{"id":2962,"date":"2021-02-14T11:00:45","date_gmt":"2021-02-14T16:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=2962"},"modified":"2021-02-11T15:28:47","modified_gmt":"2021-02-11T20:28:47","slug":"the-light-still-shines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2021\/02\/14\/the-light-still-shines\/","title":{"rendered":"The Light Still Shines"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

2 Corinthians 4: 3-6<\/a><\/p>\n

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

For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus\u2019 sake.\u00a0 For it is the God who said \u2018Let light shine out of darkness\u2019 who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.<\/em><\/p>\n

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

In a changed world, a reordered life, a twilit era, sometimes a poem lights the way.\u00a0 Ted Kooser\u2019s poem sees a church transformed into a barn, heavenly order replaced by earthly disarray, a poem of love and loss, with good works yet all around.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a tractor in the doorway of a church<\/em><\/p>\n

in Red wing, Nebraska, in a coat of mud<\/em><\/p>\n

and straw that drags the floor. A broken plow<\/em><\/p>\n

sprawls beggar-like behind it on some planks<\/em><\/p>\n

that make a sort of roadway up the steps.<\/em><\/p>\n

The steeple\u2019s gone.\u00a0 A black tar-paper scar<\/em><\/p>\n

that lightening might have made replaces it.<\/em><\/p>\n

They\u2019ve taken it down to change the house of God<\/em><\/p>\n

to Homer Johnson\u2019s barn, but it\u2019s still a church,<\/em><\/p>\n

with clumps of tiger lilies in the grass<\/em><\/p>\n

and one of those boxlike, glassed-in signs<\/em><\/p>\n

that give the sermon\u2019s topic (reading now<\/em><\/p>\n

a birdnest and a little broken glass).<\/em><\/p>\n

The good works of the Lord are all around;<\/em><\/p>\n

the steeple top is standing in a garden<\/em><\/p>\n

just up the alley; it\u2019s a henhouse now;<\/em><\/p>\n

fat leghorns gossip at its crowded door.<\/em><\/p>\n

Pews stretch on porches up and down the street,<\/em><\/p>\n

the stained-glass windows style the mayor\u2019s house,<\/em><\/p>\n

and the bell\u2019s atop the firehouse in the square.<\/em><\/p>\n

The cross is only God knows where.<\/em><\/p>\n

Ted Kooser, Kindest Regards, p. 24<\/em><\/p>\n

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

In thy light we see light.\u00a0 In thy light we see light.\u00a0 If we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another.\u00a0 If we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another.<\/p>\n

Now the light shines longer at the end of the day.\u00a0 No longer have we the deep sudden 4:30pm New England dark of December.\u00a0 The light hangs and hangs on longer.\u00a0 At 5pm you may pause, if the weather suits, and lean on the balustrade along Marsh Plaza.\u00a0 With a clear day, the sunlight lingers and warms and heals.\u00a0 The buildings to the west, as the sun now sits and sets, are a few stories only, so we have a full sunset, or nearly so.\u00a0 It feels good.\u00a0 The sunlight lingers and warms and heals.<\/p>\n

