{"id":1745,"date":"2018-03-04T11:00:21","date_gmt":"2018-03-04T16:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=1745"},"modified":"2021-02-22T15:20:07","modified_gmt":"2021-02-22T20:20:07","slug":"merton-and-sacrament","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2018\/03\/04\/merton-and-sacrament\/","title":{"rendered":"Merton and Sacrament"},"content":{"rendered":"

Click here to listen to the full\u00a0service<\/a><\/p>\n

John 2<\/a><\/p>\n

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

John 2<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Ye that do truly and earnestly repent of your sin, and are in love and charity with your neighbor, and intend to lead a new life following after the commandments of God, draw near in faith, and take this Holy Sacrament to your comfort.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

Martin Luther taught daily devotions, morning by morning, to include recitation of the ten commandments, which we just heard, of the Apostles\u2019 Creed, contours of which round out the service, and of the Lord\u2019s Prayer, to be lifted in a moment.\u00a0 To which, this morning, we append a mediation on John 2.<\/p>\n

Right away, we sense something loose in the Scripture.\u00a0 We are used to something \u2018loose\u2019, because day by day we know from our bones and ears that there is something loose in the universe, as Gardner Taylor used to say.\u00a0 Yes, we believe in God, Maker of Heaven and Earth.\u00a0 (That by the way in its creedal asperity is all Luther\u2019s favorite creed says about God the Creator).\u00a0 But along with the brute reality of all there is and all that is there, to honor both Plato and Aristotle, we know in our bones and ears that all this creation around us shakes, and rattles, and rolls, and has abiding in it something big and loose.\u00a0 The Decalogue, come Lent, brings us up short.\u00a0 Creation is one Christian doctrine, or set thereof.\u00a0 And so is Fall. Creation, and Fall. \u00a0The goodness of Creation is shot through with the fallen-ness of Creation:\u00a0 sin, death, meaninglessness, pride, sloth, falsehood, superstition, idolatry, hypocrisy.\u00a0 Something loose, in the universe.\u00a0 With blood soaked floors in public high schools far and public libraries near, we in tears do quietly nod.\u00a0 We weep as we pray. What a world.\u00a0 It is God\u2019s world.\u00a0 That\u2019s creation.\u00a0 It is a crummy world.\u00a0 That is fall.\u00a0 Somehow, by the gift of faith, in the light of Christ, we try to live with both.\u00a0\u00a0 Hence, Sacrament.<\/p>\n

Part of what was shaking loose in the community of the Gospel of John echoes here in John 2.\u00a0 There is a really odd way of speaking about the Jews in this Gospel.\u00a0 \u2018The Passover of the Jews was near\u2019\u2026 That is a strange way of saying something, like\u2026When the Fourth of July of the Americans was near\u2026When the Christmas of the Christians was near\u2026When the Patriots\u2019 Day of the Bostonians was near\u2026When the Spring Break of the College Students was near\u2026When the Bastille Day of the French was near\u2026<\/em>The Passover of the Jews\u2026Well, it is not like fifteen different religious traditions in antiquity or in modernity celebrate the feast of Passover.\u00a0 I know of no Mormon Passover.\u00a0 Nor of any alive among Southern Baptists.\u00a0 Hindus, Muslims, and many others have marvelous traditions in festival, but no Passover.\u00a0 So, even in this early passage, where the term, \u2018the Jews\u2019 carries an untypical, non-normal, frightfully odd meaning, the Gospel does not handle the term with ease, or grace, or courtesy. \u00a0Yes, John, here may be helping his Gentile readers with reminders about Judaism, its feasts, for instance.\u00a0 But there is, as the Gospel unwinds, a fuller, and tragic manner of speech, here.\u00a0 You think of Yankees fans mentioning those who have season tickets at Fenway, or the way we speak of them:\u00a0 \u2018Others\u2019. You think of Robert E. Lee, referring to the inhabitants of Boston and other places due north of him as \u2018those people\u2019.\u00a0 You think of a humorous play from a few years ago, in which one woman says something about men to three other women, one of whom responds, \u2018Oh\u2026them\u2019.\u00a0 There is a lurking animosity here, and behind that a great dark shadow, something loose in the universe.\u00a0 Bishop Hapgood once said \u2018the only factually demonstrable Christian teaching, about which there can be no doubt, is the doctrine of original sin\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0 There is something loose in the universe.<\/p>\n

