{"id":2787,"date":"2020-06-28T11:00:23","date_gmt":"2020-06-28T15:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=2787"},"modified":"2020-06-26T09:31:09","modified_gmt":"2020-06-26T13:31:09","slug":"a-reading-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2020\/06\/28\/a-reading-life\/","title":{"rendered":"A Reading Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

Matthew 10: 40-42<\/a><\/p>\n

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

Hear the gospel:\u00a0 He who receives you receives me, and he who receives me receives Him who sent me.<\/em><\/p>\n

Community <\/em><\/p>\n

At Marsh Chapel in June, we have a fairly long-standing set of Sunday traditions, honored this year, for the obvious reasons, in the breach.\u00a0 On the first Sunday of June we gather for Holy Communion and monthly dish to pass luncheon, with a presentation by Sharon Wheeler of BU on planned giving, and a review of forms of ministry in our midst.\u00a0 On the second Sunday of June we gather ahead of worship for a discussion of \u201csuggestions for summer reading\u2019, led by the Dean, or a staff member or a lay leader in the congregation.\u00a0 On the third Sunday of June we gather for Fathers\u2019 Day brunch, welcoming all of every age and station, fathers or not, ahead of worship.\u00a0 On the fourth Sunday of June we offer a foreshortened Vacation Bible School, after worship and over lunch, with one leading the singing and another teaching the Bible.\u00a0 Well, this June 2020, none of this has come to pass, a bit of a loss for or community, June being the optimal time, before vacation and after graduation, to focus on the congregation itself, University and Summer notwithstanding.<\/p>\n

Still, though, it has been pleasant to think of these none so rare as a day in June rituals, amid pandemic and pandemonium.\u00a0 More, it seemed perhaps fitting to offer a sermon, this Fourth Sunday in June, to pick up at least one of these threads, that of reading. \u00a0At least, in a fallow time, we may find more time to read.\u00a0 Who taught you to read?\u00a0 Not how to read, but to read, to love to read?\u00a0 Who taught you to read?<\/p>\n

Reading <\/em><\/p>\n

In 1965 our sixth-grade teacher, Marjorie Shafer, began each morning by reading to the class.\u00a0 She read for about thirty minutes, standing in the middle of the front of the room, glasses fixed and eyes down (though she could readily spot any movement, misbehavior, drowsiness or discourtesy).\u00a0\u00a0 While other books remain in some misty memory (Harriet the Spy<\/em> for example), only one of the books she read from stem to stern hangs in the mind to this day.\u00a0 This was JR Tolkien\u2019s The Hobbit<\/em>.\u00a0 My seat was somewhere in the middle rows, somewhere mid-way back, neither by choice nor personal assignment, but by the luck of the alphabet and a last name starting with H.\u00a0 Jill Hance sat right in front of me as she had, more or less, every year of grammar school.\u00a0 The Hobbit<\/em> captured my imagination.\u00a0 The figure of Bilbo Baggins.\u00a0 The setting out on a journey from home to somewhere.\u00a0 The various tangles and intrigues.\u00a0 The mystical setting.\u00a0 The return.\u00a0 It was a sad day when the book ended.\u00a0 In the spring, I learned that our family was moving out of town, the only town I really knew, and the place of school and friendships since kindergarten.\u00a0 For some reason I became sick, and unable to go to school for about ten days.\u00a0 One afternoon Mrs. Shafer came to our home to read to me from the last book of the year (Harriet),<\/em> to make sure I did not miss the conclusion.<\/p>\n

