{"id":2823,"date":"2020-09-06T11:00:39","date_gmt":"2020-09-06T16:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=2823"},"modified":"2021-02-22T14:22:53","modified_gmt":"2021-02-22T19:22:53","slug":"liberal-breeze","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2020\/09\/06\/liberal-breeze\/","title":{"rendered":"Liberal Breeze"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

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

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

Keep a clean wind blowing through our hearts Gracious God<\/em><\/p>\n

Keep a warm wind blowing through our hearts Gracious God<\/em><\/p>\n

Keep a liberal wind blowing through our hearts Gracious God<\/em><\/p>\n

Keep a summer wind blowing through our hearts Gracious God<\/em><\/p>\n

Matthew 18: 15-20 involves communication, especially in the practice of forgiveness in community, with precise advisements, directions, and instructions.\u00a0 Presence is important.\u00a0 Listening is important.\u00a0 Voice is important.\u00a0 Collegiality is important.\u00a0 Second tries are important.\u00a0 There is no mention of technology, neither that of the first nor that of the twenty first centuries.\u00a0 Forgiveness is personal, human, spirited, and real.\u00a0 It requires human not sub-human communication.\u00a0\u00a0 And, as we shall see next week, forgiveness includes forgiving yourself.\u00a0 We can note, to our possible discomfort, the Scriptural root and basis for the religious practice, following unsuccessful mediation, of shunning.\u00a0 One antique but Scriptural answer is in the practice of shunning. \u00a0Another sermon for another day\u2026<\/p>\n

In verse 15,<\/strong><\/em> Matthew begins to give advice about how to live in community.\u00a0\u00a0 Community involves difference, but also can involve hurt.\u00a0 Communication makes community.\u00a0 Matthew\u2019s Jesus teaches us to speak to each other in our presence and not of each other in our absence\u2014to each other in our presence not of each other in our absence.<\/p>\n

Some time ago I received a triangulating e-mail.\u00a0 It came from the leader of an organization I dislike, seeking support for a person I do like.\u00a0 I loathe one and love the other.\u00a0 The triangulation in the communication forced me either to support an organization I do not like or to disappoint a person I do like.\u00a0 What do you do in such a situation?\u00a0 The kinder approach from the organization would have been a visit, or a phone call, in which sensibilities could be explored.\u00a0 But now we have the e-document, email:\u00a0 eternal, irretrievable, international, indelible.\u00a0 And hence the tangled triangle.\u00a0 It would take 3 hours or more to unbind and loosen this knot.\u00a0 You know, there was a time when people had to come and see you before they so complicated your life.\u00a0 I think on inquiry, that Matthew 18: 15 teaches me how to respond.\u00a0 I should not send a steaming reply, tempting as that would be.\u00a0 I should not reply from a distance at all.\u00a0 I should go and see my interlocutor.\u00a0 I should make a visit to the author of such an e-mail and find a way through the horns of the dilemma, the Scylla of support for an organization I dislike and the Caribdis of hurt to a person I do like.\u00a0 A cartoon this week pictures a man saying to his friend, \u201cI used to call people, then I got into e-mailing, then texting, and now I just ignore everyone\u201d. <\/em>Get things moving, get the community walking together!<\/p>\n

\u00a0In verse 16, <\/em>Matthew quotes from Deuteronomy 19.\u00a0 That is, he goes back to the basics, back to the starting point, the Hebrew Scripture, the Old Testament, back to kindergarten, if you will, as many are going this week.\u00a0 Read again Robert Fulghum\u2019s, All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kingergarten. <\/em>Get things moveing in the community\u2014get people walking together!<\/p>\n

In verse 17,<\/em> Matthew provides a further suggestion, to use if the earlier ones fail.\u00a0 Tell the whole church, his Jesus says.\u00a0 We are clearly hearing overtones of what was needed in Matthew\u2019s community, toward the end of the first century.\u00a0 Jesus may well have taught in such fashion, though the use of a Greek word like \u2018ecclesia\u2019<\/em>\u2014twice here\u2014probably indicates this is later material placed on Jesus\u2019 lips.\u00a0 But the import remains\u2014gather the community for deliberation.\u00a0 Get things moving in the community\u2014get people walking together!<\/p>\n

