{"id":987,"date":"2014-10-26T11:00:35","date_gmt":"2014-10-26T15:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=987"},"modified":"2019-11-05T11:53:55","modified_gmt":"2019-11-05T16:53:55","slug":"religion-on-campus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2014\/10\/26\/religion-on-campus\/","title":{"rendered":"Religion on Campus"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: right\"><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/av\/chapel\/podcasts\/sundayservices\/MarshChapel102614.mp3\">Click here to hear the full service<\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: right\"><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/bible.oremus.org\/?ql=281437173\">Matthew 22:34-46<\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: right\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/av\/chapel\/podcasts\/sundayservices\/sermon\/Sermon102614.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">Click here to hear the sermon only<\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><i>Love your neighbor as yourself (Mt 22:35)<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><i>\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><b><i>A. A Sociological Perspective:\u00a0 Safety on Campus<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n<p>Our siblings at the Bossey Institute in Switzerland focus weekly on Bible, Church, and World, while we do the same here at Marsh Chapel, as lenses upon the love of neighbor.\u00a0 With our theme today we take them in reverse order, World, Church, Bible.<\/p>\n<p>Religion on campus today is blessed with sociological, ecclesiological and theological opportunities, on a grand scale.\u00a0 To all three of these blessings we will return during the rest of the year, for more detailed attention.\u00a0 Today\u2019s sermon is meant as a map of the whole territory, religion on campus, in three dimensions, social and communal and spiritual, on behalf of this marvelous Marsh community, for whom Jesus is our \u2018beacon not our boundary\u2019.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><b><i>One<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n<p>First, in the very present, with increasing attention, our nation has recognized a pervasive malady within student life and culture, certainly not limited to any one college or city, a callous disregard for the safety of women.\u00a0 This is not a women\u2019s problem, this is a men\u2019s problem and a community problem. In this past year, appalling renditions of campus life have gradually brought about a \u2018raised consciousness\u2019 (a phrase whose currency we owe to the women\u2019s movement of a generation ago).\u00a0 Read again the March (Caitlin Flanagan) Atlantic article on fraternity life.\u00a0 Look once more, if you can endure it, at the New York Times early August account of assault and rape in Geneva, NY, at Hobart William Smith.\u00a0 Peruse the various columns on acquisition and education, excellence and sheep, like that of William Deresiewicz. Assess the attention last week to Harvard\u2019s administrative change, and the objections of their law school faculty.\u00a0 Sift through carefully the daily details of what young adults recount of their own experience. \u00a0A young friend this week related the chilling experience of being chased for blocks in the early evening on a well-lit street, through no fault of her own.\u00a0 One student at Columbia now carries, cross-like, day-by-day, from class to class, the mattress on which an assault occurred some months ago.\u00a0 Groups of students readily volunteer to help.\u00a0 No campus across this land is free from the responsibility and the opportunity of facing and addressing, in real time, the issue of safety on campus.<\/p>\n<div>\n<p>Unlike many other problems\u2014tornados, cancer, mortality\u2014these are problems that need not occur and have both consequences and cures.\u00a0 One reads that 20% of college women are harassed, attacked or assaulted during their student years.\u00a0 That is going to change. \u00a0That has to change.\u00a0 That will change, if only because those funding college tuition payments over time will make sure it does.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>The voice of religious life (history, community and leadership) has everything to offer to this dilemma.\u00a0 Where there are still religious voices to be heard, on campus, where that is there are still pulpits, on campus, (a mere fraction of the number a generation ago, a tiny fraction of that two generations ago) religion has been consistently, faithfully and aggressively engaged with issues of safety on campus, in concert with many good people and leaders across campuses like this one.<\/p>\n<p>At Marsh Chapel, while we have breath, we will continue to provide sacred space that is a safe place. Come Sunday, in worship wherein we remember that life is lived before God, and that our experience rests in the presence of ultimate reality.\u00a0 And on weekdays, by employing and deploying sexual and other minorities in ministry and for ministry\u2014the Inner Strength Choir, the LGBTQ work, and all manner of life affirming and spiritual enriching groups, events and programs. Spend a Friday evening with the Seventh Day Adventist student group and you will feel and see this in action. \u00a0Learning, yes, but also virtue and also piety.\u00a0 Knowing, yes, but also doing and also being.\u00a0 Mind, yes, but also heart and also soul.<\/p>\n<p>A few years ago I met with a group of theologians at Yale.