{"id":3118,"date":"2021-03-28T11:00:48","date_gmt":"2021-03-28T15:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=3118"},"modified":"2021-03-24T12:00:22","modified_gmt":"2021-03-24T16:00:22","slug":"green-light-on-top","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2021\/03\/28\/green-light-on-top\/","title":{"rendered":"Green Light on Top"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

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

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

Said St. Patrick, \u201cI arise today through a mighty strength\u201d.<\/em><\/p>\n

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

It is not so long ago that we greeting Jesus at his nativity, humming carols at home and lighting candles of hope in winter windows.\u00a0 It is not so long ago that we witnessed his growth in wisdom and stature, in the knowledge and love of God, while as a teenager he taught in the temple.\u00a0 It is not so long ago that this mighty young man Jesus stooped, fully human, for baptism in the surging river Jordan, the river of death and life.\u00a0 It is not so long ago that we saw him take up his ministry among us, preaching and teaching and healing.\u00a0 It is not so long ago that with Peter and James and John we saw him ascend the Mountain of the Transfiguration. \u00a0With him, up through the mountains have we climbed this Lent, step by step.<\/p>\n

We are delivered from captivity, from the power of fear, in the announcement of the Gospel. It is the word of faith that delivers from enslavement to fear. From separation anxiety, survival anxiety, performance anxiety, anxiety about anxiety. The good news carries us home, to the far side of fear.<\/p>\n

Say, to profiles in courage.\u00a0 One day you may be coming home to Boston.\u00a0 You may fly into Logan Airport.\u00a0 You may deplane and walk toward the exit. And there you will find a greeting from the past.\u00a0 A visitor today to the cradle of liberty, the home of the bean and the cod, coming by air will walk underneath a bright portico at the Airport, adorned with the countenance of a familiar President, whose term of office was tragically foreshortened. \u00a0\u00a0He is pictured pointing out a rocket on the launch pad.<\/p>\n

You cannot help but pause. John F Kennedy. \u00a0Boston Airport. \u00a0A new frontier. \u00a0A profile in courage. \u00a0 An entrance into a new place. \u00a0A homecoming lit up in green.\u00a0 A New <\/em>England place. \u00a0Like the Gospel itself, a new space, a newness of life. The familiar Presidential Boston voice simply says: \u2018We do not choose to go to the moon because it is easy to do so. \u00a0We choose to go to the moon because it is hard.\u2019 (He recalls O.W. Holmes: Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing. While we are permitted to scorn nothing but indifference\u2026). Not because it is easy, but because it is hard.\u00a0 <\/em>For the same reason some choose the ministry, not because it is easy.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/em>He evokes St. Patrick:\u00a0 I arise today through a mighty strength.<\/em><\/p>\n

Paul needed this strength.\u00a0 Today Paul writes, alone in prison. His own missionary work, as we can overhear from chapter 1 of Philippians, is under revision and redirection by others who claim he has failed in certain key areas. His own personal future is more than cloudy, including the possibility of death, and again, his ruminations in the first chapter of Philippians bear this out. He acclaims deliverance for the captives, you and me, a saving drumbeat along the river of life. He has a sight line to the far side of fear.<\/p>\n

Ane, he is unafraid, this Apostle to the Gentiles, to quote his opponents. His Gnostic opponents sang hymns, like that in the Poimandres<\/em>. In these hymns they celebrated a great mind in the universe. They acclaimed the forms of God. They spoke of emptying and filling. They especially and repeatedly compared human life to enslavement in these writings and hymns. To be human is to be ensnared by the elemental spirits of the universe, to be at the mercy of the cosmic, that is historical and natural, forces all around us. To be human is to be humbled by death, even ignominious death. They sang the praise of a Redeemer, who was once preexistent in the form of God, who came to earth in human guise, and who returned to the father\u2019s house, preparing rooms for his followers, and being the most highly exalted. The name beyond all names, the light beyond all lights, before Whom all bow\u2026<\/p>\n

