{"id":1304,"date":"2016-01-31T11:00:59","date_gmt":"2016-01-31T15:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=1304"},"modified":"2019-10-08T11:26:10","modified_gmt":"2019-10-08T15:26:10","slug":"42","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2016\/01\/31\/42\/","title":{"rendered":"42"},"content":{"rendered":"

Click here to listen to the full service<\/a><\/p>\n

Luke 4:21-30<\/a><\/p>\n

Click here to listen to the sermon only<\/a><\/p>\n

Luke<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Again, the strange world of the Bible beckons us. \u00a0St. Luke, you see, stands every day, every Sunday, before us, here in the nave of Marsh Chapel. \u00a0Here is Jesus in all his Dominical Authority. \u00a0Here too is Luke. \u00a0The Scripture\u2014mighty, ancient, holy\u2014calls to us, today out of Gospel According to Luke.<\/p>\n

One day you awake, early, and are able to recall the contours of dream. \u00a0Strange. \u00a0One day, walking, your mind and memory are visited by a feeling gone fore years. \u00a0One day, frightful this, news comes of a loved one\u2019s death. \u00a0One day you come to worship to worship. \u00a0Behold the numinous, the uncanny, the mysterious, the strange, here, now, the strange world of the Bible.<\/p>\n

Today–Luke. (He is east of, stage left of Jesus. \u00a0Matthew and Mark are west of, to the stage right of Jesus. \u00a0Luke and John are to the stage left of Jesus. \u00a0And you can hear that truth in more than one way (\u263a)).<\/p>\n

Those at the dawn of life\u2026in the twilight of life\u2026in the shadows of life\u2026You too were strangers in the land of Egypt\u2026as you have done it to the littlest of these you have done it also to me\u2026<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Our Holy Scripture today places us, at first, in a thicket of problems and questions:<\/p>\n

The Scripture is fulfilled in its hearing. \u00a0A \u00a0\u00a0prophet is not honored at home. \u00a0Elijah and Elisha go to Sidon and Syria. \u00a0The crowd is outraged and poises to attack. \u00a0Jesus eases on down the road.<\/p>\n

What is going on here, in this strange world of the Bible, which beckons to us to leave behind our mercantile mediocrity?<\/p>\n

The Scripture is fulfilled, not in a perfectly just world, in a perfected justice, like that, frankly acclaimed in Isaiah, but in the Reader and the Voice. \u00a0Isaiah\u2019s literal prophecy was not fulfilled, and to date has yet been fulfilled. \u00a0\u00a0Another fulfillment Jesus acclaims:<\/p>\n

The resurrection is the preaching of the gospel. \u00a0The gospel is more than justice. \u00a0Now real religion, for sure, is never very far from justice. \u00a0But justice, alone, the prophetic, alone, is not the gospel, some of the last fifty years of quasi-theological education to the contrary not with-standing. \u00a0The gospel is bigger, truer, deeper–and more personal than that. \u00a0Heaven does not touch earth only or fully with the passage of \u00a0a perfect national health care bill, as good as that would be. The life, death and destiny of Jesus Christ are not summarized in a global tax on capital, as laudable as that might be. \u00a0Your ticket through the pearly gates is not the resuscitation of American socialism, as healthy as that might be. \u00a0No. The prophetic is a part but not the heart of the gospel. \u00a0The prophetic tradition is a just part but not the full heart of the gospel. \u00a0We can be happy to be known as \u2018the school of the prophets\u2019. \u00a0Would that we were known too as \u2018the school of the preachers\u2019.<\/p>\n

That is, Elijah and Elisha here are remembered for a very particular reason, one at odds with justice. \u00a0They have gone outside of Israel, outside of the community of faith, outside of the expected audience, and outside of their own prophetic tradition. \u00a0With Israel hungry in famine, the chosen people awaiting rain water, Elijah <\/span>comforts them not<\/span><\/i>, not at all, but goes instead to a foreign land, that of Tyre and Sidon, to alone woman, a lone widow, a lone gentile. \u00a0With Israel halt and lame and leprous, in need of healing and health care, Elisha <\/span>comforts them not,<\/span><\/i> and goes away into a foreign land and heals a Syrian, a lone gentile. \u00a0Jesus\u2019 sermon at home, where, as with every prophet, he faces a tough home crowd, explodes the minor, limited appeal of justice\u2026to universalize, to preach, the gospel. \u00a0The gospel is not justice\u2026but love. \u00a0No wonder the crowd is so angry. \u00a0The gospel moves away from the interior to the exterior, from the expected to the unexpected, from the just to the loving, from the familiar\u2026to the strange.<\/span><\/p>\n

In our passage, Luke has given us the whole of his mysterious gospel in miniature. \u00a0He has given us a prototypical text: \u00a0Isaiah, 61, with its theme of deliverance to those who are hurting. \u00a0He has given us, next, a reminder that God works in God\u2019s own ways, as he did in the days of Elijah and Elisha, when those outside of the faith community were helped first. \u00a0He has given us a warning, through the threat of the crowd to throw Jesus to death, of what awaits Him at the end of the road from Nazareth to Jerusalem. \u00a0He has further given us a fragrant scent of promise, as Jesus escapes, the same sense we are given at Easter\u2014death cannot hold him, even death cannot hold him, not even death can hold him. \u00a0He is the Lily of the Valley\u2026<\/p>\n

