It did not; the parables of the kingdom and the Sermon on the Mount continued to be regarded as indispensable elements of the Christian message, and—more importantly—the Jesus who preached them remained ever present to the Christian consciousness.

To most modern eyes the portrait painted by the Synoptists is both both simpler and more attractive. It is the portrait of a man with a special relationship with God, whom he addresses by the intimate name of Abba, Father…He was a man of his time; his teaching and preaching, even his healing miracles, can readily be placed in the context of first century Palestinian Judaaism. If he were suddenly to reappear as he really was he would no doubt seem to us, in Albert Schweitzer’s phrase,’ a stranger and an enigma’, but a recognizable human being nonetheless.

Not so the Johannine Christ (we add, here, not so the Christ of the Transfiguration). He does not belong to this world at all: it is almost true to say that he enters it with the purpose of leaving it. He is a pre-existent divine being whose real home is heaven. He enters an alien world with an unprecedented confidence and assurance, knowing who he is, where he comes from, and where he is going…He orchestrates his own passion…he can read Pilate’s heart. There is about him no trace of uncertainty. Master of his fate, captain of his soul… his head bloodied but unbowed, he never had to confront either the fell clutch of circumstance or the bludgeonings of chance. (Ashton, 1991, Understanding the Fourth Gospel, 239)

Well beloved, that is, there is a full and deep mystery here, an unfathomable, an uncanny deep, right here in our Gospel, of the sudden appearance of a Jesus who would fit well in John, but not so well in Mark. And is that not, for us, come Sunday, this Sunday, in the hearing of the word and music, a part of our needed reminder, a reminder about the limits of life, about the mystery of life, about the God gift of life, given us well beyond our capacity to understand it? Perhaps we can carry from the beauty and holiness of these precious gospel and musical moments, a sturdy reminder of the great strangeness, the great mystery, the great, tremendous, yes, unearthly voice and presence and grace of our Lord, who comes to us, this morning, interrupting the rest of his more human appearance in Mark, with this scene befitting John, and interrupting our forgetfulness about mystery. In that spirit, let us pray:

Gracious God, Holy and Just

Thou from whom we come and unto whom our spirits return

Thou source of Wisdom, fount of Wisdom, well spring of saving Wisdom

Make of us, we pray, an addressable community

That we might listen

That we might hear

That we might understand

That we might listen, hear and understand before we analyze or criticize

Make of us, we pray, an addressable community

Make of us, we pray, a benevolent community

That we might polish our proclivity for the second thought, the second try, the second chance

That we might expect to uncover a latent goodness, latent in others and in ourselves and across this great, though troubled, globe

That we might become good in ways that become the Gospel

Make of us, we pray, a benevolent community

Make of us, we pray, a soulful community

Alive to spirit, alive to love, alive to grace

Take away from our souls all strain and stress

Let us breathe again, breathe deeply, breathe the soulful breath of life

Make of us, we pray, a soulful community

For we have gathered and bear witness to Jesus, our beacon not our boundary.

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

posted in Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music, The Bach Experience, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 02.11.2018 at 11:00 am
Tags: Bach Experience, Robert Hill, Scott Jarrett

Sunday
November 19

The Bach Experience

By Marsh Chapel

1 Thessalonians 5:1-11

Matthew 25:14-30

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill

Preface

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

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

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

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

Come and join us! Come and join us for this year in worship, fellowship, and discipleship. Come and join us in this season of remembrance! Come, especially today, amid the beauties of Bach and the rituals of Thanksgiving, to remember your humanity, fragility, mortality…eternity. Death makes us mortal. Facing death makes us human. Bach today, and the Scripture every day, sing out to us: God is at work in the world to make and keep human life human.

Longing

The desire of the moth for the star, of the night for the morrow, the devotion to something afar, from the sphere of our sorrow. The desire of the moth for the star, of the night for the morrow, the devotion to something afar, from the sphere of our sorrow. So, Shelley.

