{"id":2884,"date":"2020-12-06T11:00:34","date_gmt":"2020-12-06T16:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=2884"},"modified":"2021-01-19T15:13:56","modified_gmt":"2021-01-19T20:13:56","slug":"the-dawn-of-faith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2020\/12\/06\/the-dawn-of-faith\/","title":{"rendered":"The Dawn of Faith"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

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

Mark 1: 1-18<\/a><\/p>\n

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

Dormant<\/strong><\/p>\n

We rested alone in the dormant, dormant quiet of Thanksgiving 2020, as so many did.\u00a0 There were walks and talks.\u00a0 There was time for reflection and reading, as well as distance learning about dearest loved ones, by way of the current, sometimes helpful, technologies.\u00a0 A red, bright red, maple leaf floated our way.\u00a0\u00a0 Leaves were there for the kicking and kicking up.\u00a0 We both resisted and bowed to the beckoning of disagreeable chores put off, now waiting and awaiting attention, with no earthly excuse for avoidance.\u00a0 Something to clean, something else to toss, something further to give off, something even to cherish, and, perhaps\u2026something to discover or recover.<\/p>\n

In the evenings we nestled in to see some news, not that much is newscast any longer, and then, as moved, to return to stories and novels and films and sequels.\u00a0 We had left off the Crown after two seasons, a good while ago, and made our way back into the next.\u00a0 We had stood outside Buckingham Palace, with long hair in 1972, then recently wed in 1978, then with a church tour of Methodism and its ghosts 1995, and then, overjoyed, on holiday in 2017, en route <\/em>to view John Wesley\u2019s tomb in Westminster Abbey.\u00a0 We worshiped there, seated that august and August Sunday above the stone marked for William Wilberforce.\u00a0 Would you go back?\u00a0 To London?\u00a0 In a New York minute\u2026<\/em>Marsh Chapel, Gothic in design, exudes an English spirit\u2014the garden in the poem of Sir George Sitwell, the corner stone atop two further stones from Oxford University (St. John\u2019s College and Jesus College) and the inscription, Boston University\u2019s pedigree is traced directly to Oxford University, England.<\/em>(Cambridge is both on and meant for the other of the river.)\u00a0 The University Arms, said Daniel Marsh, \u2018connect Boston University both with the town of Boston, England, and also with the University of Oxford.\u2019\u00a0\u00a0 And for good reason:\u00a0 Mr. Wesley, an Oxford don, brought through fierce preaching a vigorous gospel, the reformation faith, to the English poor, in mine and in field and in city and on ship and in prison.\u00a0 Our heritage is thus, personal, denominational, professional and religious.\u00a0 So, we are inclined to watch the show.<\/p>\n

At one point, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, is accosted by his mother, an eccentric and brilliant nun, recently transposed to Buckingham Palace from a humble nunnery in Greece.\u00a0 He interrupts her kneeling prayer, after years of disconnection.\u00a0 She, mentally troubled, in story, cared for by Sigmund Freud, and he, a kind of orphan, left alone in the world.\u00a0 In the heart of the talk she abruptly asks him a question.\u00a0 And what about your faith?\u00a0 And what about your faith?\u00a0 Have you faith?<\/em>\u00a0 A question of which Mr. Wesley would have been, would be, proud. \u00a0What about your faith?\u00a0 <\/em>He honestly, suddenly answers:\u00a0 dormant.\u00a0 My faith is dormant.<\/em>\u00a0 She murmurs, she mourns, she gasps, she then says, That is not good.\u00a0 Find yourself a faith.\u00a0 Find yourself a faith.<\/em>\u00a0 At the end of the episode, you see them walking away, arm and arm, into an English country garden.<\/p>\n

