{"id":941,"date":"2014-09-07T11:00:09","date_gmt":"2014-09-07T15:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=941"},"modified":"2019-11-05T12:05:58","modified_gmt":"2019-11-05T17:05:58","slug":"the-marsh-spirit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2014\/09\/07\/the-marsh-spirit\/","title":{"rendered":"The Marsh Spirit"},"content":{"rendered":"

Matthew 18: 15-20<\/a><\/p>\n

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

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

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

\u00a0Ecclesia.\u00a0 Symphonison.\u00a0 Pragmata.\u00a0 Church.\u00a0 Agreement.\u00a0 Issues\u2026<\/p>\n

Welcome to the ministry of Marsh Chapel!\u00a0\u00a0 Here you will find a heart in the heart of the global city, and a worship service in the service of the global city.\u00a0\u00a0 Here you will find passionate interest in matters related to gospel voice, personal vocation, and congregational volume.\u00a0 I look forward to knowing your name!<\/p>\n

Please take advantage of the opportunities here for ministry, for music, for hospitality and for international engagement.\u00a0 Find your way to your own true interests in our midst.\u00a0 Get to know Br. Larry, Dr. Jarrett, Mr. Bouchard, and Rev. Longsdorf.\u00a0 I look forward to their knowing your name!<\/p>\n

For Marsh Chapel to be a if not the leading liberal pulpit in the country, an if not the exemplary collegium for vocational discernment in our time, and a if not the largest University congregation in the country, we need you.\u00a0 We need your Sunday presence, your tithing generosity, your acceptance of service roles, your prayer before worship and night and day, and mainly your own best self.<\/p>\n

Our preaching this year, September 2014 to May 2015, will cycle around and through an engagement with Spirit.\u00a0 We will of course follow the common lectionary, and offer ordered 11am Sunday worship in the Marsh tradition.\u00a0 The sermons will test the spirits (1 Thess. 5) to see if any be of God (1 John 4).\u00a0 The sermons will speak with those who are \u2018spiritual but not religious\u2019.<\/p>\n

In particular, the first Sunday sermons, normally delivered from the chancel, will explore \u2018The Marsh Spirit\u201d.\u00a0 What is the particular, soulful spirit of our community here, over 60 years?\u00a0 What makes Marsh Chapel, Marsh Chapel?\u00a0 Then, also, once each month a theme sermon, will explore what the Spirit is saying to the Church on issues of moment (the moral equivalents of war, religion on campus, safety and student life, drones, law and love in the United Methodist Church, and other).\u00a0 Advent and Lent will give us seasons of Spirit cycles.\u00a0 In Lent, we will debate Jonathan Edwards, but on the matter of Spirit.<\/p>\n

So find your way to the Paraclete.\u00a0 Open your door to the Spirit of Truth.\u00a0 Study a little about the Holy Spirit.\u00a0 Channel your inner Third Person persona.\u00a0 And get ready.\u00a0 The word this year: Spirit.<\/p>\n

We began in a more general way a bit last week.<\/p>\n

The Spirit offers grace in invitation, compassion, vocation, and aspiration.<\/p>\n

We are a people alive in welcome to others, because we have been welcomed.\u00a0 Frost:\u00a0 You come too\u2026<\/p>\n

We are a community attuned to hurt, for we have known that pain.\u00a0 Frost:\u00a0 Treason, to go with the drift of things\u2026.<\/p>\n

We are a congregation that has developed a culture in which a sense of calling is celebrated.\u00a0 Frost:\u00a0 Yield who will\u2026<\/p>\n

We are a gathering of women and men who look out, and look down, but who regularly look up, to aspire to height and heaven and wholeness.\u00a0 Frost:\u00a0 It asks of us a certain height\u2026<\/p>\n

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

Our spirit at Marsh Chapel is one of inquiry.\u00a0 We are learning together:\u00a0 from each others\u2019 voices, through each others\u2019 thoughts, out of each others\u2019 conflicts, with each others\u2019 histories and mysteries.<\/p>\n

The Marsh Spirit includes the experimental creativity honored by Daniel Marsh, by Howard Thurman, \u00a0by Huston Smith, by Floyd Flake, by Robert Neville, and by our learning together in these years.<\/p>\n

The Marsh Spirit, which we explicitly explore, this year, on our Eucharist Sundays, is an unabashedly liberal one.\u00a0\u00a0 Compassionate, not permissive.\u00a0\u00a0 Curious, not fearful.\u00a0\u00a0 Coherent, not chaotic.\u00a0\u00a0 Traditional and Scriptural, but not unreasonable or impersonal. \u00a0\u00a0\u2018Test the spirits, to see whether any be of God.\u2019\u00a0 Scriptures of every religious tradition direly need to be fettered by our experience and our reason, alongside our traditions of understanding.<\/p>\n