\u00a0 At dinner, a highly accomplished professor approached. \u2018I picked up that you work with religious groups.\u00a0 What can you tell me about Intervarsity?\u2019\u00a0 His question carried a nervous apprehension.\u00a0 I replied that they were a campus group, more conservative than I, and my tradition, but reliable and experienced.\u00a0 \u2018Why do you ask?\u2019 I responded.\u00a0 \u2018Well, my daughter goes to that group here at Yale.\u00a0 She was raised a Presbyterian.\u201d\u00a0 I asked why she chose Intervarsity:\u00a0 \u2018did she like the bible study, or the leader?\u2019\u00a0 \u2018Oh, no\u2019, he answered. \u2018I think she just was looking for a group her age who were not drinking every night\u2019.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><b><i>Two<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n<p>At Marsh Chapel, while we have breath, we will also continue to uphold a vision of a beloved community among women and men on campus.\u00a0 A beloved community, and nothing short of it!<\/p>\n<div>\n<p>A while ago someone asked why religious leaders on campus weren\u2019t saying more about campus safety.\u00a0\u00a0 It took most of what little self-control I have not to blurt out: \u2018where have you been?\u00a0 Are you interested in these things?\u00a0 Really? Then why aren\u2019t you in church with us on Sunday?\u00a0 If you were, you would see, hear and know just steadily we have done so.\u00a0 So if you are really interested in a beloved community of women and men on campus, then I expect to see you in church on Sunday.\u00a0 Put your body where your mouth is!\u00a0 Come to Marsh Chapel.<\/p>\n<p>Here is a community of faith living weekly in the shadow of a monument to Martin Luther King.\u00a0 His dream is greatly deferred, we confess.\u00a0 But the dream lives, we affirm.\u00a0 The dream of a beloved community, including such a community among women and men on campus.<\/p>\n<p>Here you might be greeted by an African American woman from Atlanta, like one of our former ushers, Jennifer Williams, now researching her PhD dissertation in urban planning at the University of Michigan, with a winter in South Africa.\u00a0 Here you might be greeted by an Asian man like Maadiah Wang, one of our former ushers, now in business in Toronto, who was baptized by immersion on Easter Eve, on the side lawn here, last spring.\u00a0 Here you might be greeted by Dominique Cheung, one of our former ushers, a BU graduate who taught for a year in Taiwan, and who has now returned this fall for a Masters degree in Education, and is an usher again, an usher both former and current. Go ushers!<\/p>\n<p>Here you might find a friend like mine who guided me to a column by Emma Green, Atlantic, 11\/14:\u00a0 <i>Americans born after 1980 are less likely to identify with a religion.\u00a0 But.\u00a0 Religious people report more satisfaction with their love lives and sex lives.\u00a0 Church\\service attendance protects healthy people against death.\u00a0 College grads born in the 1970\u2019s are more likely than non-grads of the same age to identify with a particular faith.\u00a0 Maybe there\u2019s something about contemporary campus life that maes people more, not less, likely to gravitate toward traditional institutions\u2014or maybe college grads have simply learned that religion is pretty good for you.<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\">Here you might catch a glimpse of what love can be, neighbor to neighbor, what loving kindness, chivalry, honor, care can be.\u00a0 We still teach Shakespeare at Boston University:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><i>Let me not to the marriage of true minds<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><i>Admit impediments.\u00a0 Love is not love<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><i>Which alters when it alteration finds,<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><i>Or bends with the remover to remove:<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><i>O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><i>That looks on tempests and is never shaken;<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><i>It is the star to every wandering bark,<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><i>Whose worth\u2019s unknown, although his height be taken.<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><i>Love\u2019s not Time\u2019s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><i>Within his bending sickle\u2019s compass come;<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><i>Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><i>But bears it out even to the edge of doom.<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><i>If this be error, and upon me prov\u2019d,<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><i>I never writ, nor no man ever lov\u2019d.<b>[1]<\/b><\/i><\/p>\n<p>In sociology, Jesus is our beacon, not our boundary.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><b><i>B. An Ecclesiological Perspective:\u00a0 Love and Law<br \/>\n<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n<p>Second, religion on campus has an opportunity with regard to religion off campus, an ecclesiological rather than a sociological responsibility, one of church rather than college.\u00a0\u00a0 That is, the voices of religion on campus can provide a hopefully humble but also historically nuanced counterbalance to contemporary church vision and leadership.