{"id":2764,"date":"2020-05-10T11:00:10","date_gmt":"2020-05-10T15:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=2764"},"modified":"2021-01-19T11:32:19","modified_gmt":"2021-01-19T16:32:19","slug":"way-truth-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2020\/05\/10\/way-truth-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Way, Truth, Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

1 Peter 2:2\u201310<\/a><\/p>\n

John 14:1-14<\/a><\/p>\n

Click here to hear just the sermon<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Wherever there is a way, there is Christ.\u00a0 Wherever there is truth, there is Christ.\u00a0 Wherever there is life, there is Christ.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

The Gospel today reveals three secrets to lasting health in life.\u00a0 Here is the marrow of worship, wherein we care for the Body of Christ, to rediscover the things that make for peace.\u00a0 This is the point of Mother\u2019s Day, to reflect on the healthy habits of being, graciously given us by those who raised us, that have made us happy, and kept us healthy.\u00a0 One day at a time. One day at a time. As my grandmother pasted on her kitchen door, in her late eighties, <\/span>Today.\u00a0 Do one thing.\u00a0 There. You\u2019ve done one thing.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Now an opening confession, and a concern about your preacher today.\u00a0 He is pretty rusty at preaching on Mothers\u2019 Day.\u00a0 For fourteen years past, here at Marsh Chapel, this was the Sunday our graduating seniors spoke (you will be pleased to hear four of them next Sunday, May 17).\u00a0 For eleven years before that, in Rochester NY, the Mothers\u2019 Day sermon was usually given by one of my three supremely talented female associates\u2014with accumulated degrees from Boston University, from Colgate, from Yale, from University of Pennsylvania, from Colgate Rochester, and, exceptionally, preeminently from Ohio Wesleyan.\u00a0 This was a practice based on the awareness that these three, pioneers from the first full wave, and at the top level, of women in ministry, also were all mothers of many years\u2019 experience, and might actually know quite a bit more about it all than their boss. Which they did.\u00a0 What gifts they brought to ministry!\u00a0 (We shall continue to see, by the way, in similar fashion the gracious gifts, of gay clergy, now not just here and there, but in a great wave.)\u00a0 Then, too, in Syracuse, the eleven years before that, the Sunday was devoted to a celebration of the United Methodist Women of that church, without whom no money would have been raised, no educational programs mounted, no mission investment done, nor hardly a fellowship dinner arranged.\u00a0 The sermon came from the UMW President that day.\u00a0 It usually began with an old story\u2026<\/p>\n

Like the one about the UMW group that was mistakenly sent to hell.\u00a0 After a month the devil placed a long-distance phone call upstairs to heaven to ask that they be removed.\u00a0 Why, asked Peter?\u00a0 Because, said Beelzebub\u2014they are thorn in my flesh.\u00a0 They are organized.\u00a0 They raise money.\u00a0 They increase membership and now, the last straw, they have fundraiser to put in air conditioning.\u00a0 I want them out of here.<\/p>\n

Or like the one about a friend who once received a gracious introduction with this humorous response: \u201cI wish my parents were in the room to hear such a glowing, flattering introduction.\u00a0 My father would have enjoyed it.\u00a0 And my mother would have believed it!\u201d<\/p>\n

Or like the one about the UMW leader who was asked, \u201cMadam President, if I give lots of money to the church will it get me into heaven?\u201d\u00a0 Discarding all the theological responses to the contrary, she paused and replied, \u201cWell, it\u2019s worth a try!\u201d<\/p>\n

So, it has been 36 years, and the pastor today is a little rusty regarding Mothers\u2019 Day preaching.\u00a0 Bear with me, preach with me, and hear the Gospel; Way, Truth, Life.\u00a0 Wherever there is a way, there is Christ.\u00a0 Wherever there is truth, there is Christ.\u00a0 Wherever there is life, there is Christ.\u00a0 This is one of the deepest unities of the Scripture.\u00a0 In the deep unities of Scripture, we lean again into the secrets of happy life.<\/p>\n

First, Way<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

We learn from others.\u00a0 Especially in the home.\u00a0 What parents do is crucial.\u00a0 Especially, we might say, during this virus, the example parents set will be the path children walk.\u00a0 Parents, regardless of any or nor religious tradition, model dimensions of spirituality for their children.\u00a0 Children watch and listen.\u00a0 I think this Mothers\u2019 Day 2020 of young mothers in New England.\u00a0 Maybe you? Today, one half mom, one half professional, one half wife, one half home school administrator, one half neighbor.\u00a0 And that\u2019s not the half of it.<\/span><\/p>\n

