{"id":3722,"date":"2024-11-10T11:00:34","date_gmt":"2024-11-10T16:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=3722"},"modified":"2024-11-12T19:59:25","modified_gmt":"2024-11-13T00:59:25","slug":"faith-and-freedom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2024\/11\/10\/faith-and-freedom\/","title":{"rendered":"Faith and Freedom"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Mark 12:38\u201344<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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

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Faith and Freedom<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Mark 12: 38-44\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

November 10, 2024<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Marsh Chapel<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Robert Allan Hill<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

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

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Beloved, in this cool harsh season and week, a season and week of troubled culture and national division, a season for many and perhaps for most of nettled disappointment if not surprise, let us draw up together, and warm our hands and feet and selves at the fire of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the giver of faith and freedom. And as his disciples, let us offer ourselves to one another in presence and prayer.\u00a0 <\/span>Presence to be present with care.\u00a0 <\/span>Prayer to keep our religious muscles toned, and our religious lives in tune.\u00a0 <\/span>This Sunday, the Lord\u2019s Day, a symbol that every day, and every hour therein is his.\u00a0 <\/span>We are not alone–thanks be to God.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Our exemplars from Scripture this morning are heroines of the Bible, both women.\u00a0 This is always good to remember, but particularly in this season of denigration of women\u2019s rights and voices, even at the hands of other women. Ruth\u2019s complex, multi-valent story, a series of sermons in itself, which as you remember began last week with the courage to leave the familiar, continues today in her grasp of security for the future. Naomi reminds her, and she reminds us, that we need not fear to state our needs.\u00a0 Say what you need, name what you need, so that, as Naomi says, it may be well with you. <\/em>\u00a0Then in our Gospel, the famous widow of Mark 12 makes her appearance, as she does every third autumn, in our lectionary round of readings.\u00a0 The ordinary perception of her, as a pillar of generous giving, which she is, misses the admonishment of those of us of\u00a0means.\u00a0 There is a poignant recollection here, in the comparison of one who gives much, we might read too much (everything she had, all she had to live on)<\/em>, in contrast to those who give little, we might read too little (out of their abundance<\/em>).\u00a0 <\/span>Remember the gospel that those who have much might not have too much, and those who have little might not have too little (2 Cor 8).<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The widow\u2019s voice is an alto, second level, voice.\u00a0 Not that of Jesus\u2014not soprano.\u00a0 Not written only by Mark\u2014not tenor.\u00a0 Not absorbed in the history of interpretation\u2014not bass.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 She may have been included just here, simply by connection with the earlier teaching about disregard for widows.\u00a0 These admonitions are like others from the gospels: woes for the cities of Galilee, woes for the rich, criticisms of the current generation, threats to this generation, threats to Jerusalem, woes to the daughters of Jerusalem, woes to those who say \u2018lord, lord\u2019, rejection of false disciples, warnings about the parousia,<\/em> and others (RB, HST, 49).\u00a0 Warnings also to us, let us say, in our season, this very one, when truth <\/em>and its telling, character <\/em>and its affirmation, compassion <\/em>and its necessity, are steadily waning, even washing away.\u00a0 <\/span>Well, the good news in part, for you, and for me, is that we shall not be spiritually unemployed going forward.\u00a0 <\/span>We have plenty of work to do, plenty to keep us busy, plenty for which to labor, to bring salt and light, well on into the next decade.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Now this unnamed widow came to life in the experience of the early church.\u00a0 <\/span>This narrative itself may have originated in a sermon.\u00a0 A sermon meant perhaps \u2018to present the Master as a living contemporary, and to comfort and admonish the Church in her hope\u2019 (RB, HST, 60)<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Later, Matthew has deleted the story of the widow\u2013it is unclear why\u2013while Luke keeps her, in keeping with his own emphases on generosity (think of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son).\u00a0 Mark apparently puts her in, just here, because of the use of the word \u2018widow\u2019 in the sentence before.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Beloved, no matter how hard the wind is blowing, hold fast to the good.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In the widow\u2019s more ordinary conscription to exemplify giving with generosity, one finds a harbinger of goodness waiting to be discovered again by another generation of women and men who will enter the ministry.\u00a0There they will find her, salt and light, out in the life of ministry, endless in its labors but also precious in its gifts.\u00a0 Are you feeling a call to the ministry? Her story in the Bible would not mean very much alone, if we had not also known her, in experience, in our own life and ministry. I call her out in her modern incarnations, this giving, generous widow. What a privilege it is be be in ministry.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Here is Bernice Danks, whose husband ran the Cornell Veterinary School, she an Ithaca Nurse, later widow, and a teacher of nurses, whose favorite word was the word \u2018routine\u2019:\u00a0\u2018I tell my students to protect what is routine.\u00a0 We call the most important things the routine things because the most important things are the routine\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0 Singing with joy in the choir, attending countless, endless meetings with a good humor, greeting the day with its losses and its gains with a steady, real smile, here she is, an exemplar of goodness.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Here is Setta Moe, a North Country widow, living alone for years on a small pension, reading at dusk in the cold tundra twilight.\u00a0\u00a0 On her own, years earlier, she had gone from house to house to raise money for some beautiful stained glass in an otherwise modest church.\u00a0 \u2018I felt I could do something for the church.\u00a0 We need more beauty here, more beautiful things around here, to keep us going\u2019.\u00a0Here she is, an exemplar of goodness.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Here is Mickey Murray, a Syracuse widow, whose husband died at 40, She raised her three children alone.\u00a0 Every Wednesday in those years she went to the church after work and cooked a full meal for her own kids and twenty or so others, then had them play, sing, read the Bible and do their homework together.\u00a0 She had every reason to complain about the cards life dealt her.\u00a0Instead, she practiced a communal generosity, and made a difference in her city neighborhood.\u00a0 Here she is, an exemplar of goodness.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Here is Ruth Lippitt, a Rochester widow, who all her life gave voice to the longing for peace and justice she had learned as a graduate student in Chicago, under the influence of Ernest Freemont Tittle.\u00a0 She gathered ten elderly friends for dinner in her home to meet the new minister, a year before she died, and, before the meal said bluntly, \u2018tell him who you are, one by one, you have two minutes, and I will ring this bell if you go longer\u2019.\u00a0 \u00a0Yes, the ministry has its rigors.\u00a0 But it also has its own sheer joys.\u00a0 Here you will meet faith lived in freedom. Here she is, an exemplar of goodness.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Here is Glenice Kelly, a Boston widow for one day only, who sat with her husband Gaylen, right here in this sanctuary every Sunday.\u00a0 <\/span>They died within hours of each other inf February 2021.\u00a0 <\/span>She gave her life out in so many directions, to husband and family and neighbors and young people.\u00a0 <\/span>She taught high school young people her students about human sexuality, with joy and happiness and honesty.\u00a0 <\/span>Gaylen and Glenice went to heaven a day apart in the middle of Covid.\u00a0 <\/span>And with so many others\u2014like C Faith Richardson\u2014we as a community have had no full chance to grieve her, to grieve there loss.\u00a0 <\/span>Then along comes Mark 12 and the poor widow, to remind us of the woman of salt and light who have charmed our paths.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Hold fast to what is good!<\/p>\n

