{"id":604,"date":"2012-10-21T11:00:34","date_gmt":"2012-10-21T16:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=604"},"modified":"2019-11-26T12:41:48","modified_gmt":"2019-11-26T17:41:48","slug":"a-rumor-of-angels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2012\/10\/21\/a-rumor-of-angels\/","title":{"rendered":"A Rumor of Angels"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mark 10: 35-45<\/a><\/p>\n

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

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

 <\/p>\n

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

After my dad died two years ago we began to go through his things, as families do.\u00a0 Desk, tools, books, guns, clothes.\u00a0 (Order, play, hope, justice, humor). <\/em> We did not make much progress at first.\u00a0 We still have not made that much. His desk, somewhat more ordered, is laden drawer after drawer.\u00a0 The many tools, both inherited from earlier generations and purchased as needed over a life time, still lie here and there in the basement.\u00a0 A doll house, made for a granddaughter and then taken in for repairs years ago, and then left unattended, did migrate to the home of the great grand daughter.\u00a0 The guns\u2014a relic of another time in the woods and deer hunting of northern New York\u2014were carefully removed by two lawyer siblings.\u00a0 The papers and records now are in boxes with little titles\u2014an improvement of sorts. His clothes still hang in the old closet.\u00a0 I was either assigned or self assigned or asked (or not) to begin to take care of the books, forty years worth of books in the lifetime library of a Methodist preacher whose preaching teacher at Boston University, Allan Knight Chalmers, for whom I was named, had admonished his pupils to read one book every day.\u00a0\u00a0 That is to say, there were more than a few books to look through.<\/p>\n

I dawdled, lollygagged, procrastinated, avoided, and otherwise shirked my solemn duty.\u00a0 I asked all those I could to go through the library and take at least two books.\u00a0 The books are mostly signed and dated, and of course they have the personal underlining and notes which are typical for most of us.\u00a0 I appropriated a few:\u00a0 a set of Jacques Ellul, for a Lenten series two years ago; a few books from BU\u2014Booth, Chalmers, Bowne; sermon collections from Weatherhead, Gomes, Tittle, Fosdick;\u00a0 others.\u00a0\u00a0 But I found my progress slow and slower.\u00a0 With each book, my willingness to skim and skip diminished.\u00a0 I found my intrigue at his notes increasing, and my attention to his underlining expanding.\u00a0 I dream on and off of a large oak door, heavy with metal locks and frame, unopened, chained shut:\u00a0 my dad on one side and I on the other. In the lasting grief I feel at the earthly loss of my dad, it has happened that his preacher\u2019s library has become a kind of spiritual bridge, a mode of ongoing conversation between us.<\/p>\n

I wonder, this Parents\u2019 Weekend, given the more limited but still mammoth separation of the move to college and the emptying of the home, what healthy conversation, and modes of conversation, may emerge among and between the parents and young adult children here this morning?\u00a0 How will a new mode of conversation emerge, across a new divide, for you?\u00a0 New occasions teach new duties, and also sometimes require new forms of conversation, and also, happily, new or different topics and themes in conversation.\u00a0\u00a0 Let me suggest something.\u00a0\u00a0 In a natural, organic way, I wonder whether in these four or three or two years, at least now and then, you, parents and offspring, may find ways to think together about religious experience.\u00a0 Let me immediately identify though that I mean religious experience that is not so much religious as it is real experience.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There is range of life through which there radiates, like morning sunlight, high and deep and piercingly real<\/em> experience.\u00a0 Most of this range of experience is not, or not only, in worship or liturgy or ecclesiastical involvement or patterned devotion\u2014these are of course crucial and important, but more as signposts than as the actual meadows and still waters of religious, that is to say non-religious, religious experience.<\/p>\n

One day this summer, on one of my less than fruitful forays into the library, I came upon a book, the title of which is borrowed for this morning\u2019s sermon (A Rumor of Angels: NY, Doubleday, 1969\u2014portions quoted below found therein).<\/em> Published in 1969, hardly more than 100 pages, accessible to clergy and lay alike, brisk and direct in style, sprinkled with salt and light in humor and aphorism, the book, it happens, was written by a Boston University colleague and friend of mine, the premier sociologist of religion of our time, Peter Berger.\u00a0 Professor Berger has graciously endured lunches and conversation, including some semi-successful jokes, with me over these last few years.\u00a0 I knew of this book, both its title and its general argument, which is that God is not dead, religion is not dead and religious experience is not entirely absent from this earthly vale of tears.\u00a0 But I had never read it.\u00a0 I stuffed the book in my bag.<\/p>\n