In verse 18,<\/em> Matthew strongly affirms the lasting power of such church considerations, even saying, similar to our reading two weeks ago, in the phrase, \u2018the keys to the kingdom of heaven\u2019,\u00a0 that what is bound on earth is bound in heaven, what is forgiven on earth is forgiven in heaven. Get things moving in the community\u2014get people walking together!<\/p>\n

In verse 19,<\/strong><\/em> two or three, when truly together, suffice to form a judgement.\u00a0\u00a0 Our English words \u2018symphony\u2019 and \u2018pragmatic\u2019 are rooted in the Greek here for agreement and matter. Get things moving in the community\u2014get people walking together!<\/p>\n

In verse 20,<\/em> to conclude, the gospel further celebrates the precious joy of common life in the present, in the here and now, and it only takes a few, \u2018wherever two or three ARE gathered in my name, there I AM as well.\u2019 Get things moving in the community\u2014get people walking together.\u00a0 As our friend and colleague Dean Mary Elizabeth Moore wrote this week:<\/p>\n

Breathe in the Spirit of Life<\/em>
\nBreathe out your best selves
\nBreathe in the newness of the year
\nBreathe out your deepest hopes
\nBreathe in possibility
\nBreathe out acts of compassion and justice.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Yes, a liberal breeze is blowing all about us.<\/p>\n

The farm stand up the road from us summer by summer offers vegetables and fruit, as the summer season evolves.\u00a0 Beans, peas, berries to begin, and corn, tomatoes, squash to follow.\u00a0 They make their own maple syrup candies from the spring syrup.\u00a0 It is a family operation, careful in cleanliness, in presentation, in pricing, and in conversation.\u00a0 For all the pandemic changes, the pandemonium of policing troubles, the pugilism of the presidential contest\u2014of about equal balance by the way in our county\u2014our farm stand is an oasis of unchanging grace, natural abundance, civil discourse, and, especially, delicious foodstuffs.<\/p>\n

A woman waited on me, with mask and distance and hand sanitizer, bringing out blueberries and two dozen ears of corn, half butter and sugar, half yellow, all melt in your mouth yummy good.\u00a0 They now take a credit card, but when asked if they preferred cash said, \u2018thank you for asking; no, now with this special (something, a metal clip or other) either one is fine\u2019.\u00a0 Carefully mowed lawn, decidedly smart packaging, good pricing though not cheap, signage at a quarter mile radius, NSEW, and happy eye contact welcome at the counter:\u00a0 natural grace, at least 50 years in service, a still summer point in the soon to come autumn turning world.\u00a0 And a liberal, summer breeze blowing across the lawn.<\/p>\n

Yet. However. Nevertheless.\u00a0 Sin embargo\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

The stand is at the southeast corner of the intersection of routes 26 and 12B.\u00a0 In June of 1966, as we were preparing to move from Hamilton all the long way north, all 16 miles north, to Oneida, an itineracy at the time grave and global to the 11 year old psyche, a woman was nearly killed at the crossing.\u00a0 In a brand new car, dressed for celebration, she was driving south to her own high school reunion, had the green light and right of way, and was hit by a drunk driver, the car obliterated.\u00a0 My father was still the minister in town, and I can remember the horror of the incident, and his visits to the little, then new, town hospital through her recovery.\u00a0 Just a few years ago, by happenstance, I came to know her family and enoy their friendship. Natural grace, but a stone\u2019s throw from high way carnage, in drunk driving.\u00a0 And why the drunken driving? We could speculate abut the young man in the truck.\u00a0 A life of milking early and late every single day perhaps, , 12 hour days, perhaps, \u00a0low income, limited possibilities perhaps, the forgotten folks left to tend the sheep while the shepherds went off to the city temple, perhaps? Lurking there, beyond my younger capacity really to see, was the vast historical conspiracy of these United States against the full humanity of poor white people, in the fields and harrows of cultural life.\u00a0 White children make up the largest racial group of poor children in America (4.2 million): (\u201camong America\u2019s poor children, 4.2 million are white, 4 million are Latino, 3.6 million are African American, 400,000 are Asian, and 200,000 are American Indian\u201d:\u00a0 NCCP, 475 Riverside Drive, NYC, NY). \u00a0\u00a0<\/em>Natural grace, but a stone\u2019s throw from class discrimination, in income, housing, education, health care, and respect.<\/p>\n