El anhelo de la inmortalidad. The longing for immortality. El anhelo de la inmortalidad. The longing for immortality. So, Unamuno.

Our cantata today sings of heaven. The cantata sings out for what lasts, matters, counts.

Lao Tze wrote: The reality of the vessel is the shape of the void within it. The reality of the vessel is the shape of the void within it.

At the heart of the human being there is a longing for God, for heaven, for eternity.

Pause for a minute. Sometimes that longing has an overture in other forms of emptiness, of lack, of longing.

One autumn, following a brief pastoral conversation, you could see lingering on the leaf pocked porch step, a woman at young middle age. For a variety of reasons, common enough, in her whole life she had really no real friends, until by grace in the years before, and by grace in the church of Christ, she had found a friend, made a friend, become a friend, been befriended by another woman her own age, with children of the same ages, husbands of the same baleful tempers, parents of the same haunting failings. She had a friend. If you have friend, one is a great number in a lifetime, then you know. But in June her friend moved a long way away. Come November, there was that ache, that emptiness, that longing, that ‘shape of the void within’. To date, no other friend has come along to fill that void.

And you? Can you conjure your own such longing? If only I had finished my degree. If only I had fallen in love. If only I had really discerned a calling. If only I had kept that other job. If only I had more loving parents. If only I could put words to the pre-dawn presentiments of what I think is faith. If only someone would notice that I can be a good pal. If only I could shake off this daily anxiety. If only someone would publish my book. If only I could get the grace to forgive what he or she did to me. If only my parents would see my beloved as I see him. If I only I could wake once with a smile. If only he would see me as I really am. And you? Can you conjure your own such longing?

The more proximate longings can prefigure the ultimate longing, in its own full way unspeakable but not for that reason any less real.

The desire of the moth for the star, of the night for the morrow, the devotion to something afar, from the sphere of our sorrow. El anhelo de la inmortalidad. The longing for immortality.

Death makes us mortal. Facing death makes us human. Pastoral experience in the main shows that most of us most of the time do not fear death, but we do fear. What we fear is the death of our loved ones and the death of our dreams. What we fear is the death of our loved ones and the death of our dreams. Maybe something like that is behind Matthew’s rendering of the inherited parable today, his anger, his burning mean-spirited dyspepsia. Said a faithful Anglican a few weeks ago: ‘How much longer do we hear from Matthew and the dark side?’ Not long, not long. Yet Matthew’s recognition of the human failures in the human condition we do recognize in our own years of humiliation. The longing, that heaven shaped soul emptiness, that desire—anhelo—abides. How does Bach sing this today?

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett

Singing

In this year’s Bach Experience, we have been focusing on cantatas Bach composed in his first weeks in Leipzig as cantor at St. Thomas. His task was to provide a musical explication of the day’s lessons alongside the sermon. These cantatas, comprising solo arias, recitatives, choruses, and chorales, with librettos using both scripture and free poetic texts, typically last about 20 – 30 minutes. In this context, it was Bach’s task to work through the theological ideas at hand. Each cantata is masterpiece in miniature, and we continue to marvel at the astonishing invention, creativity, and complexity revealed note by note.

Cantata 95, ‘Christus, der ist mein Leben’, takes up one of the most difficult but ubiquitous themes of Bach’s day: how to reconcile and countenance our mortality. Our program annotator writes: Consider that pre-Enlightenment Germany saw death and devastation in the Thirty Years’ War unknown to Europe since the fourteenth century, and that Bach himself was orphaned at age ten and lost his first wife and ten of his twenty children. Death was all around; the promise of immediate salvation cultivated a cultural longing for it and served as a powerful call to faith.”

