{"id":3234,"date":"2021-10-24T11:00:37","date_gmt":"2021-10-24T15:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=3234"},"modified":"2021-10-24T11:25:34","modified_gmt":"2021-10-24T15:25:34","slug":"your-faith-has-made-youbetter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2021\/10\/24\/your-faith-has-made-youbetter\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Faith Has Made You\u2026Better"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

Mark 10: 46-52<\/a><\/p>\n

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

Son of David<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Our faith can make us better if and as post-Covid we carry out the quiet.<\/p>\n

Much of the Bible is about failure, difficulty and defeat.<\/p>\n

Many of its stories, letters and teachings record ways people have lived with difficulty, defeat and failure. \u00a0This makes the Bible a challenge for us to understand. \u00a0For we as a people have run and swatted and laughed our way past learning the language of failure. \u00a0We don\u2019t admit to it. \u00a0We won\u2019t accept it. \u00a0We do not countenance it. \u00a0Even when sometimes we clearly lose, we have a hard time admitting it.\u00a0 And this goes well beyond sports and politics. We forget Abraham Lincoln who in loss could say, \u2018it hurts too much to laugh, but I am too old to cry.\u00a0 <\/em>So, sermons, this one and others, which are fumbling footnotes to Holy Scripture, hit us from the side if they hit us at all.<\/p>\n

But by grace, it is the resurrected Christ who addresses us in the preaching of the church, in the announcement of the gospel. \u00a0The passages of the Gospel allow us safe passage into the Gospel because Jesus is present to us. Bultmann: \u201cIn all the sayings of Jesus which were reported, He speaks who is recognized in faith and worship as Messiah and Lord, and who, as the proclamation makes known his works and hands on his sayings, is actually present for the church.\u201d (HST, 348).<\/p>\n

This morning our blind beggar, \u2018Bar Timeaus\u2019, Tim\u2019s son, \u00a0shouts out an unexpected nametag for Jesus. \u00a0\u2018Son of David\u2019. \u00a0\u00a0To call Jesus such is to remember\u2026failure\u2026to remember\u2026difficulty\u2026to remember warnings unheeded from long ago\u2026to remember David.\u00a0 <\/em>For to remember David you have to remember Saul <\/em>and to remember Saul you have to remember Samuel, <\/em>and so on\u2026<\/p>\n

Bartimaeus calls Jesus by the name of David\u2014David the personification of millennial portent, of national pride\u2026and of Psalm 51 failure.\u00a0 Son of David! \u00a0He throws off his garment\u2014maybe a sign of baptism\u2014and comes naked to see if there is another chance for him. \u00a0\u00a0Here is another in Mark\u2019s \u2018book of secret epiphanies\u2019 (Dibelius\\Bultmann). \u00a0His \u2018faith has made him well\u2019, a saying and a truth most precious to Martin Luther, whose Reformation we honor next Sunday, Luther who fearlessly, willfully and willingly forever splintered the unity of the church into pieces, fragments, for the sake of\u2026the Gospel, for the sake of\u2026betting better: \u00a0faith is God\u2019s work in us, that changes us and gives new birth from God. (John 1:13). It kills the Old Adam and makes us completely different people. It changes our hearts, our spirits, our thoughts and all our powers. It brings the Holy Spirit with it. Yes, it is a living, creative, active and powerful thing, this faith. Faith cannot help doing good works constantly<\/em>. (M Luther, introduction to Romans).<\/p>\n

Our Gospel of Mark seldom uses the title, \u2018Son of David\u2019, in order that Jesus not be mistaken for the hoped-for national Messiah, the hoped-for political conqueror, the hoped for restorer of Israel. \u00a0Mark\u2019s Jesus is known by faith, in and through failure, difficulty and defeat. \u00a0\u00a0And sure enough\u2014are you ready for faith?\u2014here it is, good news, for us this morning, your faith has made you well. \u00a0The gift of our faith can make you, well\u2026at least a little better than you might been otherwise.\u00a0 This is the discipline of faith, discipleship made real in earnest living, in daily discipline.\u00a0 You can hear the beautiful Head of the Charles regatta behind us today, but the beauty of it comes from discipline, rowing crew workouts at 5:30am on the Charles, rain or shine.\u00a0 This too is BU parents\u2019 weekend.\u00a0 This parents\u2019 weekend we can honor both our biological and our spiritual parents, both our physical and our personal mothers and fathers, who have taught us the disciplines of faith.\u00a0 Of blessed memory Barbara Steen, our dear friend, in her late eighties was still making a daily list of five people to telephone.\u00a0 Of blessed memory Joe Yeakel who said of ministry,\u00a0 the one on one things matter most.<\/em><\/p>\n

