{"id":1654,"date":"2017-09-10T11:00:57","date_gmt":"2017-09-10T15:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=1654"},"modified":"2019-09-24T13:05:30","modified_gmt":"2019-09-24T17:05:30","slug":"a-season-of-remembrance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2017\/09\/10\/a-season-of-remembrance\/","title":{"rendered":"A Season of Remembrance"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

Matthew 18: 15-20<\/a><\/p>\n

Click here to listen to the meditations\u00a0only<\/a><\/p>\n

Remembrance<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

It felt so good last week to come back, after a summer of travel and preaching, to be at home in our church home, to lean forward from our home pulpit, that of which we are the current, temporary stewards.\u00a0 It is like when you go away for a week, and you come home.\u00a0 You turn the key in the latch.\u00a0 You pick up the mail.\u00a0 You turn on the light.\u00a0 You open the refrigerator to see if anything has arrived or departed (why do we do that?).\u00a0 And we take in, you savor, that sense, scent, sensibility of being home.\u00a0 It connects you again to who you are, reminds you of who you are.<\/p>\n

Last Sunday a couple who had been married at Marsh Chapel fifty years to the day earlier attended worship here.\u00a0 Our attentive usher team made sure, amid Matriculation madness, that the dean had a chance to greet the happy couple.\u00a0 We asked them their secret of success.\u00a0 He replied, \u2018She is the secret\u2019.\u00a0 He did not miss a beat.\u00a0 They came to remember who they were, who they are, who they want to be.\u00a0 Fifty years goes by more quickly than you might think.\u00a0 They had connections with Kingston Ontario, and Queens College there\u2014a beautiful college town, a fine school, along the lakeshore.<\/p>\n

Our summer travels took us, as it happens, to Kingston, Ontario in the last days of June\u2014near Queens college, in that beautiful college town, along the lakeshore.\u00a0\u00a0 We went in something of reminiscence, since decades earlier it had been a regular family vacation destination.\u00a0 Then only 2 hours away; only a couple of hundred US dollars for a few days; only a ride across the Thousand Islands Bridge, and, wa-la, another land, another country, a different currency, a slight difference in inflection.\u00a0 In those years we had gone, summer and winter, to a hotel with a big pool, an indoor gym, hot tub and sauna:\u00a0 a place where the kids could play and the parents could enjoy seeing them do so.\u00a0 What one would or would not give to return, for an hour or a day, to that young adult \u00a0happiness, in a Canadian hostel!\u00a0 In the hot tub, we found ourselves with two couples, one French and one English speaking.\u00a0 We watched as they watched as their kids did exactly what our kids used to do, in the same spot, the same splash, the same laugh, the same joy.\u00a0 We talked as travelers do.\u00a0 They four were headed the next day to Ottawa to celebrate the sesquicentennial of the birth of the Dominion of Canada.\u00a0 All six of us could remember the World\u2019s Fair, MAN AND HIS WORLD, from the Montreal of 1967.\u00a0 All of us had been there.\u00a0 They spoke of their new leader, son of a former Premier, Justin Trudeau.\u00a0 They spoke plainly, eloquently, proudly, lovingly, and personally.\u00a0\u00a0 The English wife said, \u2018You know, it\u2019s just that, I mean, it\u2019s just that\u2026He reminds us of who we are, at our best\u2019.\u00a0 As in that moment we did refrain, so here in the sermon we will refrain from making any comparative remarks, regarding current Canadian and US leadership, as to what each has reminded us about.\u00a0 \u2018He reminds us of who we are\u2019.<\/p>\n

Who reminds you of your own most self, your own best selves?\u00a0 You could ponder that this week, and let us know next Sunday.\u00a0 Whose memory, whose books, whose voice, whose example, whose life and the living of it re-clothes you in your rightful mind?<\/p>\n

Invitation<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

With that question, we offer a word of invitation to you, an invitation to discipleship and through Marsh Chapel.\u00a0 Welcome to the varied ministry of Marsh Chapel at Boston University!\u00a0 We look forward to getting to know you, as you sign up to sing in a choir, as you volunteer to usher or greet, as you attend a fellowship or study group, and especially as you worship with us on Sunday at 11am!<\/p>\n