Serving to teach, remind, and also comfort, Bach drew on four different familiar hymns or chorales that serve as the foundation for this seven-movement cantata. These tunes and texts serve as a beacon to the believer — a tuneful and memorable transmission of theology: Christ, He is my Life, To die is my gain; To it do I surrender myself, With joy I go yonder. / With peace and joy I go there according to the Will of God. Death has become my sleep. / I would bid you farewell, You evil, false world. In heaven it is good to dwell. / Since Christ is arisen from the dead, I will not remain in the grave; Your last Word is my ascension, Death’s dear You can drive away. For where You are, there do I come, That I may always live and be with You; Therefore I depart with joy.

These chorales establish the orthodoxy around which the believer can begin to reconcile his own personal response and call. Musically, the four chorale setting also offer a composition guide to the possibilities of setting chorale tunes. The first is set as an orchestral chorale fantasia with each phrase of the chorale set off by exuberant motives from the oboes and strings in G major. The second, heard as the concluding section of the first movement, casts the chorus in counterpoint with the oboes and and horn set over a more rhythmic, walking bass line. The soprano soloist takes up the third chorale, in a little aria that becomes a sweet devotional song with two oboes d’amore in unison encouraging her song. The cantata concludes with a four part setting of the fourth chorale in an expected way, with the notable additional of a fifth voice as descant in the fist violin part.

The most remarkable music of the cantata is reserved for the tenor soloist, who, through his clarity of faith, teaches Bach’s congregants a possibility of their personal attitudes toward mortality. His music in the central aria is sung almost in spite of the music of the instruments, which seem to proceed on their own clock. The aural image here is one of funeral bells, or a glockenspiel in a bell tower. The strings play entirely pizzicato, or plucked, throughout, and the organ remains silent. You can imagine this sound as the inner workings of the clock played in precise and regular patterns and rhythms. On two, the two oboes play their melody in parallels. The missing third note of their chords is obscured in the pizzicatos of the first violin part. And, to my ear, this further contributes to the ‘mechanized’ sound of this music – a Leichenglock or funeral bells. The tenor joins up musically with the instruments every time he sings the words “blessed hour”, singing the third or missing note in the oboe pattern. There are so many choices here from the composer revealing a musical reality the likes of which only a Johann Sebastian Bach could imagine.

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill

Praying

Some of you have been reading again the Confessions of St. Augustine, in Sarah Ruden’s new translation. Like the music of Bach, the music of his poetic prose, his prosaic poetry, lasts and matters and counts. Augustine lifts our eyes from earth to heaven, from the visible to the invisible, from the daily to the divine. Bach does the same. Augustine in powerful particularity, teaches us again to pray. In a word, for him, prayer is thanksgiving. All right, in four words, prayer is grace, courtesy, respect, and gratitude. Prayer is not a spiritual hockey puck, hit by slap-shot toward the masked goalie God. Prayer is being thankful, giving thanks, bespeaking gratitude. Howard Thurman knew this so well. As the student choir Morehouse College sang, to honor Thurman’s birthday, in prayer, we give thanks. So, each year, at Marsh Chapel, on this Sunday, so close to his birthdate, on this Sunday, so close to our nation’s holiday, on this Sunday, so set apart to honor the grateful, we offer Thurman’s Thanksgiving prayer. You may, by the way, take it from the website to your own Thanksgiving table, should you want need or like. Count it our annual public service!

Today, I make my Sacrament of Thanksgiving.

I begin with the simple things of my days:

Fresh air to breathe,

Cool water to drink,

The taste of food,

The protection of houses and clothes,

The comforts of home.

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

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

My mother’s arms,

The strength of my father

The playmates of my childhood,

The wonderful stories brought to me from the lives

Of many who talked of days gone by when fairies

And giants and all kinds of magic held sway;

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

The excitement of laughter and the twinkle in the

Eye with its reminder that life is good.

For all these I make an act of Thanksgiving this day

I finger on by one the messages of hope that awaited me at the crossroads:

The smile of approval from those who held in their hands the reins of my security;

The tightening of the grip in a simple handshake when I

Feared the step before me in darkness;

The whisper in my heart when the temptation was fiercest

And the claims of appetite were not to be denied;

The crucial word said, the simple sentence from an open

Page when my decision hung in the balance.

