{"id":949,"date":"2014-09-21T11:00:28","date_gmt":"2014-09-21T15:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=949"},"modified":"2019-11-05T11:56:08","modified_gmt":"2019-11-05T16:56:08","slug":"remembering-robert-hamill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2014\/09\/21\/remembering-robert-hamill\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Robert Hamill"},"content":{"rendered":"

Matthew 20:1-14<\/a><\/p>\n

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

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

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

Our sermon today remembers Dean Robert Hamill and reflects upon the Matthean gospel of divine generosity.\u00a0 The latter ennobled the former, and the former exuded the latter.<\/p>\n

Robert Hamill served in his last ministerial appointment as the Dean of Marsh Chapel, Boston University, from 1965 until his death in 1975.\u00a0\u00a0 During his tenure, here, the University and the country were convulsed in the throes of struggles over civil rights, over racial relations, over war and opposition to war, and over the authority of those governing and the responsibility of those governed.\u00a0 He was third in the line of six deans here, alongside a number of others who served in interim capacities.\u00a0\u00a0 He was a Methodist minister.\u00a0 He was a preacher. He was a teacher and author.\u00a0 And his first name was Robert.\u00a0 In short, he was fully qualified for the position (J).<\/p>\n

Dr. Hamill came here following a long and distinguished ministry in the mid west, including work on campuses and in college communities.\u00a0 He wrote regularly for MOTIVE magazine.\u00a0 He helped Howard Thurman in the last years of Thurman\u2019s ministry here, without much recognition in that era.\u00a0 He had the task of following an iconic figure, filling big shoes, and carrying forward the work of Marsh Chapel in a turbulent time.\u00a0 He died of cancer on the job.<\/p>\n

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

Meanwhile, now, in Matthew 20, in the vineyard, our parable represents the \u2018undifferentiated rewards of the Kingdom of God\u2019. (Bultmann) The parable affirms divine generosity, and inscrutable divine goodness and generosity.\u00a0 Its point:\u00a0 behold the divine generosity, do not begrudge the divine generosity.<\/p>\n

Consider the parable (found only in Matthew). All the workers are paid the same.\u00a0 As in life, so here in Scripture, there is no sure, consistent justice.\u00a0 To be sure, the landowner has paid what he agreed to pay.\u00a0 To be sure, hour by hour, the workers have received what they agreed to receive.\u00a0 To be sure, the daily needs of all for the day to come are met, from each according to his stamina and to each according to his needs.\u00a0 To be sure, the added proverb, about last becoming first and first last fits the parable awkwardly if at all.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0The parable acclaims God\u2019s bounteous generosity, not God\u2019s impartial justice.<\/p>\n

When a job truly fit and meant for you goes to another, on a shaky or unjust premise or process, you know the feeling of the early workers.\u00a0 When an illness unearned and unexpected afflicts your loved one, you know the feeling of those working among the grapes and feeling the grapes of wrath.\u00a0 When a day begins and ends as an existential illustration of Shakespeare\u2019s 66th<\/sup> sonnet, you know the resentment addressed in the story from Matthew 20:1-16.<\/p>\n

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

On Alumni Weekend each year, we have remembered one of our forebears\u2014like Franklin Littell or Daniel Marsh or Allan Knight Chalmers or Howard Thurman, and others.\u00a0 This year, Robert Hamill.<\/p>\n

Hamill\u2019s time in the vineyard was long and difficult.\u00a0 His years in this pulpit were long and hard years.\u00a0 He did not come into his labor at evening, or even at noon, but early in the day, and did not find his rest until he found his eternal rest at the day\u2019s end. \u00a0He worked, here, in the time my friend yesterday, a visiting alumnus, referred to as the time of \u2018the troubles\u2019. Unlike his predecessor, he did not enjoy quite as wide a range of recognition, nor quite as strong a national following, nor just as steady a range of response to his pulpit work.\u00a0 Unlike those who had worked in the fifties, a time of relative peace and prosperity, his era 1965-75 was fraught with conflict, with anxiety, with discord, with strife.\u00a0\u00a0 A Christmas Sunday 12\/24\/74 sermon in his last year, whose recording was found and heard earlier this week, decries the war in Vietnam, and a bombing campaign in progress.\u00a0 A 1970 sermon on racial justice and black power, preached some years earlier, became required reading for work in racial justice on campuses in the south.\u00a0 An earlier book of sermons on the theme of freedom, exhibits clearly the clouds gathering all about of constraints.<\/p>\n

