{"id":936,"date":"2014-08-24T11:00:37","date_gmt":"2014-08-24T15:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=936"},"modified":"2019-11-05T12:09:42","modified_gmt":"2019-11-05T17:09:42","slug":"learning-together","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2014\/08\/24\/learning-together\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning Together"},"content":{"rendered":"

Matthew 16: 13-20<\/a><\/p>\n

Romans 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

\u00a0<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

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

It is good to be home.<\/p>\n

We have missed you, your smiling faces, your singing voices, your radio responses, your stories, daily appended, of our shared journey in faith.\u00a0 We have missed being with you in worship.<\/p>\n

Although we did join you last Sunday.\u00a0\u00a0 The Sunday free, after a joyful itinerancy north and south through the summer, we became radio\\internet listeners to your service.\u00a0 Under a blue sky, before a blue lake, on the deck of a federal blue cottage, cooled by a light breeze, a spirit wind, we worshipped with Marsh Chapel.\u00a0 The sprightly hymns.\u00a0 The crisp readings.\u00a0 The magnificent choral and organ music. \u00a0The word of God rightly spoken in the sermon.\u00a0 Moments of prayer and communal celebration.\u00a0 You gave us all these.\u00a0 Jan and I thank you.\u00a0 As the final hymn was lifted I thought, \u2018I could go to that church\u2019.\u00a0 I said so to Jan.\u00a0 She said, \u2018you do\u2019.\u00a0 She is always so right.\u00a0 \u2018You will be there next Sunday\u2019.\u00a0 Right again.\u00a0 Such a beautiful and highly recommended marital utterance:\u00a0 \u2018You are so right\u2019.\u00a0 I commend it to you.\u00a0 It will bless you.<\/p>\n

With you, in the blue, blue sky blue house blue lake, we prayed to the Blue God, and were fed, and nourished and satisfied.\u00a0\u00a0 Your witness here, virtual and actual, lasts, matters, counts and is real.\u00a0 You help us and others learn, as we learn together.<\/p>\n

Learning in Voice<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

We have been learning this summer in voice, through voice.\u00a0 Our 8th<\/sup> annual national summer guest preacher series has brought you emerging adult voices on the theme, \u2018the gospel and emerging adulthood.\u2019\u00a0 Rev. Dr. Walton served as my teaching fellow for the course on the Gospel of John\u2014for seven years.\u00a0 And lived!\u00a0 She has heard me say everything I know about the fourth gospel, seven times.\u00a0\u00a0 She has heard me say more than that!\u00a0 Like the woman who went Niagara Falls in a barrel\u2014and lived!\u00a0 Her \u2018batting cleanup\u2019 voice lingers in our memory as do these all.\u00a0 A diminutive priest,\u00a0 more David than Goliath, more Zaccheus than Caiaphas,\u00a0 she was told by a radio listener, \u2018in the Marsh Pulpit who sound like you are 5\u20197\u201d! Rev. Brittany Longsdorf, our sister and friend and colleague in ministry, occupies a position unique in the whole country, a university chaplaincy devoted to international students as a whole\u2014not a role carved out of the petty narcissism of small religious differences, but a common ground spiritual ministry with Buddhist and Bahai, Muslim and Hindu, Confucian and Secular, all.\u00a0 Your dean celebrated and spoke next, preceded a week by our dear partner in University Church ministry, from Harvard, the Rev. Dr. Jonathan Walton, whose partnership in gospel becomes ever more meaningful to us here, across the river.\u00a0 Dr. Echol Nix come up all the way from Furman College in South Carolina, to honor his alma mater, and gather with friends here in Boston, and bring us the voice of a philosophical theologian in the pulpit.\u00a0 Br. Larry Whitney, who guides our ministry with students here at Marsh, and never complains to preach on July 4 weekend, brought his own voice in sermon and celebration.\u00a0 My son in law from Rochester,(a newly minted Princeton PhD, a student of the Rev. Dr. Kenda Dean, whose theological conversation partner for the dissertation was Howard Thurman), Rev. Dr. Stephen Cady, brought his voice and the singing voices of his wife and 3 children, or, the voices of our daughter and grandchildren, depending on your perspective.\u00a0 \u00a0Our own Rev. Dr. Robin Olson, probably the most expert and knowledgeable minister in New England regarding emerging adulthood, brought her voice way back in June, \u2018our lead off hitter\u2019, as she said.\u00a0 That is, we are learning with and through the voices of others.\u00a0 Proud of their varieties of perspective, of their varieties in gender, race, background, denomination and ethnicity.\u00a0\u00a0 Their ministries, and their personal gifts over many miles and years, to me, are exceedingly sweet and precious, precious jewels, voices of the present and future beloved community.\u00a0\u00a0 And all, with one notable decanal exception, themselves in or very near emerging adulthood!\u00a0 Voice that themselves are echoes of a gospel not yet fully spoken. Comparisons are odious, and all 8 series have brought height and breadth and depth.\u00a0 This summer\u2019s though brought just a little more height, all the way to 5\u20197\u201d, and beyond.\u00a0 Spend an evening reading or listening again to the nine sermons, and we shall continue learning together, in voice!\u00a0 And mark the learning:\u00a0 there is new generation of excellent preachers, emerging in and around Marsh Chapel.\u00a0 Amazing Grace how sweet the sound!<\/p>\n