On the northwest corner of the same intersection, nestled against the shoreline of Leland Pond, there was and still is a mile by half mile quadrangle of vegetable farming, owned by others.\u00a0 In autumn each year there would arrive for about three weeks, a traveling company of African American pickers, whose children would come to our school for those weeks. \u00a0They started in northern Maine earlier in the year and just followed the advancing harvest south, leaving our little town for the next stop in Pennsylvania, and then following the Susquehanna river further down into Maryland.\u00a0 I can see the families walking row by row, gathering the cabbage and other vegetables.\u00a0 The film Cider House Rules<\/em> decades later gave a bit of further insight.\u00a0 Lurking there, beyond my younger capacity really to see, was the vast historical conspiracy of these United States against the full humanity of black folks, a conspiracy still deeply rooted in the fields and harrows of cultural life. Black children make up the highest percentage rate by race in poverty (33% of black children) (In the 10 most populated states, rates of child poverty among black children range from 29% in California and Florida to 47% in Ohio. NCCP, 475 Riverside Dr, NYC, NY)\u00a0 <\/em>Natural grace, but a stone\u2019s throw from systemic racism, in employment, housing, education, health care, and policing.<\/p>\n

How on earth did the rightful longings and lost dreams of poor white people on the southeast corner of that intersection get opposed to the rightful longings and lost dreams of the poor black people on the northwest corner of that intersection?\u00a0 Excellent work, Wormwood, you devil you.\u00a0 You make your Uncle Screwtape so proud.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>Take heart, dear souls, take heart:\u00a0 A liberal breeze is blowing all about us.\u00a0 There is a new day coming.<\/p>\n

This cleansing summer wind blows away the spurious, silly, hate-filled attempts of national leaders to set at odds the urban and the rural, the manufacturing and the agricultural, the city and the country, the heart land and the coast.\u00a0 What ridiculous falsehood.\u00a0 Childhood piano lessons I took were given by a farm wife who then returned to the barn.\u00a0\u00a0 Sermons early on in ministry were endured by men who had been milking at 4am and were glad for a nap at 11:20am come Sunday.\u00a0 Our best parishioners then and later knew the back-breaking labor of haying, and took on our teenage sons for such a week\u2019s summer work.\u00a0 One September evening we left a magnificent meal in the farm kitchen, to help with and see the birth of a calf in the barn next door, then to return for dessert.\u00a0 In August one parishioner rode her horse to church in those years.\u00a0 The idea, the flagrant false idea, that these saints are marks to be conned into belief by pseudo leaders who have not a whisker of belief themselves is absurd.\u00a0 The idea that these good people are sitting ducks to be convinced to hate on the basis of race, to control on the basis of gender, to reject on the basis of ethnicity, nation, income, education or accent\u2014the thematic thrust of some recent political discourse–is as appalling as are its spokespeople.\u00a0 The dairy farmers we knew would have been inclined to take care of them, refine their education shall we say, perhaps out behind the barn, in no uncertain terms.\u00a0 Of all my homiletical regrets and failings this one stands out in this season: as one who has lived half his life in great city streets and the other half in great country meadows, I have somehow failed to make clear our lived experience that, when it comes to good faithful people urban and rural, there is so little lasting difference.\u00a0 <\/em>It is a hoax.\u00a0 It is a hoax! \u00a0And yet, somehow I and others who know better have not been able, yet, to make that case, and make it stick.\u00a0\u00a0 Rural people are not sexist rubes, racist dunces, greedy materialists, or fundamentalist flakes.\u00a0 Urban people are not permissive snow-flakes, flighty nincompoops, unrealistic and clumsy airheads, any less interested in law and order and prosecution for wanton property destruction, or celebrants of Willie Horton.\u00a0 You are being conned, America, you are being conned. \u00a0Take care to think through with care just who benefits from such false, adroitly engineered division. \u00a0Again: shades of Wormwood and his affectionate uncle. \u00a0The best good people, in the city and in the country, can know each other in spirit<\/em> in a heart-beat.\u00a0 They would know each other in a New York minute, and enjoy each other until the cows come home.\u00a0 They would know each other in a New York minute, and enjoy each other until the cows come home. <\/em>(I pause to break the fourth wall and to point out to budding preachers the structure and phrasing of the sentence, New York\u2026cows\u2026<\/em>see?\u00a0 Say what you say by the way you say it.)\u00a0 Such saints would, can and will happily greet each other,on this side or on the farther home side of glory, with A METHODIST HANDSHAKE. \u00a0In heaven.\u00a0 \u00a0And for all of us, it\u2019s later than we think, and Heaven-New Creation-Glory is closer than we ever fully project or expect.<\/p>\n