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

I pass before me the main springs of my heritage:

The fruits of labors of countless generations who lived before me,

Without whom my own life would have no meaning;

The seers who saw visions and dreamed dreams;

The prophets who sensed a truth greater than the mind could grasp

And whose words would only find fulfillment

In the years which they would never see;

The workers whose sweat has watered the trees,

The leaves of which are for the healing of the nations;

The pilgrims who set their sails for lands beyond all horizons,

Whose courage made paths into new worlds and far off places;

The saviors whose blood was shed with a recklessness that only a dream

Could inspire and God could command.

For all this I make an act of Thanksgiving this day.

I linger over the meaning of my own life and the commitment

To which I give the loyalty of my heart and mind:

The little purposes in which I have shared my loves,

My desires, my gifts;

The restlessness which bottoms all I do with its stark insistence

That I have never done my best, I have never dared

To reach for the highest;

The big hope that never quite deserts me, that I and my kind

Will study war no more, that love and tenderness and all the

inner graces of Almighty affection will cover the life of the

children of God as the waters cover the sea.

All these and more than mind can think and heart can feel,

I make as my sacrament of Thanksgiving to Thee,

Our Father, in humbleness of mind and simplicity of heart.

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

posted in Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music, The Bach Experience, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 11.19.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Bach Experience, Robert Hill, Scott Jarrett

Sunday
September 24

The Bach Experience

By Marsh Chapel

Matthew 20: 1-16

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill on Matthew

Here at Marsh Chapel over the last decade we have endeavored to offer our listenership around the globe, and our congregation here in the flesh, a distinctive confluence of music and word, come Bach Sundays. By experiment and practice, we have tried to allow the preaching of the Gospel, God’s external word of grace in sermon, and the music of the church, the praise of God in voice and instrument, to dance together, to become a mutual enrichment, and a call to faith. Over time that has led us, Scott and me, to reform the service and sermon, upon these Sundays, into an antiphonal teaching, including a sermon in dialogue. To our current knowledge, what you hear, here, is sui generis, not like something or anything else, what we hope is a part of what across the oikoumene is distinctive, better and best about Marsh Chapel.

In preparation for the confessional humility of today’s cantata, we give ear to our Holy Scripture. In Matthew 20, in the vineyard, our parable represents the ‘undifferentiated rewards of the Kingdom of God’ as Bultmann put it. The parable affirms divine generosity, and inscrutable divine goodness and generosity. Its point: behold the divine generosity, do not begrudge the divine generosity.

Consider the parable (found only in Matthew). All the workers are paid the same. As in life, so here in Scripture, there is no sure, consistent justice. To be sure, the landowner has paid what he agreed to pay. To be sure, hour by hour, the workers have received what they agreed to receive. To be sure, the daily needs of all for the day to come are met, from each according to his stamina and to each according to his needs. To be sure, the added proverb, about last becoming first and first last fits the parable awkwardly if at all. The parable acclaims God’s bounteous generosity, not God’s impartial justice.

When a job truly fit and meant for you goes to another, on a shaky or unjust premise or process, you know the feeling of the early workers. When an illness unearned and unexpected afflicts your loved one, you know the feeling of those working among the grapes and feeling the grapes of wrath. When a day begins and ends as an existential illustration of Shakespeare’s 66^th sonnet, you know the resentment addressed in the story from Matthew 20:1-16.

Let us attend carefully for a moment to Matthew. In the vineyard, the undeniable difference between equality and justice faces us, as it did Jesus, Matthew, the Rabbis and others. Jesus, loving the amahaaretz, the poor of the land, may have been telling the Pharisees to broaden their embrace. Matthew, among Jews and Gentiles, Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians, may have been admonishing the former to honor the latter. The Rabbis, in the same period, used the same story, but added that the later workers did in two hours what took the earlier ones all day.