One day I saw a young mother walking in a department store.\u00a0 She had too little girls in tow to starboard, and her own elderly mother to port.\u00a0 The girls pulled ahead, and grandma lagged behind, and between daughters and grandmother and promises to keep I thought I overheard this practical prayer from the mom in middle: \u201cLord get me through this day.\u201d<\/p>\n

Phyllis Trible taught us long ago that reading the Bible involves your own perspective.\u00a0 It matters what you bring with you into the reading room.\u00a0 I imagine women, and men, on this Sunday, trying desperately to balance the generational claims of relationship.\u00a0 And in some cases, to sift through hard memories, hurts, traumas left by another generation.\u00a0 You are trying to raise another generation to be faithful, good boys and girls, women and men.\u00a0 They know what they see.<\/p>\n

But we know others are hurting too, in harsher and different ways.\u00a0 We keep things in perspective, and in prayer.\u00a0 Think for a moment of the mother of Ahmaud Arbery, killed in the cross fire of race and class, the cross fire of culture and guns.\u00a0 We hold things in perspective, and in prayer.<\/p>\n

Our Gospel lessons, like John 14, are primary sources for the time, occasion, community and condition in and for which they were first written.\u00a0 They are secondary sources, at best, for what may have come before.\u00a0 So, two weeks ago, Luke 24 showed us Luke, and his community, in joyful celebration of the mystery of the Lord\u2019s ascent.\u00a0 At his ascent they did assent, perhaps following decades of loss, displacement, and martyrdom.\u00a0 Having lived through the long old-time religion winter of most of the first century, and all its rigors, they acclaimed a faith in a high, divine goodness, through it all.<\/p>\n

This is the example that Jesus has shown us, in his life, and in the lives of his own. \u00a0 More than we acknowledge, the examples of those around us sustain us in hidden, powerful ways.\u00a0 Near Pittsburgh Frank Lloyd Wright built his famous home for the Kaufmann family, called \u201cFalling Waters\u201d.\u00a0 It is built into the stone, on top of the flowing water, alongside the verdant forest, amid the wondrous rolling beauty of southern Pennsylvania.\u00a0 It protrudes, suspended nearly in thin air, like our own lives so often seem to be.\u00a0 The house is held up by cantilevers, like a diving board or a teeter totter.\u00a0 The strength and saving grounding are hidden away in the rock, and out the house stretches.\u00a0 I think that is like the hidden, silent strength that parents by example give to children.\u00a0 We remember what we have seen, by example, through others.\u00a0 This Mothers\u2019 Day 2020 we think of suffrage and suffragettes 100 years ago:\u00a0 Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Staunton; of reforms and reformer, 100 years ago: Sojourner Truth, Harriett Tubman.<\/p>\n

We learn from others.\u00a0 Especially in the home.\u00a0 What parents do is crucial.<\/p>\n

Second, Truth<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

So too is what parents say.\u00a0 As we are tightly quartered, now, parents at the office in the living room, and children at school in the dining room, we might want to measure what we say.\u00a0 To think before we speak.<\/p>\n

For the gospel reveals another of the secrets to health, in what is said.\u00a0 We learn from what is said to us by those whom we love.\u00a0 Our minds cannot change unless our hearts are changed.\u00a0 No argument will ever be as strong as ardent care.\u00a0 What changes people comes from what is said by those they know who care.\u00a0 One esteemed UTS professor could in the end never speak to me because he could never speak for me.\u00a0 Especially, we might say, during this virus, the wisdom, the sayings, the forms of speech children hear from their parents will be more formative and more lasting than the pandemic itself.\u00a0 A friend said to me, just recently, \u2018I think of my grandmother telling me, \u2018keep your wits about you, keep your wits about you.\u2019<\/p>\n

