{"id":675,"date":"2013-03-17T11:00:41","date_gmt":"2013-03-17T16:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=675"},"modified":"2023-03-23T13:41:36","modified_gmt":"2023-03-23T17:41:36","slug":"filled-with-fragrance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2013\/03\/17\/filled-with-fragrance\/","title":{"rendered":"Filled with Fragrance"},"content":{"rendered":"

John 12: 1-8<\/a><\/p>\n

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

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

Frontispiece<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Our mentor and friend Rev. Russell Clark, a Colgate and Boston University graduate, served a small church in Oriskany Falls , NY for many years.\u00a0 He dodged and weaved as appointments elsewhere were offered, to bigger churches and salaries. \u00a0He stayed.\u00a0 He fell in love with a quieter life, natural beauty, the intrigue of pastoral ministry, the mystery of the cotidian. The Clark home sported a large twirling book shelf in the living room, filled with novels and histories and poetry.<\/p>\n

His lay leader died after some years, to the regret and lasting hurt of the community.\u00a0 People are not replaceable.\u00a0 The widow, usually of regular perfect attendance in worship, stayed home, for some time.\u00a0 At last in Lent she appeared.\u00a0 Russell asked her how she found her way through the morass, the mess, the maze of grief, and got back home to church.\u00a0 \u201cWell, it was not the scripture, though I love all the scripture.\u00a0 It was not the hymns, though I sing them to myself day by day.\u00a0 It was not your visits, though they were most gracious.\u00a0 It was not the family care and feeding or that of the neighbors.\u00a0 It was not my personal faith in the resurrection, though I do have faith.\u00a0\u00a0 It was not even prayer, though I practice formal prayer, evening and morning, at meals and at bedtime.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was just this:\u00a0 the chickens had to be fed every morning.\u00a0 So I had to get up every morning.\u00a0 Once I was up, the rest of the day\u2014and at last, over longer time, the week and month, including Sunday morning\u2014seemed to fall in line.\u00a0 It was the chickens.\u00a0 The clucking of those hens.\u00a0 The clucking of those hens meant more to me, in healing, than all the hymns of Easter.\u00a0 The regularity of feeding them, early in the morning, restored me, over time.\u00a0 The clucking of those chickens meant more to me than all the hymns of Easter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Robinson<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Come Lent, here at Marsh Chapel, we converse each year with our sibling Christians out of the Calvinist tradition.\u00a0\u00a0 We grow and learn, from and with, the slight differences, in sibling traditions, wherein we do not always agree, but agree to disagree agreeably.\u00a0 Our interlocutor this year, 2013, is Marilynne Robinson\u2014essayist, novelist, Calvinist.\u00a0 Her love of Scripture, her sense of the eternal, her rendering of John Calvin, her prophetic defense of wonder in our time, her unwillingness to buy the cheap goods of a culture that languishes in the doldrums of a pervasive malaise, her celebration of quiet life, pastoral ministry, providential grace, and the deeps of love:\u00a0 all these human gifts we gratefully receive from her this year.\u00a0 Especially her sense of the extraordinary in the ordinary, health in the clucking of hens, helps us this year.<\/p>\n

On Scripture:\u00a0 One Easter I went with my grandfather to a small Presbyterian church in northern Idaho where I heard a sermon on the discrepancies in the gospel accounts of the resurrection\u2026I was a young child\u2026 yet I remember that sermon\u2026I can imagine myself that primal Easter, restive at my grandfather\u2019s elbow, pushing my nickels and dimes of collection money into the tips of my gloves\u2026memorably forbidden to remove my hat\u2026It seems to me I felt God as a presence before I had a name for him\u2026I was aware to the point of alarm of a vast energy of intention all around me\u2026and I thought everyone else must also be aware of it\u2026Only in church did I hear experience like mine acknowledged, in all those strange narratives, read and expounded\u2026(227)\u2026Amen (the preacher) said, having blessed my life with a lovely thing to ponder<\/i><\/p>\n

On Speech: What should we call the presiding intelligence that orchestrates the decision to speak as a moment requires?\u00a0 What governs the inflections that make any utterance unmistakably the words of one speaker in this whole language-saturated world? 120<\/i><\/p>\n

On Sin: It took, for instance, three decades of the most brilliant and persistent campaign of preachment and information to establish, in the land of liberty, the idea that slavery was intolerable. 249 <\/i><\/p>\n

On Salvation: (Calvin\u2019s) theology is compelled and enthralled by an overwhelming awareness of the grandeur of God\u2026his sense of things is so overwhelmingly visual and cerebral, that the other senses do not interest him 221\u2026heaven\u2019s essence for him is that it is inconceivable in the world\u2019s terms, another order of experience<\/i><\/p>\n