What Have You Learned?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Discipline is itself a reminder that life is unspeakably precious.\u00a0 We learn this again in peril.\u00a0 A dream hurts and astonishes us, waking us in a sweat, as we or someone we love or something we truly dream, dies.\u00a0 A novel or film grip us, with a reminder that life is fragile, sacred, brief, uncanny, unfathomable, in a word, precious.\u00a0 A verse of Scripture, not say that one interpreted in the sermon, but a bystander reading, a lectionary reminder, a fellow traveler in worship, Job say rather than Mark, rises up and holds us by the throat.\u00a0 All flesh is grass, it withers and fades\u2026All flesh is grass, it withers and fades\u2026All flesh is grass, it withers and fades\u2026<\/em>\u00a0 An accident, a car ahead hits a deer on the shoulder of the road, and we are again jolted.\u00a0 We have this treasure in earthen vessels\u2026We have this treasure in earthen vessels\u2026We have this treasure in earthen vessels\u2026<\/em>Life is unspeakably precious.<\/p>\n

This fall, in the close to post pandemic pileup, meetings now held, weddings rescheduled for the fourth time, a conversation about conflict postponed until face can meet face and eye can meet eye, and I can meet Thou, this fall with that vast underground of unearthed anxiety depression worry concern exhaustion dismay fury incomprehension<\/em>, all of which stand us up to be reminded: \u00a0life is precious.\u00a0 We are given, you are given, I am given, one day at a time, one year at a time, one season at a time, with no particular guarantees, none really, of what may not or may in fact follow.<\/p>\n

Yet, in this precious life, also we realize, we can do this\u2026we can do this\u2026we can do this\u2026<\/em>It may be difficutlt, even close to awful, but we can do it.\u00a0 Teaching by zoom.\u00a0 Learning by zoom.\u00a0\u00a0 Sort of teaching, sort of learning, by zoom.\u00a0 Not really teaching and not really learning by zoom.\u00a0 You have survived and lived to tell the tale.\u00a0 Listen to the most honest least jaded voices, elementary age students, in this case our grand children.\u00a0 \u201cMy teacher piled up things in a folder and expected we would find them\u2026I could not understand what the teacher was saying and I could not figure out how to ask what it meant\u2026Sitting looking at that screen was just awful\u2026it was really very stressful\u2026My music teacher would not let us sing, saying \u2018I\u2019m not getting\u2019 the \u2018rona just so you can sing\u2026<\/em>Covid.\u00a0 No fellowship before, during or after class.\u00a0 No learning from or with peers.\u00a0 No seminar surprises, awakenings, unexpected and unplanned encounters. Zoom kept students occupied, teachers working, and schools above water.\u00a0 But at what lasting, further and future cost?\u00a0 We learned that we can do things we detest, when we have to do things we detest.<\/p>\n

And, sad to say, we have been again reminded that when the going gets toughest those on the margins have it toughest.\u00a0 Under tents along the railroad track.\u00a0 In encampments in one Bowery or another.\u00a0 In poor homes, without more than water and some corn flakes to eat.\u00a0 And bad water and leaded pipes to boot.\u00a0 In tiny conditions not fit for human living, but still a roof and a sink and a sagging sofa. Panhandling for change at a highway exit, after a lifetime of employment.\u00a0 In a wheel- chair in front of a thriving Dunkin\u2019 Donuts.\u00a0 Spending a first night with little children in a shelter for battered women.\u00a0 Battered women.\u00a0 Battered.<\/p>\n

Or look in another direction.\u00a0 Look at real estate prices.\u00a0 Look at the stock market.\u00a0 Look at automobile values.\u00a0 Look at vacation home values.\u00a0 Look at the gains, the profits, the advance in abundance and the abundance of advance, for some.\u00a0 But these advances were \u00a0based on and protected and built on: 12 hour nursing shifts, burials without family and without full protection, ventilators ventilating the soon to be dead, police and fire fighters whose duties never decrease and never cease, on call for ever physicians teachers counselors clergy technicians home-health-aides salvation army food providers plumbers electricians chefs fast food workers uber-drivers janitors sewage system workers bus drivers pea pod deliverers. <\/em>\u00a0\u00a0And we complain that minimum wage as risen to the astronomical height of $15 an hour?\u00a0 Really?<\/p>\n

Also, we learned silence.\u00a0 \u2018Fear not the fallow\u2019<\/em> said Dean Thurman.\u00a0 \u2018Carry out the quiet\u2019 <\/em>says Dean Hill.<\/em>\u00a0 You do not need endless cable TV to have a happy life. The same for email, zoom, texting, techne, all.\u00a0 Carry out the quiet.\u00a0 For a good life you do and will need quiet.\u00a0 Pandemic for all its needless, heedless and grotesque trauma afforded, for those who would receive it, a modicum and measure of quiet.\u00a0 Soon we will be dead.\u00a0 Why live as if you were temporarily immortal?\u00a0 You and I are not immortal, not even temporarily.\u00a0 More than a fat bank account, and more than a new motorboat, and more than a raise or promotion or election or victory you need\u2026quiet.\u00a0 Carry out the quiet, from the pandemic. Our faith can make us better if and as, post-Covid, we carry out the quiet.<\/p>\n

