{"id":3190,"date":"2021-08-01T11:00:31","date_gmt":"2021-08-01T15:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=3190"},"modified":"2021-08-03T11:57:48","modified_gmt":"2021-08-03T15:57:48","slug":"gift-of-the-lake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2021\/08\/01\/gift-of-the-lake\/","title":{"rendered":"Gift of the Lake"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

John<\/span> 6:<\/span>24-35<\/a><\/p>\n

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

As this summer we reflect on what we have been through, over the last year and more, and as we meditate together upon the mighty themes of the Gospel, we might recall earlier intimations, earlier voices, which paved our way, cut our trail, made a space and place in grace for our own hopes.<\/p>\n

In New England now over many years we have been given a gift from the sea.\u00a0 The warm welcome and friendly spirit of your presence and care has been a guiding spirit for us, here along the Atlantic coast.\u00a0 In fact, you have lived out much of what Anne Murrow Lindberg described in her little book about the ocean and the soul, Gift from the Sea.<\/em>\u00a0 She recommends, strongly, time spent on the shore.\u00a0 She wrote some years ago: \u201cThe sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach\u2014waiting for a gift from the sea.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n

In thanks for these years of sea gifts, we bring you this morning a Gift from the Lake.\u00a0 A fresh water gift to honor a salt water gift.\u00a0 We spend our summers largely among grandchildren and their parents, alongside a fresh water lake, of which there are many in our land of upbringing, along the Erie Canal.\u00a0 This lake region bears the distinction of having given rise to many women and men who heard and heeded John 6, who did not leave freedom, the self-correcting spirit of truth loose in the universe, to somebody else.\u00a0 Its price of eternal vigilance they provided in very daily, very personal, very local, very immediate ways.\u00a0 Today, as a Gift from the Lake, we bring some of these fresh water memories.\u00a0 They may recall for us that, while there are always at of things wrong, there are also always a lot of things right.\u00a0 Yeats feared that the center could not hold:\u00a0 the falcon cannot hear the falconer; things fall apart; the center cannot hold. <\/em>And yet, over time voices of spirit and life have emerged to hold, to hold us, together.\u00a0 To hold us together as a country, as a culture, as a community.\u00a0 In a time when, for some, mendacity and violence seem to have become tools in the political workbench, we can recall and broadly affirm that in and with a measure of faith, the center can hold, the center can hold, in country and culture and community.\u00a0 Hear then of a Gift from the Lake.<\/p>\n

This is the lakeside land of Hiawatha (\u201cwho causes rivers to run\u201d).\u00a0 Such musical names adorn this lakescape:\u00a0 Canandaigua, Tioghnioga, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Cuyahoga. \u00a0The great native leader of the Iroquois showed in the 15th<\/sup> century the critical need for union, for space and time in which to live together.\u00a0 His leadership was focused on common space, on collegial relations, on counsel together, and so he is harbinger of all the examples of faith and freedom to come up along the Mohawk and the Erie Canal.<\/p>\n

All your strength is in your union<\/em><\/p>\n

All your weakness in discord<\/em><\/p>\n

Therefore be at peace henceforward<\/em><\/p>\n

And as brothers live together<\/em><\/p>\n

This is the land of Harriet Tubman.\u00a0 You may want to visit her home in Auburn, NY.\u00a0 Her neighbor William Seward, also from Auburn, bought Alaska, considered at the time a folly, an \u201cice-box\u201d.\u00a0 Our 21st<\/sup> century theological issue is space.\u00a0 Tubman\u2019s grand niece, Janet Lauerson, was on my church staff for a time in Syracuse on Euclid Avenue, after we both migrated down from the far north country, not far from the burial place of John Brown.\u00a0 His body lies moldering under a ski lift near Lake Placid.\u00a0 He and Gerrit Smith, founder of Peterboro, a community established for free slaves, a short 10 miles from our summer home, were not \u2018compatibalists\u2019 regarding slavery.\u00a0 As Lincoln would later say, he felt those who most affirmed slavery should start by trying it for themselves.\u00a0 Brown, Smith, Seward and others were the chorus before which Tubman could sing out the life of freedom, following the underground railroad.\u00a0 Remember her wisdom:\u00a0 \u201cWhen I found I had crossed that line (on her first escape from slavery, 1845), I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person.\u00a0 There was such a glory over everything…<\/em>I started with this idea in my head, \u2018There\u2019s two things I\u2019ve got a right to\u2026death or liberty\u2019\u2026\u2019Twant me, \u2018twas the Lord.\u00a0 I always told him, \u201cI trust you.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know where to go or what to do, but I expect you to lead me, and he always did.\u201d<\/p>\n

