\u201cHe comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, He came to those men who knew Him not.\u00a0 He speaks to us the same word, \u2018Follow me!\u2019\u00a0 and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time.\u00a0 He commands.\u00a0 And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.\u201d (A Schweitzer, QHJ, 389).<\/i><\/p>\n
In 1978, barely married one year, Jan and I were living in a tiny apartment, too small even for a piano, under the wings of Riverside Church NYC.\u00a0\u00a0 Jan worked as a secretary in the Interchurch Center, the \u2018God Box.\u2019\u00a0 To help finance the operation I was working at night as a security guard, studying for my afternoon classes and making rounds from 11pm -7am, then sleeping until noon.\u00a0 Near Christmas, Jan had a day off, and went shopping,\u00a0 by accident leaving our apartment door ajar.\u00a0 I awoke about 11am to see a poor street woman standing over me, with a knife and rosary beads.\u00a0 Somehow she had passed the receptionist and found her way in.\u00a0 I hoped the rosary beads meant more to her than the knife.\u00a0 But seeing her I shouted.\u00a0 She promptly raced into the bathroom and locked the door.\u00a0 About noon Jan came home to find police cars and a crowd outside McGiffert Hall.\u00a0 \u2018Your husband was down here in his pajamas\u2019 one said.\u00a0 \u2018Really?\u2019, Jan replied.\u00a0 \u201cPolice are up in your apartment\u2019 one said.\u00a0 \u2018Really?\u2019 Jan replied.\u00a0\u00a0 \u2018There is a woman in your apartment too\u2019 one said.\u00a0 \u2018Really?\u2019 Jan replied.\u00a0 \u2018She is taking a bath up in your bathroom\u2019 one said.\u00a0 \u2018Really?\u2019 Jan replied.\u00a0 That Christmas I think I was meant to receive a lifetime, vivid reminder of the poor\u2014the street cast, the mentally ill, the drug harmed, the urban lost\u2014the poor.\u00a0 The poor, like the Shepherds abiding in the field.<\/p>\n
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In 1980, with one child asleep upstairs, and one on the way to his birth three months later, we sat down in a small Ithaca parsonage for a Christmas Eve dinner.\u00a0\u00a0 Services were over.\u00a0 Snow was falling, heavy, snow on snow.\u00a0 The hillside Warren Drive was all white.\u00a0\u00a0 The baby grand piano sat silent next to us.\u00a0\u00a0 Jan went up to check the child.\u00a0 All of a sudden, a large four-door sedan careened down the hill, turned sideways, nearly flipped, and smashed into the guard rail, just feet from our dining room.\u00a0 Out stumbled three natives of the subcontinent of India.\u00a0 Waiting for a truck, they sat with us, and ate a little and drank some tea.\u00a0 \u2018They look like the three wise men\u201d, Jan whispered.\u00a0 Dark, darker, and darkest\u2014Caspar, Balthazar, and Melchior. It takes a while to get a truck on Christmas Eve.\u00a0 When he did arrive, the driver gave evidence of Christmas cheer.\u00a0 He was a jolly, happy soul.\u00a0 \u2018They look like wise men from the east\u2019 he said.\u00a0 That Christmas I think I was meant to receive a lifetime, vivid reminder of the globe\u2014the 6 billion siblings on 7 continents and myriad tongues\u2014the globe.\u00a0 The Wise Men 3, bowing before the Christ.<\/p>\n
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In 1983, on Christmas Eve day, in the drafty living room of the Burke NY parsonage, an hour south of Montreal, with two children asleep for nap, and one on the way to his birth seven months later, we stood beside the baby grand piano for a wedding.\u00a0 A farm hand and his girlfriend, living up the road in a trailer, with the minister\u2019s wife as witness, musician, caterer, and greeter, took their vows after carols and before cookies.\u00a0 As the rings were exchanged the two ostensibly napping children peered out from the stairwell.\u00a0\u00a0 Leaving, he gave me four dollars.\u00a0 They were going for lunch to celebrate at the Cherry Knoll diner.\u00a0\u00a0 They had nothing, and they had everything. \u00a0It was a sort of Norman Rockwell scene\u2014and aren\u2019t these all?\u00a0 Rockwell has finally come into his artistic kingdom, this year, 2013, at last honored as real artist.\u00a0 But that Christmas I think I was meant to receive a lifetime reminder of the mystery of marriage against a background of rural life\u2014farm work, cattle, livestock, milking, the good earth\u2014farm life.\u00a0 Mary and Joseph and the utter mystery of birth.<\/p>\n
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In 1988, 25 years ago this weekend, we left our children by the piano with a sitter, and went by foot, through the snow, to see the Syracuse Orangemen play basketball.\u00a0 The game was interrupted with the stark announcement of a new tragedy, the crash of Pan Am flight 103 in Lockerbie Scotland.\u00a0 Neighbors of ours, students, and other students from other schools perished in what in retrospect was a harsh harbinger of further such acts of violence to come in 1995 and 1998 and 2001 and 2013.\u00a0 I looked again at the Christmas sermon preached later that week, an offering drenched in sorrow.\u00a0\u00a0 SU Chancellor Melvin Eggers I believe never really recovered from the crash.\u00a0 Maybe none of us has.\u00a0 Twelve years later, dropping our son off for college at Ohio Wesleyan, I chanced to meet a man with deeply sunken eyes, who, as it happened, was the head of SU study abroad that year.\u00a0 That Christmas I think I was meant to receive a warning about the way the world would change in the decades to follow, and a call to gentleness in an age of violence.\u00a0 Rachel is still weeping for her children.<\/p>\n