God is at work, at work in the world, at work in the world to make and keep human life human, often to the consternation and surprise of God\u2019s very own people. \u00a0(If you go into the ministry, don\u2019t go in needing to be liked. \u00a0You may like to be liked without needing to be liked. \u00a0If you <\/span>need<\/span><\/i> to be liked you will not be able to say what needs saying, when people don\u2019t like it, to do what needs doing, when people don\u2019t like it, to preach what needs preaching, when people don\u2019t like it. Strive to be, in the words of a one time presidential candidate, criticizing his opponent, \u2018likeable enough\u2019 (\u263a). \u00a0Some of that is underneath Luke 4. )<\/span><\/p>\n

Forty Two<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Strange, uncanny things occur.<\/p>\n

Here is a baseball story.<\/p>\n

It seemed fitting in Boston not to talk about football this Sunday, so the historical narrative comes rather from the national pastime, invented, as you well remember, in Cooperstown NY, by Abner Doubleday, more than 150 years ago. \u00a0\u00a0It is a great sport, in which you can strike out 7\/10 times and be a superstar. \u00a0Failure never felt so good.<\/p>\n

Besides, football has its own problems, hard as it is for those of us who are avid fans to see. \u00a0We love the game. \u00a0Yet the spectacle of football, weekend by weekend, is at worst a cultural apotheosis of what one writer harshly called \u2018violence, greed, racism and homophobia\u2019 (NYRB 1\/16). \u00a0As our Boston University researchers, Robert Stern and Ann McKee continue to highlight, football, in Vince Lombardi\u2019s words, \u2018is not a contact sport but a collision sport\u2019. \u00a030% of professional football players suffer dementia. \u00a0So maybe it will be all right to leave behind our beloved gridiron, at least for a while, and tell a story about a kinder, gentler sport.<\/p>\n

Look back nearly a century. \u00a0Enter, by imagination, the main street of a small, poor southern town. \u00a0The town is Cairo, Georgia. \u00a0On one street there is a family with five children. \u00a0The year is 1919.<\/p>\n

Strange, uncanny events take place. \u00a0Now move west, out to Pasadena, a few years later. \u00a0We think of Pasadena as the home of the Rose Bowl, that place where everyone is in shirt sleeves on New Year\u2019s Day, while we shiver. \u00a0Brrr\u2026One of those children, one of the five, from Cairo, Georgia, has graduated from Pasadena College. \u00a0He has four letters, four major sports, one of which, in some ways the least of which, is baseball. \u00a0He hits, he fields, he runs, he scores. \u00a0In Pasadena.<\/p>\n

The ball player from Pasadena took a detour into the army, in the heart and heat of WWII. \u00a0\u00a0In 1945 though he signed up to play professional baseball with a team called the Monarchs, a team in Kansas City. \u00a0Do you remember them? \u00a0They were the longstanding team in the old Negro leagues. \u00a0That was short-lived. \u00a0\u00a0He soon got a better offer to play in Montreal, for the Royals, which then was a farm team for the Brooklyn Dodgers.<\/p>\n

You remember the Dodgers. \u00a0\u2018The Bums\u201d they were called, if memory serves. \u00a0That couldn\u2019t win for losing, couldn\u2019t organize a two- car funeral, couldn\u2019t compete with another team from NYC, whose name escapes me right now, and us on a regular basis. \u00a0\u00a0He batted .330 in his first year, up in Montreal. \u00a0Summer starts about July 1 in Montreal.<\/p>\n

Our Cairo GA fellow, our Pasadena star, our war veteran ballplayer, batting .330\u2014do you recognize him yet? \u00a0Hold that thought.<\/p>\n

That year, 1945, a graduate of Ohio Wesleyan University, and its former baseball coach, now President of the Dodgers, edged his way toward making history. \u00a0Now Ohio Wesleyan, as you well know, was founded in 1842, along with other freedom and abolition loving colleges in the buckeye state, from Cleveland to Cincinnati, born near the same time. \u00a0Its graduates have included Tracey Jones, Norman Vincent Peale, Ralph Sockman, Ernest Fremont Tittle and Robert Allan Hill, and all his kids. \u00a0Ohio Wesleyan is a small Methodist school located on the banks of the Olentangy River, in a town know for horse racing, Delaware, Ohio. \u00a0An early Ohio Wesleyan President is with us today, in the balcony, well, actually, in the stained glass up there, Bishop James Bashford. \u00a0The OWU football team is known as the Battling Bishops, a name that does not often strike terror into the hearts of the opposition, but oh well. \u00a0The OWU baseball coach, now the President of the Brooklyn Dodgers, was the one who made the Montreal arrangement, but with a bigger idea in mind. \u00a0In 1947, there were no black players in major league baseball. But the Pasadena star and the Ohio Wesleyan coach were about to make history. \u00a0Do you recognize them yet?<\/p>\n