At Sing Sing, almost100 years ago, another suffragette, the warden\u2019s wife became one of those people.\u00a0 She attended to the imprisoned.\u00a0 When she found a blind prisoner, she learned Braille and taught him.\u00a0 When she found a deaf prisoner, she learned sign language and taught him.\u00a0 In that hardest of spaces, she spoke the language of love.\u00a0 When she died and her coffin was pulled past the gates, the men stood in silence in her honor, and asked if the gate could be opened so that they might fill the chapel, promising to return.\u00a0 The warden took them at their word, and to a man they kept the promise and returned.\u00a0 We listen to those we trust.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Our deeds are important.\u00a0 So, Matthew Mark and Luke.\u00a0 But so, and more so are our words.\u00a0 So, we have a fourth gospel, John.\u00a0 John best reminds us that what lasts is what we say.\u00a0 What did Jesus say on the night he was glorified, John 14-17? John celebrates the secret in speech.\u00a0 God-Christ-Spirit\u2014all for John are known in the \u2018glory\u2019 that is the cross, the strange divine manner among us; the little preposition \u201cin\u201d holds the mystical magic every day\u2014celebrate, dance, love, sing, live\u2014God in Christ, Christ in God, we in him, they in us; a new commandment\u2026new\u2026new\u2026something new…are we ready for something new?\u00a0 Jesus has said something to us that is the very secret of lasting health.\u00a0 What is it?<\/p>\n

He binds what he says to what he does.\u00a0 Form and function come and go together.\u00a0 So, Jesus is the Word, the Word of God for us.<\/p>\n

The Gospel continues to teach us something that is the very secret of lasting health and happiness.\u00a0 At every step, Jesus is inviting you to deepen your capacity, to sharpen your acuity, to soften your heart.<\/p>\n

Third, Life<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Today we dimly realize, again, just how much Jesus has shared with us.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

I think of that young mother, balancing daughters and grandmother.\u00a0 They stop at the counter, in Kaufmann\u2019s, and she buys some perfumes and body lotions.\u00a0 Later she wraps them and gives them as symbols of affection.\u00a0 Especially, we might say, during this virus, the living, the sharing of life modeled by parents will in the long run have a sturdy, lasting effect on children.\u00a0 It is not so much <\/span>what <\/span><\/i>we are going through, as <\/span>how <\/span><\/i>we are going through what we are going through, in spring 2020, that lasts.\u00a0 It is not so much <\/span>what <\/span><\/i>we are going through, as <\/span>how <\/span><\/i>we are going through what we are going through, in spring 2020, that lasts.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We need to learn in the north from our southern cousins.\u00a0 They have shown us how to take care of Mother Church. At least this.\u00a0 We need to learn again to attend to the Body of Christ.\u00a0 They care to apply the body lotions of hospitality and generosity to the Body of Christ.\u00a0 They attend to the Body, like a mother tending her children and parents.\u00a0 They attend to the Body, the church, the Body of Christ, like a young mother fretting for toddlers and the aged.\u00a0 It is not just the Mind of Christ that we seek.\u00a0 It is not only the Spirit of Christ that we need.\u00a0 It is not solely the Truth of Christ that we desire.\u00a0 We need years of body lotions, applied to the church, the Body of Christ, in the north. As Hal Luccock always said, in gentle reference to different religious cultures and worship attendance patterns, <\/span>When I preached in the south the sermon hymn was always, \u2018O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing\u2019. When I preached in the north, the Gospel Lesson was always, \u2018Wherever two or three are gathered\u2026\u2019.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Oddly, or divinely, were we to invest ourselves fully in the house not made with hands, our more minor differences would gradually dissolve.\u00a0 We need to apply some ointment, some healing salve, some body lotions to the Body of Christ.<\/span><\/p>\n

I remember visiting a young woman who had been raised by her grandmother. In the last months of her grandmother\u2019s life, the young woman would visit, and I was privileged to watch their consort together.\u00a0 She would stand by the bedside and comb her grandmother\u2019s hair, and straighten her glasses, and rub her arms and hands with lotion.\u00a0 It was a wordless rebaptism that meant more than all the Psalms of David and all the Parables of Jesus and all the paragraphs of the Book of Discipline.<\/p>\n

As Gene Outka of Yale put it: \u2018God loves us before any merit on our part.\u00a0 Love is spontaneous and unmotivated, indifferent to value, creative, and initiates fellowship\u2026God\u2019s love should <\/span>(prevail) <\/span><\/i>when we estimate our neighbors\u2019 value.\u00a0 We should not allow our dislike of particular harms others inflict on us, or our condemnation of particular evil deeds, however understandable or justified, to take normative precedence over God\u2019s love for every person.\u00a0 Such love should rather carry final authority for us, and evoke in us a corresponding love.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