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett on Bach

Today’s cantata offers a similar version of the “Last shall be first, and the first shall be last.” For Bach, the Gospel text for Sunday, August 8, 1723, was the Luke story of the Tax Collector and the Pharisee, both praying in the Temple. You’ll recall with me that Jesus’s parable depicts the outwardly pious Pharisee praying ostentatiously, taking advantage of the presence of the tax collector to boost his own piety. By contrast the Tax Collector remained in the back of the temple, out of side, head bowed, beating his breast, in complete humility. Bach’s lesson is a heavy handed warning against the hypocrisy of the Pharisee, and an injunction to all to align inner and outer attitudes of faith. Furthermore, our own depravity of sin weighs us down, and it is only by acknowledging our sin before God that we may attain God’s mercy and grace. So sit up straight this morning!

We have come to trace the message of these cantatas as a move, broadly speaking, from orthodoxy at the beginning to personal or pietist devotion in the arias back out to the corporate expression of lessons learned in the final chorale. Let’s consider the two arias from the central portion of the cantata first. Each is preceded by a recitative in which Bach’s librettist reminds the listener of the elements of the Luke parable. The tenor leads off by indicting today’s Christians as puffed up, outwardly righteous, and ultimately lacking an inner purity of faith. He sings a scathing aria likening these hypocrites to Apples of Sodom, a fruit that dissolves into ash and smoke once they are picked. Though they gleam on the outside, they are filled with Unflat—filth—and in case you hadn’t guesses it, none of this will hold up before God.

The next pairing of recit and aria brings this message home, a more immediate and personal call to true piety and faith. The bass reminds us that the only way to attain relief from this sinful state is to acknowledge our sins before God. Next comes the most beautiful aria in the cantata. Sung by soprano with two hunting oboes – the oboe da caccia, today played by two English horns – the message is a plangent and pious prayer for mercy. The interweaving oboe lines played over the pulsing continue line setup the soprano’s fervent plea for mercy. In the middle of the aria, she describes the depths of her sin as coming from within her bones, and that they drown her in a deep mire. Listen for the text painting throughout this aria used by Bach to depict the weight of sin.

Without any turn toward promised redemption, the cantata concludes with the expected four-part chorale setting. Here, ‘Ich armer Mensch’ continues the distressed state of the soprano by sustaining the emotion, and thereby, the congregation takes up the soprano’s prayer.

The cantata is decidedly didactic start to finish, with the moral of the story appearing right at the front as the text of the first movement: See that your fear of God is not a hypocrisy, and do not serve God with a false heart. Bach sets this opening movement in an older style of polyphonic writing, and as much as the text is a ‘rule’, he sets it as a fugue. But there’s one element that truly takes this form to heights only possible in the hands of Bach: the second entrance of the fugue is in complete inversion of the original subject, an exact mirror image. Bach’s fugue bears the same message on the outside as on the inside, a musical device to prove the enduring lesson of the Gospel.

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill on Matthew

Listen again to the words in St. Matthew, a portion of his gospel that is all his own, unshared by Mark, unshared by Q, unshared in the rest of scripture. Our landowner, through Matthew’s rendering, is called an ‘OIKODESPOTES’, a person of some power. The allegory is clear. God is obliged to nobody. Further, the timing of God’s grace and generosity is God’s own affair, only without prejudice either to the early or to the late. In this way, Matthew concurs with Paul in 1 Thessalonians that the living will not precede the dead, in the hour of judgment.

Our parable does not rely on the famous passage from Exodus 16, read a moment ago. (This is a passage you should know and know about by the way.) Yet the acclamation of divine generosity in both is the same. Evening comes, and morning, and in the morning, there is a sweet hoar frost covering all the ground, a layer of dew under which is the ‘manna from heaven’. ‘The bread the Lord has given you to eat”.