On Service: We should maintain an appropriate humility in the face of what we think we know\u2026encourage an imagination of humankind large enough to acknowledge some small fragment of the mystery we are\u2026<\/i> The Judeo Christian ethic of charity derives from the assertion that human beings are made in the image of God, that is, that reverence is owed to human beings simply as such\u2026.Our civilization believed for a long time in God and the soul and sin and salvation, assuming, whatever else, that meaning had a larger frame and context than this life in this world. 84\u2026I do not think it is nostalgia to suggest that it would be well to reestablish the setting apart of time traditionally devoted to religious observance… 99 Science cannot serve in the place of religion because it cannot generate an ethics or a morality.71\u2026\u00a0 137<\/i><\/p>\n

Driver<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Speaking of speech, my former teacher Tom Driver recently remembered:<\/p>\n

\u201cI was twenty-five years old in 1950, a bachelor newly arrived in New York City to attend graduate school. I bought a single ticket and went alone to see director Harold Clurman\u2019s production of The Member of the Wedding<\/i>, by the southern author Carson McCullers. With the rest of the audience, I was put under a spell by Ethel Waters singing \u201cHis Eye is on the Sparrow.\u201d There came another spell at the final curtain. The play’s central focus has been the longing of a pre-adolescent girl to escape from her loneliness. Young Frankie Addams (played by Julie Harris) wants to be part of the forthcoming wedding of her older sister. This privilege is not readily granted, but In the last scene, the way becomes clear, and she exclaims with joy: \u201cThe wedding will be the we of me.\u201d Curtain.<\/p>\n

\u201cI will never forget what happened next. There was long applause and several curtain calls. And then we just sat there. No one wanted to leave. The strangers sitting next to me were just as slow to move as I was. After a few moments we hitherto strangers began to talk to each other. The theater had become the \u201cwe\u201d of us. The performances on stage (and everything that Harold Clurman and the crew did to enable them) had performed something over and above the dramatis personae <\/i>roles. They had created for that brief moment in time — less brief than most such occasions — a community of people whose lives otherwise did not cross. It is called theater magic, which means no one quite understands it and can never predict just when it will occur. But when it does, our joy is immense. It is similar to an experience of religious transcendence.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn an age in which the term \u201cpublic\u201d has been denigrated in favor of \u201cprivatization,\u201d when housing is increasingly \u201cgated \u201cif it is affordable at all, when public education and health care and transportation and all manner of intrinsically social services are either neglected or attacked as impingements upon \u201cliberty,\u201d when guns are thought to be necessary almost everywhere in the name of freedom and self defense — in such a time, the liminality engendered by ritual, theater, and religion, carries an important potential.\u201d<\/p>\n

Our gospel then raises for us the question of authority.<\/p>\n

Authority<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Religions wrestle with authority, all the time, everywhere.\u00a0 The current change in Rome, and the ascendancy of Francis, our brother, whom we honor, encourage, and celebrate, recalls for us centuries of struggle over authority.\u00a0 To the Calvinist right, all authority is vested in Scripture.\u00a0 The Bible is the only full authority, \u2018sola scriptura\u2019, an historic, in some ways tragic manner of interpretation of life and love.\u00a0 To the Catholic left, final authority is vested in the Bishop of Rome.\u00a0 Before we, or more specifically I, become too critical of these vested stations, we, or I, must also recognize that at some point, some one has to break the tie, make the decision, guide the church, be \u2018primus inter pares\u2019, whether in the form of a breathing holy person or in the form of a spirited, breathing holy text.\u00a0 My own tradition attempts to have it all or both ways, not always with shining success.\u00a0 Methodism combines catholic tradition, reformation message, puritan discipline, Anglican liturgy, and pietist feeling.\u00a0 Methodism interprets Scripture through Tradition, and Tradition through Experience, and Experience through Reason.\u00a0 Such a separation of powers, by the way, has great advantages in a university setting, like this one.<\/p>\n