Sound familiar? It sounds like Philippians 2.<\/p>\n

Philippians 2 sounds like a Gnostic hymn. Paul may have lifted and used it, because his hearers know it and because it suits his message. It is a plundering of the Egyptians, a use of the cultural language of the day to convey great tidings of good news. You need not fear. You need not fear. God has broken in upon our fear, and invaded this life with liberation to live fully and lastingly! God\u2019s beachhead is the cross. The cross is the presence of God in suffering. The cross is the love of God in suffering. The cross is the power of God in suffering, to free the captives\u2014to free every human being\u2014from fear.<\/p>\n

I wonder if we can recapture, by the imagination, Paul\u2019s decision to recite for himself and for his correspondents, a hymn to the faithful love of God that carries us over, to the far side of fear. Here is Paul.\u00a0 Here is the outspoken leader of a religious movement charged with atheism, with rejecting the gods of the empire. Here he is alone in prison. Here he affirms what can only be affirmed by faith,<\/em> the victory of the visible over the invisible, of God beyond the many gods, of Christ the failed messiah over the cross of his failure. He does so in measured, nearly serene tones.<\/p>\n

His attention is captured by the servant Christ, here so like the figure in Isaiah. To be a human being, for Paul, is to be captive under the control of malignant powers, to live in a world in which the human being has too often fallen prey to powers that are aligned and arranged against what is truly human. \u00a0In days, like today, following the racist slayings in Atlanta, and following the senseless slayings in Boulder, and clouded by our abject unwillingness as a people to confront gun violence, and guns, and violence, we can readily, fully, even without sermonic amplification, hear Paul in Philippians.<\/p>\n

Yet, as one himself immersed in fear, Paul, seized by Christ, is set to singing in his prison cell. Maybe today, given our fears, we may hear something of his happy news.\u00a0 I arise today through a mighty strength. <\/em>Meditate this Palm Sunday on what in the past has brought you strength, what brings you home.<\/p>\n

The west side of Syracuse New York includes Tipperary Hill, the only neighborhood in America where the green light is on top of the red light in the stoplight.\u00a0 The green light is on top, just so you know. \u00a0Especially coming home that light guides and illumines. \u00a0The streets on Tipperary Hill are named for poets.\u00a0 Tennyson, Bryant, Milton, Coleridge, and Whittier, Whittier the street where my dad grew up.\u00a0 He said he was the only Protestant on Tipperary Hill.\u00a0 That was an exaggeration. He said he had to fight his way to and from school every day. That was an exaggeration.\u00a0 He said all his classmates grew up to be priests or policemen.\u00a0 That was an exaggeration.\u00a0 He said the streets of Tipperary Hill were the birthplace of great leaders.\u00a0 That was not an exaggeration.\u00a0 I give you Theodore Hesburg, born on Tipperary Hill, for 35 years the President of Notre Dame. I look forward to coming home again, someday, say this summer, to a place of poetic memory, a poetic topography.\u00a0 Speaking of Whittier:<\/p>\n

I know not what the future hath of marvel or surprise<\/em><\/p>\n

Assured alone that life and death God\u2019s mercy underlies<\/em><\/p>\n

And so, beside the silent sea<\/em><\/p>\n

I wait the muffled oar<\/em><\/p>\n

No harm from Him can come to me<\/em><\/p>\n

On ocean or on shore<\/em><\/p>\n

I know not where His islands lift<\/em><\/p>\n

Their fronded palms in air<\/em><\/p>\n

I only know I cannot drift<\/em><\/p>\n

Beyond His love and care<\/em><\/p>\n

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

And now the passion.\u00a0 And now it is time to come down from the mountain, to take the full measure of this Man, the Son of Man, and to have the courage to let Him take our full measure, too.\u00a0 The crisp air and vistas of the mountain pass have fed our souls.\u00a0 But now it is time to head home, and turn our face to Jerusalem. \u00a0It is not so long ago that with Peter and James and John we saw him ascend the Mount of the Transfiguration.\u00a0 With him, up through the mountains have we climbed this Lent, step by step. \u00a0And now the passion.<\/p>\n

The road down the Mount of Olives, or down any mountain, can tax the traveler.\u00a0 It reminds us all of earlier homecomings.<\/p>\n