We have again to ponder the labor at the heart of life and the labor at the heart of faith. Faith comes by hearing, but it is an active, ‘employed’ listening that allows for that hearing. Faith is a gift, but is a gift like any other that requires receipt, and response, and embrace, (and a thank you note, too). (If faith comes by hearing it will help if you are in earshot. You truly have nothing better to do for an hour on Sunday than worship.) Faith comes as a gift at the time of God’s choosing, but to labor and live in faith requires of us a steady, even fruitful, practice of faith. Here is what Paul is driving at in his letters: live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ, striving side by side with one mind for the faith of the gospel.

I wonder about you? and me? Has the unfailing light and love of divine generosity worked on us at all this week? Are we better people than we were last Sunday? Are we able to pray each day? Martin Luther, the 500^th anniversary of whose reformation we remember this autumn, recommended morning prayer to include a recitation of the Ten Commandments, a recitation of the Apostles’ Creed, and a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, morning by morning. Will the remembered humility of this parable in Matthew 20, and the powerful call to contrition today of this music, bring us to our knees, morning by morning? And, are we better, as a people, than we were last Sunday? Luther celebrated the external word—not just spirit and experience. The external word in preaching. The external word in sacrament. The external word in forgiveness (confession and absolution). Can we somehow find our way to church to hear and be fed and receive that external word?

Here too is John Calvin (for once) interpreting this parable: We may also gather that our whole life is useless and we are justly condemned of laziness until we frame our life to the command and calling of God. From this it follows that they labor in vain who thoughtlessly take up this or that kind of life and do not wait for God’s calling. Finally, we may also infer from Christ’s words that only they are pleasing to God who work for the advantage of their brethren. (loc cit 266)

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

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

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

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

Dearest God, have mercy: let comfort and grace appear

“Dearest God, have mercy: let comfort and grace appear

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

posted in Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music, The Bach Experience, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 09.24.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Bach Experience, Robert Hill, Scott Jarrett

Sunday
April 30

The Bach Experience

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 24: 13-35

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett

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

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill

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

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

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

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

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

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

And two verses featured in this morning’s cantatas:

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

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

Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett

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

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

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

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

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

The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday
February 12

The Bach Experience

By Marsh Chapel

Matthew 5: 21-37

The Rev. Dr. Robert Hill

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Scott Jarrett

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

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

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

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

The Rev. Dr. Robert Hill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rev. Dr. Hill: Whence cometh our help?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

posted in Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music, The Bach Experience, The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel on 02.12.2017 at 11:00 am
Tags: Bach Experience, Robert Hill, Scott Jarrett

Sunday
November 20

The Bach Experience

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 23:33-43

Rev. Gaskell

The Chapel’s gothic nave, built to lift the spirit, welcomes you

The Chapel’s sixty year history, at the heart of Boston University, welcomes you

The Chapel’s regard for persons and personality, both in its Connick stained glass windows and in its current ministry, welcomes you

The Chapel’s familiar love of music, weekday and Sunday, welcomes you

The Chapel’s congregation of caring, loving souls, in this sanctuary, welcomes you in spirit.

Welcome today as we enhance our endowment.

We celebrate the endowment we already have. It is a rich and treasure. It is an endowment vocal not visible, audible not audited, psychic not physical, moral not material. Listen for its echoes…listen…

All the good you can…

The two so long disjoined…

Heart of the city, service of the city…

Learning, virtue, piety…

Good friends all…

Hope of the world…

Are ye able, still the Master, whispers down eternity…

Common ground…

Content of character…

Congregation and community, you come too.

Earthly assembly and heavenly chorus, you come too.

Beauty opens the world to grace. Beauty may prepare you for the gospel of faith, the faith of the gospel. Beauty is a ‘praeparatio evangelica’, a preparation of the gospel. Bach is a prelude to faith.

Faith, the leap of faith, requires preparation. Our colleague Peter Berger has written about this preparation: “I can find in human reality certain intimations of (God’s) speech, signals, unclear though they are, of His presence…joy, expressed in (great music) which seeks eternity…the human propensity to order which appears to correlate with an order in the universe…the immensely suggestive experience of play and humor, the irrepressible human propensity to hope, the certainty of some moral judgments, and last, but not least, the experiences of beauty…”(Questions of Faith, 12).