Liberal in the Christian, Protestant, Methodist, Bostonian, Personalist manner.<\/p>\n

Theologically liberal, that is, not necessarily politically so, all the way.\u00a0 For instance, often you have heard our voice inquiring about the health of gambling.\u00a0 Citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts might want to inquire about virtue and vice in publicly embraced gaming.\u00a0 Have you lived near Atlantic City or in Oneida NY?\u00a0\u00a0 You might want to inquire of those who have, what the consequences have been.\u00a0 We have lived near a major casino:\u00a0 blighted neighborhoods, children left for hours in back seats, people with cash to use for slots but not for heath care, a few solid jobs and many, many poor people made poorer and poor children made poorer.<\/p>\n

Our College of Arts and Sciences has a hospitality table in the main hall for the first week of classes.\u00a0\u00a0 Here is a place where information of moment and meaning may be given over to those in need.\u00a0 Call it a sermon table.<\/p>\n

Three students were discussing the heat and humidity, the first week and first weekend, causes curricular and extra curricular.\u00a0 Said one, pointing down the hall:\u00a0 I had a class in that room.\u00a0 It was terrible.\u00a0 <\/i>\u00a0A passerby asked:\u00a0 Which was terrible\u2014the room or the class?<\/i>\u00a0\u00a0 Well, in this case, it was the room.<\/p>\n

But there along Commonwealth Avenue, inside a great Cram and Ferguson building, there arose a momentary insight into the troubles of interpretation.\u00a0 Which\u2014room or class?\u00a0 In order to know, to hear properly, you have to dig a little deeper, ask a question or two, probe and inquire.<\/p>\n

Our spirit at Marsh Chapel is one of inquiry<\/i><\/b>.\u00a0 We are learning together:\u00a0 from each others\u2019 voices, through each others\u2019 thoughts, out of each others\u2019 conflicts, with each others\u2019 histories and mysteries.<\/p>\n

We inquire after truth.\u00a0 That which has been believed always and everywhere by everyone, as John Wesley put it.\u00a0 Nothing human is foreign to us\u2014nihil humanum<\/i>, as Terence put it.<\/p>\n

How shall we do so?<\/p>\n

\u00a0One:\u00a0 Talk<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

In verse 15,<\/i><\/b> Matthew begins to give advice about how to life in community.\u00a0\u00a0 Community involves difference, but also can involve hurt.\u00a0 Communication makes community.\u00a0 Matthew\u2019s Jesus teaches us to speak to each other in our presence and not of each other in our absence\u2014to each other in our presence not of each other in our absence.<\/p>\n

This week I received a triangulating e-mail.\u00a0 It came from the leader of organization I dislike, seeking support for a person I do like.\u00a0 I loathe one and love the other.\u00a0 The triangulation in the communication forces me either to support an organization I do not like or to disappoint a person I do like.\u00a0 What do you do in such a situation?\u00a0 The kinder approach from the organization would have been a visit, or a phone call, in which sensibilities could be explored.\u00a0 But now we have the e-document:\u00a0 eternal, irretrievable, international, indelible.\u00a0 And the tangled triangle.\u00a0 It will take 3 hours or more to unbind and loosen this knot.\u00a0 You know, there was time when people had to come and see you before they so complicated your life.<\/p>\n

I think on inquiry, that Matthew 18: 15 teaches me how to respond.\u00a0 I shall not send a steaming reply, tempting as that would be.\u00a0 I shall not reply from a distance at all.\u00a0 I must go and see my interlocutor.\u00a0 I must make a visit to the author of the e-mail and find a way through the horns of the dilemma, the Scylla of support for an organization I dislike and the Caribdis of hurt to a person I do like.<\/p>\n

In verse 17,<\/i><\/b> Matthew provides a further suggestion, to use if the earlier ones fail.\u00a0 Tell the whole church, his Jesus says.\u00a0 We are clearly hearing overtones of what was needed in Matthew\u2019s community, toward the end of the first century.\u00a0 Jesus may well have taught in such fashion, though the use of a Greek word like \u2018ecclesia\u2019\u2014twice here\u2014probably indicates this is later material placed on Jesus\u2019 lips.\u00a0 But the import remains\u2014gather the community for deliberation.\u00a0 Get things moving in the community\u2014get people walking together!<\/p>\n

Two:\u00a0 Remember<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

In verse 16,<\/i><\/b> Matthew quotes from Deuteronomy 19.\u00a0 That is, he goes back to the basics, back to the starting point, the Old Testament, back to kindergarten, if you will, as many of gone this week.<\/p>\n

New York City has more than doubled, from 20K to 55K, the number of 4 year old children in free universal pre-kindergarten.\u00a0 Who says things cannot change for the better, and quickly?\u00a0 In Albany our four year old granddaughter entered a similar program and her Dad wrote:<\/p>\n