The envisioned mission of Marsh Chapel is to be \u2018a heart in the heart of the city, and a service in the service of the city\u2019.\u00a0 To that end Dr. Jarrett will invite you to vocal expressions of faith in the life of our music program.\u00a0 To that end Ms. Chicka will invite you to global outreach in our work with International students.\u00a0 To that end Br. Whitney will invite you to take part and take leadership in campus student ministry.\u00a0 To that end Mr. Bouchard will solicit your support for work and works in hospitality.\u00a0 To that end I will invite you to formal membership, to joining Marsh Chapel, on October 22:\u00a0 mark the date!<\/p>\n

This year, with our emphasis on \u2018voice, vocation, and volume\u2019 in our shared life, we are using as a focus for our work the word remembrance.\u00a0\u00a0 Our fall and spring term worship and community life are laden with moments of remembrance.\u00a0 2017-2018 is a full season of remembrance.\u00a0 On September 17, we remember Elie Wiesel.\u00a0 On October 29 (and again in November) we remember Martin Luther.\u00a0 In Lent 2018 we remember Thomas Merton.\u00a0 Then in April 2018, in the week following Easter, we remember the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.\u00a0 Come and join us throughout this year in a special season of remembrance!<\/p>\n

Where I can be personally helpful to you, and where our staff, chaplains, and campus ministers can be a benefit and blessing to you, do not hesitate to call up on us.<\/p>\n

John Wesley famously called for a means of grace to \u2018spread scriptural holiness and reform the nation\u2019. May grace expand and extend in meaning for us in the fall term, 2017!<\/p>\n

A Season of Remembrance<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Elie Wiesel reminded and reminds us, at Boston University,<\/em> of who we are.\u00a0 From the very first day of the life of this University, the school has welcomed with open arms all people, regardless of gender, race, or religion.\u00a0 Women, Blacks, Jews\u2014all\u2014matriculated with day one.\u00a0 Today we would quickly add\u2014all religions, all nationalities, all sexual identities, all varieties of physical abilities.\u00a0 Wiesel\u2019s lectures, attended by more than a thousand a night, thrice each fall, in a stroke set a moral compass for the year\u2019s study.\u00a0 Every era, though few quite as despicably as our own, tempts us, particularly public leadership, to sacrifice moral judgment for the sake of political opportunity.\u00a0 To sacrifice moral judgment for the sake of political opportunity.\u00a0 It is not only a leader taking us, say, toward authoritarianism who is to be resisted and rejected, but it is also and more so those who, without recantation, abet and abide with that leadership, those who are collaborators, who use the same language, who take the same partisan identity, who quietly allow the drip by drip accretion of unfettered power that leads to the great hurricane of later trouble.\u00a0 It starts with a few drops.\u00a0 Wiesel reminds us at BU of who we are.<\/p>\n

Martin Luther reminded and reminds us, in Religious Life, of<\/em> who we are.\u00a0 Many are the difficulties to arranging a proper, nuanced recollection of Luther, Protestant Reformer, Biblical Genius, Person of Courage–and Virulent Anti-Semite.\u00a0 Down and up, though, for ill and good, he reminds us that religion is indeed like the weather.\u00a0 Sometimes sunshine, sometimes rain, never perfect, and in need of steady meteorological, that is to say, theological prediction and predilection.\u00a0 To be a protestant is to apply the protestant principle, as did Luther, and to subject religion to utterly, fully religious critique. (It was Paul Tillich who best did articulate the protestant principle, that all authority, including and especially religious authority, is subject to critique when it makes what is relative, absolute).\u00a0 The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.\u00a0 You see how sharply our moments of remembrance do diverge this year, from Wiesel to Luther and beyond.\u00a0 SEMPER REFORMANDUM.\u00a0 Sola gratia, sola fide, sola Scriptura, but SEMPER REFORMANDUM.\u00a0 The Gospel in St. Matthew today, a rehearsal of an inherited Jewish tradition, with a remarkable and telling late use of the word \u2018church\u2019, ECCLESIA, certainly many decades after Jesus, itself places us in this ongoing reformation, from the first century on.\u00a0 Luther reminds us in Religious Life of who we are.<\/p>\n