And there is more that is loose, this morning.\u00a0 Now you are keen Bible readers, so you know that normally in a Gospel the cleansing of the temple happens right at the end of the Gospel, just before the cross, and is the spark, the catalyst, or the cause of Jesus\u2019 crucifixion. As in Matthew.\u00a0 As in Mark.\u00a0 As in Luke. \u00a0Well, here the writer has brought up the temple, with its cattle and sheep and doves, with its money changers and tables overturned, with its sheer public conflict right in the heart of \u2018the Passover of the Jews\u2019, has brought the temple right up to the very beginning of the Gospel.\u00a0 This should teach us something.\u00a0 A Gospel is a stylized memory,<\/em> a preaching of the resurrection by way of reminiscence about Jesus, not a history nor a biography nor a deposition on the way to a legal brief on the way to an indictment.\u00a0 You know this.\u00a0 Even if you didn\u2019t, you would know it now, because of what was read a moment ago: after he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered\u2026and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.<\/em>\u00a0 It is the resurrection that carries the Gospel and the Gospels, not the other way around. You could call it a saving reminiscence, embedded in the simplest of elements.\u00a0 Resurrection precedes Gospel.\u00a0 And all else.<\/p>\n

By the way, along the way, in the reading of the Gospel of John, we pick up some sideways hints of what sort of community produced this sort of Gospel.\u00a0 And one of the little hints, glimmering in the big dark, is that this Gospel has a bone to pick with some folks it is close to, a bone to pick with, of all people, its close knit extended family, \u2018the Jews\u2019.\u00a0 \u2018The Jews\u2019 then said, \u2018this temple\u2026\u2019.\u00a0 Please.\u00a0 Who else at Passover in Jerusalem in 30ad was around to talk to?\u00a0 Other than Jews?\u00a0 Methodists?\u00a0 Flat Earth Believers?\u00a0 Methodist Flat Earth Believers?\u00a0 Everyone in this scene is Jewish, from Jesus on up or on down.\u00a0 You see.\u00a0 There is something odd, something sliding around, something loose, something revealingly strange about the way this Gospel, including by the way, right here, in chapter 2, speaks of Jesus, of his family and friends, of the twelve disciples, of John the Baptist, of the earliest Christian church community, of Paul of Tarsus, and many, many others\u2026all Jews.\u00a0 Something else is going on here, and it is crucial for us, year by year, carefully to hear it.\u00a0 NOTA BENE: It is likely, highly probable, that the author has in mind not \u2018Jews\u2019 in general, but, rather, some other familiar group, closer at hand, down the street, in the synagogue, out of which John and his small early church group of Jesus worshippers, have been exited, due to the, by Jewish standards, dire heresy of ditheism, and with whom they are engaged in something of a family feud.\u00a0 You know.\u00a0 Others. Those people.\u00a0 Them. Those we oppose.\u00a0 You cannot read merely with a flat nasal honkey reading any of the usages of the phrase, \u2018the Jews\u2019, in John.\u00a0 And our failure, as Christians, as a religious community, our failure in teaching the Scripture rightly over centuries, right up to this morning, our failure to see and perceive and interpret and communicate about what is loose in this Gospel\u2014its depiction of \u2018the Jews\u2019\u2014has had monstrous consequences.\u00a0 While the horrific historic tragedy of Christian antisemitism has more roots than those in this fourth Gospel, it has no deeper roots than these.<\/p>\n

