{"id":2890,"date":"2021-01-10T10:00:08","date_gmt":"2021-01-10T15:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=2890"},"modified":"2021-01-10T09:53:02","modified_gmt":"2021-01-10T14:53:02","slug":"faith-before-daybreak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2021\/01\/10\/faith-before-daybreak\/","title":{"rendered":"Faith Before Daybreak"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

Mark 1: 4-11<\/a><\/p>\n

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

A voice came from heaven, \u2018You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

There are some weeks when good news seems hard to come by.<\/p>\n

Late in November, 1963, with youth hockey around the corner, and at last some new skates that fit, a lingering pallor covered our town, after President Kennedy tragically was shot.\u00a0\u00a0 There was an evening prayer service, but good news was hard to come by.\u00a0 \u2018We are a nation drenched in sorrow\u2019 began Jan\u2019s dad\u2019s, my father in law\u2019s rewritten sermon for that Sunday.<\/p>\n

A decade later, with some of us studying abroad, preparing to teach college Spanish literature\u2014a dream deferred to another lifetime, the war in Vietnam was reportedly ending, with helicopters carrying out the remaining soldiers and staff from a rooftop in Saigon.\u00a0 \u2018How do you ask a man to be the last to die in a mistaken war?\u2019 aptly asked one then young, now veteran national leader.\u00a0 A nation chastened, broken, without bearing or mooring, and little good news to be had.<\/p>\n

A bit more than a decade later, 1988, a plane down in Lockerbie, but we rehearsed that last week, did we not?<\/p>\n

Of a Tuesday morning, a bright one, an autumn bright morning, September 2001, some of us headed out for work, wondering what we had just seen, or what had we seen?, in the skies above the Towers above the city that never sleeps.\u00a0\u00a0 Little sleep, and very little good news, there was in that week of 9\/11.\u00a0 The evenings were given over to community worship, and on Friday the churches come 11am were packed.\u00a0 The dangling chads of Broward County the year before were forgotten.<\/p>\n

On this very avenue, in April of 2013, with the blasts of Beacon street still reverberating in mind and memory, every evening that week brought, right in here in Marsh Chapel, some manner of worship service, and gathering, for healing and help.\u00a0 None of it fully adequate, all of it offered to God and neighbor on behalf of a better future day, days and weeks when there would be more news of a better sort.\u00a0 A promissory note, within the notes of grief and loss.<\/p>\n

Early November of 2016 brought another set of days, a week, weeks let us say, of confusion and despair regarding that fall\u2019s election.\u00a0\u00a0 In hindsight, we see a bit better why.\u00a0 What many meant by choices in 2016 was not the meaning of those choices.\u00a0 What one meant was not, and is not, what it means.\u00a0 What you meant is not what it means.\u00a0 What it means is found not in intention but in consequence.\u00a0 The road to hell is paved with good intentions.\u00a0 We all can attest to that from our own experience, and our own behavior.\u00a0 It was hard to scare up much good news that late autumn.<\/p>\n

There are some weeks when good news seems hard to come by, and this week is one such.\u00a0 Yet these serial reminders of dark days past are meant, as you rightly surmise, to recall that we did make it through them, and we will get through this, too<\/em>. \u00a0We did make it through them, and we will get through this, too. <\/em>Not unscathed, and hopefully not unchanged, but together, we will make it through.<\/p>\n

Coming into this week already we faced challenges aplenty.\u00a0 A climate reeling out of control.\u00a0 A pandemic claiming 350,000 lives.\u00a0 A political culture, a culture cooked politics, for politics is ever downstream from culture, putting people at daggers drawn.\u00a0 A community of communities seeing, in full, for the first full time it may be, the ravages and damages of racial bias, hatred, and prejudice.\u00a0 And pain, the pain of every day.<\/p>\n

Now this week.\u00a0 On top of all other this (Thursday) morning\u2019s blaring headline, \u2018TRUMP INCITES MOB\u2019.\u00a0 4 dead, not in Ohio this time, but in the nation\u2019s capital city, \u00a0and inside the nation\u2019s capitol building.\u00a0 Insurrection with presidential incitement. One wonders about the future of the party of Lincoln.<\/p>\n

January 6, 2021. For the rest of history, for the rest of our lives, we shall have to live with, and attempt by faith to live down, both to live with and to live down, such utter calumny, such tragic, needless, heedless yet revelatory disaster.\u00a0 It is an apocalyptic\u2014a revelatory\u2014moment, hundreds wrecking the capitol, with hardly a single arrest to date, encouraged by a wantonly graceless leader, and with 6 Senators, 6 Senators (Cruz, Hawley, Hyde-Smith, Marshall, Kennedy, Tuberville), and much other congressional cattle (Jonah 4:11), continuing to feed its root cause. For while this sermon is being recorded Thursday late afternoon, January 7, 2021, we cannot be at all sure what further difficulty and distress may visit us, in this current week of scarce good news, by Sunday when the sermon is heard, January 10, 2021.\u00a0 One said, \u2018this is like 9\/11, except we did this to ourselves\u2019.<\/p>\n