Odysseus walking the last few miles to Thebes.\u00a0 Socrates walking to the center of Athens and the cup of hemlock.\u00a0 Richard the Lionhearted sailing the English Channel, heading home.\u00a0 A prodigal son, scuffling up the last mile of country road toward a dreaded homecoming.\u00a0 You, returning at last to whatever you have long avoided, wandering as you have in the Galilee of the rest of life.\u00a0 At last, there is an Emerald City, and the road home.<\/p>\n

Today, we raise a question.\u00a0 What was Jesus\u2019 state of mind, what was on his mind and heart, as he entered the Holy City?<\/p>\n

It is perilous, even arrogant, at this late date and from this great distance, to try to imagine Jesus\u2019 state of mind as he descends the Mountain and enters the City.<\/p>\n

Albert Schweitzer, before he went of to heal the jungle sick, showed convincingly how inevitably errant are all such attempts.\u00a0 More recent attempts, like those of NT Wright and Marcus Borg, only confirm Schweitzer\u2019s thesis.\u00a0 We paint our own inner lives into the life of Jesus, when so we try to see what cannot be seen in Scripture.\u00a0 That is, against some more popular work of recent years, I still fully agree with Schweitzer.\u00a0 And yet, particularly at this point in his journey, on Palm Sunday, at the entrance into the Holy City, and on the threshold of his own death,\u00a0 we are haunted\u2014are we not?\u2014by the desire to see what Jesus saw and feel what he felt and sense what he did sense, coming home.<\/p>\n

Now Jesus is walking down into the city, down off the mountain, and down into the heart of his destiny.\u00a0 He is going to his grave.<\/p>\n

Some of the Gospel today, as Jesus heads home, is too true to be good.\u00a0 For He is not at home, not at home, in a world of injustice, abuse, violence, and death.\u00a0 For him, in such a benighted world, there is really no place like home.<\/p>\n

Jesus is heading home. As are we all, though, it seems sometimes to be a conspiratorially well-kept secret.\u00a0 We all are walking down the Lenten mountain and into our lasting, our last future.\u00a0 Every one of us is going to die.\u00a0 We are going home.<\/p>\n

Here are two possible sentiments in Jesus\u2019 heart and mind as he descends the Mount of Olives.<\/p>\n

First.\u00a0 He looks back upon his ministry and feels that he is homeless. He has found no lasting nest on earth, no lasting crib, no lasting domicile.\u00a0\u00a0 He has found opposition and rejection.\u00a0 He has encountered misunderstanding and criticism.\u00a0 To a harsh world he has brought a gentle manner.\u00a0 To a wolfish world he has brought the labor of love.\u00a0 To a selfish community he has brought the summons to service.\u00a0 To an inconsistent dozen disciples, he has brought the steady presence of peace.\u00a0\u00a0 He has not found a home, no home for Jesus, descending the Mount of Olives.\u00a0\u00a0 He has even said of himself, \u201cfoxes have their holes, and birds of the air their nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of greatest sentences ever written in English are devoted, in Hamlet\u2019s soliloquy to a similar ennui, a similar existential vagrancy.<\/p>\n

And those of us who have been shot out of the saddle, riding for a righteous cause, as we dust ourselves off and bind our wounds, we do so in the best of company, in the company of the crucified, for whom, on this green earth, as yet, there is no place like home.\u00a0\u00a0 Today you may feel shot out of the saddle.\u00a0 But let me ask you something.\u00a0 What other saddle would have rather ridden?\u00a0 Some losing causes are worth support even in defeat.\u00a0 I would rather be shot out of the right saddle than to canter comfortably all the live long day in the wrong one.\u00a0 So, dust off, bind the wound, and get ready to ride again.\u00a0 It is a warning.\u00a0 This last 52 weeks has been one long warning.\u00a0 Just because we were alive last year is no guarantee that we will be next year.\u00a0 We have not a person, dollar, idea, day or dream to spare.\u00a0 Not one.\u00a0 And it is, let us confess it, an uphill pull.<\/p>\n