Fragrance<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

But what of our gospel?\u00a0 What form of authority does the Gospel of John prefer, select, elect, prize?\u00a0 Ah, glad you asked.\u00a0 No church in John, just a communal experience of Christ.\u00a0 No leadership in John, just the deeds and words of the risen, I mean crucified, I mean incarnate, I mean spirited One.\u00a0 No worries about ethics in John, no catalogue of virtues or vices, just a single command, to love.\u00a0 No hierarchy, patriarchy, oligarchy, ecclesiology in John.\u00a0 Just this:\u00a0 Spirit.\u00a0 Another Counselor.\u00a0 With you forever.\u00a0 A guide into all further truth.\u00a0 How is that going to work?\u00a0 Exactly.\u00a0 That is why we have the letters of John, uno dos y tres, because, clearly, it did not.\u00a0 The letters add in:\u00a0 leadership, orthodoxy, ethics, teaching, form, all.\u00a0 They wake from the Johannine dream.\u00a0 But what a dream!\u00a0 A spirited dream of spirit befitting any high Calvinist view of Scripture and any high Catholic view of clergy.\u00a0 A dream of Spirit, leading to truth, over time.\u00a0 A fullness of fragrance, spirit in life.\u00a0 As in Proust, \u2018What matters is to transform common occurrence into art (NYRB, 3\/13).\u2019<\/p>\n

You will recognize the story of the anointing at Bethany.\u00a0 Sort of\u2026<\/p>\n

It is like the familiar parable (sic):\u00a0 A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and saw a man who had fallen among thieves, so he went and he asked his father for his inheritance.\u00a0 The father gave him seeds to plant, but most fell on rocky ground.\u00a0 He appealed to a judge, who would not listen, and then to a dishonest steward, who would listen, but who stole the rest of the seeds, and then planted them and they multiplied thirty, sixty and a hundredfold.\u00a0 But he left 99 of the fold and went after a lost sheep.\u00a0 On the way, he stumbled on a lost coin, and put it in his tunic.\u00a0 This will be like a mustard seed, he thought, which is small but grows a big plant.\u00a0 He went back to his father and said, I am not worthy to be a son, but make me a worker in a vineyard, and pay me as much as you pay those who started at dawn.\u00a0 Which of these do you think proved neighbor to the man who fell among thieves?<\/i><\/p>\n

<\/i>I know you remember that one.<\/p>\n

<\/i>That is, John has somehow combined a story which was also known to Mark, and used by Matthew, with a story from Luke, unused by Mark or Matthew, and has added his own special ingredients, Johnannine special sauce if you will.\u00a0 Or maybe a redactor re-edited portions of this passage.\u00a0 For the record: John has added Judas as the stingy knee jerk liberal; John has added Judas\u2019 motive, not so liberal, of greed;\u00a0 John has not kept Mark\u2019s ethical admonition, \u2018For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you want you can do good to them<\/span>\u2019.<\/i> (But Matthew also apparently erased that sentence, for who knows what reason.)\u00a0 John also has misplaced or erased the fine conclusion, which Mark writes and Matthew copies, wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.<\/i> John also neglects to repeat that Jesus said of Mary\u2019s act that she has done a beautiful thing for me<\/i>.\u00a0 In other words, what has been told in John was not so much in memory of her, though perhaps in the rest of the whole world it was so.\u00a0 Most delicately, Mark and John both use a rare adjective, rendered her by the English word \u2018pure\u2019, which comes in the original from the same root as the word \u2018faith\u2019.\u00a0 The gospels repeated an admonition from Deuteronomy 15, \u2018the poor are ever present\u2019, not at all to discountenance care of the poor (so important to us, and rightly so), but to lift the fragrance, the wonder at the heart of the gospel, to the highest level. (Bultmann, perhaps rightly, hears here a reference to the full fragrance of gnosis<\/i> spreading throughout the world.)<\/p>\n

John, alone, fills the room with fragrance.\u00a0 That is his point, here.\u00a0 Incense, the sense of the holy, the mysterium tremendum, the idea of the holy, the presence.\u00a0 Resurrection precedes crucifixion in this reading.\u00a0 Crucifixion is merely a coming occasion for incarnation in this reading.\u00a0 Incarnation is a lasting fragrance in this reading, the fullness of fragrance.<\/p>\n

Friends<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

My friend Rev. John Holt says of his work in ministry:\u00a0 \u2018we are trying to help people discover their spiritual side so that they can make a difference for good in the world\u2019.\u00a0 That is what I am trying to do in and from this pulpit, trying to help people discover their spiritual side so that they can make a difference for good in the world.<\/p>\n

Our poetic friend George Herbert wrote:<\/p>\n

Love bade me welcome: yet my sould drew back, Guiltie of dust and sinne.<\/p>\n

But quick-ey\u2019d Love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in,<\/p>\n

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning, If I lack\u2019d any thing.<\/p>\n

A guest, I answer\u2019d, worthy to be here : Love said, You shall be he.<\/p>\n

I the unkinde, ungratefull? Ah my deare, I cannot look on thee.<\/p>\n

Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, Who made the eyes but I?<\/p>\n