We will trust to Thomas Merton to remind us, as he did in life, of the better angels of Christian nature.<\/em>\u00a0 His artistic spirit, his international range, his mysticism, his Catholicism, his brilliant writing along the climb up life\u2019s SEVEN STOREY MOUNTAIN, have much to commend them, for us just now.\u00a0 This is an age in this country when a group of nine or so religious leaders in Nashville, who having studied the Bible surely know better, can stand together and dehumanize 10% of the world\u2019s population, straight forwardly dehumanizing anyone not straight.\u00a0 This is a season in which 81% of Evangelical Christians have supported the recent cultural affirmation of white nationalism, without so much as a fare thee well, and, to date, without recantation.\u00a0 Here is the bottom line:\u00a0 You shall love the God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength; and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.\u00a0 The reason your dean ended up preaching\\ speaking 18 times not 8 this summer is in part that there is a wide-open field out there for Christian preaching that is biblical, traditional, theological and practical\u2014that is, in a word, liberal.\u00a0 Who is to speak for the full, deep, wide, global body of Christianity\u2014the Nashville 9 and the Evangelical 81? Or the deeper wisdom of scripture, tradition, reason and experience? The deeper wisdom of the church has not yet found full voice or hearing, over against the conservative cacophony.\u00a0 It will.\u00a0 But it will take a decade, and the capacity to endure humiliation for a decade.\u00a0 A light touch, a little whimsy, and deep wisdom: <\/em>Merton reminds us as global Christians of who we are.<\/p>\n

Come April, we will turn toward Martin Luther King, Jr.\u00a0 We will need to do so, to recognize and honor his sacrifice, the loss of his life in and for the cause of Right.\u00a0 While most are not yet across the land, or even our community, focused on the season, this will make 50 years since King was murdered, April 4, 2018.\u00a0 Whatever others may not or may do, Marsh Chapel,<\/em> we have a song to sing, a bell to ring, a word to say, and a responsibility to meet.\u00a0 The statue out front, the doves, the remembrance of King, does not give us the endless troubles that schools near and far are having with their own statues.\u00a0 My brother is proud graduate of the law school at Washington and Lee, for instance.\u00a0 But it does ask something of us, and specifically of you, Marsh Chapel. With every gift, there comes a task, in the economy of grace.\u00a0 It asks of us a season of remembrance.\u00a0 Our cultural amnesia leading toward fascism, our Christological amnesia leading toward exclusion, our collegiate amnesia leading toward silence finally stand under the shadow of the King statue.\u00a0 King reminds us as the Marsh Chapel congregation, virtual and actual, past and future, tithing and non-tithing, you and me and all, of who we are.<\/p>\n

A Word of Faith in a Pastoral Voice toward a Common Hope<\/strong><\/p>\n

We await a common hope, a hope that our warming globe, caught in climate change, will be cooled by cooler heads and calmer hearts and careful minds.<\/em><\/p>\n

We await a common hope, a hope that our dangerous world, armed to the teeth with nuclear proliferation, will find peace through deft leadership toward nuclear d\u00e9tente.<\/em><\/p>\n

We await a common hope, a hope that our culture, awash in part in hooliganism, will find again the language and the song and the spirit of the better angels of our nature.<\/em><\/p>\n

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coda<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Wiesel said, \u2018He who hears a witness becomes a witness\u2019.\u00a0 He reminds us of who we are at Boston University.<\/p>\n

Luther said, \u2018Here I stand, I can do no other, God help me\u2019.\u00a0 He reminds us of who we are in Religious Life.<\/p>\n

Merton said, \u2018Love is my true identity.\u00a0 Selflessness is my true self.\u00a0 Love is my true character.\u00a0 Love is my name\u2019.\u00a0 He reminds us who we are as Christian people.<\/p>\n

King said, \u2018The moral arm of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice\u2019.\u00a0 He reminds us of who we are at Marsh Chapel.<\/p>\n

Come and join us!\u00a0 I mean it.\u00a0 Come and join us for this year in worship, fellowship, and discipleship.\u00a0 Come and join us in this season of remembrance!<\/p>\n

– The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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