A few years later, rummaging in the ten-year old pile of Saturday Evening Post <\/em>magazines in our summer cabin, there appeared a simple story.\u00a0 The title, author, and details are gone.\u00a0 Only the plot remains.\u00a0 The high school quarterback and class president is challenged by his friends to date a very plain, bespectacled, socially awkward girl, a loner in their class.\u00a0 On a bet and on a whim, he does so.\u00a0 At first all goes well:\u00a0 he is able to take her out and return to his friends and laugh with them about their trick.\u00a0 But then something happens, or some things happen.\u00a0 Given his attention, her attire and appearance change.\u00a0 She starts to dress, well.\u00a0 She doffs her spectacles.\u00a0 She dotes on him, and is enthralled with his stories.\u00a0 In short order she becomes something of a beauty.\u00a0 Given her transformation, his own behavior changes.\u00a0 The dates are no longer tricks, the words no longer jokes.\u00a0 He stops seeing his friends afterward.\u00a0 They fall in love, they fall fully and passionately in love.\u00a0 Well.\u00a0 Behold the power narrative.<\/p>\n

One summer in high school, 1971, Tolkien struck again, this time in the form of the Lord of the Rings<\/em> trilogy.\u00a0 If memory serves, I read the three books that one summer.\u00a0 They carried me away, into another place and kind of place, and into another mind and kind of mind, and into another story and kind of story.\u00a0 The struggle of light and darkness, of what is good and what is not, compellingly conveyed, stayed in memory and in heart.<\/p>\n

Then, two summers later, heading into a Great Books of Russia autumn course, taught at OWU by Dr. Ruth Davies, a Professor of fearsome reputation, I took to lifeguarding work at church camp The Brothers Karamazov. <\/em>It seems as though it took me the whole summer to read it, and to savor it, and to capture and be captured by it.\u00a0 You could feel the power in the pain of Raskolnikov and the love in Alyosha, without knowing much of anything, yet, about life and books and all.\u00a0 Needless to say, the book served as a fitting preparation for an introduction to the course, which, of all college courses, in its readings, requirements and sessions, was easily the best, and the hardest.<\/p>\n

I skip to For Whom the Bell Tolls<\/em>, set in the hills up outside Segovia, Spain, where I lived and studied 1974-5, the last year in the life of Francisco Franco, and of his Spain, and where I read this perhaps my favorite book.<\/p>\n

During the fall term of seminary year one, when I should have been reading the detailed notes about the 39 books of Hebrew Scripture, about which prior I knew next to nothing, and during which season my relationship with my soon to be wife Jan was settling and congealing, heading toward marriage the next summer, I found myself up late at night reading, for the first time, Moby Dick<\/em>.\u00a0 In another sense, my reading life began with this book, though, in detail and in full, it would be hard to say why.\u00a0 Yet it proved to be an excellent backstage for theological study of the formal sort still proffered at Union, NYC.<\/p>\n

Two years or so out of seminary, say 1981, before the long journey into doctoral work, I found myself at the cottage, in dead summer, reading, line by line K Barth\u2019s Epistle to the Romans<\/em>.\u00a0 It landed with the same demolition on my soul and ministry as it had landed \u2018on the playground of the theologians\u2019 earlier in the century.\u00a0 You cannot speak of God by speaking of Man in a loud voice.\u00a0 I was not, and am not, a Barthian, but I am a lover of the Bible, in part due to my reading of Barth that summer.\u00a0 For many years into the next decade, it seems, any free time for reading, not sermonic or ministerial, was flooded into the dissertation.\u00a0 There was gain and loss in that gain and loss.\u00a0 I found myself reading less fiction.<\/p>\n

That changed again in the 1990\u2019s, for whatever reason.\u00a0 The two books of Alistair Macleod, Island<\/em> and No Great Mischief<\/em>, with their silently beautifully rendering of the geography of Cape Breton, and of the inner geography of its people, stunned and captivated.\u00a0 And from there I found my way back along the trails of older classics, especially Middlemarch<\/em>, G. Eliot, whose close reading of close living in cloistered secular culture kept my imagination and interest.\u00a0 And so many others\u2026The Remembrance of Things Past<\/em>, Proust\u2026The Autobiography of Malcolm X, <\/em>Haley\u2026and on\u2026Who taught you, not how to read, but how to love to read?<\/p>\n