\u201cAccording to Anne, Sally’s drop off went very smoothly. \u00a0True to form, Sally walked into the school confidently and eagerly and, unlike many of the other kids, refused to hold her mother’s hand. \u00a0She knew right where her classroom was and where to go, found her cubby right away, put her things in it, greeted and hugged her new teacher, and then found a book, sat down on the carpet in the spot marked for her, and started to read quietly while the other kids filtered in. \u00a0I’m so proud of her!!!\u201d<\/p>\n

Robert Fulghum had it right a generation ago:\u00a0 Everything I have ever needed to know I learned in kindergarten:<\/p>\n

1. Share everything.<\/i><\/p>\n

2. Play fair.<\/i><\/p>\n

3. Don’t hit people.<\/i><\/p>\n

4. Put things back where you found them.<\/i><\/p>\n

5. CLEAN UP YOUR OWN MESS.<\/i><\/p>\n

6. Don’t take things that aren’t yours.<\/i><\/p>\n

7. Say you’re SORRY when you HURT somebody.<\/i><\/p>\n

8. Wash your hands before you eat.<\/i><\/p>\n

9. Flush.<\/i><\/p>\n

10. Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.<\/i><\/p>\n

11. Live a balanced life – learn some and drink some and draw some and paint some and sing and dance and play and work everyday some.<\/i><\/p>\n

12. Take a nap every afternoon.<\/i><\/p>\n

13. When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.<\/i><\/p>\n

14. Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.<\/i><\/p>\n

15. Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup – they all die. So do we.<\/i><\/p>\n

16. And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned – the biggest word of all – LOOK.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

\u2015<\/i>\u00a0<\/i>Robert Fulghum<\/a>,\u00a0<\/i><\/span>All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten<\/i><\/a><\/i><\/p>\n

Three: Walk<\/i><\/b><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

In verse 18,<\/i><\/b> Matthew strongly affirms the lasting power of such church considerations, even saying, similar to our reading two weeks ago, in the phrase, \u2018the keys to the kingdom of heaven\u2019,\u00a0 that what is bound on earth is bound in heaven, what is forgiven on earth is forgiven in heaven. Get things moving in the community\u2014get people walking together!<\/p>\n

In verse 19,<\/i><\/b> two or three, when truly together, suffice to form a judgement.\u00a0\u00a0 Our English words \u2018symphony\u2019 and \u2018pragmatic\u2019 are rooted in the Greek here for agreement and matter. Get things moving in the community\u2014get people walking together!<\/p>\n

In verse 20,<\/i><\/b> to conclude, the gospel further celebrates the precious joy of common life in the present, in the here and now, and it only takes a few, \u2018wherever two or three ARE gathered in my name, there I AM as well.\u2019 Get things moving in the community\u2014get people walking together!<\/p>\n

This is the announcement of presence<\/i>, in word and table, in audition and celebration, in pulpit and altar.<\/p>\n

In the spirit I call you to the Marsh Spirit of inquiry.\u00a0 In conversation, memory, and exercise.\u00a0 I<\/i>f you have not had a real conversation once a day, you have missed something.\u00a0 If you have not memorized something once a week, you have missed a chance to be mindful.\u00a0 If you have walked along the sea shore, near Boston, once a month, you have missed the cleansing of the spirit.\u00a0 If you have walked down to the harbor and back to BU once a year, you have missed something.<\/p>\n

I can not speak to you if I have not spoken for you and I cannot speak for you if I have not spoken with you.\u00a0 To needs for and for needs with.<\/p>\n

So the Apostle had made us an urgent appeal, an appeal to love one another.<\/p>\n

8\u00a0<\/i><\/b>Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. <\/i>9\u00a0<\/i><\/b>The commandments, \u201cYou shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet\u201d; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, \u201cLove your neighbor as yourself.\u201d <\/i>10\u00a0<\/i><\/b>Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.<\/i><\/p>\n

11\u00a0<\/i><\/b>Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; <\/i>12\u00a0<\/i><\/b>the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; <\/i>13\u00a0<\/i><\/b>let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. <\/i>14\u00a0<\/i><\/b>Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.<\/i><\/p>\n

Wind is a gift of the sea.\u00a0 Salt sea breeze is a gift of the great oceans deep.\u00a0 Spirit, a spirit of inquiry, is a gift of God, our gift to share.<\/p>\n

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

Matthew 18: 15-20 Click here to hear the full service Click here to hear the sermon only Welcome \u00a0Ecclesia.\u00a0 Symphonison.\u00a0 Pragmata.\u00a0 Church.\u00a0 Agreement.\u00a0 Issues\u2026 Welcome to the ministry of Marsh Chapel!\u00a0\u00a0 Here you will find a heart in the heart of the global city, and a worship service in the service of the global city.\u00a0\u00a0 […]<\/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\/941"}],"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=941"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":943,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941\/revisions\/943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}