<\/p>\n<p>For instance, as only one example, and turning to our own situation and heritage here at Marsh Chapel, there has been an historic, creative tension between the preaching leadership and the administrative management of the Methodist church, dating back at least to Peter Cartwright and his tangles with various presiding elders.\u00a0 Both are important, both spirit and structure. Our ministry at Marsh this year emphasizes spirit, but structure has its role, importance and place.\u00a0 Today, however, with most of the preachers in many Methodist conferences now lacking full education, and lacking ordination with consequent guarantee of appointment, the balance of power has shifted dramatically in the last generation.\u00a0 Those whose primary weekly commitment is to interpreting the scripture are outweighed by those whose primary annual commitment is to upholding the discipline.\u00a0 The gospel trumpeted in Scripture and tradition, freedom and grace and love, for all, including especially those in minority, including sexual minorities, is overshadowed by the rules and constraints re-voted every four years.\u00a0 University pulpits, the few that remain, bear a significant responsibility to model dimensions of humility, integrity and courage (along with those healthy, strong churches whose northeastern voices you heard a summer ago, from New York, Washington, Rochester, and Boston).\u00a0\u00a0 As Lou Martyn said, we are free here to set heaven is a little higher.\u00a0 So we need to take responsibility to lead, along the fewer strong, stable pulpits across the land.\u00a0\u00a0 We have the advantage of resources in interpretation, in memory, in thought, and in reflection that can be of some use, in this particular time.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><b><i>One<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n<p>One illustration.\u00a0\u00a0 Ministry is now denied to gay people in Methodism.\u00a0 Ordination, that is.\u00a0 But think about this for a minute, in a University chapel.\u00a0 We have spent more than a generation re-learning that ministry belongs not to the ordained, alone, but to the baptized.\u00a0 Entrance into ministry does not begin with the bishop laying on hands, at ordination.\u00a0 Entrance into ministry begins with the pastor laying on hands, in baptism.\u00a0 99% of ministry is conferred in the sacrament of baptism, and 1% in the sacramental rite of ordination.\u00a0 Those who really would consistently exclude gay women and men from ministry <i>should never have allowed the church to baptize or confirm or commune gay people. <\/i>That would have been more fully effective and consistent bigotry.\u00a0 But in baptism&#8211; the barn door has been opened, and no amount of shutting it will ever work!\u00a0 Gay people are baptized, and therefore are already in ministry! It is a short way from denying orders to denying baptism.<\/p>\n<p>Christopher Morse, my theology professor, and a Methodist minister from Virginia, told us once at dinner about a humorous baptismal moment.\u00a0 Forty years ago you baptized every infant in the northern half of the county, no matter what county, on Palm Sunday.\u00a0 38 baptisms in a row.\u00a0 He moved down the line, seizing the children one at a time.\u00a0 \u2018What name shall be given this child?\u2019\u00a0 John.\u00a0 Mary. George.\u00a0 Pinundress.\u00a0 A French couple, just learning English, presented the child.\u00a0 So, \u2018Pinundress, I baptize\u2026\u2019\u00a0 A distraught father came up later to show Christopher the pin on the dress, on which the name had been clearly written, \u2018pin on dress!\u2019\u00a0 We are not so hasty now.\u00a0 We have spent a good deal of time on the prevenient, justifying, sanctifying grace of God in baptism.\u00a0 All the baptized are all in ministry.\u00a0 Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, gay or straight.\u00a0 But it is our religious opportunity, on campus, freely and safely to think about these things, with humility but also with honesty.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><b><i>Two<br \/>\n<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n<p>Another illustration.\u00a0 The rules in Methodism explicitly state that the pastor alone is to decide whose marriage will be solemnized, \u2018in accordance with the laws of the state and the rules of the church\u2019.\u00a0 No local committee decides.\u00a0 No vote of session.\u00a0 No poll of the community or neighborhood.\u00a0 No family habit of a patriarchal auction of a daughter to an opposing family.\u00a0 No.\u00a0 The pastor shall decide.\u00a0 There is an accrued wisdom in this, the leaving of these lasting decisions to those in the local situations, in the contexts in which they are to be lived out.\u00a0 Would you want a General Conference every four years voting on a list of those to be married in Boston, those to be allowed to marry in Los Angeles, those types of people fit for matrimony in Wisconsin?\u00a0 Surely not.\u00a0 That is why the primary directive in the discipline leaves such to the discretion of the pastor.<\/p>\n<p>Marriage:\u00a0 UMCBOD Para. 340 2.a.3.a.\u00a0 <i>(Duties of pastor) To perform the marriage ceremony after due counsel with the parties involved and in accordance with the laws of the state and the rules of the United Methodist Church.\u00a0 The decision to perform the ceremony shall be the right and responsibility of the pastor.\u00a0 <\/i>So.\u00a0 Do we mean this?\u00a0 Are we going to \u2018enforce\u2019 as one general superintendent in the book, FINDING OUR WAY, \u2018enforce the discipline\u2019?