In other words, Robert Hamill lived within the rhythms of some comparative difficulty and injustice.\u00a0 On more than one occasion, you could perhaps surmise, he might have paused to wonder aloud, crossing Commonwealth Avenue, about the justice of it all, the unequal distribution of generosity, the unfairness of circumstance, the pain and pained crucible of disappointment.\u00a0\u00a0 He did not live anywhere near long enough to see that particular war ended, to see the gradual amelioration of some racial injustices, to see the still expanding circle of his great and beloved theme of freedom.\u00a0 He got to work before dawn, labored through the noon day heat, and went to eternal sleep after dusk, with no retirement to enjoy, no decades of cruises and tours, no relaxed season to hold the grandchildren, no sunset years.<\/p>\n

For instance, in October of 1970, early on a Sunday morning, 200 federal marshals, Boston Police, and FBI agents entered the chapel in which you are sitting, and arrested an AWOL Army Private whom the chapel congregation had given sanctuary.\u00a0 Students keeping vigil in the nave were awakened and cleared from the aisle.\u00a0 Rev Hamill later led a Sunday service of worship here that morning, broadcast on WBUR.<\/p>\n

The fissures and fractures that were fragmenting the country as a whole, epitomized May 4 1970 at Kent State, were visible and tangible right here.\u00a0 One can imagine that Hamill and his wife may well have wished that the timing of their ministry here had been other than it was.\u00a0 Yet when Deda, whom I knew, (Hamill\u2019s second wife whom he married after the death of his first wife, Hannah,) herself died two years ago, a mutual friend brought us the guest book used in those years at the Hamill residence.\u00a0 What is striking is that for all the turmoil of the times, worship continued on Sunday mornings, and the Hamills regularly offered hospitality over a traditional Sunday dinner in their home.\u00a0 The book contains the personal signatures of their guests, over the months and years, after church on Sunday:\u00a0 Takako Shimo, James and Eunice Matthews, Robert and Pat Nelson, Walter and Martha Muelder, Robert Luccock, Max and Betty Miller, Merle Jordan, F Thomas Trotter, Howard and Sue Bailey Thurman, Ruth and Paul Deats, Earl Kent Brown, Joe Bassett, Edward Carroll, Marjorie Metcalf, Harrell Beck, Peter Bertocci, Joe Polak, Kathryn Silber, John Silber, Loumona Petroff, and many others.<\/i>\u00a0\u00a0 The work in the vineyard continued, in season and out.<\/p>\n

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

Let us return for a moment to Matthew.\u00a0 Meanwhile, back in the vineyard, the undeniable difference between equality and justice faces us, as it did Jesus, Matthew, the Rabbis and others.\u00a0 Jesus, loving the amahaaretz,<\/i> the poor of the land, may have been telling the Pharisees to broaden their embrace.\u00a0 Matthew, among Jews and Gentiles, Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians, may have been admonishing the former to honor the latter.\u00a0 The Rabbis, in the same period, used the same story, but added that the later workers did in two hours what took the earlier ones all day.\u00a0 Oye ve (J).<\/p>\n

Our landowner, through Matthew\u2019s rendering, is called an \u2018OIKODESPOTES\u2019, a person of some power.\u00a0 The allegory is clear.\u00a0 God is obliged to nobody.\u00a0 Further, the timing of God\u2019s grace and generosity is God\u2019s own affair, only without prejudice either to the early or to the late.\u00a0 In this way, Matthew concurs with Paul in 1 Thessalonians that the living will not precede the dead, in the hour of judgment.<\/p>\n