Beauty prepares us for faith. Bach is a prelude to the gospel.

When you stand before your grandchild, in the hour of birth, you might think about that. When you look into your father’s eyes, as he lies critically ill, you might think about that. When you realize that you have a real friend, one real friend, you might think about that. When you look at your beautiful country, in a time of need, and wonder whether you should bestir yourself to write a check or make a phone call, you might think about that. When a sunset seizes you, when a poem teases you, when a sermon freezes you, you might think about that. It takes a leap. Faith takes a leap.

Something beautiful may have prepared our gospel writer. Bach may prepare you today. Bach may lift your soul beyond youthful grunge. Bach may raise your soul out of religious hiding. Bach may sear your soul with beauty, and call you out of forty years of spiritual sloth. It would not be the first time. Today we hear a song of thanksgiving, a grateful and beautiful anthem. “Bach’s cantatas, in fact, were conceived and should be regarded not as concert pieces at all, but as musical sermons; and they were incorporated as such in the regular Sunday church services”. (The Cambridge Companion to Bach, 86). I wonder whether the beautiful holiness of this music will touch you?

Dr. Jarrett

Today we present Cantata 10: ‘My soul magnifies the Lord’, Bach’s German setting of the Canticle of Mary as found in the first chapter of the Gospel according to Luke. Our program annotator Brett Kostrzewski reminds us both of the joyful prevalence of this text in most all Christian liturgies, but also the familiarity of the Leipzig congregation with this most joyful and famous canticle.

Let’s first consider the libretto for our cantata. Typically, we’d expect to find a biblical exhortation – perhaps a verse or two from a Psalm – followed by a series of recitatives and arias, each of which advances a different rhetorical argument or perspective of the scriptural subject of the day. The recits tend to pack in the most theology with their syllabic declamation, leaving the arias to convey a more personal response to the scriptural subject. Cantata 10 draws its libretto entirely from the Canticle of Mary, the first two verses quoted exactly, with the interior movements paraphrasing the remainder of the text. Only once does our anonymous librettist depart from the Lukan text when, in the final recitative, the tenor expounds on the broader theological implications of the word made flesh with themes that remind us of the first chapter of John. Bach adds the string orchestra at this moment, as if to underscore the importance of this final teaching opportunity.

There are three arias that comprise the corpus of the cantata. The first proceeds directly out of the opening movement without recitative, and immediately and successfully captures both the spirit of John the Baptist leaping in Elizabeth’s womb but also Mary’s joyful exuberance. The central aria provides the bass soloist and continuo cellist a flashy and virtuosic depiction of God casting down the mighty from their seat, exalting the humble, leaving the rich empty, and filling the hungry with gifts of grace. The third aria is perhaps the most inward looking moment in the entire cantata. Scored as a duet for alto and tenor, listen for the Magnificat chant played in long tones by the trumpet.

There are two recitatives for the tenor soloist, both of which offer rich examples of Bach’s extraordinary text setting. Note the chromatic flourish on the word ‘scatter’ in the first recitative, for example.

It is the cantata’s opening movement that best captures the urgency and ardor of Mary’s Song. The ages old Magnificat psalm tone is heard in long notes in the Soprano part, taken up by the altos for the second verse. All around, Bach scores music of brilliant vivacity, depicting both the exuberance of Mary’s joy, but also the promise and urgency of Christ’s advent.