This too is the secret of lasting health which Jesus has shared.<\/p>\n

The secret shown:\u00a0 Love one another. Way.<\/span><\/p>\n

The secret spoken: Love one another.\u00a0 Truth.<\/span><\/p>\n

The secret shared:\u00a0 Love one another. Life.<\/span><\/p>\n

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

Now, if memory serves, and remember your preacher today is rusty, a Mothers\u2019 Day sermon concludes with a memory.\u00a0 So, in the late spring of 1966, my mom invited me to have a talk on the back stoop of our parsonage, the only home then I had ever really known.\u00a0 Now I had never been invited to back porch conversation.\u00a0 In those days, gently, she ambled about the little town of Hamilton NY, a bucolic place, of ice skating, sleds, swimming lessons, autumn, the Baptist Church bells hour by hour and loud and deep, early in the morning, late at night.\u00a0 After breakfast, one day that spring, gently, she sat with me on the back steps.\u00a0 The words hardly landed, caught as I was in the Eastertide reverie of boyhood. Making plans for the next ball game. From where we sat, I could spot two windows through which I had flown, launched, catapulted two baseball.\u00a0 Eric, whose dad was the Colgate librarian, was also involved. 2 Sons break, 2 fathers repair, the world turns.\u00a0 I could see a half finished go cart, no wheels.\u00a0 I could look at the neighbors’ garden, which I had also tilled for fun–such is youth.\u00a0 Across the street lived the feared Russian professor, next door to the feared TKE fraternity, alongside a feared empty, and quite possibly haunted, house.\u00a0 I could see the evidence of unreflective, free life, naive, unaware, redolent with happiness, responsive.\u00a0 All this was about to change, for good or forever.\u00a0 Gently she spoke, but again I could not quite hear or believe or intuit. “We are moving in June.\u00a0 Next month we will leave Hamilton.\u00a0 You will have your twelfth birthday in another town”.\u00a0 It was clear that I did not comprehend.\u00a0 “Bobby, we are going to move in June.” Then a torrent of words I did not understand, and to some measure still do not, came forth.\u00a0 Itinerancy, appointment, Methodism, conference, apportionment, Bishop.\u00a0 I also was not seeing her clearly, because somehow my eyes were all watered, producing a difficulty to see.\u00a0 Probably due to pollen in the spring air, don\u2019t you think?\u00a0 We had not needed privacy, before, in which to speak.\u00a0 Somehow, I should have known that a back-porch talk meant dark news.\u00a0 And so early in the morning, early, too early to gather the friends, our fight and argue gang, and attempt to puzzle through the meaning of such disaster.\u00a0 But the talk was not done.\u00a0 <\/span>Way, Truth, Life.<\/span><\/i> She, my then young, lovely, gentle, mom, in example, and in speech, and in generosity, had something more to say.\u00a0 \u2018You know, I know this makes you very sad.\u00a0 But this will the best thing that ever happened to you.\u00a0 You will make new friends.\u00a0 You will see.\u00a0 You will have a new house, bigger and better.\u00a0 You will see.\u00a0 You can come back in the summer by bus for the Colgate chemistry program.\u00a0 You will see.\u00a0 Your sisters will be with you.\u00a0 (Here she may have gotten a little off script).\u00a0 You will see.\u00a0 And there is something more.\u00a0 Your dad and I and your siblings need you to help us to do this.\u00a0 We are going to do this together.\u00a0 You are the oldest.\u00a0 And you can do it.\u00a0 I just know you can, and I know you will.\u00a0 You are going to love it.\u00a0 I guarantee it.\u00a0 And, of course, she was right. <\/span><\/p>\n

Wherever there is a way, there is Christ.\u00a0 Wherever there is truth, there is Christ.\u00a0 Wherever there is life, there is Christ.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

–The Reverend Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Click here to hear the full service 1 Peter 2:2\u201310 John 14:1-14 Click here to hear just the sermon   Wherever there is a way, there is Christ.\u00a0 Wherever there is truth, there is Christ.\u00a0 Wherever there is life, there is Christ. The Gospel today reveals three secrets to lasting health in life.\u00a0 Here is […]<\/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\/2764"}],"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=2764"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2914,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2764\/revisions\/2914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}