We have had no shortage of dark days the year past.\u00a0 Pollution, pandemic, politics, prejudice, pain.\u00a0 Pollution and a challenged climate.\u00a0 Yet.\u00a0 The light still shines.\u00a0 One reads of a global automobile manufacturer determining now to produce only electric cars by 2035.\u00a0 Pandemic and endless losses, death near and far.\u00a0 Yet.\u00a0 The light still shines.\u00a0 One reads of the heroism of scientists in laboratories, right across the Charles River, bringing vaccines to life, for life, to use, for use.\u00a0 Politics unmoored from healthy culture.\u00a0 Yet.\u00a0 The light shines.\u00a0 There is a prayerful, heartfelt resolve, matched by some actions: a confession that character matters, decency matters, empathy matters, experience matters, honesty matters.\u00a0 Character, decency, empathy, experience, honesty, especially when it comes to leadership, they truly matter.\u00a0 Prejudice, the abiding corruption of racism near and far.\u00a0 Yet.\u00a0 The light shines.\u00a0 One sees, right here, here at Boston University, right now, now in 2021 a new full emphasis, embodied, in the flesh:\u00a0 Andrea Taylor, Katherine Kennedy, Kenn Elmore, Crystal Williams, Ibram X. Kendi, Louise Chude-Sokei\u2014the President\u2019s Senior Diversity Office, the Howard Thurman Center, the Dean of Student\u2019s work, the Associate Provost\u2019s office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, The Center for Anti-Racism, the African American Studies Program.\u00a0 With the late afternoon sun resting on the MLK monument, with the longer afternoon sunset resting on the Marsh door statue of John Wesley, there is an inkling, a dawning, a harbinger, an echo, of faith, and of better days coming, and a relighting of higher hopes past.\u00a0 Pain though remains.\u00a0 Pain remains especially in our losses of loved ones in COVID.\u00a0 In liturgy and worship on Sunday March 14, mark the date, we will engage pain and honor loss.\u00a0 Yet.\u00a0 The light still shines.<\/p>\n

In thy light we see light.\u00a0 In thy light we see light.\u00a0 If we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another.\u00a0 If we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another.<\/p>\n

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

In faith, we can face pain squarely, what Paul ascribed to \u2018the god of this world\u2019\u2014shadow, hurt, pain.\u00a0 The god of this world.\u00a0 Hm. \u00a0Paul is close here, as close as he gets, to the language of Gnosticism, and may have borrowed the phrase from the Gnostics.\u00a0 Paul is as far here, as far as he gets, from the language of the Hebrew Scripture, and may have used the phrase to set some distance between himself and his religious family of origin.\u00a0 He is in dark pain, even as he claims and acclaims that the light still shines.\u00a0 We can too.<\/p>\n

Even new life brings pain.\u00a0 There is joy but there is pain. \u00a0Even in moments of luminous new life. \u00a0A student finds her way into Marsh Chapel, and asks for prayers\u2026A young woman follows an urge and comes to church, and asks for poems\u2026An older man prays at night, knowing what he needs to do to do his job but knowing others will be hurt and still others will judge harshly, and asks for nothing\u2026A young man determines to face the music, to address his addiction, and does so, outside of church, and asks for prayers\u2026A parent loses his child, and calls in grief, and hunts for consolation\u2026A woman makes a hard choice in real time about something that counts, and finds her spirit lightened, and sings her prayers\u2026A religious man opened an Advent devotional, one part word and one part music, and heard \u2018Once in Royal David\u2019s City\u2019, and cried and cried and cried\u2026A University leader does the right things at the right times in the right ways, not always with full appreication\u2026A senator gives us his seat rather than support fascism\u2026A family member survives the hurt of another\u2026<\/p>\n

There, here and there, here, the light still shines. A scientist, Anothy Fauci, and a humanist, John Lewis, worship together in Marsh Chapel, Baccalaureate Sunday, May 2018.\u00a0 All in worship so remember the prophetic call:\u00a0 Human agency, human agency, human agency:\u00a0 May 2018 in the nave of Marsh Chapel, John Lewis and Anthony Fauci: \u00a0BU past and future.\u00a0 Incarnation is the honoring of the human being.\u00a0 You and others, in whom light shines in the heart. God is at work in the world to make and keep human life human\u2014THROUGH HUMAN BEINGS.\u00a0 It will have to be a shared agency, a common purpose, for it to work in time.<\/p>\n

The psalmist says, “The Lord has done great things for us, and we rejoiced.” It\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0easy to rejoice when things are going well.\u00a0 Nothing is more enjoyable than a season of life that is endlessly exciting, happy, and generally, personally “successful.” We readily love life when life feels easy and day to day is filled with laughter. \u00a0We struggle though when life is not so joyful. On days when tears come far more readily than smiles, joy is the furthest thing from our mind. We become grouchy and repel joy in favor of self-induced misery. \u00a0We even remember happier days through a rose-colored lens and fall into despair instead of taking those past joys as a reminder that joy will come again.\u00a0\u00a0 There is light, and light still shines.<\/p>\n