And you?\u00a0 What about your faith?\u00a0 It is a serious question, even, maybe even especially, in a dormant time.\u00a0 Perhaps, sensing this, you have for a moment allowed the car radio to linger at religion, in worship, this morning.\u00a0 Perhaps, sensing this, you have turned on or turned toward a few minutes of music, Scripture, prayer, and preachment.\u00a0 A dormant Thanksgiving may have given you pause, or a pause, coming now into December.\u00a0 Pause before illness.\u00a0 Pause before randomness.\u00a0 Pause before mortality.\u00a0 Pause before God.\u00a0 Faith, dormant faith, wakes up in that kind of pause.\u00a0 A dormant pause brings, or can, the dawn of faith.\u00a0 Pause to pray in the morning.\u00a0 Pause to recite a psalm mid-day.\u00a0 Pause to listen in care when another speaks.\u00a0 Pause to write an encouraging word.\u00a0 Pause to push your mind in study, not for what informs but for what transforms.\u00a0 Pause to recover a joy in generosity.\u00a0 Pause to make a plan to worship, come Sunday, just as now, well, you are doing.\u00a0 Faith is dormant unless it wakes up in these moments of pause.<\/p>\n

Of course.\u00a0 What other realm of life or experience do we know that opens itself with no investment?\u00a0 No investment in funds leads to no gain in growth.\u00a0 No investment in exercise leads to no gain in health.\u00a0 No investment in study leads to no gain in learning.\u00a0 No investment in equality leads to no gain in justice.\u00a0 No investment in difference leads to no gain in community.\u00a0 No investment in friendship leads to no gain in friends.<\/p>\n

Your faith, how is it with your faith?\u00a0 If the answer is \u2018dormant\u2019, come this dormant Advent, you may want to invest yourself, say, in Scripture, say, in its serious study, say, or for what is shows in life, vital moments of awakening, life\u2019s woke times.<\/p>\n

Advent<\/strong><\/p>\n

That is, you cannot come to Christmas unless you cross the river Jordan\u2026<\/p>\n

Between you and the 12 days of grace in the feast of Christmas 2020 there runs an icy river, four weeks of Advent 2020, the journey in preparation\u2026<\/p>\n

You cannot get across alone, or without cost, or without preparation, or without getting wet\u2026<\/p>\n

You will need some investment<\/em> here\u2026<\/p>\n

This beginning, Advent, is like all others\u2014uncertain, difficult, scary, hard\u2026<\/p>\n

In these weeks there is set aside a time of preparation\u2026<\/p>\n

The voices of our ancestors, forebears, precursors in faith cry out in our covid 2020 wilderness experience\u2026<\/p>\n

In today\u2019s readings, three distinct voices resound.\u00a0 The voice of the prophet Isaiah. The voice of the John the Baptist.\u00a0 And the voice of the St. Mark, the author of the earliest gospel and its beginning\u2026.<\/p>\n

The voices come out of the great, distant past, cloaked in antiquity, hooded in mystery, shrouded in misty history, covered by the winds and dust of time.<\/p>\n

Our Scripture is holy, is the word of God, because week by week, we read and listen, here, for the divine word.\u00a0 Where else would we possibly want to be, come Sunday, than in earshot of that Word? We stand on the shoulders of the ancients, stretching back two and three thousand years, for whom also these words were holy.\u00a0 They outlast us, these words of holy writ.\u00a0 They uplift us.\u00a0 They reshape us.\u00a0 They return us to our rightful minds.\u00a0 The authority of Scripture lies in a very pragmatic garden of practice: \u00a0we do this every week, all the 4,000 Sundays of our lives.\u00a0 Scripture acquires authority out of its long-time traditional use.\u00a0 Scripture exudes authority as the mind, our gift of reason, explores the caverns and caves, the stalactites and stalagmites, the dark recesses of venerable words.\u00a0 Scripture pierces the heart with authority, in our own hearing, our own recitation, our own living, our own experience.\u00a0 Tradition, reason, and experience crown <\/em>Holy Scripture with–authority.<\/p>\n

Listen, then, in love, to the voices of our ancestors, forebears, predecessors who also wrestled with the question of faith, the waking of faith at the dawn of faith.<\/p>\n

Second Isaiah<\/em><\/p>\n

The year is 540bce.<\/p>\n

In the dark days of exile, the second prophet Isaiah recalled for his people the nature of faith.<\/p>\n

How difficult it is to be away from home, to be alone, to be cut off from the people and places that mean most to you.\u00a0You college junior you. All travelers know this, as do all human pilgrims.\u00a0 Your life is a journey, a spiritual journey wrought in meaning, fraught with meaning, fought for meaning, taught by meaning.<\/p>\n