The Strange World of the Bible<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>Those who fall in love with reading will often, over time, find the pages of Holy Writ.\u00a0 Because in these there is a durability, a realism, a poignant sense of suffering, and a depth that are at least and more a match for our own experience.\u00a0 As this very hour, in our lessons from Holy, Holy Scripture.<\/p>\n

Take decisions, for example.\u00a0 While Genesis 22, a most difficult passage, allows of multiple readings, they all have in the background the tragedy of choices.\u00a0 People choose, but they do not choose their choices.\u00a0 For three months, you have been choosing, and you have that freedom, and must use it with courage, but you do not choose the context\u2014say COVID 19\u2014of the choices.\u00a0 So, each day carries a dim reminder that our choices, not fully ours, will have ramifications, even mortal ramifications, in the lives of others.\u00a0 My friend said last week, in full heart confession, \u2018I am suffering from decision fatigue.\u00a0 I am suffering from decision fatigue\u2019. \u00a0Maybe you know the feeling today. \u00a0Abraham, caught between faith and love, between God and son, at least reminds us that we are not the first, at this grim altar of choice.<\/p>\n

Take change, for example.\u00a0 While Romans 6, a most difficult passage, allows of multiple readings, they all have in the background the great watershed\u2014god, freedom, love, grace, heaven<\/em>\u2014into which Paul has been washed, and to which, by apocalyptic poetry, he bears witness.\u00a0 You can change, be changed.\u00a0 The world can change, be changed.\u00a0 A country can change, be changed.\u00a0 The orb of sin, the wages of which are also grim, may be displaced.\u00a0 Life may become an orbit around the planet of love.\u00a0 HERE: Love God, Love neighbor.\u00a0 Love, and do what you will.\u00a0\u00a0 Paul, exiled from his god, has now been enslaved in love by THE GOD BEYOND GOD.<\/p>\n

Take contagion, for example.\u00a0 While Matthew 10, a most difficult passage, allows of multiple readings, they all have in the background the power of contagious love.\u00a0 It is a hundred years at least in Boston since the citizenry has been so aware of the dark mystery of contagion.\u00a0 One finger touches another, one hand by doorknob traces another, one chill cough caught in the breeze catches up to another.\u00a0 Beloved we are probably many months and tragically hundreds of thousands of deaths away from getting away from COVID 19. \u00a0Contagion is our condition.\u00a0 But read the Holy Scripture, Matthew 10.\u00a0 Here the power of contagion OF A GOOD SORT is the metaphor for God in the world.\u00a0 Not, to be sure, the malevolent contagion of infection, virus, illness.\u00a0 But the power of it.\u00a0 That kind of power\u2014and you have seen it, here and there, now and then\u2014where one contagious prophet and prophecy touches another, where one contagious justice touches another, where one hand of faith, act of kindness, moment of self-abnegation touches, and gives birth to another.<\/p>\n

Before you miss the chance, in a short life time, to befriend the Bible, reckon with its durability, realism, poignant sense of suffering, and depth that are at least and more a match for our own experience.\u00a0 Especially today\u2019s Gospel, Matthew 10.<\/p>\n

Matthew 10<\/em><\/p>\n

The authority of Jesus\u2019 ministry is herein transferred to disciples, ancient and modern.\u00a0 To you.<\/p>\n

We meet Jesus today on the hinges of the first Gospel, as the flow of the Gospel swings from Lord to apostles. In the announcement of this good news is included a measure of empowerment for each one of us. This is the kind of day on which, for once, for the first time, or for once in a long time, we may be seized by a sense of divine nearness. The kingdom of heaven is at hand. The kingdom of heaven has come near to you. When that sentence makes a home in a heart, or in the heart of a community, a different kind of life ensues.<\/p>\n