But at some preconscious level, somewhere down in the declivities of the country\u2019s psyche, we had a sense that this was coming.\u00a0 We did not want to admit it.\u00a0 We hoped against hope to be wrong in that premonition.\u00a0 We hoped to whistle past the graveyard for another few days.\u00a0 Yet we remembered, dimly, our upbringing, \u2018don\u2019t play with fire if you don\u2019t want to get burned\u2019. We have had four years of warning, advisement, signs along the pathway of this premonition.\u00a0 So we are not surprised, and have no reason to be.\u00a0 It has been as plain as the nose on your face, even as plain as the nose on my face, at least since Charlottesville.\u00a0 It is no wonder, no surprise, that the 25th<\/sup> Amendment remedy is now rightly, and wisely, under full consideration.\u00a0 For a lot can happen in two weeks.<\/p>\n

So, the community of faith gathers come Sunday, January 10, 2021, to listen, pray, and prepare.\u00a0 You have come this morning, by radio or internet, to listen, pray, and prepare.\u00a0 And to wonder.\u00a0 Just what is the gospel, the good news for this Lord\u2019s Day?<\/p>\n

With you, I weep for my country and its people.\u00a0 More so, I pray for my own people, my own congregation, our University, our listenership, you and your loved ones, near or far or very far away.\u00a0 It must be admitted, that there are some weeks when good news seems pretty hard to come by.\u00a0 This is one.<\/p>\n

Still.\u00a0 The preacher\u2019s role is to announce the gospel in interpretation of and accord with the Scriptures. Scripture gives us the chance for the long view.\u00a0 Scripture gives us a deep grounding, with heaven a little higher and earth a little wider. Thank goodness we have the Holy Scripture to which to turn, from which to\u00a0 learn, with which to listen, pray and prepare.\u00a0 Silver and gold have I none, but that which I have I give thee. (Acts 3:6).\u00a0 <\/em>Listen. Pray. Prepare.<\/p>\n

Listen.\u00a0 The Gospel of Mark was written for listening.\u00a0 It emerged over long time, with the earliest Christians reciting and recalling their Lord, his love, and their shared shaping by that love, in faith, beginning in baptism.\u00a0 They listened, morning and evening, Sunday by Sunday, and over time, in direct response to weeks both empty and full, they began to write down for future generations what they had heard.\u00a0 Today we have such an account, that of Jesus\u2019 baptized.\u00a0 Today we have such a lesson, the hearing of a voice.\u00a0 Today we start again into an unknown future, within earshot of that same divine voice, \u2018This is my Beloved\u2019.\u00a0 For all our failure, for all manner of sin and death and meaninglessness, for all that is wrong, and there is much, especially just now, there is a voice, ringing out and calling to us.\u00a0 A voice from heaven.\u00a0 \u2018A voice came from heaven, \u2018You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased\u2019<\/em>.\u00a0 \u00a0Yes, this is a scandalous particularity, to name One the Beloved, to call out One with intimacy (\u2018with you\u2019), to identify One, baptized in the Jordan, \u2018with Thee I am well pleased\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0 Yet for generations women and men have found this particularity strikingly universal, and lastingly, eternally real. \u00a0Especially in weeks when good news is scarce.\u00a0 And in our time, into dimensions of common ground that may cause us work and make us uncertain, we will want to learn to listen, and listen again.\u00a0 Listen.\u00a0 Listen.\u00a0 Listen.<\/p>\n