You will expect to hear something of Frederick Douglass, buried in Rochester. \u00a0His burial plot is across the street Strong Hospital.\u00a0 As one patient said, looking through the window, \u201cit gives you something to think about\u201d.\u00a0 Douglass printed the \u201cNorth Star\u201d in Rochester, and through it developed a voice for a new people in a new era. \u00a0In the North Star, Douglass wrote: \u201c The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle\u2026If there is no struggle, there is no progress.\u00a0 Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening.\u00a0 They want the ocean without the awful roar of its mighty waters.\u201d Or maybe we should give the honor to his colleague Sojourner Truth, calling in the same reagon for voting rights a long while ago: \u201cThat\u2026man\u2026says women can\u2019t have as many rights as man, cause Christ wasn\u2019t a woman.\u00a0 Where did your Christ come from?\u00a0 From God and a woman.\u00a0 Man had nothing to do with him!\u201d<\/p>\n

Susan B. Anthony did not leave the project of freedom to others.\u00a0 I wonder what sort of dinner companion she might have been.\u00a0 Her constant consort with governors and senators across the Empire state made her an early Eleanor Roosevelt.\u00a0 My grandmother grew up in Cooperstown and graduated from Smith College four years before she had the right to vote.\u00a0 My mother was born in Syracuse only a few years after full suffrage, and taught Latin.\u00a0 My wife is a musician and teacher, my sister is a corporate attorney, many of my colleagues in ministry are female.\u00a0 I scratch my head to imagine a world without their voices.\u00a0 In the Episcopal tradition, Syracuse produced Betty Bone Schiess, one of the first women ordained to ministry in the Protestant Episcopal church. \u00a0One of the Philadelphia 11.\u00a0 We study her now in Introduction to Religion.\u00a0 One rainy day when my daughter Emily was 13 and had the flu, we met Schiess, at the druggist.\u00a0 The pharmacist called her name.\u00a0 I clamored over to investigate whether it were she, the famous Schiess.\u00a0 \u201cWho wants to know?\u201d she replied.\u00a0 As she left, after good banter, she turned in her slicker and totting an umbrella pronounced this blessing: \u201cOne day you will be a Methodist bishop\u201d.\u00a0 I thought at first she was addressing me.\u00a0 But no, she was talking to Emily. Thank you,<\/em> our daughter replied.\u00a0 You may visit the birthplace of women\u2019s suffrage, the one hundredth anniversary of which we have just past during Covid, and more broadly the advent of feminism in Seneca Falls, on the shores of Seneca Lake.\u00a0 Anthony\u2019s witness stands out among the witness of so many others:\u00a0 your grandmother, your mother, your sister, your wife, your daughter, your pastor, Betty Bone Schiess, and so many others.\u00a0 Who can forget the motto of Susan B. Anthony: \u201cFailure is impossible\u201d (on her 86th<\/sup> birthday, 1906).\u00a0 \u201cCautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about reform.\u00a0 Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world\u2019s estimation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sometimes the freedom train went a bit astray across this lakescape.\u00a0 Exuberance can produce minor collisions and occasional wanderings.\u00a0 When we get so focused on the speedometer that we forget to drive the car safely, then trouble arises.\u00a0 That is, Woodstock 50 years ago paled by comparison with the communal experiments along the Erie Canal 150 years ago. The Shaker Community and the Oneida Community perhaps can bracket our discussion.\u00a0 Under Mother Ann Lee, and starting in farm country near New Lebanon (Albany area), not far from Tanglewood and our BU musical program there, the shaking Quakers firmly addressed the matter of social distancing.\u00a0 They required it at all times, except in the sacred dance of Sunday worship.\u00a0 They forbade it.\u00a0 Women and men came together only once a week, on Sunday morning, for ecstatic singing and dancing, hence their name.\u00a0 This made church attendance somewhat more than casual liturgical observance.\u00a0 However, the practice did not amplify the community itself: infant baptisms lacked the requisite infant, and so were infrequent.\u00a0 Consequently the Shakers moved to Cleveland where they blended into Sherwood Anderson\u2019s new Ohio, returning to the old ways of hard work, monogamy, and frugality.\u00a0 In short, they became Methodists.\u00a0\u00a0 But hear again the beautiful Shaker tune:<\/p>\n

Tis a gift to be loving<\/em><\/p>\n

Tis the best gift of all<\/em><\/p>\n

Like a gentle rain love falls to cover all<\/em><\/p>\n

When we find ourselves in the place just right<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018Twill be in the valley of love and delight<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

When true, simplicity is gain<\/em><\/p>\n

To bow and to bend we shan\u2019t be ashamed<\/em><\/p>\n

To turn, turn, will be our delight<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018Till by turning, turning, we come round right<\/em><\/p>\n

Or you may want to read about the Oneida community in the book, Without Sin<\/em>, the best review in our generation of their somewhat different experiment.\u00a0 Also, along the Erie Canal the Oneida community set out to find heaven on earth, the end of all oppressions, and even the hope that, as John H Noyes read from Revelation, \u201cdeath itself will be no more\u201d.\u00a0 And they abandoned any and all social distancing.\u00a0 It would another three sermons to trace through the detail of complex marriage, stirpiculture, and communal life among the Oneida Community.Although I went to High School in Oneida.\u00a0 They I do not recall a full lesson on the matter of stirpiculture, the heart of the Oneida experiment.\u00a0 Three hundred in number at their greatest growth, the community produced bear traps and then silver, continuing, in some fashion, until just a few years ago.\u00a0 Of all the utopian experiments, the Oneida project is the most fascinating.\u00a0 After word got out about the doings and practices in Oneida, clergy in Syracuse banded together and ran them out of town, first to Canada and then to the Midwest.\u00a0 Noyes died on the trip, and the community disappeared, except in some of \u00a0the silverware on your dinner table, in wedding gifts, and in many restaurants.\u00a0 Let us remember the love of freedom, as Noyes expressed it, the aspiration to spirit and life, even if we cannot affirm his conclusion: \u201cI am free of sin and in a state of Perfection\u201d.<\/p>\n