This year has been full of tearful, lonely, stressful days when we looked back on life B.C. (Before Corona), and longed for times of rest and community like we had back then. Sometimes we have the feeling as though life will never be so good or so “normal” again, and we feel sorrow. We miss friends and family and ordinary life, even though we know that this isolation is not the final word. Still there is light. The light still shines. <\/em>There have been good days before and there will be joyful days in the future as well. \u00a0The future will restore the wealth of joy, community, and love that we have known before. For now, we are planting seeds of future joys and community, and we know that when this is all over and we are able to be together once again, we will come bearing overflowing hearts full of joy which were fostered through patience and loving-kindness toward our neighbors.<\/p>\n

2020-2021 has brought a plague, and pain in plague, 450,000 now dead.\u00a0 Many have lost their parents, without having the chance to grieve their going in the last weeks, days and even hours of life.\u00a0 Nurses, physicians, hospital administrators, support personnel, and others in medical care have given the last full measure of devotion. (At least 1,000 nurses have died in the course of providing medical care to others). As have police officers, teachers, morticians, bus drivers, and others.<\/p>\n

What might have been a moment of shared national commitment and common patriotic sacrifice, a war against disease, became instead a kind of war against healing, with cavalier understatement of danger, cavalier refusal to mask, distance, clean, test and trace, cavalier underestimate of the enormity and duration of the calamity (\u2018over by Easter\u2019, \u2018one day gone like a miracle\u2019), and cavalier denial and avoidance of colossal grief and loss, from sea to shining sea.\u00a0 How does one think about this? How does one reckon with this?\u00a0 The presence<\/em> of pandemic is a matter of nature. \u00a0Wise and careful leadership, or its astounding and costly absence<\/em>, is a matter of grace, or, lack of grace.<\/p>\n

Yet. Yet. Yet. The light still shines.<\/p>\n

Remember.\u00a0 There were voices, speaking truth, early on.\u00a0 <\/em>We were warned.\u00a0 Jeff Flake, 10\/24\/17: \u00a0\u2018I will no longer be complicit or silent in the face of\u2026reckless, outrageous, undignified behavior\u2026I deplore the casual undermining of our democratic ideals, the personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedom and institutions, the flagrant disregard for truth and decency\u2026We must stop pretending that the conduct of some is normal.\u00a0 It is not normal.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It is dangerous to a democracy. (NYT, 10\/24\/17)<\/p>\n

Sometimes things end badly.\u00a0 That\u2019s why they end.\u00a0 Sometimes the way a person leaves proves profoundly, beyond a shadow of doubt, why the leave-taking was needed.<\/p>\n

You may know this in your own direct experience. When someone you love says or does something you hate, something that is wrong, hurtful, damaging, and lasting, not something mild or minor but something real and permanent, then a door closes on that event or act or\u00a0 word, and you are left with disappointment and anger, disappointment that does not quickly dissipate and anger that does easily not abate.\u00a0 It is a permanent wound, a lasting, permanent scar, forgivable and forgiven, by grace it may be, but not forgettable or forgotten.\u00a0 By grace, it may be forgivable.\u00a0 In truth, though, not ever forgettable. \u00a0It has only one true first cousin in life, and that cousin is death.\u00a0 Here.\u00a0 Just here. Here is where you will need a measure of faith.<\/p>\n

Light in Darkness<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

In extremis<\/em>, we need the voices of faith, like that of Paul, to steady us and remind us:\u00a0 Yet.\u00a0 The light still shines.\u00a0 And other voices, too.\u00a0 On Transfiguration Sunday, they may just transfigure us.<\/p>\n