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In 1992, we wrapped presents beside the piano, to give to a father and children on Dell Street, in the Westcott Street neighborhood, \u00a0assigned to our church by the rescue mission.\u00a0 The dad we knew as a pizza deliverer.\u00a0 The 6 year old was in our son\u2019s class.\u00a0 Both were names Stanley Grobsmith, senior and junior.\u00a0 Our son had been to a birthday party in their very modest home.\u00a0 We had left him off for an hour or two.\u00a0 Dad brought his three children to worship, sitting in the back pew, those weeks near Christmas.\u00a0 He was a boxer, a single father.\u00a0\u00a0 That winter he was arrested for murder\u2014I pass over the gruesome details\u2014and hung himself in jail.\u00a0\u00a0 We were committed to city ministry, to work with the urban poor, to rebuilding a city church, to teaching in city schools.\u00a0 But we were chagrined to realize the danger we had placed our son in.\u00a0 That Christmas I think I was meant to receive a lifetime, bone chilling reminder of violent evil\u2014murderous, wild, ever present, harsh, sinful wrong\u2014violent evil.\u00a0\u00a0 Herod on the hunt, from whom the wise fled, going home by another way.<\/p>\n
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In 2005, on Christmas Day, and following 5 Rochester Christmas Eve services and 1 Christmas morning, Jan and I stopped up the street to visit Lucille Burke.\u00a0\u00a0 She had been in surgery mid-week, and now was home, we were told.\u00a0 A round faced, elderly, Bible studying, daughter of a Methodist minister, she would stop sometimes and listen to the piano lessons in our living room.\u00a0 I saw Throckmorton\u2019s Gospel Parallels<\/i> on her shelf.\u00a0 With wide eyes\u2014hers and ours\u2014she told us her hospital experience.\u00a0 On the day of surgery, she heard her name called, prepared herself in body and spirit, lipstick and prayer, and saw the stretcher coming.\u00a0 It came right to her room and then went right on by, to the room next door, inhabited by a non responsive patient.\u00a0 They took her in place of Lucille, even though Lucille rang bells and waved and called out.\u00a0 Fortunately, before the wrong knee was replaced, someone saw the confused woman\u2019s wrist band, and brought her back, and took Lucille up for surgery.\u00a0 That Christmas morning we offered a prayer of thanks and talked about malpractice.\u00a0 I thought, walking home, about the rarity of physicians\u2019 malpractice and how at most its effects last one lifetime. \u00a0I also thought about metaphysical malpractice, bad theology as opposed to bad surgery, and recognized it lasts three generations at least.\u00a0 That Christmas I think I was meant to receive a lifetime, sobering reminder of metaphysical malpractice, and its multi-generational endurance.\u00a0 Sober John the Baptist, winnowing fork in hand, separating theological wheat from spiritual chaff.\u00a0 More on this in the sermon coming January 26, 2014.<\/p>\n
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At Christmas we are reminded to learn with the Shepherds about the poor, with the Magi about the globe, with Mary and Joseph about the mystery of marriage, \u00a0with Rachel about weeping, with Herod about violence, and with John the Baptist about metaphysical malpractice.\u00a0 We learn from our own experience.\u00a0 We learn in our own experience.\u00a0 Christmas is about incarnation, about divine presence, about the word made flesh, about spirit in life.\u00a0 We learn from our own experience, as, one Christmas, Albert Schweitzer did say:<\/p>\n
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\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 He comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, He came to those men who knew Him not.\u00a0 He speaks to us the same word, \u2018Follow me!\u2019\u00a0 and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time.\u00a0 He commands.\u00a0 And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.\u2019 (QHJ, 389).<\/i><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u00a0~The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cHe comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, He came to those men who knew Him not.\u00a0 He speaks to us the same word, \u2018Follow me!\u2019\u00a0 and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time.\u00a0 He commands.\u00a0 And to those who obey […]<\/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\/816"}],"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=816"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/816\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2408,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/816\/revisions\/2408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}