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

Freedom, the freedom of the person of faith, surely is a great or the great blessed happy victory of the modern era.\u00a0 <\/span>Or is it?<\/p>\n

In a time when suddenly and unhappily we witness a broad willingness to taste test authoritarianism, a dark willingness to give over personal freedom for the sake of a putative security, or a rage for order, or a minimization of the more complex forms of self-government, just how precious is freedom, and at what cost?\u00a0 <\/span>How much of the saintly widow of Mark 12, generously sharing in faith and freedom her two copper coins, stays with us?<\/p>\n

In 1941 the philosopher Erich Fromm wrote a striking, seminal book on this question, \u2018just how precious is freedom, and at what cost?\u2019.\u00a0 Its English title is Escape From Freedom.\u00a0 <\/em>Fromm explores the dark side of freedom, religious, cultural, economic and political.\u00a0\u00a0As an expatriate German, watching the events in Europe at the time, Fromm was trying to understand, from the perspective of social psychology, the rise of authoritarianism in his native land, but also, and more broadly and in a general way, to understand how people and groups of people become enthralled with, enamored of, and committed to authoritarianism.\u00a0 His argument is direct and simple:\u00a0 real freedom is real difficult to handle, and, when pressed, people move to escape from the demands of freedom by investment in authority.\u00a0 Freedom is scary. \u00a0Freedom is demanding.\u00a0 Freedom is dangerous.\u00a0 Freedom is difficult.\u00a0 Better to hide underneath the apparently sturdy voice of an authoritarian leader, preferably one who denies all responsibility for wrong or hurt, and the rock-solid social identity of a mass of people, the commitment, itself often quite costly, to a cause that sets aside personal freedom, so lonely and hard and uncertain, for group support under authoritarian wings.<\/p>\n