The preparation for good news may even begin in the dark lost hurt of exile, like a birdsong before dawn. Dormancy\u2026can be the dawn of faith.\u00a0 The book of Isaiah stops at chapter 39, a hard stop.\u00a0 The book of Isaiah begins again, heard today, in chapter 40.\u00a0 Isaiah could hear the early singing of the birdsong of hope long before any of his contemporaries.\u00a0 The people of Israel, through a series of tragic decisions, guided by a series of misguided leaders, found themselves enslaved to a foreign king. Our gospel of the Prince of Peace is born out of a strife-torn experience.\u00a0 Our confidence in the God of Hope is born out of a record of nearly hopeless moments in the community of faith.<\/p>\n

What makes faith possible in a time of exile?\u00a0 What makes hope possible in the wasteland of a desert?\u00a0 What makes faith possible in pandemic?<\/p>\n

Faith comes from a mixture of memory and imagination and vision.\u00a0 Faith, like its first cousin, hope, comes from trouble.\u00a0 Over 45 years of ministry, when the question has arisen, \u201cWhere did your faith come from?\u2019, \u2018Whence, Faith?\u2019, the answer invariable runs something like this:\u00a0\u201cwell, a long time ago,\u00a0I was in a deep kind of trouble, and, here is what happened\u2026\u2019 Faith comes out of trouble. \u00a0The dawn of faith is in the dormancy of trouble.\u00a0 Faith, like cousin hope, is real faith when it is most what you need.\u00a0 And faith comes in trouble, in times of trouble, in exile, in times of exile.\u00a0 Ours this year, 2020 is such. An exile.\u00a0 And some days we feel it to the marrow bone.<\/p>\n

This is what a verse remembered does for us.\u00a0 It frees us to hope for what is not yet seen.\u00a0 A song like Isaiah 40, well sung, frees us from the tyranny of the present, the oppression of the right now, the slavery of the moment.\u00a0 We get free to dream of another time or two.\u00a0 Oddly, the best thing about the study of theology is that it frees us from the 21st<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n

The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ may involve a newfound capacity to hope, to hope against hope, to hope for what yet cannot be seen, to hope and to hope and to hope.\u00a0 The song and marrow bone of faith comes calling out just before sunlight, at dawn.<\/p>\n

Isaiah overheard and foretold another voice, another prospect.\u00a0 He sensed what was not yet visible.\u00a0 Who hopes, anyway, for what he sees? So he cried out:<\/p>\n

The voice of one crying in the wilderness<\/em><\/p>\n

Prepare the way of the Lord<\/em><\/p>\n

Make his paths straight <\/em><\/p>\n

The Baptist<\/em><\/p>\n

The year is 27 ce.<\/p>\n

It is the year of the courage of the Baptist. It takes a peculiar spiritual strength in faith to find the grace to\u2026step aside.\u00a0\u00a0 John the Baptist created a commotion with his call to confession of sin.\u00a0 He called, and the people came.\u00a0 They had a common mind, at least to the point of acknowledging their need.\u00a0 Like Isaiah, he was, he is, one of our venerable ancestors, forebears, precursors.<\/p>\n

John came out of tradition\u2014the tradition of the prophets.\u00a0 His role and work were not alien to the long history before him.\u00a0\u00a0 So, when he went out in his rough clothing, into a harsh desert, to speak unpleasant but true words of warning and judgment, he did so out of a common understanding that prophets might just come along every now and then.\u00a0 They might call the city of Jerusalem to repent every now and then.\u00a0 They might direct the people of Israel out to the river bank every now and then.\u00a0 They might point to God every now and then.<\/p>\n

John spoke directly to his people.\u00a0 He challenged his generation to look hard at the way they had lived, and with a spiritual plumb line to measure themselves according to the law of God.\u00a0 What one has no sin to confess?\u00a0 What one has no fault to regret?\u00a0 What one has no desire to be made clean? What one would not, given the chance, wash in the Jordan and start over?\u00a0 Who has not tossed and turned at night, in the dark, awaiting the dawn?<\/p>\n