\u00a0 Here the burden of responsibility is clearly, unequivocally placed upon the pastor whose \u2018right responsibility\u2019 it is to decide to marry a couple.\u00a0 There is no shading here, no hem or haw.\u00a0 The pastor decides.\u00a0\u00a0 After due counsel (pastoral care) and in accordance with <i>state law<\/i> and church rules.\u00a0 No comment here is offered to the situation when state law and church rules, both of which are to be upheld, are different.\u00a0 State law 50 years ago to prohibit interracial marriage was widely ignored by Methodist clergy, who performed interracial marriages in states prohibiting such.\u00a0 Not to marry a gay couple is now to contradict the laws of 30+ states who protect the right of gay people to marry.\u00a0 Rightly, the BOD leaves these difficult (pastoral) decisions in the hands of the minister.\u00a0 \u201cThe decision to perform the ceremony shall be the right and responsibility of the pastor\u201d.\u00a0 Not the General Conference.\u00a0 Not the General Superintendent.\u00a0 Not the District Superintendent.\u00a0 Not the Charge Conference.\u00a0 The pastor. And that is as it should be.\u00a0 Thanks be to God.<\/p>\n<p>In ecclesiology, Jesus is our beacon, not our boundary.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><b><i>C.\u00a0 A Theological Perspective:\u00a0 Freedom to Dream<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n<p>Third, religion on campus has a theological chance, a spiritual opening, the opportunity and freedom to dream, both regarding creation and regarding redemption.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><b><i>One<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n<p>That is, the remaining significant campus pulpits (Marsh, Harvard, Duke, and just a few others) have the spiritual opportunity to challenge and engage thought forms in college and culture, including some forms of popular atheism and agnosticism, and introduce them, for example, to some religious forms of atheism and agnosticism.\u00a0 Leslie Weatherhead did this already sixty years ago with sermons collected as THE CHRISTIAN AGNOSTIC.\u00a0 Edward O. Wilson this fall wrote:\u00a0 \u201cFaith is the one thing that makes otherwise good people do bad things.\u201d\u00a0 But the contrary is true as well:\u00a0 \u201cLove is the one thing that makes otherwise bad people do good things\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>The asperity with which the Holy Scripture summarizes creation is only matched by the asperity which the creeds of the Church summarize creation.\u00a0 \u2018In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth\u2019. Period.\u00a0 \u2018I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth\u2019. Period.\u00a0 Scripture and creed say what reason and experience know:\u00a0 we have the brute fact of the brute creation.\u00a0 Period.\u00a0 The rest of the Holy Scripture, all 65.9 other books, and the rest of the creed, the long second paragraph and the shorter third, go on from there.\u00a0 The love of God comes accompanied by faith and hope.\u00a0 Creation is the occasion of love but does not occasion love, does not occasion faith in love, and does not occasion a hope for a loving future.\u00a0 God is Love is more about the second person of the Trinity, the Christ of God, than about the first person of the Trinity, the creation of God, more Fairest Lord Jesus than For the Beauty of the Earth. Love is in the Second Person of the Trinity.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><b><i>Two<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n<p>When invited to come to Marsh Chapel, I looked back on the great dreamers, the voices, influential and real, that had formed me.\u00a0\u00a0 My father-in-law, who built a Wesley Foundation from the ground up in the 1960\u2019s in Oswego, NY.\u00a0 My dad, who served a college town church and helped create an ecumenical form of college ministry, UMHE, in the same decade. My mother and mother in law, who in those years hosted and graced endless fellowship meals for nervous pre-seminarians, bruised freedom riders, troubled conscientious objectors, chastened veterans, and their various boyfriends and girlfriends.\u00a0 Our friend, the Chaplain at Colgate, RV Smith, whose presence and courage, in hard years, were sustained by MOTIVE magazine.\u00a0 William Sloane Coffin, chaplain at Williams, and then at Yale, before becoming our pastor at Riverside Church in NYC in the 1970\u2019s.\u00a0\u00a0 Coffin\u2019s preaching ministry, in New York and at Columbia and through Union, continues to be a large part of my model for work here at Marsh, in Boston and at Boston University and through the School of Theology.\u00a0 Peter Gomes, both colleague and mentor, who succeeded at Harvard, as he famously said, by being \u2018ubiquitous\u2019.\u00a0 The years and losses have mounted up in equal measure for religion on campus.\u00a0 There are but 1 for every 5 to 10 pulpits now on campus that there were 50 years ago.\u00a0 But we are here.\u00a0 You are here.\u00a0 Where there is life there is hope.<\/p>\n<p>All of these fine ministers, for all of their substantial theological differences, when it came to spiritual theology, shared a freedom to dream.\u00a0 In fact, far beyond their own limited spheres, they kept dreams alive, in decades of confusion, and kept preaching alive, in years when across the land there was, in Amos\u2019s fine phrase, \u2018a famine of the word\u2019.