Capture in the mind\u2019s eye for a moment the sweep of the gospel in Matthew 10. \u00a0First. <\/em>Jesus has been about, teaching and preaching and healing. His compassion abounds. The endless range of needs about him he unblinkingly faces. Second. <\/em>Jesus calls and sends the disciples, and empowers them, and by extension empowers us. The gospel will have been read thus, as it is thus read by us. He instructs and directs them in their work, where to go, what to do, how to be. Learning, virtue, and piety together. Start at home, heal the sick, travel light. Third.<\/em> Jesus expects and forecasts for them less than utter victory in their work. They are to know how to shake dust from their feet. Fourth.<\/em> Jesus warns that there will be a price to pay. The discipline that is the hallmark of the disciple here is named. Shall we not remember Jesus ministry? Shall we ignore the call and power offered here? Shall we forget the directions given? Shall we expect to turn a deaf ear to the caution about consequences? We pray not. The main sweep of the gospel today is clear as a bell. Jesus gives power to his disciples.<\/p>\n

Hold that thought.<\/p>\n

The clear call of Christ upon our consciences in the main flow of the gospel. For the main point is crystal clear. To follow Jesus means to take up where he and his earliest companions left off.\u00a0 Jesus has taught, preached and healed. This ministry he has bequeathed to his disciples, his apostles. We have been seized by the confession of the Church; we are Christians. Now his ministry, this ministry, is ours.<\/p>\n

Which part of this ministry draws you?<\/p>\n

Do you love Jesus? Then you must do something for him.\u00a0 Many at BU did so, or tried to, this Wednesday June 24.<\/p>\n

Reading Today<\/em><\/p>\n

In consonance with the preaching of Marsh Chapel over long time, and especially in the last three months, Boston University this week offered a full day of teaching and reflection on racism and anti-racism, this past Wednesday.\u00a0 What was central, and striking, in the rich hours of presentation and discussion, were the many, and extemporaneous, references to apocalyptic, revelatory insights, recalled by the speakers\u2014aha moments!\u2014<\/em>in reading. \u00a0In reading. \u00a0Alongside our own ministry through Marsh Chapel and Religious Life, and that of the now beautifully expanded Howard Thurman Center, which you celebrated right here in worship on January 19, 2020, the voices and leadership of the faculty, staff, presidential and provostial leadership of the University, and then that of the African American Studies Program, the Associate Provost for Diversity and Inclusion, and the new BU Center for Anti-Racism, came together in a great watershed, a confluence new in my experience.\u00a0 It was wonderful.\u00a0 I commend to you its recorded version.\u00a0 Let me leave you with ten sentences (out of a hundred that might have been quoted) from that day, rooted in a shared, reading life:<\/p>\n

There is nothing innate about our racial hierarchy.<\/em><\/p>\n

The final act of violence is the very denial of violence.<\/em><\/p>\n

The heartbeat of racism is denial.<\/em><\/p>\n

Racism creates a group differentiated vulnerability, and premature death.<\/em><\/p>\n

Freedom, real freedom is a whole lot more than civil rights alone.<\/em><\/p>\n

It is unjust to ask those marginalized by the current system now alone to fix it.<\/em><\/p>\n

Even if you can\u2019t do empathy, can you at least do justice?<\/em><\/p>\n

People are rediscovering their own power.<\/em><\/p>\n

We are at a point now that comes from a movement fifty years ago.<\/em><\/p>\n

(And last, as a cautionary note, in a sermon on reading):\u00a0 We can\u2019t just read our way out of this.\u00a0 (!!)<\/em><\/p>\n

Is yours a reading life, liberally fed by what is read?\u00a0 Happy Reading, summer 2020!<\/p>\n

Hear the gospel:\u00a0 He who receives you receives me, and he who receives me receives Him who sent me.<\/em><\/p>\n

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

Click here to hear the full service Matthew 10: 40-42 Click here to hear just the sermon Hear the gospel:\u00a0 He who receives you receives me, and he who receives me receives Him who sent me. Community At Marsh Chapel in June, we have a fairly long-standing set of Sunday traditions, honored this year, for […]<\/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\/2787"}],"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=2787"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2787\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2788,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2787\/revisions\/2788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}