Those who wrote John in 90ad, who bowed before the Risen Christ, whose glory and magnificence and exaltation and divinity they had only dimly perceived for some time, and whom they had only painfully come to recognize as \u2018My Lord and My God\u2019, were coming out of an experience of odium theologicum<\/em>, theological and religious sheer hatred, conflict, difference, with\u2014well, with whom do you get angriest?\u2014their family, their kin, their closest friends, their former prayer partners.\u00a0 Let us pause for some contrition, lament, compunction, confession, this Lent, in the same year that we honored Elie Wiesel from this pulpit and across this University on September 17, 2017.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

The advantage of our conversation this Lent with Thomas Merton, who died fifty years ago, sails into view here.\u00a0 His autobiography is titled \u2018Seven Storey Mountain\u2019, and his lengthy, vital account therein, with one notable exception, explained in the Introduction, \u00a0gives full measure to his own experience of the fallen-ness of Creation.\u00a0 On one hand, his journey courses through the most beautiful and culturally gracious spaces from his time, and, to some degree still, from ours.\u00a0 Southern France, the Long Island Sound, London, Cambridge, Oxford, New York, Columbia (the University), Bermuda, and Upstate New York.\u00a0 You could argue that his relative ignorance of New England is a failure.\u00a0 But in his study and reading, as well as his travel and culture, he stays with the best.\u00a0 All of it, finally, fails him, and, it must be emphasized, fails him not for his own failure to embrace, hold fast, honor, respect what is there and what there is.\u00a0\u00a0 His parents die young.\u00a0 His brother dies before he can really know him as an adult.\u00a0 His young friendships wither and fade.\u00a0 He departs Oxford without a degree.\u00a0 His various relationships with women, faintly even coyly recollected, provide no happiness.\u00a0 His reading, apart from William Blake, disappoints.\u00a0 His teachers, apart from Mark Van Doren, fall short. His inherited religious backgrounds in Quaker silence and Episcopal liturgy leave him empty and discouraged.\u00a0 His critique of Protestant Christianity, as practiced, is scathing, but not for that matter unfair.\u00a0 He mistakenly or ironically or both refers to Riverside Church as Rockefeller Church. But he finally comes home to Sacrament, he finds, finally, a home, in Sacrament.<\/p>\n

This happens on a little side street in the Upper West Side of New York City, quite familiar to those of us who attended Union Theological Seminary.\u00a0 Through a strange course of influences, he finds himself one hot August Sunday in 1938, sitting in a pew at Corpus Christi Catholic Church on 121st<\/sup> street.\u00a0 From that very sanctuary, I weekly or bi-weekly saw my teacher, Fr. Raymond Brown, emerge, having said the Wednesday mass.\u00a0 There was a time when most theologians were also ordained, and so pressed into service, when and as that was possible.\u00a0 He would amble down the slight hill there in Morningside Heights, circa 1978, as we now remember in 2018, in black suit and white collar, and pause to talk, to check the progress of his advisee, to smile, and return to the intricacies of John 2, read a moment ago.<\/p>\n

On that August morning, 1938, Merton was overcome by grace, by community, by prayer, by liturgy, by sermon, and by Host, so overcome that he stumbled out into the bright New York sunlight without receiving the sacrament.\u00a0 He knelt next to a young woman, perhaps a fellow Columbia student, who was clearly and sincerely praying.<\/p>\n

It has been forty years since I have stood on the steps of Corpus Christi on 121st<\/sup> street.\u00a0 It seems a day ago, though.\u00a0 This is the strange thing about time, about recollection, about the passage of time, about memory, about how close things are that nonetheless are at a great distance.\u00a0 For Thomas Merton, his emergence from purgatory came in Sacrament.\u00a0 May this be so, this morning, right here, just now, for you.<\/em>\u00a0 Here is the burden and the delight of ministry on, at, or near a University campus.\u00a0 You just never know who may be coming home, now in Word, or now in Sacrament, in the very quotidian, utterly simple, spare, nothingness, really, of prayer, of worship.\u00a0 Of Sacrament.\u00a0 Touch helps, familiarity helps, music helps, some words help, repetition helps, taste helps.\u00a0 There is a physicality that helps.\u00a0 We understand God, if or as we do, in a \u2018supermental\u2019 way, as Cyril Richardson regularly put it.\u00a0 In a supermental, sacramental way, we might say, today. In prayer.\u00a0 Today: in Sacrament.<\/p>\n