Pray.\u00a0 What a tremendous spiritual gift is our Psalter.\u00a0 Remember Samuel Terrien teaching us: :\u00a0 Here are 700 years of psalms, 1000-400bce.\u00a0 For the psalmists, Yahweh\u2019s presence was not only made manifest in Zion.\u00a0 It reached men and women over the entire earth.\u00a0 The sense of Yahweh\u2019s presence survived the annihilation of the temple and the fall of the state 587bc.\u00a0 Elusive but real, it feared no geographical uprooting and no historical disruption.\u00a0 Having faced the void in history and in their personal lives, they knew the absence of God even within the temple.\u00a0 The inwardness of their spirituality, bred by the temple, rendered the temple superfluous. (279)<\/em> \u00a0In other words, they knew how to live through and out through godless weeks.\u00a0 Our psalm today, Psalm 29, ancient and redolent with glory, recalls for us how to pray.\u00a0 From your youth you have known.\u00a0 Adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication.\u00a0 The ACTS forms of prayer.\u00a0 Adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication.\u00a0 One is a word of glory, echoing the glory of God that thunders.\u00a0 Glorify God and enjoy him forever.\u00a0 A word of glory. One is a word of contrition, by which we begin every service at Marsh Chapel. \u00a0Prayer is not only a matter of individual or even personal attention, a certain sitting silent before God.\u00a0 Prayer is also the voice, the responsive voice, of the people of God, echoing in antiphonal chorus, the call, the bowing before glory.\u00a0 GLORY!\u00a0 \u00a0All have sinned, all have fallen short of that primordial glory.\u00a0 All.\u00a0 A prayer of contrition. One is a word of gratitude.\u00a0 In such a week, it may simply be a prayer of gratitude that things are not yet any worse.\u00a0 A piercing memory of an 87 year old woman who had hidden, and been hidden, from the Nazis as a child evoked this the other day: \u201cDuring the war, we didn\u2019t know if we would make a day. I didn\u2019t have any freedom. I couldn\u2019t speak loudly, I couldn\u2019t laugh, I couldn\u2019t cry\u2026But now, I can feel freedom. I stay by the window and look out. The first thing I do in the morning is look out and see the world. I am alive. I have food, I go out, I go for walks, I do some shopping. And I remember: No one wants to kill me. So, still, I read. I cook a little bit. I shop a little bit. I learned the computer. I do puzzles. (1\/3\/21, Toby Levy, NYT)<\/em>. \u00a0A word of gratitude. One is a word of longing, desire, incantation, supplication.\u00a0 Dear God, guide us through these murky moments, like those we have seen in the past, let us pray, and let our learning now make us stronger later.\u00a0 A word of supplication. Prayer takes some set aside time, some quiet, some intentional focus.\u00a0 Pray.\u00a0 Pray.\u00a0 Pray.<\/p>\n

Prepare.\u00a0 The whole of Scripture begins with the divine preparation, in creation, and in speech.\u00a0 \u2018Let there be\u2026\u2019\u00a0 And what might that be, let there be?\u00a0 Light.<\/em>\u00a0 Watch for the rays of light in the dark.\u00a0 Watch for the rays of light in the dark.\u00a0 Wednesday morning, before all, well, chaos, broke loose, a newly elected Senator from Georgia was interviewed.\u00a0 He was raised in public housing, one of 12 children.\u00a0 Whatever the day, his dad had them all up before dawn.\u00a0 Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning<\/em>, he was reminded.\u00a0 Yes, but that\u2019s the thing about the morning<\/em>, he responded, it begins in the full dark, it begins at dawn, before daybreak. <\/em>\u00a0Senator Warnock learned to prepare, shining his shoes every morning, before daylight, to get ready, to be ready.\u00a0 His parents gave him the gift of faith before daybreak.\u00a0 So.\u00a0 Light.\u00a0 <\/em>Watch for the coming rays of light. \u00a0Nor does light shine only in the heart, but also, even moreso, in the heart of the community.\u00a0 Individuals need to prepare, but so do communities. \u00a0Senator Warnock went to Morehouse College, where his dean, Dean of the Chapel the Rev. Dr. Lawrence Carter, who has preached three times in the last three years from this Marsh pulpit, greeted him.\u00a0 Now Senator Warnock went on to earn a PhD from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York (I believe I have heard of the school) and has since been in the pulpit of historic Ebenezer Church, Atlanta, for many years.\u00a0 But Dean Carter reminded me in conversation Wednesday morning, that when his parents dropped him off at Morehouse, Rafael Warnock had not a dime to his name.\u00a0 His parents could give him only what they had, their powerful, limitless, ceaseless love, pride and belief in him.\u00a0 Their powerful, limitless, ceaseless love, pride and belief in him.<\/em>\u00a0 Not much?\u00a0 Well.\u00a0 It seems to have been enough, just enough.\u00a0 That\u2019s the thing about the morning.\u00a0 It begins in the dark, in preparation, awaiting the word\u2026 LET THERE BE LIGHT.\u00a0 Prepare.\u00a0 Prepare.\u00a0 Prepare.<\/p>\n

People of God.\u00a0 Listen!\u00a0 Pray!\u00a0 Prepare!\u00a0 And hear again the gospel:<\/p>\n

A voice came from heaven, \u2018You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased\u2019.\u00a0\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 Mark 1: 4-11 Click here to hear just the sermon A voice came from heaven, \u2018You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0 There are some weeks when good news seems hard to come by. Late in November, 1963, with youth hockey around the […]<\/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\/2890"}],"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=2890"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2894,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2890\/revisions\/2894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}