Learning in Thought<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

And what did we learn?\u00a0 My dad, before he died 4 years ago, a proud alumnus of BU 1953 by the way, for whom our coming to Marsh Chapel meant more initially than it meant to anyone else on planet earth I think, partly because he knew the history more fully and felt the potential more keenly, (and I am so eternally happy that he could be here himself, for worship with us, for some years), used to ask me, and others, following high or in some cases low moments:\u00a0 \u2018and what did you learn?\u2019<\/p>\n

We are learning in thought, we are learning to learn and think, together.\u00a0 Not one generation instructing another only, or another reconstructing another only.\u00a0 Not GI\\Silent\\Gen X\\Millenial\\Gen Y in verbal or other competition, though creative tension is often creative, but together is this confluent space of Marsh Chapel and environs and extended community, a hoped for community, an aspirational desire to live, learning together.\u00a0 So what did you learn this summer?<\/p>\n

I ask graduate students to learn to summarize a book in a page.\u00a0\u00a0 What is good for the goose is good for the gander.\u00a0 So, we will here summarize a summer in nine sentences, one per sermon, June to August., and then in a word each. 1.\u00a0 A capacity for wonder bursts from the faithful witness of emerging adults.\u00a0 2. Emerging adults want love of neighbor, learned and taught in substantive even traditional worship. 3. Development for emerging adults is misunderstood if it is linear only, and benefits from a non-linear perspective.\u00a0 4.\u00a0 The gospel, particularly for the college years, is about the transformation of the mind.\u00a0 5. Emerging adults benefit to remember Bonhoeffer and the cost of discipleship (both these themes quite fit for our readings this morning.\u00a0 6. Wise leadership is humble leadership, all other appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. \u00a07.\u00a0 Higher education is wonderful but alone cannot finally teach emerging adults how to live, cannot feed all alone, especially in the most difficult experiences.\u00a0 8. Be quiet.\u00a0 Silence!\u00a0 Silence is golden, and emerging adults know it, and teach it by example.\u00a0 9.\u00a0 Emerging adults were recently children, and children are full participants, fully fellow itinerants, on the journey of faith\u2014especially when it comes to worship.<\/p>\n

For those of you who tuned out one or all summer Sundays, I offer, free of charge, like the grace of the gospel itself, this humble nine word summary of the emerging adulthood gospel :\u00a0 wondrous, hospitable, non-linear, transformative, costly, humble, nourishing, quiet, childlike. \u00a0Listen or read through the sermons again.\u00a0 They have fed us this summer 2014<\/p>\n

Learning in Conflict<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

We have needed the nourishment.\u00a0 Our thirst, our hunger, have needed the slaking, the feeding of the gospel this summer\u2014grace, freedom, love, forgiveness, pardon, peace, acceptance.\u00a0\u00a0 These are your middle names. John Grace Smith.\u00a0 Mary Freedom Jones.\u00a0 You are children of light.\u00a0 And if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another.\u00a0\u00a0 That is who you are.\u00a0 You are a child of God.\u00a0 Pray in the morning remembering that.\u00a0 Read Scripture at noon remembering that.\u00a0 Visit a lonely neighbor in the afternoon remembering that.\u00a0 Send a check in the evening remembering that.\u00a0 And come to church\u2014here or elsewhere\u2014come Sunday, remembering that.\u00a0 You are a child of God.<\/p>\n