Fromm saw and spoke, in and of his time. Freedom has a dark side.\u00a0Our own current national dilemma, in this unfolding decade of humiliation, presses us and makes us present to the question of freedom.\u00a0 It is more than issues of political liberalism\u2014gay rights, women\u2019s rights\u2014that besets us.\u00a0 It is more than issues of economic socialism\u2014ample education and abundant health care\u2014that concern us.\u00a0 It is more than cultural practices\u2014unflagging Sunday worship and vigorous voluntary associations\u2013 that beckon us.\u00a0 As important as all these are.\u00a0 It is more than a highjacked national narrative, more than a collapse of moral conscience and compass, more than the protections of civil society, the customs and ceremonies of courtesy meant to protect us from the unbridled, unhinged rhetoric, that beset, concern and beckon us.\u00a0 As important as all these are.\u00a0 It goes deeper, this our current malaise.\u00a0 It goes down deep into the caverns and caves of freedom.\u00a0 How will we live, in hope, with both faith and freedom?\u00a0 <\/span>Do we have the faith to live with freedom, in freedom—in freedom to cast our coins into the kettle?<\/p>\n

Erich Fromm warned us, way back in 1941.<\/p>\n

He warned us about the dread of freedom<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/em>He showed us the historical origins and outcomes of freedom.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>He traced the effects of the lack of hope in faith and freedom.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>He unveiled, out of his own experience, and touching too our own, the consequent appeal of authoritarianism.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>He pointed to daily consequences\u2014which sound familiar: \u2026to lose the sense of discrimination between a decent person and a scoundrel (245)\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

Beloved.\u00a0 Be alert, on the qui vive,<\/em> watchful, be sober, be watchful for nascent authoritarianism.\u00a0\u00a0 In the daily denigration and disfigurement of facts, of truth.\u00a0 In the weekly demonization of \u2018others\u2019, of those other, in religion, in race, in nation, in orientation.\u00a0 In the dishonoring of other seats of power, like the judiciary, like the press, like the churches and other religious communities.\u00a0 In the steady denial of fact and responsibility.<\/p>\n

Yet Fromm offered a word of hope in faith and freedom, what he called positive freedom:\u00a0 positive freedom consists in the spontaneous activity of the total, integrated personality (257)\u2026there is only one meaning of life, the act of living itself, for In positive freedom (one)) can relate (one)self spontaneously to the world in love and work, in the genuine expression of (one\u2019s) emotional, sensuous and intellectual capacities (139)..<\/em><\/p>\n

Freedom and faith.\u00a0 <\/span>Faith and freedom.<\/p>\n

Spontaneity.\u00a0 Comraderie.\u00a0 Emotion.\u00a0Intellect.\u00a0 Where you come alongside these there we might say is hope faith and freedom.<\/p>\n

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

There are some weeks when good news seems hard to come by, and this week is one such.\u00a0 <\/span>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>.\u00a0 <\/span>We 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

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The church\u2019s role, yours and mine together, is to announce the gospel in interpretation of and accord with the Scriptures. Scripture gives us the chance for the long view.\u00a0 <\/span>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 <\/span>learn, with which to listen, pray and prepare.\u00a0 <\/span>Silver and gold have I none, but that which I have I give thee. (Acts 3:6).\u00a0 <\/span><\/em>Listen. Pray. Prepare.<\/p>\n

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Beloved!\u00a0 Let us draw ourselves together to live in freedom and affirm our faith!<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.\u00a0 Where there is freedom, there is promise.\u00a0 There is a self-correcting Spirit of Truth loose in the universe.\u00a0There is a self-correcting Spirit of Truth loose in the universe.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>We follow the trail of that Spirit by walking in the dark with our Transforming Friend, the Transcript in Time of who God is in eternity, the gift of the Father\u2019s unfailing grace, our beacon not our boundary, the presence of the absence of God,\u00a0Jesus Christ our Kyrios, our Lord.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Click here to hear the full service Click here to watch the full service Mark 12:38\u201344 Click here to hear just the sermon   Faith and Freedom Mark 12: 38-44\u00a0 November 10, 2024 Marsh Chapel Robert Allan Hill \u00a0 Scripture \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Beloved, in this cool harsh season and week, a season and week of troubled […]<\/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\/3722"}],"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=3722"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3724,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3722\/revisions\/3724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}