One last story in this Gift from the Lake. \u00a0Norman Vincent Peale, who began his ministry in Syracuse NY. When we were at Union Seminary in New York the faculty there, both regularly and rightly criticized the inadequate theology of his Marble Collegiate Church. \u00a0James Sanders sternly referred to this famed congregation as the \u201cFirst Church of Marduke\u201d, not an accolade.\u00a0 Of course you know that for fifty years, a graduate of Boston University, and Ohio Wesleyan, and a proponent of the power of positive thinking held forth, without notes, from the Marduke pulpit.\u00a0 His son in law, Arthur Caliandro, followed him, with notes.\u00a0 You may not trust his theology.\u00a0 I myself am a critic, schooled as I was in the dour, German realism of Tillich, Niehbuhr, and company.\u00a0 You may find it too shallow.\u00a0 Everbody has their criticism of Norman Vincent Peale.\u00a0 Even Adlai Stevenson had gripes.\u00a0 When attacked from the Marduke pulpit, \u00a0Stevenson defended his Christianity on the basis of the Apostle to the Gentiles, all this in 1956, and rounded out his peroration thus:\u00a0 \u201cSir, I find Paul appealing, but Peale, appalling.\u201d\u00a0 You too may find Paul appealing and Peale appalling.\u00a0 Yet as young man in Syracuse, University Church, hte found there a happy people.\u00a0 He found there a positive people.\u00a0 He found here a hopeful people, an optimistic congregation.\u00a0 Why, they were so good to him that he relaxed and fell in love and married an SU coed, Ruth.\u00a0 Our good friend Forrest Whitmeyer, a graduate of Boston Latin by the way, knew them both well.\u00a0 It was that native buckeye spirit married to that native orange soul, and it produced the power of positive thinking, itself a form of faith and freedom not to be forgotten. Our daughter this last week affirmed her own commitment to the \u2018power of positive relationships\u2019. Well, it brought Norman to mind. The Peales, Ruth and Norman both, did not leave the project of freedom to somebody else.\u00a0 It is biblical and within limits faithful to remember Peale\u2019s seven most important words: \u201cYou can if you think you can.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 At least we could admit the contrary as true:\u00a0 If you think you can\u2019t, you probably can\u2019t and probably won\u2019t.<\/p>\n

From the past, we may today receive a Gift from the Lake.\u00a0 God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.\u00a0 The faith of Jesus Christ and the freedom of Jesus Christ we celebrate today.\u00a0 Our forebears were disinclined to leave the pursuit of freedom to others.\u00a0 They lived with faitht that the center could hold. They seized freedom in their own hands and by their own lives.\u00a0 They did not wait on others.\u00a0 They did not pause to seek a secret blessing.\u00a0 They did not wait until some ethereal sign emerged.\u00a0 They did not expect some magic insight.\u00a0 They preferred deliverance to diffidence. Real love means taking historical responsibility.<\/p>\n

In earshot of our Lord\u2019s teaching, there awaits us every Lord\u2019s day a personal question:\u00a0 as a Christian man or woman, what are you going to do to continue to expand the circle of freedom, spirit, life and love in our time?\u00a0 Where is your tribal council to create?\u00a0 Where is your slavery to escape?\u00a0 Where is your North Star to publish?\u00a0 Where is your franchise to find? \u00a0Where is your libertinism to avoid?\u00a0 Where is your hope to share?\u00a0 When it comes to spirit and life, as announced in John 6, will you lift a hand?<\/p>\n

In thanks for these years of sea gifts, we bring you this summer morning a Gift from the Lake.\u00a0 A fresh water gift to honor a salt water gift.\u00a0 Recall what Anne Murrow Lindberg described in her little book about the ocean and the soul, Gift from the Sea, <\/em>whose title has inspired this morning\u2019s sermon.\u00a0 She recommends, strongly, time spent on the shore.\u00a0 She wrote some years ago: \u201cThis is what one thirsts for, I realize, after the smallness of the day, of work, of details, of intimacy – even of communication, one thirsts for the magnitude and universality of a night full of stars, pouring into one like a fresh tide\u2026I would like to achieve a state of inner spiritual grace from which I could function and give as I was meant to in the eye of God.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

So, dear friends, travel then 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, 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 and heard, 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 John 6:24-35 Click here to hear just the sermon As this summer we reflect on what we have been through, over the last year and more, and as we meditate together upon the mighty themes of the Gospel, we might recall earlier intimations, earlier voices, which paved our […]<\/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\/3190"}],"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=3190"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3192,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3190\/revisions\/3192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}