We need that steady reminder.\u00a0 For our summer has been one in which the background of violence all about us has spilled into the foreground of existence nearer to us.\u00a0 You list the summer 2014 background conditions\u2026Gaza and Israel: Phyrric victories; Europe and Ukraine: collective effort; \u00a0Ferguson and Race, second summer: continued trauma;Iraq and Syria: islands of decency; Planet and Warming: Bill McGibben calling us to compunction; College women and campus safety:\u00a0 our failure, our shame at 1\/5 assaulted; Tornadoes and Fires:\u00a0 natural disaster;\u00a0 Debt personal and debt national:\u00a0 $1T in student loans alone.<\/p>\n

We lift only one, and briefly, this morning, Ferguson.<\/p>\n

Rev. Earbie Bledsoe, on Ferguson: \u201cNo, I don\u2019t think things have changed much. Not enough to write down,\u201d he said. \u00a0\u00a0(msnbc.com 8\/19\/14)<\/p>\n

Not enough to write down.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/i><\/p>\n

By your measure, what percentage of slavery is still with us?<\/p>\n

The wiser and more sensitive see in Ferguson a moment of judgment and revelation, an eschatological incursion into the present time, of harm from the past and hope for the future.\u00a0 As with Treyvon Martin last summer, we are brought up short, chastened, brought to compunction and to lament.\u00a0 Our desire for justice, an even handed, common justice, common to all without privilege or prejudice, is not what we see in the mirror of events in Ferguson.<\/p>\n

A sermon is often a mirror held up before a community, so that as a community we can see ourselves, as we are together.\u00a0 In a sermon we are learning together, and learning to be together.\u00a0\u00a0 There we see ongoing distrust, ongoing fear and distance, ongoing hatred that boils up into violence.\u00a0 We also learn together about the amount of military weaponry and equipment that has somehow found its way into otherwise small, sleepy communities.\u00a0 As with the violence and loss in Gaza, we are learning the hard way, learning together.\u00a0 Ferguson is a sermon.<\/p>\n

Now, one thing a town of any size can use, can benefit from, is a strong, loving church. This will bring us in a moment to Matthew 16.\u00a0 It is noteworthy that the clergy in Ferguson, of the black churches and of many churches, were a part of the leadership for compassion and civility last week.\u00a0 Pastors who make home visits know people, their voices, their needs, their fears.\u00a0 They have a built up and built in trust, or credibility, when they have been doing their pastoral work.\u00a0 So when, in the course of events, some of that pastoral capital needs to be spent and invested in the free market of peace and justice, there is money in the bank. \u00a0You need to have some of that spiritual money in the bank, in order to lead a community out of stranglehold and suffocation.\u00a0 You need some institutional traction.\u00a0 In its clergy and churches Ferguson had some of that.<\/p>\n

This too is something our bright, compassionate emerging adults are struggling with.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is no surprise, as Pew reported, that the millennial generation is skeptical of institutions \u2014 political and religious \u2014 and prefers to improvise solutions to the challenges of the moment. \u201c\u00a0 ( 8\/17\/14 NYT)<\/p>\n

Yet\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cEmpathy was a theme sounded repeatedly by some of the millennials photographed for this article, and interviewed in an online slide show that accompanies it.\u201d<\/p>\n