It is hard to try to recreate the context, 1968, in which Berger was writing and thinking what hardly anyone else was thinking and writing.\u00a0 I will not try to do so.\u00a0 1. But try to imagine, or remember, a time when Time magazine\u2019s cover read, \u2018Is God Dead?\u2019, or 2. when the most potent religious word was \u2018secular\u2019, or 3. when administrative malfeasance led to a drug experiment on Good Friday in the basement of Marsh Chapel, or 4. when the most successful camp meeting was a mud soaked musical weekend in the Upstate New York village of Woodstock.\u00a0 Just when all hell was breaking loose, Berger wrote about heaven.\u00a0 \u00a0Like debate participants try to do, he caused people to take a second look at something, or someone.<\/p>\n

There is a scene in a Woody Allen movie where, standing in line at a movie theater, Allen\u2019s character lengthily philosophizes about the work of Marshal Mcluhan.\u00a0 After several minutes of blather, the person in line ahead of Woody Allen turns around.\u00a0 It is Mcluhan himself!\u00a0 He proceeds to say, in some fashion, \u2018everything you have just said is totally bogus\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0 In two weeks, over lunch, I will check with author himself about my renderings.\u00a0 His book is so lastingly potent because he is writing about all of us, and he is especially writing about you.\u00a0 There is transcendence\u2014he speaks of the \u2018supernatural\u2019\u2014all about us.\u00a0 Maybe that is why you have come, together, to worship on this Parents\u2019 weekend.\u00a0 What are the signposts, the clues to transcendence we should look for\u2014in our lived experience?\u00a0 Berger\u2019s summary still works.\u00a0 You may be surprised by the clues he names, the rumors of angels he overhears\u2026<\/p>\n

First, give a little credit to your own blessed rage for order.<\/em><\/strong> Some of you are hoarders, of sorts, and bring order by refusing to get rid of anything.\u00a0 Others are the very opposite, \u2018when in doubt throw it out\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0 You have a desire to see things set right, one way or another.\u00a0 What were those kids doing at Woodstock, in the mud, listening to Janis Joplin, fifty years ago?\u00a0 They were shouting to the heavens that things were not right, that something was out of order.\u00a0 Berger: A.\u00a0 This is the human faith in order as such, a faith closely related to man\u2019s fundamental trust in reality.<\/span> This faith is experienced not only in the history of societies and civilizations, but in the life of each individual\u2014indeed, child psychologists tell us there can be no maturation without the presence of this faith at the outset of the socialization process. B. Man\u2019s propensity for order is grounded in a faith or trust that, ultimately, reality is \u2018in order\u2019, \u2018all right\u2019, \u2018as it should be\u2019.<\/span><\/em> Do you have a longing for order? Underneath, just there, is a mode of religious experience.\u00a0 Talk a bit about it, parents and children.<\/p>\n

Second, and swinging to a different spot, pause and meditate a little on your own enjoyment of play.<\/em><\/strong> 1. I see grown men enthralled on a green field following a wee little white ball, which seems to have a mind of its own, for three or four hours in the hot sun.\u00a0 2. I see grown women shopping together without any particular need, but immersed, self forgetful, in the process of purchasing, God knows what.\u00a0 3.I see emerging adults fixed and fixated, days on end, in the World of Warcraft.\u00a0 4. Families were mesmerized this past summer, glued to gymnastics in England. 5.\u00a0 Can you remember playing bridge in college all night long, to the detriment of your zoology grade?\u00a0 Berger: A.In playing, one steps out of one time into another\u2026When adults play with genuine joy, they momentarily regain the deathlessness of childhood<\/span>\u2026<\/em>(Viewers of the recent film Moonrise Kingdom <\/em>readily understand this). The experience of joyful play is not something that must be sought on some mystical margin of existence.\u00a0 It can readily be found in the reality of ordinary life\u2026The religious justification of the experience can be achieved only in an act of faith\u2026B.This faith is inductive\u2014it does not rest on a mysterious revelation, but rather on what we experience in our common, ordinary lives\u2026<\/span>Religion is the final vindication of childhood and of joy, and of all gestures that replicate these. <\/em> One said: \u201cI played basketball today, on the intramural team\u2014it was awesome.\u201d\u00a0 Talk about it a bit, parents and children.<\/p>\n