You need an hour a day. 8am.\u00a0 You need a day a week.\u00a0 Sunday.\u00a0 You need a week a quarter. Thanksgiving.\u00a0 You need a quarter a year, summer.\u00a0 Carry out the quiet.<\/em>\u00a0 For a year and half, after writing and recording the sermon, there was a new hour listening to the finished recording and then another new hour listening to the broadcast, come Sunday, two new and fresh hours of golden quiet.\u00a0 We became radio listeners ourselves, alongside our faithful radio congregation.\u00a0 Two new hours. Golden quiet.\u00a0 Golden quiet. \u00a0Quiet makes you think.\u00a0 All these years, did you really need to be running to another (fruitless) meeting, stopping for another (mundane) consultation, attending another (marginal) event, traveling to another (desultory) location, attending yet another (obligatory) denominational session, serving up yet another (underappreciated) lunch or dinner or social or gathering?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Carry out the quiet.\u00a0 Especially if you are an extrovert, or even an extreme extrovert, carry out the blessed quiet from COVID, carry out the quiet.\u00a0 It is the basinet of faith, and your faith can make you, if not well, at least, well\u2026better.\u00a0 By the time we became truly comfortable with Covid quiet, loneliness, and stillness, it had ended.\u00a0 But it carried a lasting and an authentic question of faith, within the divine gift of faith, a kind of healing unto spiritual sight, a kind of healing unto spiritual sight.\u00a0 Can you carry out of pandemic a purposeful respect for quiet?\u00a0 Can I? Especially now.\u00a0 For the preacher, like the artist, and for the life of faith for all in all, \u2018in times of crisis and great injustice some inner distance from the maelstrom is required\u2019<\/em> (repeat) (Mark Lilla).<\/p>\n

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

Your faith makes you\u2026better.\u00a0 And we are better when we carry out the quiet, day by day.<\/p>\n

For some of the summer, we rely on NPR radio alone, its classical music and occasional weather and news, as our only technological engagement with the wider world.\u00a0 At first, the abstinence from all other is jarring.\u00a0 But then. Alone in the earlier mornings, when the fitful restlessness of work life gradually abates, as it can over time if we give it time, as Anne Murrow Lindbergh reminded us, sometimes there is quiet, and in the quiet, sometimes, there is a momentous moment.<\/p>\n

The announcer said something about Debussy, whom you may remember from required (back in the days of required courses) college introduction to music.\u00a0 We sat on a carpet and listened and were tested later on baroque, classical, romantic, impressionist and contemporary music.\u00a0 Debussy.\u00a0 The French name made a mark.<\/p>\n

Then onto the radio waves came a light, flowing harp beauty.\u00a0 It was a shimmering beauty, light and alluring, quiet, gentle, unlike really anything one could remember hearing before.\u00a0 The host named the piece as an Arabesque, perhaps the second such from Debussy, though we may have mistaken that.\u00a0 The lake breeze lifted the notes, and there was throughout the room for a few fine minutes a shimmering beauty.<\/p>\n

Like its cousins, truth and goodness, such a beauty leaves a mark, makes a lasting mark, a beauty mark you could say.\u00a0 Time stops.\u00a0 Imagination awakens.\u00a0 Troubles recede.\u00a0 You are caught up in something larger than yourself, as sometimes happens in religious experience too.\u00a0 Even in church. \u00a0Even in the course of head of the Charles parents\u2019 weekend sermon meant to remind you that your faith has made, can make you\u2026better.<\/p>\n

In this music, it seemed to this untrained ear, there rose and fell a kind of oriental melody, a lightness, a veiled impression.\u00a0 And it seemed that the better person to listen was the non-musician, the kind of person listening in that moment, who has no musical education, other than that incurred through a short course, spouse, family, and various church musicians.<\/p>\n

It is the ear, often, rather than the eye, voice rather than face, the audible invisible, that carries an uncanny power.\u00a0 The triumph of the invisible over the visible.\u00a0 The voice remains with us.<\/p>\n

And Jesus said to him, \u2018What do you want me to do for you?\u00a0 And the blind man said to him, \u2018Master let me receive my sight\u2019.\u00a0 And Jesus said to him, \u2018Go your way; your faith has made you well\u2019.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

May faith make us well\u2026or at least a little better.<\/p>\n

Our faith can make us better if and as post-Covid we carry out the quiet.<\/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 10: 46-52 Click here to hear just the sermon Son of David Our faith can make us better if and as post-Covid we carry out the quiet. Much of the Bible is about failure, difficulty and defeat. Many of its stories, letters and teachings record ways people […]<\/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\/3234"}],"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=3234"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3234\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3236,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3234\/revisions\/3236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}