Like those who wrote John 2, Merton was astounded by the Height of Christ.\u00a0 They began to see, once they saw.\u00a0 And he began to see, once he saw. That is, once the resurrection glory, in the cross of Christ, gradually became clear to this Gospel of John group, once they began fully to realize who this Jesus was and is and was for them\u2014both human and divine\u2014<\/em>then things began to fall into place. That is, once the resurrection glory, in the cross of Christ, gradually became clear to Thomas Merton, once he began fully to realize who this Jesus was and is and was for them\u2014both human and divine\u2014then things began to fall into place. And out of this drastic dislocation, in John, came a new religion (there is really no other way to put it), the Christianity of the Christ, which would then take wing in the second and third and fourth centuries, in direct dialogue with the terms set by John.\u00a0 And out of this drastic sacramental dislocation, in Merton, came a new spiritual life, the Christianity of the Christ, which would then take wing in the next five decades, in direct dialogue with the terms set by the Sacrament.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Reminiscence<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

On Thursday evening this past week, about 6pm, at the cooling end of a bright warm day, I walked slowly across the lawn here next to the Chapel, known lovingly as the BU \u2018beach\u2019.\u00a0 As usual I was lost in some errant thought or three when I stepped forward, and found my foot resting on top of a scittering Frisbee.\u00a0 Two kind students, far left and far right, called out, one saying \u2018you can throw it to us\u2019.\u00a0 It was not clear\u2014you need friendship to know inflection and implication in speech\u2014whether that meant \u2018please feel free to throw it\u2019, or \u2018against all appearances you seem like you might actually be able to throw it\u2019, or \u2018we are not playing some game where you have to leave the Frisbee where your right foot stepped upon it\u2019.\u00a0 It did not matter, because I had every intention of throwing it, long left or long right, and that was not premeditated deliberation.\u00a0 I bent down, picked it up, and threw it, to the right, before any thinking.\u00a0 It sailed out and up, and there was bemusement that it did so, so well, or even at all.<\/p>\n

It took another block of walking before I was melted into emotion and reminiscence, brought out of that simple touch, that old feel, that muscle memory from fifty years and more ago, that gliding motion, so unfamiliar and yet so utterly familiar.\u00a0\u00a0 We spent all summer, in 1962, at age 8 throwing a Frisbee.\u00a0 It is all we had, and all we needed.\u00a0 You had breakfast, and were expected home, in that small college farm town, when the street lights came on.\u00a0 You could come back for lunch and dinner if you wanted, but it was assumed someone would feed you.\u00a0 The iron matriarchy that ran Hamilton NY decreed only one inviolable summer law:\u00a0 get home, when the street lights come on, or else.\u00a0 And so, ball and bat.\u00a0 And so, Frisbee.\u00a0 And so, decades later, this week, in a throw, the far off rural, agricultural, bucolic small town world, is become, by revelation, not only at hand, but in hand.<\/p>\n

In Grace, God holds us by hand, at hand, in hand. Sacrament told Merton who he was.\u00a0 Reminded him of who he was meant to be. Made sense of his memories! Brought a recollection, in touch and muscle and taste and sight and hearing, of God, incarnate in Jesus Christ.\u00a0 You could call it a saving reminiscence, embedded in the simplest of elements.<\/p>\n

Ye that do truly and earnestly repent of your sin, and are in love and charity with your neighbor, and intend to lead a new life following after the commandments of God, draw near in faith, and take this Holy Sacrament to your comfort.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

–\u00a0The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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