The coach is Branch Rickey, and the player is Jackie Robinson, number 42. \u00a0Branch Rickey, for whom the Athletic Building and Fields at Ohio Wesleyan are now named, was making his move. \u00a0Why? \u00a0Many years earlier his team from Delaware had a fine black catcher. \u00a0But when the team traveled to other states, or even into the Hawking Hills of southern Ohio, hotels would close their doors. \u00a0\u00a0One night Rickey solved the problem by having his catcher stay in his own room. \u00a0He came in after a meeting to find the young man weeping and fiercely washing his arms, saying, \u2018Can\u2019t I change my color?\u2019. \u00a0Rickey vowed that sometime he would do something about segregated baseball. \u00a0Rickey was not a saint. \u00a0He was a businessman running a losing team nick-named \u2018The Bums\u2019. \u00a0\u00a0But he had his faith, his own experience, his sense of history, and his vow to live out. \u00a0He needed just the right player. \u00a0He recognized that player in Jackie Robinson.<\/p>\n

Some idealized longing for justice, alone, would never have brought Branch Rickey to take the risk, to find the courage, to develop the imagination to integrate baseball. \u00a0That took love.<\/span><\/i> \u00a0Love nurtured in a quiet home. \u00a0Love taught in a simple church. \u00a0Love preached, season in and out in a Methodist congregation. Love still in the water along the banks of the Olentangy, at Ohio Wesleyan. \u00a0Then, in a descript hotel room, with two lodgers, one coach and one catcher, somehow arrived the explosion, the resurrection, the uncanny sense of consanguinity, like that in the time of Elisha and Elijah, like that Jesus preached in Nazareth, the realization that the gospel of love carries over the lines of faith, the plans of justice, the boundaries of religion.<\/span><\/p>\n

Jackie Robinson ducked bean balls, suffered spikes, endured taunting, hazing, racist rhetoric, and died, by the way, in Connecticut in 1972, still a fairly young man. \u00a0His courage, grace under pressure, had a physical cost in the long run. \u00a0But on April 15, 1947, Robinson stood at the plate in Ebbets field, played alongside Pee Wee Reese, stole home 19 times in his career, led the \u2018Bums\u2019 to beat the Yankees in the World Series of 1955, served for two decades in leadership of the NAACP, (whose current President Cornell Brooks will be with us here at BU\\SPH on Wednesday), became the highest paid athlete in the country by retirement, and founded his own bank. \u00a0In Cooperstown, in 1962, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame a decade before he died. \u00a0His number, \u201842\u2019, across the whole of Major League Baseball, now goes unused, in tribute to him.<\/p>\n

And today is his birthday, January 31. \u00a01\/31 is the birthday of 42.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

I heard William McClain, an African American preacher, tell about growing up in Tuskegee Alabama. He grew up listening to the team Branch Rickey fielded in Brooklyn. \u00a0\u201cWhen Jackie stood at the plate, we stood with him. \u00a0When he struck out we did too. \u00a0When he hit the ball we jumped and cheered. \u00a0When he slid home, we dusted off our own pants. \u00a0When he stole a base, he stole for us. \u00a0When he hit a home run, we were the victors. \u00a0And he was spiked we felt it, a long way away, down south. \u00a0He gave us hope. \u00a0He gave us hope.\u201d<\/p>\n

Love<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Love outlasts death. \u00a0Love nourishes a lasting hunger for justice, which hunger alone can never feed itself. \u00a0Love inspires hope. \u00a0Another day, we can honor those, a few, who took the example of Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey, and applied it to themselves. \u00a0\u00a0Strange, strange world\u2026For example, who would have thought that the successor to the flawless personality of Jackie Robinson, would be eminently flawed character of Curt Flood? \u00a0Yet it was Flood, almost alone, who took the baton from Robinson and ran the next lap. \u00a0But that is another sermon, for another day. \u00a0For example, the young leadership of our own home team, the Red Sox, last month made a startling, strong statement about race past and future in Boston. \u00a0For example, Rickey\u2019s own humble Methodist church now is moving toward a rendezvous with destiny, and truth, over the full humanity of gay people.<\/p>\n

Love is stronger than death. \u00a0Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. \u00a0\u00a0Or, as Paul put it\u2026<\/p>\n

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/i><\/b>And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. <\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/i><\/b>Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful;<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/i><\/b>it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; <\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. <\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. <\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect;\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/i><\/b>but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel<\/a><\/p>\n

For more information about Marsh Chapel at Boston University,\u00a0click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For information about donating to the Chapel,\u00a0click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Click here to listen to the full service Luke 4:21-30 Click here to listen to the sermon only Luke Again, the strange world of the Bible beckons us. \u00a0St. Luke, you see, stands every day, every Sunday, before us, here in the nave of Marsh Chapel. \u00a0Here is Jesus in all his Dominical Authority. \u00a0Here […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2679,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1304"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2679"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1304"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1304\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1306,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1304\/revisions\/1306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}