Truth Lord, but I have marr\u2019d them : let my shame Go where it doth deserve.<\/p>\n

And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame? My deare, then I will serve.<\/p>\n

You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat. So I did sit and eat.<\/p>\n

A friend, of some more years than I, brought her children to worship on Christmas eve.\u00a0 Afterward, she asked each one\u20146,8, and11 years old\u2014what they most liked.\u00a0 Said 6, \u2018I especially liked the candle, except the wax dripped on my finger and that hurt.\u00a0 Said 8, \u2018I liked communion and the way the choir music drew us forward, together, into it.\u00a0 Said 11, \u2018I like the way you feel after you have been to church\u2019.\u00a0 6,8,11\u2014they came to themselves.\u00a0 And grandma did too.<\/p>\n

Our neighbor Ron Dworkin wrote before his death: I shall take these two\u2014life\u2019s instrinsic meaning and nature\u2019s intrinsic beauty\u2014as paradigms of a fully religious attitude to life\u2026These are not convictions that one can isolate from the rest of one\u2019s life.\u00a0 They engage a whole personality.\u00a0 They permeate experience:\u00a0 they generate pride, remorse and thrill.\u00a0 Mystery is an important part of that thrill. (NYTRB, 68, 3\/13).<\/i><\/p>\n

My friend Frank Halse has written of the presence, recently, a letter and seven poems.\u00a0 Frank is a double Terrier, CLA\\STH, now in his late eighties, a widower, living alone in the great snows of the Tug Hill Plateau.\u00a0 He was the Protestant Chaplain at Syracuse University from 1965 to 1975.\u00a0 He drew a short straw and did marvelous ministry.\u00a0 He is a poet, and now his poetry is all about presence:<\/p>\n

Dear Bob,<\/i><\/p>\n

Joyce\u2019s death left me empty.\u00a0 Stunned even.\u00a0 That emptiness stayed for the 1st<\/sup> year.\u00a0 Then, two years ago, I began to be bumping into something that I finally put a name down. \u2018The Presence\u201d.\u00a0 My first experience with the mystic corners of our world.<\/i><\/p>\n

I felt unprepared and awkward, but in time, I began to experience what can only be described as whisperings quietly in my ears.\u00a0 So I began to struggle with poetry as I think I was hearing:<\/i><\/p>\n

God is as close as my breath<\/i><\/p>\n

My heart pulsing my breast<\/i><\/p>\n

No search reveals the Presence;<\/i><\/p>\n

Only exhaustion, tragedy, and <\/i><\/p>\n

Failure will temper my vision to<\/i><\/p>\n

The point where I can sense the<\/i><\/p>\n

Presence who responds to my <\/i><\/p>\n

Needs with gifts of patience<\/i><\/p>\n

From:\u00a0 F Halse, Epiphany at Kennebunk Pond, 8\/16\/01<\/i><\/p>\n

Coda<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

<\/i>On the Sacred, Marilynn Robinson:\u00a0 So I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes.\u00a0 I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation.\u00a0 With all respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us.\u00a0 The eternal as an idea is much less preposterous than time, and this very fact should seize our attention.\u00a0 In certain contexts the improbable is called the miraculous.<\/i><\/p>\n

What is eternal must always be complete, if my understanding is correct.\u00a0 So it is possible that time was created in order that there might be narrative\u2014event, sequence and causation, ignorance and error, retribution, atonement.\u00a0 A word, a phrase, a story falls on rich or stony ground and flourishes as it can, possibility in a sleeve of limitation.\u00a0 Certainly time is the occasion for our strangely mixed nature, in every moment differently compounded, so that often we surprise ourselves, and always scarcely know ourselves, and exist in relation to experience, if we attend to it and if its plainness does not disguised it from us, as if we were visited by revelation.<\/i><\/p>\n

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.<\/p>\n

Not everything measurable is meaningful, and not everything meaningful is measurable.<\/p>\n

The greater the sea of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of mystery surrounding it.<\/p>\n

The world does not lack for wonders, but only for a sense of wonder.<\/p>\n

~The Rev. Dr Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John 12: 1-8 Click here to hear the full service. Click here to hear the sermon only Frontispiece Our mentor and friend Rev. Russell Clark, a Colgate and Boston University graduate, served a small church in Oriskany Falls , NY for many years.\u00a0 He dodged and weaved as appointments elsewhere were offered, to bigger churches […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2679,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[46,22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675"}],"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=675"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3476,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675\/revisions\/3476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}