For empathy to be real, to be learned, to be experienced, and then to be a source of action, and hopefully of transformation to justice, for there to be traction in history toward good ends, you need institutions, particularly political and religious ones.\u00a0 Empathy without institutions is dead.\u00a0 King and others needed the NAACP and its Legal Defense Fund.\u00a0\u00a0 Wesley and others needed the annual conference, and its systematic itinerant appointments.\u00a0 Thurman and others needed Marsh Chapel, the Church of All Nations, and Rankin Chapel.\u00a0 Frederick Douglass needed the North Star.\u00a0 Abraham Lincoln needed the Republican Party.\u00a0 Dorothy Day needed the Catholic Workers.\u00a0 Kate Millett needed NOW, whether or not fish needed bicycles like women needed men.\u00a0 Bob Hill has needed:\u00a0 the Methodist Church, Camp Casowasco, Ohio Wesleyan, UnionMcGillColgateRochesterBostonUniversity,<\/i> and yes, Marsh Chapel.\u00a0 And Matthew needed the church, the ecclesia. Faith without works is dead and empathy without institutions is, too.\u00a0 Slavery is still 30% with us, and to be rid of it we shall need INSTITUTIONAL reform\u2014education, employment, health, public safety, and, yes, strong liberal southern and Midwestern churches.\u00a0 Rev. Earbie Bledsoe has been pastor at his church, built with his own hands, for 43 years.\u00a0 And the gates of hell have not prevailed against it.<\/p>\n

Learning in Scripture<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

To conclude.\u00a0 A healthy institution of any sort, particularly of any religious sort and certainly of any Christian sort, is a community that is learning together.\u00a0 As Camus said, the healthy society is a circle in which all are seated and each reminds the other:\u00a0 \u2018You are not God.\u00a0 I am not God.\u00a0 You are not God.\u2019<\/p>\n

We are disciples.\u00a0 The word means student.\u00a0 Disciple means student.\u00a0 Save Discipuli.\u00a0 Save Magistra.\u00a0\u00a0 Discipleship means studentship.\u00a0 The model of faithfulness recommended, particular in Matthew, and especially in Matthew 16, is the model of the student.\u00a0 Perhaps if we simply said \u2018studentship\u2019 rather than \u2018discipleship\u2019\u00a0 we would do better.<\/p>\n

Living right means learning together\u2014in voice, in thought, in conflict, in Scripture.\u00a0 Learning together.<\/p>\n

It is this driving kerygma that causes Matthew to eviscerate Mark here.\u00a0\u00a0 Matthew has taken a passage from Mark 8 and turned it upside down.\u00a0\u00a0 It is not so much the detail, by the way, of the manner in which Matthew and Luke revise Mark, which is important.\u00a0 What matters is that they happily regospeled the gospel for their own day, to a fair thee well.<\/i><\/p>\n

No? \u00a0No?\u00a0 Oh Yes.\u00a0 Yes indeed.\u00a0 Yes.<\/p>\n

Mark in the passage calls Peter \u2018Satan\u2019.\u00a0 Matthew calls him Rock.\u00a0 Mark has no mention of any church of any kind, staying still within the community of Judaism.\u00a0 Matthew uses the word, ecclesia\u2014not easily something Jesus would have said, and gives Peter keys to the kingdom.\u00a0 Mark has Jesus tell the disciples\u2014the students\u2014to keep it all secret.\u00a0 Matthew rejects that secrecy, except for the title, messiah, and says, \u2018preach it\u2019.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Why does Matthew gut Mark?\u00a0 Answer:\u00a0 he and his community are learning together.\u00a0 From voices.\u00a0 From thoughts.\u00a0 From conflicts.\u00a0 And Matthew sternly tells his people:\u00a0 you need institutional grounding, support, protection, and sustenance.\u00a0 And let me be clear about it:\u00a0 the gates of shall not prevail against it.<\/p>\n

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

Just more thing, as are learning together in voice, thought, conflict and scripture.<\/p>\n

Like Peter Falk used to say, in his character as Colombo, the absent minded professor like detective:\u00a0 \u2018Just one more thing\u2026\u2019<\/p>\n

Who do you say He is?\u00a0 Notice the passage crashes away from the general and the philosophical\u2014what do others say (general) about the son of man (philosophical).\u00a0 Some say (general), the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, one of the Prophets (philosophical).\u00a0 Notice the move to the specific and the personal.\u00a0 Who do you say I am?\u00a0 Meaning for you today:\u00a0 how are you going to live?\u00a0 A life of studentship, or not?<\/p>\n

Said Peter, \u2018Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God.\u201d<\/p>\n

And you?<\/p>\n

\u00a0~The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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