Third, we sense the (my word) supranatural, the transcendent, in the experience of hope.<\/em><\/strong> Hope does spring eternal in the human breast.\u00a0 Hope keeps us going when otherwise we would not.\u00a0 1. You may have seen Meryl\u00a0 Streep and Tommy Lee Jones dramatize this in the midst of their struggling marriage.\u00a0 The movie title:\u00a0 \u2018Hope Springs\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0 2. Parents hope their children will thrive in college.\u00a0 Students hope so too.\u00a0 So do professors and administrators and Deans of Chapels.\u00a0 We hope.\u00a0 Actually, every autumn, when the suitcases and duffle bags spread out on Bay State Road, I see a tide of hope.\u00a0 It is overwhelmingly beautiful, and tearful given the giving up required by such hope in all directions. ( I have not yet spoken, speaking of giving up, of the tuition check payment. (J) ) There is something lasting, real, meaningful, costly and true about hope.\u00a0 3. Where there is life there is hope.\u00a0 Better:\u00a0 where there is hope there is life.\u00a0 People with no regular religion at all know about hope, and its absence.\u00a0 Berger: A. Human existence is always oriented toward the future. <\/span> Man exists by constantly extending his being into the future, both in his consciousness and in his activity. B. \u00a0Put differently, man realizes himself in projects\u2026It is through hope that men overcome the difficulties of the here and now. And it is through hope that men find meaning in the face of extreme suffering\u2026<\/span>There seems to be a death-refusing hope at the very core of our humanitas.\u00a0 While empirical reason indicates that this hope is an illusion, there is something in us that, however shamefacedly in an age of triumphant rationality goes on saying \u2018no!\u2019 and even says \u2018no\u2019 to the ever so plausible explanation of empirical reason\u2026Faith takes into account the intentions within our natural experience of hope that point toward a supernatural fulfillment.<\/em> I wonder if the generations sitting together in the pews this morning might, come Christmas, talk a bit about that most unreligious religious experience, a thing called hope, a place called hope, a time called hope, a feeling called hope?\u00a0 Talk about it a bit, parents and children.<\/p>\n

Fourth, we have burning desire to see real justice<\/em><\/strong> done, and also to see massive injustice called to account.\u00a0 Berger uses, well, the word damnation.\u00a0 I am using slightly different language because I cannot make his argument as well with this word this morning.\u00a0 It is too loaded.\u00a0 But the heart of the intention is true and strong.\u00a0 We want people who get away with murder not ultimately to get away with murder.\u00a0 E Brunner, after WWII, was asked why he spoke about the devil:\u00a0 Said he:\u00a0 Two reasons. \u00a0Jesus did.\u00a0 And I have seen him.<\/em> When we think of mass murder, of horrific injustice, intentionally and painstakingly executed, we demand justice.\u00a0 There is something down deep in the human heart that just will not let things go.\u00a0 This is not about forgiveness.\u00a0 It is about retributive justice.\u00a0 Sometimes young people have a keener sense of this than their elders.\u00a0 Berger: This refers to experiences in which our sense of what is humanly permissible is so fundamentally outraged that the only adequate response to the offense as well as to the offender seems to be a curse of supernatural dimensions\u2026A. There are certain deeds that cry out to heaven<\/span>\u2026Not only are we constrained to condemn, and to condemn absolutely, but ,if we should be in a position to do so, we would feel constrained to take action on the basis of that certainty\u2026B.Deeds that cry out to heaven also cry out for hell\u2026No human punishment is enough in the case of deeds as monstrous as these\u2026(this is) a moral order that transcends the human community and thus invokes a retribution that is more than human<\/span>. <\/em>When adults talk as adults, younger with older, there arise memories and understandings, dark in hue and deep in sentiment, that call out for an extraordinary, unearthly, transcendent justice.\u00a0 How shall we talk about these?\u00a0 Talk a bit, bit by bit, in the years to come, parents and children.<\/p>\n