Around us is blowing a gentle, summer wind, a lasting liberal breeze.\u00a0 While creation groans, and while love suffers long and is kind, we shall need a little of the third person of the ancient trinity along the way.\u00a0 A liberal breeze, a liberal breeze.<\/p>\n

By the way, the asperity with which the Holy Scripture summarizes creation is only matched by the asperity which the creeds of the Church summarize creation.\u00a0 \u2018In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth\u2019. Period.\u00a0 \u2018I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth\u2019. Period.\u00a0 Scripture and creed say what reason and experience know:\u00a0 we have the brute fact of the brute creation.\u00a0 Period.\u00a0 The rest of the Holy Scripture, all 65.9 other books, and the rest of the creed, the long second paragraph and the shorter third, go on from there.\u00a0 The love of God comes accompanied by faith and hope.\u00a0 Creation is the occasion of love but does not occasion love, does not occasion faith in love, and does not occasion a hope for a loving future.\u00a0 God is Love is profoundly about the second person of the Trinity, the Christ of God, not about the first person of the Trinity, and the creation of God.\u00a0 Creation alone will never get us to heaven.\u00a0 In pandemic, it will take the Second Person of the Trinity to get us free from the fallen creation of the First, guided hourly by the RUAH, the PNEUMA, the spirit, the wind, the liberal breeze of life.<\/em><\/p>\n

In a moment we will hear again the ancient liturgy for eucharist.\u00a0 We are not together to receive together the bread and cup.\u00a0 But we are together in relationship, by memory, in hope, through prayer.\u00a0 And with a little imagination, with eyes closed and hearts open, we might allow the familiar, ancient prayers of communion, to bring us into communion.<\/p>\n

So, travel with a little imagination\u2026Imagine Eucharist at Marsh Chapel.\u00a0 Stand to sing\u2026 Pause to reflect\u2026 Step out into the aisle\u2026 Look at and look past Abraham Lincoln and Francis Willard\u2026Receive cup and bread, bread and cup\u2026 Kneel at the altar to pray\u2026 Stand in communion with the communion of saints\u2026Here is the bread and cup of friendship\u2026Imagine, if you are willing, your own funeral, say right here, and a congregation reciting together a creed, a psalm, a hymn, a poem.\u00a0 Imagine, if you are willing, a congregation currently in diaspora, but just now, by the word spoken, a gathered and thus addressable community, you and I and all together.<\/p>\n

Keep a clean breeze blowing through our hearts Gracious God<\/em><\/p>\n

Keep a warm breeze blowing through our hearts Gracious God<\/em><\/p>\n

Keep a liberal breeze blowing through our hearts Gracious God<\/em><\/p>\n

Keep a summer breeze blowing through our hearts Gracious God<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/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 18: 15-20 Click here to hear just the sermon Keep a clean wind blowing through our hearts Gracious God Keep a warm wind blowing through our hearts Gracious God Keep a liberal wind blowing through our hearts Gracious God Keep a summer wind blowing through our hearts […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2679,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[39,22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2823"}],"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=2823"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2823\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2824,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2823\/revisions\/2824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}