Our parable does not rely on the famous passage from Exodus 16, read a moment ago.\u00a0 (This is a passage you should know and know about by the way.)\u00a0 Yet the acclamation of divine generosity in both is the same.\u00a0 Evening comes, and morning, and in the morning there is a sweet hoar frost covering all the ground, a layer of dew under which is the \u2018manna from heaven\u2019.\u00a0 \u2018The bread the Lord has given you to eat\u201d.<\/p>\n

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

The steadiness, the weekly, seasonal consistency in Robert Hamill\u2019s hospitality at table, Sunday by Sunday, continued throughout his years here.<\/p>\n

Some here will remember that no graduation service was held at Boston University in 1970.\u00a0 Here in Marsh Chapel in May, 2010 we gathered for a service of remembrance before some of those received their diplomas, forty years later, the next day.\u00a0 The chapel was packed, hot, and tense. The pianist played Where Have All the Flowers Gone, Let it Be, and We Shall Overcome.<\/i>\u00a0 Midway into the proceedings a spirited woman stood up and interrupted the Dean\u2019s remarks. \u00a0From the back pew she began to preach her own sermon.\u00a0 Somehow, it did seem to fit the time, class and occasion.\u00a0 After a bit I told her I could not hear her, and went on.\u00a0 James Carroll, now a married columnist, but in 1970 the Catholic priest at BU, offered a powerful pastor meditation, remembering Hamill, the Armory, the war, and concluding as he asked:\u00a0 What are we doing here tonight?\u00a0 Have we not come in order to face, and thereby to let go, of a troubled time long ago?<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/i>The recording of Hamill\u2019s 1974 Christmas Sunday sermon includes his admonition to those listening to join him in rising on Christmas Day and before presents and fellowship and turkey dinner and all else sending a letter to the White House demanding an end to the war.\u00a0 His voice is raspy but his challenge is clear, six months from death.\u00a0 In his sermon book HOW FREE ARE YOU he noted: \u00a0When you get into the fight for freedom, you encounter trouble for sure.\u00a0 One of the notable preachers of our time who consistently fought for free men in a free society was Dr. Ernest Fremont Tittle.\u00a0 One day I asked Dr. Tittle how he handled controversial material, and he gave three rules of thumb:\u00a0 \u2018Be sure of your facts.\u00a0 Speak the truth in love.\u00a0 Then be unafraid of the consequences.\u2019<\/i>\u00a0 (Freedom, 77). Hamill may have been thinking of Tittle coming toward his own last Christmas day.<\/p>\n

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

Meanwhile, back in the vineyard, we have again to ponder the labor at the heart of life and the labor at the heart of faith.\u00a0 Faith comes by hearing, but it is an active, \u2018employed\u2019 listening that allows for that hearing.\u00a0 Faith is a gift, but is a gift like any other that requires receipt, and response, and embrace, (and a thank you note, too).\u00a0 (If faith comes by hearing it help if you are in earshot.\u00a0 You truly have nothing better to do for an hour on Sunday than worship.) Faith comes as a gift at the time of God\u2019s choosing, but to labor and live in faith requires of us a steady, even fruitful, practice of faith.\u00a0\u00a0 Here is what Paul is driving at in his letter to the Philippians:\u00a0 live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ, striving side by side with one mind for the faith of the gospel.<\/p>\n

You may have been impressed this week by Ken Burns\u2019 ever engaging latest documentary on the Roosevelts, Theodore and Franklin and Eleanor.\u00a0 Eleanor as an orphan was raised by drunken uncles and others in the small Hudson River village of Tivoli, a little town where my grandparents met and where my grandfather is now buried.\u00a0\u00a0 It happens, I learned this week, that a great aunt, Ella Lascher Coons, my mother\u2019s aunt, with some others in Tivoli sewed Eleanor\u2019s wedding dress.\u00a0 We are that is, neither in space or time, all that very far from Tivoli and the New Deal.<\/p>\n