\u00a0 They read Paul Tillich and made his \u2018depth\u2019 available to others.\u00a0 We can do the same, here, with the great theological minds of our time, some of whom are close at hand.<\/p>\n<p>The Nobel Laureate Patrick Modiano said recently, \u201cI have always felt like I\u2019ve been writing the same book for the past 45 years.\u201d\u00a0 And I have felt the same, preaching or trying to preach the same sermon for the past 45 years.\u00a0 I preach love.\u00a0 God\u2019s love.\u00a0 Love is God.\u00a0 All of us are better when we are loved.\u00a0 Love divine, all loves excelling, joy of heaven to earth come down.\u00a0 Love God, love neighbor\u2014so the Bible says, today.<\/p>\n<p>Religion on campus can give future leaders, secular and religious, a sense of possibility, imagination, freedom and breadth in the theopoetics of God talk.\u00a0 Those who attend worship at Marsh Chapel over four years as undergraduates, that is, will have also virtually acquired much of the vocabulary and content of the first year of graduate study in theology\u2014biblical, historical, philosophical, and pastoral theology.\u00a0 At no extra charge!\u00a0 What a bargain!<\/p>\n<p>We shall give King the last word:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><i>\u201cAgape is more than romantic love, agape is more than friendship.\u00a0 Agape is understanding, creative, redemptive, good will to all men.\u00a0 It is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return\u2026.\u00a0\u00a0 When one rises to love on this level, he loves men not because he likes them, not because their ways appeal to him, but he loves every man because God loves him.\u00a0 And he rises to the point of loving the person who does an evil deed while hating the deed that the person does.\u00a0 I think this is what Jesus meant when he said \u2018love your enemies.\u2019\u00a0 I\u2019m very happy that he didn\u2019t say like your enemies, because it is pretty difficult to like some people.\u00a0 Like is sentimental, and it is pretty difficult to like someone bombing your home; it is pretty difficult to like somebody threatening your children; it is difficult to like congressmen who spend all of their time trying to defeat civil rights.\u00a0 But Jesus says love them, and love is greater than like.\u201d<b>[i]<\/b>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/i><\/p>\n<p>If a student, your question is, where are you found on Sunday morning?\u00a0 If faculty, that one, plus a second, where are you on the weekends, when pedagogy gives way to life?\u00a0 If an administrator, both the former, plus a third, how have you planned in finance and leadership for the growth of a beloved community?\u00a0 And if a community member all three of those, plus this one:\u00a0 are you with us or not?\u00a0 We need you.\u00a0 We have not a person, hour or dollar to spare.<\/p>\n<p>In theology, as in sociology and ecclesiology, Jesus is our beacon, not our boundary.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><i>Jesus, the very thought of thee<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><i>With sweetness fills the breast<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><i>But sweeter far thy face to see<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><i>And in thy presence rest<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><i>\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><i>Jesus our only joy be thou<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><i>As thou our prize wilt be<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><i>Jesus be thou our glory now<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><i>And through eternity<\/i><\/p>\n<div>\n<hr size=\"1\" width=\"33%\" \/>\n<div>\n<p>[i] Martin Luther King, Jr., \u201cLove, Law, and Civil Disobedience,\u201d in <i>A Testament of Hope<\/i>, ed. James Melvin Washington (San Francisco:\u00a0 Harper, 1991), pp. 46-7.\u00a0 Washington notes how King relies expressly on Nygren in his depiction of agape and also amplifies what he finds, p. 16.\u00a0 For an interpretation of King\u2019s account of love, see James H. Cone, <i>Martin &amp; Malcolm and America:\u00a0 A Dream or a Nightmare<\/i> ((Maryknoll:\u00a0 Orbis, 1991), e.g., pp. 120-150.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: right\"><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/chapel\/staff\/rahill\/\">-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel<\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\">For more information about Marsh Chapel at Boston University, <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/chapel\">click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\">For information about donating to the Chapel, <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/chapel\/stewardship\/\">click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Click here to hear the full service Matthew 22:34-46 Click here to hear the sermon only Love your neighbor as yourself (Mt 22:35) \u00a0 A. A Sociological Perspective:\u00a0 Safety on Campus Our siblings at the Bossey Institute in Switzerland focus weekly on Bible, Church, and World, while we do the same here at Marsh Chapel, [&hellip;]<\/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\/987"}],"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=987"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/987\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1005,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/987\/revisions\/1005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}