Rev. Gaskell

Let us prepare ourselves, upon this Christ the King Sunday, and take on for ourselves, a spirit of wonder, of vulnerability

Erazim Kohak, of Boston University said of wonder: ‘The ageless boulders of the long abandoned dam, the maple and the great birch by twilight, the chipmunk in the busyness of his days and of his dying, even I, making my dwelling place among them, are not only right in our season. We also have our value in eternity, as witnesses to the audacious miracle of being rather than nothing. Ultimately, that is the moral sense of nature, infinitely to be cherished: that there is something. That is the eternal wonder articulated in the rightness and rhythm of time which humans honor in their commandments, the wonder of being…There are humans…who become blind to goodness, to truth and beauty, who drink wine without pausing to cherish it, who pluck flowers without pausing to give thanks, who accept joy and grief as all in a day’s work, to be enjoyed or managed, without ever seeing the presence of eternity in them. But that is not the point. What is crucial is that humans, whether they do so or not, are capable of encountering a moment not simply as a transition between a before and an after but as the miracle of eternity ingressing intot time. That, rather than the ability to fashion tools, stands out as the distinctive human calling.’

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, of blessed memory, said of vulnerability: ‘Nothing can make up for the absence of someone whom we love and it would be wrong to try to find a substitute: we must simply hold out and see it through. That sounds very hard at first, but at the same time it is a great consolation; for the gap, as long as it remains unfilled, preserves the bond between us. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap: He does not fill it, but on the contrary, He keeps it empty, and so helps us to keep alive our former communion with each other, even at the cost of pain.’

Gaston Bachelard, that Parisian philosopher poet, wrote, in full self-awareness: ‘Words—I often imagine this—are little houses, each with its cellar and garret. Common sense lives on the ground floor, always ready to engage in ‘foreign commerce’, on the same level as the others, as the passers-by, who are never dreamers. To go upstairs in the word house, is to withdraw, step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream, it is losing oneself in the distant corridors of an obscure etymology, looking for treasures that cannot be found in words. To mount and descend in the words themselves—this is the poet’s life…Yet listen well. Not to my words, but to the tumult that rages in your body when you listen to yourself…And why should the actions of the imagination not be as real as those of the perception?’

Bach is filling us with grace and beauty! In particular, the final recit (No. 6) strays a bit from Luke, to amplify a little more theology, and seems to borrow heavily from John: "Thus it ever is, that God's Word is full of grace and truth.” Because the Gospel of John is centrally about the divine presence, this note fits our music today very well. John is about presence, as is this magnificent cantata. John is about Spirit, as is this magnificent cantata. John is about mystery, as is this magnificent cantata. John is about grace, as is this magnificent cantata. Blessed be the Lord God of Israel!

“Blessed be the Lord God of Israel,

for he has looked favorably on his people and redeemed them.

He has raised up a mighty saviorfor us

in the house of his servant David,

as he spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets from of old,

that we would be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us.

Thus he has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors,

and has remembered his holy covenant,

the oath that he swore to our ancestor Abraham,

to grant us that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies,

might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness

before him all our days.

And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High;

for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways,

to give knowledge of salvation to his people

by the forgiveness of their sins.

By the tender mercy of our God,

the dawn from on high will break uponus,

to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,

to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

-The Reverend Victoria Hart Gaskell, Chapel Associate for Methodist students & Dr. Scott Jarrett, Director of Music

Reverend Gaskell's portion of this week's sermon is written by the Reverend Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel

posted in Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett, Director of Music, The Bach Experience, The Rev. Dr. Victoria Hart Gaskell, Minister for Visitation on 11.20.2016 at 11:00 am
Tags: Bach Experience, Scott Jarrett, Victoria Gaskell

Sunday
September 25

The Bach Experience

By Marsh Chapel

Luke 16:19-31

Dean Hill

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

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

Dr. Jarrett

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dean Hill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And grant us Lord, in this our day,

The ancient dream of peace.

God of our weary years

God of our silent tears

Thou who hast brought us thus far along the way

Thou who hast by thy might

Led us into the light

Keep us forever in the path we pray

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

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

Shadowed beneath thy hand

May we forever stand

True to our God

True to our native land

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

Where peace with God

And peace on earth

And peace eternal reign.

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

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