In the darkness of the 1930\u2019s Dietrich Bonhoeffer glimpsed light: \u2018God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him.\u00a0 The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us\u2026Before God and with God we live without God.\u00a0 God lets himself be pushed out of the world and onto the cross.\u00a0 He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us\u2026 And the church that calls a people to belief in Christ must itself be, in the midst of that people, the burning fire of love, the nucleus of reconciliation, the source of the fire in which all hate is consumed and the proud and hateful are transformed into the loving.\u201d LETTERS AND PAPERS FROM PRISON 196.<\/p>\n

In the darkness of the 1970\u2019s, a decade we seem tragically intent to repeat, Erazim Kohak glimpsed light: \u201cA life wholly absorbed in need and its satisfaction, be it on the level of conspicuous consumption or of marginal survival, falls short of realizing the innermost human possibility of cherishing beauty, knowing truth, doing the good, worshiping the holy\u201d<\/p>\n

In the darkness of 2020, David Blight glimpsed light: \u00a0Above all we need to revive the idea that truth matters. John Dewey:\u00a0 \u2018for truth instead of being a bourgeois virtue is the mainspring of all human progress\u2019. <\/em>(NYT 11\/9\/20, David W. Blight).<\/p>\n

In our time and on our very street, Ibram X. Kendi glimpsed light, and says so in the language of possibility, the vocabulary of your own possibilist tradition, the very tongue of historic Methodism:\u00a0 (Let us) saturate the body politic with the chemotherapy or immuno-therapy of antiracist policies that shrink the tumors of racial inequities, that kill undetectable cancer cells\u2026But before we can treat, we must believe.\u00a0 Believe all is not lost for you and me and our society.\u00a0 Believe in the possibility that we can strive to be antiracist from this day forward.\u00a0 Believe in the possibility that we can transform our societies to be antiracist from this day forward.\u00a0 . (Ibram X Kendi, How To Be An Antiracist<\/em>, p.238.)<\/p>\n

In thy light we see light.\u00a0 In thy light we see light.\u00a0 If we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another.\u00a0 If we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another. In a changed world, a reordered life, a twilit era, sometimes a poem lights the way.<\/p>\n

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

There\u2019s a tractor in the doorway of a church<\/em><\/p>\n

in Red wing, Nebraska, in a coat of mud<\/em><\/p>\n

and straw that drags the floor. A broken plow<\/em><\/p>\n

sprawls beggar-like behind it on some planks<\/em><\/p>\n

that make a sort of roadway up the steps.<\/em><\/p>\n

The steeple\u2019s gone.\u00a0 A black tar-paper scar<\/em><\/p>\n

that lightening might have made replaces it.<\/em><\/p>\n

They\u2019ve taken it down to change the house of God<\/em><\/p>\n

to Homer Johnson\u2019s barn, but it\u2019s still a church,<\/em><\/p>\n

with clumps of tiger lilies in the grass<\/em><\/p>\n

and one of those boxlike, glassed-in signs<\/em><\/p>\n

that give the sermon\u2019s topic (reading now<\/em><\/p>\n

a bird-nest and a little broken glass).<\/em><\/p>\n

The good works of the Lord are all around;<\/em><\/p>\n

the steeple top is standing in a garden<\/em><\/p>\n

just up the alley; it\u2019s a henhouse now;<\/em><\/p>\n

fat leghorns gossip at its crowded door.<\/em><\/p>\n

Pews stretch on porches up and down the street,<\/em><\/p>\n

the stained-glass windows style the mayor\u2019s house,<\/em><\/p>\n

and the bell\u2019s atop the firehouse in the square.<\/em><\/p>\n

The cross is only God knows where.<\/em><\/p>\n

Ted Kooser, Kindest Regards, p. 24<\/em><\/p>\n

For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus sake.\u00a0 For it is the God who said \u2018Let light shine out of darkness\u2019 who has hone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.<\/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 2 Corinthians 4: 3-6 Click here to hear just the sermon For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus\u2019 sake.\u00a0 For it is the God who said \u2018Let light shine out of darkness\u2019 who has shone in […]<\/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\/2962"}],"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=2962"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2962\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2963,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2962\/revisions\/2963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}