Fifth, one can sense the horizon of heaven, the transcendent radiance of mystery, the supranatural or supernatural, in the simple experience of humor<\/em><\/strong>, perhaps the very polar opposite of the cry for retributive justice.\u00a0 1. Here I will pause to tell an ostensibly humorous story.\u00a0 I was asked to pray at the start of a billion dollar campaign.\u00a0 My reply:\u00a0 \u2018It would be my pressure\u2014I mean my pleasure.\u2019\u00a0 2. People ask about interreligious life on campus and I say:\u00a0 \u2018The Hindus are the most Christian people I deal with\u2019.\u00a0 3. Phyllis Diller died this year. You remember her husband:\u00a0 Fang.\u00a0 You remember her mother in law:\u00a0 Moby Dick.\u00a0 You remember her sister in law:\u00a0 Captain Bligh.\u00a0 You remember her self deprecation (\u2018I once wore peek a boo blouse.\u00a0 One man peeked and then shouted \u2018boo!\u2019).\u00a0 You remember her cackling laughter.\u00a0 Humor, real humor, stops time still.\u00a0 \u2018He who sits in the heavens shall laugh\u2019, says the psalmist.\u00a0 Berger:\u00a0 There is one fundamental discrepancy from which all other comic discrepancies are derived\u2014the discrepancy between man and the universe\u2026A. The comic reflects the imprisonment of the human spirit in the world\u2026B.Humor mocks the \u2018serious\u2019 business of the world and the might who carry it out<\/span>\u2026Power is the final illusion, while laughter reveals the final truth\u2026It is the Quixote\u2019s hope rather than Sancho Panza\u2019s \u2018realism\u2019 that is ultimately vindicated, and the gestures of the clown have a sacramental dignity.<\/em> When you gather at Thanksgiving table, after the prayer and before the turkey, tell one funny story, or one joke, or one humorous memory.\u00a0 Talk a bit, talk a bit, talk a bit, parents and children.<\/p>\n

Here is our theme:\u00a0 Order, play, hope, justice, humor: religious experiences without recourse to religion. You may not be so religious, or so you think.\u00a0 But do you create order, and crave play, and desire hope, and long for justice, and enjoy humor?\u00a0 These are signs, for you, signs of something else, something lasting and true and good and extraordinary.\u00a0 Talk a bit about it, parents and children. \u00a0As Bonnie Raitt put it:\u00a0 let\u2019s give them something to talk about!<\/p>\n

For our gospel today, Mark 10:45, accosts us in this very way.<\/p>\n

Can you drink the cup that I drink?\u00a0 Whoever wants to be great shall be your servant.\u00a0 Whoever wants to be first shall be the slave of all.\u00a0 The Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.<\/em><\/p>\n

Parents, Students, Community, Listeners:\u00a0 Can you drink that cup?<\/p>\n

Sursum Corda:\u00a0 Things are not quite always as they seem, says the gospel.\u00a0 There is more than a little difference between appearance and reality, says the gospel.\u00a0 Real leaders serve others, says the gospel.\u00a0 Ambition unfettered will not lead to happiness, says the gospel.\u00a0 A true life is not always an easy one, says the gospel.\u00a0 The son of man did not come to be served, but to serve, says the gospel.\u00a0\u00a0 There is a mystery at the heart of life, says the gospel.\u00a0 And that mystery is Jesus Christ, and him crucified, one whose life, true life, is poured out like a ransom paid to free others.\u00a0 Underneath the tiny things lurk the great things.\u00a0 A mystery, a ransom paid, a life laid up and laid out and laid down, lurking, waiting, present, like a breath, the eternal great things, hidden under the unlikely blankets of the littlest things.\u00a0 Your calling to faith may be brewing\u2026Under a desire for order.\u00a0 Under a love of play.\u00a0 Under a feeling of hope.\u00a0 Under a longing for justice.\u00a0 Under a sense of humor.\u00a0\u00a0 And all through the cacophony of a noisy world, a hint, a glimmer, an echo, a breath,\u00a0 a rumor\u2026of angels.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark 10: 35-45 Click here to hear the full service. Click here to hear the sermon only.   After my dad died two years ago we began to go through his things, as families do.\u00a0 Desk, tools, books, guns, clothes.\u00a0 (Order, play, hope, justice, humor). We did not make much progress at first.\u00a0 We still […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2679,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","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\/604"}],"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=604"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":605,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604\/revisions\/605"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}