All three of these iconic American leaders suffered\u2014Theodore in childhood illness and adult defeat and early death, Eleanor in childhood loneliness and adult betrayal and isolation, Franklin in polio.\u00a0 Whether they would have taken Paul\u2019s formula as theirs, he has graciously granted you the privilege not only of believing in Christ but of suffering for him as well, <\/i>one cannot say.\u00a0 There certainly is no justice to any suffering as such, and certainly not to theirs, intimately and poignantly depicted in Burns\u2019 fine film.\u00a0 Yet there is something underneath the grumbling of the workers, the hiddenness of the landowner, the various and capricious deposits of weal and woe, in the Matthean parable, in the Roosevelt lives, and, more to the point, in our very own.\u00a0 Call it a different light, a refraction out of a different lens, of the divine generosity, and what happens when someone seizes\u2014or better is seized by\u2014that glorious, mysterious divine radiance, divine goodness, divine generosity.<\/p>\n

There is a scene in Burns\u2019 film inwhich the camera shows polio afflicted children swimming in the Warm Springs Florida pool.\u00a0 This is the pool that finally allowed Franklin, buoyed and warmed in its water, to stand after months and years of utter torment.\u00a0 The camera scans the children, playing, swimming, dunking, and laughing.\u00a0 Then the camera closes in on the biggest of the children, the six foot tall future president, who is right there, soaked and joyful in the midst of them.\u00a0 It was unmistakable, even at this distance of years and miles and technology, to see the glint and gleam in his eye.\u00a0 The divine generosity was splashing through him and out onto all the similarly afflicted children round about.\u00a0 Something happened to him, in all the injustice and unfairness and inscrutability of his hours in the existential vineyard.\u00a0 Something happened that made a difference\u2014to the poor of the depression, to the nearly conquered in Europe and Asia, to the women and people of color and otherwise abled whom Eleanor prodded him, cajoled him, and implored him to aid.\u00a0 He found a part of himself able to help, really help, others similarly afflicted, and somehow that part, once raised to life, opened his life to all the rest.<\/p>\n

I wonder about you? and me?\u00a0 Has the unfailing light and love of divine generosity worked on us at all this week?\u00a0 Are we better people than we were last Sunday?<\/p>\n

John Calvin (for once) on this parable:\u00a0 We may also gather that our whole life is useless and we are justly condemned of laziness until we frame our life to the command and calling of God.\u00a0 From this it follows that they labor in vain who thoughtlessly take up this or that kind of life and do not wait for God\u2019s calling.\u00a0 Finally we may also infer from Christ\u2019s words that only they are pleasing to God who work for the advantage of their brethren. (loc cit 266)<\/i><\/p>\n

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

I think back, or try to think back, fifty years\u2014a flick of the wrist, a batting of eye, no time at all.\u00a0\u00a0 Here is Robert Hamill, walking toward us in the memory, this Alumni weekend 2014.\u00a0\u00a0 He knew the labor in the vineyard.\u00a0 Yet Sunday dinner he offered every week.\u00a0 He knew the unheralded service in ministry during a time of tumult, a time of trouble.\u00a0 Yet Sunday dinner was served every week.\u00a0 He knew the unwelcome unfairness of the difficulty on his watch, the intractable conflicts therein, the lack of resolution thereof, and, to top it off, early death at an early age.\u00a0 Yet Sunday dinner\u2019s hospitality, the Hamills\u2019 form of faithfulness, never lagged and never flagged.\u00a0 Around that table, come Sunday, with china and linens and silver and meal, one feels, there was, amid all the pain of the \u2018troubles\u2019, a refraction of glory, a reflection of the divine generosity.<\/p>\n

Somehow, knowing Robert Hamill\u2019s labor in the vineyard, somehow I think I, and I expect we, can find the energy and courage generously to live, so generously to live, as well.<\/p>\n

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

Matthew 20:1-14 Click here to hear the full service Click here to hear the sermon only Hamill Our sermon today remembers Dean Robert Hamill and reflects upon the Matthean gospel of divine generosity.\u00a0 The latter ennobled the former, and the former exuded the latter. Robert Hamill served in his last ministerial appointment as the Dean […]<\/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\/949"}],"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=949"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/949\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":955,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/949\/revisions\/955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}