Friends.\u00a0 Politics lies downstream from culture, and culture downstream from religion, and religion downstream from\u2026faith.\u00a0 The dawn of faith is at the headwaters of all the rest, for all the cultural amnesia of such today.<\/p>\n

The Baptist reminds us of the distance between our dreams and our deeds.<\/p>\n

But the lasting word of the Baptist is not about his own work at all.\u00a0 Like the church to this day, finally, he exists to point to Another, the thong of whose sandals none is worthy to loosen.<\/p>\n

For all his accomplishment, at the pinnacle of human endeavor, right religion, John finds, in faith, at the right time, the grace to make space.<\/p>\n

The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ may involve a willingness, at the right time, to \u00a0make space for someone else, to step aside.\u00a0 For you, one day, the gospel may evoke a willingness to step aside.\u00a0 Or, one day, not so much the willingness, but the reluctant courage to do so.<\/p>\n

John felt that nudge,and so he cried out:<\/p>\n

After me comes he who is mightier than I<\/em><\/p>\n

The thong of whose sandals<\/em><\/p>\n

I am not worthy to stoop down and untie<\/em><\/p>\n

John Mark<\/em><\/p>\n

The year is 70ce.<\/p>\n

With others, Mark could have found a more pleasant way to begin his gospel.\u00a0 He might with Matthew have offered a long list of names of great saints and sinners past, and then told a story about wise men from the east.\u00a0 Or he might with Luke have started with thrilling birth stories, retelling the birth of the Baptist and of Jesus, to Elizabeth and Mary, and then recounted the advent of the Son of God among humble shepherds, in a humble inn, in a humble town, on a humble night.\u00a0\u00a0 The Gospel of John even begins with the beginning of time and Jesus rounding the unformed cosmos as the divine word, logos.<\/p>\n

As plain as the nose on your face, though, Mark starts simple and bare.\u00a0 No frills, no varnish, no make-up, no extras.\u00a0 Like Paul, Mark says nothing about the birth of Jesus, or young man Jesus, or the family of Jesus.\u00a0 He begins with the river Jordan, and John, a man dressed in camel\u2019s hair.<\/p>\n

This gospel begins with a barren, bleak moment in the icy dark, along a cold river, faith dormant in exile.<\/p>\n

The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ may well involve just such a cold, and foreboding start, a beginning that in that way is like all beginnings, from the infant cry at birth, to the coughing susurration at death, and every new venture in between:\u00a0 a little quiet, a little cold, a little wild honey.\u00a0 And hovering somewhere nearby\u2026the divine possibility of a divine possibility.\u00a0 So, Mark writes: The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.<\/em><\/p>\n

Let us pause to shrug off our dormancy.\u00a0 Let us awake.\u00a0 Together, let us begin the journey.<\/p>\n

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

With Second Isaiah, in a time of exile, we will face down the loneliness we feel, and will explore a newfound capacity to hope.\u00a0 In a period of discouragement, we will accept the courage and the capacity to wait, to wait without idols, to wait for the living and true God, whose messengers do come, in the fullness of time.<\/p>\n

With John the Baptist, in a period of anxiety, an age of anxiety, when our own service has been rendered, and our own work is done, we will look for that saving willingness, the grace to make space, to make way for Another.<\/p>\n

With John Mark, in an age of pestilence and dislocation, when change in work or health arrive, we will face the harsh difficulty of a cold, new beginning.\u00a0 We will rely on faith, the faith of our ancestors, forebears, precursors, those who came before, who also knew the icy cold of the river Jordan.\u00a0 We will name our precursors, honor them, remember them.\u00a0 At a dinner table.\u00a0 In the comfort of a family conversation.\u00a0 In the discussion and dialogue of real national debate.\u00a0 In divine worship, as the Scriptures are read and the Word is proclaimed.\u00a0 And in the communal silence of eucharist, today a spiritual eucharist.<\/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

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

Click here to hear the full service Mark 1: 1-18 Click here to hear just the sermon Dormant We rested alone in the dormant, dormant quiet of Thanksgiving 2020, as so many did.\u00a0 There were walks and talks.\u00a0 There was time for reflection and reading, as well as distance learning about dearest loved ones, by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2679,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","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\/2884"}],"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=2884"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2884\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2928,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2884\/revisions\/2928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}