Second.\u00a0 There is something else alive in this homeless homecoming.\u00a0 Frederick Buechner compares the feeling of faith to the feeling homesickness, that longing for the feeling of home.\u00a0 Faith is a heartfelt longing for the comforts of home.<\/p>\n

Jesus looks forward to his passion and feels that he is going home. \u00a0He is not yet home, but going home. He has come and now he must go.\u00a0 He tarries for a while, but he is going home.\u00a0 Only the greatest of the Gospels, that of John, fully and resoundingly displays this sentiment.\u00a0 But it is present, muted, in Mark as well.\u00a0 Jesus must endure the cross, just as we inevitably must endure tragedy, accident, betrayal, injustice, failure and death.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We have the finest of company, the Lord Jesus Christ himself, when we endure life\u2019s damaging darkness.\u00a0 Some have lost loved ones to death, this past year.\u00a0 Some of lost beloved institutions to death, this past year.\u00a0 Some have lost beloved dreams to death, this past year.\u00a0 Jesus walks beside you.\u00a0 Jesus walks beside you. In fact, this is his peculiarly chosen path, his way, his way of the cross.\u00a0 All of the passion, all of the passion music of Lent, all of it, all the way to the cross itself, acclaims, in passion, the compassion of God in Christ our Lord.\u00a0 God has a passion for compassion.\u00a0 God has a passion for compassion.\u00a0\u00a0 So Jesus looks forward\u2014does he not?\u2014to the completion of his mission, to the last word in the soliloquy, to the transition to glory.\u00a0 Again, only John has fully held this diamond.\u00a0 Only he sees the cross as glory, without remainder.\u00a0 Only he has Jesus say, on the cross, as we remembered last week, \u201cit is completed\u201d.\u00a0 But Mark too senses Jesus homesickness at his homeless homecoming.\u00a0 His longing for God.\u00a0 And we sense it too, because we feel it, too.<\/p>\n

Some of the Gospel today, as Jesus heads home, seems too good to be true.\u00a0 This greatest of passionate tragedies, the cross of Christ our Lord, is the passageway, strangely, wonderfully, to our heavenly home.\u00a0 He dies as we die.\u00a0 And we die with Him.\u00a0 We all die.\u00a0 We are not even temporarily immortal.\u00a0 Yet, attendant upon this road down the mountain and into the city, there resounds, softly at first, a carol of grace, a carol of love, a carol for all, like we, who are going home.\u00a0\u00a0 And we are.\u00a0 Going home.<\/p>\n

This homesickness, this spirited sense that home is over the next street, up the winding trail to the cross, this hunger for home<\/em>, this is what Paul meant elsewhere:\u00a0 this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison\u2026this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

You know, we came far closer on January 6 to a final moment in the American experiment of democracy than, on the whole, we have yet fully to internalize, than, thus far, we are willing to admit.\u00a0 We just do not want to face it.\u00a0 We will, over time. \u00a0Yet coming home, as a country, in the weeks following, perhaps it helped to awaken us to hear, coming home, reminders of a green light on top, reminders of a mighty strength:\u00a0 not the example of our power but the power of example\u2026history, faith and reason will show us the way\u2026we are defined by our common loves (Augustine)\u2026there is a cry for racial justice 400 years in the making\u2026and\u2026especially\u2026and hope and history rhyme (Heaney).<\/em><\/p>\n

One way or another, are you coming home today?\u00a0 If so take with you the breastplate of St. Patrick.\u00a0 Said he:\u00a0 I arise today through a mighty strength. Said St. Patrick, \u201cI arise today through a mighty strength\u201d. Said St. Patrick, \u201cI arise today through a mighty strength\u201d.<\/em><\/p>\n

Sursum Corda:\u00a0 Lift up your hearts!<\/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 11: 1-11 Click here to hear just the sermon Said St. Patrick, \u201cI arise today through a mighty strength\u201d. Letter It is not so long ago that we greeting Jesus at his nativity, humming carols at home and lighting candles of hope in winter windows.\u00a0 It is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2679,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[58,22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3118"}],"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=3118"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3118\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3122,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3118\/revisions\/3122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}